Category: Uncategorized

4 December 2020

Thank you to everyone who attended my on-line talk today on Reconstruction, Renewal and Reconciliation in Occupied Germany after the Second World War. The talk was part of a programme of events to complement the exhibition at the National Army Museum in London: Foe to Friend on the history of the British Army in Germany since 1945.

As a former General Officer Commanding British Forces in Germany said a few years ago, after the announcement was first made that the British Army would no longer keep a permanent base in Germany: 'Now we are leaving Germany, perhaps we should discover a little more about why we arrived here in the first place.'

The talk was recorded, so if you missed it, you can view it here.

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to add comment to this post or send me an email.

1 July 2013

It’s a pleasant surprise for a historian, to receive an eye-witness account of something they have researched in the archives, from someone who was there is person. Harry Furness, whose story I told in the previous post on this blog, was one of the British soldiers who took part in ‘Operation Butcher’, which, as I wrote in my earlier post on Hunting for Democracy, was described in the British Zone Review in November 1945 as:

'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.'

Harry Furness remembered ‘Operation Butcher’ well, because he took part in it. This is what he told me:

'You were quite right that with the great shortage of food, especially for the German civilian, it had been decided by the Control Commission to cull those over-large herds of deer in the nearby forests [whose numbers had not been controlled during the war] for food supplies. The Army had just finished war combat, so started to cull deer as a military operation. All the professional foresters had been disarmed. It was originally planned that only officers would hunt and kill the wild game. The great problem was that very few officers had any wild game hunting experience, combined with the fact that usually officers are not particularly well trained in rifle-craft; their war weapons were typically handguns and sub-machine guns. Very soon the German foresters became furious that wild game were not being humanely despatched. They insisted it had to be a one-shot kill.

The Control Commission were forced to re-evaluate the use of untrained shooters. In the area where I was stationed I was selected by my C.O. [Commanding Officer] and the Commission to shoot as many deer as possible working alongside a German forester. I had been highly trained as a Bisley ‘gravelbelly’ much earlier, so I was a well-qualified marksman. Indeed I accounted for a lot of deer always with one-shot kills. Following at some distance to the guide and myself, I had a section of soldiers with a couple of tracked Bren Gun Carriers who collected the killed game and then delivered it directly to German officials at the Rathaus (Town Hall) in Neheim, where they distributed the venison to local butchers in the surrounding areas. I only kept back a couple of killed deer, one for the Officers’ Mess, and one went to the Sergeants’ Mess … my recollection is that our method of preparation to eat venison wasn’t too good; it’s really a cook’s art.

I might mention that one of our officers (a Captain) scored a hat-trick during a deer hunt. He aimed at a deer standing next to a thick bush, and we quickly found out that his bullet had killed the deer and also another deer about to foal which couldn’t be seen behind the thick foliage, so three deer were killed with one rifle shot. It was, of course, an accident, but the German forester was unhappy at the result. ‘Operation Butcher’ didn’t last long. We killed a lot of deer, but it seemed to prove of little value in improving the food supply during that hard period.

At Ceasefire all German professional foresters had been disarmed. On retrospect it proved to be a military mistake, but it was very soon rectified and most of the hunters’ personal weapons were given back to them. After which no further unauthorised military hunting was allowed; it was by German permit only. Those few British solders with a track record of wild game hunting thereafter frequently received invitations to join German hunts.'

19 January 2011

This blog is about my research, on British people in occupied Germany after the war, not about me personally. But if anyone wonders why I first decided to write the blog and what motivates me to carry on posting, (ever since I published my first post on this blog in October 2005), have a look at my post on Why I write an academic history blog  on the website and blog of the History Blogging Project.[These links no longer work – see below]

The project was launched yesterday (18 January 2011) and aims to promote and support UK-based academic historians who either have a blog or are thinking of running one. In particular the project will develop a set of training materials to help postgraduate historians create, maintain and publicise a blog on their research.

If you are a postgraduate student and either have your own blog or are thinking of creating one and are not (yet) aware of the project, do get in touch with the organisers. I am sure they will be glad to hear from you.

Updated 3 February 2014

The History Blogging project is no longer live, and the links above no longer work, so I have copied below my post on Why I write an academic history blog, as originally written in January 2011:

For the past 5 years I have written an academic history blog, recording some of my ideas and, I hope, discoveries, as I work my way through my research.

I started the blog as a way to make myself write something about my research. At first, I didn’t know if anyone would read the blog and I didn’t care. Even if no-one else ever looked at it, I thought it would be useful as a way of helping me get my thoughts in order.

Over the past 5 years I have written 118 posts; an average of just under one a fortnight, so not quite the rate of one post a week, that I originally aimed for.

I now receive an average of 48 hits (page views) a day. Some of these are probably automatic enquiries from search engines and some people will look at more than one page in a session, so I don’t know how this number translates into real people viewing the blog. I guess an average of around 10 people look at it every day.

Most people come to the blog via searches on Google. Amazingly, if you type “British occupation of Germany” (the subject of my research) into Google, a page from my blog comes up as no.3 on the list, after two pages from Wikipedia. If you type “Operation Unthinkable” (the subject of one post) my blog also comes up third on the list, after Wikipedia and the Daily Mail!

Over the years, I‘ve had 37 comments from readers (excluding spam). Some referred to personal stories about themselves or their families. Some were from academics commenting on aspects of my research. One was from someone in Russia who said he was surprised to learn that something he had assumed was a Cold War myth perpetuated by the Communist Party (that the British had drawn up plans to invade Russia after the end of the war) turned out to be true after all.

I’ve lost count of the emails I’ve received; probably an average of one every week or two. These have come from, among others, a prize-winning children’s novelist who wanted to check the historical detail for her next book, students working on their long essays or dissertations, people researching their family histories and a lady born in Germany, now living in England, who told me about how she and her family stole coal from railway wagons after the war and who now runs her own blog.

As an academic historian, writing the blog raises some issues, which I hope this new project will address:

• Does writing a blog conflict with our research? Is it right for a PhD student to engage in this way with a non-academic audience?
• Should academic bloggers have more respect for the academic principle of proper peer review? No one has checked what I write for accuracy. Anyone can start a blog and write any old rubbish, if they want. Could academic blogs be open to abuse?
• In my posts I sometimes quote from books I have read and the archives I have researched. As my blog is entirely non-commercial and conducted for educational purposes, am I right to claim that this is permitted by the “fair dealing” provisions of the copyright act?
• Should I engage more actively with other people writing history blogs, for example by commenting on their blogs, and so try to create more of a community? Is so, what is the best way of doing this?