The
Holocaust is usually taught as the mass genocide of almost six million
Jews in Europe during World War II. But, more than five million others
were also persecuted, tortured, tattooed and killed.
Life expectancy in Sudan is just 58
years. In the United States, the average person can expect to live to
the age of 77.
Of every 1,000 babies born alive in
Sudan, 94 will die before their fifth birthdays -- compared to only 8
out of 1,000 in the United States.
Safe water is accessible to just 75%
of the people of Sudan. Almost everyone in the United States has access
to safe water.
Illiteracy is a major problem in
Africa, as is the disparity between men's and women's education. In
Sudan, 72% of the men and just 51% of the women are literate. In the
United States, nearly all adults -- 97% of both men and women -- can
read and write.
Annual per capita income in Sudan is
$1,970 (real GDP per capita, ppp$). It is $34,320 in the United States.
Did
you know that in the 1920s there were 24,000 blacks living in Germany? Neither
did I. Here's how it happened and how many of them were eventually caught
unawares by the events of the Holocaust.
Like
most West European nations, Germanyestablished
colonies in Africain
the late 1800s 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 of German colonization. After the shellacking Germanyreceived
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 final
insult of World War I. Soon thereafter 92% of them voted in the Nazi
party.
Hundreds
of these African Rhineland-based soldiers intermarried with German women
and raised their children as Black Germans. In Mein Kampf, Hitler
wrote about his plans for these "Rhineland Bastards". When he
came to power, one of his first directives was aimed at these mixed
children.
Underscoring
his obsession with racial purity, by 1937, every identified mixed race
child in the Rhinelandhad
been forcibly sterilized to prevent further " race polluting" as
he termed it. Hans Hauck, a Black Holocaust survivor and a victim of
Hitler's mandatory sterilization program, explained in the film that when
he was forced to undergo sterilization as a teenager, he was given no
anesthetic. Once he received his sterilization certificate, he was
"free to go" so long as he agreed to have no sexual relations
whatsoever with Germans.
Although most Black Germans attempted to escape their fatherland, heading
for Francewhere
people like Josephine Baker were steadily aiding and supporting the French
underground, many ran into problems elsewhere. Nations shut its doors to
Germans, including the Black ones. Some Black Germans were able to eke out
a living during Hitler 's reign of terror by performing in vaudeville
shows.
But many Blacks, steadfast in their belief that they were German first,
Black second, opted to remain in Germany.
Some fought with the Nazis (a few even became Lutwaffe pilots!).
Unfortunately, many Black Germans were arrested, charged with treason, and
shipped in cattle cars to concentration camps. Often these trains were so
charged with people (equipped with no bathroom facilities or food) that
after the four day journey, box car doors opened to piles of the dead and
dying.
Once in the concentration camps, Blacks were given the worst jobs
conceivable. Some Black American soldiers who were captured and held as
prisoners of war recounted that while they were starved an forced into
dangerous labor (violating the Geneva Convention), they were still better
off than Black German concentration camp detainees who were forced to do
the unthinkable: man the crematoriums and work in labs where genetic
experiments were carried out. As a final sacrifice, these Blacks were
killed every three months so that they would never be able to reveal the
inner workings of the Final Solution. In every story of Black oppression,
no matter how enslaved, enshackled or beaten, we are, we find a way to
survive and rescue others. Case in point, was Johnny Voste, a Belgian
Resistance fighter who was arrested in 1942 for sabotage and shipped toDachau.
One of his jobs was stacking vitamin crates. Risking his own life, he
distributed hundreds of vitamins to camp detainees, which saved the lives
of many because they were starving, weak, and ill, conditions exacerbated
by extreme vitamin-deficiencies. His motto was: 'No, you can't have my
life: I will fight for it.'
According toEssexUniversity's
Delroy Constantine-Simms, there were Black Germans who resisted Nazi
Germany, such as Lari Gilges, who founded the Northwest
Rann--
an organization of entertainers that fought the Nazis in his home town of Dusseldorf--
and who was murdered by the SS in 1933, the year Hitler came to power.
Little information remains about the numbers of Black Germans held in the
camps or killed under the Nazi regime. Some victims of the Nazi
sterilization project and Black survivors of the Holocaust are still alive
and telling their story in films such as Black Survivors of the Nazi
Holocaust. But they must also speak out for justice, not just history.
Unlike Jews (in Israeland
in Germany
),
Black Germans receive no war reparations because their German citizenship
was revoked (though they were German-born). The only pension they get is
from those of us who are willing to tell the world their stories and
continue their battle for recognition and compensation.
After the war, scores of Blacks who had somehow managed to survive the
Nazi regime were rounded up and tried as war criminals. Talk about the
final insult. There are thousands of Black Holocaust stories from the
triangle trade, to slavery in America,
to the gas ovens inGermany.
We often shy away from hearing about our historical past because so much
of it is painful. However, we are in this struggle together for rights,
dignity, and yes, reparations for wrongs done to us through the centuries.
We need to always remember so that we can take steps to ensure that these
things never happen again.
Read on: Destined to Witness : Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany,
by Hans J.
Massaquoi; written by A. Tolbert, III