There were voices of dissent, and a letter in a following edition of The Spectator refuted Morel’s claims, the correspondent being ‘sure that the Germans have deliberately exaggerated any misdeeds that may have occurred’.17 But, characteristic of the momentum of The Horror on the Rhine was that a number of very similar stories were repeated over and over again. In this respect the campaign echoed Germany’s wartime propaganda against the deployment of coloured troops, with its themes of African soldiers collecting human ears and human heads – stories repeated so often that they became, in that apt description by the British journalist Julius M. Price, ‘grim yarns’.18 The great difference was that in 1919–22 Germany’s most effective propagandist was a prominent British humanitarian, rather than a faceless intelligence officer in a Berlin back office. James Ellis Barker, a German-born British journalist, thought it ‘by no means impossible that the German campaign against the coloured troops of France emanated not so much from the Germans than from Mr. Morel’.19
Throughout 1920 and 1921 Morel’s work was stocked in great piles in German bookshops, and he became regarded as a hero of the German people. He sent messages to meetings and rallies, and his utterings were reported ad nauseam. By framing the debate around sex and rape, Morel had also tapped into a deep German opposition to racial mixing, which had its roots in the German colonial empire. Between 1905 and 1912, a string of debates in the Reichstag had examined the issue, particularly in the four African colonies, and many of the various pseudo-scientific and quasi-legalistic terms that had emerged in the colonies seeped into the language. Rassenmischung (race mixing), Rassenreinheit (racial purity), Rassenschande (racial shame), Mischlinge (people of mixed-race) and die Mischlingefrage (the mixed-race question) were all, to varying degrees, incorporated into the political discussion. In an age when pseudo-scientific racial theory had begun to mould thinking, notions of purity and contamination became prominent. The magazine Kolonie und Heimat believed that at the core of the colonial project was the task of ‘keeping our races abroad clean’. This debate had been motivated by the determination of colonial authorities and their supporters to ensure that white German men in the colonies should not have sexual relations or marriages with black women. In 1907 the Colonial Department had redrafted Paragraph 17f of the Colonial Home Rule Act, allowing for the disenfranchisement of German colonists who transgressed in this way.
Yet, the opposition towards racial mixing, and – despite the authorities’ attempts – the emergence of a mixed-race population in the colonies, was as nothing compared to the passions and furies unleashed during the Rhineland episode. The taking of black concubines by white settlers was merely a distasteful element of the first stages of colonization, whereas the presence of black soldiers in the Rhineland was portrayed as a threat to the German race itself.20 However, the most important difference was that the ‘vulnerable’ genders had been reversed. A toxic brew of fear, defeat, humiliation, racial loathing, hatred for the French victor and sexual mythology gripped the German imagination. Fanned by hysterical but calculated reports in the German and British press, it spread across the world, generating debate and controversy across Europe and in America. As the historian Julia Roos has shown, German women themselves took a leading place in the campaign against the ‘Black Shame’. The League of Rhenish Women (Rheinische Frauenliga), a semi-official grouping formed with the support of the Reich Ministry of the Interior during June 1920, produced the pamphlet Farbige Franzosen am Rhein: Ein Notschrei deutscher Frauen (‘Coloured Frenchmen on the Rhine: A Desperate Appeal from German Women’). An appeal for white racial unity, it asked the ‘women and men of the white race’ to ‘Walk with us in spirit on our way of the cross, which is lined with monuments of eternal shame for all of us, the memories of the crimes committed by African savages… against the white women on the Rhine.’21 In this febrile atmosphere, German womanhood became the abused symbol of German national honour, and the purported rapes became symbolic of the violation of Germany by France and the Versailles Treaty.22
The actual evidence as to how the French occupying armies behaved paints a different picture. On the one hand, there were police reports confirming cases of both rape and violence that were committed by colonial troops, against both male and female civilians. Also, the German Reich Commissar for the occupied areas collated a list of crimes allegedly committed by French colonial troops between September 1920 and June 1921, and around two-thirds of the recorded cases were of a sexual nature. When black French soldiers were found guilty, they were imprisoned by the French authorities – five of them for sentences of more than five years.23 However, on 20 February 1921 a report into the alleged crimes, which had been commissioned by Major General Henry T. Allen, the commander of the American troops in Germany, was published in the New York Times. It noted that the:
…very violent newspaper campaign attacking the French colonial troops, especially the negro troops, broke out simultaneously throughout Germany, and that the allegations in the German press have been for the most part so indefinite as to time and place and circumstance as to leave it impracticable to verify the alleged facts or disprove them.24
While finding there had been ‘66 actual known crimes’, the investigators concluded that ‘the wholesale atrocities by French negro Colonial troops alleged in the German press, such as the alleged abductions, followed by rape, mutilation, murder and concealment of the bodies of the victims are false and intended as political propaganda’. The report also recorded that ‘These exaggerated attacks in the German press outside the Rhineland have in several cases been refuted by responsible officials (German) and other citizens of the Rhinelands.’ General Allen felt that the prime target of the German propaganda effort was American public opinion.
There is also evidence to suggest that many of the relationships between black French troops and white German women were consensual and in cases some led to marriage. The right-wing journalist Maximilian Harden believed that ‘German women were chiefly responsible for the mingling of colored and white blood which has taken place on the Rhine’. An edition of the right-wing newspaper Der Tag, from April 1921, complained that alongside the ‘Black Shame’ there was a ‘white disgrace on the Rhine personified by that category of German women of all classes who, driven by greed or perverse sexual desires, throw themselves into the arms of the officers and soldiers’ from the French colonial regiments.25 The American investigation concluded (disapprovingly) that:
The attitude of certain classes of German women toward the colored troops have been such as to incite trouble. On accounts of the very unsettled economic conditions and for other causes growing out of the World War prostitution is abnormally engaged in and many German women of loose character have openly made advances to the colored soldiers as evidenced by numerous love letters and photographs which are now on file in the official records and which have been sent by German women to colored French soldiers. Several cases have occurred of marriages of German women with French negro soldiers.26
What motivated the German propaganda barrage was not primarily the safety of the women of the Rhineland but Germany’s desire to win sympathy in the court of world public opinion, by appealing to the widely held sentiment that it was innately humiliating for a white population be occupied by non-white soldiers. Despite the US Army investigators calling the ‘Black Shame’ campaign an ‘adroit political move’ to counter the wartime hatred of the ‘Hun’, on 28th February 1921 – just days after the New York Times article had appeared – a rally was held in New York’s Madison Square Gardens in support of the German demands for the removal of black French troops.27 Most of the 12,000 attendees were Americans of Irish or German-American descent. At around the same time an organization describing itself as the ‘New York Committee Against the Horror on the Rhine’ emerged and began to send out invitations for speakers to attend its meetings. President Wilson, in the run-up to that year’s presidential elections, had been concerned that the issue would impact on vo
ting patterns among white Southerners.28 A week after the Madison Square Garden rally, 25,000 people gathered at the same venue to press the opposing view, one of their number denouncing the work of ‘these brilliant German propagandists’.29
There is uncertainty as to when the French finally withdrew all their colonial troops, and the numbers in Germany at any one time varied enormously. Most of them were withdrawn by 1920, although there were 2,000 stationed in Germany in 1927 and 1,000 as late as 1929.30 The propaganda campaign portraying them as hyper-sexualized and unrestrained petered out by 1922, and in over a decade of occupation there were hundreds of African troops who had relationships and marriages with white German women and who remained in Germany. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s their mixed-race children became the focus of intense hostility. They were called the ‘Rhineland Bastards’ and regarded as living reminders of Germany’s humiliation and defeat. For Adolf Hitler, even this phenomenon was down to the Jews, who had been ‘responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate’.31 To the author of Mein Kampf, the French decision to occupy the Rhineland with a force that included black Africans was conclusive evidence of a French-Jewish conspiracy to contaminate German blood, to ‘deprive the white race of the foundations for a sovereign existence through infection with lower humanity’.32
In April 1933, three months after coming to power, the rapidly Nazifying German state set out to solve the ‘Rhineland Bastards problem’. On the orders of Hermann Göring, churches, schools and local authorities were asked to provide the authorities with the names and whereabouts of any mixed-race Rhineland children. A series of ‘racial-biological’ examinations were then carried out on a small sample of Rhineland children. In the same year, Walther Darre, the Nazi Minister of Agriculture wrote: ‘It is essential to exterminate the leftover from the Black Shame on the Rhine… as a Rhinelander I demand sterilization of all mulattoes with whom we were saddled.’ Darre suggested that sterilization take place within two years before the subjects became sexually active. ‘Otherwise,’ he warned, ‘it is too late, with the result that hundreds of years later this racial deterioration will still be felt.’33 In 1937, with the oldest Rhineland children reaching puberty, Special Commission No. 3 was formed by the Gestapo. Its task was to identify and then forcibly sterilize each of the Rhineland children. Throughout the spring of that year, Gestapo units arrived at their homes or classrooms and took them directly to a board of race ‘scientists’. Once an examination had been carried out to confirm that each child was mixed-race, he or she was sterilized at the nearest hospital. By the end of 1937, almost 400 had been treated in this way.
At the vanguard of the US contingent that crossed the German frontier in November 1918 was the 369th Infantry Regiment, the African Americans from New York who were still serving as part of the French Army. Severely reduced after 191 days on the front lines, they were the first American soldiers to enter Germany and the first to reach the Rhine, arriving at the town of Blodelsheim on 20 November, in time to watch the last German units slip back across the river. Of their original complement of 2,000 men, only around 700 remained; the rest were dead or wounded. Another African-American regiment, the 371st, also entered Germany as part of the occupation force, but was hastily recalled to France. There is some evidence that this was motivated by the first rumblings of German opposition to the presence of black soldiers. The 369th remained in Germany until 10 December 1918, and on 17 December the regiment was finally reincorporated back into the US Army. It was at that moment that the shackles of American racism were re-attached too, perhaps even more firmly than they had been in 1917.
In the months immediately after the war, the 369th and the other African-American regiments were kept under tight control as the US Army and War Department increasingly began to monitor them for what it described as ‘militancy and foreign influences’. The troops were now assembled together – for the 92nd Division it was the first time they had ever been united as a division. They were then kept as busy as possible, subjected to an intensive period of labour duties, marching and drill. Having avoided labour duties for most of their deployment, the combat units were now reduced almost to the status of ‘labourers in uniform’. Some were put to work on the docks, where they coaled ships and patrolled, but the least fortunate were set the detested task of recovering and reburying the remains of the war dead. Keeping the men occupied also reflected the army’s determination to end all fraternization with white French civilians (and in particular French women) and to quarantine them from further French cultural influence. Only then could they be fully disabused of any hopes that their service would inspire thanks from their nation or earn them any new rights or respect.
Not all attempts at separation were successful, and in the post-war period racial tensions erupted across the former war zones and in the towns where troops and labourers of various nationalities were billeted. Addie W. Hunton, an African-American YMCA worker, reported how:
On the first Sunday in April, 1919 St. Nazaire was changed from a quiet port city into a tumult of discord, during which a number of people were killed and wounded. It grew out of the fact that a white French woman and a colored Frenchman entered a restaurant frequented by American officers, in order that they might enjoy their lunch together. An insinuating remark concerning the woman was overheard by her brother, who understood English, and immediately resented it. The restaurant was demolished in a free-for-all fight, which grew in proportions until the French people mounted a machine gun in the middle of the public square, to restore order.34
It was during this fractious and uneasy period, while millions of men awaited the ships that would carry them home, that an unknown number of African-American soldiers were killed or went missing. A US Senate investigating committee, which convened in 1923, was presented with the names of sixty-two men, many of them African-American soldiers, who had been executed without having stood trial.35 In the wave of violence, much of it verging on lynching, at least one French colonial soldier was killed too, mistaken by an American Military Policeman for a US deserter.36 The evidence presented to the Senate committee included files of testimony from doctors who were present at hangings of black soldiers, including at one where the victim was drugged and sedated on the gallows. Despite the huge amount of evidence laid before the committee, all claims were dismissed. Yet there is no question that there were extra-judicial killings of African-American soldiers in France after November 1918.
DOMFRONT, NORMANDY, SPRING 1919. W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has been in France on a fact-finding mission since January. His movements are being monitored by US Army intelligence, as Du Bois has been under suspicion since 1916, when he began a series of editorials in The Crisis that drew comparisons between German war-time atrocities and lynchings in the United States. Now, he arrives in the small town of Domfront, where the American Expeditionary Force has created its own version of segregation. ‘Up yonder hill, transported bodily from America,’ writes Du Bois, ‘sits “Jim-Crow”’:
…in a hotel for white officers only; in a Massachusetts Colonel who frankly hates ‘niggers’ and segregates them at every opportunity; in the General from Georgia who openly and officially stigmatizes his black officers as no gentlemen by ordering them never to speak to French women in public or receive the spontaneously offered social recognition. All this ancient and American race hatred and insult in a purling sea of French sympathy and kindliness, of human uplift and giant endeavor, amid the mightiest crusade humanity ever saw for Justice!
One day, he accompanies a group of African-American and French soldiers, who gather with the town’s mayor and sing the French national anthem. He later describes the scene:
The Mayor of Domfront stood in the village inn, high on the hill that hovers green
in the blue sky of Normandy; and he sang as we sang: ‘Allons, enfants de la patrie!’ God! How we sang! How the low, grey-clouded room rang with the strong voice of the little Frenchman in the corner, swinging his arms in deep emotion; with the vibrant voices of a score of black American officers who sat round about. Their hearts were swelling – torn in sunder.
‘Never,’ Du Bois warns his nation, ‘have I seen black folk – and I have seen many – so bitter and disillusioned at the seemingly bottomless depths of American color hatred – so uplifted at the vision of real democracy dawning on them in France.’37
Although the war had been over for only two months by the time Du Bois arrived in France, already the service and the reputation of African-American soldiers were being called into question by sections of the white press. Taking a leaf from the playbook of their former German enemies, reports made unsubstantiated claims that African Americans had raped and attacked large numbers of French women. At the same time, the military record of the African-American combat regiments was being called into question. Writing to all the departments in which black troops had been stationed, Du Bois systematically dismantled those rumours by collating information on any known crimes by African-American servicemen. It was during his fact-finding tour that Du Bois obtained a copy of the wartime Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops, published verbatim in the May 1919 edition of The Crisis.
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