Senior British officers – How it really was

‘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

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.

General Sir Brian Horrocks – Corps Commander

24th April 2009

The purpose of my research is to understand what British people aimed to achieve in occupied Germany after the Second World War. For the past year or so I’ve been looking at some of the senior army officers, notably Field Marshal Montgomery, who was Military Governor of the British Zone for the first year of the occupation, from May 1945 to the end of April 1946.

As I progress further with the research I’ll be looking at other groups of people: politicians, diplomats and administrators, the education advisers, young men, who were only 18 or 19 years old at the outbreak or war and who had no adult experience of anything else, and German speaking exiles, who returned to the country they had grown up in, as members of the occupying forces or as administrators in the Control Commission.

One theme which interests me is how army officers adjusted to their changed role after the fighting was over and the task of ‘winning the peace’ had begun. I’ve recently read the autobiography of General Sir Brian Horrocks, ‘A Full Life’, (first published in 1960 by William Collins; new edition published 1974 by Leo Cooper), which provides some insight into this, although he stayed in Germany for only a few months after the end of the war.

Horrocks was one of three Corps Commanders in the British 21st Army Group, who reported directly to Montgomery as Commander-in-Chief. With the rank of Lieutenant General (which is higher than Major General) the Corps Commanders were, in the early days of the occupation, the most important people in the Zone, equal if not senior in rank to the Deputy Military Governor, Sir Brian Robertson, with complete authority in their own areas of command.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Horrocks was one of Montgomery’s most successful generals, respected by both his British and American colleagues. He fought under Montgomery at the Battle of Alamein and in North Africa, and then again, as commander of 30 Corps, from the Battle of Normandy to the final defeat of the German armies and unconditional surrender in May 1945.

I’ve quoted some extracts from his autobiography below, which are interesting for a number of reasons: his background and experience as a POW in the First World War and in Russia and Germany afterwards, which must have influenced his outlook on life later, his descriptions of Montgomery, his reactions to the liberation of a concentration camp, and how he set about his task in Germany after the Second World War was over.

Brian Horrocks was born in India in 1895, but grew up and was educated in England. His father was a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps and he remembered holidays in Gibraltar as a young boy:

“I used to travel out by P. & O. every holidays from my preparatory school in Durham and 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.”

In 1912 he went to Sandhurst to train as an officer in the army. At the outbreak of war in August 1914 he was sent to France, but was wounded and captured at the Battle of Ypres in October. He was just 19 years old at the time. He spent the rest of the war as a POW, despite numerous unsuccessful attempts to escape, one of which ended only yards from the Dutch border. As a POW he shared a room with 50 Russian officers and learnt Russian. As a result of this, he was sent to Russia in 1919 as part of the (unsuccessful) British efforts to help the White Russian armies defeat the Bolsheviks.

On returning from Russia he rejoined his regiment, now stationed in Germany, as part of the British occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War. He described his experiences as follows:

“When I returned to my regiment as a captain I was lucky, for the 1st Battalion The Middlesex Regiment then formed part of the British Army of the Rhine. For us in the occupation forces life in Cologne was very pleasant, because, owing to the chronic inflation of the German mark, we always had plenty of money, a most unusual experience for me.

It was all too easy. I opened an account for £10 sterling in a German bank and as each day the pound become worth more in German currency, all I had to do was to call and draw out the extra marks. Towards the end of this period we used to get the weekly pay for our companies in sacks. But the Germans suffered terribly. The more expensive bars were filled with fat profiteers and their hard-faced, brassy mistresses who drove round in huge cars and seemed to batten on the wretched, starving, professional classes. …

I don’t think anyone who has not witnessed at first hand the real horrors of inflation can understand what it means. I came away convinced that any sacrifice was worth while in order to avoid this economic cancer.”

In April 1921 he returned to the UK “for duty in connection with the coal strike.” He was then posted to Ireland during ‘the troubles’ “where our life consisted of searching for hidden arms, patrols, keeping a lookout for road-blocks and dealing with ambushes organised by the Sinn Feiners – a most unpleasant sort of warfare.” This was followed by a trip to Silesia in 1923 “to maintain law and order during a plebiscite” to determine whether the area should be remain part of Germany or be transferred to Poland.

He also took part in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, competing in the Modern Pentathlon. In those days the modern pentathlon had a strong military association, as it was, according to Horrocks, “based on the conception of a courier carrying dispatches though a hostile country” who needs to ride a horse, run on foot, swim, fence and shoot with a pistol.

At the start of the Second World War in 1939, Horrocks joined the British Expeditionary Force in France as a major, commanding a machine-gun battalion. He described his first meeting with the divisional commander, General Montgomery:

“I hadn’t been there two hours when I was told that the divisional commander, General Montgomery, was in his car on the road and wanted to see me. Monty had obviously come up at once to cast an eye over his new divisional machine-gun commander. This was my first meeting with him, apart from once in Egypt. I saw a small, alert figure with piercing eyes sitting in the back of his car – the man under whom I was to fight all my battles during the war, and who was to have more influence on my life than anyone before or since.

I knew him well by reputation. He was probably the most discussed general in the British Army before the war, and – except with those who had served under him – not a popular figure…. He was known to be ruthlessly efficient, but somewhat of a showman. I had been told sympathetically that I wouldn’t last long under his command, and to be honest, I would rather have served under any other divisional commander.”

Later in the book he described another meeting with Montgomery, in 1947 after the war was over and he was based in Chester:

“The highlight was a visit from Monty. I had not realised how popular he was with all and sundry. It was almost like a Royal tour, with people lining the route – and he loved every minute of it. Just before his departure for Liverpool, where he was to catch his train back to London, the mayor of Birkenhead rang me up to say that over 1,000 people were waiting for him on the near side of the Mersey tunnel. A small platform had been erected and he hoped that the field-marshal would be prepared to say a few words to the crowd. This was quite unexpected so, as we drove along, I did my best to brief him on the role which Birkenhead had played during the war. I spoke most of the time to his back as he was continuously leaning out of the window and waving to the crowds while he murmured ‘Yes, yes Jorrocks – three battleships constructed – I have got that. Yes go on.’ We arrived, and he then made a sparkling speech which delighted everybody without mentioning a single word of what I had told him during the journey.”

After defeat in France and evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940, Horrocks returned to England. In 1942 he went with Montgomery to Egypt and played an important role in the series of victories which led to the German army being driven out of Africa. His army career was interrupted in 1943, when he was seriously wounded in Tunisia in an attack by an aeroplane. He was out of action until July 1944, when he re-joined the army as commander of 30 Corps in the Battle of Normandy.

Towards the end of the war, he played a large part in the fighting which forced the German army back across the Rhine. I’ve written before on this blog about the horror many soldiers felt at the destruction caused by war; to themselves, their enemies and to innocent civilians. Horrocks described ordering the destruction of the town of Kleve, during the Battle of the Reichswald:

“One thing, during this preparatory stage, caused me almost more worry than anything else; the handling of the immense air resources which were to support us. General Crerar told me that in addition to the whole of the 2nd Tactical Air Force the heavies from Bomber Command were also available. And he put this question to me: ‘Do you want the town of Cleve taken out?’ By ‘taking out’ he meant, of course, totally destroyed.

This is the sort of problem with which a general in war is constantly faced, and from which there is no escape. Cleve was a lovely, historical Rhineland town. Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fifth wife came from there. No doubt a lot of civilians, particularly women and children, were still living there. I hated the thought of its being ‘taken out’. All the same, if we were to break out of this bottle-neck and sweep down into the German plain beyond it was going to be a race between the 15th Scottish Division and the German reserves for the hinge, and all the German reserves would have to pass through Cleve. If I could delay them by bombing, it might make all the different to the battle. And after all the lives of my own troops must come first. So I said ‘Yes’.

But I can assure you that I did not enjoy the sight of those bombers flying over my head on the night before we attacked. Generals, of course, should not have imagination. I reckon I had a bit too much.”

This “horrible battle” lasted a month. “We took 16,800 German prisoners and it was estimated that the total enemy casualties was about 75,000 as against 15,634 suffered by us. Our losses seemed very high at the time, but this was unquestionably the grimmest battle in which I took part during the last war and I kept reminding myself that during the battle of the Somme in the 1914-18 war there were 50,000 casualties during the first morning.”

After crossing the Rhine, he led the force which captured the city of Bremen:

“It was in Bremen that I realised for the first time just what the Germans must have suffered as the result of our bombing. It was a shambles; there didn’t seem to be a single house intact in this huge seaport.”

Earlier in the book, while describing his experience as a POW in the First World War, he had spoken of the ‘great respect’ front line soldiers had for those on the other side:

“I have always regarded the forward area of the battlefield as the most exclusive club in the world, inhabited by the cream of the nation’s manhood – the men who actually do the fighting. Comparatively few in number, they have little feeling of hatred for the enemy – rather the reverse.”

This was reinforced by his experience in North Africa:

“There was an odd atmosphere about this desert war: never has there been less hate between the opposing sides: that is between the Germans and ourselves. Owing to the constant ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ both armies lived alternately on each other’s rations and used quite a quantity of each other’s captured equipment.”

But at the end of the war, he was present at the liberation of Sandbostel concentration camp, and this made him change his opinion:

“Up to now I had been fighting this war without any particular hatred for the enemy but just short of Bremen we uncovered one of those horror camps which are now common knowledge, but which at that time came as a great shock. I saw a ghastly picture when I entered with General Allan Adair, the commander of the Guards Armoured Division. The floor of the first large hut was strewn with emaciated figures clad in most horrible striped pyjamas. Many of them were too weak to walk but they managed to heave themselves up and gave us a pathetic cheer. Most of them had some form of chronic dysentery and the stench was so frightful that I disgraced myself by being sick in a corner. It was difficult to believe that most of these hardly human creatures had once been educated civilised people.

I was so angry that I ordered the burgomasters of all the surrounding towns and villages each to supply a quota of German women to clean up the camp and look after these unfortunate prisoners, who were dying daily at an alarming rate. When the women arrived we expected some indication of horror or remorse when they saw what their fellow-countrymen had been doing. Not a bit of it. I never saw a tear or heard one expression of pity from any of them. I also brought one of our own hospitals into the camp and when I found some of our sisters looking very distressed I apologised for having given them such an unpleasant task. ‘Goodness me,’ they said, ‘it’s not that. We are only worried because we can do so little for the poor things – many of them have gone too far.’ A somewhat different approach to the problem by the woman of two countries.”

He received the surrender of German forces in his area:

“I had often wondered how the war would end. When it came it could hardly have been more of an anti-climax. I happened to be sitting in the military equivalent of the smallest room when I heard a voice on the wireless saying ‘All hostilities will cease at 0800 hours tomorrow morning 5th May.’

It was a wonderful moment – the sense of relief was extraordinary; for the first time for five years I would no longer be responsible for other men’s lives. The surrender on our front took place at 1430 hours on 5th May when the German general commanding the Corps Ems and his chief of staff arrived at our headquarters. Elaborate arrangement had been made for their reception. Our military police, looking very smart escorted them to a table in the centre of the room; all round the outside was a ring of interested staff officers and other ranks of 30 Corps.

When all was ready I came in and seated myself all alone opposite the two Germans. After issuing my orders for the surrender I finished with these words, ‘These orders must be obeyed scrupulously. I warn you we shall have no mercy if they are not. Having seen one of your horror camps my whole attitude towards Germany has changed.’

The chief of staff jumped up and said, ‘The army had nothing to do with these camps.’ ‘Sit down,’ I replied, ‘there were German soldiers on sentry duty outside and you cannot escape responsibility. The world will never forgive Germany for those camps.’”

But once the war was over, another “considerable mental switch” was required:

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

“There is something terribly depressing about a country defeated in war, even though that country has been your enemy, and the utter destruction of Germany was almost awesome. It didn’t seem possible that towns like Hanover and Bremen could ever rise again from the shambles in which the bulk of the hollow-eyed and shabby population eked out a troglodyte existence underneath the ruins of their houses.

Things were better in the country districts, but what struck me most was the complete absence of able-bodied men or even or youths – there were just a few old men, some cripples, and that was all. The farms were all run by women. How appalling were the casualties suffered by the Germans was brought home to me forcibly when I first attended morning service in the small village church of Eystrop where I lived. The Germans commemorate their war dead by means of evergreen wreaths – dozens and dozens of them. In a similar church in the United Kingdom I would not expect to see more than eight to ten names on the local war memorial. The Germans certainly started the last war, but only those who saw the conditions during the first few months immediately after the war ended can know how much they suffered.”

“Monty laid down the priorities as 1) food and (2) housing; he then, as always, gave us a free hand to look after our own districts until such time as proper military government could take over from us. It was a fascinating task. I found myself to all intents and purposes the benevolent (I hope) dictator of an area about the size of Wales. At my morning conference, instead of considering fire plans and laying down military objectives, we discussed such problems as food, coal, communications, press and so on. I soon discovered the merits of a dictatorship. I could really get things done quickly. One day in the late autumn a staff officer reported than the output of coal was dropping every week in our corps district. That was very serious with winter approaching. The reason, I was informed, was that the miners lacked clothes. I immediately ordered a levy to be carried our in certain nearby towns to provide adequate clothing for the miners, and sure enough a few weeks later the graph showing coal production began to rise. I smiled when I thought of what would happen in dear old democratic Britain if the Cabinet ordered clothes to be removed compulsorily from Cardiff, shall we say, to clothe the miners in the Welsh valleys.”

“To start with a great deal of this work had to be carried out by British troops and quite naturally this caused resentment. I remember being asked by an intelligent sapper corporal, ‘Why should I now have to work hard and repair bridges for the so-and-so Germans who have caused so much misery to the world.’ As he was obviously voicing the doubts of many others, I collected the company together and explained to the best of my ability that the war was now over, so Germany must take her place again as a European state. Many of the people were on the verge of starvation and if food couldn’t be moved freely into the towns they would die that winter. And this would cause great bitterness. Furthermore it was essential for our own British economy to start trading again with Germany and we would never be able to do this until communications had been repaired. Whether I convinced them or not I have no idea, but they went back to work at once without any further questions.”

“The British soldier has often been described as our best ambassador and this is particularly so if he forms part of an army of occupation because one of the most difficult things in the world is to occupy a foreign country and yet remain friendly with its people. If left to himself the British soldier will soon be on the best of terms with the local population. Unfortunately this time he was not left to himself and all sorts of regulations about non-fraternisation with the German population were issued. No doubt there were good reasons for this policy but it caused endless trouble at our level. What happened was that our troops were prevented from getting to know the ordinary, decent families in an open and normal way, and were driven to consorting on the sly with the lowest types of German women.”

“In spite of the non-fraternisation rule I was determined somehow or other to make our occupation as palatable as possible for the local inhabitants. This may sound sloppy, but I had experienced the difficulties of occupying Germany after the First World War. I knew very well that nobody will ever keep the Germans down for long because they belong to a very rare species which actually likes work. I also understood the menace of Communism better than most – thanks to my time in Russia. So, without claiming any particularly brilliant foresight, it seemed to me that the Germans were the sort of people whom it would be better to have on our side than against us. I therefore ordered all units in my corps to do everything they could to help the German children. Nobody could blame them for the last war, and they had obviously had a bad time. Some of the children had never even seen chocolates in their lives. Units were told to open special youth clubs, and camps in the summer, and organise sports, etc.”

He gave a tea party for 150 German children, but “unfortunately the party was also attended by some reporters from the British Press … inexperienced, callow, young men who were concerned mainly with getting an angle to their stories … It soon become obvious they were hostile” and the next day headlines appeared in the press “British General Gives Tea Party for German Children”. He received “an enormous number of letters in which the kindest comment was “that I had obviously gone mad.’”

“These were of little consequence, but unfortunately owing to all the adverse criticism I was ordered to cease my activities with the German children at once. Orders had to be obeyed but I still feel that this was a serious mistake. Instead of mixing with the civilian population on a friendly basis we were driven back into ourselves and when I returned to Germany some three years later to take over the appointment of commander-in-chief, I found that the B.A.O.R. was an army of occupation in the true sense of the word, living quite apart from the German people.”

He was appointed commander-in-chief of the British Army of the Rhine in 1948, but before taking up the post, had another operation on his stomach, his seventh after being wounded in North Africa:

“Very unwisely I went out to Germany before I had completely recovered and then followed the most unhappy period of my life. I arrived to command B.A.O.R. just when things were getting more and more difficult with the Russians.”

He had to resign from the army, but continued to live an active and varied life. In 1949 he was appointed gentleman usher of the Black Rod in parliament and fourteen years later became a director of Bovis, the construction company. He also presented a series of TV programmes ‘Men in Battle’ which at its peak, had eight and a half million viewers. Brian Horrocks died in 1985.

More on Goronwy Rees and his six day tour of Germany in July 1945

30th November 2008

Goronwy Rees, the distinguished journalist, writer, Fellow of All Souls College Oxford, Principal of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth, friend of Guy Burgess, and for a time, briefly, a Russian spy, was a senior intelligence officer in Germany for six months after the end of the war. He worked in the Political Division of Military Government, with the rank of Lt. Colonel, reporting to the Political Adviser, Sir William Strang, who was later Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office.

In April this year, I wrote about Goronwy Rees and the six day tour of the British Zone of Germany he made with William Strang in July 1945. The post was based on a chapter from his book ‘A Bundle of Sensations’ first published in 1960.

On a recent visit to The National Archives I found and read his original diary of the tour. This was an official document, circulated to other officers in the British Military Government, not a personal diary for his own use only.

There were a few passages in the diary which surprised me and which did not appear in the book, published 15 years later.

Firstly a short paragraph, which implied that some British officers believed that war with Russia was not only likely, it had already begun, Germany would fight this war on the side of the British and Americans, and German airmen were already being recruited to fight against Japan. “The war between the Russians and the democracies is approaching and indeed has already begun, and Germany will of course be invited to participate. An International Air Brigade is to be formed for use in the war against Japan. Volunteers are invited and will be trained in England. Several offers have been received.”

This was July 1945 and the war against Japan had not yet ended, with the dropping of the Atom Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, but even so this passage seems surprising. If anyone reading this post knows anything about German air pilots recruited to form an international air brigade, to train in England and fight against Japan, please do let me know or add your comments.

Secondly, I was surprised by just how patronising and condescending the following description of Russian and Polish forced labourers, known after the war as ‘Displaced Persons’ or DPs, now appeared, reading it more than sixty years after it was written.

In the diary Rees records how one Brigadier took them to visit a camp where they found the DPs “lying on their palliasses [straw mattreses] embowered in the flowers and foliage which they bring back from the countryside to construct each for himself a tiny green cage, which presumably reminds him of his pastoral home. It is quite impossible to describe in a few words the extraordinary impression created by these half-savage, half animal, yet curiously attractive creatures, who create for themselves in some ex-German barracks the atmosphere of a peasant festival or a horticultural show. It was interesting to hear an officer say that he had become extremely attached to them; it was equally interesting to hear that by their uncouth and savage behaviour they had converted the British soldiers in charge of them from any possible sympathy with anything that savoured of communism.”

Rees himself had been a socialist and communist sympathiser before the war and a strong opponent of fascism. I wonder to what extent his own experience in Germany at the end of the war changed his view of communism and the Soviet Union?

In general though, the description in the book of the high-minded attempts by British Military Government officers to restore a devastated and shattered country, were very similar to the impressions recorded in the original diary. For example, here is an extract (which didn’t appear in the book) describing a meeting with Lt General Horrocks, Commander of 1 Corps:

“Finally the general touched upon the problem of military government from the point of view of our own troops. He said that he regarded our occupation as a school of citizenship both for the Germans and for ourselves, and that he attached the utmost importance to using military government as a means to returning our troops to England as better and more useful citizens. At the present moment, he said, the morale of our troops was very high because they felt that after six years of destruction they were now turning to a constructive task, which would affect the morale not merely of Germany but of Europe. And since it was in the interest both of the Germans and ourselves to raise German economy and German social life to a level which would overcome the dangers of disease, famine and unrest, there was a real basis of co-operation between both parties which it was important to maintain.”

Rees added a paragraph to say he endorsed these views personally, he believed they were representative of the British army as a whole and it was “invigorating and inspiring … to find the Commander and Staff of a Corps, which has fought the Germans from Alamein to the Rhine, now entering on new and even more difficult tasks with a determination to achieve the best not merely for themselves, or for the Germans, but for Europe as a whole.”

References:

The National Archives, FO 1056/540: Goronwy Rees’ tour diary, July 1945

Goronwy Rees: Sketches in Autobiography: ‘A Bundle of Sensations’ and ‘A Chapter of Accidents’ with ‘A Winter in Berlin’, a further autobiographical essay. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001). Edited with Introduction and Notes by John Harris

On Rees acting as a spy for the Soviet Union, John Harris wrote in the introduction: “It appears [from recently available Soviet archives] that Rees for little more than a year (1938-9), and in the anti-fascist cause, supplied political hearsay gathered from weekends at All Souls – most probably on Cabinet attitudes to Hitler and the likelihood of a British stand against him.”

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

23rd November 2008

Historians have debated when and why British Policy after the war changed from ‘holding Germany down’ to ‘putting Germany on its feet again.’ Was it due to the emergence of the Cold War, and if so, was the key ‘Turning Point’ the Moscow Foreign Ministers’ conference in April 1947, as Konrad Adenauer claimed in his memoirs, or as the historian Anne Deighton has argued, was it a year earlier at the Paris conference in April 1946, or half way between the two with the speech by James Byrnes (the US Secretary of State) in Stuttgart in September 1946? Alternatively was the Turning Point due, not to the emerging Cold War, but as another historian has claimed, to economic, rather than political or diplomatic grounds, in the Winter of 1946, as the British government became concerned above all else with the costs of the occupation, or yet again, as Petra Goedde has argued (see last week’s post) was it due to personal relationships between GIs and Germans, in the first two years after the end of the war?

In the paper I gave at the History Lab postgraduate conference earlier this year, I argued that, for senior British army officers on the ground in Germany, the key Turning Point was none of the above, but immediately after the unconditional surrender of German armed forces on VE Day in May 1945 and the end of the war in Europe, when almost overnight, the British army of occupation started working energetically to rebuild and restore a country they had previously been doing their best to destroy.

On a recent visit to The National Archives I was delighted to find evidence to support my view, in a file of weekly policy directives, which specified very clearly the public relations line to be adopted by the British Military Government.

Directive no 1, issued on 13th May 1945, only a few days after VE Day on May 8th, adopted a harsh tone, stating in the first paragraph that:

“The following five points will be the dominant themes of all output:
a) The completeness of Germany’s defeat in the field
b) The common responsibility of all Germans for Nazi crimes
c) The power and determination of the Allies to enforce their will
d) The unanimity of the Allies
e) The spiritual importance of the individual”

In the main body of the directive, four points were emphasised:

"Completeness of Germany’s defeat
The common responsibility of all Germans for Nazi crimes: Concentration Camps
Unanimity of the Allies
Food production" and the need for maximum effort by all Germans to avoid famine.

There was no change in policy in the second directive, issued on May 20th, which stated clearly: “There are no changes in the main themes given in Policy Directive No 1.”

But in the third directive, for the week beginning 27th May, there was a distinct change in tone:

“1. The basic themes laid down in Policy Directive No 1 (para 1) remain valid but points (a) and (b) should no longer be dominant. While not allowing them to be glossed over, the emphasis should now be shifted to more positive aims. We should now gradually begin to lessen the harshness of our tone.

2. The immediate need, from both Allied and German points of view, is for a supreme effort by the Germans at all forms of reconstruction work. The devastation and dislocation in Western Germany is on a scale far greater than in any other occupied zone with the exception of BERLIN, and is such that without positive encouragement from ourselves, in place of the negative impression created by continual insistence on the fact of German defeat, the Germans are likely to prove incapable of finding within themselves the moral energy needed for reconstruction.

3. What is now required is to show the Germans that considerable reconstruction activity is already in progress under Allied impetus …..

4. To sum up: make it very clear to the Germans that we do not want to see them go under as a people and that (points (a) to (d) of policy directive No. 1 notwithstanding) we do want to see Western Germany build itself up again, as far as possible by its own efforts, into a prosperous though controlled community.”

Directive no 4, dated 8 June, continued this new theme, stating explicitly that policy had now changed:

“1. Directive No.1 prescribed a predominantly negative attitude designed to produce passive acquiescence. It is now superseded and emphasis will henceforth be laid on the following:

a) The encouragement of genuinely democratic persons to assist in the urgent tasks required by Mil Gov…

b) The encouragement of cultural activities

c) The exposure and discrediting of the National Socialist/Militarist regime coupled with the responsibility of the German people for supporting it…

d) The power and fundamental agreement of the Allies

e) The spiritual importance of the individual, and his duties towards the community”

Unfortunately nothing in this file explains the reasons for this change in policy. I am not aware of any formal change in policy by the British government in London and it seems to me it must be linked with Field Marshal Montgomery’s appointment as Military Governor of the British Zone. In his memoirs he describes how, following the unconditional surrender, he 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.… As the days passed after the end of the German war I became increasingly worried at the lack of any proper organisation to govern Germany.”

Montgomery flew to London on 14th May to “impress on the Prime Minister the urgent need for a decision in the matter” (ie the appointment of a Military Governor) and succeeded in being appointed Commander in Chief of the British forces in Germany on 22nd May. Now that he had been given the necessary authority, he could make the changes in policy he thought necessary himself. On May 23rd he addressed Control Commission staff in London and said: “Between us we have to re-establish civil control, and to govern, a country which we have conquered and which has become sadly battered in the process.” His biographer, Nigel Hamilton, commented on this speech: “Monty’s sympathy with the plight of Germany came as a shock to those in the auditorium who pictured him as a ruthless, Cromwellian commander, until two weeks ago waging implacable war upon the Nazis.”

He returned to Germany on 26th May, the day before Directive no 3 was issued, with the new emphasis on “more positive aims.”

References

PRISC Directives: May 1945 – March 1946
The National Archives, FO 1005/739
The first directives, numbers 1-9, were issued by the Headquarters of the British 21st Army Group. From number 10 onwards they were issued on behalf of “Major-General Information Services Control and Public Relations” following General Alec Bishop’s appointment to this position in July 1945.

Konrad Adenauer, Memoirs 1945-53, translated by Beate Ruhm von Oppen (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), Chapter 6 ‘The Turning Point’ pp 89-106

Anne Deighton in Ian D. Turner (ed), Reconstruction in Post-War Germany: British Occupation Policy and the Western Zones 1945-1955, (Oxford: Berg Publishers Ltd, 1989), p25

John E. Farquharson, ‘From Unity to Division: what prompted Britain to change its policy in Germany in 1946.’ European History Quarterly, Vol.26 1996, pp 81-123

Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949 (Yale University Press, 2003)

The Memoirs of Field-Marshal The Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, (Collins, London: 1958)

Justum et tenacem propositi virum – the wise man, firm of purpose

26th October 2008

With the start of a new academic term, I’ve restarted posting on this blog, which aims to record my thoughts, ideas, and, I hope, some insights and discoveries, as I work my way through a six year, part time PhD project, on the British in Occupied Germany after World War Two. The approach I’ve adopted, for the time being at least, is to ‘Follow the People’. I’ve identified around 20 people I think are interesting for one reason or another, and am trying to find out as much about them as I can.

In my last post, I referred to General Sir Brian Robertson, Deputy Military Governor of the British Zone of Occupation, writing in January 1946, at the end of an article in the British Zone Review, the official journal of British Military Government and the Control Commission for Germany, that he and his colleagues in the British Control Commission should take as their motto “a line written many centuries ago by wise friend Horace:”

Justum et tenacem propositi virum

During a recent visit to the archives at the Imperial War Museum, I was surprised to find Robertson saying the same thing two years later, this time to journalists at a press conference on 22nd December 1947:

“I remember when I first came to Germany, somewhat to the alarm of the staff I asked them to refresh their memories about the opening lines of the ode by the poet Horace which began:

‘Justum et tenacem propositi virum’

If you want to know what I think should be our attitude in Germany then I recommend to you to read those lines yourselves.”

As I said then, this quotation brought home to me just how much has changed in the last sixty years. Could you imagine a modern British (or American, or French or German or Italian) Commander-in-Chief quoting the first line of a Latin ode, not only to his staff, but to journalists at a press conference, and expect his readers and listeners to know and understand the rest of the poem?

The full quotation from Horace can be translated as:

“The just man, firm of purpose cannot be shaken in his rocklike soul, by the heat of fellow citizens clamouring for what is wrong, nor by the presence of a threatening tyrant.”

What can this tell us about the British in Germany after the war, who they were and what they aimed to achieve?

The just man firm of purpose, presumably, is the British officer in the Control Commission and Military Government. The fellow citizens clamouring for what is wrong and trying to shake him in his rock-like soul would appear to be their critics at home in the UK, in the press, in parliament, maybe even in the British government. The threatening tyrant could be Stalin, or could be the shadow of Hitler, or both.

Firstly, it seems to me, this reveals the supreme self-confidence of many of the British. Winning the war had demonstrated not only their physical, but also their moral superiority and, in their view, the superiority of the British way of life, government and society in general. As Michael Balfour, another general in the war and administrator in occupied Germany afterwards, said in the introduction to his history of the period, the book was written “from the standpoint of a British liberal democrat, to whom the political forms evolved in Britain and America seem the most satisfactory yet devised by man…”

Secondly, the audience Robertson was addressing was middle and upper class, educated men like himself, who, whether they were now army officers, civil administrators or journalists in the press, had all learnt their Latin at British public (ie private) schools. Because they shared the same upbringing and education, Robertson could assume, rightly or wrongly, that these men knew what was right, without having to be told.

Thirdly, by drawing on a classical tradition that was not unique to Britain, he could open the way to a common understanding with people in Germany who shared, or appeared to share, the same tradition. The first step towards reconciliation is to emphasise what people have in common, rather than what keeps them apart.

And fourthly, after the end of the war, the dangers against which the British officer – the just man, firm of purpose – had to guard, would appear to come, in his view, not so much from resistance or opposition from the German people, but from fellow citizens at home, who failed to understand the importance of the task and what he and his colleagues were trying to achieve, and from the threat of tyranny, represented on the one hand by a possible revival of German nationalism and on the other by the threat of Communism.

In practice, official British policy, as determined by the politicians in Westminster and the civil servants in Whitehall, came to be governed by concerns as to the cost of the occupation to the British taxpayer, and a desire to hand back responsibility for all aspects of government to German people as quickly as possible. The tensions between high and noble objectives, expressed by General Sir Brian Robertson and many other British officers and administrators in Germany, and the mundane practical concerns of those at home, is something that, to my mind, makes this a fascinating subject to study.

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

28th June 2008

Last Friday, June 27th, I gave a paper at the History Lab 2008 postgraduate conference on ‘Turning Points.’ The conference, as usual, was very well organised, with papers on a wide range of subjects, from (to give just two examples) the adoption of tungsten carbide cutting tools in Britain in the interwar years, to Parliamentary legislation affecting women. My own paper was on: ‘The only really worth while thing he ever did in his life.’ How three British army officers reacted to the transition from war to peace in Germany, 1945.

I started by quoting Brigadier F S V Donnison, the author of the relevant volume of the British official history of the Second World War Civil Affairs and Military Government. North-West Europe 1944-1946, who concluded the book with a “personal impression” based on discussions with many of the regular officers he spoke to during the course of his work. Although at first they disliked a posting to Civil Affairs, many “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 even said it was ‘the only really worth while thing he ever did in his life.'”

The question I tried to answer was why did three senior British army officers react to the end of the war the way they did – by working energetically to rebuild and restore a country they had previously been doing their best to destroy? The examples I chose were three people I’ve written about before on this blog, Field Marshal Montgomery, commander-in chief of British forces at the end of the war and the first Military Governor, his deputy, General Sir Brian Robertson, who was himself appointed Military Governor in 1947, and General Sir Alec Bishop, who, as head of the Public Relations and Information Services Control division for the first year after the end of the war, was responsible for how British Military Government presented itself to the outside world.

I must say that, even after working on the paper, I’m not sure I really understand the answer to this question. In part it was their sense of shock at the chaos they found in Germany after the war, in part the lack of any clear guidance from the British government at home, to tell them what to do, and in part their own personal upbringing and previous experience, which led them to assume, without question, that it was their duty to try to restore law and order, to implement the policies of disarmament and denazification agreed by the four Allies at Potsdam, but also, in Montgomery’s words, to help the defeated enemy to “find his own salvation”, or as Robertson said, in an oral history interview with the Truman presidential library, to fight “a battle over the soul of Germany.”

There seemed to be a clear link, for some officers, between their earlier experience in the British Empire, and their attitude to Germany. Bishop, for example, spent the whole of his working life, in his words “in the service of the British Empire”. I quoted him saying in his, unpublished, memoirs, written in 1971:

“Many of the people in Britain and in other countries who take a delight in condemning the period of British Colonial rule in Africa and Asia had no part in its creation and administration, nor did they experience the devotion and idealism of the British administrators. I feel no doubt that when an authoritative history of our Colonial Empire comes to be written, the part played by the British officials who administered it in establishing and maintaining law and order, in holding the interests of the people above all else and in educating and preparing them to run their own affairs in due course will become fully evident.”

Here he was speaking of the Empire, but this is exactly what these British officers set out to do and believed they were doing in Germany after the war: establishing and maintaining law and order, holding the interest of the people above all else, and preparing them to run their own affairs in due course.

At the end of my paper, I quoted an article written by Robertson in the British Zone Review, the official journal of British Military Government and the Control Commission for Germany, to try to illustrate what seemed to me to be the ‘missionary idealism’ of some of these officers. Here is an extract from the article:

“‘First things first’ was the motto when Military Government first raised its sign in Germany… ‘Give me that gun Fritz’ – ‘Put that man behind the wire.’ – ‘Clear the rubble.’ – ‘Mend the drains.’ – ‘Get some roads open, some railways running.’ – ‘Food? Yes we will get you some food but tighten your belt.’ – ‘Pull yourself together, man. You look bomb happy.’ – ‘Get your roof mended.’ – ‘There is a school open down the road. Send that boy to school.’

Have we done these things well, these first urgent things? That is for others to say. Let others praise, let others carp. We are too busy. There is so much to be done. We have a mission.”

Robertson continued by asking “What are we to do with Germany”. He offered no specific answers, but did say, to his colleagues reading the article:

“Our responsibilities in the search for these answers are immense. We shall have many difficulties, many disappointments, many critics. Let us take as our motto a line written many centuries ago by wise friend Horace:

Justum et tenacem propositi virum

And if you know the rest of the poem, or if your Latin is still able to translate it, you will find that Horace wrote that Ode specially for the Control Commission in Germany.”

I asked the audience at the conference if anyone recognised this quotation, or knew the rest of the poem, or was able to translate the original Latin. Not surprisingly, no one did. I didn’t either, of course, but I had previously looked up the full quotation in my Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, (you can also find it on the web), and this is one translation:

“The just man, firm of purpose cannot be shaken in his rocklike soul, by the heat of fellow citizens clamouring for what is wrong, nor by the presence of a threatening tyrant.”

The just man firm of purpose, presumably, is the British officer in the Control Commission and Military Government. The fellow citizens clamouring for what is wrong and trying to shake him in his rock-like soul, must be their critics at home, in the press, maybe in parliament, maybe even in the British government. The threatening tyrant – I don’t know – could be Stalin, or could be the shadow of Hitler, or both.

This quotation, from Horace, brought home to me just how much has changed in the last sixty years. This is not all that long ago, and there are many people alive today who lived through those times. But could you imagine a modern British (or American, or French or German or Italian) Commander-in-Chief quoting the first line of a Latin ode, as a motto for his troops and expect his readers to know the rest of the poem and be able to translate it?

More on Major General Sir Alec Bishop

19th May 2008

Last week I wrote about Major General Sir Alec Bishop and quoted some extracts from his unpublished memoirs Look Back with Pleasure which he wrote in 1971, and which are held, together with other personal papers, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

It is intriguing how, when the war was over, career officers, such as General Bishop, approached their work of civil administration, in a country whose people they had fought against for years and defeated in battle.

Some, such as Field Marshal Montgomery, the first Military Governor of the British Zone of Occupation in Germany, appeared to relish the task, whilst others, such as the second Military Governor, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir Sholto Douglas, appeared to be deeply unhappy with it. Douglas, for example relates in his memoirs that it was "the unhappiest period of my entire official life" and towards the end of his year in office, in the summer of 1947, he "found all too often that the questions that came to my mind about what we were doing appeared to be insoluble … I found myself wondering quite often why I, an Air Force officer, should be trying to solve problems which should have been in the hands of the politicians."

Alec Bishop appeared to have no such doubts as to the ability to army officers to manage the tasks of civilian administration and was critical of the civilians who followed them. He related in his memoirs how:

"In the early days of the Occupation, the Services had, as already mentioned, entered whole heartedly into the tasks of helping the Germans to reconstruct their shattered and chaotic economy, and to build up a democratically elected system of government. The Labour Government which came to office in Britain after the 1945 election found it at first difficult to believe that Army officers would be capable of, or even interested in helping the Germans in such tasks as the reconstruction of political parties and trade unions, and underestimated the strong desire of those who had fought during the five years of war to turn to constructive work. It was therefore decided by the politicians that Military Government should be ‘civilianised’ as rapidly as possible. The speed with which this was carried out hampered the contribution which Britain was making to the reconstruction of German life."

According to Bishop, it was difficult to recruit suitably qualified staff to work in the civilian Control Commission:

"One outcome of the recruitment difficulties was that some of those who were appointed to the Control Commission were not suitable or qualified to fulfil the responsibilities entrusted to them"

With his strong commitment to the British Empire, he added: "If more of the highly experienced members of the I.C.S. [Indian Civil Service] who were retiring from India at that time could have been invited to come and serve for a spell with us in Germany, it would have solved many of our problems."

I wonder if he knew of an ironic comment attributed to Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party, referring to the tendency of some of the British to treat Germany as if it were part of the British Empire, that "the only thing he regretted about India getting back its independence was that, no doubt, all the Indian Civil Service would turn up in Germany."

One of the most remarkable stories Bishop told occurred later, in June 1949, when he was regional commissioner for the heavily industrialised area of North Rhine Westphalia, and had to carry out the British policy of dismantling German factories in order to pay reparations to the Allies. The dismantling of weapons factories was not in dispute, but as Bishop said: "…the inclusion of plant which were not designed for the production of armaments aroused the most violent reaction from all sections of the German population."

In his memoirs he wrote that the crisis came to a head in June 1949, with opposition by workers to the dismantling of synthetic oil plants at Bergkamen and Dortmund. The troops responsible for maintaining security in these areas were Belgian, (though under Bishop’s command as Regional Commissioner), and were placed on alert.

Bishop decided to appeal directly to the German population and make a statement to be broadcast on the radio. In the statement, he said that the dismantling decision had been taken jointly by the American, British and French governments, and further resistance would result in the use of force, which he hoped and prayed would be unnecessary.

He told the same story, in more vivid terms than those he had used in his memoirs, in a BBC TV programme first broadcast in November 1981, not long before he died on 15th May 1984. (Zone of Occupation: Germany under the British, programme 4, Make Germany Pay). More recently, in September 2005, the same material was used in a BBC Radio programme introduced by Charles Wheeler (Germany: Misery to Miracle). In the programme, Alec Bishop could be heard saying:

"I thought that it was almost certain that force would have to be used, in other words that some of them would have to be shot. So I went to the Cologne broadcasting station and said I wished to take over broadcasting straight away and broadcast a message, which I did. In this message I said that I understood their feelings, but that if they insisted in opposing this by force, which had been ordained by the four allies, there was no doubt that they would get hurt and I said that there are other ways of dealing with this than using force. And I promise you if you will let up on this that I will do everything I can to find you alternative work And I said finally: don’t you think (in a voice still shaking with emotion) that you’ve killed enough of us, and we’ve killed enough of you during the war. And they called it off."

Major General Sir Alec Bishop

12th May 2008

Major General Sir Alec Bishop was one of the most senior British officers in Germany after the war. I’ve recently read his unpublished memoirs Look back with Pleasure which he wrote in 1971, and which are held, together with other personal papers, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

General Bishop was posted to Germany in June 1945, one month after the end of the war, and left five and a half years later on New Year’s Eve 1950, which makes him one of the longer serving senior officers. His first position was head of the ‘Public Relations and Information Services Control’ division of British Military Government, generally known by its acronym, PRISC. In 1946 he was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff to Sir Brian Robertson, then Deputy Military Governor, and from 1948 – 1950 he was Regional Commissioner for North Rhine Westphalia, by far the largest Land, or region, in the British Zone of Occupation.

His memoirs are easy to read with a wealth of interesting stories and anecdotes, which reinforce many of the themes I’ve written about in this blog. There are also a few surprises.

The first thing that surprised me was that nothing in his earlier life, as a career soldier, would appear to have prepared him for his role in Germany after the war, but it was a job he performed diligently and, apparently, with pleasure.

He was born in 1897, and so would have been 48 years old when he first went to Germany. In the preface to his memoirs, dated November 1971, he places himself firmly in the tradition of the British Empire:

"This book is about a life mostly spent in the service of the British Empire. Although it is fashionable at the present time to decry this period of our history, the author hopes that his story may make some contribution towards a better understanding of our successes and failures, and of the joys and sorrows which came our way."

At the age of 12 his father gave him a copy of Baden Powell’s book Scouting for Boys and he wrote that this book "excited my imagination, and I set about forming a Boy Scout Patrol among the other village boys, making myself, of course, the Patrol Leader!"

His father had not served in the army, (except as a local volunteer during the First World War), but "most of my forbears on my Mother’s side had been soldiers" dating back to the "Parliamentary Wars of the seventeenth century," and it was assumed that he too "would follow the profession of arms."

He gained a scholarship to Sandhurst in the autumn of 1914 and two years later was posted to Mesopotamia, (as Iraq was then known, at a time when it was still part of the Turkish empire), in charge of a company of 500 men. He wrote that the main reason the British were there was "to safeguard the supply of oil from the Persian oilfields."

In January 1917 he took part in the offensive which was to lead to the capture of Baghdad on 17th March. Shortly after he was lightly wounded in action, after a engagement in which the company commander was killed and he took over command. After three weeks in hospital he re-joined his regiment and again took over command of the company, still only 19 years old. By the end of the war, in November 1918, he had taken part in the defeat of the Turkish troops by the British army under General Allenby and fought his way through Palestine to Damascus.

Between the wars he spent some time in India and then became a staff officer in the Colonial Office in London, working for the Inspector General of the African Colonial Forces. During this time he travelled extensively in Africa, inspecting the troops, and summed up his time there as follows: "many of the people in Britain and in other countries who take a delight in condemning the period of British Colonial rule in Africa and Asia had no part in its creation and administration, nor did they experience the devotion and idealism of the British administrators. I feel no doubt that when an authoritative history of our Colonial Empire comes to be written, the part played by the British officials who administered it in establishing and maintaining law and order, in holding the interests of the people above all else and in educating and preparing them to run their own affairs in due course will become fully evident."

At the outbreak of the Second World War he was in Tanganyika, where he organised the arrest of German settlers, which was done in response to concerns they would "form themselves into commandos and take to the bush." He spent the rest of the war in various positions, both in Africa and as a staff officer at the War Office in London. For the last three months of the war, he was Deputy Director of the Political Warfare Executive, (PWE), deputising for the director, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, who was ill at the time. Presumably it was this which led to him taking charge of Information Services in Germany. Apparently he had no choice in the matter, as his appointment was negotiated between his boss, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, and Sir William Strang, political adviser to the Military Governor, Field Marshal Montgomery.

I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about the First Impressions of Germany after the war, of other British officers, diplomats, administrators and journalists. General Bishop writes in very similar terms:

Firstly shock at the scale of the devastation he found in Germany:

"It is very difficult for anyone who did not see the situation in Germany when the war came to an end to realise what it was like. The first impression was of the appalling destruction which had been caused by the Allies’ bombing. Very few towns had escaped wide-spread destruction. In some of the Ruhr towns such as Duisburg, over eighty per cent of the buildings had been reduced to rubble, under which lay the bodies of thousands of casualties. Water mains and sewers were disrupted, the main railway and road bridges destroyed, and those who remained alive were sheltering in the cellars under the ruins. Even those factories and mines which had escaped destruction were closed. All normal movement and civilised living had been brought to a standstill. To add to the confusion, bands of released prisoners of war and displaced person who had been brought to Germany to provide labour for the factories and farms were roaming the countryside in search of food, and sometimes to pay off old scores. The machinery of Government and of Police at all levels had collapsed. The situation was summed up by Mr Ernest Bevin, then British Foreign Secretary, in a speech he made in the House of Commons in July, 1945 when he described Germany as ‘without law, without a Constitution, without a single person with whom we could deal, without a singe institution to grapple with the situation."

Secondly, the unquestioned assumption that something had to be done about this, both to help the German people, and because this was in Britain’s own self-interest, to prevent the spread of both disease, and communism.

(I wonder how general this fear of communism was immediately after the end of the war in May and June 1945, and to what extent General Bishop was projecting back accepted wisdom at the time he was writing his memoirs in 1971, after years of the Cold War).

"No one who saw this situation could doubt that drastic measures would have to be taken by the Occupying Forces to help the German people to deal with it. Without vigorous help and support it was inevitable that epidemics would spread throughout the country, endangering the health of the Occupying Forces and of the whole of Western Europe. It was also clear that unless the German people were helped to transform the conditions then existing into a situation which would provide a bearable if modest standard of living it would be impossible to prevent the spread of communism throughout the whole country."

Thirdly, how difficult he felt it was, for those who were not there in person, to understand what conditions in Germany at the end of the war were really like:

"In the light of the ‘economic miracle’ which subsequently occurred in Western Germany, the situation described above must seem to belong to an age of fantasy; it was however very real in 1945."

And, finally, the remarkable way in which, according to Major Bishop, the British army changed from fighting the enemy one day, to helping the same people with the task of reconstruction the next:

"Our mainstay in those early days was the British Army of occupation, which had so recently been devoting all its energies to the defeat and destruction of the enemy, and now turned with an equal enthusiasm from the destruction of war to the reconstruction of peace. Commanders and men alike worked with great energy and enthusiasm at every task of reconstruction which came to their hand."

Goronwy Rees on Weimar Germany

3rd May 2008

Goronwy Rees, the writer, journalist, academic, company director and spy (see previous posts on this blog) was a senior British officer in Germany for a short period after the end of the war. Two weeks ago ago, I wrote about a six day tour which he and Sir William Strang, political advisor to the Military Governor, Field-Marshal Montgomery, made through the British Zone of Germany in late June or early July 1945, in which he described in graphic terms the conditions they found there.

I’ve started to realise that the complex and often contradictory attitudes of the British in Germany to their former enemy, depended as much on the prejudices and preconceptions they brought with them, based on their own previous experiences during and before the war, as on what they found on the ground when they got there.

Goronwy Rees knew Germany well. After the war he wrote a number of articles about his visits there in the 1930s. "Innocent Abroad" described a holiday job teaching English to the son of a Silesian aristocrat, during the Summer vacation of 1929 while he was still a student at Oxford; "A Winter in Berlin" described an extended visit he made to Berlin in 1934, to pursue his research into Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the German Social Democratic Party; and "Berlin in the Twenties" was a review of a book, Before the Deluge: A portrait of Berlin in the 1920s by Otto Friedrich. (References at the end of this posting).

Taken together, these articles help explain the attraction of Weimar Germany for a generation of young British left-wing intellectuals, reacting against the stuffiness and complacency of the British political and social establishment, and the disillusionment they felt when this Brave New World was replaced by the nationalist violence of Nazi Germany, followed by the chaos and disaster of war. As Rees wrote at the start of "Innocent Abroad" first published in 1956:

"It is hard now, nearly thirty years later, to explain even to myself the kind of attraction which Germany exerted on young men of my generation at Oxford. The image of Germany which we found so seductive has been irretrievable shattered by the events of the last twenty-five years; at the most a few scattered splinters are left, like the shards and fragments from which an archaeologist tries to reconstruct a lost civilisation. To try to recover the original image of Weimar Germany by which I, and so many others, were attracted is like trying to restore some lost masterpiece which has been painted over by a succession of brutal and clumsy artists; and in this case the task is all the harder because the masterpiece never really existed and the Germany of Weimar in which we believed was really only a country of the imagination."

What was it they found so attractive? In part, it was sympathy for the defeated country, arising from their own political reaction against what was, in their view, the senseless destruction of the First World War. In part it was an idealistic belief, shared by many at the time, that an international working-class movement was the strongest bulwark against another war, caused by the selfish interests of different nations and their governments, greedy for power. At that time, before Hitler came to power, the working class movement was stronger in Germany than in any other country in Western Europe, including Britain. As Rees wrote: "For the real bulwark of peace was not the League [of Nations] but the international working-class movement, and was not Germany, with its massive trade union and social democratic organisations, the strongest representative of that movement?"

The attraction of Weimar Germany, for Rees and others like him, lay also in its culture and society representing, so they thought, the opposite of everything they disliked about conventional life at home. "In saying this, of course, we were expressing our feelings just as much about our own country as about her defeated enemy. To sympathise with Germany was a mark of our violent revulsion against the Great War and its consequences, and against the generation which had helped to make it and to conduct it to victory. Germany was for us at the opposite extreme from everything we disliked in the land of our fathers; Germany indeed had done her best to kill our fathers, and we were not ungrateful to her for her efforts and sympathised with her failure…"

"For politics were only a part of our infatuation with Germany. Weimar also represented to us all those experiments, in literature, in the theatre, in music, in education, and not least in sexual morals, which we would have liked to attempt in our own country but were so patently impossible in face of the massive and infuriating stupidity of the British middle classes."

But all was not as it seemed. As Rees told the story in "Innocent Abroad", instead of experiencing the delights of Berlin, he found himself staying on a country estate near Breslau, in Silesia, in the middle of a boundless "golden ocean of corn," where his employer was a German baron. The family were kind to him, treating him as if he were an English country gentleman and therefore (more or less) one of themselves, but their outlook on life was totally different from his own, looking forward to a time when another war would return to Germany the lands lost at the end of the First World War in the Treaty of Versailles. The baron’s son, Fritz, "was a charming companion and friend, and I was puzzled that I should find him none the less so even though most of his ideas and beliefs were to me both fantastic and repellent."

In "A Winter in Berlin", time had moved on. By 1934, to visit Berlin was, according to Rees, "in intellectual circles, an unfashionable thing to do, because Hitler had already been in power for a year, and in that short time had totally destroyed the culture which had made Berlin as irresistibly attractive to enlightened young men, particularly English ones, as Rome is to Catholics or Mecca to Muslims."

"The suppression of all organs of opposition had deprived the vast majority of Germans of any means of making an objective assessment of what was happening to themselves or to their country. No one who has never experienced it can quite understand the sense of helplessness and apathy which affects a people which is denied access to any source of information except that which is officially approved."

Rees provided pen-pictures of a number of people he met in Berlin in 1934, some young aristocrats, others supporters of the once powerful Social Democratic Party, but all of them survivors of a lost world, who still believed that Hitler could not last for long and who "could not realize or accept the magnitude or finality of their defeat."

An anonymous friend of his had set up a small hand printing press "on which he and others printed pamphlets and broadsheets denouncing the Hitler regime". Rees supplied him with material for his leaflets and copies of English papers "for what he and his friends wanted most was to feel that there, in Berlin, they were not totally isolated in their struggle, that somewhere, in another world, there were forces at work which would come to their aid, that they were not alone in trying to fight Hitler but were encompassed by a cloud of witnesses to the significance of what they were trying to do. In all this they were of course quite wrong; no one knew of their existence or their efforts, much less came to their assistance."

"Those who actively opposed Hitler were not only a tiny minority; they were a defeated and dispirited minority, living, in the middle of industrial Berlin, like castaways on some desert island with only their hopes and their dreams to sustain them. It was impossible to believe that they would ever feel the touch of victory."

"As the long winter drew on and gave way to spring, it became increasingly clear that, whatever happened to Hitler’s regime, it would not fall as the result of any opposition from inside Germany itself, and with this realization I fell victim to a profound depression, as if for the first time I had really grasped the full horror of what had happened to Germany."

"I never saw my friends of that winter again but when I next returned to Berlin, in 1945, there were none of them left. In the years between I thought of them often, and always with affection, but the memory brought no happiness with it, as unconsciously I already thought of them as if they were dead."

In the third article, "Berlin in the Twenties" written in 1972, Rees "wondered at the fascination which Germany, and Berlin, of the 1920s still exerts both on those who preserve nostalgic memories of them and on the young, for whom the tragic story of the Weimar Republic has become a kind of pantomime," as shown by the success, both in the US and Europe, of the musical Cabaret, based on Christopher Isherwood’s book Goodbye to Berlin. He continued by asking why Weimar Germany also continued to cast its spell on serious historians. "For Weimar really presents us with at least two quite different kinds of problem. One is the difficulty of understanding how and why a great and civilised country like Germany surrendered itself to the boa-constrictor embrace of a mountebank genius like Adolf Hitler. The other is why a period which began with the total defeat of Germany in World War I and ended in the even great defeat implicit, from a cultural point of view, in the triumph of Hitler, should have coincided with a brilliant flowering of literary and artistic activity, so that in some aspects it seems to look like a glittering cultural Renaissance rather than a spectacle of the decline and fall of a great people."

It’s not for me to attempt to answer these questions. My research is on the British in Germany after the war, not Weimar Germany and the rise of Hitler. For me, what is interesting is what all this can tell us about the British in Germany, as victors in war and occupiers of a defeated country.

In my first post on Goronwy Rees, I said I could not understand why, in his preface to the book Der Fragebogen by Ernst von Salomon, he felt he needed to warn English readers not to be deceived by the book, because it was written by a very "gifted writer". It now seems to me that underlying the extracts I’ve quoted in this posting was the suspicion, the fear even, that what happened in Germany in the 1930s could also happen at home. That if one "great and civilised country like Germany" could be deceived by Adolf Hitler, so too could other great countries like Britain, or the United States. That if Goronwy Rees and others like him were attracted to Weimar Germany, but were powerless to prevent the rise of Hitler, they would be equally powerless to prevent the rise of another Hitler, or someone like him, at home.

As I wrote then, it was not only Weimar Germany which had attracted Goronwy Rees. In the 1930s, inspired by his opposition to fascism and dislike for the British establishment, he had also been a communist, and for brief period, a member of the spy ring working for the Soviet Union, of which the leading members were the "Cambridge Five": Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Perhaps, by the time he wrote these articles in the 1950s and 1960s, (by which time he had become a firm, anti-communist, member of the British literary establishment), Rees felt he personally had been deceived, by his attraction to Weimar Germany, by Stalin’s communism, and by his own friends Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, in much the same way that people in Germany had been deceived by Hitler’s national socialism.

In an oral history interview for the Truman Presidential Library, General Sir Brian Robertson, the most senior and influential British officer in Germany during the occupation, said: "The truth of the matter was that in those early days we were fighting a battle over the soul of Germany."

Perhaps Goronwy Rees and others like him at the end of the war and afterwards, felt they had to fight not only for the soul of Germany, but also, in one way or another, for their own.

References

"Innocent Abroad" and "A Winter in Berlin" are included in:
Goronwy Rees: Sketches in Autobiography: ‘A Bundle of Sensations’ and ‘A Chapter of Accidents’ with ‘A Winter in Berlin’, a further autobiographical essay. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001). Edited with Introduction and Notes by John Harris

"Berlin in the Twenties" is included in:
Goronwy Rees: Brief Encounters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974)