Blacks: forgotten target of Europe's hate and love

Thousands of Blacks in Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe were used in experiments, executed or gassed in Nazi death chambers. Why does this fact remain a well-kept secret?

And, how about the Black-influenced Swing craze of the wartime 1940's that tickled the feet, hearts and other parts of young white Britain and Europe? Are you hip to that jive?

Blacks and the Nazi Killing Fields

Thanks to an article by Barbara Reynolds in the St. Louis American newspaper, we now know a little bit more about a sad chapter in the wartime era. Volumes have been written about the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, the disabled and retarded, she writes. But there is virtually nothing said about the horrors that befell Blacks who were born in Germany or Black American soldiers captured and executed by the Nazis.

• The "Rhineland black bastards" that Hitler railed against in Mein Kampf were among the German Blacks rounded up and brutally exterminated . They were the offspring of German women and African soldiers who remained behind after the French occupation of the Rhineland in World War 1.
• The German SS infantry were given war-time orders to take no "Negro prisoners alive".
• One thousand French army Senegalese soldiers were used as factory slave labourers and then executed on orders of the owner, a high-ranking Nazi.
• Black prisoners of war were murdered. Reports say that on "May 4, 1944, three Colored Americans were hanged in the public square after being taken from a Budapest jail."
• In Belgium, Dec. 17, 1944, eleven Black Americans were brutally executed at the hands of Nazi racists. A monument was dedicated to their honour in 1989.

These Black victims of Hitler's Aryan ideology merit more than passing mention in studies of fascism and the massive slaughter of people by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. More painstaking research on the forgotten Blacks in the European holocaust remains to be done.

Black Liberators

Black Liberators

History must also record the coming in the final hours of World War II of one despised and rejected people to the rescue of another. "Just as Blacks and Jews were linked in their suffering, they were also linked in the liberation of the Jews from Nazi Germany. U.S. Black were among the first fighting units who liberated thousands of emaciated Jews from the death camps," says Reynolds describing the heroic actions of the 761st Tank Battalion at Buchenwald and Dachau.

Source: Barbara Reynolds, The St. Louis American, March 11-17, 1999, section A4. See also Liberators: Fighting On Two Fronts In World War II, by Lou Potter, with William Miles and Nina Rosenblum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1992.

Sturm und Swing

Glenn Miller

Les Back writes: on the 30th October 1944 Major Glenn Miller and his American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force arrived at Abbey Road, London to record music for a radio broadcast. Since arriving in Britain Miller's band had become the centre-piece of Allied propaganda prompting one Lieutenant General to comment that "next to a letter from home" his music was the greatest morale-booster in the European Theatre of Operations.

This session, however, was not directed to war weary civilians or homesick allied troops. Miller's swing tunes were aimed at German soldiers through the American Broadcast Station in Europe (ABSIE) in an effort to persuade them to lay down their arms. Jazz became the Allies newest secret weapon.

Black jazz used to tame the Wehrmacht
The station was the brainchild of General Dwight Eisenhower's Psychological Warfare Division and from April 1944 it offered news and commentary in almost every European language. At the core of ABSIE's programming was its jazz broadcasts. Glenn Miller's AEF Band recorded enough music during the Abbey Road sessions for six programmes. These were transmitted under the title "Music for the Wehrmacht" (i.e. German armies).

The sound quality of these sessions was extraordinarily high and the full dynamics of the band was captured complete with the addition of a string section. Major Miller addressed German soldiers in their own language with the assistance of Ilse Weinberger a German compere and translator. Ilse introduced Glenn Miller as the "magician of swing" and through a strange act of cultural alchemy tunes like Long Ago and Far Away and My Heart Tells Me were rendered by vocalist Johnny Desmond in German.

Nazi propagandists hit back by proclaiming jazz as the product of an inferior black race. Prior to the D Day landings posters were plastered over Dutch billboards representing the 'Allied Liberators' as the bearers of a dangerous cultural heritage.

Negative stereotypes
American troops were portrayed symbolically as an 'uncivilised Frankenstein' that had jitterbugging apes for its torso, a face hidden behind the mask of the Klu Klux Klan and black arms sporting a boxing glove on one hand and a jazz record in the other. They also tried to invoke racial fears amongst the peoples of occupied Europe through spreading a rumour that black American soldiers would play a prominent part in the invasion.

Goebbels' Ministry for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda produced a pamphlet entitled 'Greetings from England - The Coming Invasion'. Written in Dutch in the form of an Allied communiqué it stated that the Germans had been duped into wrongly expecting a sea invasion and that a half a million 'Negro paratroopers' would spearhead the attack:

"It will be an enormous humiliation for Hitler, the prophet of racial theories, when his warriors will be driven from western Europe by the black race. Dutchmen, your co-operation will be counted ... make your old jazz-records ready, because at the celebration of liberation your daughters and wives will be dancing in the arms of real Negroes".

Jazz was equated with blackness and the presence of black soldiers on mainland Europe with miscegenation.

Contradictory allure
Eisenhower's Psychological Warfare Division was not deterred by these attempts to invoke racial fears, although they were careful not to associate jazz with African American soldiers or musicians. The sound barrier of 1944 was marked on the one hand by the music of the Nazi marches and on the other by the big band swing of Glenn Miller. In Germany swing was banned. Despite this a vibrant jazz subculture existed in cities like Hamburg and Munich. Seventy-five 'Swing Youths', as the exponents of the culture were called, were sent to concentration camps by the SS for their seditious tastes.

One of the paradoxes of the Nazi terror was that SS officers themselves demonstrated a fondness for swing. This went as far as to encourage the formation of jazz combos in the concentration camps of Terazin and Auschwitz where prisoners performed swing tunes for the officers' pleasure. Allied propagandists recognised the potential for exploiting the contradictory allure that jazz possessed within Nazi society.

Jazz - USA symbol

Lindy hopping with a Black GI in wartime England

Miller's Wehrmacht sessions include a number of extraordinary exchanges between Ilse and the Major. In one programme he (Miller) denounced 'Nazi gangsterism' and claimed that "there is no expression of freedom quite so sincere as music". He presented the cultural diversity found amongst the musicians in his band as a microcosm of the American way of life:

"Today they are true Americans sitting side by side with their buddies, no matter who they are or where they came from. This is a true picture of the great melting pot, America, and a symbol of unity in the fight for freedom."

Through a clumsy summary of these words Ilse unknowingly touched on a profound tension in the relationship between Glenn Miller, jazz and this image of America. Her German translation characterised the AEF band as:

"A true symbol of America, where everybody has the same rights - it is all equal regardless of race, colour and religion".

Fragile inter-racial dialogue
True, Miller's band was made up from the sons of immigrants from Germany, Russia and Italy and even included some Jews. But this microcosm of American freedom was not extended to include the very black musicians who had played a vital role in the development of swing.

"In the Mood", arguably Miller's most famous tune, was composed by the black reed instrumentalist and arranger Joe Garland. Miller's musical gift transcended mere pastiche. He possessed an extraordinary gift for arranging and he brought jazz into the lives of an unprecedented number of people. Yet his music was invoked as an icon of American justice at the very time when racial segregation in the Allied armed forces was prevalent.

These years marked a crisis in the fragile forms of interracial dialogue that had been established within swing subculture. During the thirties Benny Goodman and John Hammond ignored musical segregation and brought Teddy Wilson into Goodman's band later to be joined by Lionel Hampton and Charlie Christian. Ten years on the colour-line was re-established in the most brutal fashion.

"German prisoners treated better than black Americans"

Count Basie

The war had a devastating effect on African American jazz musicians, many of whom were drawn into the armed services not as prestigious musical tribunes but as common foot soldiers. Fearing military racism some attempted to evade conscription. Buck Clayton, virtuoso trumpeter in Count Basie's Band, tried unsuccessfully to escape induction by eating soap and drinking Benzedrine and almost killed himself. Clayton later claimed that white officers treated German prisoners better than black Americans. This is borne out by the experience of bandleader Horace Henderson and Lena Horne who cut short a tour after finding that in Camp Robinson, Arkansas black soldiers were not permitted to see the show while Nazi prisoners of war were welcomed.

The military shadow of Jim Crow (segregation) is also a part of the Glenn Miller Story. John Hammond an ardent integrationist, talent scout and swing aficionado wrote at the time: "We are fighting Hitler and Hitlerism, and yet we are practising Hitler's own racial theories... every day that we countenance racial discrimination we are affronting our own partners". A damning commentary on the racial paradoxes of 'conscripted jazz'.

US dilemma
Decades after Glenn Miller's mysterious disappearance over the English Channel his music evokes powerful memories of wartime loss, love and the euphoria that surrounded the demise of Nazism. A more difficult and troubling memory is the way in which he is equally a symbol of one of America's most enduring dilemmas. Whites could pursue their fascination with black music without recourse to the minstrel's burnt cork mask, or any necessary inclusion of African American peers who so often were the innovators of the very music that captivated them in the first place. Swing challenged the cultural sensibilities of Nazism; it also exemplified some of the deepest flaws at the heart of the American dream - that all men are created equal.

The author of Sturm und Swing is Les Back a Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. The article is reproduced here with his permission. Glenn Miller - The Lost Recording has been released by Conifer Records on and includes the first complete document of the Music for the Wehrmacht programmes.