Commentary: Germany's Rhineland Blacks2 minute listen. Commentator Aaron Freeman offers a history lesson on the Rhineland Blacks. When France occupied the Rhineland after World War I, black troops from Algeria and Morroco fathered hundreds of mixed-race children who became known as the Rhineland Blacks. The Nazis systematically sterilized them, and any Afro-German culture that could have grown up was stamped out.