Persecution of black people in Nazi Germany

While interracial marriage was legal under German law at the time, beginning in 1890, some colonial officials started refusing to register them, using eugenics arguments about the supposed inferiority of mixed-race children to support their decision.

[4] After World War I, French occupation forces in the Rhineland included African colonial troops, some of whom fathered children with German women.

Newspaper campaigns against the use of these troops focused on these children, dubbed "Rhineland bastards", often with lurid stories of uncivilized African soldiers raping innocent German women, the so-called "Black Horror on the Rhine".

[7] In Mein Kampf, Adolf 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.

[11] The cohort of mixed-race children born during the occupation were approaching adulthood when, in 1937, with Hitler's approval, a special Gestapo commission was created and charged with "the discrete sterilization of the Rhineland bastards.

[16] Due to the rhetoric at the time, Black Germans experienced discrimination in employment, welfare, and housing, and were also banned from pursuing higher education;[17] they were socially isolated and forbidden to have sexual relations and marriages with Aryans by the racial laws.

[23] An influx of foreign volunteers during the North African campaign also led to the presence of some black people in the Wehrmacht in units like the Free Arabian Legion.