Hans Jürgen Massaquoi was a talented saxophonist whose musicianship would save himself and his mother from starvation after the war when he found employment playing for American merchant seaman in Hamburg clubs. But during the Hitler years, Massaquoi had the unique experience of being one of the few black German children growing up in the Third Reich. As the son of mixed-race parents (his absent father was a West African law student and his mother was a white German national), he was excluded but not persecuted by the regime, although he suffered racist abuse at school and at the hands of other children in his neighbourhood. He believed that he escaped deportation or worse simply because the regime didn’t feel there were enough mixed-race children to necessitate a round-up. Massaquoi was brought up by his mother to believe he was a German ‘just like everybody else’ and so he couldn’t understand why his teachers refused to allow him to join the Hitler Youth. He wanted to enrol so he could participate in all the activities his friends were enjoying and he admired their smart uniform. 'The Nazis put on the best show of all the political parties. There were parades, fireworks, and uniforms - these were the devices by which Hitler won over young people over to his ideas.’ So after nagging his mother he was allowed to enlist in a branch called the Deutsches Jungvolk, which brought suspicious looks from the other blond, blue-eyed Aryan boys. But Massaquoi refused to be intimidated. As the grandson of a wealthy Liberian consul official, he enjoyed a privileged childhood in a villa on the Johnsallee and was surrounded by white servants, which led him to believe that being black meant he belonged to a superior class. But after his father and grandfather returned to Liberia in 1929, when the boy was just three years old, his mother was forced to find work as a poorly paid hospital assistant, which barely covered the rent in their tiny new flat in a working-class district in Hamburg. But he recovered some of his injured pride after being taken on a school trip to the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, where he witnessed black athlete Jesse Owens beat the supposedly superior Aryan athletes. Also that summer, American boxer Joe Louis, the 'Brown Bomber’, KO’d Hitler’s champion Max Schmeling in the first round of a return bout. After this, Massaquoi’s classmates nicknamed him 'Joe’s. As a second-class citizen he was later excused from military service, excluded from further education and prohibited from all professions, so he swallowed his pride and took a job as an apprentice machinist. After surviving the Allied bombing that reduced most of Hamburg to rubble in July 1943, he emigrated to the USA where he took a degree in journalism that eventually led to the editorship of Ebony magazine. This excerpt was taken from Paul Roland’s book Life in the Third Reich Daily Life in Nazi Germany 1933-1945
↧