The Nazis banned jazz music because it was invented by Black people. They thought that the "Black race" was inferior. In their eyes the "Aryan" race was superior, better than all other "races."

In 1933 around 5,000 Black people, mainly men, lived in Germany. Most of them came from German colonies in Africa. Some were married to German women and had children with them.

The Nazis were unsure of how to treat their Black subjects. Although they were considered inferior, they only formed a small group who did not represent a threat to Germany. The Nazis also wanted to show that Black people were treated better than in Germany than in countries such as the USA. For a time young Black people were even allowed to join the Hitler Youth.

But eventually more than three thousand Black Germans were put into concentration camps. However, most of them were not arrested because of their skin colour, but because they were communists or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or because they played the forbidden jazz music.

After the First World War, France occupied the German Rhineland. The French army of occupation included Black soldiers from the French colonies. Some of them had children with German women. These children were known as the "Rhineland bastards." The Nazis thought it was a scandal that White German woman had children with Black soldiers from an enemy army. In 1937, 385 of these children were rounded up and sterilised in clinics. They would never be able to have children.