Memorial tower of Nazi occupiers in France: revenge on the hereditary enemy

It was a shock to Colette Cortet. In September 1940, just a few weeks after the armistice and German invasion, the French pupil watched as the war memorial at Pommery Park was demolished in the middle of her hometown of Reims: "The Germans demolished all sorts of monuments, including the Heroes of the Black Army 'on the boulevard Henri Vasnier, "she recalled in 2016.

Reims was the coronation place of France's monarch and in 1918 a fiercely contested bastion. After the end of the First World War, the monument was erected in 1924 in honor of the black soldiers and became a central place of remembrance. Colette, then 17, regularly passed the massive bronze. She experienced the demolition and the loading with: "It was terrible, I grew up with the hero monument."

Colette and her older sister Jacqueline wanted to at least document the sacrilege of the occupiers at the memorial. "We went up the boulevard and hid," said the former archivist. "Of course it was forbidden to take pictures of the Germans, but from a distance we managed to get a picture of the drag-out of our war memorial."

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As in Reims, the Nazis deliberately destroyed war memorials and memorial stones after the invasion of France, says Cheikh Sakho. In his dissertation ("Memories in Ore and Stone"), the teacher researches the representation of the Black Army and also researches the whereabouts of the long-lost monument. It has since been reconstructed and will be inaugurated on 6th November. "The mobilizing power of a sculpture was perceived by the Germans as dangerous and subversive," explains Sakho. "Consequently, monuments of the past have been systematically eradicated."

Extinguishing the memories of the defeat of 1918

The impetus was given by Adolf Hitler himself. In June 1940 he visited occupied Paris with his favorite architect Albert Speer and Nazi sculptor Arno Breker. On order of the "leader" the museum and the memorial in Compiègne were blown up; There, in 1918, Germany had signed the capitulation in a railroad car and in 1940 Hitler dictated to the French the conditions of subjugation, in an act of humiliating revenge.

In addition, Hitler personally ordered the destruction of two World War I monuments: the Monument to War Hero General Charles Mangin and the Monument to Edith Cavell. The British nurse had helped Allied prisoners escape from occupied Brussels and had therefore been shot dead by the Germans.

Nearly 40,000 war memorials existed according to the research institute IHRiS in France; how many destroyed the occupiers, is not captured. In Strasbourg, even monuments in honor of Jeanne d'Arc or the "Marseillaise" were flattened and replaced by Nazi monuments. In July 1941, in the Breton community of Ploermel, on the eve of the national holiday, German soldiers ripped the Gallic Rooster from the local war memorial.

"The monument in Reims provoked twice," said researcher Sakho: "By the memory of the use of black elite troops, which stopped here in the summer of 1918, the German offensive 'storm of peace' And because the German advance on Paris just prevented Africans - 'Untermenschen in the jargon of Nazi propaganda. "

Hitler was pestilent about the "Pestilence by Negro blood"

In fact, the units of the colonial army were among France's elite troops. A total of 200,000 overseas troops moved into the First World War, 135,000 from Africa ("Senegal shooters") fought on the fronts in Europe. 30,000 of them lost their lives, for example in the fierce Battle of the Marne near Reims in July 1918.

They were battle-hardened soldiers who had gained experience in the front in Mauritania, Morocco or Madagascar - and still considered exotic in France. "It was not until the beginning of the fighting that the 'Negro' was no longer considered savage, but the German," said researcher Sakho, "was from then on mocked as a 'Hun'."

When the "heroes of the Black Army" were honored in 1924, colonial minister Édouard Daladier praised their "admirable resistance." The largest park of the Reims now adorned an African granite pedestal with four black soldiers and a white officer; a copy of the bronze figures was set up in the African Bamako.

On the other side of the Rhine, black and North African troops belonged to the French occupation army after the First World War. Against the "black shame" ranted nationalists in the Rhineland. "The plague of negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe," wrote Hitler in "Mein Kampf", "is just as much the sadistic-perverse vindictiveness of this chauvinistic sworn enemy of our people as the icy cold consideration of the Jews, in this way the bastardization of the European continent to start in the center. "

In 1940 Hitler ordered the dismantling of the monument of Reims after the defeat of France. Planned was the transport to Berlin, where the group of figures in the war museum should find a new place - as evidence of the superiority of military and race. In Reims it came to angry protests. In vain. Because now the matter was a matter for the boss.

"In Reims stands a memorial from which I enclose 2 photographs," Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer SS, telegraphed on 2 July 1940 from the special train "Heinrich" to Berlin. "The Fiihrer yesterday approved that the Bronce group be transferred to Germany, the base should be blown up."

Disappeared without a trace

Consequently, Max Zankl, headmaster of the Munich stonemasonry, made the dismantling. The 42 -weight group of figures would be loaded onto a French wagon and boarded "invisibly", he reported to Albert Speer on 10 September. The only problem was the height of the monument: "The riveted flagpole had to be sawn off by us," Zankl said. "There is another bayonet in my hands from the left figure."

The confirmation from Berlin, however, did not take long. For months the transport on the way to the goods station Treptow Neukölln remained untraceable. After rumors circulated in Reims that Resistance fighters had saved the monument, the entire state administrative and security apparatus was mobilized in Berlin. And searched unsuccessfully.

Lost, hidden? It remained a mystery - up to research by doctoral student Sakho in the Freiburg military archive: The bronze was not sent to Berlin, but redirected. "The monument was delivered on 22.9.1940 to the Bauhaus Call (Eifel) and was melted down on behalf of the Reichsstelle für Metals, Berlin," according to the rapport of the field police chief of the Wehrmacht. "This should have found the matter their settlement."

For Cheikh Sakho, the case was not settled. With citizens of Reims, the native Senegalese sat down to rebuild the destroyed group of figures. After many attempts, the reconstruction was launched in 2004, as a template was the copy from Mali's capital Bamako.

Now the monument has found a new place in the park of Reims. At the end of World War I commemoration, President Emmanuel Macron will inaugurate it on November 6 - for Cheikh Sakho a "long overdue tribute to the heroes of the Black Army." Eyewitness Colette Cortet can not live this anymore. She died two years ago.