by Carr, Firpo
When these manmade laws were pitted against the laws of nature, no doubt was left, even in the minds of the framers of the Nuremberg Laws, as to which set of laws would eventually prevail.
Legal prevention of marriages with race-foreign elements is ineffective, since what is not possible legally usually happens illegally[136]
As has been demonstrated in this and other works, there has been uncanny—and perhaps, embarrassing—parallels between Nazi laws, policies, and procedures toward Blacks, and that of American laws, policies, and procedures toward Blacks.
For example, Nazi Germany’s law against “mixed marriages” was chillingly similar to comparable laws in the United States of America. In the States, such edicts were called “miscegenation” laws.
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines “miscegenation” as “a mixture of races: esp[ecially] marriage or cohabitation between a white person and a member of another race.”
Webster’s is not the only dictionary or reference work that defines “miscegenation” this way. Others do too.
The book Wicked Words: Poisoned Minds—Racism in the Dictionary, alluded to earlier, comments extensively on “miscegenation.” The book’s author claims that the definition is dishonest:
This definition isn’t entirely honest. What “miscegenation” really means is marriage (or even just sex!) between a white person and a black person. Oh, by the way, “mis-” means “bad,” so, “miscegenation” literally means “bad race mixing.” At one time, it was even against the law for a white person to marry a black person.
Certain Southern states of the U.S. enacted miscegenation laws that prevented this from happening. In fact, in 1924, urged on by white supremacists, legislators prohibited whites from marrying anyone with a “single drop of Negro blood,” according to the February 13, 1995 issue of Newsweek.
As recently as June 1967, the state of Virginia had a law on its books prohibiting blacks and whites from marrying. And as late as the 1950s the law was used to keep a “salt and pepper” married couple out of the state.[137]
Buttressing its position, the book also quotes the definition of “miscegenation” as it appears in the comprehension Oxford English Dictionary. “Mixture of races; esp[ecially] the sexual union of whites with Negroes.”
Yet another book entitled, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races (1864), says the word “miscegenation” “applied to the American White Man and Negro.”[§§§§§§§§§§]
So, although the United States, Germany, and a host of other nations would eventually lock horns in an historic theatre of war (in this case, the unbelievably deadly conflict known to the world and history as World War II), they could agree on at least one thing:
The “Negro” (especially the male of this “species”) was subhuman and hence should not be allowed to “mate” with any White female, whatsoever.
Yes, whether biracial children were born honorably within the marital arrangement between an African-French soldier and a White German woman, or not, they were still considered “bastards.” The following quote reemphasizes this reality:
Some of the black soldiers married German women and had families. Others fathered illegitimate children. All of the children became known as the “Rhineland Bastards.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that he would eliminate all traces of this “insult” (half-black-half-German children) to the German nation.[138] [Emphasis supplied.]
As one would expect, the Nazis took very seriously the edict against mixed marriages, but especially the marriages between Blacks and Whites. Fortunately, some, on very rare occasions, escaped the ruthless scrutiny of the Gestapo. And for them, it was the difference between life and death.
Gupha, the daughter of a German mother and a black father from Liberia, survived by “mistake”: her father’s Liberian nationality was mistaken for Libyan. Gupha’s mother was violating the Nuremberg racial laws by having children with a black man. This was equivalent to prostitution, thus she was sentenced to six years in a forced labor camp. Gupha’s friend Astrid was not so lucky. She was sent to a concentration camp and never seen again. Her crime: She was of mixed race.[139]
Finding the need to place the responsibility of the horrible circumstance of the “Rhineland Bastards” at someone’s doorstep other than their own, the Nazis targeted two groups for blame. Both were loathed by Hitler’s regime.
The Hated Jews—and French—For
Their Roles in the Rhineland
As has been clearly demonstrated in this book thus far, Blacks received absolutely no respect from the Nazis. They were not even credited with the ability to care for themselves. They were always, as it were, on the end of someone else’s leash.
As the Nazis perceived it, if the Jews were not manipulating Blacks in some way, shape, form, or fashion, it was someone else. The “someone else” in our discussion, as stated in Chapter Two, was the French who had their turn at controlling hapless Blacks.
That was fine as far as Germany was concerned, as long as these Blacks were kept on a short leash. As Hitler saw it, the French, or any other European nation, could do what they saw fit with Blacks. But, it was clear to him what needed to be done as regards Afro-Germans.
Let France and other states deal with their race question the way they want; for us there is only one solution: extermination of all that is foreign, especially in the case of these through violence and amorality created damages.[140]
Han Massaquoi explains how the brutal description of what happened in the Rhineland area when he was a child in elementary school nearly traumatized him. As he tells it, there was little doubt that France was the culprit in allowing “savages” to fraternize with “the German people.”
Wriede put a damper on my lifted spirits by explaining that the forced withdrawal of German troops after World War I had paved the way for the “ultimate insult” to the German people—the illegal occupation of the coal-rich Ruhr area by some forty thousand “uncivilized French Neger [Nigger]” troops. These savages out of the African jungle, he explained with an expression of utter disgust, were permitted by their French officers to freely mingle and fraternize with the German people, with the catastrophic result that the Rhineland was being saddled with thousands of physically and mentally inferior bastard children.[141]
Yes, since the French government was not quite as discriminatory and racist in their policies toward Blacks as were the Germans (as well as other European powers) Hitler specifically targeted it.
In Mein Kampf, he identified France as “by far the most terrible enemy.”[142] Ultimately, as far as Hitler was concerned, the Jews and French worked in tandem.
This [French] people which is basically becoming more and more negrified, constitutes in its tie with the aims of Jewish world domination an enduring danger for the existence of the white race in Europe. For the contamination by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe is just as much in keeping with the perverted sadistic thirst for vengeance of this hereditary enemy of our people as is the ice-cold calculation of the Jews thus to begin bastardizing the European continent at its core and to deprive the white race of the foundations for a sovereign existence through infection with lower humanity.
What France, spurred by her own thirst for vengeance and systematically led by the Jew, is doing in Europe today is a sin against the existence of white humanity and some day will incite against this people all the avenging spirit of a race which has recognized racial pollution as the original sin of humanity.[143]
In the convoluted mind of the Nazi racist things sometimes get muddled. At one moment, the French are responsible for their role in creating the “Rhineland Bastards.” Then, they are working in collusion with the Jews. And finally, when the smoke clears, the Jews are directly responsible for the trouble on the Rhineland.
It is the Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization,
throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.[144]
Hitler did not at all mince words, as we have all too clearly seen, when it came to this matter of the “Rhineland Bastards.” At some point in his mind, the pendulum swung towards the Jews as the caretakers of the “African savages” who infected the Rhineland.
As is so often the case with racism today, Hitler’s blame game had a paternalistic element to it. The “inferior” Africans just could not pull off the Rhineland shame by themselves, as noted earlier.
“Handlers” more intelligent than Black Africans from the “superior” White race had to have factored into the equation—or so Hitler reasoned.
Vacillating between the Jews and the French was not bothersome to him. He finally figured that the two groups were not mutually exclusive; they could have even worked in concert.
“The Jews and the French could have worked together to bring the Negro here to first contaminate the White people in Germany, and then eventually all of Europe!” he reasoned. Such, many believe, were the ravings and rantings of a madman.
Disturbingly, he was not alone in his obsession with oppressing and suppressing Black people—by any means necessary. Across the Atlantic, as we have noted above several times, were powerful White people who harbored similar sentiments.
Like Germany, Like America—Again?
Hans Massaquoi again takes us by the hand on a tour of Nazi German thought and culture. He not only gives us rare insights into these matters, but he is also uniquely qualified to juxtapose his experience—not only as an American, but as an American military man— with that of what he witnessed as a youth in Nazi Germany.
What picture does he paint with regard to the Nazi way of thinking and that of precious American mores? Would there be noticeable differences between the two? Or eye-catching similarities?
There were numerous occasions, inside and outside the military, when I had the opportunity to see the ugly side of America, to sample U.S.-style racism and compare it with its Nazi counterpart.[145]
A sober, and thought-provoking confession, to be sure. This disclosure is such an unfortunate, very sad commentary on American society’s interaction with her Citizens of Color.
Just a few incidents of racism or discrimination would have been bad enough. But we are told that “[t]here were numerous occasions” to view “the ugly side of America.”
Like Afro-Germans, African Americans would have to experience racism “from the cradle to the grave,” as the saying goes.
Illustrating this, racist nursery rhymes would be planted into the very psyche of young Black and White children on both sides of the Atlantic.
The book, Wicked Words: Poisoned Minds—Racism in the Dictionary, has much to say about the negative impact racist stories and fairy tales have on children of all races:
The Oxford English Dictionary describes “bugbear” as “a sort of hobgoblin (presumably in the shape of a bear) supposed to devour naughty children; hence, generally, any imaginary being invoked by nurses to frighten children.”
Guess who was depicted as the “bugbear” in the children’s story? The black man. … Children, black and white, also read comic books about Tarzan, Mickey Mouse, and the like. [Frantz] Fanon comments extensively on the psychological effects these stories have on children:
“The magazines are put together by white men for little white men. This is the heart of the problem. In the Antilles—and there is every reason to think that the situation is the same in the other colonies—these same magazines are devoured by the local children. In the magazines the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians.[146]
Although the late Black author Franz Fanon, who wrote the book, Black Skin, White Masks, spoke French, he strongly suggested that the racist ideology of which he spoke was ubiquitous in any language. The German-speaking Hans Massaquoi concurs.
As a child, he was subjected to a racist child’s story written in German. He allows us access into his childhood world by relating the following experience about “The Three Ink Boys”:
The rhyme that got the greatest reaction from my grandfather was that of “Die Drei Tintenjungen” (The Three Ink Boys), who started out as white boys but ended up black. After making fun of a loinclothed young “blackamoor” who happened by, they were punished by Santa who, by dunking them into a giant ink bottle, made them even blacker than the blackamoor. Each time I recited this condescendingly racist German children’s classic, my grandfather would roar with laughter that could be heard throughout the house. In return for my efforts, he would tell me stories of great ancient African kingdoms.[147]
Other images were to be forever etched in his memory. Images, not formed through his auditory senses, but captured through the faculties of sight, sound, and smell. It was an unforgettable visit to the zoo.
After we note his introspective musing we will examine a parallel incident that happened in the United States of America.
What he saw at this zoo was unlike anything he would ever see again at any zoo he dared to visit after this heart-wrenching experience. This is how the story goes:
At the Culture Show at Hagenbecks Zoo, there was an Indianer (Native American) display with “real live ‘Indians.’”
Being “fresh out” of Indians, the guide directed young Hans and his mother to the ‘primitive peoples’’ “African Village.” Massaquoi picks up the story from here:
After walking past spectacular exhibits of monkeys, giraffes, lions, elephants, and other African wildlife we arrived at the ‘African Village.’ Except for their skin color and hair, the Africans on display looked nothing like my relatives or any of the Africans I had met at my grandfather’s house.
All of the villagers were barefoot and dressed in tattered rags. … It was difficult to say who was more interested in whom, the Africans in the Europeans or the Europeans in the Africans. Each group studied the other across the wooden fence with the same undisguised curiosity.[148]
America, on some level, shared the Nazi thought regarding Black people—particularly Black Africans still living on the African continent. It was believed that these Africans were indeed animals to be caged in zoos for the entertainment of the White masses.
While it cannot be stated with any certainty that this was a universal idea—that all Whites in both countries believed that Black people belonged in cages—both countries permitted the caging of Africans.
Yes, shockingly, a similar event occurred in America when an African man from the Belgian Congo was captured and brought to the United States to be put on display at the Bronx Zoo in New York. The following write-up in The New York Times of Monday, September 10, 1906, says it all:
Several thousand persons took the Subway, the Elevated, and surface cars to the New York Zoological Park in the Bronx, yesterday, and there watched Ota Benga, the Bushman, who has been put by the Management on exhibition there in the monkey cage. The Bushman didn’t seem to mind it, and the sight plainly pleased the crowd. Few expressed audible objection to the sight of a human being in a cage with monkeys as companions, and there could be no doubt that to the majority the joint-man-and-monkey exhibition was the most interesting sight in the Bronx Park.
Perhaps as a concession to the fact that it was Sunday, a pair of canvas shoes had been given to the Bushman to wear. He was barefooted on Saturday. He seemed to like the shoes very much. Over and over again the crowd laughed at him as he sat in mute admiration of them on his stool in the monkey cage. But he didn’t mind that. He has grown used to the crowd laughing, has discovered that they laugh at everything he does. If he wonders why, he does not show it.
The African Pygmy, “Ota Benga.” Age 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds.
Brought from the Kasai River, Congo
Free State, South Central Africa
by Dr. Samuel P. Verner,
Exhibited each After-
noon
during September.
—The New York Times, Monday, September 10, 1906[149]
The book Ota Benga—The Pygmy in the Zoo (1992) was co-authored by Phillips Verner Bradford who, ironically, is the grandson of Dr. Samuel P. Verner, the man who actually captured Ota Benga.
Yes, the caging of Black people like animals is yet another commonality shared by America and the Nazis. So, if they are seen as animals, why not slaughter them as such?
Blacks and Hitler—the Final Solution
The question that has been asked by more than a few people is, How did Hitler come to reach the conclusion that the White race was the “superior” race? And that the Black race was the worst of the “inferior” races?
Cutting right to the chase, from a pseudoscientific point of view, Hitler got his ideas of racial superiority, at least to some degree, from German scientists like Eugen Fischer and Ernst Haekel.[***********]
For example, German zoologist Ernst Haekel weighed in against “Negroes” as far back as the 1800s. Writer Delroy Simms verifies this in an article he wrote wherein he exposes the person who had the seminal German idea of “racial superiority”:
Hitler’s view on racial superiority did not develop in a vacuum. He was influenced by the work of the 19th-century German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, whose views were based on distorted versions of Darwinism. He wrote of woolly-haired[†††††††††††] Negroes incapable of higher mental development.
Racist Darwinian evolution rears its ugly head yet again!
Annegret Ehmann, Director of Education at Wannsee Memorial Center, says that Fischer developed his loathsome ideas on “race-mixing,” or, “race disgrace” in what is today known as Namibia.[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡]
