5 Things You Didn’t Know About the Murder and Mistreatment of Black People During Nazi Germany

gestapo

Mixed-Race German Children Faced Discrimination

African-German children of mixed race were marginalized in German society, isolated socially and economically, and not allowed to attend university. Racial discrimination prohibited them from seeking most jobs, including service in the military, according to documents from the Holocaust Museum.

The children of Black soldiers and German women were called “Rhineland Bastards,” viewed by the growing Nazi party as a threat to the purity of the Germanic race. Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, said in Mein Kampf that “the Jews had brought the Negroes into the Rhineland with the clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily-resulting bastardization.”

By 1937, after the Nazis rose to power, the Gestapo (German secret state police) had secretly rounded up and forcibly sterilized many mixed-race Blacks. Some were subjected to medical experiments, while others mysteriously “disappeared,” according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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