Nazi persecution of black people

[pieter]

A forgotten part of the Holocaust are the racist policies against Black people in Germany (Afrodeutsche), and Black people in European countries occupied by Nazi Germany.


A German mixed race couple in 1914 in Germany

While black people in Nazi Germany were never subject to an organized mass extermination program, as in the cases of Jews, homosexuals, Romani, and Slavs, they were still considered by the Nazis to be an inferior race and along with Romani people were subject to the Nuremberg Laws under a supplementary decree.

Background

Even before World War II, Germany struggled with the idea of African mixed-race German citizens. While interracial marriage was legal under German law at the time, beginning in 1890, some colonial officials started refusing to register them, using eugenics arguments about the supposed inferiority of mixed-race children to support their decision. By 1912, this had become official policy in many German colonies, and a debate in the Reichstag over the legality of the interracial marriage bans ensued. A major concern brought up in debate was that mixed-race children born in such marriages would have German citizenship, and could therefore return to Germany with the same rights to vote, serve in the military, and could also hold public office as full-blooded ethnic Germans.

After World War I, French occupation forces in the Rhineland included African colonial troops, some of whom fathered children with German women. Newspaper campaigns against the use of these troops focused on these children, dubbed "Rhineland bastards", often with lurid stories of uncivilised African soldiers raping innocent German women, the so-called "Black Horror on the Rhine". In the Rhineland itself, local opinion of the troops was very different, and the soldiers were described as "courteous and often popular", possibly because French colonial soldiers harboured less ill-will towards Germans than war-weary ethnic French occupiers. While subsequent discussions of Afro-German children revolved around these "Rhineland Bastards", in fact, only 400–600 children were born to such unions, compared to a total Black population of 20,000–25,000 in Germany at the time.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe." He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardising the White race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate." He also implied that this was a plot on the part of the French since the population of France was being increasingly "negrified".

Rhineland sterilisation program


Young Rhinelander who was classified as a bastard and hereditarily unfit under the Nazi regime

Under eugenics laws during the Third Reich, race alone was not sufficient criteria for forced sterilisation, but anyone could request sterilisation for themselves or a minor under their care. The cohort of mixed-race children born during the occupation were approaching adulthood when, in 1937, with Hitler's approval, a special Gestapo commission was created and charged with "the discrete sterilisation of the Rhineland bastards." It is unclear how much these minors were told about the procedures, or how many parents only consented under pressure from the Gestapo. An estimated 500 children were sterilised under this program, including girls as young as eleven years old.

Civilian life

Beyond the compulsory sterilisation programme in the Rhineland, there was no coherent Nazi policy towards African Germans. In one instance, when local officials petitioned for guidance on how to handle an Afro-German who could not find employment because he was a repeat criminal offender, they were told the population was too small to warrant the formulation of any official policy and to settle the case as they saw fit. Due to the rhetoric at the time, Black Germans experienced discrimination in employment, welfare, and housing, and were also banned from pursuing higher education; they were socially isolated and forbidden to have sexual relations and marriages with Aryans by the racial laws. Black people were placed at the bottom of the racial scale of non-Aryans along with Jews, Slavs, and Romani/Roma people. Some Black people managed to work as actors in films about the African colonies. Others were hired for the German Africa Show, a human zoo touring between 1937–40.


Theodor Wonja Michael (15 January 1925 – 19 October 2019) was a German child actor, journalist and public servant, as well as a prominent speaker on living as an Afro-German and a prisoner in Nazi forced labor camps during Nazi Germany.

In the armed forces


Hans Hauck (1920–2003) was an Afro-German who served in the Wehrmacht during the Nazi regime in Germany. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Hauck )

The Compulsory Service Act of 21 May 1935 restricted military service to "Aryans" only, but there are several documented cases of Afro-Germans who served in the Wehrmacht, or were enlisted in Nazi organizations like the Hitler Youth.

The Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism (Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme, LVF) sent to the Eastern Front as part of the Wehrmacht initially included some 200 non-white volunteers, originating mainly in French North Africa. An influx of foreign volunteers during the North African campaign also led to the presence of some black people in the Wehrmacht in units like the Free Arabian Legion.

[pieter]

After World War I, relationships between French occupation troops and German women were banned. But they happened anyway, and liaisons involving black soldiers produced a number of mixed-race children. Many were later persecuted by the Nazis.

Around 100,000 French troops were sent to occupy Germany's Rhineland region in 1920. About 20,000 of these soldiers came from the French colonies of Tunisia, Morocco, French Indochina, and Senegal.

The African troops became targets of a harassment campaign called "Die Schwarze Schmach," or "The Black Disgrace." German political parties, the media, and many organizations tried to discredit French occupation policies by falsely claiming that black French soldiers were systematically raping German women and children. The presence of black, North African, and Asian troops in Germany was depicted as a threat to the "German race" and the future of European civilization.

Between 1919 and 1928, several hundred mixed-race children were born in Germany's Rhineland region -- the product of liaisons between local women and French occupation troops. These children, their mothers, and extended families were socially ostracized from the very beginning.

In the 1930s, these children became victims of racist Nazi policies. In 1937, Adolf Hitler secretly ordered hundreds of them to be forcibly sterilized. A special unit of the Gestapo was set up to carry out this task.

This documentary, directed by Dominik Wessely, tells the story of a forgotten crime. It also explains how propaganda and toxic "fake news" reports can create an environment in which horrific crimes can be committed.

[pieter]

Folks,

The racist, antisemitic, Anti-Romani sentiment, anti-Black and anti-Asian sentiment existed already in Colonial and Monarchist Europe of 17th, 18th, the 19th century and in the early 20th century before the First World War, during the First World War, during the Interwar period from 11 November 1918 to 1 September 1939 (20 years, 9 months, 21 days), and during the Second World War. Colonialists ideas of 'White Superiority above Black, Asian and Middle Eastern Oriental Arab and Jewish peoples' existed, accompanied with Eugenics, a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. During the Age of Enlightenment (an era from the 1650s to the 1780s), you had Scientific racist thinkers like François Bernier (1620–1688), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), Richard Bradley (1688–1732), and Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782).


François Bernier (25 September 1620 – 22 September 1688) was a French physician and traveller. He was born in Joué-Etiau in Anjou. He stayed (14 October 1658 – 20 February 1670) for around 12 years in India. His 1684 publication "Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l'habitent" ("New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or Races of Man that Inhabit It") is considered the first published post-Classical classification of humans into distinct races.


Robert Boyle FRS (25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, alchemist, inventor and Scientific racist whom had a monogenist perspective about race origin. He was a pioneer studying races, and he believed that all human beings, no matter how diverse their physical differences, came from the same source: Adam and Eve.


Richard Bradley (1688–1732) was an English naturalist. In his book titled Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature (1721), Bradley claimed there to be “five sorts of men” based on their skin colour and other physical characteristics: white Europeans with beards; white men in America without beards (meaning Native Americans); men with copper-coloured skin, small eyes, and straight black hair; Blacks with straight black hair; and Blacks with curly hair. It has been speculated that Bradley’s account inspired Linnaeus' later categorisation.[


The Scottish lawyer Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) was a polygenist; he believed God had created different races on Earth in separate regions.

You had the Swedish physician, botanist, and zoologist, Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) in the 18th century, he labeled five "varieties" of human species. John Hunter (1728–1793), a Scottish surgeon, had the idiotic idea that the Negroid race was originally white at birth. Thinking from a White centric European narrative. The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) and the German anatomist Johann Blumenbach (1752–1840) had similar ideas like John Hunter. They believed in a "degeneration theory" of the origins of racial difference.


Carl Linnaeus


John Hunter (1728–1793)


Georges-Louis Leclerc


Johann Blumenbach


Benjamin Rush

Benjamin Rush


Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), a Founding Father of the United States and a physician, proposed that being black was a hereditary skin disease, which he called "negroidism," and that it could be cured. Rush believed non-whites were actually white underneath, but that they were stricken with a non-contagious form of leprosy, which darkened their skin color.

Christoph Meiners


Christoph Meiners

Christoph Meiners (1747–1810) was a German polygenist, and believed that each race had a separate origin. Meiners studied the physical, mental, and moral characteristics of each race, and built a race hierarchy based on his findings. Meiners split mankind into two divisions, which he labelled the “beautiful white race” and the “ugly black race.”

Thomas Jefferson


Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was an American politician, scientist, and slave owner. His contributions to scientific racism have been noted by many historians, scientists, and scholars. According to an article published in the McGill Journal of Medicine: “One of the most influential pre-Darwinian racial theorists, Jefferson's call for science to determine the obvious ‘inferiority’ of African Americans is an extremely important stage in the evolution of scientific racism.”

Georges Cuvier


Georges Cuvier

Racial studies by Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), the French naturalist and zoologist, influenced both scientific polygenism and scientific racism. Cuvier believed there were three distinct races: the Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), and the Ethiopian (black). He rated each for the beauty or ugliness of the skull and quality of their civilizations. Cuvier wrote about Caucasians: “The white race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilised people of Europe belong, and which appear to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, courage, and activity.”

Arthur Schopenhauer



The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) attributed civilizational primacy to the white races, who gained sensitivity and intelligence via the refinement caused by living in the rigorous Northern climate.

Franz Ignaz Pruner



Franz Ignaz Pruner (1808–1882) was a German physician, ophthalmologist, and anthropologist who studied the racial structure of Negroes in Egypt. In a book Pruner wrote in 1846, he claimed that Negro blood had a negative influence on the Egyptian moral character. He published a monograph on Negroes in 1861. He claimed that the main feature of the Negro's skeleton is prognathism, which he claimed was the Negro's relation to the ape. He also claimed that Negroes had brains very similar to those of apes and that Negroes have a shortened big toe, a characteristic, he said, that connected Negroes closely to apes.

Arthur de Gobineau



The French aristocrat and writer Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), is best known for his book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–55) which proposed three human races (black, white and yellow) were natural barriers and claimed that race mixing would lead to the collapse of culture and civilization. He claimed that "The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength" and that any positive accomplishments or thinking of blacks and Asians were due to an admixture with whites. His works were praised by many white supremacist American pro-slavery thinkers such as Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze.

Gobineau believed that the different races originated in different areas, the white race had originated somewhere in Siberia, the Asians in the Americas and the blacks in Africa. He believed that the white race was superior, writing:

"I will not wait for the friends of equality to show me such and such passages in books written by missionaries or sea captains, who declare some Wolof is a fine carpenter, some Hottentot a good servant, that a Kaffir dances and plays the violin, that some Bambara knows arithmetic… Let us leave aside these puerilities and compare together not men, but groups.
"

Gobineau later used the term "Aryans" to describe the Germanic peoples (la race germanique).

Gobineau's works were also influential to the Nazi Party, which published his works in German. They played a key role in the master race theory of Nazism.

Houston Chamberlain


Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (9 September 1855 – 9 January 1927) was a British-German philosopher who wrote works about political philosophy and natural science. His writing promoted German ethnonationalism, antisemitism, and scientific racism; and he has been described as a "racialist writer". His best-known book, the two-volume Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), published 1899, became highly influential in the pan-Germanic Völkisch movements of the early 20th century, and later influenced the antisemitism of Nazi racial policy. Indeed, Chamberlain has been referred to as "Hitler's John the Baptist".

Born in Hampshire, Chamberlain emigrated to Dresden in adulthood out of an adoration for composer Richard Wagner, and was later naturalised as a German citizen. He married Eva von Bülow, Wagner's daughter, in December 1908, twenty-five years after Wagner's death.

As an ardent Wagnerite, Chamberlain saw it as his life's mission to spread the message of racial hatred which he believed Wagner had advocated. Chamberlain explained his work in promoting the Wagner cult as an effort to cure modern society of its spiritual ills that he claimed were caused by capitalism, industrialisation, materialism, and urbanisation.

Herman Bernhard Lundborg



Herman Bernhard Lundborg (April 7, 1868 in Väse in Värmland, Sweden – May 9, 1943 in Östhammar in Uppland, Sweden) was a Swedish physician and a race biologist.

Biography

He graduated in medicine at the Karolinska Institutet in 1895, and received his doctorate at the Uppsala University in 1903. He also habilitated there that year for psychiatry and neurology, and in 1915 for racial research and racial biology.

For his doctoral dissertation, Lundborg researched one of the genetic progressive myoclonus epilepsies first described by Heinrich Unverricht in 1891. Besides giving an account of the disease, he traced an affected family back to the 18th century, an analysis unique for that time. He concluded that the family had genetically degenerated because of "unwise marriages". The study has been described as "of considerable historic interest in human genetics". Over the years, the form of epilepsy became known as the Unverricht–Lundborg disease.

He was on the editorial board of the Hereditas journal, founded 1920, with the scope on genetics.

Lundborg was strongly involved with the ideology of racial hygiene. In the beginning of the 20th century, the idea that eugenics could improve the biological basis of society was widely held by academics and lawmakers, particularly in northern Europe and the United States. In 1922 Sweden established a eugenic governmental agency, the State Institute of Racial Biology, of which Lundborg was appointed as the head. Under his leadership, the institute began gathering copious statistics and photographs to map the racial make-up of about 100,000 Swedish people.

The Swedish writer Maja Hagerman has written a biography on Herman Lundborg and made a documentary about his racial research in Laponia.

State Institute for Racial Biology


The institute was housed in Dekanhuset in Uppsala.

The State Institute for Racial Biology (SIRB, Swedish: Statens institut för rasbiologi, SIFR) was a Swedish governmental research institute founded in 1922 with the stated purpose of studying eugenics and human genetics. It was the most prominent institution for the study of "racial science" in Sweden. It was located in Uppsala. In 1958, it was renamed to the State Institute for Human Genetics (Institutionen för medicinisk genetik) and is today incorporated as a department of Uppsala University.

The institute's first head was Herman Lundborg. He retired in 1935. He was succeeded by Gunnar Dahlberg. An early research priority was studying the commonness of the "Nordic" racial traits in the Swedish population and the alleged downsides of race-mixing between the majority population and Finns and the Sámi people. In the years 1936–1960, the majority of research projects at SIRB concerned medical genetics but racial science was still an important aspect of the institute.


Anti-Romani protest by Far right Czech Ultra Nationalists in České Budějovice, Czech Republic, 29 June 2013

While eugenic principles have been practiced as early as ancient Greece, the contemporary history of eugenics began in the late 19th century, when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom, and then spread to many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and most European countries. In this period, people from across the political spectrum espoused eugenic ideas. Consequently, many countries adopted eugenic policies, intended to improve the quality of their populations' genetic stock. Such programs included both positive measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed particularly "fit" to reproduce, and negative measures, such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction. Those deemed "unfit to reproduce" often included people with mental or physical disabilities, people who scored in the low ranges on different IQ tests, criminals and "deviants", and members of disfavored minority groups.

Modern eugenics

The idea of a modern project for improving the human population through selective breeding was originally developed by Francis Galton, and was initially inspired by Darwinism and its theory of natural selection. Galton had read his half-cousin Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which sought to explain the development of plant and animal species, and desired to apply it to humans. Based on his biographical studies, Galton believed that desirable human qualities were hereditary traits, although Darwin strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory. In 1883, one year after Darwin's death, Galton gave his research a name: eugenics. With the introduction of genetics, eugenics became associated with genetic determinism, the belief that human character is entirely or in the majority caused by genes, unaffected by education or living conditions. Many of the early geneticists were not Darwinians, and evolution theory was not needed for eugenics policies based on genetic determinism. Throughout its recent history, eugenics has remained controversial.

Francis Galton (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), was an English polymath in the Victorian era. He was a proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism. Galton was knighted in 1909.

Ernst Haeckel



Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (6 February 1834 – 9 August 1919) was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.

Haeckel was a promoter of scientific racism and embraced the idea of Social Darwinism. He was the first person to characterize the Great War the "first" World War which he did already in 1914.

[pieter]

Folks,

Of course the Dutch, Belgian, French, British, German, Spanish and Portuguese Colonial systems, structures, occupations of other African, Asian and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas (Native Americans, Amerindians) created a colonial 'White superiority' of European settlers, rulers, adiminstrators, officers and soldiers, governers over Non-White, Black African, Asian (Indonesian, Malayan, French Indo China -Vietnam- and etc.), Middle Eastern, Native American and Oceanian peoples and 'Black' Aboriginal Australians. (White British colonials and White Australians hunted and shot black native Australian Aboriginals like animals. I heard from Dutch people whom traveled to Australia and experienced Australia, that the country Australia is racist until today. The arrival and settlement of the White British colonialist and the settlement of British criminals in Australia -it was a punishment colony-, was disastrous for the Aboriginals, whom had their own way of living. Their life, culture and heritage was disrupted by these Europeans of the 'Germanic -Anglo Saxon- and Celtic British Isles'.

This colonialism had influence on the many thinkers and writers of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century I mentioned above here. They were influenced by the practices, experiences, the administrations of the colonies, the Slave trade, the system of slavery in the colonies, and Roman Catholic and Protestant 'White christian' Missionary activities and practices in these colonies. White superiority and white domination over Black, Asian, native Indian, India (the country of Hindu's, Sikhs, Indian Muslims and Buddhists) and Aboriginal Australians in Australia created a mindset of racial superiority, racism, White nationalism and imperialism (Britian rules the waves) and the inferiority of Blacks and Asians.

That colonial stuctures, systems, theories and practices influenced the thinkers, writers and ideologues that laid the foundations for Italian Fascism, German and Austrian Fascisme and Spain's Franco's far right Ultra Nationalist Falangism ideology and system that ruled spain from 1 October 1936 until 20 November 1975.

Pieter

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

Hilarius Gilges



One day in June 1933, about a dozen SS officers abducted 24-year-old performing artist Hilarius Gilges in the city where he grew up, Düsseldorf, Germany. The son of a German textile worker and an African man of uncertain origins, Hilarius had caught the attention of the Nazis because of his political affiliation and his mixed-race identity. Nazi SS officers (SS stands for Schutzstaffel, the elite paramilitary and surveillance organization established by Adolf Hitler in 1925) tortured and killed Hilarius. The murder is marked as the first death in Düsseldorf under Nazi Germany. Today, a plaza in Düsseldorf named after Gilges in 2003 is situated not far from a plaque COMMISSIONED in 1988 to commemorate the life of the slain Afro-German.

www.vergessene-biografien.de/

[pieter]

Valaida Snow



Louis Armstrong called her "Little Louis" and described her as the world's best second best jazz trumpet player after him. Even W.C. Handy, the father of blues, dubbed her the "Queen of the Trumpet." Valaida Snow was a gifted singer, dancer and instrumentalist. She also played cello, bass, violin, banjo, mandolin, harp, accordion, clarinet, saxophone. You may not have heard of her, because she spent many of her heyday years abroad in Europe. She was a bright musical sensation.



After focusing on the trumpet, Snow quickly became so famous at the instrument that she was nicknamed "Little Louis" after Louis Armstrong, who called her the world's second-best jazz trumpet player, besides himself. W. C. Handy, who is known as the Father of the Blues, gave her the nickname "Queen of the Trumpet." Contemporary critics Krin Gabbard and Will Friedwald have commented on her approach to playing like Armstrong. Gabbard said she developed a "distinctly Armstrongian style" and Friedwald said she "mimicked" Armstrong. In a 1928 performance in Chicago at the Sunset Café, Snow played the trumpet, sang. Then seven pairs of shoes were placed in a row at the front of the stage, and she danced in each pair for one chorus. The dances and shoes to match were: soft-shoe, adagio shoes, tap shoes, Dutch clogs, Chinese straw sandals, Turkish slippers, and the last pair, Russian boots. "When Louis Armstrong saw the show one night, he continued clapping after others had stopped and remarked, 'Boy I never saw anything that great'." Despite her talent, she had fewer opportunities to hold residencies as a bandleader at clubs in New York or Chicago, like many of her male peers. Instead, she predominantly toured, playing concerts throughout the US, Europe, and China. In 1926, she toured London and Paris with Lew Leslie's Blackbirds revue and then from 1926 to 1929, she toured with Jack Carter's Serenaders in Shanghai, Singapore, Calcutta, and Jakarta.


Snow appeared in a Swedish advertisement when she toured Scandinavia

But, in 1939, something dark happened. Valaida's friend and fellow performer, Josephine Baker - who was a French Resistance fighter- pleaded with her to return to America with a vehement warning about the Nazis. But Valaida traveled to Denmark, one of the first countries that the Nazis invaded. In 1941 she was arrested in Copenhagen and imprisoned in Vestre Fængsel: according to some by the Nazis, according to others for drug use (Snow was addicted to morphine). She was released in May 1942, after which she returned to America. After this, because of her experiences in prison, she was never the same again. Her manager and husband Earl Edwards (she was previously married to, among other things, the much younger dancer Ananias Berry) managed to arrange performances for her, including at the Apollo in New York. But she hadn't been so successful for a long time. She only occasionally recorded for small labels (Derby, Apollo Records and Chess Records), but had no more hits. She also performed in revues. After a performance at the Palace Theater in New York, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on May 30, 1956 and died. Valaida Snow was buried on her birthday.

[pieter]

Lieutenant Darwin Nichols

The African American pilot from Portland Oregon, was pronounced missing in action September 12, 1944. He was incarcerated in a Gestapo prison in March 1945. Blacks incarcerated by the Nazis (especially prisoners of war, who were kept separate from white POWs) often faced greater maltreatment than white inmates. It is believed that he was killed trying to escape. He fell into the Lahn river. His body was identified in June 1945. He is buried at the The Ardennes American Cemetery and Memorial in Belgium.

African Americans in Nazi Germany
encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/african-americans-in-nazi-germany

[pieter]

Black people in Nazi Germany



Many black people who lived in Germany under the Nazi regime were persecuted, alienated and murdered during this period. The Nazis viewed them as a threat to the purity of the Germanic race. Nazi propaganda posters, showing friendship across racial groups, referred to ‘a loss of racial pride.’


Racist Nazi propaganda poster © USHMM

In the 1920s, around 24,000 Black people were living in Germany. African-German mixed race children were economically and socially marginalised in German society, and not allowed to attend university. Under the Nazis black people no longer had jobs and were excluded from many aspects of life.

When the Nazis came to power, one of the first directives was aimed at mixed-race children. Underlining Hitler’s obsession with racial purity, by 1937 every identified mixed-race child in the Rhineland had been forcibly sterilised, in order to prevent further ‘race polluting’, as Hitler termed it.

Hans Hauck, a black survivor of Nazi racial policies and a victim of the 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’, as long as he agreed to have no sexual relations with Germans.

Black prisoners of war

Prisoners of war (POWs) faced mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis, who did not uphold the regulations imposed by the Geneva Convention (the international agreement on the conduct of war and the treatment of wounded and captured soldiers). Black soldiers of the American, French, and British Armies were worked to death on construction projects or died as a result of mistreatment in concentration or prisoner-of-war camps. Others were never even incarcerated, but were instead immediately killed by the SS or Gestapo. Black prisoners received harsher treatment and less food than white POWs, and whilst most white POWs were imprisoned, many of the black soldiers either worked until they died or were executed.

The Wereth 11 Massacre During the Battle of the Bulge



Members of an African American artillery battalion went from being hated to revered to tortured and killed by the SS at Wereth during the Battle of the Bulge. The crime remains unsolved.

The Wereth 11 were eleven African-American soldiers who were gruesomely murdered in the Belgian hamlet of Wereth in the East Cantons. The massacre took place on December 17, 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge. This murder is not well known to the public due to the fact that on that same day the Malmedy Massacre took place on a larger scale near the town of Malmedy.

The murder

The eleven men were separated from their unit during the Battle of the Bulge, after they were ordered to withdraw. Not knowing what was going on around them, they decided to go to Wereth. Farmer Mathias Langer temporarily took them into hiding. A Nazi sympathizer found out within a day and reported their presence to members of the 1st Waffen-SS division. The Waffen-SS searched the farm and the eleven men surrendered. Thinking they were being taken off as prisoners of war, they were taken to the nearest field. There they were brutally murdered. After their legs were broken, their fingers cut off and they were bayonets, they were shot dead in cold blood.



The victims were members of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, an all-African-American unit. During the Second World War, the US Army still had racial segregation, i.e. there were only 'white' and 'black' units but no mixed units. The perpetrators were never known and the Nazi sympathizer was never traced. As a result, they have never been tried for their crime.


Memorial to the Wereth 11

[pieter]

[pieter]