Before Germans Slaughtered Jews They Slaughtered Africans

Human rights writer Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling author of IBM and the Holocaust, War Against the Weak and The Farhud. He can be found at www.edwinblack.com.



In recent years, some in the African-American community have expressed a disconnect to Holocaust topics, seeing the genocide of Jews as someone else’s nightmare. After all, African-Americans are still struggling to achieve general recognition of the barbarity of the Middle Passage, the inhumanity of slavery, the oppression of Jim Crow, and the battle for modern civil rights. For many in that community, the murder of six million Jews and millions of other Europeans happened to other minorities in a faraway place where they had no involvement.

However, a deeper look shows that proto-Nazi ideology before the Third Reich, the wide net of Nazi-era policy, and Hitler’s post-war legacy deeply impacted Africans, Afro-Germans, and African-Americans throughout the twentieth century. America’s Black community has a mighty stake in this topic. Understanding the German Reich and the Holocaust is important for Blacks just as it is for other communities, including Roma, eastern Europeans, people with disabilities, the gay community, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and many other groups in addition to Jews. The dots are well known to many scholars—but rarely connected to form a distinct historical nexus for either the Holocaust or the African-American communities. This is understandable. The saga behind these connections started decades before the Third Reich came into existence, in a savage episode on another continent that targeted a completely different racial and ethnic group for death and destruction. But the horrors visited on another defenseless group endured, and became a template for the Final Solution. Students of the Holocaust are accustomed to looking backward long before the Third Reich and long after the demise of the Nazi war machine. African-Americans should do the same.


- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/162814#sthash.lIpo4MaZ.dpuf


Loads more to read on the link




Also a good book on this I have read on this, if people are interested on the topic




The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism
by  David Olusoga, Casper W. Erichsen  



On 12 May 1883, the German flag was raised on the coast of South-West Africa, modern Namibia a the beginnings of Germany's African Empire. As colonial forces moved in, their ruthless punitive raids became an open war of extermination. Thousands of the indigenous people were killed or driven out into the desert to die. By 1905, the survivors were interned in concentration camps, and systematically starved and worked to death.Years later, the people and ideas that drove the ethnic cleansing of German South West Africa would influence the formation of the Nazi party. The Kaiser's Holocaust uncovers extraordinary links between the two regimes: their ideologies, personnel, even symbols and uniform. The Herero and Nama genocide was deliberately concealed for almost a century. Today, as the graves of the victims are uncovered, its re-emergence challenges the belief that Nazism was an aberration in European history. The Kaiser's Holocaust passionately narrates this harrowing story and explores one of the defining episodes of the twentieth century from a new angle. Moving, powerful and unforgettable, it is a story that needs to be told

KAISER  WILHELM  II...

Grandson to Queen Victoria..
Hence:   Cousin to George V;
Distant cousin to Tsar Nichollas Romanov II.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_II,_German_Emperor#/search

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_II_of_Russia

Such naughty wicked boys,   the lot of them...