Part 1/2

I remember your question from two years ago. Back then I did some research but couldn't find anything satisfying. Since then I have continued to keep my eyes open for further information but in a lot of ways, the question you asked has raised a lot more questions rather than answers and touches upon some pertinent topics including not just the flight of Nazis to Africa, which, unlike the cases of South and North America is severely under-researched, but in connection to that also several questions concering post-colonial research and politics. Especially questions about the subject of the perception of WWII by colonial subjects and anti-colonial movements in Africa, post-colonial policies of modernization, and the legacy of imperialism.

One of the questions you raised that can be answered right off the bat is if Nkrumah was aware who Schumann was. The answer here is an unequivocal yes since the Federal Republic of Germany send a request for extradition of Schumann to the Ghanese government in 1962 detailing Schumann's activities as a Nazi doctor in the T4 program, Aktion 14f13, and Auschwitz. Schumann had been placed as a divisional doctor in a Wehrmacht unit on the Western Front in 1945 and was taken as a POW by American troops. Released from captivity after hiding his identity, he settled down in Western Germany but when he applied for fishing and hunting license, his identity was revealed and a District Attorney initiated an investigation. Schumann fled Germany in 1951 and made his way to Egypt and then Sudan. In Sudan he apparently spent his time providing medical care to Sudanese living in the border region to Congo.

The West German government discovered him there in 1959 thanks to an article in the newspaper "Christ und Welt" run by former SS-officer Giselher Wirsing, former chief editor of the Propaganda paper Signal. Christ und Welt wrote an article about the "German Albert Schweizer" residing in Sudan and being "the only doctor for 80.000 people", which according to the article he did on the behest of the Sudanese government then under the Abbud military government. Fearing extradition, Schumann fled Sudan and made his way to Ghana, which had been lead to independence by Nkrumah in 1957 and was ruled by him. There he found refuge and set up a hospital in Kete Krachi (a town that until 1914 had been part of the German colony Togo). He worked as a district medical doctor for the Nkrumah government and in 1965 applied and was granted Ghanese citizenship. In 1966 with Nkrumah ousted by a military coup, the new government under Ankrah and the National Liberation Council, imprisoned Schumann for 8 months before extraditing him to West Germany where a trial was initiated but then stopped because various doctors declared Schumann unfit for trial in 1970 due to high blood pressure. Schumann died in 1983 after spending his remaining years in Germany.

These are the basic facts. Schumann was employed by and enjoyed the protection from the Nkrumah government in Ghana, which employed him as a medical doctor, help him build a hospital, and eventually granted him citizenship. The reasons behind this or why Schumann would have chosen Ghana in the first place are a little harder to discern. Scholarship on the subject is extremely rare and to my knowledge no comprehensive monograph on countries in Africa sheltering former Nazis has been produced so far (/u/kieslowskifan, do you know more?). In 2013 a man named James Bengey apparently wrote a short brochure entitled "From Auschwitz to Accra" about Schumann and the Nkrumah government but the only remaining traces of it are the foreword hosted on a now defunct wordpress blog with no way to get the whole thing, even though I send several emails to the listed address. I haven't even been able to find out who exactly James Bengey is because aside a travel writer of the same name, there seems to be no trace of the man outside of the wordpress blog.

An interesting detail however that might shed at least a bit more light on the issue and also takes us right to the questions I mentioned in the initial paragraph is the fact that the Ghanese government under Nkrumah also employed Nazi-German flying ace Hanna Reitsch and Schumann's fellow Nazi criminal Helmut Kallmeyer. Kallmeyer was a German chemist, who served both as consultant for methods of mass-gassing people and worked for the Criminal Technical Instut (Kriminaltechnisches Instut, KTI) of Nazi Germany. Both as consutant and at the KTI – the institution that developed the infamous gas vans – Kallmeyer was crucial to developing and researching methods of killing large number of people with gas. After the war he worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations including in Ghana, though this activity mentioned in the standard encyclopedia on German medical criminals by Ernst Klee appears to be also severely under-researched.

It's actually the case of Hanna Reitsch we have the best documentation for. Reitsch had discovered an early passion for flying and had already broken world records when it came to flying in the late 1920s. In 1934 she started working for the Nazi regime as a test pilot for various new airplane and other designs where, among other things, she flew one of the first designed German helicopters. During the war, she was very active in propaganda work for the Nazi regime, having a close relationship to Adolf Hitler, who received her several times during his career as chancellor. She was also known for flying the last plane out of encircled Berlin in April 1945 and having seen Hitler in his last days. After the war, she displayed a highly uncritical relationship to the Nazi regime and while she was never part of any Nazi party organizations, she had been close to the regime during the war. From 1962 to 1966 she ran a flight school in Ghana and became Nkrumah's personal pilot – things she wrote about extensively in her memoir of the time Ich flog für Kwame Nkrumah (I flew for Kwame Nkrumah).

Due to this, the case of Reitsch is one where scholarship exists and that potentially can shed some light on Nkrumah and his relationship to former Nazis. Jean Allman of Washington University in St. Louis discusses the case in her article Phantoms of the Archive: Kwame Nkrumah, a Nazi Pilot Named Hanna, and the Contingencies of Postcolonial History-Writing, which discusses the difficulty of getting to a comprehensive answer in regards to this policy.

Allman writes:

How might we connect lofty dreams of flight and modernization in what was known as the “Black Star of Africa” to someone remembered by many and to this very day as an unrepentant Nazi and an “apologist for the Third Reich”? These are not, as it turns out, simple questions—certainly not for a historian of Africa’s postcolonial past. Almost immediately, they generate yet further and often fundamental questions—about historical evidence, about archives (their locations and their temporality), and about the very writing of postcolonial African histories. Beyond the question of how an infamous Nazi pilot could animate Ghana’s early nation-building and modernization initiatives, there is the labyrinth of postcolonial documentary evidence that is exposed by the search itself: the layers and locations of evidence, the traces, the silences, and the dead ends.

Tracing the newspaper coverage in Ghana, secondary sources on the issue of flight and modernization in post-colonial states, and the difficult to navigate Ghanese national archive, Allman points to the difficulty of answering the question why Nkrumah sought close collaboration with someone like Reitsch and points to the fact that there is an easy answer to discern.