The use of colonial troops by the British and French during the First World War had excited a certain amount of unfavourable comment in Germany; but it was their presence on German territory itself, first of all in the occupied part of the Rhineland, then in 1923 during the brief French march into the Ruhr, that really opened the floodgates for lurid racist propaganda. Many Germans living in the Rhineland and the Saar felt humiliated that, as one of them later put it, ‘Siamese, Senegalese and Arabs made themselves the masters of our homeland’.60 Soon, cartoonists were arousing racist and
...more
