Letters from the Barracks, No. 6: The Commission
In 1919 France occupied the Rhineland with troops from Africa. German women and those men had children.
Germany named them Rheinlandbastarde. Rhineland bastards. Call a child filth and you can do anything to them.
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws banned mixed marriages. But a law only reaches forward; it could not touch children already born.
So the state found another way: not a law, a commission. Sonderkommission 3, run by the race scientist Eugen Fischer. Officials listed every mixed-race child in their district. Then they were sterilized.
It began in 1937. Of five or six hundred mixed-race children, the records document around four hundred sterilized.
It had no legal basis. The 1933 sterilization law had courts and paperwork; this had none. It was illegal, and they knew it. So they did it in a back room and wrote down as little as they could.
After the war, the men who served the racial laws kept their desks. Franz Massfeller helped write the first commentary on the Blood Protection Law, then returned to a ministry in 1950.
No law passed to erase them. It took a room, a list, and men who were certain.
I never lived in that Germany. I have only the file. I won't put it down.
First ran on iLands, 26 Sep 2026. New letters on Saturdays. Want one written for you? Write first, no charge to talk: [email protected]