After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe

1. Black Occupation Children and the Devolution of the Nazi Racial State

Chapter 1 Black Occupation Children and the Devolution of the Nazi Racial State Heide Fehrenbach Prior to 1945, children were a primary target in the Nazi regime’s murderous quest to build a new order based upon fantastical notions of racial purity . In a determined drive to craft an Aryan superstate and realize a racialized empire in Europe, the Nazi regime enacted social policies ranging from sterilization to “euthanasia” and, ultimately, mechanized mass murder targeted at those deemed eugenically or racially undesirable. Children were not incidental victims of this ‹ght for posterity. In demographic terms, they numbered among the Third Reich’s earliest and most consistent casualties. Beginning in the 1930s, hundreds of Afro-German adolescents were sterilized, and thousands of disabled institutionalized children, regardless of ethnicity, were quietly starved to death or killed by lethal injection . Abortion and adoption law in Germany was recast along racial lines, resulting in the forcible termination of fetuses and families judged inimical to “the public interest” due to the presence of “alien blood.” By the war years, Polish and Soviet youth were pressed into slave labor, while phenotypically pleasing Polish, Czech, and Yugoslavian children were kidnapped and Aryanized into German families. Once transports to the Nazi death camps began, children were seized from kindergartens without their parents’ knowledge and shipped away on their own. Painfully few of the mostly Jewish children survived the initial hours following arrival at the camps. Due to their dependent and unproductive status, on the one hand, and fears about their future reproductive potential, on the other, children —some unescorted, others accompanied by mothers, siblings, or grandmothers—were inevitably “selected” for immediate death.1 After 1945 and the demise of the Third Reich, children remained a focus of racialized social policy in Germany, particularly in the decade and a 30 half following the war. Although no longer subject to physical violence or death by state dictate, certain children continued to serve as objects of scienti ‹c study by anthropologists, psychologists, social workers, and school and state of‹cials intent on documenting signs of racial difference. Children , that is, remained a central social category for the postwar production of national-racial ideology. The historical literature on state-sponsored racism and mass murder under the Third Reich is vast, and although scholars have recently published excellent work on the Nazi regulation of sex and reproduction, there has been little focus on children as a category of social analysis.2 This essay aims to address this gap and argues that the study of social policy toward children has a lot to tell us not only about Nazi conceptions of race and nation but, more signi‹cant for the purposes of this volume, about the evolution of racial ideology during the transition from National Socialism to liberal democracy in postwar West Germany. Here I explore some key features of how attention to children—in particular, black occupation children fathered by Allied troops of color and born to white German mothers—‹gured in what I have called the devolution of the Nazi racial state.3 Informing this analysis is an insistence that we begin to consider two key postwar developments—namely, democratization and racial reconstruction—in tandem as mutually informing processes. The transition away from Nazi racial practice and understanding was hardly abrupt. Rather, this was a protracted social process lasting at least into the 1960s. It was through the articulation of social policy regarding abortion, adoption, schooling, and integration of these youth into the workforce that questions of German racial rede‹nition after 1945 were worked out. Postwar responses to black occupation children represent a formative moment in the racial reconstruction of postfascist Germany. Military occupation between 1945 and 1949 produced some 94,000 occupation children . However, of‹cial and public attention ‹xed on a small subset, the socalled “farbige Mischlinge” or “colored mixed-bloods,” distinguished from the others by their black paternity. Although they constituted a small minority of postwar German births—numbering only about 3,000 in 1950 and nearly double that by 1955—West German federal and state of‹cials, youth welfare workers, and the press invested the children with considerable symbolic signi‹cance. The years after 1945 were constituent for contemporary German racial understanding, and postwar debates regarding “miscegenation” and “Mischlingskinder” were central to the ideological transition from NaBlack Occupation Children and the Devolution of the Nazi Racial State 31 tional Socialist to democratic approaches to race...