Submitted by Yardbroom
I will ask the obvious question, before it is asked of me. Yardbroom why do you write of this now almost a hundred years later? I could be flippant and retort, why not. However, a serious question deserves a considered answer and in so doing, I simply state October is Black History Month and if now is not appropriate for black history, when?
A defeated Germany after the first world war was subdued and as is often a retribution of war, had foreign soldiers on it’s soil – the Rhineland. This was barely tolerable but that some of those troops were black, seemed to pile humiliation on humiliation. As is often the case when men and women inhabit the same environment; despite prejudice, laws and a plethora of different obstacles, some even if only a tiny segment, will have sexual contact. This leads to relationships some casual, others more permanent and eventually marriage.
Later, Hitler in his book Mein Kamph in an effort to explain away the German women who associated with black French colonial soldiers called the women “bitches and whores.” At the end of the 1st World War what appeared casual became permanent and the soldiers married German women. Into this mix were German settlers returning to the fatherland with black women whom they had married abroad as well as a few missionaries from Africa.
During the Third Reich the black population in Germany was no more than 500-800 persons, miniscule in comparison to a German population in excess of 60 million but numbers, position or class matter little when race dictates regulation.
A Programme – note the word programme – was organised under Dr. Eugen Fisher of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology Human Heredity and Eugenics – as a black person, when you hear grand sounding names be watchful and guarded and be slow to be impressed – he used the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring.
For through this Law, the knife was taken to those young flowers of innocence, children of a union between black men and German women. “Some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilized”.
In the dark corners of men’s minds lurk a flickering ember of remorse and it was said the Nazis went to great lengths to keep their sterilization and abortion programme secret, but history has a way of being recorded. The Nuremberg laws of September 1935 had prohibited miscegenation but those children in most cases were of legitimate marriages and informal unions before 1935….it mattered not.
The fate of other people in Germany from 1933-1945 has been well recorded, but here I focus on the innocent children who without any knowledge of their fate, were arrested and taken to the knife to be sterilised for no other reason than that they had black blood in their veins. When the seeds of hate and naked prejudice are sown and germinate in darkness they often flourish later in full bloom in the light, as the second world war – 1939 – 1945 has shown us.
This is Black History month – October – so if only for a second we dwell on those frightened souls, young children taken to a place for their ability to procreate to be unceremoniously extinguished. We must feel their pain, for in so doing we understand what it is to be black and remember the mantra of those who laboured before us….stay alive.
“In 1978, research was to be done involving the 800 children, but not one was found. It was speculated that most if not all died in the camps under the Nazis euthanasia program. Under the Nuremberg Laws, the euthanasia program was designed to exterminate those who were considered genetically inferior.”
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