We all know what happened to Jews, Roma, and various other “minorities” in Nazi Germany. But what was the experience like for Blacks and Asians? Of course, we all know that Germany was mostly “white” at that time, but I imagine there must have been at least some Blacks, Asians, mixed-race or other non-“Aryan” citizens and residents of Nazi Germany.
According to this article, there were tens of thousands of blacks in Germany prior to and during WWII (most of them descending from Prussian and French colonies in Africa), and many of them apparently wound up in concentration camps.
According to Wikipedia, thousands of Japanese (mostly military and diplomatic officials) were given “honorary Aryan” status during the war.
Hans Massaquoi wrote what sounds like a fascinating book about his life as a half-African German in Nazi Germany. He was treated like a second class citizen, but wasn’t persecuted the same way as a Jew or Gypsy would have been.
This is a minor nitpick, but there were no “Prussian” colonies in Africa. The German colonial expansion started only after the foundation of the Empire in 1871, and while Prussia was always by far the dominant state within the Empire (which was structured on federal principles), colonial policy was a federal/imperial policy. People would have considered the colonies in Africa and the Pacific to be “German” colonies, not “Prussian” ones.
As far as the Japanese go, they were considered by Nazi racial ideology not to be Aryan, but still to be the superior race of Asia. The - relatively few - Japanese who lived in Germany at the time occupied quite a high position in the racial hierarchy established by Nazi ideology, and the political and military alliance with Japan only added to this.
What, superior to Aryan races like the Iranians and the Indians?
I know the term “Aryan” has been used in the past (and this is probably the original and correct uses of the term) for those ethnicities whose languages belong to the Indoeuropean family of languages, and this would include the ethnicities you mention. I am not sure, however, if this is the sense it which Nazi racial ideology used the word. The system was not entirely thought through theoretically, but I think where there were attempts to have a theoretical underpinning, Aryans were perceived to be of European, not Eurasian, decent.
Which was an utterly bogus and completely mythological basis for the concept of an “Aryan” race. Hitler’s “master race” of Aryans (who built and ruled the island-nation of Atlantis around 8000 B.C.E., which give you some idea of the credibility of this notion) were actually Scandinavian Gothic peoples who, ironically, were not from the Indo-European language base most closely related to the Aryan languages. There is no credible basis for an Aryan master race of blue-eyed, blond-haired Scandias, period, any more than there is a Holy Chalice that will give the bearer everlasting life, or midichlorians.
Stranger
BTW from what I read of contemporary documents the term “arisch” (Aryan) does not seem to have been used in formal contexts as much as we’d imagine (particularly in the English-language literature). The Nuremberg Laws used the term “deutsches und artverwandtes Blut” (German and related blood), a term more amenable to pragmatical definition. ‘Arisch’ (Aryan) seems to have been a term more used as an informal short form.
Regarding black Germans, I read Hans Massaquoi’s autobiography and watched a TV documentary about the African colonies and their aftermath (East African immigrants in Germany), and the impression I got was that as a black (today’s US terminology) or rather mixed-race (contemporary and frequent German terminology - because the one-drop rule isn’t a German view and e.g. to Germans most black Americans aren’t) German you were a second-class citizen but not slated for imprisonment/murder - unless you were a man and accused of miscegenation.
Concerning Japanese, Nazi German foreign policy was capable of pragmatism, and did not strongly protest the contrary.
Given that the broad classification Germanic tribes included Celts (the Gauls), the Franks, the Dani and Norse, Lombards, Saxons, Goths, Western Slavs, and of course the Huns who swept through the region pillaging, plundering, and raping everything in sight during the Great Migration, the “deutsches und artverwandtes Blut” encompasses the polyglot of peoples from the Northern Mediterranean to Scandinavia, and from the Iberian peninsula to Central Asia, and given the ethnic mixing in those areas pretty much encompasses everything from the Levant and North Africa all the way to the Subcontinent. In fact, the only people who could be almost definitively ruled out of contributing to the Deutsch gene pool are Aboriginal Australians, Native Americans, and Sub-Saharan Africans.
The “Aryan race” was strictly a fictitious creation of French writer and fundamentalist Catholic Arthur Comte de Gobineau, who can be excused for not understanding the then nascent field of genetics but whose ignorance of ethnic cultures and basic geography gave grotesque caricature to his unfounded speculations about distinct origins of the different races. His accuracy on the matter or origin or distinction of races was no more informed than Edgar Rice Burroughs’ description of Africa, or for that matter, Mars. One as might well take at face value The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This concept was appropriated by Alfred Rosenberg to concoct an ideological plank of what became the National Socialist Party to unify the “German volk” around a supposedly common linguistic ethnic identity, something that would have been absurd to anyone who actually traveled through the lands claimed by Germany and experienced the wide variety of languages and ethnic customs. Rosenberg’s definition of Aryans as including the Romans and Greeks, whose languages were clearly developed from a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) base, and explicitly rejected the Romani, whose language is very definitely of an Indo-Iranian/Indo-Aryan.
In other words, the technical basis for a linguistic tradition or ethnic “Aryan” race or language as encompassing the German people, or a distinct genetic identity of the Germanic volk, is a complete fantasy with about as much basis as Joseph Smith’s lost tribe of Israelites settling the Americas.
Stranger
Very informative post as usual, Stranger.
Thanks!