Destined to Witness

by Hans Massaquoi

  A NEW HOBBY

  To the generation of boys who grew up with me in Hamburg there was nothing more important, more compelling, and more absorbing than Fussball (soccer), Germany’s national pastime. All the boys in my class were crazy about Fussball, and those who weren’t good at playing the game made up for it by being enthusiastic spectators and fans. For some strange reason, I was neither. Somehow, I never felt the slightest inclination to chase, kick, or butt a ball, or to sit in the bleachers and watch others do it. In a city that breathed, ate, and slept soccer, my indifference toward the sport made me almost as much an aberration as did my skin color. My indifference to whether HSV, Hamburg’s vaunted amateur soccer team, won or lost was tantamount to high treason. Consequently, when it came to Fussball, my classmates justifiably thought of me as a Flasche and strenuously avoided having me on their teams. Only my prowess in track and field kept my peers from dismissing me as a total physical dud.

  It hurt my pride to be regarded as a soccer nonentity, but not enough to put forth a serious effort to become a respectable player. At the same time, I felt a strong need to participate in some sport that I could be as enthusiastic about as my soccer-playing buddies, one that would give me the recognition I craved.

  Coincidence soon came to my aid. One day—I was about twelve at the time—several friends and I were walking home from school when a young, athletic-looking blond man stopped us, introducing himself as Rudi, the coach of an amateur boxing club in suburban Bramfeld. Rudi wanted to know whether we had any interest in boxing, since his club had a pre-junior division. He suggested we check it out and, if we liked it, join.

  I was certain that the coach’s invitation did not include me, since by that time it was clear to me that all organized sports activities in Germany were regulated by the Nazi Ministry of Sports. The disastrous outcome of my quest to join the Hilter Youth had ended my hope of ever being admitted to an organization that would receive me without reservations as an equal and welcome me with open arms. But before I could walk away in anticipation of being told that the club did not accept non-Aryans, the coach turned directly to me.

  “If you’d join, I could make a real good boxer out of you,” he told me.

  I could hardly believe my ears, but that was all I needed to hear to make up my mind to join.

  “Just come to the the Old Gun Club,” Rudi said. “We’re training every Tuesday and Friday night and every Sunday morning.”

  All five of us promised him that we’d be there, pending permission from our parents of course.

  As I had expected, my mother was less than ecstatic about the idea of my joining a boxing club. Surprisingly, she gave her blessing anyway. “I know the first time you get hit hard enough that it hurts, you’re going to quit,” she predicted.

  Mutti knew me well, but not that well.

  The gym, which was located in the rundown converted beer hall of the defunct gun club, was a fifteen-minute bicycle ride away. When we boys arrived, it was bustling with the activities of about thirty men and boys, several of them our own age. Amid the whirring sound of rope skipping, we could hear the rapid-fire impact of leather gloves as two men sparred in the ring, while others whacked away at an arsenal of heavy bags and punching balls that hung suspended from the ceiling.

  Within a few months, this all-male underworld of blood, grunts, and pungent stale sweat had become my world. Three times a week, I would mount my bicycle, dressed in a gym suit, a pair of boxing gloves slung around my neck, and head for Bramfeld. Soon I was obliged to make the trip alone, since my four buddies dropped out, one by one, as soon as they learned the hard way that boxing was a two-way street. You give some and take some.

  Rudi, a former amateur national lightweight champion and an electrician by trade, turned out to be a hard taskmaster when it came to teaching us the fine points of the sport and honing our bodies and minds to a fighting edge. Yet he was a kind and sensitive friend who, with infinite patience, instilled in us a love for boxing and the meaning of true sportsmanship. From him I learned that there’s nothing lower than a low blow, a kidney punch, or hitting a man who’s down. He never let us start a round of sparring without shaking hands, or leave the ring without a comradely hug.

  Rudi was convinced that I had great potential as a fighter because of what he termed my “natural ability”—fast legs, fast hands, and fast reflexes, assets he felt were well worth cultivating. Since under prevailing amateur boxing rules I could not enter into formal competition in the junior league until I reached the age of fourteen, Rudi figured that in two years he would have me ready to take on anyone in my weight class. “I’ll make you a German junior champion,” Rudi promised. “Just do your part and keep working as hard as you have been working, and leave everything else to me.”

  There was nothing I wanted to believe more than that I could become a champ—especially since Joe Louis, the new heavyweight champion of the world, my hero and role model, had just redeemed himself after his defeat by Max Schmeling two years earlier. With a sensational first-round knockout, he had destroyed Nazi Germany’s great white hope and put the lie to Aryan supremacy, as far as I was concerned. Even though I was a staunch Joe Louis fan, I agreed with Rudi and most Germans who felt that the American boxing establishment had cheated Schmeling out of the world championship after his decisive victory over Louis by denying him a title fight with Jim Braddock, the champ. Instead, the Americans finagled to give the title fight to Louis, who—quite predictably—put Braddock away. To think that one day I might be a boxing champion like the Brown Bomber from America was mind-boggling, yet, if I could believe Rudi, not necessarily too far-fetched.

  But even without such long-range dreams to inspire me, my time at the boxing club was enormously rewarding and well spent. Besides channeling some of the aggression I’d begun to display in response to the repeated slights I received, it improved my physique and immeasurably enhanced my standing among my peers. My prestige soared to an all-time high. Even the older and bigger boys were beginning to take me seriously and treat me with respect. As word spread around school and my neighborhood that I had become a bona fide exponent of the manly art, so did the conventional wisdom that to mess with me was definitely not a good idea.

  By an odd coincidence, shortly after I joined the boxing club, Hitler made boxing lessons an integral part of all schools’ athletic curricula, since he was convinced that boxing built character and bolstered self-confidence. By the time the first boxing classes were taught in my school by a teacher who had to take a crash course in the sport’s fundamentals, I was already an accomplished amateur boxer. Since in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, I was hailed immediately as a boxing phenom. As a result, the teacher frequently asked me to demonstrate various boxing techniques, from proper footwork to the correct way of throwing a punch to skipping rope at a speed that made the rope all but invisible to the eye. He even had me put on exhibition bouts with a string of opponents. Since they were all inexperienced, sparring with them gave me a chance to demonstrate my expertise without having to worry about getting hurt. But after a couple of weeks of basking in my new-won glory, I was informed by the teacher that he had to stop the exhibition matches, since they were not part of the required curriculum. I was certain that the real reason he called off the bouts was the fear of some of his colleagues that my continuous display of non-Aryan dominance in a sport as popular as boxing sent the wrong message. But the damage had already been done. My reputation as the school’s best boxer had been firmly established and, in fact, remained intact for the rest of my school days.

  Meanwhile, back at the club, I had to earn my reputation as a creditable contender the hard way—by facing ring-savvy opponents. Rudi made sure that I saw plenty of action, often pairing me with boys who had both weight and reach advantage over me. In doing so, he taught me how to take advantage of my superior speed and trigger-sharp reflexes, which enabled me to duck or step aside a split second before a punch could land. Sometimes,
my reflexes would let me down and I had to pay the penalty in the form of a bloody nose, a cut lip, a swollen eye, or an unhinged jaw that made chewing excruciatingly painful for weeks. There were many times when I seriously considered hanging up my gloves rather than risk taking another punishing blow. But each time I changed my mind when I thought of how my quitting would play at school and in my neighborhood. Besides, I really didn’t have the guts to look Rudi in the eye and tell him that I couldn’t take it anymore. So instead of quitting, I chose the only other way out of the pressure cooker into which I had put myself. I got serious. With Rudi’s constant encouragement, I trained harder and harder to work out the kinks in my boxing style. Between grueling hours on the punching bag, running, and jumping rope, I would spar with each of the dozen or so kids in the junior league. Gradually, ever so gradually, I transformed myself into such an elusive target that I was able to step into the ring with any of my peers without having to worry about getting hit. I could see a punch coming and take evasive action long before it could land and do any damage.

  Fear of being called a quitter wasn’t the only reason I stuck it out. Another was that life at the Bramfeld Boxing Club was strangely detached from the Nazi politics that seemed to pervade everything else. It was an apolitical island in a sea of rabid Hitlerism. What it lacked in amenities, such as shower facilities and up-to-date equipment, it made up in esprit de corps. The members were plain, working-class people who genuinely liked and accepted each other, including me. The few times my race was mentioned, it was in the context of an enviable plus. Most of my teammates agreed with Rudi that my father’s African genes were a decided asset in the ring. Even though their view reflected a certain degree of stereotypical thinking, I didn’t feel offended, since I subscribed to it myself. I had no idea whether my father was athletic or not, but I was convinced that my unusual aptitude for boxing had everything to do with him.

  Neither Rudi nor I ever doubted that my hard training would pay off eventually in garnering for me and the club a junior amateur boxing championship. By the time I reached my fourteenth birthday, Rudi felt I was ready to enter the national tournament. It was therefore as devastating for him as it was for me when the application he submitted to the Reichssportverband (Reich Sports Association) in my behalf was rejected because of the old bugaboo: “Nichtarier.” I’d heard that often enough to know there was no hope, but Rudi was not a man to give up easily. Without hesitation, he composed a letter to the highest sports authority in the country, Reichssportführer Hans von Tschammer und Osten. He said he knew someone with connections who would make sure that the Reichssportführer would read the letter himself. In his letter, which Rudi read to me, he explained how I excelled both in sportsmanship and boxing skill. If given the opportunity to compete, Rudi pleaded, I would not only win the title Deutscher Jugendmeister (German junior champion) in the junior featherweight division but also be a credit to my club and the sport of boxing in general. In closing, he appealed to the Reichssportführer’s own sense of sportsmanship and fair play.

  I thanked Rudi for sticking out his neck for me, but knew that the very points Rudi had made were sufficient reason for a Nazi racist not to let me fight. My instincts proved correct. While I’ll never know whether von Tschammer und Osten ever saw Rudi’s letter, I know Rudi never received a reply. So when the deadline for registering for the championship tournament drew near, another boy, one I had chased around the ring many times during training, was entered instead of me.

  A few weeks later, to my chagrin, my replacement received a hero’s welcome as he returned to the club with his newly won junior-division title. While I realized my having been barred was not his fault, I couldn’t help feeling deep resentment toward him. As far as I was concerned, he had something that rightfully belonged to me. I couldn’t wait, therefore, to meet the new Box Meister in the ring again—if only during training—to demonstrate to him that he was champion in name only. I could well understand why he avoided a ring encounter with me as long as he could by staying away from training or by claiming to feel indisposed. Eventually, however, he ran out of dodges and I got my wish. With a ferocity I hadn’t felt since I had taken up boxing, I unleashed a barrage of punches that soon had blood spurting from the champ’s nose as he staggered into the ropes. Even after Rudi shouted for me to break, I kept hitting him as if he were my mortal enemy. Finally, Rudi had to step into the ring and pull me off the badly shaken champ. “I’m sorry I wrote what I did about your sportsmanship,” Rudi shouted at me in obvious disgust.

  “Don’t tell me about sportsmanship!” I shouted back at him, then pulled off my gloves, dressed, and walked out of the gym, my mind made up never to return.

  THE WAR COMES TO HAMBURG

  The news on September 1, 1939, that Hitler had ordered German troops to cross the Polish border and attack Poland was received with open enthusiasm by me and my eighth-grade classmates. In our youthful patriotism, which had been carefully nurtured by Goebbels’s insidious propaganda machine with daily reports of escalating Polish provocations against German nationals living in Poland, we felt that it was high time that Germany let the Poles know that you couldn’t push Germans around. Our only regret was that at age thirteen, we were much too young to get a piece of the action and worried that the war would long be forgotten by the time we were old enough to bear arms. That’s why we felt jealous when one day Herr Herbst announced that he had to give up his teaching post to report for military service. A few weeks later, following completion of basic training, he visited us to show off his brand-new crew cut and army private’s uniform. As he regaled us with humorous accounts about his adjustment to military life, none of us imagined that neither Herr Herbst nor the majority of our classmates would survive the war.

  To our great disappointment, life in Hamburg went on pretty much as if we were still at peace. The only reminders that we were actually at war were the daily accounts in the press, the Sondermeldungen (special reports) on radio, and the expanded weekly newsreels. The latter were one of the most potent weapons in Goebbels’s propaganda arsenal. Vivid frontline footage brought home to us the German military juggernaut’s crushing of the vastly outclassed Polish army in eighteen days. Valiant attempts by the Poles to charge advancing German tanks with lance-toting cavalry from a bygone era were presented as one big Polish joke. There was much rejoicing over the German victory among us kids, but Poland and the war seemed far away to us—too far, we felt, to change our lives. So for the time being, we had to content ourselves with “doing our share” of the war effort by going from door to door after school to collect leftover bones from housewives’ kitchens and taking them to our schoolyard, where they formed a huge stinking pile before being hauled away to be processed into strategically important lubricants. Otherwise, except for the increasing presence of men in military uniforms and the stringently enforced blackout that was aimed at preventing enemy aircraft from locating ground targets and also to save electricity, life in Hamburg remained deceptively normal and—as far as we youngsters were concerned—intolerably dull. But all that was soon to change.

  With the broadening of the war through the entry of Britain and France into the fray, there was plenty of action we kids could enjoy vicariously. Soon, our sports heroes were replaced by military heroes, such as submarine commander Günther Prien, who with his U-47 sneaked into Britain’s heavily fortified, “impenetrable” naval harbor of Scapa Flow and sank the British battleship Royal Oak and 833 crewmen. Unscathed, he and his men returned to their home base and a hero’s welcome by Hitler in the Reichskanzlei, the Nazi equivalent of the White House. Other military heroes Dr. Goebbels touted successfully as role models for German youths were fighter aces Werner Mölders and Adolf Galland, whose records of enemy aircraft knockouts were reported daily by the press like soccer scores.

  Yet not all accounts of German victories in the newsreels were joyous occasions for me. Some I found outright embarrassing. After the massive defeat of the French army by Germa
n troops in early June 1940, Goebbels’s cameramen delighted in showing thousands of battle-fatigued and demoralized French African soldiers in ragged uniforms being herded into German POW camps, with the sarcastic commentary, “Here come the defenders of Western civilization.” The hapless prisoners were juxtaposed with footage of distinctly Aryan-looking fresh German troops marching confidently in disciplined formations. “And here,” mocked the commentator, “come the barbarians.”

  Each special radio announcement of another German victory was accompanied by blaring fanfares and ended with a military choir’s rendition of the popular fighting anthem “Wir fahren gegen England,” that was aimed at making fighting and dying in the “crusade against England” sound like a barrel of fun. The Goebbels press was jubilant when it reported the virtual destruction of the British city of Coventry by German bombs. It even coined a new adjective, “coventriert” (coventrized), which meant totally demolished. Reichsmarschall Göring, emboldened by his Luftwaffe’s early victories over enemy aircraft, boasted openly that if only a single Allied bomber would reach German air space, “you can call me Meier.” The pronouncement was typical of Göring’s brand of humor, since Meier was one of the most common, and thus least distinguished, German names. Göring’s boast notwithstanding, the German Air Defense Command took no chances and launched a massive public air-raid shelter construction program. Soon, Hamburg was dotted with above-ground concrete bunkers, including two high-rise, fortresslike superbunkers on the Heiligengeistfeld, site of the city’s popular winter carnival, the Hamburger Dom. The two superbunkers, which loomed on the horizon like hulking monsters, added a sinister touch to Hamburg’s elegant skyline of slender church spires. In addition to providing air-raid shelters for thousands of civilians, they served as platforms for heavy Flak (antiaircraft artillery) batteries capable of doing head-on combat with low-flying enemy aircraft. They also were equipped with state-of-the-art Horchgeräte (listening devices), the precursors of radar, that looked like gigantic black metal ears of a futuristic monster. Not until after the war did the public learn that the soundproof basement of one of the bunkers also contained torture chambers for the Gestapo, which reportedly as late as April 6, 1945, used the facility to torture resistance fighters in order to force them to reveal the identities of their coconspirators.