Category: Senior British officers

Last week I wrote about Goronowy Rees and his preface to the English translation of Der Fragebogen by Ernst von Salomon.

This week, I’m writing about his experiences as a British officer in Germany after the war, based on the chapter ‘Victory’ in his book of autobiographical sketches A Bundle of Sensations, first published in 1960.

Goronwy Rees was in Germany for six months from April to September 1945. He was a senior intelligence officer in the Political Division of Military Government, with the rank of Lt. Colonel, reporting to the Political Adviser, Sir William Strang.

Of particular interest was the account of a six day tour they made through the British Zone of Germany in late June or early July, in which Rees describes in graphic terms the conditions they found there. In many ways, it’s similar to the ‘First Impressions’ of other British officers, diplomats, administrators and journalists, which I’ve quoted in earlier postings. He writes about his shock at the scale of destruction, especially in the industrial cities of the Ruhr, which were now like "some landscape on the moon", and the extraordinary efforts of some British officers to help people whom, a few weeks earlier, before the war had ended, they had been doing their best to destroy.

There are also interesting comments on the peace and quiet of the German countryside, compared to the destruction in the cities, echoes of empire in the comparison of defeated Germany with "tropical Africa", and the life of luxury led by a British Corps commander at the ‘Schloss’ (or stately home) he had commandeered for his headquarters.  I’ve provided some extracts below.

I’ve also written about Strang before, so I was interested in what Rees had to say about him:

"I found him [Strang] in every way a surprising contrast to my idea of what a British diplomat should be like. The son of a farmer and educated at a grammar school and University College, London, he was entirely free of those mannerisms of speech and behaviour which are acquired at a public school and the older universities; he was modest and shy and diffident, irked by the grandeur imposed on him by his ambassadorial rank, and had a touching faith in my abilities as a soldier to overcome any difficulties which might meet us on our journey."

He also had an "immense capacity for work" and "corrected the drafts of messages and dispatches with a meticulousness that was very near to pedantry."

As Political Adviser to the Military Governor, Strang’s rank was equivalent to that of an ambassador. On the tour, he and Rees  travelled, driven by a chauffeur, in a large black Humber car, which had been specially prepared for the Political Adviser, until his Rolls Royce arrived from England.

At one point on the way from the spa town of Bad Oeynhausen, where the headquarters of the British Zone was located, to the industrial district of the Ruhr, they stopped for lunch, unpacked a hamper of food and wine, and sat down to eat and drink "in a rich green meadow, under the shade of a tree, on the banks of a smooth and clear stream. It was wonderfully quiet and peaceful and difficult to think of the problems of Germany; as he raised his glass of hock to his lips the Political Adviser  rather wistfully murmured: ‘Do you know, I’ve never done anything like this in my life.’"

But the outlook soon changed. As Rees wrote:

"But we were driving towards the Ruhr; we were soon out of the un-ravaged countryside and evidence began to collect of the consequences of war and defeat. I began to understand the man who said that war may be hell but defeat is worse. For in most of Germany at that time, and certainly in its industrial areas, it seemed true to say that even the most elementary conditions of civilised life had ceased to exist. Wherever the war had been, it had remorselessly ground to pieces the whole structure of organised society and all we could see around us was the ruin and rubble that remained." 

They were "like lost travellers painfully exploring some landscape of the moon. And all around us, at every turn, was the same monotonous repetitive vista of gap-toothed buildings, houses brutally torn apart, endless miles of fallen and broken buildings, and a few bent and solitary figures scratching in the ruins for anything that might be useful to them in the struggle to survive. It was a landscape as mournful and fantastic as those Piranesi drew of the ruins of ancient Rome, in which a few tiny human figures are dwarfed and overshadowed by the colossal fragments of a ruined world."

When they reached Düsseldorf, "the streets were totally deserted; in this dead city there was nothing any longer to support life, neither food nor water nor shelter nor heating and everyone who could leave had already left; only the rats still scuffled in the rubble."

They drove to the local [British] commander’s office where "We found the local commander at work among a litter of papers in his naked ground floor office; from his window he had a view, through the rain, of the ruins which constituted his empire. He was a lieutenant-colonel who only a short time ago had commanded a battalion which enthusiastically engaged in completing the final downfall of Germany; now, with equal enthusiasm, he was doing what he could to mitigate the effects of her defeat … By one of those magical transformations, like a scene in a pantomime, which occur in war, he now found himself the administrator and absolute ruler of an area containing over one million human beings who had suddenly been deprived of the means of existence. He might just as well have been dropped from the skies in the middle of tropical Africa and told to get on with the job of governing some primitive tribe living on the edge of starvation."

"Indeed he might have been better off, for there at least he would have found some form of tribal organisation through which he could have given his commands." But in Germany after the war, the complex structure of government had "… been swallowed in defeat. So far as local administration was concerned, the lieutenant-colonel might just as well have been operating in the desert, and to a more rational man the task in hand would have seemed so grotesque and futile as to be not worth attempting; but he was not a rational man, particularly because he seemed quite unaware of the irony of his endeavours to succour a people whom a short time ago he had been doing his best to destroy. When the Political Adviser suggested that there might be dangers in adopting so wholeheartedly the cause of our defeated enemies, he asked rather angrily whether it was the intention that they should be left to starve, or in winter to freeze, to death."

His only "obsessive interest in life" was how to bring enough coal into the city, without transport, so that Germans were able to work again.

"But the lieutenant-colonel also had another obsession as well as coal, without which the Germans, or what he sometimes referred to as ‘my people’ would also lack all the other means of subsistence."

"For his area, like other areas of Germany, was at that moment overrun by thousands of foreign workers, Frenchmen, Poles, Czechs, Russians, who had been the slaves of the Reich and now, suddenly released and at liberty, were determined both to keep themselves alive and take their revenge by plundering its corpse. At night the countryside was alive with bands of what were politely called ‘displaced persons’, who with considerable reason felt themselves entitled to pillage, plunder, rape, and murder with impunity; for what crimes could they possibly commit worse than the crimes which had been committed against them…."

The lieutenant-colonel solved this "moral dilemma" on the "simple principle that of all evils the complete absence of any form of law and order is the worst, worse even that the lack of the means of subsistence, and that his first task was to re-establish them."

The Political Adviser had little advice to give the local commander: "So he contented himself with saying that he would report the condition of affairs to London, and that he thought this might make some difference to those politicians who, following in the footsteps of Mr Morgenthau and Mr Noel Coward, still thought that the fundamental problem in German was how to be beastly enough to the Germans."

Rees and Strang left the local commander in Düsseldorf "… to find our way to the luxuries and comforts of a [British] Corps headquarters, where the Political Adviser was received with the lavish hospitality befitting his rank but so repugnant to his taste…. The Corps Commander was giving a very good imitation of a Renaissance prince enjoying the pleasures of his latest conquest, and was anxious to show that in him the exuberance of victory was refined by the discrimination of taste."

He lived in a "freshly furnished" stately home "… from which all traces of war had been effaced … it became almost impossible to believe in the dark picture painted for us in Düsseldorf, of a population not merely ruined but abandoned and betrayed and a country devastated and denuded and systematically pillaged by bands of brigands who would have been affronted by the mere suggestion that Germans could have any rights against themselves; indeed we might well have thought the local commander guilty of sentimentality or exaggeration if we had not heard the same account at every post we visited in the course of our journey."

References

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

A Bundle of Sensations was first published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1960

12th April 2008

In my posting on 20th January, I said the approach I intend to follow for my research on "’Winning the Peace’: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1951" is to "Follow the People," and I provided a list of people who I think are interesting for one reason or another.

Some of them were senior British officers, such as the three Military Governors of the British occupied zone of Germany – Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Sholto Douglas and General Sir Brian Robertson.

Others were senior administrators and diplomats, such as Sir William Strang, Noel Annan, Sir Christopher Steel and Austen Albu, all of whom were political advisers to the Military Governors.

Many of these people are best known for what they did at other times; for example, Montgomery as the victor of the battle of El Alamein, or Noel Annan as chairman of the committee which produced what came to be known as the ‘Annan Report‘ on broadcasting. But it’s often surprising what their time in Germany can reveal both about them, and about British politics, culture and society in general.

Goronwy Rees was another senior British officer, and I think I’ll have to add him to my list of people to follow, for reasons I’ll try to explain in this post. He was in Germany for only a short time, for six months from April to September 1945, as a senior intelligence officer in the Political Division of Military Government, with the rank of Lt. Colonel, reporting to the Political Adviser, Sir William Strang. He was succeeded in this position by Noel Annan and for a short time they overlapped.

I first came across Goronwy Rees when I read the preface he wrote to the English translation of Der Fragebogen by Ernst von Salomon. I’ll write more about this another time, but suffice it to say that Der Fragebogen was a publishing sensation when it first appeared in Germany in 1951 and sold over 250,000 copies. Its author was a right-wing German nationalist who trained as a military cadet but was too young to fight in the First World War. After the war he joined the Freikorps, fought against the Poles in Silesia in 1920-1, worked with those who were attempting to subvert the Weimar constitution, and was an accomplice to the murder of the German Foreign Minister, Walter Rathenau, in 1922, for which he was sentenced to five years in prison. On his release he discovered a talent as a writer and published a number of books both before and after the Second World War. Although the Freikorps were idolised by the Nazis for their resistance to what they perceived as the iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles, Ernst von Salomon himself was no supporter of Hitler. He "found Hitler’s methods of influencing the masses repugnant" and considered National Socialism to be "another, more advanced, form of Bolshevism", both of which, in his view, represented the disintegration of the traditional state and a descent into disorder and chaos. He felt he owed his allegiance to the state of Prussia, rather than Hitler’s Third Reich and his heroes were the army officers and aristocrats who unsuccessfully attempted to kill Hitler on July 20th 1944. Many of them had been officer cadets like himself and with the failure of the plot, in his words: "July 20th 1944, marked the final collapse not only of the Prussian army but of the whole educational world of the nineteenth century."

In 1945 Salomon and his wife, who was Jewish and whom he had protected during the war, were arrested by the Allied Military authorities and imprisoned in a US internment camp, where he claimed he was beaten up and his wife raped by US soldiers. In 1946 he was released with no explanation except that his arrest had been "in error".

His book Der Fragebogen took the form of his own personal answers to the 131 questions in the questionnaire (or Fragebogen) which millions of German people had to complete after the end of the war as part of the Allied de-nazification process. The questionnaire proved to be a singularly ineffective method of doing this, and in the book, Salomon was able to pour scorn on the process, highlighting the hypocrisy of the Allies, while at the same time providing his own interpretation of the history of the previous 30 years, from the end of the First World War to the events following the end of the Second.

In his preface to the English translation, published in 1954, Goronwy Rees attempted to warn English readers not to be deceived by the book.

"It is easy to see that there was a fundamentally false assumption in the idea of conducting a written examination, of 131 questions, of the conscience of a people, and on the basis of the replies calculating the degree of responsibility of each individual …  It has been easy for Salomon to seize upon the naïveté  and the falsity of the assumptions underlying the Fragebogen, and by taking that document at its face value to turn the examination into a farce, a procedure admirably suited to his literary talents … Yet the English reader should not be deceived into taking Der Fragebogen at its face value. He should remember, firstly, that he is in the hands of a very gifted writer."

According to Rees, Salomon was not fully open about his past, as a member of the Freikorps, for his part in the murder of the German foreign minister Walter Rathenau, or the official approval his writings received during the Third Reich, even though he himself had retired from politics and worked as a film script writer during the war.

"The truth is that for a person of Salomon’s past, and beliefs, to dissociate himself, as he does in this book, from all responsibility for the triumph, and the crimes, of National Socialism, is a piece of effrontery which only so brilliant a writer could have attempted with success."

"Since its publication in 1951, over 250,000 Germans have bought Der Fragebogen, despite the fact that some of Germany’s most distinguished critics have condemned it violently both on political and moral grounds. It is difficult not to sympathise with such critics. They represent that class of humane and liberal Germans who still dare to believe, even after the disasters of the last fifty years, that Germany may yet redeem the errors of the past."

I was puzzled by this preface. I could understand that Rees wanted to draw attention to criticism the book had received within Germany, but why did he feel the need to warn English readers not to be deceived by the book? What was he afraid that an English reader might do or think? Why did he emphasise that the author was a "very gifted writer." It didn’t seem to me that Salomon was trying to excuse himself or to conceal his past; the murder of Rathenau, his part in the Freikorps, his political views and his opposition Weimar democracy were all described quite openly. Maybe Rees, like other British and American critics at the time, objected to the razor sharp criticism at the end of the book of some of the actions of the Allies, highlighting their self righteousness and hypocrisy, and implying they should apply the same standards to themselves as they did to the defeated enemy?

I haven’t discovered the answer to these questions. It still seems to me that you don’t need to share Salomon’s nationalist views and his interpretation of the history of the Weimar Republic, to believe that at least some of his criticisms of the actions of the Allies at the end of the war were fully justified. And in any case, why couldn’t English readers be trusted to make up their own minds, living in a democratic country with all the advantages of freedom of information?

But I did discover more about Goronwy Rees. Like Salomon, he was a brilliant writer, as is evident from reading his own autobiography, or more correctly, two volumes of autobiographical sketches,  A Bundle of Sensations, published in 1960 and A Chapter of Accidents, published twelve years later in 1972.

Rees was born in 1909 in Aberystwyth, a small university town in mid-Wales, where his father was a Minister in the Calvinist Methodist church. He won a scholarship to Oxford, and in 1931 was awarded a postgraduate fellowship at All Souls College, which in his own words was:

"One of the greatest gifts Oxford had to bestow, and a sure guarantee of success in whatever career one chose to adopt. When I was elected, the college included among its forty members one archbishop, one bishop, and ex-Viceroy of India, several cabinet ministers, the two brightest luminaries of the English bar and the editor of The Times."

Rees subsequently became a journalist and writer, for The Times, the Manchester Guardian, the Spectator and other journals, an army officer during the war, and a company director and successful author in the years afterwards. He maintained his connection with All Soul’s College becoming Estates Bursar, responsible for college finances, and in 1953 was appointed Principal of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth.

He also led a double life. One of his best friends was Guy Burgess, who recruited him as a Soviet agent in 1937. Other members of the so-called Cambridge spy ring included Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Rees (who was at Oxford rather than Cambridge and who met Burgess through mutual friends) would appear to have actively worked as a spy for the Soviets for only a brief period, before becoming disillusioned with Communism following the Nazi Soviet pact in 1939. However he remained on good terms with Burgess right up to his and Maclean’s defection to Moscow in 1950. Burgess was godfather to one of his children. After Burgess and Maclean "reappeared" at a press conference in Moscow in 1956, Rees published a series of articles in The People newspaper, which described his friendship with Burgess, and hinted strongly that others were also involved in the spy ring, including Anthony Blunt. Ironically, although Blunt was investigated at the time, no further action was taken, whereas Rees found himself severely criticised for his actions by some of his colleagues at Aberystwyth, who considered the articles to be "malicious, salacious and sordid" and he was eventually forced to resign as Principal.

In A Chapter of Accidents, his highly successful second volume of autobiography, published sixteen years after the articles in The People, Rees retold the story and implied he knew that Burgess, Blunt and others were Soviet spies as early as 1937, but claimed he believed that this had all stopped with the start of the war. He said nothing in the book about his own espionage activities, either as a Soviet agent working with Burgess before the war, or in the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), afterwards. 

It’s therefore ironic that Rees should criticise Ernst von Salomon for not being fully open about his past, when he himself is less than fully open in his own autobiography.

Given the admiration Rees expressed for Ernst von Salomon as a "brilliant writer", I wonder to what extent the autobiographical style of Der Fragebogen was a literary  influence on his own writing.

In his first volume of autobiographical sketches, A Bundle of Sensations, Rees makes a point of saying that this was not intended to be a conventional autobiography or life history. He made a virtue out of claiming that, rather than being "a personality with its own continuous history", he was someone who reflected, and was formed by, the events of his time:

"For I was quite certain that I had no character of my own, good or bad, that I existed only in the particular circumstances of the moment, and since circumstances were always changing, so fast, so bewilderingly, so absorbingly, how could it not follow that I must change with them?"

It seems there may be more parallels between Ernst von Salomon, the right-wing German nationalist, and Goronwy Rees, the Communist sympathiser and opponent of fascism, than might be expected. They were both superb writers, they both achieved their greatest public success using autobiography as a literary form to portray the world in which they lived, and they both tried to conceal or re-interpret aspects of their own past, one as a murderer and the other as a spy.

References

Ernst von Salomon, The Answers of Ernst von Salomon to the 131 Questions in the Allied Military Government ‘Fragebogen’ (London: Putnam, 1954) First published in Germany in 1951 as Der Fragebogen. English edition translated by Constantine Fitzgibbon with a preface by Goronwy Rees.

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

3rd March 2008

In my previous two postings I’ve commented on the autobiography of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Sholto Douglas, who succeeded Field Marshal Montgomery in May 1946, as Military Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the British forces of occupation in Germany (Years of Command, London: Collins, 1966).

As I said earlier, he appeared to see himself as, above all, a professional airman and disliked those aspects of his job which required the skills of a politician or diplomat: "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."

One aspect of the memoirs that interested me was his remarks on the German air force, the Luftwaffe.

Sholto Douglas fought as a fighter pilot in World War One, and continued to take a personal interest in the fate of those who had fought against him on the other side. Early in the book, he wrote about the German fighter pilot Ernst Udet, who later played a significant role in the rebuilding of the Luftwaffe:

"During the years that had passed since the end of the [first world] war I had followed with personal interest the exploits of another of my former adversaries in the air over the Western Front: the famous German ace Ernst Udet. He had probably seen more action than any of us in the air, and he had achieved a great reputation as a pilot who was ready to take on any sort of flying, the more hazardous the better, particularly if it had anything to do with the making of films. The flying that he did in 1929, among the mountains of Switzerland, for the film The White Hell of Pitz Palu is some of the finest that has ever been placed on record."

In 1930 Douglas was based in the Sudan, where he met Udet, who had run out of fuel and been reported missing flying back home, after filming in Kenya and Uganda.

"We flew some of our mechanics to the place where Udet had been found, and they repaired the leak in the tank; and then Udet flew his aeroplane out and came on to Khartoum. For a few days he stayed with me in the house that I had there. During the war we had heard that he was a decent likeable man; and in the contact that I was able to establish with him in Khartoum I came to appreciate his honesty and his sincerity. I also liked his rather swashbuckling attitude towards life, and I felt that he enjoyed being well-liked by everybody …"  The two former adversaries "compared the experiences that we had had during the times when we must have fought each other in the skies over the Western Front."

Many years later, "…halfway through November 1941, the German wireless broadcast an item of news which gave me cause for feelings of a distinct personal sadness. Ernst Udet, it was announced, had been killed in a flying accident." At the time Udet was the general in charge of Luftwaffe supplies. Douglas wrote that there was speculation he had committed suicide, due to disagreements with his colleagues.

Udet was not the only German air force officer for whom Sholto Douglas expressed a personal interest.

I wrote last week about his concerns at signing death warrants of those condemned to death by British Military courts.

Together with the other Military Governors of the US, Soviet and French Zones, in the Allied Control Council, Sholto Douglas was also responsible for hearing appeals for clemency and for confirming the sentences of those condemned to death at the war crime trials at Nuremberg. One of these was Hermann Goering, who previously, among other things, had also been a fighter pilot in World War One, and was subsequently head of the Luftwaffe.

As Sholto Douglas described in a chapter in his memoirs titled ‘A Matter of Conscience’, the whole issue concerned him greatly. Although, after considering all the arguments, he was convinced that the decision to sentence Goering to death was correct, he still wrote that: "But so far as I was concerned there was much more to the whole issue than just the matter of legality. That can scarcely be wondered at because of the inescapable interest that I had always had in all that Hermann Goering had been doing, and which was almost of personal concern to me."

He described how he received a personal instruction from Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, to consult him before the Control Council reached any decision on the matter of clemency, and objected strongly to this instruction:

"This time I had to take the strongest exception. I regarded myself as being in a judicial position, and I did not think that the Foreign Secretary or anybody else had any right whatsoever to tell me what I should do, and that it was up to me to give my decision according to my conscience and my conscience alone…"

He was then told in a further telegram, that that there should be no alterations in the sentences. At this he felt a sense of outrage. The accused German military leaders were sentenced on the basis that they should have followed their consciences when given orders, and now he was being forbidden to follow his own conscience. Nevertheless, he did his duty, and regardless of his own personal feelings, confirmed the sentences on all those condemned to death:

"Twenty years before Goering and I, as young fighter pilots, had fought each other in the cleaner atmosphere of the air. As I spoke the words that meant for Goering an inevitable death sentence, I could not help feeling, for all my loathing of what he had become, the strongest revulsion that I should have to be one of those so directly concerned with it."

His final words in this chapter were: "I was only too glad to be finished with the whole sordid business."

Is it too much to think that, in the back of the mind of this British Marshal of the Royal Air Force and Military Governor of Germany, could have been the thought that: "There but for the grace of God, go I"?

23rd February 2008

Last week I wrote about Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Sholto Douglas, later enobled as Lord Douglas of Kirtleside, who succeeded Field Marshal Montgomery in May 1946, as Military Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the British forces of occupation in Germany.

His time as Military Governor was not a success – in his own words it was "the unhappiest period of my entire official life" and, as I said last week, I failed to understand why he was offered the job in the first place.

According to his memoirs Years of Command (London: Collins, 1966), one issue which contributed to his unhappiness was his responsibility, as Military Governor, to sign death warrants of those condemned to death by British military courts.

"As Military Governor I was called upon to make the final decisions about all the death sentences which were passed by the courts of the [British] Zone, either confirming or commuting them as I saw fit; and there is in my memory a deep scar from that odious experience of having to deal with hundreds of these cases.

The range of the nature of the crimes which had led to these sentences ran all the way from more of the war criminals condemned to death to unfortunate Displaced Persons – among whom there were many Poles who had found ways of disposing of their hated German oppressors – to a Briton in the forces who had committed a murder such as strangling his German girl friend."

His personal experiences at this time led to "a strong conviction that the death penalty should be abolished."

He continued by saying that he was happy to confirm some sentences, such as those on warders of concentration camps, but "most of the cases that I had to deal with were far more difficult to assess … For instance, what was one to do about some unfortunate dim-witted German peasant who, while serving as a private in the army, had been told by his officer to shoot one of our parachutists? Had the poor devil refused to do it he would more likely than not have been shot for not obeying orders. How was he to know that in international law the order given by his officer was illegal? Was his lack of knowledge sufficient reason to commute the sentence?"

Most of the death sentences which came before him he therefore commuted to terms of imprisonment.

"It is one thing to kill a fellow human being in the heat of battle, but these cold, judicial executions were, so far as I was concerned, an entirely different matter."