In July 1940, after the defeat of the French Republic, about one hundred thousand individuals “whose origins were in Africa and other French colonies” (26) were captured by the German Wehrmacht. Between two and three thousand of these colonial prisoners were kept in custody in Germany, while the majority remained in France. Five years later, at the end of World War II, thirty thousand were still held as captives in Frontstalags, i.e., in prisoners-of-war (POW) camps in France.

In the long forgotten archipelago of war studies on captivity, the topic of colonial prisoners could be viewed as a “lost island,” one which emerged just a decade ago in the fields of World War II and colonial studies. Thanks to the author's remarkable command of archival and secondary sources in French, German, and English, Raphael Scheck's study forms an important part of this renewed interest. It proposes a history of captivity at the crossroads between diplomatic and military perspectives, local and European scales. Scheck's work considers divergences between mass, prisoner-based management, which tended to erase the diverse backgrounds of, and internal diversity among, colonial prisoners. At the same time, he examines differences between Europeans’ perceptions of colonials as short-term “guests” on European soil and the prolonged presence of the latter in mainland France.

The book seeks to determine which French colonial soldiers were held as prisoners and what kind of “captivity regime” they experienced. Following Scheck's milestone study on the specific violence to which colonial soldiers were subjected after their capture by German soldiers (Hitler's African Victims [2006]), this work observes a shift in German attitudes toward French colonial combatants, whose treatment after the end of the campaign of 1940 conformed, by and large, to the Geneva Convention of 1929 on POWs. Scheck investigates the specific experience of colonial prisoners in occupied France in comparison to European prisoners, and in particular to the French held in Oflags (camps for officers) and Stalags (camps for soldiers) in the Third Reich.

The author combines general observations with individual stories in nine chapters that follow colonial soldiers from their capture through captivity, to their situation after the war in France, and then to their repatriation to Africa. He shows that captivity quickly became an issue of power for the Vichy authorities, who linked improving living conditions for soldiers in captivity to a restoration of their own authority in France—in the hope of recovering national sovereignty. Captivity was also a critical issue for the German authorities, for whom it marked an opportune moment to distance colonial prisoners from French influences using propaganda based on the promotion of Islam. The different responses to German propaganda among the colonial prisoners were less a result of ideological adherence, Scheck argues, than pragmatic considerations, such as the hope for an earlier release. Finally, the Scapini mission—the French service responsible for the implementation of Vichy policy toward the POWs (named for Georges Scapini)—may have obtained some improvements for colonial prisoners, notably by ensuring that they received the benefit of protections offered by the Geneva Convention, but, at the same time, it undermined Vichy's own policies by aggravating distinctions in treatment between northern and western Africans.

As Scheck convincingly demonstrates in the chapter on the postwar period, the struggle for influence over colonial prisoners had lasting repercussions on their experience in captivity. It “nourished claims for equality… and a growing resentment against the French authorities” (11) on the part of prisoners who had fought alongside French soldiers on European soil, who had seen the defeat of their colonial overlords, and who had suffered under German captivity. This configuration may explain the gap between the prisoners’ perception of their situation—to whom should they attribute any improvement or degradation?—and the policies responsible for these developments. Often unaware of the advantages of being prisoners in France, rather than in Germany (this gave them closer proximity to French aid organizations, for example), colonial soldiers attributed the injustices they suffered more to French authorities than to German ones. This gap complicated the restoration of the image of France as a colonial power after the release of the prisoners.

This same tension was evident in conflicts about how to guard colonial prisoners as the war effort intensified. As German military authorities sought to deploy every available soldier in combat operations, they negotiated with the Vichy regime to use French officers to guard French colonial prisoners. Who retained ultimate authority, and who benefitted from it? Was it Vichy, which had regained its power but appeared in the eyes of the prisoners as subject to the German occupiers? Or was it the Germans, who thereby gained soldiers for the front, but ran the risk of increased flight?

Scheck shows that the colonial prisoners were not used as slave labor, as might have been expected in light of Nazi ideology. Moreover, colonial prisoners—who, unlike many French laborers in Germany, were neither released before the end of the war, nor given the opportunity to become civilian workers—lived, in fact, in a much less hostile environment than many non-colonial prisoners, as demonstrated by gestures of sympathy by the French population. Scheck thus argues that the radicalization of violence in the war did not affect the treatment of prisoners who were in German hands in France. This surprising observation deserves more attention than it is given here, however. Are there turning points that might have been common to the whole of the experience in captivity? If that were indeed the case, Scheck might have treated the examples provided here as elements that would have allowed him develop a typology of captivity as a whole.

This work invites us not to make assumptions based on the tragic episode of France's 1940 defeat. It challenges the representation of a war that could only have occurred in Western Europe based on racial Nazi ideology. The book encourages scholars to pay attention to the diversity of situations and the experiences of people at various decision-making levels. In so doing, it reassesses the Vichy regime's policy of collaboration, as well as the Nazis’ own balance between ideology and pragmatism. Finally, while total war tended to dissolve the specificity of the treatment of colonial prisoners, a consideration of the national level—and, even more so, the group level—cautions us about making easy assumptions and requires us to break down the category of colonial prisoners in order to understand the individual realities behind that term.