Video After The Jump
Brutal Nazi Torture of Black German Boy Gert Schramm in Nazi Germany - Buchenwald - World War 2. 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...
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