Hitler’s Black Victims by Clarence Lusane is a vital, wide-ranging study of the often-overlooked lives of Black people under Nazi rule and of the longer history that made their persecution possible. Drawing on archival research across North America, Europe, and Africa, as well as interviews with Black survivors of Nazi concentration camps, Lusane examines how Nazi racial ideology affected people of African descent in Germany and throughout the expanding territories of the Third Reich. His subjects include Afro-Germans, African and Caribbean colonial subjects, Black soldiers and prisoners of war, entertainers, students, workers, and people of mixed African and European heritage whose lives were shaped by the violent racial order of Nazism.
Rather than treating Black experience as a marginal footnote to the Holocaust or to European history, Lusane places it at the centre of an essential discussion about race, empire, citizenship, and memory. He traces the roots of German anti-Black racism through colonialism, the First World War, and the Weimar period, showing how Nazi policies of racial “purity” translated into surveillance, exclusion, forced sterilisation, imprisonment, and, in some cases, death. The book also considers the complicated position of Black people in Nazi-occupied Europe and the varied ways they endured, resisted, or were caught within the machinery of war and racial terror.
A major contribution of Hitler’s Black Victims is its attention to the postwar legacy of these experiences. Lusane addresses the continuing marginalisation of surviving Afro-Germans, many of whom were excluded from public remembrance and denied meaningful access to compensation arrangements created for other victims of Nazi persecution. Combining historical recovery with moral urgency, the book challenges narrow understandings of Nazi racial policy and asks whose suffering has been recognised, recorded, and repaired. It is an indispensable work for readers interested in Black European history, the African diaspora, Nazism, and the politics of historical memory.
Praise for Hitler’s Black Victims
“Clarence Lusane is an excellent and prolific writer and a brilliant thinker. In Hitler’s Black Victims, he turns his laser-like intelligence on yet another timely topic: the experience of the Black people in Nazi Germany. Neither Black history, nor European history, will be the same again.”
–Gerald Horne, author of From the Barrel of a Gun
“In its attention to almost the full span of the black history in Germany [Lusane’s] book comprises the most inclusive study of the black experience to date, bringing together materials hitherto only available in far less accessible publications.” –Humanities and Social Sciences Online
