Magdalene Garber with friends and family at the public beach in Wannsee, Berlin, around 1940-1941. There are Nazi flags visible in the background behind Magdalene.
Magdalene (“Leni”) Garber was born in January, 1919 in Germany. Her parents were Joseph Garber, a Togolese man, and Johanna Maychrzak, a white German woman. Magdalene grew up in Berlin-Neukölln and worked as a performer from an early age. She was part of several ethnographic shows, including a variety of Mohamed ben Ahmed’s Afrika-Schau during the late 1920s through the early 1930s, and the German Africa Show (Deutsche Afrika-Schau) during the Nazi period. After the war, she married Jack Goodwin, who was an African American GI. She moved to the United States with her husband in 1946.
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