Race After Hitler: American GIs in Post-War Germany

[Joe McCarthy]

Here is a sample chapter of Heidi Fehrenbach's Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Post-War Germany and America. Among many of the interesting details is the following: white American troops would often physically assault black American troops for dating German women. It's worth a read:

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8048.html

[Joe McCarthy]

Extract:


Perhaps the greatest surprise of intercultural contact in occupied Germany was reserved for African American soldiers, who--after the initial shock of contact, which for some included the revolting, firsthand observation of the horrors of Dachau and Buchenwald--reported surprisingly cordial relationships with Germans.68 They commented upon the striking absence of racism in postwar German society: the relative friendliness of the German population and their ability to move about without undue restriction and to socialize with anyone they pleased regardless of race. Although they had "heard about Hitler's autobiography, 'Mein Kampf,' with its unflattering reference to Negroes as 'Semi-Apes,' . . . had heard of Germans' prejudices, and . . . were prepared to hate them," as Bill Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier noted, African American soldiers experienced their stay in this formerly fascist country as both eye-opening and emancipating. Germany's reputation as a desirable place to be stationed spread among African American troops, and it remained a sought-after assignment throughout the American civil rights era.69

Germans' positive public reception of black GIs and perceived lack of racial discrimination toward the soldiers was headlined in the black press in the first years of the occupation and even resonated in the mainstream American press in publications like Newsweek. As a 1946 report in Ebony magazine put it: "Strangely enough, here where once Aryanism ruled supreme, Negroes are finding more friendship, more respect and more equality than they would back home either in Dixie or on Broadway . . . Race hate has faded with better acquaintance and interracialism in Berlin flourishes. Many of the Negro GIs in the German capital are from the South and find that democracy has more meaning on Wilhelmstrasse than on Beale Street in Memphis."70 Of course much of this German response can be attributed to African American soldiers' stature as representatives of a victorious occupying power. "Here in Naziland," noted the Pittsburgh Courier, black GIs began "to feel equal or even superior to everyone around him. And they liked for a change to feel superior."71 African American soldiers in Germany were struck by the novelty of being treated courteously as "Yanks," or representatives of the United States and its military. In Germany, unlike in the United States and its military, their uniform and national affiliation dictated German response and superseded their racial classification as "Negro" in spite of the privately held racial attitudes of individual Germans. African Americans immediately registered and responded to this outward show of respect, precisely because it was an unprecedented social experience for them

[Joe McCarthy]

More:


During the years of occupation through the 1950s, American officials devoted resources to intelligence gathering among Germans and attempted to ascertain, for example, Germans' attitudes toward the goals of the American occupation and the behavior of its troops, and the level of anti-Americanism and, to some extent, also antisemitic sentiment "on the streets" in western Germany. Moreover, U.S. occupation and military officials were acutely aware of German reactions to the public displays of interracial friction in the U.S. Army. The most common incidents were white-on-black verbal and physical assaults--including, for a time, white soldiers' practice of driving their vehicles onto sidewalks in the attempt to run down black GIs in the company of German women--or raucous barroom brawls in or near German establishments. White soldiers were also alleged to have detonated two bombs on a base in Bremen in order to dissuade black soldiers from dating German women. Occasionally, brawls got out of hand and fatalities occurred. In one case, white American southerners of the 29th Division amused themselves in a pub by firing their guns at the feet of two black GIs to "make them dance." Incensed friends of the victims, upon hearing of the incident, rushed to the scene and returned fire. At a dance at an enlisted men's club in Asberg, Bavaria, when white GIs threw beer bottles at black GIs dancing with white German women, angry black soldiers turned .30 caliber carbines on the culprits. One white soldier died and as a result, "three Negro soldiers were sentenced by court martial to hang on the gallows."

[Curtis24]

How much of this "German tolerance" was really because the German people were scared of pissing off *any* American GI?

[Magister Eckhart]

Germans were eager to distance themselves from the Nazi regime, first of all, and secondly German citizens were being actively indoctrinated to leftist racial egalitarian ideology that encouraged miscegenation and self-hatred. It's no wonder the Germans would be "friendly and welcoming" to the Negro.

Then again, even during the Olympics the Germans were good sports; Jessie Owens got a personal congratulations from Hitler but was refused an audience with Roosevelt - not that I'm condemning Roosevelt for wanting to discourage turning the Negro into some kind of hero for being able to run fast, but there it is. The Germans have a history of not recognising the Negro for what he is.

[Osweo]

Most Germans had never seen a black man in their lives. He was a novelty to them. On first acquaintance, a black man in western garb seems just like an exotic version of ourselves. The wartime Third Reich was a tense claustrophobic sort of world in some ways, like all totalitarian systems, and having US blacks suddenly appear among them might have been a breath of fresh air to some Germans.

It takes long familiarity to breed another reaction, of course.

[SwordoftheVistula]

The Germans had the same reaction towards blacks even during the third reich. Once while looking at another article by I saw by chance on the same page a letter to the editor by a black man, talking about his experience in Germany in the 1930s that everyone was nice to him, nobody was racist there (unlike back home in the US, where he had to ride in separate railroad cars and frequently experienced other forms of racism), and he wanted to protest the 'mischaracterization' of Hitler's Germany as 'racist'.

[Joe McCarthy]

How much of this "German tolerance" was really because the German people were scared of pissing off *any* American GI?

A lot of it, as Fehrenbach notes in the extract I posted. Germans often refused to rent to blacks though, and US occupation authorities looked the other way.

[Joe McCarthy]

Germans were eager to distance themselves from the Nazi regime, first of all, and secondly German citizens were being actively indoctrinated to leftist racial egalitarian ideology that encouraged miscegenation and self-hatred. It's no wonder the Germans would be "friendly and welcoming" to the Negro.

Then again, even during the Olympics the Germans were good sports; Jessie Owens got a personal congratulations from Hitler but was refused an audience with Roosevelt - not that I'm condemning Roosevelt for wanting to discourage turning the Negro into some kind of hero for being able to run fast, but there it is. The Germans have a history of not recognising the Negro for what he is.

Well, as the chapter makes clear, US occupation authorities actually made efforts to prevent racial mixing. I'm unsure why some people assume the highly 'racist' US military was brainwashing Germans with the equivalent of diversity classes. In the matter of anti-black feeling, Germany had a lot to learn from the Americans.

[Joe McCarthy]

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8048.html


When American victors entered Germany in the spring of 1945, they came armed not only with a commitment to democracy but also to Jim Crow practices. Race after Hitler tells the story of how troubled race relations among American occupation soldiers, and black-white mixing within Germany, unexpectedly shaped German notions of race after 1945. Biracial occupation children became objects of intense scrutiny and politicking by postwar Germans into the 1960s, resulting in a shift away from official antisemitism to a focus on color and blackness.

Beginning with black GIs' unexpected feelings of liberation in postfascist Germany, Fehrenbach investigates reactions to their relations with white German women and to the few thousand babies born of these unions. Drawing on social welfare and other official reports, scientific studies, and media portrayals from both sides of the Atlantic, Fehrenbach reconstructs social policy debates regarding black occupation children, such as whether they should be integrated into German society or adopted to African American or other families abroad. Ultimately, a consciously liberal discourse of race emerged in response to the children among Germans who prided themselves on--and were lauded by the black American press for--rejecting the hateful practices of National Socialism and the segregationist United States.

Fehrenbach charts her story against a longer history of German racism extending from nineteenth-century colonialism through National Socialism to contemporary debates about multiculturalism. An important and provocative work, Race after Hitler explores how racial ideologies are altered through transnational contact accompanying war and regime change, even and especially in the most intimate areas of sex and reproduction.

[Joe McCarthy]

This deals with how American and German occupation authorities cooperated in crackdowns on black GIs and German women who mingled sexually. Miscegenation was regarded as unacceptable, and German women who engaged in it were assumed to be prostitutes.

http://books.google.com/books?id=oXt-RBBCQH0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=gis+and+frauleins&source=bl&ots=COKJQCY9kM&sig=pO6LYaJQn4pp_6xzvF_5nQnySzE&hl=en&ei=kbFJTcSwO464sAORw9neCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&sqi=2&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBQ#

[Joe McCarthy]

This really says it all:

http://www.ghi-dc.org/files/publications/bulletin/bu043/91.pdf

[QUOTE][The Second World War was probably the most important factor for a
transformation in US race relations in the twentieth century. The experience
of African American soldiers in their fight against fascism brought a
new boost and particular dynamic to the African American civil rights
movement. The American dilemma, defined by Gunnar Myrdal in 1944
as the contradiction between democratic ideology and racist reality,
emerged not only as a domestic problem now but also as a weakness in
the global competition for hearts and minds in the postwar period visà-
vis the Soviet Union./QUOTE]

Leftists and black civil rights activists successfully used Hitlerism as a comparative to American racialism so as to discredit the latter, the Swede Myrdal did much to delegitimize Jim Crow academically, and Soviet pressure in denouncing America as racist thus threatening to Communize the Third World during the Cold War -- those were the main three pressure points that overthrew America's racial system.

[Eldritch]

According to this (http://www.grammerchildren.com/) the percentage of mixed race children fathered by American G.I's in Germany was about the same as the percentage of blacks (or "non-whites") in the occupation force.


The largest percentages of children, about 94%, were fathered by white Americans and Russians. The rest of the war babies were said to have been fathered by non-white American troops or GI’s.

Having been deployed abroad in the 1950’s, Afro-American GI’s (E. Drolsshahen,
2005), which made up no more than 6% of the occupation forces from the U.S., were said to have fathered as many as “3,093 Negro mulattoes” or “occupation babies.”

[Joe McCarthy]

According to this (http://www.grammerchildren.com/) the percentage of mixed race children fathered by American G.I's in Germany was about the same as the percentage of blacks (or "non-whites") in the occupation force.

Yes, that's roughly comparable to the estimate in the last link I posted. There were about 94,000 children produced by GIs and German women. About 3% were between black GIs and German women.

It just shows that even in an atmosphere of organized or semi-organized racial repression, mingling will occur if contact is made. Much the same occurred in the US, though in the US the regime was much stronger and legally formalized than in post-war West Germany.

[Joe McCarthy]

This needs a bumping.

[Leliana]

Und was willst du damit aussagen? Dass die Freveltaten im Nachkriegsdeutschland gar nicht so schlimm sind wie sie waren? Wenn man schwarze Soldaten an die Leine nehmen muss damit sie sich nicht falsch und ungebührlich verhalten spricht das doch nicht gerade für ihre Herrchen, also für die normalen US-Truppen. Bei uns in Deutschland herrschte mit Sicherheit keine Nachfrage nach Schwarzen und anderen Leuten die nicht hierher gehören.

[The Ripper]

I think this simply goes to show the superior cultural level of Germans.

[Leliana]

I think this simply goes to show the superior cultural level of Germans.
Must we prove the obvious? :D

[Joe McCarthy]

On how American democracy coexisted with white supremacy:

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/zeitung/race-and-ethnicity-in-postwar-germany/1323378.html


Racial segregation in the US Army, and violent expressions of anti-black racism by white GIs against African-American compatriots who fraternized with German women, taught Germans an inadvertent lesson: American-style democracy could coexist with commitments to racial hierarchy, even white supremacy.