The question of what life in America would have looked like under Nazi rule continues to fascinate us. In 2019, shows like Man in the High Castle are still popular. The show’s three seasons, set in 1960s America, are plenty-thought provoking, but given that it makes only oblique references to race at a time the civil rights movement would have been blooming historically, it left me wondering what a Nazi-ruled America would have looked like for blacks.

Nazi Racial Ideology

Racism was core to Nazism. In Mein Kampf, everything good was associated with Aryans, the alleged master race. Hitler declared that “[a]ll the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.” Blacks were inferior. For Hitler, in fact, they were part of a Jewish plot to degrade Germany: “[i]t was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.”

These attitudes influenced Nazi policy. The few blacks in Germany found it impossible to become German citizens; their passports eventually read “stateless negroes.” In 1941, they were kicked out of German public schools. They were the focus of forced sterilization efforts.

Historian Eve Rosenhaft suggests that a 1942 survey of blacks in Europe was done with the intent of rounding them up. That never happened. But during the war, the Nazis used blacks as propaganda to stiffen the German people’s’ spines. Take a look at these pictures:

Ironically, the Nazis later targeted black soldiers in their propaganda efforts during the war too. Leaflets targeting black soldiers bragged “there have never been lynchings of colored men in Germany. They have always been treated decently.” Others claimed that “colored people living in Germany can go to any church they like. They have never been a problem to the Germans.”

But black soldiers would have seen this for the lie it was. Black newspapers drew parallels between Jim Crow and Nazism before the U.S. even entered the war. In 1938, the New York Amsterdam News reported that “[t]aking a leaf from United States Jim Crow practices against the Negro, German Nazis plan to Jim Crow Jews on German railways…” More ominously, it noted that “[t]he Nazis, in declaring their intentions of Jim-Crowing Jews within the Reich, specifically cited American Jim Crow customs against its Negro citizens…” Walter White of the NAACP even went so far as to ask Jesse Owens and other black athletes to boycott the 1936 Olympics because it was being held in Nazi Germany.  He warned that “if the Hitlers and Mussolinis of the world are successful it is inevitable that dictatorships based upon prejudice will spread throughout the world, as indeed they are now spreading.”

Nazi obsession with racial purity ultimately led to the holocaust where more than six million Jews were murdered. Other groups such as gypsies, gays, and slavs suffered grievously too.

Life for Blacks under Nazi Occupation

Given their propensity for genocide, what would the Nazis have done if they had taken over America and its millions of blacks? Surely nothing good. Man in the High Castle hints at this. At one point, Joe Blake, one of the main characters, reads the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to a child. After reading a passage about Jim, the child asks “how can he be good–he’s black!” At which point his mom notes that the Nazis banned the book. We can infer that when they took over America, the Nazis’ propaganda targeted blacks. In the show, one of the most important resistance fighters, Lemuel Washington, is black, and so are several others. So we can infer that whatever remained of the black community perceived the Nazis as a sufficiently serious threat that it was preferable to risk death in the resistance.

The book makes these implicit racial dynamics explicit. The Nazis reinstituted slavery in the United States. This outcome is so horrifying because it is so believable. Slavery legally ended with the 13th amendment. But it continued in all but name with things like peonage, sharecropping, and chain gangs. Well into the 20th century, an outside observer could look at the lives of many blacks and conclude they had not improved since slavery. Nazi occupiers could have used blacks (and other disfavored minorities) as slave labor to power their war effort the way they used slave labor in Europe. And Nazi slavery might have been even worse than American slavery. During the antebellum period, slaves had the hope–however distant and difficult–of running the underground railroad to freedom in the North. But with Nazis occupying all of America, where would they have gone?

An even more horrifying possibility could have greeted blacks when Nazis arrived: extermination. We know the Nazis viewed blacks as inferior, and we know from the holocaust that they were willing to commit genocide against groups they despised. The logical conclusion of these attitudes would be death camps. And just as Poles and Ukrainians aided Nazis in their persecution of Jews, we can imagine some racist Americans doing similarly. This would have made blacks especially likely to resist Nazi occupation. So in the video game Wolfenstein: the New Collosus, when a black woman was a key resistance leader, I was unsurprised. All Americans would have lost freedom and dignity under Nazi rule, just as those living in conquered European nations had. Blacks could have faced wholesale genocide. The resulting calculus would have been something like “I could die if I do resist, but I will die if I don’t.” As an aside, Wolfenstein surprisingly offers a more thoughtful look at race relations in Nazi-occupied America. A scene in the game features KKK members and others welcoming Nazi rule with open arms, grateful to be rid of blacks and Jews. It acknowledges the backwards racial attitudes too many had when, in a flashback, the protagonist’s father punishes him for befriending a black girl.

Perhaps the most horrifying possibility is that things would have stayed the same under Nazi rule. Blacks would have attended separate and unequal schools, drank from separate water fountains, been denied the ability to live in particular neighborhoods, and faced widespread lynchings…just like they did under Jim Crow. The reason I say this is perhaps worst of all is because it means the Nazis–some of the most evil people in history–would have said “black people were already oppressed enough before we got here.”

This possibility was reflected in Jesse Owen’s experience. At the 1936 Olympics, Owens put the lie to Nazi racial ideology by winning four gold medals. There was a persistent story that Hitler refused to shake Owen’s hand. But Owens wryly noted, “I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either.” He later reflected that “after all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country and I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus…I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now what’s the difference [between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow]?” At a reception in his honor at the Waldorf Astoria, he was relegated to the service lift instead of the regular one reserved for whites. The sad truth is that for Owens, there was no difference between Nazi ideology about blacks and Jim Crow ideology about blacks.

All of these possibilities are frightening. But there is a more uplifting one. It’s hard to imagine a people who rebelled against a king submitting to Nazi rule. I’m confident that there would have been widespread resistance. The only way for any resistance movement to succeed would have been to unify across racial and ethnic divides. And there is hope that even racists resisting the Nazis would have had reason to reconsider their prejudices. The more self-aware ones would have been able to draw parallels between Jim Crow and Nazi racial policies.

The trailer for season four of the Man in the High Castle looks promising when it comes to race. Lots of black resistance fighters are portrayed. And I hope the show will explore in more depth what racial dynamics look like in Nazi-occupied America.

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