Black Germans and the Holocaust

The Holocaust is most often remembered through the persecution and murder of the Jews in Europe, the central crime of the Nazi regime. Yet Nazi racial ideology also targeted Black people living in Germany and occupied Europe, a history that remains far less visible. Among the least known victims were Afro-German children born in the 1920s after France stationed colonial troops in the German Rhineland following World War I. Nazi racial scientists tracked these children, photographed them and cast them as a “biological threat.” In 1937, at least 385 adolescents, some as young as 13, were forcibly sterilized after what historian Paul Weindling describes as “psychological, anthropological and genetic evaluations” designed to turn racist theory into state policy.

This violence did not emerge in isolation. It grew from older currents of colonial “race science” developed during Germany’s imperial past, particularly in German Southwest Africa, today Namibia. Weindling traces a direct line from anthropological studies of racial mixing in the colonies to Nazi public health policies that treated “blood” as destiny. Hitler’s Mein Kampf framed sterilization as a necessary remedy for what he called damage to the nation’s hereditary stock, and Nazi law soon made these ideas actionable. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws criminalized relationships not only between Germans and Jews but also between Germans and non-White people, while a Nazified medical establishment helped identify, classify and punish those deemed racially “undesirable.”

Afro-Germans and Black soldiers were thus targeted for exclusion, sterilization, imprisonment and social erasure under a regime obsessed with racial purity. Drawing on colonial-era racism and transatlantic white supremacist ideas, the late USHMM archivist Robert W. Kestling demonstrated that the Nazis barred Black people from education and employment, criminalized interracial relationships and forcibly sterilized at least 365 Afro-German children in 1937. This history reveals how Nazi ideology weaponized race across multiple groups and exposes the broader machinery of white supremacy that underpinned Nazi rule.

Daily life for Black Germans reflected this escalating exclusion. They lived as a small, highly visible minority whose presence increasingly marked them as outsiders. They were pushed out of schools and professions, harassed in public and subjected to laws that defined them as racially inferior. There was no single experience of being Black in Nazi Germany, but all were forced to navigate a society that steadily denied their right to belong. Some survived by attempting to remain invisible, avoiding attention that could lead to denunciation or arrest. Personal testimonies convey the human cost of these policies. Hans Hauck, who was forcibly sterilized as a teenager, later recalled being taken with other adolescents for days of examinations and procedures, saying, “We all were too scared to object,” and later describing the aftermath as leaving him feeling “only half human.” That Hauck was one of the very few to speak publicly underscores how stigma and fear silenced most survivors.

Persecution also extended into the Nazi camp system, though Black prisoners rarely appeared as a distinct category. Records from the International Tracing Service archive, held by the Wiener Holocaust Library, show that race often appeared alongside political or security accusations on prisoner files, indicating that Blackness itself could be a contributing factor in arrest and incarceration. Gert Schramm, a mixed-race German teenager arrested in 1944, was sent to Buchenwald, where his prisoner card explicitly listed his racial classification as a reason for detention. “They didn’t need a reason,” Schramm later recalled, “Being Black was reason enough.”

Other Black prisoners entered the camp system through wartime repression across occupied Europe. Raphael Elizé, a veterinarian and former mayor from Martinique, and Baba Diallo of Mali were deported to Buchenwald during mass Nazi roundups and died there. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents the case of Bayume Mohamed Husen, a former colonial soldier from what is now Tanzania, who was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen for alleged “racial defilement” after relationships with white German women and died in custody in 1944. As Holocaust experts Elise Bath and Roxzann Baker note, these fragmented records show how Nazi racial ideology operated through overlapping justifications, leaving many Black victims invisible both during the war and after it.

After the war ended, Weindling notes that none of the sterilized Rhineland adolescents received compensation, and the scientists who orchestrated the program were never prosecuted. Most victims remain unnamed, their lives reduced to files, photographs or racial classifications. This silence mirrors the stigma imposed on them during the Nazi era itself.

Including the persecution of Black people within Holocaust history helps demonstrate how Nazi ideology, colonial racism and antisemitism were intertwined, and how state institutions such as medicine, law and bureaucracy could be mobilized to inflict lasting harm. Remembering Black victims alongside Jewish victims does not fragment Holocaust memory. It reveals the full reach of Nazi racial ideology and reinforces why confronting racism in all its forms remains an urgent moral task.

Laura Auketayeva, Ph.D., is director of education and programs at the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center in Providence.