“A Danger to Sexual Morality and Christian Culture”: Colonial French Soldiers in German Nationalist Discourse, 1920–60s

During the 1920s, the nationalist German propaganda campaign against the “Black Horror on the Rhine” targeted French colonial troops participating in the Allied occupation of the Rhineland. The highly graphic campaign centered on images of alleged mass rapes of white Rhenish women and children by African soldiers to discredit the Versailles Treaty and its staunchest defender, France. After 1945, Allied soldiers of color—African American GIs and Moroccan and Vietnamese French soldiers—once again participated in the occupation of western Germany. Scholars have posited a shift in West German public discourse over African American GIs, away from an exclusive focus on accusations of rape and towards a stronger emphasis on the alleged sexual “immorality” of German women. Yet, if we expand our perspective to include French soldiers of color, we see that important themes of 1920s black horror rhetoric resurfaced in the early Federal Republic. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, French NATO troops stationed in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate included Moroccan soldiers. Local and state politicians called for the removal of North African troops, insinuating dangers of rape, homosexuality, and broader threats to “Christian culture.” Newspaper depictions of sinister-looking Moroccan soldiers greedily eyeing German girls and articles highlighting the alleged cruelty of Halal practices of slaughtering often seemed reminiscent of Nazi-era antisemitic tropes. Although these protests remained more localized and never escalated to the scale of the black horror agitation of the 1920s, they point to the post-1945 persistence in public discourse of problematic racialized and sexualized images of non-Christian “Others.”