The repetitive nature of the debate made some weary of the whole question. Speaking in the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, voiced his growing boredom: ‘Anyone who had tried to follow the long-drawn story of talk on this subject [of repatriation] would be surprised by the extraordinary monotony and sameness of every discussion which had taken place.’
The problem was never resolved. No neutral country would take 20,000 internees, and the British government would not countenance the appearance on the Western Front of a new German army division formed from the repatriated. Equally, there was no appetite within the Cabinet to out-Prussian the Prussians as Lord Newton, speaking for the government, pointed out in the Lords in March 1918. ‘It would require a double dose of German brutality to send away some of the Germans who have lived in this country for practically all their lives, have married British women, and have sons fighting in the British Army.’
It was precisely for the reasons given by Newton that, despite the hardships of incarceration, many enemy aliens did not want to leave Britain. Newton stressed in his speech that he had just heard of two interned Germans who had committed suicide after receiving repatriation orders, their deaths highlighting again the desperate mental fragility of men in long-term captivity.
Newton explained that, while hundreds of Germans were being repatriated every few weeks, at least a third of those interned would wish to stay owing to family circumstances. ‘The presence of a number of Germans in this country will have to be tolerated,’ he insisted.
Nevertheless, in July, the Commons listened to a second reading of the government’s British Nationality and Status of Aliens Bill, the main purpose of which was to widen the powers required to revoke certificates of naturalisation. The Home Secretary, Sir George Cave, addressing the House, emphasised that hitherto the state revoked certificates only when they had been obtained by false representation or fraud. ‘We have all come to the conclusion, mainly owing to experiences arising out of the war, that that power ought to be extended.’ ‘Hear, hear,’ cried MPs.
Cave reassured the House that the government was not looking for arbitrary powers to revoke certificates and that it should be remembered that an individual who gained British nationality generally lost his nationality in the country of his birth. Nevertheless, it was the government’s intention to revoke an individual’s right to citizenship where it was proven he or she was disloyal or of bad character. If it was no longer in the public interest for a naturalised British subject to remain a citizen, he or she could be judicially stripped of that nationality. A proposal was made to amend the Bill so that certificates awarded since the outbreak of war would be subject to review, although this would not apply to British-born persons.
This last remark sounded contradictory but Cave was referring to British-born women who married Germans and acquired through marriage their husband’s nationality. When these German men applied for naturalisation so, by default, had their wives, who were issued with their own certificates of naturalisation. In a case where an individual was to be deprived of his naturalisation, his return to ‘alien’ status would not be followed by those of his wife and children; they would be given six months to make a declaration of alienage should they wish to cease being British citizens.
The proposals of the Bill met with cross-party agreement, although one or two MPs wished the Bill to be a wartime measure only. Other MPs foresaw that the only danger to the Bill’s passage into law would be public insistence that the new rights did not go far enough.
Plenty of civilians were swayed by the arguments of parliamentarians, among them Brigadier General Page Croft MP, who mercilessly played to the public gallery. Naturalised Germans, he said, were to be more feared than unnaturalised ones, as they gained privileges with citizenship while paying only lip service to loyalty. ‘They [the government] could tie a peacock’s tail to an elephant but that did not make the elephant a peacock,’ he told a crowded public meeting in Manchester on 23 July, as the government’s Bill reached its last stages. Page Croft told the audience that Germans had been sent to Britain before the war to gain positions of responsibility, becoming naturalised and making themselves indispensible to the country. It was all part and parcel of Germany’s scheme for world domination, he said enlighteningly.
Page Croft was doing what other MPs did with apparent impunity: making wild claims without evidence; insisting that both he and other MPs knew of instances of potentially dangerous enemy aliens running free in Britain without sanction.
As predicted, the main objection to the government’s Bill was that it did not go far enough, although one press demand that naturalised Germans should be deprived of their citizenship by class and not just on an individual basis was dismissed out of hand by MPs.
The Bill received Royal Assent on 9 August. The legal basis for stripping citizenship from alien-born British subjects was passed and almost no one demurred. An Advisory Committee officially known as the Certificates of Naturalisation (Revocation) Committee was set up and began reviewing cases presented before it, notifying the Home Secretary who should have their certificate of naturalisation revoked. The Committee, composed of three judges, did not have to give reasons for its recommendations and, as reported by The Times, ‘was not bound by the strict rules of evidence’. The policy of the government, as publicly stated, would be to deport those stripped.
On 7 October, the Committee met for the first time in the Grand Committee Room of Westminster Hall to deliberate in private over an initial tranche of 190 cases. Three weeks later, the press reported that Udo Willmore-Wittner, granted naturalisation in January 1913, had had his certificate revoked for an unspecified crime committed in May 1917, for which he had been imprisoned for one year. The Home Secretary ruled that ‘the continuance of the certificate [in this case] was not conducive to the public good’. This case was followed by half a dozen more: all the individuals whose cases were examined were similarly stripped, one on a nebulous charge of showing himself disloyal to His Majesty.
One case of revocation in particular underlined the unchallenged authority of the Advisory Committee. It concerned Caroline Hanemann, a British citizen since October 1914, a trained nurse and a long-term maidservant to Katherine Graham-Smith, the sister of Margot Asquith, wife of the Prime Minister. Caroline Hanemann had served her mistress faithfully since 1890, for Katherine was in very poor health and an invalid by the outbreak of the Great War.
Horatio Bottomley, the ultra-patriotic and rabble-rousing MP for Hackney South, was one MP who prided himself on finding out through endless parliamentary questions just how many Germans had been ejected from the country and how many had had their certificates of naturalisation revoked. Why, Bottomley asked, when it was the policy of His Majesty’s Government to deport all Germans stripped of British citizenship, was Caroline Hanemann apparently exempt from such a rule?
The Home Secretary, Edward Shortt, replied that he never asked the Advisory Committee for their reasons for revoking the certificate of naturalisation ‘but I do know there was no question of disaffection, disloyalty, or any danger to this country involved’, although, since he never asked the Advisory Committee to account for their decisions, how did he know this? Shortt told the House that he had no intention of deporting a woman who, he said, had been in faithful employment since 1890 and was ‘entirely inoffensive’.
Mr Bottomley: Then the denaturalization was purely a fantastic act on the part of the Committee?
Mr Shortt: The hon. Member will form his own view.
Mr Bottomley: I have.
If Caroline Hanemann was someone not worthy to hold British citizenship, Bottomley asked, why was she allowed to accompany Katherine Graham-Smith to 10 Downing Street on several occasions during the war? Shortt stonewalled. The reasons for revoking Caroline’s citizenship remained obscure, as they no doubt did to Caroline herself. She was not deported and, given the length of her unstinting and faithful service, it is to be hoped she kept h
er job.
10
All Fall Down
By early autumn, the combined effects of economic mismanagement and the Allied naval blockade had tipped Germany into terminal crisis. British and Empire prisoners in Germany, particularly those sent on working Kommandos, became familiar with the signs. In October 1917, on the seventieth birthday of Chancellor Paul von Hindenburg, Germany had been festooned with flags and portraits of the Field Marshal. His once undeniable popularity was no more. Private George Wash, a prisoner for more than three years, passed through Münster after the celebrations. The flags and pictures had been systematically attacked. ‘Every one of them were torn, the eyes scratched out, or defaced. The war loan placards were treated in the same way.’
Exchanged Allied prisoners reported the decline, too. In interviews, they were adamant that whereas food served to prisoners in 1915 had been intentionally substandard, as the Germans then had plenty, by 1918 meals were inadequate simply because the Germans had no more to give. Private Henry Webb of the Royal Army Medical Corps recalled that, during his exchange in September 1918, the train passed through Aachen. Knowing that better food would shortly be theirs, the prisoners threw away their meagre bread rations and watched as German soldiers scrambled for the scraps. Private James Whiteside reported that troops travelling on the same train conversed openly with prisoners. ‘They said everything was “kaput”, and that they had no bread or meat and no cigarettes worth smoking. They liked the cigarettes we gave them and threw their own away.’
Private Ernest Hart, captured in April 1915, was repatriated in October 1918. On his release, he testified how, on the journey home, he was taken from Heilsburg camp in East Prussia to Berlin.
I was in the charge of a German soldier, a man about 50 years of age or more. He kept a greengrocer’s shop in Berlin. He took me to his home and gave me some dinner, but we only had potatoes. His wife said it was only England that kept the war going. ‘Why did they not give us peace?’ I told her to write and ask Mr Lloyd George. The husband said that if they do not get peace by Christmas the German soldiers would throw it in.
Just as the escaped POW Private George Allen had walked freely around Berlin, chatting without trepidation to civilians, so, it would appear, Private Ernest Hart was at liberty to see the capital without fear of attack or insult. Hart testified that after his meal the guard took him for a tram ride in what amounted to a sightseeing tour. During the trip Hart was confident enough to speak to a number of civilians.
They were all fed up with the war. The newspapers said that the new Government would bring peace by Christmas and the people seemed to have faith in it. The people seemed interested in me and not hostile. They looked thin and pale, though the children did not seem very thin. One lady asked me if I would give her a piece of soap. She was very friendly. She said that when I got home I was to ask England to hurry up and finish the war. The people treated me with great respect. They were as nice to me as anything. Very different to what it was when I was there in 1916 when people spat at me and called me swine. They said that the war was now left with Lloyd George, who was carrying it on for the capitalists.
At Berlin there was nothing in the shops, and lines of people waiting outside the shops and stalls. The soldier guard told me that he did not want to go to the front, but if he did go, he would make his home in France or England.
I saw notices posted in Berlin with instructions what to do in case of air raids. Also some big posters showing Zeppelins and aeroplanes setting English towns on fire. These had been put up quite recently. There are also illustrations showing the amount of shipping sunk by submarines. The Berlin people, and also the guards at the camps, thought the submarine campaign a washout. They cannot understand how we can get so much food if so many ships have been sunk. What surprises them is to see the contents of the [Red Cross] parcels, especially tins bearing American labels, as they are told that the Atlantic trade is stopped.
The German offensive was thoroughly spent by mid-July, and for a few weeks that summer all sides took time to recuperate. The Germans were exhausted; the great optimism of March had been shattered, to be replaced by a deepening malaise. The last German attacks were spasmodic and little short of a disaster, as Rudolf Binding witnessed. ‘I know that we are finished. My thoughts oppress me,’ he wrote on 19 July. All Germans could hope for was to hold firm, to maintain their positions, but to what end? A negotiated peace would be ideal, but the Allies were in no mood to sit down and talk. On 8 August the Allies, utilising tanks, aircraft, artillery and infantry in an all-arms assault, made spectacular gains. The enemy reeled and fell back. It was the beginning of a hundred-day campaign in which German troops were harried and chased across the old battlefields and into hitherto untouched countryside.
Frederick Hodges was a nineteen-year-old sergeant involved in mopping-up operations with the Australians on the day after the initial Allied assault.
We were amazed and thrilled at the depth of penetration, five miles deep in the German line. This had previously been unheard of. When eventually we came to some German field guns, we swarmed round them, laughing and talking excitedly to one another. Scrawled on them in chalk were the words ‘captured by the 1st AIF’ [Australian Imperial Force]. We were delighted and said ‘Good old Aussies!’
Ernst Jünger, a twenty-three-year-old German officer fortified with courage and resilience and four years’ war service, knew the war was lost. The advances showed the Allies’ strength, ‘supplemented by drafts from every corner of the earth’, he wrote in his memoirs.
‘We had fewer men to set against them, many were little more than boys, and we were short of equipment and training. It was all we could do to plug gaps with our bodies as the tide flooded in.’ There was no longer the wherewithal for the heavy counter-attacks of the past. With every enemy attack, Jünger acknowledged, their ‘blows were swifter and more devastating’.
In early September, Jünger led his men in one final and localised counter-attack. The men moved off in two lines, but Jünger was struck early on and fell into a trench. Unconscious at first, he came round to hear the ebb and flow of battle. He listened to the noise with rising alarm and the realisation that it was the enemy who were advancing: shouts indicated that British soldiers had broken through on the left. Struggling to his feet, he became aware of German soldiers with their hands raised in surrender.
There were now loud yells: ‘It’s no use! Put your guns down! Don’t shoot comrades!’
I looked at the two officers who were standing in the trench with me. They smiled back, shrugged, and dropped their belts on the ground.
There was only the choice between captivity and a bullet. I crept out of the trench . . . The only thing in my favour was perhaps the utter confusion, in which some were already exchanging cigarettes, while others were still butchering each other. Two Englishmen, who were leading back a troop of prisoners from the 99th, confronted me. I aimed my pistol at the nearer of the two, and pulled the trigger. The other blazed his rifle at me and missed.
Ernst Jünger and one or two others escaped, but for Jünger himself, badly wounded as he was, there would be no opportunity to fight another day. He was the old guard, an enthusiast of 1914, and one of the few left from the battles of 1915 and 1916, such was the level of attrition when 40 per cent of a battalion’s strength could be lost in a single attack.
More than 200,000 German prisoners were captured by British forces in 1918, of whom nearly 187,000 were taken in the three months prior to the Armistice. Corporal Fred Hodges marvelled at the British barrages that autumn, believing them ‘the most intense and concentrated I experienced; the crash and thud of multiple explosions was continuous’. In the last dozen days of September, when the Hindenburg Line was broken, as many Germans surrendered as during the entire five-month Somme campaign two years before.
And when the barrage ceased, ‘something almost miraculous happened’, wrote Hodges. ‘We saw grey clad figures emerging from the long pall of bl
ack smoke in front of us and as they got nearer we could hear them coughing as they groped their way through the acrid smoke. They stumbled towards us with their hands up; some wounded and all of them completely dazed. How had they possibly survived?’
Captain Arthur Pick, serving with the 1/4th Leicestershire Regiment, was present at the taking of the Hindenburg Line.
There was a dense fog hanging over the low-lying ground round the canal; some of it probably true fog and some of it smoke shells. One could not see many yards ahead and the company became split up. It took several minutes to collect together again before attempting to cross the canal. The fog lifted gradually. The canal here was in a fairly deep cutting. The bank down which we picked our way was a mass of undergrowth, which concealed barbed wire, and which was very difficult to negotiate. We were lucky enough to find a plank bridge to cross by. The far end had been destroyed but the water was only about knee deep. On the far side, on the towpath, three or four Staffords were drinking tea with an equal number of German prisoners. We met a Stafford major with quite a number of men. They had not reached their objective, but seemed determined not to advance any further. The Stafford major had the wind up badly – when two unarmed Germans advanced through the lifting fog, he ordered his troops to line the canal bank! Our morale would have been affected had we stayed near him, so we left him to capture the two willing prisoners. Actually, I doubt if any Staffords advanced any further than this in our immediate vicinity. On the slope up from the canal we saw in a trench a lot of arms waving above the parapet. On reaching the trench we found the occupants unarmed, all their belongings packed up and ready to be marched back. One ancient officer’s servant was deemed sufficient escort for them.
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