Blacks During the Holocaust

I received a book this week as a present about the music which was composed during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, and for some reason, it piqued my curiosity about whether or not there were black people in Germany during the Holocaust and how they were treated.

Lo and behold, there were blacks in Germany during that time, and some of them ended up in concentration camps!

In an article I found on the Internet, it says that blacks were “beaten, brutalized, sterilized, and murdered.” Apparently, after World War I, Germany was stripped of its African colonies, and German soldiers, returning home, went home with angry, racist attitudes. There were Africans in Germany at the time, and after World War I, the Reichstag (German parliament) began to enact laws of apartheid, making it illegal for the races to mix and specifically, making it illegal for Germans to marry Africans in the African colonies!

After World War I, and the victory of the Allies, Allied troops occupied Germany, and some of those soldiers, (specifically mentioned were the troops from France) were African. The Germans were mortified, and began to spread racist propaganda about the Black soldiers, saying they were carriers of venereal diseases, that they were rapists of German women, and were to be despised and feared. Children born to German women and African soldiers were called “Rhineland Bastards.”

The presence of Africans in Germany, and the fear and disdain Germans had for them, fed into the fledgling movement headed by Hitler to keep the white race “clean,” and while Hitler focused primarily on Jewish people, the movement hated Blacks for helping to spoil, or bastardize the German race.

Bi-racial (black and German) children were marginalized, kept from getting jobs, and were not allowed to attend college. It is said that in 1937, German police rounded up a large number of these mulatto children and sterilized them!

African and bi-racial adults were also targeted. An African-German dancer named Hilarius Gilges, known professionally as “Lari,” was murdered because he was Black; his German wife later received restitution from the German government for his death.

Africans and African-German people were held in concentration camps, including Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dora-Mittelbau and Dachau. Black prisoners were often treated worse than other prisoners-of-war, being brutalized in direct violation of the regulations put in place by the Geneva Convention. Black soldiers were often worked to death, literally, on construction projects, due to mistreatment.

Some African Americans participated in liberation efforts in Nazi Germany. The 761st Tank Battalion, which was attached to the 71st Infantry headed by General George Patton, helped liberate Gunskirchen, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Germans were serious about keeping their race “pure,” and the presence of Africans in the Rhineland threatened their goal. The story of the blBacks who survived is fascinating, and, of course, something that few of us know about.