Dream Deferred | The Holocaust’s forgotten black victims – the ‘Rhineland Bastards’

Most people know about the Nazi Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews and 6 million others: Russians, Gypsies, Slavs, socialists, disabled people and LGBT people.

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.

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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’

A Weighty Inheritance: An Excerpt from 'God, Faith, and Identity From the Ashes' – Tablet Magazine

I grew up in a Jewish home in a predominately Jewish town in a predominately Jewish suburb. I spent two hours every Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday at Hebrew School, and attended High Holiday services with my family at our local Conservative synagogue. I was Jewish, of course, just as everyone around me seemed to be, but I could sense early on that the world of Judaism in which I existed was just a bit different from everyone else’s.

None of my friends, after all, had great aunts and uncles and grandparents with inky numbers scrawled on their forearms. I understood it from a young age as something that set my family apart—set me apart—and somehow marked us, too. We were a family of Holocaust survivors, and that was the lens through which, unbeknownst to me at first, every Biblical account I read and every prayer I learned was filtered. From a young age, my faith was bound to my family’s legacy; their stories my ritual text, their sorrows my liturgy.

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I realized then that I had missed out on years of questions, stories, and, more acutely, years of a real relationship with my grandparents. All I had were my pieced-together memories, grainy home movie footage, and second-hand accounts of their experiences during the Holocaust. The lore I had been consumed by when I was younger had been largely cobbled together from what I knew about them at the time, snippets of stories of my grandmother surviving because of her skill as a seamstress, of cousins and uncles looking out for each other during the war and after. It wasn’t fair, my 17-year-old self angrily thought. There were so many more things I needed to know.

A Weighty Inheritance: An Excerpt from 'God, Faith, and Identity From the Ashes' – Tablet Magazine