Captured French colonial soldier undergoing an
SS-mandated "racial test" during World War II

IN A RECENT ESSAY, Salon editor Joan Walsh asks in dismay whether “our first black president [is] a ‘Nazi’?” After being exposed to the increasingly frantic political rhetoric enveloping President Obama’s health care reform proposals, one is tempted to believe that he is. None other than Rush Limbaugh has pointed out that “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate,” taking care to remind us that Obama has adopted a health care reform logo closely modeled on the Nazi Party emblem.

Well, I guess that about clinches it - for many of us, at least. Now I have already presented my own reasons why Obama isn't Hitler elsewhere, and I’ll leave the comparisons between the President’s actual policies and those of the National Socialist dictatorship to the subtle minds that congregate on talk radio. What interests me is the term “black Nazi” itself. It sounds impressive enough, but just what does it mean? Yes, I know – in itself it means nothing at all. As George Orwell once wrote, “The word Fascism has now no meaning, except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Or perhaps Lewis Carrol's Humpty-Dumpty had a better grasp of today's politics: "'When I use a word,'" Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.'" But just for fun, let us imagine for a moment that words actually do have some sort of verifiable meaning, and that terms taken from history have… well, a history of their own. So what attitude did actual members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – the fabled “Nazis” of American political punditry – display towards people of African origin? And what are the chances that a man like Barack Obama – the biracial offspring of a black Kenyan man and a white American woman – would feel any affinity for the NSDAP and its doctrines?

Americans want to know: Do the shocking similarities between
these two logos qualify Barack Obama as a "black Nazi"?

A troubled relationship

Germany, just like the rest of Europe, has always had a troubled relationship with Africa and Africans. Much of this ambivalence can be traced to that country's short but brutal experience as an openly racist colonial power, which led to hundreds of thousands of African deaths in the wake of colonial wars in “German South-West Africa” (Namibia) and “German East Africa” (Tanzania) in the early years of the twentieth century. But although Germany lost all of its overseas colonies through the Treaty of Versailles, its relationship with Black Africa did not end there. Versailles was just the beginning. For of all the horrors inflicted on Germany by the Allies in the First World War, perhaps none was more terrifying than the deployment of up to a quarter of a million soldiers of African descent on the Western Front. Wartime propagandists depicted this action by the allegedly "civilized" Western powers as a “sin” and even as “an attack upon the entire white race.”

"Civilizing Europe": German caricature of a
French-Senegalese soldier on the Western Front, 1916

Europeans and North Americans have always associated the African body with chaos, corruption, and above all sexuality. In 1918/19 this meant that defeat at the hands of black soldiers represented much more than a mere military setback. It meant the “blood defilement” of German womanhood and the beginning of the end of the "white race" itself. Not only right wing parties (including the fledgling Nazi Party) but even the progressive Social Democrats began calling for a “struggle against the black shame” of occupation. For the far right, American jazz and popular black entertainers like Josephine Baker represented a subversive “Niggerkultur” that they saw spreading through postwar German society like a sort of moral and genetic dry rot.

Biracial American dance star Josephine Baker dressed in her
infamous "banana skirt" and little else (1927): Was she a vector
of Jewish-sponsored "Niggerkultur"?

The sad fate of the "Rhineland bastards"

By the 1930s up to three thousand persons of African descent were living in Germany. These included immigrants from the German colonies, former French colonial soldiers who managed to remain in Germany following the First World War, African Americans and black Caribbeans, many of them entertainers, along with sailors and other immigrants. The most controversial group were the up to 800 so-called “Rhineland bastards,” the mixed race issue of relationships between French colonial soldiers or African American troops and German women during the period of the Rhineland and Ruhr occupations from 1918 to 1930.  It went without saying that German women were always "victims" and African men were always "perpetrators." Already in 1921 a racist journal asked: “What does the world say about the ever growing crimes being committed by these wild beasts against defenseless German women and children? Do the white peoples of the world know of this? This must be doubted, because it is impossible to believe that they have no feeling whatsoever for the racial defilement they are perpetrating against us and thus also against themselves as white peoples.”

Collection of caricatures depticing the alleged atrocities committed
by French and Belgian colonial soldiers during the Rhine
and Ruhr occupations in the Weimar Republic

Adolf Hitler was more explicit in his Mein Kampf (1926):

It was and is the Jews who brought the Negro to the Rhine, always with the same ulterior motive and the clear goal of exploiting the inevitable bastardization this will entail in order to destroy the hated white race, to topple it from its cultural and political heights, so that they [the Jews] may rise to become its masters.

Government agencies began registering these biracial children for future "handling" in 1923, a practice that Hermann Göring intensified after assuming control of the German police in 1933.

Nazi era magazine article on the "Rhineland bastards" (1934)

"Racial hygiene"

Nazi racial propaganda referred to these mixed-race children as “putrid bastard spawn.” Both pure-blooded and biracial Africans duly lost their citizenship through the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935. But since African-Germans – unlike Communists, Jews, homosexuals, and other victims – were so few in number, the government never bothered to draw up specific regulations for their annihilation. Instead, the SS took the initiative and secretly established “Special Commission 3” in 1937. The Commission worked closely with the Catholic charity organization Caritas and local welfare agencies to arrange for the illegal sterilization of at least 436 "bastards" residing in the Rhineland. However, the actual number was probably much greater and the procedure undoubtedly continued well beyond 1937.

And yet, some mixed-race persons – such as long-time Ebony editor Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi (born in 1926), who grew up in Hamburg – survived the Nazi era largely without incident. While he was always regarded as a second-class citizen, Massaquoi says that he experienced considerably less racial discrimination in Nazi Germany than he would have in the United States during the same period and actually enjoyed a better chance of survival than other Germans since he was excluded from military service. In fact, many of his classmates regarded him as "cool." Nazi propaganda may well have been based on popular racist sentiment, and yet it waged a constant struggle against the continued widespread popularity of African American culture (especially jazz) and charismatic black athletes like Jesse Owens and Joe Louis.

"Less discrimination than in America": African-German (and future Ebony editor) Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi wearing a swastika
badge at school in the mid-1930s 

Racial war

After the outbreak of war, Nazi "racial science" claimed uncounted victims. Captured Africans were regularly handed over to SS doctors for “racial testing,” whereby their skulls, torsos, arms, pelvises, and penises were painstakingly measured and photographed. The SS found African POWs to be particularly useful when it came to testing medications against malaria and sleeping sickness, which the Nazis would need for their planned colonial expansion into Africa. SS doctors set up a special military hospital at St. Médard near Bordeaux for this purpose.

"Subhuman": Jean Voste (r.), a resistance fighter born in the
Belgian Congo, at Dachau concentration camp

As the war progressed, nearly all Africans scooped up in Europe during the Nazi campaign were either locked away in camps or killed outright. An exact statistical analysis of victims is impossible since African racial origin was not used as a category for incarceration. The most reliable figure for black extermination camp victims, approximately 2,000, is certainly a gross underestimate and leaves out the vast numbers of black French, Belgian, British, and American soldiers held – and often murdered – in POW camps. The SS was under orders to liquidate all black POWs upon capture. These victims have never been tallied.

"A poor sort of memory"

But such reminiscences may be just so much water under the bridge. Unlike Jews and a few other persecuted groups, black survivors of the Nazi dictatorship have no lobby and have never received any compensation. Today, these victims are utterly forgotten. Historical oblivion makes it that much easier for modern-day talking heads to call Obama a “Nazi,” a label that is at best embarrassingly ignorant and at worst an outrageous insult to the thousands of actual black and biracial victims of Nazi terror. I like to hope that even the most casual glance at basic historical facts might some day persuade people to choose their words more cautiously. But I sense that today's postmodern pundits have moved far beyond such outmoded notions as "historical memory." Like Lewis Carrol's crazed White Queen, they too have figured out that "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."