I love the link to the “Strange Maps” site. I’d never heard of it before.
I’m not really sure what it’s a cautionary tale against. I mean, the Nazis HAVE been defeated. Is it saying that we have to crush out evil in case it arises again?
Wow, I knew it existed but that’s bizarre that it was already open in 1939. Did they know the significance, and/or did it keep the same name?
I imagine it was so named before Nazi rule, obviously a gesture against slavery, by a more open-minded society. It indeed was on the 1939 Berlin map, the same map that had an Adolf Hitler Strasse, a Herman Goering Strasse and a Horst Wessel Platz. I could consult a Berlin map, say, from 1944, to see if the station still had that same name.
One would think that ultimately the Nazis would have changed it, as people of color did not coincide with their ideas of Aryan racial superiority; ethnic Africans were depicted as inferior. Remember African-American Jesse Owens who won four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin – Hitler refused to so much as shake his hand. Perhaps the Nazis just hadn’t gotten around to that particular name change in 1939, or maybe they had no idea as to its significance. Who knows?
If it wasn’t altered on a later map one might conclude that they were too busy with the war itself to concentrate on street renaming but I’d be curious to see if and when this particular station was indeed renamed under the Nazi regime.
I think it might just be a reminder “be lucky the Nazis were defeated and this isn’t a reality.”