the quest for racial purity - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

during World War II also suffered intense persecution. Little research has been done as
to the particulars of these cases; however, a few known cases illustrate the scope of Nazi
policy. Valaida Snow, a black American female jazz musician and singer, was interned in
occupied Denmark and released to the United States in 1942, possibly in exchange for
someone in U.S. custody whom the Germans wanted.
Josef Nassy, a black Surinamese, moved to the United States as a teenager and obtained
a U.S. passport to travel to Europe in 1929. Eventually moving to Belgium, Nassy remained
after the Germans occupied the country and was eventually arrested in 1942 as an enemy
national after the United States entered the war. Incarcerated for seven months in a transit
camp in occupied Belgium, he was transferred to Germany and interned in the camps
Laufen and Tittmoning in upper Bavaria, where he survived the war.
Lionel Romney, a black American sailor in the U.S. Merchant Marine, was imprisoned
in Mauthausen; his fate is unknown. Bayume Muhammed Hussein (also known as Mohamed
Husen), a native of German East Africa, worked in the film industry as an actor in propaganda
films with German colonial themes until his arrest on a false charge of “illegal”
sexual relations with a German woman. Taken into protective custody, Hussein died in
Sachsenhausen in November 1944.
The Germans also took a number of black soldiers as prisoners of war, though treatment
of black soldiers in the POW camps was inconsistent. The Germans captured as
many as 16,000 French African soldiers in 1940. As of July 1940, they had more than
28,700 French, British, and Belgian African prisoners of war in custody. The Germans
are known to have killed between 1,500 and 3,000 French colonial soldiers upon their
capture during the summer of 1940. Some Allied troops of African descent never reached
the POW camps, although little information exists on their numbers and their fates.
Approximately 200 black U.S. military personnel fell into the hands of the Germans after
U.S. troops landed on the European continent in 1943 and 1944.
When dealing with black prisoners of war, the Germans sometimes ignored the rules
of the Geneva Convention, which had been designed to regulate the conduct of war and
the treatment of wounded and captured soldiers. In contrast to the general treatment
of white U.S. and British POWs, the Germans worked some black POWs to death on
construction projects or allowed them to die as a result of mistreatment and harsh living
conditions in the camps.
roma (gypsies)
The Nazis placed Roma (Gypsies) among the groups they most despised and feared for
the imagined threat they posed to “Aryan” German “racial purity.” Reflecting long-held
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