Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (review)

This brief, but superbly written and documented study, the first of its kind to use both German and French sources, describes and analyzes a generally ignored war crime. Altogether, in 1939 and 1940, the French army recruited some 100,000 soldiers in French West Africa, of whom three quarters served in France, while the rest performed guard duty in France's colonies. Among the Black troops were the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, of whom roughly 63,000 fought in the front lines against the Wehrmacht in May and June 1940, with ten thousand killed and thousands more missing in action.

Although with some exceptions German troops treated White French and British POWs according to the Geneva Convention (1929), they dealt with the Africans, as Raffael Scheck observes, in a way that reflected the earlier Wehrmacht atrocities in Poland, and "that anticipated the horrors of the racialized warfare associated with the later German campaigns in the Balkans and the Soviet Union" ( p. 3). Often the Germans separated the Black prisoners from the Whites, North Africans, and soldiers from other colonies, and abused or neglected them. On many occasions, African prisoners of war were shot—sometimes several hundred at a time. The casualty rate was especially high among the Tirailleurs Sénégalais.

Most of the incidents happened during the German offensive launched on June 5, 1940 along the Somme River and during the pursuit of retreating French forces in the next two-and-a-half weeks. But the abuse and killing of Black POWs continued both on the way to POW camps and in the camps themselves. Only after August 1940 did the situation of the POWs improve, when the Germans built permanent camps and renewed their interest in acquiring African colonies. "At the very least," Scheck notes, "the German government hoped to prevent French West Africa from defecting to the Free French movement of General Charles de Gaulle, as French Equatorial Africa had done in July" ( p. 49).

Postwar investigations into the massacre of the Black POWs led to no trials of perpetrators; the French manifested little interest in such inquiries. Scheck's study relies primarily on French army records containing material from West African units and unit operational journals. Other records include reports that the collaborationist Vichy regime asked French officers to file on their experiences during combat, captivity, and escape or liberation from POW camps. Numerous documents on the Tirailleurs Sénégalais are available in Fréjus in a special research center on France's overseas forces. In Germany, the most significant archival holdings are in the German military archives in Freiburg im Breisgau.

Scheck notes the problems in counting the number of Black POWs killed. This was made difficult by the chaotic situation in France in May and June 1940, which was not conducive to record-keeping. Also in many areas the Germans destroyed the military identity tags of the victims and left the corpses to decompose in fields or along roadsides. The author concludes that the Germans murdered "at least" three thousand captured Tirailleurs Sénégalais in May and June 1940. The majority of deaths, he estimates, "probably occurred in the aftermath of the campaign and were caused by deliberate neglect and maltreatment" ( p. 60).

The author asks the important questions. What motivated the German atrocities against African soldiers of the French army? Who, if anyone, authorized the massacres, and why? German commanders in 1940 had no orders to shoot Black POWs, but they considered killing them a legitimate choice under certain circumstances—even though they knew the Geneva Convention prohibited it. The men carrying out the mass executions usually acted on the orders of their officers; or if they committed individual acts of violence against Black POWs, they justified their behavior by referring to other massacres ordered by officers. "Routinization" contributed to the killings. As noted by Christopher Browning and Omer Bartov, who studied killings...