By Hans Massaquoi
In 1966 the journalist and writer Hans Massaquoi returned home after 18 years to a transformed Germany. It was not the nation he had known. That was a Germany struggling to forget the Nazis, its demoralised citizens scrambling for food amid the rubble of devastated cities at the end of the war for which Massaquoi, a German boy, had fled in exchange for Liberia and America.
One of the first things Massaquoi noticed was that it was impossible to walk the streets of the Federal Republic without seeing people of color — Americans, Africans and West Indians. All seemed to have become "as ubiquitous and as integral a part of the German scene as Knackwurst, beer, and Mercedes Benz automobiles." Hans Massaquoi was uniquely poised to notice the difference.
As a black child growing up in the German working class during the Third Reich, he was a witness – ironically an invisible one, given that he was black – to the horror perpetrated on non-Aryans. Although not the direct target of Nazism, he came to fear for his life, was officially excluded from school and public life, and in adolescence (because Hitler's dubious racist theories were indeed effective) came to despise his blackness. His enthralling and brilliant autobiography, Destined to Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany, first published in 1999 and now out in paperback, helps the rest of us understand anew the horrors of a regime that was built on fear and sustained by the blood of Europe's citizens.
In Europe, the memory of the Third Reich still evokes pain. Every year on Veterans Day millions of families all over Europe still mourn lost loved ones. Then there is the incontrovertible fact that millions of Jews and Gypsies were killed systematically in camps that made a business out of death. These two groups, seen everywhere as Europe's "niggers," an expugnable diaspora that stretched from Russia to England and from Spain to Amsterdam, were just the most handy targets.
Caryl Phillips, the black British writer who has written extensively about Europe, recalled seeing a documentary about World War II and thinking, "Jews were white and if they could do that to white people, what would they do if they got their hands on me." For Phillips, this understanding led to a new vision of the sweep of white supremacy, responsible also for the "bloody excesses of colonialism, the pillage and rape of modern Africa, the transportation of 11 million black people to the Americas."
The black experience during the Third Reich has been sadly neglected. The number of victims is comparatively small, but there is a story to be told nonetheless. It would include the brutal treatment of the Hereto people prior to the war, who today are fighting for reparations from the German government in what used to be Southwest Namibia – a German colony. Then there's the treatment of black Allied soldiers who, when caught behind enemy lines, were subjected to racial abuse on top of their prisoner-of-war status. And best known, the eradication and collective sterilisation of the so-called First World War Rhineland Bastards in 1937 – after this date nearly 385 black German children disappeared without a trace. Hitler talked about blacks as well as Jews in Mein Kampf, and was terribly impressed with white supremacy in the American south, especially with the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.
Destined to Witness reveals not only what we know – that average white Germans participated in the success of the Nazis – but also reveals what we sometimes like to forget: that Germans of all backgrounds could also oppose and be demoralised, even devastated, by a totalitarianism that compromised their humanity and freedom.
Since its publication, the book has topped best-selling lists in Germany. Store windows display its intriguing front cover: a little black boy stands in a school yard line in Hamburg, Germany, his face a mixture of defiance and vulnerability. Pinned onto his sweater is a red swastika, not the yellow star that Jewish Germans were forced to wear. This little boy is German but it is obvious he's no Aryan.Hans Jurgen Massaquoi, the son of a German mother and a Liberian father, was born in 1926 (seven years before Hitler came to power) in Hamburg. On his father's side, an impressive African lineage precedes him. His grandfather, Momolu Massaquoi, was Liberia's counsel to Germany. His son, Al-Haj Massaquoi, a rather spoilt rich young man met and became involved with Bertha Baetz, a German nurse from a working-class family of coal miners. They had a child, Hans. Even though Al-Haj refused to marry Bertha, Momolu treated her as his daughter-in-law and invited mother and child to live with his family. Growing up in his African grandfather's mansion on a tree- lined street, Massaqoui's early childhood was one of privilege.
