Books I have read – How it really was

The Craft of Research

12 February 2013

I am coming to the end of my research and have been working on writing up my thesis, which explains why I have not posted very much here over the past few months. I hope to remedy this once the thesis is complete.

This means I have been thinking about the process of studying for a PhD. I have benefitted greatly from meeting with other students in a small ‘Reading Group’. At one of our meetings we discussed how to structure the thesis and how to turn a vague and general topic, which is what most of us start with, into a more specific set of questions, which together form a research ‘problem’, to which we propose a solution in our theses.

There are some useful books around which provide guidance on how to do this. One book I have found helpful is The Craft of Research. This provides advice on turning a broad topic into a focussed topic, a focussed topic into a set of research questions and a set of research questions into a research problem.

Wayne C. Booth, Gregry G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, The Craft of Research (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2008) Third edition

Some French theorists call this problematizing your topic, which is not the sort of thing we British normally do, but the authors of this book make it all seem quite simple. If you are working on a history, humanities or social science PhD, I would recommend you buy a copy, or borrow it from your library, and read it. The following is taken from my notes on the relevant chapters. (Any errors, omissions and misunderstandings are therefore mine, and not the fault of the book or the authors).

1) From a broad topic to a focused topic

A topic is probably too broad if you can state it in four or five words. Topics can be narrowed by adding words – nouns derived from verbs expressing actions or relationships – in particular conflict, description, contribution, development. This makes the topic dynamic rather than static.

2) From a focused topic to research questions

The key point here is to think about:

– What you are writing about – I am working on the topic of …
– What you don’t know about it – because I want to find out …
– Why you want your reader to know and care about it – in order to help my reader understand …

This can be simplified to:
Topic: I am studying …
Question: because I want to find out what / why / how …
Significance: to help my reader understand …

3) From research questions to a research problem

A conceptual problem simply means not knowing or not understanding something.

The significance or importance of a conceptual problem lies in its consequence. Because we don’t understand one thing, this means that we don’t fully understand something else of greater significance.

This aims to answer the ‘So what’ problem.

Topic: I am studying …
    Question: because I want to find out what / why / how …
        Significance: to help my readers understand …
            Consequence: so that …

I have found this very helpful in my own research, trying to make sense of the mass of data I have accumulated and thinking about how to structure it all in the final thesis.

Here is my own version:

I am studying:
– The contribution made by twelve important and influential individuals to the development and implementation of British policy in occupied Germany, in the first three years after the end of the Second World War.

Because I want to find out:
– What these twelve individuals aimed to achieve, and why and how this changed over time.
– Why British policy apparently changed from unconditional surrender, strict controls enforced by a long occupation and non-fraternisation with the German people, to physical and economic reconstruction, political renewal and personal reconciliation.

To help my readers understand:
– The reasons for some of the apparent contradictions in British policy.
– How and why British policy in occupied Germany changed very soon after the end of the war.
– How and why British attitudes towards their former enemy changed in the transition from war to peace.
– How individuals implemented, modified and interpreted official policies.
– The successes and failures of the British in occupied Germany. How can you judge success or failure without understanding the original intention(s)?

So that my readers understand better:
– The British contribution to the development of post-war Germany.
– The origins of the Cold War, in particular how former enemies became allies and vice versa.
– Some of the ways in which British people engaged with the rest of the world, through the British Empire and as a great power in Europe, what motivated them and what they were trying to achieve.
– What happens in the aftermath of war, some of the problems faced by victors when they occupy the country of their defeated enemy, and how to plan better for occupation of a defeated country, after winning the war.

“We pour petrol on them”

21 July 2011

Every now and then, in my research, I find something surprising and shocking.

I’ve recently read a book first published in 1925, by Katharine Tynan on Life in the Occupied Area. I wanted to know if her view of life in the occupied parts of Germany after the First World War was similar to those given in other contemporary accounts, such Eric Gedye’s The Revolver Republic, and Violet Markham’s A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine. It was and it wasn’t.

Katharine Tynan was an Anglo-Irish writer, a prolific novelist and friend of the poet, W B Yeats. She was born in 1861 and wrote over 100 novels before she died in 1931. In 1922 she and her 21-year old daughter went to live for a little over a year in Cologne, which was then occupied by the British. She didn’t explain why she did so, but her son, Pat, had been one of the first British troops who 'made the trek' into Germany after the Armistice in November 1918 and we can assume she wanted to be near him. In any case, it seems she went as a civilian, not officially as part of the occupation.

She loved her time in Cologne, writing about the flowers in the parks and gardens and how religious the people were…

'You may walk in beauty and have beauty as far as any reasonable eye will wish to see, and if you must look beyond, why, the church-towers of Cologne dominate all the chimneys.'

Only once in Italy did she 'get the same sense of religion' as she did in Cologne.

She described how beautiful and well-behaved the children were…

'Looking at those children could one wish one of them away? They are beautiful children – as beautiful as those St. Augustine saw in the market-place, and always beautifully clean and well-kept…'

In the parks where they played: 'these children look and never touch. Yet they are not automata … They are as fearless as sparrows.'

Her first excursion away from the city to the surrounding countryside was like a trip to fairyland…

'It was an exquisite day. As we went home under the green aisles, [the trees along the roadside] by the sleeping villages, the long line of white posts marking the road brilliant in the head-lights, it was too fine for anything but Fairyland.'

She was surprised above all by the friendliness of the German people, which she found 'strikes you at first as unnatural.'

'We had come to Germany, as most people of the Allied countries must come with an expectation of enmity, open or concealed … The enmity was strangely, inexplicably absent, although we still felt that it must be there and kept saying to each other, as had been often said to us since: "You know they must hate us."'

'At first we certainly thought the friendliness too good to be true, but one got over that. A thousand kindnesses could not be prompted by policy – not the children who brought their puppies in the streets for us to handle and fondle; not the women who stood to smile at us; not the people who laughed at your ignorance of German, so that you were at least as must exhilarated as they.'

Her experience of meeting and talking to other British people in Cologne, especially the wives of officers in the occupation, made her realise that her views were not shared by all. She attributed this to two things she believed she shared with the Rhinelanders: her Catholic faith and her 'Irish temperament':

'I can believe that few of the British Occupation or the civilians of Cologne got so near the people as we did. It is the kneeling at the same altar that makes all the difference, to say nothing of the fact that there is a certain likeness in temperament between the Irish and the Rhinelander.'

None of this surprised or shocked me. The passage that did came in her description of a summer holiday at a seaside resort on the Baltic coast.

They met an American lady married to a German, with a delightful little boy who was 'fuller of the joy of life than any child I had seen up to then.'

The lady was very kind and helpful and she discussed with her how surprisingly friendly she found the Germans. The American lady replied that: 'The Germans have no hate in their hearts. They are not a hating people.'

But there was one thing the American lady was angry about: 'the use of coloured troops in the French Occupation.'

The Germans, Katharine Tynan wrote: 'regarded their presence as something intolerable and unforgivable, and no wonder,' although she personally had no objection, explaining that the French had 100,000 troops as against 8,000 British. Some were Senegalese from Africa but 'oftener the brown-skinned Algerians or Moors, very picturesque, with beautiful colouring… They are, of course, not a negroid type, but very handsome with fine features.'

Her 'American lady' she wrote, was 'very excited about the dark troops', and here is the passage that really did shock and surprise me: what she reported the American lady said next:

'"It is not Christian," she said vehemently, "It is not Christian. I’ll tell you what we do with the blacks in our country. We pour petrol on them and set them afire."'

I suppose I should have known that racial prejudice was very widespread in the 1920s, not only in Germany, but in the US, Britain and Ireland, even amongst otherwise kindly, sympathetic and well-meaning ladies, such as Katherine Tynan and her American friend. But wasn’t this murder she was talking about?

References

Katharine Tynan, Life in the Occupied Area (London: Hutchinson, 1925)

The Politics of Military Occupation

4 July 2011

As a student researching British people in occupied Germany after the Second World War, I was intrigued to read a recent book by Peter Stirk on The Politics of Military Occupation. In this, he proposed the following definition of military occupation as:

“A form of government imposed by force or threat thereof that establishes a type of mutual obligation between the occupier and the occupied, but without bringing about any change in allegiance.”

If we accept this definition, (which seems reasonable to me), this implies that occupation is the de facto rule of the inhabitants of one country, by people appointed and controlled by the government(s) of another country or countries, by the use of force if necessary, usually, but not exclusively, as a result of the invasion, capture and occupation of territory in war.

– It therefore represents the conscious denial of self-government to the inhabitants of the defeated country, on a temporary basis. (There may, of course, be good reasons for this, such as self-defence while the war is in progress, or the need to avoid chaos and anarchy).

– It combines alien rule with military dictatorship and rule by force.

– Though established and maintained by force, there is still an obligation on the occupier to protect the community, arising from the responsibility that goes with assumption of the authority to govern, and a corresponding obligation on the occupied to obey, or at least not frustrate the authority of the occupier. These mutual obligations may often be violated in practice, on both sides, but this does not mean they should not be accepted as the normal standard of behaviour.

Occupation is often presumed to be inherently disreputable; an unstable and illegitimate form of government, unlike two other outcomes of war: a) conquest and annexation of territory formerly held by the defeated government or b) liberation from the rule of an oppressive regime and the restoration of self-government. Occupiers may try to describe themselves as something else – conquerors, liberators or allies – to avoid the charge of alien rule or military dictatorship.

Occupations are often described from the point of view of the occupied, as a period of oppression before liberation and the restoration of a legitimate government – for example Belgium under German occupation during the First World War.

On the other hand, where occupation was followed by a successful annexation, the period of occupation tends to be forgotten, subsumed in the subsequent history of the territory as an integral part of the victorious country – such as the conquest and annexation of California and New Mexico by the USA, following the Mexican-American war of 1846-8.

In some cases, occupation represents the period between the cessation of hostilities, the end of active conflict, and the signing of a peace treaty. However, military occupation of all or part of a country can also continue after a peace treaty is signed, such as the occupation of the Rhineland, after the First World War.

Occupation can also be followed by self-determination and independence. In these cases it comprises a continuum, not a fixed status. For example the degree of control exercised by the occupying power could range from absolute control of all aspects of government, to reserved powers agreed by treaty and enforced by a military presence stationed in a small number of bases – such as the occupation of Germany by the Allies after the Second World War.

In these circumstances, it seems to me that occupation can perhaps be best understood by a comparison with Empire, thinking of the occupied territory as a ‘temporary colony’, administered by the occupier (the imperial power) on behalf of the local inhabitants and expected in due course, by both occupiers and occupied, to acquire full independence as a separate country. That, of course, is a fairly positive way of seeing it. It could also be viewed in more negative terms as a ‘temporary colony’ controlled and exploited by the occupier for political, economic or strategic reasons.

Occupation is essentially temporary, though it may be prolonged over several decades. It assumes the continued existence of a country, (as a defined area of land), even if that country has no government, the government is not able to enforce its rule in the occupied territories, or the juridical authority of the government is limited to less than would be considered full independence.

Although occupation may appear harsh, the idea was originally designed to limit the arbitrary conquest and annexation of territory following victory and defeat in war, creating a distinction between temporary occupation, and the permanent assertion of authority over a conquered territory, legitimised by a peace treaty.

There have been many occasions when countries, such as France, Belgium, the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan, have both been occupied and have acted as occupiers themselves. This makes it interesting to study attempts to create a set of principles which apply generally to military occupation, and which are fair to both occupiers and occupied. One such set of principles was embodied in international law in the Hague Conventions of 1907, which remain in force today. The relevant section is headed “Military authority over the territory of the hostile state’. It defines occupation as “the authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant,” and specifies some principles which limit the absolute power of the occupying authority. See articles 42-56 of the Convention.

Where does my own subject of research, the British Occupation of Germany after the Second World War, fit within a generalised understanding of Military Occupation?

Germany was not treated by the Allies as a liberated country (unlike Austria), and they had no intention of restoring the Weimar Republic as it had been prior to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The British and US had no intention of annexing any part of the country (unlike the Soviet Union and arguably the French), but they did intend to control its future political and economic development, though for how long they could continue to do this, and by what means, were not clear. The declaration of assumption of supreme power by the Allied Commanders at the end of the war included the assertion that the Hague Convention did not apply and they did not consider they were bound by them. The occupation was therefore a fairly rare example of one that was clearly not perceived as liberation and restoration of the previous order, though it was expected to be followed by self-determination and independence, subject to approval of the Allies. Nowadays we would probably call this ‘regime change’. From a British perspective, it seems a good example of occupation as a ‘temporary colony’, that would eventually be allowed independence, in line with British imperial ideas at the time. Remarkably, although at first it was expected that the occupation would last twenty years or more, it all happened very quickly, with an independent West German government created and approved by the Western Allies in 1949, though still subject to the restrictions of an Occupation Statute.

According to Peter Stirk: “Military occupiers have been consistently inadequately prepared for military government, even on those occasions where they have recognised the problem in advance and made great efforts to prepare for it, such as the Allied occupation of Germany and Japan at the end of the Second World War.”

Too often, he continued, occupation has been subject to improvisation. Occupiers have been surprised at the enormity of the task, perceiving its extent as “unprecedented” and complaining about lack of resources and inadequate personnel. This certainly matches my understanding of the British in post-war Germany.

Military occupations in the aftermath of war do occur, and however difficult, there is a good case that a properly organised and regulated occupation is better than the alternatives: unnecessary conquest and annexation that might cause resentment many years into the future, the application of brute force to maintain control or enforce specific policies against the wishes of the inhabitants, or simply walking away after military intervention and doing nothing. All three options were considered suitable, by some people, for post-war Germany, but fortunately never taken further.

The dilemma for the occupier, of course, is that they may still feel threatened by the country they defeated in war, invaded and occupied, or they may dislike or disapprove of the conduct of the government there (perhaps with good reason), but fighting a war does not lead directly to the creation of a new and better government. If the country has been invaded, victory leads to military occupation, with a whole new set of problems and challenges. Peter Stirk defined Military Occupation as a form of government, which seems correct to me, but it is one that contains the seeds of its own destruction, as the purpose of the occupation must be to make itself redundant and hand over control either to the previous government or to a new, legitimate authority. Successful occupations are those that achieve this reasonably quickly. Unsuccessful occupations are those that last longest.

References

Peter Stirk, The Politics of Military Occupation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009)

Eric Gedye – The Revolver Republic

14 December 2010

I’ve come to realise that memories of the First World War and its aftermath were an important factor in understanding British policy and actions in occupied Germany after the Second World War. I wrote about this last year in a post on The Watch on the Rhine: the British Occupation of the Rhineland after World War One.

According to his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, Eric Gedye was ‘the greatest British foreign correspondent of the inter-war years’. His book The Revolver Republic, first published in 1930, is probably the best contemporary British account of the Occupation of the Rhineland. Gedye fought in the First World War and was part of the British army advance guard that occupied Cologne after the Armistice in November 1918. After the Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919, he was a member of staff on the joint Allied Rhineland High Commission, but left in 1922. According to his friend and colleague, Vaughan Berry, he married a German woman and as a result was forced to resign and lost his job. He stayed in Germany making a precarious living as a freelance journalist, but when the French invaded the Ruhr in 1923, he was appointed Special Correspondent for The Times.

His dispatches were widely read in Britain and his criticism of French policy and tactics, in encouraging and supporting separatists attempting to establish an independent Rhineland state, probably influenced British government policy, which became increasingly critical of French support for the Rhineland separatists. In the book, he quoted a report in the Guardian newspaper in 1926 that he was leaving The Times to join the Daily Express: ‘it is little exaggeration to credit this journalist [ie Gedye] with quite a large share in the defeat of M. Poincare’s [the French Prime Minister’s] grandiose and imperialist plan.’ Gedye added that it was pleasant to find that his work ‘had contributed in some measure, however slight, to cause the disappointment of those French aspirations to German territory which, had they been successful, must inevitably have led to a repetition of the horrors of 1914-18.’

This comment highlights his view, shared by many other British people in Germany at the time, that the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles and thinly disguised attempts by the French to annex more territory and advance their border to the Rhine, rather than improving security and deterring aggression, could only provoke a desire for revenge and lead to another war.

The title of the book, The Revolver Republic referred to the various desperadoes (as he described them), armed and financed by the French, who tried to seize power and gain control of town halls and municipal buildings in the Rhineland, in a number of attempted Putsches (or coups). According to Gedye:

‘The real “Separatist” movement, headed by a few fools and many gaolbirds, and supported by hired renegades, which, with its “Revolver Republic” as loyal Germans christened the “State” it pretended to establish, was later to drench Rhineland in blood in times of peace, was from start to finish a creation of the French, organized and paid for by their secret service and chauvinist organizations.’

The great mistake made by the Allies, in his view, was not to give more support to the moderate German Social Democratic government, which came to power at the end of the war, after the Kaiser abdicated and German sailors and soldiers mutinied, creating revolutionary conditions in many parts of the country. By imposing harsh conditions in the Treaty of Versailles, supporting separatist movements in the Rhineland and taking advantage of their superior military power in the occupied areas to rule by force, rather than in strict accordance with the law, the Allies fatally weakened the moderate Social Democratic government, set the example of rule by force and paved the way for a revival of nationalism which was to lead to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. According to Gedye:

‘Fascism, Hitlerism, dreamers of revanche and of a new-born militarism – those are the plants which the Allies nurtured in German soil. Democracy, pacifism, international understanding – those are the plants, which springing up after the Revolution, found themselves faced with the withering lack of sympathy and encouragement from the victorious Allies, who had it in their power for several vital years to encourage their growth by moderation and understanding….’

‘All the world knows to-day that British and American statesmanship at Paris [during the negotiations which led to the Treaty of Versailles] tried to stand out for more reasonable treatment for Germany, but was out-manoeuvred by the implacable determination of France to be revenged on her enemy and to push the disruption of the German State to the extreme limit….’

‘Month after month we watched the spontaneous efforts of the German people … to secure and consolidate the ground which had been won for democracy being foiled by Allied severity and distrust.’

Despite (perhaps because of) his pro-German and anti-French views at the time, Eric Gedye was no advocate of appeasement or the re-militarisation of Germany. In 1925 he left Germany to take up a position as Central European correspondent, based in Vienna, where he remained until 1938, working first for The Times, then for the Daily Express, and after 1929 for the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times. Fallen Bastions, another, later, book he wrote about his experiences leading up to the fall of Austria and Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, was a searing indictment of Nazi brutality and the failure of the British government to take a stand and confront Hitler head on. Here is a brief extract of what he wrote then, from a vivid description of the persecution of Jews by the Nazis in Vienna:

‘Mine [his apartment in Vienna] proved a good centre, too, for watching the favourite amusement of the Nazi mobs during many long weeks of forcing Jewish men and women to go down on hands and knees and scrub the pavements with acid preparations which bit into the skin, obliging them to go straight to hospital for treatment.’

In his view, the British government shared responsibility for and was complicit in permitting Nazi brutality, after agreeing to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. He wrote, in an article for a British audience:

‘The whole horrible drama [which he saw and described in Austria] is to-day being re-acted in the Sudeten areas. This time you must not blame Hitler so much. He has three colleagues. The immediate cause of the new horrors is that document signed at Munich on September 30th bearing the signatures of Chamberlain and Daladier as well as of Hitler and Mussolini which says:- “Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany have agreed on the following conditions and procedure and declare themselves individually responsible for their fulfilment.” Plunder, murder, insult, torture, concentration camps, ruined existences, head-hunting, refusal of asylum by the Czechs and brutal handing over of refugees to the Nazis – “individually responsible” are these four Powers, excluding Czechoslovakia but including Britain. Does that disturb your sleep?’

Some Nazis regarded him favourably during his time in Austria, without understanding his real views, (which were always to support the underdog and oppose extremism and violence), because (to quote him writing in Fallen Bastions), ‘in a book written some years before [ie The Revolver Republic], I had tried to arouse public opinion to the criminal follies of Poincaré-imperialism during the occupation of the Ruhr and the attempted establishment of a dummy separatist republic in the Rhineland.…. Apparently my Nazi admirers overlooked one little sentence in my book, written in 1929 to 1930, in which I warned against the dangers of a policy which was “causing a desperate nation to raise an obscure fanatic like Adolf Hitler to the threshold of a Fascist dictatorship under the device of ‘force to meet force’”. Evidently also my dossier did not contain a signed article which I wrote in the Contemporary Review soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. In it I compared the attitude of France and Britain towards the defeated democratic German republic after the war to that of two men, one of whom throughout a sultry summer day stones and torments a helpless dog on the chain, while the other occasionally says deprecatingly, “I don’t think you ought to be so cruel – and also unwise”, although doing nothing to interfere. I added, that when the wretched animal finally went mad under torment and broke its chains, that was not the moment for the inactive onlooker to run forward and try to pet and conciliate the mad dog with gifts. Whatever the dog’s innocence and the fault of its tormentor, there was only one thing to be done to the dog, once it had gone mad.’

The British learnt two different, contradictory lessons from their experience in Germany between the First and Second World War. The Rhineland occupation had failed twice in its supposed aim of preventing another war: it had been both too harsh, and too soft. The occupation had not been strict enough to enforce disarmament and prevent renewed aggression, but the withdrawal of all troops in 1930 had completely failed to promote reconciliation.

References:

G. E. R. Gedye, The Revolver Republic: France’s Bid for the Rhine (London: J. W. Arrowsmith Limited, 1930)

G. E. R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions: The Central European Tragedy (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1939)

Hugh Greene, ‘Gedye, (George) Eric Rowe (1890–1970)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Michael Howard – Otherwise Occupied

19th October 2010

I first heard from Michael Howard in October 2008, when he emailed me to say he was personally ‘an alumnus of Nachkriegsdeutschland '46/7’ and asked if I would send him a copy of my MA dissertation on ‘Winning the Peace’. He thought it would be of interest to his U3A (University of the Third Age) group, which was studying the ‘Aftermath of Conflict’ in various times and places.

I was very happy to do so, and since then he has been kind enough to share with me some memories of the time he spent in Germany in 1946-47, as Intelligence Officer for T-Force, the secret British army unit first set up in 1944 to investigate and secure research laboratories and factories by-passed by the front-line troops as they advanced into Germany and which later ‘evacuated’ to Britain a large quantity of equipment, machinery, documents and key individuals and scientists.

Michael Howard has now published his memoirs of this time as Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany. Remarkably, the 67 letters he wrote home between February 1946 and December 1947 were kept by his mother and these letters, reprinted word for word, provide the chronological framework for the book, with the author commenting, explaining and elucidating various points in the letters to provide the context, or to highlight aspects that now appear important or amusing.

As a result, the book has the authenticity of a contemporary record, (he was only 19 years old when he was first posted to Germany), while the commentary helps the story flow and makes it easy to read, explaining the background to events and who were the various people mentioned in the letters.

The book tells two stories, both equally fascinating. The first is his contribution to the history of T-Force, one of the very few aspects of the Second World War which is still largely neglected by historians. At first, as he wrote to his mother, he was pleased to be given a job that was not a ‘liability to the taxpayer’ and the consequences of which had ‘a considerable and direct bearing on our economic recovery'. By the time he left Germany, his work had become his hobby and he carried on ‘evacuating’ material, as his personal contribution to British economic recovery, in the face of increasing resistance from senior officers and administrators, as the world changed around him and the official British policy was to help promote economic recovery in Germany, rather than extracting what they could in the way of reparations.

The second is a love-story, which ended in neither consummation nor tragedy, of his romance with the daughter of the local doctor, whose house had been requisitioned as accommodation for British officers. The doctor and his family were evicted from the house but were allowed to keep the use of his consulting room and the garden. As his relationship with the doctor’s daughter developed he found, as he wrote to his mother, that ‘to sit in the [officers’] mess evening after evening, discussing the three inch mortar, or the war strength of the armoured division, or re-fighting this or that battle, is infinitely tedious. I would rather spend my time talking to a pleasant and intelligent German than a stupid and uncongenial Englishman.’ It is an unusual love-story, because the power of social conventions, on both sides, persuaded them to control their passions and go their separate ways, she to train as a doctor and he to take up his university place at Cambridge. Since then they have stayed in touch, as friends, for over sixty years.

References

Michael Howard, Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany, (Tiverton: Old Street Publishing, 2010)

The book is published by Old Street Publishing. Copies are available and can be bought from Amazon and other web booksellers.

Harold Ingrams – Seven across the Sahara

23rd August 2010

After leaving Germany in August 1946, Harold Ingrams was appointed Chief Commissioner of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, now part of Ghana. Rather than take the more usual route by sea or air, he decided to travel by land.

I’ve been reading his account of the journey in his book Seven across the Sahara. The ‘seven’ were Ingrams himself, together with his wife Doreen, their two young daughters, one adopted and one their own, a Scottish governess for the children, his former personal assistant and secretary in Germany, and an Arabian servant who had been with the family for five years. They travelled in a Ford WOA2 military staff car, which with a V8 engine had enough power to see them through the soft sand, though they did become stuck (or ensablé as he called it) on numerous occasions and had to dig themselves out.

At the time they travelled, the land they passed through, nearly 4,000 miles from Calais to Marseilles and from Algiers across the Sahara to the border with the Gold Coast, was under French administration, as Algeria and the other French West African territories had not yet become independent. Ingrams was full of admiration for the work done by the French colonial administrators and wrote of the need for close collaboration between the French and British empires in Africa.

Although it was undoubtedly an adventure, it seems the journey was not as unusual as I thought. Before leaving, he consulted the AA (Automobile Association) and Royal Geographical Society, who showed him some maps and ‘books of motorists’ experiences across the Sahara’. The Shell oil company ensured petrol was available at strategic points on the journey, as did the French organisation S.A.T.T. (Société Africaine des Transports Tropicaux), which also arranged to service the car at stations along the route and provided spare parts, including tyres, which were in short supply in post-war Europe.

On the way they met a number of English emigrants trekking overland to South Africa, who had chosen this route because there was a waiting list of one or two years for passages by sea or air. The French colonial authorities estimated that in a year several thousand English people attempted to cross the Sahara. Many were ill prepared; some broke down on the way and never made it to South Africa.

Ingrams described one family, comprising a ‘father, mother, daughter and two small boys’. Their daughter had been the ‘inspiration in making the journey. At school she had formed pen friends with children in South Africa. With these as their only contacts and tired of the promises and prospects of post-war England, they had, like all the other trekkers on the route, set out on the great journey over desert, through forests and mountains to South Africa to start a new life…. most trekkers left England because they could not settle down after the war. Many had seen South Africa and thought there was no place like it.’

My own purpose in reading the book, was to look for evidence which would help me understand the colonial mentality of some of the British soldiers and administrators in post-war Germany.

Although his views may seem strange and old-fashioned nowadays, Ingrams saw himself as a modern, progressive imperialist, writing, for example that:

‘The days of colonization by force, exploitation and the imposition of an alien civilization by those who “knew what was best for the native” were over. Even the much more noble conception of trusteeship was coming to an end, and the much fuller relationship of partnership was beginning.’

In his view, benevolent rule by the imperial power would be rewarded by creating ‘bonds of friendship’ which would outlast the formal empire, as colonies were granted self-government within a British Commonwealth of Nations. He wrote of his ‘ten happy years of experience in South Arabia… There we helped men of goodwill to make peace where for a millennium there had been war, and there we helped them to set up their own ordered government.’

‘There we learnt that any self-respecting race wants to manage its own affairs, and that it is unnatural, nay wrong, for one race to be dominated by another. We learnt too that the race which in some ways may have learnt more than another will, if it casts its bread upon the waters, receive in back in such measure that the bonds of friendship so forged will be stronger than any between a conquering nation and subject peoples.’

(This optimistic view was not borne out by subsequent events in Southern Arabia, where the British were defeated militarily and withdrew in 1967, after an anti-colonial uprising known as the Aden Emergency).

Reading Seven across the Sahara, I came to realise that Ingrams’ view of empire was permeated by the spirit of what I have called ‘missionary idealism’ (see my earlier post on How three British army officers reacted to the transition from war to peace in Germany, 1945). In summary, it seemed to me, he saw his role, and that of his fellow colonial administrators, in Germany, Arabia or Africa, as to bring to the ignorant or misguided people in these countries the benefits of British experience and traditions, and convert them, to the greatest extent possible, to the British way of life. This included their religion, their spiritual and moral values, their democracy and their material prosperity.

As Ingrams wrote, when the Roman emperor Julius Caesar and Christian missionary St Augustine first landed in Britain: ‘They came to England as we now go to Africa and Asia and brought the civilization of Rome and Christian faith to these lands. We were then in much the same state as those to whom for the last hundred years or so we have taken the civilization we have built on our own institutions and what they and others brought us.’

However, it was not quite that simple. Harold Ingrams was the son of a clergyman and religion was fundamental to his outlook on life. As he wrote in the preface to the book:

‘Living amongst men and women of many different faiths has persuaded me how fundamentally religion is necessary as a background to life, and made me wonder whether, owing to the difficulties, we have not rather funked tackling the matter in our approach.’

On the other hand, his experience of the deserts of Arabia had taught him that there was no monopoly of religious truth. ‘Doreen and I had so identified ourselves with the Hadhramaut and its people’ he wrote, ‘that we felt that their country was our country, and their people our people’.

‘I have found among Muslims more sense of the abiding presence of God than anywhere else, and that I believe is largely because the wideness of the desert and its utter lack of complication portrays the spiritual, all enveloping, all seeing and all mighty nature of God more faithfully than anything else. There is – almost – nothing there but God and nothing to detract the mind from Him. That is why all the great monotheistic religions have come out of the desert.’

This meant he could not ‘go all the way with the missionary, particularly those who claim that they have the whole monopoly of truth and the only fold in which there is salvation. The Christian missionary has a mandate which he cannot refuse. In my view the administrator too must be a missionary, but I think it is his wider task to help in achieving that peace, and happiness too, which is promised to men of goodwill of whatever faith they be.’

In his view, the religion of a country depended on the environment and the African bush or forest was very different from the Arabian or Saharan desert (let alone from British villages, fields, woods and meadows)

‘Day after day of travelling through the bush makes monotonous telling, but it brought its immensity home as nothing else would do, and forced comparisons with the immensity of the desert. I was more convinced than ever of the conclusions which had grown upon me in East Africa many years ago. I could feel again the effect of his surroundings on the mind of man, and recognize the unmistakable way in which environment moulds the religious instinct present in every human being.

In the wide open spaces of the sands and barren rocks, where the endless procession of heaven is the only thing that changes, man is brought inevitably and inexorably to know the existence of the one God, to Whose infinite greatness and mercy he can only submit himself and his tiny affairs. In the bush it is far otherwise. Here his vision is cramped, indeed in the forest he scarcely sees the skies. Nature, in a multi-thousand forms, brings every sort of influence to bear on him and his, many of them harmful to human wellbeing. In the dark the million voices and unseen presences of the night whisper unimagined terrors to the puny heart of man. What wonder that he seeks to appease the infinite number of spirits which lurk in trees and rocks and springs, whence come the diseases which bring him his misery.’

In the African bush, Christianity could only progress ‘because of the renewed stream of missionaries from the West.’ If the environment was not conducive to Christianity, or to one of the other monotheistic religions, then the environment had to be changed. If this was not done, and quickly, there was a danger that the people in the colonies would follow an alternative, and dangerous route, of communism, or independence antagonistic to the ideals of western civilisation.

There was, in his view, a need for more human contact ‘between us and the people we are helping … I believe we need to be, more of us, individually believers in and practisers of democracy as a way of life.’

‘Many people believe that much of the trouble among so-called dependent peoples is due to our preaching self-government too quickly. Quite apart from the fact that most of the more vocal of the people concerned think we are too slow in our approach, there is a fundamental error in this … It is a question of human evolution, the direction taken by a world current of thought and politicians, be they of the right or left, can do very little about it. They and those they direct may hope to guide it a little, but they can do nothing to dam it nor even seriously to divert it. It is far too big.

I myself believe that to-day the only really safe way of life which is still practicable adds up to something very like what is called social democracy, and it is that which we need to teach the African and that which is the least he is likely to accept.’

‘If we agree, as I think we must, that Africa of the forest and bush needs more of the things of the spirit than her own beliefs can give her, then we must change the cramping effect of the bush and forest for something more open as fast as we can. Cultivation of the land means not only a higher material standard of living, but higher spiritual and moral standards. Christianity perhaps flourishes best in an agricultural countryside, and the more the bush and its influence disappear the better chance it is likely to have.

More cultivation and more Christianity are indeed desperately urgent. We are now attending to the former; should we not also see to the latter and, for instance, do far more to encourage the missionaries as essential partners in our development programmes? If we do not I foresee there is a grave danger that the African, finding his ancestral beliefs too slight to bear all that will be required of them, may make a religion of his politics and this could only be disastrous. Although we are not perhaps a very religious people, in the practising sense, most of what we do derives from a deep religious instinct which, I think, prevents us taking our politics violently and makes it possible for political adversaries to respect each other and be friends. Something of this spirit we have to give to others who have not the same traditions.’

In his view, Christianity, democracy, and material prosperity all went together, with his idea of the empire as a partnership.

‘Christianity and democracy always go well together in agricultural country, just as Islam and democracy do in more barren lands. Indeed our western democracy surely has Christianity as its foundation – a way of life based on love of and duty towards one’s neighbour. Only the highest type of democracy can survive in conditions of hardship and poverty. Decent average democracy must grow out of a decent standard of living. If there is to be a decent standard of living in Africa, then development must speedily be taken further than the primitive methods of agriculture one sees here in the Northern Territories. These people have not even a plough of their own … I cannot believe that civilization can be quickly built up on a plough and a couple of oxen. The salvation of democracy lies in our showing that it can produce quickly a better standard of life than communism promises. This requires a lot of education of the young and of adults, and perhaps even a reasonable measure of direction of a docile, teachable people.’

‘What we are after is surely that the peoples of Africa should accept us in the future willingly, as partners in the development of their countries, and that they should be willing and equal citizens with us not only in those countries but in Europe. It is often very difficult for people to accept this thesis, even if they accept the equality of all races of humanity and the principle of genuinely equal citizenship. The reason perhaps is that we in Europe have been so long rulers outside Europe that it is difficult for us at first to realize that if Europe is to survive we must make the new conception of partnership more real. We should want this not because we want Europe to dominate mankind, but because we wish to maintain the freedom of mankind.’

In practice, of course, things worked out very differently, in Africa, in Arabia, and in Europe, from how Ingrams envisaged them on his journey across the Sahara in 1947. But it seems to me that unless we have some understanding of the hopes and fears, the ideals and values, that he and others in similar positions had at the time, it is very difficult to explain why people did what they did, and to show, as I try to do in this blog, ‘how it really was’.

References

Harold Ingrams, Seven across the Sahara, (London: John Murray, 1949)

Demobbed

15th July 2010

I’ve recently read the book Demobbed by Alan Allport, which described the problems faced by many British servicemen when they were demobilised at the end of the Second World War.

Although this book is not directly relevant to my own work on British people in occupied Germany, I’m interested in exploring the way people coped with the transition from war to peace, in particular the ‘interlude’ in their lives between the end of the war and returning home, which was usually 12 to 18 months or more.

Alan Allport quoted the reactions of two British servicemen in Germany when they heard that the war was over, commenting that, in contrast with the celebrations at home in Britain: ‘It is not surprising that for men in the thick of battle, the end of the war – the end of being shot at by strangers on a day-to-day basis, the end of expecting each morning to be one’s last – was not easy to come to terms with.’

A Corporal in the Coldstream Guards wrote that while ‘There should have been a great sense of relief – we should have all gathered round and raised our mugs and said “here’s to the Poor Bloody Infantry”,’ in fact ‘There was no grand celebration at all … I sat down on the grassy stretch of the aerodrome at Cuxhaven and tried to collect my thoughts and all I could think of was well, that’s the end of that. We don’t have to dig slit trenches and hear the awful sound of the Nebelwerfer, the multi-barrelled mortar. No more shells screeching over.’

And a paratrooper wrote to his parents shortly after hearing the news of the surrender: ‘I suppose I should feel elated, but I feel tired and disgusted, and I can’t get the smell of Germans our of my mouth no matter how hard I clean my teeth. Disgust, contempt and a little pity mix ill. What now, I wonder.’

The way the system worked was that the older people were and the longer they had served in the forces, the earlier their release. Two months service counted as one year of age. At first release was fairly slow, with only one million men, out of the five million or so serving in the forces on VE Day (8th May) demobilised by the end of 1945. It speeded up considerably in the first half of 1946 and by the end of the year four out of five of those serving on VE Day had been released.

In contrast with the chaos that followed the end of the First World War, when the original demobilisation scheme had to be abandoned and a new one improvised which provided for more rapid release, the system worked relatively smoothly, but not without problems. There was a brief mutiny on a troopship moored in Singapore harbour and various other acts of insubordination and protests at what seemed to be unreasonable delays and unfairness in the way the system worked. According to Alan Allport, the end result was that instead of the ‘fair deal’ the system was intended to provide, many servicemen felt they received ‘equivocation, denials and indifference – in other words, the kind of runaround they had always experienced in the Forces. It was a first bitter little taste of disenchantment with postwar life that would be replicated many times again in Civvy Street over the months and years to follow.’

Once they arrived home, a few servicemen received the rapturous welcome, from friends and family, portrayed in pictures in the popular press. Others found difficulty adjusting to home life, suffered from jealousy at the, real or imagined, infidelity of their wives or husbands while they had been away, or had problems when they returned to work.

Many of the young men who worked for British Military Government or the Control Commission for Germany, in the first year and a half after the end of the war, were soldiers waiting for their demobilisation.

A little while ago I wrote a post on this blog about In Another Country, a novel by John Bayley, Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, based on the time he spent as a young officer in Germany, in which the country appeared to the hero, Oliver, as almost a make-believe place, in the interlude between the war and his inevitable return to England:

‘But Germany was like the films, or a story about exposure in lifeboats or thirst in the desert – neither mind nor body really believed it. Perhaps it was bad for you not to believe. Perhaps they were laying up trouble for themselves at home. As he talked with his colleagues Oliver had often wondered about that, and half dreaded his approaching demobilisation.’

I was also reminded of the comment an elderly gentleman, who worked for many years in Germany, made when I interviewed him in 2007. He was born in 1920, had worked in an accountant’s office before the war, volunteered to join the army in 1939 and fought in action in Greece, North Africa, Normandy, France, Belgium, Holland and across the Rhine in to Germany. When asked why he decided to stay in Germany and join the civilian Control Commission, when he was demobilised towards the end of 1946, he replied that:

‘I was offered a job over there which was considerably better than I could have expected over here. It would have been drudgery over here to start all over again. After all I was just 19 when I was called up and I was then nearly 27 …

I was far too old to start again for accountancy or anything like that. I had no other qualifications apart from my basic educational qualifications. I was no good to anybody really.’

In fact he had a successful career in the Civil Service, but life cannot have been easy for young men and women in 1945 and 1946, now the war was over and they had to decide what to do for the rest of their lives.

References

Alan Allport, Demobbed, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009)
See also Alan Allport’s website

John Bayley, In Another Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)
New edition with an introduction by A.N. Wilson
See also the post on this blog on John Bayley: In Another Country

Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, interview with J.M.G. Thexton, accession no. 30895 (2007)

Revenge

3rd June 2010

I seem to remember being taught, at school and at home, that it was (morally) wrong to take revenge. Just because someone hurt you, didn’t mean that it was right for you to hurt them. Even if someone tried to kill you, or killed a person you knew and loved, this didn’t mean it was right for you to kill them.

There seems to be something of a fashion nowadays for saying it is or was (morally) OK to take revenge; maybe not right, but not wrong either.

For example, in my own field, researching British people in Occupied Germany after World War Two, I came across the following in Richard Bessel’s book, Germany 1945: from War to Peace (for more on this, see last week’s post). He devoted a whole chapter in the book to the subject of ‘Revenge’ writing, amongst other things that:

‘As the war ended in central Europe, taking revenge against Germans was socially acceptable and widely expected.’

Socially acceptable?

No doubt he was right that it was ‘widely expected’, by British and US forces at the end of the war, that some groups of people who had suffered in Nazi Germany would take revenge after they were liberated. For example General Templer, Director of Civil Affairs and Military Government in the British zone, wrote in an article in the British Zone Review on the chaos of ‘The Early Days’ of the occupation, that the actions of some of the liberated ‘Displaced Persons’ or forced labourers in Nazi Germany were ‘not surprising’:

‘Over this grim scene there swarmed a milling mass of displaced persons, drunk with liberation and in some cases alcohol, looting, raping and killing. Considering the history of the past five years, this was not surprising.’

Of course, it is possible to argue (though Richard Bessel does not do this one way or the other) that there may be cases where taking revenge is not only ‘widely expected’ or ‘understandable’ but morally or culturally justifiable, for example as a deterrent to prevent someone committing a similar crime again.

But there is a difference between something being ‘widely expected’, ‘understandable’ or ‘not surprising’ and it being ‘socially acceptable’, which seemed to me an odd phrase to use. I’m not sure what it means. ‘Socially acceptable’ to whom, in which society or to which group of people: anyone who suffered in Nazi Germany; the victims of war crimes and atrocities; their friends and relations then and now; the victorious British, American, Russian, French and other occupation forces; or the community of historians who write about the subject nowadays?

In his book, Richard Bessel also wrote that the scenes US and British soldiers witnessed at the end of the war in the concentration camps provoked a desire for revenge. He quoted the example of US forces in Dachau, where ‘Germans were gunned down while surrendering; captives were shot at the slightest provocation…’ and claimed that the liberation of Bergen-Belsen had a similar effect on the British.

I’m not sure this is true. As far as I can tell from my own research, British soldiers felt hatred for the enemy, which was intensified when they learnt of the atrocities committed in the camps, but as far as I know, this was not translated into concrete acts of revenge. For example, one young soldier, whose memories of the war and its aftermath are held in the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, said that they were always hearing rumours of SS atrocities, having shot prisoners, or murdered Americans, which made the British soldiers angry:

'But when you see a person face to face and he’s unarmed you lose this anger and wildness, and just take them prisoner or whatever.' The only two prisoners he took personally were a couple of 16 year old lads who ‘came out of a wood with their hands up. They were just terrified…’

I wrote in a previous post on this blog about a debate on Feeling sorry for the Germans, in the letters pages of the British Zone Review, which showed quite clearly the differences between two schools of thought among the British occupiers: on the one hand ‘The Germans deserve all they get’ and on the other: ‘Humanity and justice cannot be based upon hatred and revenge.’

Even those British people who witnessed the liberation of a concentration camp appear to have felt anger, that extended to all German people collectively, but this, as far as I am aware, was not translated into concrete acts of revenge.

Patrick Gordon-Walker was one of the first British reporters to enter the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen and I wrote, in another post on this blog, about his book The Lid Lifts, which described his response. In summary, his conclusion was ‘we must be doubly careful how we react’ and horror alone was not enough. ‘The first and easy reaction is dangerous – kill them all – let the Germans starve. Hitler will triumph from his grave if this is our only reaction.’

He was concerned by a trend among people he observed back home in Britain. The desire for revenge made them believe that the use of murder as a political weapon was acceptable. In his view, those who committed crimes should be punished, with the death penalty, but it was necessary to ‘restore our respect for death’ and ‘no human life should be taken away without due formality.’

Fortunately, the situation now is very different from what it was then, but I am still reminded of these words of his that ‘no human life should be taken away without due formality’ whenever I read, for example this story yesterday, about more recent targeted killings by Intelligence Agencies, outside the rule of law.

References

Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: from War to Peace (London, New York, Sydney, Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2009)

‘The Early Days’, British Zone Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, November 1945

Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, Ronald Mallabar, accession no. 11211

Patrick Gordon Walker, The Lid Lifts (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1945)

A Harsh Occupation?

26th May 2010

One of the most recent and best books on post-war Germany is Richard Bessel’s Germany 1945: from War to Peace.

This highlights the devastation in Germany, especially the sheer scale of violence, death and destruction in the final months of the war and the chaos caused by millions of refugees and so called ‘Displaced Persons’ either returning home, or expelled from their former homes, or in some cases, both.

He also looked at and tried to explain the achievement of post-war Germany in surviving total military defeat, foreign occupation and economic deprivation, and moving forward to peace and prosperity. In his words:

‘Among the most remarkable aspects of the transformation of German mentalities that stemmed from the catastrophe of 1945 was the turn away from war and from the glorification of things military in the second half of the twentieth century.’

In his conclusion, he claims there were five reasons for this. I agree with him on three:

– ‘the completeness of Germany’s defeat’
– ‘the complete and obvious bankruptcy of National Socialism’
– ‘the vast extent of the losses’

I’m not sure about the fourth, ‘the overwhelming focus of Germans upon their day-to-day concerns’. Perhaps I can write more about this in a future post.

On the fifth reason, it seems to me, he is fundamentally wrong:

– ‘the harshness with which the Allies imposed their occupation’

‘It was not just the Russians who came determined to stamp their authority on the occupied enemy country in no uncertain terms … The harshness of the occupation in its initial months left no room for successful resistance.’

A ‘harsh occupation’ may be the right description for what the Russians, the Americans or the French did in their zones of occupation in 1945, (I’m no expert on this), but in the British zone, firstly there was no resistance anyway, and secondly, British policy (as determined by those on the ground, if not the politicians in London) changed very soon after the end of the war from destruction to reconstruction. I’ve written about this several times on this blog, for example in a post on Turning Points: when and why did British policy in Germany change after the end of the Second World War? and another on Goronwy Rees and Sir William Strang's six day tour of Germany in June 1945.

The examples Richard Bessel used to justify his claim for a ‘harsh occupation’ were nearly all taken from the US Zone. I wonder if the book therefore reflects a predominant US historical view and an (in my view, incorrect) assumption that what the British did was, more or less, much the same as the Americans. For example, another recent book by a US based historian, Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995, takes a similar view, emphasising the negative aspects of the occupation, following the author’s understanding of the ‘famous three ‘Ds’ – demilitarization, denazification, and decartelization’ of Potsdam.

The British zone was different, and British attitudes and policy changed with the end of the war in May 1945, earlier than any corresponding change in US policy. To quote three examples from three of the top British generals:

General Sir Brian Horrocks wrote in his memoirs, about how things changed ‘almost overnight’ after the end of the war:

‘During those first few days after the German capitulation we all felt as though an immense weight had been lifted from our shoulders; but this wonderful carefree atmosphere did not last for long. We were faced by the many intricate problems involved in the resuscitation of a stricken Germany. Having spent the last six years doing our best to destroy the German Reich, almost overnight we had to go into reverse gear and start building her up again. This required a considerable mental switch.’

Field-Marshal Montgomery, Military Governor of the zone, wrote about needing to offer the defeated German people ‘hope for the future’, for example in the third of his ‘Notes on the Present Situation’ in July 1945:

‘Our present attitude towards the German people is negative, it must be replaced by one that is positive and holds out hope for the future.’

His deputy, Brian Robertson, wrote in an article in the British Zone Review in October 1945, that it was necessary to be ‘stern but just’. The negative aspects of the occupation, disarmament, demilitarisation and denazification were, in his view ‘comparatively straightforward’ and there was no disagreement among the Allies in how to achieve these. On the other hand:

‘Lack of justice towards the Germans will bring us no profit but will evoke a spirit of embitterment and martyrdom which is as certain to lead to a desire for revenge as it did during the years which followed the First World War. Starvation and disease are not suitable punitive measures.’

Does this matter? It seems to me it does for two reasons.

Firstly, concentrating on the negative aspects of the occupation, means that the more positive aspects are neglected or ignored. Reconciliation between British and German people in the aftermath of war, after a very bitter conflict, did not happen automatically, as a result of a ‘transformation in German mentalities’ due to the ‘vast extent of the losses’ or ‘the harshness of the occupation’, but required a conscious and deliberate effort from many individuals on both sides. The story of how and why this was done needs to be told.

Secondly, it is all too easy to extend the idea that ‘a harsh occupation worked’ to the idea that ‘war works’. Richard Bessel ended his book by writing (correctly in my view) that in Germany in 1945 (in contrast to Germany in 1918): ‘War was seen not as a glorious crusade but as a terrible cataclysm which created only victims and was to be avoided at all costs.’

Unfortunately in Britain and the United States, if not in Germany, the Second World War is still remembered, by many people, as a ‘glorious crusade’.

This is not surprising, as that is now it was presented at the time. Konrad Jarausch quoted a private letter from President Roosevelt in which he described the war as a ‘crusade to save … civilization from a cult of brutal tyranny, which would destroy it and all of the dignity of human life’ and shortly before the Normandy Landings on D-Day, General Eisenhower gave all those involved a message which started by saying ‘You are about to embark on the Great Crusade.’ (I still have the copy my own father, who was there, received and you can read Ike’s D-Day message on the Web).

Unfortunately what some people forget, as we know only too well from more recent events, is that war may sometimes be just and necessary, but there are always victims, and if it works, (which is never certain), it only works if the right things are done after, as well as during, the war.

References:

Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: from War to Peace (London, New York, Sydney, Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2009)

Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks, A Full Life (London: Leo Cooper 1974) Revised and extended edition. First published by William Collins, 1960

Imperial War Museum, London, Montgomery papers, BLM 85/15, 'Notes on the present situation', 14 July 1945

Brian Robertson, ‘Quo Vadis?’, British Zone Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, 27 Oct. 1945

Sir Walter Moberly and his book ‘The Crisis in the University’

21st October 2009

Last week I wrote about Amy Buller, her book 'Darkness over Germany' and the foundation of Cumberland Lodge in 1947, as an alternative college or university.

The first principal of Cumberland Lodge was Sir Walter Moberly, previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester, Chairman of the University Grants Committee and the author of a book published in 1949, 'The Crisis in the University'.

His views, which he said were not only his own but representative of a group of similarly minded people, are interesting as an example of British conservative Christian thinkers, who believed that the world was in crisis, due to a lack of religious faith and respect for tradition, especially among young people. This had been especially apparent in Nazi Germany (so they believed), but the same problems affected not just Germany, but the whole Western world, including Great Britain.

Although the focus was different, there are clear similarities between his thinking and Amy Buller’s book 'Darkness over Germany'. As Walter James wrote in his history of Amy Buller and the foundation of Cumberland Lodge, although her book was about Germany, it reflected the sense that:

“Nazism was the outward manifestation of a sickness with which the entire West had been infected. This view was widely shared among Christian thinkers in the 1930s.”

Although this was a minority point of view at the time and not shared by most people in Britain, it does appear to have influenced a number of British senior officers and administrators in occupied Germany after the war and helps to explain the curious mixture of sympathy and arrogance that is apparent in some of their words and actions (See for example previous posts on this blog on Field-Marshal Montgomery as Military Governor of the British Zone). On the one hand a grave concern that, had circumstances been different, what happened in Nazi Germany could equally have happened in Britain and on the other hand, a view that because these threats to civilisation had been (so they believed) successfully resisted in Britain, it was now the responsibility of British people to convert the heathen and help people in other nations, especially the Germans, share the unquestioned strengths and benefits of British moral, religious, political and cultural traditions.

Here are some extracts from Walter Moberly's book ‘The Crisis in the University':

“The crisis in the university reflects the crisis in the world and its pervading sense of insecurity.”

“The veneer of civilisation had proved to be amazingly thin. Beneath it has been revealed, not only the ape and the tiger, but what is far worse – perverted and satanic man.”

In Moberley’s view, the real trouble lay “in the powerless of the individual in the face of mass society”. The impact of Western civilisation on Africa had been disintegrating, but now so-called civilised communities were suffering from the same problems:

“Apart from any conscious intention or propaganda, [Western civilisation] destroys the foundation of belief, custom and sentiment on which primitive life is built. Unless it also brings some new world picture and way of life to replace that which is in ruins, it leaves behind it devastation. But nemesis has followed. To-day the ‘civilized’ communities are suffering from a similar devastation. Over a large part of Europe and Asia binding convictions are lacking and there is confusion, bewilderment and discord. The whole complex of traditional belief, habit and sentiment, on which convictions are founded, has collapsed. All over the world indeed the cake of custom is broken, the old gods are dethroned and none have taken their places. Mentally and spiritually, most persons to-day are ‘dis-placed persons’.”

Despite relative economic decline after the war, Britain could still provide leadership for the rest of the world. In material resources, Great Britain was “no longer quite in the front rank” but “a full share of leadership in the realm of ideas is still open to us…. We have learned in modern times to criticize ourselves … We may still be shocked by the barbaric gospels of others; but is not all that is positive in our way of life and moral codes simply a relic of an old hierarchical order in which we have ourselves ceased effectively to believe? For ceremonial occasions, no doubt, we still have a Church as we still have a King, but neither has much to do the realities of power.”

“Much of the world is looking to this country for moral leadership with an expectancy which we have disappointed, but have not yet forfeited. It does not seem fantastic to suggest that the fate of civilization in the next period may hang on the question whether this country can rise to its moral opportunity.”

If this was his diagnosis of the global problem, the universities had, in his view, failed to show the moral and cultural leadership they should, resulting in apathetic students with no clear convictions or sense of purpose. “The universities are not now discharging their former cultural task.” This was apparent in both Britain and Germany:

“This process has been going on for a long time. But, in the last few years, it has been accentuated by the moral collapse of the German universities under the Nazi regime. Of no universities had the intellectual prestige been higher; during the last century they had been a model to the world. Yet when the stress came, with certain honourable exceptions among individuals, they showed little resistance, less indeed than the Churches. They failed to repel doctrines morally monstrous and intellectually despicable…. No doubt certain weaknesses in the German make-up contributed to this collapse, but to ascribe it solely to a double dose of original sin in the German people is unconvincing. It seems to have been due in large measure to the fact that the German universities had no independent standards of value of which they felt themselves the guardians and which they held with sufficient conviction and tenacity to stand up against the torrent. But, British teachers cannot help asking themselves, ‘Is this not also our own case? If we were subjected to a like pressure, are we confident that our own standards of value are too coherent and assured to be obliterated? Are we sure that we too should not succumb?’ They do not find it easy to answer with the ringing confidence they would wish.”

“The cultural failure of the universities is seen in the students. In recent years large numbers of these have been apathetic and have had neither wide interests nor compelling convictions”

“Whatever the cause, the university to-day lives and moves and has its being in a moral and cultural fog.”

In the final chapter at the end of the book ‘Taking Stock’, he summarised his argument that the solution to the “age of crisis” was not to abandon established traditions, but to reinvigorate and reinforce them:

“We are living in an age of exceptional crisis.
A decision in the Kremlin or the White House may revolutionize the lives of millions of peasants in Central Europe
The issue depends chiefly on the human factor
The beliefs which govern men’s actions are in flux
The old communal convictions concerning good and evil have broken up. A deep uncertainty about goals and obligations pervades all classes and all levels of culture. Our society has lost direction.
The clue to reconstruction is to be found within our own tradition
For Western civilization at least, and notably for Great Britain, reconstruction is to be achieved, not by abandoning our tradition, but by rediscovering and reinvigorating it.”

His conclusion and perhaps surprisingly enlightened solution (for a conservative thinker) to these problems was:

Free discussion: “All inhibition of discussion of the burning issues of the day must be removed, for any attitude towards them is preferable to apathy and drift.… Communication and debate must be unconstrained.”

But there were limits to neutrality and some basic values had to be reaffirmed, such as “a passion for truth” “a delicate precision in analysis” “a willingness to learn from all quarters” and “freedom of utterance”.

References:

Sir Walter Moberly, The Crisis in the University ( London: SCM Press Ltd, 1949)

Walter James, A Short Account of Amy Buller and the Founding of St. Catherine’s, Cumberland Lodge, (Privately printed, 1979)