KRO Germany, 1947 – How it really was

Colonel E H D (Eric) Grimley: ‘Hunting for democracy’

7 August 2012

Dr Peter Beckmann has emailed me from Germany to say he would very much like to hear from relatives or friends of the late Colonel E H D (Eric) Grimley, who was the British Kreis Resident Officer (KRO) for the district of Bentheim in northern Germany near the Dutch border, from January 1946 until he retired from the army in 1949.

In 1945, at the end of the war, Dr Beckmann’s father, Rudolf Beckmann, was appointed by the British as Landrat, or head of the local administration for the district, and the two men worked closely together.

Dr Beckmann also sent me a German translation of an article Colonel Grimley wrote for the Shooting Times in 1965. I’ve written previously on this blog about the role played in the occupation by British Kreis Resident Officers (KROs) and was delighted to read a first-hand account, written by a KRO, of his impressions of ‘how it really was’.

Like many British army officers at the time, Colonel Grimley was a keen sportsman. In the article, under the headline ‘I hunted for democracy’, he described some of his experiences in Germany. His district included fields, meadows, woods, heath and marsh, with plenty of game, including red deer, fish, rabbits, hare, pheasants, partridge, snipe, geese, duck and even wild boar. Part of his responsibility was to oversee the transition of the local administration from totalitarian to democratic principles. Perhaps I did not understand the situation correctly, he wrote, but ‘it seemed to me that if the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the battle for democracy could be fought on the hunting grounds of the district of Bentheim.’ He and his dog became a familiar sight not only in Nordhorn, the main town in the district, but in the country villages, where many of the local inhabitants shared his interest. Hunting he believed, combined discipline and freedom, and encouraged mutual trust that could never be achieved in the office or local council chamber.

Although, he wrote, it would have been simpler to restrict his shooting parties to members of the British military government, he decided to invite Germans to accompany him, including the Landrat, Rudolf Beckmann, who was a keen huntsman. At the end of the war all weapons, including shotguns and hunting rifles, had been confiscated from the Germans; the British were afraid of armed resistance and the official penalty for a German caught in possession of a firearm was death. Allowing their former enemy the use of firearms on a joint hunting expedition was therefore a demonstrable sign of trust.

While sorting through his father’s papers after he died, Dr Beckmann found some extracts (translated into German) from a diary that Colonel Grimley kept during his time in Bentheim and gave to the Landrat. In the extracts he described persuading the local administration to make more accommodation available for thousands of refugees, visits to the small towns and villages in the districts, and emergency measures to cope with sudden severe floods; a major problem in a low lying area.

Colonel Grimley must have taken his diary back with him to England, as he referred to it in his article for the Shooting Times. As far as I know it has never been published, but Dr Beckmann believes he gave it the title ‘I always come back to my window’. He hopes it has been preserved and could still be in the possession of the family; perhaps Colonel Grimley’s children or grandchildren, or a family friend.

The reason for the title ‘I always come back to my window’ is apparent on reading the extracts from the diary. Colonel Grimley returns again and again to the view from his office window, of the Union Jack fluttering in the wind outside the British headquarters building and people passing in the street outside. Here is one brief extract, describing the end of a long day:

'Now I stand again at my window. It is almost like the silent films of long ago. People go past, but due to the double glazed window panes, shut tightly against the cold, the noise of their passing stays outside. The flag was lowered with the onset of the dusk. For the moment nothing moves on my silver screen. Who or what will appear next, for a few brief moments, in the evening twilight?'

Lt. Col. Eric Henry Donald Grimley was born in 1899. He was commissioned as an officer in 1916 but was too young for active service. Between the wars he served in Mesopotamia, India, China, the West Indies and Africa. From 1940-1942 he was the commanding officer for the 8th Battalion of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. He joined the army civil affairs branch and served in Norway after the war, before transferring to Germany in January 1946. Colonel Grimley died in 1969, aged 70.

Eckernförde under British Occupation

25th January 2009

Eckernförde is a small town in the north of Germany, in Schleswig Holstein. It was formally occupied on 10th May 1945, two days after VE Day, although, according to the local paper, British troops first entered the town four days earlier on May 6th, and the following day a large number of American columns passed through the town on their way further north.

An old family friend recently sent me a newly published book which describes life in the town under British occupation, based on memories and stories told by around 170 witnesses; mostly older people who were there at the time, but in some cases their children; mostly German, but a few British.

As over 60 years have passed since the events took place, we have to ask how accurate these memories are. The author, Ilse Rathjen-Couscherung, said in her introduction that, although in some cases people remembered the same event differently, she was able to cross check accounts and keep contradictions to a minimum. In general, she was amazed how accurately people she spoke to were able to recall how things were at the end of the war.

There was no resistance when the British first entered the town, although both sides were reserved towards the other. However, over time, the local population came to appreciate the role of the British in maintaining law and order, and realised that they had nothing to fear, as long as they followed the rules laid down by the military authorities. Despite hunger, shortage of accommodation, made worse by the influx of large numbers of refugees, a nightly curfew, and an endless stream of orders requisitioning houses and property for British officers and troops, relations between occupiers and occupied improved over time. Many of the stories related in the book describe small favours and acts of kindness, which were clearly appreciated and remembered long after the event: for example help finding a stolen bicycle, help given to a man who had lost one eye, so he could travel to Hamburg to have a glass eye fitted, and personal friendships developed through singing songs or playing music together, despite an inability to communicate with words, as neither understood the other’s language.

I’ve written in a previous post on this blog, about the British documentary film ‘KRO Germany’ which showed an idealised portrait of a British Kreis Resident Officer (or District Commissioner) for another town. It was interesting to compare the film with the descriptions in the book of two KROs for the town of Eckernförde, as this showed how they were remembered by the local population, rather than the image the British authorities wished to present to people back home.

The first KRO, Major, later Colonel Ormsby, who was in the post from 1945 to 1949, was not well liked. He was remembered, by most of those who spoke of him, as remote, harsh, unsympathetic, loud, rude, narrow-minded and domineering. People were afraid of him if he suddenly appeared in the town, with his officer’s staff in hand, in order to personally enforce some rule or other. On the other hand he was also seen as fair and correct and some German people who worked for him spoke of him more favourably. One witness remembered her father saying that his family had been killed in a German air attack on Coventry, but despite this, he was not revengeful: “Er war ernst und streng, aber gerecht und fair.”

According to another witness, Colonel Ormsby was a British Labour Party supporter and in the Autumn of 1946, in the first local elections in the British Zone of Germany after the war, he took the trouble to find who had been members of the SPD (German Socialists) in 1933, and visited them personally, without an interpreter, to try to persuade them that it was important for them to rejoin their former party. One witness related that, during one of these visits, he told them they should take English history as an example, with its 1,000 year experience of democracy. The witness, who was 10 years old at the time, remembered saying that not only was Magna Charta signed in 1215 and therefore not 1,000 years old, but as only a small number of people had shared in its benefits, there was no true democracy in England at that time. Major Ormsby was pleased with this response, which showed that the young boy was able to think for himself.

In September 1949, Colonel Ormsby was succeeded by Colonel Errol Daniell, who was responsible for the neighbouring districts of Schleswig and Flensburg, as well as Eckernförde, and who remained in post until 1954. According to the author, he was well liked by the local population, and worked hard to ensure good relations between British and Germans. One German couple became friends with him and his family, visited him after he left the town, both in Germany and in England, and stayed in touch for many years, until shortly before he died.

Like many other senior British army officers, Colonel Daniell had excellent relations with the local German aristocracy, visiting and being entertained at a number of stately homes. The author describes, for example, the Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein saying in a phone conversation that she remembered him as an exceptionally friendly and sympathetic man.

Finally, there were two stories I particularly liked, both relating to a local drinks firm. The first described how the firm’s bottling room was converted by the British into a washroom, complete with showers and an oil-fired water heater, for the ordinary soldiers. These lived in barracks, with no washing facilities, in conditions far less comfortable than the private houses requisitioned for the officers and NCOs.

The second related to the so-called “Heissgetränk” (or “Hot Drink”), generally sold cold, and produced by the firm in the early days after the end of the war, as a substitute for beer or soft drinks, which were unobtainable. As the firm’s bottling room was in use as the English soldiers' washroom and no new bottles were available anyway, local people could turn up with their own bottles to have them filled. In fact, the drink was no more than coloured water with artificial sweetener. The story went that when they ran out of artificial sweetener, the owner of the firm took two buckets of locally caught herring on the long journey to Leverkusen, where a friendly worker at the Bayer chemical plant there swapped them for some more artificial sweetener.

References:

Ilse Rathjen-Couscherung, Eckernförde unter britische Besatzung (Schriftenreihe der Heimatgemeinschaft Eckernförde e.V. Nr. 14, 2008)

Another two Kreis Resident Officers

9th November 2008

In my last two posts, I described the short documentary film K.R.O. Germany, 1947, and an article about the film written by the director, Graham Wallace, in the magazine Documentary Film News.

The British authorities in Germany must have thought that Kreis Resident Officers, or KROs as they were known for short, represented the acceptable face of the British Occupation of Germany after the war – acceptable to the people back home that is. Hard working, authoritative and respected by those in their care, they combined a paternalistic concern for the well being of the people living in their Kreis (or district) while at the same time keeping a careful eye on everyone and everything, and prepared to take strong action to prevent trouble if necessary – much like an old fashioned headmaster. Or alternatively like a district commissioner in some far flung part of the British Empire.

At least, that was how the KRO was presented in the film, and I was interested to find a similar image in a radio script, produced by the Control Commission for Germany for the British Forces Network and broadcast in March 1948, two months after the film KRO Germany 1947 was first released in Britain.

In the radio programme, two KROs, one for the country town of Iserlohn and surrounding district, and one for the heavily industrialised urban district of Oberhausen, talked with the presenter about what they did.

It’s not clear if the script was written after the broadcast, and so represents a more or less spontaneous conversation, or if it was carefully scripted, jokes and all. I may well be wrong, but I suspect it’s the latter. Here are a few extracts.

Firstly the answers to the question posed by the presenter: what was the idea behind the job of a KRO? The country KRO, Wing Commander Bird, answered first:

“The idea, I should say is to interpret to the Germans the true spirit of democracy and the essentials of self-government. You see, it is in the parish or the towns or the county councils that parliamentarianism, as we know it, is born, and it is only at this level that the people can be taught the real meaning of self-rule.”

The city KRO, Colonel Moir, agreed and added “I think that the best way to put it, is that a Kreis Resident Officer is one of the principal means by which official policy is put into practice. He is the man who is in the closest contact with the German life ‘on the ground’.”

Much of the time was spent talking about the three main problems both KROs had to cope with: food, housing and education, in that order. Their concerns were very similar to those shown faced by the KRO in the film. For example, one of the biggest issues in Iserlohn was finding accommodation for refugees from the East. As W/Cdr Bird said: “For a long time past, there has been an influx of about 200 a month … Finding them somewhere to live has been a permanent shadow over all my work.”

But the asides in the conversation were, in many ways, the most revealing. Some of these involved Wing Commander Bird’s wife, who was also present at the interview. I imagine they were introduced into the script in an attempt to liven up the conversation. For example, what do you make of the following exchange, which starts with W/Cdr Bird telling the presenter, Mr Llewellyn, how many staff he had to help him with his work?

Wing Cdr Bird: "I’ve got a deputy KRO working with me, two German interpreters, two typists and two Public Safety clerks. No other British staff."

Mrs Bird: "Why are you laughing whenever my husband says ‘British’, Colonel Moir?"

Colonel Moir: "I think that it’s very tactful of him … he must have noticed the kilt that I am wearing. A pity that the BFN [British Forces Network] haven’t gone in for television."

Mrs Bird: "I think it looks sweet. It must save a lot of coupons.

A word of explanation is possibly needed here. Wing Commander Bird would normally have said no other English staff, but was being polite, because he knew Colonel Moir was Scottish. As the previous two posts showed, both British and German people after the war very often called someone or something 'English' rather than 'British', when they were actually referring to the whole of the United Kingdom. In the same way, they talked about 'Russia' and the 'Russians' instead of the Soviet Union (and 'America' or 'Americans', instead of the USA).

W/Cdr Bird: "I was just saying what staff I had got. Not on my staff, but working in the closest cooperation with me, is the Public Safety Officer. And then there is the Intelligence Team."

Colonel Moir: "I have got a German staff of three. They all speak English well, but we try and conduct all our activities in German. My interpreter was a sergeant-major in a German tank regiment. He was taken prisoner in Italy."

Mr Llewellyn: "KROs are obviously not overstaffed. Probably Mrs Bird has got more staff to run her house."

Mrs Bird: "I object to that Mr Llewellyn. As a matter of fact, I have only got a cook and a manservant."

Mr Llewellyn: "I apologise!"

There had been much criticism in Britain that some members of the occupation forces were living a life of idleness and luxury. Both the film and this broadcast appear to have been designed, in part, to convey the impression that, in fact, they worked very hard. I’m not sure they succeeded here, with Mrs Bird managing to run her house with only a cook and a manservant! But it was very common for British officers after the war to employ German servants and many would have had more than just two working for them.

Finally, both KROs answered the question whether they were “afraid of a revival of Nazism?” It seems to me that, in their replies, they could have been speaking about the natives in some unruly part of the British Empire.

Colonel Moir: "Not so long as we stay in Germany. If we were to leave, I’m afraid that political resistance to its return might not be strong enough to keep it at bay."

W/Cdr Bird: "The elements are still there. The German instinctively prefers to be ruled, and not to have to carry the baby himself. If democratic government fails to put Germany on its feet, there would be certainly a big risk of the revival of totalitarianism."

Mr Llewellyn: "I am afraid that our time is about up. Mrs Bird, when the time comes for you to go home for good, what part of your job, as a KRO’s wife, will you feel has helped your husband most?"

Mrs Bird: "Honestly truthfully, getting tea, I think, after he and some of his German officials have been talking politics – and German politics at that – for three solid hours."

Colonel Moir: "I must warn my wife about that. I’m hoping that she will join me in the Spring. There is so much work I cannot touch, that a woman alone can handle."

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a post on this blog on the theme of Englishness and Empire and ‘Winning the Peace’. It’s interesting to see the same themes recur as I work my way through my research.

More about the film: K.R.O. Germany 1947

5th November 2008

In my last post, I described the short documentary film K.R.O. Germany 1947, which was filmed in Germany in the Autumn of 1947 and first released in Britain in January 1948.

An article written by the film’s director, Graham Wallace, for the journal Documentary Film News, provides a further insight into why and how the film was made.

In the credits, the film was billed as a co-production between the British Crown Film Unit, and the German Junge Film Union, a group of young film makers established in Hamburg after the war. The director and unit manager were British, the cameraman, his assistant, the editor, electricians, production manager, script girl and sound technicians were all German.

In the article, the location for the film was identified as Peine, a small country town lying between Hanover and Brunswick, selected because life there was: “… typical, on a small scale, of life all over Germany. Here we find all the problems of the Black Market, shortages of clothing and food, overcrowded accommodation, idle factories and refugees that were the concern of the central character of our film – the Kreis Resident Officer.”

Making the film in post-war Germany was not easy, in the director’s words: “very much harder than working under the most trying conditions in England.” There was a shortage of film and equipment. The German team were poorly paid, short of food, and hungry: “Like everyone else in Germany, they are strictly rationed on a low level, though they are entitled to draw heavy-workers’ rations. Even these, by English standards, are meagre indeed … Much of their salary went to buying extra food.” English members of the unit helped out with part of their, higher, rations. Transport was difficult. Motor transport was almost unobtainable locally, and “at one time we transported our lights through the streets of Peine on a horse-drawn cart!”

Processing the film locally in the British Zone proved impossible, as the laboratories were subject to frequent power cuts which meant they “… cannot work for days at a time, until there is a guarantee of current being available for long enough to run a roll of film through the bath.” Eventually it had to be sent to Berlin and then returned to the team for viewing and editing. Interruptions in the electric current also caused problems when shooting, as the lights were run off the local electricity supply: “This was never constant for more than a few minutes. All the members of the unit had to stand by the lamps ready to move them forwards or backwards with the voltage fluctuations.”

Probably most interesting was the description in the article of relations between the film unit and the local population. In contrast with the impression given in the film of the quiet and authoritative K.R.O. listening attentively to the German Bürgermeister (the mayor), sympathising with his problems, but also giving the German authorities clear instructions he expected to be obeyed, the article explained that, although at first the Burgermeister willingly consented to appear in the film, he later had second thoughts. “Apparently he had been accused by his colleagues on the council of undue ‘collaboration’ with the English and he was fearful for his re-election at the forthcoming municipal elections.” Similarly, in contrast with the picture shown in the film of the K.R.O. sympathising with the plight of 300 refugees in temporary accommodation and being welcomed there when he visited them, the article revealed that they “regarded our operations as a put-up propaganda job by the English and demanded to know what we are going to do about sending them back home or giving them proper accommodation.”

On the other hand, as Graham Wallace explained in the article: “again and again we received great help and friendship from the people of Peine who appreciated what we were trying to do. They felt strongly the lack of mutual information about our two countries and if our little film would in any way help to promote an understanding of German problems in England, then they were quite willing to help.”

The only serious antagonism (and this was in 1947, well before political and diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies had formally broken down) was not with the Germans in Peine, but when the unit was filming near the border with the Russian Zone, when the sight of English and German technicians working together “aroused deep suspicion in the minds of the Russians guarding the frontier between the two Zones … otherwise we might well have been making a film in the English countryside, instead of in occupied Germany.”

The final paragraph of the article sums up, in many ways, a typical British view of post-war Germany and the German people.

“And when the shooting was finished and the unit broke up, the two English technicians had a much deeper insight and understanding of Germany today and the difficulties under which the German technicians work. The German technicians, too, had learnt something of the English tradition of documentary film production and later the [German] cameraman was able to visit England for two weeks to study our methods at first hand.”

Though Graham Wallace is describing film-making here, the same sentiments could be transferred to many other areas. Note how he describes himself, the director, and the British unit manager, as the two ‘English technicians’, modestly implying an equality of status with their German subordinates and colleagues. But note also how the “English tradition of documentary film production” is clearly assumed to be superior to the German tradition, which had been condescendingly referred to earlier in the article as dealing, not with “real people and their daily work”, but “for the main part of excellent instructional films or pretty studies of ‘Spring in an Alpine valley’ and other well-worn themes.” And the solution: was for one of the German technicians, the cameraman, to visit England and learn the English way of doing things, for himself.

Kreis Resident Officer – The film K.R.O. Germany 1947

2nd November 2008

In January 1948, a short 10 minute documentary film, called simply K.R.O. Germany 1947, was released in Britain. The film was part of a continued public relations effort by the British Control Commission for Germany, to show people back home the work they were doing in the best possible light.

It aimed to show a day in the life of a Kreis Resident Officer (or K.R.O.) – the Control Commission’s ‘man on the ground’ in the British Zone of Germany. In the words of the film, narrated by the K.R.O himself:

“Germany is split up into a number of units. The smallest of these is a district – or Kreis – one hundred and fifty thousand people live in this one, in one large town and fifty-eight villages, which come under the supervision of a British civilian officer – called the Kreis Resident Officer or K.R.O.

I am the K.R.O. of this particular Kreis. It is my job to know everything that goes on. To advise, observe and report on local affairs. The Control Commission relies on K.R.O.s to ensure that their orders for making Germany work again are carried out.”

In previous postings on this blog, I’ve described earlier efforts by the Control Commission to portray their work in Germany to people back home, in three official sources all produced in the first year after the end of the war in May 1945: the film A Defeated People, directed by Humphrey Jennings, the British Zone Review and the exhibition Germany under Control. It was therefore interesting to see how much had changed in the two years since then.

In contrast to the film A Defeated People, which showed a grim picture of destruction, tempered only by under-stated sympathy and concern for the suffering of people as individuals, the picture shown in K.R.O. Germany was that of a benevolent and sympathetic British official, whose job was “to make the Germans do things for themselves and learn that they can’t call on us for ever.” To quote a review of the film in July 1948, in the magazine 'Film Sponsor':

“Necessarily we have only brief glimpses of his day, and of the difficult problems with which he must cope. But within its tiny limits the film does manage to convey something of life over there, its difficulties, hungers and sorrows.

One of its great assets is the officer himself, a middle-aged unmilitary type with a manner at the same time gentle and authoritative.”

The film opens by scanning across a townscape of ruins and empty shells of houses. We then see, coming in to the picture, a young barefoot boy pulling a handcart through the ruins, rifling through the rubbish in a dustbin, picking out an old discarded leather shoe and trying it for size, while the narrator says:

“This is the British Zone of Germany in the Autumn of 1947.

In 1939 this was a prosperous country town. Today fifty percent of the houses are in ruins. Even so, forty thousand people are still living here. Scenes likes these are familiar to everyone like myself, working in the Control Commission for Germany.
….

Life is hard for the Germans. Food is scarce and the people are hungry. They may have to queue for hours only to find that supplies have run out. The Bürgermeister – in England we would call him the mayor – has to listen to all the complaints and grouses – and he passes them on to me. If they concern us, I take them up with the British authorities for immediate action.”

One of the biggest problems in the town was finding accommodation for refugees. The town council had done all they could to find room, but there were still ten thousand people living in the town in overcrowded cellars. The K.R.O. had to take a firm line and say that although he sympathised with the Bürgermeister “… if he did not do something more, then the Council would have to elect a new Bürgermeister. I insisted that he must find accommodation for the refugees before winter …”

According to the film, the refugees were either “prisoners of war who have been released” or “civilians who have been uprooted by the war, and swept into distant parts of Germany” now returning home. This was the only time the film made the point (which was stressed several times in A Defeated People) that the German people brought all this upon themselves. To a close-up picture of a man with one leg, walking on crutches, the narrator says: “This is the price that Germany is having to pay for waging war.”

Interestingly there was no mention in the film of the real reason for the large numbers of refugees in the British Zone of Germany after the war – the expulsion of an estimated 12 million ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia, around 7 million of whom reached the Western zones of Germany by 1949, forming an average of around 16% of the total population, but more, up to 33% or higher in rural areas. The German refugee crisis had been a controversial topic in Britain and the subject of a high profile campaign in 1945 and 1946 by, among others, the publisher Victor Gollancz.

The film showed the K.R.O. visiting around 300 refugees, all living together in temporary accommodation in an open hall, sympathising with them, offering one man a cigarette because he felt sorry for him, and commenting:

“I find it a sad and rather terrible sight, to see all these men, women and children living like animals in the straw. But at least they have a place where they can rest.”

After visiting a school, to make sure the children had enough to eat, a factory, where the machinery had been standing idle since 1939 but which would soon be working again, and a farm where he found the farmer had a big house which could accommodate some more refugees, the K.R.O. returned home to his office, to complete his paperwork and report for his superiors. Finally, late in the evening, he had a call from the local police chief, who had received reports of three black marketeers raiding a farm and wanted the K.R.O. to go out with him to back him up.

The film ended with the K.R.O saying, to a picture of him and the German police officer walking down the road together in the dark:

“The Kreis Resident officer has a very important job in Germany today. He is the man on the ground. He has to see that our plans for making Germany work again are carried out … and that the Germans do the job properly.”

The film K.R.O. Germany, directed by Graham Wallace and produced by the Crown Film Unit, is held in the archives of the British Film Institute. I would like to thank BFI staff for locating the film and providing viewing facilities at the BFI Library in London.