Before Germans Slaughtered Jews They Slaughtered Africans

Herero prisoners of war in chains. C 1904

In recent years, some in the African-American community have expressed a disconnect to Holocaust topics, seeing the genocide of Jews as someone else’s nightmare. After all, African-Americans are still struggling to achieve general recognition of the barbarity of the Middle Passage, the inhumanity of slavery, the oppression of Jim Crow, and the battle for modern civil rights. For many in that community, the murder of six million Jews and millions of other Europeans happened to other minorities in a faraway place where they had no involvement.

However, a deeper look shows that proto-Nazi ideology before the Third Reich, the wide net of Nazi-era policy, and Hitler’s post-war legacy deeply impacted Africans, Afro-Germans, and African-Americans throughout the twentieth century. America’s Black community has a mighty stake in this topic. Understanding the German Reich and the Holocaust is important for Blacks just as it is for other communities, including Roma, eastern Europeans, people with disabilities, the gay community, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and many other groups in addition to Jews. The dots are well known to many scholars—but rarely connected to form a distinct historical nexus for either the Holocaust or the African-American communities. This is understandable. The saga behind these connections started decades before the Third Reich came into existence, in a savage episode on another continent that targeted a completely different racial and ethnic group for death and destruction. But the horrors visited on another defenseless group endured, and became a template for the Final Solution. Students of the Holocaust are accustomed to looking backward long before the Third Reich and long after the demise of the Nazi war machine. African-Americans should do the same.

GERMANY COMES TO AFRICA

It is settled, everyday history that Nazi Germany aggressed against its neighbors in part because of a twisted concept known as Lebensraum, that is, the self-declared mandate to achieve “living space” for an overcrowded Germany. Lebensraum declared that the Third Reich was inherently entitled to supplant and destroy other nations to advance German biological supremacy. This racist philosophy underpinned Germany’s invasion, subjugation, and rape of much of Eastern Europe. However, students of lebensraum know it was not a Hitlerian concept. Rather, it was coined in the last gasp of the nineteenth century by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel.

In the second half of the 1800s, Germany suffered massive urban overcrowding due to its shift from an agrarian society to an industrialized nation. As it changed, Germany found itself in the throes of a concomitant population boom and rampant poverty. Low-priced American grain only exacerbated Germany’s economic woes. Germans in large numbers were sleeping on city streets. The social upheaval ignited the so-called “Flight from the East.” In the 1850s, as Beethoven’s Ninth played on for the secure classes, a million desperate Germans boarded steamers with their luggage and their memories, emigrating to American shores. Some 215,000 came in 1854 alone. Things did not improve in Germany. In the 1880s, another 1.5 million Germans came to America, bringing their beer and brats. Upon arrival in this country, they poured west into such centers as Milwaukee and St. Louis.i It was an epic population influx for America that in large measure helped build the continental United States and the nation’s social fabric.

But in the Second Reich, rapid multimillion-person population loss and the tearfully destitute conditions propelling the outflow, were devastating to the German national identity. A concept arose: Volk ohne Raum, that is, “a people without space.” As the father of German geopolitics, Ratzel, with his post-Darwinian notions of racial supremacy, insisted that colonizing land to create extra “living space” was the cure for Germany’s urban overcrowding.ii In those turn-of-the twentieth-century days, a weakened Germany turned its focus from the Balkans and the Slavic realms to Africa. Indeed, Ratzel wrote that Africa was an ideal candidate for the push to achieve Lebensraum.iii

Africa, with its wide-open spaces and rugged, romantic beauty, had long beckoned white Europe. By the early 1880s, imperialists in England, Belgium, Portugal, France, and other countries were planning or had inaugurated colonies throughout the African continent. Many were incomprehensibly brutal and exploitative regimes. Kaiser Wilhelm feared Germany would be shut out of Africa and its natural resources, including gold.iv

The Second Reich enthusiastically joined the so-called “Scramble for Africa.” Beginning in November 1884, Germany convened the Berlin Conference of leading European powers to cooperatively carve up the African continent. Out of that international conclave came an agreement, enacted “in the Name of God Almighty,” that would systematize an orderly territorial invasion by European powers, as well as river navigation, land use, and the other needed “rules for the future occupation of the coast of the African Continent.” As part of the treaty, European governments also agreed to interdict and suppress the Arab slave trade—a lofty moralistic ideal with a double edge. Stemming Arab slave exports also kept able-bodied Africans on the land and available to labor in abject and cruel, slave-like conditions on colonial plantations.v

Beginning in 1884, Germany colonized four territories across the breadth of the continent: Togoland, the Cameroons, Tanganyika, and a main coastal presence in Southwest Africa, now known as Namibia. In Southwest Africa, German settlers were able to establish lucrative plantations by exploiting the labor of local Herero and Nama (also known as Hottentot) indigenous peoples. German banks and industrialists combined to provide needed economic support and investment. Berlin dispatched a small military contingent to protect white settlers as they confronted the lightly armed African natives considered subhuman in Germany’s twisted notion of racial hierarchy.vi

Once entrenched, the German minority established a culture of pure labor enslavement. Tribeswomen were subjected to incessant and often capricious rape—and not infrequently, their men were killed while attempting to defend them. Whites routinely stole the possessions of natives, such as cattle, and found ways to seize ancestral lands over trivialities. Confiscation was often facilitated by predatory European lending practices enforced at gunpoint by the German military. In 1903, on the verge of utter dispossession, Nama warriors revolted against the 2,500-strong white community. Later, Herero fighters joined. Scores of German settlers were massacred in a sequence of surprise attacks.vii

The 700-plus Schutztruppe or “protection force” was overwhelmed. The colonial governor called for reinforcements.viii

In 1904, Berlin dispatched 14,000 soldiers to suppress the uprising. Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, Supreme Commander of German Southwest Africa, had learned from other European battles in Africa, such as Britain’s costly Boer War. Trotha was determined to quickly and completely exterminate the African natives, leaving the land free for fulfillment of the dream of Lebensraum. Armed with modern cannon and Gatling guns, Trotha’s troops surrounded the Africans on three sides. When Trotha wrote on October 2, 1904, “It is my intention to destroy the rebellious tribes with streams of blood and money,” his men used the German word vernichtung. Vernichtung means extermination.ix

After decimating the outclassed fighters, Trotha decided to annihilate the civilians as well. His proclamation to the Hereros and the colonists was an open pledge of extermination, unmistakable to all:

I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Hereros. The Hereros are German subjects no longer. … The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the ‘long tube’ (cannon). Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children. I shall give the order to drive them away and fire on them. Such are my words to the Herero people.

Understandably, Trotha’s command became known in official circles as a vernichtungsbefehl, that is, an “extermination order.”x

Nearly surrounded, more than 3,000 Hereros were cut down by fusillades. But bullets and cannon were only the beginning. German guide Jan Cloete testified, “I was present when the Herero were defeated in a battle in the vicinity of Waterberg. After the battle, all men, women, and children who fell into German hands, wounded or otherwise, were mercilessly put to death. Then the Germans set off in pursuit of the rest, and all those found by the wayside … were shot down and bayoneted to death. The mass of the Herero men was unarmed and thus unable to offer resistance. They were just trying to get away with their cattle.”xi

To avoid staining the honor of German soldiers, von Trotha instructed his troops to fire over the heads of women, children, and weakened men, driving them east into the scorching dry Omaheke section of the Kalahari Desert. In anticipation of their flight, troops poisoned the wells or surrounded them with deadly forces. Starved of food or water, the desperate and weakened Herero wandered from watering hole to watering hole. Thousands, in family groups, gradually fell dead, their rib cages bulging to the limits of their gaunt and emaciated skins. Many who did not die quickly enough were seized—still whimpering—and then stacked by soldiers into human heaps atop makeshift pyres comprised of bush branches and limbs. The people mounds of vanquished Hereros, still barely alive and breathing, were set on fire—to finish the business. For many years, their mass murdered bodies littered the desert in nightmarish aggregations of killed humanity. Whistled by the desert winds and photographed through the lens of eternity, flesh and bones became fleshless bones, as the unburied corpses not completely immolated were finally devoured by desert elements.xii

A deadly fate also awaited the Nama tribespeople. Trotha sent them a similar message: “The Nama who chooses not to surrender and lets himself be seen in German territory will be shot, until all are exterminated.”xiii

With the vast majority of the Africans murdered, Berlin rethought the extermination program. What good was maintaining a colony without a local workforce to exploit? Therefore, at some point, those civilian Herero and Nama people and related clans that managed to escape the bullets, cannon shot, killing thirst, and fiery execution were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Many died on the long march. Others were simply transported to serve in cruel bondage for great German industrial concerns, building roads, berms, and useful holes for the German infrastructure. One of these camps was the notorious Shark Island Concentration Camp. For all intents and purposes, Shark Island was considered an “extermination by labor” camp where Nama and Herero civilians, including women and children, were knowingly and methodically worked to death. Investigators estimate the death rate at 90 percent, as thousands of defenseless Africans perished under the brutal living conditions, the heavy loads, the piercing elements, and the endless whippings with stinging sjamboks made of rhinoceros or hippopotamus hide awaiting all those who showed either weakness, reluctance, or just slowness of step. A missionary recalled in shock, “A woman who was so weak from illness that she could not stand, crawled to some of the other prisoners to beg for water. The overseer fired five shots at her. Two shots hit her: one in the thigh, the other smashing her forearm.” One surviving family member of a chief later testified to a British commission, “I was sent to Shark Island by the Germans. We remained on the island one year. [Approximately] 3,500 Hottentots [Nama], and Kaffirs were sent to the island and [only] 193 returned—3,307 died on the Island.”xiv

Another member of the German settlement wrote, “During the worst period an average of thirty died daily … it was the way the system worked. General von Trotha publicly gave expression to this system of murder through work in an article he published. … ‘the destruction of all rebellious tribes is the aim of our efforts.’ ”xv

At the beginning of the German occupation, Herero society was estimated at about 80,000 to 90,000 souls. Some 50,000 Africans comprising other tribal groups, created a total approximate native population of about 130,000 to 140,000. By the time the cannon smoke cleared and the injured stopped breathing, only about 15,000 broken Hereros remained to be dragooned for labor. In 1911, after hostilities had ceased and the extermination policy was challenged in Berlin, an official German census counted an 80 percent reduction of all tribal groups, or about 92,000 dead in the preceding few years. Settlements Commissioner Paul Rohrbach insisted, “To secure the peaceful white settlement against the bad, culturally inept, and predatory native tribe, it is possible that its actual eradication may become necessary.” Even still, Rohrbach bemoaned that so many sheep and cows had to die along with the Hereros, due to the sweeping nature of Trotha’s Vernichtungs Prinzep, or extermination policy. He chastised that it was a waste to lose that much livestock.xvi

Scholars commonly say the Armenian genocide of 1914–1915, perpetrated by the Turks, was the first genocide of the twentieth century. That is wrong. History records the first deliberate effort to systematically exterminate an entire group was by the Germans in Southwest Africa, 1904–1908.

Yet the systematic slaughter of the Hereros and related African groups was hardly a secret genocide. The sanctioned extermination was long debated in the Reichstag—was too much or too little force applied? In one 1906 Reichstag session, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow read a newspaper letter explaining, “Around 2,000 [Hereros] are presently under German imprisonment. They surrendered against the guarantee of life, but were nevertheless transferred to Shark Island in Lüderitz, where, as a doctor assured me, they will all die within two years due to the climate.”xvii

Coveted medals were awarded to the military leaders. A heroic national myth was invented to glamorize the German conquest and victory, complete with grandiose horse-mounted soldier statuary in public squares both in Germany and Africa. Germany’s military establishment compiled a two-volume official report for study at its academies. The entire campaign was justified and elevated along numerous social and military planes. Published memoirs, artworks, and geopolitical promulgations enshrined the supposed gallantry of the extermination of the Hereros.xviii

AFRICA COMES TO GERMANY

After World War I, Germany was stripped of her African colonies as part of the Treaty of Versailles. German Southwest Africa and its other African colonies were set on a path to independence, albeit under close direct and indirect European tutelage. The loss of its colonies might have convinced many Germans that Africa was part of a dark past. Not so.

Conscription and recruitment had been introduced into France’s African territories decades earlier. Nearly half a million fearsome fighters, mainly from Senegal, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco—all generally referred to as Senegalese Tirailleurs regardless of their national origins—fought in the French Army in World War I. At times, Africans comprised about 14 percent of the wartime French army. During World War I, French Colonial African regiments fought in great numbers in the European theater.xix

The Treaty of Versailles, in Article 428, stipulated that the Allies would occupy the Rhineland for fifteen years. In 1919, French troops occupied this part of Western Germany. Between 20,000 and 40,000 of these occupying soldiers were Senegalese Tirailleurs—about half from Arab North Africa, and about half from central and interior Africa. The presence of African soldiers in authority caused hysteria in Germany and shock on both sides of the Atlantic. Germans popularized a national panic over the so-called “Black Horror on the Rhine.” Deviant racial sexual imagery, including caricatures of monkey-like soldiers—often possessed of giant phalluses—ravaging helpless German damsels spread widely in print and public discourse. By 1920, mass rallies had been convened in 25 German cities, including one with 50,000 attendees at Hamburg’s Sagebiel Hall. Sympathetic rallies by German-American groups were organized across the United States by “The American Campaign against the Horror on the Rhine.” One such demonstration at Madison Square Garden attracted 12,000 protestors of Irish and German descent. In the contentious presidential contest of 1920, some supporters of Warren G. Harding were fond of verbalizing support for his apparent promise that “he would do his best to get those niggers out of Germany.” Even Pope Benedict XV and his successor Pius XI voiced objection to African presence on German soil.xx

Occupation by African soldiers was seen among the German people as a further wound-salting French humiliation of German honor and prestige. Certainly, there were a number of rapes, but there were also consensual marriages as people mixed. From these came a class of mixed-race Afro-Germans popularly called mulattos. Estimates vary widely, but many observers surmise some 20,000 mulattos, that is, Afro-Germans with legal German citizenship, were now amongst them. Everywhere, fear gripped German society that its racial superiority would be poisoned by Negro blood. The “Black Horror on the Rhine” coincided with the advent of American and international eugenics, a pseudoscience born on Long Island that found intellectual partnership with German racists of the day.xxi

Eugenics was an early twentieth century American crusade to create a white, blond, blue-eyed, Germanic utopian society that would rise following the systematic elimination of all people of color or of unwanted mixed ancestry. A famous founding document of the American movement was a 1912 German study, The Bastards of Rehoboth and the Problem of Miscegenation in Man, which claimed to document the corrupted moral and biological nature of black-white offspring. The author was German biologist and race scientist Eugen Fischer. He was stationed in colonial Southwest Africa, where he studied local Dutch-African families cited in the work. From studies such as Fischer’s sprang the fraudulent science of American eugenics that medicalized racial theory. Propelled by abundant financing from the Carnegie Institution, Harriman Railroad fortune, and Rockefeller Foundation, eugenics ultimately led to the sterilization of some 60,000 Americans under laws in 27 states, as well as racial and ethnic incarceration.xxii

Carnegie and Rockefeller poured millions of dollars into proliferating the pseudoscience in Germany after World War I. Average Germans everywhere embraced the American theories, elevating their visceral racial hatred into an entrenched university science with broad acceptance.

The German and global public outcry against claimed biological and cultural debasement by French African troops finally gave way in May 1920, when Paris announced its troops were almost entirely being transferred to the Mideast to fight the war against Arab nationalism in Syria.xxiii

But if in late 1920, Germany once again thought its juncture with Africa was over, they were wrong. Thousands of French African soldiers returned in 1923. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed a massive $33 billion war debt on the newly established Weimar Republic, successor to the Second Reich. Germany struggled to pay its debt in cash and raw materials. When it defaulted on the delivery of 140,000 telegraph poles, thousands of French troops occupied Germany’s Ruhr industrial region to seize the value of local factory output. German workers walked out in a general strike. Berlin began printing worthless money to support the striking families—which led to the famous hyperinflation, where worthless cash was carted in wheelbarrows to buy bread.xxiv

FROM COLONIALIST TO NAZI

With Germany roiled by socio-economic and political chaos and the fright of French African troops in many streets, the militarized rabble of Germany’s recent wars rose again. They were determined to turn back the clock and achieve a racial and territorial triumph. The pervasive ghastly legacy of Southwest Africa and the concomitant panic over the “Black Horror on the Rhine,” combined with unrelated factors such the rise of communism, German imperial humiliation, a global economic Depression, and seething anti-Semitism to produce a combustible fascist mix. Out of this mix came the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler. Nazi crimes, Hitler’s henchmen, and their methodologies are well known. Their nexus with Southwest Africa is less known.

The Sturmabteilung—the Storm Troopers—wore brown shirts. Why brown? Many early Nazis served in the Schutztruppe, the military units that had operated in Southwest Africa. Recalling German colonial grandeur, Nazi Storm Troopers purchased surplus Schutztruppe uniforms, light brown for service on the Kalahari Desert in the Southwest Africa realm.xxv

Hermann Goering rose as one of the Nazi triumvirate, second only to Hitler. The first Reichskommissar, or Governor, of German Southwest Africa was Goering’s father, Heinrich. The elder Goering was among the first to confront the Herero. For decades, a main street in the Southwest African settlement immortalized his name—Heinrich Goering Street.

For his part, Hermann was captivated by his father’s exploits in Africa. Goering’s 1939 official Nazi biography records reveal that the young Goering “was even more thrilled by his [father’s] accounts of his pioneer work as Reichskommissar for South-West Africa … and his fights with the Herero.” Years later, Goering swore under oath that of the leading “points which are significant with relation to my later development,” he counted among the top four as “the position of my father as first Governor of Southwest Africa.”xxvi

Franz Ritter von Epp was an early leading figure of the Third Reich. He formed the Freikorps Epp in 1919, which was one of the many street fighting units that evolved into the Nazis. Indeed, von Epp’s personal aide was Ernst Röhm, who would later become a founding leader of the Storm Troopers. Von Epp hired a young informant named Adolf Hitler. Later, von Epp helped raise 60,000 marks to purchase the official Nazi newspaper Völkische Beobachter. Hitler appointed von Epp Reichskommissar forBavaria in 1933, and as such, von Epp was involved with the inauguration and oversight of Germany’s first concentration camp, Dachau. During special ceremonial meetings with leaders, such as Mussolini, von Epp was in photos next to Hitler or other ranking Nazis.xxvii

Who was von Epp? Von Epp was one of the earlier volunteer German fighters in the Schutztruppe that fought the Herero in Southwest Africa. He served as a company commander under von Trotha, and stayed on as concentration camps were established. During Third Reich years, von Epp was often pictured in his colonial Southwest African military garb with its distinctive upturned desert hat serving as a reminder that Germany’s colonial exploits were part of the Nazi ethos. He also loudly supported the Reich’s push to reclaim its African colonies.xxviii

Eugen Fischer was the Nazi doctor who helped pioneer murderous eugenics in the Third Reich. As director of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, Fischer steered racial pseudoscience into a war of extermination. In 1939, Fischer declared in a lecture: “When a people wants … to preserve its own nature, it must reject alien racial elements, and when these have already insinuated themselves, it must suppress them and eliminate them. The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defense. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight.” Fischer’s protégé was the rabid anti-Semite Otmar von Verschuer, who undertook twin studies. Von Verschuer’s assistant, Josef Mengele, continued the twin research in Auschwitz, sending back weekly reports of his macabre dissection of eyeballs and skulls. Fischer had launched his career in race science with a study of interbreeding between the Nama and Dutch settlers. Working arduously in such concentration camps as Shark Island, Fischer ordered hundreds of executed inmates to be decapitated. Herero women were required to remove all flesh from the heads using shards of glass, to create clean skulls suitable for shipment. These were then packed in crates and sent back to Berlin for Fischer’s eugenic examination at nameplate German scientific institutes. So celebrated were these skull shipments, a popular color postcard sporting a photograph of the packing process was published in Germany in commemoration of the ghastly endeavor.xxix

The list of Southwest African soldiers, colonial overseers, and commercial settlers and their prominent involvement in the Nazi movement is long and odious. A much shorter list of Nazi concepts and mechanisms carries a more than eerie relation to the Southwest Africa genocide.

Jews were termed untermenschen or “sub-human.” This concept underpinned Nazi Jew hatred. The Nazi conceptualization of untermenschen is often traced to the American eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, a close colleague of Margaret Sanger and a director of her American Birth Control League, a forerunner organization of Planned Parenthood. Stoddard’s writings were a personal favorite of Hitler. In 1922, Stoddard issued his tract The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. Later, many historians thought this vocabulary triggered the German adoption. However,the racial view that Africans were actually not humans, but rather sub-humans first appears in German usage in Southwest Africa. It was von Trotha who archetypically wrote, “A humane war cannot be waged against those who are not human.” Southwest African colonial officials and military men took the view that the Herero were actually a form of baboon or other monkey, but not human. One German in Southwest Africa wrote: “We should burn all these dogs and baboons.”xxx

African people were commonly thought of as talking monkeys by many eugenicists worldwide. Indeed, in 1906 at the time of Germany’s continual subjugation of the remnant Hereros, a small-statured but well-spoken Congolese man named Ota Benga was displayed in a cage at the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo in New York City. The New York Times brushed off criticism by African-American ministers of the day, stating in an editorial: “We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter .… It is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation Benga is suffering. The pygmies ... are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place ... from which he could draw no advantage whatever. The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.” The addition to German vocabulary of the term untermenschen as an intellectual fundamental did not arise in Berlin, but in Southwest Africa. That said, whether gilded by the intelligentsia or inculcated as a common man’s deception, it was a view held by too many worldwide at the time.xxxi

The Third Reich established thousands of concentration camps and sub-camps where so many Jews were confined under inhuman conditions or were sent to be industrially killed. The German word for such sites was Konzentrationslager. America’s Civil War probably pioneered the cruel concept of the concentration camp with several depraved, high-density stockades for prisoners of war, such as the one known as Andersonville. In the last years of the nineteenth century, civilians in conflict were subjected to the same treatment. During the Spanish-American War period, Spain barbarically herded large masses of Cuban civilians into concentration camps as part of its Reconcentrado—“Reconcentration Program.” The Cubans in those camps were systematically starved to death. Deprived of food and transformed into staggering skeletons, more than 300,000 Cubans died. Spain’s camps seem to be the first for civilians—but not the last. The British in South Africa emulated the idea in the Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century.xxxii

It wasn’t until Germany inaugurated its camps for the Hereros that the term Konzentrationslager entered the German language. In a letter from Berlin, von Trotha was ordered to cease his extermination policy to salvage usable laborers, that is, to “establish Konzentrationslager for the temporary housing and sustenance of the Herero people.” This is the first known use in German parlance. Hence, for Germany, the linguistic and structural model of the Konzentrationslager originated not in the Nazi mind but in the Southwest African colony.xxxiii

Jews were dispatched to concentration camps across Europe in cattle cars. These trains were dubbed Transport. For Germany, the process had happened once before. In Southwest Africa, to expedite the transfer of un-killed Hereros to be worked to death, the Germans loaded them into cattle cars. Germany called those particular Herero transit trains Transport.xxxiv

To achieve racial purity, the Third Reich introduced race laws, which designated many non-Aryan people as Mischlinge, or “mixed race.” Aryans who married or consorted with Jews were accused of Rassenschande, that is, a racial shame or defilement. Ironically, the first time Germans began using the term Rassenschande was in Southwest Africa when, in 1905, they enacted never-before-seen regulations against intermarriage between Africans and Europeans. Back in Germany, during those colonial and Great War years, the African precedent was debated—and often lauded—in the Reichstag for implementation in the Fatherland. Once the Nazis came to power, however, precedents set in Southwest African were enacted in Germany.xxxv

The Nazis spoke of the “Final Solution.” The German word was Endlösung, suggestive of extermination. It was uttered first in German by Georg Hartmann in 1904, decades before the Third Reich. Hartmann, manager of the Southwest Africa Company, prepared a special report asserting that “the final solution to the native question can only be to break the power of the natives totally and for all time.” The German word Hartmann used, for the first time as a code word for murder, was “Endlösung.”xxxvi

During the Hitler years, hundreds of thousands of Jews and other enemies of the state were held in concentration camps. Each of them was given a number recorded on a Häftlingskarte—prisoner card. The card followed each inmate from site to site. IBM kept track of all the cards and numbers. From 1907, in Southwest Africa, so-called “pass laws” were inaugurated, requiring all Hereros to wear a circular numbered metal neck tag wherever they went and before being permitted on a work assignment.xxxvii

In the popular mindset of Nazi-era Germans, the callous exploits of Southwest Africa were a cherished recent memory. In 1936, German shipyards finished work on two giant new passenger liners, including the Windhuk, the second such vessel bearing that name, built at the Blohm & Voss works in Hamburg, to sail between Germany and Southwest Africa. Popular trading cards included some for Southwest Africa. Historians of the period have noted that numerous bestsellers of the day offered Southwest African themes. These included the 1934 book South West Africa Then and Now by Hugo Blumhagen and the 1935 brisk seller German Africa, End or Beginning? by formerSouthwest Africa Settlements CommissionerRohrbach. A plethora of popular movies stoked collective African memories, such as the 70-minute Deutsches Land in Afrika, screened in 1939 and re-released in a shorter version under the title The Dream of Lost Colonies.xxxviii

No wonder the image of a giant ape capturing a blonde in the 1933 international hit King Kong caused panic in some quarters of Germany. “It provokes our racial instincts to show a blonde woman of the Germanic type in the hand of an ape … For the German people, this film is unbearable,” a leading Nazi academic warned a film censorship committee. When Jesse Owens, grandson of a slave, triumphed over Aryan athletes, garnering a record four medals in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, his victory was more than an Olympic feat—it was a prodigious defeat for the long-held German concept of racial hierarchy.xxxix

NAZI POLICY IMPACTS AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS

During Hitler’s pre-war years, IBM helped the Reich cross-index those identified as Jews in the census with professional and industry registers and organizations. Once German Jews were exposed in their professions, they were summarily fired. Now Nazi policy directly impacted African-Americans in the United States—but with a great benefit. Under Hitler’s repression, some 2,000 German and Austrian refugee scholars fled to America. They arrived in a nation still staggering under its Depression, and deeply veined with both the scourge of segregation and the sting of anti-Semitism. More than 50 German-Jewish academics relocated to a number of historically Black colleges and universities, such as Howard University in Washington, D.C., North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University), Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, and Talladega University in Birmingham.xl

The influx of German-Jewish academics offered an unexpected stimulus to many African-Americans’ educational experiences during the formative years of the pre-Civil Rights era. Refugee professors helped set the stage for the intellectual movement to come. Among the students who credit the inspiration of German-Jewish professors is Joyce Ladner, who went on to organize civil rights protests with Medgar Evers and who would later rise to the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] and the Congress on Racial Equality [CORE]. Ladner’s mentor was Ernst Borinski, a Jewish sociologist who arrived from Germany in 1938 and eventually taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. His sociology student Ladner excelled and ultimately became a board member of the American Sociological Association as well as interim president of Howard University. In 1996, Washingtonian Magazine named her “Washingtonian of the Year.” As for Borinski, he is remembered for fighting Jim Crow all his years in Mississippi. When he died, he was buried on the Tougaloo Campus. His tombstone reads simply: “Ernst Borinski, Inspiring Teacher.” Ladner remembered Borinski’s devotion to overturning segregation, recalling his “affinity with blacks because they experienced a similar persecution.” The Mississippi chapter of the ACLU still grants the “Ernst Borinski Civil Libertarian of the Year Award.”xli

Another African-American student is Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who went from being mentored by a German-Jewish professor to a distinguished career in medicine. In 1993, she became Surgeon General of the United States. Later, Elders reflected on the indispensable years as student of a German-Jewish émigré. “I can read almost any German scientific literature,” Elders told the Wall Street Journal. “The German-Jewish professors had a tremendous impact on young blacks in the South,” summed up African-American attorney Jim McWilliams, who attended Talladega College. “They exposed us to new music, art, and academic programs.”xlii

Ironically, the German Jews fleeing oppression found it again, this time in America’s Deep South. A still-cherished relic of the German-Jewish academic presence is a receipt for $28. That was the legal fine Talladega University professor Donald Rasmussen was assessed in 1942 for sitting at a café with Black students in violation of the Birmingham city code prohibiting race mixing in eating establishments.xliii

Dr. Ismar Schorsch, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, summed it up this way: “They found a place where they could make a contribution, and they found a place where they could pursue their intellectual life. They found a place where they could make a difference.”xliv

The importance of Jewish victims of Nazism teaching a generation of African-American victims of Jim Crow has been dramatically chronicled in a book, From Swastika to Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges, along with a PBS special of the same name and a traveling museum exhibit. Ladner told one interviewer that she remembers her professor because, "He taught us how not to be victims.”xlv

The transfer of courage was not limited to academia. While some German Jews in the pre-war years were able to manage their immigration from Germany, thousands of Afro-Germans could not. After World War I, so-called mulattos and others of mixed African-German parentage lived in Germany as ordinary German citizens despite the race hatred. The numbers are approximate, but it is thought that by 1933, the Afro-German population numbered some 20,000. 

When the Nazis came to power, like throngs of other loyal Germans, some Afro-Germans tried to join the Nazi Party. Hans Massaquoi, son of a Liberian diplomat and a German woman, was among those who wanted to sign up with his local branch of the Hitler Youth, just like the rest of his schoolmates. Young Hans was astonished to discover that the 1935 Nuremburg Laws, defining German blood and racial status, applied to him—denying him admittance. His teacher reluctantly told him that joining the Hitler Youth was now impossible. “But I am German,” implored Hans, “my Mother says I'm German just like anybody else.” Nearly hysterical, he pressured his incredulous mother to take him to the nearest Hitler Youth recruitment home, where he was roundly told to leave.xlvi

From that moment on, Massaquoi learned to live with the twin fears that the Gestapo would knock on his door or that Allied bombs would rain down on the roof. He dated a white German girl and was a one of the “Swing Kids,” who extolled Black Jazz in a Reich that considered it an abomination. His life was trebly precarious. However, his nerve-wracking existence as an Afro-German produced an extraordinary man who became one of America’s most influential civil rights figures. xlvii

After the war, Massaquoi was able to emigrate to the United States, where he became a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. Later, Hans became a marcher alongside Martin Luther King in Chicago. In Chicago, he took a job with Jet Magazine and then Ebony, where he rose to become the managing editor. For years he served with distinction, chronicling the saga of civil rights giants such as Dr. King and Muhammad Ali. Despite his rise in a free post-war country, he always remembered that day in America on a train crossing south over the Mason-Dixon Line when the conductor gruffly demanded that he change seats to the segregated “colored car.” Angry, the conductor shouted, “Go where you niggers belong.” According to his memoirs, Massaquoi could not resist frequent visits back to Germany, which he always considered his “homeland.”xlviii

MASS STERILIZATION

Afro-Germans were under constant threat in Nazi Germany. The Reich was adamant that their bloodlines be terminated. Some offspring were traced to the African colonies. But those with a clear lineage to occupying French African colonial soldiers or American troops were the most detested among Nazi policymakers. These children were labeled with the derogation “Rhineland Bastards.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler denounced “contamination by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe,” which he said, “suits the purpose of the cool calculating Jew.” A key member of the Nazi Party wrote, “It is essential to exterminate the leftovers from the black Shame on the Rhine. These mulatto children werecreated either through rape or by white mothers who were whores. In either case, there is no moral obligation whatsoever to this progeny of an alien race.” Because they were German citizens, the regime concluded that deportation or expulsion was impractical. Instead, Berlin decided to eliminate the group through sterilization. However, under the 1933 mandatory sterilization law, African descent was not listed as a justification.xlix

So in 1935, a secret working group was ordained, Special Commission Number 3, led by Fischer and two colleagues. Genealogies were evaluated one by one to prove ancestry to French-African or African-American parentage. A typical evaluation read: “C.M.B. of German nationality, born July 5, 1923, living in Koblenz, is a descendent of a member of the former Allied occupation forces, in this case an American negro, and shows corresponding typical anthropological characteristics, for which reason she shall be sterilized.” The survey process took two years. Implementation finally began in 1937 after the triumphant visit of Jesse Owens. Approximately 385 youngsters of either French or American occupying troops were quickly sterilized at several hospitals, such as Bonn University’s Women’s Clinic.l

Once WWII broke out, the Germans were not willing to limit their animus toward the black race to sterilization. In wartime, mass murder was the frequent solution.

BLACK SOLDIERS ON THE BATTLEFIELD

Generally speaking, Allied POWs in Nazi custody were treated according to the Geneva Convention, except those of the Russian army who were, in some situations, killed in large numbers. A second exception was the treatment of black soldiers, either from France or the United States. Scholarship is still emerging, but it is thought no direct order mandated the murder of black soldiers. But when captured, there were many instances of massacre. Those sent to POW camps were often, but not always, singled out for special brutal treatment.li

Certainly, French Africans, the Senegalese Tirailleurs, suffered great losses. It is suggested by military historians that 1,500 to 3,000 French African troops were actually summarily murdered when discovered by the Germans during the first weeks of War, known as “the Blitzkrieg.” The first such massacre is believed to have occurred on May 24, 1940 near the French village of Augbigny, when German units marched 50 captured French Africans into the distance and shot them. Some scholars believe the total killed, either in captivity or in combat, is between 55,000 and 60,000.lii

The record of African-American GIs is even more obscure. Historians reviewing the events of 1944 have discovered a case in Salzburg. The SS shot African-American airmen as a group. In Budapest, the Gestapo hanged three pilots. On September 1, 1944, the SS murdered eleven young artillerymen of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion (FAB) after they surrendered from their hiding place in a private home. These were the so-called “Wereth 11.” Their bodies were disfigured and showed signs of torture. Despite this, Washington did not quickly investigate this war crime. It seems their horrible deaths were not a priority for the Pentagon. Only after villagers came forth with their memories was their fate acknowledged, publicity inaugurated, and a monument built. It is the only monument to black soldiers in Europe. But certainly there should be more.liii

It is thought that several African-American units were among those who liberated the concentration camps where many emaciated Jews were rescued from the membrane that divides life and death. This would include the all-black 761st Tank Battalion in General Patton’s Third Army. In the last days of the war, the 761st helped liberate Gunskirchen, a cruelly operated Mauthausen subcamp for Hungarian Jews. Many of the liberators came away with nightmares and then had to face bitter segregation in post-war America.liv

NAZI EUGENICS IN AMERICA

Many Jews studiously track the post-war Nazi legacy, and its impact on Arab Countries as well as the details of escaped Nazi SS, Gestapo, and camp guards to Latin America and other havens. Long after Hitler’s bunker fell, African-Americans in North Carolina and other states were impacted by the race theories and race science that began in Southwest Africa, which oppressed Europe under Hitler, but did not easily disappear from broad acceptance in America. The scourge of Nazi eugenics found a welcome and official embrace in 27 states. A total of some 67,000 coercive sterilizations targeted many groups, including disproportionate numbers of African-Americans.lv

Initially, before WWI, American eugenics led the way for Germany. After Hitler came to power, the Americans took a back seat and tried to emulate Nazi policy in the United States. North Carolina was just one example. In crafting its sterilization law, North Carolina legislators and its eugenic advocates worked closely with Harry Laughlin, the head of the Carnegie Institution’s Eugenic Record Office located at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. Laughlin was arguably the central irrepressible force in America, framing state-by-state legislation designed to eliminate “unwanted” segments of society. He worked in conjunction with the Municipal Court of Chicago, distributing a massive guidebook to passing similar legislation—found constitutional—in every state in the Union. He was also a principal conduit for Nazi eugenic theories in the United States. In 1937, Laughlin received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg for helping devise the Nuremberg Law formulas that designated who was a full Jew and who possessed just a fraction of Jewish blood.lvi

North Carolina eugenic officials also worked closely with the Human Betterment Foundation, a collection of openly rabid Nazi stalwarts located in Pasadena, California. Human Betterment Foundation founder and president E. S. Gosney had counseled Germany’s newly installed Reich leaders on proper eugenic enforcement, including courtroom “trials” where individuals were accused by prosecutors of hereditary defects and were obliged to prove otherwise with “evidence.” Gosney also maintained regular, congenial, and encouraging communication with Hitler’s chief Nazi doctor, Otmar von Verschuer, renowned for eugenic twin research. Verschuer’s assistant, Josef Mengele, continued his boss’s twin research with monstrous experiments in Auschwitz. The Human Betterment Foundation Annual Report for 1935 cited a congratulatory letter from fellow California eugenicist Charles Goethe to Gosney. After a 1934 trip to Nazi Germany, Goethe wrote: “You [Gosney] will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program …. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”lvii

The North Carolina Eugenics Board’s 1935 report, Eugenical Sterilization in North Carolina, A Brief Survey of the Growth of Eugenical Sterilization and a Report on The Work of the Eugenics Board of North Carolina through June 30, 1935, was typical of dozens of similar agency reports and publications. In the forty-page 1935 report, on page 9, the Eugenics Board sets forth the state’s sterilization targets, namely, “moral degenerates,” the so-called “feebleminded,” and “hereditary criminals.” On the same page, the official report quotes two paragraphs from the Nazi sterilization law. By consulting with the local North Carolina medical, legal, and academic adherents of Nazi eugenics, a Reich-mimicking process designed to subtract unwanted family lines from North Carolina’s population was set in motion.lviii

About 7,600 North Carolinians were sterilized. Exactly how many were African-American is not completely certain, as the shame kept many in the shadows. But it is known that African-American women were disproportionately selected for ligation. The imposed sterilizations continued into the 1970s, long after Hitler fell.lix

North Carolina’s advisor Laughlin and others held the view that the state’s population was riddled with unfit humans, and that their spawn had infiltrated the entire United States. In 1936, Laughlin was commissioned by Connecticut governor Wilbur Cross to undertake a “Survey of the Human Resources of Connecticut.” The purpose? To bring Nazi-style ethnic cleansing to Connecticut in an organized, scientific fashion. The plan was to trace the ancestry of all 1.75 million residents of Connecticut. Page 63 of the 1938 survey’s final report stated that the eugenic commission would “determine the racial descent of the present population of the state with particular reference to social value—good and bad.” The final report continues: “Make a special study of alien blood in Connecticut …. The non-white blood in the state constitutes the subject of a survey of particular value. Investigation should include … their origin, numbers and interracial mixtures, and rates of increase.”lx

Those considered unfit would be denounced as “aliens.” They would be rounded up, their assets seized, and they would then be “deported” to their ancestral states or regions under a program called “Intertown, intercommunity, and interstate deportation.” This would be the modern equivalent, the state plan asserted, “of being run out of town.” This policy also mirrored the Nazi approach of the day. Page 56 of the report states, “If exile, or ‘encouraged emigration,’ or ‘dumping’ were no longer possible” due to the large numbers to be internally deported, American states that “now permit the production of certain types of human defectives and inadequates would be compelled to consider more seriously a practical means for the reduction of their supply.”

Compelled? How? Reciprocal legislation between states was envisioned.lxi

Specifically, when the limit of re-absorption of the deported masses was reached, special “population control” measures were to be undertaken. Five measures were cited: 1) Migration Control “to enforce deportation”; 2) Marriage Restriction; 3) Sterilization; 4) Segregation and Incarceration “for the prevention of their living again in their handicapped offspring in the next generation,” which would necessitate confinement camps; and 5) Euthanasia.lxii

Laughlin explained, “In some communities ‘mercy death’ has been advocated in certain extreme cases … but the modern American state has not yet worked out ‘due process of law’ nor has it yet decided on who should sit in judgment.” The final Connecticut state report added, “The legality and protection finally found in the eugenical sterilization laws after twenty years of experimental legislation gives some hope that a similarly sound basis for euthanasia might be worked out … for states or communities which desire it.”lxiii

Reciprocal “treaties” would be engineered with like-minded eugenic advocates in the legislatures of Connecticut and alien-recipient states using the robust interstate cooperation model perfected during the quest to achieve mass sterilization. To that end, on page 66, in a section headed “Needed Researches,” project 8 “Euthanasia—Mercy Death,” the task was set forth: “Compile and analyze all past and existing statutes of all nations which bear upon the subject.” Euthanasia had been the holy grail of eugenics since the movement’s inception at the end of the nineteenth century.lxiv

Among the many ancestral states long under particular scrutiny for their freed slaves were Kentucky, Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina. These were to receive thousands of Connecticut’s deportees. If the notion spread, similar deportation policies would be adopted by other states. The plan took its first step with mass registration of nearly all 2,190 citizens of the town of Rocky Hill, Connecticut. About half of them were fingerprinted.lxv

But the mass deportations, recipient-state incarceration camps, and euthanasia mills never happened. Within weeks of the plan’s launch in Rocky Hill, Governor Cross lost the 1938 election. With Cross out of office, Laughlin’s entire project was quietly abandoned. World War II broke out in 1939. Nazi atrocities and eugenic fascism shocked the world. After World War II, as the smoke cleared from millions murdered in the name of racial supremacy, international law officially declared that hampering reproduction of any ethnic group constituted “genocide.”lxvi

We have only begun to chart the impact of German policy on those of African descent. More would be known, but such research remains almost completely unfunded. However, this much is certain: all misery bleeds the same color blood. Everyman’s persecution is everyman’s crusade.

©Copyright 2016 Edwin Black

All Rights Reserved

**********************************************************

Major Sources

Original papers and documents were accessed at several archival repositories, record collections,

and in unprocessed files located in England, the United States, Germany, and Africa. The challenging range of repositories and collections spanned the gamut from governmental, military, and organizational archives to corporate and private files. A range of secondary sources, including published books, unpublished manuscripts, journals, media, and period works were consulted. Electronic gateways employed include the Alvin Sherman Library at Nova Southeastern University (http://sherman.library.nova.edu/), NYPL (http://www.nypl.org/) and the NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Green Library at Stanford University, and the Cambridge University Library (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk). In addition, we relied on JSTOR to search journal articles and on ProQuest’s historical newspaper and thesis repositories, which were made possible by generous access provided by the Sherman Library at Nova Southeastern, Cambridge University Library, and the Green Library at Stanford University. Most of the main sources utilized are listed below, but space precludes a complete roster.

Online Resources

Avalon Law Project, Yale University Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/

The Civil War Historic Trust, http://www.civilwar.org/

The German Federal Archives, https://www.bundesarchiv.de/

German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College, http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/

Holocaust Research Project, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/

Imaging Genocide, http://genocide.leadr.msu.edu/

The Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/

The Museum of Jewish Heritage, http://www.mjhnyc.org/

NavSource Online, http://www.navsource.org/

Postkolonial projects websites:

Bielefeld-Stieghorst, http://www.stadterkundungen-bielefeld.de/

Berlin, http://www.berlin-postkolonial.de

Countrywide Freedom Roads, http://www.freedom-roads.de/efrrd/ewelcom.htm

Dortmund, http://www.dortmund-postkolonial.de

Dresden/Saxony, http://www.einewelt-sachsen.de/schwerpunkte/themen/kolonialismus

Frankfurt, http://www.einewelt-sachsen.de/schwerpunkte/themen/kolonialismus

Freiburg, http://www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/

Hamburg, http://www.hamburg-postkolonial.de/willkommen.html and https://hhpostkolonial.wordpress.com/

Hanover, http://www.koloniale-spuren.de/

Köln, http://www.kopfwelten.org/kp/

Leipzig, http://www.leipzig-postkolonial.de/

Munich, http://muc.postkolonial.net/ and http://mapping.postkolonial.net/mapping

Oldenburg, https://www.uni-oldenburg.de/ol.postkolonial/

Saarbrucken, https://www.a3wsaar.de

Umbrasearch, http://www.umbrasearch.org

University Library of Frankfurt am Main, http://www.ub.bildarchiv-dkg.uni-frankfurt.de/Bildprojekt/DFG-Projekt/DFG-Projekt.htm

US Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://www.ushmm.org/

US State Department History, https://history.state.gov/

WikiMedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/

Newspapers, Magazines, and Published Media

Atlantic Times, http://www.atlantic-times.com/

Biography.com, http://www.biography.com/

BBC and BBC News, http://www.bbc.co.uk/; http://news.bbc.co.uk

Daily Commercial News and Shipping List

Deutsche Welle (DW), http://dw.com/

Civil Rights Movement Veterans, http://www.crmvet.org/

Haaretz, http://www.haaretz.com/

History News Network, http://historynewsnetwork.org/

L’Express, http://www.lexpress.fr/

The New Republic

The New York Times (NYT), http://www.nytimes.com/ and via ProQuest

New York Times Current History: The European War, From the Beginning to March, 1915, reproduced at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13635

Der Spiegel (DS) and Der Spiegel International, http://www.spiegel.de/; http://www.spiegel.de/international/

The Statist: A Journal of Practical Finance and Trade, reproduced at https://archive.org/details/statist82londuoft

USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), http://www.wsj.com/ and via ProQuest

The Washington Post (WP), https://www.washingtonpost.com/ and via ProQuest

Washingtonian Magazine, http://www.washingtonian.com/

Journals

The Advocate of Peace (1894–1920)

British Journal of International Studies

Brown Working Papers in the Arts & Sciences, Southwestern University, http://www.southwestern.edu/academics/bwp/index.php

Bulletin of the German Historical Institute (GHI Bulletin),

California Law Review, http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/

Callaloo

Canadian Journal of African Studies

Cultural Critique

European History Quarterly

FASEB Journal, http://www.fasebj.org/

Foreign Affairs

Georgia Review 

German Studies Review

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences

Horror Film Case Studies (Deutsche Filminstitut)

Immigrants & Minorities

Itinerario

Jewish Social Studies 

The Journal of African History

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law

Journal of Contemporary History

Journal of Modern History 

Journal of Namibian Studies 

Journal of Southern African Studies 

Journal of the American Society for Naval Engineers

Journal of the International Institute

Journal of the Royal African Society

Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs

The Living Age 

London Review of International Law

OAH (Organization of American Historians) Magazine of History

Public Culture

Race & Class

Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Social History

Teaching Sociology

Theory and Research in Comparative Social Analysis

Women in German Yearbook

Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie

Diplomatic Papers, Government Papers, International Agreements, and Treaties

Colored Troops in the French Army: A Report from The Department of State Relating to the Colored Troops in the French Army and the Number of French Colonial Troops in the Occupied Territory, Feb 1921, 66th Cong., 3rd sess., Senate Document 397, reproduced at https://archive.org/details/coloredtroopsinf00unit

General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa, 26 February 1885, reproduced at http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/readings/berlinconference.html

Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany (Cd. 9416, 1918), reproduced at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00072665/00001

Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945–1 October 1946 (Nuremburg: International Military Tribunal, 1947) reproduced at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/imt.asp

The Versailles Treaty, June 28, 1919, reproduced at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/

Secondary Sources

Papers, Lectures, and Conference Proceedings

Evans, Richard, “From Conquest to Control.” Lecture, Museum of London, Jan 24 2012. http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/from-conquest-to-control

Unpublished Manuscripts

Ast, Theresa Lynn. “Confronting the Holocaust: American Soldiers Who Liberated the Concentration Camps.” PhD diss., Emory University, 2000

Films, Videos, and TV Shows

“1936: Hero of the Olympic Games: Jesse Owens.”Video, 8:26, Documentary Channel, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCeiqLd0U5g

“From Swastika to Jim Crow,” Video, 3:51, Coral Gables Museum, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4DecqDTB3Y

Cheatle, Lori and Martin D. Toub, dirs. From Swastika to Jim Crow, ITVS/PBS, 2001.

Mohri, Karl, “Deutsches Land in Afrika”, 1939. 

https://archive.org/details/1939-Deutsches-Land-in-Afrika

Olusoga, David Adetayo. “Namibia Genocide and the Second Reich.” Video, 58:36, BBC, 2004. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhOOPVdRQk

Other

Mauthausen Memorial Annual Report, 2007

Books

Ames, Eric, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, eds. Germany's Colonial Pasts. Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Black, Edwin. IBM and The Holocaust. Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2001; 2009.

Black, War Against the Weak expanded ed. Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2012.

Bridgman, Jon. Revolt of the Hereros. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

Ciarlo, David. Advertising Empire. New York: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Drechsler, Horst. “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism, 1884–1915. London: Zed Press, 1980.

Edgcomb, Gabrielle Simon. From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Co., 1993).

Erichsen, Casper and David Olusoga. The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. London: Faber & Faber, 2010.

Gann, L. and Peter Duignan. The Rulers of German Africa, 1884–1914. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1977.

Gewald, Jan-Bart. Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923. Oxford, James Currey: 1999.

Harvey, Alton. Freedom, an Optical Illusion. Mustang, OK: Tate Publishing, 2007.

Hinsley, F. H., ed. The New Cambridge Modern History vol 11: Material Progress and World-Wide Problems, 1870–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.

Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. James Murphy, trans. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939.

Jonassohn, Kurt and Karin Solveig Björnson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998.

Langbehn, Volker. German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory. London: Routledge, 2010.

Lusane, Clarence. Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of European Blacks, Africans and African Americans during the Nazi Era. London: Routledge, 2004.

Marouf Jr., Hasian. Restorative Justice, Humanitarian Rhetorics, and Public Memories of Colonial Camp Cultures. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Massaquoi, Hans. Destined to Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany. New York: Morrow, 1999.

Moore, Bob and Kent Fedorowich, eds. Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II. Oxford: Berg, 1996.

Müller-Hill, Benno. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933–1945. G. R. Fraser, trans. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press: 1998.

Packehnam, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa. London: Little, Brown, 1991.

Poley, Jared. Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005.

Scheck, Raffael. Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Simon, Benjamin. From Migrants to Missionaries: Christians of African Origin in Germany. Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang: 2010.

Sobich, Frank. “Schwarze Bestien, rote Gefahr”: Rassimus und Antisozialismus im deutschen Kaiserreich. Frankfurt am Main; New York: Campus-Verlag, 2006.

Spiro, Jonathan. Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009.

Steckel, Richard H. and Roderick Floud, eds. Health and Welfare during Industrialization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Totten, Samuel and William S. Parsons, eds. Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts. London: Routledge, 2004.

Urwand, Ben. The Collaboration. New York: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Wildenthal, Lora. German Women for Empire, 1884–1945. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Wistrich, Robert S. Who’s Who in Nazi Germany 3rd ed. London: Routledge: 1996; 2013.

Period Publications

Fischer, Eugen. Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardisierungsproblem beim Menschen. Jena: Fischer, 1913.

Grimm, Hans. Volk Ohne Raum. München: A. Langen, 1926. Reproduced at https://archive.org/details/Grimm-Hans-Volk-ohne-Raum

Kriegsgeschichtliche Abteilung des Großen Generalstabs, Die Kämpfe der deutschen Truppen in Südwestafrika. Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1906, 1907.

Morel, E.D. The Horror on the Rhine 8th ed. London: Union of Democratic Control, 1922. Reproduced at http://www.balderexlibris.com/index.php?post/Morel-Edmund-Dene-The-horror-on-the-Rhine

Rohrbach, Paul. Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft, vol. I. Berlin: Berlin-Schöneber, 1907.

Stoddard, Lothrop. The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922.

iENDNOTES

“Chronology” in The Germans in America, LoC Publications, Apr 23, 2014, http://www.loc.gov/rr/european/imde/germchro.html (02/18/2016). Sophia Twarog, “Heights and Living Standards in Germany, 1850–1939: The Case of Württemberg” in Richard H. Steckel and Roderick Floud, eds., Health and Welfare during Industrialization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 285–288, http://www.nber.org/chapters/c7434 (02/18/2016). Robert L. Nelson, “From Manitoba to the Memel: Max Sering, Inner Colonization, and the German East,” Social History,, vol. 35 (2010), 439–440, 442. See John J. Weisert, “Lemcke Visits Kentucky's German Colonies in 1885,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, vol. 75 (1977), 222–232. 

ii Twarog, “Heights and Living Standards,” 285–286. Woodruff D. Smith, “Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum,” German Studies Review, vol. 3 (1980), 51–55. Jeremy Noakes, “Hitler and ‘Lebensraum’ in the East,” BBC History, Mar 30, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/hitler_lebensraum_01.shtml (02/19/2016). “GERMANS LOST TO GERMANY,” NYT, Jul 14, 1889, 15. See Woodruff Smith, “The Colonial Novel as Political Propaganda: Hans Grimm's “Volk Ohne Raum,’” German Studies Review, vol. 6 (1983), 215–235.

iii Benjamin Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly, vol. 35 (2005), 429–464. Casper Erichsen and David Olusoga, The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), 109–111. “England, Germany, and Africa,” NYT, May 3, 1896, 30. See Smith, “Fredrich Ratzel.” See Nelson, “Manitoba to the Memel,” 439–440.

iv BBC World Service, “The European Scramble” in The Story of Africa, http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1624_story_of_africa/page35.shtml (02/19/2016). “DIVIDING THE TWO WORLDS: PAST AND PRESENT SCHEMES FOR LARGER EMPIRE,” NYT, Apr 4, 1886, 5. “EUROPE’S MANY TROUBLES: RIVALS IN AFRICA AND DANGERS AT HOME,” NYT, Jan 11, 1885, 1. See R.E. Robinson and J. Gallagher, “The Partition of Africa” in F. H. Hinsley, ed., The New Cambridge Modern History vol 11: Material Progress and World-Wide Problems, 1870–98 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 593–640. See W.A. Crabtree, “German Colonies in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society, vol. 14 (1914), 4–6.

v General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa, 26 February 1885, reproduced at http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/readings/berlinconference.html (02/19/2016). “Scramble for Africa: Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 to Divide Africa,” Kasi Economics, Mar 30, 2013, http://kasieconomics.com/2013/03/30/scramble-for-africa-berlin-conference-of-1884-1885-to-divide-africa/ (02/19/2016). Matthew Craven, “Between Law and History: the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 and the Logic of Free Trade,” London Review of International Law, vol. 3 (2015), 31–59. “The European Scramble.” See “THE BERLIN CONFERENCE: THE PART THE UNITED STATES TAKES THEREIN,” NYT, Jan 30, 1885, 3. Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany, (Cd. 9416, 1918), 18 (Cited hereafter as Blue Book). See “SLAVERY IN CONGO STATE: REPORT ON THE WORK DONE FOR ITS SUPPRESSION,” NYT, Dec 29, 1889, 14. 

vi Crabtree, “Economic Resources of German Colonies in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society, vol. 16 (1917), 125–134. Crabtree, “German Colonies,” 1–2. Craven, “Berlin Conference,” 40–41. Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 430. Isabel V. Hull, “The Measure of Atrocity: The German War against The Hereros,” GHI Bulletin, no. 37 (2005), 39–40, http://www.ghi-dc.org/publications/ghipubs/bu/037/6hull.pdf (02/29/2016). See “GERMANY’S NEW POSSESSIONS,” NYT, Jan 2, 1885, 6. Blue Book, 5, 14–16. See Blue Book, 18. See Rayford W. Logan, “German Acquisition of Southwest Africa,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 18 (1933), 369–395. See Cyrus C. Adams, “The African Colonies of Germany and the War,” Geographical Review, vol. 1 (1916), 452–454. See Jon Bridgman, Revolt of the Hereros (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 63.

viiBlue Book, 5, 17, 18–19, 29–33, 43–45, 53, 81–82. “REBEL AGAINST GERMANS: All the Bondelzwarts Tribes in Namaqualand Now in Revolt,” NYT, Dec 28, 1903, 7. “HOTTENTOT REVOLT GRAVE: German Reinforcements to start for Africa at Once,” NYT, Jan 19, 1904, 3. “ATROCITIES IN KAMERUN: Three German Merchants Sent to Prison for Horrible Cruelty to Natives,” NYT, Dec 2, 1901, 7. “REVEALS GERMAN CRUELTY TO BLACKS: British Answer Solf’s Demand for Return of Colonies by Citing Official Documents,” NYT, Sep 13, 1918, 13. Martin Plaut, “A Bloody History: Namibia's Colonisation,” BBC News, Aug 29, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1514856.stm (03/07/2016). Albert Gray, “The German Colonies of Africa,” Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, 3rd ser.,, vol. 1 (1919), 30, 32. Bridgman, Revolt, 59–60. Michael Sontheimer, “Deutscher ‘Rassenkrieg’ gegen die Herero,” Der Spiegel (DS), Jan 26, 2016, http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/suedwestafrika-der-deutsche-voelkermord-an-den-herero-a-1073974.html (03/12/2016). See “GERMAN OUTRAGES IN AFRICA: An Officer Accused of Having Natives Tortured and Killed,” NYT, Jan 7, 1900, 6.

viii “Reinforcements for German Africa,” NYT, Mar 15, 1904, 5. Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923, (Oxford, James Currey: 1999), 169–170. See “HOTTENTOTS TRAP GERMANS: Seven Officers Slain; Besides Nineteen of the Rank and File,” NYT, Mar 20, 1904. 4.

ix “GERMAN TROOPS FOR AFRICA: Kaiser to Address Soldiers Before Their Departure,” NYT, Jan 24, 1904, 6. “KAISER MUCH ALARMED BY RISING IN AFRICA: Almost All the German Colonies Now in Revolt,” NYT, Aug 20, 1905, 4. “Reinforcements for German Africa.” George Steinmetz, “The First Genocide of the 20th Century and its Postcolonial Afterlives: Germany and the Namibian Ovaherero,” Journal of the International Institute, vol. 12 (2005), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.4750978.0012.201 (02/26/2016). Hull, “Measure of Atrocity,” 42. Governor Colonel Theodor Leutwein to Major Estorff, 16 June 1904, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg, Landstreitkräfte der Kaiserlichen Marine 121 I, Nr. 431, 50–51, cited in Hull, “Measure of Atrocity,” 42n7. Gray, “German Colonies,” 33–34. Blue Book, 95. Frank Sobich, “Schwarze Bestien, rote Gefahr” : Rassimus und Antisozialismus im deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main; New York: Campus-Verlag, 2006), 59. Steinmetz, “From ‘Native Policy,’” 

x “KAISER’S COMMANDER IN AFRICA DENOUNCED: He Gave to Drive Out All the Hereros,” NYT, Aug 27, 1905, 4. Rachel Anderson, “Redressing Colonial Genocide under International Law: The Hereros’ Cause of Action against Germany,” California Law Review, vol. 93 (2005), 1161–1163, http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/vol93/iss4/3/ (02/18/2016).

xi Horst Drechsler, “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism, 1884–1915 (London: Zed Press, 1980), 157.

xii David Adetayo Olusoga, “Namibia Genocide and the Second Reich” video, 58:36, BBC, 2004, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhOOPVdRQk (03/05/2016). Hull, 39–40. “KAISER’S COMMANDER IN AFRICA DENOUNCED.” Erichsen and Olusoga, Kaiser's Holocaust, 358. Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 441–443. Blue Book, 40, 61–67. Anderson, “Redressing Colonial Genocide,” 1163. Steinmetz, “First Genocide.” See Map, “German Southwest Africa, 1884–1915,” Steinmetz, “First Genocide.” Steinmetz, “From ‘Native Policy’ to Exterminationism: German Southwest Africa, 1904, in Comparative Perspective,” Theory and Research in Comparative Social Analysis, no. 30 (2005), http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclasoc/trcsa/30 (03/09/2016), 9–10. Swantje Unterberg, “Schlacht am Waterberg: ‘Aufräumen, aufhängen, niederknallen,’” DS, Aug 8, 2014, http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/herero-aufstand-1904-schlacht-am-waterberg-in-deutsch-suedwestafrika-a-984565.html (03/15/2016).

xiiiBlue Book, 45. Bridgman, Revolt, 145–146.

xiv “GERMANY’S POLICY IN AFRICA: Chancellor von Caprivi Defends the Military Administration,” NYT, Feb 18, 1894, 5. Blue Book, 99, 103. Erichsen and Olusoga, Kaiser's Holocaust, 210. Photo, Surviving Herero, ca. 1907, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Surviving_Herero.jpg (03/12/2016). Gray, “German Colonies,” 34.

xv Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,”449.

xviBlue Book, 66–67. “German Crimes in Southwest Africa,” 325–326. Erichsen and Olusoga, Kaiser's Holocaust, 112–113. Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 440–441. Paul Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft, vol. I (Berlin, Berlin-Schöneber, 1907), 282, cited by Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 440–441. Gray, “German Colonies,” 34.

xvii Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 447. Erichsen and Olusoga, Kaiser's Holocaust, 221.

xviii Anderson, “Redressing Colonial Genocide,” 1164. Steinmetz, “First Genocide.” See Hasian Marouf Jr., “The German Konzentrationslager and the Debates about the Annihilation of the Herero, 1905–1908,” in Marouf, Restorative Justice, Humanitarian Rhetorics, and Public Memories of Colonial Camp Cultures (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 90–127. See Jill Suzanne Smith, “A Female Old Shatterhand? Colonial Heroes and Heroines in Lydia Höpker's Tales of Southwest Africa,” Women in German Yearbook, vol. 19 (2003), 141–158. Steinmetz, “From ‘Native Policy’ to Exterminationism,” 9–10. Kriegsgeschichtliche Abteilung des Großen Generalstabs, Die Kämpfe der deutschen Truppen in Südwestafrika (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1906, 1907). See Bundesarchiv, “Der Feldzug gegen die Hereros,” Der Krieg gegen die Herero 1904, https://www.bundesarchiv.de/oeffentlichkeitsarbeit/bilder_dokumente/00663/index-10.html.de (03/11/2016).

xix Christian Koller, “The Recruitment of Colonial Troops in Africa and Asia and their Deployment in Europe during the First World War,” Immigrants & Minorities, vol. 26 (2008), 113–114, 123. Myron J. Echenberg, “Paying the Blood Tax: Military Conscription in French West Africa, 1914–1929,”Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 9 (1975), 172, 174. Laura Rice, “African Conscripts/European Conflicts: Race, Memory, and the Lessons of War,” Cultural Critique, no. 45 (2000), 111. See Santanu Das, “Experiences of Colonial Troops,” World War One(British Library), http://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/colonial-troops (03/10/2016). Jared Poley, Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), 163.

xx “The Versailles Treaty, June 28, 1919” part XIV, reproduced at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/partxiv.asp (03/09/2016). “RAISE ‘BLACK PERIL’ BOGEY ON RHINE: Germans Profess to Fear a Reign of Terror by Entente Negro Troops,” NYT, Jan 12, 1920, 3. “DENIES BERLIN SLURS ON FRENCH TROOPS: Millerand Sharply Answers Charges of Sengalese Misdeeds in Occupied Area,” NYT, May 9, 1920, 9. Keith L. Nelson, “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy,” Journal of Modern History , vol. 42 (1970), 611, 618–620. Nelson, “Black Horror,” 618n58. Iris Wigger, “‘Black Shame’—The Campaign against ‘Racial Degeneration’ and Female Degradation in Interwar Europe,” Race & Class, vol. 51 (2010), 34–37. Koller, “Recruitment,” 128–129. Reiner Pommerin, “The Fate of Mixed Blood Children in Germany,” German Studies Review, vol. 5 (1982), 316–317. “The Return of the Hyphen,” The Literary Digest, Mar 12, 1921, 13–14. US Department of State, Colored Troops in The French Army: A Report from The Department of State Relating to the Colored Troops in the French Army and the Number of French Colonial Troops in the Occupied Territory, 66th Cong., 3rd sess., Senate Document 397 (Washington, DC, 1921). See “African Troops on the Rhine,” New Republic, Mar 9, 1929, 29–30. See Hilke Fischer, “Africa and the First World War,” Deutsche Welle (DW), Apr 16, 2014, http://dw.com/p/1Bjew (03/10/2016). See “FINDS NEGRO TROOPS ORDERLY ON RHINE: General Allen Reports Charges Are German Propaganda, ‘Especially for America,’” NYT, Feb 20, 1921, 9. See “ALLEN OPPOSES USE OF COLORED TROOPS: General Says Presence of Units of ‘Lower Civilization’ on Rhine Is Undesirable,” NYT, Jun 17, 1922, 4. See “DENIES CONDEMNING BLACK TROOPS ON RHINE: Gen. Allen Says He Really Explained That France Needed to Use Them,” NYT, Jul 29, 1922, 4. E.D. Morel, The Horror on the Rhine 8th ed. (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1922).

xxi Nelson, “Black Horror,” 606, 618. Wigger, “’Black Shame,’” 36. See “FINDS NEGRO TROOPS ORDERLY ON RHINE.” Edwin Black, “The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics,” HNN, Sep 2003, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796 (03/09/2016). Chiponda Chimbelu, “The Fate of Blacks in Nazi Germany,” DW, Oct 1, 2010, http://dw.com/p/LFjM (03/10/2016). Robert W. Kestling, “Blacks under the Swastika: A Research Note,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 83 (1998), 87–88. Pommerin, “Fate,” 317–318. See Tina Campt, “Converging Spectres of an Other within: Race and Gender in Prewar Afro-German History,” Callaloo, vol. 26 (2003), 322–341. Benjamin Simon, From Migrants to Missionaries: Christians of African Origin in Germany (Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang: 2010), 12–14.

xxii Black, “Horrifying American Roots.”

xxiii “Return of the Hyphen,” 14. Nelson, “‘Black Horror,’” 616. See Ishaan Tharoor, “Bastille Day is a reminder of what France owes its colonial soldiers,” WP, Jul 14, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/14/bastille-day-is-a-reminder-of-what-france-owes-its-colonial-soldiers/ (03/12/2016).

xxiv “45,000 FRENCHMEN NOW OCCUPY RUHR: Official News through French Embassy Causes Increasing Concern in Washington,” NYT, Jan 16, 1923, 3. Office of the Historian, “The Dawes Plan, the Young Plan, German Reparations, and Inter-allied War Debts,” State Department Milestones, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/dawes (03/10/2016). Nicholas Roosevelt, “The Ruhr Occupation,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 4 (1925), 113–119. D.G. Williamson, “Great Britain and the Ruhr Crisis, 1923–1924,” British Journal of International Studies, vol. 3 (1977), 70–73. B.T. Reynolds, “A Review of the Occupation of the Rhineland,” Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, vol. 7 (1928), 204–206. Koller, “Recruitment,” 129. “La honte noire,” LEexpresse, Feb 1, 2004, http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/la-honte-noire_808765.html (03/10/2016). Alexander Jung, “Millions, Billions, Trillions: Germany in the Era of Hyperinflation,” DS International, Aug 14, 2009, http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/millions-billions-trillions-germany-in-the-era-of-hyperinflation-a-641758.html(03/10/2016). Edwin L. James, “FIRMER HAND IN THE RUHR: French May Send Mangin to Command if Strike Causes Trouble,” NYT, Jan 22, 1923, 1, 2. “The Versailles Treaty, June 28, 1919” parts VIII and IX, reproduced at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/partviii.asp and http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/partix.asp (03/10/2016).

xxv Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 452. Erichsen and Olusoga, The Kaiser's Holocaust, 12.

xxvi “Testimony of Reich Marshal, Defendant Hermann Goering, 13 March 1946,” Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945–1 October 1946 (Nuremburg: International Military Tribunal, 1947) reproduced at  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/03-13-46.asp#Goering1 (03/03/2016). Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 450–451.

xxvii “Epp, Franz Xaver Ritter von” in Robert S. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany 3rd ed. (London: Routledge: 1996; 2013), 54. Roland V. Layton, Jr., “The ‘Völkischer Beobachter,’ 1920–1933: The Nazi Party Newspaper in the Weimar Era,” Central European History, vol. 3 (1970), 353-354. Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 452–453. 

xxviii Franz Ritter von Epp, “Germany’s Case for Colonies: Translated from the Europaische Revue, German National Socialist Monthly,” The Living Age, Nov 1, 1936, 238–241. Kurt Jonassohn and Karin Solveig Björnson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), 76–77. “Epp, Franz Xaver Ritter von.” “ASKS COLONIES FOR REICH: Von Epp Urges Germans to Demand Old Possessions,” NYT,

Jun 19, 1934, 7. “REICH TO SEEK COLONIES: General von Epp to Lead Agitation by New Group,” NYT, Jun 16, 1936, 

14. “CLAIMS GERMAN COLONIES: Von Epp Says Mandated Territories Still Belong to Reich,” NYT, Apr 25, 1937, 32. “REICH WOULD RISK WAR FOR COLONIES, NEURATH INDICATES,” NYT, Dec 7, 1937, 1. Photo, Franz Ritter von Epp at the Colonial Exhibition in Dresden, 1939, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-franz-ritter-von-epp-at-the-colonial-exhibition-in-dresden-1939-36994336.html (03/16/2016). 

xxix Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933–1945, G. R. Fraser, trans. (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press: 1998), 13. Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 437, 453–457. Kestling, “Blacks Under the Swastika,” 86–87. François Haas, “German Science and Black Racism—Roots of the Nazi Holocaust,” FASEB Journal, vol. 22 (2008), 333–334. Müller-Hill, “The Blood from Auschwitz and the Silence of the Scholars,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, vol. 21 (1999), 331–358. Eugen Fischer, Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardisierungsproblem beim Menschen (Jena: Fischer, 1913). Photo, Gefangene Herero beim Transport nach Swakopmund in “Schlacht am Waterberg: ‘Aufräumen, aufhängen, niederknallen!,’” DS, Aug 8, 2014, http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/herero-aufstand-schlacht-am-waterberg-fotostrecke-117670-3.html (03/17/2016). Photo, Grausames Kriegsandenken in “Schlacht am Waterberg,” http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/herero-aufstand-schlacht-am-waterberg-fotostrecke-117670-14.html (03/17/2016).

xxx “German Crimes in Southwest Africa,” New York Times Current History, vol. 17 (1918), 322–326. Blue Book, 67. Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 442. Black, WatW, 133–134. Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922).

xxxi Kestling, “Blacks,” 87. Jon Bridgman and Leslie J. Worley, “South West Africa, Chapter 1,” in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, eds., Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (London: Routledge, 2004). See generally Stoddard, Revolt against Civilization. “TOPICS OF THE TIMES: Send Him Back to the Woods,” NYT, Sep 11, 1906, 6. “BUSHMAN SHARES A CAGE WITH BRONX PARK APES: Some Laugh Over His Antics, but Many Are Not Pleased,” NYT, Sep 9, 1906, 17. “NEGRO MINISTERS ACT TO FREE THE PYGMY: Will Ask the Mayor to Have Him Taken from the Monkey Cage,” NYT, Sep 11, 1906, 2. “THE MAYOR WON’T HELP TO FREE CAGED PYGMY: He Refers Negro Ministers to the Zoological Society,” NYT, Sep 12, 1906, 9. Jonathan Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009), 46–49. See Cynthia Crossen, “How Pygmy Ota Benga Ended Up in Bronx Zoo As Darwinism Dawned,” WSJ, Feb 6, 2006, B1. See “The Father of Scientific Racism,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 8 (1995), 38.

xxxii William B. Hesseltine, “Andersonville,” Georgia Review, vol. 3 (1949), 103–114. James A. Percoco, “The Space beyond the Gates: Andersonville Prison,” OAH Magazine of History, vol. 8 (1993), 37–43. “OUR PRISONERS IN THE SOUTH: Diagram Showing the Outline and Surroundings of the Deadly Camp at Andersonville, in which Thirty Thousand Union Soldiers are Confined,” NYT, Sep 5, 1864, 8. Gary Flavion, “Civil War Prison Camps,” Civil War History: Warfare and Logistics (Civil War Trust),http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/warfare-and-logistics/pow-camps/prison-camps.html (03/14/2016). “General Valeriano Weyler,” The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War (LoC), https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/weyler.html (03/14/2016). José M. Hernandez, “Cuba in 1898,” World of 1898 (LoC), https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/hernandez.html (03/14/2016). “GEN. WEYLER UNRELENTING: He Is Quoted As Saying He Has Lost No Sleep Over His Rigid Course in Cuba,” NYT, May 3, 1898, 1. “WEYLER’S CAREER IN CUBA: His ‘Reconcentrado’ Plan Did Much to Bring on Spanish War,” NYT, Aug 6, 1910, 3. See “WEYLER’S ACTS UPHELD BY U.S. GOVERNMENT: Reconcentrado Order Declared to have been Justifiable,” NYT, Apr 18, 1902, 1. “‘CONCENTRATION CAMPS,’” NYT, Nov 9, 1901, 8. “Lessons of the South African War,” The Advocate of Peace (1894-1920), vol. 64 (1902), 150. See Paul Moore, “’And What Concentration Camps Those Were!': Foreign Concentration Camps in Nazi Propaganda, 1933-9,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 45 (2010), 649–674.

xxxiii Kestling, “Blacks,” 85. Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 446. Haas, “German Science and Black Racism,” 333. Sontheimer, “Deutscher ‘Rassenkrieg.’” See Bundesarchiv, “Telegramm, von Trothas vom 10. März 1905 über die Gesamtzahl der gefangenen Herero und der im Lager Gestorbenen,” Der Krieg gegen die Herero 1904, https://www.bundesarchiv.de/oeffentlichkeitsarbeit/bilder_dokumente/00663/index-16.html.de (03/13/2016). Photo, Kriegsgefangene in “Schlacht am Waterberg,” http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/herero-aufstand-schlacht-am-waterberg-fotostrecke-117670-13.html (03/17/2016).

xxxiv “Deportations to Killing Centers,” Holocaust Encyclopedia (USHMM), https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005372 (03/15/2016). Erichsen and Olusoga, Kaiser's Holocaust, 210–212. Blue Book, 8, 66. Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 446–449. Photo, Gefangene Herero beim Transport nach Swakopmund in “Schlacht am Waterberg,”http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/herero-aufstand-schlacht-am-waterberg-fotostrecke-117670-3.html (03/17/2016). 

xxxv Bruno Blau, “The Jewish Population of Germany 1939–1945,” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 12 (1950), 161–168. See Viktor Lebzelter, “Über Khoisanmischlinge in Südwestafrika,” Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie, bd. 34 (1934— Festband Eugen Fischer), 213–231. Campt, “Converging Spectres,” 328–332. Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 438–439. Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 91–94. Wolfram Hartmann, “Making South West Africa German? Attempting Imperial, Juridical, Colonial, Conjugal and Moral Order,” Journal of Namibian Studies, vol. 2 (2007): 74. See Hartmann, “Making,” 51–84. Jan-Bart Gewald, “The Road of the Man Called Love and the Sack of Sero: The Herero-German War and the Export

of Herero Labour to the South African Rand,” Journal of African History, vol. 40 (1999), 28–29. Richard Evans, “From Conquest to Control” (lecture, Museum of London, Jan 24 2012), http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/from-conquest-to-control (03/16/2016). See “SAYS LINCOLN BLUNDERED: Emancipation Proclamation a Mistake, Says German Minister,” NYT, May 5, 1912, C1.

xxxvi “South-West Africa Company,” The Statist, Jan 11, 1896, 54. Madley, “Auschwitz to Africa,” 440. Andrew J. Crozier, review of Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft, Die großen Land- und Minengesellschaften (1885–1914), by Horst Drechsler, GHI Bulletin, vol. XX (1998), 80–84, http://www.ghil.ac.uk/fileadmin/redaktion/dokumente/bulletin/GHIL%20Bulletin%2020%20%281998%29,2.pdf (03/15/2016).

xxxvii Black, IBM and the Holocaust (Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2001; 2009), 354. Andreas Kranebitter, “Der Faschismus in den Daten: Probleme der Datenlage in Bezug auf das KZ Mauthausen,” in Mauthausen Memorial: Annual Report 2007 (Wien, 2007), 13, http://en.mauthausen-memorial.at/index_open.html (03/17/2016). Photo, WVHA-Karteikarte des Häftlings 99439, Kranebitter, “Der Faschismus in den Daten,” 13. See Kim Wünschmann, “Cementing the Enemy Category: Arrest and Imprisonment of German Jews in Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933–8/9,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 45 (2010), 576–600. “Auschwitz Concentration Camp: The Basics,” Holocaust Research Project, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/auschwitzbasics.html (03/17/2016). Gray, “German Colonies,” 34–35. Philipp Prein, “Guns and Top Hats: African Resistance in German South West Africa, 1907–1915,” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 20 (1994), 102–104, 113–114. Gewald, “The Issue of Forced Labour in the Onjembo: German South West Africa 1904–1908,” Itinerario, vol. 19 (1995), 102.  Blue Book, 111–113, 119. 

xxxviii “The Windhuk,” Daily Commercial News and Shipping List, Aug 15, 1919, 4. L.H. Kenney, “Salvaging of the Steamship Windhuk,” Journal of the American Society for Naval Engineers, vol. 56 (1944), 544. “Ship Named for Le Jeune,” NYT, Mar 18, 1943, 14. “USS Lejeune (AP-74),” NavSource Online: Service Ship Photo Archive, http://www.navsource.org/archives/09/22/22074.htm (03/17/2016). Photo, SS Windhuk underway in the Livery of the Woermann Line, “USS Lejeune,” NavSource Online: Service Ship Photo Archive,http://www.navsource.org/archives/09/22/092207403.jpg (03/17/2016). Robert Gordon and Dennis Mahoney, “Marching in Step: German Youth and Colonial Cinema” in Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, eds., Germany's Colonial Pasts (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 2005), 189. “German Vernichtungsbefehl (‘annihilation order’) against the Herero and Nama People: ‘Every Herero Will Be Shot,’” Imaging Genocide, http://genocide.leadr.msu.edu/german-vernichtungsbefehl-annihilation-order-against-the-herero-and-nama-people-every-herero-will-be-shot/ (03/16/2016). David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire (New York, Harvard University Press, 2011), 104, 105, 270–271. Felix Axster, “‘… will try to send you the best view from here: Postcards from the Colonial War in Namibia (1904–1908)”, in Volker Langbehn, German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory (London: Routledge, 2010), 56, 61–64. Madley, “Africa to Auschwitz,” 457.

xxxix Ben Urwand, The Collaboration (New York: Harvard University Press, 2013), 4ff. Laura Bezerra, Karin Moser, and Tomáš Lachman, “King Kong,” Horror Film Case Studies (Deutsche Filminstitut), http://collate.deutsches-filminstitut.de/collate_sp/se/se_05a04.html (03/17/2016). See also Sidney “George” Strube, cartoon, “Kong!,” Daily Express, May 10, 1933 reproduced at https://www.cartoons.ac.uk/record/GS0251 (03/16/2016). “Jesse Owens Biography,” Biography.com (A&E), http://www.biography.com/people/jesse-owens-9431142(03/18/2016).

“1936: Hero of the Olympic Games: Jesse Owens” (Documentary Channel, 2009), video, 8:26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCeiqLd0U5g (03/17/2016). See John Kieran, “Sports of the Times: Just Jesse, a Tale of Speed,” NYT, Jun 30, 1935, S2.

xl Black, IBM, 54–58. Lucette Lagnado, “When Jewish Scholars Fled to the South,” WSJ, Apr 24, 2009, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB12405372386295114 (02/06/2016). Ilana Blumenthal, “Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges,” Announcement of Exhibition at National Museum of American Jewish History, Jan 15–Jun 2, 2013. “About the Exhibition,” Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow (Museum of Jewish Heritage), http://www.mjhnyc.org/college/about.html (02/06/2016). “From Swastika to Jim Crow,” The Coral Gables Museum, video, 3:51, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4DecqDTB3Y (03/17/206). See “JEWISH PROFESSORS HERE FROM GERMANY: One Expelled by University, Other Quit as Protest,” NYT, Oct 10, 1933, 11. See Isidor Ginsburg, “THE TRIPLE AIMS OF THE NAZIS: AN ANALYSIS OF THEIR PROGRAM,” NYT, Apr 16, 1933, XX3. See “REICH FORCES OUT 31 MORE TEACHERS: Noted Professors Are Among Those Ousted by Forces of ‘National Resurgence,’” NYT, May 3, 1933, 11.

xli “Joyce A. Ladner,” Missisippi Writers Page, Apr 2003, http://mwp.olemiss.edu//dir/ladner_joyce/index.html (03/17/2016) Joyce Ladner, “For a SNCC member, Aug. 28, 1963 was a day of joy, anger and hope,” WP, Aug 27, 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/08/27/for-a-sncc-member-aug-28-1963-was-a-day-of-joy-anger-and-hope/ (03/17/2016). Judy Maltz, “In 1930s, Blacks Told Jews: ‘We Shall Overcome,’” Haaretz, Jul 16, 2012, http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/ipad/in-1930s-blacks-told-jews-we-shall-overcome-1.451382 (03/18/2016). Donald Cunnigen, “The Legacy of Ernst Borinski: The Production of an African American Sociological Tradition,” Teaching Sociology, vol. 31 (2003), 397–411. Tougaloo College, “Dr. Ernst Borinski Endowed Chair Proposal,” https://www.tougaloo.edu/sites/default/files/page-files/borinski-brochure.pdf (03/18/2016). Maria Lowe, “An Unseen Hand: The Role of Sociology Professor Ernst Borinski in Mississippi’s Struggle for Racial Integration in the 1950s and 1960s,” Brown Working Papers in the Arts & Sciences, Southwestern University, vol. VII (2007), http://www.southwestern.edu/academic/bwp/vol7/lowe-vol7.pdf (03/18/2016). John Herbers, “SCHOOL IS CENTER OF RACE PROTESTS: Students at Tougaloo Lead Antisegregation Actions,” NYT, Mar 15, 1964, 48. James W Loewen, “How Two Historians Responded to Racism In Mississippi,” HNN, Dec 7, 2014, http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153548 (03/18/2016). Washingtonian Staff, “Past Washingtonians of the Year,” Jan 29, 2008, http://www.washingtonian.com/2008/01/29/past-washingtonians-of-the-year/(03/18/2016).

xlii Steve Barnes, “Dr. Elders,” NYT, Oct 15, 1989, SM38. Lagnado, “When Jewish Scholars Fled.” Betsy Aldredge and Abby R. Spilka, “Remarkable Story of Jewish Refugee Scholars and Their Students at Historically Black Colleges Told in New Exhibition,” Mar 4, 2009, http://www.mjhnyc.org/pressroom/documents/BSAJC.pdf (03/18/2016). 

xliii Aldrege and Spilka, “Remarkable Story.” “Example Segregation Laws,” Civil Rights Movement Veterans, http://www.crmvet.org/info/seglaws.htm (03/18/2016).

xliv Alton Harvey, Freedom, an Optical Illusion (Mustang, OK: Tate Publishing, 2007), 61–62.

xlv Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb, From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Co., 1993). From Swastika to Jim Crow, Lori Cheatle, Martin D. Toub, dirs., ITVS, 2001. Lagnado, “When Jewish Scholars Fled.” See “From Swastika to Jim Crow: Overview,” ITVS, http://itvs.org/films/from-swastika-to-jim-crow (03/18/2016).

xlvi Hans Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany (New York: Morrow, 1999), 100–101. Andreas Eckert, review of “Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger!” Meine Kindheit in Deutschland (“Negro, Negro, Chimney Sweep!”: My childhood in Germany), by Hans J. Massaquoi, African Affairs, vol. 99 (2000), 477–478.

xlvii Hans, Destined, xiii–xvi. See Olivier Urbain, “Jazz and Social Justice (Part1): Giving Voice to the Voiceless” SUPRI, vol. 22 (2000): 57–68, https://www.brandeis.edu/ethics/pdfs/Jazz_and_Social_Justice.pdf (03/18/2016).

xlviii Uwe Siemon-Netto, “Falling through The Cracks of the Holocaust: How a Black German Kid of Royal Lineage Survived in Nazi Germany and Became a Successful American Journalist,” Atlantic Times, Oct 2007, http://www.atlantic-times.com/archive_detail.php?recordID=1047 (03/01/2016). Audrey Fischer, “Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany: The Remarkable Life of Hans Massaquoi,” LoC Information Bulletin, Mar 2000, 

xlix “ASKS NEGRO STERILIZATION: GERMAN STRIKE AT CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND BY FRENCH COLONIALS,” NYT, 

Feb 8, 1934, 4. Haas, “German Science and Black Racism,” 332–337. Pommerin, “Fate,” 320–324. Simon, From Migrants to Missionaries, 13. Clarence Lusane, Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of European Blacks, Africans and African Americans During the Nazi Era (London: Routledge, 2004), 51. Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. James Murphy, 507.

l Pommerin, “Fate,” 317, 322–323. See Len Cooper, “ARYAN NATION: GERMANY’S CRUEL AFRICAN HERITAGE,” WP, Feb 20, 1994, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1994/02/20/aryan-nation-germanys-cruel-african-heritage/fe183603-d8c6-481b-bfe3-0ab31a637842/ (03/07/2016). Kestling, “Blacks under the Swastika,” 89–90.

li Lusane, Hitler's Black Victims, 135. Kestling, “Blacks under the Swastika,” 92–96.

lii Raffael Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–24. See Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims, 165–166. Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims, 137. See See David Killingray, “Africans and African Americans in Enemy Hands,” in Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich, eds., Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 181–204. 

liii Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims, 141–142. Jim Michaels, “Emerging from history: Massacre of 11 black soldiers,” USA Today, Nov 8, 2013, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/07/wereth-black-soldiers-battle-of-bulge-army-world-war-ii-history/3465059/ (03/18/2016). Taylor Massey, “Massacred Wereth 11 Honored at Belgian Ceremony,” Army News Archives, May 29, 2014, http://www.army.mil/article/126907/Massacred_Wereth_11_Honored_at_Belgian_Ceremony/ (03/18/2016). “Home,” U.S. Memorial WERETH,http://www.wereth.org/en/home (03/18/2016).

liv Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims, 162–163. “Blacks during The Holocaust,” USHMM Encyclopedia, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005479 (03/18/2016). See generally Theresa Lynn Ast, “Confronting the Holocaust: American Soldiers Who Liberated the Concentration Camps,” PhD diss., Emory University, 2000, 27, 104. 

lv See generally Black, War Against the Weak, expanded ed. (Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2012).

lvi Black, WatW, 560–565. Black, WatW, 554–555. 

lvii Black, WatW, 560–561.

lviii Black, WatW, 560–561.

lix Black, WatW, 565–566.

lx Black, WatW, 555–556.

lxi Black, WatW, 557–558.

lxii Black, WatW, 557–558.

lxiii Black, WatW, 558.

lxiv Black, WatW, 557–558.

lxv Black, WatW, 557–558, 564. Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Analysis, Proposals for Redress (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), pp. xi, xiv, xv.

lxvi Black, WatW, 564.

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