The end of World War II brought Allied occupation forces into Germany. American, British and French forces included numerous soldiers of African American, Afro-Caribbean or African descent, and some of them fathered children with ethnic German women. At the time, these armed forces generally maintained non-fraternization rules and discouraged civilian-soldier marriages. Around 8,000 of these biracial Afro German children were born immediately after the war, making up about 1% of all births in ethnically homogeneous West Germany in 1945. ""Brown Babies Adopted By Kind German Families," Jet, 8 November 1951. Vol. 1, No. 2. 15. Retrieved from Google Books on November 7, 2021. . Most single ethnic German mothers kept their "brown babies", but thousands were adopted by American families and grew up in the United States. Often they did not learn their full ancestry until reaching adulthood.
