K. Wade Radomske
Germ 380
Dr. Josiah Simon
18 November 2015

Afro-Deutsche

In his autobiography Colin Powell, the only black person to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Military, said this in his Autobiography “...black GIs, especially those out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom--they could go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date whom they wanted, just like other people. The dollar was strong, the beer good, and the German people friendly...". He makes it seem like paradise for the black community, and in some ways it may have been but it wasn’t completely, and it wasn’t always that way. Germany’s black-history isn’t particularly long, but it is tumultuous.
The majority of black-history in Germany starts after WWI when an influx of French-Senegalese occupation soldiers and their families moved to the Rhineland in Germany. Compared to the United States, Germany was a relatively welcoming place for blacks in the 1920’s and many American musicians and entertainers took their skills to Berlin and other major cities where Jazz was on the rise. Throughout the 1920s Jazz became a very prominent part of German entertainment and nightlife. With the introduction of the radio, German’s had easy access to the American greats they idolized such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. The Weimar Republic, as Germany was known at the time, associated jazz with the modern era of progressivism. This more tolerable environment didn’t last long however.
With Hitler and the Nazi party taking control of Germany, things rapidly changed for the black community. More and more negrophobia surfaced, and blacks started to become linked or associated with the Jews. This link surfaced through the Jazz music that the nation shared during the previous decade, as many Jews also began playing and performing the music. This link led to the afro-deutsche being placed at the bottom of the racial scale along with the Jews and gypsies. Racial laws were enacted, banning relationships between the afro-deutsche and aryans. The children of such relationships were labeled as ‘Rhineland Bastards’.
One such child was Hans Jurgen Massaquoi, who became a world renowned journalist and author. Massaquoi escaped Nazi Germany and went on to became editor of the American magazine, Ebony. But as he describes in his book Destined to Witness: Growing up black in Nazi Germany, he and many other young mixed-race children didn’t initially feel the need to flee. Being black or mixed-race was very uncommon in Germany at the time and so Massaquoi describes this feeling of aloneness, and in an attempt to be a part of something and be a ‘good German’, he tried to join the Deutsches Jungvolk (Hitler Youth). He was never able to and after the Nuremburg Laws were enacted in 1935, which the afro-deutsche were subject to, he had to flee Germany and made his way to America. As editor at Ebony Magazine Massaquoi was very involved in the next phase of Afro-Deutsche history.
With the fall of Nazi Germany came the allied forces and their occupation of West Germany.