Category: British Occupation of Germany after the Second World War

The Council of Foreign Ministers’ meetings, 1945-1947

15 March 2011

I’ve written before about the Potsdam Agreement, in August 1945, in which the three Allied victors in the Second World War, Britain, The United States and the Soviet Union, agreed on a set of rules to govern their policy in occupied Germany.

The first clause of the agreement was the establishment of a ‘Council of Foreign Ministers’, of Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, France and China. The role of this Council of the ‘Five Great Powers’ in the world was to prepare peace treaties with the Axis powers, defined in the agreement as the 'enemy states': Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland, as well as Germany, and settle outstanding territorial questions.

The Council met five times before the meeting in London in December 1947 ended in acrimony, without a date being set for the next meeting.

It’s interesting to track what occurred at each meeting, so here is a brief summary. I’m not really sure how to interpret this. The traditional ‘Western’ view is that the British and US had no option other than to go it alone, in the face of Soviet intransigence. An alternative view is that neither the British nor the US were prepared to compromise on their ability to run their own Zones the way they wanted, so they engineered the failure of the negotiations, which, in fact, suited all four of the Allies quite well.

1) London: September 1945

After discussing peace treaties for Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania and Finland, the meeting broke up without agreement. In a statement to the House of Commons, the British Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin, blamed procedural difficulties.

2) Paris: April-June 1946

The first session of the Paris meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers lasted from 25 April – 16 May. The principal topic of discussion was the Italian peace treaty but no firm agreement was reached before the first session was adjourned.

The meeting resumed in mid-June. Agreement was reached on Italy, but there was no progress on Germany and the meeting adjourned after Britain, France the US and the Soviet Union had presented very different proposals:

The French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, advocated the separation of the Rhineland from the rest of Germany and the internationalisation of the Ruhr.

The Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, announced he was in favour of a united Germany and the setting up of central German administrations, [which had been vetoed by the French in the Allied Control Council, on the grounds they were not prepared to agree to a central administration for the whole of Germany, before the future of the Rhineland and Ruhr had been settled.]

The US Secretary of State, James Byrnes, proposed a draft treaty which was intended to guarantee the de-militarisation of Germany for 25 years. Molotov rejected this on the basis that they had not yet ensured that Germany was disarmed in the present, let alone in the future. He claimed that some units of the German army, which had surrendered in the British Zone, had not been fully disarmed and demobilised. [This was partly true. Although they had been disarmed, the units, known as ‘Dienstgruppen’, carried out support tasks for the British army, such as transport.]

The British Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin was concerned about the costs of the occupation. He announced that unless the others were prepared to cooperate economically to ensure that German exports covered the costs of imports [mainly food], the British government would be compelled to ‘organise the British Zone of occupation in Germany in such a way that no further liability shall fall on the British taxpayer.’

The following day Byrnes offered to cooperate economically with any of the other zones willing to do so. After the conference the British accepted the invitation. This was to lead to the formation of the so-called Bizone and the economic fusion of the US and British zones in January 1947.

3) New York: October 1946

The New York session of the Council of Foreign Ministers lasted from 3 November to 12 December 1946. It was preceded by the Paris Peace Conference which lasted from 29 July to 15 October 1946. Agreement was eventually reached on peace treaties for Italy, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland, which were signed on 10 February the following year in Paris.

Discussions on Germany in New York did little more than agree 10 March as the date for the next meeting in Moscow.

4) Moscow: March – April 1947

The Moscow Council of Foreign Ministers lasted from 10 March to 25 April. Having settled peace treaties for the other Axis powers, Germany was now the main item on the agenda.

It was agreed to abolish the State of Prussia, which had survived as a separate state within Germany throughout the Weimar Republic and Nazi Third Reich.

Bidault reasserted the French opposition to creating central administrations [and thereby treating Germany as a single entity, rather than as four separate zones] until the western frontiers of Germany had been agreed and the future of the Rhineland, Ruhr and Saar finalised. Molotov disagreed with both the separation of the Ruhr and Rhineland from Germany and also a decision to allow the French to annex the Saar, which at that time, the British and US would have agreed to.

Bevin presented the British plan for the economic future of Germany, including elements which he probably knew would be unacceptable to the Russians and French: including a decision to proceed with the US in setting up the ‘Bizone’, no reparations from current production [which was one thing the Russians wanted], no four-power control for the Ruhr and no separation of the Ruhr or Rhineland from the rest of Germany.

The new US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, George Marshall asked for a decision on the US proposal for the 25 year disarmament of Germany. Molotov argued this did not go far enough and the discussions lapsed.

After the conference was over, Marshal delivered his Harvard speech on 5 June 1947, setting forth his ideas for an economic ‘European Recovery Programme’ now known as the Marshall Plan.

At first the Russians were invited to participate, but a meeting in Paris between Molotov, Bidault and Bevin, on 27 June, broke up without agreement over the issue of which countries should be invited to participate. In his view only those occupied by Germany or had contributed to the Allied victory should be invited; not ex-enemy states such as Germany.

Bevin and Bidault went ahead anyway and invitations were sent to 22 European countries inviting them to a conference in Paris on 12 July (known as the Conference on European Reconstruction).

Cominform, (the Communist Information Forum) was founded on 22-23 September 1947 at a meeting at which 9 Communist parties were represented, including the French and Italian parties, in addition to those from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

5) London: November – December 1947

Despite ending in acrimony with no date set for the next meeting, progress was made on a few issues including agreement on a new, higher maximum level for German steel production of 10.5 million tons a year. This was something the British had been advocating ever since the Level of Industry negotiations had agreed, in March 1946, on a maximum ‘production’ level of 5.8 million tons, and ‘capacity' of 7.5 million tons; levels the British delegation had always thought too low. It was hoped the new higher level of permitted steel production would enable an increase in exports to offset the costs of the occupation.

The breaking off of negotiations over Germany in London did not extend to Austria, and Foreign Ministers’ deputies continued to discuss this in January 1948. However discussions were postponed indefinitely in May 1948 after disagreement on Yugoslav territorial claims in Carinthia.

Despite its failure to agree a peace settlement for Germany, the Council met again in May and June 1949 in Paris, when they agreed to end the Berlin Blockade. A further meeting in Berlin in 1954 ended in deadlock, but in 1955 a peace treaty was agreed for Austria. In 1971 the four wartime allies met again to discuss and agree the Four Power Agreement on Berlin and in September 1990 they, and the two German governments, signed the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany.

References

Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) (First published in 1983 by William Heinemann Ltd)

Anne Deighton, The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_foreign_ministers

 

Eric Gedye – The Revolver Republic

14 December 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

How much was T-Force worth to the British Economy … £20 million or £2,000 million?

10 November 2010

In my last post, I wrote about an excellent new book, Otherwise Occupied, by Michael Howard who, as a young man in occupied Germany after the war, worked as Intelligence Officer for T-Force, the secret British army unit which obtained material: equipment, documents and technical know-how, from Germany to benefit the British economy.

The book raises the intriguing question of how much the material removed by T-Force was worth in monetary terms. The difference between what Michael Howard and his colleagues thought the value was at the time, and later official estimates, is striking.

In the book, Michael Howard claimed that an internal report, compiled in 1949 by staff who had worked for T-Force, proposed the extraordinary figure of £2,000 million as the total value of material removed by T-Force. He made a similar point in his review, in the RUSI  Journal, of Sean Longden’s history of T-Force, regretting that although Longden discussed the issue in his book, he did not ‘hazard a view’ as to the correct amount. An article in the Daily Express, on 9 October 1946, had suggested that the total value of property obtained by T-Force, then less than half-way into its programme, was the lower, but still substantial, amount of £100 million. Longden referred to an interview with a British official, who had said this figure was ‘niggardly’ and at the very bottom end of the scale of what had actually been achieved. This suggests a total figure for the whole programme of well into the hundreds of millions of pounds, if not quite as high as the two billion pounds estimated by Michael Howard’s former colleagues in 1949.

Figures quoted by historians for the total value of reparations obtained by Britain from Germany are very much lower than this. UK official receipts for reparations from Germany after the Second World War totalled just over £30 million. Alan Bullock quoted a similar figure of £29 million, in his biography of Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary.

There would seem to be four possible reasons for this discrepancy.

Firstly, like was not compared with like. Most of the material removed by T-Force by-passed the official system which allocated reparations from Germany among the western allies. This was co-ordinated by an organisation known as IARA, the ‘Inter Allied Reparations Agency’, created on 14 January 1946, consisting of representatives from 18 countries claiming a share in reparations from Germany.

Material obtained on the battlefield was classified as ‘booty’, rather than as reparations, and could be unilaterally removed by the victors for their own use. As John Farquharson has described in an article in the Journal of Contemporary History, the victorious allies failed to agree on exactly what comprised ‘booty’ or a ‘battlefield’ in modern warfare, but eventually accepted the fairly wide definition that booty consisted of: ‘any material of whatever nature and wherever situated’ intended for use in war. In March 1946 a more narrow definition of ‘booty’ was adopted by the British. According to Farquharson:

‘There is no doubt that up to that date [March 1946] large amounts of information, technical research facilities and prototype machines were confiscated as booty by the British authorities in Germany, and that some of what disappeared did not come under the heading of purely military usage. Until 1 January 1946 the war against Japan validated (at least in theory) such actions, but confiscation continued even after that date. … However, it is true that whatever industrial machinery found its way to Britain under this rubric prior to March 1946, thereafter booty excluded such material. Unilateral removals of industrial prototypes and so on were now carried out as reparations, chargeable to Britain at IARA.’

Eventually an official figure of £48,000 was produced, in 1951, for the value of material removed as ‘booty’ (but excluding anything removed before 1 January 1946, when no satisfactory records had been kept). This figure is tiny; less than 1,000th of the £100 million quoted in the Daily Express on 9 October 1946 as the total value of property obtained by T-Force, which suggests that either the value of material removed as ‘booty’ was actually very much higher than this, or there were other reasons for the discrepancy.

A second possible explanation is that the figure quoted in the Daily Express, and the report Michael Howard recalled seeing in 1949, may both have assumed a much higher value for intangibles, (such as documents, patents and know-how transmitted by German scientists recruited by T-Force to work in Britain), than later official estimates, which did not include figures for ‘intellectual reparations’.

During the war there had been a massive expansion in industrial capacity in Britain, to manufacture arms and equipment to support the war effort, so there was no great need for additional industrial equipment such as machine tools. Quality and know-how was a different matter. According to an article in The Times on 10 December 1946, a vast quantity of information was compiled by 10,000 investigators working in Germany for BIOS, the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, supported by Michael Howard and his colleagues in T-Force. 1,400 reports were produced by BIOS on a wide range of industries including agriculture, fisheries, electrical and mechanical engineering, glass and ceramics, metals, mineral, optical and mechanical precision instruments, rubber, textiles and clothing. Industrialists were encouraged to make use of ‘Germany’s war-time advances in science and heavy industry’ at an exhibition, organised by the Board of Trade, which opened in London on 9 December 1946, and then toured the country. According to The Times, 460,000 copies of the reports had already been circulated to various institutions and 490,000 copies sold to individuals. All material was freely available so there was ‘no question of infringement of patent rights by British manufacturers.’

Given the scale of this operation, it is easy to imagine a high value could be placed on the information obtained. From an accounting perspective, however, the intangible nature of these assets and the lack of patent protection could make it difficult, if not impossible, to provide an accurate monetary assessment of how much the material obtained in this way was worth.

A third possible reason for the discrepancy, was that it was in the interest of the British government to minimise the value of reparations booked to their own account, so as not to have to share these with the 17 other Western Allies or with the Soviet Union, which, according to the Potsdam Agreement, was entitled to 25% of the total value of reparations obtained from the British Zone (in addition to 100% of the reparations from their own zone). In his article, John Farquharson described how both IARA and the Soviet Union were suspicious of the official figures produced by the British. IARA expressed ‘grave concerns’ over unaccounted removals by the occupying powers (ie Britain, France, the US and the Soviet Union) and ‘fictitious figures’ were given by the British government to the Soviet Union, at the March 1947 meeting of the quadripartite Council of Foreign Ministers.

Michael Howard was quite forthright in his review in the RUSI Journal as to what he considered had happened. Whatever the correct number was for the value of material obtained by T-Force, he wrote: ‘it was one that His Majesty’s Government intended to conceal…’

‘The parallel operations of the Russians, who were not members of the IARA in Brussels, but took whatever they wanted by way of unilateral reparations as well as booty, were on a scale calculated to have been ten times that of T-Force. As the British had been openly critical of the Russian wholesale sacking of any territory under their control, public disclosure of any definitive figure for our own calculations would have made us appear embarrassingly hypocritical. Any unilateral reparations taken by the British were meant to be declared to the IARA in Brussels and deducted from their multilateral reparations entitlement. In the 1961 final report of the IARA, the British total was shown as $180 million, equivalent at the rate of exchange prevailing in 1946-48 to £45 million. It had already reached that sum by the end of 1946, as shown in their annual report for that year. This meant either that they had not declared much of what had been taken, or that they had declared absurdly low values, or both. If the total suggested in 1949 [by his former colleagues] had been published, they were at risk of being found out in a deception.’

Fourthly, the official figures may have been broadly correct and the estimates by the Daily Express and Michael Howard’s former colleagues exaggerated. This is the conclusion John Farquharson reached at the end of his article, writing that: ‘Britain's tangible gains from Germany did not amount to any great worth … How far the gap was covered by intellectual reparations cannot be determined with any accuracy’ he continued, as patent information was generally published and made available to all and it was not reasonable to expect to UK to book a financial benefit for something that was shared with others. In the same way, he argued, the UK received no royalty payments for the discovery of penicillin or Whittle’s work on jet engines, as the work on both of these was undertaken in the UK, but the benefits shared with other countries. In addition, he wrote, British payments to its own zone in Germany totalled £140 million by April 1947, far in excess of the official receipts from reparations of around £30 million.

References:

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

Sean Longden, T-Force: the Race for Nazi War Secrets, 1945 (London: Constable, 2009)

John E. Farquharson, ‘Governed or Exploited? The British Acquisition of German Technology, 1945-48’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.32, No.1, (1997), pp 23-42

Michael Howard, ‘Review of Sean Longden, T-Force: the Race for Nazi War Secrets 1945’, RUSI Journal, (December 2008), pp 108-110

Michael Howard – Otherwise Occupied

19th October 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

Harold Ingrams and echoes of Empire

14th August 2010

Earlier posts on this blog, on the British Military Governors in occupied Germany and other senior army officers of their generation, such as Field-Marshal Montgomery, Generals Brian Robertson and Alec Bishop, have shown how their view of the world was permeated with the ideals, values and prejudices of the British Empire. The same applied to some of the civilian diplomats and administrators, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Harold Ingrams (whose papers I have recently read at the excellent Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge).

His background was very similar to that of Generals Montgomery, Robertson and Bishop. His father was a clergyman and assistant master at Shrewsbury School. He was born in 1897 and so was the same age as Bishop and a year younger than Robertson. He fought and was wounded in France in the First World War. He then joined the Colonial Service and was posted to Zanzibar, Mauritius and Arabia, where he served with great distinction. For reasons which are not entirely clear, he was seconded by the Colonial Office in 1945 to the Administration and Local Government branch of the Control Commission for Germany and in December that year was made head of branch. It seems odd that someone with no experience of local government and elections, who probably had not even had an opportunity to vote in Britain, should have been given responsibility for restoring democracy in post-war Germany, but he threw himself into the task with conviction and enthusiasm. 

Not content with repealing Nazi laws and restoring the German administrative system as it had been in 1933 before Hitler came to power, he decided a more fundamental reform was necessary and that as far as possible, a British model of local government should be introduced in Germany.

In a comment which possibly reflected a point of view he had learnt at school or from his reverend father, or both, he wrote that true democracy had to be based on Christian principles (as understood by the British) and the biblical ‘thou shalt not’ of the Old Testament replaced by, in his words, ‘the principle of duty towards one’s neighbour, as we understand it, and if we are to change German methods our only yardstick is our own system.’ This sentence embodied three principles he stuck to throughout his time in Germany: the need for a fundamental change to the former German system; his belief that the essence of democracy lay not in collective social or political structures or institutions, but in personal relations between individuals conducted in a spirit of Christian morality; and a conviction that the only practicable way forward for British people in Germany was to apply as much of their own system as possible, as this was not only ‘the most robust in the world’ but the kind of democracy they knew and understood best.

True to the principles of ‘indirect rule’ in the British Empire, he wrote that suitable controls over local administration had to be prescribed and imposed by Military Government, but ‘German authorities will to the fullest extent practicable be ordered to assume administration of such controls. Thus it should be brought home to the German people that the responsibility for the administration of such controls and for any break-downs in those controls will rest with themselves.’ As he added in a later document: ‘Policy cannot succeed without the understanding and cooperation of the Germans. ‘Works without faith’ is not enough. Change of heart necessary.’

The same fundamental principles were expressed in different ways in many other documents. In February 1946 he prepared a one page paper with the title ‘On Promoting Democracy in Germany’ which he showed to General Robertson, the Deputy Military Governor. According to Ingrams, Robertson ‘read it through carefully and then passed it back saying, with some emphasis “I agree with every word if it.”’ Ingrams asked for the paper to be printed as the Forward to a new Military Government Directive on Administrative, Local and Regional Government and the Public Services and this was done.

In this he wrote, firstly, on the assumed superiority of the British form of democracy and the need for a fundamental change to the German system:

‘The character of a people generally reflects the influence of the country in which they live. Our democracy, the most robust in the world, is the product of our character and our country. It is on British soil that it flourishes best but we do export it and tended carefully it grows and flourishes in diverse lands, even if it takes a long time to acclimatise itself.

Although the Germans are to some extent of the same stock as the British, democracy as we understand it, government by the people, for the people and through the people, has never really flourished on the plains of Germany as it has in Island Britain.’

And secondly, on his understanding of the Christian basis of democracy:

‘Miracles are not to be expected but they may happen if we work with sufficient resolution and faith. The democracy we seek to establish is based on Christianity, the fulfilment of our duty towards our neighbours. The welfare of everyone of us is the concern of each of us and this is the idea which we have to practise ourselves and help the Germans to practice in each other and to us.’

A few months earlier, in November 1945, he had given a lecture tour, speaking to Military Government regional and local government detachment commanders across the zone. In this he stressed the difficulty of their task ‘selling democracy in extremely trying economic conditions’ but also the unique opportunity:

‘We have such an opportunity as has never yet occurred in history of attempting to introduce forms of democracy which, if successful should make it far more possible for us when the time comes, to leave Germany better fitted than ever before to take part with the rest of us in peaceful cooperation in Europe.’

Government, in his view, was the concern of every individual man and woman and it was ‘to the individual in the first place we have to turn our attention’. He described the role of the British in Germany as similar to that of a doctor with a patient, though in some ways, his words read as though the role in had in mind was that of priest and sinner, rather than doctor and patient:

‘I think that our role with the German is rather that of a doctor dealing with the case of a man suffering from a serious illness which he has brought on himself. It is the doctor’s role to make the patient realise his own responsibility for his sufferings, and to make him realise the danger he has been to others, to induce in him a feeling or repentance for what he has done to others.’

Needless to say, Ingrams’ ideal view of British democracy represented, at best, a very partial view of history. He made no mention of rotten boroughs or the widespread corruption that existed in British politics before the 1832 Reform Act, let alone that large parts of the population, such as those without property, farm labourers, and women, had not been able to vote at all until very recently. In his emphasis on the role of the individual, and an accompanying distrust of political parties, he seemed to hark back to an idyllic rural past, when everyone in the village knew each other and the church was the focus of the life of the community. As he said in his lecture in November 1945:

‘Nothing is more conducive to sound local government than such things as mothers’ meetings, baby shows, relief organisations and the like, and the real strength of local government in England, which is very constantly described as the home of local government, resides not so much in the higher formations but in the parish; and the strength of the parish was originally in that Christian life of collective organisation for mutual help which centred round, and was often directed by, the Church.’

It seems that his ideal view of British history and democracy was based, to a large exent, on a desire to present it as the opposite, the antithesis, of his understanding of German history. Above all, in his view, it was essential to make it as difficult as possible for anyone in Germany to re-establish the authoritarian Führerrprinzip or ‘leadership principle’ which Hitler had made the basis of Nazi society in Germany. An analysis of regional and local government under the Nazis, with the help of briefing papers prepared by the British Foreign Office, had led him to the conclusion that ‘What democratic self-government there was in Germany proved an easy prey for the Nazis’ and ‘to restore the pre-1933 system could be nothing more than ineffectual patch-work.’ As he said in the lecture:

‘German democracy has never been able to stand up to the authoritarian spirit of Prussia. There were weaknesses inherent in the political system of Weimar which inevitably led to the overthrow of that regime, and there were defects in the administrative machinery of local government which tended to bureaucracy and made it easier for an authoritarian administration to centralize power.’

The conclusions he drew from this for his work in Germany were that:

Firstly, there should be no early elections, as they needed time to introduce a new procedure, based on the British model. Simply asking German officials to arrange elections based on pre-1933 practices, as was done in the US zone, was in his view, dangerous and unwise. 

Secondly, until elections could be held, nominated, rather than elected, councils should be established, with the members chosen by British officials, on the colonial model. In this way councillors would acquire experience of the British form of local government and develop a sense of responsibility.

Thirdly, elections, when they did take place, should be on the British ‘first past the post’ or ‘majority’ system, with the electorate voting for an individual rather than a party list, as had previously been the practice in Germany. In his view, the proportional system, with candidates elected in proportion to the number of votes cast for their party, did not lead to a democratic way of life, as it was impersonal, candidates owed their election to having been selected by a party caucus, rather than to their ability to convince the electorate, and so, in his view, the system tended to lead to one strong man with a weak following. Proportional representation also tended to encourage smaller splinter or ‘freak’ parties, as he called them, rather than promoting stable government by one major party with another as an effective opposition.

Fourthly, elected representatives should be unpaid and should decide policy. The paid executive officials, who carried out agreed policies, should not be party members or take part in politics. In particular, there should be a clear separation of role and function between the elected ‘Chairman of the Council’ and the paid 'Town Clerk' or Chief Executive of the local authority.

Fifthly, to avoid a ‘clean sweep’ of one party winning all the seats at any one election, councillors should remain in post for three years, but elections should be held, and one third of the councillors elected, each year.

So how did it all work out? Ingrams’ reforms aroused strong opposition in Germany, ironically especially among confirmed anti-Nazi supporters of the Social Democratic Party, which was disadvantaged politically by many of his reforms.

Wolfgang Friedmann, a legal expert who had fled from Nazi Germany to Britain in 1934, qualified as a lawyer and barrister in Britain, and later in 1955 was appointed Professor of International Law at Columbia University New York, was highly critical of Ingrams’ reforms in a book he published in 1947 on ‘The Allied Military Government of Germany’. Friedmann spent two years working for both British and US Military Governments in Germany from May 1945, the same time that Ingrams was there.

Referring specifically to the proposal to separate the functions of ‘Chairman of the Council’ and ‘Town Clerk’, which previously in Germany had been combined in the position of the ‘Bürgermeister’, an elected mayor with executive responsibility, he wrote that:

‘By this administrative reform the British Control Commission created a vital divergence between local government in its own zone and that of the other three zones. From the beginning it aroused violent opposition amongst the vast majority of German parties and organisations. Opposition was directed mainly against the alien character of the reform, the duplication of the apparatus and the increase in cost.’

‘It has also created an instinctive opposition to a reform contrary to a great, though lately perverted, tradition of German local government. The English principle is time-honoured but has led to an increasing de facto predominance of the permanent official over the changing councils. Its operation is moreover entirely dependent upon the existence of a class of people who can take honorary office after having obtained professional security or retirement. This is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain even in England. All these traditions are absent in Germany.’

Friedmann was not impressed by the colonial mentality of some of his colleagues and it is quite possible he had Ingrams in mind when he wrote that:

‘Another type of British administrator suffers from the colonial mind. Many came to Germany with the idea that Germany could be administered on the pattern of an undeveloped British Colony. The British experience of colonial government may be more of a handicap than of a benefit in the administration of a highly developed and civilised country.’

In practice Ingrams had to compromise on proportional representation and most of his other reforms were rolled back in later years by an independent West German government.

Even in Britain, many of the features he considered a fundamental part of British democracy and an essential safeguard against authoritarianism, no longer apply. Most people now vote for a party rather than an individual, proportional representation has been introduced for elections to the European, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies, elected mayors in London and some other cities combine an elected role with (paid) executive responsibilities, (as has long been the case in the US), and special advisers have started to erode the principle of an independent, non-political, civil service.

References

Harold Ingrams papers at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge

W. Friedmann, The Allied Military Government of Germany, (London: Stevens & Sons Limited, 1947)

Harold Ingrams

4th August 2010

I’ve spent the past few days researching the papers of Harold Ingrams at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge.

Harold Ingrams was a British Colonial Administrator, best known for the ‘Ingrams Peace’ which he and his wife Doreen brokered in 1937 between warring tribes in the Hadhramaut in southern Arabia (now part of the Republic of Yemen).

He was born in 1897, the son of a clergyman and assistant master at Shrewsbury School. He fought and was wounded in the First World War and then joined the Colonial Service, working in Zanzibar and Mauritius before being posted to Aden, in southern Arabia, in 1934.

He seems to have been cast in the same mould as other British colonial officials and travellers in Arabia, such as T E Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger. After being sent to the coastal town of Al Mukalla, he and his wife were the first Europeans to visit some of the remote inland wadis (or valleys) in the Hadhramaut, travelling by donkey and camel. In 1937 he was appointed British Resident Adviser for the territory that was to become the Eastern Aden Protectorate. He wore Arabian clothes and like Lawrence, believed the Arabs should be left alone to work out their own destiny and opposed the implantation of a Western style democracy.

In 1945, and this is the reason for my interest in him, he was seconded by the Colonial Office to work for the Control Commission for Germany. He was given the job of head of the Administration & Local Government branch, responsible for restoring democracy in the British Zone of Germany after the fall of Hitler, recommending suitable forms of governmental organisation, which he believed generally should be based on the British model, and organising elections.

In 1947, after two years in Germany, he returned to the Colonial Office as Chief Commissioner for the Northern Gold Coast (now part of Ghana), but retired and returned to the UK after only one year in post. In later life he continued to be consulted by the Colonial Office on various matters and took part in missions to Gibraltar, Hong Kong and Uganda, though he was not appointed to another permanent full-time position. He retired from this advisory work in 1968 and died in 1973.

I find it intriguing that someone who spent his entire career as a Colonial Administrator in the British Empire should have been chosen for the job of restoring democracy in Germany. Maybe he volunteered? I haven’t found anything in the archives that explains why he was offered or applied for the position.

Noel (later Lord) Annan, who also worked in Germany after the war, and accompanied Ingrams on a lecture tour to seven major towns in the British Zone of Germany in November 1946, wrote in his book Changing Enemies that:

‘Ingrams was apt to treat the Germans as if they were a specially intelligent tribe of Bedouins. Discussion in the shady tent was permitted until the Resident Officer struck the ground with his stick and gave his decision. This attitude exasperated the Germans.’

That may be a little unfair, (though Noel Annan was there at the time and I wasn’t). I hope that looking in more detail at the life and work of Harold Ingrams in Germany from 1945-1947 will provide an insight into the ‘echoes of Empire’, which seem to have characterised many aspects of British post-war involvement in Germany.
 

References

Roger T. Stearn, ‘Ingrams, (William) Harold (1897–1973)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004

Doreen Ingrams, Obituary, British-Yemeni Society

G. Rex Smith, ‘"Ingrams Peace", Hadramawt, 1937-40. Some Contemporary Documents’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Apr., 2002), pp 1-30

Noel Annan, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany (London: Harper Collins, 1995)

Demobbed

15th July 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Playing in the Band

1st July 2010

A little while ago, I wrote about the memories of British naval officer, preserved at the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, who commanded a flotilla of minesweepers off the North-West coast of Germany after the war.

Another, very different interview in the same archive, was with an RAF aircraftman and instrument repairer, who spent his time in Germany after the war playing a jazz band, while waiting to be demobilised and allowed to return to Britain.

He was born in April 1925 and so was just 20 years old at the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. He had left school in 1939 and before being called up in 1943 worked in a silk stocking factory and then as a stockbroker’s clerk. He joined the RAF, landed with the troops in Normandy in July 1944 and moved up with them through France, Belgium and Holland into Germany. By chance, he found a piano that was still playable and applied to the local Welfare Officer for a posting that would let him play some music. In September 1945 he was transferred to a position as a clerk at the Welfare Unit at the Headquarters of British Air Forces of Occupation at Bückeburg, where he joined a jazz band as a drummer and then the station band as the pianist.

They were just waiting their time for demobilisation, he said, but it was a lovely way to do this. Asked by the interviewer how he got on with German civilians he replied he didn’t have much to do with them as he was too busy playing in the band. He had a ‘sainted life’ and could do more or less what he liked. ‘It was just one big ball actually while we were there’ he said.

After a few months, the bands started to break up as some members were demobilised and went home. He joined another group which toured various bases in the British zone. He was invited to Hamburg to do some radio broadcasts and played in a radio show in Paris, in which Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward also performed.

In September 1946 he was posted to RAF Hamburg. His ‘jolly 12 months’ came to an end and he had to carry out ‘general duties’ in the officers’ mess. He was then attached to RAF police on guard room duties. He used to practice playing the piano, but there were no bands there any more as ‘all the musicians had gone home’.

By early 1947, he was getting very bored and in March that year he was finally demobilised. Back in Britain he worked for a time as a professional musician before settling down to a more permanent and stable job as a clerical officer with the Post Office, dealing with telephone customer accounts.

References

Imperial War Museum Sound Archive
John Ashcombe
Accession no. 23187

A Collection of Individuals

15th June 2010

As I said in a previous post on this blog on Max Weber and the Ideal Type the problem we face as historians is how to make sense of the mass of facts and circumstances we discover and how to communicate this to our listeners or readers.

The approach I have adopted in my research, on British people in occupied Germany after the war, is to ‘follow the people’ and study a number of individuals who are interesting for one reason or another and who collectively illustrate what different British people aimed to achieve once the war was over.

The advantage of this approach, it seemed to me, was that it avoided excessive generalisation, claiming for example, that the ‘British’ did this, the ‘Americans’ that, and the ‘Germans’ something else. Different people of all nationalities thought and acted in very different ways, depending among other things, on their age, education, previous experience, personal moral and religious beliefs.

To ‘follow the people’ also seemed a suitable approach for researching a time when the ‘people on the ground’ received very little in the way of clear policy direction from their government; from those they reported to and worked for. As a result they often ended up doing what they personally thought was best. In the chaos and confusion that followed the end of the war, any study of official government policy could be misleading. What politicians and diplomats said and wrote in London did not necessary reflect what people actually did in Germany.

But history is more than a collection of individuals and I need to group the people I study in a way that makes sense to my readers or listeners. So here are some thoughts on different ways of grouping or categorising people that makes sense to me in my own field of study, but which could also apply more generally in other areas:

Nationality:
I study British people, not French, Americans, Russians or Germans, though part of my work involves looking at how the victorious British soldiers and administrators interacted with people of other nationalities, notably the defeated Germans. One day it might be interesting to compare the British people I study with what the French, Russians or Americans did in their zones, but one problem with doing this is that I would need access to a different set of sources and ideally would be able to read French and Russian as well as English and German. I suspect that nationality is an artificial distinction and there are more similarities than differences across national boundaries, as people in similar circumstances tend to think and act the same way, but I have very little evidence to prove this one way or the other. So nationality is an unavoidable category, as that is how our sources are often organised, but it can be difficult to make meaningful comparisons between groups of people of different nationalities.

Power and influence
I decided to limit the people I study to those who worked in an official capacity in British Military Government, the Control Commission, or the occupation forces. Where suitable sources are available, I am looking at those at the top of the organisation, as they had the power and influence to carry out whatever it was they decided to do; or more accurately, they could attempt to carry it out, in the face of the various obstacles and difficulties they encountered in the course of their work. Sometimes I have found people at a more junior level possessed considerable discretion in their own area, together with a high degree of power and influence and I have included some of these people in the study. Some exceptional individuals went ahead and did whatever they thought was right, without their immediate superiors knowing, or regardless of what they thought about it. But I did decide to exclude short term visitors and those who held no official position, such as journalists and politicians based in Britain and the wives and families who joined their husbands in Germany from 1946 onwards. Though it is interesting to study these groups, both in their own right and as a source of independent observations and descriptions of the time, they could not be taken to represent an ‘official view’ of what British people aimed to achieve in postwar Germany.

Gender:
The number of British women who worked in an official capacity for Military Government or the Control Commission was very small. Nearly all the people I study, therefore, are male and there is no point categorising them by gender, though there is plenty of scope, outside my own field of study, for looking at the topic of ‘British women in post-war Germany’.

Social class:
Social and economic class is often seen as a key distinction in British society. Those at the top of Military Government tended to come from wealthier and more privileged backgrounds and formed part of what might be called the British professional establishment. Many British people in Germany also seem to have been very conscious of class distinctions; between officers and other ranks in the army, or between the pilots and ground crew in the air force. But categorising the victorious occupiers by social class seems to have limited value in an occupied country in the aftermath of war. In postwar Germany all British people were members of a relatively wealthy and privileged upper class, compared to the defeated enemy soldiers and prisoners-of-war, a civilian population of mainly old men, women and children, let alone homeless Displaced Persons, refugees or concentration camp survivors.

Education:
More than social class, educational background does seem to have influenced what some British people did in postwar Germany: with common attitudes shared by those who went to university, to the military academies at Sandhurst or Woolwich, to the major public schools, or to a state-funded grammar school.

Age:
Those at the top of Military Government, with the greatest power and influence, were inevitably part of an older generation. The Military Governors and senior officers I studied were all born between 1887 and 1897 and so were between 48 and 58 years old when the war ended in 1945. They had a very different outlook on life from a younger generation of more junior officers, men and women, around 18 and 32 years old in 1945 with no adult experience apart from war.

Occupation:
Those working in the various divisions and branches of Military Government seemed to share a common attitude and approach to their work that differed from other divisions. It should therefore be possible to group people by their role and job function: among the occupation forces, those who were part of the army, navy or RAF, or at a more detailed level, those who were stationed in Berlin compared to those in British zone of occupation; those who worked for the Information Services Control, Education, Political, Economic or Local Government divisions, those who were engaged in de-nazification, security, prosecuting war crimes, or the care and welfare of refugees or Displaced Persons.

Revenge

3rd June 2010

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

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

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

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

Socially acceptable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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