Just as a horrifying photograph showing Pakistani women carrying a sign saying "God bless Hitler" has gone around the world, I, who thought I had heard all sides of the horror of Nazism - and who have something of a family feud against it - found out about yet another crime this vicious cult managed to commit. Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian episcopate, published this review of a book by one Serge Bilé about the Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of blacks. The reviewer is Paola Springhetti and I just translate her article.
Besides Jews, Gypsies, disabled people, nazismo persecuted and butchered blacks as well. Civilians, immigrants from the former German colonies, but also in France, Netherlands and other conquered countries, and soldiers in enemy armies, the French especially. Little is known about the numbers and stories of those taken to the concentration camps or killed even before. Sometimes even fellow prisoners, when rescued, were unable to tell whether they had seen one or more; they tended to be unable to tell them apart. And nobody bothered, afterwards, to collect testimonies and evidence of their presence and experiences in the death camps.
They were certainly not few. Although Nazi practice was to murder black prisoners on the spot, Petain's collaborationist French government alone held 44,000 dark-skinned prisoners. They included Léopold Sédar Senghor, later to become a major poet and head of State. He was lucky because he remained in the French-ran camps; the Germans found it funny to steal even the starvation rations from African prisoners and watch them starve to death.
A new book sheds light on this neglected aspect of the history of Nazism and its victims. Bilé's work starts in Namibia in the late 1800s, when it was a German colony. Its governor from 1884 was Heinrich Goering, father of the notorious Hermann. Daddy Goering is heavy-handed and in a rush: he shifts whole populations and enslaves them; he confiscates land and has any opponent killed. Only one tribe try a serious resistance, the Hereros. Goering has them exterminated. In a few months 60.000, over 80% of the population, are butchered. The 15 thousand survivors are shut up in concentration camps where one half die within a year, of starvation and appalling medical and scientific experiments practiced upon them. This is a test run of what Hitler is to do on a large scale in his death camps, including the design of the camps themselves.
Anyway, in the first decades of the twentieth century a certain number of Africans immigrated into Germany. They were mostly children of the African upper classes, eager to advance their studies and genuinely impressed by the country that had conquered theirs. But, from the word go, Germany rejected them: they were an inferior race.
World War One cost Germany her colonies - among other things - and the black immigrants were left without a country. Among the things that infuriated the German army was to have been beaten by the French - an army which made large use of black soldiers. The French troops that occupied the Rhineland in 1923 included African regiments. Hitler wrote; "Jews have taken niggers into the Rhineland to pollute and bastardize the Aryan race". In 1936, the Nazis rounded up all the eight hundred children born from mixed couples; half of them were sent to the camps, the other was sterilized. The following year, sterilization - without anaesthetics - was forced on all black men and women.
24,000 African-Germans lived in Germany in the thirties, plus a number of American blacks, mostly musicians and artists. The latter fled back to the USA, but the German citizens had no second country to take them back. Serge Bilé tries to follow the fate of a few black internees, reconstructing their history as far as as possible. There is one Raphaël Élizé, France's first-ever black mayor - utterly intolerable for the Nazis - killed in Buchenwald in 1945. Anton de Kom, from Suriname, a leading opponent of colonialism, dead in Neuengamme only a few days before the liberation. And Blanchette, whose real name and origin are totally unknown, but who ended up in Ravensbrück in February 1944 - and vanished again. Saddest of all, perhaps, there was a black kapò or trusty in Auschwitz, who allowed himself to be humiliated in every possible way to scrounge a little bread to share with his fellow prisoners. He was remembered for his justice and kindness, but he died in Auschwitz. A favourite Nazi game was to try to "wash out" the prisoners. One Mamadou N'Diaye found himself at the receiving end of a "washing" with boiling water, soap and rough towels, ending up with wounds and bleeding scrapes all over his body.
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