Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America available in Paperback, eBook
Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America
- ISBN-10:
- 0691133794
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691133799
- Pub. Date:
- 07/22/2007
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691133794
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691133799
- Pub. Date:
- 07/22/2007
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America
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Overview
Beginning with black GIs' unexpected feelings of liberation in postfascist Germany, Fehrenbach investigates reactions to their relations with white German women and to the few thousand babies born of these unions. Drawing on social welfare and other official reports, scientific studies, and media portrayals from both sides of the Atlantic, Fehrenbach reconstructs social policy debates regarding black occupation children, such as whether they should be integrated into German society or adopted to African American or other families abroad. Ultimately, a consciously liberal discourse of race emerged in response to the children among Germans who prided themselves on—and were lauded by the black American press for—rejecting the hateful practices of National Socialism and the segregationist United States.
Fehrenbach charts her story against a longer history of German racism extending from nineteenth-century colonialism through National Socialism to contemporary debates about multiculturalism. An important and provocative work, Race after Hitler explores how racial ideologies are altered through transnational contact accompanying war and regime change, even and especially in the most intimate areas of sex and reproduction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691133799 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/22/2007 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Race after Hitler
Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and AmericaBy Heide Fehrenbach
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2005 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-11906-9
Chapter One
CONTACT ZONES: AMERICAN MILITARY OCCUPATION AND THE POLITICS OF RACEI like this goddamn country, you know that? That's right You know what the hell I learned? That a nigger ain't no different from nobody else. I had to come over here to learn that ... They don't teach that stuff back in the land of the free.
Maybe I'll write a book about all this I'll write a book and tell how the Germans listen attentively to speeches on democracy and then look around at the segregated camps and race riots over white women and listen to the slurs on Negro soldiers on the streets, and then how Germans in the coffee houses along the Hauptstrasse ... gather and laugh at the Americans who preach a sermon on what they, themselves, do not yet know. -William Gardner Smith, Last of the Conquerors, 1948
THE MILITARY occupation of Germany by American troops elicited two striking responses that were organized around irony and issues of race. One came from Germans, who noted with incredulity and derision that they were being democratized by a nation with a Jim Crow army and a host of antimiscegenation laws at home. The second came from African American GIs who,in their interactions with Germans, were stunned by the apparent absence of racism in the formerly fascist land and, comparing their reception with treatment by white Americans, experienced their stay there as unexpectedly liberatory. Both responses criticized the glaring gap between democratic American principles and practices; both exposed as false the universalist language employed by the United States government to celebrate and propagate its political system and social values at home and abroad. Yet both also suggested the centrality of intercultural observation and exchange for contemporaries' experience and understanding of postwar processes of democratization.
From their inception, the occupation zones in Germany were zones of social and cultural contact between occupier and occupied. Rapidly, they emerged as informal sites of racial reeducation and reconstruction as well. When the victorious allies subdued Germany in May 1945, their most urgent agenda centered upon the need to demilitarize, denazify, and democratize their defeated foe. Dismantling attitudes of racial superiority among Germans was understood by the Western allies as an implicit part of this process. But aside from the first year of occupation-when American officials in particular insisted on mandatory screenings of atrocity films like Todesmühlen (Mills of Death), with its graphic scenes of liberated death camps, denunciation of notions of Aryan supremacy, and blunt accusations of collective German guilt-"race" barely figured in formal reeducation programs, nor did it play a central role in allied policies for German reconstruction. Racial reeducation in early postwar Germany resulted primarily not from the official programs of occupation authorities, but rather more spontaneously through the experience of social interactions between Germans and Americans or through German observations of social relations among the multiethnic American occupation forces. In the public behavior of U.S. troops on the street and in the pub, the current complexion of American race relations was on display for postwar Germans to see.
It was in the specific historical circumstances of the occupation that two distinct national-historical idioms of race-the American and German-confronted and instructed each other. Under these circumstances, Germans reformulated their notions of race after National Socialism, and African American GIs experienced and appraised the comparative state of race relations between democratic America and its fascist foe. It is in this context, then, that racial reeducation as an informal interactive process must be investigated and understood. Encounters between white Germans and African American GIs after 1945, moreover, were not merely transitory phenomena; rather, they had a constituent effect on postwar racial understanding in both countries that outlived the period of occupation.
* * *
German-American interactions were embedded in a larger field of power relations dominated by the United States and structured by official American policies and practices. As is well known, the United States conquered and occupied National Socialist Germany with an army in which troop units, training, work assignments, housing, recreational and other facilities, and even religious worship, were segregated by race. And although President Harry Truman formally began the process of desegregating the U.S. military in 1948, when he issued an executive order proclaiming "equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces," a corresponding commitment to the principle of racial integration was not at that time a value held by most American commanders in general, nor by those responsible for Germany in particular. As a result, the actual integration of American military forces stationed both within and outside of the United States dragged on well into the 1950s.
Ultimately Cold War considerations, and especially the United States' entry into the Korean conflict in 1950, helped dictate the timing of desegregation of the U.S. military, which emerged as a pragmatic response to the pressing exigencies of mobilizing manpower and fighting the Korean War. Commitment to the social value of integration had little to do with it. Predictably, then, its application was uneven. Where wartime exigencies did not exist, leadership response was lethargic or temporizing. According to historian Bernard Nalty, "the need for efficiency imposed by the Korean War did not make itself felt in Europe ... where enthusiastic reports from Korea [regarding the performance of integrated troops] went unread or encountered disbelief." In Germany, the mandate to integrate U.S. army bases was ignored until the spring of 1952 and then took over two years-into August 1954-to complete.
Nearly a decade after defeating and occupying Nazi Germany, and some five years after overseeing the foundation of a democratic West German state, the United States finally dismantled its almost century-long tradition of racial segregation in its armed forces. The slow pace of postwar integration of the U.S. military-and the even slower pace of postwar integration of American society-meant that for the entire period of military occupation (1945-49), and throughout most of the High Commission in Germany (1949-55), postfascist German society was democratized by a country whose institutions, social relations, and dominant cultural values were organized around the category of race and a commitment to white supremacy.
FIGHTING THE WAR, WINNING THE PEACE: "THE PROBLEM OF NEGRO TROOPS"
Like Germany, American society too was undergoing an uneasy period of challenges and adjustments to entrenched racial ideology after 1945. Unlike Germany, however, the postwar years in the United States represented a continuation and intensification of social transformations that began in earnest during World War II. The important point for our purposes is that at the same time it was fighting Nazi Germany, the U.S. government was under considerable public pressure by a growing number of African American activists and organizations to democratize the United States and dismantle its discriminatory policies and practices toward its own citizens of color. Democratic America of the 1930s and 1940s can not be said to have enjoyed a stable or consensual understanding of the significance of race. Rather, the social ideology and organization of race was hotly disputed and, with mobilization for war, gave rise to a new sort of advocacy politics that was attentive to both national and international developments and ultimately succeeded in affecting the political decision-making process in Washington, D.C.
Prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, African American newspapers tended to express an isolationist view, characterized by a 1940 essay in the NAACP's mouthpiece, The Crisis, which proclaimed that while they were: "sorry for brutality, blood, and death among the peoples of Europe ... the hysterical cries of the preachers of democracy in Europe leave us cold. We want democracy in Alabama and Arkansas, in Mississippi and Michigan, in the District of Columbia and the Senate of the United States." Or as C.L.R. James pithily put it, "the democracy I want to fight for, Hitler is not depriving me of."
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, however, the battle broadened to two fronts for most African American leaders. Instead of characterizing war as an either/or proposition, black leaders and newspapers fused domestic and international quests for democracy into a campaign for "double victory." To modify columnist George Schuyler's 1940 dictum in the Pittsburgh Courier, their motto became "our war is against Hitler in Europe and against the Hitlers in America." From early 1942, African American leaders and the press overwhelmingly supported black participation in the war effort while continuing to lobby against racial discrimination and injustice at home.
The United States' entry into war-and especially its official justification of fighting Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in order to free the world for democracy-created a useful context for African Americans to press their case for social equality and civil rights. Black leaders well recognized the wrenching irony of the situation and did their best to use it to its greatest political effect. As the Pittsburgh Courier noted, "What an opportunity the crisis has been ... to persuade, embarrass, compel and shame our government and nation ... into a more enlightened attitude toward a tenth of its people!"
One of the most prominent organizations to lobby on behalf of "Negro" interests was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which, during the wartime and postwar years, became an outspoken advocate of African American soldiers' rights. NAACP leaders scrutinized the relevant policies of U.S. officials in the War Department and White House, and later in the American Military Government in Germany, and publicized their reactions and recommendations in the African American press. Complaints centered around racial inequities in soldiers' recruitment, training, assignments (most black troops were relegated to service, housekeeping, supply, or transport duties), promotion, housing, entertainment, and other facilities. In addition to frequent episodes of violence directed at black servicemen by white American citizens and soldiers in the United States and overseas, African American leaders and the black press documented and publicized widespread discriminatory practices exercised by the Selective Service, white military officers, white communities surrounding the predominantly southern U.S. military bases, and by the Red Cross, which segregated by race not only the soldiers' social functions it hosted, but also the blood plasma it collected.
African Americans bristled at the poor treatment accorded black troops. Soldiers wrote letters to loved ones and the black press that chronicled the wide range of indignities they were subjected to, which resulted in a profound sense of demoralization and disgust. Soldiers from the northern United States were shocked by official expectation that they adjust to the overtly racist Jim Crow practices of the southern states and proved unwilling to adopt the self-effacing posture demanded of them by white southerners. Black inductees clearly expected that as American soldiers in uniform, they should receive the respect extended their white compatriots. When this did not occur-when, for example, African Americans in uniform were refused service in local restaurants, were ordered to the back of the bus when traveling off base, were subjected to racist epithets, physically assaulted, or saw their black officers mistreated or passed over for promotion, to name but a handful of common occurrences-they became disillusioned or embittered.
Throughout the decade of the 1940s, and extending well into the 1950s, African American soldiers' experience was dictated by the U.S. military's insistence on the primacy of race and the "fact" of their Negro blood. According to official military policy, African American soldiers-unlike their white counterparts-were not treated as individuals with specific abilities, aptitudes, or educational accomplishments. Rather, their military selection and assignment were made according to their group identity as "Negro" with all of the racist valuations that accompanied that social classification. As a result, skilled African American soldiers rapidly became insulted and dejected by assignments to labor and service units that derived solely from their race and failed to recognize or utilize their abilities. As one soldier remarked: "Civilian life is one thing, but to be drafted and fight to save the world for democracy only to find that you have entered the most undemocratic and racist organization in the whole country is quite another thing. This ... turned me off completely."
One of the greatest insults to African American soldiers-and one repeatedly commented upon in the black press-was the comparatively better treatment, even camaraderie, extended to German POWs by white American soldiers and civilians in the presence of black American troops. Since numerous complaints were recorded on this issue, a few examples will have to suffice. Sergeant Edward Donald of the 761st Tank Battalion remembered that African American soldiers were housed in the segregated "swampland" of Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, while German POWs were accommodated in a more desirable area of the camp, "had access to facilities denied black American soldiers ... and were given passes to town when black soldiers were confined" to base. "This was one of the most repugnant things I can recall of the many things that happened to Negro servicemen," he concluded. Captain Charles Thomas of Detroit remembered having hunger pangs on his return trip to his camp in Texas and looking for a place to eat:
The station restaurant was doing a rush business with white civilians and German prisoners of war. There sat the so-called enemy comfortably seated, laughing, talking, making friends, with the waitresses at their beck and call. If I had tried to enter that dining room the ever-present MPs would have busted my skull, a citizen-soldier of the United States. My morale, if I had any left, dipped well below zero. Nothing infuriated me as much as seeing those German prisoners of war receiving the warm hospitality of Texas.
Black soldiers weren't the only ones infuriated. Singer Lena Horne was scheduled to give two concerts at Camp Robinson in Alabama, the first for white officers, the second for black GIs. However, the second concert was also attended by German POWS, who were given the best seats up front, while black American soldiers were relegated to the back. Realizing the outrage, Horne responded, "Screw this!" stormed off the stage and refused to perform. Following that incident, she consented to sing only for African American troops.
As the comparative official and informal treatment of German POWs and African American soldiers in the United States makes clear, the "problem of Negro soldiers," from the perspective of African Americans, had its origins in the prejudicial practices and policies of white America. The first point made by the preceding testimony was that African Americans-whether in uniform or out-were not accorded the rights or recognition of their American citizenship. Rather, they were treated as subordinates-as inferior or "not-quite" Americans-by white compatriots and military leaders, as evidenced by the preferential treatment extended white prisoners of war. While the American rhetoric of war pivoted on the appeal to a national "we," African Americans learned time and again from their wartime experience that this was empty rhetoric. The second point derives from the first. This was that race-and especially a shared whiteness-trumped nationality when it came to social privilege and prerogative. As a result, even though German soldiers were, and remained, the military enemy throughout World War II, once they were pacified as POWs, they were treated as social equals in a way that African American soldiers never were. And to a large extent these sociocultural presumptions and practices of whiteness survived the war to shape postwar reconstruction in occupied Germany.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Race after Hitler by Heide Fehrenbach Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Democratizing the Racial State: Toward a Transnational History 1
Chapter One: Contact Zones: American Military Occupation and the Politics of Race 17
Chapter Two: Flaccid Fatherland: Rape, Sex, and the Reproductive Consequences of Defeat 46
Chapter Three: "Mischlingskinder" and the Postwar Taxonomy of Race 74
Chapter Four: Reconstruction in Black and White: The Toxi Films 107
Chapter Five: Whose Children, Theirs or Ours? Intercountry Adoptions and Debates about Belonging 132
Chapter Six: Legacies: Race and the Postwar Nation 169
Abbreviations of Archives Consulted 189
Notes 191
Select Bibliography 247
Index 257
What People are Saying About This
At once sophisticated in concept and fully accessible, Race after Hitler is written with the mature fluency and authoritativeness of a seasoned historian and storyteller. The book is full of rich and evocative evidence and persuasive arguments that will give students and specialists alike much to debate and ponder.
— Dagmar Herzog, Graduate Center, City University of New York
An exemplary model of the new transnational history with a strongly sociocultural bent, Heide Fehrenbach's pathbreaking book will be of great interest to historians of the United States and Germany alike.
— V. R. Berghahn, Columbia University
Race after Hitler will have a significant impact that extends well beyond the community of those who study modern German history. It offers extremely interesting insights into how to think about the categories in which racial difference is articulated and expressed, and provides an exceptionally rich model of how to write a complex historical account. It is a major accomplishment that will change the way we think about German attitudes toward race in the aftermath of the Third Reich.
— Robert Moeller, University of California-Irvine
"Clearly written, forcefully argued, very well researched and documented, and highly original, Race after Hitler is a major contribution to our understanding of the transformation of postwar German society and its complex relationship with the United States. This book will also be of great interest to students of gender, race, and ethnicity. A truly splendid accomplishment."—Omer Bartov, Brown University"Heide Fehrenbach has written a fascinating and compelling tale of the children born after 1945 of unmarried German mothers and African American GI fathers. This brilliant example of the new international history will attract a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic."—Thomas Borstelmann, coauthor of Created Equal"At once sophisticated in concept and fully accessible, Race after Hitler is written with the mature fluency and authoritativeness of a seasoned historian and storyteller. The book is full of rich and evocative evidence and persuasive arguments that will give students and specialists alike much to debate and ponder."—Dagmar Herzog, Graduate Center, City University of New York"Race after Hitler will have a significant impact that extends well beyond the community of those who study modern German history. It offers extremely interesting insights into how to think about the categories in which racial difference is articulated and expressed, and provides an exceptionally rich model of how to write a complex historical account. It is a major accomplishment that will change the way we think about German attitudes toward race in the aftermath of the Third Reich."—Robert Moeller, University of California-Irvine"An exemplary model of the new transnational history with a strongly sociocultural bent, Heide Fehrenbach's pathbreaking book will be of great interest to historians of the United States and Germany alike."—V. R. Berghahn, Columbia University
Heide Fehrenbach has written a fascinating and compelling tale of the children born after 1945 of unmarried German mothers and African American GI fathers. This brilliant example of the new international history will attract a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic.
— Thomas Borstelmann, coauthor of "Created Equal"
Clearly written, forcefully argued, very well researched and documented, and highly original, Race after Hitler is a major contribution to our understanding of the transformation of postwar German society and its complex relationship with the United States. This book will also be of great interest to students of gender, race, and ethnicity. A truly splendid accomplishment.
— Omer Bartov, Brown University