Black German Holocaust Victims

[Nubian Queen]

BLACK GERMAN HOLOCAUST VICTIMS

So much of history is lost to us because we often don't write the history books, film the documentaries, nor pass the accounts down from generation to generation.

One documentary now touring the film festival circuit, telling us to "Always Remember" is "Black Survivors of the Holocaust" (1997). Outside the U.S., the film is entitled "Hitler's Forgotten Victims" (Afro-Wisdom Productions) . It codifies another dimension to the "Never Forget " Holocaust story--our dimension.

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

Hans Hauck, a Black Holocaust survivor and a victim of Hitler's mandatory sterilization program, explained in the film "Hitler's Forgotten Victims" that, when he was forced to undergo sterilization as a teenager, he was given no anesthetic. Once he received his sterilization certificate, he was "free to go", so long as he agreed to have no sexual relations whatsoever with Germans.

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". In every story of Black oppression, no matter how we were enslaved, shackled, or beaten, we always found a way to survive and to rescue others.

As a case in point, consider Johnny Voste, a Belgian resistance fighter who was arrested in 1942 for alleged sa botage and then shipped to Dachau. One of his jobs was stacking vitamin crates. Risking his own life, h! ! e distributed hundreds of vitamins to camp detainees, which saved the lives of many who were starving, weak, and ill--conditions exacerbated by extreme vitamin deficiencies.

His motto was "No, you can't have my life; I will fight for it." According to Essex University's Del! roy Constantine- Simms, there were Black Germans who resisted Nazi Germany, such as Lari Gilges, who founded the Northwest Rann--an organization of entertainers that fought the Nazis in his home town of Dusseldorf--and who was murdered by the SS in 1933, the year that Hitler came into power.

Little information remains about the numbers of Black Germans held in the camps or killed under the Nazi regime. Some victims of the Nazi sterilization project and Black survivors of the Holocaust are still alive and telling their story in films such as "Black Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust", but they must also speak out for justice, not just history.

Unlike Jews (in Israel and in Germany), Black Germans received no war reparations because their German citizenship was revoked (even though they were German-born) .

The only pension they get is from those of us who are willing to tell the world their stories and continue their battle for recognition and compensation.

After the war, scores of Blacks who had somehow managed to survive the Nazi regime, were rounded up and tried as war criminals. Talk about the final insult!

There are thousands of Black Holocaust stories, from the triangle trade, to slavery in America, to the gas ovens in Germany.

We often shy away from hearing about our historical past becau se so much of it is painful; however, we are in this struggle together for rights, dignity, and, yes, reparations for wrongs done to us through the centuries.

We need to always remember so that we can take steps to ensure that these atrocities never happen again.

For further information, read Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany, by Hans J. Massaquoi.

[Nubian Queen]

Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experience of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans and African Americans in the Nazi Era

By: Clarence Lusane
Published: 2002
Routledge
Race discrimination
320 pages
ISBN 0415931215

The Nazi era in Germany and all of its accompanying atrocities is one of the most documented periods in history. However, this documentation is incomplete in one important area: the history and experiences of people of African descent in Nazi Germany. Did Afro-Germans and other blacks suffer under Nazism? The answer to this question, to the degree it has been asked at all, remains vague even for those scholars and researchers familiar with the Nazi era and the Holocaust in particular.Drawing on interviews with the Black survivors of Nazi concentration camps and archival research in North America, Europe, and Africa, this book documents and analyzes the meaning of Nazism's racial policies towards people of African descent, specifically those born in Germany, France, England, the United States or Africa, and the impact of that legacy on contemporary race relations in Germany, and more generally, in Europe. The book also specifically addresses the concerns of those surviving Afro-Germans who were victims of Nazism, but have not generally been included in or benefited from the compensation agreements that have been developed in recent years.

[Nubian Queen]

How much more of this was AIRBRUSHED out of history...I have done my research...coming back with lots more

What an eye opener

[Nubian Queen]

Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich

Hardcover: 296 pages
Publisher: University of Michigan Press (December 11, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0472113607
ISBN-13: 978-0472113606

It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity. Tina Campt's Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-semitism. She also provides oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black Germans for the book.In the end, the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities?The answers to Campt's questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it meant to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.Tina Campt is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University. It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity. Tina Campt's Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-semitism. She also provides oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black Germans for the book.In the end, the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities?The answers to Campt's questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it meant to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.Tina Campt is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University.



About the author:

TINA MARIE CAMPT is an associate professor of women’s studies at Duke University with secondary appointments in the departments of history and German; she is also a visiting associate professor of women’s studies at Vanderbilt. The author of over eleven articles and chapters on race in Germany, her first book was Other Germans: Blacks, Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2004). Campt’s forthcoming publications include work on diasporic hegemonies and popular culture.
Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities fellows program

[s8loud]

Here's another one:

Amazon.com: Germany's Black Holocaust, 1890-1945: The Untold Truth!: Firpo W. Carr: Books

I went to the author's book-signing event, and man, he had a lot of interesting things to say about all this.

[Nubian Queen]

Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany

Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial (February 6, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060959614
ISBN-13: 978-0060959616

In a unique addition to the literature of life under the Third Reich, Massaquoi, a former managing editor of Ebony magazine, chronicles his life as the son of a German nurse and Al-Haj Massaquoi, the son of the Liberian consul general to Germany. Soon after his birth in Hamburg in 1926, the author's father returned to Liberia to bolster his family's failing stature in national politics, leaving his wife and son to grapple with everyday life amid the rise of fascism in Germany. The Reich's racial politics were so steadfastly drummed into German schoolchildren that the young Hans quickly acquired an anti-Semitic outlook only to realize that he was also subject to discrimination as a non-Aryan. He sought intellectual escape from German nationalism through reading books by Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle and James Fenimore Cooper; in his idealization of African-American athletes Joe Lewis and Jesse Owens; and by learning how to play jazz and his involvement with the "swingboys" officially condemned as purveyors of "degenerate" music and dance. Massaquoi and his mother survived both Nazi rule and the devastating 1943 British bombing of Hamburg. He tells of life after the war, of befriending black American soldiers, of moving to Liberia in 1948 and of his subsequent move to America in 1950, where he came to feel that racism was as prevalent as it had been under the Third Reich. Thoughtful and well written, Massaquoi's memoir adds nuance to our comprehension of 20th-century political and personal experience.



B]About the author:[[/b]


CHICAGO (AP) -- In 1933, when he was a second-grader in his native Hamburg, Hans J. Massaquoi wanted to show what a good German he was, so he cajoled his baby sitter into sewing a swastika onto his sweater.

Massaquoi's mother spotted the Nazi emblem that evening and promptly snipped it off, but a teacher had already taken a school yard snapshot of the boy wearing the badge. The other children in the picture are typical fair-haired north Germans, but young Hans -- the only child with a swastika -- is dark-skinned and has kinky hair.

The startling photo appears on the dust jacket of Massaquoi's autobiography, "Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany," published in the United States by William Morrow.

Massaquoi, now 74, retired three years ago after more than 30 years as managing editor of Chicago-based Ebony magazine, a post that gave him access to statesmen, leaders of the Civil Rights movement and the stars of American culture.

But in writing his autobiography, Massaquoi chose not to deal with his decades of success in the United States or with the famous people he has known. He told instead the story of his life as a young man in the working-class neighborhoods of Hamburg.

He credits the late Alex Haley, author of "Roots," with convincing him of the importance of sharing his experience of being "both an insider in Nazi Germany and, paradoxically, an endangered outsider."

"I left Germany in 1948, and since then I have met only two German-born blacks of my generation," Massaquoi said in an interview from his home in New Orleans. "There weren't many to begin with, and most probably died in the (concentration) camps."

Many other black Germans were the children of French and Belgian colonial troops from Africa who occupied the Rhineland after World War I. Massaquoi, though, was from a more privileged background -- at least at first. His mother, Bertha, was a German nurse and his father, who did not marry Bertha, was the playboy son of a former tribal king who served as Liberia's first consul general in Germany.

Massaquoi's earliest years were spent at his grandfather's villa, where white German servants waited on African dignitaries. A few days before his fourth birthday, however, his grandfather was recalled to Liberia in a political shake-up.

The grandfather and father wanted Massaquoi and his mother to come to Liberia with them, but she refused, saying that Hans, who had been born prematurely, was too delicate for the African climate. And so she chose to keep Hans in Hamburg, although it meant returning to work as a single parent. (Hans' father did not contribute to his son's support.)

It was 1929, and the district they moved into was the scene of frequent street brawls between Communists and members of the emerging Nazi party.

To young Hans, those Nazis were less fearsome than the occasional sadistic teacher or the neighborhood bullies who tormented him by chanting "Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger!" ("Negro, Negro, chimney sweep!").

That painful taunt provided the title for the German translation of Massaquoi's book.

"That title was not my idea," Massaquoi said. "I agonized over it for quite a while before letting them use it, but it seems to have caught on. The book is selling very well in Germany."

In mid-July, nine months after publication, "Neger, Neger" was still on the best-seller lists in Germany, and Massaquoi said it was being adapted there for use as a public school text. Movie plans are also in the works.

"I had expected some interest there, but this has surpassed all my expectations," he said. "I think the Germans want to get some closure about those years."

For Massaquoi, those years were filled with restrictions, rejections and even a certain fascination with Nazism -- particularly the Hitler Youth. One of the saddest moments of his childhood, he writes, was when his homeroom teacher told him he couldn't join -- and explained why.

"Of course, I wanted to join," he said. "I was a kid and most of my friends were joining. They had cool uniforms and they did exciting things -- camping, parades, playing drums."

With adolescence, Massaquoi faced more limitations. He learned to dance but could only dance in private; he learned to box but was not allowed to box Aryan opponents. Although he was a good student, higher education was forbidden.

And by the time Massaquoi was in his teens and growing more aware of the Nazi regime's true nature, Germany was at war.

Some of the most harrowing pages in Massaquoi's book tell of the near-destruction of Hamburg during the Operation Gomorrah bombing attack in the summer of 1943.

Massaquoi also tells stories of the "swingboys," disaffected youths like himself who took great risks by playing and dancing to their own version of American swing music -- something condemned by the regime as "Negermusik."

"There really wasn't anything political about it," he said. "It was more a manifestation of the normal rebellion of young people toward regimentation."

'Swingboy' credentials
Massaquoi's "swingboy" credentials came in handy after Germany's collapse and the occupation of Hamburg by British troops. He was able to save his mother and himself from starvation by playing saxophone in clubs that catered to members of the American Merchant Marine.

Those sailors included the first American blacks Massaquoi ever got to know. They schooled him in American ways and gave him access to the American cigarettes that had become the "money" of defeated Germany.

After three years of cigarette smuggling and music, the 22-year-old Massaquoi was finally able to leave Germany. He first sailed to join his father's family in Liberia, where he wound up doing menial jobs in the bush. Later, in 1950, he flew to the United States to study aviation mechanics in Chicago.

Although he was an alien on a student visa, Massaquoi was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and decided not to challenge it. Volunteering for the elite 82nd Airborne kept him from being sent to Korea. Instead, he spent his Army years in the still-segregated South.

The Army led to U.S. citizenship, education and eventually to Massaquoi's career as a journalist.

"Even at its worst, the American version of racism seemed much more endurable than the Nazism I had already experienced," he said. "In Germany, I was isolated -- I was the only one."
CNN.com - Growing up black in Nazi Germany: A witness remembers - August 24, 2000

[jimihaze]

I knew about this. I am glad to see it here on the board. massaquoi also work at ebony for a time.

[Chevron Dove]

I read other books on this. I am so happy to see this post. Thank you so much. I cannot thank you enough.

[Terminal Server]

It is true that Nazi ideology demonised black people. Hitler in Mein Kampf described blacks as 'culture destroyers' (in contrast to Aryan 'culture creators', and Asian 'culture preservers'. When the Nazis came to power they sought to uproot cultural elements of black origin (such as jazz music) that had penetrated German society.

They also sought to get rid of black people.

There were four categories of black people who were affected by the Nazis in Germany and in German-occupied Europe during World War II. They were

(1) Persons who had come to Germany from Germany's African colonies before World War I. That is persons from Cameroon (Kamerun), Namibia (South-West Africa), and Tanganyika (now the greater part of Tanzania). These included members of the Herero people of Namibia who had been the victims of the first genocide of the twentieth century, in which about 80 percent of the Hereros died, directed against them by the German colonial authorities in 1904. Germany has consistently refused to apologise for this crime against humanity.

(2) The so-called 'Rhine bastards', children born to German women and French West African (mostly Senegalese) occupation troops in the 1920s. The Nazis considered such biracial children visible and embarrassing emblems of what they called 'racial shame'.

(3) A small number of black people from various parts of the world who settled in Germany in the 1920s, mostly entertainers.

(4) Black colonial subjects and citizens of countries occupied by Germany or at war with Germany. When the Germans occupied France, the Netherlands, and Belgium they found in those countries a number of African and Caribbean colonial subjects who were black. During the course of the war, they interned black civilian seamen from British and American ships, and black soldiers, sailors, and airmen from British, American, and French forces at war with them.

Members of categories 1, 2, and 3 were directly subject to German racial laws. This included being sent to concentration camps, and sometimes death camps. Most of the members of categories 1 and 2 were sterilised (that is they were forcibly castrated or spayed). However, some of them survived by working as film actors for the German Ministry of Propaganda (which made films about the former German colonies in Africa, and used black actors to portray native Africans), and others managed to keep jobs in factories.. One such survivor recorded the surprise of the Soviet troops who liberated him at finding a black man in Germany.

The numbers, however, were by no means as large as your friend has suggested. Most estimates of categories 1 and 2 are in the mid-twenty thousands, and the total number in categories 1-3 was probably no more than 30,000.

Category 4 was much larger, but little seems to have been done to them unless they were caught acting against German interests, as happened to the Surinamese national hero Anton de Kom, who was active in the Dutch resistance and died in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944 (it is a truly shameful matter that his contribution to Dutch resistance to German occupation was not acknowledged by the government of the Netherlands until the 1980s, though when his homeland of Surinam became independent the university there was named in his honour). African-American French Resistance officer, Josephine Baker, on the other hand, survived the war unharmed, and it is greatly to the credit of the French Republic that when she died in the 1970s she received a state funeral.

Prisoners of war and interns seem, in the main, to have been treated correctly.

[Chevron Dove]

Originally Posted by Terminal Server

It is true that Nazi ideology demonised black people. Hitler in Mein Kampf described blacks as 'culture destroyers' (in contrast to Aryan 'culture creators', and Asian 'culture preservers'. When the Nazis came to power they sought to uproot cultural elements of black origin (such as jazz music) that had penetrated German society.

They also sought to get rid of black people.

There were four categories of black people who were affected by the Nazis in Germany and in German-occupied Europe during World War II. They were

(1) Persons who had come to Germany from Germany's African colonies before World War I. That is persons from Cameroon (Kamerun), Namibia (South-West Africa), and Tanganyika (now the greater part of Tanzania). These included members of the Herero people of Namibia who had been the victims of the first genocide of the twentieth century, in which about 80 percent of the Hereros died, directed against them by the German colonial authorities in 1904. Germany has consistently refused to apologise for this crime against humanity.

(2) The so-called 'Rhine bastards', children born to German women and French West African (mostly Senegalese) occupation troops in the 1920s. The Nazis considered such biracial children visible and embarrassing emblems of what they called 'racial shame'.

(3) A small number of black people from various parts of the world who settled in Germany in the 1920s, mostly entertainers.

(4) Black colonial subjects and citizens of countries occupied by Germany or at war with Germany. When the Germans occupied France, the Netherlands, and Belgium they found in those countries a number of African and Caribbean colonial subjects who were black. During the course of the war, they interned black civilian seamen from British and American ships, and black soldiers, sailors, and airmen from British, American, and French forces at war with them.

Members of categories 1, 2, and 3 were directly subject to German racial laws. This included being sent to concentration camps, and sometimes death camps. Most of the members of categories 1 and 2 were sterilised (that is they were forcibly castrated or spayed). However, some of them survived by working as film actors for the German Ministry of Propaganda (which made films about the former German colonies in Africa, and used black actors to portray native Africans), and others managed to keep jobs in factories.. One such survivor recorded the surprise of the Soviet troops who liberated him at finding a black man in Germany.

The numbers, however, were by no means as large as your friend has suggested. Most estimates of categories 1 and 2 are in the mid-twenty thousands, and the total number in categories 1-3 was probably no more than 30,000.

Category 4 was much larger, but little seems to have been done to them unless they were caught acting against German interests, as happened to the Surinamese national hero Anton de Kom, who was active in the Dutch resistance and died in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944 (it is a truly shameful matter that his contribution to Dutch resistance to German occupation was not acknowledged by the government of the Netherlands until the 1980s, though when his homeland of Surinam became independent the university there was named in his honour). African-American French Resistance officer, Josephine Baker, on the other hand, survived the war unharmed, and it is greatly to the credit of the French Republic that when she died in the 1970s she received a state funeral.

Prisoners of war and interns seem, in the main, to have been treated correctly.

This kind of history is so bitter in my spirit and one main reason has to do with America's educational system. THEY ARE APART OF THE SCAM when they denied us this education about Europe. Also, I wonder how this kind of history set with Obama due to the fact that his mother was of European-Jewish background. I heard all about them and nothing about the black victims.