# 385 Children, Almost No Names: The 1937 Sterilisation of the Rhineland Children

The number is 385. It appears in the standard study, in the Holocaust Encyclopedia, in a 2022 article in the American Journal of Public Health, and it is given without a range. Three hundred and eighty-five children, aged thirteen to sixteen, sterilised in German hospitals in the summer of 1937 because their fathers had been colonial soldiers in the French army of occupation.

Set beside that precision is an absence. Apart from one man, Hans Hauck, who spoke on camera decades later, the 385 have almost no names. Not in the literature, not on a memorial, not in a compensation file, because no compensation was ever paid. A regime that documented its own crime to the last digit produced victims nobody can list. That is the gap this post is about.

Who the children were

After 1918 French troops occupied the Rhineland, and among them were units from Senegal, Morocco, Madagascar and Indochina. Some of these soldiers had children with German women. The German nationalist press of the early 1920s ran a campaign against what it called the „black shame on the Rhine,“ and the phrase that stuck to the children was a Nazi-era coinage, „Rhineland bastards,“ which this post will not use again except in quotation. The children were German citizens, born mostly between 1919 and 1926. Their number was small. A Prussian count in the late 1920s found a few hundred.

The racial anthropologists got to them before the state did. In 1933 Wolfgang Abel of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin-Dahlem examined a group of the children in Wiesbaden, measured and photographed them, and in 1934 published his conclusions in the magazine of the Nazi party’s racial-policy office. The examinations built a card index. The card index made the operation possible.

The order

There was no law for this. The 1933 sterilisation law covered a list of hereditary conditions, and having an African father was not on it. Gisela Tascher, who reconstructed the Saarland part of the operation from court files in 2016, gives the chain of command: a secret order from Hitler dated 18 April 1937, reconfirmed on 7 May after the Foreign Office objected, presumably because the children’s fathers had been soldiers of a foreign power. The Reich interior ministry passed it to the Gestapo, which set up „Sonderkommission 3“ in Berlin to run it, and three regional commissions: I in Wiesbaden, II in Ludwigshafen, III in Koblenz. Each was chaired by a Gestapo officer and included two doctors, a clerk, a photographer, and an anthropological assessor from the Dahlem institute. Tascher names Eugen Fischer, Abel, Herbert Göllner and Engelhard Bühler; Paul Weindling adds Heinrich Schade. Blood and hair samples went to Berlin.

The families were summoned to the health office with the children, who were examined, measured, photographed stripped to the waist from front and side, and then, often the same day, driven by the Gestapo to a hospital. In Saarbrücken a barred room had been prepared in the cellar of the Bürgerhospital, guarded by a detective; the operation followed the next morning. Parents were made to sign consent forms. The 1947 court file that Tascher used contains the case of a seventeen-year-old, Gerda S., whose mother refused, was told her daughter would be sterilised regardless, and was then herself summoned for intelligence tests on the ground that a woman who had slept with an Indochinese soldier might be feeble-minded. The daughter was operated on the next day. The mother was spared, the file says, because she had already raised six children.

Where 385 comes from

Reiner Pommerin’s 1979 book, still the standard work, found the figure in the surviving files of the interior ministry and the commissions, which recorded the operations as they were completed. So 385 is the perpetrators‘ count of completed cases by the end of 1937. It is exact because the Gestapo kept books.

It is also almost certainly not the whole. Georg Lilienthal, reviewing Pommerin in 1980, pressed on the continuity between Weimar-era race hygiene and the 1937 action and on what the files could not show. The educational project Zum Feind gemacht, which has been reconstructing individual cases, states that at least 436 people can now be documented, with the real number likely higher. Tascher notes that for the Saarland the total is simply unknown; she could recover eighteen names from district lists of 1936 and the 1947 trial file, five of them male. The Holocaust Encyclopedia writes „at least 385.“ The 385 is a floor that has been printed as a total.

What happened to the people involved

To the children: they grew up, mostly in the Rhineland and the Saar, unable to have children. Some were later drafted. Hans Hauck, sterilised as a teenager, served in the Wehrmacht and spoke about it in a 1997 documentary; he is, as Weindling puts it, the one voice. Weindling’s finding on the rest is flat: none of the 385 received compensation from the Federal Republic, not as victims of coerced sterilisation and not as subjects of the Dahlem institute’s research on their blood and hair. No Bundestag apology has been made to them as a group. Refertilisation, which was surgically possible for some, was never offered.

To the doctors: in August 1947 the Saarbrücken regional court tried three of them under Control Council Law No. 10, crimes against humanity. Two senior medical officials, Horst Friedel and Max Obé, blamed each other; the surgeon, Karl Kiefer, and every witness said they had acted on the Führer’s order. All three were party members. Friedel and Obé were acquitted on 14 April 1949; the appeal court dropped the case on 1 June; the last thread against Friedel was cut by an amnesty law in 1958. In January 1950 Obé was elected first chairman of the Saarland medical chamber.

To the scientists who selected the children: nothing. Weindling’s summary sentence is the one worth quoting, because it is the conclusion of the leading journal in the field eighty-five years on: „The concerned human geneticists went unprosecuted.“ Fischer retired with honours in 1942 and died in 1967. Abel held a chair in Berlin until 1945 and lived until 1997.

What doesn’t add up

**An exact count and an empty list.** The files that give 385 were kept by the Gestapo and the interior ministry, and they recorded each operation with a name, a birth date and a photograph, because the whole point of the examinations was to build a research record. Those names existed. Either the files that survive to give the total also give the names, in which case the anonymity is a choice made by later researchers or by the archives, or the total survives in a summary report and the individual files were destroyed or dispersed, in which case the 385 rests on a single summary the perpetrators wrote. Pommerin’s book, from 1979, does not resolve this for a general reader. What would settle it: a statement of which files in the Bundesarchiv (the R 18 interior ministry series and the Gestapo records) carry the number, and whether they carry the names. Zum Feind gemacht’s 436 suggests the names are recoverable case by case, from local health office and guardianship files, which is the slow way.

**The count stops in 1937 and the operation did not.** Weindling and the Holocaust Encyclopedia both note that sterilisations of Black and mixed-race Germans continued through the war without any legal basis and in unknown numbers. The 385 is the count for one action in one year. The children born to occupation soldiers who were under thirteen in 1937, and the Afro-Germans who were not occupation children at all, are outside it. What would extend it: the wartime files of the regional health offices in the Rhineland and Saar, and the postwar compensation applications that were refused, which would at least yield the names of those who tried.

What stays open

Who the other 384 were. Whether the files that name them exist and where. How many were done after 1937. Whether any are still alive; the youngest would be in their late nineties. Whether the German state, which paid restitution to the Herero and Nama and recognised the T4 victims, will ever address by name the smallest and best-documented group it sterilised, the one whose only crime was a father in a French uniform.

KardiKassin

Writes about Africa’s colonial history and how it gets told, sourced and checked at every step.

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Sources

• Pommerin, Reiner: Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde. Das Schicksal einer farbigen deutschen Minderheit 1918 bis 1937. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1979
• Lilienthal, Georg: „Rheinlandbastarde“. Rassenhygiene und das Problem der rassenideologischen Kontinuität. Zur Untersuchung von Reiner Pommerin. Medizinhistorisches Journal 15 (1980), pp. 426 to 436
• Weindling, Paul: The Dangers of White Supremacy: Nazi Sterilization and Its Mixed-Race Adolescent Victims. American Journal of Public Health 112 (2), 2022, pp. 248 to 254. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306593
• Tascher, Gisela: NS-Zwangssterilisationen. Handeln auf Befehl des Führers. Deutsches Ärzteblatt 113 (10), 2016, A 420 to 422. https://www.aerzteblatt.de/archiv/175272/
• Zum Feind gemacht (NS-Beratung): Zwangssterilisierungen. https://www.zumfeindgemacht.de/zwangssterilisierungen/