Growing up in Nazi Germany as the mixed-race son of a black Algerian Muslim, Hans Hauck only once felt truly accepted by the Fatherland – when it needed him to join Adolf Hitler’s war machine.
Hauck’s story is heartbreaking – joining the Hitler Youth as a boy to fit in, being sterilised by the Gestapo, spending years in a Soviet PoW camp and finally dying alone back in his home town.
And it has emerged after the release of controversial British movie Where Hands Touch, which tells of a mixed-race romance in Nazi Germany.
The film, starring Christopher Eccleston and Amandla Stenberg, explores the fate of the country’s black and mixed-race population, estimated at 25,000.
Professor Tina Campt, of New York’s Barnard College, has written about that community and discovered and interviewed Hauck.
She says: “Hans was a wonderful, extremely affable, outgoing and hardy working-class old guy. He was well-read and worked on the railroad until he retired.
"He was a pacifist and we kept in touch up until his death.”
Born in Frankfurt in 1920 to a white Catholic German, Hauck later learned his absent father was a colonial French soldier.
"They were in Germany after 1918 as part of the Armistice agreement and 800 mixed-race children known as the “Rhineland Bastards” would be born in the region.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler said they and the French colonial troops showed the full extent of Germany’s humiliation.
Hauck said: “I was insulted and verbally abused about my father’s heritage. The fathers of all the other kids were German soldiers. And mine was the enemy.
“The kids were so nasty because of my colour it made my mother cry when I complained about it.”
Hauck got little support from his mother’s family, who saw his heritage as “taboo”.
His mum died when he was eight, “from anxiety and her family’s rejection”.
Incredibly, Hauck, desperate to fit in, joined the Hitler Youth.
He said: “At 13, you don’t think about politics. But the games and the marching and playing soldier, that was fun.”
Now in the care of his maternal grandmother, Hauck left school at 14 and became a railway apprentice. He thought his position as a German more secure.
He said: “I was an apprentice with the railroad. Without the Hitler Youth I wouldn’t have been allowed. No one saw any more that I didn’t really belong.”
But he could not have been more wrong. In 1935, with Hitler’s racial laws in place, he got a visit from the Gestapo.
He said: “We were lucky we were not victims of euthanasia. We were only sterilised. I got a vasectomy certificate.
"We had to sign a paper saying we agreed not to marry people with German blood or have sexual relations with Germans. I felt only half-human.”
Prof Campt said it was ultimately Nazi racism that saved much of the black community from sharing the fate of the Jews.
She said: “The Nazis were trying to shape this pure Aryan state through the Nuremberg laws that defined racial groups such as Jews but Germany did not recognise itself as having a black population.
"So the fact that the community was caught between categories marginalised them but meant they were not discriminated against like Jews. They fell through the cracks.
“The exception were the Rhineland children, because of the huge political uproar about the presence of black occupation soldiers.
"When these kids were born they were registered and tracked. They were eventually sterilised so they could not have children and pollute the German race.”
In 1939, Hauck was conscripted for the army but subsequently branded “unworthy for service”. At 21, he tried to kill himself, terrified at the prospect of paramilitary training.
But Hauck also knew his prospects outside the military were worse – with many minorities sent to concentration camps.
In 1942, he joined a German army increasingly desperate for manpower. Hauck said: “I now had a chance, the normal chance, 50-50. Either I make it through or not. And I made it.”
He found his new comrades accepted him, saying: “I made private first class after five months. You didn’t notice discrimination in the army.”
Hauck was captured by the Red Army in 1945. He was held for four years in the Minsk area. He said: “I was treated more humanely than I ever was by my own countrymen.
"I was treated just like other Germans. My own Fatherland didn’t do that.”
Released in 1949, Hauck returned to hometown Dudweiler but never married and lived in obscurity. He said: “Whom could I have married? After the war, it was too late.
"Before that, no girl would have me. Even if they wanted to, their parents wouldn’t allow it.”
Hauck died alone in 2003, aged 82.
Prof Campt said: “As he did not have any family he was cremated and his belongings taken by the state. Germany is deeply bureaucratic but it was convenient he and his story disappeared.
"He was such a warm person, with so many friends and this kind of erasure felt shocking. No one came forward to commemorate him.”