Did you know Black Germans were also persecuted during the Holocaust?
Gert Schramm was just 15 years old when the Nazis arrested him and imprisoned him in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Born in Germany in 1928 to a Black American father and a white German mother, Schramm was targeted under Nazi racial ideology that labeled Afro-Germans as “non-Aryan” and racially inferior.
Although Afro-Germans were a small community, they were still subjected to discrimination, harassment, and state violence. Black children were pushed out of schools, families lost jobs, and hundreds of Afro-German youth were forcibly sterilized as part of the Nazi effort to erase so-called “undesirable” populations.
Unlike the genocide carried out against Europe’s Jewish population, the Nazis did not implement a single, systematic extermination program specifically targeting Black Germans, and because of that, there is no exact historical record of how many Black people were killed in camps. But historians confirm Afro-Germans were imprisoned, abused, and in some cases murdered under the Nazi regime.
And although Black people still face widespread racism across the world today, the number of researchers and historians who have explored the persecution of Black people under the Nazis in any meaningful depth remains relatively small.
Schramm survived Buchenwald..and after the war, he refused silence. In his memoir, My Father Was a Negro: Wer hat Angst vorm schwarzen Mann, he documented what it meant to be a Black teenager living under Nazi rule, ensuring Afro-German voices would not be erased from Holocaust remembrance.
His story is a reminder: Black history is global. Holocaust history is broader than many are taught. And remembrance must include every life they tried to erase.
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