The Black Horror on the Rhine was a moral panic perpetuated in Weimar Germany and elsewhere concerning allegations of widespread crimes, especially sexual crimes, supposedly committed by Senegalese and other African soldiers serving in the French Army during the French occupation of the Rhineland between 1918 and 1930. Die schwarze Schande or Die schwarze Schmach ("the Black Shame" or "the Black Disgrace") were terms used by right-wing press as German nationalist propaganda in opposition to these events. The colonial troops referred to were soldiers from Senegal, Indochina, and Madagascar.
The majority of colonial African soldiers were accused of committing rape and mutilation against the German population by government propaganda and newspapers, despite a lack of complaints in the region itself. The campaign reached its peak between 1920 and 1923, but did not stop until 1930. Adolf Hitler blamed Jews for bringing the Senegalese into the Rhineland. The stories of the Black Horror were racist hoaxes, and numerous inquiries by the French and American militaries and press found the claims were baseless.
Along with phrases like "the black scourge" and "black horror," these terms were used by campaigners in different countries beyond Germany, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The term "black horror on the Rhine," coined by E. D. Morel, was mostly used in the English-speaking world. Children of mixed parentage were known as Rhineland bastards.
Background
Following the Kiel Mutiny on 3 November 1918, German revolutionaries visited numerous cities across Germany announcing the German Revolution. The German Army had already experienced a series of mutinies, particularly since the failure of the German spring offensive which was brought to a halt in July 1918. French colonial soldiers played a significant role in defending the city of Reims which was under siege during the German attack. As one German writer put it, "It is not the French fighting at Reims. France has entrusted the protection of the ancient city of coronation to black and brown soldiers. It is true that the defence of Reims does not cost a drop of French blood, it is Negroes who are sacrificed."
By the evening of 6 November, two hundred German revolutionaries had reached the city of Cologne, where they joined local workers and soldiers to establish a Workers and Soldiers' Council, along the lines of the Russian soviets. When reports of this reached Wilhelm Groener, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Imperial German Army, he no longer supported Wilhelm II's plan to instigate a civil war, but rather joined the call of Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD) for the Kaiser to abdicate. This the Kaiser did on 9 November, and Ebert became Chancellor of Germany the same day.
Thus the Rhineland had played a significant role in toppling the Kaiser and obliging the German state to accept the armistice. Likewise, the African soldiers of the French Army had played a significant role in the defeat of the Imperial German Army in the Second Battle of the Marne. This battle which was a decisive victory for the Allies, saw the French Army using a massed tank attack alongside forces of its (colonial army). Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg wrote in his 1920 memoirs Mein Leben: "Where there were no tanks our enemy sent black waves against us. Waves of black Africans! Woe to us when these waves reached our lines and massacred or worse, tortured our defenseless men!" Notwithstanding this remark by the Chief of the German General Staff, the highly armed German Army used poison gas in attacks on French Colonial Troops in the battle of Reims. Hindenburg's view of the Senegalese was typical of German views of the Senegalese, and many German soldiers were reluctant to surrender to the Senegalese as they believed that they would be eaten by them, as racist propaganda portrayed the Senegalese as cannibals from "darkest Africa".
Ironically, German propaganda demonizing nonwhite colonial soldiers serving the Third French Republic was spread simultaneously with that of "The Cult of the Loyal Askari". In the latter campaign, the native African NCOs and enlisted men who had fought in the Schutztruppe under the command of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck during the East African Campaign were lionized as heroic and were depicted as still feeling loyal to Germany. This allowed both the right-wing parties and the government of the Weimar Republic to stir up support for demanding that the Allied Powers return the former German colonial empire.Robert Gaudi (2017), African Kaiser: General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Great War in Africa 1914-1918, pages 419-422.
French use of colonial troops
Following the defeat of the Second French Empire by the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, a current of revanchism developed in France which sought to regain the lost territory of Alsace-Lorraine which had been ceded to the newly formed German Empire. Thus politicians such as Georges Clemenceau, of the Radical Republicans, opposed participation in the scramble for Africa as they were concerned it would divert the Republic from objectives related to regaining Alsace-Lorraine. Nevertheless, French officers repeatedly ignored orders, as they led the French Army on various campaigns in Africa. Charles Mangin, a career officer in the French Army with campaign experience in Africa, set out to resolve these conflicting imperialist strategies in his 1910 book La force noire (The Black Force). He argued that as Germany had a greater population and a higher birth rate than France in the early 20th century this meant that the German Army was always going to be larger than the French Army. He proposed that the French recruited extensively from their African colonies to provide an almost limitless source of manpower that could counter Germany's numerical superiority. Thus the expansion of the French colonial empire could be seen as complementing rather than competing with the desire to oblige Germany to return the lost territory.
Political dilemma of citizenship for French colonial soldiers
One of the products of the French Revolution was a concept of the nation linked to citizenship and military service. The levée en masse or forced mass military conscription was introduced in 1793 during the French Revolutionary Wars. This gave rise to the demand that by serving in the French Army, colonial subjects should gain full French citizenship. However, whilst military service provided a very clear expression of political allegiance to the state, French society had developed the idea of the statut personnel by which particularly French Muslims would have a distinct status, being governed by Koranic law administered by local religious authorities. As the norms of Islam permitted polygamy, this created what were considered insurmountable problems by those who defended an assimilationist viewpoint. Many of the assimilationists saw the culture and civilisation of France as something far superior to what they regarded as the barbaric customs of their non-European subjects. Another political current, the associationists advocated something along the lines of indirect rule as practised by the British. They saw the colonised subjects as having to find their own path to civilisation and relied on local elites to manage the colonial system on the ground. Both, however, viewed the subject peoples as being in debt to their conquerors, who by dominating them offered the allegedly profound benefits of French culture. Thus, despite the egalitarian ideology of the French Third Republic – which would theoretically exclude any color line – the development of French colonies created a quite different reality.
Election of Blaise Diagne
The election of Senegalese politician Blaise Diagne in February 1914 to the French Chamber of Deputies provided a champion for the demand of citizenship rights being granted to France's colonial soldiers. Diagne represented the Four Communes, the four oldest colonial settlements in France's West African colonies which had been granted the right to send deputies to the Chamber of Deputies following the 1848 revolution as part of a policy known as "assimilation". The policy stipulated that indigenous subjects in France's colonial empire would be granted the same rights held by citizens of France as long as they assimilated to the French culture and language as part of the mission civilisatrice. In theory, this policy was intended to provide a measure of racial equality in the French colonial empire, though in reality de facto racial segregation continued to exist both in Metropolitan France and the colonies. Diagne was a prominent supporter of the policy of assimilation, and helped recruit numerous Africans into French military service.M. M. Knight. French Colonial Policy—the Decline of "Association". The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Jun., 1933), pp. 208–224
Although Germany had also recruited soldiers in its African colonies both before and during World War I, the Allied blockade prevented any Askaris from fighting in Europe for Germany. During the war, German propaganda had often attacked the French for deploying African soldiers to fight in Europe, claiming that black men were innately savage and barbaric and it was unacceptable for the French to use Senegalese soldiers in Europe as it "endangered" European civilization.
Under the terms of the armistice which ended the fighting on the Western Front on 11 November 1918, the Allies had the right to occupy the Rhineland, and during the negotiations the Germans had specifically demanded that no African troops be included in the French occupation force. However, as the terms of the armistice were dictated to the Germans, this was of little import. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed on 28 June 1919, the Allies had the right to occupy the Rhineland until 1935, though the last Allied troops were pulled out of the Rhineland in June 1930. German opposition to African troops being permanently stationed in Europe were shared by some in the English-speaking world, and both U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George asked the French Premier Georges Clemenceau that no African soldiers be used as occupation troops in the Rhineland.
Non-European troops arrive