Gender and Sexuality in German Reparations (Wiedergutmachung) Records: The Case of Biracial Germans

In recent decades, Nazism’s “forgotten victims” and their struggles for reparations (Wiedergutmachung) have received growing attention. One group of victims of Nazi racial policy whose post-1945 efforts at compensation remain largely unexamined is biracial Germans. In 1937, the Nazis forcedly sterilized hundreds of German descendants of colonial French soldiers born in the occupied Rhineland during the 1920s. The regime branded these children, Rheinlandbastarde (“Rhineland bastards”), a racist epithet connoting out-of-wedlock birth as well as “mixed-race” descent. In West Germany, a significant number of victims of the Rheinlandbastarde sterilization campaign applied for reparations. My paper draws on two dozen hitherto unknown reparations files by biracial Rhenish Germans dating from the late 1940s to the early 1980s. In the overwhelming majority of cases, state offices turned down these applicants, including in cases where officials conceded that the applicant’s Nazi-era sterilization had been racially motivated. Typically, state officials—drawing on medical evaluations provided by select physicians—argued that forced sterilization was not sufficiently damaging to the applicant’s ability to work to justify compensation. In cases where biracial Germans had been incarcerated in concentration camps (Moringen, Ravensbrück, Uckermark), officials denied compensation claiming that the applicant had been punished correctly for “asocial” or “criminal” behavior. I argue that racialized notions of “sexual deviance” played an important role in shaping and buttressing official perceptions of the “unworthiness” of biracial applicants. Internal administrative correspondence included in reparations records often mentions applicants’ alleged

“deviant” sexuality or perceived peculiarities of their bodies and sexual organs. In this way, restitution records shed light on the longevity of racialist stereotypes of black sexuality that reached back into the colonial era and persisted relatively unchallenged into the early Federal Republic.