Being black in Nazi Germany

Film director Amma Asante came across an old photograph taken in Nazi Germany of a black schoolgirl by chance.

Standing among her white classmates, who stare straight into the camera, she enigmatically glances to the side.

Curiosity about the photograph – who the girl was and what she was doing in Germany – set the award-winning film-maker off on a path that led to Where Hands Touch, a new movie starring Amandla Stenberg and George MacKay.

The historical background to the film concerns the way that black Germans were treated in the Nazi era – from 1933 to 1945.

One group that particularly raised the ire of the Nazis were about 600 mixed-race children derogatorily known as the “Rhineland bastards”.

Many of them were forcibly sterilised because the idea that they could have children was anathema to the Nazi racist mindset.

Black Germans were never systematically targeted in the way Jewish people were, but there were all persecuted, stigmatised and isolated.

There are hints that they could have faced annihilation, historian Robbie Aitken says. BBC News