Black Holocaust Survivors?

                       Black Holocaust Survivors?
By Mary Mitchell on October 17, 2006 8:09 PM
Written by A. Tolbert, III

So much of our history is lost to us because we often don't write the
history books, don't film the documentaries, or don't pass the accounts
down from generation to generation.

One documentary now touring the film festival circuit, telling us to
"Always Remember" is "Black Survivors of the Holocaust" (1997). Outside the
U.S., the film is entitled "Hitler's Forgotten Victims" (Afro-Wisdom
Productions) . It codifies another dimension to the "Never Forget "
Holocaust story--our dimension.

Did you know that in the 1920's, there were 24,000 Blacks living in
Germany?

Neither did I.

Here's how it happened, and how many of them were
eventually caught unawares by the events of the Holocaust.

Like most West European nations, Germany established colonies in Africa in
the la te 1800's in what later became Togo, Cameroon, Namibia, and
Tanzania. German genetic experiments began there, most notably involving
prisoners taken from the 1904 Heroro Massacre that left 60,000 Africans
dead, following a 4-year revolt against German
colonization. After the shellacking Germany received in World War I, it was
stripped of its African colonies in 1918.

As a spoil of war, the French were allowed to occupy Germany in the
Rhineland--a bitter piece of real estate that has gone back and, forth
between the two nations for centuries. The French willfully deployed their
own colonized African soldiers as the occupying
force. Germans viewed this as the final insult of World War I, and, soon
thereafter, 92% of them voted in the Nazi party.

Hundreds of the African Rhineland-based soldiers intermarried with German
women and raised their children as Black Germans. In Mein Kampf, Hitler
wrote about his plans for these "Rhineland Bastards". When he came to
power, one of his first directives was aimed at
these mixed-race children. Underscoring Hitler's obsession with racial
purity, by 1937, every identified mixed-race child in the Rhineland had
been forcibly sterilized, in order to prevent
further "race polluting", as Hitler termed it.

Hans Hauck, a Black Holocaust survivor and a victim of Hitler's mandatory
sterilization program, explained in the film "Hitler's Forgotten Victims"
that, when he was forced to undergo sterilization as a teenager, he was
given no anesthetic. Once he received his
sterilization certificate, he was "free to go", so long as he agreed to
have no sexual relations whatsoever with Germans.

Although most Black Germans attempted to escape their fatherland, heading
for France where people like Josephine Baker were steadily aiding and
supporting the French Underground, many still encountered problems
elsewhere. Nations shut their doors to Germans, including the Black ones.

Some Black Germans were able to eke out a living during Hitler's reign of
terror by performing in Vaudeville shows, but many Blacks, steadfast in
their belief that they were German first, Black second, opted to remain in
Germany. Some fought with the Nazis (a few even became Lutwaffe pilots)!
Unfortunately, many Black Germans were arrested, charged with treason, and
shipped in cattle cars to concentration camps. Often these trains were so
packed with people and (equipped with no bathroom facilities or food),
that, after the four-day journey, box car doors were opened to piles of the
dead and dying.

Once inside the concentration camps, Blacks were given the worst jobs
conceivable. Some Black American soldiers, who were captured and held as
prisoners of war, recounted that, while they were being starved and forced
into dangerous labor (violating the Geneva
Convention), they were still better off than Black German concentration
camp detainees, who were forced to do the unthinkable-man the crematoriums
and work in labs where genetic experiments were being conducted. As a final
sacrifice, these Blacks were killed
every three months so that they would never be able to reveal the inner
workings of the "Final Solution".

In every story of Black oppression, no matter how we were enslaved,
shackled, or beaten, we always found a way to survive and to rescue others.
As a case in point, consider Johnny Voste, a Belgian resistance fighter who
was arrested in 1942 for alleged sabotage and
then shipped to Dachau. One of his jobs was stacking vitamin crates.
Risking his own life, he distributed hundreds of vitamins to camp
detainees, which saved the lives of many who were starving, weak, and
ill--conditions exacerbated by extreme vitamin deficiencies. His motto was
"No, you can't have my life; I will fight for it."

According to Essex University's Delroy Constantine- Simms, there were Black
Germans who resisted Nazi Germany, such as Lari Gilges, who founded the
Northwest Rann--an organization of entertainers that fought the Nazis in
his home town of Dusseldorf--and who was murdered by the SS in 1933, the
year that Hitler came into power.

Little information remains about the numbers of Black Germans held in the
camps or killed under the Nazi regime. Some victims of the Nazi
sterilization project and Black survivors of the Holocaust are still alive
and telling their story in films such as "Black Survivors of the Nazi
Holocaust", but they must also speak out for justice, not just history.

Unlike Jews (in Israel and in Germany), Black Germans receive no war
reparations because their German citizenship was revoked (even though they
were German-born) . The only pension they get is from those of us who are
willing to tell the world their stories and continue their battle for
recognition and compensation.

After the war, scores of Blacks who had somehow managed to survive the Nazi
regime, were rounded up and tried as war criminals. Talk about the final
insult! There are thousands of Black Holocaust stories, from the triangle
trade, to slavery in America, to the gas
ovens in Germany.

We often shy away from hearing about our historical past because so much of
it is painful; however, we are in this struggle together for rights,
dignity, and, yes, reparations for wrongs done to us through the centuries.
We need to always remember so that we can take steps
to ensure that these atrocities never happen again.

For further information, read: Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in
Nazi Germany, by Hans J. Massaquoi.