"Our Victims Don't Count"

Over 20,000 people took part in a memorial march on the 8th May in the Algerian town of Sétif. While tens of thousands of people throughout Europe were commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the German capitulation at the end of the Second World War, in Sétif and elsewhere in Algeria, they were commemorating the up to 40,000 people who were killed by the French army on 8th May 1945 in several towns in the Algerian province of Constantine.

In the days leading up to the anniversary, Algerian papers wrote copiously about the events of sixty years ago. Thousands of people had heeded the call of the Algerian independence movement and were celebrating — as in many other places throughout the world — victory over the National Socialists.

Massacre after the celebrations

The victory over Germany — which, as far as French efforts were concerned, owed much to the participation of North African soldiers — was seen by Algerian nationalists not just as the end of fighting in Europe. The downfall of Nazi Germany meant for them the removal of a final hurdle on the way to an independent Algeria.

But the celebrations and demonstrations ended in a bloodbath. French settlers and police provoked incidents in the course of the demonstrations which ended in the French air force being used against civilians.

It took the French side until February 2005 to acknowledge the massacre, but for decades Algerians have been marking the 8th May 1945 as the start of the Algerian war of independence against the French.

Implicit criticism of the official commemorations in Europe

A new book, "'Unsere Opfer zählen nicht' – Die Dritte Welt im Zweiten Weltkrieg", ("'Our victims don't count': The Third World in the Second World War"), published in April by the Berlin publisher Assoziation A, documents many such incidents, which are still part of the memory of the Second World War in the former colonies. The book, written by the Rhineland Journalists' Group, can be read as a critical commentary on the current official celebrations of the end of the war in Germany and Europe.

The book includes many documents and eye-witness reports which show that the German and European view of history is Eurocentric, both geographically and historically. For example, many of the German books and television documentaries which came out ahead of the anniversary concentrated on the suffering of the Germans.

As in England, the USA and France, the millions of non-European victims usually went unmentioned. But the authors of this study note that more people died in China alone than in all the countries of the Axis powers.

They write, "In Africa the Second World War began when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. By 1937, Japan had occupied both Korea and Manchuria, and was expanding its war with China by moving southwards." In such a view the war was global from the start.

Thousands of forgotten dead

The authors have investigated the events of the Third World's Second World War in thirty countries. Eye-witness accounts by those who experienced the war as civilians or as soldiers in Africa, Oceania, Asia and Latin America bring to light events which are missing even in detailed studies of the war.

Among them are the bloody excesses of the Japanese army in the Chinese city of Nanking in December 1937, in which an estimated 370,000 people or more were killed.

Another event was the massacre in the French village of Chasselay on 20th April 1940, when African prisoners-of-war were separated from their non-African comrades and shot by the German army. After the war, the cemetery in which they were buried became a place of pilgrimage for the relatives of the African dead.

The descriptions of such events are complemented by background information which allows the incidents to be put in their historical context. There's an overview of Nazi plans for Africa demonstrating continuity with German colonial history, which the Germans drew on during the Second World War.

The Second World War and colonialism

But African countries also played an important role for France and Britain. Hundreds of thousands of men from the African colonies had already served as soldiers in the armies of the colonial powers in earlier wars. In the Second World War, they became — especially for France — a major element in the defence and later the liberation of the country.

It is therefore scarcely possible to separate the Second World War from the history of colonialism. As a global conflict, the war between the Axis powers and allies forced national independence movements to take a position, so that they often split into different tendencies over the issue.

The murder of the Egyptian prime minister by a pro-German member of the opposition shortly after his country had declared war against Germany in February 1945, is just one of the examples quoted in the book.

The Egyptian case is typical of the conflict of interests felt by independence movements. Large groups of the Egyptian population saw Nazi Germany as a potential partner in the fight against the British colonial power. The German army's advance towards the Nile under General Erwin Rommel was seen by many as the first step in liberation from British rule.

"For me Rommel stood for dictatorship"

This enthusiasm was not shared by everyone. Even during the war years Egyptian intellectuals remained true to the liberal and democratic traditions which had become rooted in the country's literature and press since the 1920s. Many of them took a firm stand against National Socialist ideology.

The Egyptian writer Edwar Al-Charrat, who was then sixteen years old, tells the authors of this book: "I was politically and intellectually mature enough," he says, "to know that it was one thing to support the liberation and independence of our country, and an entirely different thing to welcome another occupying power. . . . For me, Rommel stood for dictatorship, tyranny and a racist view of the world, especially towards the people of the Third World."

Such interviews make it powerfully clear in the book how far the battles of the Second World War were seen by the population of the colonies — then as now — as part of the history of colonialism.

The Algerian war of independence against France from 1954 to 1962, like the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam in the fifties and sixties can only be understood in the context of the disappointment felt by the independence movements in those regions at the end of the Second World War.

German military policy was different

But the emphasis on this aspect is also one of the weaknesses of this book. The war was started by Germany in 1939 as a war of extermination against the Soviet Union and as a precondition for the so-called "final solution of the Jewish question" though the Holocaust. That made it different from all previous wars which had been fought either in Europe or in the colonies.

It is indeed correct not to restrict treatment of the Second World War to the period from 1st September 1939 to the 8th May 1945, but it is also necessary to note the special characteristics of German military policy compared with the colonial policy of the allies during the Second World War. It was precisely National Socialism which confronted the inhabitants of the colonies with the stark choice: collaboration with the Axis powers or support of the Allies.

In the end, it's the context of European colonial history which makes the eye-witness reports of civilians and ex-servicemen from the colonies who supported the Allies especially rewarding.

Goetz Nordbruch

© Qantara.de 2005

Translation from German by Michael Lawton

Qantara.de

Muslim Cemetery in Bobigny
A Place to Remember the Immigration
Using a Muslim cemetery near Paris as an example, journalist Marie-Ange d'Adler has written a book examining France's contradictory attitude toward Muslims. Götz Nordbruch reports

European Islam
Muslims in Europe between the Two World Wars
The controversial debate about possible methods of "Europeanising Islam" is not new; it already raged in several European countries in the 1920s. This was just one of many issues raised at the recent "Islam in Europe between the two world wars" workshop in Paris. Götz Nordbruch was there.