Gert Schramm: Black Survivor of Nazi Germany's Buchenwald Concentration Camp

World History: True Stories of the 20th Century · Jul 12, 2026 · 20m

Gert Schramm was one of the few Black Germans to survive the Nazi concentration camp system and later bear witness to a largely forgotten chapter of Holocaust history. Born in 1928 in Erfurt during the Weimar Republic, Schramm was the son of a white German mother and a Black American engineer. From an early age, he experienced racism that intensified dramatically after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party seized power in 1933. Under Nazi racial ideology, Black Germans were labeled “non-Aryan” and excluded from German society. Although the regime did not pursue their total extermination, many were…