Brown Babies
Brown Babies is a term used for children born to black soldiers and white women during and after the Second World War.
[2][3] In Occupied Austria, estimates of children born to Austrian women and American soldiers ranged between 30,000 and 40,000 perhaps 500 of them biracial.
[4][5] In the United Kingdom, West Indian members of the British military, as well as African-American soldiers in the US Army, fathered around 2,000 children during and after the war.
[6][7] A much smaller and unknown number, probably in the low hundreds, was born in the Netherlands,[8] but the lives of some have been followed into their old age and it is possible to have a better understanding of the experience that would unfold for all of the Brown Babies of World War II Europe.
Although all mischlingskinder were racially persecuted, the kind of external response the children received was dependent on the paternity of the child.
That designation and financial responsibility fell to the father or to whomever the mother was married, unless he could prove that the child was not his, which was easily accomplished in the case of biracial children.
[15] After losing their American partners when soldiers were reassigned out of Germany, many single German mothers often had difficulty finding support for their children in the postwar nation.
[17] African American newspapers, which had been vocal about equality in the military during the course of the war, took up the cause of the German and English Brown Babies.
The Pittsburgh Courier, in particular, was aggressive in reporting on "Brown Babies turned into sideshow attractions," in the countries in which they had been born, and eventually warned of a possible genocide if they were not protected in Germany.
and in the 1950s German attitudes about the children began to evolve away from the racism of World War II toward a less hostile society.
In 1952, a World Brotherhood conference was convened among academics, policy makers and media in Wiesbaden to consider the situation faced by the children and declare that it was incumbent on German society to treat them as equals and to support them in the gaining of secure futures.
They were ostensibly welcomed by British officials and military, but with unofficial concern that their presence would be disruptive in a society that knew few Black people except for several thousand who worked mainly in port areas of England.
In 1944, the League of Coloured People opened an effort to bring attention to the children, whom it "called casualties of war."
The seventy-five social, governmental and church organizations in attendance were generally compassionate and realistic about the welfare of the children, but their position in society would continue to be ambiguous.
The plight of the children became a cause first in the African American press and eventually in some of the popular media directed primarily at white readership.
In 1948, Life magazine pictured a group of the children sitting happily on the lawn of a British orphanage, Holnicote House, under the headline "The Babies They Left Behind Them."
An authoritative work on the children has been documented in a book written by British historian Lucy Bland, Professor of Social and Cultural History at Anglia Ruskin University, in Britain's Brown Babies.
Twelve of the group became subjects of research beginning in 2014 with an oral history project, "The Children of African American Liberators," leading to books on the subject published in Dutch,[26] and American[8] versions as well as contemporaneous newspaper articles, as examples in de Volksrant,[27] and NRC Handelsband,[28] and a television documentary[29] broadcast in 2017.
[30] Of those who stayed with their married mothers, four were accepted and nurtured by their de facto stepfathers, while three were not and three were sexually abused by step and adoptive fathers.
Many Germans wanted to export the children of occupiers to help them avoid racism and to find more of a home in a country with a history of many people of African descent, even though they were segregated in the South.
