Activity 8: Black people and the Nazis

Read the following sentences. They are not in the correct order. Try to sequence them into an order that makes sense.

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Black people were, therefore, in Germany when the Nazis came to power.
 
 
After World War 1, The Treaty of Versailles (1919) also set out that Germany had to leave its African colonies. 
 
 
The German soldiers who returned to Germany from the African colonies brought back with them racist attitudes.
 
 
The sterilisation programme affected thousands of black and mixed race people.
 
 
Black people suffered racism in Germany before the Nazis came to power.
 


The Treaty of Versailles (1919) allowed allied troops to occupy the Rhineland in West Germany.
 

 
By 1937 the German secret state police rounded up many black people and forced them to be sterilised.
 
 
African troops from French colonies were used to police the Rhineland in West Germany.
 
 
Some African Americans caught in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War 2 became victims of the Nazi regime.
 
 
Hitler refused to recognise Jesse Owens’ success because he believed he was ‘racially inferior’.
 
 
Before and after World War 1, many Africans came to Germany as students, craftspeople, entertainers and workers for the colonial government as tax-officials.
 
 
In 1936 at the Olympic games in Berlin, Hitler refused to hand over the four gold medals won by black athlete Jesse Owens.
 
 
The African troops in the Rhineland were the focus of much racism from Germans feeling humiliated by their defeat in World War 1.
 


They were not Aryans (white, non-Jews from German ancestors) so were excluded from mainstream society like the Jews, Roma and Sinti and others.