On April 6, 1920 the French government, in reprisal for the entry of German troops into the demilitarized zone of the Ruhr, occupied Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Hanau, and Homburg. During the occupation French Moroccan soldiers fired on a German mob in Frankfurt and killed several. In covering the event the Daily Herald, alone among English newspapers, called special attention to the “race” of the French troops. It headlined:

FRANKFURT RUNS WITH BLOOD

FRENCH BLACK TROOPS USE

MACHINE GUNS ON CIVILIANS

On April 10, the Herald followed its accounts of events on the Rhine by a front page article by Edmund Dene Morel under banner leads:

BLACK SCOURGE IN EUROPE

SEXUAL HORROR LET LOOSE BY FRANCE ON RHINE DISAPPEARANCE OF YOUNG GERMAN GIRLS

France, Morel wrote, “is thrusting her black savages …into the heart of Germany.” There “primitive African barbarians”, carriers of syphilis, have become a “terror and a horror” to the Palatinate countryside. The “barely restrainable beastiality of the black troops” has led to many rapes, an especially serious problem since Africans are “the most developed sexually of any” race and “for well-known physiological reasons, the raping of a white woman by a negro is nearly always accompanied by serious injury and not infrequently has fatal results.…” Morel had reports of rapes, “some of them of an atrocious character”, and of “dead bodies of young women discovered under manure heaps and so on”. German municipalities were forced to provide bordellos and white women, and even young boys, for these over-sexed blacks. Master-minding this effort to “ruin, enslave, degrade, dismember [and] reduce to the lowest depths of despair and humiliation a whole people” was a “ruthless” and militaristic French government. Furthermore Morel warned his working class readers, “If the manhood of these races, not so advanced in the forms of civilisation as ourselves, are to be used against the Germans, why not against the workers here or elsewhere?”

Die Forschungen zur Geschichte des Kommunistenbundes befinden sich immer noch in der Phase der Materialerschließung. Es konnte in jüngster Zeit nicht zuletzt deshalb zu Kontroversen über die historische Bedeutung dieses Geheimbundes im Rahmen der deutschen Arbeiter-bewegung kommen, weil ein sehr beträchtlicher Teil des erhaltenen Materials der Forschung bisher teils nicht bekannt teils nicht zugänglich war. In Anbetracht dieses unbefriedigenden Zustandes ist zu begrüßen, daß die Institute für Marxismus-Leninismus in Moskau und Berlin die Edition der ihnen verfügbaren Dokumente zur Geschichte des Bundes der Kommunisten angekündigt haben. Unabhängig davon, aber in Abstimmung mit dem Vorhaben der Moskauer und Berliner Historiker, betreibt das Amsterdamer Internationale Institut für Sozialgeschichte die Veröffentlichung des restlichen Materials, das sich noch über den Kommunistenbund in seinem Besitz befindet. Im Zusammenhang damit werden hier drei Dokumente zur Geschichte des Bundes der Kommunisten im Sommer 1850 vorgelegt.

The keelmen, who transferred coal in keels or barges from the river banks to the waiting colliers at the ports of the north-eastern coalfield, had a history of industrial unrest during the eighteenth century, particularly on Tyneside. So early as 1671 there is an entry in Gateshead parish books which reads: “Paide for powder and match when the keelemen mutinyed 2s.”, and five strikes occurred between 1738 and 1771. As a relatively powerful economic group, which, in the absence of any other method of transporting the coal from the inland pits to the colliers bound chiefly for London, could almost put a stop to the coal trade, the keelmen were often successful in obtaining consent to their demands, especially in the field of wages, where they were well-paid as compared with other labouring groups. In spite of this they had a continuing grievance, with regard to the overloading of the keels, which it was difficult to satisfy, even although an Act of Parliament, passed in 1787, to establish a permanent fund for the support of sick and aged keelmen, had contained the following:

“…. in order that the keels used on the River Tyne may be fairly and justly loaded, after the due and accustomed rate of eight chaldrons to each keel, be it enacted …. that no person or persons shall …. be capable of acting as an offputter or offputters at any coal staith upon the said river, until he or they respectively shall have taken and subscribed an oath ….”

When war came to Europe in August 1914, several thousand Russians were caught by surprise in Switzerland, and their number increased with the influx of refugees from Austria and Germany. Cut off from their homeland and temporarily unable to exchange their money, they faced great hardship. Self-help societies sprang up everywhere; some groups experimented with organizing cheap or free kitchens. Swiss newspapers continually carried notices of benefit concerts or literary evenings. The Russian mission in Bern offered assistance, and the degree of cooperation which briefly sprang up between Russian émigré organizations and the Russian legation was subsequently to prove an embarrassment for both sides.