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 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. And the Europe of that time 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 hatreds 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. 

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 18th 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.

Though not equivalent to the effect of the Holocaust, the ultimate American expression of the tone of the time 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 20th century, but African Americans paid the highest price by far. A study by the Tuskegee Institute of the years 1882–1968 catalogued 1,297 white lynchings, often of immigrants, Catholics and non–Christians, but 3,446 of Blacks. 1 

Both World Wars had been seen as opportunities for Black Americans to gain acceptance and equality through service and valor for their nation in time of war. 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 American 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.” 2

The ratio of white to Black soldiers in U.S. 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 non-combat labor as truck drivers, janitors, cooks and gravediggers, among other tasks (those Blacks who, through combat, became eligible for the Medal of Honor did not receive that honor until 1997, all but one posthumously). Living 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.” 3

In World War II, the British quietly informed American military leaders that they did not want African Americans among the influx of U.S. troops starting in the early 1940s. At the same time, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, and an unofficial observer of events in England, suggested to the head of the U.S. 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.” 4

The perceived dilemma rose into the concerns of General Dwight David Eisenhower, who would be constantly challenged during the war by both the enemy and the export abroad of American racial mores. “(To) village girls,” he wrote, “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.” 5

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 South Netherlanders seemed not to take what they saw seriously. Black population in the Netherlands was mostly limited to the port cities and most in the South had never before seen a Black human being. In addition, they had just been subject to years of racist Nazi occupation, which held Blacks as 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.

Limburg in particular may have been racially innocent in the 1940s, but the full history of the Netherlands included some of the most vicious practices of the Atlantic and Caribbean slave trade of the 17th through 19th centuries; vicious in its cruel treatment of black human beings as commodities in international trade, but in some respects ambivalent about the actual use of that commodity within its 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. They could eventually achieve 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. 6 They were encouraged in the formation of their own communities, most notably in the portion of historic New York City that would become Washington Square Park. 7

American society would be damaged by its history with slavery into the present day. 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 1960s, which did much to legalize integration and equality, but did not fully erase regular re-eruptions of historic American racism into the 21st century. 

In post-slavery Netherlands, the tolerant attitudes developed in New Netherland seemed to prevail in a society with limited minority populations and until the economic and immigration strains of the late 20th century. And in the 2020s the culturally iconic Dutch figure of Zwarte Piet – Black Pete – as a dark and perhaps menacing alter ego to Sinterklaas/Saint Nicholas, a harbinger of the joy of the Christmas holidays, was still a point of social conflict. In 2013, the Dutch concept of Black Pete received the condemnation of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights with the question as to “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.” 8In 2023, the character would remain the subject of a contemporary movement against Dutch racism. 9

The American participation in World War II led inevitably to the birth of children of American soldiers worldwide. The conceptions could result from normal sexual and romantic activity between the parents, or from prostitution in economically difficult times. Rape was certainly a factor, though its numbers or percentages range from minimal to disturbing and can’t be accurately known. 10 There is no official accounting of the numbers of resulting births, but in Europe a working estimate is 100,000, more or less, though probably more. A similar estimate of biracial children of African American soldiers might be 10,000 more or less. In England, the estimated numbers are 22,000 children, of which 1,700 came to be called the “Brown Babies” of the war; in post-war occupied Germany an estimate of 90,000 children of all Allied troops includes est. 5,000 who were biracial; 9 and in Austria estimates ranged from 8,000 to 30,000 occupation children of American servicemen, perhaps 500 biracial. 11

In the Netherlands, the vast majority of illegitimate 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 would seek 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 10,000 Dutch-German children had been born of such unions, half of all illegitimate births during that time. That estimate has since quintupled. 12 

In the Liberation years, most of these children were born of Canadian fathers, and the number of those of American fathers can’t be known. Unofficially, the number of those who were biracial has been estimated at 100 by author and Public Historian Mieke Kirkels.  There was no effective record-keeping 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 co-ordination 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 ends of what have been confusing and unresolved European lives.

That resolution of the questions of “who am I? who is my father? where have I come from ?”, asked in the context of the difficulties of their biracial identities, has been the subject of Mieke Kirkels’ work and writing with twelve of the Dutch children of African American soldiers in her initial work in the Netherlands, 13 and of this writer as the two have co-authored a book about the topic examined in a particularly American context. 14

The lives of two of the twelve, Huub Schepers and Els Geijselaers, both now deceased, offer contrasting though difficult stories of a result of the coming together in 1944-1945 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 that she would never talk about. His life would become a constant struggle to overcome the odds against him, with each success seemingly followed by its crumbling into despair, then a small triumph that would be revelatory to the other biracial adults of South Netherlands near its end. Except for a few good years of a good marriage, he would live mostly outside of society or at its margins.

Huub would be a half-brother to two children already born to his mother, but she insisted on keeping the baby in the basement of their home in Geleen, and out of their reach, though her sister would occasionally rescue him out to the fresh air for a carriage ride with her own child. Her husband had been arrested in the liberation as a member of the Nationaal-Socialistiche Bewegging (NSB) and was currently imprisoned in Valkenburg. When learning of Huub, he vowed to drown him in a bucket of water upon his eventual return. Ironically, he would be let out of prison by legally accepting responsibility for the child as his own, but, by the time he returned, 

Huub had been moved on to the care of an elderly woman in Sittard. In the first vestiges of his memory he 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. 

Then he was taken from her by social services and placed with a foster family that included four daughters, which 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 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 difference from everyone else. 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. Thus, it became a supply center for the difficult post-war reconstruction to come.

Briefly after the Normandy Invasion, 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 supply trucks that supplied the Allied advance from Normandy into Germany, and, more unofficially, the basic needs of the civilian population as possible. It was not uncommon for Red Ball Express drivers, and those of other suppliers, 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 that 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 constantly more distant points of the 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 400,000 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 of Buffalo, New York. He became a recognized presence as he traveled through the village, enough so that he would be remembered by some half a 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, as 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. 

Her childhood was a good one 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 began, with a declaration from Pope John Paul II, to deal publicly with the problem of sexual abuse of children within its dioceses and institutions. It had been a particular problem in the Netherlands, where the church held strong influence over one-third of the population and supplied much of the social service 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, about “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.” 15

The investigation covered the years 1945 – 2010 in the Netherlands, Aruba and Curacao, and determined that ten percent of Dutch children had been abused during that time, though the number of children abused in Catholic and non-Catholic orphanages and institutions had been twenty percent. Between 1945 and 1981, 800 Catholic priests and lay workers had sexually abused a wide-ranging estimate of 10,000 to 20,000 children.

Huub Schepers had been sexually, physically and emotionally abused from childhood through his teenage years in Catholic institutions. He had had no one to advocate for him, and no place or person with which to escape. 

In 1952, he was placed in Huize St. Joseph in Cadier en Keer, which would be cited in the Deetman Report for the “use of excessive forms of violence, combined with sexual abuse.” 16

The home was run by the Fathers of the Sacred Heart and held children of both American and German fathers, and of members of the National Socialist Workers Party, which had collaborated with the Nazis.

Huub was one of only a few with dark skin. He learned to try to stay out of view, to disappear.

The prevalence of violence against the boys of Huize St. Josef was most described sensationally in the 2010 book Nr. 21 by Dutch artist Frans Houben.

“21” had been Houben’s number in the home. He described an immediate beating upon 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, regularly kicked and beaten. His personal pictures were torn up, and a duck he had taken as a pet had been killed. His caretakers found frequent reasons to fondle his genitals. 

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. 17

Of the twelve children who are the subject of Dutch Children of African American Liberators, five would suffer sexual, physical or emotional abuse as children in families and orphanages.

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, north of Den Haag. 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. Its happiest years would be in a fine marriage which brought him into the nurture of an accepting white Dutch family, and produced three children. But the marriage eventually failed in his inability to live with other people. His ex-wife, Nettty, would care for him as best she could until his death.

Nels GIejselaers had led a good childhood. Her 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 Hanke Geijselaers and had a 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.” 18

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 become her father. In the following years, Els taught herself English, sought out U.S. 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, 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 aware of those Americans who had been helpful during a difficult time and just wanted to thank those that 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 out there

who is part of you, a father you don’t know.

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 Terblijt [Limburg province, Netherlands]"

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. 

He wrote in her journal. “Dear daughter, may this be the beginning of a new family life.”  And, 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 circumstances that had no history, no traditions that were spoken or unspoken, and no pathways 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 by her stepfather, who accepted her as the child of his wife’s infidelity - “Haike was really a beautiful person,” in Arzeymah’s view. 18

Her brothers had always protected her. When she persisted in searching for her father and finally came close to finding him, however, one of them, for whatever reasons, demanded that she drop the pursuit, and he cut off contact with her when she would not. After that, they would never talk again. 

She told Arzeymah that she thought she had been the luckiest of all the biracial children of the war, but 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 wasn’t supposed to be there, and she needed to disappear, but she couldn’t 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.” 19

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?

Henry van Landingham died in 2006 after a successful life in civil service and his church.

Of the twelve biracial children whose stories are told in Dutch Children of African American Liberators Els would be the only one to know her father well and with great satisfaction. Just four of the others would know a father’s identity. Two of those would have limited contact with him in their childhood, and one, finally learning his identity, would visit his 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 the various children, though with a wife and children out of that relationship, in which 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 attempted suicide). But, by 2009, he could no longer maintain that life, and, with his divorce from Nettty, was moved into a home for assisted living where he lived with an 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 would give him a monthly income as settlement for what had happened to him in St. Joseph House.

Then, 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 had been a reluctance, bordering on denial, to talk about their differences from others. 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 emerged into the Netherlands of 1944-1945. That history was continued in an unwritten policy of the U.S. 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 had been exhausting, frustrating and debilitating. They and the people of Limburg had been told to not interact with each other. Many Limburgers had never experienced black people before, and could only stare at them from a distance. Though their initial impulses were to accept and befriend the soldiers, the examples of segregation by white American soldiers and command, gave them a guide to their own eventual treatment of these different people.  

A 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 a book, Van Alabama naar Margraten 19, written with Mieke Kirkels and published in 2014, 20in which Wiggins narrated his experience growing up in the Jim Crow south, his family’s experiences with the Ku Klux Klan and the racial segregation of the U.S. 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. This was 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 subject of a story in the newspaper de Volksrant under the headline “The Battered Life of a Liberation Child.” 21

“It suddenly felt like I belonged to something,” he said of the Wiggins book. “Something opened inside. One of those boys could have been my father.” And with that information he wanted now to know who his father was. 

As the other children read of his life in Dutch society they learned that they were not alone and that there were others who had shared their experiences. And for the first time for most, they learned about American racism and the segregation of the U.S. Army as it helped to bring the Netherlands out of years of German Naziism. 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).22 He obtained an American flag, and, reflecting what he had learned about the land of his father, he 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 he 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!”

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.