Paris, 1956: Moroccan Soldiers, German Sovereignty and a Trip to Paris

Schrempp and Lienhart’s visit to Paris was hardly a success. They were unable to meet General Widmer or the Minister of Defence, General Billotte. Instead, they were welcomed by the assistant General, Commissaire Bertin, who, moreover, soon reneged on his earlier promise to provide written confirmation of the agreement that the German politicians thought they had reached with him. Back in Donaueschingen, Schrempp and Lienhart wrote to Commissaire Bertin expressing that they were “disillusioned” because the French officials had been unable to promise the withdrawal of Moroccan soldiers from the Black Forest. This decision, they argued, would affect Franco-German relations; Schrempp was now unsure whether he would continue to attend events at the invitation of French army officials in Donaueschingen. The city council also, in accordance with French Army officials, introduced a number of pre-emptive measures, notably a ban on local pub owners serving alcoholic beverages to Moroccan soldiers. This move reflected, at least in part, the racist and infantilising assumptions propagated by French Army officials themselves, who portrayed Moroccan soldiers as “easy to tame”, except when drunk.

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Subsequently, the mayors and Lienhart also issued a press release claiming that the French had “shown great understanding for their concerns” but had not been able to address them. In addition to the economic and ‘psychological’ consequences of the stationing of North African soldiers, they also stressed the threat to women walking alone in the streets and the impact on the reputation of the town, which they insisted, “still had a reputation to lose”. This rhetoric of security and economic damage remained a constant theme throughout the stationing of North African soldiers.

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While the impact of the trip to Paris was limited to the regional press, the arrival of the North African soldiers was widely covered by the national and even international press, including Time and Life Magazines. On a national level, the arrival of the troops in Germany and their first days in Donaueschingen were covered by Die Zeit, and the magazine Illustrierte Woche even devoted several sensational pages to the story in its late January issue. Lienhart, ever concerned about his town’s reputation, described the coverage as a “vicious press campaign”, utter “nonsense”, and very detrimental to his efforts to “calm down the local population”. While the wider attention died down after a few weeks, the local press coverage remained constant for the eight years that North African soldiers were stationed in Donaueschingen.

 

Schrempp’s and Lienhart’s trip to Paris, their previous trips to Bonn and Baden-Baden, and the tone of their reports illustrate the extent to which local officials felt entitled to complain to the French authorities and to take action against the presence of North African soldiers in the town and region in which they lived. In the months that followed, individual members of the civilian population would also make similar complaints and express them in letters to the mayors of the different towns. The arguments used by the German officials provide examples of blatant racism and, aligned with views, also present in the higher ranks of the French Army at the time.

 

The episode is significant for its wider historical context. It was only in the summer of 1955 that Germany had transitioned from occupation status to the status of a NATO ally. This determined the mayors’ attitude to the arrival of the North African troops. They framed their complaints in terms of their newly acquired sovereignty and were determined to use their agency as local actors in ways that the occupation had not allowed them to do. However, various justifications for this behaviour, influenced by racist views and a degree of cooperation on the part of the French authorities, contributed to a defiant attitude on the part of the German population and authorities. This attitude persisted for more than a decade in the Black Forest region and beyond. It drove an incessant campaign which only ended with the withdrawal of the last North African regiments in 1963.

 

The involvement of North African soldiers in the French Army on European soil – and European reactions to it – whether during the First World War, the occupations of the Rhineland and the Ruhr in the 1920s, or the Second World War, has received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades. However, their presence, experiences, and perceptions during the post-1945 occupation and the NATO deployment until the mid-1960s have been considerably less well researched. This subject deserves more detailed study as it reveals new dynamics in the context of the Cold War and decolonisation.