Chinese Foreign Nationals in Nazi and Postwar Germany

Kimberly Cheng

After the establishment of the Third Reich, the June census of 1933 tallied 827 Chinese within Germany’s borders. By 1936, the Chinese community of Nazi Germany, made up primarily by ship workers, merchants, circus performers, and foreign students with both Nationalist and Communist inclinations, amounted to over 1,600 people. While demographically small, the lives of the Chinese population of the Third Reich reveal the complexities and contradictions behind the formation of race, racism, and status in Nazi Germany. Although Hitler considered Chinese people as one of the world’s weakest races and utterly unfit for German life, Chinese nationals’ foreign citizenship and socio-economic status at times spared them from racial persecution. Some Chinese men were even able to extend the limited protection they derived by virtue of their foreign citizenship to German Jewish women they married, thereby exempting these women from deportation.

This project examines the daily life of Chinese individuals in Germany to track the ways in which they navigated life among Germans, in German cities, and under Nazi subsequently Allied military law. How did Chinese migrants conceive of their lives in Germany, and how were they regarded by the greater German population? What was the range of encounters between Chinese and Germans and German Jews in daily life? What bearing did Germany’s foreign policy and its shifting diplomatic and economic relationship with China have on how German authorities treated Chinese people on German soil? How did the end of the war and the postwar period change the status of Chinese migrants? By writing Chinese people back into the history of Germany, we can ultimately better understand the extent to which Germany constituted a significant locale for the unfolding of the Chinese Civil War and the varying notions of citizenship, foreignness, class, sexuality, and gender that factored into the racialization of Chinese people in Germany.