1.1 An āOutrageous Humiliation and Rape of a Highly Cultivated White Race by a Still Half-Barbaric Coloured.ā Mapping the āBlack Shameā Campaign
On the 10 January 1920, the Treaty of Versailles came into force. It laid down the occupation of strategically important areas of Germany by the Allied Forces for a period of 15 years; the occupation affected mainly regions left of the river Rhine, amongst them the cities of Coblenz, Cologne and Mainz. The French government used black troops from its African colonies in, for example, Tunisia, Morocco, Madagascar, Algeria and Senegal as part of the French occupation troops. 1
The presence of these non-white African soldiers in the German Rhineland after the end of the First World War provoked massive protests in Germany, Europe and the United States. Since 1919, they were stereotyped in racist terms as primitive savages who committed predominantly sexual crimes on a massive scale. Despite provably committing fewer crimes than other divisions of the Allied troops, they were frequently represented as violent beasts, against which one needed to protect the German people, the white race and culture .
However, it is also beyond doubt that conflicts did occur in the context of the French occupation on the Rhine and so did isolated proven criminal offences and acts of violence committed by colonial soldiers. Christian Koller closely looks at the relation between the Rhenish population and the colonial soldiers taking part in the Allied occupation of the German Rhineland using local Administration files from Worms and Wiesbaden. These contain āevidence of conflicts as well as of a fairly normal social coexistence in the context of the occupation situation.ā 2
Complaints from Worms are often referring to bagatelle cases such as unauthorised cycling or football playing. Moreover, some cases of āattacksā from Moroccan soldiers against Germans and physical conflicts are reported. Complaints about sexual atrocities , however, are ārare,ā and the Wormser senior mayor later considered the Senegalese regiment a āwell-disciplined troop.ā
In Wiesbaden, reports are referring to conflicts, the damage to property, brawls and other crimes, amongst them some of a sexual nature, and they also note four ācases of death caused by colonial soldiers.ā Despite the fact that this number of deaths was smaller than that of deaths caused by white French troops, they resulted, according to Koller , in a ātense relationshipā between the population of Wiesbaden and the colonial troops . Besides such conflicts, reports also referred to friendship-based contacts between the German population in the occupied territories and the colonial soldiers.
Koller considers the stories spread by the propagators of the campaign as āindisputably invented atrocities of the German unofficial propaganda .ā He also dismisses official German propagandaās claim of large-scale black atrocities as questionable, based on the lack of precision and the āsameness of several statementsā in the collections of cases released by the authorities above the local county districts. 3
On the basis of Allied investigations of these accusations, we can conclude that the sexual crimes of colonial soldiers were single, isolated cases, rather than, as propagated in the campaign, a large-scale phenomenon and problem. However, regardless of the fact that colonial troops made up less than half of the French occupation troops, and did, as Koller argues, not commit āatrocities above the averageā compared to other troops present, the protests focused for years predominantly and nearly exclusively on the āBlack Shame.ā 4
The history of the āBlack Horrorā is insofar predominantly a history of propaganda, the history of a campaign, unleashed under this title to protest against the deployment of French colonial troops in Germany. The use of colonial troops in Europe had already been a matter of intense controversy before and during the First World War, 5 and even Max Weber had expressed his concern over āan army of Negroes, Ghurkhas and all barbaric mob of the worldā threatening āto ravageā Germany. 6 After the end of the war, protests against these troops became highly popular and culminated, with the help of modern mass media , in a massive international racist campaign that defamed the Africans as black brutes who would, driven by their excessive sexual instincts, racially contaminate the German people . The campaign found many supporters in Germany, several other European nations and the United States.
Contemporaries accused those āsavagesā of presenting āa gruesome dangerā 7 to German women and children, of frequently raping members of the white race in the occupied territory and of therefore threatening the occidental cultural sphere in general. It was also argued that their presence alone on the territory of the cultured German nation (Kulturnation) had to be condemned as a humiliation. 8 Such severe racist rhetoric had clearly calculated propagandistic dimensions. When German authorities and politicians called for public protest against the use and the atrocities of coloured troops , they attempted politically to discredit France internationally, to put pressure on the French government and to achieve an alleviation of the hardships associated with the Allied occupation .
However, the use of black troops was not only under attack from German authorities, politicians, a wide range of organisations and the majority of the German press. The āBlack Shameā also became a popular issue in the bulk of popular media , which rapidly spread populist and scandalising images of the āBlack Horrorā on the Rhine. I shall hence argue that the campaign developed a dynamic of its own, which was neither foreseen, nor controllable.
On a political level, the campaign was supported by different governmental authorities and political associations, many of them linked with the authorities, and the vast majority of political parties in the German Parliament. Different campaigners criticised the āBlack Shameā as an act of French violent rule (Gewaltherrschaft) over Germany and included the German Office for Foreign Affairs (AuswƤrtiges Amt), the Reichsheimatdienst, the Rheinische Volkspflege (Rhenish Peopleās League) and all parties of the German Parliament with the exception of the left-wing USPD and the Communist K.P.D.
The German government protested against the use of colonial troops in late 1918, following warnings of the German Colonial Society (deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), which condemned their use in Europe as a threat to European civilisation . 9 Amongst the most prominent members of the Parliament speaking out against the garrisoning of black troops as part of the Allied occupation were the secretary of the German Office for Foreign Affairs, Wilhelm Solf, the German President Friedrich Ebert and Foreign Minister Adolf Kƶster . They wanted āthe worldā to know that the āuse of coloured troops of lowest culture as overseers over a population of the high intellectual and economic rank of the Rhinelandersā violated the ārules of European civilisation.ā 10
Well-known figures of German public life, sharing these concerns, included, for example, Prince Max von Baden, Professor Lujo Brentano , Count Max Montgelas and General Paul von Hindenburg . They emphasised that the āblack plagueā was not a purely German but...