BLACK GERMAN HOLOCAUST VICTIMS
This is a bit of history that few of us are aware of, I hope it enlightens.
So much of our history is lost to us because we often don't write the history
books, don't film the documentaries, or don't pass the accounts down from
generation to generation.
One documentary now touring the film festival circuit, telling us to "Always
Remember" is "Black Survivors of the Holocaust" (1997). Outside the U.S.., the
film is entitled "Hitler's Forgotten Victims" (Afro-Wisdom Productions). It
codifies another dimension to the "Never Forget" Holocaust story--our
dimension.
Did you know that in the 1920's, there were 24,000 Blacks living in
Germany, and how many of them were eventually caught unaware by the
events of the Holocaust? Like most West European nations, Germany
established colonies in Africa in the late 1800's in what later became Togo,
Cameroon, Namibia, and Tanzania. German genetic experiments began there,
most notably involving prisoners taken from the 1904 Heroro Massacre that
left 60,000 Africans dead, following a 4-year revolt against German
colonization. After the shellacking Germany received in World War I, it was
stripped of its African colonies in 1918.
As a spoil of war, the French were allowed to occupy Germany in the
Rhineland--a bitter piece of real estate that has gone back and forth between
the two nations for centuries. The French willfully deployed their own
colonized African soldiers as the occupying force. Germans viewed this as the
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