Here’s a quick little 101 primer about Black Germans during the Holocaust, and the experiences of Black people in Nazi-controlled areas.

(CW for Nazi violence, anti-Blackness, one image of people in a Nazi death camp, and all standard Holocaust CW’s).

Firstly, it is important to note that Nazi persecution of Black Germans is inherently tied up with the German Empire’s genocide of the Herero, Nama, and San people in Namibia at the start of the 20th century.

It’s also a subject I’m not qualified to speak directly to.

Also, the general consensus is that ‘Black Germans’ is preferable to ‘Afro-Germans,’ but please correct me if I’m mistaken.

By 1933, there were thousands of Black people in Germany. Estimates usually fall between 10k and 20k individuals.

Most Black Germans had come to Germany during the short-lived, distasterous German Empire. Some had fought for the Empire in WWI.

The Rhineland had been occupied by French forces during WWI, including Black French forces. These occupying soldiers sometimes had children with German women.

These 600-800 children, mostly Black, were derogatorily known as The Rhineland Bastards.’

German papers published horror stories of Black soldiers r*ping poor, defenseless white German women. In reality, they were very popular, particularly for bringing jazz to Germany.

Black Germans faced discrimination in housing, employment, and higher education even before the rise of the Nazis, but it was severely ramped up after 1933.

Hitler despised the notion of Black people in his perfect Aryan Germany. Can you guess whom he blamed for their presence?

CW Mein Kampf quote:

"It was and is the Jews who bring the [anti-Black slur]s into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardisation."

The Nazis began their campaigns of terror by targeting political groups they believed were part of a larger Jewish conspiracy.

This included trade unions and Communists, the LGBTQ community, as well as Black political activist groups, and Jazz culture.

In 1933, a Black man named Hilarius Gilges, a Communist, dancer, and anti-Nazi activist, was kidnapped by the SS and murdered.

The Nuremberg laws in Sept 1935 stripped Jewish people of the right to marry white Germans, have children with them, receive public education, practice law, etc.

On 26 Nov 1935, the laws were expanded to include Romani and Black people on the basis of race.

In 1937, a secret unit of the Gestapo was dispatched to the Rhineland to target the ‘Rhineland bastards.’ Almost all of the Black children of the Rhineland, including girls as young as 11, were sterilised by the Gestapo.

Routine sterilization of Black Germans continued till the end of the war.

As the war progressed, Black Germans teetered on a knife’s edge. They were allowed to exist in Hitler’s Germany, not as citizens, not as people, but alive.

Black German boys were (apparently) allowed to join the Hitler youth, and Black Germans did serve in the Wermacht even after Jews and Roma were dishonorably discharged.

Most Black German eyewitnesses describe the perpetual battle to become ‘invisible.’

In 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered a census taken of Black Germans, almost as an afterthought. As the Shoah and Porajmos ramped up, no organised effort to murder Black Germans entirely was put into place.

Though we can easily postulate that Himmler eventually intended it.

Altogether, we have evidence of about 20 Black Germans, mostly mixed race, who were sent to the Nazi death camps.

The only photographic evidence I’ve ever encountered is this image of Jean Vost in Dachau (photo via Frank Manucchi and the US HMM).

Most Black Germans ‘survived’ the Nazis. But like all targeted groups, they suffered communal PTSD, trauma, poverty, and the loss of so many of their members to the Nazis.

A final note: I am obviously not a Black German or a descendent of Black Germans.

Please take this thread in the context of a Roma Holocaust historian who has done this work concerning my own people.