Konrad Adenauer and his dismissal as Mayor of Cologne by the British in 1945

30th March 2008

I’ve recently finished reading Konrad Adenauer‘s Memoirs 1945-53 and a biography of Adenauer by Terence Prittie, who was the Guardian newspaper’s correspondent in Germany from October 1946 to June 1963, and who, in his own words, "covered all but the last four months of what has come to be known conventionally as the Adenauer Era."

I am not qualified to comment on Adenauer as a politician and statesman, but I was interested in what these books reveal about his attitude to the three Western Allies, the US, France and Britain, during their occupation of Germany after the war.

I’m also interested in the story of his dismissal by the British as Oberbürgermeister (Mayor) of Cologne in October 1945. He was first installed as Mayor of Cologne on October 18, 1917, when he was 41 years old. In 1933 he was dismissed by the Nazis and spent the next 12 years in retirement, apart from brief periods when he was arrested on suspicion of opposing the regime. In May 1945 he was reinstated as Mayor of Cologne by the Americans, only to be dismissed by the British five months later. Ironically, this gave him more time to devote to national politics, the creation of a new political party, the CDU, and his eventual  election as Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of (West) Germany in 1949.

Possibly Adenauer’s greatest achievement as Chancellor was the rapprochement with France and the acceptance of West Germany into the various international organisations formed in Western Europe after the war, promoting peace and stability after decades, even centuries, of conflict. In his memoirs, shortly after describing the admission of the Federal Republic as a full member of the Council of Europe on 2nd May 1951, he wrote:

"One must never forget that between Bonn and Paris lie the gigantic graveyards of Verdun [referring to the battles of the First World War], and that it required a common and continuous effort of the good will of all at last to put an end to one of the most tragic chapters in the history of Europe and to begin a new one."

Adenauer spoke favourably of the US on several occasions, for example, when he was reinstated as Oberbürgermeister of Cologne in May 1945:

"The Americans with whom I dealt were all intelligent and reasonable men. We soon understood each other,"

when describing the work of former President Hoover, who led a commission to investigate the food shortages in Europe after the war, and in Germany in particular:

"I want to take this opportunity to thank President Hoover on behalf of all Germans and to express my admiration to him for this report on the situation of the defeated and ostracized Germany. The report is a great humanitarian document. It must have been the first time in the history of the last few centuries that a humanitarian spirit animated the victor and that the victor desired to help the vanquished to emerge from their misery,"

and when expressing gratitude for CARE packages, donated by private individuals in the US, which started arriving in Germany in the Spring of 1946:

"No one who was not living in Germany at that time can imagine what this relief, coming from private or church sources, meant to hungry and defeated Germans. The arrival of a CARE parcel made any day into a feast day for a family."

References to the British, on the other hand, were mixed, to say the least. He spoke favourably of General Sir Brian Robertson, for example on his leaving Germany in 1950. (Robertson was British High Commissioner in Germany from 1949-50 and before then deputy Military Governor from 1945-7 and Military Governor from 1947-9).

"I must here pause to say that to my great regret Sir Brian
Robertson was no longer British High Commissioner. He had been in
Germany for nearly five years. He had come at a time when we Germans
were in an extremely difficult situation. By his personality, the
honesty of his convictions, his humanity and sincerity he had made a tremendous contribution to changes which none of us would have dreamed of in 1946 or 1947."

But most of his comments on the British were far from complimentary. Here are a few examples:

Firstly when the British took over responsibility for Cologne from the Americans:

"My relations with the officers of the American forces were, as I have said, very good. Things changed when, after a while, on 21 June 1945, the Americans left Cologne and were replaced by British troops. Conflicts soon arose between me and the British administrative officers. In my opinion the British were treating the population very badly. Their attitude to me was very negative."

Secondly a general comment on the administrative abilities of the British in general:

"The British and other occupying powers were not equal in practice to the extraordinary tasks involved in administering a destroyed country."

Thirdly his opinion of British attempts to improve productivity in the coal mines:

"On the orders of the British Military Government, men from all parts of the British zone were forced to work in the mines. This proved completely futile. Also, miners were given special food rations which they were supposed to eat alone, away from their families. It is easy to imagine the psychological consequences. The miner was expected to eat his fill at his place of work while his wife and children went hungry at home."

And fourthly on British lack of participation in discussions in the early 1950s which were to lead to greater European integration:

"In the face of the new European possibilities Great Britain assumed an attitude of hesitation, irresolution and indecision."

An interesting insight into what the British thought of Adenauer, and his criticisms of them, is provided by Sir Christopher Steel, who was a senior and influential British diplomat in Germany, as Political Advisor to the Commander-in-Chief in Germany in 1947, Deputy High Commissioner in 1949 and British Ambassador in West Germany from 1957-63. In his Forward to Prittie’s biography, Steel wrote:

"Naturally it is Adenauer’s relations with the British which have principally interested me. The question will always be asked whether he found us fundamentally unsympathetic from the start, whether he was permanently alienated by Brigadier Barraclough [the senior British officer in Cologne], when dismissed from his post of Mayor of Cologne, or whether as I believe, and I saw him repeatedly over the whole period of his chancellorship, he only settled into petrified hostility to us when he had lost his touch and was blindly trailing de Gaulle."

This appears to me to be an extraordinary statement, for a diplomat, all the more surprising as Steel knew Adenauer well and was "… considerably in his [Adenauer’s] confidence because he was a friend of my father-in-law, who was Military Governor of Cologne after the First World War." (Steel’s father-in-law was General George Sidney Clive, the British commanding officer in the Rhineland during the occupation at the end of the First World War. Prittie described in his biography how Clive worked with Adenauer at the time, tactfully counteracting French separatists who wanted to split the Rhineland from the rest of Germany and link it more closely with France).

The story of Adenauer’s dismissal as Mayor of Cologne by the British has been told many times. According to Prittie and Adenauer’s own memoirs, he was summoned to Barraclough’s offices on 6th October 1945, summarily dismissed for incompetence, ordered to leave Cologne as soon as possible and instructed not to engage in any political activity.

Prittie also quotes an account Barraclough gave later in an interview in the Daily Express soon after Adenauer ceased to be Chancellor and which was republished in a biography of Adenauer by Rudolf Augstein, editor of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, and a long-standing political opponent of Adenauer’s.

In this interview, Barraclough said Major General Templer (Director of Civil Affairs and Military Government at the time of the invasion of Germany and later Deputy Chief of Staff under Robertson), had told him he was disturbed by the lack of progress in Cologne. Barraclough arranged a meeting with Adenauer to discuss the problems of the city, asked him to sit down, and in response to his concerns Adenauer showed him plans for the Cologne of the Future, built outside the city: "Surrounded by the chaos which I have described [Cologne after the war] here we had the senior paid official with his head well in the clouds."

Adenauer’s own account in his memoirs is quite different. Adenauer had to stand, and the meeting was short and consisted of the reading of a 500 word statement dismissing him. The reason given in the statement was that Barraclough "was not satisfied with the progress which has been made in Cologne in connection with the repair of buildings and the clearance of the streets and the general task of preparing for the coming winter," an accusation Adenauer dismissed as ridiculous.

Prittie says in his biography, that Steel told him later neither he nor Robertson had any knowledge of Adenauer’s sacking, and added:

"Sir Christopher [Steel] compared Templer’s part in the affair with a stray remark of King Henry II of England, which resulted in the murder of Thomas a’Becket."

This seems to me another extraordinary remark. Did Steel really mean to compare Templer with King Henry II and Adenauer with Thomas a’ Becket. One a king and the other a saint and martyr? If not, did he understand that this was exactly how Adenauer could present the story?

According to Prittie, Adenauer retold the story of his sacking a great many times afterwards. Sometimes he tried to make a joke of it, as when he told Brigadier Barraclough, many years later, when he was Chancellor, that he had two files in his office, one headed ‘Dismissal by the Nazis’ and the other ‘Dismissal by the Liberators’.

In his memoirs, Adenauer also refers to the story in describing his first meeting with the newly appointed Sholto Douglas, who succeeded Field Marshal Montgomery as Military Governor of the British Zone of Occupation, in 1946.

"The British Commander-in-Chief and Military Governor, Air Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, arrived amid a roll of drums and a blare of trumpets."

Members of the Zonal Advisory Council (a representative body of leading German politicians) were presented to the Military Governor. Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the Social Democrats, had a "long and cordial welcome." Adenauer’s own lasted one minute and forty-five seconds:

"Douglas asked me about my political career to date. I said: ‘In 1917 I became Oberbürgermeister of Cologne; in 1933 I was removed by the National Socialists because of political unreliability. In March 1945 I was reinstated by the Americans and in October of the same year dismissed by the British for incompetence. That is why I am now on the Zonal Advisory Council.’ Douglas looked rather surprised and walked on without saying a word."

In his biography Prittie refers to personal conversations with Robertson and also with Lord Longford (who succeeded J B Hynd as the British Minister with responsibility for Germany in 1946), saying that both of them "believed that he [Adenauer] regarded his dismissal as an affront and that it left a mental scar which never entirely healed."

This is pure speculation, but it seems to me this story shows how little many of the British in Germany really understood Adenauer (or German politics in general after the war). Above all, Adenauer was a consummate political operator. His dismissal by the British was a political gift, which he was able to exploit, for many years, for all it was worth. He didn’t really care very much what the British thought about him, (something British politicians and diplomats, with a great sense of their own self importance, probably failed to understand), but he did care a great deal about what the German people thought about him.

He could make a subtle comparison between the British Military Government and the Nazis, passing it off as a joke, drawing attention to the fact that both could act in an authoritarian manner and arbitrarily dismiss local city officials. In so doing he could reinforce his own legitimacy and authority as an elected representative of the German people, (and imply that if the British occupiers really believed in democracy why didn’t they practice what they preached?).

He could suggest (with some justification) that on occasions the British were incompetent and lacked judgement, and in so doing reinforce the view that the sooner the Allies restored responsibility for governing Germany to the Germans, the better.

He could emphasise his independence from the Allies, and his willingness to stand up to them, at a time when he was under constant criticism from his political opponents, the Social Democrats, for being too subservient to them (an issue which reached its peak when Kurt Schumacher accused him in a debate in the German parliament of being the ‘Chancellor of the Allies’, a remark he later had to withdraw).

And if the British were offended by this, why should he care, as they were far less important for the future of the new West German Federal Republic, than the French or the Americans!

Sholto Douglas – and the German Luftwaffe

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"?

More on Sholto Douglas – and his opposition to the death penalty

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."

Sholto Douglas – the second Military Governor of the British Zone in Germany

8th February 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" was to "Follow the People," and I provided a list of people who I think are interesting for one reason or another.

One of the people on the list was Sir Sholto Douglas, or, to give him his full title, after he was enobled in 1948, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Douglas of Kirtleside G.C.B. M.C. D.F.S.

Sholto Douglas succeeded Field Marshal Montgomery as Commander-in-Chief of the British forces of occupation in Germany, and Military Governor of the British Zone in May 1946 and was in this post for 18 months, until October 1947, when he was succeeded by Sir Brian Robertson.

I’ve recently read his autobiography, (Sholto Douglas with Robert Wright, Years of Command:  London: Collins, 1966).

His time as Military Governor was not a success. In his own words:

"It is still impossible for me to think of the time that I spent as Military Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Germany as anything but the unhappiest period of my entire official life."

On his own admission, he would seem to have been out of his depth. Several times in the book he made comments similar to the following:

"By the end of the summer of 1947, I 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 … I also know that I was much too simple in my tastes for the trappings of such an office; and since I was essentially an R.A.F. officer there was so much about it that, having nothing to do with the Service, I found far from congenial."

I fail to understand why he was offered the job in the first place.

He had been a young pilot on the Western Front, during the First World War. After a brief spell working for a civil aviation company, he re-joined the RAF in 1920, and worked for Group Captain Dowding at HQ at Kenley.

A year later he became Chief Flying Instructor at Manston, where he worked with Keith Park and "Mary" Coningham. Park and Coningham were New Zealanders, which is, apparently, why "Mary" had his name, as a corruption of "Maori".

In 1922 he joined the newly formed RAF staff college, where one of his fellow students was Charles Portal, later to become Chief of the Air Staff during the war.

It’s interesting to observe that all these men were later to become some of the most senior officers in the RAF during the Second World War.

In 1936 he was appointed to the rank of Air Vice Marshall and became Assistant Chief of the Air Staff at the Air Ministry, with responsibility for all aspects of operational training. In 1940 he was promoted to Deputy Chief of the Air Staff and in October of that year, shortly after the Battle of Britain, replaced Dowding as Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command. Two years later he was appointed Air Officer, Commanding in Chief, for the Middle East, where he fought with Montgomery at the battle of El Alamein. At the start of 1944 he returned to Britain as Commander-in-Chief of Coastal Command.

After the end of the war he was appointed Commander of the British air forces of occupation in Germany, with additional responsibility for disarming and dismantling what was left of the German Luftwaffe.

This was undoubtedly a distinguished military career, but nothing in it would appear to qualify him for the position of Military Governor, with responsibility for all aspects of government and administration of the British Zone in Germany, with a population of over 20 million people – a position requiring the skills of a politician and administrator, rather than those of a military commander.

In his autobiography he claims he never wanted the job:

"After all that had happened in the two world wars in which I had participated, I felt less like going to Germany than to anywhere else. But there was also in my mind a feeling of regret that was perhaps only natural, since I was a professional airman, about the fate of the German air force."

He says he expressed a wish to return to civilian life in January 1946 and was given to understand that this would be granted. He then saw Montgomery who told him he had been recommended to succeed him as Commander-in-Chief and Military Governor. Shortly after, Arthur Tedder, Chief of the Air Staff, approached him with the same question, and he reluctantly accepted.

Back in London, he was asked to meet the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who said to him:

"I am told, Sholto, that you do not want to go back to Germany … but the Cabinet discussed the matter this morning, and you were unanimously elected to the job. I think you ought to go."

I can think of three possible reasons why he was offered the job, despite his apparent reluctance, and obvious unsuitability for it:

The politicians in London, including the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and the rest of the Cabinet, didn’t have a clue as to what was required, and what the situation was really like in Germany at the time.

It was something of a poisoned chalice, and no-one else wanted it.

For some reason it was decided the job should go to an RAF officer, rather than another army officer like Montgomery, and Sholto Douglas was the most senior person available.

This is pure speculation on my part. If anyone reading this posting can shed any light on this, please add a comment, or send me an email.

Mass Observation at the Movies

8th February 2008

I’ve recently read ‘Mass Observation at the Movies’ by Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987).

Mass Observation is the organisation founded in 1937 by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the poet and journalist Charles Madge and the documentary film maker, Humphrey Jennings, to create a kind of written documentary of their own times, and to study their own civilisation in much the same way as anthropologists studied other civilisations, for example the Pacific islanders of the New Hebrides, from where Tom Harrisson had recently returned.

Mass Observation archives are held at the University of Sussex and form a wealth of material for historians to draw on. Some of the material has been published and I’ve been particularly impressed by ‘Nella Last’s War: the Second World War Diaries of a Housewife‘ and three books edited by Simon Garfield, comprising extracts from diaries written for Mass Observation during and immediately after the war. I wrote about the first of these, (in the order in which they were published), ‘Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain‘, in one of my first postings on this blog, two years ago.

I’ve also written extensively on this blog about one of the three founders of Mass Observation, the documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings, and his film about Germany after the war, ‘A Defeated People.’

Jennings was involved with Mass Observation for only a short time, during the two years between founding Mass Observation in January 1937 and the start of the war in 1939. During this time he worked on two projects, a book about events on the day King George VI was crowned and ‘Spare Time‘, a documentary film about what people did when they were not at work, in three industrial areas of Britain – South Wales, Tyneside and Lancashire.

During the war, Mass Observation undertook a few projects to study the reactions of cinema audiences. Firstly a report on Ministry of Information short films, dated 24 July 1941, analysing data from answers to the question: which were the best films and which the worst? "The most frequently praised film" by far, was Humphrey Jennings’ ‘London can take it’ with 12 favourable mentions.

Secondly, Mass Observation issued a directive in November 1943, asking their panel of observers the question: "What films have you liked best during the past year? Please list six films in order of liking and give your reasons for liking them." In this case, the archives include not just a summary and analysis of the data, but the responses themselves. Most of them refer to feature films, but some people mention documentaries among their favourite films.

This is the first time I’ve found anything written about Jennings’ films by members of the general public who watched his films soon after they were made.

Most of the references are to two of his films made that year: Fires were Started and The Silent Village. I found it interesting that all the observers quoted said they liked the sincerity they saw in the films, their portrayal of ordinary men and women, their restraint, and lack of melodrama.

Here are some extracts:

A 26 year old wireless operator in the Royal Corps of Signals in Kent:
"Fires were Started. The best wartime documentary yet: never have ordinary people been more convincingly done … and the film is nevertheless ‘poetic’ in its treatment."

University lecturer, aged 55, Aberystwyth:
"The Silent Village – I believe that was the title. Welsh Lidice. This was good. Quiet, impressive, real. No melodrama."

Electrical engineer, aged 33, London
"Fires have been started. Having lived through the London blitz we naturally enjoyed this film. We were impressed with the way things were done and with the lack of heroics."

Radio Operator (unemployed) aged 31, Newport
"The Silent Village, a short film showing how Cwmgiedd, near Swansea, might have been treated by the Nazis if it had been Lidice in Czechoslovakia. Played with complete sincerity and conviction by the inhabitants of Cwmgiedd, without any professionals."

ATS sergeant (female) aged 22, London:
"The Silent Village – Natural, very moving and restrained"

Typist, aged 20, Reading
"Fires were Caused. (I think I’ve got the name wrong). It was a short, ‘official’ film, but very sincere, moving and human. About the work of the AFS [auxiliary fire service]. Photography was good and the actors were perfect."

‘You have to see it to believe it’: British first impressions of Germany after the war.

2nd February 2008

Most accounts of Germany after the war, written by British soldiers, administrators, diplomats and journalists, include a paragraph or two describing their first impressions – what they saw looking out of the aeroplane or train window, or driving through the streets of one of the cities.

I wrote about British and US first impressions of Germany in 1945 in a posting on this blog a few weeks ago. I was therefore interested to find, a few days ago, an article in the British Zone Review, in which the author reflected on "First impressions of newcomers to Germany." The article was part of a regular series called "Passing Comment" and dated 22nd June 1946, just over one year after the end of the war:

"First impressions of newcomers to Germany are always of interest. Older members of the Control Commission are accustomed to the bomb-blasted ruins of industrial centres such as Essen, Dortmund, Hamm, Munster and intervening smaller towns as seen from a leave train. The new arrival, however, reflects upon B.B.C. news bulletins which during late war years spoke of the tremendous effect of our bombing. He realises that returning friends who said to him, ‘You have to see it to believe it’ were right when they also intimated that, by comparison, Britain’s industrial areas had been much more fortunate. This may be difficult to believe by workers of London, Coventry, Plymouth, Southampton, and the rest of Britain’s scarred cities and towns; but it is true that nowhere in Britain is it possible to travel for hours at a time through built-up areas which, as far as the eye can see, show literally no building without its scars, and the majority just acres of roofless, tottering shells. Such is the picture of the new arrival. He looks out of his compartment in vain hoping to see perhaps one small group of houses untouched. He notices too, the yellowish tinge on people’s faces, and wishes his acquaintances in Britain, who frequently repeat how a second cousin of ‘so-and-so’ says the Germans are well-fed while Britons gradually become more under-nourished by each new cut in their rations, could see for themselves."

E F (Fritz) Schumacher

26th January 2008

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

One of the people on the list, in the category "German speaking exiles who took British nationality to return to Germany to work for the Control Commission" is E F (Fritz) Schumacher.

Fritz Schumacher is best known as a pioneer of sustainable development and the author of the book "Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered."  I remember reading the book many years ago, and it made a deep impression on me, as it did on millions of others all around the world.

Schumacher founded, or was involved at an early stage, in a number of organisations which remain important today. Probably the best known is Practical Action (which he founded in 1966 as the Intermediate Technology Development Group). In 1970 he became President of the Soil Association. After his death the Schumacher Circle was formed in his memory and to help continue his work.

I’ve recently read a biography of Schumacher by his daughter, Barbara Wood. (Alias Papa: A Life of Fritz Schumacher. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984).

Fritz Schumacher wrote "Small is Beautiful" towards the end of his life. He was born in 1911 and grew up in Bremen. In 1930 he was selected as one of two German Rhodes scholars to go to Oxford, and he also spent a year studying in Harvard. His younger sister Elizabeth was married to the Nobel prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, and he married the daughter of Rudolf Petersen, a Hamburg shipping magnate. After the end of the war Petersen was appointed mayor of Hamburg by the British.

(I wrote about a meeting in 1945 between Rudolf Petersen and William Strang, the political adviser to the British Military Governor in an earlier post. At the time I didn’t know about the connection between Petersen and Schumacher.)

An opponent of Nazism, Schumacher left Germany after he was married in 1936, and moved, with his wife, to England. After the outbreak of war he worked for a time as an agricultural labourer, before being offered a job as an economist at the ‘Oxford Institute of Statistics’ which had connections with Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. He wrote articles for the Observer and other papers, and worked with William Beveridge on plans for the welfare state. For this he was criticised personally at the 1944 Liberal Party assembly by a certain Commander Geoffrey Bowles who attacked him as follows (which just goes to show that not everyone in Britain was in favour of the Welfare State):

"Herr Schumacher is a Prussian who came over here in 1934 and the National Socialism he left behind in Germany he is now advocating here in England. The Beveridge state slavery plan would require Englishmen to ask officials for a licence to live, and turn free Englishmen into Schumacher sheep to be herded about by officials. It is German state slavery."

Soon after the end of the war he returned to Germany to work as part of J K Galbraith‘s strategic bombing survey of Germany. A year later, in May 1946, after being naturalised as a British citizen, he was appointed economic advisor to British Control Commission in Germany, where he strongly advocated nationalisation of coal and steel. For various reasons, including the attitude of the US in Germany, who were strongly opposed to nationalisation, this never happened.

He returned to England in late 1949 to take up a job as economic advisor to the newly created National Coal Board in Britain. He opposed the running down of the coal industry in the late 1950s and 1960s, in the face of cheap imports of oil and gas, and during this time he formulated his ideas on sustainable development, which were eventually published as "Small is Beautiful." He died in 1977.

I found the most moving part of the book was where Barbara Wood, his daughter, quotes from letters he wrote to his wife shortly after returning to Germany in 1945. During the war his parents and the rest of his family had stayed in Germany. Unlike Fritz, his younger brother Ernest had joined the Hitler Youth as a boy, then become a soldier and died on Eastern Front in Russia in 1943.

In some ways, such as his uncertainty what to make of it all, and his comments on how beautiful the country looked, in contrast with the grim destruction in the towns, they remind me of another set of letters which the British documentary film director Humphrey Jennings, wrote to his wife a few months later, and which I quoted in an earlier posting.

Here are some extracts from Schumacher’s letters to his wife:

On June 12th 1945 after arriving in Germany:
"Germany, from the air, is very, very beautiful. If one could forget about the towns (and a lot of other things) it would be heavenly.

Soon I might be able to write more concretely, but not yet. There is something uncanny about all I have seen so far – as if you saw a person walking about who you knew was dead. He speaks and moves and even laughs – and then you notice that he does not breathe. He does not seem to see you and you pretend not to see him."

A second letter written the same day:
"Driving through Frankfurt I could say nothing but ‘My God’. But one seems to get used to it: the town is still beautiful with wonderful rows of trees everywhere. In many houses the ground floors and cellars are still habitable. You see many shops in houses the three upper storeys of which are totally destroyed. Somehow the people seem to find shelter…"

On June 18th:
"Well, I have just completed my first week, and I am beginning to find my way about. Yet it is still impossible to give even a preliminary summing up on impressions.

I was out in the field yesterday going through Marburg, Giessen, to Fritzlar. Giessen is dreadfully knocked about. But Marburg and Fritzlar are still lovely – so is the whole countryside, indescribably lovely. The woods are so beautiful it almost makes me weep. The fields are large and generous, without silly little hedges everywhere."

On June 23rd:
"My mind is a chaos of thoughts and emotions, and I cannot describe what I feel. I need time to digest it all. There is also so much to digest of the stuff I am learning here. What a bunch of gangsters these Nazis were! I am now looking into their most secret stuff. And what an immeasurable tragedy – this regime and those shortsighted stupid people – owning the most beautiful country in the world, living in the most beautiful houses – and falling for the idiocies of power and glory."

Later in the same letter:
"You cannot imagine how beautiful is this country of Germany. I had forgotten it myself … I look around and say nothing but, ‘Why, why, why not be happy here? What is it that makes human beings so inhuman as a nation when they are (as you know, and as everyone can see here) so human as individuals?"

On July 2nd:
After meeting his parents, who were now at Ueberlingen near Lake Constance, and hearing about the fate of his brother Ernst…

"They then told me a lot about him, and what I heard tore up a wound which time had only incompletely healed. I went through some of his letters which reveal a personality so complete, so full of promise, so beautiful that I have known of no one to compare him to – considering his age. They also show – is it a consolation or an additional cause of grief? – that he was abundantly happy till the last day, believing firmly that he was fulfilling a noble duty.

These letters are terrible to read. My father has written a biography of Ernst, about a hundred pages, which tells the whole story… But I was very bitter during the night. [after reading the biography] Why did they corrupt the mind of Ernst with nationalist poison? … My parents find consolation in the thought that Ernst had sacrificed himself for the noblest of all causes. It is terrible to think that he has been sacrificed for the worst of all causes. I want to forget it, because if I go on thinking about it I shall become bitter against my father, who is a good and lovable man – and bitterness is no good.

So there was this bitter-sweet mixture in everything during those two days. The crisis of our time, the crisis of Germany, goes right through my family."

Follow the People (continued)

20th January 2008

In my posting last week, I said the approach I intend to follow for my research on "’Winning the Peace’: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1951" was to ‘Follow the People’.

Here is a list of people I think are interesting for one reason or another. I’ve written about some of them on this blog. I know very little about the others.

Senior officers
    Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery
    Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Sholto Douglas
    General Sir Brian Robertson
    General Gerald Templer
    General Alec Bishop

Politicians, administrators and diplomats
    J B Hynd
    Austen Albu
    William Strang
    Harold Ingrams
    Christopher Steel
    Noel Annan

Education advisers
    Donald Riddy
    Robert Birley
    T H Marshall

Young men
    John Seymour Chaloner

German speaking exiles who took British nationality to return to Germany to work for the Control Commission
    Harry Bohrer
    Michael Thomas
    George Clare
    E F (Fritz) Schumacher

Follow the People

13th January 2008

Last week I attended the annual postgraduate conference at the German Historical Institute in London. It was interesting to hear what other students were working on and how they approached their subject. Most those attending gave a short, 15 minute talk, followed by 15 minutes for questions and comments from the audience.

My own talk was on the conclusions of my MA dissertation, (on the British Occupation of Germany, as portrayed in three official British sources, Humphrey Jennings‘ documentary film A Defeated People, the exhibition Germany under Control, and the British Zone Review) and an attempt to describe some of the principles I intend to follow for my PhD thesis.

As I have only recently started working on this, I wasn’t able, as others did, explain the structure of the PhD thesis, or describe in detail the sources and archives I propose to use. But preparing for the talk did make me think about how I should approach my research. In summary, I decided the best approach was to "follow the people", and here is the part of my talk where I tried to explain and justify this approach:

Aims of my PhD thesis on ‘Winning the Peace’: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1951.

So where should I go from here? The aim of the PhD thesis is to take the same topic [as the MA dissertation]: the British in Germany after the war, through their own eyes, what they said they hoped to achieve, what they thought they were doing, and why they were doing it, and how this changed over time – and explore this in more detail, over a longer period, across a wider range of sources.

Why should we be interested now in what a relatively small number of people thought and did? At its peak there were 26,000 British staff in the Control Commission, the body responsible for administering Germany after the war, compared with a population of around 50 million in Britain and 20 million in the British Zone of Germany.

It seems to me there are three things in particular which make this subject worth studying:

Firstly, what the British in Germany did was different from British government policy made in London, and their attitudes, policies and actions, were formed not by official policy, but by the combination of the reality of what they found on the ground and the prejudices and preconceptions they brought with them.

Official British government policy, in general, did little more than reflect the decisions made at Potsdam and at subsequent Allied Foreign Ministers’ conferences at Moscow, Paris, London and New York, and bore little relation to the issues and problems faced by those responsible for day to day administration in Germany. In fact there had been extensive planning for what should be done in post-war Germany, but British officers interviewed or writing afterwards, said they either received no policy instruction at all, or that which they did receive was completely inappropriate. To quote Brian Robertson, Deputy Military Governor from 1945 to 1947, Commander-in-Chief and Military Governor from 1947-49, and High Commissioner from 1949-51, and probably the most influential British figure in post-war Germany, writing in 1965:

"As for the men who came from the United States and from this country to confer in Teheran, Quebec, Yalta and Potsdam, [at the Allied summits held during and immediately after the war], they had an entirely false picture in their minds as to what the situation would be in Germany, and they were aiming at a completely wrong objective. I do not say this in criticism. I do not for a moment claim that you or I might have been wiser if we had been in their shoes. I merely state what I believe to be the fact…."

Secondly, what the British in Germany actually did, and why they did it, is not well understood, in part because it is so difficult to generalise. Because there was no clear guidance from London it is not really possible to speak of  British policy as such, or even, therefore, of British influence on this or that aspect of West German society. Instead, the British in Germany were a collection of individuals, who may have shared some common principles and prejudices, but who reacted to different circumstances in different ways. Because German political, economic and social structures had collapsed in chaos at the end of the war, some British individuals possessed enormous power and influence in particular areas. We therefore find many extraordinary, but disconnected stories, such as, to quote one of the best known, the very young, 22 year old British Major John Chaloner, giving the, even younger, 21 year old Rudolf Augstein a licence to publish the news magazine Der Spiegel, in part because they shared the same birthday, and he trusted him, but also because he liked someone who didn’t always say yes and was prepared to argue with him. When his senior officer discovered what he had done, Challoner was disciplined and removed from his post for exceeding his duties. In an interview many years afterwards Challoner said:

"The Spiegel was my baby. I told them how to do the magazine and what it should look like, by producing a dummy. This was the famous ‘Probenummer.’ … I used my, what I will call ‘sweeping powers’ that I had, to commandeer offices, commandeer people, recruit people from all over the zone and push them into this one title, that I wanted to be a success, if nothing else, and it was."

Thirdly, the period is of considerable interest in its own right, not only as part of British or German national histories, because it provides an illustration, or maybe a case study, of three important themes which continue to be relevant today. The first is the transition from war to peace. I need only mention the word ‘Iraq’ to make the point that what happens after the end of a war can be at least as important as what happens during the war itself. Secondly, the meeting of different cultures. During the war there was very little contact between British and German people, apart from when they were shooting each other, or dropping bombs on each other, and as a result people tended to see each other in terms of collective national stereotypes, reinforced by government propaganda on both sides. After the war, this changed as occupiers and occupied had to deal with each other face to face as individuals, and as the historian Anthony Nicholls has said "Before long, therefore common sense overcame the myths about national character." The third theme I wish to highlight, related to the other two is: coming to terms with the enemy. How did people, on both sides, become reconciled to the former enemy, after a very bitter war, and even, in many cases, become friends, allies and partners?

Lastly, and to conclude this talk, what approach should I adopt to research these issues and what sources should I use? Clearly I need to be selective, but how do I find the most relevant and interesting topics and sources?

In my view, history is a process of discovery. As L P Hartley famously said in the opening words of his book, The Go-Between: "The Past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." We can study the past in the same way as we visit a foreign country. We can read the guidebooks, plan our visit and use our time as effectively as possible. Or we can simply go and see what we find when we get there. It may take longer, but I prefer the second approach, because you are more likely to find something unexpected.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is another film I can use as the focus for my research, in the same way as I used A Defeated People, and in any case, I’m not sure this would be right for a PhD.

As I said earlier, in my view the British in Germany are best seen as a collection of individuals, some of whom had far more power and influence than would normally be expected from someone in their position. The approach I plan to use for the PhD, therefore, is to follow the people. There is no shortage of material available to do this. Many have written memoirs, or left personal or official papers in the archives. Some are still alive. I recently interviewed one elderly gentleman who worked in Germany for 16 years from 1945 to 1962 and claims he was the first British soldier to be given permission to marry a Germany woman. For two years after the end of the war, until 1947, this was forbidden. I may try an oral history approach and interview others, but there will probably not be time to do this, as I already have a list of around 15 people I think are especially interesting, for one reason or another and whose papers are in the archives.

What I hope to find are individual accounts which reveal something unusual or unexpected, but which can also be substantiated by reference to other people and other sources, and therefore accepted as representative of at least one aspect of the British in Germany.

Happy New Year

7th January 2008

Happy New Year to all my readers. If you’ve stumbled upon this blog for the first time, I am a part-time PhD student at the (CCBH) Centre for Contemporary British History, part of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

In this blog I try to record and make sense of my thoughts, and the books, the papers and archives I read, as I gradually work through my research. As a part-time student it will take around 6 years to complete the thesis, so I don’t expect to finish until 2013.

My area of research is the British Occupation of Germany after the Second World War, 1945-1951. A few weeks ago I described this in a little more detail and posted my Research Proposal.

I aim to post on this blog around once a week, and generally manage to do so, more or less, with a few breaks over Christmas and New Year, and during the Summer.

In my view history is a process of discovery and in this blog I aim to share my discoveries and, I hope, the occasional insight, with anyone who is interested. I also find writing a weekly post very useful to help organise my own thoughts.

Over the past two years I’ve posted most of what later became my MA dissertation, (after suitable re-writing, amendments, references and so on), and will do the same with the PhD. If you find anything of interest to you, please browse further through the postings, ‘search this blog’, quote what I say (with suitable acknowledgement, reference, link or trackback) and if you wish, post or email me your comments.