I was surprised to learn he was Egyptian.

Hess, the eldest of three children, was born on 26 April 1894 in Ibrahimieh, a suburb of Alexandria, Egypt (then under British occupation, though formally a part of the Ottoman Empire), into a wealthy German family. Originally from Bohemia, the Hess family settled in Wunsiedel, Upper Franconia, in the 1760s. His grandfather, Johann Christian Hess, married Margaretha Bühler, the daughter of a Swiss consul, in 1861 in Trieste. After the birth of his father, Johann Fritz Hess, the family moved to Alexandria, where Johann Christian Hess founded the import company Heß & Co. which his son, Johann Fritz Hess, took over in 1888. His mother, Klara Hess, was the daughter of Rudolf Münch, a textile industrialist and councillor of commerce from Hof, Upper Franconia. His brother, Alfred, was born in 1897 and his sister, Margarete, was born in 1908.[3][4] The family lived in a villa on the Egyptian coast near Alexandria, and visited Germany often from 1900, staying at their summer home in Reicholdsgrün (now part of Kirchenlamitz) in the Fichtel Mountains.[5][6]

That also makes him the most powerful African in Germany.