Rhineland Bastard
Encyclopedia : R : RH : RHI : Rhineland Bastard
Rhineland Bastard was a derogatory term used in Nazi Germany to describe children of mixed German and African or Melanesian parentage. Under Nazism's racial theories, these children were considered inferior to pure Aryans and consigned to sterilization.
History
The term "Rhineland Bastard" can be traced back to World War I, when Entente troops, most of them French, occupied the Rhineland. A handful of German women married soldiers from the occupying forces, while others had children by them out of wedlock (hence the disparaging name "Bastards"). Some of these troops were from France's colonies in Africa and were known locally as Neger (German: "negroes" - then not a derogatory term in Germany) or the "Black Disgrace" due to the fact that the Germans, who had been accustomed to have colonies in Africa before 1914 now felt to be colonised themselves by "Negroes". The occupation itself had been regarded as a national humiliation. The fact that it was carried out by what were viewed as "B-grade" troops increased the feelings of disgrace. Whether these sentiments were racist (in the modern sense of the word) or merely "ordinary" European nationalism might be disputed. Of course, the Nazis exploited these sentiments and gave them a racist direction and interpretation. In Mein Kampf Hitler described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as an "insult to Germany." He disliked the German women who gave birth to these children, and referred to them as whores and prostitutes.
However, most of the tiny non-white population in Germany at that time were children of German settlers and missionaries in the former German colonies in Africa and Melanesia who had married local women or had had children with them out of wedlock. With the loss of Germany's colonies after World War I, some of the colonists returned to Germany with their mixed-race families. While the Black population of Germany at the time of the Third Reich was insignificant (around 500-800 in a population of 60 million), the Nazis despised Black culture, which they considered inferior, and even sought to prohibit traditionally black musical genres such as jazz. No official laws were enacted against the Black population, or even against the children of mixed parentage, since they were the offspring of marriages and informal unions from before the anti-miscegenation laws (see Nuremberg laws). Instead, a group named "Commission Number 3" was created to resolve the "problem" of the "Rhineland Bastards" with the aim of preventing their further procreation in German society. Organized under Dr. Eugen Fischer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, it was decided that the children would be sterilized under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Defects (see compulsory sterilization).
The program began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all "Rhineland Bastards" under their jurisdiction. All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilized. This order only applied in the Rhineland. Massaquoi, a German-Liberian from Hamburg, wrote in his autobiography that mixed raced Rhinelanders were rounded up and exterminated in Nazi death camps.
See also
References
- Massaquoi, Hans J. "Destined to Witness : Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany" Harper Perennial, 2001.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.