Hans Massaquoi--born Jan. 19, 1926--was the German-born son of a white German mother and black Liberian father. He grew up in Hamburg, Germany during the Nazi rise to power and at one point considered joining the Hitler Youth.
Because of his mixed-race background, he was barred from any professional career. Instead his mother encouraged him to learn a trade. Massaquoi was not persecuted but suffered as the target of racism and abuse. In 1947, he traveled to Liberia where his father lived. He then emigrated to the U.S. After serving as an Army paratrooper, Massaquoi earned a degree in journalism. He wrote for Jet and Ebony where he became managing editor. In 1999, he published his memoir Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi German. He died in January 2013.
"I was six years old when I started school in 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
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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience. Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog! Thanks for reading. And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013. Copyright 2013.
