In June 1942, an African man named Jonas N’Doki was executed in Nazi Germany, not for murder, treason, or political rebellion, but for what officials branded as “sexual misconduct with White women,” a charge driven more by racism and Nazi racial laws than by any proven wrongdoing.
Jonas N’Doki was born in Douala, Cameroon, once a German colony. Though not from the elite class, he received formal education in German-run schools and worked in the postal division of the colonial army. By 1920, he made his way to Germany, part of a post-World War I wave of Africans who migrated to the metropole. Like many Cameroonians, he brought with him a fluency in multiple languages, experience with European customs, and a strong sense of identity.
Initially working as a sailor, N’Doki settled into German life, eventually joining the Deutsche Afrika-Schau, a traveling colonial show sponsored by the Nazis. The show, which paraded Black performers across the country to “educate” Germans about their lost colonies, was steeped in racist spectacle. Yet for many Africans in Germany, it offered rare income, legal status, and a means of survival in a country that hated them.
Running from 1937 to 1940, the Deutsche Afrika-Schau was a continuation of earlier human zoo exhibitions from Germany’s colonial past. It doubled as propaganda calling for the return of Germany’s colonies and glorifying African Askari soldiers, even as African minorities were denied basic rights. Performers such as Bayume Mohamed Husen, a Swahili teacher, appeared in the show alongside other Germans of African ancestry, who were costumed and made to perform dances and staged acts for the entertainment of white audiences.
In 1932, Jonas married a German woman. Their marriage lasted five years, ending in divorce, but even a short-lived interracial union placed him in the Nazi crosshairs. As the regime tightened its grip, Black men were increasingly viewed as a threat to white womanhood, the sanctified vessel of the “Aryan race.”
For years, N’Doki moved through Germany with charisma and confidence. Known for dressing well and speaking eloquently, he embodied the kind of dignified masculinity that flew in the face of Nazi propaganda, which insisted that Black men were primitive, oversexed, and dangerous. This made N’Doki a target.
By the late 1930s, the Nazi state had transformed sex into a racial battleground. Although the infamous Nuremberg Laws did not formally criminalize African-German relationships, the regime harassed and punished interracial couples through threats, social ostracism, and state violence.
Jonas N’Doki, who lived publicly, performed widely, and was known to engage with German women, embodied everything the Nazis feared. His very presence was an act of rebellion, and the state began treating him as a criminal.
Between 1938 and 1941, N’Doki became the subject of multiple police reports. The accusations were often vague, being seen in a bathrobe in a shared hallway, alleged flirtation, offensive language. But the state’s interest in him grew more sinister with each report.
In 1940, N’Doki was arrested and charged with rape and attempted rape. The trial collapsed when the court found the two white women who testified against him to be unreliable. He was acquitted. But the regime was not satisfied. Nazi authorities had begun to view his acquittal not as proof of innocence, but as a failure of the justice system to “protect” white women.
In December 1941, Jonas N’Doki was retried before a Nazi Special Tribunal. This time, he was accused of a single attempted rape, based on testimony from a woman who admitted to previously having an affair with him. That nuance didn’t matter. The court condemned him to death, citing his “persistence in seeking sexual contact with Aryan women.”
The prosecutor’s language was drenched in racial fear: N’Doki was portrayed as a Black predator with “natural instincts” that made him a danger to society. His long residence in Germany was twisted into a reason to punish him more severely.
In June 1942, Jonas N’Doki was executed by beheading, the preferred method for political executions under the Nazi regime. He was just one of a handful of Afro-Germans to receive the death penalty during Hitler’s reign, and likely the only one for the supposed crime of sexual transgression.
His personal belongings at the time of death paint a picture of a man who took pride in his identity: gold rings, cufflinks, a tobacco pouch, cologne, gloves. Far from a “brute,” N’Doki was a man of style, intelligence, and charisma, qualities that the Nazi regime could not tolerate in a Black man.
His death was not just a personal tragedy, it was a calculated act meant to terrorize the entire Afro-German community, especially Black men who dared to live freely or love across racial lines.
Sources:
Aitken R, Rosenhaft E. Problem men and exemplary women? Gender, class and ‘race.’ In: Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960. Cambridge University Press; 2013:161-193.
