Destined to Witness

by Hans Massaquoi

  With the RAF stepping up its retaliatory air attacks on German cities, bombed-out buildings became a common sight in Hamburg. Not so common, however, was the sight of prominent Nazis at the scenes of bombing disasters. I heard much grumbling among the people over the fact that Hitler himself was never seen at bombing sites where his mere presence might have done much to boost the people’s shattered morale.

  SWINGBOYS

  By the time I reached my second apprenticeship year, I no longer considered working as hard and as long as a full-grown man such a harsh reality. It had simply become reality. Yet, even under those trying conditions, my life was not all work and no play. Each day after quitting time, I and thousands of Hamburg’s teenage boys underwent a remarkable metamorphosis. After much scrubbing, primping, and brushing, we would change from grease- and grime-splattered blue-collar workers into meticulously coiffed, manicured, and dressed men of the world—or so we thought. With each metamorphosis, we would temporarily leave the world of machines, grit, and toil behind and enter the fantasy realm of the “swingboys,” an unchartered, unorganized, and leaderless, yet highly visible fraternity whose membership dwarfed that of the vaunted Hitler Youth. The swingboy movement, if one could call it that, had neither dues-paying members nor elected leaders, only devotees. While mostly a working-class phenomenon, since there were more of us blue-collar types than members of the upper class, the swingboy cult cut across economic and social classes and included youths from every walk of life. Not unlike the American punkers of the eighties, German swingboys were acting out an adolescent need to rebel against conformity, in our case against Nazi regimentation. Like the punkers, we had neither a political creed nor a political agenda. But unlike the grungy-looking punkers, we were exaggeratedly neat and dressed like men-about-town. Our unstated aims were to express our antiestablishment mind-set, short of getting into serious trouble with the Gestapo; to listen whenever possible to jazz, which we had adopted as our favorite music because it was banned by the Nazis as Negermusik; to impress the girls with our macho and sophistication; and last—but by no means least—to get laid. In my particular case, this last objective was based more on wishful fantasy than on realistic expectations, since I considered my chances of finding a willing partner and the necessary privacy to achieve my goal as absolutely nil.

  Swingboys went to great lengths to become the direct antithesis of Nazi youths. This meant wearing our hair long and with sideburns in contrast to the short, military-style haircuts and clean-cut look prescribed by the Hitler Youth leadership. Unfortunately, thanks to my African ancestors, my hair refused to cooperate. Only after continued “conditioning” with gobs of pomade did it reluctantly submit to the prescribed over-the-collar swingboy style. When it came to growing sideburns, I fared even worse. No matter how often I shaved in front of my ears to encourage hair to grow, the area remained as hairless as a baby’s butt. This obvious shortcoming, however, was amply offset by my precocious, much-envied ability to grow a mustache. While a bit on the sparse side, it could nevertheless be seen with the naked eye. Thus, I was never tempted to consider the ultimate “remedy” for upperlip nudity. The procedure, which was highly recommended by our journeymen, consisted of treating the area under the nose with a series of nightly applications of dog feces. Many of my peers were as skeptical as I about the remedy’s effectiveness, but I knew for a fact that some who were ridiculing the procedure publicly were using it privately—just in case it might work. To them, looking authentically swingboy was worth a little inconvenience.

  Our well-established swingboy trademark was a dandylike facade that belied the fact that most of us were rough-and-ready guys who were as handy with a wrench and a hammer as we were with our fists. As a total putdown of the “wholesome,” outdoors lifestyle advocated by the Hitler Youth leadership, we chose as our main role model and idol an ever-so-suave musical film star by the name of Johannes Heesters, a smooth lady-killer who, with his pale complexion and carefully coiffed long black hair, epitomized the indoor type. Like the debonair, Dutch-born Heesters, we wore knee-length double-breasted jackets, wide-bottom pants that nearly covered our shoes, starched shirt collars, waist-fitting navy blue overcoats, matching homburg hats, and—as a touch of ultimate elegance—white silk scarfs. The thought that we pimple-faced, fuzz-cheeked adolescents didn’t look like Heesters but like Heesters’s caricatures never entered our minds.

  Since dance band musicians were high on the swingboy prestige scale, second only to movie stars, I decided to give my image and ego a much-needed boost by taking a second stab at a musical instrument, after my abortive brush with the violin. One day, I noticed a gleaming silver trumpet in the window of a downtown music shop, and it was love at first sight. Within hours, I returned to the store with the necessary cash from my savings and the instrument changed owners. Shopping around for a trumpet teacher, I settled on a conservatory that offered trumpet lessons on hourly terms I could afford. Unlike my halfhearted attempt at becoming a violinist, I threw myself body and soul into mastering the complexities of the trumpet. But no matter how hard I tried, I failed to develop a satisfactory embouchure. After carefully inspecting my trumpet and finding it in good order, my trumpet teacher decided that the fault must lie with my lips. “I think your lips are too full for playing the trumpet,” he ventured, then showed off his Aryan lips, which, while playing, he would compress into a razor-thin vertical slit. “Perhaps you should switch to another wind instrument, like the clarinet, which requires a different embouchure where lip size is of no consequence,” he suggested.

  When I pointed out that world-famous jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong was not exactly noted for thin lips, he argued that what came out of Satchmo’s horn wasn’t exactly music either. On that sour note, I terminated my trumpet lessons at the Vermeeren Conservatory, unshaken in my belief that if Satchmo’s lips weren’t too big to play trumpet, neither were mine.

  Rather than give up my dream of learning to play the trumpet, I decided to teach myself as best I could. To the annoyance of our neighbors who were my captive audience, I never got tired of practicing. The result of my efforts didn’t turn me into a budding Louis Armstrong, but my playing improved to a point where some of the fellows in the neighborhood told me that I sounded real good.

  The hub of swingboy activity in my neighborhood was Café König, an expansive nightclub that featured a lively combo consisting of a tenor saxophonist, a pianist, a drummer, and a bassman, each of them a swingboy in his own right. Despite the fact that alcohol-free “beer” was the only beverage served, the joint was packed and jumping seven nights a week. “Jumping,” however, did not include dancing. By a recent order of the government, public dancing had been suspended. Dance prohibition was aimed at curbing the opportunities for hanky-panky between frontline soldiers’ lonely wives and prowling civilian and military males on the home front. The German military high command had deemed such liaisons a threat to the morale of the fighting men. From what I observed, I had reason to believe that the ban on dancing did nothing to stem the tide of married women finding romance in the arms of men they weren’t married to.

  Getting in on the Café König action as a fifteen-year-old was easier said than done. Youths under the age of eighteen were barred from nightclubs by law, and violators, if caught, could count on stiff punishment. Since I and some of my buddies had no intention of waiting three years for our turn, we threw caution to the wind and became regular crashers. Each time we visited our hangout, we faced an element of danger and suspense. To get inside, we not only had to get past a sign that stated YOUTHS UNDER 18 NOT ALLOWED, but more important, past the chief enforcer of that policy, Herr Wilhelm König, the owner of the joint. König was a Nazi Party member in good standing with a swastika button in his lapel to prove it. A short but enormous ex-wrestler who bore an uncanny resemblance to his boxer dog, which never left his side, König doubled as greeter and bouncer, depending on which of his talents was needed at any given time. Having once seen him cha
rge like a tank into a dozen or so unruly patrons while single-handedly breaking up a brawl, I was convinced that he was not a man to be trifled with. But although he regularly turned back dozens of boys and girls after checking their IDs, he never stopped me once or gave me a hard time. He also turned deaf whenever the band got carried away and, at the urging of the crowd, squeezed a few forbidden jazz tunes into their normal repertoire of foxtrots. Getting caught by the wrong person or persons in the act of playing jazz could get band members arrested, fined, suspended, or—in the case of incorrigible recidivists—sent to the Russian front.

  Part of the excitement of being a swingboy was the harassment by the Hitler Youth that came with the territory. Rarely did a week go by without a Hitler Youth Streife (patrol), consisting of from ten to twenty uniformed young men, showing up at our popular hangout. They would quietly block the exits, then fan out and systematically go from table to table in order to check—of all things—the length of the male patrons’ hair. Swingboys with the longest hair were ordered outside and marched under guard to a facility where several barbers stood ready to give them the clipping of their lives. Since there was an implied correlation between long hair and anti-Nazi attitude, those who had their locks forcibly sheared “wore” their baldness like a badge of courage. They were regarded by us as the martyrs of the movement, young men who had paid the ultimate price for their conviction.

  The closest I ever came to getting my compulsory haircut was when I was ordered outside by a junior member of a patrol. Happy to have finally been chosen for this distinction, I stuck out my chest and prepared to leave the club. But before I had reached the door, the leader of the patrol intervened. “You may wear your hair as long as you like, Kamerad,” he said, in an exaggeratedly polite tone. “We really don’t care what you do with your hair.” When I returned to my table under the humiliating stares of the entire club, I realized that the spirit of Heinrich Wriede that had made my life miserable during my school years was still very much alive.

  Although the swingboy fad in Hamburg was for the most part harmless and more a nuisance than a threat to the security of the Nazi state, the Gestapo was not amused by the ubiquitous dandylike youths. Toward the end of the war, it reportedly arrested some four hundred of the city’s swingboys and sent about seventy to concentration camps.

  REINGRUBER

  Since changing employment was all but impossible during the war, we were surprised when one day a new machinist journeyman by the name of Reingruber showed up at our plant. All we learned about this white-haired toothpick of a guy in his mid-fifties was that he was from Bavaria and, like most Bavarians, a Catholic. In predominantly Protestant Hamburg, that combination made him a member of the much-maligned minority referred to as Saubayern (Sow-Bavarians), a “compliment” the Bavarians returned by calling all non-Bavarians Saupreussen (Sow-Prussians).

  I couldn’t have cared less about Reingruber’s church affiliation and geographic origins, and never participated in the contemptuous scuttlebutt that abounded behind his back. As far as I was concerned, Reingruber was an all-right guy, especially since he went out of his way to befriend me. But Hannes Mauer, one of the journeymen who had become a close buddy of mine, kept warning me. “Watch your steps, boy,” he cautioned me. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about this Reingruber fellow that isn’t quite right.”

  None of Mauer’s warnings made sense to me, since Reingruber had never said or done anything I considered suspicious. I therefore was not displeased when Reingruber informed me one day that he and I had been assigned to air-raid watch together. Throughout the war, all plant employees were required periodically to spend a night at the plant on air-raid watch duty. In the event of an incendiary-bomb fire, we were expected to attack the blaze with fire extinguishers and thereby save the plant.

  It was in the autumn of 1942. Air attacks on Hamburg were still a relatively rare occurrence, so Reingruber and I could reasonably expect an eventless night. Before bedding down on cots, we killed time reading and listening to front-line radio reports from the Führer’s headquarters. Things were still going pretty much according to Hitler’s plans. Poland, France, Belgium, and Holland had fallen. German troops were deep inside the Soviet Union in the suburbs of Stalingrad. British naval forces had been badly mauled in an attack on Tobruk in North Africa, while the Japanese were beating the hell out of the Americans in the Pacific.

  In spite of all the “good news,” Reingruber was pessimistic. Referring to the day’s newspaper headlines that announced another Japanese victory at sea, Reingruber informed me that the Japanese were now unstoppable.

  “Don’t think that they’ll be satisfied with being the rulers in Asia,” he lectured me. “As soon as this war is over, the Japanese will send a special hit squad to Berlin and assassinate Hitler. After that, they will take over the entire world. In any event, whether they’ll be beaten by the Allies or by the Japanese, the Nazis will soon be through.”

  Although Reingruber’s scenario of the war’s outcome seemed a bit far-fetched to me, who was I to argue with as mature a journeyman as the Bavarian? But remembering Hannes Mauer’s warning about that “funny feeling” he had about Reingruber, I decided against adding my two cents’ worth and intentionally withheld whatever opinions I had on the matter.

  Having thus run out of things to discuss, we turned off the lights and went to sleep. The next morning, after a siren-free, eventless night, we got up and went back to work.

  I had all but forgotten about Reingruber’s dire predictions regarding the outcome of the war when a secretary summoned me to the plant manager’s office. There, my memory received a most unwelcome, jolting assist. Already assembled were the plant manager, Herr Habicht; Meister Neumann; and, inexplicably, my fellow air-raid guard, Reingruber. All three looked at me with grave expressions that together signaled bad news. To me, the whole thing smacked of a major ass-chewing in the making, but I couldn’t figure out for what. Least of all could I explain to myself what Reingruber had to do with all this.

  “Herr Reingruber here tells us,” said Herr Habicht, coming right to the point, “that you made some treasonous remarks last night. Specifically, you told him that it was only a matter of time until Germany would lose the war. You do realize the seriousness of such talk, don’t you?”

  I was stunned, unable to speak. For a moment my vision blurred from anger and fear—anger at Reingruber, who stood there fixing me with an inscrutable smirk, and fear because of the dangerous predicament into which his bald-faced lie had put me. I had often heard that making “treasonous remarks,” like treason itself, was punishable by death. At the thought of execution, my knees began to shake and I felt like throwing up. I realized that I had been set up, that I had been shamefully betrayed by a man who had given me the impression that he liked me. But why? Why did Reingruber hate me so much that he wanted to destroy me? What had I ever done to him? These and similar questions raced through my head, but no answer emerged.

  “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” The voice of Herr Habicht yanked me back into the nightmarish reality.

  “It’s not true,” I stammered. “It’s all a lie. He’s the one who said it, not I.” Fully aware how unconvincing my voice sounded, I looked helplessly from Habicht to Meister Neumann, and then, with unconcealed contempt, at Reingruber, who was still regarding me with that inscrutable smirk.

  I felt a growing urge to hit him in his face, to hit him and hit him and hit him until his face was nothing but an unrecognizable bloody mess. I had to force myself not to look at that insolent smirk, because I felt that the urge to destroy Reingruber right then and there was becoming stronger than my ability to control myself.

  “You may go back to the shop now, Herr Reingruber.” Herr Habicht, seemingly sensing what went on in my mind, dismissed the journeyman.

  After Reingruber had closed the door behind him, Herr Habicht resumed the conversation in what seemed a somewhat less unfriendly tone.

&n
bsp; “I don’t know who is lying,” he said. “It is obvious that somebody here isn’t telling the truth. I don’t have to tell you, my boy, that this kind of talk can get you into the most serious trouble.

  “We have always been pleased with your performance here as an apprentice,” he continued. Therefore, we would really hate to see anything bad happen to you. For that reason, we shall refrain from referring this matter to the authorities for further investigation.”

  There was no doubt in my mind what he meant by “authorities.”

  “You do realize that if Germany were to lose the war,” he continued, “all of us would be finished—you, I, everybody. You do realize that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I stammered, while trying unsuccessfully to impart a ring of sincerity to my quivering voice.

  The truth, which I could not admit, was that I had never believed the widely accepted Goebbels’s propaganda that all Germans would be liquidated, tortured, raped, imprisoned, or enslaved should the Allies win the war.

  On the advice of Herr Habicht and Herr Neumann, I avoided Reingruber like the plague, but I could not help staring at him with all the hate I felt for him whenever our paths crossed. When I told Hannes Mauer about what had happened, he felt vindicated in his initial judgment of the Bavarian, but even he was unable to come up with a plausible explanation for Reingruber’s motive to denounce me after initially pretending to be my friend.

  Less than a year after this memorable interlude, in the July 1943 raids that destroyed most of the city, the plant was leveled. I and other Lindner A.G. workers who survived the raids moved to other cities and other jobs. Although I had every intention to get to the bottom of Reingruber’s treachery and, if possible, to even the score after the war, I never got the chance. No matter how hard I looked for him, I never saw or heard of Reingruber again.