The French Massacred Algerians by the Tens of Thousands in 1945
May 8th, 1945, the day of Germany’s surrender and the end of World War II in Europe, was a day of celebration in the victor nations. In the eastern Algerian town of Setif, thousands of native Algerian men, women, and children, held a parade to celebrate the victory. 200,000 Algerians had been conscripted by their French colonial overlords during WWII, and the marchers planned to lay a wreath at a monument commemorating the Algerians killed in the conflict.
The parade, whose numbers included many Algerian veterans recently returned from the front lines, angered French settlers and French police. The French feared both the march’s undertones of Algerian nationalism, and assertion of a right to equality with the French settlers. Some marchers carried placards stating “We Want Equality“, and “End the Occupation“, and others called for the release of Algerian political prisoners held by the colonial authorities. When those carrying the placards refused to get rid of them, French settlers and police opened fire on the marchers. That led to widespread rioting, followed by attacks on French settlers in the surrounding countryside in which about 100 were killed.
The head of government in Metropolitan France, General Charles De Gaulle, ordered the colonial authorities in Algeria to restore order by all means possible. The French military needed little prompting, and responded with a campaign of collective punishment that entailed the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons of war against Algerian civilians.
French battleships and cruisers opened fire on native Algerian neighborhoods in Setif and its surrounding environs. French dive bombers struck and flattened over 40 Algerian villages. French soldiers carried out a ratissage, or “raking over” of Algerian rural communities suspected of involvement in the unrest, in which thousands were shot in summary executions. French settlers went on a rampage in which they lynched Algerians seized from local jails, randomly shoot natives out of hand, tortured them to death, or doused them in fuel and set them on fire.
Humiliation routinely accompanied the repression. Algerian men were frequently rounded up and forced to kneel in front of a French flag, then made to shout “We are dogs” before being led away, never to be seen again. By the time the orgy of killing and repression finally came to an end weeks later, thousands of Algerian natives had perished. The exact numbers are unknown, but most historians put the death toll within a range of 6000 to 20,000, while some contemporary news sources put the figure as high as 45,000.
