In Activision’s latest iteration in the decades-old Call of Duty franchise, Call of Duty: Vanguard, you play as a member of an elite team of commandos from America, Australia, England and Russia. Your leader, and the supposed representative of England, is a Black man, Arthur Kinglsey, whose name seems to allude to both King Arthur and the We Wuz Kangz cultural phenomenon.
The team of allied commandos battle across the top of a Nazi train outside of Hamburg, as the city is being invaded by the allies in 1945. Our Black hero expresses approval as he sees the German city burning. He states, “would you look at that?!” and he grins as the camera pans to capture the flame soaked skyline.
The tall protruding building on fire in the backdrop is likely the St. Nicholas Church. This was the tallest building in the world, for a brief period of time, and it’s well-known for being partially destroyed in the 1943 fire bombing. Technically, the scene in Call of Duty takes place in 1945, two years later, but nevertheless the reference seems apparent.
As another interesting aside, the firebombing of Hamburg was codenamed Operation Gomorrah. This was a reference to the Jewish god, Yahweh, utterly destroying the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is a bizarre lens through which to view a Nazi city in the 1940s. Hamburg wasn’t exactly known for sodomites and degenerate hedonistic culture. (There is an interesting and nuanced Talmudic perspective on the divine destruction laid out in an article on Chabad.org which may explain why the Jews saw Germany as an analogue for Gomorrah.)
Of course, Activision doesn’t explore the subtle reference much further. That is… there are no scenes of huddled masses in a cellar being cooked alive by the intense heat. No images of children’s bones turned to jelly. No screams of old women being sucked into a fiery vortex. No agonizing shrills of folks as their feet sink into the melting asphalt. Instead we see a Black man signaling his glee that the city is on fire with a big grin.
Eventually, our heroes get captured and interrogated by a Nazi commander, who calls into question the Black man’s supposed British identity. The Nazi goes down the line of captured commandos, designating each one’s national origins. He gets to Arthur Kingsley and pauses.
Kingsley tells him to “get on with it.” The German commander responds with “How delightful. You think you’re British?” Kingsley firmly states: “A Cambridge man, through and through.” The German replies with "you know better than to ruin a man’s evening.” He then asks if the negro gives orders in English and if his comrades follow them.
Kingsley then goes on the offensive, stating in German “You know what it’s like to take orders from a Black man.” The commander and his comrades laugh in surprised amusement at the fact that Kingsley speaks German. Then he asks Kingsley to continue. Kingsley says the following:
“Your Rhineland accent. You must be from Neustadt. During the occupation, you saw French soldiers who look like me carry guns in your streets. Marry your women. That’s what I hear, when you speak German.”
What Activision’s Black hero is referencing here is the French occupation of German towns along the Rhine river after WWI. This came to be known to Germans as Die Schwarze Schmach am Rhein, or in English as The Black Horror on the Rhine. The French employed Black and North African colonial troops to police the Rhineland, and these troops were accused by local Germans of engaging in mass rapes.
These accusations have been dismissed by post-war scholars as the product of a “racist” German propaganda campaign, but the truth, as I will attempt to evidence, is that while we can debate the extent of the rapes, the accusations probably reflected very real-life phenomena, and their dismissals may have ironically been the product of anti-German propaganda, both at the time and throughout the 20th century. Below are some examples of anti-German propaganda during the war. Also note that Germans in America were placed into internment camps.
Regardless, the writers for Call of Duty invoked the Rhineland occupation with an express intent to shame German men. It was a hostile jest. The use of the term “marry” was a denial and reorientation of the alleged mass rapes. But even absent a context of mass rapes, or even racial dynamics, any men from any racial or ethnic group would certainly feel shame if their women were voluntarily sleeping with foreign men who had militarily vanquished them. Either scenario is a sign of conquest. This doesn’t even need to be a racial matter. Note that thousands of Dutch, French and Italian women suffered reprisals from their compatriots for having slept with German troops during the war.
But let’s discuss the Rhineland Occupation in more depth. For those who are unfamiliar, in 1920 after the Armistice was signed, the French military deployed between 30,000 and 40,000 colonial troops to the Rhineland to police the local population. [1] These figures were disputed by General Henry Allen in a report written in 1921, wherein he claimed there were only 20,000 colored troops. [2] Even so, thousands of Black and North African troops did occupy the Rhineland. This is cannot be disputed. Eventually, there was a series of allegations against the French military, claiming that these troops had been committing mass atrocities against locals.
The most notable English language compilation of evidence is a series of a pamphlets written by Edmund Morel, a Journalist born to a French father and an English mother. Most famously in April of 1920, The Daily Herald published his article Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine. In it, Morel claimed that there was a deliberate policy of importing sexually unrestrained men into Germany to inflict harm on locals. The economic poverty in which the Versailles Treaty plunged the working and middle classes in Germany, he claimed, was an incentive to prostitution.
The men who are doing this know what they are doing, and why they are doing it. What inextinguishable fires of hatred are being accumulated upon the heart of the French people, innocent as a people for these things, the future will only too clearly show. As a distinguished soldier said to me the other day: - Were I a German, I would forgive everything. But this--never. [3]
Eventually, Morel started writing his pamphlets entitled The Horror on the Rhine which further detailed the events. These were translated into a number of languages and widely distributed despite allied efforts to censor them. Now while Morel did use what today would be considered disparaging language to describe Africans, he also expressed anger at French militarists for using Africans as “canon fodder for the benefit of French capitalistic militarism and imperialism in Europe.” [4]
Morel had also previously written numerous books denouncing European imperialism and had advocated for the rights of Africans. For example, he wrote books outlining and condemning the rubber trade and King Leopold’s policies in the Congo. He even wrote a book called The Black Man’s Burden in 1920 which he stated was to “convey a clear notion of the atrocious wrongs which the white peoples have inflicted upon the black.” [5] Indeed, quite a few academics today regularly cite his work when discussing the evils of European Colonialism, yet when it comes to Morel’s assertions about the Rhineland occupation, his claims are suddenly and rigorously scrutinized. One author said Morel’s “liberal credentials were unimpeachable” [6] yet went on in his paper to claim that Morel had “imaginative assertions” about what was going on in the Rhineland. [7]
Morel wrote in some detail on how the French military demanded local German towns establish and maintain brothels for colonial troops. When they protested, they were threatened. The mayor of a certain town in the Palatinate, who protested when ordered to set up a brothel, was told that hesitation on his part would render him liable to prosecution before a military court. The officials told him that if a brothel was not established "German women, girls and boys would suffer the unavoidable consequences." [8]
As Morel informs us, brothels or no, the Germans suffered these “unavoidable consequences.” Children as young as seven were assaulted and raped on their way to and from school.
Reported from Kaiserlauten: A batch of cases ranging from December 1918 to May 1920. Cases include two cases of indecent assault upon boys aged seven and eleven respectively, in the latter case a medical examination reveals that the victim has contracted syphilis; and eight cases of attempted rape by soldiers, variously designated as "Coloured," "Moroccan" and "Black.'' [9]
When women were able to escape and seek aid, they were told by French officials that their assailants have “not been home for two and a half years, that these things must happen.” Sometimes the authorities pointed to their fair hair and remarked that the Black soldiers are partial to blondes. [10]
The whole affair made quite the international stink at the time. Notably several women’s rights organizations spoke out against the use of colored troops in Germany and in Europe. The international Women’s League sent a petition to the League of Nations demanding the withdraw of colonial troops. In it, they said the following:
That in the interest of good feeling between all the races of the world and the security of all women, this meeting calls upon the League of Nations to prohibit the importation into Europe for warlike purposes, of troops belonging to primitive peoples, and their use anywhere, except for purposes of police and defence in the country of their origin. [11]
In Sweden, the primer discussed the atrocities at the rigsdag and some 50,000 Swedish women signed a similar petition. [12] In Germany, the Rhenish Women’s League published and distributed their own advocacy material, wherein they too shared the details of numerous cases.
Today we’re repeatedly told to “#BelieveAllWomen” but the axiom carries some fine print, if you’re a White woman accusing non-White men of anything. Considering how often modern feminists abhor victim blaming, it should be emphasized here that something Morel and his female allies contended with was the fairly regular accusation that German women were lying. Then, to add insult to injury, they were slandered with counter accusations of being sexually promiscuous. I’ll cite a statement by The Rhenish Women’s League.
Our press has espoused our cause, some in foreign countries have given utterance in our behalf, and our government has also voiced a protest. But those, into whose power we have come, the representatives of French militarism and imperialism, proclaimed mockingly that our press and our government were lying. Not the white woman on the Rhine was to be protected before the yellow and black soldiers of the French republic, but vice versa, the nigger of the island of Madagascar ought to be protected against the immoral influence of the white women on the Rhine. The same nigger* who is treated in France as a second class human being, and there is kept in check only by the most rigid discipline, thus is allowed to also in future act the victor and master in the country of the Rhine. [13]
*The word “nigger” was not derogatory at this time.
This slander mentioned was perhaps initiated and promoted by two particular journalists at the time, Maximilian Harden and J. Ellis Barker. Curiously, both men were Jews who grew up in Germany. Yes, this is relevant, because even in the 1920s, Jews and Germans were known to harbor animosity toward each other. In 1921, Barker wrote a paper on the events in the Rhineland. He quotes Harden who said some of the following:
The African negro type which one finds constantly displayed in the bitter cartoons of the German comic papers does not resemble in the slightest the type of the French Colonial soldiers. Unfortunately we have seen the aberrations of the female sex every time when Hagenbeck has shown us tribes of natives. Everywhere the German women followed the black and yellow men and pestered them with love letters flowers and presents. They were not repelled by their smell. On the contrary, they found in it a special stimulus, a special attraction. However, these natives were birds of passage. They were only too often malnourished and sickly. They were rarely men of fine physique. They compare unfavorably with the warriors whose jet black skin covers splendid muscles and who are clad in striking uniforms. [14]
As comical as it sounds, Harden was essentially insulting German women by claiming they found even the smelliest and ugliest of Black men attractive. He was referencing African men who had previously traveled to Germany in Hagenbeck’s ethnological expositions. Harden’s thought process was that since German women had found even these uglier, smellier negroes attractive, then they would go absolutely wild for France’s colonial troops who were much finer specimens sporting flashy uniforms.
Even were we to assume that Harden was correct about German women who had frequented Hagenbeck’s expositions, how is it that he knew they found “a special stimulus” in what was normally considered the repellent smell of negroes? Did he conduct a survey? To me it seems painfully obvious that Harden was defaming the German people at the expense of Blacks.
Soldiers themselves complained to their officers about the shameless advances made to them by German women and frequently a military guard had to be called out to keep women from entering the barracks by the windows. [15]
It is a reasonable conclusion that this was a kind of counter propaganda intended to shame German society. The scene depicted here would be preposterous, even absent a racial dynamic. Moreover, these are exactly the kind of accusations the Rhenish Women’s League expressed anger over in their pamphlets. Not only were their plights ignored, but they were called liars and slandered with accusations of sexual promiscuity. Every single major Western power at the time looked down on Blacks as inferior, or primitive, in some sense. No one in the press who accused German women of having relations with Blacks did so out of some modern anti-racist sensibility. The intent was hostile and aimed at defamation. This of course hasn’t stopped Black academics from citing Harden and Barker for their aims to condemn White “racism.” Clarence Lusane in his book, Hitler’s Black Victims, cites both men as stating absolute facts. [16]
Detractors of German accusations invariably bring up that General Henry Allen’s report asserts that French authorities told him there were only 66 total accusations of rape reported to the French authorities against the colored troops between 1918 and 1920. [17] Now beyond the consideration that the French authorities were withholding information from Allen, do note that Allen qualified his statements:
On the other hand, undoubtedly many instances have occurred where women or girls have been assaulted and some where boys and men have been sodomized by members of the French colored colonial troops. See report above as to the official figures. There are undoubtedly cases which are not included in the official figures due to the natural desire to keep out of obscene notoriety. For example, a case of attempted assault was reported June 14th, 1920, from Saarbrucken which is not included in the French official figures. Some cases will never come to light due to the natural feeling of shame of the women concerned…[18]
The Rhenish Women’s League specifically addressed the shame, disgrace and the reluctance they felt to report at the beginning of their pamphlet. Here is a quote.
We, German women on the Rhine, are compelled, much against our innermost sentiments, to lay before the public the following pages. Whoever would read them, will understand our reluctancy, and will appreciate the fact that we have battled with ourselves for a long time, before we could resolve upon this step. For, what we are telling, what we call out into the world a thousandfold, is our own disgrace. It is more than that, it is the degradation of the white woman as such, and on the main it is so horrifying and terrible that we must ask all those reading it to place themselves in our condition, if they want to understand why we dare to go before the public. [19]
Detractors also tend to highlight that Allen’s report references local German newspapers that admitted to having “employed certain terms and expressions which they might better have omitted.” [20] This is often seen as an admission of having lied about the events, but in the very same report, Allen tells us that those newspapers made those statements after the allied forces suspended their publishing for 15 days. [21] In other words, they were probably made under threat of being shut down entirely. The French government also issued various summonses against French newspapers that printed accusations.
Several other considerations should be made here. The French elites had imperial ambitions at the time which arguably hinged on the perception of the successful use of Colonial troops in Europe. Charles Mangin, a French military man had written a book in 1910 called La Force Noire, in which he argued that masses of Black troops should be recruited from French colonies in the event of a war in Europe. France had a much smaller population than Germany’s, and there was concern that the nation couldn’t compete in terms of manpower.
As an important aside, in his review of the book, La Force Noire: In Defense of France, by Marc Michel, author and professor Myron Echenberg stated that “French speakers often saw Black soldiers as men who terrorized the German foe but who were gentle and child-like in their dealings with French civilians.” [23] This is more or less what I have encountered in my own research. The French public had to be sold on the idea and usage of Black troops and reassured that they would behave. (See the image below)
Prior to WWI, France had been recruiting and utilizing Black troops in Africa for various campaigns in the region. A French woman, by the name of Bonnetain wrote a book in 1894 about her experiences traveling there entitled Une Française au Soudan. In her section dedicated to the behavior of Black troops, she informs us that Black troops serving in Africa were very accustomed to taking war brides and captives, a term she says had become a euphemism for “slaves.”
…these black recruits were happy to serve as soldiers; but it is not, as one might think, the taste for panache, nor the pleasure of fighting, which excites them, even though they adore flashy colors and gunshots. Their dream, their ambition, their goal, which they admit with touching cynicism, is to "win captives", that is to say, to possess slaves of their own!!!
Yes, they know that they will form a column against Samory or Ahmadou, that the latter will be defeated once again, thanks to the science of the toubabs and because we now have all the grigris and then captives will be taken from the enemy who will become the property of the tirailleurs… This disgrace had to be tolerated officially in order to prevent abuses and also because, absent the prospect of “winning captives,” the Black man would no longer enlist. No money, no Swiss mercenaries. No slaves to ravage, no negro soldier! [22]
Toubab and grigris were local terms for White people and magical trinkets respectively. Thus, in a sense, the Africans saw the White man as a kind of sorcerer who gave them magical powers on their quest to acquire more slaves.
Now yes, Bonnetain wrote this more than 20 years before the Rhineland Occupation, but she evidences a reflection of African culture very much in line with what Morel and the Rhenish Women’s League claimed.
Historian Anthony Clayton wrote extensively about the French colonial army. In his book, France, Soldiers and Africa, he strengthens Bonntain’s claims:
A number of Africans volunteered for the Tirailleurs, attracted by a sense of adventure and new experience, uniforms, the rate of pay (15 francs per month plus an engagement payment of 160 francs), three meals a day and the prospect of capturing women after a victorious campaign. Three or four women épouses libres might be one soldiers' reward; these could be kept or sold. Sometimes scandals arose from this practice, officers being reprimanded and disciplined… [24]
It seems quite reasonable to assume that if these troops had a cultural custom, a unit tradition if you will, of treating women like this in Africa, that they would’ve carried over this mentality into Europe and probably would’ve expected to be allowed to treat the vanquished Germans in a similar manner. This is in fact more or less what the accusations reflected, that these men were from largely polygamous and hypersexual societies the nature of which was alien to European customs and sensibilities. Even today West Africa has retained a high level of polygamy, child marriages, and rape. [25]
Regarding African sexual norms, I want to highlight here the work of Maryse Condé, a woman of West African descent who wrote a book in the 1980s called Segu. The book centers on an 18th century African kingdom and follows the lives of four brothers as they travel throughout the region. There is a startling amount of rape.
In one case, brother Tiekoro sees a slave girl in a market. He is overcome with passion and rapes her.
The courtyard was empty. The girl had finished kindling her fire and was standing with her hands hanging idle and her long wiry legs slightly apart, showing the inside of the thighs. Tiekoro flung himself on her and dragged her into the privy. He did not know what possessed him. It was as if some savage beast lurking in his belly were trying to tear its way out. He entered her and she gave a little cry like a child, but didn't try to defend herself. He took her several times, avenging himself for the long months of solitude, for his abstinence, and also for the disappearance of his younger brother. At last he pulled away. He was aware now of the terrible stench of excrement and urine, and wished he could die on the spot. He went out into the courtyard. The girl followed. He would have liked her to fight him, to cry out. But she just stood there behind him, silent. [26]
In another scene, another brother, Malobali is insulted by a prepubescent girl and rapes her as punishment. I will quote the passages here, but I warn you that they are deeply disturbing.
Then she turned and fled. Malobali rushed after her. At first she had inspired in him only the vague and easily mastered desire he felt in the presence of any pretty girl. But pursuit made it more acute. As Ayaovi ran, her naked buttocks bobbed up and down and the sweat pouring down her back made her skin shine. She disappeared behind a tree, reappeared between two ferns, then tripped over a vine. Malobali threw himself down on her as she lay in a patch of leaf mold. Realizing, from the shape of her body, how very young she was, he was almost moved to let her go with nothing worse than a fright. But she started to insult him so volubly that his ear, still unused to twi, the Ashanti language, could not make out the words, and this angered him. He was just about to slap her to make her stop when she lifted her head as swiftly as a snake and spat right in his face. It was too much. He had to punish her, and he had only one way of doing it. As he roughly pushed her legs apart it occurred to him that she must be below the age of puberty, and he realized the énoctity of what he was doing. But she flashed him a look of defiance unusual in anyone so young. So he penetrated her. She shrieked, and Malobali knew he would hear that earsplitting cry until his dying day. It was like the death cry of a terrified child, a child calling on the gods to witness the cruelty of adults.
He felt a little pool of blood under his suddenly wilting member. He almost got up and begged her forgiveness, but he was seized by some malignant force that came from he knew not where. With some difficulty he finished penetrating her, then lay still, not daring to look at her. A hand tapped him on the shoulder. It was Kodjoe.
"Don't forget your friends!" he said. Malobali made way for him. [27]
What is perhaps more startling about the book is that while the rapists often do feel some remorse for their actions, they are all depicted as having no ability to control their actions, and more shocking still, all the victims eventually fall in love with them.
The book is fictional, but it is meant to reflect precolonial African cultural norms. In fact, I was assigned this book in college by a Black female professor in a course about precolonial African history. Thus Africans themselves will sometimes acknowledge that historically they’ve had a very different perspective on sexual relations. When men like Edmund Morel characterized them and other equatorial peoples as being different from Europeans, he wasn’t being irrational, disingenuous, or even biased. He was merely relating facts. If people wish to debate the cause of these differences, they can do so, but to this day, Africa has an extremely high prevalence of rape.
But returning to the Rhenish women’s accusations during the 1920s, over two decades later during WW2, men from many of the same French Colonial units were once again accused of massive rapes in Italy. These were known to locals as le marocchinate, which roughly translates as “Moroccan deeds,” although the term wasn’t exclusive to Moroccans, but rather referenced all French colonial troops. The main culprits here were the goumiers who were North African Arabs and Berbers, although there were some West African troops deployed as well.
The Italian accusations followed a pattern similar to those from Germans in the 1920s. Victims included women as old as 86 and children as young as eleven. The National Association for the Victims of the Marocchinate states that there were a minimum of 20,000 documented acts of physical violence, however, they also inform us that this is conservative estimation. Statements from doctors and other professionals at the time asserted that about a third of the people raped probably didn’t report it due to a sense of shame. [28] Also as was the case with the Germans in 1920s, the allied press accused Italian locals of exaggerating the scenario. Many locals may have found unsympathetic authorities if and when they tried to report their case.
To give a sense of how extreme the situation was for some locals, official Italian government documents from 2010 acknowledge the account of the mayor of Esperia, a small town of 2500 inhabitants of whom 700 were raped. [29] The local men who tried to intervene were beaten and sodomized themselves. A local priest was raped all night after he tried to hide several of Esperia’s women, and he subsequently died due to his injuries. [30] Reportedly, things got so bad that Pope Pius XII took action, demanding that the French Commanders put a stop to the atrocities and forbid these colonial troops from advancing to Rome. [31]
Now, with the more recent Italian accusations against colored troops in mind from WWII, I want to highlight a relevant side note. Many of us are familiar with the Civil Rights case of Emmett Till who was killed in the 1950s supposedly for having offended and/or assaulted a White woman. It’s not my aim here to get into the particulars of that case, but coincidentally Emmett’s own father had served in the US Army in Italy during World War 2. Private Louis Till of the Army’s 177th Port Company, 397th Port Battalion was tried and convicted of raping two Italian women and murdering a third. He was executed by hanging on July 2nd 1945. [32] Indeed, as a general rule, following the end of WW2, African Americans were overrepresented in rape accusations in occupied Europe, most notably in France.
In the book, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, the author, Mary Louise Roberts, primarily sets out “to debunk an old myth about the GI, thought of as a manly creature that always behaved well — the GIs were having sex anywhere and everywhere." [33] But she encounters a problem on her quest to smear the “Greatest Generation,” i.e. all the old White American and British men we’ve been praising for the last several decades for having defeated the Nazis.
Up until chapter seven, she had deconstructed American Army propaganda in France as a chauvinistic campaign of “sexual conquest.” As she states in Chapter Two, which is entitled The Myth of the Manly GI…
The US military was male, and France, female. Second, the American incursion onto French soil was consistently envisioned in sexualized terms: as an opportunity for sexual conquest. [34]
Yet in Chapter Seven, which she entitled The Innocent Suffer, she broaches the politically incorrect fact that Black GIs were disproportionately accused, tried, convicted and executed for rape in allied occupied France. As Roberts states in her book…
…seventy-seven percent of court-martial convictions for rape in the ETO concerned African American soldiers. [35]
This is on top of the fact that African Americans only comprised 10% of US forces. So Roberts then switches gears, throws out her sympathy for French women and resorts to calling them "dishonest" and "hysterical" with their "fears concerning black men." [36] Are we noticing a pattern here?
All throughout Chapter Seven, Roberts repeatedly highlights that many French women were raped in dark places, and uses this fact as a way to call into question their ability to accurately identify their assailants. The idea is absurd. Now, on an individual level, she may have a point. It is possible that one Black individual may have been misidentified as the culprit for a rape another Black individual had committed. The matter here, however, is racial overrepresentation, and clearly a woman can discern her rapist's race even in minimal lighting. If some men, Black or White, were wrongly accused by a woman, that is unfortunate, but it is absurd to assert these women consistently misidentified their assailants as Black, when they were in fact White. And this is indeed what Roberts is asserting.
Roberts deploys a myriad of methods to explain Black overrepresentation. As she highlights: “Seventy-eight percent of rape accusations against GIs were targeted against troops in service units, where black troops had disproportionate representation.” [37]
She argues that logistical units had more contact with civilians than combat units, and because they were situated in the rear and not on the front, civilians and authorities had more opportunities to report and try cases. She might have a point, if it weren’t for the fact that almost 40% of American enlisted personnel had rear echelon assignments. [38] Quite stunningly, Roberts then states that “…no evidence exists that comparable problems plagued the Canadian or British troops. The US Army alone appeared to be out of control.” [39]
She never stops and considers that Canada had very few colored soldiers. In fact, there may have been fewer than 22,000 Black people in all of Canada in the 1940s, [40] and yet somehow a Black Canadian soldier, Horace Bedford Gordon, still managed to show up in the British press after he raped and stabbed an English girl to death in 1944. [41] (I actually mentioned this same case in my previous Substack article on the UK Race Riots of 1919.)
As for why Britain’s army wasn’t “out of control,” well they specifically didn’t employ colored units from the empire in France or in England, ironically out of concern that something like this might happen. See David Reynolds’ 1984 paper on Britain’s various racial policies.
Roberts does far more than simply assert that Blacks didn’t get fair treatment. She states that White men were framing Black men for rapes that they had committed themselves.
Aware that black men suffered from a credibility problem with white officers, white soldiers framed blacks for crimes the latter did not commit—either to escape guilt themselves or out of pure racial hatred. [42]
Then she goes even further and states that:
White soldiers could rape a French white woman with impunity if an African American was in the vicinity and could be plausibly blamed. [43]
Now, to be fair, I do think Roberts makes a decent case that perhaps in one instance, it was possible that a French woman, Marie Rouvrière, may have falsely accused a Black man of rape to hide the fact that she was cheating on her husband. [44] In another case, a local prostitute, Madaleine, Peronneau, may have falsely accused Black servicemen after she attempted to increase her fees and they refused. [45]
In this latter case, the authorities dropped the charges, after the prostitute’s neighbor testified that she was an irresponsible and habitual drunk. Rather than grant the justice system any credit here, however, Roberts instead focused on the idea that had the neighbor remained silent, the Black men could have been convicted. Roberts states that French prostitutes “were known to threaten black soldiers with charges of rape in order to extort higher fees for services.” [46] In support of this claim, she states in her bibliography that:
Extortion could explain what happened in Le Havre some months later when a prostitute was allegedly assaulted in her home by a black soldier who wanted to have sexual relations with her. When a fight broke out between them, the soldier shot her and fled. [47]
I’m not sure why Roberts cites this, since it seems to support the idea that Blacks indeed have low impulse control and a propensity toward violence. Regardless of Roberts’ aims, this observation potentially alludes to a better explanation of what had actually happened to, Madaleine Peronneau, the French prostitute Roberts highlighted earlier as having lied about being raped.
That prostitute, as Roberts stated herself, “claimed to have been gang-raped by four black soldiers.” In her testimony, which Roberts herself cites, Peronneau even appears to admit to being a prostitute, stating outright that she had sex with all of the accused. But then she states that afterwards they wanted another “round.” [48] What likely happened here is that she was tired and said no, and then they just raped her anyway. So perhaps “the case would have looked quite different…if the neighbor had not testified.”
But more importantly, nothing Roberts posits supports the idea that White men were successfully raping White women and actively framing Black men for it. That sort of cartoonishly evil act would require that local French women knowingly lie about who actually raped them, and Roberts offers no real motive or reason as to why they would do that. What she does do is cite a Jewish author, Studs Terkel, who in turn cited a Black GI in Britain who claimed that sixteen-year old British girls who had sex with Black GIs were encouraged to claim they were raped. [49]
I think Roberts is suggesting that White men in Britain took advantage of the impressionability of young teenage girls and coerced them to lie about being raped. But if the object here is the impressionability of young teenage girls, is it not possible that many of these young teenage girls, some of whom were as young as 14, were assertively coerced into sex when they didn’t feel comfortable, as some accounts suggest? [50]
But let’s simply grant Roberts that all these young teenage girls in England willingly had sex with Black men and were later coerced into lying, does this reveal that adult women in France were living in such fear of White men that they would lie and claim a Black man raped them when they knew their rapist was White?
Of course, we should note that Roberts vacillates between the ideas that White women were racist and the idea that they were coerced into lying. Again she highlights that most of these women, who were raped in the dark and unable to identify their individual assailant, nevertheless used “racist stereotypes” such as “speech, large lips and shiny skins” to narrow down the suspects. [51]
Roberts also engages hereafter in the trope that White men were just jealous. Though, if you remember, elsewhere in the chapter she called French women "dishonest" and "hysterical" with their "fears concerning black men." The rationale seems to be that French women hysterically terrified of Blacks sexually preferred them over jealous White rapists with whom they colluded to frame Blacks for rapes they didn’t commit. It’s insane.
It just seems more plausible here that Black men simply raped more women than White men did. Perhaps there were a few instances in which they were wrongly accused, but by October of 1944, out of 152 total rape accusations in France, 139 of those cases local women accused a Black man. [52] Again taking into account that Blacks made up 10% of total US forces, 139 is quite the increase above the 15 accusations we would expect, if their representation were proportionate.
Now, maybe some of what Roberts brings up in her book can account for some of the overrepresentation, but nothing she’s says can take us from 139 to 15. What we have here, in my opinion, is an intelligent but ideologically-biased woman who began all of her work with the religious-like assumption that Black men cannot possibly commit more violent crime than Whites, and if such appears to be the case, then it must be the fault of White men… and women for that matter.
Summary and Conclusions
While it is possible that the Germans exaggerated some of the situation in the Rhineland during the 1920s to some extent, they likely did not fabricate the entire phenomenon. It is probably true that the French military had employed colored troops for a variety of purposes, and one of those purposes was to shame Germans. We can also see that this same desire to shame Germans has carried over into 21st video games. Even if ultimately their goal was to promote Blacks to an unrealistic intellectual and behavioral standard in the minds of players, the game Call of Duty: Vanguard very much set out to use the Rhineland occupation in a such demeaning way toward German men when its Black protagonist referenced it.
There is ample historical evidence to demonstrate that on average, Sub-Saharan Africans have committed rape at a higher per capita rate than White men, and they come come from cultural backgrounds that retain very different attitudes toward sex and women. This has been the documented case for hundreds of years. Just as I highlighted in my last article on the UK Race Riots of 1919, I will reiterate here that White academics are morally corrupted by their religious-like adherence to the assumption that all races are equal in character, ability and average behavior.
They are corrupted to such a malignant point that when the outcomes are disparate in a way that reflects poorly on Blacks, or any non-white racial group, they consistently assume that White “racism” is the culprit. Because of this, their rationales and analyses become increasingly disjointed and detached from reality. Until, this base line assumption is corrected in academia, we will all continue to suffer the “unavoidable consequences.”
Sources and Citations
1. The Horror on the Rhine. E.D. Morel. Saint Clements Press. April 1921. Page 5. See also: Iris Wigger. Black Shame. Race and Class. Institute of Race Relations, Vol 51 issue 3, page 35.
2. American Representation in Occupied Germany 1920-1921 Volume 1. Pages 94-95.
3. The Daily Herald - Saturday 10 April 1920
4. The Horror on the Rhine. E.D. Morel. Saint Clements Press. April 1921. Page 10.
5. Ibid, page vii.
6. Racialism on The Left: E.D. Morel and The “Black Horror on The Rhine.” Robert C. Reinders. Cambridge University Press. 2013. Page 2.
7. Ibid, Page 5.
8. The Horror on the Rhine. E.D. Morel. Saint Clements Press. April 1921. Page 12.
9. Ibid, page 14.
10. Ibid, page 14.
11. Coloured Troops in Europe. Women's International League (British Section). (London: WILPF, 1920), copy in the British Museum.
12. The Horror on the Rhine. E.D. Morel. Saint Clements Press. April 1921. Page 7.
13. Colored Frenchmen on the Rhine. Rhenish Women’s League. Chicago, Ill.: The New Times. 1920. Page 3.
14. The Colored French Troops in Germany. J. Ellis Barker. Current History (1916-1940), volume 14, no. 4. University of California Press, 1921, page 596.
15. Ibid, page 596.
16. Hitler’s Black Victims. Clarence Lusane. Rutledge, New York London. 2003. Page 67.
17. American Representation in Occupied Germany 1920-1921 Volume 1. Page 95.
18. Ibid, page 97.
19. Colored Frenchmen on the Rhine. Rhenish Women’s League. Chicago, Ill.: The New Times. 1920. Page 3.
20. American Representation in Occupied Germany 1920-1921 Volume 1. Page 96.
21. Ibid, page 96.
22. Une Française au Soudan : sur la route de Tombouctou, du Sénégal au Niger. Madame Paul Bonnetain. Librairies-Imprimeries Réunies. 1894. Page 74.
23. Review: La Force Noire: In Defence of France. Myron Echenberg. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Volume 18, No. 1. 1984. Page 221.
24. France, Soldiers and Africa. Anthony Clayton. Brassey’s Defense Publishers. 1988. Pages 336-337.
25. Visit: https://www.womanstats.org/maps.html See the following maps: Prevalence and Legal status of Polygyny, Child Marriage Practice and Law, Practice of Child Marriage for Girls, Estimate of Rape Under-Reporting, Reported Prevalence of Rape, Estimate of Marital Rape Victimization. Visit: http://www.west-africa-brief.org/content/en/polygamy-remains-common-and-mostly-legal-west-africa Visit: https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures
26. Segu. Maryse Condé. Penguin books. 1984. Page 84.
27. Ibid, pages 229-230.
28. "Le marocchinate". Cronaca di uno stupro di massa. Emiliano Ciotti. Youcanprint SelfPublishing. Kindle Edition. Location 235 of 3061.
29. MOZIONE N. 33 IN RICORDO DELLE VITTIME DELLE “MAROCCHINATE”. ESTRATTO DAL VERBALE DELLA SEDUTA DEL CONSIGLIO DEL MUNICIPIO ROMA II (Seduta del 16 dicembre 2010)
30. "Le marocchinate". Cronaca di uno stupro di massa. Emiliano Ciotti. Youcanprint SelfPublishing. Kindle Edition. Location 2404 of 3061.
31. Ibid, 2316 of 3061.
32. Emmett Till and The Mississippi Press. Davis W. Houck and Matthew A. Grindy. University Press of Mississippi. 2008. Page 134.
33. The GIs who raped France. Guy Walters. Daily Mail, May 2013. Roberts is directly quoted.
34. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. Mary Louise Roberts. University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. Location 1099 of 8860.
35. Ibid, 3424 of 8860.
36. Ibid, 3464 of 8860.
37. Ibid, 3561 of 8860.
38. Research Starters: US Military by the Numbers. National WW2 Museum New Orleans.
39. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. Mary Louise Roberts. University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. Location 3974 of 8860.
40. Eighth Census of Canada, 1941, Volume III. Page 128.
41. West Sussex Gazette - Thursday 07 December 1944
42. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. Mary Louise Roberts. University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. Location 3848 of 8860.
43. Ibid, 3848 of 8860.
44. Ibid, 3765 of 8860.
45. Ibid, 3733 of 8860.
46. Ibid, 3734 of 8860.
47. Ibid, 7317 of 8860.
48. Ibid, 3734 of 8860.
49. Ibid, 3823 of 8860. Roberts cites: The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two. Studs Terkel. Ballantine Books. 1984. Page 276.
50. There are several newspaper articles in the UK from 1934-1946 reporting on girls as young as 14 consorting with Black American troops. In the Diss Express - Friday 16 June 1944, a 14-year-old girl reported allowing a Black soldier whom she had befriended to engage in sexual intercourse with her, after she felt threatened. As the paper reported: The girl in her evidence, said that she did not consent to the suggestion of the soldier but that she was afraid he was going to kill her. She had had no experience of that sort before and was really frightened and that in future she would not speak to coloured soldiers. She had stayed out that night as she was afraid of her father, who would not allow her to stay out later than ten o'clock unless she was going to a dance.
51. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. Mary Louise Roberts. University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. Location 3676 of 8860.
52. Ibid, 3399 of 8860. Roberts cites the following: National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 498, Records of Headquarters, ETO, US Army, 1942–46 (hereafter RG 498), Adjutant General’s Section Administration Branch, General Correspondence (1944–45), Box 27, 250.
The Black Horror on the Rhine
“Of course, Activision doesn’t explore the subtle reference much further. No scenes of huddled masses in a cellar being cooked alive by the intense heat. No images of children’s bones turned to jelly. No screams of old women being sucked into a fiery vortex. No agonizing shrills of folks as their feet sink into the melting asphalt. Instead we see a Black man signaling his glee that the city is on fire with a big grin.”
So the Germans under the Nazi regime decimating towns and cities before and at the beginning of the war with Guernica, Spain and Frampol, Poland, or later with Rotterdam, London, Coventry, Minsk, Sevastopol, Leningrad, Stalingrad and Warsaw (twice over) is a no never mind? Spanish, Polish, Dutch, British, Ukrainian, Belarussians, and Russian families being burned, buried under rubble and having their entire neighborhoods and cities wiped off the face of the earth. Then among these devastated towns, you had that overweight commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering cracking a joke of how the Luftwaffe devastated Coventry and coined the word “Coventrated”.
Also the game developers wouldn't be allowed to show such graphic scenes of Hamburg devastation or completely describe in greater morbid detail of the cities I listed without risking ban of sale.
To sum up my final thoughts would be a paraphrased quote by Sir Arthur Harris of the RAF: “they reaped the whirlwind.”