The 30th of January 1933, Germany. Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany and the Nazi regime quickly begins to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and other individuals deemed to be “enemies of the state,” and opens the first concentration camp – Dachau – situated near Munich.
The regime targets not only Jews and political prisoners, but also Afro-Germans, who are discriminated against and persecuted despite their relatively small presence in Germany. Even though the Nazis do not have an organized program to eliminate them, an unknown number of Black people in Germany and German-occupied territories will be sterilized, incarcerated, or murdered. One such man is Gert Schramm.
Gert Schramm was born on the 28th of November 1928 in Erfurt, the capital, and the largest city of Thuringia, then part of the Weimar Republic which was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933. His parents were Marianne Schramm, a white German woman and Jack Brankson, a black American engineer with a steel company from San Francisco who arrived in Thuringia on a contract in order to build a bridge.
The two met in the shop of gentleman’s tailor Kurt Schramm who was Marianne’s father. Racism was a part of Black people’s everyday lives in Weimar Germany and this made it difficult for them to find employment, a situation exacerbated by the Great Depression which started in 1929, one year after Gert Schramm was born.
Jack Brankson, after the termination of his contract, left Germany but kept coming back to Thuringia where his son Gert was growing up. When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power in Germany in 1933, they began to put their discriminatory and false ideas about race into law and practice. The Nazis wanted to create a racially pure Germany and they considered Germans to be members of the supposedly superior “Aryan” race.
They targeted Jews, Roma, and Black people including Gert Schramm as “non-Aryans” and as members of supposedly inferior races. The Nazis passed laws that limited the rights of non-Aryan Germans. These laws were primarily intended to exclude Jews, but they also applied to Black and Romani peoples. For Black Germans, the Nazi era was a time of escalating persecution, marginalization, and isolation.
Though they had faced racism during the Weimar era, the institutionalized racism of the Nazi regime made life for them and their families even more difficult and precarious. As a result, Black people in Germany saw the Nazi rise to power as a turning point in their lives. Nazi racist ideology permeated all aspects of life in Germany. Many Germans embraced this ideology and openly discriminated against Black people on their own initiative.
As a result, for several thousand Black people then living in Germany it became increasingly difficult to find and keep work. Colleagues and bosses were reluctant to work with people whose skin color marked them as outsiders in the Nazi racial community. Firings, evictions, and poverty were common. Some Black people remember life in Nazi Germany as a time in which strangers spat on them and called them racial slurs with impunity.
In April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service removed people of “non-Aryan descent” from the German civil service. The decree was vague as to how exactly to define “non-Aryan descent.” The intention to exclude Jews was obvious, but subsequent decrees clarified that this was also applied to Black and Romani people.
In practice, relatively few Black people were directly affected by this law, because only citizens could be civil servants. And most of those Black people who were German citizens were still too young to be employed in the civil service. These citizens were multiracial Children born in the Rhineland, a region in western Germany.
Their mothers were white German women and their fathers were mostly French colonial soldiers who had been part of the large Allied military occupation of the Rhineland between 1918–1930. During the Weimar era, there were between 600-800 multiracial children born in the Rhineland and the German press referred to them using the derogatory label “Rhineland Bastards”.
These children were often discriminated against because of their fathers and their physical appearance. They experienced racism from their neighbors, classmates, and even in their own families. While some remained with their birth mothers or their families, others were placed into children’s homes or adopted.
The previously-mentioned decree and subsequent race-based restrictions severely limited future job opportunities and career paths for these children. It also made clear that the Nazis did not consider Black people part of the German national community and intended to formally exclude them from Germany society.
In September 1935, the Nazi regime announced the Nuremberg Race Laws, which put Nazi ideas about race into law. Those laws primarily targeted Jews but, beginning in November 1935, the Nuremberg Laws also applied to Romani and Black people, whom the regime referred to derogatorily as “Gypsies, Negroes and their bastards”.
There were two Nuremberg Race Laws. The first, the Reich Citizenship Law, defined a German citizen as a person who is “of German or related blood.” The point was to exclude people whom the regime saw as racially inferior, namely Jews, Roma, and Black people, from having political rights in Germany.
The second was the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. This law banned race-mixing or what was called “race defilement”. It forbade future intermarriages and sexual relations between Jews and people “of German or related blood.” A subsequent supplement to the law forbade Black people in Germany to marry “people of German or related blood.”
The goal was to prevent Black people from marrying and having children with Germans. The Nuremberg Race Laws made it very difficult for Black people in Germany to marry, start families, or build a future. They particularly affected those of reproductive and marrying age. While it was legal for Black people to marry each other, those couples were rare because of the small size of the Black community.
Despite the Nuremberg Laws, some Black people and so called German “Aryans” still became romantically involved with one another. These relationships were dangerous for both partners, especially if they chose to try to legally marry. In Nazi Germany, everyone was required to apply for permission to marry.
When interracial couples applied, their applications were consistently denied for racial reasons. These applications brought their interracial relationships to the attention of government authorities. This often had dire consequences for the couple. In multiple cases, marriage applications resulted in harassment, sterilization and the breaking up of partnerships.
Legal couples whose marriages pre-dated the Nuremberg Laws were harassed by the Nazi regime. The regime pressured white German women to divorce their Black husbands. Interracial couples and their children were often humiliated and even assaulted when they appeared together in public.
Like their parents, many Black children in Germany experienced the Nazi era as a time of increased loneliness, isolation, and exclusion. Some Black children felt German and wanted to be a part of the excitement. But Nazi racial ideology had no place for Black-German children.
For Black children in Nazi Germany, schools became sites of humiliation. Black children were often degraded in racial science classes and ridiculed by teachers who supported the Nazis. Just as the Nazification of the education system greatly restricted the rights of Jewish children to attend public schools, it also impacted Black children over the course of the 1930s.
Some Black students were expelled and unable to complete their education. Few private schools would accept Black students and finding apprenticeships, which in Germany was crucial to find employment, became increasingly difficult. Such was a case of Gert Schramm.
After completing elementary school, he worked as a helper in a car repair shop. According to the Nuremberg Laws, he was denied the right to any apprenticeship as a “Mischling of the first grade”. Mischling was a pejorative legal term used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed “Aryan” and non-Aryan ancestry as codified in the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935.
Most of the Black people living under the Nazi Regime were effectively trapped there. While some tried to leave, for the vast majority this was not possible as they could not receive visas to other countries or legally immigrate elsewhere because of citizenship issues. Eventually, Black people in Germany had little choice but to adapt to life under the Nazis.
The second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939 with the invasion of Poland. During World War II, Nazi policies against Black people became more extreme. This occurred in the context of the broader radicalization of Nazi policies against supposed racial and political enemies.
Because of laws and policies that sharpened discrimination and racism in Germany, many Black people ended up imprisoned in workhouses, prisons, hospitals, psychiatric facilities, and concentration camps. In 1941, Jack Brankson, Gert’s father, was arrested during one of his visits to Germany on the basis of the Nazi racial laws and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. There is no trace of him after that.
However, Gert Schramm was no exception either. He was arrested in May 1944. Officially, he was taken into “protective custody” by the Gestapo under the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor as his father was an Afro-American man.
For weeks, he was moved from one Gestapo prison to another, denied food and water, beaten up, hit in the face and knocked around until on the 20th of July 1944 when he was finally deported to Buchenwald concentration camp which was one of the largest concentration camps established within German borders. He was 15 years old when the gate with the inscription “Jedem das Seine” meaning “to each what he deserves” closed behind him.
From that moment on Gert was not called by his name anymore. He became only a number: 49489 which was tattooed onto his left arm. His sentence was an unspecified time, to be no less than fifteen years. Prisoners lived in the Buchenwald main camp which was surrounded by an electrified barbed-wire fence, watchtowers, and a chain of sentries outfitted with automatic machine guns.
At the entrance to the main camp, there was a notorious punishment block, known as the Bunker, where prisoners who violated the camp regulations were punished and often tortured to death. In addition to the punishment block, the main camp included 33 wooden barracks, disinfection buildings, a brothel, and a crematorium.
Most of the early inmates at Buchenwald were political prisoners, people who had been arrested for some form of political opposition to the Nazi regime. In addition to the political prisoners and Jews, Buchenwald prisoners also included repeat offenders, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Sinti and Roma people and German military deserters.
In Buchenwald, Gert had to do heavy forced labor. During this time, he was buried in a satellite commando during an air raid by an Allied bomber. He later recalled:
“I suffered a severe head wound in the attack. Despite this, the parlor service didn’t want to send me to the infirmary at first because they were afraid I might not come back. An injured prisoner could be quickly classified as a ‘useless eater’ in the SS manner and simply hosed down.
But the wound became infected and I developed a fever. With a heavy heart, my blockmates finally sent me to the outpatient clinic. Hours later, it was finally my turn and the frightening pleasure of being treated personally by the head of the infirmary. He pushed me into the operating room, where a man was having his leg amputated without anesthesia.
Then he took one quick look at my head and, without warning, just ripped open the wound with a hook. I almost fainted from the intense pain. He grabbed some kind of pliers and tried to pull out a splinter of metal stuck in my skull. When that didn’t work, he used a hammer and chisel to help. With every hit I thought my head would fly apart. After that, for three long weeks I was cared for by my comrades.”
15-year-old Gert was then taken to barrack 42 with the so called “political” prisoners where he met people who were friendly to him. Most were communists who had been in Buchenwald for a long time and therefore knew the camp well. They told Gert which work details were a little less bad, and how best to protect himself from beatings at roll call.
The block senior, Otto Grosse, a Lower Saxony communist, sat down with Gert and gave him vital tips:
“Don’t look SS men in the face, hide in the middle during roll call, just don’t attract attention.”
Those tips would later save his life. In the camp, Gert was also forced to work in a limestone quarry which supplied the material for the construction of buildings, roads and paths. Labour in the quarry was one of the hardest occupations and the survival rate of prisoners was very low.
Every day, up to ten men were carried out dead from the quarry back to the camp by Schramm and political prisoners he was put in with. Many died of exhaustion or were shot “on the run” by the SS. After 3 weeks in a quarry, a Communist kapo Willi Bleicher moved Gert to an easier job in construction team and finally he ended up in the carpentry workshop, where the working conditions were more bearable.
Before the Buchenwald prisoners went to work, they were counted during roll call. If the numbers did not add up, roll call was prolonged and often took long hours which could be especially tormenting for the prisoners, particularly in severe weather. Schramm later recalled how in the snow during cold winter days they were ordered to stand outside, with no food and water, from 5 to 11 AM.
Schramm once saw a prisoner, a young Jew from Leipzig named Wolfgang Kohn, get stomped to death by an SS guard, simply because he had moved during roll call. During roll calls, the unhealthy or those who stood out, risked being sent to an extermination camp or killed on the spot.
As the only Black prisoner, he already stood out and after weeks in the stone quarry, he was in a weakened state. The previously-mentioned block senior, Otto Grosse, organized other inmates to surround him during the daily roll call, thus protecting him.
The Buchenwald camp was liberated in April 1945. On the 8th of April 1945 Buchenwald camp prisoners, using a secret short-wave transmitter and small generator, send the Morse code message:
“To the Allies. To the army of General Patton. This is the Buchenwald concentration camp. SOS. We request help. They want to evacuate us. The SS want to destroy us.”
3 minutes after the transmission, the desperate prisoners receive the message:
“Hold out. Rushing to your aid. Staff of Third Army.”
3 days later, on the 11th of April, the US 6th Armored Division liberated Buchenwald and found more than 21,000 survivors who were weak and emaciated. They survived because when Gestapo headquarters at Weimar telephoned the camp administration to announce that it was sending explosives to blow up any evidence of the camp, including its inmates, the Gestapo did not know that the administrators had already fled and a prisoner answered the phone informing headquarters that explosives would not be needed, as the camp had already been blown up, which was not true.
After General Patton toured the camp, he ordered the mayor of the nearby city of Weimar to bring 1,000 citizens to Buchenwald to be shown the crematorium and other evidence of Nazi atrocities. The Americans wanted to ensure that the German people would take responsibility for Nazi crimes, instead of dismissing them as atrocity propaganda.
Many of them were crying and some of them even fainted after seeing the dead bodies, starved survivors behind barbed wire fences as well as a table display of paintings on human skins, lampshades made of human skin, various parts of the human body preserved in alcohol and two heads which were shrunk to one-fifth of their normal size.
When thousand citizens from Weimar visited the Buchenwald, Gert Schramm was there. They claimed:
“We did not know what was going on!”
However, Gert never believed them. Years after the end of the war he remembered thinking:
“Now have a look what happened here with your acquiescence.”
Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 persons from all countries of Europe in Buchenwald. Exact mortality figures for the Buchenwald site can only be estimated, as camp authorities never registered a significant number of the prisoners. The SS murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system. Some 11,000 of them were Jews.
In June 1945 Gert Schramm returned home, on foot, into a new life. He then worked at the Wismut uranium mine in the Soviet occupation zone. From 1956 to 1964, he worked in Essen in a coal mine, but then chose to move to East Germany.
With the help of another former Buchenwald prisoner, Hermann Axen, who had been one of a group of Communist prisoners who protected him during his imprisonment, he started his own business in 1985, “Schramms Reisen,” a taxi company.
As a member of the prisoners advisory board of the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation, Schramm for years visited schools to speak of the horrors of the Buchenwald camp. During one such visit in 2012 he said:
“I wish our youth will never give in to these racist Nazi thugs and they won’t heed their views filled with hatred and racial discrimination.”
Gert Schramm was 87 years old when he died after a long illness on the 18 of April 2016. Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana, his friend and a Member of the European Parliament, believes he never fully recovered from his country’s rejection of him because of the color of his skin.
“He was an unhappy man,” she said.
Gert‘s revenge was not only that he survived and lectured for years about the hardship he endured during the Nazi regime, but that his legacy and bravery will go on through his family as after the war he got married and had four grown children, was a grandfather and great-grandfather. He left to the generations to come a message of peace and reconciliation.
There were many tears shed for Gert Schramm.
