Minesweeping

1st December 2009

The Imperial War Museum Sound Archive has a wonderful collection of recordings of people’s memories of what they did in the Second World War and after.

I’ve been listening to all those I can find recorded by men and women who were between 18 and 32 years old when the war ended in 1945 and were in Germany between 1945 and 1948, either in the British forces or working in some official capacity for the Control Commission.

After researching what the Military Governors and some of the most senior British officers aimed to achieve in Germany after the war, (see earlier posts on this blog on Field-Marshal Montgomery, Marshal of the RAF Sholto Douglas, and Generals Brian Robertson, Alec Bishop and Brian Horrocks), I thought it would be interesting to study what some much younger men and women remembered of those times. Unlike the Military Governors and senior officers, (who typically were born before 1900, had fought in the First World War and served in the British Empire, in Africa, the Middle East or India between the wars), these young men and women had very little, if any, adult experience apart from their service in the Second World War. How did they react to the transition from war to peace in 1945 and the two or three years afterwards, when they were living and working in the country of their former enemy?

So far, I have listened to recordings from nearly 20 people; some officers, some ordinary soldiers; some in the army, navy or air force, and some civilian members of the Control Commission. The range of experiences and memories was huge. Some spoke in detail about the work they did, which they took very seriously; others spoke mostly of how they had a good time now the war was over, or of their memories and experience of the black market.

One of the pleasures of reading or listening to the archives is that every now and then something appears that seems to be interesting, new, or different. Over time, a pattern emerges and it all starts to fit together. It’s still too early for me to identify the most significant themes and issues which have emerged from this collection of recordings, but here is one example: the memories of a naval officer who spent his time after the war minesweeping off the North Sea coast of Germany.

He was born in 1923, and so was 16 years old at the outbreak of war in 1939. He joined the navy as an ordinary seaman, took part in the arctic convoys to Russia, trained and was commissioned as an officer in 1943. He then worked on MTBs (motor torpedo boats) in the Mediterranean and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

When the war was over, there was no great need for torpedo boats, so he volunteered for a minesweeping course, as this was the only naval opportunity available. After 6 weeks training in Scotland, when he met his future wife, he was promoted to chief instructor. He was then given command of an old paddle minesweeper, which he sailed from Scotland to Southampton and worked for a time clearing mines off the coast of Holland.

He spoke of how he found that minesweeping was boring as much as it was dangerous. Because some devices, such as magnetic mines, allowed a certain number of ships to pass before they blew up, the minesweepers had to cover the same ground 16-18 times. They could do that for days on end with nothing happening and then suddenly a mine would go up in their wake.
 
A year or so after the end of the war he was demobbed, but uncertain of what to do next, he discovered that there was a need for “people like him” to work in Germany for the Control Commission, but “under Admiralty orders”. So still only 23 or 24 year old, he found himself running a flotilla of minesweepers “manned by Germans, officered by Germans” but under overall British command.   

It was “an odd experience” soon after the end of the war, as all he was given for his own personal protection was a revolver, which wouldn’t have been much use “had the German seamen wanted to chuck him over the side,” so he got rid of it.

“I have to say this. They work impeccably and were very fine seaman, and I had no problems of any kind at all. They seemed to accept me. I got on well with them. They were very correct.”

“We operated as if it were a British minesweeping flotilla except they were all Germans. Most incredible. And the reason it was civilianized or run as a civilian operation is that the Russians – this is hearsay but I am told – that the Russians were afraid that we were going to maintain a nucleus of the German Kriegsmarine and Ernie Bevin negotiated with them – he was the Foreign Minister at the time – that we would run it as a civilian force. But I can tell you that the discipline and everything connected with it was just as if they were still in the Kriegsmarine.”

As an aside, he then spoke of “one interesting highlight at that time … in 1948.” His wife had joined him in Germany, they had a little house and he had become involved with naval intelligence. It was thought they could land agents in the Baltic on the Russian or Finnish coast and several days or weeks were spent planning the operation in great secrecy in the cellar of his house, where his wife would bring them all coffee. Eventually a couple of Motor Torpedo Boats were brought across from England and, with the help of some of the Germans in the minesweeping flotilla, they did manage to land some agents. He was disappointed he couldn’t go with them himself.

He didn’t elaborate further on who the “agents” were and what they were meant to do once safely landed in Finland or Russia.

He stayed in Germany until 1949, when his first children were born and then decided to come home, where he found a job and stayed with the same company until he retired aged 70.

References

Imperial War Museum Sound Archive
George Philip Henry James
Accession no. 14837

The 4 ‘D’s of the Potsdam Agreement, 1945

18th November 2009

Some historians have adopted an easy shorthand way of describing the aims of the three Allies; Britain, the US and the Soviet Union; for the occupation of Germany after the war, as agreed at the Potsdam conference in July and August 1945, as the “four D's”.

However not everyone agrees about exactly what these “four D's” were:

Alan Bullock, in his classic study of the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, lists them as: disarmament, demilitarization, de-nazification and democratization.

John Ramsden, in his study of Anglo-German relations, ‘Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890’ has decentralisation instead of disarmament, writing of “the four D's agreed at the July 1945 Potsdam conference: the denazification, decentralisation, demilitarisation and democratisation of Germany.”

Nicolas Pronay, in his introduction to ‘The Political Re-Education of Germany & her Allies after World War II’ also has de-nazification, de-militarisation and democratisation, but adds de-industrialisation as his fourth ‘D’, instead of disarmament or decentralisation.

Richard Bessel, in his recent book on ‘Germany 1945’ also has de-nazification, de-militarization and democratization, but adds decartelization to make up the four.

Perhaps not surprisingly therefore, the Wikipedia article on the Potsdam Conference lists five ‘D’s, not four: demilitarization, denazification, democratization, decentralization and decartelization.

This may seem trivial, but it reveals some interesting differences in how both contemporary politicians and diplomats, and historians, have interpreted the agreements reached at the conference, (quite apart from the thorny issue of whether these words should be spelt with an ‘s’ or a ‘z’).

Firstly, everyone would appear to have agreed about the military and political aims of disarmament (or demilitarisation), denazification, and democratisation. At least in theory. What these meant in practice proved to be subject to interpretation.

A quick look at the original text of the agreement shows it was full of ambiguity. For example:

Where and how should the line be drawn between “Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions” who were to be arrested, interned and deprived of public office, and those who had only been “nominal participants in its activities”?

On disarmament, “All arms, ammunition and implements of war and all specialized facilities for their production” were to be destroyed. But how could you work out what “Production of metals, chemicals, machinery and other items” was “directly necessary to a war economy” and therefore also to be dismantled or destroyed, and what was required in peacetime as “essential to maintain in Germany average living standards not exceeding the average of the standards of living of European countries. (European countries means all European countries excluding the United Kingdom and the U. S. S. R.)”?

And on democratisation, what was the best way to do something defined in such vague and general terms as to “prepare for the eventual reconstruction of German political life on a democratic basis and for eventual peaceful cooperation in international life by Germany” let alone to control German education so as “completely to eliminate Nazi and militarist doctrines and to make possible the successful development of democratic ideas”?

Secondly, although these historians all have (more or less) the same ‘D’s for the military and political aims of the occupation: disarmament (or demilitarisation), denazification and democratisation, there would appear to be less of a consensus about what were the economic aims of the occupation, as agreed at Potsdam.

Alan Bullock has no economic aim among his four ‘D’s. John Ramsden has de-centralisation as his fourth aim. This was specified in the original text in two separate clauses as both a political and economic principle.

Nicolas Pronay has de-industrialisation, which reminds us that the first economic aim of the occupation, as specified in the Potsdam agreement, was to drastically reduce German industrial capacity generally and use the surplus plant and equipment to pay reparations. To quote the original text again:

“In order to eliminate Germany's war potential, the production of arms, ammunition and implements of war as well as all types of aircraft and sea-going ships shall be prohibited and prevented. Production of metals, chemicals, machinery and other items that are directly necessary to a war economy shall be rigidly controlled and restricted to Germany's approved post-war peacetime needs…. Productive capacity not needed for permitted production shall be removed in accordance with the reparations plan recommended by the Allied Commission on Reparations and approved by the Governments concerned or if not removed shall be destroyed.”

The next clause but one, clearly influenced by the Morgenthau Plan, named after the US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, who proposed that all heavy industry in Germany should be dismantled or destroyed, stated that: “In organizing the German Economy, primary emphasis shall be given to the development of agriculture and peaceful domestic industries.”

Richard Bessel’s fourth ‘D’, Decartelization, was just one part of this general picture. The relevant clause in the agreement stated that: “At the earliest practicable date, the German economy shall be decentralized for the purpose of eliminating the present excessive concentration of economic power as exemplified in particular by cartels, syndicates, trusts and other monopolistic arrangements.”

In practice, it soon turned out that the level of industry in post-war Germany was not sufficient to pay for essential imports of food to prevent starvation and the British and American governments found that, at the same time as they were extracting reparations from Germany in the form of industrial plant and equipment, they were subsidising the cost of food imports from their own resources. So they tried to invoke another clause in the agreement, which implied that levels of production could be increased, rather than decreased:

“Payment of Reparations should leave enough resources to enable the German people to subsist without external assistance. In working out the economic balance of Germany the necessary means must be provided to pay for imports approved by the Control Council in Germany. The proceeds of exports from current production and stocks shall be available in the first place for payment for such imports.”

For the purposes of my own research, which aims to discover just what British people aimed to achieve in Germany after the war, the question remains whether the text of the Potsdam Agreement, and the four ’D’s, however your define them, was a good summary of what the victorious allies, including the British, aimed to achieve in their occupation of Germany after the war. The Agreement could be interpreted in so many different ways. While the politicians and diplomats continued to argue about what had and had not been agreed at Potsdam, at subsequent conferences held in 1945, 1946 and 1947 in London, Paris, Moscow and New York, the men and women on the ground in Germany did what they thought best in the circumstances, in their own zones and within their own area of responsibility, and then tried to justify what they had done afterwards.

References:  

Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) (First published in 1983 by William Heinemann Ltd)

John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890 (London: Little Brown, 2006)

Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson (eds), The Political Re-education of Germany and her Allies after World War II (London & Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985)

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

Max Weber and the “Ideal Type”

4th November 2009

As the name of this blog “How it really was” suggests, I start from the assumption that the aim of the historian is not to judge the past, but to discover and reveal what really happened, following the German historian Leopold von Ranke, who famously said:

“Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukünftiger Jahre zu belehren, beigemessen: so hoher Ämter unterwindet sich gegenwärtiger Versuch nicht: er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen”

which I translate as:

The role, commonly attributed to History, is to judge the Past, to instruct the Present, for the benefit of the Future: such a high (noble) role is not claimed for this essay: it aims simply to show how it really was

I am therefore very suspicious of any theoretical approach to history, especially those which attempt to judge the past, (who are we to criticise what other people may or may not have done, in circumstances and times we can barely understand), preferring to stay firmly grounded on what we know, drawing on the evidence of what people said, wrote, or were reported to have done. It seems to me that all too often the historian’s interpretation tells us more about their own personal views and the commonly held prejudices of their time, than anything new about what actually happened.

But this empirical approach to history means I very quickly come across the issue of whether the people and events I describe and find interesting are typical of what other people thought and did at the time, or whether they are just unrepresentative, isolated instances. 

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.

One way of addressing this issue is through some form of statistical analysis. It seems to me, though, that the problem with this approach is that we have to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator and generalise to the point where too much data is lost. The most influential and interesting people and events were often those that were exceptional in some way.

Some time ago, another research student at the Institute for Historical Research (at the University of London) introduced me to Max Weber’s concept of the “Ideal Type” and this seemed attractive, as a way of generalising from specific examples without losing their individuality. I had already classified the various people I intend to study for my thesis, on the British in occupied Germany after the war, as “senior army officers”, “diplomats and administrators”, “educators”, “young men” and “returning exiles.” Perhaps I should construct an “Ideal Type” for each of these groups?

I had never read anything by Max Weber before and was very sceptical as to what he could offer a historian. After all, he is best known as one of the founders of modern sociology (a theoretical discipline I have done my best to avoid, as it seemed too full of complex jargon, abstruse logic, and highly questionable assumptions).  

But after reading what Max Weber himself wrote about the “Ideal Type”, (rather than what other people have written about it), it seemed to make a lot of sense.

So here is my understanding of Max Weber’s concept of the “Ideal Type” and how it could be used by historians.

1)  It is not possible to describe historical events without using concepts of some sort. If historians are not explicit about the concepts they use, the result is that they either do this implicitly, using some kind of logical or verbal construction, (and so possibly mislead their readers), or else they stay lost in a world of undefined “feelings”.

2) To be useful as an aid to historical description, concepts must have certain characteristics and be used in particular ways. 

  • They should be based on, or constructed from, a selection of historical events and form a logically consistent thought picture (Gedankenbild). In other words, they must be firmly grounded on the evidence and be internally consistent, without obvious logical contradictions.
  • Though based on real events, they should remain purely theoretical constructs and not represent anything that can be found, in its entirety, in the real world.
  • They should be used as the means to the end, not as the end in itself.

3) Weber called a concept which meets these criteria an “Ideal Type”:

  • logical constructions, not what actually happened
  • an aid to description, not in themselves a description of historical reality
  • not hypotheses to be proved or disproved
  • not schemas to be used for the purposes of classification
  • “ideal” only in the logical sense and not implying in any way that an “Ideal Type” forms the “essential core” (das Wesen) of historical reality, or can predict the future course of history, or act as a model or recommendation for future action

4) Different historians will construct different "Ideal Types" as our understanding of historical events changes over time.

5) To be useful, concepts used as "Ideal Types" should be precise and specific, not vague or general. It doesn’t matter if this means some historical events do not always fit with the "Ideal Type" as the historian has defined it, because our understanding of what happened works by highlighting differences between the concepts we hold in our minds and historical reality, as well as similarities.

In summary, Max Weber seems to be saying that history is a dialogue between the present and the past (very similar in many ways to the English historian EH Carr in his book What is History). The present is represented by the concepts – the “Ideal Types” – created by historians and held in the minds of listeners and readers. The past is represented by the historical evidence, as discovered and revealed in the historians’ sources.

References:

Max Weber, “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntis” in Johannes Winckelmann (ed) Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen, 1988)

Sir Walter Moberly and his book ‘The Crisis in the University’

21st October 2009

Last week I wrote about Amy Buller, her book 'Darkness over Germany' and the foundation of Cumberland Lodge in 1947, as an alternative college or university.

The first principal of Cumberland Lodge was Sir Walter Moberly, previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester, Chairman of the University Grants Committee and the author of a book published in 1949, 'The Crisis in the University'. 

His views, which he said were not only his own but representative of a group of similarly minded people, are interesting as an example of British conservative Christian thinkers, who believed that the world was in crisis, due to a lack of religious faith and respect for tradition, especially among young people. This had been especially apparent in Nazi Germany (so they believed), but the same problems affected not just Germany, but the whole Western world, including Great Britain.

Although the focus was different, there are clear similarities between his thinking and Amy Buller’s book 'Darkness over Germany'. As Walter James wrote in his history of Amy Buller and the foundation of Cumberland Lodge, although her book was about Germany, it reflected the sense that:

“Nazism was the outward manifestation of a sickness with which the entire West had been infected. This view was widely shared among Christian thinkers in the 1930s.”

Although this was a minority point of view at the time and not shared by most people in Britain, it does appear to have influenced a number of British senior officers and administrators in occupied Germany after the war and helps to explain the curious mixture of sympathy and arrogance that is apparent in some of their words and actions (See for example previous posts on this blog on Field-Marshal Montgomery as Military Governor of the British Zone). On the one hand a grave concern that, had circumstances been different, what happened in Nazi Germany could equally have happened in Britain and on the other hand, a view that because these threats to civilisation had been (so they believed) successfully resisted in Britain, it was now the responsibility of British people to convert the heathen and help people in other nations, especially the Germans, share the unquestioned strengths and benefits of British moral, religious, political and cultural traditions.

Here are some extracts from Walter Moberly's book ‘The Crisis in the University':

“The crisis in the university reflects the crisis in the world and its pervading sense of insecurity.”

“The veneer of civilisation had proved to be amazingly thin. Beneath it has been revealed, not only the ape and the tiger, but what is far worse – perverted and satanic man.”

In Moberley’s view, the real trouble lay “in the powerless of the individual in the face of mass society”. The impact of Western civilisation on Africa had been disintegrating, but now so-called civilised communities were suffering from the same problems:

“Apart from any conscious intention or propaganda, [Western civilisation] destroys the foundation of belief, custom and sentiment on which primitive life is built. Unless it also brings some new world picture and way of life to replace that which is in ruins, it leaves behind it devastation. But nemesis has followed. To-day the ‘civilized’ communities are suffering from a similar devastation. Over a large part of Europe and Asia binding convictions are lacking and there is confusion, bewilderment and discord. The whole complex of traditional belief, habit and sentiment, on which convictions are founded, has collapsed. All over the world indeed the cake of custom is broken, the old gods are dethroned and none have taken their places. Mentally and spiritually, most persons to-day are ‘dis-placed persons’.”

Despite relative economic decline after the war, Britain could still provide leadership for the rest of the world. In material resources, Great Britain was “no longer quite in the front rank” but “a full share of leadership in the realm of ideas is still open to us…. We have learned in modern times to criticize ourselves … We may still be shocked by the barbaric gospels of others; but is not all that is positive in our way of life and moral codes simply a relic of an old hierarchical order in which we have ourselves ceased effectively to believe? For ceremonial occasions, no doubt, we still have a Church as we still have a King, but neither has much to do the realities of power.”

“Much of the world is looking to this country for moral leadership with an expectancy which we have disappointed, but have not yet forfeited. It does not seem fantastic to suggest that the fate of civilization in the next period may hang on the question whether this country can rise to its moral opportunity.”

If this was his diagnosis of the global problem, the universities had, in his view, failed to show the moral and cultural leadership they should, resulting in apathetic students with no clear convictions or sense of purpose. “The universities are not now discharging their former cultural task.” This was apparent in both Britain and Germany:

“This process has been going on for a long time. But, in the last few years, it has been accentuated by the moral collapse of the German universities under the Nazi regime. Of no universities had the intellectual prestige been higher; during the last century they had been a model to the world. Yet when the stress came, with certain honourable exceptions among individuals, they showed little resistance, less indeed than the Churches. They failed to repel doctrines morally monstrous and intellectually despicable…. No doubt certain weaknesses in the German make-up contributed to this collapse, but to ascribe it solely to a double dose of original sin in the German people is unconvincing. It seems to have been due in large measure to the fact that the German universities had no independent standards of value of which they felt themselves the guardians and which they held with sufficient conviction and tenacity to stand up against the torrent. But, British teachers cannot help asking themselves, ‘Is this not also our own case? If we were subjected to a like pressure, are we confident that our own standards of value are too coherent and assured to be obliterated? Are we sure that we too should not succumb?’ They do not find it easy to answer with the ringing confidence they would wish.”

“The cultural failure of the universities is seen in the students. In recent years large numbers of these have been apathetic and have had neither wide interests nor compelling convictions”

“Whatever the cause, the university to-day lives and moves and has its being in a moral and cultural fog.”

In the final chapter at the end of the book ‘Taking Stock’, he summarised his argument that the solution to the “age of crisis” was not to abandon established traditions, but to reinvigorate and reinforce them:

  • “We are living in an age of exceptional crisis.
  • A decision in the Kremlin or the White House may revolutionize the lives of millions of peasants in Central Europe
  • The issue depends chiefly on the human factor
  • The beliefs which govern men’s actions are in flux
  • The old communal convictions concerning good and evil have broken up. A deep uncertainty about goals and obligations pervades all classes and all levels of culture. Our society has lost direction.
  • The clue to reconstruction is to be found within our own tradition
  • For Western civilization at least, and notably for Great Britain, reconstruction is to be achieved, not by abandoning our tradition, but by rediscovering and reinvigorating it.”

His conclusion and perhaps surprisingly enlightened solution (for a conservative thinker) to these problems was:

Free discussion: “All inhibition of discussion of the burning issues of the day must be removed, for any attitude towards them is preferable to apathy and drift.… Communication and debate must be unconstrained.”

But there were limits to neutrality and some basic values had to be reaffirmed, such as “a passion for truth” “a delicate precision in analysis” “a willingness to learn from all quarters” and “freedom of utterance”.


References:

Sir Walter Moberly, The Crisis in the University ( London: SCM Press Ltd, 1949)

Walter James, A Short Account of Amy Buller and the Founding of St. Catherine’s, Cumberland Lodge, (Privately printed, 1979)

More on Amy Buller and her book ‘Darkness over Germany’

14th October 2009

For some time I’ve been puzzled by what you might call the 'spiritual dimension' to British activities in occupied Germany after the war, typified by Field-Marshal Montgomery, the first Military Governor of the British Zone, saying that what they were really trying to do was to “save the soul of Germany”. It’s as if they thought they were missionaries trying to convert the heathen, rather than soldiers administering a defeated enemy country.

Back in December 2008, I wrote on this blog, about how I gained an insight into this way of thinking after reading a book published in 1943, Darkness over Germany, by Amy Buller.

Amy Buller was a remarkable woman. Her greatest achievement was founding Cumberland Lodge in 1947, as a type of alternative university or college, where students and others could meet to attend courses and conferences. I’ve now discovered more about her after reading 'A Short Account of Amy Buller and the Founding of St. Catherine’s, Cumberland Lodge', by Walter James, who was the Principal of Cumberland Lodge from 1974-82.

She was born in 1891, and died in 1974. She was brought up as a Baptist in South Africa, but appeared to experience something of a religious conversion when she returned to England in 1911 to study at Birkbeck College and became a devout Anglo-Catholic. After the end of the First World War she worked for the Student Christian Movement and developed close links with both senior academics and Anglican bishops, including William Temple, later Archbishop of York and Canterbury.

Between the wars she made several visits to Germany and these formed the basis of her book 'Darkness over Germany'. Walter James described her views at the time as follows:

“What she wanted people to understand, as far as one can judge, was that Nazism, though false, was a new and powerful religion, demanding the whole man as every religion did and as German Protestantism had ceased to do.”

And he quoted from the prologue to Darkness over Germany, where she wrote that:

“I record these stories to emphasize the need for youth and those who plan the training of youth to consider carefully the full significance of the tragedy of a whole generation of German youth who, having no faith, made Nazism their religion.”

According to James, writing the book was the watershed in her life and this was when she started to think of founding a college. She resigned from her job as warden of a residential women’s college in Liverpool and moved back to London. By chance, Queen Elizabeth read the book on the recommendation of the Bishop of Lichfield and she was summoned to meet the queen in March 1944. She told her of her ambition to establish a college and the queen said she would do what she could to help.

After many difficulties raising the necessary funds and finding a suitable location for the college, the King and Queen offered her the use of Cumberland Lodge in 1947. Sir Walter Moberly was appointed as the first principal in 1949, and an impressive array of people came to speak at events there, including Lord Lindsay, Karl Popper, A J Ayer, Michael Oakeshott, R H S Crossman, Ernst Gombrich and T S Eliot. Amy Buller became the honorary warden until 1964, when she retired, first to Oxford and then later to London, where she died in 1974.
 
References:

Walter James, A Short Account of Amy Buller and the Founding of St. Catherine’s, Cumberland Lodge, (Privately printed, 1979)

Operation Unthinkable

30th September 2009

Some months ago I wrote about a reference I found in an official intelligence report, written by a British officer in Berlin soon after the end of the Second World War, that another war was likely and this time German soldiers and airmen would fight on the side of the British and Americans against the Russians:

“The war between the Russians and the democracies is approaching and indeed has already begun, and Germany will of course be invited to participate. An International Air Brigade is to be formed for use in the war against Japan. Volunteers are invited and will be trained in England. Several offers have been received.”

(See: More on Goronwy Rees and his six day tour of Germany in July 1945)

I was surprised by this, and since then I’ve looked out for other references to people believing that war between Britain, America and Russia was likely, well before relations between the four victorious Allies broke down, the start of Berlin airlift in 1948 and the division of Germany. 

While researching a different subject – the way ‘communism’ or ‘Bolshevism’ was described as a ‘disease’, rather than as a set of ideas or a political doctrine, by people in Britain between the wars and after and by Winston Churchill in particular – I came across a reference to Operation Unthinkable. Apparently documents released by The National Archives in 1998 showed that in May 1945, immediately after the end of the war in Europe, Churchill instructed his staff to prepare top secret plans for a surprise Anglo-American attack on the Soviet Union, with the assistance of 10 German divisions, under the codename “Operation Unthinkable: Russia: Threat to Western Civilisation.” The aim of the plan was to get “a square deal for Poland” with free and fair elections based on secret ballots and the participation of democratic leaders from all parties, not just the communists, in the government of the country. For planning purposes, the attack was scheduled to be launched on 1st July 1945.

The military planners soon discovered that the idea was hazardous, to say the least, as the Soviet Union had four times as many soldiers and twice as many tanks in Western Europe, as the British and Americans combined, and recommended it was not taken any further. Churchill gave way and modified the terms of reference to defence rather than attack: covering the “hypothetical” case that US troops would go home, and the island of Britain needed to be defended against an attack from Russia.

But the question remains whether “Operation Unthinkable” was just an isolated example of military planning for all contingencies, and how close Britain, the US and the Soviet Union really were to war in 1945. Here are four pieces of evidence I’ve come across in my research which could have some bearing on this:

Firstly, the curious incident of the missing telegram. In 1954 Churchill said, in a speech in his constituency at Woodford in Essex that, even before the war was over, he had “telegraphed to Lord Montgomery directing him to be careful in collecting the German arms, to stack them so they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance continued.” This caused a furore in the British press, and rather spoilt the celebrations for Churchill’s 80th birthday, as a number of Labour MPs, including Barbara Castle, refused to sign a Birthday Book in his honour because he had been willing to “use Nazi soldiers against our war allies.”

Montgomery, when asked about this, at first said he had received the telegram, but then could not find it in his papers. Churchill withdrew the remark saying he must have confused one telegram with another and the matter died down.

However, as David Reynolds and other historians have found, in Montgomery’s papers at the Imperial War Museum archives there is a handwritten note, dated June 1959, entitled “The Truth about the Telegram”, in which Montgomery confirms he received a verbal, but not written, order from Churchill to ‘stack’ German weapons, in case they might be needed to fight the Russians.

“On 14th May 1945 I flew to London from Germany to see the Prime Minister to tell him that the problems of government in Germany were so terrific that he must at once appoint a C-in-C and Military Governor…. The announcement was made on 22nd May.
 
At our meeting in Downing Street the P.M. got very steamed up about the Russians and about the zones of occupation – which would entail a large scale withdrawal on our part.  He ordered that I was not to destroy the weapons of the 2 million Germans who had surrendered on Luneburg Heath on the 4th May. All must be kept, we might have to fight the Russians with German help.”

A month later no further instructions had been received, so according to Montgomery:

“On 14 June I got fed up with guarding the weapons. We had signed the surrender in Berlin on 5th June and agreed to set up the Control Commission for 4-Power Government of Germany. So I sent the attached telegram to the War Office on 14 June 1945. Things were pretty hectic in Whitehall in those days, the Coalition government was coming to an end; a general election was announced; it was impossible to get a decision, a firm one, on anything. I got no answer.

I waited for one week. I then gave orders for all the personal weapons and equipment to be destroyed!!

Then in November 1954, Winston Churchill in a speech at Woodford referred, unwisely to the order he had given. He said he had sent me a telegram. It could not be found. There was no telegram.”

Secondly, despite official denials by British officials that there were differences between them and their Soviet allies, rumours abounded that things were not as they seemed. For example in his book ‘Berlin Twilight’ (published in 1947) Lt-Colonel Byford-Jones described the lack of cooperation between the Russians and other victorious allies immediately after the end of the war, writing that:

“If a man builds a high wall round his house, locks his gates, refuses to admit his neighbours, he should not be surprised if the building becomes the centre of morbid curiosity….This illustrates the situation in which the Russian zone of Germany found itself in the eight months after the war’s end….Officers of the Allied forces, with whom Russia had been co-operating in the world’s greatest war, were suddenly treated as would be saboteurs or spies, and were refused admittance into the Russian zone, the frontiers of which, adjoining those of the American and British, were closely guarded day and night….Journalists and broadcasters belonging to Allied and neutral countries were forbidden to enter.

It was not surprising in these circumstances that a new Crusade seemed imminent, that officers talked of little else at one time in their British and American messes over strong Schnaps and Steinhaiger [beer] than ‘the coming conflict’. There was something too ‘cloak and dagger’ about these conversations. One did not mention the words Soviets or Russia or even the Red terror; one spoke of ‘they’ and ‘it’ in appropriately lowered tones, and everyone had the key to the code.”

Thirdly, a key element of Nazi propaganda in the closing months of the war was the attempt to persuade the Western allies that they should join with them in forming a “Bulwark against Bolshevism.” For example in a speech on 2nd May 1945, after Hitler had committed suicide, but before the end of the war on May 8th, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, foreign secretary in the interim German government headed by Admiral Dönitz, said:

“But the more German territory in the east, which ought to form a basis for food supplies for the starving people in the west, falls into the hands of the Bolsheviks, the most speedily and terribly will famine sweep over Europe. Nurtured by this distress, Bolshevism flourishes. A Bolshevised Europe constitutes the first phase on the path towards a world revolution which the Soviets have been persistently pursuing for over twenty-five years.”
 
Incidentally, this speech, by Schwerin von Krosigk contains one of the first references I have found to the existence of an “iron curtain” separating East and West: “In the east, the iron curtain is advancing even further, behind which the work of annihilation proceeds hidden from the eyes of the world.” This was well before Churchill used the phrase at his speech at Fulton Missouri, on March 5th 1946, to say: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Please note I am not claiming that Churchill or other British politicians or soldiers were influenced by Nazi propaganda – if anything this made them take extra care to emphasise the unity of the Allies – but it is still interesting that plans were made to attack Russia, Britain’s wartime ally, despite the enemy they had both defeated saying this was exactly what they should do. (In war you don’t normally do what your enemy says you should!)

Fourthly, how much did Stalin and other Soviet Union leaders know about “Operation Unthinkable? It seems they were, justifiably, very suspicious of British intentions at the end of the war and for several months afterwards. At the Four Power Control Council in Berlin, the Russians claimed, on several occasions, that the British were not meeting their obligations under the Potsdam Agreement to disband the German army. At the meeting on 20th November 1945, Marshal Zhukov, the Russian representative, tabled a formal notice objecting to the “presence of organised units of the former German Army in the British Zone of Occupation.”

Montgomery was incensed by this, writing in a telegram to Arthur Street, the Permanent Secretary of the British “Control Office for Germany and Austria” in London that:

“… it is a mystery to me why it should be thought that we do not want to carry out the POTSDAM agreement in disbanding the German armed forces. We have fought them in two bloody wars and our very existence as a nation has been threatened by them. That we should retain any affection for them or should desire their continued existence is a matter beyond my comprehension.”

Perhaps Montgomery was sincere when he wrote this, or perhaps he was being disingenuous. I don’t know. In any case, by now, in the autumn of 1945, the situation seems to have become very messy. Of the roughly two million German soldiers who had surrendered into British custody at the end of the war, over half a million had been released to work on the land or in the coal mines (under operations codenamed “Barleycorn” and “Coalscuttle”). Others had been sent to the US zone, but around 700,000 were still detained. Whatever British intentions were immediately after the end of the war in May and June 1945, there were now other reasons for not fully disbanding the German army, as Montgomery explained in the “Notes on the Occupation of Germany” held with his papers at the Imperial War Museum:

“There were two main reasons for the presence of the 700,000 ex-Wehrmacht personnel in concentration areas awaiting disbandment … first, we had nowhere to put them if they were disbanded and we could not guard them if they were dispersed in prison camps over our area; second, His Majesty’s Government required 225,000 Germans as reparations labour for the United Kingdom.”

As Montgomery explained in a statement at the subsequent Control Council on 20th November, German soldiers who surrendered at the end of the war were not formally designated as prisoners of war because if they were so described “we should have to accord them certain privileges in conformity with the Geneva Convention. We should be debarred from using them for certain tasks. We should have to feed them on a relatively high scale of rations.”

In addition, the British army in Germany were using some German soldiers, still under the command of their own officers, as so-called ‘Dienstgruppen’ (or service units) to carry out general labouring tasks. As Noel Annan explained in his book ‘Changing Enemies’

“The labour for these schemes was provided by keeping the German army in being and renaming them DienstGruppen, although these had shortly to be dissolved following Russian complaints…”

Somewhat reluctantly, in response to Russian pressure, the remaining captured German soldiers were released, in a process given the intriguing name of “Operation Clobber”, which, according to an army conference held on 4th December was due to start on 10th December 1945 and finish on 20th January 1946 – so you could say this blog post traces British ideas on what to do with the two million German soldiers who surrendered and were interned at the end of the war: from Operation “Unthinkable”, via “Barleycorn” and “Coalscuttle” to “Clobber.”

References

Some of the original “Operation Unthinkable” documents have been digitised and can be viewed on the web:

On Churchill’s use of medical imagery to describe the “disease of Bolshevism”:
Antoine Capet, ‘“The Creeds of the Devil’ Churchill between the Two Totalitarianisms, 1917 – 1945”, Finest Hour Online, 31 August 2009 

 On Churchill writing his memoirs and his interpretation of the history of the War, including references to “Operation Unthinkable” see the chapter on "The Unnecessary Cold War” pp 464-486 in:
David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004)

Montgomery’s handwritten note on the “Truth about the Telegram” is held at the Imperial War Museum archives:
BLM 162: “The Woodford Speech of Nov 1954 and the famous Telegram”

For a description of rumours circulating in the feverish atmosphere of post-war Berlin:
W. Byford-Jones, Berlin Twilight (London: Hutchinson, 1947)

The speech by Count Schwerin von Krosigk is reprinted in Ulrike Jordan (ed), Conditions of Surrender, Britons and Germans witness the end of the war (London & New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1997)

The references to Soviet objections to “organised units of the German army in the British Zone”, the Dienstgruppen and the disbandment of the German army are from:
Montgomery’s Notes on the Occupation of Germany, Part 3 (Imperial War Museum, BLM 87) and M.E. Pelly and H.J.Yasamee (eds) assisted by G.Bennett, Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series 1, Volume 5, Germany and Western Europe 11 August – 31 December 1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1990)

History and Biography

23rd September 2009

As I tried to explain in a post back in January 2008, the approach I am using for my research into the British in occupied Germany after the Second World War is to follow the people.

I hadn’t realised then that the relationship between history and biography is quite controversial. For many years historians have been reacting against the idea that history is the lives of great men (and the occasional great woman). They have been looking at economic trends, social structures and institutional frameworks as a way of explaining what happened in the past, rather than seeing the course of events determined by the actions and desires of individual men and women.

One of the first people to adopt this approach, of course, was Karl Marx, who believed that the future course of history was determined by the dialectical struggle between the capitalist and working classes, with the inevitable result the victory of communism. But you do not have to share a Marxist view of economics, or be a socialist historian, to focus on long term trends, or try to describe and analyse the economic, social and cultural factors which influence and determine the way people behave.

I would never claim (as the historian Herbert Butterfield did in 1955) that “It is men [and women] who make history” but I do think it is impossible to understand, describe and explain what happened in the past, without referring to how this affected individual men and woman and how people responded to the circumstances in which they found themselves.

All too often I have read works by other historians who, so it seems to me, have generalised to the point of being misleading. For example, in my own field of research, Germany under Allied occupation after the Second World War, it is all too easy to say the “British” did this, the “Americans” did that, and the “French” and “Russians” and “Germans” did something else. I know from my own research that British people in Germany formed a very mixed and diverse group, with widely different backgrounds, attitudes and beliefs, and I expect the same was true of people of other nationalities. I also suspect that, although British people generally behaved differently from, for example, German people, in some ways, due to different social and cultural backgrounds, in other ways some groups of British people had more in common with people of other nationalities, than with their own compatriots.

For example, it seems to me that senior British army officers such as Montgomery, Robertson and Bishop, with a deeply conservative and traditionalist outlook on life and strong personal religious beliefs, had more in common with German Christian Democrat politicians such as Konrad Adenauer and Karl Arnold, than any of them had with Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the German Social Democrats, or with John Hynd, self-taught railwayman, trade unionist and British minister with responsibility for Germany, let alone a US GI, a 21 year old British tank commander with no adult experience other than war, or a half-Jewish, German-speaking exile returning to the country in which he had been born.

I have recently read an excellent book, in which a number of historians and biographers discuss the relationship between history and biography: Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography. The following comments are based on my reading and understanding of the introduction by Simone Lässig:

In the 1970s, many social historians attempted to create a theory-driven historical (social) science and biography was seen as “an antiquated and unreflective approach to history.” This trend was especially noticeable in Germany among the so-called “Bielefeld school” of historians, although in Britain and the US, biography remained an established academic and popular form.

Both forms of writing about the past have their weaknesses. If history is only concerned with structures, long term processes, and mass phenomena “a science of human societies will entirely lose sight of the human beings themselves.” On the other hand, the weaknesses of biography include a lack of theory or methodology and an artificial coherence in the description of a life story, which often in reality develops as much from luck and chance as deliberate intention. Every individual person’s life is to some extent fragmented and inconsistent. People take on different roles during their lives with contradictions, upheavals and turning points.

Recently, distinguished historians have returned to writing biographies and in the book, some described their approach. For example, Ian Kershaw explained why he decided to write his biography of Hitler. Although, as a social historian, he was initially sceptical, he came to biography as a way of looking at the nature of Hitler’s power, not through giving direct orders, but through establishing a framework of broad policy objectives within which others could act.

In addition to discussing how historians can bring new approaches to biography, Simone Lässig outlined five trends by which a biographical approach is opening up new possibilities for modern historical scholarship:

1) As a way of moving from the abstract towards the concrete, from system and structure to the unique and individual, and of describing “how people master life’s unforeseen challenges.”
2) At the same time it offers a method of describing how individuals “bear the characteristics of a larger [social] group”. It can also help explain change: “It is rarely possible to explain change in history if the individual is marginalized or even ignored” (For example Luther and the Reformation or Hitler and Nazi Germany)
3) Biographies provide exactitude and detail “not only to discover what is typical, but also to grasp these ways of life in all their breadth and variability.”
4) Because biography deals with people, rather than attempting to discover objective universal facts or rules, a biographical approach “sensitizes the reader” to the fundamental openness of history, its subjective character and to the relativity and limited nature of historical knowledge.
5) An individual example can stimulate more general insights and so reveal or highlight social, economic, cultural or political interconnections and networks.

In summary, this shows that a biographical approach to writing history can reveal aspects which may remain hidden or misunderstood in other approaches which rely too heavily on generalisation, or on an analysis of social, political, cultural or economic structures and institutions, and neglect the individual people.

References:

Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig (eds), Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography (New York, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2008)

 

The Watch on the Rhine: the British occupation of the Rhineland after World War One

14th September 2009

It’s intriguing how memories of the First World War and its aftermath influenced British people in occupied Germany at the end of the Second World War.

At the end of the First World War, French, British, Belgian and US troops occupied the Rhineland. This was agreed as part of the Armistice signed on November 11th 1918. The details, including zones of occupation, were worked out by the French Marshal Foch and the British were allocated the city of Cologne and surrounding area. British troops first crossed the frontier into Germany on 2nd December 1918.

The occupation was originally intended to last for 15 years, with the number of Allied troops reduced in stages after 5 and 10 years, subject to certain conditions being met. The British left Cologne in January 1926, but some troops stayed on in Wiesbaden until 30th June 1930.

Looking back to memories of the First World War and its aftermath helps to explain some of the ambivalence in British policy and attitudes towards the German people after the Second World War. On the one hand a concern not to be deceived again by a duplicitous people, who, so the story went, had courted sympathy from well-meaning Allied soldiers, claiming they were victims of an unjust peace settlement, while at the same time planning their revenge and preparing for war. But on the other hand, a concern that the Allies had also made some mistakes, and the economic depression, hunger and unemployment which followed the First World War should not be repeated, for fear that an even worse disaster may occur in the not so distant future.

As examples of the view that this time, in 1945, they had to “stay the course” and “do the job properly”, here are some extracts from three articles in early editions of the British Zone Review, the official journal of the British Military Government and Control Commission for Germany:

“Experiences of Rhineland Occupation: 1919-1925

You will not, I think, be surprised at my conclusions – that the occupation, intended as a measure for preventing their making war, was used by the Germans as a means of dividing the Allies and of getting their propaganda into the very heart of each of the Allied countries. Moreover we failed to see that Germany was only shamming dead economically and financially and was exploiting the situation to arouse a wholly unjustified sympathy and causing us serious trade difficulties, for which we would blame the peace settlement and our Allies.”
(British Zone review, October 13th 1945)

“Lessons of History

We set out to see whether there was a lesson to be learnt from history. It now stares us in the face. To cut down our occupying forces below an effective minimum or to let considerations of retrenchment weaken our control organisation would be to fly in the face of experience.”
(British Zone Review, November 24th 1945)

“Why Weimar failed

Behind the welter of political strife, the confusion of unversed and inept politicians, the militarists and industrialists waited and planned to avenge themselves of their defeat.”
(British Zone Review, December 22nd 1945)

On the other hand, if we look at contemporary accounts of the British occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War, written in the 1920s rather than in 1945, we find that the troops generally got on well with the local population, and in many cases returned home “definitely pro-German.” Violet Markham, who spent two years in Germany with her husband, who was chief demobilization officer for the British Army of the Rhine, wrote in her book 'A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine' published in 1921, that “Life in Cologne is very pleasant for the occupying army” and “surely no Army of Occupation was ever so well housed or so comfortable as we are.” On first crossing the border into Germany, she remarked that “It is almost with a shock you realise that German civilians are not equipped with hoofs and horns or other attributes of a Satanic character” and she soon came to see people as individuals, rather than as the stereotypes promoted by governments in wartime:

“It is easy to hate the abstraction called Germany, but for individual Germans one feels either like, dislike or indifference the same as for other people.”

Although she had no doubts as to the “noble ideal” for which the British had fought the war, and was irritated at Germany’s “refusal to say she is sorry”, she was also critical of Allied post-war policy; especially the continuation of the economic blockade; and the Treaty of Versailles, which she said had “scrapped the fundamental ideals for which we fought the war.”

In her view, the democratic government which emerged in Germany in 1918 had an impossible task as it was “confronted by hunger, defeat, despair, and the miseries which resulted from the blockade” and the Allies were partly to blame for the rise of the extreme parties and the decline in the vote for the Social Democrats in the elections of 1920:

“The party standing for ordered democratic development had been knocked out. The British public should try to realise it has been killed by the Allied policy.”

She was not optimistic for the future. In a prediction, which may have seemed extravagant at the time, but which turned out to be unpleasantly close to the truth, she wrote that:

“The post-war chaos appears so complete that men turn from it in despair. Moral disillusion and weariness have their counterparts in recklessness and wild extravagance. There is a sense of an approaching Twilight of the Gods; of a collapse of the foundations of society.”

Perhaps surprisingly, it seems that official British policy after the Second World War, at least as implemented by those on the ground in Germany, was influenced as much by this second strand of thought, of the need to avoid hunger, despair and unemployment, as by concerns that German militarists would re-arm and seek their revenge. This can be traced in the papers of General Sir Brian Robertson, arguably the most influential British soldier and administrator in Germany after the end of the war. His father, General, later Field-Marshal, Sir William Robertson had been Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the First World War and for a time, in 1919, Military Governor of the British occupied part of the Rhineland.

In a speech in November 1939, when he was President of the Natal Chamber of Industries in South Africa, well before he had any idea of his future role in post-war Germany, Brian Robertson looked forward to the end of the war, saying:

“This war, so far at least, is very unlike the last. It is equally certain that the peace treaties, which have yet to be made, will be quite unlike those which ended the last war. Those treaties were failures because they were based upon fear and vindictiveness. The next treaties, if they are to give lasting peace, must be founded upon confidence and generosity, and they must strike at the root causes of international unrest. Chief among these causes is that economic nationalism which has grown up like a rank week to stifle the national flow of trade between nations.”

Many years later in 1965, in a speech to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Brian Robertson referred to his experience as a member of the British delegation at the League of Nations in Geneva in 1932-3 and how this had made him: “a first hand witness of the failure to deal properly with Germany after World  War 1.” He continued by saying:

“My father had been Military Governor for a period then. He often talked to me about the mistakes and problems of those years. ‘The idea that you can hold down a country like Germany with her face in the dust indefinitely is a foolish one’ he used to say.”

If it was not possible to 'hold Germany down' for ever, there had to be an alternative policy to one that was purely negative, based on disarmament, demilitarisation and economic controls. In an article in the British Zone Review in October 1945, Robertson tried to explain his own personal philosophy, which suggested he had learnt a different 'lesson from history' from the other articles I quoted earlier in this posting. The analogy Robertson used was that of education: the German people had to be treated as one would treat a child. Firstly it was necessary to be stern, as the child had “inherited some very bad qualities from its parents”. But secondly it was necessary to be just, as:

“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.”

In a talk he gave in December 1945 at a conference of British Army Corps Commanders, who at the time also acted as regional governors, responsible for all aspects of Military Government in their areas, Robertson gave his view of the attitudes of the four Allies in Germany, claiming that it was only the British who had a constructive policy. The French were concerned above all with their own security and the Russians with the payment of reparations. The Americans went from one extreme to the other and “their main contribution to Quadripartite government is to produce a series of unpractical laws which have very little bearing on the main problems.” The British were, in his view: “the only power that really cares what happens to Germany. We flatter ourselves that we can regenerate her. Probably we feel instinctively that our interests will not best be served by turning Germany into a helpless desert.”

References:

David G. Williamson, The British in Germany 1918-1930: the Reluctant Occupiers (New York, Oxford: Berg, 1991)

David Williamson, A Most Diplomatic General: The life of General Lord Robertson of Oakridge (London, Washington: Brasseys, 1996)

Violet Markham, A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1921)

 

List of postings: June 2009 – May 2007

3rd September 2009

For anyone reading this blog for the first time, I am a PhD history student at the Centre for Contemporary British History at the University of London, researching the British in occupied Germany after the end of World War Two. I am now in the third year of a six year part-time course. In my view, history is a process of discovery, and I try to post something new and interesting on this blog once a week, as I work my way through the research. 

Here is a list of all posts since May 2007. For earlier posts, see the previous list

Stephen Spender on Humphrey Jennings, libraries, and his Humber car 6th June 2009

More on Stephen Spender and post-war Germany 1st June 2009

Stephen Spender – European Witness 9th May 2009

Marriage with ‘ex-enemy nationals’ 2nd May 2009

General Sir Brian Horrocks – Corps Commander 24th April 2009

Why did Field-Marshal Montgomery believe that a Germany that 'looked East’ was ‘a menace to the British Empire’? 5th April 2009

What did Field-Marshal Montgomery mean by ‘Winning the Peace’ in 1945? 30th March 2009

Field-Marshal Montgomery and the fraternisation ban 14th March 2009

Field-Marshal Montgomery’s ‘Notes on the occupation of Germany’, part 1 21st February 2009

Stealing coal in Germany after the war 14th February 2009

Field-Marshal Montgomery as Military Governor of the British Zone of Germany 1st February 2009

Eckernförde under British Occupation 25th January 2009

John Bayley – In Another Country 18th January 2009

Patrick Gordon-Walker – the Lid Lifts (part 2) 9th January 2009

Patrick Gordon-Walker – the Lid Lifts 4th January 2009

Amy Buller – Darkness over Germany 15th December 2008

The documentary film 'School in Cologne' made in 1948 6th December 2008

More on Goronwy Rees’ six day tour of Germany, 1945 30th November 2008

Turning Points: when and why did British policy in Germany change after the end of the Second World War? 23rd November 2008

‘GIs and Germans’ by Petra Goedde 15th November 2008

Another Two Kreis Resident Officers 9th November 2008

More about the film: K.R.O. Germany 1947 5th November 2008

Kreis Resident Officer – The film K.R.O. Germany 1947 2nd November 2008

Justum et tenacem propositi virum – the wise man, firm of purpose 26th October 2008

How three British army offices reacted to the transition from war to peace in Germany, 1945 28th June 2008

More on Major General Sir Alec Bishop 19th May 2008

Major General Sir Alec Bishop 12th May 2008

Goronwy Rees on Weimar Germany 3rd May 2008

Goronwy Rees on Field Marshal Montgomery27th April 2008

Goronwy Rees and Sir William Strang’s six day tour of Germany in 194518th April 2008

Goronwy Rees and his preface to Der Fragebogen by Ernst von Salomon 12th April 2008

Konrad Adenauer and his dismissal as Mayor of Cologne by the British in 1945 30th March 2008

Sholto Douglas – and the German Luftwaffe 3rd March 2008

More on Sholto Douglas – and his opposition to the death penalty 23rd February 2008

Sholto Douglas: the second Military Governor of the British Zone of Germany 18th February 2008

Mass Observation at the Movies 8th February 2008

‘You have to see it to believe it’: British first impressions of Germany after the war 2nd February 2008

E F (Fritz) Schumacher 26th January 2008

Follow the People (continued) 20th January 2008

Follow the People 13th January 2008

Happy New Year 8th January 2008

Drew Middleton: The Struggle for Germany 8th December 2007

British and US first impressions of Germany in 1945 1st December 2007

Potsdam 1945 to Western Germany 1965: A Miracle 24th November 2007

Sir Brian Robertson 18th November 2007

Englishness and Empire and ‘Winning the Peace’ 11th November 2007

Finest Hour – films by Humphrey Jennings 3rd November 2007

Winning the Peace – the British in occupied Germany 1945-51 29th October 2007

The Battle of the Winter 23rd July 2007

Germany in 1945 and Britain in 1967 as 'super-Sweden' 14th July 2007

‘Germany under Control’ exhibition 2nd July 2007

Alec Cairncross – 'The Price of War' and 'A Country to Play With' 24th June 2007

Ratchford and Ross – Berlin Reparations Assignment 18th June 2007

George Clare – Berlin Days 9th June 2007

Ivone Kirkpatrick – The Inner Circle 2nd June 2007

The Bonfire of Berlin – a lost childhood in wartime Germany 29th May 2007

Germany Year Zero 20th May 2007

Stephen Spender on Humphrey Jennings, libraries, and his Humber car

6th June 2009

Sometimes the asides and diversions in a book can be as, if not more, revealing than the main story. In this third and final post on Stephen Spender’s book European Witness, an account of two visits he made to Germany immediately after the Second World, I want to write about the unacknowledged hero, or villain, of the piece, his Humber car.

One of the ironies of the book, is that despite his grand and noble conclusion that only a “conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light” could save the world from “a threat of a still greater darkness, a total and everlasting one … rising up from the ashes of fascism", he himself appeared powerless and unable to do anything.
 
The original reason for his visit to Germany was to inspect and re-open libraries in the Ruhr and Rhineland, including vetting and removing Nazi books. But he came to think that this was a pointless task:

“…my conversation with Dr Reuter, [the librarian at Düsseldorf] made me realize that there was little point in our policy. Anyone who wished to obtain Nazi books in Germany could easily do so, and to withdraw the Nazi books seemed only a piece of window-dressing which would give us a reputation for treating literature in the same way as the Nazis themselves had done.”

For example, a librarian at Aachen told him there was no difficulty at all carrying out his orders; they had previously done much the same for the Nazis:

“We understand exactly what you want, and there is no difficulty whatever about carrying out your instructions. You see, throughout the Nazi regime, we kept all the books by Jewish and socialist writers in a special cellar, under lock and key, as having only historical and scientific interest. All we have to do now is to take out these books and put them on our open shelves, while at the same time we lock up all the Nazi books, because now they only have historical and scientific interest.”

And in any case, many local German librarians had already done what was necessary on their own initiative:
 
“In practice, I found that the libraries of the Ruhr and the Rhineland were capable of opening themselves without my intervention … In every case, the Germans had automatically set about purging their libraries on the day of their towns being occupied by the Allies, if not before that.”

Throughout this time, Spender was often unable to travel round the British Zone and do his job, because his (British) Humber car had broken down, often for days, despite attempts to fix it:

“During these days of my car being broken down, I was often left with little to do but observe conditions and listen to rumours.”

“The car remained in a very bad state. However, one day we managed to get it to Aachen and almost all the way back before we got stuck a few miles outside Bonn, from where we had to be towed.”

I don’t think he intended the book to be read this way, but it seems to me that the car had become a symbol of the British occupation; of how despite the best of intentions, they were not able to achieve anything constructive, and were in fact no different from, and no better than, the people whose country they were occupying:

“On 20th September the Humber had a slight attack of recovery. I made an attempt to get it to Düsseldorf. After going very fast for four miles, it stopped in a rain-storm on the autobahn between Bonn and Cologne. My driver decided that the pump was wrong and he got out to repair it. After he had taken it to pieces and put it back, no petrol came through the pipe leading to it from the tank at the back of the car. He undid the cap of the petrol tank and blew down the hole. There was some pressure of air in the tank and petrol squirted back at him into his eyes, mouth and nose. He was practically blinded for five or ten minutes. Three little German boys who were present at this scene were in ecstasies of hysterical joy. They rolled over on the ground roaring with laughter, and, for the next hour, while we waited dismally in the car, they imitated to each other the expression on his face when he fell back into the road. This was one of those moments when our occupation suddenly appeared like all occupations: one could imagine similar scenes in which little French boys were squirming on the ground with laughter at solemn German officers whose Mercedes had broken down, during their Occupation.”

Spender could be extraordinarily insensitive to the needs and feelings of those around him, as well as very perceptive. For example, he described meeting, by chance, a former inmate of a concentration camp, and arranged to see him later at his hotel. Because he was classified as a German civilian, Spender was not permitted to share his tea with him:

“The next day he arrived at four-thirty while I was having a large tea in the lounge. I could not offer him, a German civilian, tea, so I sent him up to my room while I finished off my excellent repast with far more butter and ham than one gets in England. I was aware of the contrast between my own standard of living and that of this concentration camp inmate; but although this worried me, on the whole it had the effect of making me eat perhaps a slightly larger tea than I would have done otherwise, because this worry was a form of anxiety and anxiety tends to make me greedy.”

I don’t think there was any irony in this account, or even self-criticism.

During his second visit, in September and October 1945, Spender met the documentary film director Humphrey Jennings, who was in Germany making his film ‘A Defeated People’ (see previous posts on this blog).

In the book Spender refers to Jennings as ‘Boyman’, presumably from his tendency to say “Oh boy, oh boy”.

“Boyman talks an Anglo-American-Continental Film World slang in which he mixes up phrases such as ‘Oh boy, oh boy,’ with cockney such as ‘Bob’s-your-uncle.’”

Jennings’ self confidence irritated him. At the end of an evening in the British officers’ mess, Spender wrote that:

“[Boyman] talked a great deal more and said that the damned fool of a British public ‘had no realization of these conditions.’ His attitude that everyone except his Film Unit is a bloody fool, annoys me. Besides which, why should the British public be sensitive to conditions in Germany? I often wonder whether sensibility is such a virtue as I myself am inclined to suppose it to be, since my own experience is that being sensitive, aware and imaginative does not prevent one from being selfish. In fact, it makes one ego-centric. All the same, Boyman is a live wire, and part of my irritation with him is undoubtedly due to jealousy and competitiveness. After the evening with Boyman I went to bed doubly depressed: by the squalid destruction of Düsseldorf and by the assertive cocksureness of Boyman.”

One of the ironies of history is that while Spender’s reputation has declined over time, that of Jennings has grown, and he is now considered by many to be Britain’s greatest wartime documentary film maker. For example, Angus Calder in his classic work, ‘The Myth of the Blitz’, referred to him as “Britain’s most remarkable maker of official films.”

But what struck me most were not the differences, but the similarities in outlook between Spender’s book, European Witness, and Jennings’ film A Defeated People. Words and images in the book reappear in the film. For example these words from European Witness could be describing a shot in the film: “The girders of the Rhine bridges plunged diagonally into the black waters of the Rhine frothing into swirling white around them”; as could descriptions and portraits of a demoralised and apathetic people; ‘Zero Hour’ represented by the clock whose hands have stopped working; and an overriding concern, in the words of the commentary of the film, that “our powers of destruction today are terrible”. But also apparent both from reading the book and watching the film, were the high and noble ideals of many of those responsible for the British occupation; their belief in the urgent need to do whatever was necessary to prevent another war; combined and contrasted on occasions, with a sense of hopelessness in the face of extreme adversity; and running in parallel with all of this, a grudging sympathy with the current condition of the former enemy.

Despite overwhelming odds, and personal limitations, both the book and the film tried to convey to the British people back home, the sense that things could not be left as they were; in the words of the film, the German people could not be “left to stew in their own juice”; and despite everything that had happened in the past, what was needed now was a constructive effort, on both sides, to repair the physical, moral and, for some people, the spiritual damage caused by the war. In Spender’s words: “a conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light.”