MovieChat Forums > Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Discussion > Nazi-Germany's message to the black sold...

Nazi-Germany's message to the black soldiers


The first time I saw this in the movie with the female German woman speaking to the black men through loud speakers, I was curious what the Nazi's were trying to convince the black troops of exactly, like were they trying to get them to defect and join them? It'd be an odd thing given that an army of Nazi's would try to recruit black-Americans to join them. Well, I went on Yahoo Answers and asked, and I was told that it was a propaganda technique to demoralize the soldiers.

I also recall when watching "Roots: The Next Generation", during a battle scene taking place during World War I, a group of black troops had received a propaganda leaflet of some sort that the Germans dropped off behind enemy lines through their jets pretty much saying the same thing that would later be said to the black men in World War II.

Why I am so intrigued by that is because I have been studying another war recently - The American Revolution, and during that war, the British promised any black male slave that escaped from their masters and served with them would win their freedom after the war, and it reminded me of what the Germans would later do over one-hundred and sixty years later.....kinda disturbing if you think about it...that's a big gap, and black people were still beig mistreated in the U.S.A., and enemy troops were still playing off that.

Does anymore information about the Nazi propaganda that they were trying to sell to the black soldiers? i.e. A site, a book, etc, that explains this in detail, or if you know about it, please share whatever knowledge you have below.

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I am pretty sure that Nazi propaganda had slim to none effect on any of our troops.

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Well it's just sad that those Black troops showed allegiance to the side that hated them the most (to this day) and didn't shoot BOTH sides like I would have.

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Oh, I am so sure the Nazis would have smothered them with kisses then put them up in 3 star hotels. The Nazis enslaved the Europeans then in far worse conditions than those black soldiers' ancestors ever suffered.

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Says You...They probably would not have been treated any worse than they were treated by the country they were helping to fight for. The enemy of my enemy is a friend...

The ONLY Difference between the 2 is that you can see footage of what the Nazis did to Europeans. Most of what happened to African American enslaved people was NOT photographed and shown to illicit sympathy from the masses, and even when footage IS shown...who cares? "Get over it." "It's in the past." They're just black slaves right? Yeah...

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Slavery in the USA had been finished for 80 years when that fighting took place in the movie. As well as who is defending American slavery? And as bad as it was, it wasn't Auschwitz, so spare me the self pity. As well as you mindlessly forgot what Hitler was doing to the "inferior" races, untermenschen, back then. Not only was he busy exterminating Jews and gypsies, he was enslaving and killing off millions of "subhuman" Slavs. So if he was willing to enslave and kill millions of Slavs, it doesn't take an IQ > 100 to guess how well he would've treated blacks if he had many under his control.

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@docmanoff

What the hell are you talking about? The Nazis didn't give a fck about black soldiers and were just as racist against black people as they were Jewish people---that's a known fact. What proof do you even have that they "showed allegiance" to any Nazis? Where's your proof? None, just like I figured.

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Actually Hitler won the 1933 election partly because the French had posted Black troops in Germany after 1918. They were veteran Senegalese Gunmen (tirailleurs Sénégalais) whose cause had been defended by no-one else but Jean Moulin, later French Resistance n°2 who died a national hero under the torture of nazi Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie in 1942.

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I think the one sentence that sums it all up was when one of the soldiers said he had never felt more free than he did there in Italy where he was accepted for who he was without regard to the color of his skin - I spent several years in Europe and found this to STILL be true into the 70s .... with the exception of hatemongering Germans (Yep they were still at there *beep* even in the 70s) but Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Norway, Finland etc. all seem to be oblivious to skin color/race - it's a beautiful and quite remarkable thing.

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