A Spotlight on the Marginalized Black Germans in the Second and Third Reich

When exploring the groups that suffered under the Third Reich, other than the Jews; one will find the common list of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, communists, political adversaries, Jehovah’s Witnesses, physically and mentally disabled people, and anyone else that Hitler deemed as “asocials.” Far down on this list, one might find Black Germans. Tina Campt shines a light on this marginalized group in her book, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich. Campt graduated from Cornell University in 1996, with her Ph.D. in history and she has focused on the intersection between modern Germany and race relations. As per her biography from Princeton University, where she currently serves as a professor of the Art and Archeology department, Campt is a “black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective Sojourner Project.” (Campt Bio). Dr. Campt is also the host of the AAS Podcast (African American Studies Podcast). Campt uses the podcast as a medium to convey her black feminist views to a broader audience with the intention of revealing the historical perspectives of people of color through a modern feminist lens. One such example of Campt’s podcast is titled, “A Black Gaze,” in which Campt covers topics such as: “How to listen to a photograph,” “Practicing Refusal Collective, The Sojourner Project,” the concept of “sovereignty,” and other racially and politically charged topics. (AAS Podcast). While it is clear that Tina Campt is extremely biased, she delivers a plethora of documentation and explanation for the black feminist lens through which she views the world. Campt uses her skills as an academic and her position of influence to share her marginalized perspective and research, through her podcasts, her courses, and her academic writing.

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In Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich, Campt establishes a historiography of race and gender throughout the Second and Third Reich in Germany. While most of the book focuses on the Second Reich, it serves as a precursor for what many groups would experience when Hitler came to power. In a time of eugenics, racial supremacy, and colonization, Campt exposes the mentality of contemporary Europeans and their bigoted views on race mixing, African aggression, and work ethic. (Campt, 33). Due to a lack of abundant scholarship, Campt depends on the memory of interviewers, many of whom were either very young or generations removed from the age of the Second Reich. Campt defends this practice with the following:

The methodology of oral history quite literally provides the structure of these accounts, and these interviews emerged from an active and critical engagement with oral history, ethnography, and qualitative research methodologies. Yet I will be reading these accounts as narrative texts rather than strictly as documents. Although my analysis aims to mine these accounts’ valuable insights into the historical settings that are rendered, I resist seeing the interviews as direct presentations of the past “as it really was.” My interest lies in reading these narratives ‘symptomatically,’ … If read (or listened to) again and again, not just for facts and comments, but also, as Althusser suggests, for insights and oversights, for the combination of vision and non-vision and especially for answers to questions which were never asked, we should be able to isolate and describe the problematic which informs the particular interview. It is at the level of this problematic–the theoretical or ideological context within which words and phrases, and the presence or absence of certain problems and concepts, is found — that we find the synthesis of all the various structural relationships of the interview, as well as the particular relation of the individual to his vision of history. (Campt, 9-10).

While it would be easy to dismiss Campt’s methodology, oral history is a common tool in the researchers’ arsenal for uncovering veiled and muddled histories. Campt’s usage of ethnography is valid within the confines of anthropological studies. Ethnography is the study of people in their own environment. It is a qualitative method for collecting data often used in the social and behavioral sciences. Ethnography is based on fieldwork and requires the complete immersion of the anthropologist in the culture and everyday life of the people who are the subject of their study. Ethnography is usually based on participant observation, interpersonal interviews, and results in a written account of a people, a place, or an institution. The fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people, and learning about their ways of life. Ethnography focuses on interpretation, understanding, and representation. With representation being a heavy theme in Campt’s work, it is easy to understand Campt’s motives for investigating the lives of Black Germans between the Second and Third Reich. Such research is difficult to conduct, and it is commendable that Dr. Campt went through this arduous research to focus a spotlight on this unrecognized and marginalized group: the Black Germans.

Dr. Campt exposes the results of European colonization and exploitation of Africans throughout her work. In one example, Campt reveals that the French recruited an estimated 190,000 African soldiers known as la force noire, from French-dominated colonies. The implementation of the la force noire meant that the French soldiers could remain in France and other European countries throughout the conflict. (Campt, 31-3). Colonization and exploitation are recognized themes in the migration story for many Africans within Europe. France and Germany are no different. The French who dominated the Rhineland for a time, imported many Africans from their colonies as a sentry force against the native Germans. (Campt, 35). Over time, the French lost their dominance of the Rhineland and the native Germans reestablished control. Over time, these Africans were assimilated or attempted to assimilate into the dominant German culture, making them, Black Germans.

As Campt illustrates, “Racial mixture played an important role in early-twentieth-century scientific efforts to define and interpret the significance of race and racial difference.” (Campt, 38). Issues of citizenship and authenticity arose when the native Germans would intermarry with the African immigrants. As per German law, a child is recognized by the racial composition of their mother. For the racist German government, a problem presented itself. How could they objectify and deport a group that was lawfully German? “The colloquial designation “mixed­ blood” (Mischling) was irrelevant to citizenship law; citizenship could not be ‘mixed.’” (Campt, 44). As Campt writes, “Born to German mothers and thus holding German citizenship, the children could also not be deported, a possibility also discussed by the ministry. Moreover, such an undertaking would be hindered by the fact that few mothers would agree to it.” (Campt, 64). The outcome was that a group of already marginalized people was stuck in a culture that openly resented their being.

Like the French, the Germans utilized and exploited African labor. In many cases, German soldiers would impregnate African women. “The Black German children of these soldiers were seen as a lasting legacy of the occupation, while their mixed racial heritage and illegitimate birth posed a moral and biological threat to the chastity and purity of the German ‘race.’ The danger these children posed surpassed that presented by the Black troops, for as German citizens whose presence in the country was in no way temporary, the children presented a more far-reaching threat. In the articles written in this period, this danger is formulated as Mulattisiernng, or the ‘mulattoization’ of the German race–a foreboding warning that should this situation be allowed to continue,’ one need not wonder if, in a few years, there will be more half-breeds than whites walking around; if sacred German motherhood has become a myth and the German woman a Blaek whore.” (Campt, 59-60). The very existence of such children within the Second Reich and moreover, the Third Reich, was a contradiction to the Ethos of racial supremacy and Aryan dominance. Should these African-born Germans or their children be exposed, the Aryan’s would lose credibility as the superior race and government.

Dr. Campt continues throughout her text and uses specific examples of how Black Germans survived, living as walking, and breathing contradictions. They were German, yet they were all the things that contemporary Germans hated. These Black Germans thrived by creating a new identity for themselves and by embracing the identity of “the other.” They would become another one of Hitler’s “asocials,” with such a low population and the political consequences, there is no wonder why the Black Germans have been hidden or excluded from the history of the Third Reich.

The BBC created a documentary titled, Namibia: Genocide and the Second Reich, in which they focus on the Africans that were colonized by Germans during the Second Reich. Such a documentary speaks volumes to the scholarship that Tina Campt produced on Black Germans. The Second Reich’s method of domination of southwest Africa was largely fueled by eugenic philosophy. While European colonization was the norm after the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885, in which world leaders like Otto von Bismarck and King Leopold II, as well as many others, discussed and implemented the systematic colonization of Africa for their respective countries’ financial gains. The German colonists and military found reasons to justify the theft of land, the enslavement of the African Herero and Nama people. Enslavement would serve the German’s demands for labor and genocide would come shortly after. The Third Reich learned many of their methods of genocide and their philosophy from the actions of their predecessors. For example, “Friedrich Reitzel was a late nineteenth, early twentieth century German Geographer who taught at the University of Leipzig and he is most famous today for having created Lebensraum theory: the idea that a people or nation must have space and increasing space as they grow to survive and prosper” (BBC Nambia, 4:37). The demand for “Lebensraum” is a primary motive for the Nazis in the Third Reich. Prior to the Blitzkrieg that Hitler began in the 1930s, the Kaiser was engaging in colonization in Africa for the same reasons.

Namibia: Genocide and the Second Reich, illustrates how Germany developed the methodology needed to facilitate genocide. The “science” of Eugenics was used to justify how the Second Reich mistreated the Nama and the Herero; the same ill-informed people would use that philosophy to conduct the evils committed in the Third Reich. Like the Jews during the Third Reich, the Germans of the Second Reich found the Herero worth more as slaves then just killing them off entirely. Also like the Nazis, the Second Reich implemented concentration camps, the BBC narrator explains, “A concentration camp was built here because Swakopmund was a center of German industry and commerce, a place where the slave labor of the prisoners could best be put to use” (BBC Namibia, 28:00). The subjugated Nama and Herero would occasionally fight back and that would ultimately give the German colonists the excuse they were looking for to perpetrate mass execution to the Native Africans. In one such rebellion, the BBC illustrates how and why the Germans justified their violent assault against their already dominated neighbors and slaves. “The rebellion provided the perfect pretext for the Settlers and the Army to take over the land, they now set about the grim work of ethnically cleansing the Herero” (BBC Namibia, 11:26). These Germans were more than willing to execute the Herero out of perceived self-defense, duty, and the obvious racial difference. In the days of the Third Reich, Nazis murdered the Jews and the Poles, who were White. The Herero and the Nama were Black, which made the eugenically obsessed Germans more comfortable with carrying out their duties.

Tina Campt and the BBC draw connections about how the Germans treated “the other,” even before Hitler’s rise to power. The racist and eugenic policies were already established, and the subjugation of racial minorities was already set into motion long before 1933. While both Campt and the BBC have issues with their reporting methodologies, such as the usage of ethnography, and interviews with people who were born up to a generation after the incidents, along with others, the work is compelling. The theme of racial oppression is not new to the history of the Second and Third Reich. While Campt’s Black feminist lens may not appeal to many, the act of setting a spotlight on marginalized groups is certainly something that is necessary for uncovering hidden facts in history. While revision is largely frowned upon when historians omit or redact the facts, this form of revision, in which new data is intergraded is one that should be welcomed. It is my personal belief that the inclusion of these discoveries helps us to recognize and dispel the myths of the Third Reich. The traditional idea which has been shattered repeatedly now, that the Germans were working against their will at the behest of Nazi overlords becomes ridiculous when one understands that the motifs of the Holocaust predate the creation of the Third Reich.

Bibliography

AAS Podcast. “[Aas Podcast] Season 2, Episode 8: ‘A Black Gaze’ | Department of African American Studies.” Princeton University, June 16, 2022. https://aas.princeton.edu/news/aas-podcast-season-2-episode-8-black-gaze.   

Namibia: Genocide and the Second Reich (BBC). YouTube, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rbon6HqzjEI&ab_channel=bildungskanal.

Campt, Tina M. Other Germans: Black Germans and the politics of race, gender, and memory in the Third Reich. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2005.

“Tina M. Campt | Department of Art and Archaeology.” Princeton University, 2023. https://artandarchaeology.princeton.edu/people/tina-m-campt.