Meeting the Enemy

by Richard van Emden

  ‘The more irons one has in the fire, the more likely is success I believe,’ Nellie counselled a sympathetic supporter. ‘And if Carl’s name is mentioned again and again from different quarters, it should make more impression. Of course what makes me uneasy, and what Carl mentions too, is the fact that naturalized Germans are not particularly in favour with the Government here at present.’

  Indeed they were not. No one was about to go out of their way to help Nellie Fuchs, as she gradually came to realise.

  The stress placed upon married women in time of war was extraordinary, with husbands and sons away on active service, their men’s lives in daily peril.

  In 1913 Mary Newton married Arthur Harthaus, giving birth to a son the following year in Blackpool. At some point, probably around April 1915, Arthur was interned, forcing his wife to rely on eleven shillings a week in relief for herself and her child. Mary was forced to move from her home in Stockport to live with her mother near Durham. Serious domestic arguments ensued and, in October 1915, Mary took up a British government offer to ‘repatriate’ German women by birth or marriage. Mary travelled to Gotha in central Germany to live with her parents-in-law.

  The move proved unsuccessful. Mary had no money of her own and her parents-in-law had little enough to provide for themselves. Within months she applied to return to England. ‘I have decided to beg of you [the American Consulate] to communicate with England regarding my return as I am so very unhappy here.’ The American vice-consul in Erfurt wrote to the American Embassy in Berlin: ‘As Mrs Harthaus is a German citizen by marriage and evidently not entitled to a British passport, I have the honour to ask if I may advance her sufficient money to defray the expenses of her return to England if she is able to obtain permission to leave Germany.’

  The British Foreign Office ordered a report from the Manchester City Police Force as to whether Mary’s relatives would look after her and her son. Mary’s brother-in-law, John Sutherst, claimed that he had no objections to her coming to stay, but she had to be in a position to keep herself and this was evidently impossible. He added that in his opinion Mary should remain in Germany. She had quarrelled with relatives and in all likelihood the same state of affairs would recur once she was back in England.

  Two months after making her application, Mary Harthaus received the Foreign Office reply: ‘Viscount Grey has the honour to state that His Majesty’s Government regret that after due enquiry they do not feel able to grant permission for Mrs Harthaus’ return.’

  Why would the Foreign Office allow Mary Harthaus to return and become a financial burden to the state, especially when she was German and had opted to leave Britain at state expense? If this case appeared clear-cut, there were others in which absurdly punitive measures were adopted with no such rationale.

  Annie Vinnicombe married an Anglophile German named Michael Reiser at a church in Marylebone, central London, in the summer of 1894. After four years of marriage the couple and their young family emigrated to Bordeaux where they set up a tailoring business called ‘New England’.

  Within weeks of war, Michael Reiser was interned and the business seized. Mrs Reiser was financially secure but by February 1915 the French government decided that as she was legally a German, she could no longer reside in France and would have to go either to Spain or Switzerland. Annie Reiser had contacts in neither country and feared that, instead, she would be sent to Germany where she was not aware of having any living family; she could not, in any case, speak the language.

  Much distressed, she appealed for help to the British Consulate in Bordeaux. Arthur Rowley, a consular official, replied informing her that any British-born wife of an enemy alien interned in France would be given permission to return as long as they lived with relatives and were not a drain on state resources.

  Annie had a brother and two sisters in England. Her brother, George Vinnicombe, a carman working for the London, Brighton and South Coast Railways, was contacted but he said that he was not in a position to support his sister and her children under his roof.

  Annie might have moved in with her sisters but there was a further problem. Both lived within twenty-five miles of the coast, in areas prohibited to ‘enemy aliens’. One sister lived near Falmouth, the other near the village of Chailey in East Sussex. In a letter to Annie, the Home Office refused permission for her to live with either sister and consequently her return to Britain was effectively blocked.

  The official rejection was sent at the end of February with a note suggesting the best solution would be if the French authorities allowed her to stay in Bordeaux. On 16 April 1915, the French government informed the British Embassy that they considered it impossible for her to remain as it would set an ‘awkward precedent’. She would thus be removed to an internment camp. The British government then lost all interest in Annie Reiser. Their only concession was to allow her two oldest sons, as British-born subjects, to return home. Twenty-year-old Michael Reiser went to Paris and enlisted with the British artillery. Cecil, the second son, followed a year later and was posted to the 30th Middlesex Regiment, embarking for the Western Front in April 1918. Despite her sons’ patriotism, Annie Reiser remained in France with her youngest son. She does not appear to have been sent to an internment camp.

  In contrast to the British government’s attitude towards Annie Reiser, the rights of German-born ‘British’ women to enter Britain were not restricted. David Russell’s German-born wife might have had a miserable time in Britain but there was no question about her not being admitted. Elfride Robson, née Frick, was another arrival. Her position was much healthier than Mrs Russell’s: Elfride had English relatives with whom she could stay in Birkenhead. Being on the coast, it was a restricted area for aliens but then, of course, Elfride was not considered an alien.

  Elfride had met her English husband Alan in Hamburg where he was working as a company manager. They married and had a daughter, Muriel, born in 1915. Apart from a total of six weeks’ holiday in England, Elfride had never been overseas and Muriel, owing to her father’s internment, had had little or no contact with him. Mother and daughter spoke only German. In October 1918 as the tide of war flowed irrevocably against Germany, Alan applied for his wife and daughter to come to England. The government’s reply arrived within a couple of weeks: ‘His Majesty’s Government have the honour to state that they have no objection to the issue of a passport to Mrs Robson to enable her to return to the United Kingdom with her daughter as soon as she has obtained permission from the German Government to leave Germany.’

  Mother and daughter left Germany for Britain on 6 November.

  By the start of 1915 the entire east coast and most of the south coast of Britain had been designated an area prohibited to enemy aliens. A surprise enemy naval raid on England in December 1914, and the bombardment of towns including Hartlepool and Whitby, fuelled suspicion that enemy agents were signalling to German ships in the North Sea, increasing pressure on the government to remove any Germans still near the coast. Around 2,500 enemy aliens were living in prohibited areas at the beginning of the New Year, with their continued occupation at the discretion of county Chief Constables. Permits were granted to those Germans considered unreservedly loyal or whose work was of such national importance that their presence inside the prohibited area was of more use than their expulsion. Permits were also given to enemy aliens who were elderly, blind or bedridden or who were confined to a hospital or asylum. In February, the Home Office explained these arrangements to MPs.

  On grounds of mere humanity, lone women with nowhere else to go . . . may be made exceptions . . . In rarer cases financial loss or ruin which might follow an expulsion may perhaps be accepted as a reason for indulgence, but in all cases the main factor is that the alien is an enemy, and, if any interest is to suffer it must be that of the individual and not of the country.

  This statement should have reassured ‘lone women’ like Julia Jacobitz, the retired German school governess whose only wish was to be left in p
eace in her Bournemouth home. However, since registering with local police she had been systematically harassed. Within days of registration she received a letter requiring her to move, being given twenty-four hours to comply or face a fine she could not hope to pay. She remained where she was, only to be served with a further demand to go: this time she was threatened with up to six months in prison. Once again she ignored the order; she had no choice:

  Since my very existence as a decent human being was bound up with this little house of mine, to leave it would have amounted to being rendered homeless, destitute and ruined for life and I could therefore not comply with such an order any more than I could be expected to conform with one to commit suicide. I had therefore to prepare for imprisonment. For a whole day and night I sat up at the appointed time without food, or sleep, expecting every moment to be taken away.

  Julia was given a reprieve but made subject to the five-mile travel restriction imposed on all enemy aliens. No sooner had she heard that she could remain in Bournemouth than she became the subject of a Deportation Order. Miss Jacobitz applied for an exemption, being obliged to reply to questions she felt ‘far exceeded the requirements of the official application forms’. Only after she had endured five months of uncertainty was permission granted for her to remain, whereupon she was served with two further notices to move.

  In exasperation, she wrote to the American Embassy’s German Department asking for help.

  Having done no wrong whatsoever to justify proceedings against me, I beg to invoke [the] intervention of the Embassy on my behalf in their capacity as temporary protectors of Germans’ interests, to prevent my being forcibly removed from my house. Ever since the beginning of the war, I have been kept in a state of permanent anxiety and suspense: the present being the fourth official order to leave my house. For a woman of 65 years, like myself, weakened in health and placed in exceptionally difficult position by absolute loneliness, having to go through this nerve-racking experience all alone and unaided, passes torture in itself.

  Julia Jacobitz had nowhere to go and no close friends with whom she could stay for any length of time. Her income was limited, an amount ‘which any ordinary labourer would scarce accept as a living wage’, and she lived within a carefully mapped-out plan of expenses. Normally she could manage but these were not normal times ‘and I view with grave apprehension the possibility of the war outlasting the small saving which I am drawing upon now’.

  She continued:

  The Authorities have not stated what they are going to do with me, but recalling to my mind precedents and the manner in which they treated their own country’s women, I do not entertain any illusions as to the treatment I shall receive at their hands . . . Broken in health and having grown old, I do not ask any more of life than to end my days in peace.

  The American Embassy enquired into Julia Jacobitz’s case but to no avail. The Chief Constable of Hampshire had ordered her removal and he proved impervious to all requests to reconsider. Julia was duly arrested for non-compliance with the order, as a letter written on behalf of the Under Secretary of State confirmed:

  Miss Jacobitz received considerate treatment in being exempted from repatriation, but the grant of the further privilege of remaining at Bournemouth was within the discretion of the Chief Constable of Hampshire. The Secretary of State did not see his way in this case to interfere with the Chief Constable’s decision which follows the general practice of requiring persons of enemy nationality to remove to non-prohibited areas . . . Miss Jacobitz has been ill-advised as to refuse to leave the prohibited area and consequently was charged at the Bournemouth police court with the offence of residing there without a permit when she elected to be tried by jury and consequently she is now in the custody in Winchester Gaol . . . She is said to have made no application for bail.

  The case came to court on 11 January 1916, with proceedings being reported in the Bournemouth Guardian. While the Court Recorder acknowledged that the defendant was no threat and that he regarded the case as one of ‘wrong-headedness’ on her part, nevertheless Julia Jacobitz ‘seemed to think that her home was her castle and that if that castle was in a prohibited area it made her entitled to live in it. Of course that was not so.’ Julia’s defence lawyer pleaded that his client subsisted on a government annuity of under £60 a year, half of which went to rent her ‘little cottage’. Giving evidence for the police, a Superintendent Hack said that Jacobitz was ‘stubborn and obstinate’ but conceded, too, that there were no grounds whatsoever to suspect the defendant and that the only reason she had been asked to move was because she was an enemy alien.

  The Recorder stated that the law had to be obeyed even if it caused ‘discomfort and hardship’. Julia Jacobitz was found guilty and fined £75, which would be held over as long as she left the prohibited area within a week. In the meantime, she would have to report daily at Boscombe police station in Bournemouth.

  The Foreign Office files do not contain any further material on the case. Perhaps Julia Jacobitz moved; perhaps she ended up back in Winchester gaol. On such a tight budget she could hardly have afforded the fines. The only thing that is certain is that the retired governess remained in Britain. She died of pneumonia in a Southampton hotel on 14 December 1927, aged seventy-six. Her entire estate was worth £185.

  Issues concerning nationality and statehood affected men as well, and not only vicariously through their wives. Men who took citizenship of another country automatically lost their former nationality and therefore citizenship, and the rights of protection under the law granted at birth. It meant, for example, that a German-born man, raised and working in Germany, who had, for whatever reason, accepted British citizenship, would be interned in Ruhleben camp as quickly as a British-born enemy alien. But irrespective of the perverse position in which many people found themselves, it is unlikely that there were many cases as odd as that concerning an uninterned British academic and Munich University lecturer, Wilford Wells.

  His story came to light when the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs received an urgent letter from a friend of Wilford Wells, Thomas Smith, a former lecturer at Erlangen University in Bavaria. In August 1914, Smith wisely chose to return to Britain but Wells, who was unmarried, remained overseas. Then, in late 1915, Smith’s attention was drawn to a short newspaper article.

  I see by the Fränkischer Kurier [a Nuremberg newspaper] for October 29th 1915, that Mr Wells has been called up to serve in the German army. He is about 36 to 38 years of age and as he was a personal friend of mine, I am convinced that he has never taken this step of his own free will . . . [or] that he ever took out papers of naturalisation.

  There was no longer an American consul in Munich, the last incumbent having been removed, Smith claimed, because of his pro-German sympathies. As a result, there was no one obvious to whom Wells could directly appeal. The Foreign Office, Smith suggested, should look into the case through the offices of the American Embassy in Berlin.

  Born in September 1878, Wells left Britain for Germany in 1901, taking a position as an English lecturer at Munich University in 1906. Four years later Bavarian law changed: certain jobs, including teaching, were to be deemed government posts and attracted, for those foreigners who held them, Bavarian nationality. Both Smith and Wells knew that they were now considered Bavarian civil servants but, they believed, with only ‘complimentary citizenship and pension rights.’ ‘At the time,’ wrote Smith, ‘I enquired from the British Consul in Nuremberg whether it made any difference to my [British] nationality and he replied in the negative.’ Yet, according to Bavarian law these were not complimentary rights but full rights and, as a Bavarian subject, rights came with obligations.

  Wells held a valid British passport obtained on the outbreak of war from the British vice-consul in Munich and assumed, logically, that he was ineligible for active service in the German army. In January 1915, to his surprise, he was called for a medical examination. Wells went to see the Secretary of Munich University and was info
rmed of a two-year period of grace during which he should have given up Bavarian nationality in order to keep British citizenship. This he had failed to do. In a statement to the American vice-consul, Wells gave his side of the story:

  Subsequent enquiries at the University showed that I had in fact been for two years a subject of both states, but through my neglect to apply to the British Consulate for permission to retain my British nationality beyond this time, I had lost my British nationality. I was then asked unofficially whether I should object to serving against the Russians and was confidentially assured that I should not be employed in the West. I considered the matter and said I would serve. Since 1912 I evidently have not been a British subject.

  Naively, Wells never checked as to whether or not the British considered him a subject, merely accepting that the British vice-consul had made an error in giving him a passport in August 1914.

  Although it transpired Wells had British nationality, he decided to enlist rather than be seen by the Bavarians as avoiding his obligations. He did not ‘wish to antagonise the German authorities’. Wilford Wells was conscripted on 2 September 1915 and took the oath of allegiance eleven days later. His army records show that he was considered ‘fully fit for active service’ and that his conduct was ‘excellent’. It is interesting to note that on his records appear the words: ‘May only be deployed on the Eastern Front’, in line with his request. After training he was sent to join his unit, the 2. Bayerische Infanterie Regiment.

  ‘So far as I could gather,’ wrote the American vice-consul to the British Foreign Office, ‘Mr Wells’ own attitude is that he took the military oath of allegiance voluntarily, in the sincere belief that having lost his British nationality it was his duty to do so; that under these circumstances he does not wish to take any action, or to have any action taken on his behalf.’