Germany's Black Holocaust: 1890-1945

by Carr, Firpo

  The Plan for “Mittelafrika”

  While the “master race” policies persisted during World War II, black POWs and others were subjected to medical experiments in Germany, supposedly as part of a larger Nazi plan for the conquest of “Mittelafrika”….

  The “Mittelafrika” plan called for exploiting African resources to economically bolster Nazi Germany. To accomplish this goal, the Nazis planned to re-conquer the German colonies (as well as other African territories) surrendered after World War I.

  The idea was to resettle and enslave blacks… to expropriate black property and land … to form a police state under Heinrich Himmler’s direction … and to put into effect the Nuremberg Laws of 1935—proclaimed at a special session of the Reichstag at the annual Nazi party rally in Nuremberg—which had been adopted for the German colonies.[241] [Emphasis supplied.]

  Under the Nazis, eugenics performed medical experiments on Jews and also on blacks and other minority groups. On July 20, 1942, Dr. Ernst Grawitz, SS Chief Physician, reported to Heinrich Himmler that racial blood testing had been performed in 1938 on the serums of “whites and blacks.” Some of the test subjects were perhaps “Rhineland Bastards” or African-Germans.

  The tests were performed by Dr. Eugen Fischer, an anatomist and anthropologist who served as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology in Berlin-Dahlem from 1927 to 1942. Later, Fischer became a judge on the “Superior Genetic Health Court” under the Nazi regime.

  Fischer performed such tests on Gypsies and scheduled similar tests for Jewish inmates at Sachsenhausen in 1942. Grawitz also reported that a Dr. Horneck, another SS physician who had performed tests on “Negro” prisoners of war in France, also achieved similar results. The experiments seemingly involved studying blacks to learn how whites could better adapt to tropical environments.[242] [Emphasis supplied.]

  In 1945, Dr. Ernst Rodenwald, the former director of the Berlin Institute for Tropical Diseases in 1940, and an authority on African German children mulattoes in the German colony of Togo [African west coast], gave testimony to U.S. Army Intelligence personnel. He reported that in the vicinity of Stargard, Germany, there was a “Negro” prisoner-of-war camp where medical experiments had been performed on these POWs. [Emphasis supplied.]

  The experiments and the data gathered, Rodenwald said, were used to prepare German officials who had been selected to work in the tropics in Africa. Some of these officials, he explained, were prepared to go to Cameroon [the African west coast]. The military organization and the medical installations for the German occupation troops were such that each company had special equipment and a doctor who specialized in tropical diseases and the use of chemicals.[243] [Emphasis supplied.]

  Blacks and Nazi Racial Ideology

  Even before Germany’s Nuremberg Laws there had been growing recognition and support for Social-Darwinism, anthropology, eugenics and human genetics (the idea of the inheritance of superior and inferior traits). In Germany, some of the rationale for the Nazi racial theories was offered by Dr. Eugen Fischer.

  In 1908, Fischer had gone on an expedition to the Germany colony of Süd-West (South-West) Africa to undertake a field study of the so-called “Rehoboth Bastards.” These were descendants, after the Boer War (1899-1902), of the Nama Hottentots of South-West African and the Boers (inhabitants of South Africa of Dutch or French Huguenot descent, also known as Afrikaners).

  In the final chapter of his published research report of 1913, “The Political Importance of the Bastaard” (reprinted in 1961 with the exception of the last chapter), Fischer wrote: “Negroes, Hottentots and many others are inferior…. [they should be protected] as long as they serve our [German] needs.”[244]

  On June 20, 1939, months before the start of World War II, Fischer indicated something about Nazi racial attitudes when he stated, “I do not categorize every Jew as inferior, as [I do] Negroes, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy [Jews] with whom we have to fight.”[245]…

  Other correspondence in the German Community Conference’s files contains similar guidance.[246] One December 2, 1941, the Director of the Thuringischen Sanatorium reported to Dr. Schmiljan, Hauptreferent (Deutscher Gemeindetag in Berlin) that a four-year-old “Negro” (mulatto) female was in his institution. He requested guidance from Berlin.

  Schmiljan responded that existing offspring of mixed-marriages must go before a special board, and that they were not eligible to be cared for in regular sanitariums. He concluded that since no social institution showed any interest in carrying for the “Negro” girl, the only option was to keep her there until she could be placed with a mixed-race couple. Local bureaucrats were eager in most cases to comply with Nazi racial doctrine.

  Mulattoes, African Germans

  and other Civilians

  Not all African Germans were driven to be criminals or helpless wards of the courts. Hilarius (Lari) Gilges, an African-German dance, was subjected to racism and discrimination by white Germans. Nevertheless, he had been a member of the KJVD (German Communist Youth Organization) in 1926. As a performer, he founded the leftist actors group “Nordwest Ran” which organized anti-Nazi demonstrations. He was eventually arrested by the Gestapo, on June 30, 1933, and the following day his body was found under a bridge in Dusseldorf, Germany.[247]

  Other black entertainers also suffered under Nazi racism. Valaida Snow, a popular African American female jazz entertainer [was] interned in pro-fascist Denmark from 1940 to 1942. … Valaida, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, played several instruments including trumpet, saxophone and banjo. By the 1920s and 1930s she was performing in jazz clubs with such notables as Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong.

  Later Valaida made films and records. While recording in Nazi-occupied Denmark, in 1940, she was arrested by some pro-fascist Danish police for being a non-Aryan alien and imprisoned in the Wester-Faeglaen internment camp for political prisoners. She was later used as a hostage in a prisoner exchange and returned to the United States, in 1942, to continue her musical career.[248]

  Ludwik Zuk-Skarszewski, a Polish Jew and survivor of Auschwitz Birkenau, was asked to form a “largerkapelle (orchestra) at Falkensee concentration camp, in which there were musicians of worldwide fame as well as Negroes and mulattoes.”

  On April 14, 1942, Josef John Nassey, a mulatto artist born in Surinam (Dutch Guiana) and who possessed a counterfeit American passport, was arrested and imprisoned in Laufen, Germany. The camp’s prisoner population consisted of fifty Jews, twelve blacks, and an assortment of white Americans and British nationals.

  Despite the common predicaments of black and white prisoners, the two groups were racially segregated in separate barracks.[249] Nassey’s landscapes and portraits painted at Laufen are a lasting testament to an otherwise untold story.

  Jean (Johnny) Marcel Nicolas, a Haitian-Creole, was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris. Survivor testimonies from the concentration camp of Rottleberode confirm that Nicolas attended to the physical maladies of Jewish slave laborers and provided them with excuse forms not to report for work details. They referred to him as a “doctor.” On April 4, 1945, approximately 2,000 inmates were marched from Rottleberode to Niedersachswerfen, Germany, then dispatched on two trains, seemingly for another camp. Nicolas was reported to be among those on the trains. After an Allied air attack, the trains had to be abandoned at Mieste and Zienau, Germany. Nicolas disappeared from history.[250]

  American Nationals

  and Allied POWs

  American interests in war crimes focused on atrocities and other mistreatments directed at American nationals, including military personnel. On December 17, 1944, near the town of Wereth, Belgium, eleven African American soldiers of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion were brutally executed.

  Their bodies—hideously mutilated before and after the executions—were discovered lying in a cattle ditch partially covered by snow. Townspeople produced information that “an unknown SS unit committed the heinous crimes.”[251]

 
; In an account given British war crimes investigators, a female Polish Jew alleged that she had overheard her superior—Doctor Prima, who was responsible for a municipal hospital in Salzburg, Austria—boasting to a colleague that on February 20, 1944, he was called upon to render assistance to some American flyers who had crashed nearby.

  Upon his arrival, he noticed that “four Negro airmen were unharmed, while others were seriously injured or dead.” Prima claimed to have executed the ones who had remained alive.[252]

  On May 5, 1944, witnesses said “three colored American pilots” were executed by the Gestapo while incarcerated in a prison at Budapest, Hungary. The method of execution was death by hanging in a public square.[253]

  On or about September 1, 1944, near Merzig, Germany, two former SS guards said they say “Negro American soldiers being executed after they were ordered to dig their own graves.”[254] A citizen of Merzig noted that on September 1, 1944, he saw “20 Negro soldiers detained in a hotel,” adding that they were taken to a nearby forest and executed. The witness brought investigators to the mass burial site.[255]

  During December, 1944, two Afro-American airmen were shot down over the town of Debrecen, Hungary. After landing, they were clubbed to death by Hungarian SS troops. Witnesses said they were executed because “Hungarians do not like Negroes.”

  This case file includes a statement by an American sergeant who claimed that on December 18, 1944—while he was being held captive in a jail at Sopron, Hungary—an African-American pilot in the next cell was executed. Later, the American sergeant explained, he overheard a conversation between two Gestapo guards in which one of them observed, “Hungarians do this to all Negroes.”[256]

  On March 28, 1945, Americans captured a German SS officer, Otto Vetter. In his possession was a persona letter stating he witnesses “two colored airmen clubbed to death by townspeople of Weinboella, Germany, after they were directed to perform the executions by the local Gestapo.”[257]

  Also on March 28, 1945, near Iserlohn, Germany, a witness reported that “a Negro American airman was brutally executed by the townspeople of Iserlohn upon orders issued by the local Gestapo.” The method of execution was by “dung fork and other implements.”[258]

  By April 18, 1945, the military and political situations in Nazi Germany had grown steadily worse. Himmler was willing to trade concentration camp inmate lives for promises by the Allies to treat his SS as normal prisoners of war. As part of the negotiations, Himmler asked that “no Negro occupation forces be stationed in Germany after the war.”[259] [Emphasis supplied.]

  Toward the end of April, 1945, two “Negroes” were evacuated from Ploemnitz (Leau), a subcamp of Buchenwald. During the march-on-foot they were shot by SS guards—supposedly because the two were too weak to keep up.

  On April 29, 1945, Dachau was liberated by divisions of the 7th U.S. Army. During the liberation, an unidentified American soldier had a camera and took a photograph of Jean (Johnny) Voste, an African-Belgian, who was an inmate of camp.

  Wilhelm Ruhl, a Gestapo guard at the infamous Butzbach prison, acknowledged seeing African-French civilians and prisoners of war; he also reported seeing Lieutenant Darwin Nichols, an African-American airman POW, held in this facility in March, 1945. Ruhl accused other Gestapo guards of deliberately executing some of the black prisoners and burying their bodies in a bomb crater near the prison.[260] [Emphasis supplied.]

  On June 1, 1945, the 21st Army Group submitted a report to the United Nations War Crimes Commission stating that “Negroes” were used as slave laborers at Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany.[261]

  According to a war crimes investigation dated February 15, 1946, the commander of the German 1st Battalion, 17th SS Infantry Division in France, ordered that “No Negro prisoners of war were to be taken alive.” This charge was made by a captured Dutch national who had been a member of the unit. He added that he saw at least “one American Negro being executed.”[262] [Emphasis supplied.]

  Another investigation, dated July 14, 1945, alleged that Fritz Scholz, commander of the 2nd Battalion, SS Regiment, “Der Fuhrer,” in August 1944 near Tours, France, ordered “100 Negro prisoners of war to be executed once they completed the task of digging their own graves.” These statements were made by two former members of the battalion.[263] [Emphasis supplied.]

  Another investigation noted that on July 16, 1945, 1,000 black Senegalese soldiers—who had been used as slave laborers at a factory at Fritzlar, Germany—were executed on orders by Alfred Moretao, a member of the SS and owner of the business. [Emphasis supplied.]

  According to the statements of four French surviving prisoners of war, Moretao ordered the executions because the soldiers “were stealing potatoes from the field.” The surviving prisoners explained that the “potatoes were stolen because Moretao was deliberately starving them.”[264]

  Although there was no clear directive or official plan, evidence exists that black Allied prisoners of war were brutally mistreated in comparison to their white counterparts, particularly by members of the Gestapo or SS.

  In 1940 Ernst Hemming Hardenberg, a former member of the SS, was tried by an SS court for failure to shoot a wounded African-French prisoner of war. He was acquitted of the charges but the court recommended his removal from the SS. Heinrich Himmler issued the order removing him.[265] [Emphasis supplied.]

  During the war, some captured black colonial troops from Africa were used as slave laborers by the Wehrmacht in engineering battalions. The prisoners constructed military fortifications and repaired roads.

  This work was physically demanding upon the blacks, some of whom died in captivity form malnutrition and disease. They were not part of the German POW camp system, and their mistreatment violated the Geneva Convention. [See Appendix E.]

  Another violation reported to the U.S. Army involved five African American prisoners of war being used as drivers for the 116th SS Panzer Division near Petit Halleux, France.[266] Meanwhile, Gauleiter Holz of Belgium had ordered “no prisoners of war would be captured,” and his Volkssturm commander gave orders to “kill all colored prisoners on sight, because they stink.”[267] [Emphasis supplied.]

  The 761 Tank Battalion, unofficially known as the “Black Panther Battalion,” was a segregated unit consisting, along with a small number of white officers, mostly of African Americans. The famous heavyweight boxer Joe Louis was an enlisted man with the unit.

  From September 7, 1944, to May 6, 1945, the unit distinguished itself in combat while in France, Germany and Austria. President Carter awarded The Presidential Unit Citation for Extraordinary Heroism to the 761st. The 71st Infantry Division was cited for participating in the “liberation” of the Mauthausen subcamp of Gunskirchen on May 5-6, 1945.[268]

  Appendix C

  Correspondence Between Scholars

  Regarding Blacks and the Holocaust

  Research on Germany’s Black Holocaust victims has been quietly conducted in different parts of the world, and some scholars and historians have even been willing to share their work-in-progress.

  The late Dr. Robert Kesting of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum appears to have become the de facto coordinator of such underground worldwide research as the following letters to him will attest to.

  We will first look at correspondence between him and Dr. Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst of Germany’s University of Cologne, Institute of African Studies, regarding research that Dr. Kesting was conducting:

  [February 9, 1997]

  Dear Dr. Kesting,

  I am working on the history of Africans and Black Germans in Germany, 1933-1945. A few month[s] ago people from Afro-Wisdom in London told me that you are doing research on the same subject. I am very interested to know about the kind of work you are doing, records you are using, etc.

  I collected most of the documents my research is based on in the archives at Berlin, Hamburg, and Bonn. With the help of surviving witnesses I am trying to compile a list of all Africans and their relatives who
stayed in Germany during that time and to reconstruct their biographies. In addition to that I would like to reconstruct the policy of Nazi-Germany toward people of African descent.

  In looking at the internet pages of the HMM [Holocaust Memorial Museum] I learned that there is one file containing lists of prisoners including Africans deported from various concentration camps to KZ Mauthausen. I would very much appreciate further information concerning this file or other documents which might be important for my research.

  Thank you in advance.

  Yours sincerely,

  [signed]

  (M. Bechhaus-Gerst)

  Dr. Kesting responded as follows:

  February 13, 1997

  Dr. Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst

  Markusplatz 35

  50968 Koln

  GERMANY

  Dear Dr. Bechhaus-Gerst:

  Thank you for your fax of February 9. It is good to know that another colleague is interested in this subject.

  I am willing to share my research with you, but in turn, I would ask that you share your research with me and with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

  As a sign of good faith, I am enclosing a copy of an article I wrote from the Winter, 1992, issue of The Journal of Negro History. It relates mainly to the experiences of African American soldiers and airmen and other Allied African troops who were captured, tortured and killed by the Gestapo or SS. It also touches upon the story of the “Rhineland Bastards,” but at this time I knew very little about the fates of other Africans living in Germany or its occupied territories during the years 1933-1945. My forthcoming articles deal mainly with this latter subject and will be published by Indiana University Press in book form sometime this year and by The Journal of Negro History (date undecided).