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Concept
Rhineland Bastard
Summary
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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