Colored Troops in the French Army / A Report from the Department of State Relating to the Colored Troops in the French Army and the Number of French Colonial Troops in the Occupied Territory

by United States. Department of State

(f) Claims in the Nauen Radio Service on April 29, 1920, that the working people of Alsace-Lorraine had protested, demanding the removal of the Moroccan division from Alsace-Lorraine, when there was no part of those troops in Alsace-Lorraine.

9. 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 14, 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, but they are, in my opinion, cases such as generally occur in any land when soldiery is for a long time quartered upon the population.

10. The impression gained from contact with and observation of the French colonial troops is that, as a general rule, they are quiet, orderly, and well behaved. Discipline has a purely relative value and is hardly of the same order as that which we would require. That the discipline of the Senegalese brigade was not always good, is established by the incidents which recently occurred at Marseille, when a part of these troops committed serious infractions of discipline when ordered aboard their transports.

11. The attitude of certain classes of German women toward the colored troops has been such as to incite trouble. On account of the very unsettled economic conditions, and for other causes growing out of the World War, prostitution is abnormally engaged in and many German prostitutes and women of loose character have openly made advances to the colored soldiers, as evidenced by numerous love letters and photographs which are now on file in the official records and which have been sent by German women to colored French soldiers. Several cases have occurred of marriages of German women with French Negro soldiers. One German girl of a first-class burgher family, her father a very high city functionary of a prominent city in the Rhinelands, recently procured a passport to rejoin her fiance in Marseille. He was a Negro sergeant. Other Negro soldiers have had French wives here, and the color line is not regarded either by the French or the Germans as we regard it in America; to keep the white race pure. At Ludwigshafen, when the Seventh Tirailleurs left for Frankfurt, patrols had to be sent out to drive away the German women from the barracks, where they were kissing the colored troops through the window gratings.

CONCLUSIONS.

I. The wholesale atrocities by French Negro colonial troops alleged in the German press, such as the alleged abductions, followed by rape, mutilation, murder, and concealment of the bodies of the victims are false and intended for political propaganda.

II. A number of cases of rape, attempted rape, sodomy, attempted sodomy, and obscene mishandling of women and girls have occurred on the part of French Negro colonial troops in the Rhinelands. These cases have been occasional and in restricted numbers, not general or widespread. The French military authorities have repressed them severely in most cases and have made a very serious effort to stamp the evil out. The amount of evidence necessary to convict in such cases is a very delicate matter to express opinion upon. However, the number of acquittals is not large and there is nothing surprising about these acquittals, except in one case where a girl of 14 years was known carnally. In this case the acquittal followed upon the claim that the girl had consented.

III. As a rule the number of convictions and the thoroughness of the reports of the investigations and trials indicate the very earnest effort of the French trial authorities to do justice and to stamp out the evil by stern repressive measures. That their sentences are often milder than ours would be is largely due to extenuating circumstances found in the evidence according to their rules of evidence which are very different from ours, and to the fact that in general French courts do not punish these crimes as severely as American and English courts do.

IV. The discipline of the Senegalese Tirailleurs was not always good as evidenced by the refusal of some of them to get aboard transports at Marseille when ordered to Syria.

Henry T. Allen.