The Treatment of Black Citizens and Civilians in the Range of Nazi Germany

Hello, Friends!

I’m excited to introduce a new contributor to our blog, Olivia. She is one of my spring interns and is working on her Masters of Art in History at Liberty University. Her primary field is Modern American Military History focusing on leadership in World War II and the Korean Conflict. Her work seeks to bring to light those leaders and subordinates whose impact is often overlooked or undervalued. She has also presented at several conferences and won an award for her work on the Japanese American Nisei Soldiers. I am very excited to have Olivia on board and hope you enjoy her post on treatment of African Americans in Nazi Germany!

-Maggie

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The horrors afflicted by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 are ingrained in the world’s memory with the tragedy and loss still present in the minds of people around the globe. While the atrocities Nazi Germany afflicted on groups such as the Roma and Jewish communities are well known there are other groups, which also suffered at the hand of Nazi controlled Germany. One of these lesser-known groups the black and mulatto citizens of in reach of Nazi Germany.

Before World War I there were not many black German citizens living in Germany. When Germany lost World War I the Treaty of Versailles stated Germany was so give up her colonies in land that is present day Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Ghana, Togo, Cameroon, and Namibia. With the loss of these military outposts, military men and German colonial students, artisans, writers, and performers both white and black returned to Germany. Many military and colonial leaders also brought with them a system of deep racism and discrimination of black citizens. The Treaty of Versailles also stated troops were to occupy the Rhineland region of West Germany. The French assigned 200,00 soldiers both nationals and colonials to occupy the Rhineland. Racist propaganda groups in Germany quickly moved to compound the situation in order to spread racism and discrimination against blacks in the Rhineland and Germany. Propaganda viewed the black colonial French soldiers as rapist and carriers of disease. Other special interest groups blamed black soldiers for all of the unrest, rape, and murder of German women by the occupying forces, causing panic and uproar. This escalated and even resulted in Pope XV asking for the removal of black French troops and people writing to US President Woodrow Wilson demanding the removal of the black colonial troops. Even before Hitler’s rise to power, discrimination began with forbidding black citizens from holding any type of government jobs or roles in the military. Interracial marriage was also banned in Germany and all of its holdings.

However, with the rise of Hitler’s power in 1933 came wide spread persecution and further discrimination was implemented against blacks and mulattos living in Germany and the territories Hitler acquired. While there was never a program of systematic elimination, treatment of black citizens varied in levels of severity from discrimination and isolation to sterilization and medical experimentation. In Mein Kamph, Hitler stated that, “Jews had brought Negros into the Rhineland with the clear aim of running the hated while race by the necessarily-resulting bastardization.” In this statement Hitler used the previous post World War I tensions to push the German people to accepted racism and discrimination.

By 1937 the Germans decided something had to be done about the approximately 800 mixed raced children living in the Rhineland which Hitler deemed “an insult to the German Nation. Therefore, a committee created Commission Number 3, giving the German government power to start sterilizing mixed race children deemed “Rhineland Bastards”. As many as 400 German African mulatto children were gathered and sterilized, many with out the parents knowledge beforehand. Hans Hauck was a teenager at the time this organization was commissioned and was serialized by the Nazis. Hauck recalled in the documentary, “Hitler’s Forgotten Victims,” he was serialized without anesthesia. Once his procedure was completed he was given a certificate validating his procedure and told to avoid sex with German women. At the same time women who were found pregnant with mixed babies were forced to have abortions.  At the same time, persecution was also happening to the small population of full black German citizens.

Under Hitler’s rule all black citizens were banned from universities and in some cases the subjects of anthropological and medical studies, there were also cases of murder and abuse. Such is the case of Hilarius Gilges. Gilges was a 24-year-old native of Dusseldorf and an artist. In June of 1933 approximately a dozen SS officers attacked Gilges, captured, tortured, and killed the young man for his race identity and political affiliations. Today his life is memorialized in a plaza in Düsseldorf as the first marked death in Düsseldorf under the Nazi oppression. Others with similar stories are shared in published works such as Born to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany, which tales the story of Hans Massaquoi who grew up during the War in Germany.

At the time Hitler and the Nazi’s came to power there were approximately 25,000 black or mulatto citizens in Germany out of population of 65 million. Taking into account the low population proportion of black and mixed German citizens during Hitler’s rule combined with the world wide level of accustomed prejudice and discrimination toward men and women with African heritage at the time it, is easy to see how the plight of those souls tortured and maimed by Nazi practices went unheard of for so many years. However, the policies of hatred and abuse toward those deemed “impure” or “a threat to the master race” practiced by Nazi Germany goes beyond the treatment of Roma, Jews, and Russians. The torment and pain Nazi Germany inflicted on the population of men, women, and children with African decent deserves to be told in shared with the same hope of never allowing such a travesty to occur in our lifetime and in future generations. 

-Olivia

Defending “Fortress Europe”: The Atlantic Wall

My name is Tyler; I am a history major at the University of Virginia and am interning with the National D-Day Memorial over the summer. My primary internship responsibilities include the expansion and maintenance of our archives, giving tours, and assisting with our many education programs. Having been exposed to so much D-Day history in the past few months, I developed an interest in the obstacles these soldiers faced and decided to complete more research on the Atlantic Wall.

Steel 'hedgehogs' at the Pas de Calais, April 1944

On March 23, 1942 Adolf Hitler issued Fuhrer Directive No. 40 calling for the creation of the Atlantic Wall.  A nearly 2000-mile long line of coastal defenses, the Atlantic Wall stretched from the northern reaches of Norway, along the coast of continental Europe, and down to the Franco-Spanish border.  Its purpose, to defend against an Allied invasion of Europe no matter where it may come.

The monumental task of designing and building this defensive network was given to Organization Todt, the engineering group which had been responsible for both the Autobahn and the Siegfried Line which protected Germany’s western border.  Over half a million French workers were drafted through the Vichy regime’s compulsory labor program to build the defenses.  Many were paid for their labor, although not much, but slave labor was used as well.  Even with these savings in labor costs the project was enormously expensive, requiring both money and resources.  In France alone the cost was over 3.5 billion Deutschmarks, and the wall defenses as a whole required 600 million cubic feet of concrete and 1.3 million tons of steel.

Rommel surveying defenses along the French coast

Initially these defenses were concentrated around naval and U-boat bases. But starting in late 1943, the fortifications were expanded to cover virtually the entire coast.  In early 1944, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was given the task of improving the defenses against an increasingly likely Allied invasion.  Because of his experience fighting the Allies in North Africa, Rommel believed that Allied air power posed the greatest threat.  Owing to this, he ordered the building of reinforced concrete bunkers and pillboxes capable of surviving an aerial bombardment.  Further inland, in the open fields of farmland, large sharpened logs were driven into the ground.  Known as “Rommel’s asparagus”, these were meant to destroy Allied gliders should they try to land.

Rommel also believed, quite rightly, that if the Allies were able to secure a beachhead then the war would be lost for Germany.  As such, the beaches were where he focused most of his attention.  Numerous beach obstacles were put in place to guard against Allied landing craft. Steel “hedgehogs” and tetrahedrons were placed in the water to tear out the hull of the invasion craft, and log ramps were erected to capsize them. Mines were used extensively, both in the water and behind the beaches as well; in Northern France alone, over 6 million of these mines were laid.  Rommel never believed that these obstacles would stop an invasion, but he hoped they would slow it down enough to allow reinforcements arrive and repulse the Allied forces.

Clearly, the task of invading France was no easy one, and the Allies knew they would need luck on their side in order to pull it off.  The reserve panzer divisions which could have repulsed the invasion could only be released upon the direct order of the Fuhrer himself. And as luck would have it, Adolf Hitler had taken a sleeping pill the night before the invasion and his staff refused to wake him.  Because of this one blunder, the entire defense network was rendered virtually useless and the Allied invasion succeeded.

-Tyler

74th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor

This week, we are featuring a blog from Ches Bono, one of our Visitor Services staff members, about Pearl Harbor since today is the 74^th Anniversary of the attack. I’ll be back next week with a blog on a 1940’s do-it-yourself Christmas tree.

-Maggie

             

Early in the morning of December 7, 1941, the Japanese Imperial Army attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. During the attack, over 2,400 Americans died, and over 1,100 were injured. Of the eight battleships in the harbor, four were sunk and the rest significantly damaged. 188 aircraft were destroyed, three cruisers were sunk or destroyed, as well as three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer. This surprise attack was meant to cripple the Pacific Fleet and deter the United States from entering World War Two. However, the attack woke a sleeping giant instead.

Jeanette Rankin, Congresswoman from Montana
(1916-1918 and 1940-1941)

On December 8, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war against

Japan. It was passed almost unanimously. The only dissenting vote came from Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, famously said, “As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.” Ironically, she was in Congress for the declarations of war in World War I and World War II. Almost immediately after the declaration of war, Germany, Japan’s ally and fellow Axis Power, declared war on the United States. With one swift attack, the United States entered World War II.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt during
a fireside chat

Throughout the Great Depression and the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt communicated with the nation through his fireside chats over the radio. In his address to the nation after the attack, he declared that it was “a date which will live in infamy.” Americans all over the country were shocked and saddened by the sudden loss of life from such an attack. In Bedford, as in other communities across the country, the townspeople were preparing for the holiday season and enjoying their normal Sunday activities when they found out. Families were heading off to church and gathering afterwards

for a meal. When word came, families across the county worried for those in the Pacific, but they also worried for themselves since many of the young men in the county had enlisted in the National Guard in order to make ends meet during the Depression. For many of these young men, a dollar a day for the work that they did with the National Guard was a fortune, especially during such a harsh economic downturn. When Congress declared war on December 8, these young men were now in the military for the long haul of the war, whether they liked it or not. For many, however, the desire to serve their country outweighed the fear of war.

Although the United States participated in the war prior to the attack through the Lend-Lease Act, this declaration of war caused the economy to shift from a peacetime one to a wartime one, with rationing and production increasing across the nation. Although the United States did not see intense action for a few years, men were still called away from home for training leaving the factories and farms largely unattended. The women of the United States answered the call, and joined the ranks of factory workers and providers for their family, aiding in the victory effort.

On this solemn anniversary, we remember those who lost their lives on December 7, 1941 and all who participated in the war. Each December, the National D-Day Memorial remembers the 4,413 men who lost their lives on D-Day during our Flames of Memory Illumination Event with 4,413 luminaries placed around the Memorial. The event takes place December 11-13 from 6 pm to 9 pm on these evenings, and the cost is free for all, although donations are appreciated. We hope to see you all there!

-Ches