Posted on 01/18/2003 7:20:52 PM PST by aculeus
UNLIKE the Jewish victims of Hitler’s Third Reich, there is no permanent memorial to mark their terrible fate. While hundreds were murdered in the Nazi death camps because of the colour of their skin, their story has been largely forgotten.
Now, however, a controversial new exhibition is forcing Germans to confront the disturbing truth of what happened to the thousands of black people living in their country during the Führer’s rise to power.
The Nazi Documentation Centre in Cologne is showing the first exhibition on the subject. Called Distinguishing Feature: Negro - Blacks in National Socialist Times, it documents the lives of black people in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
At that time, immigrants from European colonies, the Caribbean and Africa called Germany their home. There were also many black Americans who fled to Europe to escape the economic crisis in America, as well as diplomats, business people, students and sailors who began to make their presence felt in Hitler’s narrow, racially-obsessed society.
The driving force behind the exhibition, Dr Peter Martin, of the Hamburg Foundation for the Cultivation of Culture and Science, estimates that some 10,000 black people lived in Germany before the Nazis came to power.
Martin said he was motivated to put on the exhibition by the "lack of awareness" among Germans about the fate of black people during Nazi rule.
He said: "It is important to remember that there were more victims than Jews and that each one was a piece in the mosaic of evil that was Nazism."
Martin added: "Hitler wanted a whiter-than-white society. It had no place for blacks, Asians or anyone else. The one thing that you can say about The Führer is that he was an equal-opportunity hater."
The forgotten chapter in German history has been revealed to the public through a collection of posters, flyers, films, sound recordings and photographs. The venue where they are shown is hauntingly appropriate: The Cologne Nazi Documentation Centre is housed in a building used by the Gestapo for torture and interrogation.
Before Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, there had been widespread tolerance of black people. Black entertainers, in particular jazz musicians, singers and dancers, were wildly popular in Germany and black music was considered hip in the Weimar Republic.
But Josef Goebbels hated it and it was soon demonised then outlawed. He called it "Negroid swamp music" and ordered his brownshirts to the music halls where it was played to beat up and deport listeners to concentration camps.
The Nazis’ 1933 racial law, which applied to black people as well as Jews, institutionalised racism and made it impossible for them to lead normal lives. Propaganda on the streets and in the media labelled blacks as a "dangerous plague" and "bastards". Black men were said to be a danger to German women.
Black Germans who had married white Germans were subjected to additional persecution. Many were forcibly sterilised.
Martin said: "The Nazis liked to demonise blacks in the way that bigots of the deep south in America did. It was all part of the desensitising of the German race in the Nazi effort to convince them they were the chosen people."
Nazi Germany regarded black soldiers as inferior beings and treated them as such. French colonial troops captured after the fall of the country in 1940 were photographed by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry to depict them as "subhuman savages". American troops captured during the Second World War were singled out for particularly brutal treatment in PoW camps.
Historians still don’t know what happened to most blacks in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Many simply disappeared from public life, most of them permanently.
Some were able to leave the country but many others were sent to concentration camps. Hundreds or even thousands may have been killed.
Martin explained: "The Nazis collated names and addresses but there was no separate register for blacks. We honour both those who died and those who survived."
The exhibition also features the great American athlete Jesse Owens whose spectacular performance at the 1936 Olympic Games, which Hitler wanted to be a showcase for ‘Aryan supremacy’, caused the Führer to storm out of the stadium.
In addition, it reveals the spurious pseudo-scientific theories used by the Nazis to justify their perverse ideology. A series of photographs show black men and women having their skulls measured with callipers - supposedly to show that the thickness of black people’s skulls indicated a small brain "unreceptive to intelligence".
Researchers spent months scouring libraries and archives for information and found many letters seized by the Nazis from black prisoners that had been intended for loved ones back home.
One was from a Jamaican sailor called Gilbert Thwaites, who was arrested on 1934. He was sent to the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen on the outskirts of Berlin where thousands died at the hands of the SS.
In the days before his arrest he wrote to his mother in Manderville: " "People started to spit at me in the street and make noises like an ape when I went by. I daren’t speak with a white lady on the streets anymore. There was an article in the Hamburger Morgenpost saying Hitler wants to make us wear a black star like the Jews have to wear a yellow one. The jazz club where I used to hang out in the centre of Hamburg was raided last week. Josef Goebbels said it was a centre of vice and corruption."
Thwaites ultimately managed to escape Germany, after his former boss on the Hamburg waterfront intervened on his behalf and he was able to buy himself freedom.
Also chronicled is the murder of dozens of mixed-race children in 1937. These were children born in the Rhineland to women who cohabited with French colonial occupation troops after the First World War.
Around 800 of the children - referred to as the "Rhineland bastards" and "black disgrace" in Nazi propaganda - were sterilised by a secret group called Commission Number 3.
In Mein Kampf Hitler said he would eliminate all the children born of African-German descent because he considered them an "insult" to the German nation.
This from BLACK DUTCH
http://www.geocities.com/mikenassau/BlackDutch.htm
Schwarzer Deutsch or Black Germans, found along the Danube River in Austria and Germany, in the Black Forest and, to a lesser extent, along the Rhine River, have dark hair and eyes, unlike the fairer people both north and south of them. Their descendants in America may be called either Black Dutch or Black German.
The origin of their dark coloration is ancient, from the Roman army in the third and fourth centuries, C.E. The Roman army of this time period was mostly made up of German mercenary soldiers, but along the German border, the Romans preferred to station non-Germans. The army on the Danube was mostly drawn from Garamante soldiers. The Garamante (called Tubu now) were Black Africans from the central Sahara. Now the Tubu live in northern Chad, eastern Niger and southern Libya. They are not usually found north of Marzuk in Fezzan or Kufra in Cyrenaica now, but in Roman times they ranged north to the central coast of Libya and to Ghadames in southern Tunisia. As well as Garamante, there were some Iranic people stationed on this frontier, especially Sarmatians (called Ossets now) and Scythians (Ashkenazi in the Bible) from southern Russia and the Ukraine. These African and Iranic soldiers left many descendants who tend to have black, heavy hair and dark eyes even yet.
Beethoven and Hitler are two famous examples of this group. It is interesting to imagine Hitler's reaction to someone telling him he probably got his heavy, black hair from Black African ancestry...
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Note: this topic is from 2003. See message 7. Blast from the Past. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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