History really came alive for Natalye Pass Harpin in college, where she saw herself reflected in the stories and events they were learning about in class, and was also learning about other groups of people. It was in that environment where history wasn’t just about what happened in the past, but its relationship to the present.

“I wanted to be able to create that environment for others, so that they could feel more connected to it,” says Harpin, a continuing lecturer at UC San Diego, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. She’s also an associate professor at Grossmont College. “Also … to be able to connect it to the things that are happening today and how many of these communities are still affected by the legacies of the histories that we’re learning about.”

She’s heard people describe history as “boring,” but she wants to make it accessible and meaningful. Part of that effort will be in her upcoming lecture at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Central Library in downtown San Diego, “Afro-Descendants in Nazi Germany.” To close out Black History Month, Harpin will share the history of the Nazi’s racial policies toward Black Germans during the 1930s and ‘40s, and how they were inspired by the racism of America’s Jim Crow-era South. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )

Q: Can you talk about what initially brought Black people to Germany before World War I? Where did they arrive from? What were their circumstances in Germany before the Nazi party came to power?

A: I’m not saying this is the definitive history, but from the research that I’ve done, it looks as if some of the people emigrated from the continent of Africa, in the different areas that had German occupation, to Germany to do things like go to school. Some of these people were children of dignitaries or other important people in their home countries. Around the time period of World War I, there were talks about if and how they would restrict people based on the fact that they were a different race. If they could be German citizens, what would it look like for children who were mixed race? Oftentimes, it would have been African men having children with German women. Sometimes, in the colonies, you’d have German men who would have marriages to African women. If those children [from those relationships] would be “legitimized” and have German citizenship, there were concerns about giving people access to citizenship because of this racialized aspect. From what I understand, there wasn’t a set of rules, like we had in the American South, because there wasn’t a very large population of Afro-Germans and they weren’t all segregated to one area. They were more spread out, so when you see some of the primary sources of people who did grow up then — like Theodor Michael and Hans Massaquoi, who were biracial and had German mothers and African fathers — they describe how they stood out because they were darker than their peers, but it wasn’t as hostile, with regard to them not being able to go to formal school, until the Nazis came to power.

Q: From what I’ve read, Black people in Germany were already dealing with anti-Black racism in Germany, so what was different once Adolf Hitler was leading the country?

A: There was a lot more push to forcibly sterilize, for example. So, because these people were non-Aryans [by Nazi ideology] — there were terms like “mischling kinder” (mixed children) or “Rheinlandbastarde” (Rhineland bastard)— and were considered to be a result of colonization within continental Africa, a lot of them were forcibly sterilized because [the Nazis] didn’t want them to be able to have their own children who would be German citizens because of where they were born, sort of like in the United States. If you’re born here, on the soil, generally, you’re regarded as an American citizen.

There was also the delegitimization of a lot of these people’s relationships, so they weren’t allowed to be in public spaces with their non-Black partners anymore. It sort of became a Jim Crow situation, like in the U.S. The Nazis borrowed a lot from the Jim Crow South and applied it to their populations of non-Aryans in Germany, so that included people who weren’t Black. [There were rules like] not being able to go to parks or other public spaces on certain days and only having a certain time where you could go to those places if you wanted to. A lot of anti-Blackness had already been a thing, but now there was more of an incentivized push to encourage people to do that type of anti-Black violence, even with adults doing it to children just to prove that they were part of the Aryan group, part of the Nazis.

I was reading in Hans Massaquoi’s book, “Destined to Witness,” and he was talking about how, often, the principal would organize a day where the students would document their Aryan status, or there would be Hitler Youth drills, but he would specifically single out Hans and not allow him to showcase anything. Hans talked about how he, of course, is a German boy because nationality and race are two different things. So, he’s a German boy and his friends are doing these types of exercises and he wants to be involved, but he’s never given the chance to show that he’s just as good as, or better than, everybody else around him. The principal would do things like publicly call him out or stop him from doing something and make it very clear to all of the other children that he was not like the rest of them.

I’m not saying it didn’t happen before, but you also had instances where people were more encouraged to say racist chants or sayings to Black people they would encounter in public spaces. There’s one that he referenced where the translation is basically calling someone “nigger, nigger, chimney sweep.” There were more of those types of displays where it was no longer considered rude to do those kinds of things; it became encouraged that you should do it because you’re Aryan and they’re not. In that hyper-nationalist state, that fascist state, where everybody is supposed to try to outdo each other to prove that they’re more Aryan than their counterparts, that became something that was even more aggressive toward non-Aryans, in general, and to Afro-Germans in particular. [Afro-Germans] had to constantly worry about people harassing them in public spaces.

Hans also mentions that when he was a child, an SS officer tried to grab him and pull him into a pub as an example of the shame of Germany that they’d allowed all of this diversity to happen in the first place. That there were Black people living there, mixed-race people living there. His mom had seen him and she intervened, but he was about 6 or 7 years old when this pack of adults decided they could assault and torment a child. It’s interesting the things that people have to learn to survive, like always having to be hyper-aware of your surroundings.

Q: Can you talk about the role that German citizenship, or the denial of it, played in the lived experiences of Black people in the country during this time?

A: In the earlier part of the 1900s, they had determined that they would give German citizenship to children who were born in the colonies who had a German parent and a non-German parent. That citizenship was really called into question in the late ‘30s as Hitler rose to power and the Nazis had taken over politically. That’s not unlike different times in American history where you had a lot of people classified as “mixed race” having their citizenship questioned or potentially revoked. I think a lot of people at that time who were benefitting from what the Nazis were doing (as far as having access to employment and leisure activities, how life was for the average, German citizen), made excuses for treating people who were non-Aryans this way because they felt like the benefits outweighed the risks. It was easier to go along when you can now take care of your family and inflation isn’t through the roof, so you had a lot of people who felt like they were personally benefitting and that their families were prospering under this. There was a huge propaganda machine that was discussing how people who weren’t Aryan weren’t even full humans, couldn’t be trusted, and they shouldn’t be seen as national brothers and sisters. Since the Nazis owned all of the forms of media, there was nothing to counter that narrative. Even Hans Massaquoi talked about how even he bought into the antisemitism that was disseminated at that time. Again, we have someone who’s from one marginalized group buying into things about another marginalized group, but because he’s a child at the time, he’s not really making all of those connections to say, ‘Well, if I’m not the way that they’re depicting, maybe these people aren’t like that either.’

Q: What is the legacy of these racist policies for Black people in Germany, and in Europe, today?

A: That, I’m not familiar with. I mentioned that Germany had pulled a lot of the similar barriers that were in practice, de facto and de jure, in the Jim Crow South. The Nazis thought that the Jim Crow system took things too far, like the one-drop rule, for example. [The one-drop rule is the idea that any kind of Black ancestry — one drop — makes a person racially Black.] The Nazis thought that the one-drop rule was too far because they also recognized that a lot of people had technically been mixed in at some point; but the Nazis were really in awe of the fact that the United States maintained this innocence and this whole public image around the world as being a place of liberty and freedom, but never having anyone sort of confront that, ‘How are you the country of freedom and liberty when you’re restricting people and what they can and can’t do, where they can and can’t eat, and these are your own citizens?’ So, the Nazis thought that it was too far to try and implement everything, but they liked the fact that the United States sort of got away with having a sterling reputation of freedom and liberty on its public face, but behind the scenes were really practicing a lot of the same ideologies among the marginalized communities here. [The Nazis] didn’t organically come up with that themselves, they pulled a lot of that from the Southern states’ de jure segregation laws.

Q: The Nazis were known for destroying documents connected to concentration camps and their sterilization programs, making it very difficult to retrace the experiences of the victims of their regime. Currently, we continue to be confronted with things like the rejection of African American studies in schools, or the banning of books and discussions of the racism and bigotry in American history. As a historian, what happens when societies are successful in altering and erasing history in this way? What is the danger here?

A: As a historian, I would say the danger is that we open ourselves up to having to repeat it because I find that when people don’t know the things that actually happened, they can’t analyze how they may be participating in the early stages of it, modern day. When you don’t learn about the things that have happened to other people, even today, you can’t understand why their descendants are still upset. So, it’s very easy to say things like, ‘Well, you know, everyone has freedom. That’s what they fought for in the 1960s.’ But, if you don’t know that redlining continued, that sundown towns continued, into the 1970s in California, you’re not going to really think about, ‘Why are there no Black people who live in this neighborhood?’ Or, ‘Why is everyone homogenized in these pockets of San Diego?’ All of this is by design, so when you ban those perspectives and histories, it makes people potentially doomed to repeat it because they don’t know what happened and how to stop it from happening again. It makes it so that they can’t understand different perspectives, or what different families are going through currently, as a legacy of those time periods.

I also think that it leaves open other histories to now be potentially excluded because we’ve seen throughout history that when negative things happen to Black people, they also happen for other groups down the road. That has always, historically, happened. So, if we’re talking about banning Black history, or different cultural things, it then opens the door to ban Asian history and women’s history and Latinx/Hispanic history. When society has allowed Black people to be excluded, and rules that have restricted us throughout our time in this country for the last 400 years, it makes other people have to deal with a lot of the same things we do, it’s just tailored differently to their population. You see that with regard to the Black lynchings, and in the southwest people were lynching Mexicans at the same time, for different reasons. The point is that if it’s OK to do it to this group, then now it’s OK to do it to another group because it’s still part of this whole idea that “these people are not really Americans like us.” The thing that I don’t think enough people appreciate is that, even if they don’t see themselves reflected in this and they think that, ‘This doesn’t personally affect me or my culture,’ it will eventually affect them because it’s never just stopped at Black people.

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The mansion on the corner of Jackson and Laguna streets has seen better days. The front door, atop the stone steps where a dashing Nazi spy once regaled overeager San Francisco reporters, is locked today. The paint on its colossal, curved Romanesque twin towers peels in the sun, exposing the original cinnamon-colored sandstone beneath.

2090 Jackson Street is not like other San Francisco mansions. For starters, it’s big. With 30 rooms covering just under 20,000 square feet of space, it’s one of the biggest private residences in the city. It’s also very old. Built in 1896 for a very rich man named William Franklin Whittier, the home survived the great earthquake and outdates any other building on the block. And perhaps most notably, during World War II, it was a Nazi enclave.

As with most old, storied homes in San Francisco, some say the place is haunted. Ghosts may not be real, but ghost stories are a window into some wild histories of the city, and 2090 Jackson doesn’t disappoint. If a ghost does exist there — the fables say the dim outline of a figure often appears on a wall in the basement of the giant building — then there are a number of former residents who may seek to spook the aging sun-baked palace. Here are the candidates.

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William Whittier moved from Maine to California at the age of 22 and quickly entered the glass and paint business, with huge success. He founded Whittier, Fuller & Company, the paint and glass manufacturer, then built the town of Hemet in SoCal and was generally a rich white man making a fortune in California, which was the thing to do in the 1850s. Whittier was also a man-about-town. The San Francisco Chronicle once called him “one of the most widely known citizens of San Francisco.”

In 1896, architect Edward R. Swain celebrated Whittier built a giant mansion. Some stories say he built it as a gift for his wife, who died in a carriage accident during its construction.

He moved in at the age of 64 with his three children — Billy, Mattie and Jane. (Beyond losing his wife, Whittier lost two other children before the age of ten for undisclosed reasons, but times were indeed tough.)

Within a year of the relocation, all adult children married or moved out and left William alone in the 30-room palace, where he likely spent many lonely hours in the octagonal smoking room on the third floor. What drove Whittier’s children out of the home so soon, beyond marriage, is not clear. The San Francisco Examiner reported on his third child Jane’s lavish wedding in the Presidio a few years later, but noted that her father was not in attendance.

Billy, who is invariably described as the “black sheep” of the family, was reportedly a drunk and an endless disappointment to his dad. Whittier once bribed him with an offer of $300 a month to sober up and move down to sleepy Hemet by the lake to live a good life. Billy turned down the offer and continued to drink and party in San Francisco for the rest of his days. Whittier was so maddened he changed his will, deciding to no longer pass the mansion down to Billy.

2090 Jackson Street, San Francisco.

Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

San Franciscans were intrigued about the old millionaire in his mansion, as were the gossip columns of the era. One decidedly large San Francisco Chronicle article in 1907 eagerly reported that Whittier had left the city to lust after a “vivacious young widow” named Mrs. Tilden, whose husband, a Red Cross volunteer, had been shot dead in his car in the Mission the chaotic days after the earthquake.

Whittier, who was 75 years old at the time, was a “devoted admirer of Mrs. Tilden for some time and had showered favors upon her with the burning intensity of a youth.” Another Pacific Heights society watcher claimed that Whittier’s interest in the young widow was “purely parental.”

Either way, the paper announced that “The Whittier mansion at 2090 Jackson street is closed, and his whereabouts or the date of his homecoming are profound mysteries.”

There are many bizarre stories about the goings on of Jackson Street during the following years.

On a Sunday night in 1912, a chauffeur named HC Freeman working for Whittier at the mansion awoke to shattering glass in his bathroom. He reported to the police that two bullets were fired from the street, through the window, and into the looking glass. Quite curiously, Freeman told the cops that he had a habit of staring into the mirror at himself for long periods of time, and he suspected that the shots “were an attempt on the part of someone familiar with his habits to end his vain career. ” Perhaps coincidentally, Whittier’s glass and paint company is credited with being the first to manufacture mirrors on the West Coast.

Two years later, the archives reveal that during the mysterious and fatal bombing of the Old Vedanta Hindu Temple — a majestic building I once argued may be the most beautiful in the city — a resident at 2090 Jackson got hurt. Morris Walter, likely a tenant of Whittier’s, survived the bombing with a “destroyed right eye” and lacerated face. However, the brief mention in the papers states that Walter merely walked the few blocks up the hill and “went home” rather than to the hospital that day.

Whittier died of pneumonia in his giant home in 1917, and with black sheep Billy spurned from the will, Mattie moved in. The building was a private residence until 1941 when the mansion’s second, even stranger act began.

That year, as was raging in Europe, the mansion was sold to the German Reich. Dozens of Germans diplomats moved in to the new lavish consulate.

The Nazi who ran the operation, Captain Fritz Wiedemann, was a stylish former German soldier who once acted as Hitler’s personal assistant. The Chronicle described him as “Hitler’s most astute diplomatic and espionage agent,” while also complimenting his appearance as “suave and smiling,” just months before the US would join the war.

Fritz Wiedemann and a photo of his boss.

Archival / Unknown

Wiedemann appeared to live two lives in San Francisco. Herb Caen mentioned the Nazi in many columns, painting him as a playboy in the city, who friends referred to as “Bubbles.” At the same time, stories were surfacing that in his position in San Francisco, Wiedemann was directing all Nazis in Central and South America, and was “chief disseminator of all Nazi and German propaganda in the United States.”

But only weeks after moving into the consul’s new home, on June 16, 1941, the US government kicked all German diplomats out of the country.

Reporters gathered in Pacific Heights that day to interview Wiedemann. “I like the city and the scenery. Without politics, I would like to live here,” he said on the front steps of 2090 Jackson.

When asked if he would be heading back to Germany to fight for his fuhrer, Wiedemann replied, “No idea,” though consular staff said they were all being sent to South America.

The saddest Nazi that day may have been Wiedemann’s 15-year-old son, Eduard, a Lowell High School student who loved life in the city. “I like it here,” Eduard told reporters in his distinctly Californian accent while “sulking” around the grounds. “It’s swell.”

Young Eduard Wiedemann stares longingly over the Bay from his mansion after being told he must leave America due to his dad being a Nazi.

San Francisco Examiner / Archival

Outside of San Francisco, Wiedemann’s story took many more turns. Years later, it was revealed that as early as 1940, Hitler’s former right-hand man was spurned by the dictator after he had an affair with a Hungarian princess, who the fuhrer had been using for secret missions. Wiedemann then betrayed Hitler and urged the British to attack the Nazis, warning them that Adolf had a “split personality and numbered among the most cruel people in the world.”

Wiedemann didn’t make it to South America, but instead spied for the Germans in China, where it’s unclear if he worked for or against the Third Reich.

Back on Jackson Street, after the war, life normalized. The mansion was seized from the Germans in 1950 and became a private residence again. From 1956 to 1991, its tall wooden doors opened to the public as the home of the California Historical Society. It sold to a private resident in 1991 for $3,000,000 and hasn’t changed hands since. Its current worth is estimated at around $17,000,000.

So who haunts the basement on Jackson Street? Maybe one of Whittier’s children who died before adolescence, or maybe Billy the drunk who died just a few years after his father, returning to claim what was his. Maybe it’s the vain chauffeur, back to get one last look in the mirror, or maybe the one-eyed Hindu temple visitor, who crawled up the hill after the bombing. My money, however, is on Eduard, the sulking son of the double-crossing Nazi, back from exile in the swell city he loved.

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Robert Schwentke’s devastating “The Captain”, a black and white widescreen film from World War II, is a diabolical variation on Nikolai Gogol’s classic “The Inspector General” from the 19th century.

Based on an astonishing true story of the “hangman of Emsland”, the film tells the story of Willi Herold (a great Max Hubacher), a very Aryan-looking, 19-year-old German soldier who pretends to be the captain of the air force in command of his three-axle service car, the two Weeks before the end of the war, gathered a gang of crazy Nazi murderers and wreaked havoc behind the lines. The real Willi, a chimney sweep by trade, was brought to justice by the British and guillotine executed after the war.

We meet Schwentke’s Willi for the first time when he is fleeing from other German soldiers who are chasing him and shooting him from an open truck, provided he’s a deserter. Willi hardly escapes, finds the company car with its uniform in a suitcase and puts it on, if only to warm up. But the impressively tailored garment soon takes over and transforms Willi into an officer with the commanding demeanor, voice and gestures of the Air Force elite. He even has a monocle.

Captain Herold and the diabolical gang he gathers enter a Nazi labor camp and pretend to be on a mission for the Furher himself to report on conditions behind the lines. After Herold and the other Nazi soldiers raised the bloodlust of one of the commanding officers and threw drunken dinner parties where starving prisoners provide entertainment and fighting breaks out and spreads across the premises, they execute most of the camp’s inmates.

“The Captain” is the story of a con man who leads a group of armed sociopaths in a reign of terror made possible by the pandemic that was sparked in the late stages of an evil war. It’s a cautionary story for these demagogic, saber-rattling times. While the Gogol touch is there, “The Captain” also suggests a feature film version of Francisco Goya’s “Los disastres de la guerra” from World War II. In one scene, Willis barbarians open fire on prisoners in a trench with an anti-aircraft gun and tear the victims to pieces. In another, Herold steps through a forest over a carpet of human skeletons.

That this grueling masquerade could ring so many artistic and psychological bells makes it all the more remarkable. The young Swiss actor Hubacher makes Willi’s transformation from a weak, frightened private man into an imperious, absolutely merciless “Captain Herold” absolutely credible. Frederick Lau is frighteningly memorable as one of Herald’s maniacs. Some later scenes play out like a dinner-theater version of Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” (1969). But nothing that the writer and director Schwentke (“Allegiant”, “Red”, “RIPD”) has done indicates that he had such a great film as “The Captain” in him.

The fact that Schwentke, who was born in Stuttgart, used the seal of approval he had earned in Hollywood for this real World War II story with Florian Ballhaus-Linsen, would almost give hope if the film wasn’t so deeply dark and disturbing. The ending is very different from the real story. But it’s a fitting conclusion for the larger-than-life antihero. A parade during the credits suggests that Willi lives on in a colorful modern Germany and thus in all so-called civilizations of the West.

(“The Captain” contains extreme violence, cruelty and nudity).

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