[4][5] In May 1940, as German troops captured territory in the Somme region, numerous French prisoners of war, including non-white soldiers from France's African colonies, fell into their hands.

[6] German soldiers, many of whom remembered the racist Black Horror on the Rhine moral panic and were angered by suffering casualties at the hands of a supposedly "inferior" race, started to carry out massacres of non-white French POWs.

[7] The high command of the German armed forces, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, had not specifically issued any order to mistreat captured colonial troops, but did nothing to stop these massacres.

[6] On 17 June, Marshal Philippe Pétain issued an announcement that he would seek an armistice with Nazi Germany, while German forces continued to rapidly overrun remaining French resistance.

The colonial POWs, consisting of Black soldiers and their white officers, were forcibly moved by German troops down an isolated road to a nearby field.

In the summer of 1940, he requested the establishment of a cemetery for the deceased soldiers, built in a West African style with red ochre.

[7] Though Marchiani was at first "faced with polite indifference", his suggestions that the cemetery's construction would show the Vichy regime's attachment to the French colonial empire eventually convinced his superiors.