Blacks during the Holocaust Era

Blacks in Germany Before 1933

After World War I, the Allies stripped Germany of its African colonies. The German military stationed in Africa, known as the Schutztruppen, as well as missionaries, colonial bureaucrats, and settlers, returned to Germany with racist attitudes. Separation of whites and blacks was mandated by the Reichstag (German parliament), which enacted a law against mixed marriages in the African colonies.

Following World War I and the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the victorious Allies occupied the Rhineland in western Germany. The use of French colonial troops, some of whom were black, in these occupation forces heightened anti-black racism in Germany. Racist propaganda against black soldiers depicted them as rapists of German women and carriers of venereal and other diseases. The children of black soldiers and German women were called “Rhineland Bastards.”

Nazi Perceptions of Blacks

The Nazis, at the time a small political movement, viewed the “Rhineland Bastards” as a threat to the purity of the Germanic race. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler charged that “the Jews had brought the Negroes into the Rhineland with the clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily-resulting bastardization.”

African German mulatto (a person of mixed white and black ancestry) children were marginalized in German society, isolated socially and economically, and not allowed to attend university. Racial discrimination prohibited them from seeking most jobs, including service in the military. With the Nazi rise to power they became a target of racial and population policy. By 1937, the Gestapo had secretly rounded up and forcibly sterilized many of them. Some were subjected to medical experiments; others mysteriously “disappeared.”

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