Teaching the Holocaust’s Lessons to Black Youths

Scholars searching for ways to broaden the lessons of the Holocaust told an audience at Los Angeles’ most prominent black church Thursday that Nazis murdered and mutilated African American prisoners of war because of their race, and sterilized young children of mixed German and African blood.

The presentation of previously unpublicized research was organized by the Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust in Los Angeles, which is working with local teachers and researchers to develop curriculum supplements for secondary school students.

Researchers told listeners at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church that documents from Nazi war crimes trials show that blacks--both Americans and soldiers from Africa serving in the armies of colonial powers--were singled out for mistreatment once they were captured by the Nazis.

In one case, said Robert Kesting, an archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, 11 captured African American soldiers were humiliated by SS officers and forced to carry them on their backs before they were tortured, executed and mutilated. Other black soldiers were forced to dig their own graves before they were executed.

Although white soldiers were also mistreated by Germans, Kesting said blacks tended to be treated worse because of their race: Nazis considered people of African descent, as well as Jews, Gypsies and handicapped people, to be “race polluters.”

In a horrific example of Nazi eugenics--the pseudo-science of genetically “improving” the human race--hundreds of half-black, half-German children, ages 6 to 12, were sterilized under government dictates in the 1930s, Kesting said.

The children, labeled the “Rhineland bastards,” were for the most part the offspring of German women who married African soldiers who were part of the French army occupying western Germany after World War I. Hundreds of the children later disappeared without a trace.

The 14-year-old Holocaust memorial organization, run by the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, sponsored Thursday’s lecture in response to the controversy that erupted after some black high school students in Oakland were kicked out of a movie theater for laughing at scenes of the murder of Jews in “Schindler’s List.”

Educators, struggling to get students interested in history that seems long ago and far away, said they believe the greater scope of genocide will hit home to African American students if they are taught that people of African descent were also persecuted by the Nazis.

Students need to understand that “it could have been me,” said Suzanne Riveles, a political scientist who teaches at Howard University and participated in Thursday’s lecture.

The Rev. Leonard Jackson, associate minister of First AME, said interest in the Holocaust in the black community is “little or nothing.”

“It is easy to look at a story such as ‘Schindler’s List’ and say, ‘So what?’ But if you realize . . . it was not just Jewish individuals, it was African Americans, black Africans . . . that’s what makes a difference.”

Museum Director Alex Grobman said the students in Oakland were unfairly criticized. They were simply unfamiliar with the history, he said, and could not understand that the events on screen really happened. He said he later took several of the students on a tour of the museum and found them “very receptive.”

In their search for ways to teach the Holocaust in a broader context, Grobman and Allan Scholl, the museum’s education specialist, began looking for Holocaust stories that involved blacks. They found Kesting and Riveles.

Riveles said the racist attitudes of some Nazi officials were shaped by their experiences in German colonies in Africa, where they began to consider some races “subhuman.” “Germans . . . carried racial attitudes toward Africans very far. . . . They later attributed similar negative features to the ‘Negro of Europe’--the European Jew,” she said.

Riveles was born in Berlin, and although her family is not Jewish, she suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Her father was executed for his role in Resistance activities. She later earned her Ph.D. in African studies at Howard University, and she has worked with Amnesty International. Riveles said it is important to keep telling stories from the past because the racist attitudes they reflect live on today.

First AME’s Jackson agreed: “You ask the Jewish population, ‘Why do you continue to talk about the Holocaust?’ People continue to ask black people, ‘Why talk about history, it happened a long time ago.’ (But) as long as we keep it on the front page we won’t allow it to happen again.”