When history reflects upon the horrors of the Third Reich, the narrative typically focuses—rightly—on the Holocaust, the systematic state-sponsored genocide that claimed six million Jewish lives, alongside the millions of Romani, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, disabled individuals, and homosexuals who were brutally murdered. Yet, within this vast tapestry of human suffering lies a lesser-known chapter: the plight of Black people living under Nazi rule, and the extraordinary story of Lionel Romney, one of the very few Afro-Caribbean civilians to survive the brutality of a Nazi concentration camp.

Romney’s ordeal, which spanned years of internment, forced labor, and psychological horror, offers a rare, first-hand look into how Nazi Germany’s ideological anti-Black racism translated into physical persecution on the ground.

Black People Under the Swastika: Ideology and Persecution

To understand Lionel Romney’s experience, one must first examine the precarious position of Black people in interwar Europe and Nazi Germany. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Black population in Germany was small but visible. It comprised individuals from former German colonies in Africa (such as Cameroon, Togoland, and German Southwest Africa), Afro-Caribbean migrants, African American musicians and artists living abroad, and a growing generation of mixed-race children.

The latter group became the primary target of Nazi anti-Black propaganda. Following World War I, French colonial troops—many from Senegal, Morocco, and Madagascar—were stationed in the demilitarized Rhineland as part of the Allied occupation. German nationalists and eventual Nazi leaders launched a vitriolic campaign against these soldiers and their children, coining the derogatory term “the Rhineland Bastards.” Nazi racial ideology categorized Black people as Untermenschen (subhumans) and viewed them as a biological threat to the “purity” of the Aryan race.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the persecution of Black individuals intensified rapidly:

• Civil and Economic Stripping: Black residents were stripped of their German citizenship, barred from civil service jobs, excluded from higher education, and forced out of traditional employment. Many were reduced to working in traveling “colonial shows” or as extras in racist propaganda films.
• Forced Sterilization: In 1937, under secret orders from the Gestapo, the Nazi regime forcibly sterilized an estimated 500 mixed-race Afro-German children in the Rhineland to prevent them from having descendants.
• Social Isolation and Violence: Interracial marriages were strictly prohibited under the Nuremberg Laws. Black people lived in constant fear of arrest, police harassment, and arbitrary detention.

While the Nazi regime never devised a formal, centralized blueprint for the total extermination of all Black people solely on account of their race—in the way it did for the Jewish population—it systematically sought their removal from European society. Black people were routinely arrested and sent to concentration camps under the guise of being “anti-socials,” political subversives, enemy aliens, or criminal offenders.

Lionel Romney: From the Caribbean to the Mediterranean War Zone

Lionel Romney was born in 1912 on the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten. Like many young West Indian men of his era, he sought a life at sea, finding employment as a merchant sailor on international commercial vessels. This maritime career ultimately dragged him directly into the gears of World War II.

In June 1940, Romney was serving aboard a Greek merchant vessel, the SS Makis, navigating the Mediterranean Sea. The ship struck a naval mine off the coast of Italy and sank. Rescued from the water by the Italian military, Romney’s status changed instantly. Because he was a British subject—Sint Maarten had historic ties, and Romney carried British identification through his merchant marine credentials—he was classified as an “enemy civilian” by Italy, which was then aligned with Nazi Germany under Benito Mussolini.

For the next four years, Romney was detained in a series of Italian internment camps. While conditions in these camps were harsh, restrictive, and characterized by bad food and isolation, they were essentially civilian detention centers rather than death camps. Internees were generally spared systematic physical torture or forced extermination.

However, everything changed in late 1943. Following the Allied invasion of southern Italy, the Italian government surrendered. In response, German military forces immediately invaded and occupied northern and central Italy, taking direct control of the internment camps and their inmates.

Into the Abyss: Deportation to Mauthausen

In mid-1944, the SS began liquidating the Italian internment camps, transferring prisoners northward into the main Nazi concentration camp system. Lionel Romney was loaded onto a transport train and shipped to Austria. His destination was Mauthausen.

Mauthausen was categorized as a Grade III camp—the highest and most severe classification within the Nazi camp infrastructure. Intended for “unreformable political enemies,” Mauthausen was explicitly designed for Vernichtung durch Arbeit (extermination through labor). Located near a granite quarry, it was famous among prisoners for its sheer brutality, rampant disease, and execution facilities.

When Romney arrived at Mauthausen, he immediately stood out. As one of the extremely few Black prisoners in the entire camp complex, his presence drew instant, hostile attention from the SS guards. Upon stepping off the transport, he was singled out for racial abuse and physically assaulted before being assigned a prisoner number, stripped of his personal identity, and forced into the standard striped uniform.

Living in a camp where thousands died monthly from starvation, typhus, and summary shootings, Romney faced double jeopardy: the daily struggle against the camp’s lethal baseline conditions, combined with the constant threat of being targeted at any moment due to his skin color.

Strategies of Survival in a Factory of Death

Survival in a camp like Mauthausen was rarely a matter of pure chance; it required a combination of physical endurance, strategic positioning, and immense mental fortitude. Several critical factors enabled Lionel Romney to survive nearly a year in the camp:

1. Avoidance of the Quarry: Mauthausen’s primary killing mechanism was its granite quarry, anchored by the notorious “Stairway of Death”—186 uneven stone steps that exhausted prisoners were forced to climb while carrying heavy boulders on their backs. SS guards regularly pushed prisoners to their deaths from the top cliff. Crucially, Romney was assigned to a timber-cutting detail outside the quarry itself. While logging in the cold winter months was brutal physical work, it spared him the immediate, daily slaughterhouse environment of the stone quarry.
2. Multilingualism as a Lifeline: Born in the multicultural Caribbean and having spent years traveling the world as a sailor, Romney was fluent or proficient in six languages: English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian, and Papiamentu. In a concentration camp holding prisoners from dozens of occupied nations, language was power. Romney’s ability to translate between guards, kapos (prisoner functionaries), and various inmate factions made him indispensable. It allowed him to build trust across different prisoner networks, gather vital intelligence about camp operations, and occasionally secure extra scraps of food.
3. Psychological Resilience: Romney maintained a low profile, avoiding conflict whenever possible and leaning on his deep self-reliance formed during years at sea.

On May 5, 1945, elements of the U.S. Army’s 11th Armored Division liberated Mauthausen. Romney was among the survivors rescued by American troops, bringing an end to his five-year ordeal in fascist captivity.

Silence, Testimony, and Historical Legacy

After his liberation, Romney eventually immigrated to the United States, settling in New York. Like many survivors of extreme trauma, he chose silence as his initial defense mechanism. For more than four decades, Romney rarely spoke of his time in Mauthausen, shielding his family from the horrors he had witnessed.

It was not until the late 1980s that his daughter, Mary Romney-Schaab, an educator, began asking detailed questions about her father’s past. Recognizing the historical urgency of his memory, Romney agreed to record hours of oral history interviews, detailing every stage of his capture, internment, and liberation.

Following Lionel Romney’s death, Mary Romney-Schaab compiled his accounts into a landmark book, An Afro-Caribbean in the Nazi Era: From Papiamentu to German. Her work brought his testimony to a global audience, filling a significant void in the historiography of World War II.

Lionel Romney’s life serves as a stark reminder that the machinery of Nazi persecution was vast and affected diverse populations across the globe. His story not only honors the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable cruelty, but also ensures that the forgotten history of Black victims and survivors of the Nazi regime is permanently woven into our collective memory of the 20th century.

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