Category: Books I have read

More on Amy Buller and her book ‘Darkness over Germany’

14th October 2009

For some time I’ve been puzzled by what you might call the 'spiritual dimension' to British activities in occupied Germany after the war, typified by Field-Marshal Montgomery, the first Military Governor of the British Zone, saying that what they were really trying to do was to “save the soul of Germany”. It’s as if they thought they were missionaries trying to convert the heathen, rather than soldiers administering a defeated enemy country.

Back in December 2008, I wrote on this blog, about how I gained an insight into this way of thinking after reading a book published in 1943, Darkness over Germany, by Amy Buller.

Amy Buller was a remarkable woman. Her greatest achievement was founding Cumberland Lodge in 1947, as a type of alternative university or college, where students and others could meet to attend courses and conferences. I’ve now discovered more about her after reading 'A Short Account of Amy Buller and the Founding of St. Catherine’s, Cumberland Lodge', by Walter James, who was the Principal of Cumberland Lodge from 1974-82.

She was born in 1891, and died in 1974. She was brought up as a Baptist in South Africa, but appeared to experience something of a religious conversion when she returned to England in 1911 to study at Birkbeck College and became a devout Anglo-Catholic. After the end of the First World War she worked for the Student Christian Movement and developed close links with both senior academics and Anglican bishops, including William Temple, later Archbishop of York and Canterbury.

Between the wars she made several visits to Germany and these formed the basis of her book 'Darkness over Germany'. Walter James described her views at the time as follows:

“What she wanted people to understand, as far as one can judge, was that Nazism, though false, was a new and powerful religion, demanding the whole man as every religion did and as German Protestantism had ceased to do.”

And he quoted from the prologue to Darkness over Germany, where she wrote that:

“I record these stories to emphasize the need for youth and those who plan the training of youth to consider carefully the full significance of the tragedy of a whole generation of German youth who, having no faith, made Nazism their religion.”

According to James, writing the book was the watershed in her life and this was when she started to think of founding a college. She resigned from her job as warden of a residential women’s college in Liverpool and moved back to London. By chance, Queen Elizabeth read the book on the recommendation of the Bishop of Lichfield and she was summoned to meet the queen in March 1944. She told her of her ambition to establish a college and the queen said she would do what she could to help.

After many difficulties raising the necessary funds and finding a suitable location for the college, the King and Queen offered her the use of Cumberland Lodge in 1947. Sir Walter Moberly was appointed as the first principal in 1949, and an impressive array of people came to speak at events there, including Lord Lindsay, Karl Popper, A J Ayer, Michael Oakeshott, R H S Crossman, Ernst Gombrich and T S Eliot. Amy Buller became the honorary warden until 1964, when she retired, first to Oxford and then later to London, where she died in 1974.
 
References:

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

History and Biography

23rd September 2009

As I tried to explain in a post back in January 2008, the approach I am using for my research into the British in occupied Germany after the Second World War is to follow the people.

I hadn’t realised then that the relationship between history and biography is quite controversial. For many years historians have been reacting against the idea that history is the lives of great men (and the occasional great woman). They have been looking at economic trends, social structures and institutional frameworks as a way of explaining what happened in the past, rather than seeing the course of events determined by the actions and desires of individual men and women.

One of the first people to adopt this approach, of course, was Karl Marx, who believed that the future course of history was determined by the dialectical struggle between the capitalist and working classes, with the inevitable result the victory of communism. But you do not have to share a Marxist view of economics, or be a socialist historian, to focus on long term trends, or try to describe and analyse the economic, social and cultural factors which influence and determine the way people behave.

I would never claim (as the historian Herbert Butterfield did in 1955) that “It is men [and women] who make history” but I do think it is impossible to understand, describe and explain what happened in the past, without referring to how this affected individual men and woman and how people responded to the circumstances in which they found themselves.

All too often I have read works by other historians who, so it seems to me, have generalised to the point of being misleading. For example, in my own field of research, Germany under Allied occupation after the Second World War, it is all too easy to say the “British” did this, the “Americans” did that, and the “French” and “Russians” and “Germans” did something else. I know from my own research that British people in Germany formed a very mixed and diverse group, with widely different backgrounds, attitudes and beliefs, and I expect the same was true of people of other nationalities. I also suspect that, although British people generally behaved differently from, for example, German people, in some ways, due to different social and cultural backgrounds, in other ways some groups of British people had more in common with people of other nationalities, than with their own compatriots.

For example, it seems to me that senior British army officers such as Montgomery, Robertson and Bishop, with a deeply conservative and traditionalist outlook on life and strong personal religious beliefs, had more in common with German Christian Democrat politicians such as Konrad Adenauer and Karl Arnold, than any of them had with Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the German Social Democrats, or with John Hynd, self-taught railwayman, trade unionist and British minister with responsibility for Germany, let alone a US GI, a 21 year old British tank commander with no adult experience other than war, or a half-Jewish, German-speaking exile returning to the country in which he had been born.

I have recently read an excellent book, in which a number of historians and biographers discuss the relationship between history and biography: Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography. The following comments are based on my reading and understanding of the introduction by Simone Lässig:

In the 1970s, many social historians attempted to create a theory-driven historical (social) science and biography was seen as “an antiquated and unreflective approach to history.” This trend was especially noticeable in Germany among the so-called “Bielefeld school” of historians, although in Britain and the US, biography remained an established academic and popular form.

Both forms of writing about the past have their weaknesses. If history is only concerned with structures, long term processes, and mass phenomena “a science of human societies will entirely lose sight of the human beings themselves.” On the other hand, the weaknesses of biography include a lack of theory or methodology and an artificial coherence in the description of a life story, which often in reality develops as much from luck and chance as deliberate intention. Every individual person’s life is to some extent fragmented and inconsistent. People take on different roles during their lives with contradictions, upheavals and turning points.

Recently, distinguished historians have returned to writing biographies and in the book, some described their approach. For example, Ian Kershaw explained why he decided to write his biography of Hitler. Although, as a social historian, he was initially sceptical, he came to biography as a way of looking at the nature of Hitler’s power, not through giving direct orders, but through establishing a framework of broad policy objectives within which others could act.

In addition to discussing how historians can bring new approaches to biography, Simone Lässig outlined five trends by which a biographical approach is opening up new possibilities for modern historical scholarship:

1) As a way of moving from the abstract towards the concrete, from system and structure to the unique and individual, and of describing “how people master life’s unforeseen challenges.”
2) At the same time it offers a method of describing how individuals “bear the characteristics of a larger [social] group”. It can also help explain change: “It is rarely possible to explain change in history if the individual is marginalized or even ignored” (For example Luther and the Reformation or Hitler and Nazi Germany)
3) Biographies provide exactitude and detail “not only to discover what is typical, but also to grasp these ways of life in all their breadth and variability.”
4) Because biography deals with people, rather than attempting to discover objective universal facts or rules, a biographical approach “sensitizes the reader” to the fundamental openness of history, its subjective character and to the relativity and limited nature of historical knowledge.
5) An individual example can stimulate more general insights and so reveal or highlight social, economic, cultural or political interconnections and networks.

In summary, this shows that a biographical approach to writing history can reveal aspects which may remain hidden or misunderstood in other approaches which rely too heavily on generalisation, or on an analysis of social, political, cultural or economic structures and institutions, and neglect the individual people.

References:

Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig (eds), Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography (New York, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2008)

 

The Watch on the Rhine: the British occupation of the Rhineland after World War One

14th September 2009

It’s intriguing how memories of the First World War and its aftermath influenced British people in occupied Germany at the end of the Second World War.

At the end of the First World War, French, British, Belgian and US troops occupied the Rhineland. This was agreed as part of the Armistice signed on November 11th 1918. The details, including zones of occupation, were worked out by the French Marshal Foch and the British were allocated the city of Cologne and surrounding area. British troops first crossed the frontier into Germany on 2nd December 1918.

The occupation was originally intended to last for 15 years, with the number of Allied troops reduced in stages after 5 and 10 years, subject to certain conditions being met. The British left Cologne in January 1926, but some troops stayed on in Wiesbaden until 30th June 1930.

Looking back to memories of the First World War and its aftermath helps to explain some of the ambivalence in British policy and attitudes towards the German people after the Second World War. On the one hand a concern not to be deceived again by a duplicitous people, who, so the story went, had courted sympathy from well-meaning Allied soldiers, claiming they were victims of an unjust peace settlement, while at the same time planning their revenge and preparing for war. But on the other hand, a concern that the Allies had also made some mistakes, and the economic depression, hunger and unemployment which followed the First World War should not be repeated, for fear that an even worse disaster may occur in the not so distant future.

As examples of the view that this time, in 1945, they had to “stay the course” and “do the job properly”, here are some extracts from three articles in early editions of the British Zone Review, the official journal of the British Military Government and Control Commission for Germany:

“Experiences of Rhineland Occupation: 1919-1925

You will not, I think, be surprised at my conclusions – that the occupation, intended as a measure for preventing their making war, was used by the Germans as a means of dividing the Allies and of getting their propaganda into the very heart of each of the Allied countries. Moreover we failed to see that Germany was only shamming dead economically and financially and was exploiting the situation to arouse a wholly unjustified sympathy and causing us serious trade difficulties, for which we would blame the peace settlement and our Allies.”
(British Zone review, October 13th 1945)

“Lessons of History

We set out to see whether there was a lesson to be learnt from history. It now stares us in the face. To cut down our occupying forces below an effective minimum or to let considerations of retrenchment weaken our control organisation would be to fly in the face of experience.”
(British Zone Review, November 24th 1945)

“Why Weimar failed

Behind the welter of political strife, the confusion of unversed and inept politicians, the militarists and industrialists waited and planned to avenge themselves of their defeat.”
(British Zone Review, December 22nd 1945)

On the other hand, if we look at contemporary accounts of the British occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War, written in the 1920s rather than in 1945, we find that the troops generally got on well with the local population, and in many cases returned home “definitely pro-German.” Violet Markham, who spent two years in Germany with her husband, who was chief demobilization officer for the British Army of the Rhine, wrote in her book 'A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine' published in 1921, that “Life in Cologne is very pleasant for the occupying army” and “surely no Army of Occupation was ever so well housed or so comfortable as we are.” On first crossing the border into Germany, she remarked that “It is almost with a shock you realise that German civilians are not equipped with hoofs and horns or other attributes of a Satanic character” and she soon came to see people as individuals, rather than as the stereotypes promoted by governments in wartime:

“It is easy to hate the abstraction called Germany, but for individual Germans one feels either like, dislike or indifference the same as for other people.”

Although she had no doubts as to the “noble ideal” for which the British had fought the war, and was irritated at Germany’s “refusal to say she is sorry”, she was also critical of Allied post-war policy; especially the continuation of the economic blockade; and the Treaty of Versailles, which she said had “scrapped the fundamental ideals for which we fought the war.”

In her view, the democratic government which emerged in Germany in 1918 had an impossible task as it was “confronted by hunger, defeat, despair, and the miseries which resulted from the blockade” and the Allies were partly to blame for the rise of the extreme parties and the decline in the vote for the Social Democrats in the elections of 1920:

“The party standing for ordered democratic development had been knocked out. The British public should try to realise it has been killed by the Allied policy.”

She was not optimistic for the future. In a prediction, which may have seemed extravagant at the time, but which turned out to be unpleasantly close to the truth, she wrote that:

“The post-war chaos appears so complete that men turn from it in despair. Moral disillusion and weariness have their counterparts in recklessness and wild extravagance. There is a sense of an approaching Twilight of the Gods; of a collapse of the foundations of society.”

Perhaps surprisingly, it seems that official British policy after the Second World War, at least as implemented by those on the ground in Germany, was influenced as much by this second strand of thought, of the need to avoid hunger, despair and unemployment, as by concerns that German militarists would re-arm and seek their revenge. This can be traced in the papers of General Sir Brian Robertson, arguably the most influential British soldier and administrator in Germany after the end of the war. His father, General, later Field-Marshal, Sir William Robertson had been Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the First World War and for a time, in 1919, Military Governor of the British occupied part of the Rhineland.

In a speech in November 1939, when he was President of the Natal Chamber of Industries in South Africa, well before he had any idea of his future role in post-war Germany, Brian Robertson looked forward to the end of the war, saying:

“This war, so far at least, is very unlike the last. It is equally certain that the peace treaties, which have yet to be made, will be quite unlike those which ended the last war. Those treaties were failures because they were based upon fear and vindictiveness. The next treaties, if they are to give lasting peace, must be founded upon confidence and generosity, and they must strike at the root causes of international unrest. Chief among these causes is that economic nationalism which has grown up like a rank week to stifle the national flow of trade between nations.”

Many years later in 1965, in a speech to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Brian Robertson referred to his experience as a member of the British delegation at the League of Nations in Geneva in 1932-3 and how this had made him: “a first hand witness of the failure to deal properly with Germany after World  War 1.” He continued by saying:

“My father had been Military Governor for a period then. He often talked to me about the mistakes and problems of those years. ‘The idea that you can hold down a country like Germany with her face in the dust indefinitely is a foolish one’ he used to say.”

If it was not possible to 'hold Germany down' for ever, there had to be an alternative policy to one that was purely negative, based on disarmament, demilitarisation and economic controls. In an article in the British Zone Review in October 1945, Robertson tried to explain his own personal philosophy, which suggested he had learnt a different 'lesson from history' from the other articles I quoted earlier in this posting. The analogy Robertson used was that of education: the German people had to be treated as one would treat a child. Firstly it was necessary to be stern, as the child had “inherited some very bad qualities from its parents”. But secondly it was necessary to be just, as:

“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.”

In a talk he gave in December 1945 at a conference of British Army Corps Commanders, who at the time also acted as regional governors, responsible for all aspects of Military Government in their areas, Robertson gave his view of the attitudes of the four Allies in Germany, claiming that it was only the British who had a constructive policy. The French were concerned above all with their own security and the Russians with the payment of reparations. The Americans went from one extreme to the other and “their main contribution to Quadripartite government is to produce a series of unpractical laws which have very little bearing on the main problems.” The British were, in his view: “the only power that really cares what happens to Germany. We flatter ourselves that we can regenerate her. Probably we feel instinctively that our interests will not best be served by turning Germany into a helpless desert.”

References:

David G. Williamson, The British in Germany 1918-1930: the Reluctant Occupiers (New York, Oxford: Berg, 1991)

David Williamson, A Most Diplomatic General: The life of General Lord Robertson of Oakridge (London, Washington: Brasseys, 1996)

Violet Markham, A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1921)

 

Stephen Spender on Humphrey Jennings, libraries, and his Humber car

6th June 2009

Sometimes the asides and diversions in a book can be as, if not more, revealing than the main story. In this third and final post on Stephen Spender’s book European Witness, an account of two visits he made to Germany immediately after the Second World, I want to write about the unacknowledged hero, or villain, of the piece, his Humber car.

One of the ironies of the book, is that despite his grand and noble conclusion that only a “conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light” could save the world from “a threat of a still greater darkness, a total and everlasting one … rising up from the ashes of fascism", he himself appeared powerless and unable to do anything.
 
The original reason for his visit to Germany was to inspect and re-open libraries in the Ruhr and Rhineland, including vetting and removing Nazi books. But he came to think that this was a pointless task:

“…my conversation with Dr Reuter, [the librarian at Düsseldorf] made me realize that there was little point in our policy. Anyone who wished to obtain Nazi books in Germany could easily do so, and to withdraw the Nazi books seemed only a piece of window-dressing which would give us a reputation for treating literature in the same way as the Nazis themselves had done.”

For example, a librarian at Aachen told him there was no difficulty at all carrying out his orders; they had previously done much the same for the Nazis:

“We understand exactly what you want, and there is no difficulty whatever about carrying out your instructions. You see, throughout the Nazi regime, we kept all the books by Jewish and socialist writers in a special cellar, under lock and key, as having only historical and scientific interest. All we have to do now is to take out these books and put them on our open shelves, while at the same time we lock up all the Nazi books, because now they only have historical and scientific interest.”

And in any case, many local German librarians had already done what was necessary on their own initiative:
 
“In practice, I found that the libraries of the Ruhr and the Rhineland were capable of opening themselves without my intervention … In every case, the Germans had automatically set about purging their libraries on the day of their towns being occupied by the Allies, if not before that.”

Throughout this time, Spender was often unable to travel round the British Zone and do his job, because his (British) Humber car had broken down, often for days, despite attempts to fix it:

“During these days of my car being broken down, I was often left with little to do but observe conditions and listen to rumours.”

“The car remained in a very bad state. However, one day we managed to get it to Aachen and almost all the way back before we got stuck a few miles outside Bonn, from where we had to be towed.”

I don’t think he intended the book to be read this way, but it seems to me that the car had become a symbol of the British occupation; of how despite the best of intentions, they were not able to achieve anything constructive, and were in fact no different from, and no better than, the people whose country they were occupying:

“On 20th September the Humber had a slight attack of recovery. I made an attempt to get it to Düsseldorf. After going very fast for four miles, it stopped in a rain-storm on the autobahn between Bonn and Cologne. My driver decided that the pump was wrong and he got out to repair it. After he had taken it to pieces and put it back, no petrol came through the pipe leading to it from the tank at the back of the car. He undid the cap of the petrol tank and blew down the hole. There was some pressure of air in the tank and petrol squirted back at him into his eyes, mouth and nose. He was practically blinded for five or ten minutes. Three little German boys who were present at this scene were in ecstasies of hysterical joy. They rolled over on the ground roaring with laughter, and, for the next hour, while we waited dismally in the car, they imitated to each other the expression on his face when he fell back into the road. This was one of those moments when our occupation suddenly appeared like all occupations: one could imagine similar scenes in which little French boys were squirming on the ground with laughter at solemn German officers whose Mercedes had broken down, during their Occupation.”

Spender could be extraordinarily insensitive to the needs and feelings of those around him, as well as very perceptive. For example, he described meeting, by chance, a former inmate of a concentration camp, and arranged to see him later at his hotel. Because he was classified as a German civilian, Spender was not permitted to share his tea with him:

“The next day he arrived at four-thirty while I was having a large tea in the lounge. I could not offer him, a German civilian, tea, so I sent him up to my room while I finished off my excellent repast with far more butter and ham than one gets in England. I was aware of the contrast between my own standard of living and that of this concentration camp inmate; but although this worried me, on the whole it had the effect of making me eat perhaps a slightly larger tea than I would have done otherwise, because this worry was a form of anxiety and anxiety tends to make me greedy.”

I don’t think there was any irony in this account, or even self-criticism.

During his second visit, in September and October 1945, Spender met the documentary film director Humphrey Jennings, who was in Germany making his film ‘A Defeated People’ (see previous posts on this blog).

In the book Spender refers to Jennings as ‘Boyman’, presumably from his tendency to say “Oh boy, oh boy”.

“Boyman talks an Anglo-American-Continental Film World slang in which he mixes up phrases such as ‘Oh boy, oh boy,’ with cockney such as ‘Bob’s-your-uncle.’”

Jennings’ self confidence irritated him. At the end of an evening in the British officers’ mess, Spender wrote that:

“[Boyman] talked a great deal more and said that the damned fool of a British public ‘had no realization of these conditions.’ His attitude that everyone except his Film Unit is a bloody fool, annoys me. Besides which, why should the British public be sensitive to conditions in Germany? I often wonder whether sensibility is such a virtue as I myself am inclined to suppose it to be, since my own experience is that being sensitive, aware and imaginative does not prevent one from being selfish. In fact, it makes one ego-centric. All the same, Boyman is a live wire, and part of my irritation with him is undoubtedly due to jealousy and competitiveness. After the evening with Boyman I went to bed doubly depressed: by the squalid destruction of Düsseldorf and by the assertive cocksureness of Boyman.”

One of the ironies of history is that while Spender’s reputation has declined over time, that of Jennings has grown, and he is now considered by many to be Britain’s greatest wartime documentary film maker. For example, Angus Calder in his classic work, ‘The Myth of the Blitz’, referred to him as “Britain’s most remarkable maker of official films.”

But what struck me most were not the differences, but the similarities in outlook between Spender’s book, European Witness, and Jennings’ film A Defeated People. Words and images in the book reappear in the film. For example these words from European Witness could be describing a shot in the film: “The girders of the Rhine bridges plunged diagonally into the black waters of the Rhine frothing into swirling white around them”; as could descriptions and portraits of a demoralised and apathetic people; ‘Zero Hour’ represented by the clock whose hands have stopped working; and an overriding concern, in the words of the commentary of the film, that “our powers of destruction today are terrible”. But also apparent both from reading the book and watching the film, were the high and noble ideals of many of those responsible for the British occupation; their belief in the urgent need to do whatever was necessary to prevent another war; combined and contrasted on occasions, with a sense of hopelessness in the face of extreme adversity; and running in parallel with all of this, a grudging sympathy with the current condition of the former enemy.

Despite overwhelming odds, and personal limitations, both the book and the film tried to convey to the British people back home, the sense that things could not be left as they were; in the words of the film, the German people could not be “left to stew in their own juice”; and despite everything that had happened in the past, what was needed now was a constructive effort, on both sides, to repair the physical, moral and, for some people, the spiritual damage caused by the war. In Spender’s words: “a conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light.”

More on Stephen Spender and post-war Germany

1st June 2009

In my last post, I wrote about Stephen Spender’s book 'European Witness', and his reactions to the destruction he found in the cities of Germany after the war; of how this made him all too aware of the fragility of European civilisation, and his fear that the ruins of Cologne and Berlin could all too easily be followed by the ruins of London, Paris or Brussels.

The conclusion he drew from this was, that if things were to get better instead of worse, a conscious effort was required:

“… today we are confronted with the choice between making a heaven or a hell of the world in which we live, and the whole of civilization will be bound by whichever fate we choose.”

The Nazis had shown, in his view, that it was possible for individuals to have a dramatic effect on the future of the world, for the worse. Previous outlooks on life, prevalent before the war, were no longer sustainable. Both Marxist historical determinism and liberal laissez-faire attitudes had assumed that the actions of individuals were insignificant compared to the greater impersonal forces of history. But if the end result of trusting to a benign and inevitable social progress was the rise of fascism and the destruction of civilisation, as he knew it, what was the alternative?

“We realize today that what goes on in men’s minds may have a terrifying effect on their environment. The nihilistic nightmares of Fascism have proved that, and the weapons which destroyed fascism have proved it to a degree which makes even Fascism seem a childish dream.”

“One might compare the countries of the world to-day to clocks. Each country registers a different time, but outside their time there is one time for the whole world, registered to one clock, with a time-bomb attached to it.”

“The countries of the world are isolated in their separate experience. Yet the pressure of awareness is so great that the world to-day has a kind of transparency. We look through our own experiences to those of other countries. They might be us and we might be them. What has happened to us might happen to them. Through the streets of London and Paris we see the streets of Hamburg and Warsaw. Yet, it is easier in Paris to imagine the whole city being destroyed, than in Berlin to imagine Berlin being rebuilt.”

Liberal ideas of individual freedom, of each individual striving for his own personal self-interest, resulting in social progress and greater happiness for all, were no longer acceptable as a guide to personal conduct. The only answer to the nightmare of present destruction and the threat of worse to come was a conscious and deliberate effort, by all those who recognised the danger, to do whatever they could to avoid it.

“If we are truthful with ourselves, we have to admit, surely, that political freedom has been tolerable and welcome to us, because we did not think that it confronted us with the direct responsibility of a choice between good and evil. We were free because we believed in ‘laissez-faire’, in the old-fashioned conception of evolution, in the sense of having confidence that an interplay of free forces and conflicting interests would inevitably product the best results. And no one was responsible for these results, no one was responsible for progress. If one was a reformer or even a radical revolutionary, one was still only a force within a total of conflicting forces which were producing the general movement of social advancement, so that in a sense it was true that the people who were opposed to reform, the conservatives, were contributing as much to the general progress (in that they themselves represented one of the forces of society) as the progressives.”

The Nazi and fascist leaders showed that individuals could make a difference, even if it was for evil, rather than for good:

“They made social and political activity significant moral, or rather immoral, activity, and they renounced the irresponsible amoral automatism of the progressive industrial era. As human beings, they were at the centre of their own social actions and in a universe which, if it does not include the idea of heaven, at least includes the idea of hell, they damned and destroyed themselves and a great part of the world with them.”

I’ve written before on this blog (in my post on Amy Buller’s book ‘Darkness over Germany’) about how some British commentators described the war and its aftermath in religious and spiritual terms. Perhaps surprisingly, even an enlightened, liberal and rational commentator such as Stephen Spender ended his book by writing in religious and spiritual terms about the importance of morality, and of the “realization that society has got to choose not just to be free but to be good.”

“Thus can I explain to myself why it is that these terrible men preoccupied (I can witness only for myself) not only my waking thoughts but also my dreams, during many years. And in my dreams, I did not simply hate them and put them from me. I argued with them, I wrestled with their spirits, and the scene in which I knew them was one in which my own blood and tears flowed. The cities and soil of Germany where they were sacrificed were not just places of material destruction. They were alters on which a solemn sacrifice had been performed according to a ritual in which inevitably all the nations took part. The whole world had seemed to be darkened with their darkness, and when they left the world, the threat of a still greater darkness, a total and everlasting one, rose up from their ashes. And at the same time, there could not be the least doubt that the only answer to this past and this present is a conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light.”

Stephen Spender – European Witness

9th May 2009

Stephen Spender was one of a group of highly influential left-wing writers and artists who came to prominence in Britain in the 1930s, including W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood. After the war he was a notable public intellectual, editor of the magazine Encounter, and received numerous honours and awards, including Poet Laureate of the United States in 1965, and a knighthood in Britain in 1983.

In more recent years his reputation as a poet has declined. See for example this review, in the electronic magazine Slate, of a recent biography of Spender:

“Fairly or unfairly, Spender's reputation as a toady has steadily consolidated, while his reputation as a poet has steadily declined.”

I am no expert on Spender and can’t comment on whether this view of his poetry and personality is justified or not, but I’ve recently read his book European Witness, an account of two visits he made to Germany immediately after the Second World War, in July and August, and September and October 1945.

In some ways, European Witness tells a similar story to other British and American accounts of Germany after the war, such as Patrick Gordon-Walker’s The Lid Lifts, and Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film ‘A Defeated People’, but Spender seemed to have had a knack of making explicit, what other observers alluded to but rarely, if ever, said directly.

I’ve written on this blog before, about the shock many British observers felt at the scale of destruction in Germany – far worse than anything at home. It wasn’t just the physical destruction of the cities they found shocking, but the apparent collapse and demoralization of the people. Humphrey Jennings expressed this in stark terms in a letter he wrote to his wife Cicely, when filming in Germany in September 1945:

“… the problem of the German character and nation … seeing, watching, working with the Germans en masse – terrified, rabbit-eyed, over-willing, too friendly, without an inch of what we call character among a thousand … a nation of near zombies with all the parts of human beings but really no soul – no oneness of personality to hold the parts together and shine out of the eyes. The eyes indeed are the worst the most telltale part – no shine, often no focus – the mouth drawn down with overwork and over-determination …” 
 
Jennings was unusual in expressing this so directly and visually. Spender, writing in European Witness, a book for publication, was more literary, but some of the language he used – parasites sucking at a dead corpse – was just as vivid:

“Now it requires a real effort of the imagination to think back to that Cologne which I knew well ten years ago. Everything has gone. In this the destruction of Germany is quite different from even the worst that has happened in England (though not different from Poland and from parts of Russia). In England there are holes, gaps and wounds, but the surrounding life of the people themselves has filled them up, creating a scar which will heal. In towns such as Cologne and those of the Ruhr, something quite different has happened. The external destruction is so great that it cannot be healed and the surrounding life of the rest of the country cannot flow into and resuscitate the city which is not only battered but also dismembered and cut off from the rest of Germany and from Europe. The ruin of the city is reflected in the internal ruin of its inhabitants who, instead of being lives that can form a scar over the city’s wounds, are parasites sucking at a dead carcase, digging among the ruins for hidden food, doing business at their black market near the Cathedral -  the commerce of destruction instead of production.

The people who live there seem quite dissociated from Cologne. They resemble rather a tribe of wanderers who have discovered a ruined city in a desert and who are camping there, living in the cellars and hunting amongst the ruins for the booty, relics of a dead civilization.

The great city looks like a corpse and stinks like one also, with all the garbage which has not been cleared away, all the bodies still buried under heaps of stones and iron.”

It’s easy now, looking back with hindsight, to think that reconstruction and economic recovery – the economic miracle – followed almost inevitably from the ruins of war. For contemporary British observers in 1945, it was very far from obvious. Their expectation was the opposite – that what had been destroyed was lost for ever and could never be rebuilt. According to Spender this sense of hopelessness, and despair at the future, affected the occupiers, as well as the occupied:

“The effect of these corpse-towns is a grave discouragement which influences everyone living and working in Germany, the occupying forces as much as the German. The destruction is serious in more senses than one. It is a climax of deliberate effort, an achievement of our civilization, the most striking result of co-operation between nations in the twentieth century. It is the shape created by our century as the Gothic cathedral is the shape created by the Middle Ages…. The city is dead and the inhabitants only haunt the cellars and basements. Without the city they are rats in the cellars, or bats wheeling around the towers of the cathedral…. The destruction of the city itself, with all its past as well as its present, is like a reproach to the people who go on living there.”

It made him feel sick, as he described in a chapter in the book, entitled Nausea:

“A few days later, I experienced a sensation which is as difficult to describe as a strong taste or a disagreeable smell or a violent action, because, although it was a mental condition, its effects were so physical. It is worth endeavouring to describe however, because although I may have felt this rather more acutely than others, I believe that the condition is a mental one which is partly the result of the occupation, and from which many people in the occupying Armies suffer. Other people would probably explain the horror – the longing to get away at all costs – which affects the majority of the members of the Forces occupying Germany as a result of the ruined surroundings, the lack of entertainment and the generally depressing atmosphere. But I think that subtler and deeper than this is a sense of hopelessness which is bred of the relationship of Occupiers and Occupied.

The first symptoms of the illness were violent homesickness accompanied by a sensation of panic that I would never get out of Germany…. Such sensations are acuter than most physical pain and, although they do not last, whilst they go on it is of little use telling oneself, what is most certainly true, that one will be better to-morrow, because they have the force of a vision…”

In some ways therefore, although the war had ended and Nazi Germany had been defeated, things were no better than they had been before. The ambitions of modern nation states, the destructive power of war, and the possible consequences of this in the future for everyone, for the victors as well as for the defeated, were starkly obvious in the ruins of the German cities and a demoralised and hopeless people. The Cologne and Berlin of today could all too easily be the London, Paris or Brussels of tomorrow. According to Spender, there was no German problem now, only the problem of the disunity of the Allies.

“Germany, instead of being a place where the ‘German problem’ is being solved has become a scene where the disunity of the Allies is projected and one more demonstration of the fact that modern states were incapable, during what is called peace, of sacrificing national sovereignty in order to avert foreseen disasters.”

The foreboding he had felt in 1931, before the rise of the Nazis, had not been dispelled by victory in war, as the potential for further and even worse destruction was all too obvious and the ruins of Germany could become the ruins of the whole of Europe. Just as there had been, in his words, “enormous power for good or for evil” in Weimar Germany, the future in 1945 was not inevitable, but required a conscious choice. In summary, as he wrote at the end of the chapter, his “sense of nausea on certain days in Bonn”, was due to:

“… a real potentiality in my environment, as vivid as the potentialities of Nazism in 1931. This was the potentiality of the ruin of Germany to become the ruins of the whole of Europe: of the people of Brussels and Paris, London and New York, to become the herds wandering in their thousands across a continent, reduced to eating scraps and grass. It was the sense as I walked along the streets of Bonn with a wind blowing putrescent dust of ruins as stinging as pepper into my nostrils, that the whole of our civilization was protected by such eggshell walls which could be blown down in a day. It was a sense of two futures within modern humanity, like the two worlds within Faust’s breast, one a future of confidence between people in a world of such happiness as can reasonably be organized within the conditions of human existence, the other a world given over to destruction and hatred. Both these potentialities were real: but the constructive one required resolution, unity, will, acceptance of guilt, and a conscious choice to determine our future, the destructive one was to be got by going on as we have done now ever since 1918.”

References:

Stephen Spender
European Witness
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946)

For other views of Stephen Spender see:

John Xiros Cooper
“The Crow on the Crematorium Chimney”: Germany, Summer, 1945
https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ESC/article/view/341/317 (PDF)

David Aberbach
'Stephen Spender's Jewish roots'
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5800826.ece

Stephen Metcalf
Stephen Spender, Toady: Was there any substance to his politics and art?
http://www.slate.com/id/2113164/

Marriage with ‘ex-enemy nationals’

2nd May 2009

I’m trying to work out who was the first British soldier or civilian member of the Control Commission to marry a German, after the end of the Second World War, and when the first wedding took place.

Two years ago I conducted an oral history interview (now held as part of the Imperial War Museum sound archive) with an elderly gentleman who married his wife in Germany on 28th June 1947. He believed he was the first serving British soldier to have been given permission to marry a German woman, but I am not sure that is correct, as in her autobiography, Lucky Girl Goodbye, Renate Greenshields describes how she, and fourteen other German women, travelled to Britain on the ship the Empire Halladale on 18th December 1946, to marry British men they had met in Germany. Her wedding took place on 6th January 1947. But she was married in Britain, so perhaps the rules were different for couples marrying in Germany.

The ban on fraternisation was relaxed on 25th September 1945, permitting British soldiers and members of the Control Commission to mix socially with German men and women, but intermarriage with German women was still forbidden, at least until August 1946.

The first official reference I have found on the subject is a file at The National Archives entitled Marriage with ex-enemy nationals. It starts with a copy of Hansard (the official record of proceedings in the British Parliament), for 31st July 1946, in which Lord Nathan, the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for War, said in the House of Lords, in answer to a question by Lord Faringdon, that the matter had been considered by the government and he was now:

 “… able to state that it has been decided that local military Commanders should be authorised to relax the present ban on marriage between British servicemen and alien women, other than Japanese, in cases where the reasons for marriage are good and there is no security objection.”

In reply, Lord Faringdon said that:

“I should like to thank the noble Lord very much indeed for his reply, which I believe will give great satisfaction, both in this country and to members of the Forces abroad.”

Although the government had decided in principle that the ban could be relaxed, in the British Zone of occupied Germany, specific approval in each case was still required from “Commanding officers with the rank of Commander, Lieutenant Colonel or Wing Commander” or above, and marriage was only permitted under certain conditions.

A note from the armed forces Chiefs of Staff Committee to the Military Governor of the British Zone, Sir Sholto Douglas, entitled “The conditions under which British Service men may marry German women in the British Zone of Germany,” stated that:

“This approval only to be given if the marriage is in the interest of the man concerned, subject to security examination and to specific conditions:

  • No marriage until after 6 months from date of application, during which time the man is to go to the UK on his normal leave
  • Married accommodation available on the same conditions as apply to British families, and the applicant is entitled to it (to prevent members of the occupying forces living with Germans)
  • Medical certificate by a British medical officer to be submitted for the prospective wife
  • A certificate of good character to be signed by the Oberbürgermeister or other relevant official
  • Pregnancy not to influence above conditions
  • Conditions to apply even if a form of marriage has already taken place”

The Military Governor, Sholto Douglas, suggested a minor amendment, (which was agreed a few days later on the 29th August), in a reply which also revealed something of his own attitude to the matter:

“I consider that the words ‘in the interest of the man concerned’ should be deleted from the conditions. A Commanding Officer might hold the view – which indeed I am inclined to share – that in no case is it in the interest of a British officer or man to marry a German girl, and so might prevent any of his men from so doing. This would not be in accordance with the spirit of the Government instruction. The sentence would now read ‘This approval only to be given if the marriage is subject to security examination etc etc’”

As one of the conditions was that marriage could not take place earlier than 6 months after the date of application, it seems unlikely that any marriages were permitted in Germany before 1st March 1947 at the earliest. However, Renate Greenshields described how she and her husband-to-be, had originally applied to be married in May 1946, so maybe there was some flexibility in how the date of application was interpreted.

Mr Jan Thexton, the gentleman I interviewed, had great difficulty securing approval to marry his wife, not only from the British, but also from the German authorities. He remembered the announcement being made in the House of Commons, rather than the House of Lords, and told me about the reaction of his local commander:

“When I first got engaged to my wife we weren’t allowed to get married. And then it was announced in the House of Commons that people could get married to Germans … And when I applied I was told I couldn’t get married. They didn’t accept the parliamentary … what had gone through parliament they didn’t accept …

I had to apply to, well fundamentally at that time the local commander, who was a brigadier I think from memory; this was in the Control Commission of course. And he said I couldn’t get married, and in fact … I knew him quite well … he said ‘Look I’d much sooner you married a wog, rather than marry a German. They’re quite terrible people.’ I said ‘I don’t agree.’ Anyway I got fed up with this. I knew the thing had gone through Parliament and I had a neighbour who was an MP … my parents had a neighbour who was an MP, so I went home and told him the story …

Anyway he said he’d take it up, and when I got back to Germany there was a big notice on my desk: ‘Here is your authority to get married. God help you.’ So I started to sort things out, and then I was told that the Germans were still operating under the laws of the Third Reich, so the Third Reich forbade German citizens to marry foreigners. So I had to take a car and a driver and go all over the place in Germany to sort out the legal situation. I finished up at what amounts to … what would be the equivalent over here … a sort of district legal office … and I sat down with the German civil service lawyers and we thrashed out a method of doing this….

When we’d sorted it out I went back and applied and got married in a German registry office. I set up a sort of … established notice of how to do it and this was circulated. I was told three thousand other couples married in that year … based upon what I’d negotiated with the Germans.”

References:

Imperial War Museum sound archive
Interview with Mr J M G Thexton, 7th November 2007

The National Archives
FO 1030/174
Marriages with ex-enemy nationals

Renate Greenshields
Lucky Girl Goodbye
First published 1988

General Sir Brian Horrocks – Corps Commander

24th April 2009

The purpose of my research is to understand what British people aimed to achieve in occupied Germany after the Second World War. For the past year or so I’ve been looking at some of the senior army officers, notably Field Marshal Montgomery, who was Military Governor of the British Zone for the first year of the occupation, from May 1945 to the end of April 1946.

As I progress further with the research I’ll be looking at other groups of people: politicians, diplomats and administrators, the education advisers, young men, who were only 18 or 19 years old at the outbreak or war and who had no adult experience of anything else, and German speaking exiles, who returned to the country they had grown up in, as members of the occupying forces or as administrators in the Control Commission.

One theme which interests me is how army officers adjusted to their changed role after the fighting was over and the task of ‘winning the peace’ had begun. I’ve recently read the autobiography of General Sir Brian Horrocks, ‘A Full Life’, (first published in 1960 by William Collins; new edition published 1974 by Leo Cooper), which provides some insight into this, although he stayed in Germany for only a few months after the end of the war.

Horrocks was one of three Corps Commanders in the British 21st Army Group, who reported directly to Montgomery as Commander-in-Chief. With the rank of Lieutenant General (which is higher than Major General) the Corps Commanders were, in the early days of the occupation, the most important people in the Zone, equal if not senior in rank to the Deputy Military Governor, Sir Brian Robertson, with complete authority in their own areas of command.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Horrocks was one of Montgomery’s most successful generals, respected by both his British and American colleagues. He fought under Montgomery at the Battle of Alamein and in North Africa, and then again, as commander of 30 Corps, from the Battle of Normandy to the final defeat of the German armies and unconditional surrender in May 1945.

I’ve quoted some extracts from his autobiography below, which are interesting for a number of reasons: his background and experience as a POW in the First World War and in Russia and Germany afterwards, which must have influenced his outlook on life later, his descriptions of Montgomery, his reactions to the liberation of a concentration camp, and how he set about his task in Germany after the Second World War was over.

Brian Horrocks was born in India in 1895, but grew up and was educated in England. His father was a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps and he remembered holidays in Gibraltar as a young boy:

“I used to travel out by P. & O. every holidays from my preparatory school in Durham and the Gibraltar of those days was a small boy’s paradise, much more so than today, as we had free access to Spain. Life consisted of bathing, hunting with the Calpe hounds, cricket matches, race meetings and children’s parties – all great fun.”

In 1912 he went to Sandhurst to train as an officer in the army. At the outbreak of war in August 1914 he was sent to France, but was wounded and captured at the Battle of Ypres in October. He was just 19 years old at the time. He spent the rest of the war as a POW, despite numerous unsuccessful attempts to escape, one of which ended only yards from the Dutch border. As a POW he shared a room with 50 Russian officers and learnt Russian. As a result of this, he was sent to Russia in 1919 as part of the (unsuccessful) British efforts to help the White Russian armies defeat the Bolsheviks.

On returning from Russia he rejoined his regiment, now stationed in Germany, as part of the British occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War. He described his experiences as follows:

“When I returned to my regiment as a captain I was lucky, for the 1st Battalion The Middlesex Regiment then formed part of the British Army of the Rhine. For us in the occupation forces life in Cologne was very pleasant, because, owing to the chronic inflation of the German mark, we always had plenty of money, a most unusual experience for me.

It was all too easy. I opened an account for £10 sterling in a German bank and as each day the pound become worth more in German currency, all I had to do was to call and draw out the extra marks. Towards the end of this period we used to get the weekly pay for our companies in sacks. But the Germans suffered terribly. The more expensive bars were filled with fat profiteers and their hard-faced, brassy mistresses who drove round in huge cars and seemed to batten on the wretched, starving, professional classes. …

I don’t think anyone who has not witnessed at first hand the real horrors of inflation can understand what it means. I came away convinced that any sacrifice was worth while in order to avoid this economic cancer.”

In April 1921 he returned to the UK “for duty in connection with the coal strike.” He was then posted to Ireland during ‘the troubles’ “where our life consisted of searching for hidden arms, patrols, keeping a lookout for road-blocks and dealing with ambushes organised by the Sinn Feiners – a most unpleasant sort of warfare.” This was followed by a trip to Silesia in 1923 “to maintain law and order during a plebiscite” to determine whether the area should be remain part of Germany or be transferred to Poland.

He also took part in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, competing in the Modern Pentathlon. In those days the modern pentathlon had a strong military association, as it was, according to Horrocks, “based on the conception of a courier carrying dispatches though a hostile country” who needs to ride a horse, run on foot, swim, fence and shoot with a pistol.

At the start of the Second World War in 1939, Horrocks joined the British Expeditionary Force in France as a major, commanding a machine-gun battalion. He described his first meeting with the divisional commander, General Montgomery:

“I hadn’t been there two hours when I was told that the divisional commander, General Montgomery, was in his car on the road and wanted to see me. Monty had obviously come up at once to cast an eye over his new divisional machine-gun commander. This was my first meeting with him, apart from once in Egypt. I saw a small, alert figure with piercing eyes sitting in the back of his car – the man under whom I was to fight all my battles during the war, and who was to have more influence on my life than anyone before or since.

I knew him well by reputation. He was probably the most discussed general in the British Army before the war, and – except with those who had served under him – not a popular figure…. He was known to be ruthlessly efficient, but somewhat of a showman. I had been told sympathetically that I wouldn’t last long under his command, and to be honest, I would rather have served under any other divisional commander.”

Later in the book he described another meeting with Montgomery, in 1947 after the war was over and he was based in Chester:

“The highlight was a visit from Monty. I had not realised how popular he was with all and sundry. It was almost like a Royal tour, with people lining the route – and he loved every minute of it. Just before his departure for Liverpool, where he was to catch his train back to London, the mayor of Birkenhead rang me up to say that over 1,000 people were waiting for him on the near side of the Mersey tunnel. A small platform had been erected and he hoped that the field-marshal would be prepared to say a few words to the crowd. This was quite unexpected so, as we drove along, I did my best to brief him on the role which Birkenhead had played during the war. I spoke most of the time to his back as he was continuously leaning out of the window and waving to the crowds while he murmured ‘Yes, yes Jorrocks – three battleships constructed – I have got that. Yes go on.’ We arrived, and he then made a sparkling speech which delighted everybody without mentioning a single word of what I had told him during the journey.”

After defeat in France and evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940, Horrocks returned to England. In 1942 he went with Montgomery to Egypt and played an important role in the series of victories which led to the German army being driven out of Africa. His army career was interrupted in 1943, when he was seriously wounded in Tunisia in an attack by an aeroplane. He was out of action until July 1944, when he re-joined the army as commander of 30 Corps in the Battle of Normandy.

Towards the end of the war, he played a large part in the fighting which forced the German army back across the Rhine. I’ve written before on this blog about the horror many soldiers felt at the destruction caused by war; to themselves, their enemies and to innocent civilians. Horrocks described ordering the destruction of the town of Kleve, during the Battle of the Reichswald:

“One thing, during this preparatory stage, caused me almost more worry than anything else; the handling of the immense air resources which were to support us. General Crerar told me that in addition to the whole of the 2nd Tactical Air Force the heavies from Bomber Command were also available. And he put this question to me: ‘Do you want the town of Cleve taken out?’ By ‘taking out’ he meant, of course, totally destroyed.

This is the sort of problem with which a general in war is constantly faced, and from which there is no escape. Cleve was a lovely, historical Rhineland town. Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fifth wife came from there. No doubt a lot of civilians, particularly women and children, were still living there. I hated the thought of its being ‘taken out’. All the same, if we were to break out of this bottle-neck and sweep down into the German plain beyond it was going to be a race between the 15th Scottish Division and the German reserves for the hinge, and all the German reserves would have to pass through Cleve. If I could delay them by bombing, it might make all the different to the battle. And after all the lives of my own troops must come first. So I said ‘Yes’.

But I can assure you that I did not enjoy the sight of those bombers flying over my head on the night before we attacked. Generals, of course, should not have imagination. I reckon I had a bit too much.”

This “horrible battle” lasted a month. “We took 16,800 German prisoners and it was estimated that the total enemy casualties was about 75,000 as against 15,634 suffered by us. Our losses seemed very high at the time, but this was unquestionably the grimmest battle in which I took part during the last war and I kept reminding myself that during the battle of the Somme in the 1914-18 war there were 50,000 casualties during the first morning.”

After crossing the Rhine, he led the force which captured the city of Bremen:

“It was in Bremen that I realised for the first time just what the Germans must have suffered as the result of our bombing. It was a shambles; there didn’t seem to be a single house intact in this huge seaport.”

Earlier in the book, while describing his experience as a POW in the First World War, he had spoken of the ‘great respect’ front line soldiers had for those on the other side:

“I have always regarded the forward area of the battlefield as the most exclusive club in the world, inhabited by the cream of the nation’s manhood – the men who actually do the fighting. Comparatively few in number, they have little feeling of hatred for the enemy – rather the reverse.”

This was reinforced by his experience in North Africa:

“There was an odd atmosphere about this desert war: never has there been less hate between the opposing sides: that is between the Germans and ourselves. Owing to the constant ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ both armies lived alternately on each other’s rations and used quite a quantity of each other’s captured equipment.”

But at the end of the war, he was present at the liberation of Sandbostel concentration camp, and this made him change his opinion:

“Up to now I had been fighting this war without any particular hatred for the enemy but just short of Bremen we uncovered one of those horror camps which are now common knowledge, but which at that time came as a great shock. I saw a ghastly picture when I entered with General Allan Adair, the commander of the Guards Armoured Division. The floor of the first large hut was strewn with emaciated figures clad in most horrible striped pyjamas. Many of them were too weak to walk but they managed to heave themselves up and gave us a pathetic cheer. Most of them had some form of chronic dysentery and the stench was so frightful that I disgraced myself by being sick in a corner. It was difficult to believe that most of these hardly human creatures had once been educated civilised people.

I was so angry that I ordered the burgomasters of all the surrounding towns and villages each to supply a quota of German women to clean up the camp and look after these unfortunate prisoners, who were dying daily at an alarming rate. When the women arrived we expected some indication of horror or remorse when they saw what their fellow-countrymen had been doing. Not a bit of it. I never saw a tear or heard one expression of pity from any of them. I also brought one of our own hospitals into the camp and when I found some of our sisters looking very distressed I apologised for having given them such an unpleasant task. ‘Goodness me,’ they said, ‘it’s not that. We are only worried because we can do so little for the poor things – many of them have gone too far.’ A somewhat different approach to the problem by the woman of two countries.”

He received the surrender of German forces in his area:

“I had often wondered how the war would end. When it came it could hardly have been more of an anti-climax. I happened to be sitting in the military equivalent of the smallest room when I heard a voice on the wireless saying ‘All hostilities will cease at 0800 hours tomorrow morning 5th May.’

It was a wonderful moment – the sense of relief was extraordinary; for the first time for five years I would no longer be responsible for other men’s lives. The surrender on our front took place at 1430 hours on 5th May when the German general commanding the Corps Ems and his chief of staff arrived at our headquarters. Elaborate arrangement had been made for their reception. Our military police, looking very smart escorted them to a table in the centre of the room; all round the outside was a ring of interested staff officers and other ranks of 30 Corps.

When all was ready I came in and seated myself all alone opposite the two Germans. After issuing my orders for the surrender I finished with these words, ‘These orders must be obeyed scrupulously. I warn you we shall have no mercy if they are not. Having seen one of your horror camps my whole attitude towards Germany has changed.’

The chief of staff jumped up and said, ‘The army had nothing to do with these camps.’ ‘Sit down,’ I replied, ‘there were German soldiers on sentry duty outside and you cannot escape responsibility. The world will never forgive Germany for those camps.’”

But once the war was over, another “considerable mental switch” was required:

“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.”

“There is something terribly depressing about a country defeated in war, even though that country has been your enemy, and the utter destruction of Germany was almost awesome. It didn’t seem possible that towns like Hanover and Bremen could ever rise again from the shambles in which the bulk of the hollow-eyed and shabby population eked out a troglodyte existence underneath the ruins of their houses.

Things were better in the country districts, but what struck me most was the complete absence of able-bodied men or even or youths – there were just a few old men, some cripples, and that was all. The farms were all run by women. How appalling were the casualties suffered by the Germans was brought home to me forcibly when I first attended morning service in the small village church of Eystrop where I lived. The Germans commemorate their war dead by means of evergreen wreaths – dozens and dozens of them. In a similar church in the United Kingdom I would not expect to see more than eight to ten names on the local war memorial. The Germans certainly started the last war, but only those who saw the conditions during the first few months immediately after the war ended can know how much they suffered.”
 
“Monty laid down the priorities as 1) food and (2) housing; he then, as always, gave us a free hand to look after our own districts until such time as proper military government could take over from us. It was a fascinating task. I found myself to all intents and purposes the benevolent (I hope) dictator of an area about the size of Wales. At my morning conference, instead of considering fire plans and laying down military objectives, we discussed such problems as food, coal, communications, press and so on. I soon discovered the merits of a dictatorship. I could really get things done quickly. One day in the late autumn a staff officer reported than the output of coal was dropping every week in our corps district. That was very serious with winter approaching. The reason, I was informed, was that the miners lacked clothes. I immediately ordered a levy to be carried our in certain nearby towns to provide adequate clothing for the miners, and sure enough a few weeks later the graph showing coal production began to rise. I smiled when I thought of what would happen in dear old democratic Britain if the Cabinet ordered clothes to be removed compulsorily from Cardiff, shall we say, to clothe the miners in the Welsh valleys.”

“To start with a great deal of this work had to be carried out by British troops and quite naturally this caused resentment. I remember being asked by an intelligent sapper corporal, ‘Why should I now have to work hard and repair bridges for the so-and-so Germans who have caused so much misery to the world.’ As he was obviously voicing the doubts of many others, I collected the company together and explained to the best of my ability that the war was now over, so Germany must take her place again as a European state. Many of the people were on the verge of starvation and if food couldn’t be moved freely into the towns they would die that winter. And this would cause great bitterness. Furthermore it was essential for our own British economy to start trading again with Germany and we would never be able to do this until communications had been repaired. Whether I convinced them or not I have no idea, but they went back to work at once without any further questions.”

“The British soldier has often been described as our best ambassador and this is particularly so if he forms part of an army of occupation because one of the most difficult things in the world is to occupy a foreign country and yet remain friendly with its people. If left to himself the British soldier will soon be on the best of terms with the local population.  Unfortunately this time he was not left to himself and all sorts of regulations about non-fraternisation with the German population were issued. No doubt there were good reasons for this policy but it caused endless trouble at our level. What happened was that our troops were prevented from getting to know the ordinary, decent families in an open and normal way, and were driven to consorting on the sly with the lowest types of German women.”

“In spite of the non-fraternisation rule I was determined somehow or other to make our occupation as palatable as possible for the local inhabitants. This may sound sloppy, but I had experienced the difficulties of occupying Germany after the First World War. I knew very well that nobody will ever keep the Germans down for long because they belong to a very rare species which actually likes work. I also understood the menace of Communism better than most – thanks to my time in Russia. So, without claiming any particularly brilliant foresight, it seemed to me that the Germans were the sort of people whom it would be better to have on our side than against us. I therefore ordered all units in my corps to do everything they could to help the German children. Nobody could blame them for the last war, and they had obviously had a bad time. Some of the children had never even seen chocolates in their lives. Units were told to open special youth clubs, and camps in the summer, and organise sports, etc.”

He gave a tea party for 150 German children, but “unfortunately the party was also attended by some reporters from the British Press … inexperienced, callow, young men who were concerned mainly with getting an angle to their stories … It soon become obvious they were hostile” and the next day headlines appeared in the press “British General Gives Tea Party for German Children”. He received “an enormous number of letters in which the kindest comment was “that I had obviously gone mad.’”

“These were of little consequence, but unfortunately owing to all the adverse criticism I was ordered to cease my activities with the German children at once. Orders had to be obeyed but I still feel that this was a serious mistake. Instead of mixing with the civilian population on a friendly basis we were driven back into ourselves and when I returned to Germany some three years later to take over the appointment of commander-in-chief, I found that the B.A.O.R. was an army of occupation in the true sense of the word, living quite apart from the German people.”

He was appointed commander-in-chief of the British Army of the Rhine in 1948, but before taking up the post, had another operation on his stomach, his seventh after being wounded in North Africa:

“Very unwisely I went out to Germany before I had completely recovered and then followed the most unhappy period of my life. I arrived to command B.A.O.R. just when things were getting more and more difficult with the Russians.”

He had to resign from the army, but continued to live an active and varied life. In 1949 he was appointed gentleman usher of the Black Rod in parliament and fourteen years later became a director of Bovis, the construction company. He also presented a series of TV programmes ‘Men in Battle’ which at its peak, had eight and a half million viewers. Brian Horrocks died in 1985.

Eckernförde under British Occupation

25th January 2009

Eckernförde is a small town in the north of Germany, in Schleswig Holstein. It was formally occupied on 10th May 1945, two days after VE Day, although, according to the local paper, British troops first entered the town four days earlier on May 6th, and the following day a large number of American columns passed through the town on their way further north.

An old family friend recently sent me a newly published book which describes life in the town under British occupation, based on memories and stories told by around 170 witnesses; mostly older people who were there at the time, but in some cases their children; mostly German, but a few British.

As over 60 years have passed since the events took place, we have to ask how accurate these memories are. The author, Ilse Rathjen-Couscherung, said in her introduction that, although in some cases people remembered the same event differently, she was able to cross check accounts and keep contradictions to a minimum. In general, she was amazed how accurately people she spoke to were able to recall how things were at the end of the war.

There was no resistance when the British first entered the town, although both sides were reserved towards the other. However, over time, the local population came to appreciate the role of the British in maintaining law and order, and realised that they had nothing to fear, as long as they followed the rules laid down by the military authorities. Despite hunger, shortage of accommodation, made worse by the influx of large numbers of refugees, a nightly curfew, and an endless stream of orders requisitioning houses and property for British officers and troops, relations between occupiers and occupied improved over time. Many of the stories related in the book describe small favours and acts of kindness, which were clearly appreciated and remembered long after the event: for example help finding a stolen bicycle, help given to a man who had lost one eye, so he could travel to Hamburg to have a glass eye fitted, and personal friendships developed through singing songs or playing music together, despite an inability to communicate with words, as neither understood the other’s language.

I’ve written in a previous post on this blog, about the British documentary film ‘KRO Germany’ which showed an idealised portrait of a British Kreis Resident Officer (or District Commissioner) for another town. It was interesting to compare the film with the descriptions in the book of two KROs for the town of Eckernförde, as this showed how they were remembered by the local population, rather than the image the British authorities wished to present to people back home.

The first KRO, Major, later Colonel Ormsby, who was in the post from 1945 to 1949, was not well liked. He was remembered, by most of those who spoke of him, as remote, harsh, unsympathetic, loud, rude, narrow-minded and domineering. People were afraid of him if he suddenly appeared in the town, with his officer’s staff in hand, in order to personally enforce some rule or other. On the other hand he was also seen as fair and correct and some German people who worked for him spoke of him more favourably. One witness remembered her father saying that his family had been killed in a German air attack on Coventry, but despite this, he was not revengeful: “Er war ernst und streng, aber gerecht und fair.”

According to another witness, Colonel Ormsby was a British Labour Party supporter and in the Autumn of 1946, in the first local elections in the British Zone of Germany after the war, he took the trouble to find who had been members of the SPD (German Socialists) in 1933, and visited them personally, without an interpreter, to try to persuade them that it was important for them to rejoin their former party. One witness related that, during one of these visits, he told them they should take English history as an example, with its 1,000 year experience of democracy. The witness, who was 10 years old at the time, remembered saying that not only was Magna Charta signed in 1215 and therefore not 1,000 years old, but as only a small number of people had shared in its benefits, there was no true democracy in England at that time. Major Ormsby was pleased with this response, which showed that the young boy was able to think for himself.
 
In September 1949, Colonel Ormsby was succeeded by Colonel Errol Daniell, who was responsible for the neighbouring districts of Schleswig and Flensburg, as well as Eckernförde, and who remained in post until 1954. According to the author, he was well liked by the local population, and worked hard to ensure good relations between British and Germans. One German couple became friends with him and his family, visited him after he left the town, both in Germany and in England, and stayed in touch for many years, until shortly before he died.

Like many other senior British army officers, Colonel Daniell had excellent relations with the local German aristocracy, visiting and being entertained at a number of stately homes. The author describes, for example, the Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein saying in a phone conversation that she remembered him as an exceptionally friendly and sympathetic man.

Finally, there were two stories I particularly liked, both relating to a local drinks firm. The first described how the firm’s bottling room was converted by the British into a washroom, complete with showers and an oil-fired water heater, for the ordinary soldiers. These lived in barracks, with no washing facilities, in conditions far less comfortable than the private houses requisitioned for the officers and NCOs.

The second related to the so-called “Heissgetränk” (or “Hot Drink”), generally sold cold, and produced by the firm in the early days after the end of the war, as a substitute for beer or soft drinks, which were unobtainable. As the firm’s bottling room was in use as the English soldiers' washroom and no new bottles were available anyway, local people could turn up with their own bottles to have them filled. In fact, the drink was no more than coloured water with artificial sweetener. The story went that when they ran out of artificial sweetener, the owner of the firm took two buckets of locally caught herring on the long journey to Leverkusen, where a friendly worker at the Bayer chemical plant there swapped them for some more artificial sweetener.

References:

Ilse Rathjen-Couscherung, Eckernförde unter britische Besatzung (Schriftenreihe der Heimatgemeinschaft Eckernförde e.V. Nr. 14, 2008) 

John Bayley: In Another Country

18th January 2009

How useful is a work of fiction as a historical source? It’s difficult enough to work out how accurate supposedly factual accounts are, especially if they were written long after the events they describe. Fiction doesn’t even claim to be an accurate record of “how it really was.” On the other hand, the atmosphere of a place, and the thoughts and feelings of the people who were there, can sometimes emerge more strongly from fiction, than from official documents or other factual sources, in which much may be assumed, but never expressed directly and therefore remains hidden.

John Bayley is now best known now as the husband of Iris Murdoch and author of the best-selling books 'Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch', and 'Elegy for Iris', in which he told the story of her decline in old age due to Alzheimer’s Disease. He is also a distinguished literary critic, fellow of New College Oxford and from 1974-1992 was Warton Professor of English at Oxford University.

'In Another Country', was his first, and for a long time his only, novel. It was published in 1955 and reissued by Oxford Univeristy Press as a "Twentieth Century Classic" in 1986. The novel is set in Germany in 1945 in "the first cold winter of peace" and is based on John Bayley’s own experiences there, as a young officer at the end of the war. 

I am no literary critic, but the book is clearly well written. In the introduction to the 1986 edition, A N Wilson, who was taught by John Bayley at Oxford and later wrote his own biography of Iris Murdoch, quoted the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, speaking with “a most distinguished and personalized stammer, which caused her voice to seize up suddenly on key words” once asking him:

“‘Have you read John’s novel?’
‘No’
‘Well it’s very …’
‘Good’ I clumsily prompted her again
‘It’s quite brilliant”’. She said sharply, as if I had contradicted her. ‘It is a great pity that he has never written any more.’”

The title of the book comes from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta, (act 4, scene 1). The relevant passage is:

Barnadine: Thou hast committed …
Barabas:    Fornication? But that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.

A girl does die in the book, though not, perhaps, the one the reader expects.

This is not the place to re-tell the story of the novel. Suffice it to say that the hero is Oliver Childers, a young lieutenant in the British military forces in Germany. John Bayley himself worked in T-Force, an exclusive unit with the job of identifying German scientists who could be useful to Britain at the end of the war. The fictional hero of the book appears to do something very similar, but his work is of no concern at all to Oliver, and is described in the book as follows:

“P(I)15 was chiefly engaged in reporting on the condition and prospects of the local industries which had survived bombardment. More ambitiously and in collaboration with other units that bore the code P, it sometimes set about the absorption of a technician, a process, or a whole plant, whose services were coveted back in England. But such undertakings were obscure and protracted, dating from a past too remote for the longest memory of the present staff: even the Colonel, who had been in charge nearly four months, could not remember beginning or finishing anything of this kind. What the unit did was ultimately mysterious to itself, but it was a tranquil mystery – no one yearned to behold the completed pattern, the larger meaning. Like conveyor-belt workers who attend their passing bits and pieces and remain indifferent to the nature of the final product, the personnel of P(I) 15 dealt with their daily stint of letters, files and samples, and looked no further. ”

Germany appears 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.”

The main theme of the book is how the various people in the unit related to each other, on a personal basis, and Oliver’s own relationship with Liese, a young German woman. As with all good novels, it can be interpreted in different ways and works on many levels, but above all, it seemed to me, it describes one (fictional) young man’s attempt to make sense of his life, and what to do next. After various events in Germany, some of which involve him directly, some indirectly, some quite dramatic, but described with great understatement, he returns to his parents' suburban house in England and half-heartedly tries to find a job.  

“Life was all before him – but that was just the trouble.”

He loses his job, but keeps the girl, and the book ends with an uncertain future ahead of him.

“‘Which way do we go?’
Oliver drew a deep breath. ‘We’ll decide that when we get outside,’ he said firmly.”

In summary, it seems to me, John Bayley’s novel, In Another Country, is a useful reminder to historians that, for some young British men in Germany at the end of the war, the work they did was insignificant and of little concern. In stark contrast with the high and noble claims of senior officers, (referred to in previous posts on this blog), that what they were doing was “fighting a battle to save the soul of Germany”, these young men were concerned, above all, with their own personal relationships with friends, colleagues and sometimes, lovers, how they could re-build their lives at the end of the war and what would happen to them when they got home.

References:

John Bayley, In Another Country, first published by Constable & Co, 1955. Republished by Oxford University Press, 1986, with an introduction by A N Wilson

For two other, completely different and contrasting descriptions of T-Force, see:

Ian Cobain writing in The Guardian on 29th August 2007

Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Battle for the Spoils and Secrets of Nazi Germany, (Paladin, 1988) (First Published by Michael Joseph Ltd, 1987)