Elinor and Frederick were entering a country where interracial dating, marriage, and children were still isolated experiences that were scorned by German society. During the Allied occupation from 1947 to 1955, an estimated 67,000 children were born to soldiers from the occupied forces and German women. Out of that, a reported 4,776 were “brown babies.” That term and mischlingskinder were used to describe mixed-race children with white German mothers and black fathers. The ostracizing of these children would have been a good indication for Frederick and Elinor of what was in store for them had they known.

Mischlingskinder were often placed in orphanages because no German families wanted to raise a half-black child. The children were seen as a blight on German culture and were mistreated. In response to the terrible predicament of these unwanted tan-skinned babies, an African American journalist named Mabel Grammer intervened. Grammer was married to Oscar Grammer, a black warrant officer stationed in Mannheim, Germany, from 1950 to 1954. She became aware of the discrimination these mixed-raced children faced when she was approached by German women seeking her help and nuns overseeing orphanages. She came up with the “Brown Baby Plan,” a transatlantic adoption program that placed mixed-race children in Germany who were in need of good African American families to adopt them. France, England and Italy were also facing a similar crisis where babies born to black soldiers and European white women were shunned and unwanted. The October 1948 cover of Ebony magazine pictured a mixed-race baby with the headline “Homes Needed for 10,000 Brown Orphans.”15

The shunning of these mixed-race babies was emblematic of how both German and American society felt about black-white romantic relationships. German women who had children fathered by black soldiers were treated as castaways and had very few options for maintaining a decent life as a single parent without harassment and constant threats.

Even though America was by no means free of racial prejudice, Mabel Grammer believed the orphans would be better off in the United States. It was no secret that the “brown babies” were leaving one oppressive regime, the remnants of the Third Reich, for another, Jim Crow, but Grammer thought that at least the children would have loving black families to take care of them. There would be communities of African Americans that would rally behind these children, unlike in Germany, where there was no significant black population.