Mistreatment of French Colonial Troops

While checking out TV France International the other day, I got to watch a very interesting documentary about June 1940, and the specific subject of the mistreatment of French colonial POWs by the Nazis inmediately caught my eye, ranging from their exhibition as mere animals in propaganda films to mass murder, both in the battlefield and in the prisoner cages. There was even mention of several Senegalese killed during the reenactment of a recently fought skirmish, for the benefit of Goebbels' mob, where they were armed with blanks, but faced live ammo!

Can any of you lot provide more info on the subject?

 

good day warlord,veteran wannabe,yesterday.11:13pm.re:mistreatment of french colonial troops.i have not read about the colonial troops.but from all the mass murder carrird out by germans as a whole.it could be correct.regards bernard85

 

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/42233482?searchTerm=French%20Colonial%20Troops&searchLimits=l-decade=194|||l-year=1940|||l-month=7

Some credence to the stories

 

In post 21 in this thread you'll find a lot of documentation:

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=109515&p=1876408&hilit=french+colonial#p1876408

The Uebermensch did apparently not appreciate being fought off by the Untermensch, and took revenge on a number of occasions.

All the best

Andreas

 

Maybe read this one Alberto.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521857996

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

I know we've mentioned the shooting of Black French soldiers before.
Need to find the thread.
I know Rommel's 7th Panzer Div was involved after they crossed the Somme in some executions.

 

The Scheck book Owen refers to is very well written and documented, with impeccable references and none of the hysteria that often accompanies such debates.There is disagreement over the involvement and casualty figures for French African colonial troops, but about 10,000 of them were killed in the fighting and there is general agreement that some 2-3,000 of those were certainly massacred by various German units, both SS and ordinary Wehrmacht, after surrendering.

Thereisi also no doubt that the Nazis pursued a deliberate policy of racial hatred and intolerance towards black colonial troops which fed and legitimised the catalogue of indifference and poor treatment - and indeed execution of black prisoners on a large scale.

David Irving has this account in his biography of Rommel: “The Nazi propaganda minister, Goebbels, asked him to collaborate on a big army film about the campaign, Victory in the West (Sieg im Westen). Rommel spent part of August re-enacting for the movie cameras the Spook Division’s crossing of the Somme. He had a great time playing movie director, and he schooled his troops in acting techniques. A battalion of French black troops was hauled out of the prison camps to stage the surrender of a village. Again, this time for the cameras, Rommel’s tanks charged, guns blazing. He told the blacks to come out toward the tanks with their hands up and looking scared; but the men over- acted, rolled the whites of their eyes, and screamed with terror. Rommel cut the cameras, and patiently explained through interpreters that actors had to show their emotions more subtly than that. The battle scenes were finally filmed on such an epic and reckless scale that several more lives were lost, though through no fault of Rommel’s. “No expense has been spared to show it as it really was,” he wrote on the last day of shooting. “There were blacks in it again today. The fellows had a whale of a time and thoroughly enjoyed putting up their hands all over again.”

I started this post on the subject http://ww2talk.com/forums/topic/46324-photographs-june-1940-or-not/

The cameraman was Hans Ertl, one of Leni Riefenstahl's camera operators, who had recently been awarded an Iron Cross for his work on filming scenes for Sieg im Westen.

 

Do things change much? Looking at the pictures of ISIS massacring persons possibly Iraqi troops in my paper today.

Chris

 

Owen,
I seem to think that the thread on the subject was started by Diane around 2009 but I will search for it.

Regards
Tom

 

I cannot find the thread after much searching on our Forum.

Here is a site that deals with the question.

http://histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/cou/frac/ww2-frac.html

Regards
Tom

 

Without causing an international incident, and perhaps a touch off topic, some time ago I watched 'Days of Glory' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_Glory_(2006_film) and was taken aback at the treatment of French 'Colonial' troops by the French themselves.

Worth a watch if you have the chance.

TD

 

I know Drew has read Raffael Scheck's book Hitler's African Victims - about the German army massacres of Black French soldiers in 1940. It is a matter of record that German units, including ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers, massacred thousands of Black African soldiers - and not all in combat/'hot blood' situations. Near Chasselay, tanks (of the 10th Panzer Division) were seen to run over bodies of those dead and wounded in an effort to pursue fleeing Tirailleurs. Rommel certainly ordered the death of hundreds of colonial black troops by using them in a filmed reconstruction of the Somme Battles, even writing home to his wife and joking about the fact that the blacks had no bullets in their guns.Scheck's excellent book places this in a historical and cultural context without in any way attempting to mitigate these crimes. Nlo bodies spreadeagled on the front of tanks though.

An account of the fighting in St Pierre du Vauvray on June 9/10th 1940 from the war diary of the 2nd Regiment de Dragon Portes reads - " We hear the explosions of grenades, running feet, screams, bursts of German, French and English automatic weapons at different rates ... and then, becoming clearer in the fog, a dark mass moving slowly ... at an abnormally slow and cautious pace. Lt Montille believes he can see a car full of refugees, similar to thousands we have encountered on the road since May 10. But this car is followed by a sight that defies description - the Germans are driving before them a screen of refugees."

In seven years of looking I haven't been able to find any evidence of that incident whatsoever - including those accounts written by refugees. The village had been evacuated two days before and while there were 6 civilians killed in the fighting, contemporary documents suggest there were fewer than 20 people left in the village itself.

I understand that documents are but a snapshot, but so, sadly are individual memories. In many years of interviewing veterans, my dad's rule of thumb seems to have applied - 'the emptiest vessels make the loudest noise'. For the record though, his recorded experiences of the period June 6 1944 to the end of the war didn't involve any reprisals against prisoners, although he did say they found many SS men dressed as civilians escaping at the end of the war and they got roughed up, pretty badly sometimes. He always felt that the newer and less experienced soldiers in the unit tended to indulge in this form of behaviour, out of frustration and bravado, he felt.

http://ww2talk.com/forums/topic/20035-alleged-german-ill-treatment-of-prisoners/

 

Well, discrimination happened, happens and will continue happening as long as there is "scale of worlds" with abysmal differences between poor and rich countries.

However, and to the point for the benefit of the thread, POW white french officers were shot while trying to defend their black troops from the Nazis; war might be hell, but it takes care of all social differences.

 

CL1 - thanks for finding that - only the scantiest evidence is available about the Rommel incident - the letter discussing it exists as it's in the David Irving archives and I think I have expressed my worrries about relying on one source and particularly that one. Neither Liddel Hart's version of the Rommel Papers or Ertl's autobiography mention it, but I wouldn't expect them to. My position now would be that the initial report I read of hundreds of casualties would have to be revised downwards, but that the reconstruction most defintely did take place.

 

The French Colonial troops wanted shooting after their performance to the north of Cassino in January 1944 when they went on a raping
and pillaging spree of many villages there - we were glad they went back to their posts with the US 5th Army - who didn't seem to

notice their bad behaviour- and it was BAD

Cheers

 

This topic has been aired on thr forum before....before the software change and but I cannot find it.

I remember while passing through Haut Marne on our way to Germany at a village by the name of Graffigny,I found a memorial to French colonial troops who had fought the Germans to the utter end, late on in the 1940 campaign.Sometime later I found out that what had transpired was that the colonial troops had been murdered on being taken POW and that a memorial had been erected to that effect..have tried to locate it through the usual means without success, as I have not passed that way since.

These war crimes in the field were carried out by Wehrmacht formations and by Waffen SS elements..history tends to place these excesses at the feet as the SS but as deeper study has revealed,the Wehrmacht were not entirely innocent wherever they fought..

Apart from the Nazi ideology regarding the untermenchen,the Germans were indoctrinated by Goebbels ministry of propaganda of the supposed role taken by French colonial troops in excesses against German civilians during the French occupation of their particular section of the Rhineland after the First World War.Signal exploited the defeat of the French and published that the "Defenders of French Culture" were the "Berbers,Moroccans,Arabs,Senegalese,Bantu negroes,Cingalese,a varie-gated mixture of peoples and races"...(varie-gated.... Signals appreciation of the Engish language)

Some might have seen the Goebbelsque frames showing captured French colonial troops engaged in tribal dances in POW cages...all intended to add to the thrust of the ideology.Signal added that the French could not maintain their army up to strength without the use of coloured troops as they had to resort to in the First World War.

 

Highly pointed out in the documentary I saw

 

What was the title of the documentary Warlord?

 

JUIN 40, LE GRAND CHAOS



http://www.tv5.org/cms/chaine-francophone/programmes/p-80-s8-z86-lg3-JUIN-40-LE-GRAND-CHAOS.htm?prg_id=298020&