Last of the Conquerors

Last of the Conquerors is the 1948 debut novel by African-American journalist and editor William Gardner Smith.

[1][2] The novel concerns the author's experience as an African-American GI serving in the racially segregated United States Army in US-occupied Germany after World War II.

[1] The protagonist, Hayes Dawkins, has an affair with Ilse, a white German woman.

Last of the Conquerors depicts post-Nazi Germany as more racially tolerant than the United States.

While this depiction may or may not be accurate, Smith's novel is offering a critique of Marshall Plan rhetoric claiming that American society should be a model for the world, while African-Americans continued to suffer under the Jim Crow system at home and in the military (an inconsistency noticed by many other writers, American and German, at the time).