Afrodeutsche

Sworn-in at Stahnsdorf in 1943 this man served as a volunteer under Franz Wimmer-Lamquet with Sonderstab F (Major Felmy's Freies Arabien Division). Photo is in the public domain.

Approximately 24,000 Black Germans lived in Germany (Afrodeutsche) in the 1920's most if not all where the children of Black French troops. Just like the majority of other Western European countries of that time, like Britain and France Imperial Germany also established territories in the Africa’s around the late 1800's, in what is today Cameroon, Togo, Namibia, and Tanzania. After the defeat Germany received in WW1, Germany colonies in Africa were confiscated for good in 1918 and many of the Germans based in Africa returned bringing with them strong racist attitudes.

France received as a spoil of war, the occupation of Germany`s Rhineland, incidentally this area has changed hands between the two countries for centuries. The French then proceeded to wilfully deploy it´s own colonised black African troops in the region as the occupying French force instead of white French troops, and the notion of Africans controlling white Germans infuriated many in the country and racist propaganda portrayed the African troops who had relationships with locals as rapists of German women and spreaders of sexual and other diseases.

The French also tried to separate the occupied areas from Germany by establishing an independent Rhenish Republic as a French puppet state. Separatist riots were encouraged and supported by the French, who tried to exploit traditional anti-Prussian resentments in the overwhelmingly Catholic region. In the end, the separatists failed to gain any decisive support among the population. The Treaty of Versailles also specified the de-militarization of the entire area to provide a buffer between Germany on one side and France, Belgium and Luxembourg (and to a lesser extent, the Netherlands) on the other side, which meant that no German forces were allowed there after the Allied forces, had withdrawn. Furthermore (and quite unbearably from the German perspective) the treaty entitled the Allies to reoccupy the Rhineland at their will, if the Allies unilaterally found the German side responsible for any violation of the treaty.  The Germans viewed these acts as insults, and, soon thereafter, 92% of them voted in the Nazi party.

Ok let’s get back to the job at hand, hundreds of French African soldiers began to intermarry with German maidens and raise families, as Black Germans. Germans all over complained bitterly in newspapers and propaganda films about African soldiers from the French colonial army having relations with their women, which at the time you could understand, imagine if the same had happened in England in the twenties. In 1932 in Breslau, Hitler gave a speech in which he told Jews and anyone not Aryan to leave Germany or go into a camp to await deportation, in theory a choice not a nice one, but a choice none the less. But most blacks in Germany did not heed Hitler`s warning as they were German citizens with German passports and had nowhere else to go.

While a fair number escaped to France, It is no secret that Hitler harboured extreme race ideas and in his book Mein Kampf, he wrote his thoughts on them, these "Rhineland Bastards" end of quote also Hitler stated that ‘the Jews had brought the Negroes into the Rhineland with the clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily-resulting bastardisation’. As soon as Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, he retaliated by targeting black people living there. At maximum 400 biracial children were sterilised in the area by the end of 1937. So as you can see Hitler's fixation with racial purity was by 1937, all identified biracial child in the Rhineland should be sterilised, so in order to put a stop to further race polluting, but many where not and continued for a while to live “normal lives” or as normal as it got in Hitler´s Germany.

A black German survivor, Hans Hauck was a victim of Hitler's biracial sterilisation edict and a former member of the Hitler Youth, explained that he was selected for sterilisation as a youngster, and once he had received his sterilisations official document, he was a free man and free to go, with the condition that he would not pursue a relationship with a white woman.

Even though most black or biracial Germans tried to get out of their fatherland, by way of France where people like the actress La Baker were actively supporting the French Underground, most black Germans still had problems elsewhere. Many countries closed their borders to ethnic white Germans as well as the Black ones, the same way they did to Jews trying to escape the pending doom.  Some black Germans tried to return to the former German colonies, taken over by the League of Nations in 1920. The British colonial authorities in the newly named South West Africa would not allow black Germans refugee status on the grounds that they had fought for the Germans in World War I.

But on the other side of the coin some black Germans were able to maintain a basic standard of life, during Hitler's reign for example partaking in Vaudeville performances and other things, but most Afro-Germans, unwavering in the belief, that they were German first, and colour was not an issue in their minds, so many chose to stay put in their homeland, Germany. Also many chose to fight with the Germans in the war, and some even became Luftwaffe pilots! Note: there is photographic evidence of this, and not only blacks from Germany but Africa proper, Middle Eastern Arab Muslims, Indians and Oriental Asians. But also on the darker side, unfortunately, some biracial and black Germans were arrested, on trumped up charges, and imprisoned there is also no known systematic program, or official party policy of extermination of the black Germans. However there was no recording of the numbers of Afrodeutsche who perished at the hands of the National Socialists, but the number are believed to be quite low.

It is very interesting to note that in the 1920s and 1930s, and even during Hitler´s regime that, Afrodeutsche appeared as extras in German movies portraying Africans, notably in the German colour spectacle Baron von Münchhausen (1943), produced by the Ufa studio. The relatively low numbers of blacks in Germany, their wide dispersal across the country, and the fact that the National Socialists concentrated on other groups of people was a key factors that made it possible for the majority of Afro-Germans to survive the war.

One such survivor, Hans Jürgen Massaquoi describes with stunning frankness how as a young boy he so badly wanted to fit into the German culture that he had his babysitter sew a swastika on to his sweater, He wore it to school before his mother removed it. When the war came to Germany, Hans Jürgen had more than the National Socialists to worry about. He goes on to say heavy Allied bombing forced him and his German mother Bertha Baetz to flee Hamburg. He attributes his survival to good luck and the help of his mother and German friends.

However National Socialist Germany speculated about the possibility of winning the support of Africans from former German colonies for a pro-German colonial propaganda, as the Germans were planning an "African colonial empire under German predominance". The legislation for a planned, apartheid-like system already existed in design in 1940 and an African passport design.

Not much information remains about the numbers of Black Germans maltreated under Hitler´s Germany. But some black German survivors are still alive and telling their story in books and films, and its not all in a totally negative light but black victims must also speak out for justice, not just history.

But unlike the Jews, be they in Israel or Germany, Afrodeutsche received no war reparations because their German citizenship was revoked, even though they were German-born. The only pension they get is from those who tell the world their stories and continue their battle for recognition and compensation, incidentally going a little off the topic no Roma was called to testify at the Nuremberg Trials, and no one came forth to testify on their behalf. No war crimes reparations have been paid to the Roma (gypsies) as a people. It is difficult to determine exactly how many Romani were eliminated. The estimates range from 220,000 to 600,000 depending on what you read so that could be 40% and 80% of the estimated Romani population. Compare that to the estimated $50 billion Israel and world Jewry will have received by 2020,  for me to state this does not make me an Anti-Semite, but these day to question anything Jewish or Israeli, one is instantly labelled an Anti-Semite, which is not the case but does something not seem odd to you with these payouts? Although the German reparations program is accepted and often praised in the democratic West, it is also, at least implicitly, strikingly undemocratic in two fundamental respects:

First, it regards Jews not as equal and fully integrated citizens of whatever country they live in, but rather primarily as members of an alien and cosmopolitan national group.

Second, it is based on the premise that the German nation, including even the Germans who grew up since 1945, is collectively guilty of terrible crimes, contrary to the democratic notion of individual responsibility for crime.

Germany's lucrative and historically unparalleled payoff to Israel and world Jewry is a legacy and permanent reminder of Germany's catastrophic defeat in 1945 and subsequent domination by foreign powers.

Anyway after the hostilities ended, many Afrodeutsche who had survive Hitler´s regime, were rounded up and tried as war criminals, I thought we were fighting to stop oppression and injustice, hmm well who knows. There are many thousands of Black “Holocaust” stories, from the Transatlantic Triangular Trade operated during the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, to slavery in America, and the trials of the Afrodeutsche in Hitler´s Germany.

We today often shy away from hearing about our nations, peoples or racial historical pasts because so much of it is painful, or socially unacceptable today; however, we are in this struggle together for all our rights, dignity, and, yes, in some cases reparations for wrongs done to people through the centuries by various groups or individuals, but we need to look past these differences and make our nations today cohesive productive, safe, progressive places to live based on human nature and not Marxist-egalitarian dreams, which is an altered state of living which has an expiry date.

All the way through history, encounters between peoples and tribes of men have so severely sown the roots of discrimination and prejudice that people are no longer sure why race, colour and creed variations are so repugnant. Each and every one of us is a casualty of our own faults in the search for personal pride, and while in the pursuit of dominance, our vanity urges rivalry across so many subconscious levels and has no concern for the loser in reality. The need to win mentality we seem to have may have derive from our hunter survival ancestry, this drive may be the main force behind what seems to be our blind hate. Ask yourself how many times have you said, “I hate you” have you used those three words anytime, ever? The European soul is in accord with all of humanity, to be the winners, just like the Mongols of Genghis Khan or Darius the Great, the Persian. The key difference between the National Socialists and the violence they unleashed on Europe, and the Israelites who utterly destroyed Jericho was the claim that God guided the hands that held those supernatural rams horns, so that makes it ok, and Hitler´s troops merely held machine guns, The city of Jericho was completely destroyed, and every man, woman, and child in it was killed. Only Rahab and her family were spared, because she had hidden the two spies sent by Joshua. After this Joshua burned the remains of the city and cursed any man who would rebuild the city of Jericho at the cost of his firstborn son.

How many Jews and Arabs, made good or pocketed gold which came from the African slave trade, do you think Nefertiti carried her groceries home? What African or Inca king ever cleaned a toilet? Before the 1500s skin colour was not the foundation of slavery. Slaves were the unfortunate people bought, captured in war or simply kidnapped. All thought the age’s persons of all races have been snatched from their roots, and forced to become part of a new society like St Patrick for example. West Africans exported slaves to traders and imported some white slaves for household service. The Arabs also enslaved substantial numbers of Europeans. According to Robert Davis between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates, who were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, and sold as slaves between the 16th and 19th centuries. These slaves were captured mainly from seaside villages from Italy, Spain, Portugal and also from more distant places like France or England, the Netherlands, Ireland and even Iceland and North America. The impact of these attacks was devastating – France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants. Pirate raids discouraged settlement along the coast until the 19th century.

What I am saying is that hate lives within us all. We are all animals caught in a struggle to survive and be victorious, where victory lives in the domination of others, traditionally as nation groups. To truly move beyond what has been and still is in places we must all reach out to less fortunate humans across the globe and seek a more even distribution of possibility when possible, but not at our own expense and prosperity in the guise globalisation i.e. don’t give aid to a country while your own people starve for example, it sounds harsh but its a reality charity starts at home. I believe there is no community of man that does not wish their own children well. In this common goal, we should all bond to deliver upon our children the wealth of a peaceful, prosperous tomorrow when possible but don’t give up our own rights as a people or nation.