The Third Reich ran tanks over Senegalese soldiers
The Third Reich ran tanks over Senegalese soldiers
Throughout the Second World War there were many executions carried out by the German Army and the SS. One of the most shocking series of executions took place in France in 1940, after the capture of a number of colonial soldiers. Near to the city of Lyon, the Senegalese colonial fighters who fought ...
Quoting Raffael Scheck’s Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940, page 39:
The [Fascists] then led eight white officers and sixty to seventy Tirailleurs Sénégalais down the road to Chères, the next village. Near a field where two tanks were parked, the officers had to lie down. Meanwhile, the [Fascists] ordered the Tirailleurs to assemble with raised hands in the field with the tanks and ordered them to start running, as if attempting to escape. The two tanks then fired their machine guns and cannons at the fleeing black soldiers while driving over the wounded and dead.59
Close to fifty Tirailleurs were murdered in what an observer described as a Dantesque “vision of horror.”60 A [Fascist] deliberately wounded the white French commander with a pistol shot, but the other officers were not hurt. In the days that followed, some surviving Tirailleurs were found in the houses of Chasselay and the surrounding fields and orchards.
[…]
Some sources claim that the tanks deliberately ran back and forth over the bodies, but witnesses closer to the events state that the tanks drove over the bodies while in pursuit of the fleeing Tirailleurs without apparent intention to crush them. For testimonies, see Archives départementales de Lyon, folders 3808 W 879 (Chasselay) and 437 W 173. The most detailed and reliable witness reports are by Marcel Requier, one of the surviving officers, and by Raymond Murard, a resident of Chasselay who helped bury the corpses the next day.
(Emphasis added.)
Similarly, the Fascists in Libya very probably ran tanks over some of the natives.