British Occupation of Germany after the Second World War – Page 4

A Harsh Occupation?

26th May 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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

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

Minesweeping

1st December 2009

The Imperial War Museum Sound Archive has a wonderful collection of recordings of people’s memories of what they did in the Second World War and after.

I’ve been listening to all those I can find recorded by men and women who were between 18 and 32 years old when the war ended in 1945 and were in Germany between 1945 and 1948, either in the British forces or working in some official capacity for the Control Commission.

After researching what the Military Governors and some of the most senior British officers aimed to achieve in Germany after the war, (see earlier posts on this blog on Field-Marshal Montgomery, Marshal of the RAF Sholto Douglas, and Generals Brian Robertson, Alec Bishop and Brian Horrocks), I thought it would be interesting to study what some much younger men and women remembered of those times. Unlike the Military Governors and senior officers, (who typically were born before 1900, had fought in the First World War and served in the British Empire, in Africa, the Middle East or India between the wars), these young men and women had very little, if any, adult experience apart from their service in the Second World War. How did they react to the transition from war to peace in 1945 and the two or three years afterwards, when they were living and working in the country of their former enemy?

So far, I have listened to recordings from nearly 20 people; some officers, some ordinary soldiers; some in the army, navy or air force, and some civilian members of the Control Commission. The range of experiences and memories was huge. Some spoke in detail about the work they did, which they took very seriously; others spoke mostly of how they had a good time now the war was over, or of their memories and experience of the black market.

One of the pleasures of reading or listening to the archives is that every now and then something appears that seems to be interesting, new, or different. Over time, a pattern emerges and it all starts to fit together. It’s still too early for me to identify the most significant themes and issues which have emerged from this collection of recordings, but here is one example: the memories of a naval officer who spent his time after the war minesweeping off the North Sea coast of Germany.

He was born in 1923, and so was 16 years old at the outbreak of war in 1939. He joined the navy as an ordinary seaman, took part in the arctic convoys to Russia, trained and was commissioned as an officer in 1943. He then worked on MTBs (motor torpedo boats) in the Mediterranean and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

When the war was over, there was no great need for torpedo boats, so he volunteered for a minesweeping course, as this was the only naval opportunity available. After 6 weeks training in Scotland, when he met his future wife, he was promoted to chief instructor. He was then given command of an old paddle minesweeper, which he sailed from Scotland to Southampton and worked for a time clearing mines off the coast of Holland.

He spoke of how he found that minesweeping was boring as much as it was dangerous. Because some devices, such as magnetic mines, allowed a certain number of ships to pass before they blew up, the minesweepers had to cover the same ground 16-18 times. They could do that for days on end with nothing happening and then suddenly a mine would go up in their wake.

A year or so after the end of the war he was demobbed, but uncertain of what to do next, he discovered that there was a need for “people like him” to work in Germany for the Control Commission, but “under Admiralty orders”. So still only 23 or 24 year old, he found himself running a flotilla of minesweepers “manned by Germans, officered by Germans” but under overall British command.

It was “an odd experience” soon after the end of the war, as all he was given for his own personal protection was a revolver, which wouldn’t have been much use “had the German seamen wanted to chuck him over the side,” so he got rid of it.

“I have to say this. They work impeccably and were very fine seaman, and I had no problems of any kind at all. They seemed to accept me. I got on well with them. They were very correct.”

“We operated as if it were a British minesweeping flotilla except they were all Germans. Most incredible. And the reason it was civilianized or run as a civilian operation is that the Russians – this is hearsay but I am told – that the Russians were afraid that we were going to maintain a nucleus of the German Kriegsmarine and Ernie Bevin negotiated with them – he was the Foreign Minister at the time – that we would run it as a civilian force. But I can tell you that the discipline and everything connected with it was just as if they were still in the Kriegsmarine.”

As an aside, he then spoke of “one interesting highlight at that time … in 1948.” His wife had joined him in Germany, they had a little house and he had become involved with naval intelligence. It was thought they could land agents in the Baltic on the Russian or Finnish coast and several days or weeks were spent planning the operation in great secrecy in the cellar of his house, where his wife would bring them all coffee. Eventually a couple of Motor Torpedo Boats were brought across from England and, with the help of some of the Germans in the minesweeping flotilla, they did manage to land some agents. He was disappointed he couldn’t go with them himself.

He didn’t elaborate further on who the “agents” were and what they were meant to do once safely landed in Finland or Russia.

He stayed in Germany until 1949, when his first children were born and then decided to come home, where he found a job and stayed with the same company until he retired aged 70.

References

Imperial War Museum Sound Archive
George Philip Henry James
Accession no. 14837

The 4 ‘D’s of the Potsdam Agreement, 1945

18th November 2009

Some historians have adopted an easy shorthand way of describing the aims of the three Allies; Britain, the US and the Soviet Union; for the occupation of Germany after the war, as agreed at the Potsdam conference in July and August 1945, as the “four D's”.

However not everyone agrees about exactly what these “four D's” were:

Alan Bullock, in his classic study of the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, lists them as: disarmament, demilitarization, de-nazification and democratization.

John Ramsden, in his study of Anglo-German relations, ‘Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890’ has decentralisation instead of disarmament, writing of “the four D's agreed at the July 1945 Potsdam conference: the denazification, decentralisation, demilitarisation and democratisation of Germany.”

Nicolas Pronay, in his introduction to ‘The Political Re-Education of Germany & her Allies after World War II’ also has de-nazification, de-militarisation and democratisation, but adds de-industrialisation as his fourth ‘D’, instead of disarmament or decentralisation.

Richard Bessel, in his recent book on ‘Germany 1945’ also has de-nazification, de-militarization and democratization, but adds decartelization to make up the four.

Perhaps not surprisingly therefore, the Wikipedia article on the Potsdam Conference lists five ‘D’s, not four: demilitarization, denazification, democratization, decentralization and decartelization.

This may seem trivial, but it reveals some interesting differences in how both contemporary politicians and diplomats, and historians, have interpreted the agreements reached at the conference, (quite apart from the thorny issue of whether these words should be spelt with an ‘s’ or a ‘z’).

Firstly, everyone would appear to have agreed about the military and political aims of disarmament (or demilitarisation), denazification, and democratisation. At least in theory. What these meant in practice proved to be subject to interpretation.

A quick look at the original text of the agreement shows it was full of ambiguity. For example:

Where and how should the line be drawn between “Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions” who were to be arrested, interned and deprived of public office, and those who had only been “nominal participants in its activities”?

On disarmament, “All arms, ammunition and implements of war and all specialized facilities for their production” were to be destroyed. But how could you work out what “Production of metals, chemicals, machinery and other items” was “directly necessary to a war economy” and therefore also to be dismantled or destroyed, and what was required in peacetime as “essential to maintain in Germany average living standards not exceeding the average of the standards of living of European countries. (European countries means all European countries excluding the United Kingdom and the U. S. S. R.)”?

And on democratisation, what was the best way to do something defined in such vague and general terms as to “prepare for the eventual reconstruction of German political life on a democratic basis and for eventual peaceful cooperation in international life by Germany” let alone to control German education so as “completely to eliminate Nazi and militarist doctrines and to make possible the successful development of democratic ideas”?

Secondly, although these historians all have (more or less) the same ‘D’s for the military and political aims of the occupation: disarmament (or demilitarisation), denazification and democratisation, there would appear to be less of a consensus about what were the economic aims of the occupation, as agreed at Potsdam.

Alan Bullock has no economic aim among his four ‘D’s. John Ramsden has de-centralisation as his fourth aim. This was specified in the original text in two separate clauses as both a political and economic principle.

Nicolas Pronay has de-industrialisation, which reminds us that the first economic aim of the occupation, as specified in the Potsdam agreement, was to drastically reduce German industrial capacity generally and use the surplus plant and equipment to pay reparations. To quote the original text again:

“In order to eliminate Germany's war potential, the production of arms, ammunition and implements of war as well as all types of aircraft and sea-going ships shall be prohibited and prevented. Production of metals, chemicals, machinery and other items that are directly necessary to a war economy shall be rigidly controlled and restricted to Germany's approved post-war peacetime needs…. Productive capacity not needed for permitted production shall be removed in accordance with the reparations plan recommended by the Allied Commission on Reparations and approved by the Governments concerned or if not removed shall be destroyed.”

The next clause but one, clearly influenced by the Morgenthau Plan, named after the US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, who proposed that all heavy industry in Germany should be dismantled or destroyed, stated that: “In organizing the German Economy, primary emphasis shall be given to the development of agriculture and peaceful domestic industries.”

Richard Bessel’s fourth ‘D’, Decartelization, was just one part of this general picture. The relevant clause in the agreement stated that: “At the earliest practicable date, the German economy shall be decentralized for the purpose of eliminating the present excessive concentration of economic power as exemplified in particular by cartels, syndicates, trusts and other monopolistic arrangements.”

In practice, it soon turned out that the level of industry in post-war Germany was not sufficient to pay for essential imports of food to prevent starvation and the British and American governments found that, at the same time as they were extracting reparations from Germany in the form of industrial plant and equipment, they were subsidising the cost of food imports from their own resources. So they tried to invoke another clause in the agreement, which implied that levels of production could be increased, rather than decreased:

“Payment of Reparations should leave enough resources to enable the German people to subsist without external assistance. In working out the economic balance of Germany the necessary means must be provided to pay for imports approved by the Control Council in Germany. The proceeds of exports from current production and stocks shall be available in the first place for payment for such imports.”

For the purposes of my own research, which aims to discover just what British people aimed to achieve in Germany after the war, the question remains whether the text of the Potsdam Agreement, and the four ’D’s, however your define them, was a good summary of what the victorious allies, including the British, aimed to achieve in their occupation of Germany after the war. The Agreement could be interpreted in so many different ways. While the politicians and diplomats continued to argue about what had and had not been agreed at Potsdam, at subsequent conferences held in 1945, 1946 and 1947 in London, Paris, Moscow and New York, the men and women on the ground in Germany did what they thought best in the circumstances, in their own zones and within their own area of responsibility, and then tried to justify what they had done afterwards.

References:

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

John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890 (London: Little Brown, 2006)

Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson (eds), The Political Re-education of Germany and her Allies after World War II (London & Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985)

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

Operation Unthinkable

30th September 2009

Some months ago I wrote about a reference I found in an official intelligence report, written by a British officer in Berlin soon after the end of the Second World War, that another war was likely and this time German soldiers and airmen would fight on the side of the British and Americans against the Russians:

“The war between the Russians and the democracies is approaching and indeed has already begun, and Germany will of course be invited to participate. An International Air Brigade is to be formed for use in the war against Japan. Volunteers are invited and will be trained in England. Several offers have been received.”

(See: More on Goronwy Rees and his six day tour of Germany in July 1945)

I was surprised by this, and since then I’ve looked out for other references to people believing that war between Britain, America and Russia was likely, well before relations between the four victorious Allies broke down, the start of Berlin airlift in 1948 and the division of Germany.

While researching a different subject – the way ‘communism’ or ‘Bolshevism’ was described as a ‘disease’, rather than as a set of ideas or a political doctrine, by people in Britain between the wars and after and by Winston Churchill in particular – I came across a reference to Operation Unthinkable. Apparently documents released by The National Archives in 1998 showed that in May 1945, immediately after the end of the war in Europe, Churchill instructed his staff to prepare top secret plans for a surprise Anglo-American attack on the Soviet Union, with the assistance of 10 German divisions, under the codename “Operation Unthinkable: Russia: Threat to Western Civilisation.” The aim of the plan was to get “a square deal for Poland” with free and fair elections based on secret ballots and the participation of democratic leaders from all parties, not just the communists, in the government of the country. For planning purposes, the attack was scheduled to be launched on 1st July 1945.

The military planners soon discovered that the idea was hazardous, to say the least, as the Soviet Union had four times as many soldiers and twice as many tanks in Western Europe, as the British and Americans combined, and recommended it was not taken any further. Churchill gave way and modified the terms of reference to defence rather than attack: covering the “hypothetical” case that US troops would go home, and the island of Britain needed to be defended against an attack from Russia.

But the question remains whether “Operation Unthinkable” was just an isolated example of military planning for all contingencies, and how close Britain, the US and the Soviet Union really were to war in 1945. Here are four pieces of evidence I’ve come across in my research which could have some bearing on this:

Firstly, the curious incident of the missing telegram. In 1954 Churchill said, in a speech in his constituency at Woodford in Essex that, even before the war was over, he had “telegraphed to Lord Montgomery directing him to be careful in collecting the German arms, to stack them so they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance continued.” This caused a furore in the British press, and rather spoilt the celebrations for Churchill’s 80th birthday, as a number of Labour MPs, including Barbara Castle, refused to sign a Birthday Book in his honour because he had been willing to “use Nazi soldiers against our war allies.”

Montgomery, when asked about this, at first said he had received the telegram, but then could not find it in his papers. Churchill withdrew the remark saying he must have confused one telegram with another and the matter died down.

However, as David Reynolds and other historians have found, in Montgomery’s papers at the Imperial War Museum archives there is a handwritten note, dated June 1959, entitled “The Truth about the Telegram”, in which Montgomery confirms he received a verbal, but not written, order from Churchill to ‘stack’ German weapons, in case they might be needed to fight the Russians.

“On 14th May 1945 I flew to London from Germany to see the Prime Minister to tell him that the problems of government in Germany were so terrific that he must at once appoint a C-in-C and Military Governor…. The announcement was made on 22nd May.

At our meeting in Downing Street the P.M. got very steamed up about the Russians and about the zones of occupation – which would entail a large scale withdrawal on our part. He ordered that I was not to destroy the weapons of the 2 million Germans who had surrendered on Luneburg Heath on the 4th May. All must be kept, we might have to fight the Russians with German help.”

A month later no further instructions had been received, so according to Montgomery:

“On 14 June I got fed up with guarding the weapons. We had signed the surrender in Berlin on 5th June and agreed to set up the Control Commission for 4-Power Government of Germany. So I sent the attached telegram to the War Office on 14 June 1945. Things were pretty hectic in Whitehall in those days, the Coalition government was coming to an end; a general election was announced; it was impossible to get a decision, a firm one, on anything. I got no answer.

I waited for one week. I then gave orders for all the personal weapons and equipment to be destroyed!!

Then in November 1954, Winston Churchill in a speech at Woodford referred, unwisely to the order he had given. He said he had sent me a telegram. It could not be found. There was no telegram.”

Secondly, despite official denials by British officials that there were differences between them and their Soviet allies, rumours abounded that things were not as they seemed. For example in his book ‘Berlin Twilight’ (published in 1947) Lt-Colonel Byford-Jones described the lack of cooperation between the Russians and other victorious allies immediately after the end of the war, writing that:

“If a man builds a high wall round his house, locks his gates, refuses to admit his neighbours, he should not be surprised if the building becomes the centre of morbid curiosity….This illustrates the situation in which the Russian zone of Germany found itself in the eight months after the war’s end….Officers of the Allied forces, with whom Russia had been co-operating in the world’s greatest war, were suddenly treated as would be saboteurs or spies, and were refused admittance into the Russian zone, the frontiers of which, adjoining those of the American and British, were closely guarded day and night….Journalists and broadcasters belonging to Allied and neutral countries were forbidden to enter.

It was not surprising in these circumstances that a new Crusade seemed imminent, that officers talked of little else at one time in their British and American messes over strong Schnaps and Steinhaiger [beer] than ‘the coming conflict’. There was something too ‘cloak and dagger’ about these conversations. One did not mention the words Soviets or Russia or even the Red terror; one spoke of ‘they’ and ‘it’ in appropriately lowered tones, and everyone had the key to the code.”

Thirdly, a key element of Nazi propaganda in the closing months of the war was the attempt to persuade the Western allies that they should join with them in forming a “Bulwark against Bolshevism.” For example in a speech on 2nd May 1945, after Hitler had committed suicide, but before the end of the war on May 8th, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, foreign secretary in the interim German government headed by Admiral Dönitz, said:

“But the more German territory in the east, which ought to form a basis for food supplies for the starving people in the west, falls into the hands of the Bolsheviks, the most speedily and terribly will famine sweep over Europe. Nurtured by this distress, Bolshevism flourishes. A Bolshevised Europe constitutes the first phase on the path towards a world revolution which the Soviets have been persistently pursuing for over twenty-five years.”

Incidentally, this speech, by Schwerin von Krosigk contains one of the first references I have found to the existence of an “iron curtain” separating East and West: “In the east, the iron curtain is advancing even further, behind which the work of annihilation proceeds hidden from the eyes of the world.” This was well before Churchill used the phrase at his speech at Fulton Missouri, on March 5th 1946, to say: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Please note I am not claiming that Churchill or other British politicians or soldiers were influenced by Nazi propaganda – if anything this made them take extra care to emphasise the unity of the Allies – but it is still interesting that plans were made to attack Russia, Britain’s wartime ally, despite the enemy they had both defeated saying this was exactly what they should do. (In war you don’t normally do what your enemy says you should!)

Fourthly, how much did Stalin and other Soviet Union leaders know about “Operation Unthinkable? It seems they were, justifiably, very suspicious of British intentions at the end of the war and for several months afterwards. At the Four Power Control Council in Berlin, the Russians claimed, on several occasions, that the British were not meeting their obligations under the Potsdam Agreement to disband the German army. At the meeting on 20th November 1945, Marshal Zhukov, the Russian representative, tabled a formal notice objecting to the “presence of organised units of the former German Army in the British Zone of Occupation.”

Montgomery was incensed by this, writing in a telegram to Arthur Street, the Permanent Secretary of the British “Control Office for Germany and Austria” in London that:

“… it is a mystery to me why it should be thought that we do not want to carry out the POTSDAM agreement in disbanding the German armed forces. We have fought them in two bloody wars and our very existence as a nation has been threatened by them. That we should retain any affection for them or should desire their continued existence is a matter beyond my comprehension.”

Perhaps Montgomery was sincere when he wrote this, or perhaps he was being disingenuous. I don’t know. In any case, by now, in the autumn of 1945, the situation seems to have become very messy. Of the roughly two million German soldiers who had surrendered into British custody at the end of the war, over half a million had been released to work on the land or in the coal mines (under operations codenamed “Barleycorn” and “Coalscuttle”). Others had been sent to the US zone, but around 700,000 were still detained. Whatever British intentions were immediately after the end of the war in May and June 1945, there were now other reasons for not fully disbanding the German army, as Montgomery explained in the “Notes on the Occupation of Germany” held with his papers at the Imperial War Museum:

“There were two main reasons for the presence of the 700,000 ex-Wehrmacht personnel in concentration areas awaiting disbandment … first, we had nowhere to put them if they were disbanded and we could not guard them if they were dispersed in prison camps over our area; second, His Majesty’s Government required 225,000 Germans as reparations labour for the United Kingdom.”

As Montgomery explained in a statement at the subsequent Control Council on 20th November, German soldiers who surrendered at the end of the war were not formally designated as prisoners of war because if they were so described “we should have to accord them certain privileges in conformity with the Geneva Convention. We should be debarred from using them for certain tasks. We should have to feed them on a relatively high scale of rations.”

In addition, the British army in Germany were using some German soldiers, still under the command of their own officers, as so-called ‘Dienstgruppen’ (or service units) to carry out general labouring tasks. As Noel Annan explained in his book ‘Changing Enemies’

“The labour for these schemes was provided by keeping the German army in being and renaming them DienstGruppen, although these had shortly to be dissolved following Russian complaints…”

Somewhat reluctantly, in response to Russian pressure, the remaining captured German soldiers were released, in a process given the intriguing name of “Operation Clobber”, which, according to an army conference held on 4th December was due to start on 10th December 1945 and finish on 20th January 1946 – so you could say this blog post traces British ideas on what to do with the two million German soldiers who surrendered and were interned at the end of the war: from Operation “Unthinkable”, via “Barleycorn” and “Coalscuttle” to “Clobber.”

References

Some of the original “Operation Unthinkable” documents have been digitised and can be viewed on the web:

On Churchill’s use of medical imagery to describe the “disease of Bolshevism”:
Antoine Capet, ‘“The Creeds of the Devil’ Churchill between the Two Totalitarianisms, 1917 – 1945”, Finest Hour Online, 31 August 2009

On Churchill writing his memoirs and his interpretation of the history of the War, including references to “Operation Unthinkable” see the chapter on "The Unnecessary Cold War” pp 464-486 in:
David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004)

Montgomery’s handwritten note on the “Truth about the Telegram” is held at the Imperial War Museum archives:
BLM 162: “The Woodford Speech of Nov 1954 and the famous Telegram”

For a description of rumours circulating in the feverish atmosphere of post-war Berlin:
W. Byford-Jones, Berlin Twilight (London: Hutchinson, 1947)

The speech by Count Schwerin von Krosigk is reprinted in Ulrike Jordan (ed), Conditions of Surrender, Britons and Germans witness the end of the war (London & New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1997)

The references to Soviet objections to “organised units of the German army in the British Zone”, the Dienstgruppen and the disbandment of the German army are from:
Montgomery’s Notes on the Occupation of Germany, Part 3 (Imperial War Museum, BLM 87) and M.E. Pelly and H.J.Yasamee (eds) assisted by G.Bennett, Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series 1, Volume 5, Germany and Western Europe 11 August – 31 December 1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1990)

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

14th September 2009

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

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

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

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

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

“Experiences of Rhineland Occupation: 1919-1925

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

“Lessons of History

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

“Why Weimar failed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

List of postings: June 2009 – May 2007

3rd September 2009

For anyone reading this blog for the first time, I am a PhD history student at the Centre for Contemporary British History at the University of London, researching the British in occupied Germany after the end of World War Two. I am now in the third year of a six year part-time course. In my view, history is a process of discovery, and I try to post something new and interesting on this blog once a week, as I work my way through the research.

Here is a list of all posts since May 2007. For earlier posts, see the previous list

Stephen Spender on Humphrey Jennings, libraries, and his Humber car 6th June 2009

More on Stephen Spender and post-war Germany 1st June 2009

Stephen Spender – European Witness 9th May 2009

Marriage with ‘ex-enemy nationals’ 2nd May 2009

General Sir Brian Horrocks – Corps Commander 24th April 2009

Why did Field-Marshal Montgomery believe that a Germany that 'looked East’ was ‘a menace to the British Empire’? 5th April 2009

What did Field-Marshal Montgomery mean by ‘Winning the Peace’ in 1945? 30th March 2009

Field-Marshal Montgomery and the fraternisation ban 14th March 2009

Field-Marshal Montgomery’s ‘Notes on the occupation of Germany’, part 1 21st February 2009

Stealing coal in Germany after the war 14th February 2009

Field-Marshal Montgomery as Military Governor of the British Zone of Germany 1st February 2009

Eckernförde under British Occupation 25th January 2009

John Bayley – In Another Country 18th January 2009

Patrick Gordon-Walker – the Lid Lifts (part 2) 9th January 2009

Patrick Gordon-Walker – the Lid Lifts 4th January 2009

Amy Buller – Darkness over Germany 15th December 2008

The documentary film 'School in Cologne' made in 1948 6th December 2008

More on Goronwy Rees’ six day tour of Germany, 1945 30th November 2008

Turning Points: when and why did British policy in Germany change after the end of the Second World War? 23rd November 2008

‘GIs and Germans’ by Petra Goedde 15th November 2008

Another Two Kreis Resident Officers 9th November 2008

More about the film: K.R.O. Germany 1947 5th November 2008

Kreis Resident Officer – The film K.R.O. Germany 1947 2nd November 2008

Justum et tenacem propositi virum – the wise man, firm of purpose 26th October 2008

How three British army offices reacted to the transition from war to peace in Germany, 1945 28th June 2008

More on Major General Sir Alec Bishop 19th May 2008

Major General Sir Alec Bishop 12th May 2008

Goronwy Rees on Weimar Germany 3rd May 2008

Goronwy Rees on Field Marshal Montgomery27th April 2008

Goronwy Rees and Sir William Strang’s six day tour of Germany in 194518th April 2008

Goronwy Rees and his preface to Der Fragebogen by Ernst von Salomon 12th April 2008

Konrad Adenauer and his dismissal as Mayor of Cologne by the British in 1945 30th March 2008

Sholto Douglas – and the German Luftwaffe 3rd March 2008

More on Sholto Douglas – and his opposition to the death penalty 23rd February 2008

Sholto Douglas: the second Military Governor of the British Zone of Germany 18th February 2008

Mass Observation at the Movies 8th February 2008

‘You have to see it to believe it’: British first impressions of Germany after the war 2nd February 2008

E F (Fritz) Schumacher 26th January 2008

Follow the People (continued) 20th January 2008

Follow the People 13th January 2008

Happy New Year 8th January 2008

Drew Middleton: The Struggle for Germany 8th December 2007

British and US first impressions of Germany in 1945 1st December 2007

Potsdam 1945 to Western Germany 1965: A Miracle 24th November 2007

Sir Brian Robertson 18th November 2007

Englishness and Empire and ‘Winning the Peace’ 11th November 2007

Finest Hour – films by Humphrey Jennings 3rd November 2007

Winning the Peace – the British in occupied Germany 1945-51 29th October 2007

The Battle of the Winter 23rd July 2007

Germany in 1945 and Britain in 1967 as 'super-Sweden' 14th July 2007

‘Germany under Control’ exhibition 2nd July 2007

Alec Cairncross – 'The Price of War' and 'A Country to Play With' 24th June 2007

Ratchford and Ross – Berlin Reparations Assignment 18th June 2007

George Clare – Berlin Days 9th June 2007

Ivone Kirkpatrick – The Inner Circle 2nd June 2007

The Bonfire of Berlin – a lost childhood in wartime Germany 29th May 2007

Germany Year Zero 20th May 2007

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

6th June 2009

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

One of the ironies of the book, is that despite his grand and noble conclusion that only a “conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light” could save the world from “a threat of a still greater darkness, a total and everlasting one … rising up from the ashes of fascism", he himself appeared powerless and unable to do anything.

The original reason for his visit to Germany was to inspect and re-open libraries in the Ruhr and Rhineland, including vetting and removing Nazi books. But he came to think that this was a pointless task:

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

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

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

And in any case, many local German librarians had already done what was necessary on their own initiative:

“In practice, I found that the libraries of the Ruhr and the Rhineland were capable of opening themselves without my intervention … In every case, the Germans had automatically set about purging their libraries on the day of their towns being occupied by the Allies, if not before that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Spender – European Witness

9th May 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

“… the problem of the German character and nation … seeing, watching, working with the Germans en masse – terrified, rabbit-eyed, over-willing, too friendly, without an inch of what we call character among a thousand … a nation of near zombies with all the parts of human beings but really no soul – no oneness of personality to hold the parts together and shine out of the eyes. The eyes indeed are the worst the most telltale part – no shine, often no focus – the mouth drawn down with overwork and over-determination …”

Jennings was unusual in expressing this so directly and visually. Spender, writing in European Witness, a book for publication, was more literary, but some of the language he used – parasites sucking at a dead corpse – was just as vivid:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

For other views of Stephen Spender see:

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

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

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

Marriage with ‘ex-enemy nationals’

2nd May 2009

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

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

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

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

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

In reply, Lord Faringdon said that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

Renate Greenshields
Lucky Girl Goodbye
First published 1988