Rhineland Bastard

Rhineland Bastard ( Rheinlandbastard) was a derogatory term used in Nazi Germany to describe Afro-Germans, believed fathered by French Army personnel of African descent who were stationed in the Rhineland during its occupation by France after World War I. There is evidence that other Afro-Germans, born from unions between German men and African women in former German colonies in Africa, were also referred to as Rheinlandbastarde. After 1933, under Nazi racial theories, Afro-Germans deemed to be Rheinlandbastarde were persecuted. They were rounded up in a campaign of compulsory sterilization. The term "Rhineland Bastard" can be traced to 1919, just after World War I, when Entente troops, most of them French, occupied the Rhineland. The British historian Richard J. Evans suggests the number of mixed-race children among them was not more than five or six hundred. All World War I belligerents with colonial possessions went to great lengths to recruit soldiers from their colonies. Germany was the only one of the Central Powers with substantial overseas possessions; it used numerous non-white troops to defend its colonies. Regardless of German attitudes toward the indigenous inhabitants of German colonies, Germany's lack of control of the sea lanes would have made it nearly impossible for the German Army to bring any substantial number of colonial troops to European battlefields. Notwithstanding the exact circumstances, most Germans quickly came to view non-white Allied troops with disdain and were contemptuous of the Allies' willingness to use these troops in Europe. Germans across the political spectrum regarded the occupation as a national disgrace. Many considered all forms of collaboration and fraternization with the occupiers as immoral (if not illegal) treason. From the spring of 1920 onward, German newspapers frequently ran hysterical stories about the alleged "Black Horror on the Rhine", accusing Senegalese soldiers of routinely gang-raping thousands of German women and girls on a daily basis.

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Related concepts (7)

Mischling

Mischling (ˈmɪʃlɪŋ; "mix-ling"; plural: Mischlinge) was a pejorative legal term which was used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed "Aryan" and non-Aryan, such as Jewish, ancestry as they were classified by the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935. In German, the word has the general denotation of hybrid, mongrel, or half-breed. Outside its use in official Nazi terminology, the term Mischlingskinder ("mixed children") was later used to refer to war babies born to non-white soldiers and German mothers in the aftermath of World War II.

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (ˈaːdɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ; 20 April 1889 - 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. During his dictatorship, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland on 1 September 1939. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.

Nazi eugenics

Nazi eugenics refers to the social policies of eugenics in Nazi Germany, composed of various ideas about genetics which are now considered pseudoscientific. The racial ideology of Nazism placed the biological improvement of the German people by selective breeding of "Nordic" or "Aryan" traits at its center. These policies were used to justify the involuntary sterilization and mass-murder of those deemed "undesirable". Eugenics research in Germany before and during the Nazi period was similar to that in the United States (particularly California), by which it had been heavily inspired.