BLACK PEOPLE in Germany were also holocaust victims of the Nazi era

MONTEGO BAY, January 31, 2022 - February is Black History Month, and one of the historical facts not very well known, is that the Jews were not the only people to be killed by the Nazis during the holocaust which defined Adolph Hitler's Nazi regime in the last World War. Untold numbers of Black people in Germany were dehumanized, experimented upon and murdered by Hitler's surrogates.

The 27th of January, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp, is commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in memory of the victims of the Holocaust during during World War Two. On this day we are asked to remember the 6 million Jewish people murdered across Germany by Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party.

When you think of holocaust, the imagery is that of thousands of emaciated white people in Nazi concentration camps. We were not conditioned to think of the thousands Black people who were also placed in concentration camps, while many were murdered as a result of Nazi persecution. In fact, Black people did not even rise to the rank of honourable mention in relation to the Nazi atrocities.

For many in the Black community, the murder of six million Jews and millions of other eastern European minorities including Roma, Sinti, Gypsies and many other groups had very little to do with them. It was not their nightmare. In fact many Black people in America are just beginning to come to grips with the barbarity of the transatlantic slave trade, and with it, the ignominy and inhumanity of slavery, their repression as a result of Jim Crow as well as the renewed struggle for civil and voting rights in the "land of the free".

While the world continue to focus on the fact that antisemitism was critical part of  Hitler’s Nazi ideology of hate, there has been little if any focus on the fact that thousands of Black people were severely persecuted by Hitler and died alongside Jews and other minorities in the horrible concentration camps.

It is estimated that there were some 24-thousand Black people living in Germany during the 1920s to the 1930s which included an emerging black community from Germany’s own African colonies stretched across Germany, many of whom were active in communist and anti-racist organisations. Very few people of African descent had German citizenship, even if they were born in Germany. Many were given passports that designated them as “stateless negroes”.

When Germany convened the Berlin Conference of leading European powers in November 1884 to carve up the African continent, Germany colonized four territories across the breadth of Africa: Togoland, the Cameroons, Tanganyika, and  territory in Southwest Africa, now known as Namibia.

In Southwest Africa, German settlers were able to establish lucrative plantations by exploiting the labor of local Herero and Nama (also known as Hottentot) indigenous peoples. Of course, Germany provisioned a well armed military contingent in order to protect white settlers from the relatively unarmed 'subhuman' African natives in the newly acquired colonies.

According to the Times of Israel, "the German minority established a culture of pure labor enslavement.

Tribeswomen were subjected to incessant and often capricious rape — and not infrequently, their men were killed while attempting to defend them.

Whites routinely stole the possessions of natives, such as cattle, and found ways to seize ancestral lands over trivialities. Confiscation was often facilitated by predatory European lending practices enforced at gunpoint by the German military."

Hence, there's no wonder why Hitler saw Black people as sub-human, threatening the purity of the white German race and as a result, they were excluded from Germanic society socially and economically.

Despite this however, the powerful influence of the many Blacks who found expression in art and music were condemned by the Nazis who felt that the influence of “Negro culture” on German art and music was “degenerate” and “racially alien.”

As a result, Black employment prospects in Germany dried up under Hitler's racist policies.  Unable to find regular work, some were drafted for forced labour as “foreign workers” during World War II and the preceding years. "Films and stage shows making propaganda for the return of Germany’s African colonies became one of the few sources of income, especially after black people were banned from other kinds of public performance in 1939.," said 'The Conversation'.

But the persecution of Black people did not stop there. Hitler went on to  target mixed race children and by 1937 it is said that every identifiable mixed race child in Germany had been forcibly sterilized in order to prevent what he described as “race pollution.” These included some 800 children fathered by French colonial soldiers – many, though not all, African – when the French army occupied the Rhineland as part of the peace settlement after 1919.

“Mixed” couples were harassed into separating. When others applied for marriage licences, or when a woman was known to be pregnant or had a baby, the black partner became a target for involuntary sterilisation.

In a secret action in 1937, some 400 of the Rhineland children were forcibly sterilised. Other black Germans went into hiding or fled the country to escape sterilisation, while news of friends and relatives who had not escaped intensified the fear that dominated people’s lives.

Unlike  the Jews, and maybe out of ignorance, there seems to be little interest in Hitler’s black victims. As a result, no exact figures exist as to the numbers of  Black people who were either detained in concentration camps or forced labour camps by the Nazi regime. 

Nonetheless, their plight is hardly referenced, despite the fact that they had been denied their human rights, sterilised, persecuted, experimented upon and murdered by the SS or Gestapo of the Nazi regime

According to the  Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, “ Black Soldiers of the American, French and British armies, were worked to death on construction projects or died as a result of mistreatment in consentrtation of prisoner-of-war camps. Others were never even incarcerated, but were instead immediately killed by the SS or Gestapo. Black prisoners receive harsher treatment and less food than white POWs, and whilst white POWs were imprisoned, many of the Black  soldiers either worked until they died or were executed.`

A  recent piece by the Guardian on the topic noted that “This racist philosophy underpinned the decision to deny German citizenship to people of African descent, thus complicating their employment prospects and their ability to get by in society. Being born in Germany did not make the slightest difference.” 

“Nazi fears of “racial pollution” led to the traumatic break-up of many mixed-race families. The derogatory term Rheinlandbastard (Rhineland bastard) was used to describe children from interracial relationships. They were viewed as symbols of racial “disgrace”, and many were forcibly sterilised to prevent “alien blood” from being passed on.”

The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with “people of German blood”. A subsequent ruling confirmed that black people (like “gypsies”) were to be regarded as being “of alien blood” and subject to the Nuremberg principles. Very few people of African descent had German citizenship, even if they were born in Germany, but this became irreversible when they were given passports that designated them as “stateless negroes”.

After the enactment of the notorious Nuremberg racial laws, which designated black people as a minority with “alien blood”, many left Germany. Those who remained were isolated and suffered horrendous abuse. And while the exclusion of black children from public schools became official policy in 1941, it is a matter of record that they had long suffered racist abuse in their classrooms.

Some were forced out of school and none were permitted to go on to university or professional training. Published interviews and memoirs by both men and women, unpublished testimony and post-war compensation claims testify to these and other shared experiences.

The  Guardian story concluded by saying that “In reflecting upon the fate of black people during the Nazi reign of terror, it is clear that any honest dialogue about racism must include the Nazi treatment of black people. Black people’s pain and suffering should not be reduced to a footnote in the history of Nazism. 

“Their pain and suffering should not be marginalised because they were not also targeted for annihilation. Understanding the full extent of Nazi anti-black racism is important for everyone whose ancestors were targeted by the Nazi regime, just as it is for all communities in general in contemporary society.”

But a number of Black men from the United States, including Jesse Owens the son of a sharecropper and the grandchild of a slave, Ralph Metcalfe a Black Sprinter from Chicago, and Matthew Robinson, sprinter and brother to baseball great Jackie Robinson,  made certain of that during the1936 Berlin Olympics, when they put paid to Hitler’s Aryan race diatribe. Owens became the first US track and field athlete to win four gold medals at a single Olympiad, while Metcalfe won the 100m silver behind Owens in an equally outstanding performance.

“@official_EMMYJ: TODAY IN HISTORY:
3 Aug 1936: U.S. #Olympic runner Jesse #Owens defeats the “fastest man” in the world, fellow U.S. teammate Ralph #Metcalfe, in the 100 meter dash at the 1936 #Berlin Summer Olympic games. #history #running #race #ad @Gidi_Traffic pic.twitter.com/EmdN6CsT8q

— GIDI (@Gidi_Traffic) August 3, 2021

For the world watching his dominance of the 100m, 200m, long jump, and his performance along with Metcalfe in the 4x100m relays, Owens was a powerful repudiation of Hitler’s myth of the pure white blue eyed Nazis being a superior race of humans, the Aryan Übermensch. 

Jesse Owens shocked the Hitlerites in such a manner that the Fuehrer's chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, would later write in his diary that “white humanity should be ashamed of itself” by allowing Black athletes to participate in the Olympics. 

However, Hitler  was dismissive of the triumphs of the African-Americans at the Games – of course they won golds, he told aides, because they were essentially animals, physically stronger than the “civilised whites”. They simply needed to be banned from future competitions.

Edwin Black, wrtiting about "The African Story behind the Holocaust" in "The Tower" publication, said "when African American soldiers were deployed to Europe, Nazi soldiers who encountered them treated them mercilessly, often committing massacres and war crimes against POWs.

"After the fall of Berlin, returning African American soldiers discovered Nazi racial policy was in force in some 27 U.S. states that had adopted forced sterilization laws based on corrupt German eugenic pseudoscience. Ironically, this race science had been nurtured in America first and then transplanted to Germany.

"In state after state, eugenic boards quoted Nazi race theory and statutes as justification to sterilize blacks, and even confine them in camps as a social protective measure. In Connecticut, one state program even sought to implement Nazi-style race-based expulsions and organized euthanasia of those deemed unworthy of life."

"We have only begun to chart the impact of German policy on those of African descent," he concluded. "Such research remains almost completely unfunded and indeed unsupported. However, this much is certain: all misery bleeds the same color blood."