There are relatively few well-documented or remembered black victims of the Holocaust and Nazi repression in general; these people often live on only as footnotes in other memoirs, or in a small number of little-known testimonies. I've put together a few that I know of
Black Germans, particularly the "Rhineland Bastards", the children of black French occupation soldiers and German women after World War One, were not protected from spasmodic violence, but the Nazi state considered inducing infertility (via X-rays) the most efficient way of removing the 'stain' on German honour these people represented - in nationalist German propaganda, and later Nazi propaganda, they were assumed the children of rape by "bestial" black soldiers. Other black Germans (such as those from Germany's former African colonies) lived strange half-lifes, existing in the margins of Nazi concerns. One black German, who had been born in Germany, Theodor Wonja Michael, even received his call-up papers to the Wehrmacht - and turned up for duty, only to be turned away by the desk officer! He later went on to appear in the Goebbels-led Nazi film industry, and so he later joked as a respected Shakespearan actor that he owed his career to Goebbels.
[Picture: Theodor Wonja Michael, whose book "Black German" I'd recommend to anyone. Mr Michael strongly believed himself a German through-and-through, and a pre-Nazism German at that, it is amusing to note in some interviews in later life he contrasts modern German values with his more strict "Prussian" values.]
Bayume Mohamed Husen, another black German, met a more terrible fate; in 1940 he had attempted to join the Wehrmacht to prove his loyalty to the German state, but was rejected - like Theodor Wonja Michael he ended up working in the Nazi film industry, but seems to have had an affair with a white 'Aryan' actress, for which he was denounced; arrested for 'racial defilement' he was sent to Sachsenhausen camp, and died there in November 1944.
Jean (Johnny) Voste, in the main picture, was born in the Belgian Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo) to a white Belgian mother and a black Congolese father. He was arrested for taking part in sabotage efforts on behalf of the Belgian resistance. He was the only black person in Dachau when it was liberated by the US 7th Army.
Dominique Mendy, a French-Senegalese man, had served in the French army in World War One and joined the Bordeaux region French resistance in 1940, acting as intelligence officer for his cell, he believed that Nazi racist views about black people provided him and his activities extra security. Captured in 1944, he survived Neuengamme camp by playing the fool to his guards, and was eventually taken on as a personal servant by a German commandant who had been born in Cameroon. In the camp, Mendy became close friends with another Senegalese man, Sidi Camara, and both conversed in their native language, Wolof (the language from which the word 'banana' derives). Sidi Camara was to be transferred to Bergen-Belsen camp, and died at the typhus-plagued camp shortly after liberation by British forces.
[Picture: Josef Nassy and an example of his camp art. Josef fitted the Nazi definition of Jewish in the Nuremburg Race Laws, but no written record of this, and preconceptions about his skin colour meant no Nazi ever imagined the possibilty this black man was Jewish.]
Josef Nassy was an Afro-Jewish man born in Suriname (then Dutch Guiana) to a Jewish Dutch father and a black Surinamese mother. He went to high school in Brooklyn, New York. When applying for a job with Warner Brothers in Europe, he lied and said he was an American citizen, and failed to enter his religion on his residency application in Belgium. Consequently, he was not identified as a Jewish Dutchman during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, but was rounded up with about 2,000 other Americans in April 1942 and kept in comparatively good conditions in order to be in a good state for prisoner exchanges with the Allies. He was reunited with his Belgian wife Rosine van Aerschot after liberation in 1945 and died in 1974 a successful portrait artist. The art he produced while in Nazi captivity is today held by the Washington DC Holocaust Memorial.
Jean Marcel Nicholas, a Haitian, was arrested in Paris in 1943 and eventually sent to Buchenwald as inmate number 44451, with his nationality as USA/H (reflecting that Haiti was under US rule at the time). He worked as a doctor in this camp and the subcamps he was moved to, providing Jewish prisoners with medical certificates exempting them from labour. There are two conflicting accounts of his death; the first is that on 4 April 1945, approximately 2000 inmates from Rottleberode subcamp were moved to get ahead of the Allied advance; their journey began on train but then became a death march which ended in the "Gardelegen massacre", in which a mob of German civilians, firefighters, Hitler Youth, home guard (Volkssturm) and some SS men, forced the 1000 survivors into a barn on the Isenschnibbe estate near Gardelegen and burnt it down around the people. A single black corpse who burnt to death trying to force open the barn door has been tentatively identified as Jean Nicholas. An alternative account is that he was rescued by US soldiers of the 87th Cavalry Reconnisance unit having escaped from Nazi captivity, only to die of camp-caught tuberculosis in September 1945.
Two other unidentified black men from Buchenwald camp are reported as being shot by their SS Guards for being 'too weak to keep up' with another death march.
A German-Cameroonian victim briefly mentioned in one source is Erika N'gando, daughter of Ida Kleinfeld and Ekwe N'Gando (a black man who worked at Hanover Zoo as a waiter), who was potentially arrested for being the maid to a couple involved in the German resistance, details are slim but it appears that she died in Ravensbruck camp in 1940/41 having fell into deep despair in the harsh conditions there; other survivors suggest she did not truly understand what had led to her being incarcerated.
Odd Nansen, one of the post-war co-founders of UNICEF, a Norwegian, notes in his autobiography that when he was arrested for working with the Norwegian resistance, he was sent to Sachsenhausen camp with a black South African who had been arrested in Oslo; the identity and fate of this man is not known to history, though Nansen notes that frequently en-route Nazi officials expressed shock at the "negro Norwegian".
It is estimated that perhaps 10,000-30,000 black people died in the Holocaust, but this calculation obviously suffers from the difficulty of meaningfully defining 'black'. The cause of these victims of the Holocaust is often also championed by aggressively anti-Semitic pan-Africanists (of the "all slave traders were Jewish" mould), further muddying the waters.
