Raffael Scheck

A terse little monograph that puts the bad fate of numerous French colonial troops in June of 1940 into context. On one side of the equation was a mixture of bad German memories from World War I and Nazi propaganda. On the other there was the flair of the "Tirailleurs Senegalais" for hand-to-hand combat to the literal hilt of the knife in the service of a desperate defense. This generated what one might call a "normal" process of massacre, wherein the angry victors take their vengeance on the hateful "other." What Scheck doesn't find is much evidence for the institutionalization of annihilation that the German armed forces took with them into the Soviet Union; the progress by which active campaigning routinized violence in the German Army and the Waffen-SS was sufficient in this circumstance.… (meer)