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Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940. By Raffael Scheck. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-521-85799-6. Photographs. Table. Figure. Notes. Sources. Index. Pp. xiii, 202. $65.00.
In a continuation of the policy initiated during the First World War, France recruited nearly 65,000 West Africans who served as combatants during the German Blitzkrieg in the spring of 1940. In a long-overdue and path-breaking book, Hitler's African Victims, Raffael Scheck explores the fate of these soldiers and, in particular, how long-standing (as well as more recent) racist dogmas contributed to massacres of them by German troops.
Scheck's book is organized into three major sections. In the first, he painstakingly reconstructs the role of African units in the Battle of France. Drawing on operational reports from French and German military archives, he chronicles the character of the...