British Occupation of Germany after the Second World War – Page 8

E F (Fritz) Schumacher

26th January 2008

In my posting last week, I said the approach I intend to follow for my research on "’Winning the Peace’: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1951" was to "Follow the People," and I provided a list of people who I think are interesting for one reason or another.

One of the people on the list, in the category "German speaking exiles who took British nationality to return to Germany to work for the Control Commission" is E F (Fritz) Schumacher.

Fritz Schumacher is best known as a pioneer of sustainable development and the author of the book "Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered." I remember reading the book many years ago, and it made a deep impression on me, as it did on millions of others all around the world.

Schumacher founded, or was involved at an early stage, in a number of organisations which remain important today. Probably the best known is Practical Action (which he founded in 1966 as the Intermediate Technology Development Group). In 1970 he became President of the Soil Association. After his death the Schumacher Circle was formed in his memory and to help continue his work.

I’ve recently read a biography of Schumacher by his daughter, Barbara Wood. (Alias Papa: A Life of Fritz Schumacher. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984).

Fritz Schumacher wrote "Small is Beautiful" towards the end of his life. He was born in 1911 and grew up in Bremen. In 1930 he was selected as one of two German Rhodes scholars to go to Oxford, and he also spent a year studying in Harvard. His younger sister Elizabeth was married to the Nobel prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, and he married the daughter of Rudolf Petersen, a Hamburg shipping magnate. After the end of the war Petersen was appointed mayor of Hamburg by the British.

(I wrote about a meeting in 1945 between Rudolf Petersen and William Strang, the political adviser to the British Military Governor in an earlier post. At the time I didn’t know about the connection between Petersen and Schumacher.)

An opponent of Nazism, Schumacher left Germany after he was married in 1936, and moved, with his wife, to England. After the outbreak of war he worked for a time as an agricultural labourer, before being offered a job as an economist at the ‘Oxford Institute of Statistics’ which had connections with Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. He wrote articles for the Observer and other papers, and worked with William Beveridge on plans for the welfare state. For this he was criticised personally at the 1944 Liberal Party assembly by a certain Commander Geoffrey Bowles who attacked him as follows (which just goes to show that not everyone in Britain was in favour of the Welfare State):

"Herr Schumacher is a Prussian who came over here in 1934 and the National Socialism he left behind in Germany he is now advocating here in England. The Beveridge state slavery plan would require Englishmen to ask officials for a licence to live, and turn free Englishmen into Schumacher sheep to be herded about by officials. It is German state slavery."

Soon after the end of the war he returned to Germany to work as part of J K Galbraith‘s strategic bombing survey of Germany. A year later, in May 1946, after being naturalised as a British citizen, he was appointed economic advisor to British Control Commission in Germany, where he strongly advocated nationalisation of coal and steel. For various reasons, including the attitude of the US in Germany, who were strongly opposed to nationalisation, this never happened.

He returned to England in late 1949 to take up a job as economic advisor to the newly created National Coal Board in Britain. He opposed the running down of the coal industry in the late 1950s and 1960s, in the face of cheap imports of oil and gas, and during this time he formulated his ideas on sustainable development, which were eventually published as "Small is Beautiful." He died in 1977.

I found the most moving part of the book was where Barbara Wood, his daughter, quotes from letters he wrote to his wife shortly after returning to Germany in 1945. During the war his parents and the rest of his family had stayed in Germany. Unlike Fritz, his younger brother Ernest had joined the Hitler Youth as a boy, then become a soldier and died on Eastern Front in Russia in 1943.

In some ways, such as his uncertainty what to make of it all, and his comments on how beautiful the country looked, in contrast with the grim destruction in the towns, they remind me of another set of letters which the British documentary film director Humphrey Jennings, wrote to his wife a few months later, and which I quoted in an earlier posting.

Here are some extracts from Schumacher’s letters to his wife:

On June 12th 1945 after arriving in Germany:
"Germany, from the air, is very, very beautiful. If one could forget about the towns (and a lot of other things) it would be heavenly.

Soon I might be able to write more concretely, but not yet. There is something uncanny about all I have seen so far – as if you saw a person walking about who you knew was dead. He speaks and moves and even laughs – and then you notice that he does not breathe. He does not seem to see you and you pretend not to see him."

A second letter written the same day:
"Driving through Frankfurt I could say nothing but ‘My God’. But one seems to get used to it: the town is still beautiful with wonderful rows of trees everywhere. In many houses the ground floors and cellars are still habitable. You see many shops in houses the three upper storeys of which are totally destroyed. Somehow the people seem to find shelter…"

On June 18th:
"Well, I have just completed my first week, and I am beginning to find my way about. Yet it is still impossible to give even a preliminary summing up on impressions.

I was out in the field yesterday going through Marburg, Giessen, to Fritzlar. Giessen is dreadfully knocked about. But Marburg and Fritzlar are still lovely – so is the whole countryside, indescribably lovely. The woods are so beautiful it almost makes me weep. The fields are large and generous, without silly little hedges everywhere."

On June 23rd:
"My mind is a chaos of thoughts and emotions, and I cannot describe what I feel. I need time to digest it all. There is also so much to digest of the stuff I am learning here. What a bunch of gangsters these Nazis were! I am now looking into their most secret stuff. And what an immeasurable tragedy – this regime and those shortsighted stupid people – owning the most beautiful country in the world, living in the most beautiful houses – and falling for the idiocies of power and glory."

Later in the same letter:
"You cannot imagine how beautiful is this country of Germany. I had forgotten it myself … I look around and say nothing but, ‘Why, why, why not be happy here? What is it that makes human beings so inhuman as a nation when they are (as you know, and as everyone can see here) so human as individuals?"

On July 2nd:
After meeting his parents, who were now at Ueberlingen near Lake Constance, and hearing about the fate of his brother Ernst…

"They then told me a lot about him, and what I heard tore up a wound which time had only incompletely healed. I went through some of his letters which reveal a personality so complete, so full of promise, so beautiful that I have known of no one to compare him to – considering his age. They also show – is it a consolation or an additional cause of grief? – that he was abundantly happy till the last day, believing firmly that he was fulfilling a noble duty.

These letters are terrible to read. My father has written a biography of Ernst, about a hundred pages, which tells the whole story… But I was very bitter during the night. [after reading the biography] Why did they corrupt the mind of Ernst with nationalist poison? … My parents find consolation in the thought that Ernst had sacrificed himself for the noblest of all causes. It is terrible to think that he has been sacrificed for the worst of all causes. I want to forget it, because if I go on thinking about it I shall become bitter against my father, who is a good and lovable man – and bitterness is no good.

So there was this bitter-sweet mixture in everything during those two days. The crisis of our time, the crisis of Germany, goes right through my family."

Follow the People (continued)

20th January 2008

In my posting last week, I said the approach I intend to follow for my research on "’Winning the Peace’: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1951" was to ‘Follow the People’.

Here is a list of people I think are interesting for one reason or another. I’ve written about some of them on this blog. I know very little about the others.

Senior officers
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery
Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Sholto Douglas
General Sir Brian Robertson
General Gerald Templer
General Alec Bishop

Politicians, administrators and diplomats
J B Hynd
Austen Albu
William Strang
Harold Ingrams
Christopher Steel
Noel Annan

Education advisers
Donald Riddy
Robert Birley
T H Marshall

Young men
John Seymour Chaloner

German speaking exiles who took British nationality to return to Germany to work for the Control Commission
Harry Bohrer
Michael Thomas
George Clare
E F (Fritz) Schumacher

Follow the People

13th January 2008

Last week I attended the annual postgraduate conference at the German Historical Institute in London. It was interesting to hear what other students were working on and how they approached their subject. Most those attending gave a short, 15 minute talk, followed by 15 minutes for questions and comments from the audience.

My own talk was on the conclusions of my MA dissertation, (on the British Occupation of Germany, as portrayed in three official British sources, Humphrey Jennings‘ documentary film A Defeated People, the exhibition Germany under Control, and the British Zone Review) and an attempt to describe some of the principles I intend to follow for my PhD thesis.

As I have only recently started working on this, I wasn’t able, as others did, explain the structure of the PhD thesis, or describe in detail the sources and archives I propose to use. But preparing for the talk did make me think about how I should approach my research. In summary, I decided the best approach was to "follow the people", and here is the part of my talk where I tried to explain and justify this approach:

Aims of my PhD thesis on ‘Winning the Peace’: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1951.

So where should I go from here? The aim of the PhD thesis is to take the same topic [as the MA dissertation]: the British in Germany after the war, through their own eyes, what they said they hoped to achieve, what they thought they were doing, and why they were doing it, and how this changed over time – and explore this in more detail, over a longer period, across a wider range of sources.

Why should we be interested now in what a relatively small number of people thought and did? At its peak there were 26,000 British staff in the Control Commission, the body responsible for administering Germany after the war, compared with a population of around 50 million in Britain and 20 million in the British Zone of Germany.

It seems to me there are three things in particular which make this subject worth studying:

Firstly, what the British in Germany did was different from British government policy made in London, and their attitudes, policies and actions, were formed not by official policy, but by the combination of the reality of what they found on the ground and the prejudices and preconceptions they brought with them.

Official British government policy, in general, did little more than reflect the decisions made at Potsdam and at subsequent Allied Foreign Ministers’ conferences at Moscow, Paris, London and New York, and bore little relation to the issues and problems faced by those responsible for day to day administration in Germany. In fact there had been extensive planning for what should be done in post-war Germany, but British officers interviewed or writing afterwards, said they either received no policy instruction at all, or that which they did receive was completely inappropriate. To quote Brian Robertson, Deputy Military Governor from 1945 to 1947, Commander-in-Chief and Military Governor from 1947-49, and High Commissioner from 1949-51, and probably the most influential British figure in post-war Germany, writing in 1965:

"As for the men who came from the United States and from this country to confer in Teheran, Quebec, Yalta and Potsdam, [at the Allied summits held during and immediately after the war], they had an entirely false picture in their minds as to what the situation would be in Germany, and they were aiming at a completely wrong objective. I do not say this in criticism. I do not for a moment claim that you or I might have been wiser if we had been in their shoes. I merely state what I believe to be the fact…."

Secondly, what the British in Germany actually did, and why they did it, is not well understood, in part because it is so difficult to generalise. Because there was no clear guidance from London it is not really possible to speak of British policy as such, or even, therefore, of British influence on this or that aspect of West German society. Instead, the British in Germany were a collection of individuals, who may have shared some common principles and prejudices, but who reacted to different circumstances in different ways. Because German political, economic and social structures had collapsed in chaos at the end of the war, some British individuals possessed enormous power and influence in particular areas. We therefore find many extraordinary, but disconnected stories, such as, to quote one of the best known, the very young, 22 year old British Major John Chaloner, giving the, even younger, 21 year old Rudolf Augstein a licence to publish the news magazine Der Spiegel, in part because they shared the same birthday, and he trusted him, but also because he liked someone who didn’t always say yes and was prepared to argue with him. When his senior officer discovered what he had done, Challoner was disciplined and removed from his post for exceeding his duties. In an interview many years afterwards Challoner said:

"The Spiegel was my baby. I told them how to do the magazine and what it should look like, by producing a dummy. This was the famous ‘Probenummer.’ … I used my, what I will call ‘sweeping powers’ that I had, to commandeer offices, commandeer people, recruit people from all over the zone and push them into this one title, that I wanted to be a success, if nothing else, and it was."

Thirdly, the period is of considerable interest in its own right, not only as part of British or German national histories, because it provides an illustration, or maybe a case study, of three important themes which continue to be relevant today. The first is the transition from war to peace. I need only mention the word ‘Iraq’ to make the point that what happens after the end of a war can be at least as important as what happens during the war itself. Secondly, the meeting of different cultures. During the war there was very little contact between British and German people, apart from when they were shooting each other, or dropping bombs on each other, and as a result people tended to see each other in terms of collective national stereotypes, reinforced by government propaganda on both sides. After the war, this changed as occupiers and occupied had to deal with each other face to face as individuals, and as the historian Anthony Nicholls has said "Before long, therefore common sense overcame the myths about national character." The third theme I wish to highlight, related to the other two is: coming to terms with the enemy. How did people, on both sides, become reconciled to the former enemy, after a very bitter war, and even, in many cases, become friends, allies and partners?

Lastly, and to conclude this talk, what approach should I adopt to research these issues and what sources should I use? Clearly I need to be selective, but how do I find the most relevant and interesting topics and sources?

In my view, history is a process of discovery. As L P Hartley famously said in the opening words of his book, The Go-Between: "The Past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." We can study the past in the same way as we visit a foreign country. We can read the guidebooks, plan our visit and use our time as effectively as possible. Or we can simply go and see what we find when we get there. It may take longer, but I prefer the second approach, because you are more likely to find something unexpected.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is another film I can use as the focus for my research, in the same way as I used A Defeated People, and in any case, I’m not sure this would be right for a PhD.

As I said earlier, in my view the British in Germany are best seen as a collection of individuals, some of whom had far more power and influence than would normally be expected from someone in their position. The approach I plan to use for the PhD, therefore, is to follow the people. There is no shortage of material available to do this. Many have written memoirs, or left personal or official papers in the archives. Some are still alive. I recently interviewed one elderly gentleman who worked in Germany for 16 years from 1945 to 1962 and claims he was the first British soldier to be given permission to marry a Germany woman. For two years after the end of the war, until 1947, this was forbidden. I may try an oral history approach and interview others, but there will probably not be time to do this, as I already have a list of around 15 people I think are especially interesting, for one reason or another and whose papers are in the archives.

What I hope to find are individual accounts which reveal something unusual or unexpected, but which can also be substantiated by reference to other people and other sources, and therefore accepted as representative of at least one aspect of the British in Germany.

Drew Middleton: ‘The Struggle for Germany’

8th December 2007

Drew Middleton was Foreign Correspondent for the New York Times during the Second World War. He wrote for the paper from 1942 until his death in 1990. During this time he covered the Dieppe Raid, the Normandy Landings and the end of the war in Germany. He spent some time in Moscow in 1946, moved to Germany in 1947, where he remained for 6 years, and was then Chief Correspondent in London for ten years from 1953-63, before returning to New York. For more details, see his obituary in the New York Times.

His book "the Struggle for Germany" was published in 1949, and provides an early view of the origins of the Cold War.

He describes Germany immediately after the war in similar terms to the "First Impressions" of other observers I’ve quoted in this blog:

"Here was destruction and chaos in a degree never before known in the world. An intricate, highly organized society had been disrupted. The invasion of Germany from west and east, heralded in the west by prolonged and intensive bombing, had brought about not only the complete defeat of the German armies but the ruin of a state. This we have forgotten. The Germans have not forgotten it, for there are very few Germans living today who are not reminded of it every day of their lives."

"The Germany of that day was silent and broken. Allied planes flew over the Ruhr. In the sunshine lay the huge plants that had fed the armies of the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler with guns and ammunition. Nothing moved on the ground. Locomotives and cars lay on their sides rusting in the sun."

The situation in Germany in 1945, was far worse than it had been in 1918, at the end of the First World War:

"In that summer [1945] very few Germans saw further ahead than the coming winter. All the standards had fallen. The national slogan seemed to be ‘eat, drink and be merry and damn the expense to your honor or your virtue.’ The Germans did not believe ‘tomorrow we die.’ They believed something far more hopeless; that tomorrow would be worse than today. So it was not surprising that millions of Allied soldiers found Germany a combination of brothel and black market."

Drew Middleton described how his own views changed from supporting a hard, revengeful peace in Germany, as Communist Russia appeared a greater threat:

"Having seen at first hand the terror and destruction and brutality of the Nazi regime from Belgium in 1940 to Holland in 1945, I was, in 1945, strongly convinced that a German desert might be a good idea. What changed my mind in the next three years was the impression gained in western Europe that a German desert now meant a general European desert and a general European war later. And, of course, in the meantime I had been in the Soviet Union for a year and had been profoundly impressed by the enormous potential strength of that country and the potential power for evil which resides there, as indeed it does in all tyrannies."

His own views reflected those of the US government:

"The policy of the United States toward Germany has oscillated between a ‘hard’ and a ‘soft’ peace. In the beginning during the last years of the war, the objective was a harsh settlement. Midway through 1946 sentiment both in Washington and Germany began to swing toward a less restrictive peace and a considerable measure of German recovery. In both instances, however, the principal governing factor was relations between the United States and other Occupying Powers. The United States hoped in 1944 and 1945 to govern Germany in harmony with the other Occupation Powers. When through the intransigence of first France and then Russia this proved impossible, the United States had to hammer out its own German policy. Russia replaced Germany as the potential enemy."

According to Middleton, in 1945, US policy towards Germany was uncertain. He quotes one US official too busy with coping with the pressure of daily events, to worry about what was official policy:

"’What’s our policy in Germany?’ I asked a Military Government officer in Bavaria in 1945. ‘Brother, I don’t know. Maybe the big wheels in Frankfort can tell you. They snow me under with all sorts of papers. How ‘m I going to read them when I’m doing forty-eleven different things to get this burg running again?’"

The Russians, on the other hand:

"… knew what they wanted. Of all the advantages enjoyed by the Soviet Union in the struggle for Germany, this is the simplest and most explanatory. The Russians want Germany, not as conquered territory, although they would certainly not disdain force if it could be used without interference by the United States, but as a political and economic vassal of the new Russian Empire. They want all Germany, not merely the 46,600 square miles of the Soviet Zone of occupation or its seventeen and a half million people. This is a fundamental of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union."

Communist Russia was a threat not only to the US in Germany, but to the capitalist world generally:

"Before we progress farther in our examination of Russian policy in Germany, account must be taken of one event which affected the Soviet policy in Germany, the entire German problem and, indeed, the entire civilized world. This was the decision taken sometime in 1945 by the political Bureau of the Communist Party, the supreme policy making group in the Soviet Union, to press and emphasize the revolutionary and destructive elements in Marxism and Leninism as they apply to the capitalist and enemy world."

The British in Germany had started out well:

"British Military Government at the outset boasted a much better-prepared personnel than that of the other powers … In the first summer after the war, traveling through the British Zone, I was impressed by the large number of experienced and able men who knew exactly why they had been sent to Germany, exactly what the local problems were and precisely how and where their particular task fitted into the whole job of Military Government."

But British influence dwindled over the next four years due to the "near collapse of the British economy in the winter of 1946-7." For the first two years of the occupation Britain had born an equal share of the costs with the US, but "from late 1947 onward, Britain began to yield some of its influence on political and economic policy making in Germany. In September of that year the British Government notified the United States that the dollar shortage would make it impossible for Britain to continue the 1946 agreement sharing costs in Western Germany. After negotiation, the two countries on December 17, 1947, signed a new agreement under which the United States undertook to finance virtually the entire cost of the British-American bizonal area and thus assumed an additional liability of about $400,000,000 a year."

As for Germany and the Germans, rather than a revival of National Socialism, Middleton was concerned by the survival of authoritarianism, (which could be communist or fascist). This led him to the view that the greatest danger was an alliance of a nationalist Germany with Communist Russia.

Looking to the future, he thought it unlikely Germany would remain divided. Either Germany would become part of the "Western community of nations" or a united Germany would enter into an alliance with the Soviet Union becoming the most powerful of its satellite states. This could come about through either a Fascist revival in Germany reaching a deal with the Soviet Union for restoration of the lost Eastern territories, or through economic depression and popular discontent.

In summary: "Now we [ie the US] are engaged in a great contest with a totalitarian power [ie the Soviet Union] whose sources of strength are greater than those of Nazi Germany. The last four years have taught us, if they have taught us anything, that there is no retreat. The consequences of defeat are before us in eastern Europe. One of the ways in which victory can be won is to bring Germany back into the Western community of nations. But this Germany cannot be the Germany of Hitler. A Fascist Germany is a false reinforcement to the democratic powers.

We must make two efforts. The first is to see that the Germany which develops in the next five or ten years is a democratic Germany which we can trust. The second is to ensure that this Germany does not through our own mistakes fall to Communist pressure and ally itself with Russia."

This view, expressed by Drew Middleton in 1949, is generally much the same as the classic Cold War orthodoxy, which was dominant in the US and Western Europe throughout the 1950s and much of the 1960s.

Subsequently, as David Reynolds has described in his article on "The Origins of the Cold War: The European Dimension, 1944-1951" (The Historical Journal Vol. 28, No 2, 1985), this "orthodox" view was challenged in the 1960s by "revisionist" historians who "attributed much of the blame for the Cold War to the U.S.A." and who "frequently portrayed Stalin as a cautious, flexible statesman, with limited security interests and suggested that U.S. leaders behaved in a cynical, calculating way, both in their diplomacy and in their manipulation of domestic opinion." The revisionists were then questioned by others, who used aspects of both views to form a "post revisionist synthesis" which Reynolds himself criticises for seeing the Cold War as a bi-polar struggle between the US and the Soviet Union, and for not taking sufficient account of the "European Dimension."

I am no expert on the Cold War and its origins, a subject well covered by many other historians. But as a student whose research interests are the British in Germany, I am interested in why people at the time acted the way they did, and the debate does raise some interesting questions:

When and why did British and US policy towards Germany change after the war? In my research so far, I have found that British policy and attitudes towards Germany changed in the transition from war to peace, in many ways which had little to do with fear of any threat from the Soviet Union. It seems to me that this change in policy was led as much by those on the ground, in Germany, as by the politicians and civil servants in London.

The British in Germany realised very soon after the end of the war that there was no threat of further German resistance. They were shocked at the scale of destruction they saw all around them and made great efforts to restore order and start the process of economic reconstruction. They did this partly because the need appeared self-evident, and partly to reduce the cost of occupation to the British taxpayer. In time, they came to feel and express sympathy for the suffering of Germany people as individuals. Both British and US soldiers and administrators found they could work well with German administrators and were increasingly willing to transfer responsibility for government back to local German control. All this happened well before Cold War concerns started to dominate foreign policy in Britain and the US, with the Berlin Air Lift in 1948 and the Korean War in 1950.

Why then did Drew Middleton write the way he did in 1949? Was it his time in Moscow in 1946-7 that changed his view of the Soviet Union? How realistic was his concern that a re-united nationalist Germany would become an ally and dependent satellite state of the Soviet Union?

And to what extent were his (Cold War) views (as published in 1949) shared by British soldiers and administrators in occupied Germany after the war?

British and US first impressions of Germany in 1945

1st December 2007

In previous posts I quoted some first impressions of Germany after the war, written by British soldiers, diplomats, administrators and journalists.

I’ve recently read John Gimbel’s history of the US Zone of Occupation in Germany (The American Occupation of Germany: Politics and the Military, 1945-1949, Stanford University Press, 1968) and was interested to find that many US administrators, soldiers and journalists, from the president downwards, expressed similar views to the British, when they first saw Germany after the war:

President Truman (to quote Gimbel): described his own sense of depression as he drove among ruined buildings in Berlin and past the "long, never-ending procession of old men, women, and children wandering aimlessly … carrying, pushing, or pulling what was left of their belongings."

Lucius D Clay, initially Deputy, then Military Governor of the US Zone, wrote to a colleague on April 26th 1945 (12 days before VE day on May 8th):

"In one of his earliest recorded observations of the scene over which he would bear primary responsibility …. Clay reported that: "retribution … is far greater than realized at home … Our planes and artillery have … carried war direct to the homes of the German people."

In his own memoirs, Decision in Germany, Clay wrote of his first visit to Berlin on June 5th 1945:

"Where-ever we looked we saw desolation. The streets were piled high with debris which left in many places only a narrow one-way passage between high mounds of rubble, and frequent detours had to be made where bridges and viaducts were destroyed. Apparently the Germans along the route, which was lined with Soviet soldiers, had been ordered to remain indoors, and it was only at the intersections that a few could be seen on the streets which crossed our route. They seemed weak, cowed, and furtive and not yet recovered from the shock of the Battle of Berlin. It was like a city of the dead. I had seen nothing quite comparable in western Germany, and I must confess that my exultation in victory was diminished as I witnessed this degradation of man. I decided than and there never to forget that we were responsible for the government of human beings."

Gimbel also quotes the US military governor of the province of Hesse describing how Americans "came into towns and cities that were deathly quiet, that smelled of death and destruction. They came into villages where white flags were draped outside every door, where faces could be felt, not seen, behind barricaded windows."

… and two journalists from the New York Herald: Walter Millis, an editorial writer, on arriving at Berlin: "This is more like the face of the moon than any city I had ever imagined," and Joseph Barnes, the foreign editor of the paper, posing the question to the authorities: "Why didn’t any of you people tell us about this."

For comparison, some other (mostly) British first impressions, quoted in earlier posts, are listed below:

Alex Cairncross
Ratchford & Ross
George Clare
Yvone Kirkpatrick
Raymond Ebsworth
Fenner Brockway
Noel Annan
William Strang
Ethel Mannin
Michael Thomas
Lieutenant-Colonel Byford-Jones

Potsdam 1945 to Western Germany 1965: A Miracle?

24th November 2007

Last week I wrote briefly about Sir Brian Robertson, probably the most influential British soldier and administrator in Germany after World War 2. He was Deputy Military Governor from 1945 to 1947 and Commander-in-Chief and Military Governor from 1947-49.

I’ve now read the article he wrote for the journal International Affairs in 1965, in which he tries to answer the question whether the British and American occupation of Germany "all worked out successfully"?

As I said in my first post on this blog two years ago, in my view, the role of the historian is not to judge the past. Who are we to say, with the benefit of hindsight, what people should or should not have done, especially when they lived and worked in places and times which were far more difficult and dangerous than our own, and which we can understand only imperfectly?

In this view I follow the great 19th century German historian Leopold von Ranke, whose words ‘how it really was’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen), I used for the name of this blog. The full quotation is worth repeating:

"Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukünftiger Jahre zu belehren, beigemessen: so hoher Ämter unterwindet sich gegenwärtiger Versuch nicht: er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen."

This translates into English as:

The role, commonly attributed to History, is to judge the Past, to instruct the Present, for the benefit of the Future: such a high (noble) role is not claimed for this essay: it aims simply to show how it really was.

Rather than attempting to judge the past, what I try to do is discover and reveal, as best I can, how people in the past portrayed their work, their actions and their ideas, in their own terms and according to their own standards.

To return to Sir Brian Robertson and his article on whether the British and US Occupation of Germany was a success or not. The article was written in 1965 at the height of the Cold War. I’ve quoted a few extracts below. To my mind, they are interesting because they show, firstly, Robertson saying how the situation in Germany at the end of the war was completely different from what people in Britain and the US had expected and planned for, and secondly, looking back in 1965, his view of the ‘miracle’ that had happened in Western Germany in the previous 20 years.

"I was Field Marshal Montgomery’s deputy for Military Government in Germany in 1945. Later I succeeded to the top position. I remained in Germany for five years, becoming High Commissioner in 1949, instead of Military Governor, when the Federal German Government was set up…."

"All things being considered … [the occupation] has been surprisingly successful … When I say ‘all things being considered’, I chiefly have in mind that the plans which were made for dealing with Germany after victory had been won were based on a series of complete misrepresentations as to what the real problem would be…"

"As for the men who came from the United States and from this country to confer in Teheran, Quebec, Yalta and Potsdam, [President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill and their advisors, at the Allied summits held during and immediately after the war], they had an entirely false picture in their minds as to what the situation would be in Germany, and they were aiming at a completely wrong objective. I do not say this in criticism. I do not for a moment claim that you of I might have been wiser if we had been in their shoes. I merely state what I believe to be the fact…."

"But the first discovery which I made, and made very quickly, [when he arrived in Germany in July 1945, two months after the end of the war], was that the men on the spot had their minds on other things. Very soon I could see that the assumptions on which our policy had been based were false, and that the objectives chosen were quite irrelevant. The real menace for the future of Europe and to world peace was not Germany, but Russia. The immediate objective was not to batter Germany down – she was sprawling in the dust already – but too build her up and to do so wisely. We had to save Germany physically from starvation, squalor and penury, spiritually from despair and Communism."

"Montgomery’s agile mind had of course seen this clearly. His chief staff officer was Gerald Templer, a man whom I had always liked and respected. He was quite clear about the real state of affairs and I was glad to persuade him to join me as my Deputy…."

"Very soon we were driven by events to take action to restore the German economy in a manner that had certainly not been contemplated at Potsdam. The Germans in the British and American Zones were starving. Food had to be imported in large quantities and very obviously the German economy had to be geared to pay the bills… The war had wrecked the German economy … It was in this appalling situation that a partnership was born between the occupiers and the occupied, a partnership with a common objective – to rebuild the German economy as fast as possible…."

"Western Germany today is a prosperous and contented country with a stable and democratic governmental system. She is a loyal member of NATO, a sincere partner in the European Economic Community … There are no signs of a recrudescence of militarism of Nazi-ism…."

"If the authors of the series of agreements which culminated at Potsdam could have foreseen these days, they would no doubt have found the picture in many respects very satisfactory. In fact they deserve precious little credit for the good results, and they were greatly to blame for what was not so good. Wise statesmanship wilts in the over-heated atmosphere of victory…."

"Where then does the credit belong? Some of it should, in fairness, be ascribed to the innate decency and Christian charity of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. At the sight of starving Germany their consciences rebelled and that was the start of it. Much credit must [also] go to the German people …

"National characteristics made possible miraculous results, but there will be no miracle unless the men are forthcoming to lead the nations. As I look back on the past 20 years I can see without any doubt that it has been the intervention of certain leading men that has been decisive for good…. the real miracle has been that they were found when they were most needed."

"There are those today who tell us that God does not intervene in human affairs, and that it is wrong to expect Him to do so. When with my simple mind I look back to Potsdam, 1945, and forward to Western Europe in 1965, it just seems to me that a cleverer hand has been at work than any hand of man."

Sir Brian Robertson – General Lord Robertson of Oakridge

Sir Brian Robertson, later enobled as Baron Robertson of Oakridge, was probably the most influential British soldier and administrator in Germany during the occupation. He was Deputy Military Governor from 1945 to 1947 and promoted to Commander-in-Chief and Military Governor from 1947-49. After the formation of an independent West German Government, he was the first UK High Commissioner in Germany, from 1949-50.

His career is comparable in some ways to that of Lucius D. Clay, who was initially Deputy Military Governor, then Military Governor, of the US Zone. Clay is now much better known, in part because of his role during the Berlin air lift and also because his book, Decision in Germany, first published in 1950, is still essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the period.

Unlike Clay, Robertson never published his memoirs, and, as far as I know, never wrote about his time in Germany. (Apart from a talk he gave at Chatham House in 1965, published in International Affairs, Vol. 41, No. 3)

Very little seems to have been written about him by historians, although there is an interesting oral history interview on the web, conducted in 1970 for the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. The interview is worth reading in full, but I’ll quote one passage here, where Robertson compared himself to General Clay:

"General Clay was a very powerful character…. I am not such a strong character, perhaps, but maybe I have a way of getting my own way. However it may be, it is certain that policy in Germany, in fact, emanated very largely from General Clay and myself." (Oral History Interview with General Lord Robertson of Oakridge, 11th August 1970 by Theodore A. Wilson (Harry S. Truman Library & Museum)

Englishness and Empire and ‘Winning the Peace’

11th November 2007

I’ve recently read "Englishness and Empire: 1939-1965" (Oxford University Press, 2005), in which the author, Wendy Webster, describes how the way the British Empire was portrayed (in the press and films) changed during and after the Second World War.

During the war, ‘heroic’ narratives of empire, as a story of British power and conquest, were superseded by a story of a multi-racial community of (more or less) equal nations, loyal to Britain as the ‘mother country’ and united in the fight against a common enemy. Wendy Webster calls this a ‘People’s Empire’, to complement the idea of a ‘People’s War’, which united everyone within Britain regardless of wealth, class or status.

The projection of a ‘People’s Empire’ reached its high point at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, but soon faded to be replaced (in the press and in feature films) by siege narratives of isolated British people defending their threatened homes in colonial wars in, for example, Malaya and Kenya, as the native inhabitants of these countries fought to achieve independence from Britain.

Instead of a multi-racial ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ the empire was now increasingly portrayed as a racial community of (white) people, with the British sharing ties of kinship and culture with the (white) inhabitants of the dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. If this was extended to the idea, popularised by Winston Churchill, of a community of the ‘English Speaking Peoples‘, the US could also be included as part of the family.

In parallel with these changing images of empire, the Second World War was presented, not as a ‘People’s War’, but as a story of heroic individuals. (For example in numerous adventure feature films such as The Dam Busters, in contrast with high-minded documentaries such as those by Humphrey Jennings, which showed the teamwork and heroism of ordinary men and women in wartime). In Wendy Webster’s words "The idea of heroic British masculinity, transposed from an imperial to a Second World War setting, offered a far more exclusive image of the nation than the ‘People’s War’.

So what is the relevance of all this to my own research on the British Occupation of Germany after the war?

Firstly, many of the British behaved as if their Zone in Germany was an extension of the empire. Noel Annan in his memoirs ‘Changing Enemies‘ gives his chapter on post-war Germany the title ‘Britain’s new colony’ and Donald Cameron Watt, in his book ‘Britain looks to Germany: British Opinion and Policy towards Germany since 1945’ says of the occupation: "… it will be obvious that the method of control and re-education bears a strong resemblance to the systems of indirect rule administered in the 1890s by Lord Cromer in Egypt and Lord Lugard in sub-Saharan Africa."

In the early days of the Occupation, many of the British thought they would need to stay in Germany for a long time, 25 years or more, to complete their civilising mission to make Germany a democratic country, much like Britain, but this soon changed to an overriding concern with the cost of occupation, and the transfer of government back to German control. So the withdrawal from Germany could be seen in some ways as similar to the British retreat from empire elsewhere (though there are clearly many differences as well as similarities).

Secondly, I think Wendy Webster’s description of changing attitudes to Englishness and empire after the war helps to explain why the British Occupation of Germany has faded from popular memory. It doesn’t fit easily with any of the themes she discusses: a multi-racial ‘People’s Empire’ united against a common enemy (Germany), or a community of ‘English speaking peoples’ united by common ties of kinship and culture. In the retreat from empire, nostalgia for former British national power and glory could be preserved in heroic memories of the war, and what happened afterwards conveniently forgotten.

To some extent, I suppose, you could say the countries of western Europe after the war, including both Britain and Germany, did unite in a new People’s Empire, but this time it was a Cold War empire led by the US, against a new enemy, the Soviet Union. From a British point of view, this was a far less exciting story than that of the ‘finest hour’ when British people ‘stood alone’ to defend civilisation from barbarism.

This left no room for an alternative theme of reconstruction and reconciliation, of international fellowship and of seeing people, whoever they are, as individuals (rather than as collective members of an ethnic or racial or national group, and therefore different).

In my work, I try to restore the memory of how people, on both sides, worked to achieve reconciliation with the former enemy. Heroic war stories are not enough. What really matters is ‘Winning the Peace.’

So to finish this posting, I’d like to quote from the front page of the final issue of the British Zone Review, the quarterly journal of the Military Government and British Control Commission in Germany. This was published on September 20th, 1949, a little over four years since the end of the war and sums up how the British in Germany wished to portray their work of ‘winning the peace’ after ‘winning the war’ – as a task of reconstruction, not destruction, and of reconciliation, not revenge. To my mind it’s just as relevant now as it was then:

"We have grown and developed with the changes brought about by the reconstruction of Germany and now our task has come to an end. In this, our last issue, we should like to express our very sincere thanks to all our readers in all parts of the world and to our many contributors, whose support and co-operation has made success possible. We are glad to think that this spirit of good will and the desire shown for better understanding between British and Germans may have contributed towards a better international co-operation and fellowship which alone can ensure a lasting peace."

Finest Hour: Films by Humphrey Jennings

3rd November 2007

A few weeks ago I saw a programme of four films by Humphrey Jennings (Finest Hour: Films by Humphrey Jennings, 11th – 13th September 2007, BFI South Ban k). This was part of a documentary season run by the British Film Institute (BFI) commemorating five British documentary film-makers, all of whom were born in the same year, 1907 – Humphrey Jennings, Basil Wright, Paul Rotha, Edgar Anstey and Marion Grierson.

I’ve written several posts in this blog about Humphrey Jennings’ film A Defeated People and the view it portrayed of Germany after the war. Seven of Jennings’ films were shown as part of the documentary season at the BFI, (four in ‘Finest Hour’ and three in other programmes), but not A Defeated People, and none of the programme notes made any reference to it, probably because it does not fit easily with the themes highlighted in the season – technology, nationhood and industry, the everyday heroism of ordinary men and women during Britain in wartime, technical and industrial progress, people at work and Britain as a ‘Land of Promise’.

This made me think about using film as historical evidence. On the one hand films can provide a very immediate and accessible view of place and time. Angus Calder in his classic work ‘The Myth of the Blitz’ makes extensive reference to Humphrey Jennings and his films in his last three chapters on ‘Deep England’ (on the emotive power of the English landscape), ‘Telling it to America’ and ‘Filming the Blitz.’ He refers to most of Jennings’ films in the book, but, like the BFI documentary season, completely ignores A Defeated People. Presumably this is because the film does not fit easily with his theme of ‘The Myth of the Blitz’ and how British people like to remember their role in the war and afterwards.

In my MA dissertation (on ‘Winning the peace’: Germany under British Occupation, as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film A Defeated People, the British Zone Review and the exhibition Germany under Control) I argued that, if Jennings’ films are considered an accurate representation of Britain in wartime, A Defeated People should also be considered an accurate representation of post-war Germany, especially when viewed critically and compared with the treatment of similar themes in other sources.

On the other hand, different people respond to films in different ways. As I said in my dissertation "when we watch the film now, our reactions may tell us more about our own personal experiences and beliefs and about popular memories in the society in which we grew up, than what were the original intentions of the director, or whether the film reflected official policy or popular attitudes at the time."

I was therefore interested to read (in the BFI programme notes) about differences in interpreting another of Humphrey Jennings’ films ‘Spare Time’. This short, 15 minute film aimed to show what ordinary working people did in their spare time in different parts of England: coal miners in Wales, steel workers in the North-East, and cotton workers in Lancashire. The ‘Kazoo Band’ sequence in the film, where a group of young people, dressed in uniform, practiced playing their kazoos, marching up and down an empty football pitch, has been controversial ever since the film was first released in 1939. Basil Wright, Jennings’ fellow documentary film maker, wrote in 1951:

"The Kazoo band, the wind blowing chilly through the imitation silk uniforms, the Britannia tableau tottering on its undernourished pall bearers, and the drum majorette aping, like a grey ghost, the antics of a transatlantic and different civilisation – all this is brilliantly presented. But it is presented in terms of a cold disgust; there is no sense of the human enthusiasms which must somewhere exist behind such a drab and pathetic spectacle. Humphrey was, perhaps rightly, attacked violently for this sequence when Spare Time first appeared, but the fact remains that, as a piece of movie, it is both brilliant and unforgettable." (Quoted in the BFI programme notes for ‘Finest Hour’ Films by Humphrey Jennings)

Others have different views. As the BFI programme notes said:

"All this results in a film that different viewers have quite differently interpreted. Some find it patronising: Jennings’ fellow ‘movement’ film-maker Basil Wright attacked it as ‘sneering’. Others consider it less patronising than other documentaries of the period whose concern for social improvement has sometimes dated horribly."

After watching around 20 films in the documentary season at the BFI, including programmes of films by other directors, I was in no doubt that I agreed with those who found ‘Spare Time’ less patronising than many other documentaries, a few of which had indeed dated horribly. Though all those featured were great documentary film directors, what distinguished all of Humphrey Jennings’ films (including ‘Spare Time’, his wartime films, and A Defeated People) was an overriding concern for people as individuals, sympathy and human understanding, and his ability to portray people on their own terms, without putting words into their mouth, or obviously acting out a script.

If a viewer sees a sequence in his films, such as the Kazoo Band, as ‘patronising’ or ‘sneering’, perhaps this reflects more of the attitudes of the viewer, than those of Jennings himself?

Winning the peace: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1951

29th October 2007

I’ve not posted for a few months, as I’ve been finishing my MA dissertation on: ‘Winning the peace’: Germany under British Occupation, as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film A Defeated People, the British Zone Review and the exhibition Germany under Control

The MA dissertation is now complete and I’ve enrolled on a PhD course, which will allow me to look at the same themes in greater depth, over a slightly longer period.

In my first post on this blog, on 1st October 2005, I wrote that:

"History is a process of discovery, and in this weblog I intend to record my thoughts, ideas, and, I hope, some insights and discoveries as I work my way through the course."

Let’s hope I can keep posting new ideas and discoveries over the next 6 years, as I work my way through the PhD course. (As a part time student, it will take me twice as long as a British full time student normally takes to complete a doctorate).

Thank you to everyone who has read this blog, and especially to those who have emailed me or posted comments.

So to start things rolling, here is my PhD proposal:

Winning the peace: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1951

At the end of the First World War crowds in the streets in London were calling for the government to ‘Hang the Kaiser’. In more recent times Anglo-German relations is often trivialised as being about football hooliganism, towels on the beach and Fawlty Towers. At the end of the Second World War things were very different, and more serious, as British soldiers and administrators in occupied Germany struggled to cope, as best they could, with the challenge of winning the peace after winning the war; of occupying a country they had just defeated in battle; and of governing a country where the physical infrastructure had been destroyed and the existing political, social and moral frameworks had collapsed.

To what extent did the British and Americans succeed in ‘winning the peace’ as well as the war? And how did people, on both sides, become reconciled to the former enemy and even, in many cases, become friends, allies and partners?

For my MA dissertation, I looked at how the British Occupation of Germany was portrayed to people back home, in the eighteen month period between June 1945 and December 1946, in three official sources: Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film ‘A Defeated People’, first shown to the public in Britain in March 1946; an exhibition, ‘Germany under Control’, organised by the Ministry of Information, which opened in London in June 1946; and the British Zone Review, the official fortnightly review of the British Control Commission for Germany and Military Government. These sources show that attitudes to the former enemy were varied and complex and changed with the transition from war to peace, as the British occupying forces found they had to deal with people as individuals, rather than collectively as the enemy.
For my PhD I propose to extend the period covered to the full six year period of the occupation; from the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces in May 1945, to the announcement made by Herbert Morrison in the House of Commons on 9th July 1951 that the state of war between Britain and Germany was now formally terminated. During this period there was a transformation in British policy and attitudes to Germany; from disarmament to re-armament; from dismantling, de-nazification and dismemberment, to reconstruction, recovery, and reconciliation.

Research Objectives

The aim of the research is to achieve a better understanding of what the British in Germany thought they were doing, and why they were doing it.

It is proposed to examine the issue from both a British and a German perspective; to address issues of concern within both British and German historiographies, and so attempt to write a history that can be understood and accepted within both British and German societies and cultures.

Historical Context

Historical interpretations of the British occupation of Germany are contradictory and inconsistent. The prevailing view is that Allied policy in general, and British and US policy in particular, succeeded in creating a democratic and prosperous nation from the destruction of the Nazi dictatorship, with the former enemy nation becoming a friend, ally and partner in the subsequent Cold War struggle against new forms of totalitarianism, against communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular.

Many historians have questioned this view, from different perspectives, but without providing any coherent alternative interpretation that addresses the period as a whole. Some have highlighted intense contemporary criticism in the British press and in parliament, which portrayed the Occupation of Germany as a ‘badly managed disaster area’. Others have claimed that the British didn’t have a clue what they were meant to do before they got there and post-war planning undertaken during the war proved inappropriate and unrealistic. Tom Bower has written an impassioned moral indictment of British economic policy in Germany in the immediate aftermath of war, as the cynical plundering of technology gained by the exploitation of slave labour and concentration camp victims, whereas Patricia Meehan, responsible for a BBC TV documentary series broadcast in 1981, is fiercely critical of British policy and personnel, describing incompetent and inebriated administrators living a life of luxury on the spoils of war. In the 1980s a new generation of German historians debated the issue of ‘restoration or reform’ describing as ‘a tragedy’, failed British attempts to create a new start in German society and politics in areas such as land reform, nationalisation, local politics, the civil service and government administration, schools and universities. More recently there has been a debate within Germany on whether it is acceptable for Germans to remember and mourn their own suffering during and after the war. Perhaps it is therefore not surprising that there is still no single volume history of the British Occupation of Germany, although John Gimbel’s classic work on ‘The American Occupation of Germany’ was published as early as 1968, and more recently Norman Naimark has published a comprehensive study of ‘The Russians in Germany’.

Research Methods

The British Military Government and Control Commission were acutely conscious of the need to promote and publicise their activities to people back home. This is revealed in a great variety of sources including official publications such as the ‘British Zone Review’, government papers held in the National Archives, memoirs and autobiographies written by British soldiers and administrators and contemporary reports from press correspondents and other observers.

In the same way as I selected three sources I considered especially significant for my MA dissertation and examined these in some detail, I would propose to select a small number of additional sources or activities and use these to develop the story further. In this way I would aim to show how British policies, activities and attitudes in Germany changed over the course of the occupation and that what the British did in Germany can provide a different perspective, with some interesting and perhaps unexpected insights, into British culture and society as a whole.