Editing Racial policy of Nazi Germany (section)

==Afro-Germans==
{{Main|Persecution of black people in Nazi Germany}}
[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 102-15664, Farbiger Junge.jpg|thumb|right|180px|A young Rhinelander who was classified as a ''bastard'' and ''hereditarily unfit'' under the Nazi regime]]
In ''[[Mein Kampf]]'', [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]] described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the Aryan race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe."<ref>[[Mein Kampf]], volume 1, chapter XIII.</ref> He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the [[Rhineland]], with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate."<ref>[[Mein Kampf]], volume 1, chapter XI.</ref> He also implied that this was a plot on the part of the French, saying the population of France was being increasingly "negrified".<ref name="voice-online.co.uk"/><ref>Adolf Hitler, [http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/meinkampf/v2c13.htm ''Mein Kampf,'' Vol. II, chapter XIII]</ref>

[[File:Eugen Fischer box crop.png|thumb|left|upright|[[Eugen Fischer]] in 1934]]

The number of black people in Germany when the Nazis came to power is variously estimated at 5,000 to 25,000.<ref name="voice-online.co.uk">{{cite web| url = http://www.voice-online.co.uk/content.php?show=15123 | title = The forgotten black victims of Nazi Germany | date=16 February 2009 | work = Voice Online | publisher = GV Media Group Ltd | access-date = 9 March 2014 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090223073157/http://www.voice-online.co.uk/content.php?show=15123 | archive-date=23 February 2009}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.annefrankguide.net/en-us/bronnenbank.asp?oid=15973 |work=Anne Frank Guide |title=Black people in Nazi Germany |date=28 September 2018 |publisher=Anne Frank House}}</ref> According to the [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]; "While there was no centralized, systematic program targeting Black people in Germany for murder, many were imprisoned, forcibly sterilized, and murdered by the Nazis. An unknown number of them, perhaps hundreds, were killed."<ref>{{Cite web |title=What Groups of People Did The Nazis Target? |url=https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/what-groups-of-people-did-the-nazis-target#black-people-in-germany-3 |access-date=28 April 2025 |website=Holocaust Encyclopedia: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum}}</ref>

Prior to Hitler coming to power, black entertainers were popular in Germany, but the Nazis banned [[Jazz in Germany|jazz]] as "corrupt [[Negermusik|negro music]]".<ref name="voice-online.co.uk"/>

Of particular concern to the Nazi scientist [[Eugen Fischer]] were the "[[Rhineland Bastard]]s": [[Mulatto|mixed-race]] offspring of [[Senegalese]] soldiers who had been stationed in the Rhineland as part of the French army of occupation. He believed that these people should be [[Compulsory sterilization|sterilized]] in order to protect the racial purity of the German population. At least 400 mixed-race children were forcibly sterilized in the Rhineland by 1938. This order only applied in the Rhineland. Other [[Afro-Germans|African Germans]] were unaffected. Despite this policy, there was never any systematic attempt to eliminate the black population in Germany, though some black people were used in medical experiments, and others mysteriously disappeared.<ref name="voice-online.co.uk"/>

According to Susan Samples, the Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilization and abortion program in the Rhineland.<ref>Samples, S., "African Germans in the Third Reich", ''The African German Experience'', Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay ed.</ref> [[Hans Massaquoi]] describes his experience as a half-African in [[Hamburg]], unaware of the Rhineland sterilizations until long after the war.<ref>Massaquoi, Hans J., ''Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany'', Harper Perennial, 2001. He mistakenly states that they were later murdered in the Holocaust, p. 2</ref> Samples also points to the paradoxical fact that African-Germans actually had a better chance of surviving the war than the average German. They were excluded from military activity because of their non-Aryan status, but were not considered a threat and so were unlikely to be incarcerated. Samples and Massaquoi also note that African-Germans were not subjected to the segregation they would have experienced in the United States, nor excluded from facilities such as expensive hotels. However, they both state that downed black American pilots were more likely to become victims of violence and murder from German citizens than white pilots.<ref name="voice-online.co.uk"/>

[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1974-079-57, Berlin, Ausstellung "Planung und Aufbau im Osten".jpg|thumb|upright|In March 1941 [[Deputy Führer]] [[Rudolf Hess]] and ''[[Reichsführer-SS]]'' [[Heinrich Himmler]] visit an exhibition of proposed rural German settlements within occupied Eastern Europe.]]