World War II Crimes Against Africans Not Reflected in European History
Countless pages have been written in history books about the brave, white Allied soldiers who fought and died during the first and second world wars.
But relatively little attention and documentation has been written about African American soldiers and even less about the native Africans who were drafted to fight from their millet fields and were singled out for the cruelest treatment by both the Nazis and the Allies.
And even less reported have been the atrocities committed by the Allies against the people who lived in their colonies.
During World War II, France turned to their colonies and drafted into battle around 200,000 West Africans, known as Sharpshooters. At least 14,000 died among the Sharpshooters, named sarcastically for their lack of training. They came from various West African countries, including Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast. Others were captured by the Nazis and sent to labor camps in northeastern France, in order to avoid “racial contamination.”
The courageous West African soldiers sacrificed themselves on the battlefields of World War II. During the Battle of France, around 120,000 soldiers from the French colonies were captured by the Germans. Most of the captured troops came from the French North African possessions, while around 20 percent were from French West Africa. German troops summarily killed between 1,000 and 1,500 black prisoners in May and June 1940. The Nazis claimed they imprisoned the Africans in France rather than send them to German camps to prevent the spread of tropical diseases but records showed they wanted to prevent “racial defilement” of German women.
Black and native African POWs were treated much worse than the white soldiers who were captured by the Nazis. In many cases, the Black POWS were tortured or summarily executed by their German captors. In 1941, 100 Senagalese soldiers were trying to surrender but were instead massacred by the Nazis. In 1944, the Germans tortured and murdered 11 African American soldiers in Belgium.
France colonized Senagal in the 17th century, eventually converting it into France’s regional center until Senegal won independence in 1960. The Allied had landed in Normandy in June 1944 and they proceeded to liberate the African troops who had been interned by the Nazis. In November, a group of 1,635 former prisoners of war were taken by ship to the military camp of Thiaroye, a fishing village not far from Dakar, the Senegalese capital. Returning West African soldiers were members of Tirailleurs Senegalais, or the Sharpshooters, a corps of colonial infantry.
The African troops were repatriated to find very poor conditions and on Dec. 1, 1944, they confronted the French soldiers for bread and the back wages they had been promised for four years.
The French had machine guns, two battalions, a tank and other military vehicles. The French soldiers later claimed they had to act to subdue a growing mutiny and opened fire on the largely unarmed Senegalese, massacring hundreds of Sharpshooters and others from former French colonies. It took all of 14 seconds. One unnamed general was quoted as saying the killings were necessary to halt a “painful stab in a dangerous abscess.”
The following year, 34 of the Sharpshooters were tried and given sentences ranging from one to 10 years of prison. They were absolved of guilt in March 1947, but they were not exonerated, and the widows of the fallen mutineers were not given veteran pensions usually granted to widows of fallen soldiers
France has always insisted that 70 Sharpshooters were killed but historians say that more than 300 died at the hands of the French soldiers and that many remain interred in a mass grave. Historians have been unable to trace about 350 men known to have been at the camp
The Thiaroye massacre is not taught in French schools and a Senegalese film about the massacre released in 1988, was banned in France and censored in Senegal.
Seven decades later, France acknowledged that something had gone horrifically wrong although the public statement referred to far fewer casualties than the Senagalese have asserted.
Last week, on the 80th anniversary of the slaughter, and after ongoing pressure from the Senagalese government, French President Emmanuel Macron for the first time recognized the killing of West African soldiers by the French Army in 1944 as a “massacre.”
During the war, the Nazis committed atrocities that far exceeded the Thiaroye massacre.
During the Battle of France, German forces massacred captured tirailleurs on multiple occasions during the 1940 campaign. The first incident occurred on May 24, 1940, when 50 wounded soldiers of the 24e Régiment de Tirailleurs Sénégalais were executed by Wehrmacht troops.
On June 5, a number of tirailleurs were executed after surrendering. One French officer recounted, “The enemy then appears, furious, beside himself, ready to finish us off all together. An extremely engaged intervention by a German officer prevents the troops from executing the European officers, but there was no indigenous man alive anymore after a few moments.”
On the night of June 9, the Germans repeated the practice of separating white and black prisoners.
“The Europeans . . . had to sit in front of a ravine under the barrels of machine guns while about fifty surviving Tirailleurs were led to a nearby place and shot with a machine gun. We, the officers, were able to confirm this later when we were led onto trucks that drove us toward captivity,” according to a journal kept by French soldiers.
The infamous Chasselay massacre took place on June 19, 1940, near Lyon. Soldiers with the Régiment de Tirailleurs Sénégalais surrendered to the Germans after their ammunition ran out. Following the surrender, 50 tirailleurs were separated from their white officers and ordered to stand in an open field, where they were machinegunned by German tanks. The tanks then drove back and forth over the bodies of the dead tirailleurs to ensure there would be no survivors. On the same day, a further 14 tirailleurs were executed at Sillé-le-Guillaume.
In Hitler’s 1925 tirade, “Mein Kampf,” he referred to “Rhineland bastards” to describe children born of marriages between German women and African men serving in the French military. He called interracial relationships between white and Black people a “sin against God” and called their progeny “contaminated” and “infected with lower humanity.”
Blacks held in concentration camps were subjected to cruel medical experiments. In 1937, Hitler approved the forcible sterilization of around 500 biracial Black children, a fact kept hidden until 1979, when it was exposed by a German historian,
There were tens of thousands of Black people living in Nazi Germany when Hitler instituted the 1935 Nuremberg laws, which denied Black Germans citizenship and forbid them from attending German schools and from most employment.
French Algeria was the scene of a mass slaughter by the authorities against a largely black Muslim population in May 1945. An estimated 5,000 protesters took to the streets of Sétif, a town in northern Algeria, to press new demands for independence. The confrontation led to riots by native Algerians, resulting in the deaths of 102 authorities. The French colonial authorities and European settlers retaliated by killing an estimated 6,000 to 45,000 Muslims in the region.
The incident marked a turning point in Franco-Algerian relations, leading to the Algerian War of 1954–1962. Nine years later, a general uprising lead to independence from France in March 1962. The 1945 massacre was censored in France until 1960.
In the so-called, Paris massacre of 1961, French National Police killed as many as 300 Algerians who were living in Paris and were demonstrating against French rule in Algeria. The attack came during the Algerian War. Maurice Paon, head of the Paris police, ordered his troops to attack a demonstration by 30,000 pro-National Liberation Front Algerians. After 37 years of denial and censorship of the press, in 1998 the government acknowledged 40 deaths, while some historians estimate that between 200 and 300 Algerians died. Many died from being beaten by police and others were thrown into the river Seine and drowned.
Papon had been convicted in 1998 of crimes against humanity for his role under the Vichy collaborationist regime during World War II. He was the only Vichy France official to be convicted for his role in the deportation of Jews during World War Two.
No one has been prosecuted for participation in the killings, because they fell under the general amnesty for crimes during the Algerian revolution.