The following article is from our November 2009 issue.

Racism is everywhere Historians debate German anti-Semitism and American racism - By Peter H. Koepf

It wasn't long ago that Maria Höhn was repeatedly called upon to justify her work. Whenever she presented the results of her research, someone in the audience was sure to stand up and ask: "How can you, as a German, dare to speak about racism in America?" A historian who teaches at Vassar, an elite liberal arts university in Poughkeepsie, New York, Höhn sympathizes. "My research has also had the effect of tarnishing the mystique of 'the greatest generation' a little," she said.

Höhn's work addresses the experiences of black American soldiers in Germany after World War II. In post-Nazi Germany, of all places, these soldiers learned a lot about racism in their own country. Their experiences in Germany would go on to have a substantial impact on the American civil rights movement.

Still, American scholars have also began to discover this sensitive topic - one that was long swept under the carpet because, in the race for superiority against the Soviet Union, it threatened to give the competition a bully pulpit.

Early in October, Höhn and Martin Klimke of the German Historical Institute in Washington invited academics and veterans to Vassar for a conference on "African American Civil Rights and Germany in the 20th Century." One of the speakers was Leon Bass, an 85-year-old veteran who vividly described how World War II changed his life.

He was in Germany for only one year. As a 19-year-old soldier in the winter of 1944-1945, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, helping to stop the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes. Soon afterward, he was among the first to see the Buchenwald concentration camp and its "walking dead." "What are you doing here?" he asked himself at the time. "What are you fighting for?"

The fact that he was reflecting on such questions had a lot to do with his background. He said he understood two things then. Evil was everywhere - and evil in Germany was similar to evil at home. Anti-Semitism simply had a different name in America: racism.

Seeing Buchenwald brought Bass face-to-face with Germany's scourge. At the camp, he saw imprisoned Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, labor organizers, homosexuals, communists and others. These people were in concentration camps because the Nazis considered them inferior, "not good enough" to live as a part of their society, he said.

Bass was also considered inferior back home. He, too, was considered "not good enough" to drink from a water fountain in Georgia that was reserved for whites, "not good enough" to sit in the front of the bus in Mississippi and "not good enough" to eat in an all-white restaurant in Texas.

But above all, he was "not good enough" to be in an army company where blacks and whites fought together. And he sensed then that after his return home, he would also be "not good enough" to enjoy the civil rights he had fought for in Europe.

Oddly enough, then, it was in Germany, the country that perpetrated some of the most horrific racist crimes in history, that many black GIs learned what greater equality felt like. Colin Powell, who was stationed in Germany in 1958, put it this way in his book, "My American Journey": "For black GIs, especially those out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom - they could go where they wanted, eat where they wanted and date whom they wanted, just like other people."

Nevertheless, some of the nonchalant parallels drawn between the Nazis and the white majority in the U.S. by those attending the Poughkeepsie conference were troubling. For Germans, they raise the question if it is no longer necessary to distinctly point out that comparisons with the murderous Nazi regime are completely out of bounds - that there is a distinction between a situation where minorities were deprived of their civil rights and one where they were deprived of their right to live. Is the Holocaust no longer a unique historical event?

Kenneth Barkin of the University of California at Riverside went so far as to quote the late 19th century anti-Semitic German historian Heinrich von Treitschke ("The Jews are our national misfortune!") in an effort to set apart the American brand of racism, citing Treitschke's claim that "the American south is not part of Western civilization."

Magie Morehouse, a historian at the University of South Carolina at Aiken, did not shrink from criticizing her own country: "One of the 'greatest' attitudes that Americans exported to the world was racism," adding that racism is "a worldwide business with different faces."

If this premise is considered, then it is perfectly acceptable for Germans today to follow in Höhn's footsteps. As Robert Sackett, a historian at the University of Colorado said: "Of course Germans can talk about American racism."


Picture above: Leon Bass.