“Rhineland Bastards” and the Memory of Transnational Racial Discrimination in Hans Massaquoi’s "Destined to Witness"

Résumé ou Introduction

The post-World War I presence of black French soldiers and their romantic relationships with German women put the spotlight on the black community in Germany. Many relationships and marriages resulted from those soldiers' presence in the Rhineland. From these relationships were born brown “Mischlinge”, “mixed blood” or “half breed” children which the Nazis would call “Rhineland bastards.” Much has been written on the Holocaust, but the subject of “Rhineland bastards” as Hitler’s black victims of the Holocaust has not received much scholarly attention. In the wake of the initial scholarly interest in their stories, some of the “Rhineland bastards” started sharing their racialized lived experiences through interviews, books, and autobiographies such as Hans Massaquoi’s Destined to Witness (1999).

This paper investigates how the memory of Massaquoi’s transnational racialized experiences– in Nazi Germany, Liberia, and the United States, influenced his identity construction as an Afro-German thereby informing his fight against racism. Further, this paper argues that Massaquoi’s widely read autobiographical account of his racialized experiences in Nazi Germany relies heavily on memory and created an awareness of Blacks as other forgotten victims of the Holocaust.