Hitler and the Negro
By J. A. Rodgers
Adolph Hitler inspired no doubt by the valorous conduct of the Negro in the last World War declares in Mein Kampf that Negroes are “half-apes.”
This, however, is far from being the opinion of pre-Hitler Germany if one is to judge by the various monuments and pictures of Negroes in German museums and other public places.
Foremost of these pictures and monuments are those of St. Maurice (or St. Mautritus) leading Catholic saint of Germany, who is invariably depicted in Germany as a Negro of the finest type. St. Maurice is the patron saint of the city of Cobourg and he appears in the city’s coat-of-arms. His picture, by Grunewald, hangs in the Alte-Pinokathek, Southern Germany’s largest museum. (At least I saw it there as late as 1934.) Another painting of St. Maurice by Hans Baldung is, if I remember rightly, in the Dresden Museum. There is also a monument of him in armor in the Cathedral of Magdeburg.
In almost every German art gallery are pictures by great artist of “The Adoration of Magi,” one of who is invariably depicted as a Negro. The most celebrated shrine in Germany is that of the Black Virgin in Alt-Oetting, Baravaria. There and there especially in Southern Germany and in what was once Austria are shrines of Black Madonnas. The blackness of these, be it noted is not due to age as the lace and some of the other decorations of these statues are still nearly white. Only the face is black.
On the most important bridge over the Spree at the south end of the Unter den Linden near the Berlin Cathedral in the very center of the north side of the bridge is a monument no less than eight feet high of a Negro. In the park of the royal palace at San Souci, Potsdam, favorite residence of the last Kaiser are several statutes of Negroes, who were the favorites of the Prussian rulers.
In the state pictures of Kaiser Wilhelm I, between the years 1857 and 1870 appears a Negro as a German officer. “This Henri Noel an unmixed Negro brought by Rohls from Central Africa, whom Wilhelm I, adopted as his own son. I have given further details in “The 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro.”
Hitler is a native of Austria and there, too, St. Maurice and the Black Virgin are highly revered. In the Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna are the portraits of Angelo Soliman and his daughter and grandson, Baron Edward von Feuchtersleben.
Angelo Soliman was a Negro ex-slave who became a tutor of royalty, and the friend and companion of Joseph II, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. In the Vienna Museum is another piece of priceless Negro art: that of the Venus of Willendorf, oldest known representation of a human being executed by a Negro artist, about 10,000 or 15,000 B. C.
Several other art treasures in which Negro figure could be cited. It is interesting to know what Hitler and his brown shirted reformers have done about these Negro monuments, and how they reconcile them with their statement that the Negro is a “half-ape,” and the Negro professional man a monstrosity. Perhaps these pictures and monuments have been removed or destroyed; only the coming peace will tell.
J.A. Rodgers