Destined to Witness Read online

  DESTINED TO WITNESS

  GROWING UP BLACK IN NAZI GERMANY

  HANS J. MASSAQUOI

  To my mother,

  Bertha Nikodijevic (1903-1986)

  with deep gratitude

  Contents

  Prologue

  Begin Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  To write of one’s self, in such a manner as not to incur the imputation of weakness, vanity, and egotism, is a work within the ability of but few; and I have little reason to believe that I belong to that fortunate few.

  —FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  I could not agree more with the above sentiments, expressed so eloquently over a century ago by the great abolitionist in the preface to his autobiography, My Bondage, My Freedom. If, like Mr. Douglass, I nonetheless decided to risk being thought of as weak, vain, and egocentric by making public the story of my life, it was mainly because of the persistent urging of persons whose literary judgment I felt was above reproach, such as my longtime friends Alex Haley, the author of Roots; Ralph Giordano, of Cologne, Germany, author of Die Bertinis; and my former employer and mentor, Ebony publisher John H. Johnson. Each convinced me that my experiences as a black youngster growing into manhood and surviving in Nazi Germany—an eyewitness to, and frequent victim of, both Nazi racial madness and Allied bombings—followed by my years in Africa were so unique that it was my duty as a journalist to share this rather different perspective on the Holocaust. Alex felt that because I was both an insider in Nazi Germany and, paradoxically, an endangered outsider, I had a rare perspective on some of the Third Reich’s major catastrophic events. He also urged me to record my equally unique experience of finding my own African roots.

  Four fundamental aspects set the private hell I endured under the Nazis apart from both the pogroms suffered by my Jewish compatriots in Germany and from the racial persecution inflicted on my African-American brothers and sisters in the United States.

  As a black person in white Nazi Germany, I was highly visible and thus could neither run nor hide, to paraphrase my childhood idol Joe Louis.

  Unlike African-Americans, I did not have the benefit of inherited survival techniques created and perfected by countless ancestors and passed down from generation to generation of oppressed people. Instead, I was forced to traverse a minefield of potential disasters and to develop my own instincts to tell me how best to survive physically and psychologically in a country consumed by racial arrogance and racial hatred and openly committed to the destruction of all “non-Aryans.”

  Nazi racists, unlike their white American counterparts, did not commit their atrocities anonymously, disguised in white sheets and under the protection of night. Nor did they operate like some contemporary American politicians who advance their racist agendas by dividing black and white Americans with cleverly disguised code words about “unfair quotas,” “reverse discrimination,” and “states’ rights.” Racists in Nazi Germany did their dirty work openly and brazenly with the full protection, cooperation, and encouragement of the government, which had declared the pollution of Aryan blood with “inferior” non-Aryan blood the nation’s cardinal sin.

  For all practical purposes—except for the courageous and unflagging support I received from my German mother, who taught me to believe in myself by believing in me and my potential—I faced the constant threat that Nazi ethnic-cleansing policies posed to my safety alone. I faced this threat without the sense of security and feeling of belonging that humans derive from being members of a group, even an embattled one. Because of the absence of black females and the government-imposed taboo of race mixing, I had no legal social outlet when I reached puberty. Unlike the thousands of Africans and so-called “brown babies”—children of black GI fathers and German mothers—who reside in the Federal Republic of Germany today, there simply was no black population to speak of in Germany during the Hitler years, certainly none that I encountered. Not until long after the war did I learn that a small number of black Germans—the tragic so-called “Rhineland bastards” fathered by World War I French and Belgian colonial occupation troops—were exterminated in Hitler’s death camps.

  Because Germans of my generation were expected to be fair skinned and of Aryan stock, it became my lot in life to explain ad nauseam why someone who had a brown complexion and black, kinky hair spoke accent-free German and claimed Germany as his place of birth. So let me state here once again, for the record, that I was born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, because my grandfather, then consul general of Liberia to Hamburg, had brought with him his sizable family. His oldest son became my father after an intense courtship with my mother, a German nurse. Shortly before Hitler’s rise to power, my grandfather and father returned to Liberia, leaving my mother and me to fend for ourselves in an increasingly hostile racist environment.

  Our ordeal of living in constant fear of both Gestapo executioners and Allied bombs ended in the spring of 1945, when Karl Kaufmann, Hamburg’s Nazi governor, surrendered the nearly destroyed city to the advancing British troops in defiance of Hitler’s order to defend Hamburg “to the last man.” That which Studs Terkel in his oral history of World War II calls The Good War was everything but. It certainly was not for my mother and me, who narrowly escaped death in Hamburg’s inferno after surviving some two hundred British and American air attacks, the killing of more than forty-one thousand civilians, and the destruction of more than half of the city’s homes, including our own.

  Three years after the war, in 1948, I joined my father in Liberia. While in Africa, I not only developed an appreciation for African culture, but also got my first taste of colonial racism, both French and British style. In 1950 I was admitted to the United States on a one-year student visa. Not quite nine months after my arrival, about a third of the way into the Korean “conflict,” I, a noncitizen, was ordered to report for military service due to an apparent clerical error, and served two years as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division.

  There were numerous occasions, inside and outside the military, when I had the opportunity to see the ugly side of America, to sample U.S.-style racism and compare it with its Nazi counterpart. In one incident that clearly demonstrated that racism was not confined to the Jim Crow South, as is often alleged, I joined a “march for open housing” led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1966 in Chicago’s all-white Gage Park neighborhood. As Dr. King led our peaceful group in prayer, we were pelted with rocks and assaulted with profanities by an enraged white community barely held at bay by the thin ranks of police assigned to protect us.

  In another incident, dressed in my army uniform, I was riding a train from Chicago to Fayetteville, North Carolina, on my way back to my post at Fort Bragg, when I was assaulted by a white train conductor after I had fallen asleep and missed moving to a segregated “colored car” when the Southbound train reached the Mason-Dixon Line. “Get your black ass out of here and go where you niggers belong!” the conductor, a shriveled white man, had screamed at me after kicking me from behind. Rather than risk being lynched for beating an old white man, as was my deep-felt inclination, I controlled my anger, picked up my duffel bag, and did as I had been told.

  Such indignities were almost too much to bear, but I learned early in life that survival is the name of the game. My reward for having endured was the GI Bill, which enabled me to obtain the college education denied to me in Nazi Germany. Between studies, I managed to woo, win, and marry a young social worker from St. Louis. Although the marriage ended in divorce after fourteen years, it blessed us with two fine sons who provided much of the impetus for the
modest success I have enjoyed.

  Armed with a degree in journalism and communication from the University of Illinois, I held minor editorial jobs until I joined Johnson Publishing Company as an associate editor of the weekly black newsmagazine Jet. Within a year I was transferred to a similar position on Ebony, the company’s flagship monthly photo-feature magazine.

  Overnight, I became an active participant, observer, and reporter of the greatest social and political movement of the century—the black struggle for racial equality waged during the fifties, sixties, and seventies in the United States, in colonial Africa, and in the West Indies. Throughout my nearly forty-year career with Ebony, during which I rose to the rank of managing editor and became a member of the publication’s editorial board, I had a ringside seat to some of the most important historic events of our times and came face-to-face with some of the best-known personalities of our age, including three U.S. presidents (Carter, Reagan, and Bush) while covering a wide range of assignments in the United States, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. My diverse assignments ran the gamut from exclusive interviews with statesmen, including Presidents Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Tseretse Kama of Botswana, William Tolbert of Liberia, and Sam Njomo of Namibia; Jamaican Prime Ministers Michael Manley and Edward Seaga; civil-rights activists, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Malcolm X, to a fair number of “living legends,” such as Lena Horne, Diana Ross, Shirley Temple Black, Joe Louis, Max Schmeling, and Muhammad Ali.

  Researching and reporting the achievements of black people for so long had many rewards. The most important one for me was that it allowed me to find my own psychological moorings after twelve years of dehumanizing and degrading mistreatment under the Nazis. It was the solution to the conflict which so many biracial people experience regarding their racial identity. I could not be a living witness to the ongoing heroic struggle for black survival and equality in racist America, document in article after article the countless achievements of blacks in the face of staggering odds, and not feel black and proud myself. The finest hour of the civil-rights struggle, the 1963 March on Washington, during which I stood at the Lincoln Memorial and heard Dr. King give his unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech, is still one of my proudest and most cherished memories.

  As a youngster growing up among ordinary German working people, I witnessed the rise of one of the most oppressive governments ever devised by man and—twelve agonizingly slow years later—its well-earned, cataclysmic demise. From my vantage point I observed firsthand how the Nazi poison—concocted by Hitler and served by a clever manipulator named Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda—slowly but surely did its contaminating work until it had transformed decent, caring, reasonable men and women into fanatical racists who approved the destruction of anyone and anything that did not conform to their vision of a new world order that took their national anthem, “Deutschland Über Alles,” literally. That Germans as a people were more than willing to take their racist marching orders from a bunch of unscrupulous political opportunists headed by a bloodthirsty madman is often cited as proof that all Germans were tainted and thus culpable. I disagree. I know that a large number—unfortunately not enough to have made a crucial difference—remained decent human beings despite pressures exerted by the Nazi leadership and the fact that decency had gone totally out of style. It is owing to some of these individuals who resisted the temptation to go with the prevailing flow of racial madness and who never regarded me as anything less than a worthwhile fellow human being that I survived largely unscathed. That I, a certified non-Aryan, was spared extermination, sterilization, or medical experimentation in one of Hitler’s death camps I attribute largely to two fortunate coincidences. Unlike Jews, blacks were so few in numbers that they were relegated to low-priority status in the Nazis’ lineup for extermination. Also, the unexpectedly rapid advance of the Allied military juggernaut kept the Nazis preoccupied with their own survival and in many cases crushed the Gestapo executioners before they could put the finishing touches on their racial cleansing. Thus, I fell through the cracks of modern history’s most extensive, most systematic mass-murder scheme, with the fortunate result that I am still around and able to write this account of my life.

  In retracing the events of more than seven decades, I relied heavily on my own memory and personal records and—in the case of events that preceded my birth or ability to remember—on the memories of my mother and other family members in Germany, the United States, and Liberia. Since not all of the incidents described are flattering, I have changed some of the names in order to spare the people involved undue embarrassment.

  Begin Reading

  BRIEF ENCOUNTER

  One beautiful summer morning in 1934, I arrived at school to hear our third-grade teacher, Herr Grimmelshäuser, inform the class that Herr Wriede, our Schulleiter (principal), had ordered the entire student body and faculty to assemble in the schoolyard. There, dressed as he often was on special occasions in his brown Nazi uniform, Herr Wriede announced that “the biggest moment of [our] young lives” was imminent, that fate had chosen us to be among the lucky ones privileged to behold “our beloved Führer Adolf Hitler” with our own eyes. It was a privilege for which, he assured us, our yet-to-be-born children and children’s children would one day envy us. At the time I was eight years old and it had not yet dawned on me that of the nearly six hundred boys assembled in the schoolyard, the only pupil Herr Wriede was not addressing was me.

  Taking Wriede at his word, the entire school soon buzzed with anticipation of this rare, totally unexpected treat of a virtually school-free day. We had all been thoroughly indoctrinated in the Führer’s heroic rise to power and his superhuman efforts to free Germany from the enslavement endured since its defeat in World War I and to restore its old glory and preeminence. Already we had come to feel the Führer’s omnipresence. His likenesses appeared everywhere—throughout the school, in public buildings of the city, on posters and postage stamps, in newspapers and magazines. Even more vivid were his by now familiar voice on radio and his compelling appearances in the weekly newsreels at the neighborhood cinema. Now we would get a chance to see with our own eyes this legendary savior and benefactor of the Vaterland. To most of the students, myself included, the thrills in store for us seemed beyond our ability to comprehend.

  Buoyed by our enthusiasm and flanked by our teachers, we marched for nearly an hour to a point along Alsterkrugchaussee, a major thoroughfare leading to Hamburg’s airport in suburban Fuhlsbüttel. The entire route from the airport to Hamburg’s venerable Rathaus downtown, which the Führer’s fleet of cars was scheduled to travel, was lined with thousands of nearly hysterical people. They were kept from spilling into the street by stern brownshirts who, with clasped hands, formed an endless human chain. Seated along the curb behind the SS and SA troopers, we children endured an agonizing wait that dragged on for several hours. But just as our strained patience was reaching the breaking point, the roar of the crowds began to swell to a deafening crescendo. A nearby SS marching band intoned the opening fanfares of the “Badenweiler Marsch,” a Hitler favorite designated as the official signal of the Führer’s arrival. The moment everyone had been waiting for was here. Standing erect beside the driver of his black Mercedes convertible, his right arm outstretched in the familiar Nazi salute, the Führer rolled past at a brisk walking pace, his eyes staring expressionlessly ahead.

  The “biggest moment in our lives” for which Principal Wriede had prepared us had lasted only a few seconds, but to me they seemed like an eternity. There I was, a kinky-haired, brown-skinned eight-year-old boy amid a sea of blond and blue-eyed kids, filled with childlike patriotism, still shielded by blissful ignorance. Like everyone around me, I cheered the man whose every waking hour was dedicated to the destruction of “inferior non-Aryan people” like myself, the same man who only a few years later would lead his own nation to the greatest catastrophe in its lon
g history and bring the world to the brink of destruction.

  MOMOLU MASSAQUOI

  The story of how I became part of that fanatically cheering crowd did not begin on January 19, 1926, the day of my birth. Neither did it begin, as one might suspect, in Hamburg, the city of my birth. Instead, it began five years earlier, more than three thousand miles away in the West African capital city of Monrovia, Liberia, with the shrewd decision of a president to rid himself of a potential political rival, Momolu Massaquoi, my paternal grandfather-to-be.

  Charles Dunbar King, the fourteenth president of Liberia, had for some time considered the rising popularity of the ambitious Massaquoi as potentially dangerous. The American-educated Massaquoi had been the hereditary ruler of the indigenous Vai nation, which straddled Liberia and the adjacent British colony of Sierra Leone. At age thirty, after having been forced in a tribal dispute to abdicate the crown he had inherited upon the death of his parents, King Lahai and Queen Sandimannie, and that he had worn for ten years as Momolu IV, he had sought his fortune in Monrovian politics. He helped his cause immensely by divesting himself of five tribal wives and marrying a young beauty, Rachel Johnson, who—by a fortuitous coincidence—happened to be the politically and financially well-connected granddaughter of Hilary W. R. Johnson, the country’s first Liberian-born president. The marriage proved gratifying not only to Massaquoi’s boundless appreciation for feminine beauty, but to his ambitions, for it gave him something without which no one in Liberia could hope to succeed in politics—social acceptance by the country’s “Americo-Liberian” ruling class. (“Americo-Liberian” was the name favored by the descendants of American slaves who had founded the republic in 1847 before setting up a rigid caste system designed to keep the indigenous population in a perpetual state of political and economic impotence.)