Blacks in National Socialist Germany

[christianbethel]

Hello, all. This is my first foray onto this forum and I thought it would be appropriate to begin with a topic that has been on my mind for at least two years now. I am referring to the treatment of blacks in NS Germany under Hitler. I bring this forth because I have been introduced to this topic from a variety of conflicting sources, including Veronica K. Clark's Black Nazis II! and aryanism.net. Clarence Lusane's book Hitler's Black Victims also comes to mind, as it alleges blacks were horribly mistreated in Nazi Germany. I hope this topic can bring some clarity to myself and others interested.

So far, what I have gathered from the aforesaid sources and Wikipedia is that Blacks were persecuted and considered to be subhuman, but were never targeted for systematic extermination like the Jews and Gypsies. They were forbidden from having relationships or marriages with whites in NS Germany, barred from pursuing a higher education, subject to discrimination at work and school, and others. Blacks were also barred from entering the SS, but some served in the Wehrmacht. Whether these soldiers were segregated and treated well is unclear. Black POWs were also mistreated, or so I've read.

This is all I've found out. If anyone has anything to contribute about this topic, please post a reply ASAP. Thank you in advance.

[Hannover]

First, the NS German government never used the word 'subhuman', that's just more propaganda on top of other propaganda.

As to treatment of blacks in NS Germany Jesse Owens, black 1936 Olympic athlete, debunked the lies that Hitler treated him differently because of his race.

Jesse Owens, after winning his events, said:

"When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany."
and:
"Hitler didn't snub me, it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram."

Hitler and other heads of state were forbidden by Olympic officials from visiting any athletes after their events.
Hence the lie that Hitler deliberately avoided black Jesse Owens is a lie.
Jesse Owens was never invited to the White House nor bestowed any honors by Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) or Harry S. Truman during their terms.

As for your intermarriage point, laws against mixed race marriages were the norm worldwide at the time.

Just like Jews, gypsies AND homosexuals were not targeted for extermination, there is no proof any of them were, period.

The 'blacks, homosexuals & gypsies' canard is merely an attempt by Jews to buy votes for their laughable and impossible '6M & gas chambers'.

The German National Socialist policies and actions towards homosexuals were no different than other governments at the time, and in many cases less severe. There is absolutely no proof that they executed homosexuals just because they were homosexuals, none.

see:
The "Gassing" of Gypsies in Auschwitz on August 2, 1944, By Carlo Mattogno : https://codoh.com/library/document/1488/?lang=en
"Consequently, we can be certain that the story about the gassing of the gypsy-camp is not grounded in historical fact."

Gypsy Holocaust? The Gypsies under the National Socialist Regime, By Carlo Mattogno : https://codoh.com/library/document/3239/?lang=en

The Myth of a Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals by Jack Wikoff
http://www.cwporter.com/homo.htm

Gypsies and Homosexuals in the Camps
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=1894

homosexuals - Yad Vashem ...
http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=1930

- Hannover

[Lamprecht]

Suggested thread on this topic:

Black people / Africans in the "Holocaust" / Rhineland Bastards
viewtopic.php?t=12342

Many Blacks did fight along side the Germans against communism. There were very few Blacks in Germany, mostly being French occupation troops after World War 1. To be fair, if Germany had treated Blacks as equals it would have been the only White country to do so in that period. Blacks were heavily discriminated against in the USA, and most Americans during WWII even admitted that they would rather lose WWII than give equality to Blacks.

Since there were so very few Blacks in Germany, there were no laws about them. Any discrimination they experienced was just due to ordinary people treating them that way, something Blacks elsewhere in Europe and America experienced at that period of time. There's a lot more in the thread I linked to above.

As for:

Blacks were persecuted and considered to be subhuman, but were never targeted for systematic extermination like the Jews and Gypsies.

The term "subhuman" was not a racial term at all, and Jews/Gypsies were not targeted for extermination either, as pointed out by Hannover. Check out my recent thread here:

Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?
viewtopic.php?t=12690

[christianbethel]

What say you about Hilarius Gilges? He was mulatto (IIRC) and was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by officers of the Gestapo and SS. Surely this must have been a state-funded act of racism, as none of the perpetrators were punished for this crime.

[Hannover]

What say you about Hilarius Gilges? He was mulatto (IIRC) and was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by officers of the Gestapo and SS. Surely this must have been a state-funded act of racism, as none of the perpetrators were punished for this crime.

So tell us how you know he was allegedly "kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by officers of the Gestapo and SS" because he was black.
Please cite the records which name the alleged "perpetrators"

- Hannover

[Lamprecht]

What say you about Hilarius Gilges? He was mulatto (IIRC) and was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by officers of the Gestapo and SS. Surely this must have been a state-funded act of racism, as none of the perpetrators were punished for this crime.

Hilarius Gilges was an avowed communist agitator. After being imprisoned for political violence, he continued his communist activism. How do we know his race had anything to do with what happened to him? And how do we know it was state funded, and not just a settling of a personal score?

[Hannover]

If his death was caused by racial purity issues then why did his children live such long lives?

- Hannover

[christianbethel]

I read this in Clarence Lusane's Hitlers Black Victims. But your questions give me something to think about. Aryanism.net also has some radical views about race and ethnicity. If you'd like, I can post some links.

But here's another unrelated question. Is it fallacious to say that "Y follows after X. Y believes in Z, so that must mean X also believes in Z"?

[Hannover]

I read this in Clarence Lusane's Hitlers Black Victims. But your questions give me something to think about. Aryanism.net also has some radical views about race and ethnicity. If you'd like, I can post some links.

But here's another unrelated question. Is it fallacious to say that "Y follows after X. Y believes in Z, so that must mean X also believes in Z"?

What specifically does Lusane claim and what are his sources?

Not interested in Aryanism.net's views unless they provide information related to your posts.

I notice you have dodged my questions:

- So tell us how you know he was allegedly "kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by officers of the Gestapo and SS" because he was black.
- Please cite the records which name the alleged "perpetrators"
- If his death was caused by racial purity issues then why did his children live such long lives?

Here's another:

- If those who were black or mixed race were supposedly killed, then how did they get into the Hitler Youth and also serve in the Wehrmacht?

Hannover

[Lamprecht]

The story on Gilges in the book can be read here: https://vdocuments.site/hitlers-black-v ... icans.html

Hilarius Gilges

Somewhere around a dozen SS men arrived as the evening was coming to an end. It was around 10 oclock. They had been looking for and finally found their victim, a leader in the opposition to their authority. As his daughter recalls, this would be the last time his family would see him alive. Hilarius Lari Gilges was an early fatality of the Nazi regime in the Düsseldorf area but certainly not the last. Only twenty-four when murdered, he became a hero and a martyr for many who would resist the fascists in the years to follow.

Not a lot is known about Gilgess early life. He was born on 4 March 1909 in Düsseldorf and was of mixed-race heritage. His mother, in a 1945 interview, noted that the family was working class. For Hilarius, his class upbringing and experiences and his racial uniqueness would inform his life activities as he grew up. Even in the pre-Hitler period, he was, as an Afro-German, often the target of racial taunts, insults, and slanders. These provocations would push him toward more radical politics during his teen years. According to his mother, he became active in the workers movement at a young age. At only sixteen or seventeen, in 1926, Gilges joined the German Communist Youth Organization (KJVD). Reportedly, he was extremely commited to his political work in the party.

In addition to being a labor organizer, Gilges was a tap dancer and an actor. It is unknown how he became interested in tap dance, a form of dance with a distinct African American characterthere is no evidence one way or the other that he was influenced by outside dancers. Even in this area, Gilges fought for justice and a progressive politics. When he was only twenty-one, around 1930, he became one of the cofounders of the leftist worker-entertainment group the Northwest Ran, in Düsseldorf. The Northwest Ran group, comprising actors, musicians, and other performers, organized anti-Nazi demonstrations and protests in an attempt to stem the growing tide of Nazism. By this time, the Nazi Party had become a serious force across the country including the Düsseldorf area. The agitation of the entertainment troup and his labor organizing in all the cities and villages of the low Rhine, had made Gilges well known beyond his hometown. These activities strengthened the hate of his enemies and their determination to rid themselves of this troublesome and even dangerous black man.

The situation heated up in 1931 as labor unrest grew and large demonstrations occurred at the Marz-Gedenfeier work site. At one of the protests, racists were able to provoke Gilges into a fight in which the police, who were politically reactionary, if not pro-Nazi, seized the opportunity to punish him. He was arrested and sentenced some weeks later by the country court in Düsseldorf. He was given one year in the area prison.

If the authorities believed that a year of incarceration would diminish Gilgess organizing activities, they were disabused of that notion fairly quickly after his release. Shortly after getting out of prison, he aggressively renewed his position as a leader of the labor movement in the area. In fact, according to his family, his activities grew as the danger of the Nazi takeover loomed larger and larger. Only months before the Nazis came to power, he was agitating and organizing through the party. In the 1932 elections, he traveled through nearly every city, town, and village attempting to mobilize against the coming fascist era.

When Hitler and the Nazis came to national power in January 1933, Gilges was at the top of the list of enemies of the state in the Düsseldorf area. He began to work both above ground and underground as the Nazis set out to destroy the left and any opposition that remained. In the face of death threats and other warnings, Gilges refused to back down or go into hiding. In addition to his commitment to his work, he also had a family by then. He was married and had two daughters.

One daughter, Franziska Helmuss, recalls with a deep sense of loss the night they came to get him and the aftermath. She remembers, on the night of June 20,

My father was grabbed in front of my eyes. Twelve big SS officers dragged him out of the house. The next time I saw him was here [the Rhine river near Düsseldorf], floating under the bridge. Hed been stabbed 37 times and shot through the head His funeral was well attended, but exclusively by women. The men were too afraid to be associated with him. The stonemason who made the gravestone for my father was incarcerated for five years in a Nazi concentration camp.4

According to his mother, Gilgess killers were known. She noted that one of his murderers was the notorious SS guard Carl Wüsthoff of Düsseldorf. The cruelty and torture involved in Gilgess murder expressed a vindictiveness that would characterize much of what was to follow for the next dozen years. Also, the fear that Helmuss described on the part of the men (and the bravery on the part of the women) would be repeated as the terrorist state consolidated itself and step-by-evil-step eliminated its perceived and real enemies.5

The city of Düsseldorf put up a monument to Gilges near the site where his body was found. To the very end, he refused to submit to the Nazi state. Although attacked by his foes for his politics and his black skin, he always viewed himself in the broadest terms and battled the Nazis on behalf of working-class people and the nation as a whole. The respect he earned was remembered by all who knew him. Maria Wacher, who was in Northwest Ran with him, sums up Gilges best when she says, simply, he was a fighter.6

So, as I said, he was a political activist communist who was imprisoned for violence and then after being released started agitating heavily again. So I think what happened to him was not merely in response to his skin color. The National Socialists very much believed that Communism was a poisonous, homicidal ideology that was attempting to take over Germany. He died in 1933, the same year that millions of White Ukranians died in a famine orchestrated by the Jewish Supremacist dictator Lazar Kaganovich. The National Socialists opposed Gilges because of his espousal of communism, not his skin color.

[Breker]

I see no mention of the many Germans who were killed by violent communists like Gilges during that period.
And imagine what would have happened to an anti-communist agitator in the USSR.
The things that go unmentioned
B.

[christianbethel]

@Hannover To answer your questions, 1.) I read about his story in Clarence Lusane's Hitler's Black Victims. Unfortunately, I cannot remember his sources off the top of my head, but I think he got references from the Murphy translation of Mein Kampf. 2.) Sadly, I do not know the names of the perpetrators 3.) Probably because they were white...? 4.) Wait, blacks were allowed to join the Hitler Youth???

@Lambrecht Although the typical "cruel and evil Nazis" narrative is employed, that story was incredibly informative. Thank you for posting it. I couldn't help but notice it said he was taunted and insulted because of his skin color, but not tortured and killed.

[Lamprecht]

it said he was taunted and insulted because of his skin color, but not tortured and killed.

Yes, I am sure he was. Just as he would have been if he lived in the USA or Britain or virtually any other White majority country. In the USA, discrimination was still legal at this time.

It seems as though he was killed for his communist agitation. Perhaps him being Black made the perpetrators think they could more easily get away with it? Maybe, maybe not. I think it's clearly not a case of "Black man killed for no other reason than skin color" but, to be fair, it almost never is. Even though race baiters love to make it seem like such things are normal occurrences

[christianbethel]

This is unfortunate. I was led to believe Hitler wasn't a racist. He made a comment praising Negroes about how they "were granted [liberties] only in exceptional cases, where they devoted themselves in service to the Empire." Would it be possible that Hitler himself wasn't racist, but the ordinary white Germans were? I think it equates to how US presidents openly protest racism, but racism is still practiced in the United States today.

[Lamprecht]

This is unfortunate. I was led to believe Hitler wasn't a racist. He made a comment praising Negroes about how they "were granted [liberties] only in exceptional cases, where they devoted themselves in service to the Empire." Would it be possible that Hitler himself wasn't racist, but the ordinary white Germans were? I think it equates to how US presidents openly protest racism, but racism is still practiced in the United States today.

The term "Racist" is a very confusing one because of the many differing definitions. Usually, a person or idea is called "racist" if it hurts someone's feelings and is related to race. Often the promoters of the "Holocaust" narrative like to claim that Hitler hated Jews because he believed they were an "Inferior race" or "subhuman" and found them as an easy scapegoat. The actual truth is that he was against "Jewish Bolshevism" which is what he called communism. There are many threads in this forum, as well as the World War I forum that detail the overwhelmingly Jewish role in European communist movements of that era. Also, I suggest the following thread:

Why did Hitler hate the Jews?
viewtopic.php?t=9592

From a book I linked to in the first link I posted in this thread:

Master racists?

Harry Truman, not Adolf Hitler, said the following: “I think one man is as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will...says that the Lord made a white man out of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman.” Had Hitler said this, historians would scream “über-racism!” Even though no such statements ever came out of Hitler’s mouth, not even about Jews in private, historians still argue that he was an über-racist, all the while ignoring or obfuscating the über-racism of both Allied and non-German Axis leaders. The British conducted “bizarre tests of racial purity,” but only Berlin’s ‘racial purity’ tests were subjected to international scrutiny and attack.27 Gerald Horne relayed that “[e]ven as the Empire seemed on the verge of being overrun by predatory Japanese troops, London was unwilling to accept offers of aid by people not of ‘pure European descent’— particularly for posts beyond simple soldiering.” He went on to say, “This applied to ‘Dartmouth Cadetships and direct entry cadetships’ where the ‘practice of the interview committee’ was to ‘reject boys who evidently have a colour stain’.”28 The British deliberately left racial references like this out of official memoranda, just in case these memoranda ended up in anti-British hands. To cite another example: Croatians were intolerant of Serbs during World War II, yet we never read about this in most history books. Is it because Croats and Serbs do not deserve our attention? Are they somehow ‘less important’ than other ethnic groups of that era? Is their racism nonexistent?

Hitler’s über-racism is an ahistorical construct. Historians decided who was “racist” and who was not on the basis of who won World War II. But historians cannot have it both ways: either all Western leaders are portrayed as the “racists” they were, or none of them are. We do not cherry pick our racists. If we do so, then we need to research ever further back in history and condemn Emperor Hadrian as a “genocidal anti-Semite,” Napoleon as an “anti-black racist” and “genocidal madman” (in the light of his actions against Roma and blacks), and the Romans as “racist” towards Greeks and Gauls. Some historians have already started doing this.

Hitler certainly believed in the biological reality of race, and in racial differences. Really, back in the 1930s, who wasn't a racist? Look into American history a bit. Some good stuff here:

Were Americans more anti-Semitic than anti-German during WWII?
viewtopic.php?t=12464

Whenever a society has various races/ethnic groups inhabiting the same land, competing over the same resources, there will be racism. Things like poverty and political conflict also exacerbate feelings of racism, as does the religion of Judaism which is racial supremacist at its roots. Hitler's aim to have a "Final Solution" where the Jews had their own separate living spaces would have reduced racism. If everyone in Germany was the same race or ethnicity, who was there to be racist against? Check out these informative threads:

Lessons of the Holocaust: Diversity + Proximity = War?
viewtopic.php?t=12362

Judaism is Racism!
viewtopic.php?t=8387