The 30th of January 1933, Germany. Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany
and the Nazi regime quickly begins to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and other
individuals deemed to be "enemies of the state," and opens the first concentration
camp – Dachau – situated near Munich. The regime targets not only the Jews and
political prisoners, but also Afro-Germans, who are discriminated and persecuted despite their
relatively small presence in Germany. Even though the Nazis do not have an
organized program to eliminate them, an unknown number of Black people in Germany
and German-occupied territories would be sterilized, incarcerated, or murdered.
On the 11th of November 1918 the First World War ended when the German leaders signed the
armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France. The introduction of new weapons like the machine gun
and gas warfare led to the enormous losses and the war claimed the lives of ten million soldiers.
Property and industry losses were catastrophic. As a result,
the victorious powers imposed a series of treaties upon the defeated powers. Among the treaties,
the 1919 Treaty of Versailles held Germany responsible for starting the war and liable
for massive material damages. The treaty imposed harsh penalties on the Germans including the loss
of 13% of its prewar territories, extensive reparation payments and the demilitarization
of the Rhineland in western Germany which, following World War I, was occupied by the
victorious Allies. The use of French colonial troops, some of whom were Black, in these
occupation forces heightened anti-Black racism in Germany. Racist propaganda against Black soldiers
falsely depicted them as rapists of German women and carriers of venereal and other diseases.
The German press derogatorily referred to the children of Black soldiers and
German women as the “Rhineland Bastards.” The Nazis viewed Afro-Germans—children with one
African parent and one German parent—as a threat to the purity of the Germanic race. In his 1925
autobiography Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler said: “the Jews had brought the Negroes into the Rhineland
with the clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily-resulting bastardization.”
In the 1920s some African Americans traveled to Weimar Germany, which was the government
of Germany from 1918 to 1933, where they could freely eat in restaurants, stay in hotels, go
to the theater, and perform at mainstream venues. However, after the Nazis came to power in January
1933, Germany was no longer safe or appealing for African Americans. The Nazi German regime
was explicitly racist, which included a wholesale rejection of African American
culture, such as jazz and swing music that were increasingly popular at the time.
During the Nazi regime, Afro-Germans were marginalized in German society,
isolated socially and economically, and not allowed to attend university.
Racial discrimination prohibited them from seeking most jobs.
In addition to being persecuted for their race, Afro-Germans were persecuted for other reasons
as well . Such was a case of Hilarius Gilges, an Afro-German dancer and Communist activist from
Düsseldorf born in 1909. Gilges was one of the few black Germans born in the country before the First
World War and in mid 1920s he joined the German Communist Youth. Because of his radical politics,
he was arrested in 1931 and sentenced to one year in prison. After his release in 1932 he
continued as an active communist agitator. After the Nazis seized power in January 1933, Gilges
attempted to go into hiding, but his visibility due to his skin color made this difficult.
In June 1933, he was arrested and on the following day, his body was found
under a bridge. The perpetrators who killed Gilges for his politics, as well as his race,
are believed to have been six members of the Gestapo - the German Secret State Police, and SS.
By the end of 1937, the Gestapo had secretly rounded up and forcibly sterilized many
Afro-Germans. Some were subjected to medical experiments; others mysteriously “disappeared.”
Children were no exception. The Nazis forcibly sterilized a group of Afro-German children whom
they derogatorily called “the Rhineland Bastards.” Most of these children were the progeny of French
colonial troops from Africa that were stationed in the Rhineland region after World War I.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
In response to Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on the 7th of December 1941, the United States
quickly declared war on Japan and 4 days later on the 11th of December, Adolf Hitler responded by
declaring war on the United States even though the US had only declared war against Japan.
Consequently, many American citizens, including some African Americans,
were interned throughout Germany and German-occupied Europe as enemy aliens.
Such was a case of Josef Nassy - a Black expatriate portrait artist of Jewish descent who
held a US passport. In 1942 Nassy was arrested in German-occupied Belgium as an enemy alien.
He was then interned and held for seven months in the Beverloo transit camp.
He was later transferred to Germany, where he spent the rest of the war in the Laufen internment
camp and its subcamp, Tittmoning, both located in Upper Bavaria. By early 1945, 850 men holding
American and British passports, including a dozen Black men, were interned at Laufen and Tittmoning.
Conditions in these camps were much better than in concentration camps.
Throughout his three-year imprisonment, Nassy created a unique visual diary of
more than 200 paintings and drawings. The camp commandant actually encouraged Nassy to paint
and give art lessons to other internees and many of Nassy’s works depict daily life in
the internment camps. The life that Nassy depicted was obviously restricted and his
works stressed features such as barbed wire, watchtowers, walls, gates, and prison bars.
Rules of the Geneva Conventions, which protect people such as prisoners of war,
the wounded and civilians, who are not or are no longer taking part in hostilities,
did govern conditions in civilian internment camps,
including Laufen and Tittmoning where Nassy was confined from 1942 to 1945.
Nassy and other internees in these camps were not detailed for forced labor and they usually had
enough food, thanks to Red Cross packages that supplemented German rations of bread and soup.
The US Third Army liberated Laufen on the 5th of May 1945. Nassy and nearly
all the internees at Laufen and Tittmoning, including 50 Jews, survived the war. Many of
the Jews had obtained false papers showing British, US, or South American citizenship.
Another of Tittmoning’s prisoners was an African American horn and piano player Freddy Johnson. By
the mid-1930s Nazi authorities banned all foreign, non-Aryan music in Germany including jazz which
Nazi ideology deemed to be immoral. However, the campaign to rid the country of jazz did not stop
American artists, such as Johnson, from going abroad to share their art. In December 1941,
he was arrested in German-occupied Amsterdam and interned at the Tittmoning prisoner-of-war camp.
Once in a while, despite the oppression of prisoners in the camps across German-occupied
Europe, the sounds of jazz could be heard. For many, musical talents helped them survive
another day. In February 1944, Johnson was released from the camp in a prisoner exchange.
However, rules of the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the nearby Dachau concentration camp
and other camps across German-occupied Europe. There, prisoners were brutally exploited for
forced labor, and many died from exhaustion, starvation, and other harsh conditions.
Those Black people who fought in World War II against Nazi Germany as members of the
Allied militaries and were caught and held as prisoners of war fared far worse than those in
civilian internment camps. Black prisoners of war faced imprisonment and mistreatment at the hands
of the German military, who did not uphold the regulations imposed by the Geneva Conventions.
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 incarcerated, but were instead immediately killed by the SS or Gestapo.
Despite segregation in the military at the time, more than one million African Americans
served in the US Armed Forces during World War II. Such was a case of Benjamin O. Davis Jr.
During World War II, Davis was commander of the 99th Fighter Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group,
which escorted bombers on air combat missions over Europe. Davis flew sixty missions in Mustang
fighters and was one of the first African-American pilots to see combat. Davis survived the war
and became the first African-American brigadier general in the US air force.
Some African American members of the US armed forces were liberators and witnesses to Nazi
atrocities. In the camps, they found piles of unburied corpses and barracks filled with
dead and dying prisoners. After months and years of maltreatment, starvation, and forced labor,
the small percentage of prisoners who survived often required immediate assistance.
One such witness of the Nazi atrocities was Leon Bass, an African-American soldier,
who in April 1945 was among the American troops who liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.
Leon Bass later said: ‘“The day that I walked through the concentration camp gates of
Buchenwald, and I saw what I saw, I can never say that I’m callous about human life. It made me know
that human life is sacred, because when I walked through those gates in the spring of April of
1945, I was totally unprepared for what I saw. And I saw what I can refer to now as the walking dead.
I saw human beings there that had been beaten and starved and tortured and so mistreated that
they were nothing but human skeletons. They were skin and bone and they had those skeletal faces
with the deep-set eyes, and their heads had been clean-shaved. And they were standing there holding
on to one another, and they were so thin. And I ? I just said to myself, “My God, what is this? This
is some kind of insanity! Who are these people? What did they do that was so wrong?” And that’s
when I found out that they were Jews, gypsies, some were Jehovah Witnesses, they were trade
unionists, they were Communists, they were homosexuals. There were so many different
groups placed in that camp by the Nazis. And what did the Nazis use as a yardstick as to who would
be chosen to go there? They said those people who were not good enough, those people who were
inferior, they could be segregated. So, you see what I mean? Segregation,
racism, can lead to the ultimate, to what I saw at Buchenwald.”’
With the exception of its white officers, the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion,
of which Leon Bass was a member, was made up entirely of Black soldiers.
After battling for freedoms and defending democracy worldwide,
African American soldiers returned home in 1945 only to find themselves faced
with the existing prejudice and “Jim Crow” laws which legalized racial segregation.
Racial segregation in the United States Armed Forces officially ended only in 1948.
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