Alongside the big narrative of the Holocaust there are a myriad of small, individual stories and testimonies that help illustrate and shed light on the cruelty and barbarity of the Nazi regime.
One such account is the story of what happened to Germany’s tiny black population.
Primo Levi once wrote, “this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns”. Some may know their story, I certainly didn’t.
Tucked away inside Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribe, Mein Kampf, there is the following passage:
It was, and is, the Jew who brought negroes to the Rhine, brought them with the same aim and with deliberate intent to destroy the white race he hates by persistent bastardisation, to hurl it from the cultural and political heights it has attained, and to ascend them as its masters.[,,,]
An organisation named “Commission Number 3″ was created by the Nazis to deal with the so-called problem of the “Rhineland Bastards”. This was organised under Dr Eugen Fischer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. It was decided that the African-German children would be sterilised under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.
The programme began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all “Rhineland Bastards” under their jurisdiction.
All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilised. The Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilisation and abortion programme.
What happened to these Afro-Germans is very complex – their experiences were not uniform. Some of these children were subjected to medical experiments and others mysteriously “disappeared”.
Hans Hauck, a black Holocaust survivor and a victim of Hitler’s mandatory sterilisation programme, explained in the film Hitler’s Forgotten Victims that when he was forced to undergo sterilisation as a teenager, he was given no anaesthetic. Once he received his sterilisation certificate, he was “free to go”, so long as he agreed to have no sexual relations whatsoever with Germans.
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From the comments:
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the photograph taken in 1933 of a brown-skinned boy wearing a swastika in a schoolyard in Hamburg, Germany, does not begin to tell the story of the remarkable life of Hans J. Massaquoi. Mr. Massaquoi, former managing editor of Ebony magazine, has now told the story himself in his new book, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0003/black_nazi.html
Dream Deferred | The Holocaust’s forgotten black victims – the ‘Rhineland Bastards’
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