1964: The complete devastation of the Second World War was barely two decades past. And American attempts to de-nazificate the German psyche had long given way to the needs of the “Cold War”, where old German Nazis still felt a youthful spring during the reconstruction of West Germany. My mother had reason to be afraid for her baby and her own future. After all, this was the country of the “Herrenrasse” – the white master race. The public rejection of her relationship with a black man was sometimes subtle, but mostly obvious.
True, there had been thousands of mixed-race births
in Germany after the war. The United States occupied the country with tens of thousands of African-American troops.
And young black men from the rural Deep South to cities like Los Angeles or New York were the victors. With bravery, they had overpowered and killed German soldiers – white soldiers – who fought for a fascist regime, that deemed black people racially inferior. These men earned their human dignity, their civil rights with blood. And then upon victory, the General Office of the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces expected their black brothers in arms to be celibate. As if to say, the battles are over, now go back to your proper place. But the genie was out of the bottle.
“The marriage between a Negro and a white person is considered against the best interest of the service [since] a marriage of a Negro and a white foreign person would create a social problem upon return to the United States." 2
There were romantic affairs, there was love and there were “Brown Babies” or “Mischlingskinder,” as we were called in those days. During the first five years after the war, almost 5,000 black “Occupation Children”
(Besatzungskinder) were born in West Germany alone.
Their white German mothers were ostracized and despised as “Nigger-Whores” or “Ami-Flittchen.” Local German as well as American military institutions pressed for the separation of those “scandalous” relationships. Most black soldiers were encouraged to leave their white partners and black children behind and were transferred back home by their military superiors. That practice continued even after the desegregation of the U.S. military in 1948.
The stories of these children were captured in the documentary, Brown Babies: The Mischlingerskinder Story, produced Regina Griffin, an Emmy award-winning news producer formerly of CBS News and currently executive producer of Sunday Morning Programming at WUSA-TV in Washington D.C. Brown Babies won the award for best documentary at the 2011 American Black Film Festival.
Time flies
The growing group of mixed-race children in Germany was considered a “problem” for German and American officials alike. Even the German Parliament discussed in 1952 the challenges these “Brown Babies” would face in the harsh German weather conditions.3 As a consequence, a lot of the young mothers of mixed-race children faced pressure to give up their kids for adoption. And indeed, hundreds of them were adopted by African-American families in the U.S.4 One thing was absolutely clear: Germans had to be white. And we did not fit that description.
Still, most of us remained in Germany. Either with their stubborn mothers, their grandmothers or in German orphanages. We cannot know the exact number of Afro-German kids, fathered by African-American GIs. Only the institutionalized children where counted.
8
7 Albrecht Dürer, Head of an African in Augsburg, 1508