Black Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust

Did you know
•that in the 1920's, there
were 24,000 Blacks living in Germany?

•that in the 1890s Blacks were tortured in German concentration camps in Southwest Africa (now called Namibia) when Adolph Hitler was only a child?

•that Colonial German doctors conducted unspeakable medical experiments on these emaciated helpless Africans decades before such atrocities were ever visited upon the Jews?

If you are like most people, you simply have never heard the unbelievable story of Black victims of the Holocaust. Well, 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 1800's 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 against 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, and,
soon thereafter, 92% of them voted in the Nazi party. Hundreds of the African Rhineland-based soldiers intermarried 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-race children. Underscoring Hitler's obsession with racial purity, by 1937, every identified mixed-race child in the Rhineland had
been forcibly sterilized, in order to prevent further "race polluting", as Hitler termed it.

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 still encountered problems elsewhere. Nations shut their 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 packed with people and (equipped with no bathroom
facilities or food), that, after the four-day journey, box car doors were opened to piles of the dead and dying.

Once inside 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 being 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 being conducted. 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".

Little information remains about the numbers of Black Germans held in the camps or killed under the Nazi regime. Some Black survivors of the Holocaust
are still alive and telling their story in films such as "Black Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust". After the war, scores of Blacks who had somehow managed to survive the Nazi regime, were rounded up and tried as war criminals.

For further information, read: Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany, by Hans J. Massaquoi. Other titles on the subject can be found on Amazon.com.