Eckernförde under British Occupation

25th January 2009

Eckernförde is a small town in the north of Germany, in Schleswig Holstein. It was formally occupied on 10th May 1945, two days after VE Day, although, according to the local paper, British troops first entered the town four days earlier on May 6th, and the following day a large number of American columns passed through the town on their way further north.

An old family friend recently sent me a newly published book which describes life in the town under British occupation, based on memories and stories told by around 170 witnesses; mostly older people who were there at the time, but in some cases their children; mostly German, but a few British.

As over 60 years have passed since the events took place, we have to ask how accurate these memories are. The author, Ilse Rathjen-Couscherung, said in her introduction that, although in some cases people remembered the same event differently, she was able to cross check accounts and keep contradictions to a minimum. In general, she was amazed how accurately people she spoke to were able to recall how things were at the end of the war.

There was no resistance when the British first entered the town, although both sides were reserved towards the other. However, over time, the local population came to appreciate the role of the British in maintaining law and order, and realised that they had nothing to fear, as long as they followed the rules laid down by the military authorities. Despite hunger, shortage of accommodation, made worse by the influx of large numbers of refugees, a nightly curfew, and an endless stream of orders requisitioning houses and property for British officers and troops, relations between occupiers and occupied improved over time. Many of the stories related in the book describe small favours and acts of kindness, which were clearly appreciated and remembered long after the event: for example help finding a stolen bicycle, help given to a man who had lost one eye, so he could travel to Hamburg to have a glass eye fitted, and personal friendships developed through singing songs or playing music together, despite an inability to communicate with words, as neither understood the other’s language.

I’ve written in a previous post on this blog, about the British documentary film ‘KRO Germany’ which showed an idealised portrait of a British Kreis Resident Officer (or District Commissioner) for another town. It was interesting to compare the film with the descriptions in the book of two KROs for the town of Eckernförde, as this showed how they were remembered by the local population, rather than the image the British authorities wished to present to people back home.

The first KRO, Major, later Colonel Ormsby, who was in the post from 1945 to 1949, was not well liked. He was remembered, by most of those who spoke of him, as remote, harsh, unsympathetic, loud, rude, narrow-minded and domineering. People were afraid of him if he suddenly appeared in the town, with his officer’s staff in hand, in order to personally enforce some rule or other. On the other hand he was also seen as fair and correct and some German people who worked for him spoke of him more favourably. One witness remembered her father saying that his family had been killed in a German air attack on Coventry, but despite this, he was not revengeful: “Er war ernst und streng, aber gerecht und fair.”

According to another witness, Colonel Ormsby was a British Labour Party supporter and in the Autumn of 1946, in the first local elections in the British Zone of Germany after the war, he took the trouble to find who had been members of the SPD (German Socialists) in 1933, and visited them personally, without an interpreter, to try to persuade them that it was important for them to rejoin their former party. One witness related that, during one of these visits, he told them they should take English history as an example, with its 1,000 year experience of democracy. The witness, who was 10 years old at the time, remembered saying that not only was Magna Charta signed in 1215 and therefore not 1,000 years old, but as only a small number of people had shared in its benefits, there was no true democracy in England at that time. Major Ormsby was pleased with this response, which showed that the young boy was able to think for himself.
 
In September 1949, Colonel Ormsby was succeeded by Colonel Errol Daniell, who was responsible for the neighbouring districts of Schleswig and Flensburg, as well as Eckernförde, and who remained in post until 1954. According to the author, he was well liked by the local population, and worked hard to ensure good relations between British and Germans. One German couple became friends with him and his family, visited him after he left the town, both in Germany and in England, and stayed in touch for many years, until shortly before he died.

Like many other senior British army officers, Colonel Daniell had excellent relations with the local German aristocracy, visiting and being entertained at a number of stately homes. The author describes, for example, the Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein saying in a phone conversation that she remembered him as an exceptionally friendly and sympathetic man.

Finally, there were two stories I particularly liked, both relating to a local drinks firm. The first described how the firm’s bottling room was converted by the British into a washroom, complete with showers and an oil-fired water heater, for the ordinary soldiers. These lived in barracks, with no washing facilities, in conditions far less comfortable than the private houses requisitioned for the officers and NCOs.

The second related to the so-called “Heissgetränk” (or “Hot Drink”), generally sold cold, and produced by the firm in the early days after the end of the war, as a substitute for beer or soft drinks, which were unobtainable. As the firm’s bottling room was in use as the English soldiers' washroom and no new bottles were available anyway, local people could turn up with their own bottles to have them filled. In fact, the drink was no more than coloured water with artificial sweetener. The story went that when they ran out of artificial sweetener, the owner of the firm took two buckets of locally caught herring on the long journey to Leverkusen, where a friendly worker at the Bayer chemical plant there swapped them for some more artificial sweetener.

References:

Ilse Rathjen-Couscherung, Eckernförde unter britische Besatzung (Schriftenreihe der Heimatgemeinschaft Eckernförde e.V. Nr. 14, 2008) 

John Bayley: In Another Country

18th January 2009

How useful is a work of fiction as a historical source? It’s difficult enough to work out how accurate supposedly factual accounts are, especially if they were written long after the events they describe. Fiction doesn’t even claim to be an accurate record of “how it really was.” On the other hand, the atmosphere of a place, and the thoughts and feelings of the people who were there, can sometimes emerge more strongly from fiction, than from official documents or other factual sources, in which much may be assumed, but never expressed directly and therefore remains hidden.

John Bayley is now best known now as the husband of Iris Murdoch and author of the best-selling books 'Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch', and 'Elegy for Iris', in which he told the story of her decline in old age due to Alzheimer’s Disease. He is also a distinguished literary critic, fellow of New College Oxford and from 1974-1992 was Warton Professor of English at Oxford University.

'In Another Country', was his first, and for a long time his only, novel. It was published in 1955 and reissued by Oxford Univeristy Press as a "Twentieth Century Classic" in 1986. The novel is set in Germany in 1945 in "the first cold winter of peace" and is based on John Bayley’s own experiences there, as a young officer at the end of the war. 

I am no literary critic, but the book is clearly well written. In the introduction to the 1986 edition, A N Wilson, who was taught by John Bayley at Oxford and later wrote his own biography of Iris Murdoch, quoted the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, speaking with “a most distinguished and personalized stammer, which caused her voice to seize up suddenly on key words” once asking him:

“‘Have you read John’s novel?’
‘No’
‘Well it’s very …’
‘Good’ I clumsily prompted her again
‘It’s quite brilliant”’. She said sharply, as if I had contradicted her. ‘It is a great pity that he has never written any more.’”

The title of the book comes from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta, (act 4, scene 1). The relevant passage is:

Barnadine: Thou hast committed …
Barabas:    Fornication? But that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.

A girl does die in the book, though not, perhaps, the one the reader expects.

This is not the place to re-tell the story of the novel. Suffice it to say that the hero is Oliver Childers, a young lieutenant in the British military forces in Germany. John Bayley himself worked in T-Force, an exclusive unit with the job of identifying German scientists who could be useful to Britain at the end of the war. The fictional hero of the book appears to do something very similar, but his work is of no concern at all to Oliver, and is described in the book as follows:

“P(I)15 was chiefly engaged in reporting on the condition and prospects of the local industries which had survived bombardment. More ambitiously and in collaboration with other units that bore the code P, it sometimes set about the absorption of a technician, a process, or a whole plant, whose services were coveted back in England. But such undertakings were obscure and protracted, dating from a past too remote for the longest memory of the present staff: even the Colonel, who had been in charge nearly four months, could not remember beginning or finishing anything of this kind. What the unit did was ultimately mysterious to itself, but it was a tranquil mystery – no one yearned to behold the completed pattern, the larger meaning. Like conveyor-belt workers who attend their passing bits and pieces and remain indifferent to the nature of the final product, the personnel of P(I) 15 dealt with their daily stint of letters, files and samples, and looked no further. ”

Germany appears 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.”

The main theme of the book is how the various people in the unit related to each other, on a personal basis, and Oliver’s own relationship with Liese, a young German woman. As with all good novels, it can be interpreted in different ways and works on many levels, but above all, it seemed to me, it describes one (fictional) young man’s attempt to make sense of his life, and what to do next. After various events in Germany, some of which involve him directly, some indirectly, some quite dramatic, but described with great understatement, he returns to his parents' suburban house in England and half-heartedly tries to find a job.  

“Life was all before him – but that was just the trouble.”

He loses his job, but keeps the girl, and the book ends with an uncertain future ahead of him.

“‘Which way do we go?’
Oliver drew a deep breath. ‘We’ll decide that when we get outside,’ he said firmly.”

In summary, it seems to me, John Bayley’s novel, In Another Country, is a useful reminder to historians that, for some young British men in Germany at the end of the war, the work they did was insignificant and of little concern. In stark contrast with the high and noble claims of senior officers, (referred to in previous posts on this blog), that what they were doing was “fighting a battle to save the soul of Germany”, these young men were concerned, above all, with their own personal relationships with friends, colleagues and sometimes, lovers, how they could re-build their lives at the end of the war and what would happen to them when they got home.

References:

John Bayley, In Another Country, first published by Constable & Co, 1955. Republished by Oxford University Press, 1986, with an introduction by A N Wilson

For two other, completely different and contrasting descriptions of T-Force, see:

Ian Cobain writing in The Guardian on 29th August 2007

Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Battle for the Spoils and Secrets of Nazi Germany, (Paladin, 1988) (First Published by Michael Joseph Ltd, 1987)

 

Patrick Gordon-Walker: The Lid Lifts (part 2)

9th January 2009

In last week's post I wrote about Patrick Gordon-Walker, who was one of the first British news reporters to visit Belsen concentration camp, five days after its liberation by British army forces on April 15th 1945. When he was there, he recorded the first Jewish service held in the camp, which was later broadcast by the BBC.

The description of Belsen and the conclusions he drew from this, form only one part of his book ‘The Lid Lifts’. In this week’s post I’ve written about his impressions of other parts of Germany, as described in the book, during two tours following the advancing British and American troops; the first from February 24th to March 1st and the second in the final days of the war, from April 16th to 22nd. On his second tour, in April 1945, he covered 1,250 miles, travelling from West to East, across what was soon to be the British Zone of Germany, from Luxembourg via Aachen, Krefeld, across the Rhine to Essen, through the industrial area of the Ruhr, to Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel, north to Celle and Belsen, and then back east again via Dortmund, Bochum, Essen, Düsseldorf and Aachen.

‘The Lid Lifts’ is the diary of these two tours, plus some concluding reflections. In the introduction he described the book as follows: “I kept a diary during these two trips – describing without art or afterthought what I saw. This diary follows. It is probably the best way of conveying what Germany is like today. There is no overall generalised picture. There are only innumerable impressions of a country, reeling and rocking on its feet. To this diary I have added certain conclusions and reflections based on my experiences as a whole.”

In the final chapter, titled ‘Reflections in Tranquillity’ he tried to sum up what he had seen, “draw a picture in as firm outline as I can manage” and at the end provide “my personal opinions on some of the problems of the future.” (It’s interesting to observe that he wrote two separate concluding chapters to the book. In ‘Reflections in Tranquillity’ he makes no reference to Belsen. His thoughts on the concentration camps are covered in the previous chapter ‘The Challenge of the K.Z.’ which I described in my post last week.)

Patrick Gordon-Walker was a very junior member of the post-war British labour government and had no official responsibility for policy towards Germany, but as one of the very few members of the government who spoke fluent German and knew something about the country, it seems likely that he had at least some unofficial influence, perhaps in his role as parliamentary private secretary to Herbert Morrison. He certainly remained interested in German affairs. As late at 1974, the same year he retired as an MP from the House of Commons, he took part in a conference, organised by a group of British and German historians, on German emigration and resistance to Hitler: “The ‘Other Germany’ in the Second World War”, attended by many of the German socialists he had known from their time as exiles in London during the war.

I have quoted some extracts from his book below at some length, not because I want to argue that Patrick Gordon-Walker’s views were right or wrong, but because much of what he advocated, as his personal opinion, became official British policy, such as: the re-education of POWs, the promotion of democracy from the bottom up, the reversal of the non-fraternisation policy, and the concern for the future German youth.

Like many other British observers (described in previous posts on this blog) he was shocked by the scale of destruction he saw all around him:

“The most emphatic impression that today’s Germany leaves in one’s mind is the fantastic scale of the destruction…. Some of the destruction was due to last-minute defence of towns – Düren and Jülich paid with their lives as towns for their defence. In most cases the destruction seems to have been due to air attack. But all of it – all the significant destruction was done since last autumn. Everywhere you hear – the real destruction was done in twenty minutes last October, last November, last December, this March. The destructive power of air raids seems to have made an advance in kind in the autumn of 1944…. In Germany today you can see the exact price of fighting on till five minutes past twelve.”

In addition to physical destruction, the social fabric of the country had collapsed. “In Germany, the whole apparatus of a modern state, capable of sustaining a population of millions, lies in destruction. That’s the lasting impression one brings back from Germany. Just below the surface you find a parallel social collapse. The Nazi party has run away; the army is in our prisoner-cages. These were the two principal organs of state. Without them there is no central Government. This does not just mean no Cabinet, no Ministerial Departments. It means no post, no telephones, no pensions, no law-courts. It means each community is isolated unto itself. The only means of movement is on foot. Local government too has collapsed. The whole apparatus for looking after sewage, trams, schools, has just packed up… Garbage has not been collected for months in Germany: in every town stand derelict trams where they last came to a stop. Most of them are not even overturned. German towns are Pompeiis petrified by the volcano of modern war.”

“The second most obtrusive impression left by Germany today is the vast number of Displaced Persons, as they are called. In all there are some ten-twelve millions of foreign workers and prisoners. They present a problem of vast dimensions. As a result of the allied victory the greatest slave-revolt in history has taken place in Germany – a white revolt. The slaves are the masters. And as they roam and wander, taking what they will, plundering and sometimes killing their oppressors and recent masters, they add to the German confusion and collapse. This problem is a passing one: it will be solved by the physical removal of the foreigners to their own countries.”

“There is one other extraordinary characteristic of Germany today. It is a country without men. Never do you see a young German man, except those pouring back to our prisoner cages. The streets are filled with women, young boys and men over sixty.”

There was no sign of resistance or any ‘Werewolf’ organisation. “There is total revulsion against the war and all it has brought in its train” together with “sincerely expressed bitterness against the regime and its leaders … here and there are groups of individuals who have not given in – in particular some of the Hitler Youth. But these traces of an embryo resistance movement seemed, in my observation, more than overweighted by the general readiness to denounce such people to the Allies. I am pretty confident that there is no danger of a mass-resistance. No immediate danger: what happens in the future depends on many things, some of them under our control.”

What of the future?

“For a long time the problem of Germany will be the problem of material reconstruction on a scale that it is hard to imagine. So vast that more destruction may have to be done: many buildings are unsafe – many must be completely pulled down. Towns, or sections of towns, may have to be burned. When I was in Brunswick the early hot spring-sun came out. At one there was the smell of death. Under the ruins of many towns must lie hundreds, even thousands of corpses – waiting to revenge themselves upon the living by spreading disease.”

In general, his impressions of the British Military Government were favourable. They were “sympathetic and firm, took their job very seriously and worked extremely hard.” But although Military Government was “tackling its immediate problems with vigour and considerable success” he was concerned that there appeared to be no long term aim. Military Government had “shown itself adept at rubble clearing. What is lacking is any policy beyond getting things running again as quickly as possible. There is vigour but no direction.”

In his view, Allied policy should be based on a positive engagement with the German people, not upon the fear of future German aggression. Taking the policy of non-fraternisation as an example, he argued that, although it was appropriate for Allied troops to conduct themselves with “a certain dignity and restraint”, the order had been imposed, to some extent, due to a fear that “our conquering soldiers will be wheedled and twisted by the diabolically clever Germans.” This was wrong and a better approach was to allow and encourage Allied soldiers to engage directly with German people. “One of our aims is to bring democracy to Germany; this can only, in the long run, be done positively, by regarding our soldiers as practical prophets of democracy – by bearing ourselves as moral and confident victors over evil.”

Another example of the need for a positive policy, as he saw it, arose from British and American fears that myths might form in Germany, similar to those that were formed after the First World War and subsequently exploited by Hitler, (such as the legend that Germany was only defeated by a stab in the back). Rather than “fight against the formation of all myths” it would be better to “encourage the right myths and create the possibility of their birth by our own positive and confident policy.”

“We want a Germany that is purged of national socialism and militarism – and of the myths that go with these things. But we also want a Germany that is, in the end friendly, co-operative, and truly desirous of democracy – that is desirous of our way of life and of the idea and impulses that underlie it. A Germany friendly to Western civilisation must be our ultimate ideal.”

Germans should not be treated as an oppressed people. “If Germans remain a proletariat in the heart of Europe – there can be no certainty of peace. Some fifty million people who reject Europe, who come to regard themselves as a permanent outcasts and react as outcasts, are an immense danger … The only policy an oppressed people need have is to upset the applecart in the hope that there will be some apples to pick up at the end … One of the evil consequences of such a course is that a people becomes conditioned to the ways of a proletariat nation – conspiracy, violence, ruthlessness and exaggerated nationalism.”

Foreshadowing subsequent events, he went on to say that the greatest immediate danger, so he believed, was a split between the occupying powers (ie the British, Americans, French and Russians) with “each power playing off its own Germans in its own zones and in its neighbour’s zones against the German adherents of other occupying powers.” Although neither Communism nor Democracy were well understood within Germany, both, in his view, could have a great appeal. “For Communism in the sense in which many Germans who profess themselves communists understand it, there certainly is a future in Germany – namely in the sense of radical egalitarian solutions. German socialists want much the same thing. Their persisting fear of Communism is a mixture of dislike of communist ethics and methods and of distrust of Soviet domination of the party.”

The ideal solution, in his view, was the development of democracy from the bottom up, through local trade unions, local government and other cooperative undertakings: “In the long run Germany’s fate might be a happy one. Democracy might be learned from the bottom up without capitalism. For there are at the moment none of the preconditions for capitalism. Co-operation will prove far more efficient and easy to organise. Capitalism could no doubt be revived in Germany: but it would have to be done by deliberate interference from outside – by the same sort of interference that would be necessary for the organisation of Communism in the technical Russian sense.”

Finally he mentioned two other problems; both related to “the absence of German manhood – the main cause for the lack of initiative in Germany today.” The first was the need to prevent young people becoming disillusioned and to harness their enthusiasm and energy to work for the community in a time of need, and for democracy. The second was to re-educate the millions of prisoners of war, and encourage those who were “eager to learn preach and practise Democracy” so that some would return early to their own country and others could be “sent as missionaries amongst the remaining prisoners.”

“By these means the new manhood that grows up in Germany and returns to Germany can become a force for good. Eager to do the hard work of rebuilding, starting schools and hospitals again, practising democracy and finding a peaceful and fruitful outlet for German energies.”

References:

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

Lothar Kettenacker (ed), The ‘Other Germany’ in the Second World War: Emigration and Resistance in International Perspective (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1977)

Patrick Gordon-Walker: The Lid Lifts

4th January 2009

According to Wikipedia, Patrick Gordon-Walker is now best remembered for losing his parliamentary seat for the constituency of Smethwick, in the 1964 British general election. At a time when voters in most parts of Britain were swinging to Labour, Smethwick went the opposite way, as his Conservative opponent fought a racist campaign, exploiting fears among the local inhabitants of large numbers of immigrants moving into the area.

At the time, Patrick Gordon-Walker was expected to become Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson’s first Labour cabinet. Despite losing his seat in the House of Commons, he was still appointed Foreign Secretary and a by-election was arranged for the supposedly safe Labour seat of Leyton. He lost this election as well, resigned as Foreign Secretary and his political career never recovered from the setback, despite regaining the seat in the general election of 1966, and being briefly appointed to the cabinet as Minister of Education and Science. He retired from this position in 1968 and as a Member of Parliament six years later, in 1974.

Twenty years earlier, in 1945, Patrick Gordon-Walker was one of the first British reporters to enter the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen after its liberation. During the war he worked for the BBC, broadcasting regularly to Germany. In the last few months of the war he made two tours of occupied Germany, following the advancing British and American troops; the first from February 24th to March 1st and the second in the final days of the war, from April 16th to 22nd. He made several recordings on these tours, some of which were broadcast on the BBC or Radio Luxemburg (which was now under Allied control). He kept a diary on these tours, which was published later in 1945 as a short book with the title ‘The Lid Lifts.’

Before the war he had taught history at Oxford University. He spoke fluent German, having spent a year in the country in 1931. During the war, while working for the BBC, he met and became friends with many of the German socialist exiles in London, especially the members of the Neu Beginnen group, such as Richard Loewenthal. He first entered parliament in 1945, was soon appointed PPS (Parliamentary Private Secretary) to Herbert Morrison, and in 1947 joined the government as a minister in the Commonwealth Relations Office. During the Labour party’s years in opposition from 1951 to 1964, he was principal spokesman on foreign affairs and shadow foreign secretary.

He entered the camp at Belsen on Friday April 20th, five days after its liberation on April 15th, and in ‘The Lid Lifts’ he described how that afternoon he recorded the first Jewish eve of Sabbath service held in the camp:

“A group of around a hundred or so, in the open air amidst the corpses. Two or three women sang duets and solos. The [Jewish] padre read the service in English and Hebrew. No eye was dry. Certainly not mine. Most of the celebrants were in floods of tears.”

The following day he returned to the camp and recorded the Sabbath morning service:

“During the service, singing and the reading of the traditional prayer for the dead – all round women and men burst into tears and cried openly. We were packed tight in a wooden hut – people standing to the walls.”

The following day, Sunday April 22nd, he recorded in his diary: “I was feeling very angry with Germans.” But in the final two chapters of ‘The Lid Lifts’ written a few weeks later, after time for reflection based on his experiences during the tour as a whole, he came to a different and broader set of conclusions.

The first of the two concluding chapters was titled 'The Challenge of the K.Z.' It was dated May 18th, nearly a month after the end of his second tour of Germany. He started by asking what was it that made the concentration camps unique and “one of the exclusive characteristics of our own age.” The only parallel he could think of was the holds of the slave ships. “And when I heard of the maintenance of orchestras in the worst concentration camps I was reminded of the fiddlers engaged by slave traders to keep their cargo quieter.” However, unlike the slave ships, the concentration camps were imposed by a European government on large numbers of its own citizens, who were deprived of their liberty and their most basic legal rights as human beings. “Here is the link with the slaves in the holds of the ships. Here, too, is the distinction. The slaves are now amongst your fellow citizens. The slave ships, driven from the Atlantic, have anchored at Dachau, Belsen and Buchenwald, in the midst of Europe.” 

A second factor which, in his view, made the camps unique, was their scale, mass-extermination, and the deliberate degradation of humanity. “Never have human beings been brought so low – deliberately and with calculation brought so low.”

What conclusions did he draw from this?  He was concerned that the camps had changed standards of morality, not only in Germany, but in Britain and elsewhere as well: “They have raised our standards of horror to dizzy heights. Slaughter and torture must be on a colossal scale or achieved by a novel means it is to draw attention at all today. How many people must be gassed or burned alive to make the headlines today? … We used to turn away our eyes and shut our ears because we did not wish to know: we look away now because we know too much. Because Hitler has played hell with our standards.”

He continued by saying “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.” Not only were there German victims in the camps “Jews and political opponents and homosexuals” but “even overlooking that, such a reaction of blind vengeance would ignore our own share of the guilt.”

In his view, there had been a “long descent into degradation” and loss of moral standards, from the British concentration camps of the Boer War, through the Spanish civil war, to the compromises made at Munich. But above all he was concerned by a trend he observed among people at home, which he described as a “readiness to follow the trend that led to Belsen and Buchenwald.” In his view, the desire for revenge made people believe that the use of murder as a political weapon was acceptable. “Murder is often more convenient. Mass-murder often seems the convenient way out of intractable problems.”

The first step against this trend was to “restore our respect for death” and “no human life should be taken away without due formality.” Those responsible for the concentration camps would need to be punished, with the death penalty, but this should be done, not through using the same methods as the Nazis, but by following proper formal legal processes.

He believed that all German people had a special responsibility to face the implications of the existence of the camps “on a vast scale in the midst of Germany”. As “the most deliberate and logical development of the concentration camp so far happened in Germany, a development that plumbed the depths of the inhuman and the anti-human … Germans have a particular duty to face the question of their moral guilt. … We can demand of the Germans that they regard the Hitler era that produced these things with horror and loathing, which must be expressed in their laws, their poetry, their songs, their schools, their newspapers.”

But he ended the chapter by saying: “The road back from Belsen and Buchenwald is a road not only for the Germans, but for all of us.”

The chapter in ‘The Lid Lifts’ about Belsen is its most striking part, but by no means the whole of the book. Most of it describes what he found in the towns and cities of Germany, following Allied bombing and the advance of the British and American armies in the last six months of the war. Next week I’ll write about this, and his second concluding chapter titled 'Reflections in Tranquillity.'

References:

Patrick Gordon-Walker, The Lid Lifts, published by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1945.

 

Amy Buller: Darkness over Germany

15th December 2008

What British people aimed to achieve in Germany after the war, depended not only on what they found when they got there, but to a large extent on their views and beliefs as to why they fought the war, and why it started in the first place.

This helps to explain some of the complexity and apparent contradictions in the attitudes of British people, who were in Germany as soldiers in the army of occupation or as diplomats and administrators in the Military Government and Control Commission, towards Germany (the country) and the German people (collectively and as individuals).

If they thought the war was caused by a tradition of ‘Prussian Militarism’, as some did, the answer was to disband the German army and dissolve the state of Prussia (which still existed as a legal and administrative entity through the Weimar republic and the Third Reich). If they thought, following Marxist lines, that both the war and the rise of the Nazi Party were due to desperate attempts by industrial capitalists to preserve their power and wealth, the answer was to nationalise the steel factories and coal mines and dissolve or split the large industrial holding companies and cartels. If they thought it was due to weaknesses in the Weimar constitution, which allowed one party to seize power too easily and establish a totalitarian dictatorship, the answer was to reform the political institutions of the country, to establish more checks and balances, and so, they hoped, create a liberal democracy. 

For some people, social and political explanations such as these were not enough. In addition to materialist, economic or historical causes, they believed the war had a religious and spiritual dimension. It was a battle between good and evil, and the rise of the Nazi Party within Germany was due, so they believed, to spiritual factors, or more precisely, to a lack of spirituality and a lack religious faith. The growing secularisation of society, (in Germany and elsewhere) so some people believed, meant that young people were all too easily attracted to an ersatz religion, with the ceremonies and the sense of belonging to and being part of a larger group, that the Nazi party provided.

When I started to study this period I was surprised to find, in the sources I read, British people speaking of their work as a ‘crusade’ or as ‘fighting a battle for the soul of Germany’.  For example, an army sergeant wrote in a letter to the British Zone Review, as part of the debate on ‘Feeling Sorry for the Germans’, that: “We have called ourselves the Army of Liberation, the Crusaders of Truth, Justice and Liberty. If we are democrats and liberators of the oppressed, entrusted with the mission of enlightening and reaching the principles of truth, justice and liberty, then, in the name of logic and commonsense, why not practice what we preach?” and a Colonel in the Information Services Control Division wrote in another letter that: “the re-birth of Germany is fundamentally a moral and not a material issue. It is in fact a moral Crusade … Too much talk about ‘democracy’ (that overworked word) and not enough about Christianity will tend to place the whole of the vast undertaking to which we are committed on too low a plane.”

Some British people in Germany after the war appeared to see their task in missionary terms, as converting the heathen. Both Field-Marshal Montgomery, Military Governor of the British Zone from 1945-6, and his deputy and successor, General Sir Brian Robertson, spoke of the need to save the ‘soul of Germany’. For example, in a letter to Robertson after visiting the city of Berlin in early 1948, Montgomery wrote that in Berlin: “In fact you find yourself in the front line of the conflict between the East and West. This conflict, I have always maintained, is for the possession of the German ‘soul’; once this is realised everything becomes quite clear,” and in an oral history interview in 1970 for the Truman presidential library, Robertson summed up their task as follows: “The truth of the matter was that in those early days we were fighting a battle over the soul of Germany.”

As an atheist with no religious faith myself, I found it hard to understand just what did Montgomery, Robertson and others mean when they spoke of the ‘soul’ of Germany. I can accept that some people believe quite sincerely that every human being has a ‘soul’ that outlives their physical and material existence, but how could they believe that a nation of 70 million individuals had some kind of collective ‘soul’ that could be fought over and possessed by other nations? Did they believe that every country had a ‘soul’ that survived the physical destruction of land and buildings and millions of individuals who once lived there?

I think I now understand what we could call this ‘spiritual dimension’ to the war and its aftermath, a little better, after reading the book ‘Darkness over Germany’ by Amy Buller. This was published in 1943 and so had nothing to say about Germany after the war, but she was very clear in her view of the causes of the rise of the Nazi party and thus of the war itself, and therefore, by implication, of what needed to be done to ‘win the peace’ after the war was won.

She refered to the “fundamentally religious appeal to the Nazi youth in much of the teaching given to them” and at the end of the book summed up her views as follows:

“It is commonly recognized that Hitler gained support because he assured the youth of his country not only that there would be jobs for them but they had an important part to play in the great struggle for the resurrection of the nation from defeat and despair. It is less often recognized that in addition to these two things he made them feel they belonged to something much greater than the organization they were in and that their destiny was linked with a kind of mystical destiny of the Fatherland. Now it is this last point which is so important and which constitutes what I have called the essentially ‘religious’ side of the Nazi movement.”

In her view, the experience of the fellowship and ceremony of the party gave young people, many of whom had suffered hardship and unemployment during the economic depression, a “new life and energy” which “transcended as well as transformed their immediate tasks and gave their own little existence a cosmic significance and eternal destiny.”

“To a generation without faith, the Nazis gave a brutal philosophy and millions of lives have been sacrificed to free the world of this false answer to a real need, but let us not fail to understand that it was caused by real need. We are now faced with the greater task of bringing healing to the nations including our own. I am convinced this cannot be done without a faith in God adequate to the tremendous task of reconstruction.”

Please note, if you have read this far, that I make no judgement as to whether this view of the rise of Nazism in Germany, and its appeal to young people, was correct or not. The focus of my research is not on Nazi Germany before or during the war, but on who were the British people in occupied Germany after the war, what was it they aimed to achieve and why, and how did this change over time. But the past is connected to the present, and reading Amy Buller’s book, ‘Darkness over Germany’ prompted me to find references by other British people to the ‘soul’ of Germany and to the ‘spiritual dimension’ to the war and its aftermath. To my mind, this helps explain what now, more than sixty years later, appear to be the extraordinary and almost incomprehensible things that some people said at the time.

For some British people, there was something unique to Germany and the German people, which explained a history of unmitigated evil, going back at least 2,000 years to the time of Julius Caesar and Tacitus – much like the religious doctrine of original sin. Lord Vansittart wrote in his notorious book ‘Black Record’, published in 1941, that “The ages during which civilizing influences have changed other nations have so far left the Germans relatively untouched” and “The ground was already prepared for Nazism before Hitler sowed the dragon’s teeth in it.” In a passage referring to a need for a change of heart, mind and soul, he wrote that:

“Of course there have been potential reformers in Germany, but they have always been a weak minority, and have never been able to impede the iniquitous habits and course of the majority. That does not necessarily mean that it is hopeless ever to expect them to be in the ascendant. But the facts which I am going to connect for you do show that if Germany, after a long and unbroken record of evil-doing, is ever to cease to be a curse to herself and to everyone else, she will have to undergo the most thorough spiritual cure in history; and part at least of that cure will have to be self-administered. It will have to comprise a complete change of heart, mind and soul; of taste and temperament and habit; a new set of morals and values, a new, a brand-new way of looking at life.”

For others, such as Robert Birley, Education Adviser to the British Military Governor in Germany and later headmaster of Eton, (as also for Amy Buller), the moral and spiritual problem was expressed in very different terms and was not confined to Germany. In a lecture given in London in December 1947, Birley said that the experience of the First World War had “…taught us that military victory was not enough and that Germany would only cease to threaten the peace of the world if there were a change in the mind and outlook of the German people. Above all we were faced with what was pre-eminently a spiritual problem…

Our occupation of the British Zone of Germany should force us to face the truth. We are now committed to a direct interest in and responsibility for a country which openly accepted Evil as its Good. The eventual success of this occupation depends very largely on our readiness to appreciate the real nature of the responsibility we have accepted. That responsibility means that we must attempt to change the spirit of the people that we have defeated in battle. It is undoubtedly one of the most difficult tasks we have undertaken in our history….

First, it is necessary to recognise that this moral collapse was not merely an isolated German phenomenon. It was largely a manifestation in an extreme form of a diseased condition in Western civilisation as a whole.”

Above all else, this placed a tremendous responsibility on English people to set an example to the rest of the world, as: “We have our own troubles, of course, but the traditional foundations of public morality in our country remain secure. The contrast seems still too great to be convincing. We have not yet a real sense of the break which has occurred in the history of civilisation….

Englishmen should realise that there are millions in Europe today, who feel that we in this country will decide whether the way of life of our western civilisation will survive or perish. Material resources can only come, no doubt, from across the Atlantic, but the spiritual example must come in very large measure from us, just because we are ourselves suffering the same crisis. It is surely not enough to tell ourselves only that ‘we work or want.’ On our readiness to work, which depends ultimately on our solution of our spiritual problem, will depend the survival of faith in other lands that our own. We are fighting a bigger battle than many of us realise.

One thing, at least, we can do ourselves. We can offer the strength of our own traditions to Germany.”

 

The documentary film, “School in Cologne” made in 1948

6th December 2008

A few weeks ago I wrote, on this blog, about the short documentary film K.R.O. Germany 1947, which followed a day in the life of a British Kreis Resident Officer (or K.R.O.) in the British Zone of Germany after the war.

I recently viewed another film, ‘School in Cologne’, made by the same director, Graham Wallace, and released later in the same year, 1948.

Whereas the main character in ‘K.R.O. Germany’ was a British official, the Kreis Resident Officer, the main character in ‘School in Cologne’ was a young German schoolgirl, and the commentary was shared, equally, between a British Education Officer and the German girl, speaking perfect English with only a trace of a German accent.

The film shows just how much official British policy and attitudes would seem to have changed in the two and a half years since the grim picture of destruction and understated, almost grudging, sympathy shown in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People’, made in the autumn of 1945; since the debate in the British Zone Review at much the same time, on whether it was acceptable for British men and women to "feel sorry for the Germans” and since British soldiers were told, in capital letters in The British Soldiers Pocketbook "THERE WILL BE NO BRUTALITY ABOUT A BRITISH OCCUPATION, BUT NEITHER WILL THERE BE SOFTNESS OR SENTIMENTALITY."

The first thing we see in the film ‘School in Cologne’ is a row of children’s feet, some with ragged shoes and some feet bare, while a trickle of rain falls into a tin, from a hole in the roof. The camera scans up to the faces of the children, and we see we are in a crowded classroom, with the children sitting four or five to a desk while the opening credits are displayed on the screen to the sound of the children singing a nursery rhyme. The film then shows the twin towers of Cologne cathedral, followed by children playing in the ruins, and the commentator says: “This is Cologne, in the third winter after the war. When I first came here, two and a half years ago, as a British Education Officer, the schools were still shut. Now they are open again, but our job of reorganising German education is far from finished.”

The film then cuts to a picture of the young German girl, 10-12 years old or so, running and skipping home, barefoot, to what remains of a ruined house. She takes over the commentary and says, in very good English with only a trace of a German accent: “We live in a street where only a few houses are standing. Our old home was burnt down. I live together with my brothers and sister and mother in two rooms under the roof.”

The reason the girl has no shoes, we learn, is because she and her brother have only one pair between them, and today, he has gone to the railway to collect coal for them to burn. The film shows her brother stealing coal briquettes, picking them up from the ground in a railway siding. He hides from a policeman under a railway truck and then runs away home, with his sack of stolen coal, after the policeman has passed. The sympathies of the audience are clearly intended to be with the boy, rather than with the policeman, as the Education Officer says: “The education of these children is one of our biggest problems in Germany. This boy never had any proper schooling during the war years. Now he is 14 years old. He cannot read, and he has never been taught what is right or wrong.”

To pictures of children walking to school, some barefoot, and one young boy with one leg walking on crutches, the Education Officer continues: “I found that when I arrived here, over half the schools in the city were completely destroyed, and of the others, not one was undamaged. Today some 84,000 children use these schools. They are desperately over-crowded. Several schools have to share one building and classes have to be held in shifts. There are still many children who cannot come to school in bad weather, because they have no proper clothing. One fifth of the children in Cologne have no shoes at all.”

The children enter a classroom, and we see the girl has brought her brother and sister with her. She takes over the commentary and says: “My little brother and sister are too young to go to school. But I have to bring them with me. There is no-one at home to look after them. Our father is dead and mother has to work all day in a factory.”

The film continues to show the difficulties faced by the teachers in the school: crowded classes, one textbook shared between four or five children in the class, only odd scraps of paper for the children to make notes and even their slates are broken. “The teachers do their best to improvise, using chalk and their imagination, but there is even a shortage of chalk.”

In a science lesson the teacher uses improvised bits of home-made apparatus to “demonstrate the principles of heat, in a room where the master and pupils have to wear their overcoats to keep warm,” because there is no heating in the school, even in winter.

To try to overcome the shortage of teaching materials, the British education authorities started a schools broadcasting service. We see the children in the classroom listening to the radio, and then the film cuts to a recording studio, where two English women in tweed suits read from a script, speaking very slowly and deliberately, in very proper accents:

“‘Good morning Mrs Smith. Please come in, you are early this morning.’
‘Well I am just on the way to the shops to buy something for lunch and for supper. And if you don’t go early in the morning, there is not much left to buy later.’”

The highlight of the school day is firstly lunch, when a huge cauldron of soup is wheeled into the classroom and ladled out to the children, and the girl says, as she gives her little brother and sister each a spoonful of soup: “This is the first food we have had today. You can imagine how much we enjoy it.”

And secondly the arrival of the post from England. The headmaster brings a number of parcels into the classroom and the girl says, to a close-up shot of her unpacking the parcel with a big smile on her face: “The school in Birmingham sends us clothing and books. I had a lovely big parcel from my English friend Katherine. I was very happy. I hope that one day we can meet and see each other.” The parcel contains clothes, a dress, and a packet of sweets, one of which she pops into her mouth.

The only time we see the British Education Officer, a youngish, very serious-looking man, in his late 30s or so, is when he comes to inspect the school. The children all stand up as he enters the classroom, and he inspects the books the teacher and children are using: “We are also producing new schoolbooks to replace the perverted lessons of the Nazis… With a staff of under 200, we have to tackle the enormous job of controlling all educational activities in the British Zone. We work in close contact with the German authorities, to guide German education along better lines.”

The film continues by showing one of the new British Information Centres, called 'Die Brücke' (The Bridge), in a German high street, where “adults and parties of students” come to read English books and newspapers and “attend lectures and discussion groups in English to further their understanding of England.” We then see a group of earnest young men engaged in discussion round a table: “These are ex-prisoners of war who have come back to school to make up for the lost war years. This man fought at Stalingrad, he was a POW in Canada, in North Africa, in Norway. Between them they have seen quite a lot of the world, and they can be a valuable influence in Germany. Now they are studying so that they can become teachers.”

The last two sequences repeat and sum up the message of the film. The children leave the classroom at the end of term, at the start of the Christmas holidays, each carrying a wooden toy they have made themselves, because there are no toys for sale in the shops. The last to leave the school is the boy with one leg, walking down the steps on crutches with his satchel on his back, as another group of children, the afternoon shift, walk up the steps to start their school day. We then see the first group of children again, now walking outside with the ruined city in the background – the twin towers of the cathedral, a square church tower, ruined houses, heaps of rubble. Then another group of children run down the steps from a school entrance, and as the camera pans up to a ruined dome above the, once imposing, school entrance, the Education Officer says: “Never before has the school been so important. In these ruined cities it is often the only barrier between these children and a life of complete barbarism.”

Finally, at the end of the film, we see a group of children at work in a half-destroyed and derelict school room, carrying ladders and building materials, clearing rubble, sweeping the floor, fitting new window frames, plastering walls. While they work, the soundtrack is of the children singing a Christmas carol and this continues while the commentator says: “Today in Cologne and in the other cities of Germany, the children are working with their teachers to rebuild their schools. Building material is scarce, but much can be salvaged from the ruins around them. Never before has there been such a desire for education as in Germany today. These children are repairing their schools, so as to be able to build up their own lives again. They must clear away the rubbish that Hitler left behind, so that their schools can be a free and solid foundation for the future. We are here to see that this is done.”

And the end title says:

Made for the Control Commission for Germany
By the Central Office of Information

References:

The documentary films ‘School in Cologne’ and ‘K.R.O. Germany, 1947’ were directed by Graham Wallace and produced by the Crown Film Unit. They are both held in the archives of the British Film Institute and I would like to thank BFI staff for locating the films and providing viewing facilities at the BFI Library in London.

 

More on Goronwy Rees and his six day tour of Germany in July 1945

30th November 2008

Goronwy Rees, the distinguished journalist, writer, Fellow of All Souls College Oxford, Principal of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth, friend of Guy Burgess, and for a time, briefly, a Russian spy, was a senior intelligence officer in Germany for six months after the end of the war. He worked in the Political Division of Military Government, with the rank of Lt. Colonel, reporting to the Political Adviser, Sir William Strang, who was later Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office.
 
In April this year, I wrote about Goronwy Rees and the six day tour of the British Zone of Germany he made with William Strang in July 1945. The post was based on a chapter from his book ‘A Bundle of Sensations’ first published in 1960.

On a recent visit to The National Archives I found and read his original diary of the tour. This was an official document, circulated to other officers in the British Military Government, not a personal diary for his own use only.

There were a few passages in the diary which surprised me and which did not appear in the book, published 15 years later.

Firstly a short paragraph, which implied that some British officers believed that war with Russia was not only likely, it had already begun, Germany would fight this war on the side of the British and Americans, and German airmen were already being recruited to fight against Japan. “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.”

This was July 1945 and the war against Japan had not yet ended, with the dropping of the Atom Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, but even so this passage seems surprising. If anyone reading this post knows anything about German air pilots recruited to form an international air brigade, to train in England and fight against Japan, please do let me know or add your comments.

Secondly, I was surprised by just how patronising and condescending the following description of Russian and Polish forced labourers, known after the war as ‘Displaced Persons’ or DPs, now appeared, reading it more than sixty years after it was written.

In the diary Rees records how one Brigadier took them to visit a camp where they found the DPs “lying on their palliasses [straw mattreses] embowered in the flowers and foliage which they bring back from the countryside to construct each for himself a tiny green cage, which presumably reminds him of his pastoral home. It is quite impossible to describe in a few words the extraordinary impression created by these half-savage, half animal, yet curiously attractive creatures, who create for themselves in some ex-German barracks the atmosphere of a peasant festival or a horticultural show. It was interesting to hear an officer say that he had become extremely attached to them; it was equally interesting to hear that by their uncouth and savage behaviour they had converted the British soldiers in charge of them from any possible sympathy with anything that savoured of communism.”

Rees himself had been a socialist and communist sympathiser before the war and a strong opponent of fascism. I wonder to what extent his own experience in Germany at the end of the war changed his view of communism and the Soviet Union?

In general though, the description in the book of the high-minded attempts by British Military Government officers to restore a devastated and shattered country, were very similar to the impressions recorded in the original diary. For example, here is an extract (which didn’t appear in the book) describing a meeting with Lt General Horrocks, Commander of 1 Corps:

“Finally the general touched upon the problem of military government from the point of view of our own troops. He said that he regarded our occupation as a school of citizenship both for the Germans and for ourselves, and that he attached the utmost importance to using military government as a means to returning our troops to England as better and more useful citizens. At the present moment, he said, the morale of our troops was very high because they felt that after six years of destruction they were now turning to a constructive task, which would affect the morale not merely of Germany but of Europe. And since it was in the interest both of the Germans and ourselves to raise German economy and German social life to a level which would overcome the dangers of disease, famine and unrest, there was a real basis of co-operation between both parties which it was important to maintain.”

Rees added a paragraph to say he endorsed these views personally, he believed they were representative of the British army as a whole and it was “invigorating and inspiring … to find the Commander and Staff of a Corps, which has fought the Germans from Alamein to the Rhine, now entering on new and even more difficult tasks with a determination to achieve the best not merely for themselves, or for the Germans, but for Europe as a whole.”

 
References:

The National Archives, FO 1056/540: Goronwy Rees’ tour diary, July 1945

Goronwy Rees: Sketches in Autobiography: ‘A Bundle of Sensations’ and ‘A Chapter of Accidents’ with ‘A Winter in Berlin’, a further autobiographical essay. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001). Edited with Introduction and Notes by John Harris

On Rees acting as a spy for the Soviet Union, John Harris wrote in the introduction: “It appears [from recently available Soviet archives] that Rees for little more than a year (1938-9), and in the anti-fascist cause, supplied political hearsay gathered from weekends at All Souls – most probably on Cabinet attitudes to Hitler and the likelihood of a British stand against him.”

 

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

23rd November 2008

Historians have debated when and why British Policy after the war changed from ‘holding Germany down’ to ‘putting Germany on its feet again.’ Was it due to the emergence of the Cold War, and if so, was the key ‘Turning Point’ the Moscow Foreign Ministers’ conference in April 1947, as Konrad Adenauer claimed in his memoirs, or as the historian Anne Deighton has argued, was it a year earlier at the Paris conference in April 1946, or half way between the two with the speech by James Byrnes (the US Secretary of State) in Stuttgart in September 1946? Alternatively was the Turning Point due, not to the emerging Cold War, but as another historian has claimed, to economic, rather than political or diplomatic grounds, in the Winter of 1946, as the British government became concerned above all else with the costs of the occupation, or yet again, as Petra Goedde has argued (see last week’s post) was it due to personal relationships between GIs and Germans, in the first two years after the end of the war?

In the paper I gave at the History Lab postgraduate conference earlier this year, I argued that, for senior British army officers on the ground in Germany, the key Turning Point was none of the above, but immediately after the unconditional surrender of German armed forces on VE Day in May 1945 and the end of the war in Europe, when almost overnight, the British army of occupation started working energetically to rebuild and restore a country they had previously been doing their best to destroy.

On a recent visit to The National Archives I was delighted to find evidence to support my view, in a file of weekly policy directives, which specified very clearly the public relations line to be adopted by the British Military Government.

Directive no 1, issued on 13th May 1945, only a few days after VE Day on May 8th, adopted a harsh tone, stating in the first paragraph that:

“The following five points will be the dominant themes of all output:
a) The completeness of Germany’s defeat in the field
b) The common responsibility of all Germans for Nazi crimes
c) The power and determination of the Allies to enforce their will
d) The unanimity of the Allies
e) The spiritual importance of the individual”

In the main body of the directive, four points were emphasised:

"Completeness of Germany’s defeat
The common responsibility of all Germans for Nazi crimes: Concentration Camps
Unanimity of the Allies
Food production" and the need for maximum effort by all Germans to avoid famine.

There was no change in policy in the second directive, issued on May 20th, which stated clearly: “There are no changes in the main themes given in Policy Directive No 1.”

But in the third directive, for the week beginning 27th May, there was a distinct change in tone:

“1. The basic themes laid down in Policy Directive No 1 (para 1) remain valid but points (a) and (b) should no longer be dominant. While not allowing them to be glossed over, the emphasis should now be shifted to more positive aims. We should now gradually begin to lessen the harshness of our tone.

2. The immediate need, from both Allied and German points of view, is for a supreme effort by the Germans at all forms of reconstruction work. The devastation and dislocation in Western Germany is on a scale far greater than in any other occupied zone with the exception of BERLIN, and is such that without positive encouragement from ourselves, in place of the negative impression created by continual insistence on the fact of German defeat, the Germans are likely to prove incapable of finding within themselves the moral energy needed for reconstruction.

3. What is now required is to show the Germans that considerable reconstruction activity is already in progress under Allied impetus …..

4. To sum up: make it very clear to the Germans that we do not want to see them go under as a people and that (points (a) to (d) of policy directive No. 1 notwithstanding) we do want to see Western Germany build itself up again, as far as possible by its own efforts, into a prosperous though controlled community.”

Directive no 4, dated 8 June, continued this new theme, stating explicitly that policy had now changed:

“1. Directive No.1 prescribed a predominantly negative attitude designed to produce passive acquiescence. It is now superseded and emphasis will henceforth be laid on the following:

a) The encouragement of genuinely democratic persons to assist in the urgent tasks required by Mil Gov…

b) The encouragement of cultural activities

c) The exposure and discrediting of the National Socialist/Militarist regime coupled with the responsibility of the German people for supporting it…

d) The power and fundamental agreement of the Allies

e) The spiritual importance of the individual, and his duties towards the community”

Unfortunately nothing in this file explains the reasons for this change in policy. I am not aware of any formal change in policy by the British government in London and it seems to me it must be linked with Field Marshal Montgomery’s appointment as Military Governor of the British Zone. In his memoirs he describes how, following the unconditional surrender, he had “suddenly become responsible for the government and well-being of about twenty million Germans. Tremendous problems would be required to be handled and if they were not solved before the winter began, many Germans would die of starvation, exposure and disease.… As the days passed after the end of the German war I became increasingly worried at the lack of any proper organisation to govern Germany.”

Montgomery flew to London on 14th May to “impress on the Prime Minister the urgent need for a decision in the matter” (ie the appointment of a Military Governor) and succeeded in being appointed Commander in Chief of the British forces in Germany on 22nd May. Now that he had been given the necessary authority, he could make the changes in policy he thought necessary himself. On May 23rd he addressed Control Commission staff in London and said: “Between us we have to re-establish civil control, and to govern, a country which we have conquered and which has become sadly battered in the process.” His biographer, Nigel Hamilton, commented on this speech: “Monty’s sympathy with the plight of Germany came as a shock to those in the auditorium who pictured him as a ruthless, Cromwellian commander, until two weeks ago waging implacable war upon the Nazis.”

He returned to Germany on 26th May, the day before Directive no 3 was issued, with the new emphasis on “more positive aims.”

References

PRISC Directives: May 1945 – March 1946
The National Archives, FO 1005/739
The first directives, numbers 1-9, were issued by the Headquarters of the British 21st Army Group. From number 10 onwards they were issued on behalf of “Major-General Information Services Control and Public Relations” following General Alec Bishop’s appointment to this position in July 1945.

Konrad Adenauer, Memoirs 1945-53, translated by Beate Ruhm von Oppen (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), Chapter 6 ‘The Turning Point’ pp 89-106

Anne Deighton in Ian D. Turner (ed), Reconstruction in Post-War Germany: British Occupation Policy and the Western Zones 1945-1955, (Oxford: Berg Publishers Ltd, 1989), p25

John E. Farquharson, ‘From Unity to Division: what prompted Britain to change its policy in Germany in 1946.’ European History Quarterly, Vol.26 1996, pp 81-123

Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949 (Yale University Press, 2003)

The Memoirs of Field-Marshal The Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, (Collins, London: 1958)

‘GIs and Germans’ by Petra Goedde

15th November 2008

I’ve recently read ‘GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949’ by Petra Goedde (Yale University Press, 2003).

In summary, the argument put forward in the book is that personal relationships between the occupiers and occupied preceded and, in part, caused the changes in US policy towards Germany in the two years after the war.

“Within the first year of occupation, American soldiers developed a feminized and infantalized image of Germany that contrasted sharply with the masculine, wartime, image of Nazi storm troopers … By 1947, Americans saw the Soviet Union as a greater threat to their security than Germany, not so much because the Soviet Union had become more of a threat but because Western Germany had become less of a threat. … The cold war was therefore as much a consequence as a cause of the improved relationship between Germany and the United States.”

The German people the US soldiers met did not correspond to their “government’s official wartime image of a monolithic people unified by their support for the war. Instead they found a defeated population devastated by the destruction of the war and rather desperate in its desire to make peace with the Allies. While the Army pamphlets warned solders about ‘the German’ – mostly in the masculine singular – soldiers saw a plurality of Germans, men and women, young and old, Nazis and non-Nazis, locals and refugees, perpetrators and victims. The lines that once had so clearly separated ‘us’ from ‘them’ became increasingly blurred … Just as American military officials could not prevent the emergence of mutual friendships between their soldiers and German women, so too policy makers could not hold on to a punitive directive in the face of the socio-cultural rapprochement in occupied Germany.”

This was the first time I have found a historian explicitly claim, in Petra Goedde’s words in the conclusion to her book, that: “the process of rehabilitation began before the emergence of the cold war. It thus refutes one of the major assumptions of postwar German-American relations: that American policy toward Germany became conciliatory as a result of the cold war. In fact, as the preceding study shows, German-American rapprochement was as much a cause as a consequence of the cold war.”

‘GI’s and Germans’ refers almost exclusively to the US Zone of Occupation, as you would expect from the title, but much of what she wrote would appear to apply equally to the British Zone, and not surprisingly, given my own research as described on this blog over the past 3 years, I tend to agree with her conclusions. See, for example my posts on British and US First Impressions of Germany in 1945, and How three British army offices reacted to the transition from war to peace in Germany, 1945.

A year ago, in a post about the book The Struggle for Germany, by Drew Middleton, the highly regarded US journalist and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, I asked the question: “When and why did British and US policy towards Germany change after the war?” and the answer I gave at the time was:

“In my research so far, I have found that British policy and attitudes towards Germany changed in the transition from war to peace, in many ways which had little to do with fear of any threat from the Soviet Union. It seems to me that this change in policy was led as much by those on the ground, in Germany, as by the politicians and civil servants in London. The British in Germany realised very soon after the end of the war that there was no threat of further German resistance. They were shocked at the scale of destruction they saw all around them and made great efforts to restore order and start the process of economic reconstruction. They did this partly because the need appeared self-evident, and partly to reduce the cost of occupation to the British taxpayer. In time, they came to feel and express sympathy for the suffering of Germany people as individuals. Both British and US soldiers and administrators found they could work well with German administrators and were increasingly willing to transfer responsibility for government back to local German control. All this happened well before Cold War concerns started to dominate foreign policy in Britain and the US, with the Berlin Air Lift in 1948 and the Korean War in 1950.”

However, as always, there are no simple answers. The more I look into the question of why British soldiers and administrators in Germany reacted to the end of the war in they way they did, what they aimed to achieve, and how this changed over time, the more difficult and complex it appears.

For a different view of the book ‘GIs and Germans’ see the review on H-Net

 

Another two Kreis Resident Officers

9th November 2008

In my last two posts, I described the short documentary film K.R.O. Germany, 1947, and an article about the film written by the director, Graham Wallace, in the magazine Documentary Film News.

The British authorities in Germany must have thought that Kreis Resident Officers, or KROs as they were known for short, represented the acceptable face of the British Occupation of Germany after the war – acceptable to the people back home that is. Hard working, authoritative and respected by those in their care, they combined a paternalistic concern for the well being of the people living in their Kreis (or district) while at the same time keeping a careful eye on everyone and everything, and prepared to take strong action to prevent trouble if necessary – much like an old fashioned headmaster. Or alternatively like a district commissioner in some far flung part of the British Empire.

At least, that was how the KRO was presented in the film, and I was interested to find a similar image in a radio script, produced by the Control Commission for Germany for the British Forces Network and broadcast in March 1948, two months after the film KRO Germany 1947 was first released in Britain.

In the radio programme, two KROs, one for the country town of Iserlohn and surrounding district, and one for the heavily industrialised urban district of Oberhausen, talked with the presenter about what they did.

It’s not clear if the script was written after the broadcast, and so represents a more or less spontaneous conversation, or if it was carefully scripted, jokes and all. I may well be wrong, but I suspect it’s the latter. Here are a few extracts.

Firstly the answers to the question posed by the presenter: what was the idea behind the job of a KRO?  The country KRO, Wing Commander Bird, answered first:

“The idea, I should say is to interpret to the Germans the true spirit of democracy and the essentials of self-government. You see, it is in the parish or the towns or the county councils that parliamentarianism, as we know it, is born, and it is only at this level that the people can be taught the real meaning of self-rule.”

The city KRO, Colonel Moir, agreed and added “I think that the best way to put it, is that a Kreis Resident Officer is one of the principal means by which official policy is put into practice. He is the man who is in the closest contact with the German life ‘on the ground’.”

Much of the time was spent talking about the three main problems both KROs had to cope with: food, housing and education, in that order. Their concerns were very similar to those shown faced by the KRO in the film. For example, one of the biggest issues in Iserlohn was finding accommodation for refugees from the East. As W/Cdr Bird said: “For a long time past, there has been an influx of about 200 a month … Finding them somewhere to live has been a permanent shadow over all my work.”

But the asides in the conversation were, in many ways, the most revealing. Some of these involved Wing Commander Bird’s wife, who was also present at the interview. I imagine they were introduced into the script in an attempt to liven up the conversation. For example, what do you make of the following exchange, which starts with W/Cdr Bird telling the presenter, Mr Llewellyn, how many staff he had to help him with his work?

Wing Cdr Bird:  "I’ve got a deputy KRO working with me, two German interpreters, two typists and two Public Safety clerks. No other British staff."

Mrs Bird:  "Why are you laughing whenever my husband says ‘British’, Colonel Moir?"

Colonel Moir:  "I think that it’s very tactful of him … he must have noticed the kilt that I am wearing. A pity that the BFN [British Forces Network] haven’t gone in for television."

Mrs Bird:  "I think it looks sweet. It must save a lot of coupons.

A word of explanation is possibly needed here. Wing Commander Bird would normally have said no other English staff, but was being polite, because he knew Colonel Moir was Scottish. As the previous two posts showed, both British and German people after the war very often called someone or something 'English' rather than 'British', when they were actually referring to the whole of the United Kingdom. In the same way, they talked about 'Russia' and the 'Russians' instead of the Soviet Union (and 'America' or 'Americans', instead of the USA).

W/Cdr Bird:  "I was just saying what staff I had got. Not on my staff, but working in the closest cooperation with me, is the Public Safety Officer. And then there is the Intelligence Team."

Colonel Moir:  "I have got a German staff of three. They all speak English well, but we try and conduct all our activities in German. My interpreter was a sergeant-major in a German tank regiment. He was taken prisoner in Italy."

Mr Llewellyn:  "KROs are obviously not overstaffed. Probably Mrs Bird has got more staff to run her house."

Mrs Bird:  "I object to that Mr Llewellyn. As a matter of fact, I have only got a cook and a manservant."

Mr Llewellyn:  "I apologise!"

There had been much criticism in Britain that some members of the occupation forces were living a life of idleness and luxury. Both the film and this broadcast appear to have been designed, in part, to convey the impression that, in fact, they worked very hard. I’m not sure they succeeded here, with Mrs Bird managing to run her house with only a cook and a manservant! But it was very common for British officers after the war to employ German servants and many would have had more than just two working for them.
 
Finally, both KROs answered the question whether they were “afraid of a revival of Nazism?” It seems to me that, in their replies, they could have been speaking about the natives in some unruly part of the British Empire.

Colonel Moir:  "Not so long as we stay in Germany. If we were to leave, I’m afraid that political resistance to its return might not be strong enough to keep it at bay."

W/Cdr Bird:  "The elements are still there. The German instinctively prefers to be ruled, and not to have to carry the baby himself. If democratic government fails to put Germany on its feet, there would be certainly a big risk of the revival of totalitarianism."

Mr Llewellyn:  "I am afraid that our time is about up. Mrs Bird, when the time comes for you to go home for good, what part of your job, as a KRO’s wife, will you feel has helped your husband most?"

Mrs Bird:  "Honestly truthfully, getting tea, I think, after he and some of his German officials have been talking politics – and German politics at that – for three solid hours."

Colonel Moir:  "I must warn my wife about that. I’m hoping that she will join me in the Spring. There is so much work I cannot touch, that a woman alone can handle."

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a post on this blog on the theme of Englishness and Empire and ‘Winning the Peace’. It’s interesting to see the same themes recur as I work my way through my research.