Black Germans during the Nazi Period
1933–1945 · Persecution, survival and the authority of lived experience
Black people’s experiences under National Socialism belong within German history and within the history of Nazi racial persecution. Memoirs and oral histories preserve individual lives that administrative records often reduce to racial categories.
Photograph: OTFW, Berlin (2020), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Image unaltered.
Persecution and exclusion
Nazi rule restricted Black people’s work, education and family life. Persecution included forced sterilization, imprisonment and murder, but there was no centralized programme to murder all Black people. In 1937, at least 385 multiracial Rhineland children were forcibly sterilized. Some Black people were incarcerated in concentration camps and other institutions. [1]
The children targeted in the Rhineland were associated with the occupation after World War I. They should not be conflated with the children born to Black Allied servicemen and European women after 1945. [1]
Listen to Black German accounts
Tina Campt’s Other Germans places interviews with Black Germans in conversation with historical research. Her attention to race, gender and memory helps readers examine both what people experienced and how those experiences are later told and heard. Oral history adds meanings that a state file alone cannot supply. [2]
Theodor Michael’s memoir follows a life beginning in Berlin in 1925, with a Cameroonian father and German mother. His account connects childhood, survival under Nazism and a long postwar life. Read alongside Hans Massaquoi’s and Marie Nejar’s autobiographies, it opens a way to study different families and survival experiences without making one biography stand for everyone. [3–5]
Louis Brody: performance, organizing and survival
Louis Brody (1892–1951), born Ludwig M’Bebe M’Pessa Akwa in Douala, built a performing career in Germany while also taking part in Black collective organization. He helped establish the Afrikanischer Hilfsverein in 1918 and protested racist campaigning in 1921. His artistic and political work should be read together.
Under Nazi rule, Brody continued working in cinema within a system that constrained Black performers through racialized roles. He survived in Berlin and resumed film work after 1945, including with DEFA. His presence on screen should not be treated as evidence of endorsement of the regime or its representations of Africa.
Source: Berlin Senate: Louis Brody commemorative plaque and biography (2024).
Continue researching: BGHRA 2026 Panel 5, including Louis Brody · Earlier Black organizing · Erika Diek and postwar community connections.
Gert Schramm: childhood, Buchenwald and remembrance
Gert Schramm (1928–2016) was born in Erfurt to a German mother and an African American father. Racist exclusion shaped his schooling and access to vocational training. In 1944, at fifteen, he was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he endured forced labour. He survived liberation in April 1945 and later shared his experiences with younger generations. Read the Stiftung Denkmal account.
His memoir, Wer hat Angst vorm schwarzen Mann: Mein Leben in Deutschland (2011), preserves his own account of life in Germany before and after 1945.
Remembrance resource: Gert-Schramm-Straße, Erfurt
Erfurt honoured Schramm in 2023 by renaming the section of Karlstraße between Adalbertstraße and Nettelbeckufer Gert-Schramm-Straße. The street signs were unveiled on 5 September 2023. This site of Black German remembrance is in Erfurt, Thuringia. City of Erfurt: street naming and background. City resource on the memorial stele and digital archive.
Books in the BGHRA reading list
- Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany (2013) — community history from the colonial era to the postwar years.
- Tina Campt, Other Germans — historical analysis and oral testimony.
- Theodor Michael, Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu — also available in English as Black German, translated by Eve Rosenhaft (2017).
- Hans J. Massaquoi, Destined to Witness — growing up in Hamburg.
- Marie Nejar, Mach nicht so traurige Augen, weil du ein Negerlein bist — an autobiography whose historical title contains racist language.
Questions for research and teaching
- How did family relationships, gender, nationality and place shape a person’s options?
- What do testimony and family photographs reveal that official categories conceal?
- How do we document persecution while also preserving work, creativity, relationships and life after 1945?
Cited sources and further reading
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Nazi Persecution of Black People in Germany”.
- Tina M. Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2004). Publisher record.
- Theodor Michael, Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century, translated by Eve Rosenhaft (Liverpool University Press, 2017). Publisher record.
- Hans J. Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany (William Morrow, 1999). See the linked BGHRA book entry.
- Marie Nejar with Regina Carstensen, Mach nicht so traurige Augen, weil du ein Negerlein bist: Meine Jugend im Dritten Reich (Rowohlt, 2007). See the linked BGHRA book entry.
- Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Publisher record.
Related: Black Germans during World War I · Books & Reading.
Sources and image credits
Sources are linked beside the relevant passages and in this page’s reference sections. Each historical image carries its own identification, creator or photographer credit, source, and reuse terms beneath the image. Representations, memorials, and portraits are identified separately.