Black Germans were also victims of the Nazis — but their story is mostly forgotten

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/black-germans-were-also-victims-of-the-nazis-but-their-story-is-mostly-forgotten/

The fact that we officially commemorate the Holocaust on January 27, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, means that remembrance of Nazi crimes focuses on the systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews.

The other victims of Nazi racism, including Europe’s Sinti and Roma are now routinely named in commemoration, but not all survivors have had equal opportunities to have their story heard. One group of victims who have yet to be publicly memorialised is black Germans.

All those voices need to be heard, not only for the sake of the survivors, but because we need to see how varied the expressions of Nazi racism were if we are to understand the lessons of the Holocaust for today.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were understood to have been some thousands of black people living in Germany – they were never counted and estimates vary widely. At the heart of an emerging black community was a group of men from Germany’s own African colonies (which were lost under the peace treaty that ended World War I) and their German wives.

They were networked across Germany and abroad by ties of family and association and some were active in communist and anti-racist organisations. Among the first acts of the Nazi regime was the suppression of black political activism. There were also 600 to 800 children fathered by French colonial soldiers – many, though not all, African – when the French army occupied the Rhineland as part of the peace settlement after 1919 which returned to Germany when it annexed the Rhineland in 1936.

Denial of rights and work

The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with “people of German blood”.

A subsequent ruling confirmed that black people (like “gypsies”) were to be regarded as being “of alien blood” and subject to the Nuremberg principles. Very few people of African descent had German citizenship, even if they were born in Germany, but this became irreversible when they were given passports that designated them as “stateless negroes”.

In 1941, black children were officially excluded from public schools, but most of them had suffered racial abuse in their classrooms much earlier. Some were forced out of school and none were permitted to go on to university or professional training. Published interviews and memoirs by both men and women, unpublished testimony and post-war compensation claims testify to these and other shared experiences.

Employment prospects which were already poor before 1933 got worse afterwards. Unable to find regular work, some were drafted for forced labour as “foreign workers” during World War II. Films and stage shows making propaganda for the return of Germany’s African colonies became one of the few sources of income, especially after black people were banned from other kinds of public performance in 1939.

this history sounds strangely like that of the American south, is this why we hear the Nazi rhetoric and only from them pop up every so often is this what gave birth to skinheads and KKK and the latest groups of segregational hate??????  please read the article in whole and make your own comparisons to history then and our history throughout.  i guess you can't take the Nazi hatred out of those who seem to have inherited those genes.



we have been deprived of too much of our history we need to know and why haven't those Jews who shared the experience not stepped up and given a shout out, was their Holocaust not also ours????????????