{"id":53575,"date":"2017-04-19T21:15:14","date_gmt":"2017-04-19T21:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=53575"},"modified":"2017-04-19T21:16:15","modified_gmt":"2017-04-19T21:16:15","slug":"the-erasure-of-people-of-african-descent-in-nazi-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=53575","title":{"rendered":"The Erasure of People of African Descent in Nazi Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Erasure of People of African Descent in Nazi Germany<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Black Perspectives<\/a>
\n2017-04-19<\/p>\n

Jaimee A. Swift<\/strong><\/a>
\nHoward University, Washington, D.C.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nAfro-German<\/a> during the Third Reich<\/a>. Photo: Propaganda-Pravada.<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Recently, Donald Trump\u2019s<\/a> press secretary Sean Spicer<\/a> made some peculiar<\/a> and offensive comments comparing Syrian leader President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s<\/a> chemical attacks<\/a> to those of Nazi Germany<\/a> leader Adolf Hitler<\/a>. In attempts to justify Trump\u2019s random missile strikes against Assad, Spicer asserted that what Assad did was completely inhumane\u2014so inhumane that he claimed not even Hitler used chemical weapons against his own people, when in fact he did. Spicer would later on apologize<\/a> for his Hitler comparison.<\/p>\n

His comments were met with much backlash, and many have claimed they\u00a0were disrespectful to the Jewish community and therefore\u00a0diminished the horrible plight<\/a> of the millions of innocent Jewish lives lost at the hands of Hitler and the Nazi regime. What is critical in understanding Spicer\u2019s offensive statement is assessing not only his erasure of the violence enacted on the Jewish community during the Holocaust<\/a>, but also the effacing of the experiences<\/a> of Afro-Germans<\/a>, African-Americans, and persons of African descent during the Nazi era<\/a>. Both national and global discourses have excluded the narratives about and perspectives on Afro-Germans in German society. While the German constitution forbids racism, prejudice, and other forms of discrimination, there lacks a substantive and stable legal reform on combatting racism, as a \u201cgenerally accepted definition of racism does not exist in Germany<\/a>.\u201d The intentional void of state-sanctioned discourses on race in Germany<\/a> because of the legacy of the Nazi era ignores the historical remnants and current manifestations of systemic racism against Afro-Germans, which is embedded in every facet of German society…<\/p>\n

…In their article \u201cMaking the Black Experience Heard in Germany<\/a>,\u201d authors Jamie Schearer<\/a> and Hadija Haruna<\/a> detailed how during World War II<\/a>, thousands of African-American GIs<\/a> occupied Germany and had relationships with German women, thus producing bi-racial or multiracial children. German professor Maria Hoehn<\/a> also discussed the percentage of Black children<\/a> birthed to African-American GIs and white women in Germany and how animosity arose from many Euro-Germans surrounding the presence of Black children or Besatzungskinder<\/em> (occupation children) or \u201cRhineland bastards<\/a>\u201d in the country. Hoehn explained:<\/p>\n

\u201cThey would always identify them as \u2018Black Occupation children.\u2019 Or as mischling kinder<\/em>, or mixed-race children. In the immediate postwar period, there were over 90,000 babies born of American soldiers, and about three-and-a-half thousands of them were African American. What is interesting is that almost the whole focus of the debate on occupation children was on those black children rather than the larger group of children.\u201d…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is critical in understanding Spicer\u2019s offensive statement is assessing not only his erasure of the violence enacted on the Jewish community during the Holocaust, but also the effacing of the experiences of Afro-Germans, African-Americans, and persons of African descent during the Nazi era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,28,459,8],"tags":[3228,26485,2948,26879,26876,26877,26878,24528,26206],"class_list":["post-53575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-europe","category-history","category-media-archive","tag-afro-germans","tag-black-perspectives","tag-germany","tag-hadija-haruna","tag-jaimee-a-swift","tag-jaimee-swift","tag-jamie-schearer","tag-maria-hoehn","tag-nazi-germany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53575"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53577,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53575\/revisions\/53577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}