dutch children of african american liberators

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Based on a presentation by the author to the 2023 conference of the American Association of Dutch American Studies (AADAS); published in the conference book E Pluribus Unum, Van Raalte Press, 2024.

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Neither Here nor There: 

The Biracial Dutch American Children of World War II

Chris Dickon

The United States of the early 1940s was still years away from its first civic, political, and legal attempts to mitigate the racism that had marked its history since the first importation of African slaves in 1609. Europe of the 1940s was caught, tragically, in a continental war that was premised in large part on a different form of racism powerful enough to lead to a massive genocide of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals, among others.

The German Holocaust was expanded as the Axis Powers captured one country after another. The contamination of those societies with the hatred of Naziism became effective enough that the industrial destruction of those who were ethnically, racially, and otherwise different could seem an almost logical next step to some. The process often began with assertions casually given to those under German occupation that served to dehumanize those others who were not purely like themselves.1

As the United States entered the war in 1941, it could not seem

to do so without the attempted exportation to Europe of its own

form of destructive racism through the social rules and norms of Jim

Crow. Named after a black-faced minstrel show caricature who had

entertained American and British audiences since the early eighteenth

century, Jim Crow was a largely unwritten but implicit system of rules

for the treatment, suppression, and punishment of American Negroes

(then called) after their promised release from slavery post-Civil War.

The ultimate expression of the tone of the time (though not

equivalent to the effect of the Holocaust) was an epidemic of extrajudicial

public lynchings of blacks by angry mobs as events of public spectacle.

All groups who were marginal in American society could be subject to

lynching over a period beginning with the first black lynching in 1835

and lasting well into the twentieth century, but African Americans

paid the highest price by far. A study by the Tuskegee Institute of the

years from 1882 to 1968 catalogued 1,297 white lynchings, often of

immigrants, Catholics, and non-Christians, but 3,446 of blacks.2

Both World Wars were seen as opportunities for black Americans

to gain acceptance and equality through service and valor on behalf

of their nation. But blacks were severely limited in recruitment and

participation in World War I, gaining no social benefit from the conflict.

The same objectives would go largely unrealized in World War II. It was

the determination of the War Department that the American effort in

the war would not be the occasion for overcoming Jim Crow.

Army chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, was resolute in the

matter, writing that the effort “would be tantamount to solving a social

problem which has perplexed the American people throughout the

history of this nation. The army cannot accomplish such a solution,

and should not be charged with the undertaking.”3

The ratio of white to black soldiers in US forces would be kept

at approximately ten to one by complicated formulae. Those blacks

who successfully enlisted would often be required to travel to far

away military bases on their own resources. With rare exception, black

soldiers were limited to noncombat roles such as truck drivers, janitors,

cooks, and gravediggers. Blacks who, through combat, became eligible

for the Medal of Honor did not receive that honor until 1997, all but

one posthumously. Living circumstances and recreation for black and

white soldiers was subject to enforced segregation, and black integration

into European societies was actively discouraged.

Of particular importance to American military leadership was a

solid social wall between black American soldiers and white European

women. In World War I, the War Department had used secret memos to

French commanders urging them “to co-operate toward the prevention

of these harmful relationships by enlightening the residents in the

villages concerned of the gravity of the situation and by warning them

of the inevitable results.” It was, said the War Department, a matter of

concern both for the French “and even more so to the American towns,

the population of which will be affected later when troops return to

the United States. It therefore becomes necessary for both the colored

and white races that undue mixing of these two become circumspectly

prevented.”4

In World War II, the British quietly informed American military

leaders that they did not want African Americans among the influx

of US troops. At the same time, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of

the New York Times and an unofficial observer of events in England,

suggested to the head of the US Information Services in London that

African Americans should not be stationed in rural England, which had

“no experience with foreigners, let alone colored people, particularly

the girls, do not know how to take the negroes [sic] and, as a matter of

fact, are very much attracted to them.”5

The perceived dilemma rose into the concerns of General Dwight

Eisenhower who would be constantly challenged during the war by

both the enemy and the export abroad of American racial mores.

   [To] village girls, even those of a perfectly fine character—the

   negro [sic] soldier is just another man, rather fascinating because

   he is unique in their experience, a jolly good fellow and with

   money to spend. Our own white soldiers, seeing a girl walk down

   the street with a negro, frequently see themselves as protectors of

   the weaker sex and believe it necessary to intervene in the event to

   the extent of using force to let her know what she’s doing.6

The American role in the abrupt liberation of the southern provinces

of the Netherlands as forces moved toward Germany brought

a more situational urgency to the march of Jim Crow across Europe.

There are no discoverable policy directives about the interactions

between white Dutch citizens and black American soldiers, but the

word to both groups was that they were to stay away from each other.

And, though they may not have heard anything from official sources,

the Dutch could certainly see the enforcement of the separation of the

races modeled in the ways that black and white American soldiers now

in their communities were officially separated from each other. The

command discrimination shown toward black Americans in the form

of inferior housing and reduced social and entertainment opportunity

was easily apparent.

At first, the liberated Southern Netherlanders seemed not to

take what they saw seriously. Black population in the Netherlands was

mostly limited to the port cities, and most people in the south of the

country had never before seen a black human being. In addition, they

had just been subject to years of racist Nazi occupation that considered

blacks inferior beings with animal tendencies. In Limburg, children

were reported to have stared endlessly at the first black gravediggers

who opened the earth of the Margraten cemetery.7

Limburg in particular may have been racially innocent in the 1940s,

but the full history of the Netherlands includes some of the most vicious

practices of the Atlantic and Caribbean slave trade of the seventeenth

through nineteenth centuries. Although the Dutch were often cruel,

treating black human beings as commodities in international trade,

in some respects, they were ambivalent about the actual use of slaves

within their own boundaries. The practice of slavery was not allowed

within the Netherlands proper, and when the enslaved were brought to

New Netherland in the lower Hudson Valley of the American continent,

they were supported in the basic human pursuits of family, education,

spirituality, and economic striving. Some slaves eventually achieved a

form of freedom that permitted ownership of real estate and entrance

into the commerce of the larger community. Documents identifying

them as “free and at liberty on the same footing as other free people”

even allowed intermarriage between the races.8 Blacks were encouraged

by the Dutch immigrants and their descendants in the formation of

their own communities, most notably in the portion of historic New

York City that would become Washington Square Park.9

American society would be damaged into the present day by its

history with slavery. Jim Crow arose after the official end of slavery in

1867 and extended into a military version until it was outlawed with

Executive Order 9981 under President Harry Truman in 1948. There

followed the Civil Rights Movement, beginning in the 1950s, which did

much to legalize integration and equality but has not prevented regular

eruptions of racism into the twenty-first century. In post slave-trade

Netherlands, the tolerant attitudes that developed in New Netherland

seemed to prevail in a society with limited minority populations

until guest workers from southern Europe and North Africa and

migrants from the former Dutch colonies arrived, beginning in mid twentieth

century. In 2013 the Dutch character “Black Pete”—a dark

and sometimes menacing alter ego to Sinterklaas/Saint Nicholas—

received the condemnation of the United Nations Commission on

Human Rights. The commission asked, “Why it is that the people in

the Netherlands cannot see that this is a throwback to slavery, and that

in the 21st century, this practice should stop?”10 In 2023 the character

would remain the subject of a contemporary movement against Dutch

racism.11

American participation in World War II led inevitably to the birth

of children of American soldiers worldwide. Conception of the child

could result either from normal activity between the parents or from

prostitution in economically difficult times. Rape was also certainly

a factor, though its numbers and percentages range from minimal to

disturbingly high and cannot be accurately known.12 There is no official

accounting of the numbers of resulting births, but in Europe, a working

estimate of the number of pregnancies from all American soldiers is

one hundred thousand, more or less, though probably more. A similar

estimate of biracial children of African American soldiers might be ten

thousand, more or less. In England, the estimated numbers are twenty-two

thousand children from American soldiers, of which seventeen

hundred came to be called the “Brown Babies” of the war. In postwar

occupied Germany, an estimate of ninety thousand children of all

Allied troops includes estimates of five thousand who were biracial,13

and in Austria, estimates range from eight thousand to thirty thousand

occupation children of American servicemen, perhaps five hundred of

them biracial.14

In the Netherlands, the vast majority of children of war were

born during the Nazi occupation. In Adolf Hitler’s mind, the people of

Germany and the Netherlands were of common Aryan stock, and the

birth of Dutch children fathered by German soldiers was desirable. The

Nazi Lebensborn program sought to promote and support the birth of

Aryan children, within or without marriage, throughout Europe during

the war years. For many years, it was believed that perhaps ten thousand

Dutch German children had been born of such unions, half of all outof-

wedlock births during that time. Recently, that estimate has ranged

from moderately to dramatically higher, though it cannot ultimately

be known.15

In the liberation years, most of the Dutch children were born of

Canadian fathers, and the number of those born of American fathers

cannot be known. Unofficially, the number of those who were biracial

has been estimated at one hundred by author and public historian Mieke

Kirkels. There was no effective recordkeeping at the time, and as in

other countries, a biracial infant was not always seen to be such at birth.

Those children could have been subsumed into the population beyond

the reach of demographic research, and there was little coordination

and information shared between social and religious agencies charged

with the welfare of children and women.

In truth, none of these numbers can be fully authenticated and

footnoted. It is certain, however, that the presence and problems of

biracial children in these countries would be occasional matters of

public policy and concern. It is safe to say that in 2023 many of them

are coming toward the end of potentially confusing and unresolved

European lives.16

That resolution of the questions “Who am I? Who is my father?

Where have I come from?” asked in the context of the difficulties of

their biracial identities, is the subject of Mieke Kirkels’ work in the

Netherlands, contained in her book about twelve of the Dutch children

of African American soldiers,17 and with this author, she copublished

a book about the topic examined in a particularly American context.18

The lives of two of the twelve, Huub Schepers and Els Geijselaers,

both now deceased, offer contrasting and difficult stories of the coming

together in 1944-45 of the racial sensibilities and norms of American

and Dutch societies.

Huub Schepers was conceived as the result of an encounter

between his mother and a black American soldier, something that

she would never talk about. Huub’s life would become a constant

struggle to overcome the odds against him, with each success seemingly

followed by a crumbling into despair. Except for a few good years of

a satisfactory marriage, he would live either mostly outside of society

or at its margins. Near the end of his life, a small triumph would be

revelatory to the other biracial adults of the Southern Netherlands.

Huub would have been a half-brother to two children already

born to his mother. When he was born, his mother insisted on keeping

him in the basement of their home in Geleen and out of their reach.

At times, his mother’s sister would rescue him out to the fresh air for a

carriage ride with her own child. His mother’s husband (his stepfather)

was arrested during the liberation as a member of the Nationaal-

Socialistiche Bewegging (NSB) and imprisoned in Valkenburg. When

learning of Huub, he vowed to drown him in a bucket of water upon

his eventual return, but ironically he would be let out of prison by

legally accepting responsibility for the child as his own. By the time he

returned, however, Huub had been moved into the care of an elderly

woman in Sittard. In the first vestiges of his memory, Huub could see

her sitting in the dark and constantly praying, a setting of comfort for

him. Later in life, he would learn that among her first efforts to care for

him had been regular scrubbing to try to remove his own darkness.

He was taken from her by social services and placed with a foster

family that included four daughters; this he remembered as a happy

time, until he was taken away again, this time by car to Maastricht,

where he was placed in a children’s home under the care of Catholic

nuns. “That was when the lights went out,” he would later recall.

The vow to drown Huub in a bucket of water was one of various

kinds of responses by husbands whose wives had conceived children by

American soldiers, white or black, in all affected European countries.

White babies could be more easily blended into families that had been

disrupted by the wife’s infidelity. Many would become objects of family

discord, but some would find stepfathers who would raise them lovingly

and with their best efforts.

Many biracial babies were born into conditions of ambiguity.

As infants they might initially be seen as white and noted as such in

their birth records—until at some point in their growth their color and

features would evolve into their true genetic heritage. Or they could be

seen initially as cute, even exotic, small human beings, but increasingly

less so as they grew into society. As important, and particularly for the

small number of biracial children in white Dutch society, they would

grow up with little chance of settling on an effective self-identity.

Who, exactly, were they? Els Geijselaers would always deal with

the confusion of who she was, but she was fortunate to have been

born into a family that loved her fully, and no less so by the man who

would be her father, despite his wife’s infidelity. The village in which she

grew up, Berg en Terblijt, in Limburg, was accepting of her differences.

The village hairdresser always struggled with her hair but never with

disrespect.

Els was born into a home across the street from the historic

Geulhem cave system that had played a role in the commerce, wars, and

religious and community life of four centuries of Dutch history. In the

liberation of 1944, much of village life that had been hidden within

during the occupation emerged into daylight as a center of commerce

and recovery. The town would become a supply center for the difficult

postwar reconstruction to come.

After the Normandy landing, reconstruction became one of the

many intense jobs of the Red Ball Express. Named after the American

railroading concept of the red ball signaling an express train as it

sped through a small town or freight yard, the Express was a constant

caravan of trucks that supplied the Allied advance from Normandy

into Germany and, more unofficially, the basic needs of the civilian

population when possible. It was not uncommon for Red Ball Express

drivers to accidentally allow packages of food to fall off their trucks as

they drove through populated areas.

The Red Ball Express was distinguished by a workforce that was

primarily African American. Men who were, for the most part, not

allowed to fight were instead set upon a constantly moving racetrack

from the source of supply on the French coast to the increasingly

distant points of the Army’s march toward the enemy. The work was

exhausting and intense, and the trucks were constantly driven between

inevitable breakdowns. Between August 25 and November 16, 1944, the

Express would carry four hundred thousand tons of supplies and fuel

across Europe.

Berg en Terblijt and the Geulhem caves were a regular stop and

resting place on the Express for Henry van Landingham, a young black

man from Buffalo, New York. He became a recognized presence as he

traveled through the village, enough so that he would be remembered by

some people a half century later. At some point, he formed a relationship

with Trinette Nols, whose husband Harrie was then a medic with Allied

troops in Germany. The Nols family was open and accepting to the

black Americans in their midst, and when Henry van Landingham

became physically and mentally exhausted with his work, he came

under Trinette’s wing and was returned to health. Their daughter Els

was born nine months after his last visit to Berg en Terblijt.

Els had a good childhood, and her family, including seven

brothers and sisters, was enfolding. When Harrie returned from the

war, he embraced her as his own. As she grew, she stood out in the small

Dutch village, though not always unhappily. But she would grow up as

someone no one else fully understood, no less so herself.

As he emerged into young adulthood, Huub Schepers found work

as an attendant in a psychiatric hospital in Maastricht. It was a fitting

pause between the darkness in which he lived after the “lights went out”

and the very difficult years that were to follow, despite his best efforts

to find normalcy.

It would not be until 2002 that the Roman Catholic Church, with

a declaration from Pope John Paul II, began to deal publicly with the

problem of sexual abuse of children within its dioceses and institutions.

It was a particular problem in the Netherlands, where the church held

a strong influence over one-third of the population and supplied many

of the social services for the nation.

In 2011 the Conference of Bishops and the Dutch Religious

Conference created and released the Deetman Report, named after its

chief investigator, Dr. J. W. Deetman. It reported on

   any sexual contact by Representatives of the Roman Catholic

   Archdiocese . . . with a child or youth under age of 18, entrusted

   to the responsibility of those representatives, where those persons

   felt unable to refuse the sexual contact as a result of physical

   dominance, abuse of a position of authority, emotional pressure,

   compulsion or force.19

The investigation covered the years from 1945 to 1981 in the

Netherlands, Aruba, and Curacao. It determined that 10 percent of

Dutch children had been abused during that time, though the number

of children abused in Catholic and non-Catholic orphanages and

institutions was 20 percent. Between 1945 and 1981, eight hundred

Catholic priests and lay workers had sexually abused between ten and

twenty thousand children who were raised Catholic and spent some

time in Catholic institutions. The number of those not necessarily

Catholic or Catholic-institutionalized who were sexually abused was

estimated to be “several tens of thousands.”

Huub Schepers had been sexually, physically, and emotionally

abused in Catholic institutions from childhood through his teenage

years. He had no one to advocate for him and no resources for his own

escape or rescue. In 1952 he was placed in Huize St. Josef in Cadier en

Keer, which would be cited in the Deetman Report for the “use of excessive

forms of violence, combined with sexual abuse.”20 The home was run by

the Fathers of the Sacred Heart and held children of both American and

German fathers and members of the National Socialist Workers Party

who had collaborated with the Nazis. Huub was one of only a few with

dark skin. He learned to stay out of view, to disappear.

The prevalence of violence against the boys of Huize St. Josef

was described sensationally in Nr. 21, by Dutch artist Frans Houben

(Glasgalerie Frans Houben, 2010); twenty-one was Houben’s number

in the home. He described a beating that occurred immediately upon

his entering St. Josef, followed by years of mental, physical, and sexual

harassment. He had been locked in small closets for hours at a time,

given cold showers for bedwetting, and regularly kicked and beaten. His

personal pictures were torn up, and a duck he had taken as a pet was

killed. His caretakers found frequent reasons to fondle his genitals.21

Houben was white, but as a small, biracial child, Huub Schepers

had had to contend with other abuses.

   You felt a lot of things were not right. The Fathers and Brothers

   were completely unpredictable. Some got hysterical when they

   were beating you. But nobody ever talked about anything. Every

   now and then, one of the Brothers would hit me and call me

   names like, son of a bitch, and nigger, or jigaboo. Once, I was

   locked up in one of the cells in the basement as a punishment.

   Those were small rooms with a bed, a concrete table and a chair.

   And a catechism.

  In the morning, they would take away the mattress, and

  then you would just sit there. With this catechism. If you wetted

  your bed, you got locked in the metal wardrobe, standing up,

  with nothing but a piece of bread sprinkled with salt. Another

  punishment was sitting on the balance beam on your knees,

  hands up in the air, and you were not allowed to move. Once

  a week, the boys could take a shower. Before you went in, the

  Brothers checked the crotch of your underpants. If they found it

  was stained, you had to take a cold shower.22

One day, in his sixteenth year, Huub was abruptly removed from

Huize St. Joseph (he later supposed in order to cover up the abuse) and

driven to a psychiatric clinic in Oegstgeest. Eventually, he came under

the care of a foster family in Maastricht, graduated from high school,

and set the path of his professional life with work in a Catholic nursing

home. He would later understand that the course of his mental health

had also been inalterably set. His happiest years would be in a fine

marriage, which brought him into the nurture of an accepting Dutch

family and produced three children. But the marriage eventually failed

due to his inability to live with other people. His ex-wife Netty would

care for him as best she could until his death.

Els Geijselaers' family, including her stepfather and six brothers and sisters, had cared for and protected her, not that it was particularly needed in Bergit en Terblijt. But a condition of her upbringing seemed to have been the question given

to her by her family as to why she should wonder about her heritage

when she was so well loved in their home and family. In her own

incomplete understanding, she was an outsider in her family and in her

village, darker than everyone else but unsure of what that meant. The

circumstances of her birth were not an easy topic of discussion.

She grew up, married a good man in Haike Geijselaers, and had

her son Marc in 1965. After the death of her mother, Trinette, she

began a determined search for her father. She would later tell the Dutch

magazine Libelle of:

   the uncertainty about my origin, the anger that no one told me

   anything. I was sure there had to be someone who knew. . . . Where

   was I supposed to start looking? Who was I? I became stressed,

   nervous, lost my sense of self-worth.23

Though some in the village had vague memories of Henry van

Landingham, they could not fully remember his name, though there

was a sense that he might have been her father. In the following years,

Els taught herself English, sought out US Army records, arrived at four

paternal candidates, found their addresses in the United States, and

wrote a letter to three of them. Henry van Landingham, now living in

Florida, emerged as the likely person she sought.

At the time, her son Marc had a young family of his own and,

with his wife Sonja, had a familiarity with America through family and

friends they had visited before. On their next trip, they went to Florida

and knocked on Henry van Landingham’s door. Their pretense was

that, as young citizens of Berg en Terblijt, they had been made aware of

Americans who had been helpful during a difficult time and just wanted

to thank those they could in person while traveling in the United States.

Marc did not broach the subject of his mother in the visit, but

that would come in a letter to him from Els, dated July 4, 1995.

   My family told me that during World War II at the end of 1944,

   you had a relation with Mrs. Nols who was my mother. I was born

   on 9th September 1945 as a black baby in a white family. 5 years

   ago my sister told me your name. At that time I began the search

   for my real father. Then also started the desire to know how he

   would look like, if he’s married and if he has any children and a

   lot of these questions. It hurts to know, that there is somebody

   The only thing I want is to meet you. So I ask you, are you

  The only thing I want is to meet you. So I ask you, are you

   that American soldier my mother had a relation with? Please

   forgive me if this letter is going to hurt you and your family.

   Maybe you are angry if you read this letter, but believe me, I’m

   asking myself for years this question: Who is my father?

   If I know that, then I can forwards with my life.

   Els Geijselaers

   Berg en Terblijt24

Henry van Landingham’s response was immediate and gracious.

“Child,” he said, “it has to be you; you are the spitting image of my

younger sister. Why didn’t your son say anything?” A fully integrated,

biracial Dutch American family was formed by this exchange. Its

members traveled back and forth across the ocean to visit with each

other. When Marc and Sonja returned to America with Els, Henry met

them at the Orlando airport. He took Els into a bear hug and would not

leave her side for the rest of the visit. He put her luggage in one of his

bedrooms and said, “This is your room, and it will remain your room.”

He took her to his church and introduced her to the congregation.

Henry wrote in her journal, “Dear daughter, may this be the

beginning of a new family life.” For Els, it was also the beginning of

the resolution of who she was, helped by a close relationship with

Henry’s American daughter, Arzeymah Raquib, who could listen

openly to her story.

She had been born into a kind of childhood that had no history

in the Netherlands, no traditions that were spoken or unspoken,

and no pathway to success or failure in Dutch society. There were no

guidelines toward a biracial concept of herself; she was not supposed to

seem different from others, but she was. She was loved by her mother

and stepfather Haike who had accepted her as the child of his wife’s

infidelity. “Haike was really a beautiful person,” in Arzeymah’s view.25

Her brothers had always protected her, but when she persisted in

searching for her father and finally came close, one of them, for whatever

reason, demanded that she drop the pursuit, and he cut off contact

with her when she would not. After that, they never spoke again.

She told Arzeymah that, although she believed she was the

luckiest of all the biracial children of the war, she had always struggled.

When she was growing up, she could be in a room with others, feeling

that she did not belong there. She felt that she was not supposed to be there, and she needed to disappear, but she could not because of her

skin color.

   You’d see a picture of her with her brothers and sisters and you’d

   say, “Who is this child?” So she wanted to make herself disappear,

   either physically or psychologically. And she said she thought

   that people were going to come and take her away.

   So it was very important to her to figure out who the hell

   she was. She spent time and effort. I mean, you don’t go to the

   army, and several departments, and rejections, and letters and

   calls [to identify her father], and all that, if it’s not important to

   you. I think she was more comfortable here, that she had a family

   here and we loved her and accepted her. And it wasn’t like we were

   pretending.26

Els died in the Netherlands in 2004 with Arzeymah at her side.

Talking about it years later, Arzeymah wept. “Somebody comes and

enriches your life. And then . . . they’re gone. You know?”27 Henry van

Landingham died in 2006 after a successful life in the civil service and

his church.

Of the twelve biracial children whose stories are told in Dutch

Children of African American Liberators, Els was the only one to know her

father well and with great satisfaction. Just four of the others would

know their fathers’ identities. Two of those would have limited contact

with them in their childhood, and one, finally learning his identity,

would visit her father’s grave after his death. Just six would grow up in

healthy families that accepted their circumstances of birth, and most

would have to deal with social racism at various points in their lives.

Huub Schepers would deal with every difficulty faced by these

black Dutch American children, albeit with a wife and children, and he

was loved and valued by his wife’s family in his lifetime. He had worked

in therapeutic professions to the benefit of others who would continue

to be grateful to him for his help (including one of the other biracial

children who had been hospitalized after attempting suicide). But by

2009, he could no longer maintain that life, and with his divorce from

Netty, he was moved into a home for assisted living where he lived with

his emotional support dog Boedha and found peace in long bike rides

by himself in the hills of South Limburg. The revelations of the Deetman Report gave him a monthly income as settlement for what had happened

to him in St. Josef House.

Huub would become the catalyst for the resolution of the

questions of self-identity that each of the children had faced to various

degrees and at various times. They had grown up into adulthood and

lived through the following years still unknowing of where they had

come from genetically. Even for those who had been raised in healthy

families, there was reluctance bordering on denial to talk about their

differences. Though they would face racism in various forms, there was

no available social mechanism to understand and deal with it, and there

was no real knowledge of the racial history from which their fathers had

come into the Netherlands of 1944–45. That history was continued in

an unwritten policy of the US military that moved African American

soldiers to other parts of the war if their relationships with white

women became apparent.

Among the African American soldiers who first arrived in South

Limburg were the grave diggers of the Army Quartermaster Corps

who broke the first ground of the Margraten American Cemetery in

1944. Their work through a cold, wet fall and historically cold winter

was exhausting, frustrating, and debilitating. They and the people of

Limburg were told to not interact with each other. Many Limburgers

had never seen black people and could only stare at them from a

distance. Though their initial impulse was to accept and befriend the

soldiers, the example of segregation by white American soldiers and

command gave them a guide to their own eventual treatment of these

people.

The first of the American soldiers to command his fellow

gravediggers was Jefferson Wiggins, a child of an Alabama family of

sharecroppers who would later in life become a distinguished educator

and writer in Connecticut. An oral history project about the creation

of Margraten would lead to the publication of a book.28 In it, Wiggins

narrates his experience growing up in the Jim Crow south, his family’s

experiences with the Ku Klux Klan, and the racial segregation of the

US military in World War II—all of it as a prelude to his arrival on

the yet undisturbed farmland that would become one of America’s

international war cemeteries.

For Huub Schepers, the book was a revelation, a description of

blackness in a white society that confirmed his own experience and a

probable description of his father’s life before he was conceived. Thiswas new information for the biracial children of Limburg and, as a

few others became aware of it, the beginning of the unlocking of the

mystery of their lives.

Huub’s experiences with it all then became the subject of a

newspaper story.29 “It suddenly felt like I belonged to something,” he

said in the Wiggins book. “Something opened inside. One of those boys

could have been my father.” With that information in mind, he wanted

now to know who his father was.

As the other children read of Huub’s life in Dutch society, they

learned that they were not alone; there were others who shared their

experiences. For the first time, for most, they learned about American

racism and the segregation of the US Army as it helped to bring the

Netherlands out of years under German Nazism. Their urge to form

community with each other led to a meeting at the Museum for Family

History in Eijsden, and friendships were formed.

In the last year of his life, Huub Schepers became an American in

spirit (indeed, he had been an American citizen at his birth and for some

years after as a complicated aspect of American immigration law).30 He

obtained an American flag and, reflecting what he had learned about

the land of his father, flew it in his yard on Martin Luther King Day.

On that same day, one year later, his body lay in state at the museum

in Eijsden. As Huub rested beneath his American flag, Netty quoted

from a Dutch translation of the "I Have a Dream" speech given by Martin

Luther King Jr. in 1963: “Finally free! Finally free! Thank God almighty,

we are finally free!”31

1 Afro-Germans and the Holocaust, The Zekelman Holocaust Center, https://www.holocaustcenter.org/afro-germans-holocaust-history/. MiekeKirkels and Jo Purnot, From Farmland to Soldier’s Cemetery (Heinen

Uitgevers, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 2009), 47.

2 University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, “Lynchings by State

and Race, 1882-1968,” from the Archives at Tuskegee Institute. https://

web.archive.org/web/20100629081241/http:/www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/

projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html, accessed 10/31/2023.

3 Maggi M. Morehouse, Fighting in the Jim Crow Army (Rowman & Littlefield,

2000), 26.

4 Graham Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull (St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 9.

5 John Belchem, Before the Windrush: Race Relations in 20th-Century Liverpool

(Oxford University Press, 2014), 92.

6 David Reynolds, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain (Harper

Collins, 1995), 219.

7 Mieke Kirkels, Van Alabama naar Margraten (Self-published, 2014), 33.

8 E. R. O’Callaghan, Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland 1638–1674 (Weed

Parsons & Co., 1807), 86.

9 Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. van Minnen, Giles Scott-Smith, eds., Four

Centuries of Dutch American Relations (SUNY, 2009), 197.

10 Emma Thomas, “Outrage in Netherlands over Calls to Abolish ‘Black

Pete’ Clowns Which March in Christmas Parade Dressed in Blackface,”

The Daily Mail (24 Oct. 2013). https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/

article-2474693/Zwarte-Piet-abolished-Outrage-Netherlands-Black-Pete-

Christmas-tradition.html, accessed 11/9/2019.

11 “Kick Out Zwarte Piet: National Actions 2022-3.” https://kozwartepiet.

nl/.

12 Mieke Kirkels and Chris Dickon, Dutch Children of African American

Liberators (McFarland Publications, 2020), 135.

13 “Negro Children Studied,” New York Times (23 July 1952), 5.

14 Philip Rohrbach and Niko Wahl, “Black Austria: The Children of African

American Soldiers of the Occupation,” exhibit of the Vienna Museum of

Folk Life and Folk Art, 2016.

15 Foray, Jennifer L., “The ‘Clean Wehrmacht’ in the German-Occupied

Netherlands, 1940-45,” Journal of Contemporary History 45 (no. 4), 779n29;

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25764581?read-now=1&seq=12#page_scan_

tab_contents.

16 For more on the lives of biracial children of American soldiers in World

War II Europe, see Lucy Bland, Britain’s Brown Babies (University of

Manchester Press, 2019); Heide Fehrenbach, Race After Hitler (Princeton

University Press, 2007); and Kirkels and Dickon, Dutch Children.

17 Mieke Kirkels, Kinderen van zwarte bevrijders (Uitgeverij Vantilt, 2017).

18 Kirkels and Dickon, Dutch Children.

19 The Conference of Bishops and the Dutch Religious Conference,

“The Deetman Commission Report,” Dec. 2011, summary, 3. https://

www.bishop-accountabi l ity.org/news2011/11_12/2011_12_26_

DeetmanCommission_DeetmanCommission_2.htm; accessed 10/31/23.

20 Ibid.

21 Weblog “Bierenbroodspot,” http://www.bierenbroodspot.info/summonenglish.

html, accessed 31 Oct. 2023.

22 Mieke Kirkels, Kinderen van zwarte bevrijders (Uitgeverij Vantilt, 2017), 153.

Of the twelve children who are the subjects of Dutch Children of African

American Liberators, five suffered sexual, physical, or emotional abuse as

children in their families and orphanages.

23 “Small Portrait: Liberation Child,” (3 May 1996), 18.

24 Limburg province, the NetherlandsLibelle, Netherlands (3 May 1996), 18.

26 Kirkels and Dickon, Dutch Children, 197.

27 Ibid.

28 Mieke Kirkels, Van Alabama naar Margraten (Self-published, 2014).

29 Rob Gollin, “The Battered Life of a Liberation Child,” De Volksrant (24 Apr.

2015); https://www.volkskrant.nl/mensen/het-gehavende-leven-van-eenbevrijdingskind~

b8e97b9e/, viewed 31 Oct. 23.