Beginning Over, 8. Overlooked History.

Day 6.

I can say I'm perfectly fine today. Tomorrow is still my last day of quarantine, and I can't wait to go out on Saturday, just in time for the long-awaited rain to come. It's supposed to rain this afternoon, but tomorrow it'll clear up.

Among the different ways of occupying my time, is TikTok. I opened an account a while back, but not with the intention of posting anything. I simply follow interesting creators, talking about different topics (no challenges, I don't follow stupidities), including archeology, urban gems, ancient languages, and a stop-motion creator who uses felt instead of clay. A couple of those I follow are actual survivors of the Holocaust. 

One of them made a duet video with a Black poet, who talked about Black Germans in the Holocaust. I never realized there was a Black German population at the beginning of the twentieth century, and earlier. Nor did I know that many of them were caught up in the ethnic cleansing the Nazis had set up. We always hear about how the Holocaust affected Jews, with LGBTQ and Roma people almost added as an afterthought. We also sometimes hear about the Nazi killing of disabled and sick people, sometimes as a footnote to all the atrocities. But, all the emphasis is on European people of European descent, as if Blacks hadn't existed in Europe.

But they did. Some of them came from the old German African colonies, many fewer descended from French African soldiers stationed in the Rhineland after World War I. There weren't many, in a country with the total population around 65 million, but their number was still significant, from 20,000 to 25,000, though some say they were more. The descendants of the soldiers in the Rhineland were particularly hated by the fanatics, calling them the "Rhineland Bastards," with Hitler claiming that the Jews had brought the soldiers to the German heartland with an aim to ruining the white race in an attempt to become the masters. Their persecution, however, was sporadic, until an addition was made to the Nuremburg race laws in 1937. That was when forced sterilization was put into practice on the "Rhineland Bastards". Three hundred eighty-five teenagers were forcefully sterilized, including a young girl of eleven.

Before then, some Black Germans were taken around the country as exhibits in a circus, where people could pet them like animals. Blacks were evicted from their apartments or lost their jobs. Students were forced to take classes explaining "race science" and denied entry to university studies. Later, in 1941, that last was made into law, with Blacks denied access to public education and universities. Blacks could not marry white Germans, nor have sexual relations with them, to avoid having mixed children. They were not systematically hunted down like Jews, but some were jailed, others were put into forced labor, and others wound up in concentration camps. Some were experimented on, others were sterilized, and yet others were killed under the "Euthanasia Program" set up to kill the disabled. 

After the war, those that survived were merely forgotten, their presence not seen. Many since have died, their stories untold. Others, few, have spoken. In 2018, a film came out, fictional, but based on real stories. It's Where Hands Touch, by Amma Asante. It follows one of the "Rhineland Bastards," a girl in Berlin during the war. A scholarly book, Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans During the Nazi Era, by Clarence Lusane, has also been written, and I intend to read it one of these days. There are more books and articles, but they really haven't become mainstream enough for a lot of people to start talking about them.

In a sense, it embodies perfectly how Africa and its people are not seen as important or worthy of the attention of the part of the world that has always considered itself superior. Even in suffering, the suffering of only certain groups has been given historical publicity. Absent, also, is mention of any kind of atrocities committed in African colonies. In German Namibia, from 1904 to 1908, Germans force sterilized, starved, herded into camps, and killed, members of two ethnicities, the Herero and the Nama. That genocide foreshadowed the European genocide, yet it's been forgotten because it happened in an African country. There have been no advocates to come forth and demand it be recognized and remembered, like did happen with the Armenian genocide in Turkey.

There is so much hidden away in history we really should know to better understand ourselves and our world. Everyone should develop historical curiosity to find them out.

Life continues.