Figure 1.--This is an typica; article in a German NAZI era magazine about the chilren the NAZIs called the 'Rhineland Bastards', children of German women ad French Afrcan occupation troops in the Rhineland after world War I. We do not yet know the name of the mazine.

As with virtually everything Hitler did not like--he blamed it on the Jews. He wrote, "It was, and is, the Jew who brought negroes to the Rhine, brought them with the same aim and with deliberate intent to destroy the white race he hates by persistent bastardisation, to hurl it from the cultural and political heights it has attained, and to ascend them as its masters." [Hitler] The French used colonial troops in the occupation of the Rhineland, giving rise to considerable resentment. Some 0.2 milliom French troops occupied the Rhineland after World war I. This included African colonial troops. The ineviable occurred. Some of the Fremch occupation soldiers married German women and raised their children in Germany. Other German women had children with the occupation troops without marrige or any permant relationship. And this included the French African soldiers. [Carr] Because of German racial atttutues, there was considerable animosity toward Blacks used by the French as occupation troops in the Rhineland after World War I. Actually the same would have occurred if the situation had been reversed, although the internsity of feeling is more difficult to assess. The Germans, and not only the NAZIs, began calling them the 'Rhineland bastards' (Bastarde am Rhine). The more polite term was Rhineland Mischlingers. The Rhineland bastards term appeared in the press (figure 1). There is no precise accounting, but more than 800 bi-racial children are believed to be living in the Rhineland region at the time the NAZIs seized power. The children involved were not only vilified because they were part back, but becaused they were mixed race. The mixing itself was seen as a race crime. sith the Jews, the isolation, segregation and attempted distruction of Germany’s small black population was carried out in steps. This of course is exactly how the NAZIs orchestrated the Jewish Holocaust. Some of the families and the older children wisely fled Germany. As part of their eugenics effort, the NAZIs almost immediately upon seizing power proclaimed a new law providing a legal basis for forced sterilisation of disabled people, Gypsies, and blacks (July 14, 1933). [Muellar-Hill] Afro-German children were marginalised. Apparently because of their small numbers and historic novely, they did not get the attebtion the NAZIs focused on Jews. They were, however isolated both socially and economically. Unlike Jews, they were allowed to attend German schools. They were not, however, pemitted to pursue university studies. And professional as well as many other jobs were closed off to them. The Nuremberg Laws changed their legal status (September 1935). The Laws made miscegenation a crime. Mixed marriages between Aryans and others were invalidared. Afro-German woman who got pregnant was forced to have an abortion. German doctors cooperated fully with the new laws.

Sources

Carr, Firpo. Germany’s Black Holocaust: 1890-1945.

Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf.

Muellar-Hill, Benno. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933-1945.

Created: 8:56 PM 12/17/2015
Last updated: 5:48 PM 9/28/2016