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.

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]

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

1. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Nazi Persecution of Black People in Germany”.
2. 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.
3. Theodor Michael, Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century, translated by Eve Rosenhaft (Liverpool University Press, 2017). Publisher record.
4. Hans J. Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany (William Morrow, 1999). See the linked BGHRA book entry.
5. 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.
6. 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.