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Did you know that in the 1920s there were 24,000 blacks living in
Germany?
> Neither did I. Here's how it happened and how many of them were
eventually
> caught unawares by the events of the Holocaust.
>
> >Like most West European nations, Germany established colonies in Africa
in
> the late 1800s in what later became Togo, Cameroon, Namibia, and Tanzania.
> German genetic experiments began there most notably involving prisoners
> >taken from the 1904 Heroro Massacre that left 60,000 Africans dead
> following a 4 year revolt of German colonization. After the shellacking
> Germany received in World War I, it was stripped of its African colonies
in
> 1918. As a spoil of war, the French were allowed to occupy Germany in the
> Rhineland, a bitter piece of real estate that has gone back and forth
> >between the two nations for centuries. The French willfully deployed
their
> own colonized African soldiers as the occupying force. Germans viewed this
> as the final insult of World War I.
>
> >Soon thereafter 92% of them voted in the Nazi party. Hundreds of these
> African Rhineland-based soldiers inter-married with German women and
raised
> their children as Black Germans. In " Mein Kampf". Hitler wrote about his
> plans for these "Rhineland Bastards ". When he came to power, one of his
> first directives was aimed at these mixed children.
> >
> >Underscoring his obsession with racial purity, by 1937, every identified
> mixed race child in the Rhineland had been forcibly sterilized to prevent
> further " race polluting" as he termed it. Hans Hauck, a Black Holocaust
> survivor and a victim of Hitler's mandatory sterilization program,
explained
> that when he was forced to undergo sterilization as a teenager,
> >he was given no anesthetic. Once he received his sterilization
> certificate,he was "free to go" so long as he agreed to have no sexual
> relations whatsoever with Germans.
> >
> >Although most Black Germans attempted to escape their fatherland, heading
> for France where people like Josephine Baker were steadily aiding and
> supporting the French underground, many ran into problems elsewhere.
> >Nations shut its doors to Germans, including the Black ones. Some Black
> Germans were able to eke out a living during Hitler 's reign of terror by
> performing in vaudeville shows.
> >
> >But many Blacks, steadfast in their belief that they were German first,
> Black second, opted to remain in Germany. Some fought with the Nazis (a
few
> even became Lutwaffe pilots!). Unfortunately, many Black Germans were
> arrested, charged with treason, and shipped in cattle cars to
concentration
> camps. Often these trains were so charged with people (equipped with no
> >bathroom facilities or food) that after the four day journey, box car
doors
> opened to piles of the dead and dying.
> >
> >Once in the concentration camps Blacks were given the worst jobs
> conceivable. Some Black American soldiers who were captured and held as
> prisoners of war recounted that while they were starved and forced into
> dangerous labor (violating the Geneva Convention), they were still better
> off than Black German concentration camp detainees who were forced to do
> >the unthinkable: man the crematoriums and work in labs where genetic
> experiments were carried out. As a final sacrifice, these Blacks were
killed
> every three months so that they would never be able to reveal the inner
> workings of the Final Solution.
> >
> >In every story of Black oppression, no matter how enslaved, enshackled or
> beaten we are, we find a way to survive and rescue others. Case in point,
> was Johnny Voste, a Belgian Resistance fighter who was arrested in 1942
for
> sabotage and shipped to Dachau. One of his jobs was stacking vitamin
crates.
> Risking his own life, he distributed hundreds of vitamins to camp
> >detainees which saved the lives of many because they were starving, weak,
> and ill, conditions exacerbated by extreme vitamin-deficiencies. His motto
> was: 'No, you can't have my life: I will fight for it.'
> >
> >According to Essex University's Delroy Constantine-Simms, there were
Black
> Germans who resisted Nazi Germany, such as Lari Gilges, who founded the
> Northwest Rann--an organization of entertainers that fought the Nazis in
his
> home town of Dusseldorf--and who was murdered by the SS in 1933, the year
> Hitler came to power. Little information remains about the numbers of
Black
> Germans held in the camps or killed under the Nazi regime. Some victims of
> the Nazi sterilization project and Black survivors of the Holocaust are
> still alive and telling their story in films such as Black Survivors of
the
> Nazi Holocaust. But they must also speak out for justice, not just
history.
> >
> >Unlike Jews (in Israel and in Germany), Black Germans receive no war
> reparations because their German citizenship was revoked (though they were
> German-born). The only pension they get is from those of us who are
willing
> to tell the world their stories and continue their battle for recognition
> and compensation.
> >
> >After the war, scores of Blacks who had somehow managed to survive the
Nazi
> regime were rounded up and tried as war criminals. Talk about the final
> insult. There are thousands of Black Holocaust stories from the triangle
> >trade, to slavery in America, to the gas ovens in Germany. We often shy
> away from hearing about our historical past because so much of it is
> painful.
> >
> >However, we are in this struggle together for rights, dignity, and yes,
> reparations for wrongs done to us through the centuries. We need to always
> remember so that we can take steps to ensure that these things never
happen
> again.

hum... interesting.... in my humanities class we are talking about the rhineland occupation too.... the teacher had mentioned that the french used senegalese troops in gemany but i didn't know that they had married geman women.... anyway i have a german last name, and when the berlin wall fell in the 80s i don't know the exact date, my family recieved phone calls from all the way in germany telling us that we can come back now.... we were puzzled because we didn't know where home they were talking about and then they ask: your family name is not such and such , we say yes, so they said: then you are germans. we were like no we are from Haiti .... they were really surprised to learn that we were black people!!!

Very interesting...but I would like/need further verification...

I know about this horrible historical fact. I am on my wya outm but in my book Black owmen for beginners by Saundra Sharp. there are accounts of African Russians for many centuries.............. So the Rheinhold issue has many more twists. There were African Jews killed and persucted of course.

Later

wow, thanx queenbea, this is a very interesting topic. In all my years of living (which is very few), i have NEVER heard of Black Germans, nor anything about them in the holocaust. Wow, i must do some more research on this because I take that as a great insult that black history, yet again is forgotten.

You can go to any museum and their isn't any tribute or recognititon paid to black ppl being in the holocaust at all.

I am REALLY glad and pleasantly surprised that this information is finally coming out and being discussed on a Caribbean website.

I have known about this almost obscure piece of history for some years now and it will surprise many readers to known that the presence of African people in Europe (not just Germany) goes back many thousands of years. In fact, a great many places in Europe got their names because of the profound presence or influence of African people and cultures. The capital of France, Paris, for instance, was named after an Egyptian deity Auset (Isis) and according to an otherwise racist (though at least he was intellectually honest) scholar David MacRithchie, in his book "Ancient and Modern Britons" the word "Scot" in SCOTland essentially means "black" and this was because of the substantial numbes of Africoid peoples living there (as well as in other parts of the British Isles) even BEFORE the Anglo-Saxons moved out of Germany and settled in what is now called England.

It is also noteworthy that the earliest "European" art and sculptures happen to show distinct African features. Witness the famous "Venus" statues of Monaco and France that goes back some 45,000 years ago. There were also three African popes that we know of and a possible fourth as well as at least two African emperors of Rome -- Septimus Severus and his son Caracalla

This is one of the more embarrassing aspects of European history so it should come as no surprise that you guys haven't heard about it until Queen Bee brought it up. A very good book to read onthe subject is "African Presence in Early Europe" edited by Guyanese anthropologist Dr Ivan Van Sertima

i read a book on this subject....gotta get the name......

the book i read was Destined to Witness - Growing up black in nazi germany, by Hans J. Massaquoi

Ah yes, I am familiar with Massequoi. I read an interview of him, I think it was on Yahoo's Global African Presence

This is very informative. I'd heard about these things vaguely but it's good to have concrete names and circumstances. Do you have a link or copy of the original article(s)? I want to pass it along but I'd like to have a better formatted version with which to do so.

...the name rings a bell

Wow, interesting.....I never knew that. I just did an internet search under "holocaust survivors" and there were 214,000 results. Did another search under "black holocuast survivors", 2 results.

thanks for that info that will be put on my 'to read list'

damn, they can even make search engines racist these days.

try google, it return over 73,000 results for "black holocaust survivors", many on the 1st page were interesting looking books. Granted, that's less than the 312,000 u get for "holocaust survivors", but that's a little more in line with what's out there.