Raffael Scheck. Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xii + 202 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-85799-4.
Reviewed by Jeremiah Kitunda (Appalachian State University)
Published on H-Genocide (September, 2012)
Commissioned by Elisa G. von Joeden-Forgey
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31854
A Tribute to Europe’s African Retainers and Their Fate in the Twentieth-Century Rhineland
During the first half of the twentieth century the fate of Africa and Europe became intricately connected through the two bloody conflicts of 1914-18 and 1939-45. However, as one African adage goes, “until the lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter,” and most histories of the two world wars focus on the European rank-and-file. The narratives of African retainers of Europe as victors and victims is overshadowed by the story of their European comrades, not because black soldiers’ stories were inconsequential, not because their numbers and actions were insignificant compared to those of their fellow white comrades, but because history is by nature selective and subjective. Moreover, archival sources containing such narratives are only now becoming publicly available.