When Stewart Roddie visited Friedrichshof, he had been outraged ‘to find the place over-run by black troops’. Indeed, France’s deployment of colonial soldiers provoked a chorus of criticism – and not just from Germans. In those unashamedly racist times, many British observers saw it as a conscious attempt by France to heap yet further humiliation on Germany. Joan Fry noted the rising resentment among the Germans who had to provide extra homes for ‘the many unwanted brown babies, who cannot be put in such homes as are provided for white children’.
