SHSS Lecture Series: Maria Höhn

"We will Never go back to the Old ways Again": African American GIs in Postwar Germany and the Struggle for Civil Rights

America’s leadership role in the world after 1945, and especially its military occupation and reeducation of Germany, presented the U.S. with a considerable dilemma. Intent to prove to the Germans “that the whole concept of superiority is evil” and that America was the “living denial of Hitler’s absurd theories of a superior race,” the U.S. nevertheless conducted its mission of democracy with a segregated and deeply racist military. To the astonishment of many white Americans, black soldiers serving in segregated units described post-Nazi Germany as a place where they experienced more equality and freedom than in their own country. German society was, of course, hardly free of racism, but missing in the encounter between black soldiers and German civilians were the legal manifestations of the Jim Crow South, and the color line that defined the daily lives of black Americans even outside of the South. As a result, in the recollections of black soldiers, and also in the discourse of the African American civil rights movement, occupied Germany and later Cold War West Germany emerged as a crucial point of reference for a society without a color line.

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