BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY RHINELAND CHILDREN

Rhineland Children

Germany’s brief colonial period saw an increase in the community of Africans and Afro Germans in Germany. Many Black Germans were also descendants of Black Askari troops recruited from Germany’s former colonies. Thousands of these men had fought and died for Kaiser Wilhelm during the First World War in Germany’s East African campaign.[i]

Living within a self proclaimed “white” society with a history of misunderstanding, mistreating, and misrepresenting “People of Color,” life was never easy. This was especially so since much of the Colonial German literature at that time depicted Africa and its people in a negative light. The sexuality of African women and men was often described in white colonial literature in base, animalistic ways. In the 1800’s there were even exotic exhibitions of live human zoos[1] where African individuals[2] were displayed in recreated African villages within regular zoos and toured through major European metropolises including Hamburg and Berlin.[ii]

The end of the First World War and the occupation of the Rhineland by French soldiers, including many Afro French soldiers, resulted in the birth of another generation Afro German children that were often referred to within German society by degrading terms such asBesatzungskinder “War Babies” or Rheinlandbastard “Rhineland Bastard.”[iii] For white German nationalists the occupation and policing of the former German colonizer by Black African solders was the final humiliation.

The children of these “interracial”[3] unions, unlike the offspring of white occupying solders, stood as living breathing proof of this shame. Monroe H. Little Jr. reports in The Black Military Experience in Germany that despite the citizenship of their German mothers, these Afro German children were treated like foreign outsiders by fellow Germans and the German government alike.[4]

As narrated in Black Survivors of the Holocaust, “Shortly after Hitler’s election, the Nazis organized medical teams to develop a sterilization program to eliminate future generations of those considered racially unfit to reproduce. Most of the victims were those with physical and mental disabilities. But also those targeted were mixed race children growing up in Germany’s Rhineland.”[iv]

The sterilization program was led by one of the leading Nazi geneticists, Dr. Eugen Fisher. The parents or guardians of young Afro German children on the cusp of puberty were ordered to deliver them to their local Department of Racial and Hereditary Welfare. There they would be examined and measured (their skulls, eyebrows, eye color, noses, all carefully recorded), after which the children were condemned to undergo sterilization surgery with or without full anesthesia.

The program began in 1937 and by the end almost half of all the Black German Rhineland children, estimated roughly between 400 – 500, had been sterilized by the Nazi doctors.[v] Amazingly, degradingly, even after they had received an official sterilization certificate from the local Gestapo headquarters, these children were still required to sign a paper agreeing never to marry or have sexual relations with people of German or even half-German blood.[vi] As they themselves were half German by such a law they were not even allowed to marry one another. An additional 200 would disappear over the course of the war.[vii]

[1] An article that I really appreciated on the subject of Ethnographic zoos and the exhibition of Black bodies and the white gaze was Obioma Nnaemeka’s ‘Bodies that Don’t Matter: Black Bodies and the European Gaze’, published in Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, edited by Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche, and Susan Arndt.

[2] The most famous African individual to be exhibited in Europe was Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman born in South Africa in 1789. Sold and shipped to Europe in the 19th-century she was exhibited as a “wild or savage female” in freak show attractions under the name “Hottentot Venus”. Her exhibition in London shortly after the passing of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 caused an abolitionist scandal. A campaign was conducted for her release in London, but she continued to be displayed across Europe until her death. Visually her exhibition and scientific examination were used to amplify and reinforced racist ideologies of the day. Drawings and cartoons of her were often exaggerated to highlight how far her features strayed from the perceived “norm” of the Caucasian female. Her remains were finally returned to South Africa in 2002