When the Nazis came to power in 1933, there were several thousand Black people living in Germany. The Nazi regime harassed and persecuted them because the Nazis viewed Black people as racially inferior. While there was no centralized, systematic program targeting Black people for murder, many Black people were imprisoned, forcibly sterilized, and murdered by the Nazis.
Introduction
When Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933, there were several thousand Black people living in Germany. The Nazi regime discriminated against them because the Nazis viewed Black people as racially inferior. During the Nazi era (1933–1945), the Nazis used racial laws and policies to restrict the economic and social opportunities of Black people in Germany. They also harassed, imprisoned, sterilized, and murdered an unknown number of Black people.
Gert Schramm, for example, was a mixed-race German man born in Erfurt on 25 November He was arrested on 6 May 1944 in Bad Langensalza and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp where he was given prisoner number 49489.
The document below is Gert’s Prisoner Registration Card from that camp. As well as showing his basic biographical details and a physical description, this record also gives brief details of Gert’s arrest and arrival into Buchenwald. In the section of this document which gives the reason for arrest, two are given.
The first is ‘politisch’ , i.e. political, and the second is ‘Negermischling 1. Grades,’ a racial slur used to indicate that a person was mixed-race. The fact that Gert’s ethnicity appears in the section of card used to record a reason for arrest indicates that this was a factor in his incarceration.
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