A separate German
Hans, wearing a swastika in the courtyard of their school, at seven years

The image is as terrifying as overwhelming. Hamburg, 1933. Surrounded by blond children as beer , Aryan to the bone and guts, I get a black buck for seven years, with a swastika pinned on his vest. Not a bad joke or a trick of the most cruel of destinies. It is the image, the picture of J.Massaquoi Hans, the son of a German nurse and a Liberian diplomatic mogul.


Hans grew up among children of Nibelung and Valkyries and, most unusual, managed to survive the racist regime in history thanks to his guts, his wit, intelligence and courage of his mother who managed to pull it off Germanic while his countrymen were blinded by hatred and fanaticism.


A sign on the swings little Hans prevented from playing with children Aryan

The black population in Germany during the Nazi period was negligible. A few hundred, maybe a few thousands, of people in a population of 65 million. The larger nucleus were called Rhineland bastards, five hundred teenagers that border region born after World War I, women and German soldiers of the French occupation forces originating in African colonies. According to Hitler, were the result of an alliance between blacks and Jews to infect the Aryan race. As of 1937 were sterilized and eventually deported to the camps. Massaquoi survived because the Nazi bureaucracy ordered not know what to do with it and postponed a fate that eventually, it seemed inevitable.


Massaquoi's father was the son of the consul general of Liberia in the Weimar Republic. His mother, Berta, a German nurse lower middle class. The rich African hunk took a fancy to the pretty young local to see at a party, and their relationship was born Hans Jürgen. Although his father never paid much attention, refined grandfather, the first African diplomat in Europe, gave him shelter in his palace in Hamburg together with his many uncles and cousins. The patriarch boasted a grandchild German speaking the local language as such. "I associated black skin with superiority, because our servants were white."


Working in a factory, Massaquoi watched the German war machine fall apart. In 1943, the Allies launched Operation Gomorrah. The systematic bombing of Hamburg for ten days to leave the city turned into a wasteland that killed over 40,000 people. " My wife often says that my guardian angel was working overtime. I would have like to have died at the hands of the Gestapo in a bombing. The threat of the Gestapo was around me and I had more time to live with the constant threat of presence, but the bombings were a true threat. The truth is that the more close to death I was the day when a crowd tried to lynch me to take me for a pilot ally. "


The end of the war with the capture of Hamburg by the British also meant a new life for Massaquoi. "For the first time in my life I felt free of the paralyzing fear that my pride did not allow me to admit. The fear of being humiliated, ridiculed , degraded, deprived me of my dignity, to make feel subhuman, less a person than those around me. "


He spent the war as a jazz saxophonist, and then emigrate to Liberia, the country of his father, and calling at the United States, where he was recruited to participate in the Korean War. He studied journalism, a profession to which he devoted four decades. "Everything is fine, but just. I'm pretty happy with the way my life has gone. I lived to tell the story portion of which I witnessed. At same time, I hope that everyone can have a happy childhood in a just society. And that's definitely not my case. "

wow how cool!

More pics

.