4 Amazing Stories Behind the Most WTF Photos from History

Question: Have you ever seen a black Nazi ... wearing a sweater vest? Well you have now. The little boy in the center of the picture above is Hans Massaquoi, one of the few biracial Germans who were born and raised under the Nazi regime. So if you ever feel like you were born in the wrong time and place in history, shut up, because unless you're a black child goose-stepping around with a swastika sewn to your sweater, you have no idea what it means to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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I spoke too soon.

Hans was born in Hamburg in 1926, the son of a German nurse and a Liberian law student whose dad happened to be the Liberian consul for Germany. Not long after his birth, Hans' father and grandfather both moved back to Africa, leaving the little boy and his mom to navigate through the ins and outs of living under an Aryan regime on their own. Both the title and the picture above are a little misleading, though, because Hans never actually made it into the Nazi Party, although he tried. In third grade, Hans was so eager to prove that he was a good German that he persuaded his babysitter to sew a swastika onto his sweater. His teacher snapped a picture on the one day Hans wore the emblem, but his mom unstitched it that night, hopefully while defiantly singing whatever the German version of "Edelweiss" is.

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Some say the swastika was only worn in rebellion over this sailor suit/baggy sock combo.

The funny thing about being a kid is that you're so entrenched in kidness that you can't see or understand the big picture of the world around you. Even if you're knee-high to pure evil, from your perspective everyone swims around in a hazy pool of authority and rightness. Even though he was the polar opposite of what the Nazi Party was looking for, Hans couldn't see why he couldn't join the party, literally. At age 10, he tried to join the junior division of Hitler Youth for the same reason you and I join the hippie drum circle at the farmer's market:

"They had cool uniforms and they did exciting things -- camping, parades, playing drums."

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"... chicken fighting on land ... you know. The fun stuff."

The big question is why wasn't Hans persecuted? In later years, he said he thought it was because blacks were so low in the hierarchy of groups to attack: right after people who couldn't do cartwheels, but before mimes of Chinese descent. Massaquoi actually operated in Nazi society easier than you'd expect. During his teen years, he worked at a government-run job center where an SS officer advised him that he'd be useful to the party once Germany reclaimed their old African colonies. The biggest dangers Hans faced during the war were the bombs from the Allies and getting caught dancing to Nazi-banned swing music.

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If there's one thing Nazis didn't get, it was the power of dance.

Once the war was over, Hans and his mom moved to America on a student visa, where he was accidentally drafted into the Korean War, which he also survived. By this point, Hans was over the Nazi thing and Americanized his ideology nicely. So naturally he ended up a managing editor of Ebony magazine. Of course he did.

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It's an unlikely scenario, but something similar happened in 1731, when the King of Sweden got an unusual gift from an Algerian chieftain -- a live lion. We don't know if it was the shock of seeing all the pales, Sweden's cold climate, or the fact that this was a very regal yet suicidal lion, but the animal wasn't destined for a long life.

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How the lion had the dexterity to tie the noose is lost to history.

Here's where things get screwbally. Up until this point, it was a typical "lion meets Sweden and mysteriously offs himself" story. But the taxidermist on the receiving end of the bag of bones had never seen a lion before. Not in books or works of medieval art or on a flag, not on a lionish gargoyle or in the arms and back of a lionish chair laying around the castle.

Harmony Kids

Nothing. It was 1731, so the printing press was up and running nicely. The taxidermist couldn't hop over to a monastery and ask if they had some cool lion tapestries or illuminated art of lions farting at each other or anything? He couldn't find a regular-size cat to sketch for reference? Just one? "I got this," he probably said while happily petting his slow-witted but endlessly loyal golden retriever named Bjorn Bjud.

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The result of the effort was a lion that looked like the fruit of a dog/cat orgy, a creature so ridiculously off the mark that even visiting hyenas thought it looked stupid. Not helping his "I'm a lion!" cause are the white block teeth, so horrifically misplaced and sturdy that they should be guarding a high security prison cell, nor the steak-tongue of a monster. Between the tongue and the teeth, you almost miss the glassy eyes too narrowly placed together to be condoned by Mother Nature. Poor King Frederick's lion ended up more of a future cautionary tale against GMO animals than the exotic display he was hoping for.

UNLESS you take a step back and look at it from the perspective the taxidermist intended all along.

Mona Skoglund

Suddenly our steaming plate of fur and ignorance just got a little more fierce. His posture looks about right, and that sloppy grin takes on the look of a growl. Even his previously baby-doll-esque eyes look menacing. Which makes the taxidermist the greatest artist of all time. He invented beer goggles and tested them on a stuffed lion. From far away, the lion is magnificent. Up closer, it's an actual dog.

Until September 2, 1967, everyone in Sweden drove on the left side of the road, despite the fact that almost everyone else in Europe were righties, which made for some dumbass driving at Sweden's borders. At least England was surrounded by enough water that drivers would have time to wrap their heads around switching lanes before they crossed the border. Sweden didn't have that luxury. So legislators spent a good part of the 20th century trying to convince drivers to switch sides, but they wouldn't budge. In fact, in 1955, 83 percent of the population voted to keep to the left. Eventually Parliament gave up on asking anyone their opinion and decided to mandate right-side driving anyway.

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"Notice how our hands represent cars in traffic."

Even though the government decided to railroad this monumental switch through without the people's consent, they did have the good sense to give everyone half a decade to get ready for the move. In the meantime, they put together a PR campaign rivaled only by the one that convinced America that meth is what you smoke to get ugly. First, they created this ultra-modern sign as a reminder:

Anthony Ivanoff

Then they spent the next five years plastering this emblem on everything from milk cartons to panties in the hopes that no one would forget that September 3, 1967, was the big day.

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This was also the first PR campaign helmed by Benny Hill.

There were songs, ads, and 12 million reminder notes distributed among the population. And when the morning of the switch came, the Swedes treated it like the world's most mundane Mardi Gras. In Stockholm, alarms were set to ring at 4:00 a.m. so everyone could head down to the main street with their cars. A countdown ticked off the seconds before someone on the loudspeaker announced "Now is the time to change over." You look at the picture above and you see complete chaos, but a closer glance reveals that this was the most exciting thing to happen to Sweden since someone turned a lion into an entry in a cryptozoology book.

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Other than the bafflingly buoyant atmosphere, Dagen H was actually about as organized and smooth a transition as you can get for a major paradigm shift. Within minutes the party was over and Sweden went back to being as orderly as a frightfully white calendar.

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That's Abe Fortas, Johnson's own Supreme Court appointment and a man described as a lifelong Johnson crony. Most of us have enough sense of personal space to not get this close to anyone without giving them a smooch, but Johnson wasn't like us. This was a man who had more ambition in his nose cartilage than today's average person has in his whole body, and that's counting the fact that today's average person is huge. So when you see the look on Abe Fortas' face -- the overeager grin, the back bending supported by a foot long accustomed to taking this awkward stance, the half-amused, half-too-scared-to-enter-the-room expressions on the guys in the doorway -- just know that LBJ wasn't some Texas rube who stumbled into the White House. This was the guy who shaped the entire decade of the 1960s himself, first by bullying the Civil Rights Act through Congress, then by Vietnamming it up immediately afterward. LBJ wasn't a friend -- he was a force. Even his own boss wasn't immune to the Johnson treatment.

University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections Division

Look at JFK's face! Kennedy and Johnson were just about the same height, so LBJ couldn't do his towering gig that he enjoyed with others, but Kennedy also wasn't prepared to meet the eyes of a man clearly intent on eating his face off. So instead he focused his Rodney Dangerfield eyes on Johnson's waddle and girded his arms for the long haul. Only his lame ass back prevented him from bending backward, but maybe Johnson didn't know that. Maybe Johnson thought this was the first man to ever stand up to him, and maybe Johnson repaid him with loyalty so strong that this happened:

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OR MAYBE HE ORCHESTRATED JFK'S ASSASSINATION BECAUSE KENNEDY WOULDN'T SUBMIT APPROPRIATELY. We'll probably never know.

Just kidding, we totally know.

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