How much was T-Force worth to the British Economy … £20 million or £2,000 million?

10 November 2010

In my last post, I wrote about an excellent new book, Otherwise Occupied, by Michael Howard who, as a young man in occupied Germany after the war, worked as Intelligence Officer for T-Force, the secret British army unit which obtained material: equipment, documents and technical know-how, from Germany to benefit the British economy.

The book raises the intriguing question of how much the material removed by T-Force was worth in monetary terms. The difference between what Michael Howard and his colleagues thought the value was at the time, and later official estimates, is striking.

In the book, Michael Howard claimed that an internal report, compiled in 1949 by staff who had worked for T-Force, proposed the extraordinary figure of £2,000 million as the total value of material removed by T-Force. He made a similar point in his review, in the RUSI  Journal, of Sean Longden’s history of T-Force, regretting that although Longden discussed the issue in his book, he did not ‘hazard a view’ as to the correct amount. An article in the Daily Express, on 9 October 1946, had suggested that the total value of property obtained by T-Force, then less than half-way into its programme, was the lower, but still substantial, amount of £100 million. Longden referred to an interview with a British official, who had said this figure was ‘niggardly’ and at the very bottom end of the scale of what had actually been achieved. This suggests a total figure for the whole programme of well into the hundreds of millions of pounds, if not quite as high as the two billion pounds estimated by Michael Howard’s former colleagues in 1949.

Figures quoted by historians for the total value of reparations obtained by Britain from Germany are very much lower than this. UK official receipts for reparations from Germany after the Second World War totalled just over £30 million. Alan Bullock quoted a similar figure of £29 million, in his biography of Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary.

There would seem to be four possible reasons for this discrepancy.

Firstly, like was not compared with like. Most of the material removed by T-Force by-passed the official system which allocated reparations from Germany among the western allies. This was co-ordinated by an organisation known as IARA, the ‘Inter Allied Reparations Agency’, created on 14 January 1946, consisting of representatives from 18 countries claiming a share in reparations from Germany.

Material obtained on the battlefield was classified as ‘booty’, rather than as reparations, and could be unilaterally removed by the victors for their own use. As John Farquharson has described in an article in the Journal of Contemporary History, the victorious allies failed to agree on exactly what comprised ‘booty’ or a ‘battlefield’ in modern warfare, but eventually accepted the fairly wide definition that booty consisted of: ‘any material of whatever nature and wherever situated’ intended for use in war. In March 1946 a more narrow definition of ‘booty’ was adopted by the British. According to Farquharson:

‘There is no doubt that up to that date [March 1946] large amounts of information, technical research facilities and prototype machines were confiscated as booty by the British authorities in Germany, and that some of what disappeared did not come under the heading of purely military usage. Until 1 January 1946 the war against Japan validated (at least in theory) such actions, but confiscation continued even after that date. … However, it is true that whatever industrial machinery found its way to Britain under this rubric prior to March 1946, thereafter booty excluded such material. Unilateral removals of industrial prototypes and so on were now carried out as reparations, chargeable to Britain at IARA.’

Eventually an official figure of £48,000 was produced, in 1951, for the value of material removed as ‘booty’ (but excluding anything removed before 1 January 1946, when no satisfactory records had been kept). This figure is tiny; less than 1,000th of the £100 million quoted in the Daily Express on 9 October 1946 as the total value of property obtained by T-Force, which suggests that either the value of material removed as ‘booty’ was actually very much higher than this, or there were other reasons for the discrepancy.

A second possible explanation is that the figure quoted in the Daily Express, and the report Michael Howard recalled seeing in 1949, may both have assumed a much higher value for intangibles, (such as documents, patents and know-how transmitted by German scientists recruited by T-Force to work in Britain), than later official estimates, which did not include figures for ‘intellectual reparations’.

During the war there had been a massive expansion in industrial capacity in Britain, to manufacture arms and equipment to support the war effort, so there was no great need for additional industrial equipment such as machine tools. Quality and know-how was a different matter. According to an article in The Times on 10 December 1946, a vast quantity of information was compiled by 10,000 investigators working in Germany for BIOS, the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, supported by Michael Howard and his colleagues in T-Force. 1,400 reports were produced by BIOS on a wide range of industries including agriculture, fisheries, electrical and mechanical engineering, glass and ceramics, metals, mineral, optical and mechanical precision instruments, rubber, textiles and clothing. Industrialists were encouraged to make use of ‘Germany’s war-time advances in science and heavy industry’ at an exhibition, organised by the Board of Trade, which opened in London on 9 December 1946, and then toured the country. According to The Times, 460,000 copies of the reports had already been circulated to various institutions and 490,000 copies sold to individuals. All material was freely available so there was ‘no question of infringement of patent rights by British manufacturers.’

Given the scale of this operation, it is easy to imagine a high value could be placed on the information obtained. From an accounting perspective, however, the intangible nature of these assets and the lack of patent protection could make it difficult, if not impossible, to provide an accurate monetary assessment of how much the material obtained in this way was worth.

A third possible reason for the discrepancy, was that it was in the interest of the British government to minimise the value of reparations booked to their own account, so as not to have to share these with the 17 other Western Allies or with the Soviet Union, which, according to the Potsdam Agreement, was entitled to 25% of the total value of reparations obtained from the British Zone (in addition to 100% of the reparations from their own zone). In his article, John Farquharson described how both IARA and the Soviet Union were suspicious of the official figures produced by the British. IARA expressed ‘grave concerns’ over unaccounted removals by the occupying powers (ie Britain, France, the US and the Soviet Union) and ‘fictitious figures’ were given by the British government to the Soviet Union, at the March 1947 meeting of the quadripartite Council of Foreign Ministers.

Michael Howard was quite forthright in his review in the RUSI Journal as to what he considered had happened. Whatever the correct number was for the value of material obtained by T-Force, he wrote: ‘it was one that His Majesty’s Government intended to conceal…’

‘The parallel operations of the Russians, who were not members of the IARA in Brussels, but took whatever they wanted by way of unilateral reparations as well as booty, were on a scale calculated to have been ten times that of T-Force. As the British had been openly critical of the Russian wholesale sacking of any territory under their control, public disclosure of any definitive figure for our own calculations would have made us appear embarrassingly hypocritical. Any unilateral reparations taken by the British were meant to be declared to the IARA in Brussels and deducted from their multilateral reparations entitlement. In the 1961 final report of the IARA, the British total was shown as $180 million, equivalent at the rate of exchange prevailing in 1946-48 to £45 million. It had already reached that sum by the end of 1946, as shown in their annual report for that year. This meant either that they had not declared much of what had been taken, or that they had declared absurdly low values, or both. If the total suggested in 1949 [by his former colleagues] had been published, they were at risk of being found out in a deception.’

Fourthly, the official figures may have been broadly correct and the estimates by the Daily Express and Michael Howard’s former colleagues exaggerated. This is the conclusion John Farquharson reached at the end of his article, writing that: ‘Britain's tangible gains from Germany did not amount to any great worth … How far the gap was covered by intellectual reparations cannot be determined with any accuracy’ he continued, as patent information was generally published and made available to all and it was not reasonable to expect to UK to book a financial benefit for something that was shared with others. In the same way, he argued, the UK received no royalty payments for the discovery of penicillin or Whittle’s work on jet engines, as the work on both of these was undertaken in the UK, but the benefits shared with other countries. In addition, he wrote, British payments to its own zone in Germany totalled £140 million by April 1947, far in excess of the official receipts from reparations of around £30 million.

References:

Michael Howard, Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany, (Tiverton: Old Street Publishing, 2010)

Sean Longden, T-Force: the Race for Nazi War Secrets, 1945 (London: Constable, 2009)

John E. Farquharson, ‘Governed or Exploited? The British Acquisition of German Technology, 1945-48’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.32, No.1, (1997), pp 23-42

Michael Howard, ‘Review of Sean Longden, T-Force: the Race for Nazi War Secrets 1945’, RUSI Journal, (December 2008), pp 108-110

Michael Howard – Otherwise Occupied

19th October 2010

I first heard from Michael Howard in October 2008, when he emailed me to say he was personally ‘an alumnus of Nachkriegsdeutschland '46/7’ and asked if I would send him a copy of my MA dissertation on ‘Winning the Peace’. He thought it would be of interest to his U3A (University of the Third Age) group, which was studying the ‘Aftermath of Conflict’ in various times and places.

I was very happy to do so, and since then he has been kind enough to share with me some memories of the time he spent in Germany in 1946-47, as Intelligence Officer for T-Force, the secret British army unit first set up in 1944 to investigate and secure research laboratories and factories by-passed by the front-line troops as they advanced into Germany and which later ‘evacuated’ to Britain a large quantity of equipment, machinery, documents and key individuals and scientists.

Michael Howard has now published his memoirs of this time as Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany. Remarkably, the 67 letters he wrote home between February 1946 and December 1947 were kept by his mother and these letters, reprinted word for word, provide the chronological framework for the book, with the author commenting, explaining and elucidating various points in the letters to provide the context, or to highlight aspects that now appear important or amusing.

As a result, the book has the authenticity of a contemporary record, (he was only 19 years old when he was first posted to Germany), while the commentary helps the story flow and makes it easy to read, explaining the background to events and who were the various people mentioned in the letters.

The book tells two stories, both equally fascinating. The first is his contribution to the history of T-Force, one of the very few aspects of the Second World War which is still largely neglected by historians. At first, as he wrote to his mother, he was pleased to be given a job that was not a ‘liability to the taxpayer’ and the consequences of which had ‘a considerable and direct bearing on our economic recovery'. By the time he left Germany, his work had become his hobby and he carried on ‘evacuating’ material, as his personal contribution to British economic recovery, in the face of increasing resistance from senior officers and administrators, as the world changed around him and the official British policy was to help promote economic recovery in Germany, rather than extracting what they could in the way of reparations.

The second is a love-story, which ended in neither consummation nor tragedy, of his romance with the daughter of the local doctor, whose house had been requisitioned as accommodation for British officers. The doctor and his family were evicted from the house but were allowed to keep the use of his consulting room and the garden. As his relationship with the doctor’s daughter developed he found, as he wrote to his mother, that ‘to sit in the [officers’] mess evening after evening, discussing the three inch mortar, or the war strength of the armoured division, or re-fighting this or that battle, is infinitely tedious. I would rather spend my time talking to a pleasant and intelligent German than a stupid and uncongenial Englishman.’ It is an unusual love-story, because the power of social conventions, on both sides, persuaded them to control their passions and go their separate ways, she to train as a doctor and he to take up his university place at Cambridge. Since then they have stayed in touch, as friends, for over sixty years.

References

Michael Howard, Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany, (Tiverton: Old Street Publishing, 2010)

The book is published by Old Street Publishing. Copies are available and can be bought from Amazon and other web booksellers.

Harold Ingrams – Seven across the Sahara

23rd August 2010

After leaving Germany in August 1946, Harold Ingrams was appointed Chief Commissioner of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, now part of Ghana. Rather than take the more usual route by sea or air, he decided to travel by land.

I’ve been reading his account of the journey in his book Seven across the Sahara. The ‘seven’ were Ingrams himself, together with his wife Doreen, their two young daughters, one adopted and one their own, a Scottish governess for the children, his former personal assistant and secretary in Germany, and an Arabian servant who had been with the family for five years. They travelled in a Ford WOA2 military staff car, which with a V8 engine had enough power to see them through the soft sand, though they did become stuck (or ensablé as he called it) on numerous occasions and had to dig themselves out.

At the time they travelled, the land they passed through, nearly 4,000 miles from Calais to Marseilles and from Algiers across the Sahara to the border with the Gold Coast, was under French administration, as Algeria and the other French West African territories had not yet become independent. Ingrams was full of admiration for the work done by the French colonial administrators and wrote of the need for close collaboration between the French and British empires in Africa.

Although it was undoubtedly an adventure, it seems the journey was not as unusual as I thought. Before leaving, he consulted the AA (Automobile Association) and Royal Geographical Society, who showed him some maps and ‘books of motorists’ experiences across the Sahara’. The Shell oil company ensured petrol was available at strategic points on the journey, as did the French organisation S.A.T.T. (Société Africaine des Transports Tropicaux), which also arranged to service the car at stations along the route and provided spare parts, including tyres, which were in short supply in post-war Europe.

On the way they met a number of English emigrants trekking overland to South Africa, who had chosen this route because there was a waiting list of one or two years for passages by sea or air. The French colonial authorities estimated that in a year several thousand English people attempted to cross the Sahara. Many were ill prepared; some broke down on the way and never made it to South Africa.

Ingrams described one family, comprising a ‘father, mother, daughter and two small boys’. Their daughter had been the ‘inspiration in making the journey. At school she had formed pen friends with children in South Africa. With these as their only contacts and tired of the promises and prospects of post-war England, they had, like all the other trekkers on the route, set out on the great journey over desert, through forests and mountains to South Africa to start a new life…. most trekkers left England because they could not settle down after the war. Many had seen South Africa and thought there was no place like it.’
 
My own purpose in reading the book, was to look for evidence which would help me understand the colonial mentality of some of the British soldiers and administrators in post-war Germany.

Although his views may seem strange and old-fashioned nowadays, Ingrams saw himself as a modern, progressive imperialist, writing, for example that:

‘The days of colonization by force, exploitation and the imposition of an alien civilization by those who “knew what was best for the native” were over. Even the much more noble conception of trusteeship was coming to an end, and the much fuller relationship of partnership was beginning.’

In his view, benevolent rule by the imperial power would be rewarded by creating ‘bonds of friendship’ which would outlast the formal empire, as colonies were granted self-government within a British Commonwealth of Nations. He wrote of his ‘ten happy years of experience in South Arabia… There we helped men of goodwill to make peace where for a millennium there had been war, and there we helped them to set up their own ordered government.’

‘There we learnt that any self-respecting race wants to manage its own affairs, and that it is unnatural, nay wrong, for one race to be dominated by another. We learnt too that the race which in some ways may have learnt more than another will, if it casts its bread upon the waters, receive in back in such measure that the bonds of friendship so forged will be stronger than any between a conquering nation and subject peoples.’

(This optimistic view was not borne out by subsequent events in Southern Arabia, where the British were defeated militarily and withdrew in 1967, after an anti-colonial uprising known as the Aden Emergency).

Reading Seven across the Sahara, I came to realise that Ingrams’ view of empire was permeated by the spirit of what I have called ‘missionary idealism’ (see my earlier post on How three British army officers reacted to the transition from war to peace in Germany, 1945). In summary, it seemed to me, he saw his role, and that of his fellow colonial administrators, in Germany, Arabia or Africa, as to bring to the ignorant or misguided people in these countries the benefits of British experience and traditions, and convert them, to the greatest extent possible, to the British way of life. This included their religion, their spiritual and moral values, their democracy and their material prosperity.

As Ingrams wrote, when the Roman emperor Julius Caesar and Christian missionary St Augustine first landed in Britain: ‘They came to England as we now go to Africa and Asia and brought the civilization of Rome and Christian faith to these lands. We were then in much the same state as those to whom for the last hundred years or so we have taken the civilization we have built on our own institutions and what they and others brought us.’

However, it was not quite that simple. Harold Ingrams was the son of a clergyman and religion was fundamental to his outlook on life. As he wrote in the preface to the book:

‘Living amongst men and women of many different faiths has persuaded me how fundamentally religion is necessary as a background to life, and made me wonder whether, owing to the difficulties, we have not rather funked tackling the matter in our approach.’

On the other hand, his experience of the deserts of Arabia had taught him that there was no monopoly of religious truth. ‘Doreen and I had so identified ourselves with the Hadhramaut and its people’ he wrote, ‘that we felt that their country was our country, and their people our people’.

‘I have found among Muslims more sense of the abiding presence of God than anywhere else, and that I believe is largely because the wideness of the desert and its utter lack of complication portrays the spiritual, all enveloping, all seeing and all mighty nature of God more faithfully than anything else. There is – almost – nothing there but God and nothing to detract the mind from Him. That is why all the great monotheistic religions have come out of the desert.’

This meant he could not ‘go all the way with the missionary, particularly those who claim that they have the whole monopoly of truth and the only fold in which there is salvation. The Christian missionary has a mandate which he cannot refuse. In my view the administrator too must be a missionary, but I think it is his wider task to help in achieving that peace, and happiness too, which is promised to men of goodwill of whatever faith they be.’

In his view, the religion of a country depended on the environment and the African bush or forest was very different from the Arabian or Saharan desert (let alone from British villages, fields, woods and meadows)

‘Day after day of travelling through the bush makes monotonous telling, but it brought its immensity home as nothing else would do, and forced comparisons with the immensity of the desert. I was more convinced than ever of the conclusions which had grown upon me in East Africa many years ago. I could feel again the effect of his surroundings on the mind of man, and recognize the unmistakable way in which environment moulds the religious instinct present in every human being.

In the wide open spaces of the sands and barren rocks, where the endless procession of heaven is the only thing that changes, man is brought inevitably and inexorably to know the existence of the one God, to Whose infinite greatness and mercy he can only submit himself and his tiny affairs. In the bush it is far otherwise. Here his vision is cramped, indeed in the forest he scarcely sees the skies. Nature, in a multi-thousand forms, brings every sort of influence to bear on him and his, many of them harmful to human wellbeing. In the dark the million voices and unseen presences of the night whisper unimagined terrors to the puny heart of man. What wonder that he seeks to appease the infinite number of spirits which lurk in trees and rocks and springs, whence come the diseases which bring him his misery.’

In the African bush, Christianity could only progress ‘because of the renewed stream of missionaries from the West.’ If the environment was not conducive to Christianity, or to one of the other monotheistic religions, then the environment had to be changed. If this was not done, and quickly, there was a danger that the people in the colonies would follow an alternative, and dangerous route, of communism, or independence antagonistic to the ideals of western civilisation.

There was, in his view, a need for more human contact ‘between us and the people we are helping … I believe we need to be, more of us, individually believers in and practisers of democracy as a way of life.’

‘Many people believe that much of the trouble among so-called dependent peoples is due to our preaching self-government too quickly. Quite apart from the fact that most of the more vocal of the people concerned think we are too slow in our approach, there is a fundamental error in this … It is a question of human evolution, the direction taken by a world current of thought and politicians, be they of the right or left, can do very little about it. They and those they direct may hope to guide it a little, but they can do nothing to dam it nor even seriously to divert it. It is far too big.

I myself believe that to-day the only really safe way of life which is still practicable adds up to something very like what is called social democracy, and it is that which we need to teach the African and that which is the least he is likely to accept.’

‘If we agree, as I think we must, that Africa of the forest and bush needs more of the things of the spirit than her own beliefs can give her, then we must change the cramping effect of the bush and forest for something more open as fast as we can. Cultivation of the land means not only a higher material standard of living, but higher spiritual and moral standards. Christianity perhaps flourishes best in an agricultural countryside, and the more the bush and its influence disappear the better chance it is likely to have.

More cultivation and more Christianity are indeed desperately urgent. We are now attending to the former; should we not also see to the latter and, for instance, do far more to encourage the missionaries as essential partners in our development programmes? If we do not I foresee there is a grave danger that the African, finding his ancestral beliefs too slight to bear all that will be required of them, may make a religion of his politics and this could only be disastrous. Although we are not perhaps a very religious people, in the practising sense, most of what we do derives from a deep religious instinct which, I think, prevents us taking our politics violently and makes it possible for political adversaries to respect each other and be friends. Something of this spirit we have to give to others who have not the same traditions.’

In his view, Christianity, democracy, and material prosperity all went together, with his idea of the empire as a partnership.

‘Christianity and democracy always go well together in agricultural country, just as Islam and democracy do in more barren lands. Indeed our western democracy surely has Christianity as its foundation – a way of life based on love of and duty towards one’s neighbour. Only the highest type of democracy can survive in conditions of hardship and poverty. Decent average democracy must grow out of a decent standard of living. If there is to be a decent standard of living in Africa, then development must speedily be taken further than the primitive methods of agriculture one sees here in the Northern Territories. These people have not even a plough of their own … I cannot believe that civilization can be quickly built up on a plough and a couple of oxen. The salvation of democracy lies in our showing that it can produce quickly a better standard of life than communism promises. This requires a lot of education of the young and of adults, and perhaps even a reasonable measure of direction of a docile, teachable people.’

‘What we are after is surely that the peoples of Africa should accept us in the future willingly, as partners in the development of their countries, and that they should be willing and equal citizens with us not only in those countries but in Europe. It is often very difficult for people to accept this thesis, even if they accept the equality of all races of humanity and the principle of genuinely equal citizenship. The reason perhaps is that we in Europe have been so long rulers outside Europe that it is difficult for us at first to realize that if Europe is to survive we must make the new conception of partnership more real. We should want this not because we want Europe to dominate mankind, but because we wish to maintain the freedom of mankind.’

In practice, of course, things worked out very differently, in Africa, in Arabia, and in Europe, from how Ingrams envisaged them on his journey across the Sahara in 1947. But it seems to me that unless we have some understanding of the hopes and fears, the ideals and values, that he and others in similar positions had at the time, it is very difficult to explain why people did what they did, and to show, as I try to do in this blog, ‘how it really was’.

References

Harold Ingrams, Seven across the Sahara, (London: John Murray, 1949)

Harold Ingrams and echoes of Empire

14th August 2010

Earlier posts on this blog, on the British Military Governors in occupied Germany and other senior army officers of their generation, such as Field-Marshal Montgomery, Generals Brian Robertson and Alec Bishop, have shown how their view of the world was permeated with the ideals, values and prejudices of the British Empire. The same applied to some of the civilian diplomats and administrators, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Harold Ingrams (whose papers I have recently read at the excellent Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge).

His background was very similar to that of Generals Montgomery, Robertson and Bishop. His father was a clergyman and assistant master at Shrewsbury School. He was born in 1897 and so was the same age as Bishop and a year younger than Robertson. He fought and was wounded in France in the First World War. He then joined the Colonial Service and was posted to Zanzibar, Mauritius and Arabia, where he served with great distinction. For reasons which are not entirely clear, he was seconded by the Colonial Office in 1945 to the Administration and Local Government branch of the Control Commission for Germany and in December that year was made head of branch. It seems odd that someone with no experience of local government and elections, who probably had not even had an opportunity to vote in Britain, should have been given responsibility for restoring democracy in post-war Germany, but he threw himself into the task with conviction and enthusiasm. 

Not content with repealing Nazi laws and restoring the German administrative system as it had been in 1933 before Hitler came to power, he decided a more fundamental reform was necessary and that as far as possible, a British model of local government should be introduced in Germany.

In a comment which possibly reflected a point of view he had learnt at school or from his reverend father, or both, he wrote that true democracy had to be based on Christian principles (as understood by the British) and the biblical ‘thou shalt not’ of the Old Testament replaced by, in his words, ‘the principle of duty towards one’s neighbour, as we understand it, and if we are to change German methods our only yardstick is our own system.’ This sentence embodied three principles he stuck to throughout his time in Germany: the need for a fundamental change to the former German system; his belief that the essence of democracy lay not in collective social or political structures or institutions, but in personal relations between individuals conducted in a spirit of Christian morality; and a conviction that the only practicable way forward for British people in Germany was to apply as much of their own system as possible, as this was not only ‘the most robust in the world’ but the kind of democracy they knew and understood best.

True to the principles of ‘indirect rule’ in the British Empire, he wrote that suitable controls over local administration had to be prescribed and imposed by Military Government, but ‘German authorities will to the fullest extent practicable be ordered to assume administration of such controls. Thus it should be brought home to the German people that the responsibility for the administration of such controls and for any break-downs in those controls will rest with themselves.’ As he added in a later document: ‘Policy cannot succeed without the understanding and cooperation of the Germans. ‘Works without faith’ is not enough. Change of heart necessary.’

The same fundamental principles were expressed in different ways in many other documents. In February 1946 he prepared a one page paper with the title ‘On Promoting Democracy in Germany’ which he showed to General Robertson, the Deputy Military Governor. According to Ingrams, Robertson ‘read it through carefully and then passed it back saying, with some emphasis “I agree with every word if it.”’ Ingrams asked for the paper to be printed as the Forward to a new Military Government Directive on Administrative, Local and Regional Government and the Public Services and this was done.

In this he wrote, firstly, on the assumed superiority of the British form of democracy and the need for a fundamental change to the German system:

‘The character of a people generally reflects the influence of the country in which they live. Our democracy, the most robust in the world, is the product of our character and our country. It is on British soil that it flourishes best but we do export it and tended carefully it grows and flourishes in diverse lands, even if it takes a long time to acclimatise itself.

Although the Germans are to some extent of the same stock as the British, democracy as we understand it, government by the people, for the people and through the people, has never really flourished on the plains of Germany as it has in Island Britain.’

And secondly, on his understanding of the Christian basis of democracy:

‘Miracles are not to be expected but they may happen if we work with sufficient resolution and faith. The democracy we seek to establish is based on Christianity, the fulfilment of our duty towards our neighbours. The welfare of everyone of us is the concern of each of us and this is the idea which we have to practise ourselves and help the Germans to practice in each other and to us.’

A few months earlier, in November 1945, he had given a lecture tour, speaking to Military Government regional and local government detachment commanders across the zone. In this he stressed the difficulty of their task ‘selling democracy in extremely trying economic conditions’ but also the unique opportunity:

‘We have such an opportunity as has never yet occurred in history of attempting to introduce forms of democracy which, if successful should make it far more possible for us when the time comes, to leave Germany better fitted than ever before to take part with the rest of us in peaceful cooperation in Europe.’

Government, in his view, was the concern of every individual man and woman and it was ‘to the individual in the first place we have to turn our attention’. He described the role of the British in Germany as similar to that of a doctor with a patient, though in some ways, his words read as though the role in had in mind was that of priest and sinner, rather than doctor and patient:

‘I think that our role with the German is rather that of a doctor dealing with the case of a man suffering from a serious illness which he has brought on himself. It is the doctor’s role to make the patient realise his own responsibility for his sufferings, and to make him realise the danger he has been to others, to induce in him a feeling or repentance for what he has done to others.’

Needless to say, Ingrams’ ideal view of British democracy represented, at best, a very partial view of history. He made no mention of rotten boroughs or the widespread corruption that existed in British politics before the 1832 Reform Act, let alone that large parts of the population, such as those without property, farm labourers, and women, had not been able to vote at all until very recently. In his emphasis on the role of the individual, and an accompanying distrust of political parties, he seemed to hark back to an idyllic rural past, when everyone in the village knew each other and the church was the focus of the life of the community. As he said in his lecture in November 1945:

‘Nothing is more conducive to sound local government than such things as mothers’ meetings, baby shows, relief organisations and the like, and the real strength of local government in England, which is very constantly described as the home of local government, resides not so much in the higher formations but in the parish; and the strength of the parish was originally in that Christian life of collective organisation for mutual help which centred round, and was often directed by, the Church.’

It seems that his ideal view of British history and democracy was based, to a large exent, on a desire to present it as the opposite, the antithesis, of his understanding of German history. Above all, in his view, it was essential to make it as difficult as possible for anyone in Germany to re-establish the authoritarian Führerrprinzip or ‘leadership principle’ which Hitler had made the basis of Nazi society in Germany. An analysis of regional and local government under the Nazis, with the help of briefing papers prepared by the British Foreign Office, had led him to the conclusion that ‘What democratic self-government there was in Germany proved an easy prey for the Nazis’ and ‘to restore the pre-1933 system could be nothing more than ineffectual patch-work.’ As he said in the lecture:

‘German democracy has never been able to stand up to the authoritarian spirit of Prussia. There were weaknesses inherent in the political system of Weimar which inevitably led to the overthrow of that regime, and there were defects in the administrative machinery of local government which tended to bureaucracy and made it easier for an authoritarian administration to centralize power.’

The conclusions he drew from this for his work in Germany were that:

Firstly, there should be no early elections, as they needed time to introduce a new procedure, based on the British model. Simply asking German officials to arrange elections based on pre-1933 practices, as was done in the US zone, was in his view, dangerous and unwise. 

Secondly, until elections could be held, nominated, rather than elected, councils should be established, with the members chosen by British officials, on the colonial model. In this way councillors would acquire experience of the British form of local government and develop a sense of responsibility.

Thirdly, elections, when they did take place, should be on the British ‘first past the post’ or ‘majority’ system, with the electorate voting for an individual rather than a party list, as had previously been the practice in Germany. In his view, the proportional system, with candidates elected in proportion to the number of votes cast for their party, did not lead to a democratic way of life, as it was impersonal, candidates owed their election to having been selected by a party caucus, rather than to their ability to convince the electorate, and so, in his view, the system tended to lead to one strong man with a weak following. Proportional representation also tended to encourage smaller splinter or ‘freak’ parties, as he called them, rather than promoting stable government by one major party with another as an effective opposition.

Fourthly, elected representatives should be unpaid and should decide policy. The paid executive officials, who carried out agreed policies, should not be party members or take part in politics. In particular, there should be a clear separation of role and function between the elected ‘Chairman of the Council’ and the paid 'Town Clerk' or Chief Executive of the local authority.

Fifthly, to avoid a ‘clean sweep’ of one party winning all the seats at any one election, councillors should remain in post for three years, but elections should be held, and one third of the councillors elected, each year.

So how did it all work out? Ingrams’ reforms aroused strong opposition in Germany, ironically especially among confirmed anti-Nazi supporters of the Social Democratic Party, which was disadvantaged politically by many of his reforms.

Wolfgang Friedmann, a legal expert who had fled from Nazi Germany to Britain in 1934, qualified as a lawyer and barrister in Britain, and later in 1955 was appointed Professor of International Law at Columbia University New York, was highly critical of Ingrams’ reforms in a book he published in 1947 on ‘The Allied Military Government of Germany’. Friedmann spent two years working for both British and US Military Governments in Germany from May 1945, the same time that Ingrams was there.

Referring specifically to the proposal to separate the functions of ‘Chairman of the Council’ and ‘Town Clerk’, which previously in Germany had been combined in the position of the ‘Bürgermeister’, an elected mayor with executive responsibility, he wrote that:

‘By this administrative reform the British Control Commission created a vital divergence between local government in its own zone and that of the other three zones. From the beginning it aroused violent opposition amongst the vast majority of German parties and organisations. Opposition was directed mainly against the alien character of the reform, the duplication of the apparatus and the increase in cost.’

‘It has also created an instinctive opposition to a reform contrary to a great, though lately perverted, tradition of German local government. The English principle is time-honoured but has led to an increasing de facto predominance of the permanent official over the changing councils. Its operation is moreover entirely dependent upon the existence of a class of people who can take honorary office after having obtained professional security or retirement. This is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain even in England. All these traditions are absent in Germany.’

Friedmann was not impressed by the colonial mentality of some of his colleagues and it is quite possible he had Ingrams in mind when he wrote that:

‘Another type of British administrator suffers from the colonial mind. Many came to Germany with the idea that Germany could be administered on the pattern of an undeveloped British Colony. The British experience of colonial government may be more of a handicap than of a benefit in the administration of a highly developed and civilised country.’

In practice Ingrams had to compromise on proportional representation and most of his other reforms were rolled back in later years by an independent West German government.

Even in Britain, many of the features he considered a fundamental part of British democracy and an essential safeguard against authoritarianism, no longer apply. Most people now vote for a party rather than an individual, proportional representation has been introduced for elections to the European, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies, elected mayors in London and some other cities combine an elected role with (paid) executive responsibilities, (as has long been the case in the US), and special advisers have started to erode the principle of an independent, non-political, civil service.

References

Harold Ingrams papers at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge

W. Friedmann, The Allied Military Government of Germany, (London: Stevens & Sons Limited, 1947)

Harold Ingrams

4th August 2010

I’ve spent the past few days researching the papers of Harold Ingrams at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge.

Harold Ingrams was a British Colonial Administrator, best known for the ‘Ingrams Peace’ which he and his wife Doreen brokered in 1937 between warring tribes in the Hadhramaut in southern Arabia (now part of the Republic of Yemen).

He was born in 1897, the son of a clergyman and assistant master at Shrewsbury School. He fought and was wounded in the First World War and then joined the Colonial Service, working in Zanzibar and Mauritius before being posted to Aden, in southern Arabia, in 1934.

He seems to have been cast in the same mould as other British colonial officials and travellers in Arabia, such as T E Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger. After being sent to the coastal town of Al Mukalla, he and his wife were the first Europeans to visit some of the remote inland wadis (or valleys) in the Hadhramaut, travelling by donkey and camel. In 1937 he was appointed British Resident Adviser for the territory that was to become the Eastern Aden Protectorate. He wore Arabian clothes and like Lawrence, believed the Arabs should be left alone to work out their own destiny and opposed the implantation of a Western style democracy.

In 1945, and this is the reason for my interest in him, he was seconded by the Colonial Office to work for the Control Commission for Germany. He was given the job of head of the Administration & Local Government branch, responsible for restoring democracy in the British Zone of Germany after the fall of Hitler, recommending suitable forms of governmental organisation, which he believed generally should be based on the British model, and organising elections.

In 1947, after two years in Germany, he returned to the Colonial Office as Chief Commissioner for the Northern Gold Coast (now part of Ghana), but retired and returned to the UK after only one year in post. In later life he continued to be consulted by the Colonial Office on various matters and took part in missions to Gibraltar, Hong Kong and Uganda, though he was not appointed to another permanent full-time position. He retired from this advisory work in 1968 and died in 1973.

I find it intriguing that someone who spent his entire career as a Colonial Administrator in the British Empire should have been chosen for the job of restoring democracy in Germany. Maybe he volunteered? I haven’t found anything in the archives that explains why he was offered or applied for the position.

Noel (later Lord) Annan, who also worked in Germany after the war, and accompanied Ingrams on a lecture tour to seven major towns in the British Zone of Germany in November 1946, wrote in his book Changing Enemies that:

‘Ingrams was apt to treat the Germans as if they were a specially intelligent tribe of Bedouins. Discussion in the shady tent was permitted until the Resident Officer struck the ground with his stick and gave his decision. This attitude exasperated the Germans.’

That may be a little unfair, (though Noel Annan was there at the time and I wasn’t). I hope that looking in more detail at the life and work of Harold Ingrams in Germany from 1945-1947 will provide an insight into the ‘echoes of Empire’, which seem to have characterised many aspects of British post-war involvement in Germany.
 

References

Roger T. Stearn, ‘Ingrams, (William) Harold (1897–1973)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004

Doreen Ingrams, Obituary, British-Yemeni Society

G. Rex Smith, ‘"Ingrams Peace", Hadramawt, 1937-40. Some Contemporary Documents’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Apr., 2002), pp 1-30

Noel Annan, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany (London: Harper Collins, 1995)

Demobbed

15th July 2010

I’ve recently read the book Demobbed by Alan Allport, which described the problems faced by many British servicemen when they were demobilised at the end of the Second World War.

Although this book is not directly relevant to my own work on British people in occupied Germany, I’m interested in exploring the way people coped with the transition from war to peace, in particular the ‘interlude’ in their lives between the end of the war and returning home, which was usually 12 to 18 months or more.

Alan Allport quoted the reactions of two British servicemen in Germany when they heard that the war was over, commenting that, in contrast with the celebrations at home in Britain: ‘It is not surprising that for men in the thick of battle, the end of the war – the end of being shot at by strangers on a day-to-day basis, the end of expecting each morning to be one’s last – was not easy to come to terms with.’

A Corporal in the Coldstream Guards wrote that while ‘There should have been a great sense of relief – we should have all gathered round and raised our mugs and said “here’s to the Poor Bloody Infantry”,’ in fact ‘There was no grand celebration at all … I sat down on the grassy stretch of the aerodrome at Cuxhaven and tried to collect my thoughts and all I could think of was well, that’s the end of that. We don’t have to dig slit trenches and hear the awful sound of the Nebelwerfer, the multi-barrelled mortar. No more shells screeching over.’

And a paratrooper wrote to his parents shortly after hearing the news of the surrender: ‘I suppose I should feel elated, but I feel tired and disgusted, and I can’t get the smell of Germans our of my mouth no matter how hard I clean my teeth. Disgust, contempt and a little pity mix ill. What now, I wonder.’

The way the system worked was that the older people were and the longer they had served in the forces, the earlier their release. Two months service counted as one year of age. At first release was fairly slow, with only one million men, out of the five million or so serving in the forces on VE Day (8th May) demobilised by the end of 1945. It speeded up considerably in the first half of 1946 and by the end of the year four out of five of those serving on VE Day had been released.

In contrast with the chaos that followed the end of the First World War, when the original demobilisation scheme had to be abandoned and a new one improvised which provided for more rapid release, the system worked relatively smoothly, but not without problems. There was a brief mutiny on a troopship moored in Singapore harbour and various other acts of insubordination and protests at what seemed to be unreasonable delays and unfairness in the way the system worked. According to Alan Allport, the end result was that instead of the ‘fair deal’ the system was intended to provide, many servicemen felt they received ‘equivocation, denials and indifference – in other words, the kind of runaround they had always experienced in the Forces. It was a first bitter little taste of disenchantment with postwar life that would be replicated many times again in Civvy Street over the months and years to follow.’

Once they arrived home, a few servicemen received the rapturous welcome, from friends and family, portrayed in pictures in the popular press. Others found difficulty adjusting to home life, suffered from jealousy at the, real or imagined, infidelity of their wives or husbands while they had been away, or had problems when they returned to work.

Many of the young men who worked for British Military Government or the Control Commission for Germany, in the first year and a half after the end of the war, were soldiers waiting for their demobilisation.

A little while ago I wrote a post on this blog about In Another Country, a novel by John Bayley, Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, based on the time he spent as a young officer in Germany, in which the country appeared to the hero, Oliver, as almost a make-believe place, in the interlude between the war and his inevitable return to England:

‘But Germany was like the films, or a story about exposure in lifeboats or thirst in the desert – neither mind nor body really believed it. Perhaps it was bad for you not to believe. Perhaps they were laying up trouble for themselves at home. As he talked with his colleagues Oliver had often wondered about that, and half dreaded his approaching demobilisation.’

I was also reminded of the comment an elderly gentleman, who worked for many years in Germany, made when I interviewed him in 2007. He was born in 1920, had worked in an accountant’s office before the war, volunteered to join the army in 1939 and fought in action in Greece, North Africa, Normandy, France, Belgium, Holland and across the Rhine in to Germany.  When asked why he decided to stay in Germany and join the civilian Control Commission, when he was demobilised towards the end of 1946, he replied that:

‘I was offered a job over there which was considerably better than I could have expected over here. It would have been drudgery over here to start all over again. After all I was just 19 when I was called up and I was then nearly 27 …

I was far too old to start again for accountancy or anything like that. I had no other qualifications apart from my basic educational qualifications. I was no good to anybody really.’

In fact he had a successful career in the Civil Service, but life cannot have been easy for young men and women in 1945 and 1946, now the war was over and they had to decide what to do for the rest of their lives.

References

Alan Allport, Demobbed, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009)
See also Alan Allport’s website

John Bayley, In Another Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)
New edition with an introduction by A.N. Wilson
See also the post on this blog on John Bayley: In Another Country

Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, interview with J.M.G. Thexton, accession no. 30895 (2007)

Playing in the Band

1st July 2010

A little while ago, I wrote about the memories of British naval officer, preserved at the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, who commanded a flotilla of minesweepers off the North-West coast of Germany after the war.

Another, very different interview in the same archive, was with an RAF aircraftman and instrument repairer, who spent his time in Germany after the war playing a jazz band, while waiting to be demobilised and allowed to return to Britain.

He was born in April 1925 and so was just 20 years old at the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. He had left school in 1939 and before being called up in 1943 worked in a silk stocking factory and then as a stockbroker’s clerk. He joined the RAF, landed with the troops in Normandy in July 1944 and moved up with them through France, Belgium and Holland into Germany. By chance, he found a piano that was still playable and applied to the local Welfare Officer for a posting that would let him play some music. In September 1945 he was transferred to a position as a clerk at the Welfare Unit at the Headquarters of British Air Forces of Occupation at Bückeburg, where he joined a jazz band as a drummer and then the station band as the pianist.

They were just waiting their time for demobilisation, he said, but it was a lovely way to do this. Asked by the interviewer how he got on with German civilians he replied he didn’t have much to do with them as he was too busy playing in the band. He had a ‘sainted life’ and could do more or less what he liked. ‘It was just one big ball actually while we were there’ he said.

After a few months, the bands started to break up as some members were demobilised and went home. He joined another group which toured various bases in the British zone. He was invited to Hamburg to do some radio broadcasts and played in a radio show in Paris, in which Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward also performed.

In September 1946 he was posted to RAF Hamburg. His ‘jolly 12 months’ came to an end and he had to carry out ‘general duties’ in the officers’ mess. He was then attached to RAF police on guard room duties. He used to practice playing the piano, but there were no bands there any more as ‘all the musicians had gone home’.

By early 1947, he was getting very bored and in March that year he was finally demobilised. Back in Britain he worked for a time as a professional musician before settling down to a more permanent and stable job as a clerical officer with the Post Office, dealing with telephone customer accounts.

References

Imperial War Museum Sound Archive
John Ashcombe
Accession no. 23187

A Collection of Individuals

15th June 2010

As I said in a previous post on this blog on Max Weber and the Ideal Type the problem we face as historians is how to make sense of the mass of facts and circumstances we discover and how to communicate this to our listeners or readers.

The approach I have adopted in my research, on British people in occupied Germany after the war, is to ‘follow the people’ and study a number of individuals who are interesting for one reason or another and who collectively illustrate what different British people aimed to achieve once the war was over.

The advantage of this approach, it seemed to me, was that it avoided excessive generalisation, claiming for example, that the ‘British’ did this, the ‘Americans’ that, and the ‘Germans’ something else. Different people of all nationalities thought and acted in very different ways, depending among other things, on their age, education, previous experience, personal moral and religious beliefs.

To ‘follow the people’ also seemed a suitable approach for researching a time when the ‘people on the ground’ received very little in the way of clear policy direction from their government; from those they reported to and worked for. As a result they often ended up doing what they personally thought was best. In the chaos and confusion that followed the end of the war, any study of official government policy could be misleading. What politicians and diplomats said and wrote in London did not necessary reflect what people actually did in Germany.

But history is more than a collection of individuals and I need to group the people I study in a way that makes sense to my readers or listeners. So here are some thoughts on different ways of grouping or categorising people that makes sense to me in my own field of study, but which could also apply more generally in other areas:

Nationality:
I study British people, not French, Americans, Russians or Germans, though part of my work involves looking at how the victorious British soldiers and administrators interacted with people of other nationalities, notably the defeated Germans. One day it might be interesting to compare the British people I study with what the French, Russians or Americans did in their zones, but one problem with doing this is that I would need access to a different set of sources and ideally would be able to read French and Russian as well as English and German. I suspect that nationality is an artificial distinction and there are more similarities than differences across national boundaries, as people in similar circumstances tend to think and act the same way, but I have very little evidence to prove this one way or the other. So nationality is an unavoidable category, as that is how our sources are often organised, but it can be difficult to make meaningful comparisons between groups of people of different nationalities.

Power and influence
I decided to limit the people I study to those who worked in an official capacity in British Military Government, the Control Commission, or the occupation forces. Where suitable sources are available, I am looking at those at the top of the organisation, as they had the power and influence to carry out whatever it was they decided to do; or more accurately, they could attempt to carry it out, in the face of the various obstacles and difficulties they encountered in the course of their work. Sometimes I have found people at a more junior level possessed considerable discretion in their own area, together with a high degree of power and influence and I have included some of these people in the study. Some exceptional individuals went ahead and did whatever they thought was right, without their immediate superiors knowing, or regardless of what they thought about it. But I did decide to exclude short term visitors and those who held no official position, such as journalists and politicians based in Britain and the wives and families who joined their husbands in Germany from 1946 onwards. Though it is interesting to study these groups, both in their own right and as a source of independent observations and descriptions of the time, they could not be taken to represent an ‘official view’ of what British people aimed to achieve in postwar Germany.

Gender:
The number of British women who worked in an official capacity for Military Government or the Control Commission was very small. Nearly all the people I study, therefore, are male and there is no point categorising them by gender, though there is plenty of scope, outside my own field of study, for looking at the topic of ‘British women in post-war Germany’.

Social class:
Social and economic class is often seen as a key distinction in British society. Those at the top of Military Government tended to come from wealthier and more privileged backgrounds and formed part of what might be called the British professional establishment. Many British people in Germany also seem to have been very conscious of class distinctions; between officers and other ranks in the army, or between the pilots and ground crew in the air force. But categorising the victorious occupiers by social class seems to have limited value in an occupied country in the aftermath of war. In postwar Germany all British people were members of a relatively wealthy and privileged upper class, compared to the defeated enemy soldiers and prisoners-of-war, a civilian population of mainly old men, women and children, let alone homeless Displaced Persons, refugees or concentration camp survivors.

Education:
More than social class, educational background does seem to have influenced what some British people did in postwar Germany: with common attitudes shared by those who went to university, to the military academies at Sandhurst or Woolwich, to the major public schools, or to a state-funded grammar school.

Age:
Those at the top of Military Government, with the greatest power and influence, were inevitably part of an older generation. The Military Governors and senior officers I studied were all born between 1887 and 1897 and so were between 48 and 58 years old when the war ended in 1945. They had a very different outlook on life from a younger generation of more junior officers, men and women, around 18 and 32 years old in 1945 with no adult experience apart from war.

Occupation:
Those working in the various divisions and branches of Military Government seemed to share a common attitude and approach to their work that differed from other divisions. It should therefore be possible to group people by their role and job function: among the occupation forces, those who were part of the army, navy or RAF, or at a more detailed level, those who were stationed in Berlin compared to those in British zone of occupation; those who worked for the Information Services Control, Education, Political, Economic or Local Government divisions, those who were engaged in de-nazification, security, prosecuting war crimes, or the care and welfare of refugees or Displaced Persons.

Revenge

3rd June 2010

I seem to remember being taught, at school and at home, that it was (morally) wrong to take revenge. Just because someone hurt you, didn’t mean that it was right for you to hurt them. Even if someone tried to kill you, or killed a person you knew and loved, this didn’t mean it was right for you to kill them.

There seems to be something of a fashion nowadays for saying it is or was (morally) OK to take revenge; maybe not right, but not wrong either.

For example, in my own field, researching British people in Occupied Germany after World War Two, I came across the following in Richard Bessel’s book, Germany 1945: from War to Peace (for more on this, see last week’s post). He devoted a whole chapter in the book to the subject of ‘Revenge’ writing, amongst other things that:

‘As the war ended in central Europe, taking revenge against Germans was socially acceptable and widely expected.’

Socially acceptable?

No doubt he was right that it was ‘widely expected’, by British and US forces at the end of the war, that some groups of people who had suffered in Nazi Germany would take revenge after they were liberated. For example General Templer, Director of Civil Affairs and Military Government in the British zone, wrote in an article in the British Zone Review on the chaos of ‘The Early Days’ of the occupation, that the actions of some of the liberated ‘Displaced Persons’ or forced labourers in Nazi Germany were ‘not surprising’:

‘Over this grim scene there swarmed a milling mass of displaced persons, drunk with liberation and in some cases alcohol, looting, raping and killing. Considering the history of the past five years, this was not surprising.’

Of course, it is possible to argue (though Richard Bessel does not do this one way or the other) that there may be cases where taking revenge is not only ‘widely expected’ or ‘understandable’ but morally or culturally justifiable, for example as a deterrent to prevent someone committing a similar crime again.

But there is a difference between something being ‘widely expected’, ‘understandable’ or ‘not surprising’ and it being ‘socially acceptable’, which seemed to me an odd phrase to use. I’m not sure what it means. ‘Socially acceptable’ to whom, in which society or to which group of people: anyone who suffered in Nazi Germany; the victims of war crimes and atrocities; their friends and relations then and now; the victorious British, American, Russian, French and other occupation forces; or the community of historians who write about the subject nowadays?

In his book, Richard Bessel also wrote that the scenes US and British soldiers witnessed at the end of the war in the concentration camps provoked a desire for revenge. He quoted the example of US forces in Dachau, where ‘Germans were gunned down while surrendering; captives were shot at the slightest provocation…’ and claimed that the liberation of Bergen-Belsen had a similar effect on the British.

I’m not sure this is true. As far as I can tell from my own research, British soldiers felt hatred for the enemy, which was intensified when they learnt of the atrocities committed in the camps, but as far as I know, this was not translated into concrete acts of revenge. For example, one young soldier, whose memories of the war and its aftermath are held in the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, said that they were always hearing rumours of SS atrocities, having shot prisoners, or murdered Americans, which made the British soldiers angry:

'But when you see a person face to face and he’s unarmed you lose this anger and wildness, and just take them prisoner or whatever.' The only two prisoners he took personally were a couple of 16 year old lads who ‘came out of a wood with their hands up. They were just terrified…’

I wrote in a previous post on this blog about a debate on Feeling sorry for the Germans, in the letters pages of the British Zone Review, which showed quite clearly the differences between two schools of thought among the British occupiers: on the one hand ‘The Germans deserve all they get’ and on the other: ‘Humanity and justice cannot be based upon hatred and revenge.’

Even those British people who witnessed the liberation of a concentration camp appear to have felt anger, that extended to all German people collectively, but this, as far as I am aware, was not translated into concrete acts of revenge.

Patrick Gordon-Walker was one of the first British reporters to enter the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen and I wrote, in another post on this blog, about his book The Lid Lifts, which described his response. In summary, his conclusion was ‘we must be doubly careful how we react’ and horror alone was not enough. ‘The first and easy reaction is dangerous – kill them all – let the Germans starve. Hitler will triumph from his grave if this is our only reaction.’

He was concerned by a trend among people he observed back home in Britain. The desire for revenge made them believe that the use of murder as a political weapon was acceptable. In his view, those who committed crimes should be punished, with the death penalty, but it was necessary to ‘restore our respect for death’ and ‘no human life should be taken away without due formality.’

Fortunately, the situation now is very different from what it was then, but I am still reminded of these words of his that ‘no human life should be taken away without due formality’ whenever I read, for example this story yesterday, about more recent targeted killings by Intelligence Agencies, outside the rule of law.

References

Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: from War to Peace (London, New York, Sydney, Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2009)

‘The Early Days’, British Zone Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, November 1945

Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, Ronald Mallabar, accession no. 11211

Patrick Gordon Walker, The Lid Lifts (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1945)

A Harsh Occupation?

26th May 2010

One of the most recent and best books on post-war Germany is Richard Bessel’s Germany 1945: from War to Peace.

This highlights the devastation in Germany, especially the sheer scale of violence, death and destruction in the final months of the war and the chaos caused by millions of refugees and so called ‘Displaced Persons’ either returning home, or expelled from their former homes, or in some cases, both.

He also looked at and tried to explain the achievement of post-war Germany in surviving total military defeat, foreign occupation and economic deprivation, and moving forward to peace and prosperity. In his words:

‘Among the most remarkable aspects of the transformation of German mentalities that stemmed from the catastrophe of 1945 was the turn away from war and from the glorification of things military in the second half of the twentieth century.’

In his conclusion, he claims there were five reasons for this. I agree with him on three:

– ‘the completeness of Germany’s defeat’
– ‘the complete and obvious bankruptcy of National Socialism’
– ‘the vast extent of the losses’

I’m not sure about the fourth, ‘the overwhelming focus of Germans upon their day-to-day concerns’. Perhaps I can write more about this in a future post.

On the fifth reason, it seems to me, he is fundamentally wrong:

– ‘the harshness with which the Allies imposed their occupation’

‘It was not just the Russians who came determined to stamp their authority on the occupied enemy country in no uncertain terms … The harshness of the occupation in its initial months left no room for successful resistance.’

A ‘harsh occupation’ may be the right description for what the Russians, the Americans or the French did in their zones of occupation in 1945, (I’m no expert on this), but in the British zone, firstly there was no resistance anyway, and secondly, British policy (as determined by those on the ground, if not the politicians in London) changed very soon after the end of the war from destruction to reconstruction. I’ve written about this several times on this blog, for example in a post on Turning Points: when and why did British policy in Germany change after the end of the Second World War?  and another on Goronwy Rees and Sir William Strang's six day tour of Germany in June 1945.

The examples Richard Bessel used to justify his claim for a ‘harsh occupation’ were nearly all taken from the US Zone. I wonder if the book therefore reflects a predominant US historical view and an (in my view, incorrect) assumption that what the British did was, more or less, much the same as the Americans. For example, another recent book by a US based historian, Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995, takes a similar view, emphasising the negative aspects of the occupation, following the author’s understanding of the ‘famous three ‘Ds’ – demilitarization, denazification, and decartelization’ of Potsdam. 

The British zone was different, and British attitudes and policy changed with the end of the war in May 1945, earlier than any corresponding change in US policy. To quote three examples from three of the top British generals:

General Sir Brian Horrocks wrote in his memoirs, about how things changed ‘almost overnight’ after the end of the war:

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

Field-Marshal Montgomery, Military Governor of the zone, wrote about needing to offer the defeated German people ‘hope for the future’, for example in the third of his ‘Notes on the Present Situation’ in July 1945:

‘Our present attitude towards the German people is negative, it must be replaced by one that is positive and holds out hope for the future.’

His deputy, Brian Robertson, wrote in an article in the British Zone Review in October 1945, that it was necessary to be ‘stern but just’. The negative aspects of the occupation, disarmament, demilitarisation and denazification were, in his view ‘comparatively straightforward’ and there was no disagreement among the Allies in how to achieve these. On the other hand:

‘Lack of justice towards the Germans will bring us no profit but will evoke a spirit of embitterment and martyrdom which is as certain to lead to a desire for revenge as it did during the years which followed the First World War. Starvation and disease are not suitable punitive measures.’

Does this matter? It seems to me it does for two reasons.

Firstly, concentrating on the negative aspects of the occupation, means that the more positive aspects are neglected or ignored. Reconciliation between British and German people in the aftermath of war, after a very bitter conflict, did not happen automatically, as a result of a ‘transformation in German mentalities’ due to the ‘vast extent of the losses’ or ‘the harshness of the occupation’, but required a conscious and deliberate effort from many individuals on both sides. The story of how and why this was done needs to be told.

Secondly, it is all too easy to extend the idea that ‘a harsh occupation worked’ to the idea that ‘war works’. Richard Bessel ended his book by writing (correctly in my view) that in Germany in 1945 (in contrast to Germany in 1918): ‘War was seen not as a glorious crusade but as a terrible cataclysm which created only victims and was to be avoided at all costs.’

Unfortunately in Britain and the United States, if not in Germany, the Second World War is still remembered, by many people, as a ‘glorious crusade’.

This is not surprising, as that is now it was presented at the time. Konrad Jarausch quoted a private letter from President Roosevelt in which he described the war as a ‘crusade to save … civilization from a cult of brutal tyranny, which would destroy it and all of the dignity of human life’ and shortly before the Normandy Landings on D-Day, General Eisenhower gave all those involved a message which started by saying ‘You are about to embark on the Great Crusade.’ (I still have the copy my own father, who was there, received and you can read Ike’s D-Day message on the Web). 

Unfortunately what some people forget, as we know only too well from more recent events, is that war may sometimes be just and necessary, but there are always victims, and if it works, (which is never certain), it only works if the right things are done after, as well as during, the war.

References:

Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: from War to Peace (London, New York, Sydney, Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2009)

Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995  (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks, A Full Life (London: Leo Cooper 1974) Revised and extended edition. First published by William Collins, 1960

Imperial War Museum, London, Montgomery papers, BLM 85/15, 'Notes on the present situation', 14 July 1945

Brian Robertson, ‘Quo Vadis?’, British Zone Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, 27 Oct. 1945