A YOUNG BLACK BOY AND HITLER'S GERMANY

At the risk of understating the content of this review, this is a bit of a diversion in tone from the previous ones, but exceedingly noteworthy as an expat novel/memoir.

This story is not written by a native born American who lived abroad.    This is a reverse migration tale, in the context of Blog, of a black man, a refugee from Hitler's Europe, who eventually chose to become an American citizen.

I remember reading Hans Massaquoi's editorials in Ebony Magazine as a little girl growing up in NYC.  

He was then the managing editor.  

Ebony Magazine was the first magazine of its kind to feature the lives and accomplishments of  accomplished Negros…as we were called at the time.  

Ebony Magazine

It was required reading in my home among other similar publications and books which were my parents' supplement to the limitations of their childrens’ standard Eurocentric education in school.

Ebony Magazine was founded by John Johnson in 1945 and was dedicated to black American issues in a much needed positive and self-affirming manner.

Publisher, John Johnson

For many years, I assumed that Mr. Massaquoi was a native- born American and because of his surname and appearance a Creole from, perhaps, Louisiana.

That was until later years, when I ran across this:

Hans Massaquoi as a young boy in Hamburg, Germany

“I was six years old when I started school on 1932.  Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. I was too young then to understand what this would mean for me.  I didn’t know that my mother, a nurse, had lost her government job because of me.  The teachers who had objections to the new regime were quickly replaced by younger teachers who were openly pro-Nazi.  Some of them, including the head teacher were plainly hostile to me and did their very best to insult me and to make disparaging remarks about my race. One time – I must have been about ten – one of the teachers took me aside and said, ‘When we’ve finished with the Jews, you’ll be next.’  The most important reason why I survived Hitler and was not killed during the holocaust was that there wasn’t a large Black community in Germany.”

                                             

                                ~Hans Massaquoi, in the Anne Frank Journal, 1994

In 1933 around 5,000 Black people, mainly men and mainly from German colonies in Africa, lived in Germany. Some were married to German women and had children with them.

The Nazis, despite that fact that they found their black subjects inferior and impure, were unsure of how to treat them. Since these blacks only formed a small group who did not represent a threat to Germany they were generally less targeted than the Jews of Germany.

Ironically, at the same time, the Nazis also wanted to show that Black people were treated better than in Germany than in countries such as the USA. 

For a time young Black people were even allowed to join the Hitler Youth.

But eventually more than three thousand Black Germans were put into concentration camps. However, most of them were not arrested because of their skin colour, but because they were communists or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or because they played the then forbidden jazz music.

Mr. Massaquoi, the son of a Liberian father and German mother writes of his journey from Hitler’s Germany to his search for identity in Liberia, then his ultimate immigration to the United States where he would become involved in the American Civil Rights Movement.

He tells of life after the war where he sought friendship with black American soldiers and of his eventual  move to the States in 1950 where he found that racism was as prevalent as it had been under the Third Reich!

Hans Massaquoi

Need I write more?