Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

telly we share what we've been watching

Cladie Aide.

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service

first-hand accounts of events that have shaped our world. I'm Mike Lanchin. Today we're bringing you

the disturbing story of how thousands of children born to black American soldiers

and white German women at the end of World War II went on to endure years of virulence racism in post-war Germany.

I've been hearing from the author Ika Hugo Marshall about her experience of growing up in Germany

as a so-called occupation baby.

When I was a child people would scratch my face with a scrubbing brush to show other children that it wasn't chocolate on my face.

Obviously as a child I couldn't figure out why this was happening to me.

I just wanted to be white, to have the feeling of belonging and be like the others.

Eichahugel Marshall was born in a small town in Bavaria in March of 1947. Her father Eddie had been an African-American

soldier stationed in Germany at the end of World War II. Her mother Katerina was a German woman.

They'd had a secret romance following the lifting of the ban on contact between foreign soldiers and German women.

But while Katerina was still pregnant, Eddie was sent back to the US and never returned.

Alone with her new baby girl, the 21-year-old Katerina married a local man who became Eka's stepfather.

When it comes to my family, I always felt very loved by my mother, but it was different with my stepfather. He never hit me or

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