British Zone Review

‘Hunting for Democracy’ (continued)

2 April 2013

I wrote previously on this blog about Colonel Eric Grimley, a British Kreis Resident Officer (KRO) in occupied Germany. He was a keen sportsman and wrote an article for the Shooting Times in 1965 on his earlier experiences, with the title ‘I hunted for democracy.’

Colonel Grimley was not alone in his belief that a shared interest in hunting encouraged mutual trust between British and Germans. General Gordon Macready, one of four British Regional Commissioners appointed in May 1946, responsible for all aspects of local and regional government in what is now the German Land, or region, of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), described in his memoirs how he worked together with the German ‘Prime Minister’ of his region, the social democrat Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf:

‘Co-operation with such a man was always pleasant, and on many occasions I enjoyed an excellent day’s sport with him. Inviting the Prime Minister to a shoot was always a matter of some delicacy. The control of all shooting and fishing had been taken over by the Allies, and no German was allowed to possess a firearm of any kind. Sporting guns and rifles had been collected immediately after the end of hostilities and in some localities the Allied military had senselessly destroyed piles of valuable sporting weapons by driving tanks over them. However, many remained and were kept under lock and key. When inviting Herr Kopf to a shoot, or accepting an invitation from him, I handed him one of his own guns which had fortunately been preserved, and gave him a ration of ammunition. The balance of the latter and the former were returned at the end of the shoot. We were glad when some months later, German high officials, estate owners and others who were vouched for by Military Government were allowed to resume possession of their guns.’

Hunting was a popular activity among many British army officers in the first half of the twentieth century. Here are two more examples from my researches among senior British army officers in occupied Germany:

General Alec Bishop wrote in his memoirs about life as a young British officer in India in the 1920s:

‘The big game shooting was first class, and included tiger, bison, wild boar, sambhur, cheetah and spotted deer. Serving officers could obtain … a licence entitling them to shoot one bison, one sambhur and four spotted deer in a season. The shooting of tiger and wild boar was not restricted … Life was very pleasant in those days for young officers serving in India. We were in fact a very privileged body of young men.’

General Brian Horrocks remembered his school holiday trips, before the First World War, to Gibraltar, where his father was serving as a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps:

‘The Gibraltar of those days was a small boy’s paradise, much more so than today, as we had free access to Spain. Life consisted of bathing, hunting with the Calpe hounds, cricket matches, race meetings and children’s parties – all great fun.’

What did hunting symbolise and mean for men such as these, when they found themselves in occupied Germany at the end of the war? Here are a few suggestions:

– Hunting wild animals (perhaps paradoxically) symbolised peace. It was what army officers did during peace time, when they were not at war.
– Hunting, in occupied Germany, therefore meant that the war was over and they could (at last) return to activities they associated with life in peacetime.
– Inviting the former enemy to accompany them symbolised reconciliation as well as peace. It symbolised mutual trust.
– It showed they were now on the same side. Weapons confiscated earlier were reissued and used against a common enemy (the animals they hunted together).

But it was not that simple. British officers tried, on some occasions, to justify hunting as a way of solving the new problems they faced in peacetime. For example, I came across a brief article in the British Zone Review in November 1945, with the headline:

‘Troops are hunting game as a military operation’

‘Operation Butcher’…is probably the biggest hunt ever organised. It is designed to kill as much wild pig, deer and other livestock as possible and thus supplement the meagre larder of the Germans. It is being treated as a military operation.’

The war was over. Their job as army officers had been completed. But they now faced new problems, such as shortages of food among the German population, which they did not know how to solve. They had won the war but did not know how to win the peace. So they justified hunting on the basis that it alleviated food shortages. By calling it ‘Operation Butcher’ they went about it as if it were a military operation – trying to use the methods of war to solve the problems of peace.

Of course ‘Operation Butcher’ was only one of many things the British did in occupied Germany. The practical effect of hunting on alleviating food shortages was minimal. The solution which worked in the end was to increase the volume of food imports from the USA and Canada (see my earlier posts on Bread Rationing in Britain).

Then as now, hunting (at least in Britain) was an elite activity. It created mutual trust and reconciliation between some members of a British elite of senior army officers and German administrators. In some rural areas, as Colonel Grimley described in his article, this would extend to local farmers, but Germans living in poor conditions in the big cities were no more likely than British people at home to react favourably to stories of British officers out hunting, while they went short of food.

References

Lt-General Sir Gordon Macready, In the Wake of the Great (London: William Clowes and Sons Ltd, 1965)

Alec Bishop, Look Back with Pleasure (Beckley, Sussex: unpublished, 1971)

Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks, A Full Life (London: Leo Cooper, 1974)

British Zone Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, Saturday 10 November 1945

The Battle of the Winter

23rd July 2007

One issue that intrigues me is how and why the British in Germany, after the war, transferred their efforts and energy from destruction to reconstruction.

One source which can give us an insight into this is the ‘British Zone Review’ the official publication of the British Military Government and Control Commission.

The first issue was published on 29th September 1945, nearly five months after the end of the war in Europe. In his introductory message on the front page, Field Marshal Montgomery, the Military Governor and Commander-in-Chief of British forces in Germany, spoke of entering the second phase of the occupation and how having won the war, his soldiers now had to fight a new battle to win the peace: the ‘Battle of the Winter.’

"Before launching my troops into battle it has always been my custom to issue to them a Personal Message…

Some time before hostilities came to an end in Europe five months ago, plans were being prepared for the post-war task, which may be summarised as the permanent eradication of Nazism, and the administration of Germany according to the principles which we hold to be right.

Before the task of reconstruction can be undertaken, the complicated machinery of a war making race has to be carefully pulled apart. Furthermore, twelve years of Nazi rule and nearly six years of war have resulted in more than material destruction.

For five months we have been clearing the ground, and the task of sweeping clean is still proceeding. As we approach its completion we shall be entering, in concert with our Allies, the second stage, the stage of reconstruction. Much of the responsibility for guiding and supervising this reconstruction rests with you. The defeated enemy must be made to put his house in order. He must learn to feed himself. Also he must be made to pay for the war which was of his making. At present he cannot sustain himself, far less repay what he owes. First he must be raised to his feet, and then made to work in such a way that he will not only be able to liquidate his debts but finally find his own salvation. We shall try to be wise conquerors. As we were strong in battle so we shall be just in peace.

You are here in Germany to help with the administration and reconstruction of the most ravaged country the world has known. On you will depend the shape of the future Germany."

The issues which concerned the British were simple: how to avoid starvation and disease, which could spread to the rest of Europe. Under the heading ‘Getting on with the Job’ Montgomery explained that:

"The objectives for the battle of the winter are food, work and homes. Of course, it is not quite so simple as that; everybody knows that a thousand other considerations are immediately involved, transport, raw materials, administration and , above all, coal."

Under the headline, ‘Will Germany starve this Winter: The problem of Feeding the British Zone’, the current German food ration of 1,550 calories was contrasted with the "lowest wartime civilian consumption in Britain" of about 2,800 calories, and described as "the minimum needed to forestall an economic and social collapse that would be as disastrous for Western Europe as a whole as it would be for Germany" as "epidemics need no passports."

On page 8 of the same issue, another article described the ‘Battle of the Winter’ in more detail, under the heading ‘Campaign against epidemics.’

"The war is over, but the Germans will receive a sharp reminder this winter that the terrors they unleashed in 1939 are not yet at an end. A demoralised people with inadequate housing, diet barely sufficient in some areas to prevent starvation, and little fuel for domestic heating, cannot hope to escape widespread misery and disease.

The Germans must fight the battle and bear the consequences, but in order to safeguard the occupying forces and to prevent Germany becoming a plague spot that would infect the whole of Europe we have to give whatever assistance is possible.

Unfortunately a serious strain has suddenly been thrown on this rather delicate structure. No sooner had the bulk of DPs been repatriated than a surge of hundreds of thousands of refugees threatened to pour in from the East – Germans turned out of Poland and Czechoslovakia, trekking westwards probably with little clothing and no food.

Quite apart from the general care of this mass of refugees, action must be taken to prevent them bringing fresh disease into our zone. The louse-borne scourge of typhus is a serious danger."

‘Winning the peace’: Germany under British occupation, as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People’ and the ‘British Zone Review’.

Next Thursday 12th July, I will be giving a paper at the Centre for Contemporary British History (CCBH) annual summer conference, on Britain and Europe in the Twentieth Century.

Here is a copy of my paper. Next week I hope to write about any comments and questions
from those attending the conference.

‘Winning the peace’: Germany under British occupation, as portrayed in
Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People’ and the ‘British Zone
Review’

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 are 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.

The British knew only too well that, although the military conflict was over, their job had only just begun. On 4th May 1945, after receiving the unconditional surrender of German forces in North West Germany, Holland and Denmark on Lüneburg Heath, Field Marshall Montgomery issued a personal message to the troops under his command, in which he said: ‘We have won the German war. Let us now win the peace.’ This message was repeated many times in the months which followed.

As there was no German government in existence any more, the British now ruled an area half the size of their own country with direct responsibility for a population of over 20 million people. With the self-confidence engendered by victory, many people expected that the occupation would last 25 years or more. Contemporary sources frequently refer to the scale and importance of the task: “…an enterprise of great magnitude and difficulty for which there is indeed no precedent in human history” as J B Hynd, the minister responsible for Germany, said in his speech at the opening of the London exhibition ‘Germany under Control’, in June 1946.

In this paper I intend to show how the attitudes of many British soldiers and administrators in Germany changed in the first year of the occupation, in the transition from war to peace, with particular reference to Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film ‘A Defeated People’. I’ll also refer to two other sources, the exhibition ‘Germany under Control,’ and the British Zone Review, the official fortnightly review of the activities of the British Control Commission for Germany and Military Government.

These were all official sources, and were all sponsored by either the Ministry of Information, or the British Military Government and Control Commission for Germany, or both. They therefore show, not only a personal view of the film’s director, the exhibition organisers, or the Review’s contributors, but an official British view of Germany after the war, in the first few months of Occupation.

Firstly, I would like to set the scene by describing some contrasting British attitudes to Germany and the German people at the end of the war. Attitudes in Britain are well documented by Mass Observation surveys, Gallup opinion polls and general press comment, and show that opinion hardened during the course of the war, moving from general agreement with Chamberlain’s much quoted speech on 1st September 1939 that: “We have no quarrel with the German people except that they allow themselves to be governed by a Nazi Government,” to outright hostility and a belief in the collective guilt of an entire nation. This change started as early as the Norwegian campaign in 1940, when the BBC was instructed to abandon making any distinction between Nazis and Germans, grew stronger throughout the war as people reacted to the bombing of civilians and reports of atrocities; and culminated with the newsreel films of the concentration camps shown very widely in Britain in April and May 1945. To quote historian Nicholas Pronay, writing about how a defeated Germany was presented in British newsreels: “Any lingering doubts about the thesis of the collective guilt of a whole nation were … crushed at the end of April by the footage from the concentration camps.” From now on, according to Pronay, even when German people after the war were shown as suffering and in distress, this was always presented in the context of a collectively guilty people getting their just deserts.

Similar attitudes were shown in a US training film, ‘Your Job in Germany’, originally made in 1944 by the noted director, Frank Capra, and first released in April 1945. The film was designed to be shown to troops immediately following footage from the concentration camps. The message of the film to the US soldier entering German territory for the first time was to be suspicious: “You’ll see some mighty pretty scenery. Don’t let it fool you. You are in enemy country. Be alert, suspicious of everyone. Take no chances. You are up against more than tourist scenery. You are up against German history. It isn’t good.” Somewhere in this Germany there were still SS guards, Gestapo guards, thousands of storm troopers, two million Nazi officials, and most dangerous of all, German youth. To pictures of apparently friendly, smiling people, the commentator says: “You are not being sent into Germany as educators … Every German is a potential source of trouble. Therefore there must be no fraternisation with any of the German people. Fraternisation means making friends. The German people are not our friends. You will not associate with German men, women or children. They’re not sorry they caused the war, just sorry they lost it.”

In contrast with these public and official attitudes in Britain and also in the US, as British soldiers and administrators in Germany came face to face with individual German people, and saw the scale of the destruction in the cities, far worse than anything they had experienced at home, they grappled with two contrasting emotions – should they leave the Germans to ‘stew in their own juice’ even if that meant that possibly millions would die of starvation, or should they feel pity for the suffering of the former enemy, and do what they could to alleviate it.

This was no academic discussion. Before he left London, General Templer, director of Civil Affairs for the British 21st Army Group, was told by PJ Grigg, Secretary of State for War, that: “You must resign yourself to the fact that two million are going to die of hunger in Europe this spring. You and the Army must do all you can to mitigate it, but you won’t be able to cure it.”

Field Marshal Montgomery, the British commander-in-chief was equally aware of his responsibilities. He tells in his memoirs how, following the unconditional surrender on 4th May 1945: “I had suddenly become responsible for the government and well-being of about twenty million Germans. Tremendous problems would be required to be handled and if they were not solved before the winter began, many Germans would die of starvation, exposure and disease.”

In the event, in the British Zone, despite widespread hunger and appalling living conditions, relatively few people did die of starvation and disease as, almost overnight, the British army and Military Government, transferred their attentions from destruction to re-construction, with equal energy and determination. In the former German Eastern territories, of course, it was a different story. The number of people who died as a result of the expulsion of around 12 million ethnic Germans from the East is a highly contentious topic, but was certainly substantial. Estimates vary from around 500,000 to nearly 3 million.

In the words of Noel Annan, political adviser to the British Military government, “Templer’s energy transformed the British zone.” The British Official History of the war tells the same story, of how Templer, “more than any other man saved the zone from famine and anarchy through the desperate winter of 1945-6.” Equally remarkable, the author of the official history concludes his work with a personal impression
. Although many of the regular officers he spoke to at first disliked a posting to Civil Affairs, many from Templer downwards: “made it very clear to the writer that by the time their connection with military government was to be severed, they had come to feel it was the most rewarding work they had ever undertaken.” One officer even said it was “the only really worth while thing he ever did in his life.”

‘A Defeated People’

I’d now like to return to the film, ‘A Defeated People’ and examine in more detail what it can tell us about the complex and varied, often confused and contradictory nature of British policy and attitudes to Germany in the first year of the occupation; bearing in mind that this was an official film, designed to show people at home what life was really like in Germany.

The film was made shortly after the end of the war, in the Autumn and Winter of 1945, by the Crown Film Unit, part of the Ministry of Information. The film’s director, Humphrey Jennings was probably the greatest of all the British wartime documentary film makers. Angus Calder, for example, in ‘The Myth of the Blitz’ refers to him as “Britain’s most remarkable maker of official films.” His wartime films include well known classics such as London can Take It, Listen to Britain and Fires were Started, the last of which has been described by the film historian Jeffrey Richards as “one of the key works in creating the mythic image of the London Blitz. Those heroic figures silhouetted against the blazing inferno sweeping the dockside warehouse etched themselves into history, embodying the epic of the ordinary men and women who calmly and courageously took up the defence of their city.”

His films were remarkably popular, at a time when film was still a mass medium, and the British documentary film movement was at its peak. In 1946, at the height of its popularity, a third of the population visited the cinema at least once a week. In addition to cinema showings, the Ministry of Information arranged so called non-theatrical film shows in factories, village halls and clubs, reaching an audience of twenty million people over a two and a half year period. In the heightened emotional atmosphere of wartime, these non-theatrical audiences sometimes wept, or broke out into spontaneous applause, when they saw Jennings’ films. Helen Forman, who was second in charge of the non-theatrical distribution section of the Films division of the Ministry of Information, wrote that: “One of the … films … which was liked and applauded was Humphrey Jennings’ magical Listen to Britain. All sorts of audiences felt it to be a distillation and also a magnification of their own experience of the home front.”

It is therefore intriguing to ask what did this Englishmen, who created the mythic image of the London Blitz, and whose audiences felt his films were a distillation and magnification of their own experiences, make of Germany after the war.

The picture his film ‘A Defeated People’ shows of Germany after the war is grim. It shows not only the physical destruction at the end of the war, but its effect on the people, who were shown as stunned, dazed, as if they didn’t know what had hit them. In the words of the commentary: “Place and time meant nothing, because the people; the links between the people, were smashed too. They were just left wandering, looking for food, looking for their homes, looking for each other.”

Nicholas Pronay, the historian of British newsreels, has argued that the left-wing idealist documentary film makers in general, and Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People,’ in particular, presented the same image of Germany after the war, that of a guilty people getting its just deserts, as the right wing commercial newsreels and this reflected a basic consensus in Britain about Germany.

The thesis of my paper today is that Pronay may have been right about the newsreels but was wrong about Humphrey Jennings and his film ‘A Defeated People.’ While the script of the film tells one story, the images show a different and more complex picture. On the one hand, the voice-over commentary, accompanied by pictures of destroyed cities, factories and bridges, has no hesitation in blaming the Germans for “the war they started.” But the images also show German people as individuals, not as a collectively guilty nation; men and women looking for lost relatives, children playing in the rubble on the bomb sites, people living underground in cellars because that’s all that remains of their houses, old women sawing up logs to take home for fuel because they have no coal.

Not only, I would argue, has Pronay misunderstood the film, but he has also underplayed several important and contrasting aspects of the British view of Germany and the German people after the war, which are clearly evident in the film: firstly, awe at the scale of destruction they saw all around them, secondly, the energy and determination with which the British Military Government tackled the process of reconstruction; thirdly, their perceived need to explain to people back home that that they were doing this out of self-interest, not altruism, to prevent disease and prevent a resurgence of fascism which could lead to another war; fourthly, the unquestioned belief of the British in their own superiority and moral self-righteousness; and fifthly, and this is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the film, sympathy with the undoubted suffering of the former enemy, recognition that life goes on in the midst of destruction, and hope for the future.

What evidence is there to support this case? Of course we can watch the film, but as with all visual materials, we have to do this critically and question its value as historical evidence, because, especially when referring to images rather than the script, we are dealing with a work of art and different people will respond to it in different ways. When we watch the film now, our reactions may tell us more about our own personal experience 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 it was made.

Fortunately there is other evidence available. Firstly when the film was first shown in London in March 1946, it was extensively reviewed by the Press, which helps us understand how it was perceived when it was first released. Secondly, while filming in Germany in September and October 1945, Jennings wrote a number of letters to his wife and these provide an indication of his state of mind, his reactions to what he saw in Germany and the ideas he intended to convey in the film. And thirdly, we can compare how certain themes were treated in the film, with the presentation of similar themes and images in other historical sources, such as the exhibition ‘Germany under Control’ and the ‘British Zone Review’.

What the film reviews said in 1946

The film was first shown to the public at the Tivoli cinema in London on March 17th 1946, after a private press showing earlier in the week. It was reviewed in all the major papers, including The Times, Manchester Guardian, Glasgow Herald, Daily Mail, Daily Express, News Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, Daily Worker, Sunday Dispatch, Sunday Times, Sunday Express and Reynolds News.

The publicity material for the film stated that, as the “first official film record of life in Berlin and Hamburg under the British Control Commission,” it would answer the question everyone was asking: “What is it like inside Germany today?” It would show the scale of the destruction, but also how a curl of smoke emerging from the rubble showed someone, still living in the cellar of a destroyed building, was trying to make a home out o
f chaos. The role of the British Control Commission was stressed in bringing order out of ruin and despair. And in the final sentence, there was a glimmer of hope for the future as, “In the wintry sunlight the children are beginning to laugh and dance again, the horrors of war behind them.”

The reviews in all the papers, regardless of their political persuasion, were universally favourable and followed much the same line as the publicity material. It had been a week in which there was a shortage of good new feature films and the News Chronicle said: “it is left to documentaries again to bring weight and dignity to the week’s screen.” According to the Daily Worker: “the most important film of the week is A DEFEATED PEOPLE” and Reynolds News agreed that this was a “documentary film you must see.”

Some reviewers, such as the Daily Telegraph saw in the film a clear expression of sympathy: “A DEFEATED PEOPLE, made by Humphrey Jennings for the Crown Film Unit, gives a picture of life in the British Zone of Germany all the more impressive for its restraint. The tone is agreeably free from gloating, and it would need a much more vindictive race than ours to see without sympathy women cooking amid the ruins and crowds studying huge boards covered with the names of missing persons.” In summary, the reviewers recognised that the situation in Germany was grim, that conditions were bad and people were suffering. The British, as the occupying power, had an obligation to do something about this, but there was no single answer and no easy solutions. As Joan Lester said in her review in Reynolds News, the film dealt with “the vital and complex problems arising out of the economic, political and human tangle created by Nazism in defeat. Mr Jennings has, within certain essential limitations of time and opportunity, brought to his subject understanding, intelligence and humanity.”

Humphrey Jennings’ letters to his wife while filming in Germany

Humphrey Jennings’ own reactions to the situation in Germany are revealed in the letters he wrote to his wife in September and October 1945. These show that he was initially confused and uncertain what to make of it. In his first letter, written on September 1st, he says:

“Well I have been quite overwhelmed by Germany in the past few days and can’t really say anything sensible yet – it is quite unlike anything one has been told or thought – both more alive and more dead.”

A week later he was still none the wiser:

“I am still unable to give any sort of reliable picture of Germany – even of the bits (Cologne, Essen, Hannover, Hamm) which we have seen – for the moment the contradictions are too great …”

Jennings’ mixed, complex and uncertain reactions, were perhaps best expressed in a letter he wrote on 10th September. I would like to quote from this at some length, because it illustrates both his eye for visual detail and his attempts to make sense of what he saw. Many of the sights he describes in this letter, appear as images in the film:

“At lunchtime today we were photographing a [German] family cooking their lunch on campfires in dixies on the blitzed main stair-case of the Palace of Justice at Cologne – one of the few buildings still standing in the centre of the city – outside apparently deserted – surrounded by miles of rubble and weed-covered craters – but inside voices cries of children and the smell of drifting wood-smoke – of burnt paper – the sound of people smashing up doors and windows to light fires in the corridors – the smoke itself drifting into side rooms still littered with legal documents – finally adding to the blue haze in front of the cathedral. The cathedral now with all the damage round immensely tall – a vast blue and unsafe spirit ready to crumble upon the tiny black figures in the street below … and then returning to Duesseldorf – much less knocked about – blitzed but not actually destroyed like Cologne and Essen and Aachen – still a beautiful city, returning here to tea we meet sailing through the park-like streets a mass of white Sunday-frocked German school children standing tightly together on an Army truck and singing at the tops of their voices as they are rushed through the streets … In Essen they still fetch their water from stand-pipes and firehose in the streets and the sewers rush roaring and stinking open to the eye and the nose – seep into blitzed houses into cellars where people still live.

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

This is not the uncompromising view, claimed by Pronay, as the consensus in Britain, of a guilty people getting its just deserts. There is no doubt in Jennings’ mind that the Germans were to blame for the war, but he also clearly is looking beyond this to the plight of people as individuals, to the obligations of the British as occupiers, and even to a Germany that once was a beautiful country, and might become so again.

The British Zone Review.

It is interesting to compare how these themes, revealed in the film, were handled in the British Zone Review, the official fortnightly review of the activities of the British Control Commission. Not surprisingly, the same themes which emerge in the film appeared in numerous articles in the early issues of the publication:

As one example, I’d like to quote from an article in the first issue, dated 29th September 1945, which described what the British had already achieved in the small town of Buxtehude, near Hamburg. Using the familiar image of life in Germany as a broken clock, the article tells the story of “what Military Government has done and is doing to restore to the British Zone the essential things of life which were swept away in the collapse of Nazi Germany….”

The article continues:

“When the British 213 Military Detachment took over the Nazi-run town on May 10, Buxtehude was like a clock with its spring unwound. There was no gas, and there was no electricity. The water was impure. The town’s small industries were at a standstill. The flour mills were idle. Road transport had stopped, and no trains ran. Today the Nazi bosses are gone, and the town has a Burgomeister, a social democrat, who was three times imprisoned by them. The public services have been restored. Trains are running, and there is a daily bus for those who have passes to say that their journeys are really necessary… How have these things happened?

‘It has just been part of the drill for dealing with such problems’, a British Army officer … told me. ‘The German people have been obedient and cooperative. We have told them what they must do and they have got on with the job.’”

A long running series on “The Price of War” catalogued the devastation in most of the major cities in the British Zone, followed by the work being done to put things right again. In article after article similar themes appear – awed descriptions of the scale and extent of the damage, usually caused by RAF bombing, followed by descriptions of the work being done by the British to repair it.

Other articles in the Review explained why reconstruction was in their own self interest. Chief of these was the fear of disease and unrest. “Epidemics need no passports” as Montgomery had said in his introductory message in the first issue; the economic and social collapse of Germany would be “as disastrous for Western Europe as a whole as it would be for Germany”.

The British in Germany clearly felt their work of reconstruction was not fully appreciated. The lead article in issue number 6, titled ‘For Those at Home’ spoke in almost biblical terms of the need to ensure that all those at home understood the enormity of the task: “The truth is that mere words and pictures cannot convey to those at home the enormity of the disaster that Germany has reaped. It must be seen and felt. …. Many of us returning from leave have remarked with some bitterness ‘They don’t seem to realise the problems we are up against.’

We must preach the gospel of information by every means …” the article continued “What sort of picture do they have in England of Germany, British Zone? London, at the height of the blitz, was well-nigh a land of plenty compared with life today in Dortmund, Munster, Hannover, Hamburg or Cologne … The mind reels when it attempts to assess the proportions of the problem…”

But if the need for reconstruction was obvious, if unappreciated by those at home, the same article went on to say that: “These pitifully inadequate pen-pictures which have many omissions, are not drawn in any attempt to win sympathy for the German … Sympathy for the Germans does not exist for us; our job is to see facts and evaluate them. Having helped to win the war we must strive to win the peace.”

Was it acceptable to feel sorry for the enemy or not? An extensive debate on the issue, under the headline, ‘Feeling sorry for the Germans’, was conducted in the letters pages of the Review, over five issues, from 13th October to 8th December 1945, with correspondents expressing a wide range of views. I’d like to conclude my talk by quoting from the letter which started the debate from ‘Lucia Lawson, Subaltern, A.T.S.’

“In writing this I am probably bringing a storm of criticism down on my head, but I do not think that I am alone in my views. And I would be interested to know.

Some time ago I went to Berlin, prepared to experience the greatest satisfaction of my life, by seeing the town in ruins and the people with no place to live. I came away feeing sorry for some of the Germans …

You will say that those sweet little children with curly fair hair and blue eyes are all potential killers, but with their spindly legs and lips just turning blue from lack of food it is hardly in human nature to hate them. The old man and woman who I saw digging for tree roots in the ruins of the Tiergarten for food, surely deserve a little pity, or do they? The young girl dressed in a thin summer frock who I found sleeping under the shelter of a pile of rubble in the Kaiser Wilhelm church, is she to be hated too? Hundreds are now dying from starvation and disease. In a couple of months the number may easily be doubled.

Well, it is open to discussion, but think before you write, or get someone who has been to Berlin to tell you what conditions are like. Maybe I am too sensitive and soft hearted, but I still say I am sorry for some of them.”

Conclusion

To sum up, British policy and planning for Germany after the war is often described in terms of four D-words, denazification, decentralisation, demilitarisation and democratisation. To these are sometimes added another four D-words: destruction, disarmament, dismantling and dismemberment. But if this typifies the largely negative official policy of the British, the US, the Soviet Union and later France towards Germany, at the diplomatic level, as discussed and agreed at the numerous three and four power summits held during the war and afterwards at Potsdam, it is incomplete, even misleading, as a description of the policy, attitudes and activities of the British Military Government and personnel directly responsible for the occupation. These were often very different, and were determined, not by the official Four Power policy as agreed at Potsdam, but by their direct experience on the ground.

This paper has aimed to show that the film ‘A Defeated People’ and the ‘British Zone Review’ reveal other aspects of British policy and actions in Germany during the transition from war to peace, which are neglected or underplayed by those historians focussing on the high politics of the period. Firstly the uncertain and complex reaction of the British to the destruction they saw all around them; secondly the surprising energy and determination with which the British in Germany tackled the process of reconstruction; and thirdly despite the many voices both in Britain and Germany, expressing the view that the former enemy were a collectively guilty people receiving their just deserts, there was another strand of opinion, which showed sympathy with the undoubted suffering of people as individuals, recognition that life goes on in the midst of destruction, and hope for the future. In summary, reconstruction not destruction and reconciliation not revenge.

Germany under British occupation – as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People.’

6th January 2007

Next Saturday 13th January, I will be giving a brief talk on my research at a conference for postgraduate students at the German Historical Institute in London.

The talk summarises the work I have been doing in the past year or so, much of which I’ve been writing about in this blog.

So as this is my first posting of the New Year, here is a copy of the talk. Next week I hope to write about any comments and questions from those attending the conference.

The British Occupation of Germany – as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People’

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

I am currently in the second year of a part-time MA in Contemporary British History and for my dissertation, I am researching how British policy and actions in Germany were presented by the government, to people back home, in the eighteen month period between June 1945 and December 1946. In particular I am looking at how the British Occupation of Germany was portrayed in two specific contemporary sources: Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film ‘A Defeated People’ which was filmed in Germany in September and October 1945 and first shown to the public in Britain in March 1946, and an exhibition which opened in London in June 1946, called ‘Germany under Control.’

I have chosen these two sources because they were both sponsored by the British Ministry of Information and both received the full support of the British Military Government and Control Commission for Germany. They therefore show, not only a personal view of the film’s director, or the exhibition organisers, but an official British view of Germany after the war, in the first few months of Occupation.

When I started looking at the subject, I thought the British Occupation of Germany was a neglected area, and in some ways it is, especially in Britain. But it soon became apparent that a great deal of historical work has been done on this period, especially in the 1980s, most notably, the project sponsored by the German Historical Institute, completed in 1993, to catalogue and create an inventory of the British Control Commission files held at the National Archives in Kew.

In the past ten years, since 1995, less work appears to have been published, but I have been pleasantly surprised to find several other postgraduate students are now working on various aspects of the subject, some of whom are here at this conference, so perhaps it is now due for a revival and maybe also a re-assessment.

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

For five years, and with reserved powers in some areas for longer, the British ruled an area half the size of their own country and had direct responsibility for a population of over 20 million people.

With very few exceptions, such as the recent article by Matthew Frank in Twentieth Century British History on ‘The New Morality – Victor Gollancz, ‘Save Europe Now’ and the German Refugee Crisis’, this episode in British history is largely ignored in surveys of Britain, except in so far as it contributed to increased global tensions and the cold war, or was an economic burden on the British treasury.

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

Progress to date

Up to now, most of my time has been spent researching the film ‘A Defeated People’ and the film’s director, Humphrey Jennings.

Humphrey Jennings was probably the greatest of all the British wartime documentary film makers. Angus Calder, for example, in "The Myth of the Blitz" refers to him as "Britain’s most remarkable maker of official films." His wartime films include well known classics such as London can Take It, Listen to Britain and Fires were Started, the last of which has been described by the film historian Jeffrey Richards as "one of the key works in creating the mythic image of the London Blitz."

His films were remarkably popular, at a time when film was still a mass media, and the British documentary film movement was at its peak. In addition to cinema showings, the Ministry of Information arranged so called non-theatrical film shows in factories, village halls and clubs, reaching an audience of twenty million people over a two and a half year period. In the heightened emotional atmosphere of wartime, these non-theatrical audiences sometimes wept, or broke out into spontaneous applause, when they saw Jennings’ films. For example, Roger Manvell, who worked for the Ministry of Information as a regional film officer, and later became a well-known film critic and writer, organised over 25,000 showings during the war and included a film by Humphrey Jennings in nearly all of them. He has told how "I do not exaggerate when I say that members of audiences …(especially during the earlier, more immediately alarming years) frequently wept as a result of Jennings’ direct appeal to the rich cultural heritage of Britain … going back to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, to Purcell and Handel."

It is therefore intriguing to ask what did this Englishmen, who some historians say created the mythic image of the London Blitz, and whose audiences sometimes cried when they saw his films, make of Germany after the war.

The film ‘A Defeated People’ was intended to show an accurate and realistic picture of Germany at the time. As far as we know there was no formal brief, no rules as to what could and could not be filmed and no official censorship. Humphrey Jennings wrote the script as he went along and was expected to tell it like it was, which was the way he worked on all his films, both during and after the war.

The picture it shows of Germany after the war is grim. Many British observers were openly shocked at the scale of destruction they saw when they crossed the frontier into Germany, especially in the cities and above all, in Berlin. This was far worse than anything they had seen at home, even in Coventry, Bristol or London during the blitz. As British soldiers were told in the 64 page pocketbook given to them before they crossed the frontier into Germany, (recently republished by the National Archives), more tons of bombs were dropped by the Allies on one German city, Duisburg, in just two days on 14th and 15th October 1944, than were dropped on London in the eleven months from September 1940 to July 1941.

The film shows not only the physical destruction, of the cities, the railways and factories, but its effect on the people, who were shown as stunned, dazed, as if they didn’t know what had hit them. In the words of the commentary: "Place and time meant nothing, because the people; the links between the people, were smashed too. They were just left wandering, looking for food, looking for their homes, looking for each other."

Most historians and other commentators have largely ignored Humphrey Jennings’ post war films, preferring to discuss his films about Britain during the war, rather than the one about Germany after the war. One well-known British historian however, Nicholas Pronay, refers to the film in the context of writing about how a defeated Germany was presented in British newsreels at the end of the war. The initial attitude of the newsreels was, to quote Pronay, "The Germans were a guilty people with an inborn compulsion to war." This reflected long held views in Britain, going back to stereotypes presented during the first world war. Then, as Pronay says: "Any lingering doubts about the thesis of the collective guilt of a whole nation were … crushed at the end of April by the footage from the concentration camps" which was shown very widely, both in Britain and in Germany. This meant that whenever German people were shown in the newsreels as suffering and in distress, this was always presented in the collective context of Germany as a guilty nation, receiving its just deserts.

Pronay goes on to argue that the left-wing idealist documentary film makers, and Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People,’ in particular, presented the same hard-line image of Germany after the war as the right wing commercial newsreels, and this reflected a basic consensus in Britain about Germany.

In my dissertation I argue that Pronay may have been right about the newsreels, but was wrong about ‘A Defeated People’. Far from presenting the same picture as the newsreels, the film shows that attitudes in Britain 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. While the script tells one story, the images show a different and more complex picture. On the one hand, the film shows a grim picture of destruction, with a voice-over commentary that has no hesitation in blaming the Germans for "the war they started." But the images also show German people as individuals, not as a collectively guilty nation; men and women looking for lost relatives, children playing in the rubble on the bomb sites, people living underground in cellars because that’s all that remains of their houses, old women sawing up logs to take home for fuel because they have no coal.

Not only, I would argue, has Pronay misunderstood the film, but he has also underplayed several important and contrasting aspects of the British view of Germany and the German people in the first year after the war, which are clearly evident in the film. Firstly the energy and determination with which the British Military Government tackled the process of reconstruction, their desire to get on with the job and get the place working again. Secondly, their perceived need to explain to people back home that that they were doing this out of self-interest, not altruism, to prevent disease and prevent a resurgence of fascism which could lead to another war. Thirdly, the unquestioned belief of the British in their own superiority and moral self-righteousness. And fourthly, and this is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the film, sympathy with the undoubted suffering of the former enemy, recognition that life goes on in the midst of destruction, and hope for the future.

What evidence is there to support this case? Of course we can watch the film. I am one of those who believes that sources speak for themselves, without requiring too much interpretation by the historian, which sometimes serves to confuse as much as it illuminates. But we have to question the film’s value as historical evidence, because, especially when referring to images rather than the script, we are dealing with a work of art and different people will respond to it in different ways. When we watch the film now, our reactions may tell us more about our own personal experience 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 it was made.

The film was first shown to the public at the Tivoli cinema in London on March 17th 1946, after a private press showing earlier in the week. The publicity material stated that, as the "first official film record of life in Berlin and Hamburg under the British Control Commission," it would answer the question everyone was asking: "What is it like inside Germany today?" It would show the scale of the destruction, but also how a curl of smoke emerging from the rubble showed someone, still living in the cellar of a destroyed building, trying to make a home out of chaos. The role of the British Control Commission was stressed in bringing order out of ruin and despair. And in the final sentence, there was a glimmer of hope for the future as, "In the wintry sunlight the children are beginning to laugh and dance again, the horrors of war behind them."

The film was reviewed in all the major British papers, and all, regardless of their political persuasion, followed much the same line as the publicity material. In summary, the reviewers recognised that the situation in Germany was grim, that conditions were bad and people were suffering. The British, as the occupying power, had an obligation to do something about this, but there was no single answer and no easy solutions. As Joan Lester said in her review in Reynolds News, the film dealt with "the vital and complex problems arising out of the economic, political and human tangle created by Nazism in defeat. Mr Jennings has, within certain essential limitations of time and opportunity, brought to his subject understanding, intelligence and humanity."

Humphrey Jennings’ letters to his wife while filming in Germany

"Well I have been quite overwhelmed by Germany in the past few days and can’t really say anything sensible yet – it is quite unlike anything one has been told or thought – both more alive and more dead." A week later he was still none the wiser: "I am still unable to give any sort of reliable picture of Germany – even of the bits (Cologne, Essen, Hannover, Hamm) which we have seen – for the moment the contradictions are too great …"

In general, the letters are very far from the uncompromising view, claimed by Pronay, as a consensus in Britain at the end of the war, of a guilty people getting its just deserts. There is no doubt in Jennings’ mind that the Germans were to blame for the war, but he is also clearly looking beyond this to the plight of people as individuals, to the obligations of the British as occupiers, and even to a Germany that once was a beautiful country, and might become so again.

The theme of the broken clock

I have found it interesting to compare how themes were handled in the film, with the treatment of similar themes in articles, features and letters in other official sources: in particular the British Zone Review, which was a fortnightly review of the activities of the British Control Commission.

To take one example: the theme of the broken clock. Near the start of the film, the commentator says, to a picture of broken clock on a ruined railway station: "And at the finish, life in Germany just ran down like a clock."

The same theme appears in the first issue of the British Zone Review, published on 29th September 1945, the same time as Jennings was filming in Germany, in a feature on page four with the headline "Winding up the Clock" about what the British were doing in Buxtehude, a small town near Hamburg.

The image, of course, is similar to that of ‘Stunde Null’ – Year Zero. Life had stopped, like a broken clock, and the job the British believed they had to do was to wind it up and get things going again. Many German people have written about their memories of the time, but very few British. So to conclude my talk I would like to quote this official British view of ‘Stunde Null’ in a small town in Germany. Like the film, it reveals the same strange mixture of sympathy and self-interest, of reconstruction and self-righteousness:

"This is the story of Buxtehude. It is not a sensational story because Buxtehude is one of those quiet little country towns where – even in Germany – sensations seldom happen. But it is the story of what Military Government has done and is doing to restore to the British Zone the essential things of life which were swept away in the collapse of Nazi Germany…. When the British 213 Military Detachment took over the Nazi-run town on May 10, Buxtehude was like a clock with its spring unwound. There was no gas, and there was no electricity. The water was impure. The town’s small industries were at a standstill. The flour mills were idle. Road transport had stopped, and no trains ran. Today the Nazi bosses are gone, and the town has a Burgomeister, a social democrat, who was three times imprisoned by them. The public services have been restored. Trains are running, and there is a daily bus for those who have passes to say that their journeys are really necessary… How have these things happened?

‘It has just been part of the drill for dealing with such problems’, a British Army officer of the Military Government Detachment told me. ‘The German people have been obedient and cooperative. We have told them what they must do and they have got on with the job.’"

Finally, and as a way of summarising the aims of the dissertation, I would like to quote Peter Wende, the former director of the German Historical Institute here in London, who said in the introduction to a symposium held in May 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the Unconditional Surrender of German armed forces in Europe: "May 1945 marked the transition from decades of conflict to an era of peace and cooperation. Focusing on this decisive historical event from different angles may provide a starting point for discussion of its wider implications."

Christopher Knowles
January 2007

‘Feeling sorry for the Germans’

4th December 2006

In my last post on ‘The British Soldier’s Pocketbook‘ issued to all British troops as they first entered German territory in 1944 and 1945, I wrote how soldiers were warned against ‘feeling sorry for the Germans.’ This reminded me of a debate on exactly the same subject, in the letters pages of the ‘British Zone Review‘ which ran through five issues, from 13th October to 8th December 1945.

I’ve included some of the relevant pieces from both sources below. This makes this post quite long, but I think it’s an interesting subject. Why were the British authorities so concerned that the ordinary British soldier would feel sorry for the ordinary German civilian? And the debate in the British Zone Review shows quite clearly the differences between the two schools of thought in Britain: on the one hand "The Germans deserve all they get," and on the other: "Humanity and justice cannot be based upon hatred and revenge."

To start with the Foreward to the ‘Soldier’s Pocketbook’:

"The civilian population of Germany has seen the war brought into its homes in a terrible form. You will see much suffering in Germany and much to awake your pity. You may also find that many Germans, on the surface at least, seem pleasant enough and that they will even try to welcome you as friends."

However the British soldier is warned that "The Germans have much to unlearn" and "much to atone for" and needs to be on his guard. After discussing atrocities committed by the German Government and the German Army, the book goes on to say that "The German people as a whole cannot escape a large share of responsibility" and "…it is only by the sacrifice of thousands upon thousands of your fellow countrymen and Allies, and at a cost of untold suffering at home and abroad through five long years, that British troops are at last on German soil. Think first of all this when you are tempted to sympathise with those who to-day are reaping the fruits of their policy, both in peace and war."

The same theme is repeated on the next page, in a section headed: "To begin with – "

"But most of the people you will see when you get to Germany will not be airmen or soldiers or U-boat crews, but ordinary civilians – men, women and children. Many of them will have suffered from overwork, underfeeding and the effects of air raids, and you may be tempted to feel sorry for them."

Again the British soldier is reminded of: "… how the German armies behaved in the countries they occupied" and told in capital letters: "THERE WILL BE NO BRUTALITY ABOUT A BRITISH OCCUPATION, BUT NEITHER WILL THERE BE SOFTNESS OR SENTIMENTALITY."

The book continues: "You may see many pitiful sights. Hard luck stories may somehow reach you. Some of them may be true, at least in part, but most will be hypocritical attempts to win sympathy…. SO BE ON YOUR GUARD AGAINST ‘PROPAGANDA’ IN THE FORM OF HARD LUCK STORIES. Be fair and just, but don’t be soft."

The same points are repeated later in the book, in a summary of Do’s and Don’ts.

"DON’T be sentimental. If things are tough for the Germans they have only themselves to blame."
"DON’T fall for political hard-luck stories."

The debate in the British Zone Review on ‘Feeling sorry for the Germans’ was started by a letter from ‘Lucia Lawson, Subaltern, A.T.S.’ in issue 2, on 13th October 1945:

"In writing this I am probably bringing a storm of criticism down on my head, but I do not think that I am alone in my views. And I would be interested to know.

Some time ago I went to Berlin, prepared to experience the greatest satisfaction of my life, by seeing the town in ruins and the people with no place to live. I came away feeing sorry for some of the Germans.

It is hard to believe when we have just come through six years of a war which was not of our asking that anyone can feel sorry for the people who caused it, but I challenge any average English man or woman to spend one week in Berlin and not feel some small measure of pity for some Berliners.

You will say that those sweet little children with curly fair hair and blue eyes are all potential killers, but with their spindly legs and lips just turning blue from lack of food it is hardly in human nature to hate them. The old man and woman who I saw digging for tree roots in the ruins of the Tiergarten for food, surely deserve a little pity, or do they? The young girl dressed in a thin summer frock who I found sleeping under the shelter of a pile of rubble in the Kaiser Wilhelm church, is she to be hated too? Hundreds are now dying from starvation and disease. In a couple of months the number may easily be doubled.

Three responses to this letter were published in the next issue of the Review, on 27th October. The first, from Duncan Wilson, ISC (Information Services Control) Branch starts:

"I for one am sorry that Sub Lawson is sorry that she feels sorry for the people of Berlin. Why should one feel shy about a decent human sentiment, whatever its direction?"

He continues by saying that the Germans are not unique in their suffering, but that this does not mean "we should be indifferent to indiscriminate suffering here or anywhere else." He distinguishes 2 kinds of collective guilt. That of the active perpetrators, and that of "those who sat by passively or who carried out orders unthinkingly…. It does not seem to me that the guilt of these latter people differs in kind (in degree it does) from the guilt of others outside Germany who found it more comfortable to forget the seamy side of Nazism and thought it possible even in 1938 to do business with Hitler."

"Let us not be self-righteous; let us remember history’s indiscriminate judgement on ourselves; (the near catastrophe of 1940) and let us not pretend indifference to the sight of history being executed indiscriminately on the German people."

The second letter was from Margaret Beak, Sjt, ATS on the plight of children in Paris in December 1944, and in contrast, how well fed Germans in Frankfurt appeared:

"I personally cannot feel much pity for these people who are only suffering the same conditions that they have imposed on so many thousands of others in the past six years."

And the third from Sjt R.J. Dolamore:

"Surely no-one can feel sorry for any members of a race that has inflicted all the horrors of a second world war within a generation…. We all want to avoid another war in the future and the only way is to teach the Germans that war does not pay. We shall never do this by feeling sorry for them. Let them suffer all the hardships possible for the next 10 years and probably by that time the lesson will have entered their thick heads."

In the next issue, on 10th November, there were two further letters on the "Feeling Sorry" debate. The first from F/Lt E.A. Salmon, HQ Air Division:

"Subaltern Lawson’s recent letter and the replies it evoked must be of great interest to the many who are trying to adopt a correct attitude to the Germans. Sub Lawson found that although she can probably hate the Germans as a nation, it is more difficult to hate individuals whom she sees suffering in Berlin. I feel with Mr D Wilson that there is no shame in being sorry…. but it seems to me extremely important that our feelings should be given a true perspective…. If we appear sorry for their plight, they will only too readily assume the role of martyrdom. If we are harsh and indifferent they will accept us as conquerors and wait for revenge, instead of learning the meaning of civilised conduct, which must be our ultimate aim to teach. Surely, then, we must continually strive neither to condone nor to condemn, but rather to point out with as complete detachment as possible that although it is their nation which has caused the terrible devastation and want now existing throughout Europe, maturer countries than Germany have grown out of tribal warfare and will try to help Germany to grow out of it as well. This will not feed hungry children. But everything possible is being done by the various organisations in the field to tide over the winter, and there is little more that individuals can do at present. Since, however, circumstances have made it inevitable that a lesson is to be taught, we can do our best to ensure that (unlike in the years after the 1914-1918 war) the moral is not lost."

And the second from F. Royen, Interpreters’ Pool, Berlin:

"As one who has lived in Germany for some months and who has a fair knowledge of German mentality I feel that Sub Lawson’s letter (‘Feeling Sorry for the Germans’) expresses not softheartedness but sympathy, which I am sure every decent human being must feel when confronted with cases of distress and misery.

We should however not be arrived away by feelings of sympathy, lest we ‘forgive and forget’ and by doing so help to create conditions leading to far greater distress and misery all over the world….

By methods of deceit and apparent servility, too much food is subtracted already now from rations which would far better be used to feed those who have suffered years of starvation in invaded countries, while the Germans were still doing well on food stolen from those countries.

It is necessary that they should suffer, and unfortunately innocent ones among them, to drive it home to them that aggression does not pay in the long run. Do not let us be deceived by some cases of sufferings, which, painful as they may be, constitute only a fraction of the misery the Germans have brought about all over the world. A repetition must be prevented by hard means if civilisation, or indeed the human race, is to survive."

In Issue 5, on 24th November, Sjt J.P. Noonan joined the debate:

"Sir, Sgt Dolamore would condemn all Germans – men, women and innocent children – to the same fate as that of the unfortunate peoples of Europe when the Nazis were in power. May I suggest that if such methods of ‘justice’ are applied, within ten years there will be no Germans left in Germany – starvation and disease will have done an effective job.

We have called ourselves the Army of Liberation, the Crusaders of Truth, Justice and Liberty. If we are democrats and liberators of the oppressed, entrusted with the mission of enlightening and reaching the principles of truth, justice and liberty, then, in the name of logic and commonsense, why not practice what we preach? Humanity and justice cannot be based upon hatred and revenge. Our mission is to show the Germans they failed because they ignored the principles of humanity. We must punish the criminals responsible and teach the others by example that we have something better to offer: we must show them that, when they have paid their debt to society, they may once again become a democratic nation and a self respecting people. Let us punish the war criminals and the war mongers who have brought horror, misery and chaos to the world, but not innocent women and children."

The final contribution was in Issue number 6, on 8th December, in a letter from ‘D. G. Hannover’:

"The correspondence concerning sympathy for German children appears to be wandering from the subject.

I would suggest that one must have two standards of conduct. The first, official, in which one carries out the policy of the Control Commission. The second standard must be a personal one."

I would suggest three rules for this. First that merely because the Germans have been wicked, we are not justified in a similar retributive offence. It is nearly two thousand years since a better formula than an eye for an eye was suggested. Our standards must be our own, and be kinder than those of the National Socialists, or I do not know for what positive aim we fought.

The second rule is that one should be kind where one is. These wise men who say never be kind to Germans, reserve your sympathy for the French, Yugoslavs or Greeks, speak a half-truth. Of course one is sympathetic towards such innocent victims of German aggression. If I were in Yugoslavia, the children there should have all my chocolate and the German children none. But I’m not in Yugoslavia…. Sooner than see kindness in the wrong place, some people would see no kindness at all.

The last rule which occurs to one is that one should remember that Western Europe is a cultural entity…. Germany is, however unpalatable a fact it may be – and I recognise that it is very unpalatable – a major contributor to the civilisation of Western Europe, and one whose destruction will impoverish us all."

‘Germany under Control’ exhibition – part 2

11th October 2006

The exhibition, ‘Germany under Control,’ which opened in London on 7th June 1946, can tell us much about how the British Control Commission and Military Government in Germany wanted to present themselves to people at home. Having won the war, what were the British now doing to win the peace?

Two weeks before the exhibition opened, on 25th May 1946, the British Zone Review, the official journal of the Control Commission for Germany (CCG), published an article on how the London exhibition would illustrate ‘achievements and problems in the British Zone.’

"It will endeavour to explain to the public at home what the 22,000 odd solders and civilians working for the CCG are doing in conjunction with the men and women of the three services stationed in Germany."

"In his last budget speech, the Chancellor of the Exchequer stated that the occupation of Germany would cost Great Britain £80,000,000 a year."

The exhibition would, the article continued

"…emphasize the necessity for continued effort in the interests of world peace and prosperity. We have won the war: we have yet to prove that we have won the peace. The verdict of history on this last struggle will be based largely on the achievements of the Control Commission."

"The first section of the exhibitions will represent the chaos and destruction in Germany a year ago when the allies first entered the country."

"From destruction, the visitor passes to the beginnings of law and order. A white section will show in charts, photographs, and captions, the allies’ intentions for Germany embodied in the Potsdam declaration, and the machinery created to carry out those plans."

"From this section, the visitor is taken to a display of the British component of the Allied Control Authority."

"The remainder of the exhibition is taken up with further detailed displays of the various problems facing the British in Germany."

"First comes the economic problem, with its inherent vicious circle. Coal is a paramount necessity; coal requires transport, transport requires steel and industry; steel and industry require coal… A model of the smashed Bielefeld viaduct will introduce the visitor to this problem …"

"From the economic problem the visitor passes on to finance, from finance to food, where he can see a model of the normal ration for the German people. From food he proceeds to displaced persons and population movements of all kinds within Germany. A glimpse is given of the everyday problems of the German people – paramount among which are the problems of housing and health."

"A staircase then leads the visitor up to the sections which deal with the re-education of the Germans and the rebuilding among them of a democratic way of life. The actual education problem is dealt with at length together with the reorganisation and reconstitution of local government, police, law, trade unions and political parties."

"The visitor is then confronted with a large board, with illustrated sections lit up, designed to sum up the whole of the exhibition and to give the visitor something fairly concise to carry away in his mind. So often, after seeing an exhibition, no very definite impression remains. This section will try to avoid that by gathering together all the various subjects and presenting them with a simple message:- ‘We’re in Germany to finish the job.’"

"This part of the exhibition has intentionally been made as popular as possible, and is designed to enable 7,000 people a day to pass through without missing anything of its purpose."

To cater for the expert "there will be an Information Room on the site of the exhibition, but away from the main display sections."

"Experts from all Divisions of the CCG will be on site to answer questions either at a special desk in the Information room or at the various sections in the popular part of the exhibition."

"It has been designed and constructed by the Exhibition Division of the Central Office of Information in collaboration with the Control Office for Germany."

8th October 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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