On the twentieth of July, 1944, a fifteen-year-old boy walked through the gate of the Buchenwald concentration camp. His name was Gert Schramm, and he was the only black prisoner in the camp. The inscription above the gate read Jedem das Seine, to each what he deserves. From that moment, he was no longer called by his name.
He was number 49489, tattooed into his left arm. His sentence was unspecified, but it was to be no less than fifteen years. Gert Schramm had been born on the twenty-eighth of November, 1928, in Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, then part of the Weimar Republic. His mother, Marianne Schramm, was a white German woman.
His father, Jack Branson, was a black American engineer from San Francisco who had come to Thuringia on a contract to build a bridge. The two met in the shop of Marianne’s father, a gentleman’s tailor. When Jack’s contract ended, he left Germany, but he kept returning to visit his son. Racism was already part of everyday life for black people in Weimar Germany, and the Great Depression made it harder for them to find work.
But when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor on the thirtieth of January, 1933, the situation changed dramatically. The Nazi regime quickly moved to restrict the civil and human rights of Jews and other people deemed enemies of the state. It opened the first concentration camp, Dachau, near Munich. And it began to put its false ideas about race into law and practice.
The Nazis wanted to create a racially pure Germany, and they considered Germans members of a supposedly superior Aryan race. They targeted Jews, Roma, and black people as non-Aryans and members of supposedly inferior races. The laws they passed were primarily intended to exclude Jews, but they also applied to black and Romani people. For the several thousand black people then living in Germany, the Nazi rise to power was a turning point.
Many ordinary Germans embraced the regime’s ideology and discriminated against black people on their own initiative. Colleagues and bosses were reluctant to work with people whose skin color marked them as outsiders. Firings, evictions, and poverty were common. Strangers spat on them and hurled racial slurs with impunity.
In April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service removed people of non-Aryan descent from government employment. Although the decree was vague about exactly how to define non-Aryan descent, subsequent regulations made clear that it applied to black and Romani people as well as Jews. In practice, few black people were directly affected, because only citizens could be civil servants, and most black German citizens were still children. These were the multi-racial children born in the Rhineland between 1918 and 1930, whose fathers had been French colonial soldiers in the Allied occupation.
The German press called them, derogatorily, Rheinlandbastarde, Rhineland bastards. They faced discrimination from neighbors, classmates, and even their own families. In September 1935, the Nazis announced the Nuremberg Race Laws. The first, the Reich Citizenship Law, defined a German citizen as a person of German or related blood, excluding Jews, Roma, and black people from political rights.
The second, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, forbade marriage and sexual relations between Jews and people of German or related blood. A subsequent supplement extended this ban to black people, forbidding them to marry people of German blood. The goal was to prevent black people from marrying and having children with Germans. Interracial couples who applied for permission to marry were consistently denied, and their applications brought them to the attention of the authorities.
This often led to harassment, sterilization, and the breaking up of partnerships. Couples whose marriages predated the laws were pressured to divorce, and white German women were pressured to leave their black husbands. For black children, schools became sites of humiliation. They were degraded in racial science classes and ridiculed by teachers who supported the Nazis.
Some were expelled and could not complete their education. Finding apprenticeships, which in Germany was crucial to employment, became increasingly difficult. This was true for Gert Schramm. After elementary school, he worked as a helper in a car repair shop, but under the Nuremberg Laws he was denied the right to any apprenticeship as a Mischling, a pejorative legal term for a person of mixed Aryan and non-Aryan ancestry.
Most black people under the Nazi regime were effectively trapped in Germany. Some tried to leave, but for the vast majority this was not possible. They could not obtain visas or legally immigrate elsewhere because of citizenship issues. They had little choice but to adapt to life under the Nazis.
When the Second World War began on the first of September, 1939, Nazi policies against black people became even more extreme. Many ended up imprisoned in workhouses, prisons, hospitals, psychiatric facilities, and concentration camps. In 1941, Jack Branson, Gert’s father, was arrested during one of his visits to Germany under the Nazi racial laws. He was deported to Auschwitz.
There is no trace of him after that. Gert Schramm was arrested in May 1944. Officially, he was taken into protective custody by the Gestapo under the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, because his father was an African-American man. For weeks, he was moved from one Gestapo prison to another, denied food and water, beaten, hit in the face, and knocked around.
Finally, on the twentieth of July, 1944, he was deported to Buchenwald. Buchenwald was one of the largest Nazi concentration camps within German borders. The main camp was surrounded by an electrified barbed wire fence, watchtowers, and a chain of sentries with automatic machine guns. It contained thirty-three wooden barracks, disinfection buildings, a brothel, a crematorium, and a notorious punishment block called the bunker, where prisoners who violated camp regulations were punished and often tortured to death.
Most of the early inmates were political prisoners, but the camp also held Jews, repeat offenders, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Sinti and Roma people, and German military deserters. Gert was forced to do heavy labor. During an air raid by Allied bombers, he was buried in a satellite commando. He later recalled that he suffered a severe head wound.
The prisoner service at first did not want to send him to the infirmary because they were afraid he might not come back; an injured prisoner could be quickly classified as a useless eater and simply hosed down. But the wound became infected, and he developed a fever. His blockmates finally sent him to the outpatient clinic, where the head of the infirmary treated him. Without warning, the doctor ripped open the wound with a hook, then tried to pull out a splinter of metal from his skull with pliers.
When that failed, he used a hammer and chisel. With every hit, Gert thought his head would fly apart. Afterward, his comrades cared for him for three weeks. He was then taken to barracks 42, with the political prisoners, mostly communists who had been in Buchenwald for a long time and knew the camp well.
They told him which work details were less bad and how to protect himself from beatings at roll call. The block senior, Otto Grazer, a communist from Lower Saxony, gave him vital advice: do not look SS men in the face, hide in the middle during roll call, just do not attract attention. Those tips would later save his life. Gert was also forced to work in a limestone quarry, one of the hardest occupations in the camp.
The survival rate was very low. Every day, up to ten men were carried out dead from the quarry. Many died of exhaustion or were shot by the SS. After three weeks, a communist capo moved Gert to an easier job in the construction team, and finally to the carpentry workshop, where conditions were more bearable.
Roll call was a constant ordeal. If the numbers did not add up, it was prolonged and could take long hours, especially tormenting in severe weather. Schramm recalled standing outside in the snow from five in the morning to eleven, with no food or water. He once saw a young Jewish prisoner from Leipzig, Wolfgang Kohn, stomped to death by an SS guard simply for moving during roll call.
Those who stood out risked being sent to an extermination camp or killed on the spot. As the only black prisoner, Gert already stood out, and after weeks in the quarry he was weakened. Otto Grazer organized other inmates to surround him during daily roll calls, hiding him from view and protecting him. In April 1945, liberation came.
On the eighth of April, prisoners used a secret shortwave transmitter to send an SOS to the Allies, to General Patton’s army. “This is the Buchenwald concentration camp. SOS. We request help.
They want to evacuate us. The SS want to destroy us. ” Three minutes later, the desperate prisoners received the reply: “Hold out. Rushing to your aid.
Staff of Third Army. ” On the eleventh of April, the US Sixth Armored Division liberated the camp and found more than 21,000 weak and emaciated survivors. The prisoners had survived partly because a prisoner had answered a telephone call from the Gestapo headquarters at Weimar, which was sending explosives to blow up evidence of the camp. The prisoner told headquarters that explosives would not be needed, because the camp had already been blown up.
It had not. After General Patton toured the camp, he ordered the mayor of nearby Weimar to bring one thousand citizens to see the crematorium and other Nazi atrocities. The Americans wanted the German people to take responsibility for Nazi crimes instead of dismissing them as propaganda. Many of the visitors cried, and some fainted, after seeing the dead, the starved survivors behind barbed wire, and a display of paintings on human skin, lampshades made of human skin, body parts preserved in alcohol, and two heads shrunk to a fifth of their normal size.
Gert Schramm was there. The Weimar citizens claimed they had not known what was going on. Gert never believed them. Years later, he remembered thinking, “Now have a look what happened here with your acquiescence.
”
Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 people from all countries of Europe in Buchenwald. The SS murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners in the camp system, some 11,000 of them Jews. Exact mortality figures can only be estimated, because the camp authorities never registered a significant number of prisoners. In June 1945, Gert Schramm returned home on foot into a new life.
He worked at the Wismut uranium mine in the Soviet occupation zone, then in a coal mine in Essen, then chose to move to East Germany. With the help of another former Buchenwald prisoner, Hermann Axen, he started his own business in 1985, a taxi company called Schramms Reisen. As a member of the prisoners’ advisory board of the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation, he spent years visiting schools to speak of the horrors of the camp. In 2012, during one such visit, he said, “I wish our youth will never give in to these racist Nazi thugs and they won’t heed their views filled with hatred and racial discrimination.
”
Gert Schramm died on the eighteenth of April, 2016, at the age of eighty-seven, after a long illness. His friend Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana believed he never fully recovered from his country’s rejection of him because of the color of his skin. “He was an unhappy man,” she said. His revenge was not only that he survived and lectured for years about what he had endured, but that his legacy would go on through his family.
After the war he married, had four children, and became a grandfather and great-grandfather. He left to the generations to come a message of peace and reconciliation.