Rhineland bastard (German : Rheinlandbastard) was a derogatory term used in Nazi Germany to describe Afro-Germans, born of mixed-race relationships between German women and black African men of the French Army who were stationed in the Rhineland during its occupation by France after World War I.
After 1933, under Nazi racial theories, Afro-Germans deemed to be Rheinlandbastarde were persecuted. They were rounded up in a campaign of compulsory sterilization. [1]
The term "Rhineland bastard" can be traced to 1919, just after World War I, when Entente troops, most of them French, occupied the Rhineland. [2] The British historian Richard J. Evans suggests the number of mixed-race children among them was not more than five or six hundred. [3]
All World War I belligerents with colonial possessions went to great lengths to recruit soldiers from their colonies. Germany was the only one of the Central Powers with substantial overseas possessions; it used numerous non-white troops to defend its colonies. Regardless of German attitudes toward the indigenous inhabitants of German colonies, Germany's lack of control of the sea lanes would have made it nearly impossible for the German Army to bring any substantial number of colonial troops to European battlefields. Notwithstanding the exact circumstances, most Germans quickly came to view non-white Allied troops with disdain and were contemptuous of the Allies' willingness to use these troops in Europe.[ citation needed ]
Germans across the political spectrum regarded the occupation as a national disgrace. Many considered all forms of collaboration and fraternization with the occupiers as immoral (if not illegal) treason. From the spring of 1920 onward, German newspapers frequently ran hysterical stories about the alleged "Black Horror on the Rhine", accusing Senegalese soldiers of routinely gang-raping thousands of German women and girls on a daily basis. [4] In the popular 1921 novel Die Schwarze Schmach: Der Roman des geschändeten Deutschlands (The Black Shame A Novel of Disgraced Germany) by Guido Kreutzer, he wrote that all mixed race children born in the Rhineland are born "physically and morally degenerate" and are not German at all. [5] Kreutzer also declared that the mothers of these children ceased to be German the moment they had sex with non-white men, and they could never join the Volksgemeinschaft . [5]
As Germans considered the occupation to be carried out by "B-grade" troops (a notion that was drawn from colonial and racial stereotypes), their humiliation was heightened, increasing hostility toward the women and children in these unions. [6] In May 1920, the foreign minister of the new German government lodged a protest to his French counterpart stating that "we will accept the inferior discipline amongst your white troops if you will only rid us as fast as possible of this black plague". [7]
In the Rhineland itself, local opinion of the troops was very different. The soldiers were described as "courteous and often popular", possibly because French colonial soldiers harbored less ill-will towards Germans than war-weary French occupiers. [8]
In his book Mein Kampf , Adolf Hitler described children resulting from any kind of relationship to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe." [9] He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate." [10] He also implied that this was a plot on the part of the French, since the population of France was being increasingly "negrified". [11]
Most of the tiny multiracial population in Germany at that time were children of German settlers and missionaries in the former German colonies in Africa and Melanesia, who had married local women or had children with them out of wedlock. With the loss of the German colonial empire after World War I, some of these colonists returned to Germany with their mixed-race families. [3] While the black population of Nazi Germany was small –20–25,000 in a population of over 65 million [12] –the Nazis decided to take action against those in the Rhineland. They despised black culture, which they considered inferior, and sought to prohibit "traditionally black" musical genres such as American jazz as being "corrupt negro music". [13] No official laws were enacted against the black population, or against the children of mixed parentage, as they were born from marriages and informal unions that preceded the Nuremberg laws of September 1935. The latter prohibited "miscegenation". However, future sexual relations and "mixed marriages", between so-called "Aryans" and "non-Aryans" were banned. In addition, persons of mixed parentage were deprived completely of the right to marry.
The government established the Sonder Kommission Nr.3 ("Special Commission 3") and appointed Eugen Fischer, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, to head it. He was tasked with preventing procreation and reproduction by Rhineland bastards. It was decided that anyone so deemed would be sterilized under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. [1]
The program began in 1937, when local officials were asked to identify all Rhineland bastards under their jurisdiction. [1] All together, some 800 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilized. According to Susan Samples, the Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilization and abortion program. [1]
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, based on pseudoscientific and racist doctrines asserting the superiority of the putative "Aryan race", which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics program that aimed for "racial hygiene" by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), which culminated in the Holocaust.
Eugen Fischer was a German professor of medicine, anthropology, and eugenics, and a member of the Nazi Party. He served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and also served as rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927 in Berlin, Germany. The Rockefeller Foundation partially funded the actual building of the Institute and helped keep the Institute afloat during the Great Depression.
The term racial hygiene was used to describe an approach to eugenics in the early 20th century, which found its most extensive implementation in Nazi Germany. It was marked by efforts to avoid miscegenation, analogous to an animal breeder seeking purebred animals. This was often motivated by the belief in the existence of a racial hierarchy and the related fear that "lower races" would "contaminate" a "higher" one. As with most eugenicists at the time, racial hygienists believed that the lack of eugenics would lead to rapid social degeneration, the decline of civilization by the spread of inferior characteristics.
In 1924, the Virginia General Assembly enacted the Racial Integrity Act. The act reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage and classifying as "white" a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian". The act, an outgrowth of eugenicist and scientific racist propaganda, was pushed by Walter Plecker, a white supremacist and eugenicist who held the post of registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics.
The Rhine Province, also known as Rhenish Prussia or synonymous with the Rhineland, was the westernmost province of the Kingdom of Prussia and the Free State of Prussia, within the German Reich, from 1822 to 1946. It was created from the provinces of the Lower Rhine and Jülich-Cleves-Berg. Its capital was Koblenz and in 1939 it had 8 million inhabitants. The Province of Hohenzollern was militarily associated with the Oberpräsident of the Rhine Province. Also, for a short period of time, the Province of Hohenzollern was indirectly and de facto controlled by the Rhine Province.
Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany (ISBN 978-0060959616) is an autobiographical book by Hans J. Massaquoi.
Edmund Dene Morel was a French-born British journalist, author, pacifist and politician.
Walter Ashby Plecker was an American physician and public health advocate who was the first registrar of Virginia's Bureau of Vital Statistics, serving from 1912 to 1946. He was a leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, a white supremacist organization founded in Richmond, Virginia, in 1922. A eugenicist and proponent of scientific racism, Plecker drafted and lobbied for the passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 by the Virginia legislature; it institutionalized the one-drop rule.
Afro-Germans or Black Germans are Germans of Sub-Saharan African descent.
The Senegalese Tirailleurs were a corps of colonial infantry in the French Army. They were initially recruited from Senegal, French West Africa and subsequently throughout Western, Central and Eastern Africa: the main sub-Saharan regions of the French colonial empire. The noun tirailleur, which translates variously as 'skirmisher', 'rifleman', or 'sharpshooter', was a designation given by the French Army to indigenous infantry recruited in the various colonies and overseas possessions of the French Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring or "Sterilisation Law" was a statute in Nazi Germany enacted on July 14, 1933, which allowed the compulsory sterilisation of any citizen who in the opinion of a "Genetic Health Court" suffered from a list of alleged genetic disorders – many of which were not, in fact, genetic. The elaborate interpretive commentary on the law was written by three dominant figures in the racial hygiene movement: Ernst Rüdin, Arthur Gütt and the lawyer Falk Ruttke.
Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, disability or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.
Wolfgang Abel was an Austrian anthropologist and one of Nazi Germany's top racial biologists. He was the son of the Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel.
While black people in Nazi Germany were never subject to an organized mass extermination program, as in the cases of Jews, homosexuals, Romani, and Slavs, they were still considered by the Nazis to be an inferior race and along with Romani people were subject to the Nuremberg Laws under a supplementary decree. There is evidence that at least two dozen black Germans ended up in concentration camps in Germany.
The Occupation of the Rhineland placed the region of Germany west of the Rhine river and four bridgeheads to its east under the control of the victorious Allies of World War I from 1 December 1918 until 30 June 1930. The occupation was imposed and regulated by articles in the Armistice of 11 November 1918, the Treaty of Versailles and the parallel agreement on the Rhineland occupation signed at the same time as the Versailles Treaty. The Rhineland was demilitarised, as was an area stretching fifty kilometres east of the Rhine, and put under the control of the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission, which was led by a French commissioner and had one member each from Belgium, Great Britain and the United States. The purpose of the occupation was to give France and Belgium security against any future German attack and serve as a guarantee for Germany's reparations obligations. After Germany fell behind on its payments in 1922, the occupation was expanded to include the industrial Ruhr valley from 1923 to 1925.
Hans Hauck (1920–2003) was an Afro-German who served in the Wehrmacht during the Nazi regime in Germany.
Brown Babies is a term used for children born to black soldiers and white women during and after the Second World War. Other names include "war babies" and "occupation babies." In Germany they were known as Mischlingskinder, a term first used under the Nazi regime for children of mixed Jewish-German parentage. As of 1955, African-American soldiers had fathered about 5,000 children in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. In Occupied Austria, estimates of children born to Austrian women and Allied soldiers ranged between 8,000 and 30,000, perhaps 500 of them biracial. In the United Kingdom, West Indian members of the British military, as well as African-American soldiers in the US Army, fathered 2,000 children during and after the war. A much smaller and unknown number, probably in the low hundreds, was born in the Netherlands, but the lives of some have been followed into their old age and it is possible to have a better understanding of the experience that would unfold for all of the Brown Babies of World War II Europe.
The Black Horror on the Rhine was a moral panic aroused in Weimar Germany and elsewhere concerning allegations of widespread crimes, especially sexual crimes, committed by Senegalese and other African soldiers serving in the French Army during the French occupation of the Rhineland between 1918 and 1930. Die schwarze Schande or Die schwarze Schmach were terms used by right-wing press as German nationalist propaganda in opposition to these events. The colonial troops referred to were soldiers from Senegal, Indochina, and Madagascar. The majority of colonial African soldiers were accused of committing rape and mutilation against the German population by government propaganda and newspapers, despite a lack of complaints in the region itself. The campaign reached its peak between 1920 and 1923, but did not stop until 1930. Adolf Hitler blamed Jews for bringing the Senegalese into the Rhineland.
The Chasselay massacre was the mass killing of French prisoners of war by German Army and Waffen-SS soldiers during the Battle of France in World War II. After capturing non-white French POWs during the capture of Lyon on 19 June 1940, German troops took approximately 50 black soldiers to a field near Chasselay, and used two tanks to murder them. After the massacre, local civilians buried the dead in a mass grave despite German warnings not to do so. Vichy official Jean-Baptiste Marchiani ordered the construction of a cemetery for the victims, which opened in 1942.