Everything about Rhineland Bastard totally explained
Rhineland Bastard was a derogatory term used in
Nazi Germany to describe children of mixed
German and
African parentage. Under
Nazism's racial theories, these children were considered inferior to "pure
Aryans" and consigned to
sterilization.
History
The term "Rhineland Bastard" can be traced back 1919, just after
World War I, when
Entente troops, most of them French, occupied the
Rhineland. A handful of German women married soldiers from the occupying forces, while others had children by them out of
wedlock (hence the disparaging label "bastards"). Some of these troops were from
France's colonies in
Africa and were known locally as
Neger (German: "negroes") or the "Black Disgrace" due to the fact that the Germans, who had been accustomed to having colonies in Africa before 1914 now felt they were being colonised themselves by "Negroes". The occupation itself had been regarded as a national disgrace. The fact that it was carried out by what were viewed as "B-grade" troops increased the feelings of humiliation. Whether these sentiments were racist (in the modern sense of the word) or merely "ordinary" European nationalism might be disputed. Nazis exploited these sentiments and gave them a racist direction and interpretation. In
Mein Kampf,
Hitler described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe." He disliked the German women who gave birth to these children, and referred to them as
whores and prostitutes. He also implied that this was a plot on the part of the French, since the population of France was being increasingly "negrified".
However, most of the tiny non-
white population in Germany at that time were children of German
settlers and
missionaries in the former
German colonies in
Africa and
Melanesia, who had married local women or had had children with them out of wedlock. With the loss of Germany's colonies after
World War I, some of these colonists returned to Germany with their "mixed-race" families. While the Black population of Germany at the time of the
Third Reich was insignificant (around 500-800 in a population of 60 million), the Nazis decided to take action against those in the Rhineland. They despised Black culture, which they considered inferior, and even sought to prohibit traditionally black musical genres such as
jazz. No official laws were enacted against the Black population, or even against the children of mixed parentage, since they were the offspring of marriages and informal unions from before the 1935
Nuremberg laws which prohibited
miscegenation. Instead, a group named "Commission Number 3" was created to resolve the problem of the "Rhineland Bastards" with the aim of preventing their further procreation in German society. Organized under Dr.
Eugen Fischer of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, it was decided that the children would be sterilized under the
1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.
The program began in
1937, when local officials were asked to report on all "Rhineland Bastards" under their jurisdiction. All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilized. This order applied only in the Rhineland. Other African-Germans were unaffected. According to Susan Samples, the Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilization and abortion program.
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