Customer Reviews

Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America

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I have always been mystified by the apparent hypocrisy in the way America fought WWII, ostensibly to preserve democracy in the world and rid it of a racist tyranny, while at the same time remaining blissfully unaware of its own deep problems with race. Ms. Fehrenbach fills in some of the missing links through her examination of the role of the US in occupied Germany in helping to reshape the old Nazi racism into one more like its own - the binary of black/white color.

As Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out, "Hitler gave racism a bad name." But Fehrenbach digs deeper to examine exactly what kind of racism got the "bad name" in Germany. Specifically, she posits, racially perceived anti-Semitism. (It remains a mystery to me how anti-Semitism survived as strong as it did in the US post WWII - and post Holocaust awareness - all the way through the mid 1960's). In its place, the new West Germany learned its lessons well from American occupiers, a lesson a about binary, color-based racism.

As Fehrenback points out, anti-Black racism was certainly nothing new to Germany. But a people seemingly eager to reconstruct themselves after the racist disaster of Nazism and the Holocaust learned quickly that its American sponsors did not practice what it preached -- so much so that even the Germans eventually realized it would be better to place its unspoken-for Black occupation children in Denmark than in the United States or Germany because in the latter two countries, it was felt by German officials, Black kids would never be accepted.

Very interesting social and cultural history that sheds light on the chain of events that eventually gave traction to the modern Civil Rights movement in the US - not the least of which was how hypocritical the US looked on the world stage and how fast the Communist bloc was to seize on it as propaganda fodder.

This an a excellent book. My father was in the USAF and stationed in Germany in the 1950s. All the stories that he told me about Germany were true. I felt like I had walked in my father's shoes by reading this book. Even though at times this books reads like a college text book, it really gets to the point. The interesting racial dynamics of American racial policy both abroad and at home. I also went to Germany in 1987. Germans and especially German women treated a black man better than Americans do.