Most people know about the Nazi Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews and 6 million others: Russians, Gypsies, Slavs, socialists, disabled people and LGBT people.
Alongside the big narrative of the Holocaust there are a myriad of small, individual stories and testimonies that help illustrate and shed light on the cruelty and barbarity of the Nazi regime.
One such account is the story of what happened to Germany’s tiny black population.
Primo Levi once wrote, “this is a story interwoven with freezing dawnsâ€. Some may know their story, I certainly didn’t.
Tucked away inside Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribe, Mein Kampf, there is the following passage:
It was, and is, the Jew who brought negroes to the Rhine, brought them with the same aim and with deliberate intent to destroy the white race he hates by persistent bastardisation, to hurl it from the cultural and political heights it has attained, and to ascend them as its masters.
This was not entirely a figment of his imagination; there were a small number of young black children of African heritage living in the Rhineland.
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