Hitler's Black Victims

The Historical Experiences of European Blacks, Africans and African Americans During the Nazi Era

Clarence Lusane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135955236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Drawing on interviews with the black survivors of Nazi concentration camps and archival research in North America, Europe, and Africa, this book documents and analyzes the meaning of Nazism's racial policies towards people of African descent, specifically those born in Germany, England, France, the United States, and Africa, and the impact of that legacy on contemporary race relations in Germany, and more generally, in Europe. The book also specifically addresses the concerns of those surviving Afro-Germans who were victims of Nazism, but have not generally been included in or benefited from the compensation agreements that have been developed in recent years.

Part I
Beyond a White German Past

Introduction

Black in Germany during the Nazi Era

The Undiscovered Country

In general terms, who constructs collective identity, and for what, largely determines the symbolic content of this identity, and its meaning for those identifying with it or placing themselves outside of it.

—Manuel Castells¹

The date: 21 June 1933. The place: Düsseldorf, Germany. The time: five months after Adolf Hitler has become chancellor of Germany’s Third Reich. An incipient resistance movement has emerged, but it is already coming to know the murderous ferocity of the Nazi state. That June day, in the luminous and buoyant blue waters of the Rhine, a brutalized and battered body is discovered under the Rhinebridge. It is the remains of another casualty of the expanding Nazi crusade that had only a short time ago come to power and would soon give the world a bone-chilling meaning to the phrase “racial purity.” The victim, Hilarius “Lari” Gilges, was an anti-Nazi labor organizer, performing artist, and communist who chose to defy the state authority of Hitler and his followers. While millions of Germans saw in Hitler a national redemption and reassertion of Aryan might—a manifest destiny of the worst kind—aimed at Germany’s internal and European enemies, Gilges was one who was willing to fight the onslaught of National Socialism and to make the ultimate sacrifice in the name of justice, democracy, and freedom. To many of those familiar with the history and politics of Nazi Germany, perhaps the most unusual fact in this saga was that he was also black.

The existence of blackness under Hitler raises not only the issue of identity and resistance but also the issue of an identity of resistance. The construction (in many ways imposition) of blackness from above struggled with the reality of an unformed blackness from below. This combination created a complex and unstable racial landscape for people of African descent as they, with little choice, practiced what James Scott termed the “arts of resistance.” Gilges’s murder begs the questions “How did people of African descent fare under Nazism?” “Was there an indigenous ‘black’ community, and, if so, where did it exist?” “Were Blacks targeted and singled out for specific forms of repression?” “Where do their experiences fit within the Holocaust paradigm—or do they?” The answers to these questions, to the degree they have been asked at all, remain vague even for those scholars and researchers familiar with the Nazi era and the Holocaust in particular. In part, the vagueness is informed by a lack of historical rendering of the experiences of Afro-Germans and other Blacks during the period. Indeed, it is not unusual, when the question is raised, for the response to be one of surprise that there were any Blacks present in Nazi Germany at all. The Black presence is mystified, shrouded in whispers and innuendoes, dismissed as inconsequential, and lost in the popular and scholarly notions of an all-white Europe and in a reading of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in which blackness is excluded.

Of those who are aware that Blacks did live in Germany during the period, some argue that the black presence in Nazi Germany was too small and too insignificant to warrant the kind of detailed and extensive research that has been afforded other groups targeted for Nazi oppression and extinction. A further implication of this notion is that Afro-Germans and other Blacks had no agency of their own: they were simply acted upon. This denies the fact that Afro-Germans and other Blacks were more than just the “other,” but were subjects of their own history, subjects that engaged in “infrapolitics,” anti-Nazi resistance, and a perpetual redefinition of Germany’s cultural and social life.

To dismiss the antiblackness character of Nazism and the subjugation of its black victims is a historical whitewashing. This erasure abandons the important insights regarding the nature of racism and fascism offered by a more inclusive and rigorous investigation of the substantive level of oppression faced by Blacks under Nazism and their resistance. The reinsertion of Blacks into the historical process that gave rise to and drove perhaps the most decisive social and moral moments of the 20th century is a necessary corrective.

The relentless goal of Hitler’s National Socialist Workers Party, as Michael Bureleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann point out, was to create a racial state that was built on the fantasy of breeding “pure” Aryans while eliminating all “others” including even some who would otherwise be considered white.² At the core of this framework was a pervasive anti-Semitism that consolidated state power with popular appeal resulting in Hitler’s “final solution” that called for and attempted the murder of Europe’s Jews. Other groups of people were also targeted for extermination, mostly notably the different Gypsy ethnic groups, as well as communists, homosexuals, Slavic peoples, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.³ Politically, Germany’s response to the global crisis of capitalism was a racialized fascist state, supported by the German bourgeoisie and lingering nobility, that attempted successfully to consolidate its legitimacy among the middle and working classes upon the bedrock of anti-Semitism, the myth of Aryan superiority, and domination of the European landscape.

While this analysis is essentially sound and constitutes the consensus discourse on the racial politics of Nazism, it fails to demarcate the dynamics of the specific racisms that emerged under National Socialism. Multiracial societies in which racism is a major factor generate multiple racisms, that is, each identifiable and subordinated racialized group experiences a distinct relationship to the dominant racial class and to the state that has its own dynamics, history, logic, and path of development. These societies also ignite multidimensional forms of counterhegemonic, antiracist resistance. Though hardly alone, South Africa, especially during the apartheid era (and since), is perhaps the best example of this process given the rigid racial classifications that shape and drive that nation. Racism against Blacks, Indians, and the so-called Coloured took different forms as applied by the state and lived in practice.⁴ In the discourse produced by Hitler and the Nazi leadership and its theoreticians, it is clear that a particular type of antiblackness gaze and praxis evolved that overlapped with anti-Semitism but had its own character, argument, and sociohistoric significance. Nazism’s racial policies were also about politics, and a number of self-interest factors determined when and to what degree each particular racism was implemented despite what might have been the desires of Hitler and others. Local prerogatives were also a variable in the way in which racism was exercised. Additionally, while the Nazis could tap into an anti-Semitic predisposition on the part of the German masses, rooted in a long history of European antagonism toward Jews, it is not clear that a similar attitude existed regarding people of African descent although negative media images of Blacks were pervasive.⁵ More important, the documented (and undocumented) lived experiences of Afro-Germans inform our understanding of the differentiated expressions of racism carried out by the Nazis and the German people. This study is an effort to excavate the nature and significance of “blackness” and “antiblackness” in Germany and the occupied lands in the periods preceding and constituting the Nazi era. This also includes identifying the oppositional praxis and resistance on the part of black Germans and other people of African descent trapped under Nazism, as well as the discourse and engagement regarding these issues from other parts of the black diaspora, including African Americans.

The dialectic between fascism and blackness is also an unexplored dimension of the period. In Paul Gilroy’s Against Race, he contends that elements of fascism, in the form of ultranationalisms among contemporary black diasporic peoples, have appeared despite the apparent and real racist nature of fascistic ideologies. This provocation will also be explored in relation to the Nazi era itself and, in particular, the small but notable debate among African Americans whether they should oppose the war, support Hitler or National Socialism, or even embrace anti-Semitic thinking. This discussion was informed by some African Americans’ limited knowledge of the desperate situation of Blacks in Germany.

Objectives of the Study

The purpose of this study is multifold. First, it is to expand our understanding of the Nazi Holocaust and all the peoples that were its victims. Necessarily, this project challenges and deconstructs the hegemonic discourse on the Nazi era that, for the most part, has written out or downplayed the presence of antiblackness and Negrophobia. In the thousands of books on the period, Afro-Germans and other Blacks, and their experiences are notable only for their absence. Classic works such as William L.Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich⁶ or more recent works such as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners⁷ are groundbreaking studies on the Nazi era and the politics of the time, yet offer no insight whatsoever into this particular slice of the pie.

In a similar vein, the large number of museums dedicated to remembering the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazism, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., also give little, if any, exposure to the black experience.⁸ At the USHMM, an important, unique, and indispensable archive of files on Blacks during the Hitler era is available to researchers, files that were critical to this present work. The museum, which opened in April 1993, has also held a number of special exhibits over time highlighting various aspects of the black experience. In 1997, for instance, it displayed the internment camp paintings and drawings of an Afro-Belgian artist (who was also Jewish by religion), Joseph Nassey. (See chapter 6) Despite these important efforts, in the permanent exhibits of the museum, which are the only exhibits seen by perhaps 90 percent or more of the two million visitors each year, there is virtually no black presence.⁹ Located among the numerous museums on Washington’s Mall, the Holocaust Museum receives the second-highest numer of visitors to the area, exceeded only by the U.S. Air and Space Museum, the largest museum in the world.¹⁰ There are more than 100 Holocaust museums and research centers in the United States.¹¹ In a number of instances at the USHMM, displays note other victims of the Holocaust besides Jews, including homosexuals, Gypsies, and the handicapped, but consistently fail to include Blacks. Apart from a few photos of Blacks in an exhibit displaying identification cards of those who were sent to the camps, one could visit the museums’ permanent exhibits and leave with no appreciation of this perhaps relatively small, but nonetheless important, aspect of the Nazi era.

Second, I argue that Nazism’s racial agenda was complex, fluid, and contradictory as opposed to simple, straightforward, and unproblematic. A consensus reading of Nazism’s racial agenda reduces it to its most vulgar expression: the implementation of the “final solution” of mass extermination. In fact, the Nazi racial agenda, rhetoric, and practice changed over time, was unevenly applied and carried out, and was often contradictory, especially in the case of Afro-Germans and the experiences of other people of African descent. In Mein Kampf and other works, Hitler and prominent Nazi gave considerable and specific, though often incoherent, attention to antiblackness themes. However, despite a vicious and unyielding determination to create an Aryan-only society, and an ongoing rhetoric of Negrophobia and antiblack racism, the Nazis did not deport or (initially) exterminate Afro-Germans and Africans, or remove them completely from German social life. In fact, in many cases, they were allowed to attend schools and work while Jews and Gypsies were not. More important, a perpetual debate in Nazi ruling circles on the black question extended through the entire dozen years of Nazi rule. These circumstances and occurrences demand a more complex reading of the will, capacity, and limits of the Nazis’ racial agenda.

My third purpose is to deepen our knowledge of the experiences of the African diaspora. The European experiences of people of African descent are often forgotten when the diaspora is discussed, especially from an African American and, perhaps more broadly, American perspective. For example, in a number of comparative works on antiblack racism, the focus is invariably on the United States, South Africa, and Brazil, as a Ford Foundation-sponsored June 2000 conference, “Beyond Racism,” held in South Africa, exemplified.¹² The tendency to privilege for research the large number of Blacks who reside in these nations and their overt and formal histories of legalized segregation misses the quality of the racial experiences of the much smaller numbers of Blacks in European societies: it also ignores the fact that the level of development of the United States and Europe, and how those states address issues of race and racism, are closer in nature than comparisons with vastly disparate societies.¹³ There are, of course, some African American scholars who have given theoretical, historical, and contemporary attention to the European branches of the diaspora tree, including the sociologists Tina Campt and Charles Green, the political scientists Terri Sewell, Lorenzo Morris, and Ronald Walters, and the historian Allison Blakely, among others.¹⁴ They are a welcome exception in terms of African American scholars. European race scholars, such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and others, naturally are more cozignant of the need to connect and not just compare, this dynamic relationship.¹⁵ Diaspora itself remains a contested term, one of social construction and fluid definitional character.

Fourth, I argue the need to reconceptualize our framework on racism and see racism as multidimensional, contingent, and intersecting. One of the lessons that we can glean from the Nazi experience is to view racism as differentially applied, contingent, and intersecting. The case has been made that in a given society multiple racisms may be in practice, that is, differentially constructed oppressed racial groups will face dissimilar experiences in terms of racism. This will include everything from portrayals in the media, the application of state authority, treatment in the criminal justice system, and opportunities related to education, health care, and housing. Relative to the Nazi period, the various racialized oppressed groups—Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and people of African descent, among others—suffered distinct though overlapping racist encounters. The contingent nature of racism tells us that local prerogatives, in many cases, overrode national and general racial orders. This can be viewed in the experiences of Afro-Germans, who often lived isolated, where their individualized status—an “It’s only one, so don’t bother” attitude—allowed some of them a degree of protection that, in many instances, was enough for their survival. The contingent nature of racism also intersected with other exigencies such as the sexist-informed need to preserve a romanticized German womanhood even if it meant allowing a mixed-raced child to be spared the worst of Nazism’s racial onslaught. More generally, the intersecting nature of gender, class, nationality, and race is inseparable in grasping the lived reality of Afro-Germans and other Blacks during the period, and in the present.

Finally, I examine the roots of contemporary European racism through the prism of the black experience under Nazism. The post-Cold War rise in incidents of racism and racist rhetoric in Europe on the part of both conservative and even mainstream political parties has among its features a distinguished Negrophobia. Manifest in the violent physical attacks on African workers and students, the criminalization of people of color, the slinging of the term “nigger,” and the racialized discourse on immigration, antiblackness is not simply the contemporary expression of the so-called new racism, but is also derived from unresolved contradictions regarding antiblack racism from the Nazi era including the erasure of the black experience.¹⁶

Research on the experiences of Afro-Germans has a contemporary resonance. Since the end of World War II, there have been successful campaigns to seek compensation and reparations, estimated to be as high as $100 billion, for the victims of Nazism—those who were in the concentration and death camps as well as those who were forced into slave labor. It has been a struggle, mostly unsuccessful, on the part of older Afro-Germans to benefit from these victories because of the difficulty in proving their repression and specific targeting by the Nazis. The denial of compensation to Afro-Germans is due in part to the lack of a popular moral outrage over their experiences at the hands of the Nazis. Winning compensation is contingent not only on the justice that should be given but on the mobilizing of political and moral power that eases the process and embarrasses the German government and German corporations who still hold responsibility for the events of more than half a century ago. The postwar movement against racism that was a catalyst for the United Nations, the purging of notions of biological races, and the founding of the state of Israel, which played a key role in winning compensation agreements for Jewish victims of Nazism, virtually ignored the needs of surviving yet victimized Afro-Germans. It is time for a correction of the historical record.

A second compensation battle revolves around the descendants of the Herero peoples of Namibia. The 1904–1907 state-sanctioned German slaughter and near genocide of more than 80 percent of the Hereros ranks as one of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century. A campaign in Namibia has been initiated to win reparations for a people who have never recovered economically from the theft and homicide inflicted upon them by German colonialism.

This inquiry also requires an interrogation of the German discourse and legal parameters regarding citizenship. Perhaps more than any other modern industrialized nation, Germany has fixated on blood linkages as the condition and determinant for full citizenship rights. Under German law, preceding, during, and even after Hitler, to become a citizen required that one be descendant from Nordic bloodlines, that is, the state sought to create, consolidate, and defend what Uli Linke terms a “community of blood.”¹⁷ In contemporary Germany, the issue of citizenship for a wide range of non-Germanic peoples who reside there remains a foundation on which everyone from neo-Nazis to politicians to the corporate and noncorporate media to “ordinary” German citizens can elaborate a xenophobic rationale masking a racism that has generally had state support, if not encouragement. Moderately successful efforts in 1999 and 2000 at changing the German citizenship laws operated within a context of new forms of German nationalism that seek again to close borders and shut doors. Within this discourse, Afro-Germans find themselves in a liminal position where their objective and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Crosscurrents in African American History
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Beyond a White German Past
• Part II Blackness before Hitler
• Part III “The Worst That You Can Imagine” Blacks and Nazism
• Part IV Black Skins, German Masks Blackness in Contemporary Germany
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index