We should remember the black victims of Nazi Germany
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day as designated by the United Nations General Assembly. That day was chosen for symbolic reasons: it’s the day that the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated.
In an essay in The Conversation, a historian argues that by choosing that day, the Holocaust becomes shorthand for Nazi mass murder of European Jews and ignores other groups that were victimized, especially black Germans who were killed under Hitler’s rule.
“All those voices need to be heard,” Eve Rosenhaft, a Professor of German Historical Studies at University of Liverpool, writes, “not only for the sake of the survivors, but because we need to see how varied the expressions of Nazi racism were if we are to understand the lessons of the Holocaust for today.”
Rosenhaft recaps the short history of blacks living in Germany after emigrating from Germany’s African colonies and slowly integrating into society before becoming subject to the same Nuremberg Laws that Jews were subject to (citizenship revoked, not allowed to marry “people of German blood,” etc.) and officially declared “stateless negroes” while black children were excluded from public school. The mistreatment did not extend to mass internment in concentration or labor camps (though there are some examples), but was more along the lines of a series of actions designed to run the black community out of Germany altogether.