THE UNTOLD STORY OF NAZI BLACK GENOCIDE
Sep. 25 (GIN) - Hitler referred to them as “Rhineland bastards” - the hundreds of children born of German mothers and African fathers. The men were African soldiers deployed by the French army in Germany’s Rhineland after WW1.
Finally a memorial is to be erected outside the home of one Black victim of the Nazi Holocaust, giving a name to the nameless. Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed, originally from Tanzania, married a German woman and was charged with ‘miscegenation’. He died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in November 1944.
The idea behind the memorial - part of the Stolperstein Project, is to remember the millions of nameless and forgotten Blacks, Gypsies, Disabled, Homosexuals, Communists. It coincides with the publication of “Truthful Till Death” by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst – a book which focuses attention on the persecution of black people under the Third Reich, which included forced sterilisation and, ultimately, extermination.
When complete, the Stolperstein (meaning ‘stumbling block’) project will consist of 12,000 markers outside houses, giving the name of the person or persons who lived there and the date on which they were taken to a concentration camp. Its aim is to stop future generations from thinking of the Holocaust in terms of anonymous, faceless numbers.
Sep. 25 (GIN) - Hitler referred to them as “Rhineland bastards” - the hundreds of children born of German mothers and African fathers. The men were African soldiers deployed by the French army in Germany’s Rhineland after WW1.
Finally a memorial is to be erected outside the home of one Black victim of the Nazi Holocaust, giving a name to the nameless. Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed, originally from Tanzania, married a German woman and was charged with ‘miscegenation’. He died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in November 1944.
The idea behind the memorial - part of the Stolperstein Project, is to remember the millions of nameless and forgotten Blacks, Gypsies, Disabled, Homosexuals, Communists. It coincides with the publication of “Truthful Till Death” by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst – a book which focuses attention on the persecution of black people under the Third Reich, which included forced sterilisation and, ultimately, extermination.
When complete, the Stolperstein (meaning ‘stumbling block’) project will consist of 12,000 markers outside houses, giving the name of the person or persons who lived there and the date on which they were taken to a concentration camp. Its aim is to stop future generations from thinking of the Holocaust in terms of anonymous, faceless numbers.
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