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

In a continuation of the policy initiated during the First World War, France recruited nearly 65,000 West Africans who served as combatants during the German Blitzkrieg in the spring of 1940. In a long-overdue and path-breaking book, Hitler's African Victims, Raffael Scheck explores the fate of these soldiers and, in particular, how long-standing (as well as more recent) racist dogmas contributed to massacres of them by German troops.

Scheck's book is organized into three major sections. In the first, he painstakingly reconstructs the role of African units in the Battle of France. Drawing on operational reports from French and German military archives, he chronicles the character of the fighting, which resulted in unusually high African casualties. Furthermore, among the nearly 17,000 Africans who lost their lives as a result of this campaign, the author documents the massacre of between 1,000 and 1,500 soldiers and argues that the actual number of post-surrender murders committed by German troops was more likely on the order of 3,000 men.

Scheck assesses factors contributing to these massacres in the subsequent sections of his work. Examining the origins and evolution of German prejudice against Africans, the author deftly explores the literature on a series of interrelated historical themes—including German colonial conflicts, the French use of African "savages" during the First World War, the alleged "Black Horror" on the Rhine during the post-1918 Rhineland occupation, and the Nazi propaganda offensive against African "sub-humans" on the eve of the invasion, but concludes that the German heritage of racial hostility alone was insufficient to trigger the mass killings.

Situational considerations, including devotion to Nazi ideology and comparative combat conditions, also entered into play. Scheck finds that atrocities against the tirailleurs were committed by both the ideological warriors of the SS and the German rank-and-file. In neither instance, however, were the killings carried out as an act of official policy; instead, they were sporadic and unpredictable, and their causal nexus ultimately remains elusive. Nevertheless, the author concludes that the massacres represent a significant link in the Nazis' progressive racial radicalization of the war—from the casual killing of captured Polish and African Untermensch in 1939 and 1940, to the deliberate mass murder of millions of Soviet POWs after 1941, which was sanctioned as state policy.

This otherwise commendable work might have been improved in a few minor ways. It would be interesting to explore in greater depth the comparative mortality rates Scheck raises by differentiating among British, French, African, and Soviet POWs in order to gauge whether Nazi racism or anti-Bolshevism appears to have been the more lethal ingredient in determining the brutality of the regime's policy, and where Africans ranked in this hierarchy. Moreover, considering some African veterans of the 1940 campaign are still available to be interviewed, this study would have benefited from adding their oral histories about their ordeal to the European archival accounts.

Nevertheless, Scheck's book makes an important contribution to the broader historiography of African participation in the World Wars. And in showing how the western racist heritage, exemplified in perhaps its most murderous ideological manifestation, distorted that experience, it offers truly unique insights. In this regard, Hitler's African Victims represents a laudable and significant achievement.