The Unheard Stories of Nazi Germany

The atrocities faced in Nazi Germany have impacted people for decades being a reminder of the evil that exists in the world. For many of us, we know the popular stories and movies that surround WWII, but there are some voices that have not been heard.  In class, we spoke about the Lower reading, Hitlers Furies and one quote stuck out "... Germans would conquer to the death." The Nazi's not only wanted to exterminate the Jewish people, but those that were impure including black people living in Germany.

Propaganda

Propaganda was a tool used to paint a gruesome picture of black people. They were said to be rapists of German women and to carry diseases which were a threat to German blood (Bell 20). Propaganda posters furthered this narrative from denouncing Jazz music as the music of Negros to showing photos of black women stating that this would get rid of racial pride, and even depicting black French soldiers as caricatures of themselves and being the evils of society("US Holocaust Museum"). All of these posters were not true to what black people were, and it is even noted that when people came across black soldiers from other countries they were pleasant people and not rapists as they were said to be. These narratives are a part of a bigger problem in German society during the time that was the underlying view that people who were not white could not be German. The propaganda was used to create a stark contrast with what it was to be white versus what it was to be black.

Treatment of Blacks

Prior to the start of WWII, there were 20,000+ blacks in Germany. I want to be clear that the rise of Nazi Germany was not the start of the injustice black & mulatto people faced in the country it just heightened the sentiments against them. Black children were marginalized in school and their peers treated them as subhuman. Once the Nazis took over, they were banned from school altogether. The children never had a place and with this new regime, their hope for acceptance was completely erased. Outside of being ostracized from school, many children as young as 11 were forced to be sterilized along with their older counterparts("Holocaust Memorial Day Trust"). With this sterilization, they also became the victims of medical experiments. By the early 1940s, every child in the Rhineland who was of black or mixed race had been sterilized("Holocaust Memorial Day Trust"). The black adults of German society faced sterilization and the loss of jobs amongst being targets of racially motivated violence.

The People

Hilarius Gilges “The First Death”

Seeing as will be close to Dusseldorf, I want to highlight this particular death in Germany. Gilges was a young artist who was taken an tortured by Nazi SS officers because of his political and racial backgrounds. He is regarded as the first death to happen in Dusseldorf under Nazi Germany. In late 2003, there was a plaque placed at the site of his death to commemorate him(Oduah).

Valaida Snow 

We’ve all heard of Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong, but many of us don’t know about Valaida Snow. She was an outstanding trumpet player in Europe, but soon her spark would be dimmed. While in Denmark, she was captured during a Nazi invasion and placed in a concentration camp. She was there for a year and a half, but was traded and returned to the US, however, at that point she was weak and scarred mentally(Oduah). Her story ties into the propaganda that despite the fame black jazz players may have had in Europe being black was seen as a threat.

Gert Schramm

As another connection, to one of the places, we will visit in Germany Schramm was a prisoner at Buchenwald. He was arrested for being racially impure due to being the son of a black man and a white German woman. At 15 years old, he no longer was Gert Schramm but prisoner 49489. Schramm was forced to work in a stone quarry where many men died, and the survival rate was low, but somehow he survived . He made it to liberation where he lived out the rest of his life talking about Buchenwald and starting his own taxi company(Oduah). 

These are only a few injustices these people faced. Even though they were a small community in Germany, at the time, it did not make their children any less German or their stories any less valuable than those that we’ve been told before. The holocaust makes us realize there is much to be learned about tolerance and acceptance. 

Sources:

Bell, Dominic. "Examining the Persecution of Blacks During the Holocaust." Undergraduate Transitional Justice Review 4.1 (2013): 3.

Lower, Wendy. Hitler's furies: German women in the Nazi killing fields. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Museum, US Holocaust. “How Nazi Germany Weaponized the Race Card against the US Army.” Medium.com, Medium, 13 Feb. 2017, medium.com/@HolocaustMuseum/the-nazi-plan-to-divide-and-conquer-the-us-army-296a3c97fb54

“Nazi Persecution:Black People.” Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/nazi-persecution/black-people/.

Oduah, Chika. “The Afro-German Experience Under Hitler.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 7 Dec. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/chika-oduah/the-afrogerman-experience_b_9234700.html.