German Nationalism & The Question of Color

I never thought I’d have a conversation where Nazis and American slavery intersect. Last year, following a dinnertime gathering of Larry’s colleagues, we spent the later evening hours hanging out and talking with one couple.

Somehow the conversation turned to the legacies under which we labor. Larry’s colleague talked about the struggle between knowing his grandfather and knowing that his grandfather was a Nazi.

When he asked about my history, I realized no one had ever done that before. I told him what little we knew, about my sister’s discovery of a great-great relative’s slave papers and my father’s genealogical research.

In just those few moments, however, I felt a bit of catharsis. That someone would ask about and acknowledge my personal history--without sidestepping around its horrific origins--was a bit freeing.It’s something most African Americans and, I suspect, no Afro Germans get to experience.

In the early 20th century, increased exposure to the world at large was changing the face of Germany—literally. After World War I immigrants from former African colonies came to study and explore life in Germany. 

Due to Germany’s failure to pay reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, the Rhineland was occupied by Belgian and French-African soldiers, and many were starting multiracial families there.

As national socialism gained popularity and the Nazis came to power, the one thing that probably saved Afro Germans from a worse scourge was the party’s focus on Jews. But that’s not to say blacks in Germany came away unscathed.

The principles of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws were also applied to blacks. Even those born in Germany were considered to be foreigners and given papers identifying them as “stateless negroes.” 

Black children were banned from schools in 1941, and the following year Himmler began a survey of all black people living in Germany.

Meanwhile, the Nazis harassed interracial couples and families, forcing them to flee the country or separate. Discrimination made employment for blacks difficult, and many found the “Afrika-Schau”—a traveling exhibit in the tradition of the “human zoos” that first sprung up in the late 1800s—their only option.

As part of their attempts to rouse a sentiment of a united, superior Germany, the Nazis assumed control of the Afrika-Schau. They had one hope to gather and control all the country’s blacks in one place. They had a larger goal to use the show as a propaganda tool: one of their ideas was to revive German colonialism.

But the Afrika-Schau was short-lived and failed on both fronts, particularly since only dark-skinned blacks were accepted to fit the stereotype presented, and Germany had too many other fronts to handle without adding overseas colonies to the mix.

Master plan or not, the Nazis continued to oppress the black populace into silence. An estimated 800 interracial children now lived in the Rhineland, their existence irksome enough to Hitler for him to mention it in Mein Kampf. The solution? At least 400 of those children were kidnapped and sterilized.

At 15, biracial teen Gert Schramm was branded a
"political prisoner" and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp

And though they did not make up a recognized percentage of prisoners, black Germans were also sent to concentration camps.

With the survivors mostly mum or ignored, these stories risk being lost. But a new film—Ava and Duante—is scheduled to come out later this year, providing a fictionalized account of an interracial German couple trying to survive during this time.

Maybe it will bring the acknowledgement this chapter of history deserves. Maybe it will bring some small amount of catharsis to those who have suffered.

Hopefully it will be a catalyst to acknowledge and discuss what happened here less than a century ago, and how it’s shaped the attitudes of Germany today.