Jennifer H. Svan, Stars and Stripes
- In the words of retired Gen. Colin Powell, postwar Germany was “a breath of freedom” for black soldiers, especially those out of the South: “[They could] go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date, whom they wanted, just like other people.”
Germany, on the heels of a Holocaust flamed by anti-Semitism, would seem to be the last place on earth to experience any wisp of racial freedom.
But two historians studying the experience of black American GIs in postwar Germany maintain that racial discrimination was not institutionalized as it was in the southern United States at the time. So, interracial interactions were possible, if not always popular.
