Category: British Occupation of Germany after the Second World War

British Zone Review

8th October 2006

The ‘British Zone Review’ was a fortnightly review of the activities of the British Control Commission for Germany and Military Government.

The first issue appeared on 29th September 1945 and the final issue was published almost exactly four years later on September 20th 1949.

It was published by the Control Commission’s Public Relations and Information Services Control Group, (known as P.R.I.S.C.), and so is as close to an ‘official view’ of the activities of the  British occupation forces and civilian administration as we are likely to find.

In the second issue, General Sir Brian Robertson, the deputy military governor, described the Review as "Our Shop Window" with a wide circulation. "It goes not only to every part of the British Control Commission and Military Government at Headquarters and in the field, but also copies are sent to our opposite numbers in the US, Russian and French Zones. Editors of the principal newspapers in England will read it, as well as British Military Missions on the Continent."

A diversity of views were represented. Articles were published on all aspects of the occupation, written by staff representing all divisions of Military Government, including the army and air force, research department, education, local government, food, health, culture, legal, finance and economics, as well as public relations and information services control. 

A long running series on "The Price of War" catalogued the devastation in most of the major cities in the British Zone, while other articles described efforts to reconstruct railways and canals, rebuild bridges, and restore the economy. In a regular ‘Guest Feature,’ journalists from the major British newspapers and press agencies were invited to express their opinions, and an "Open Letter Bag" section published widely divergent views from serving members of the armed forces and Control Commission.

‘Germany under Control’ exhibition

1st October 2006

On 7th June 1946, John Hynd, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the British Minister responsible for Germany, formally opened an exhibition in London called "Germany under Control."

The opening ceremony was held at the Dominion Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, in front of an invited audience of 3,000 people, including the mayors of the Boroughs of Greater London, sitting in the front row of the dress circle, wearing their full regalia, and wives, relations and friends of personnel serving in Germany.

Hynd’s speech at the event provides an interesting overview of what the British hoped to achieve, one year after the end of the war in Europe; their aims, achievements, and challenges still to come; in summary how they hoped to win the peace, after winning the war.

This is what he said:

"It is not inappropriate, I think, that this exhibition "Germany under Control" should be opened to the pubic today. For six long dismal and dangerous years we have fought desperately and stolidly against – what? Against a menace, the menace that threatened to overwhelm us as it has already overwhelmed the whole of Western Europe, but a menace which was only dimly understood by many of our people.

In that struggle we prevailed. The thing that once threatened to destroy us now lies shattered at our feet, and tomorrow the whole country will be celebrating our victory and our liberation.

But this is the second time in thirty years that our peace has been shattered and our security threatened, and in the midst of next week’s celebrations how many will be asking themselves if wars must always be?

We hope this exhibition will help in some little way to offer a glimpse of the reality of what our trials and struggles and sacrifices of the past six years have been for, and at the same time, show the work that is still being done and that still requires to be done if peace, security and prosperity are to be assured for our children.

For there is much still to be done. This time we must be sure. This time we must stay until we have finished the job.

The exhibition will no doubt give some indication of just how big that job is. It will show if only in miniature, but nevertheless graphically and effectively, the growth of the Nazi ideology. It will reproduce for you Germany under the rule of the Beast; her economic institutions destroyed; the voice of reason and humanity brutally suppressed wheresoever it sought to speak in that unhappy land; her children brutalised, as the sinister influences that had laid hold of her prepared to submerge, not only Germany, but the whole world, in dark misery.

You will see, too, the terrible price the people of Germany have paid for the mad ambitions of their rulers; the tangled mass of debris and destruction, and dazed, bewildered humanity that was once the Germany from which the boastings of Hitler and Goebbels used to din our ears and the vaunted Luftwaffe soared to bomb our towns and villages, now reduced to a scene of squalor and devastation unequalled in world history.

The plight of Germany is not, however, a matter we can ignore. It is a situation that involves not only the German People. but threatens Europe and the world unless it is controlled, with new tragedy, a tragedy of economic dislocation, with consequent disease and famine, and civil strife that might lead us again into another still more disastrous war; a situation that only wise, determined and courageous measures can now avert.

That, and no less, is the task we and our Allies have set ourselves. It is an enterprise of great magnitude and difficulty for which there is indeed no precedent in human history, but I think the exhibition will satisfy most people that it is a task which, despite its magnitude, is being carried our with no less credit by our men and women in Germany than was the military victory itself.

For the British Zone, with which the exhibition deals, represents a territory as large as England itself, with no Government, no local authorities, no established institutions – all these were Nazi and have fled or been destroyed; her industries wrecked, her transport in chaos, her food supplies exhausted. In this context our Military Government and the Control Commission have worked miracles, but miracles have still to be achieved before order is restored and the objective of the Potsdam Agreement, which is to create a democratic Germany that can take her place in the community of free peoples in a free and peaceful world, has been realised.

It is a costly business. Of that we are only too aware. But we are aware too, that peace is indivisible and that poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere.

Europe needs German coal; that means transport must be restored and the factories must commence producing the mining equipment, locomotives and trucks; that means agriculture must be re-organised to produce food to feed the miners and the railwaymen, and the factory workers; that means, in turn the production of fertilisers and farm machinery and implements. But Man cannot live by bread alone, and the workers needs shelter and clothing and cooking utensils if they are to continue working. The organisation and administration of these activities requires public administration to replace the discredited Nazi institutions, and therefore the encouragement of democratic activities, political parties and trade unions must be part of our task. All that has to be achieved in circumstances of unimaginable difficulty, and our men are doing it.

We have to destroy the Nazi war industry and war potential. That means steel, and many of the products upon which Germany once depended for the exports with which to pay for her imported food. But if her steel production is to be reduced for security reasons, we must help to create a new import/export basis for her economy, for until we do there is no payment for the food that must be supplied to prevent mass starvation and the consequent destruction of all our hopes of security and peace.

It is therefore, in the beginning a costly job, but investment for peace is better, and infinitely cheaper than investment for war, and the work we are doing is no less than a great, perhaps final, effort to establish conditions in which the world may be freed from the menace of war forever.

In the light of this, I hope and believe that our exhibition will not only provide a fund of interest and instruction to our people, who have fought, suffered and triumphed in the big struggle through which we have passed since 1939, but will enable them to appreciate why and how we are now proceeding to finish the job.

(Hynd’s speech is in the National Archives, FO 945/533)

Humphrey Jennings’ film: A Defeated People

20 September 2006

The documentary film "A Defeated People" is remarkable both for its images of life in Germany immediately after the war, and for what it reveals of the attitudes of the British occupation forces.

The film was made in 1945, soon after the end of the war, by the Crown Film Unit, part of the British Ministry of Information, with the full support of the Control Commission for Germany. It was directed by Humphrey Jennings, arguably the greatest of the British wartime documentary film makers. His films include "London can Take It" and "Fires were Started," which has been described as "one of the key works in creating the mythic image of the London Blitz. Those heroic figures silhouetted against the blazing inferno sweeping the dockside warehouse etched themselves into history, embodying the epic of the ordinary men and women who calmly and courageously took up the defence of their city."  (Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain can take it: The British Cinema in the Second World War. Oxford, Basil Blackwell 1986)

In 1940 Jennings wrote to his wife: "Some of the damage in London is pretty heart-breaking but what an effect it has had on the people! What warmth – what courage! What determination … Everybody absolutely determined: secretly delighted with the privilege of holding up Hitler. Certain of beating him: a certainty which no amount of bombing can weaken, only strengthen…"

Angus Calder in his book "The Myth of the Blitz" calls Jennings "Britain’s most remarkable maker of official films," and goes on to describe how "virtually everyone in Britain must have seen a fairish proportion of "London Can Take It" as the images from the film have been "recycled almost every time events in 1940 have been narrated on TV" (even if the source is not acknowledged) and in sequences in many feature films. (Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz. London, Jonathan Cape,1991)

Roger Manvell, a regional film officer during the war, responsible for arranging showings in factories, public halls and clubs, (and later to become a well-known film critic and writer), included a film by Humphrey Jennings in nearly all his programmes, and tells how "I do not exaggerate when I say that members of audiences …(especially during the earlier, more immediately alarming years) frequently wept as a result of Jennings’ direct appeal to the rich cultural heritage of Britain … going back to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, to Purcell and Handel."

What did this Englishman who created the "mythic image of the blitz", make of Germany after the war?

According to Nicolaus Pronay, the image of Germany presented in Jennings’ film "A Defeated People", is the same as that presented by the popular newsreels; that of a guilty people receiving their just deserts. This image could be summarised as: "The Germans were a guilty people with an inborn compulsion to war; it was they who were responsible for Hitler, just as they had been responsible for the Kaiser, and not the other way round. The German government merely represented the character and the aspirations of the German people: unless these were changed the Germans would start another war as soon as they felt strong enough." ("Defeated Germany in British Newsreels: 1944-45" in K.R.M. Short & Stephan Dolezel (Eds), Hitler’s Fall: The Newsreel Witness)

Pronay goes on to say that: "Perhaps the most illuminating demonstration of the extent to which there was a basic consensus in Britain about Germany – spanning both the intellectual and the class divisions – is to be found in the remarkable fact that, for once, the right-wing populist newsreels and the austerely elitist and left-wing documentarists presented an identical perception of Germany, in all essentials, for their both socially and educationally different target audiences."

It’s true that the script of Jennings’ film "A Defeated People" shows no hesitation in blaming the Germans for "the war they started," but it is possible to interpret the film as a whole in a very different way from Pronay.

While the script tells one story, the images show a very different picture; one that shows people as individuals, not as a collective guilty nation, that shows pity for their suffering and hope for the future.

At the end of the war, both the defeated Germans and British occupiers were confused, overwhelmed by the destruction they saw all around them, daunted by the magnitude of problems which seemed insoluble, but nevertheless prepared to try to do their best, to bring order out of chaos, and even, in their own way, make the world a better place, after the horrors of war.

This different picture is illustrated in the film, in, to take a few examples: A picture of a broken clock on a bombed out railway station with the commentary "at the end of the war, life in Germany ran down, like a broken clock." Vast numbers of people on the move, in all directions, looking for somewhere to live, or for lost friends and relatives. People leaping into cattle trucks as a train pulls into a station and the announcer saying over and over again "it is forbidden to ride on the bumpers." Bewildered refugee children huddled over suitcases. People living in cellars under the rubble of the cities, or in a room on the third floor of a building, with two of its four walls blown away and missing. Trains taking coal from the mines to the liberated countries, while German women saw up logs in the forest to take the wood home in prams to use as fuel because "for the Germans there is no coal."

While the script at one point warns ominously of children "growing up like their fathers," the film ends by switching between two sets of images which present a positive view of the future: a group of young girls holding hands in a circle and a group of German judges being sworn in, promising to uphold the constitution.

In summary, in Jennings’ own words it was "a hell of a tangle" and one thing only was certain: that we, (the British), can’t "leave them to stew in their own juice."

Jennings’ own mixed, complex and uncertain reactions, were expressed in a letter he wrote to his wife on 10 September 1945, while filming in Germany:

"At lunchtime today we were photographing a family cooking their lunch on campfires in dixies on the blitzed main stair-case of the Palace of Justice at Cologne – one of the few buildings still standing in the centre of the city – outside apparently deserted – surrounded by miles of rubble and weed-covered craters – but inside voices cries of children and the smell of drifting wood-smoke – of burnt paper – the sound of people smashing up doors and windows to light fires in the corridors – the smoke itself drifting into side rooms still littered with legal documents – finally adding to the blue haze in front of the cathedral. The cathedral now with all the damage round immensely tall – a vast blue and unsafe spirit ready to crumble upon the tiny black figures in the street below – permanent figures: Cologne’s Black Market … and then returning to Duesseldorf – much less knocked about – blitzed but not actually destroyed like Cologne and Essen and Aachen – still a beautiful city, returning here to tea we meeting sailing through the park-like streets a mass of white Sunday-frocked German school children standing tightly together on an Army truck and singing at the tops of their voices as they are rushed through the streets (where?) … In Essen they still fetch their water from stand-pipes and firehose in the streets and the sewers rush roaring and stinking open to the eye and the nose – seep into blitzed houses into cellars where people still live. Look down a deserted street which has a winding path only trodden in the rubble – above the shapes of windows and balconies lean and threaten – below by the front-door now choked with bricks you will see scrawled in chalk ‘IM KELLER WOHNEN:’… and the names of the families who have taken over the underground passages where there is no light (or once I saw one bulb crawling with bees – they too must live through this winter in Essen) no water – no gas – a ray of daylight from the pavement level airhole …"

"Once no doubt Germany was a beautiful country and still remembers it on summer evenings in the country. For the people themselves they are willing enough or servile enough or friendly enough according to your philosophy of History and the German problem. They certainly don’t behave guilty or beaten. They have their old fatalism to fall back on: ‘Kaput’ says the housewife finding the street water pipe not working … and then looks down the streets and says ‘Kaputt … alles ist kaput.’ Everything’s smashed … how right – but absolutely no suggestion that it might be their fault – her fault. ‘Why’ asks another woman fetching water ‘why do not you help us?’ ‘You’ being us. At the same time nothing is clearer straight away than that we cannot – must not leave them to stew in their own juice … well anyway it’s a hell of a tangle."

(Mary-Lou Jennings (ed), Humphrey Jennings: Film-maker, Painter, Poet. London. British Film Institute, 1982)

Winning the Peace

13 September 2006

After a gap of six months, I am re-starting this blog to write about my dissertation, which needs to be completed in 12 months time – in September 2007.

My area of interest is the British Occupation of Germany after the second world war. In particular, to what extent did the British and Americans succeed in ‘winning the peace’ as well as the war? And how did people, on both sides, become reconciled to the former enemy and even, in many cases, become friends, allies and partners?

The period between the end of the war in Europe, in May 1945, and the economic recovery of Western Europe from 1948 onwards, has been largely neglected by historians.

Those who have studied it, have looked at issues such as the Cold War, the division of Europe into two opposing blocs, the Marshall Plan and economic recovery in the West, and the influence of the occupying powers on the future development of German politics and society.

As a student of Contemporary British History, it seems to me that a significant gap in our knowledge lies, not in understanding the period of occupation in terms of international diplomacy, or the history of Germany, but in what it can tell us about British history, society, politics and culture.

For five years, and with reserved powers in some areas for longer, the British ruled an area half the size of their own country and had direct responsibility for a population of over 20 million. At its peak the number of people employed by the Control Commission for Germany, British Element, to give it its proper name, was 26,000.

With very few exceptions, this episode in British history is ignored in surveys of Britain, except in so far as it contributed to increased global tensions and the cold war, or was an economic burden on the British treasury.

My dissertation aims to show that the British occupation of Germany can tell us as much about how the British saw themselves, as about how they perceived Germany and the Germans.

It will focus in particular on how British policy and actions in Germany were presented by the government, to people at home. In this way, I hope it can shed some light on both the policies and attitudes of government, and on the concerns of the general population, during the critical period of transition from war to peacetime.