Destined to Witness Read online

  When I took my gadget to school and demonstrated it to my classmates, they were full of praise and admiration. But when I expected similar approval of my handiwork from Herr Dutke, I was in for a big surprise. Disregarding the fact that I had been the only pupil in his class who had been inspired enough by him to make the effort of putting his teachings to work, he berated me for coming up with a clumsy imitation of his own creation and told me not to bring such Murks (Hamburg slang for poor workmanship) into his class.

  I was devastated, and so were some of my classmates, who tried to console me after class by telling me that the only thing that made Dutke mad at me was that he couldn’t sell me one of his earphones. I was certain that they were partially right but I also knew that there was another, even more important reason for Dutke’s rejection of me—the color of my skin.

  My suspicion was soon confirmed. When a pupil referred to my scholastic and athletic abilities to refute Dutke’s contention that people of other than “Aryan blood” were both intellectually and physically inferior, Dutke dressed down the pupil for daring to disagree with him. He then lectured the class that my case was merely the exception that proved the rule, and suggested that whatever “normal characteristics” I displayed I had definitely inherited from my Aryan parent. Without the slightest consideration of my feelings, he suggested that in my case the last word had not yet been spoken, and that there was still a very good chance that my inferior blood would surface in one form or another. “There are many ways of being racially inferior,” he argued. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your Klassenkamerad one day winds up as an antisocial element, such as a criminal or an alcoholic, or if he isn’t already susceptible to a host of debilitating diseases.”

  After passing on that piece of information, Dutke ordered me not to leave the room when the bell signaled the end of class. “What I have to tell you won’t take long,” he announced after making sure that all the children had left the room. Looking at me with undisguised loathing through his thick horn-rimmed glasses, Dutke chided me for trying to turn the class against him and for showing my disrespect of him with my constant “negerhaftes Grinsen.” “Let me tell you something, young man. Don’t feel so smug, because after we have finished with the Jews, people like you will be next. That’s all I have to say. Heil Hitler.”

  Although I couldn’t grasp the full significance of what he had meant by “finished with the Jews,” I had learned that Jews were the most hated group of people in the country and, as a result, at extreme risk. For a while I debated with myself whether or not to tell my mother what Dutke had told me, but decided against it. What was the use? It only would get my mother into a fight she couldn’t possibly win. So I left things alone in the hope that Dutke and his prophecy would simply go away.

  THE SHAME OF THE RHINELAND

  One morning in early March 1936 when I arrived at school, the entire building was abuzz with excitement that emanated from the teachers and soon spilled over to us pupils. We were told that the Führer had just scored a major coup. In defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, which Germany signed at the end of World War I, he had ordered his troops to march into the demilitarized Rhineland, on Germany’s border with France. For the moment, the whole country was holding its collective breath in anticipation of a hostile response from the Western powers, a response that never came.

  After summoning the entire school to the auditorium, Herr Wriede, his chest stuck out in a visible display of pride, announced that, thanks to the courage of our beloved Führer, “one of the most shameful chapters in Germany’s history has come to a close.” He then went on to tell us about the terrible humiliation Germany had suffered at the hands of the victorious Western allies when it was forced to permanently withdraw its military forces from the Rhineland to lessen the likelihood of German military aggression. “Thanks to our Führer,” Wriede declared, “you German boys can again walk with your heads held high.”

  Just as I was about to share in the pride and hold my head a little higher, Wriede put a damper on my lifted spirits by explaining that the forced withdrawal of German troops after World War I had paved the way for the “ultimate insult” to the German people—the illegal occupation of the coal-rich Ruhr area by some forty thousand “uncivilized French Neger” troops. These savages out of the African jungle, he explained with an expression of utter disgust, were permitted by their French officers to freely mingle and fraternize with the German people, with the catastrophic result that the Rhineland was being saddled with thousands of physically and mentally inferior bastard children. Today’s courageous action by our Führer, Wriede continued, would forever prevent a recurrence of such humiliating infringement on Germany’s sovereignty.

  What the principal didn’t mention was the fact that Hitler had already put into motion a sweeping program that provided for the forced sterilization and eventual extermination of the “Rhineland Bastards.” The plan was openly advocated in the writings of his minister of agriculture, Reichsbauernführer Richard-Walther Darre, who as early as 1933 wrote for everyone to read:

  It is essential to exterminate the leftovers from the black Shame on the Rhine. These mulatto children were created either through rape or by white mothers who were whores. In any case, there exists not the slightest moral obligation toward these racially foreign offspring. About fourteen years have elapsed in the meantime; those of the mulattoes who are still alive will now enter the age of puberty, meaning that there isn’t much time left for long discussions. Let France and other states deal with their race question the way they want; for us there is only one solution: extermination of all that is foreign, especially in the case of these that through violence and amorality created damages. Thus, as a Rhinelander I demand: sterilization of all mulattoes with whom we were saddled by the black Shame at the Rhine.

  This measure has to be carried out within the next two years. Otherwise it is too late, with the result that hundreds of years later this racial deterioration will still be felt. Legal prevention of marriages with race-foreign elements is ineffective, since what is not possible legally usually happens illegally.

  Because of its racial policies, Hitler targeted France as “by far the most terrible enemy.” “This [French] people,” he wrote in Mein Kampf,

  …which is basically becoming more and more negrified, constitutes in its tie with the aims of Jewish world domination an enduring danger for the existence of the white race in Europe. For the contamination by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe is just as much in keeping with the perverted sadistic thirst for vengeance of this hereditary enemy of our people as is the ice-cold calculation of the Jews thus to begin bastardizing the European continent at its core and to deprive the white race of the foundations for a sovereign existence through infection with lower humanity.

  What France, spurred by her own thirst for vengeance and systematically led by the Jew, is doing in Europe today is a sin against the existence of white humanity and some day will incite against this people all the avenging spirit of a race which has recognized racial pollution as the original sin of humanity…

  Hitler then goes on to predict that

  if the development of France in the present style were to be continued for three hundred years, the last remnants of Frankish blood would be submerged in the developing European-African mulatto state. An immense self-contained area of settlement from the Rhine to the Congo, filled with a lower race gradually produced from continuous bastardization…

  Hitler’s malevolent plan to sterilize, then murder mixed-race children in the “liberated” Rhineland was far too close for comfort. But luckily, I did not learn of the fate of these unfortunates until after the war, and thus was spared years of agonizing over when their tragic lot might catch up with me.

  JOE AND JESSE, MY NEW HEROES

  In the summer of 1936, my frequently bruised ego received a huge boost from a totally unexpected source. It came in the persons of two young black American athletes, one a profess
ional boxer and the other an amateur track-and-field man. Their names were Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. Although I was not to meet either of them in person until I was well into adulthood, both men had a profound and lasting effect on my life, since they instilled me with genuine pride in my African heritage at a time when such pride was extremely difficult to come by.

  By spring 1936, word reached Germany that a young black American was to fight Max Schmeling, the Nazis’ version of the Great White Hope. Joe Louis, we learned, was a twenty-two-year-old fighting machine from the cotton fields of Alabama and the auto factories of Detroit whose uninterrupted string of knockouts had earned him the nickname “The Brown Bomber” and made him the top contender for the world heavyweight title, held at the time by James J. Braddock, his white countryman.

  From the moment the news hit the neighborhood, all eyes were again on me. Confirming that the tendency to insist that “all blacks look alike” is not confined to American whites, most of my buddies insisted, “You look exactly like Joe Louis.” Never mind that there was at least a 150-pound difference between the American fighter and me, everybody on the block agreed that I came as close to being the Braune Bomber as anyone in the neighborhood had ever come. I could hardly disagree with that.

  It occurred to my pals that I and the man who had been predicted to defeat the best fighter on the European continent were veritable brothers under the skin, that we shared not only the same complexion, the same hair, and the same white teeth, but, more important, that in our veins ran the same mysterious, all-powerful African blood. The more the German press touted the Brown Bomber’s phenomenal punching power, the higher rose my stock among my peers. I never let on that, like any dyed-in-the-wool Hamburger Junge, I had rooted for Schmeling, our hometown hero, for as long as I had followed his career. But since my peers hailed me as the Brown Bomber’s successor, I became obliged to forgo my local patriotism and come out for my black brother from the States. This took a great deal of psychological wrestling with myself, since my loyalty to Schmeling was as deep as any ten-year-old boy was capable of feeling. Then something happened that made it quite easy for me to decide. Reading a prefight interview with Schmeling in a local newspaper, I came across an alleged quote by my hero in which he promised to “turn the Neger boxer from a Brown Bomber into a green-and-blue bomber.” This remark (which, along with more racist remarks attributed to him, Schmeling was to emphatically deny after the collapse of the Third Reich) hurt me to the quick. I felt betrayed by the man who had been an idol to me, and decided then and there that henceforth, my loyalty would belong to Joe Louis, the man everybody said looked exactly like me.

  While the Nazi-controlled press presented Louis as a formidable puncher, it also stressed that he was mostly brawn and little brain, and predicted that Schmeling’s superior intelligence, coupled with his superb fighting skill and experience, would prevail.

  The Nazi regime’s interest in boxing in general and Schmeling in particular was no accident. Hitler, while nurturing his grandiose dreams of world conquest, had proclaimed that he expected German boys to grow up “tough as leather, swift as greyhounds and hard as Kruppsteel.” Toward that end, he ordered that physical fitness of German youths and boys in particular become a chief objective of Nazi education. Max Schmeling, the man picked by Goebbels’s propaganda machine to symbolize Germans’ manly virtues of physical strength, precision reflexes, endurance, sportsmanship, courage, and squeaky-clean living, seemed an unlikely choice for the job. For one thing, the black-haired, pug-nosed, beetle-browed fighter with the chronic five-o’clock shadow lacked the fair skin and blue eyes favored by the Aryan mythmakers, and at age thirty-one, he was considered by many fight buffs as being over the hill. But beggars can’t be choosers, and ex-heavyweight-boxing-champion Max Schmeling was the closest thing to a German super-athlete the Nazis could get their hands on.

  In 1930, he had become the first and only German to win the world heavyweight title when he was fouled by a low blow from American Jack Sharkey and Sharkey was disqualified. Two years later, he lost the title in a rematch. But thanks to a tremendous Goebbels’s press buildup, which made him the idol of my generation, he was put on the comeback trail.

  On June 19, the day of the fight, men and boys in my neighborhood talked about nothing else but the upcoming match. While most were rooting for Schmeling, many had grave doubts that their man would be able to withstand the awesome punching power of the black American. Whenever I joined the discussions, the boys on the block immediately deferred to me as the authority on Joe Louis. Sensing my new position of importance, I eagerly obliged them with details on how Joe would put an end to Max’s world title ambitions. Since I had read and memorized everything on Joe Louis that I could get my hands on, I was able to rattle off interesting facts about my hero, from his awesome vital statistics to his ability to knock out opponents with a single punch of either hand. While my cronies listened in awe, I savored every moment of my new elevated status. It felt wonderful to note the respect accorded to a black man by people who normally felt superior to blacks, and have some of that respect rub off on me. I hadn’t enjoyed that feeling of pride in my African ancestry since my grandfather left Germany six years earlier. To me, that seemed like a lifetime away.

  I could hardly wait for the day to end so that the fight, which was scheduled for around 9 P.M. (U.S. EST) in New York City’s Yankee Stadium, could get under way. Since that would make it about 3 A.M. in Germany, I asked my mother to set the alarm clock for 2 A.M. (just to be on the safe side) so I could get up and listen to the fight transmission on my trusty crystal earphone set. At 2 sharp I was awakened by the shrill bell of the alarm clock. After waiting an unbearably slow hour, during which the German announcer described the tense atmosphere among the nearly forty thousand spectators in Yankee Stadium, I finally heard the gong signal the beginning of round one. For the first three rounds I was buoyed by the superior performance of the Brown Bomber, whose hooks and jabs had already closed Schmeling’s left eye. Then, in the fourth round, the totally unexpected—no, the impossible—happened. Two successive crashing rights by my countryman to the chin of Joe Louis put my hero on the canvas for the count of four. I was screaming my head off for Joe to get up, but the only person who could hear me was my mother, who came running into my bedroom to find out what was going on.

  “Joe’s been knocked down!” I screamed. “Joe’s in trouble!”

  Not fully comprehending the significance of what I had just told her, and not too pleased about having been awakened again, my mother asked me to keep my voice down.

  “It’s nothing but a boxing match,” she tried to console me. “You can’t take that sort of thing too seriously.”

  There was no way I could explain to her that the black man who was fighting some four thousand miles away was not only fighting for himself but also for me, that his victory would be my victory and his loss—heaven forbid—a major catastrophe for me.

  Until that point, the possibility of Joe Louis’s losing the fight had never entered my mind. Now there was a distinct possibility that Schmeling, the ten-to-one underdog, would defy the odds and emerge as the winner. If that happened, what would I tell the kids on the block who had believed me when I told them that Joe would beat the stuffing out of Max? How could I ever face them again? These and similar thoughts tortured me as the news from Yankee Stadium that came through my headset turned from bad to worse to excruciatingly intolerable. Obviously hurt seriously by one of Schmeling’s crashing rights to the chin in the early rounds, Louis took blow after punishing blow as the rounds went by, but stayed on his feet, bolstered only by the power of his will. In the twelfth round of the fifteen-round match, my worst nightmare became reality when Schmeling ended the fight by landing a solid right to Louis’s jaw that sent him to the canvas for the count of ten. The man I believed was invincible, who had been my ticket to prestige and respect among my peers, had been destroyed.

  Although it was still pitch black outside, I w
as unable to go back to sleep. Instead, I was lying awake, reliving every agonizing moment of the past hour until finally a leaden sleep put a temporary end to my ordeal.

  But the worst was yet to come. The next day—a Sunday—I stayed inside all day to avoid running into any of the boys on the block. But I knew I couldn’t hide forever. On Monday, whether I liked it or not, I had to go to school and face the music. As I entered my classroom, I was greeted by a barrage of ridicule from some of the same boys who only a few days earlier had looked at me in awe.

  “What happened to your Brown Bomber?” someone asked contemptuously.

  “The Brown Bomber turned out to be a Flasche,” another boy chimed in, using the derisive street term for “weakling.”

  “I thought you said Louis could fight,” sneered still another boy. “How come he let Max use him for a punching bag? I tell you why, because he’s a Neger and a coward!”

  The boy looked at me with an expression that I interpreted as saying, “If you don’t like what I said, do something about it.”

  Without weighing the odds of fighting a boy who was a year older than I and accordingly bigger (since this was his second stab at fifth grade), I lunged at him and hit him in the face with a barrage of lefts and rights that would have done my idol Joe Louis proud.

  The symbolism was not lost on my classmates, who had formed a circle around us and, instead of continuing with their ridicule, started to cheer me on.

  “Hit him, Joe Louis!”

  “Knock him out, Joe!”

  “Another right, Joe!”

  “Where’s that left hook?”

  My sudden, vicious attack had taken my opponent completely by surprise. Caught off balance, he fell backward while I was punching away, too agitated to stop hitting him. All of the anger, frustration, and shame I felt over the defeat of my hero came pouring out through my fists. Before I was able to inflict serious damage, I was grabbed from behind and pulled off my adversary.