No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Bodies and Spaces: Citizenship as Claims-Making in Germany, 1942–1949
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 August 2023
Abstract
In 1935, the Nazi Party promulgated the Reich citizenship law, which, to protect the purity of the Volksgemeinschaft, denaturalized numerous people who perceived themselves as German. Despite this perceived threat to the national body, the Third Reich drafted some mixed-race men to serve in the Wehrmacht during World War II. Traditionally, scholars have focused their studies of mixed-race veterans on the so-called Jewish Mischlinge who served in the Wehrmacht. This article expands the aperture by examining the oral history testimony of Hans Hauck, a Black German Wehrmacht veteran whose wartime experiences present a complex story of a man who claimed to be German despite legal structures and normative ideals about Germanness that excluded him. Drawing on Hauck's oral history testimonies regarding two periods of his military service, I argue that Hauck used his body, symbols, and physical spaces to seek recognition as a legitimate claimant of Germanness.
- Type
- Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society of the American Historical Association
References
1 Reichsgesetzblatt 1935, Teil 1 (hereafter RGB1.I), September 15, 1935, 1146, in Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., ed., State, Economy, and Society, 1933–1939, vol. 2, Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader (Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 1994), 53–56Google Scholar; Majer, Diemut, “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe, with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939–1945, trans. Hill, Peter T., Humphrey, Edward V., and Levin, Brian (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 111Google Scholar.
2 Hans Hauck, interview by Alexander Karschnia, March 18, 1998, interview code 41964, video recording, Visual History Archive Online, USC Shoah Foundation, Los Angeles, CA (http://vha.usc.edu/viewingPage?testimonyID=42720&returnIndex=0). Antoinette Sutto translated this interview. In his description of this incident, Hauck did not indicate if other soldiers tried on the red tarboosh.
3 Hauck 1998 interview.
4 Hauck was one of approximately 600 children fathered by French colonial troops during the occupation of the Rhineland. See Pommerin, Reiner, “Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde.” Das Schicksal einer farbigen deutschen Minderheit, 1918–1937 (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag Gmbh, 1979), 12 and 96–101Google Scholar.
5 In accordance with Germany's 1913 citizenship law, children gained German citizenship through their fathers unless their mothers were unmarried and their foreign fathers did not claim them. Hans Hauck inherited German citizenship from his unwed mother. Lora Wildenthal argues that this form of citizenship rooted in paternal descent reflected the “racialization of contemporary thinking about Germanness” without including racial definitions in the law. See “German Imperial & State Citizenship Law of 1913, July 22, 1913,” American Society of International Law 8, no. 3, Supplement: Official Documents (July 1914): 218; Lora Wildenthal, “Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 265–67.
6 Hauck 1998 interview; Campt, Tina, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 31 and 96Google Scholar; Campt, Tina, “Family Matters: Diaspora, Difference, and the Visual Archive,” Social Text 27, no. 1 (2009): 84–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Black Survivors of the Holocaust, directed by David Okuefuna, Afro Wisdom Films, 1997. Hauck speculated about his father's name in his 1998 interview; I have chosen not to include the name as a result. In Okuefuna's documentary, Hauck expresses his belief that his mother died from anxiety resulting from her family's rejection and her concern for him.
7 Hauck 1998 interview; Black Survivors of the Holocaust; Pommerin, “Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde,” 77–84. After the procedure, officials escorted Hauck to an office where they gave him a vasectomy certificate; he signed an agreement that he would neither marry nor have intimate relations with “Aryan” Germans.
8 Hauck 1998 interview; Campt, Other Germans, 115, 121–22; Campt, “Family Matters,” 99.
9 Hauck 1998 interview.
10 Hauck 1998 interview; Campt, Other Germans, 203–04.
11 Elizabeth Dulle, “Hans Hauck (1920–2003),” Black Central Europe (http://www.blackcentraleurope.com/biographies/hans-hauck-elizabeth-dulle).
12 Nathans, Eli, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility, and Nationalism (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 201–02 and 217–18Google Scholar. Prior o 1934, each Land (state) developed its own citizenship laws.
13 Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany, 218–19; Brubaker, Rogers, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 12Google Scholar.
14 Majer, “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich, 111.
15 Majer, “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich, 111.
16 Majer, “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich, 111–22; RGB1.I (1935), 1333–34, cited in Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945, 538–39. The First Supplementary Decree (November 1935) automatically excluded persons of “foreign blood” or those who exhibited its influence from the status of “Reich citizen” and stripped the right to vote from Geltungsjuden (individuals counted as Jews). The Eleventh Decree (November 1941) divested “state subjects” of this status upon their voluntary or involuntary departure from the Reich. The Twelfth Decree (April 1943) reserved unrestricted “state subject” status for foreign “Aryans” who served in the Wehrmacht or its auxiliary organizations; it also created the categories of “conditional state subjects” and individuals with “protected status,” which differentiated between non-Jewish “non-Aryans” whom the regime viewed as “capable of Germanization” and those who were not.
17 Walter Fischer, Die Deutsche Wehrpflicht, ihre Rechtsgrundlagen and ihre Rechtsnatur. (PhD diss., Tübingen, 1938), 128 and 138–42, and Johannes Heckel, Wehrverfassung und Wehrrecht des Großdeutschen Reiches, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1939), 101, quoted in Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription, and Civil Society, trans. Andrew Boreham and Daniel Brückenhaus (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 257.
18 Kathleen Canning, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 203; Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, 50–51; Kathleen Canning, “The Stakes of Citizenship: Bodies in the Aftermath of War and Revolution,” Plenary Speech at the Eighth Conference in Citizenship Studies: Bodies and Citizenship, Wayne, NE, April 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35vJ9KFDZPQ); Paul-Ludwig Weinacht, “‘Staatsbürger’ zur Geschichte und Kritik eines Politischen Begriffs,” Der Staat 8, no. 1 (1969): 61–63.
19 Margaret Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 23.
20 On “aspirational citizenship,” see Anne Epstein and Rachel Fuchs, ed., “Conceptualizing Citizenship,” in Gender and Citizenship in Historical and Transnational Perspective: Agency, Space, Borders (London: Palgrave, 2017), 233.
21 Irene Bloemraad, “Theorising the Power of Citizenship as Claims-Making,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, no. 1 (2018): 6.
22 For other works on the relational aspects of citizenship, see Saskia Bonjour and Betty de Hart, “Intimate Citizenship: Introduction to the Special Issue on Citizenship, Membership and Belonging in Mixed-Status Families,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 28, no. 1 (2021); Charles Tilly, “Citizenship, Identity, and Social History,” International Review of Social History 40 (1995).
23 Bloemraad, “Theorising the Power of Citizenship as Claims-Making,” 5–6.
24 Engin Isin, “Performative Citizenship,” in The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, ed. Ayelet Shachar, Rainer Bauböck, Irene Bloemraad, and Maarten Vink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 501–07; Bloemraad, “Theorising the Power of Citizenship as Claims-Making,” 4–5 and 12. For a detailed discussion of performative citizenship in nondemocratic polities, see Isin, “Performative Citizenship,” 511–14.
25 Elzbieta H. Olesky, “Citizenship Revisited,” in Intimate Citizenships: Gender, Sexualities, Politics, ed. Elzbieta Olesky (New York: Routledge, 2009), 3–5.
26 See Brian Crim, “‘Was It All Just a Dream?’ German-Jewish Veterans and the Confrontation with völksich Nationalism in the Interwar Period,” in Sacrifice and National Belonging in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Greg Eghihian and Matthew Paul Berg (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 90–117; Michael J. Geheran, “Remasculinizing the Shirker: The Jewish Frontkämpfer under Hitler,” Central European History 51, no. 3 (2018): 440–65.
27 See Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 62–65; Steven R. Welch, “Mischling Deserters from the Wehrmacht,” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 44, no. 1 (1999): 273–324. Soldiers of Jewish descent comprised less than 1 percent of the estimated 17 million Wehrmacht soldiers.
28 Majer, “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich, 111; Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke, Kommentare zur deutschen Rassengesetzgebung, vol. 1 (Munich: Beck, 1936), 136, quoted in Campt, Other Germans, 146.
29 For a discussion of petitions submitted by Germans of Jewish ancestry to the Reich Agency for Kinship Research, see Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 144–52; Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, “Determining ‘People of German Blood,’ ‘Jews,’ and ‘Mischlinge’: The Reich Kinship Office and the Competing Discourses and Powers of Nazism, 1941–1943,” Central European History 15, no. 1 (2006): 46 and 52–53.
30 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 2–3 and 120–21.
31 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 121.
32 Among these works are George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Bronwen Walter, Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place, and Irish Women (New York: Routledge, 2001). For a more recent study, see Sarah Thomsen Vierra, Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
33 Ray Beveridge, Die schwarze Schmach, die weiße Schande (Hamburg: F. W. Rademacher, 1922), 22, quoted in Julia Roos, “Racist Hysteria to Pragmatic Rapprochement? The German Debate about Rhenish ‘Occupation Children,’ 1920–30,” Contemporary European History 22, no. 2 (May 2013): 161; Pommerin, “Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde,” 12–22.
34 “1918 und 1940. So führt das verkommene Frankreich Krieg!” Völkischer Beobachter 53, no. 152 (May 31, 1940): 4, cited in Raffael Scheck, Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 106.
35 Scheck, Hitler's African Victims, 9 and 100–05. In general, Germans viewed North Africans as having a higher status than sub-Saharan Africans because of their lighter skin. Some high-ranking officials, including Joseph Goebbels, shared this view because of North African support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War and viewed this population as potential, although subordinate, allies. Even so, this view of the political usefulness of North Africans did not result in clear and consistent propaganda messages that distinguished between these two populations.
36 Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 7–8.
37 Young, Embodying Black Experience.
38 Barth was sterilized in June 1937. See “Die Rheinlandbastarde,” Euskirchen.de (https://www.euskirchen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/PDF/service/stadtarchiv/Gegen_das_vergessen/Rheinlandbastarde.pdf).
39 These works include May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz, ed., Farbe bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf fen Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1986), translated as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, trans. Anne V. Adams (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, ed., The African-German Experience: Critical Essays (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996). For a more recent study of Afro-German history, see Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
40 Campt, Other Germans; Campt, “Family Matters,” 83–114; Tina Campt, “The Motion of Stillness: Diaspora, Stasis, and Black Vernacular Photography,” in Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro-German History, Politics, and Culture, ed. Sara Lennox (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 157.
41 Campt, Other Germans, 94, 115, 121–22; Campt, “Family Matters,” 99; Hauck 1998 interview.
42 Julia Roos, “An Afro-German Microhistory: Gender, Religion, and the Challenges of Diasporic Dwelling,” Central European History 49 (2016): 255–56.
43 Priscilla Layne, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 153.
44 Hauck 1998 interview; Campt, Other Germans, 115–16. Hauck was wounded in the shoulder and lungs. A Gestapo official helped Hauck conceal the event by reporting it as an accidental discharge of a weapon. Hauck recounts this event in both interviews, but he offers different explanations. In the 1998 interview, Hauck suggested he had been motivated by his exclusion from military service and the limitations placed on him by the Nazi regime's discriminatory policies; he later denied this.
45 In his 1998 interview, Hauck seemed to grow exasperated when his interview partner interrupted him or asked questions that Hauck did not want to answer. There are moments in the excerpts of his interview with Tina Campt where Hauck attempts to relate to her as a Black American by suggesting that “one doesn't have to tell a Black American in what way this difference … was expressed.” See Campt, Other Germans, 200 and 230.
46 Christopher Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Post-war Testimony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 42.
47 Browning, Collected Memories, 37–38.
48 Manfred Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Zeit der Indoktrination (Hamburg: R. v. Decker's Verlag, 1969), 75.
49 Welch, “Mischling Deserters from the Wehrmacht,” 279 and 284–86; Rigg, Hitler's Jewish Soldiers, 230.
50 Peter Martin and Christine Alonzo, “Mandenda Ngando (Mitte) als Soldat der Wehrmacht, um 1940,” in the section titled “Ein Familienalbum,” in Zwischen Charleston und Stechschritt. Schwarze im Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz Verlag GmbH, 2004), 55; “Die Rheinlandbastarde,” Euskirchen.de (https://www.euskirchen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/PDF/service/stadtarchiv/Gegen_das_vergessen/Rheinlandbastarde.pdf). I cannot estimate the numbers of Black German men who served in the Wehrmacht, but I expect the population size to be very small.
51 Jeremy Noakes, “The Development of Nazi Policy towards the German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge’ 1933–1945,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 34, no. 1 (1989): 322–23.
52 Hauck 1998 interview; Campt, Other Germans, 96.
53 Hauck 1998 interview.
54 Hauck 1998 interview.
55 Hauck 1998 interview.
56 Hauck 1998 interview.
57 Hauck 1998 interview; Campt, Other Germans, 96. When describing this period in his life, Hauck commented that “by the time I was twelve, I didn't let anyone hit me; I defended myself.”
58 Hauck 1998 interview. In the interview, Hauck noted that it was only later in life that he realized that he “was the perfect ‘Aryan’ choice to pass out leaflets, which were actually directed against [him]. This contradiction, this ambivalence, yes it was there then, but it's been part of my whole life.”
59 Hauck 1998 interview; Campt, Other Germans, 106.
60 Hauck 1998 interview.
61 Hauck 1998 interview; Black Survivors of the Holocaust.
62 Hauck 1998 interview. When describing the procedure and its aftermath, Hauck noted, “If you look at the big picture, it doesn't play a big role for assessing my beliefs and all that.”
63 Hauck 1998 interview; Campt, Other Germans, 118. In his 1998 interview, Hauck explains that his physical exam indicated that he was “fit for all branches of service.” However, the officer distributing the service record books refused to issue Hauck his book and said, “You know why. You're not fit for service.” In his interview with Campt, Hauck noted that he was “allowed to work, but back then [he] wasn't allowed to become a soldier.”
64 Hauck 1998 interview; Campt, Other Germans, 115–18. In his 1998 interview, Hauck noted that he did not receive a second physical exam, and yet there was “a red mark in [his] timeline” to indicate that his unfit status had been revoked. During his interview with Tina Campt, Hauck credited this change to a friend's father who had led the local Hitler Youth group, of which Hans Hauck had been a member. Hauck did not specify what actions the man took on his behalf, but it may have involved waiving the second exam.
65 Hauck 1998 interview.
66 Campt, Other Germans, 121–22; Hauck 1998 interview.
67 Hauck 1998 interview.
68 Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, 253–58.
69 Campt, Other Germans, 119.
70 Hauck 1998 interview. According to Hauck, his master sergeant was the most knowledgeable about his background. Later, the unit's leadership changed rapidly due to deaths, injuries, or administrative moves. This rapid leadership turnover meant that fewer leaders had time to become familiar with soldiers in the unit.
71 Hauck 1998 interview. Jüdche is dialect for “little Jew.”
72 Hauck 1998 interview. After recounting this story, Hauck said, “I should scratch out that he called me ‘Jüdche’ because of how I look, that wasn't it…. To the two others [soldiers from Upper Silesia], he said, “‘Oh, you Polacks’ because they sometimes didn't understand; but without meaning it contemptuously, or, or saying any other kind of things. That was not the case, I can rule that out with certainty.”
73 Rolf Giesen, Nazi Propaganda Films: A History and Filmography (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Company, 2003), 51–55; the radio broadcast Voice of the Front (February 4, 1940), quoted in German Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcasts During the War, ed. Ernst Kris and Hans Speier (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), 204.
74 Hauck 1998 interview.
75 Hauck 1998 interview.
76 Hauck 1998 interview.
77 Hauck 1998 interview.
78 Hauck 1998 interview; Campt, Other Germans, 121.
79 Svenja Goltermann, The War in Their Minds: German Soldiers and Their Violent Pasts in West Germany, trans. Philip Schmitz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 60 and 80.
80 Henri Lefebvre, “Space: Social Product and Use Value (1979),” in State, Space, World: Selected Essays, ed. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009): 188–89.
81 Hauck 1998 interview.
82 Hauck 1998 interview.
83 Campt, Other Germans, 124. In his interview, Hauck noted that none of these Saarlanders were French or spoke French.
84 Hauck 1998 interview.
85 Hauck 1998 interview.
86 On hard manliness, see Thomas Kühne, “Protean Masculinity, Hegemonic Masculinity: Soldiers in the Third Reich,” Central European History 51, no. 3 (2018): 398–401.
87 From the radio broadcast Front Reports (December 15, 1940), quoted in German Radio Propaganda, 335–36. The virtues included resolution, circumspection, courage, energy, daring, and patience.
88 Campt, Other Germans, 124.
89 For a more detailed discussion of positionality and identity construction as it relates to this event in Hauck's testimony, see Campt, Other Germans, 126–35.
90 On authorized and marginalized masculinities, see Connell, R. W., Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 80–81Google Scholar.
91 Geheran, “Remasculinizing the Shirker.” 458–64.
92 Hauck 1998 interview.
93 For a more detailed discussion, see Goltermann, The War in Their Minds, 60–80.
94 Hauck 1998 interview.
95 Hauck 1998 interview. Hauck explained that he “read everything [he] could get, because [he] was always a bookworm, [his] whole life.”
96 Hauck 1998 interview.
97 Hauck 1998 interview.
98 Hauck 1998 interview. When asked if his political consciousness was shaped by his studies at the Antifa school, Hauck declared, “Mm-hm [no], it was through reading.”
99 Young, Embodying Black Experience, 4 and 7–8.
100 Hauck 1998 interview.
101 Hauck 1998 interview.
102 Hauck 1998 interview. It is unclear whether the men in this camp were from Hauck's unit or if these relationships emerged from their shared hardships at this camp.
103 Hauck 1998 interview.
104 Eley, Geoff and Palmowski, Jan, “Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany,” in Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Eley, Geoff and Palmowski, Jan, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 19Google Scholar.
105 Burleigh, Michael and Wipperman, Wolfgang, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 45Google Scholar.
106 Majer, “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich, 40.
107 Wiesen, S. Jonathan, “Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Public Relations and Consumer Citizenship in the Third Reich,” in Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Eley, Geoff and Palmowski, Jan, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 147Google Scholar.
108 Wiesen, “Creating the Nazi Marketplace,” 162.
109 Eley and Palmowski, Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany, 19.
110 Plummer, Kenneth, Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 100Google Scholar.