Montgomery, Douglas and Robertson had the power of life and death without any interference from Westminster. They ruled with the aid of the Control Commission Germany, or CCG. This was jestingly known as ‘Charlie Chaplin’s Grenadiers’ or ‘Complete Chaos Guaranteed’. It had a gigantic staff of nearly 25,000, five times as many as the American contingent, and was reportedly venal, overpaid and riddled with scandal. British officers serving in occupied Germany were sent to Bletchley for a course. According to George Clare there were superficial lectures on German history and classes on the function of the Control Commission. The potential officers were a mixed bunch, including many women speaking excellent German. Only about a fifth of the recruits dealt with administering Germany; the rest was made up of senior officers who served in its ‘swollen bureaucracy’.12 In April 1946 the men were joined by their wives and families, further inflating the household and leading to the requisitioning of yet more undamaged homes. In Münster only 1,050 houses remained undamaged of a total of 33,737. The occupiers promptly requisitioned 445 of them - over 40 per cent.13 After Indian independence Germans feared that they would receive all the former ICS (Indian Civil Service) men, some of whom might in fact have been an improvement. There were some able administrators in the CCG such as the banker Sir Vaughan Berry in Hamburg, who had studied in Germany and knew the country and its people.14
Victor Gollancz objected to a Herrenvolk mentality he saw among British officers, and to the contrast he saw between the accommodation and food in the officers’ mess and the miserable, half-starved hovels outside. Much of Germany was uninhabitable. The military governor had a modest HQ in Bad Oeynhausen, where all the inhabitants had been cleared out of the spa town to make way for the British, and a country house in Melle; but there were plans to build something more grandiose in Hamburg. It was to be a vast military and social headquarters, presumably to rival the Soviet HQ at Karlshorst or its American counterpart in Frankfurt. The complex was to include hotels and clubs, as well as lodgings for married and unmarried officers. Had it gone ahead, an estimated 38,200 Germans would have lost their homes. The district governor, Vaughan Berry, was vehemently opposed to the project, and, given the state of British finances at the time, it must have seemed like so much pie in the sky.15
Au fond the British believed more in re-education than in denazification and the story of the re-establishment of schooling and university education in the zone was one of its great claims to fame. Robert Birley took a couple of years off between the headmasterships of Charterhouse and Eton to reorganise schools in the British Zone. As an historian he was well aware that there was no precedent for the Allied position in Germany: ‘We occupied a country without a government and from the outset our occupying forces had not only to prevent the revival of a military danger, they had to rebuild a community.’16 Birley was evidently shocked by the godlessness of the Nazi state. He had been to Brno, and seen the chapel in the Spielberg fortress above the city. The SS had turned it over to paganism. The altar had been mounted by a giant swastika containing a copy of Mein Kampf and an immense eagle decorated the wall in the place of a reredos. The British needed to change the minds and outlook of the people who did such a thing, and who had suffered a ‘complete moral collapse’. Birley stressed, however, that the German malaise was not an isolated phenomenon but another manifestation of the ‘diseased condition of western civilisation’.17
Nothing was easy: the three Rs took a back seat to the three Fs (food, fuel and footwear) and the three Ps (pens, pencils and paper). Birley thought shoes the greatest of these.18 He took heart when he saw a German desire to get on. In cities laid waste by bombing he saw young men as old as twenty-three trying to pass their Abitur to enter a university. They were so many ‘Peter Pans’, utterly ignorant of anything other than what their National Socialist instructors had told them. Many had been in the Wehrmacht. These were prevented from entering higher education before February 1947. And yet the British were forced to impose a numerus clausa until 1949. The lack of places was down to the wrecking of the buildings by bombing and the long-drawn-out process of screening all university teachers though the Public Safety Branch (the name perhaps an unintentional evocation of the French revolutionary terror).19
Birley wanted to restore the love of freedom and a readiness to accept personal responsibility. The most important men for the task, he thought, were philosophers, and he pointed to the sterling work done at St Michael’s House near Hamburg. It may have been a coincidence, but at the precise moment when Wehrmacht men were finally allowed to enter the universities, the dean of the faculty of philosophy at Cologne University appealed to those who had emigrated to return to the department.20 It was not so much the philosophers, however, who tried to reform the German mind as historians like Birley and Michael Balfour, who had been a friend of the late Helmuth James von Moltke of Kreisau. Balfour was made director of Information Services within the British Zone in 1946. He made it clear that he needed to move quickly: ‘We are not in Germany forever.’21 As it was, he lasted only a year.
One of the most successful British efforts at re-education was Wilton Park in Buckinghamshire, a former POW camp which had been turned over to residential courses for Germans run by Heinz Koeppler, Koeppler was a German who had left his country to study at Oxford in 1933, and had never gone home. The style was derived wholly from Oxford and Cambridge - something utterly new to even the most privileged students at the German universities. They were waited on at table, received tutorials and were allowed to discuss issues freely. The idea was to make men ready for public life and to create a new non-Nazi elite. ‘Respectable’ Germans such as the socialist Kurt Schumacher, Bishop Dibelius, Pastor Niemöller and Archbishop Frings also addressed the students.22
Another distinguished historian, the expert on the Reformation A. G. Dickens, was editing the Lübecker Nachrichtenblatt, aided by the inevitable Viennese Jew.23 There weren’t so many German-speakers around, apart from these specialised historians. Another purveyor of British civilisation was the British Council. Its well-meaning, bumbling approach is caricatured in Wilfrid Hyde White’s role in The Third Man. The screenplay for the film was written by Graham Greene, whose brother Hugh Carlton Greene ran the NWDR radio in occupied Germany. The latter expressed a view in total opposition to that of Vansittart, one which was closer to Balfour: ‘I am here to make myself superfluous.’ He too thought the Germans merely needed re-education. Kaye Sely and George Clare interviewed German denazification candidates in Greene’s office, while Greene sat on the sofa to make sure they were fairly treated. Greene had saved a little treat for himself: a magnificent car, the Maibach Tourer that had formerly belonged to Karl Wolff, Himmler’s chief of staff.24 Greene took over from Rex Palmer as broadcasting controller to the British Zone. Palmer had been a disaster - he had run children’s radio before the war, and it showed.
The British needed to take stock of their zone. They had the largely empty farmlands of Schleswig-Holstein, the industrial and farming areas of Lower Saxony, and the industrialised but also highly cultural region of the Rhine and the Ruhr. The area had been very badly damaged by bombing. Cologne was 66 per cent destroyed, and Düsseldorf a staggering 93 per cent. Aachen was described as a ‘fantastic, stinking heap of ruins’. The British reordered their domain, creating Rhineland-Westphalia by amalgamating two Länder. The French responded with Ordonnance 57 which gave birth to Rhineland-Palatinate in August 1946. Naturally suspicion was aroused again over the motives of the French. People imagined they were trying to create independent German states before annexing them to France.25
The most glamorous posting was Berlin. The military train took the soldiers into Charlottenburg Station, which was their introduction to the city, if they were not lucky enough to fly into Gatow. British soldiers in Berlin wore a flash on their sleeve. It was a black circle rimmed with red - ‘septic arsehole’ they called it. British Control Commission’s headquarters in Berlin was in ‘Lancaster House’ on the Fehrb
elliner Platz. George Clare described it as a ‘concave-shaped grey, concrete edifice’ in the style of Albert Speer. Under the British Control Commission there were detachments in each of the boroughs under British control, together with a barracks and an officers’ mess. There were messes all over the British Sector. When George Clare reappeared in officer’s garb on his second tour of duty, he was assigned to one on the Breitenbach Platz which was large and lacked social cachet, and resembled a Lyons Corner House. British Military Government was a large yellow building on the Theodor Heuss Platz. This was the former Adolf Hitler Platz in Charlottenburg, the name of which was changed to Reichskanzlerplatz until it was realised that Hitler too had been chancellor. On the other side of the square was the Marlborough Club, where officers could be gentlemen. For the Other Ranks there was the Winston Club.26
Germans had to receive permission to enter HQ Mil. Gov. This was not issued to former Pgs. The rules were bent only if the person was of interest to the British - that is, a scientist, a pre-1933 politician or an expert technician. A German editor seeking permission to start a magazine (such as Rudolf Augstein with Der Spiegel) or an entrepreneur looking to put on a theatrical performance had to take his suit to the Berlin Control Unit in the Klaus Groth Strasse near by. The path to redemption in all cases was the Fragebogen. The forms had to be filled in, and any membership of Nazi organisations checked out. With time minor Nazis were let off the hook. As far as soldiers were concerned, the Wehrmacht members who were not already languishing in a POW camp were fine. The SS was divided into grey and black. Blacks (Totenkopf) were interned, greys (Waffen-SS) were released. Eventually the British authorities learned that separating black and grey was not so cut and dried.27
The life of an interrogator was filled with unexpected surprises: charming young men who turned out on closer examination to have been inveterate Nazis, and rebarbative Prussian militarists who, it transpired, were anything but. Clare had a visit from the widow of the General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel who wanted to join her daughter in the British Zone. He eventually recalled that this general was the one who had locked up the Paris SS and the Gestapo on 20 July 1944, who attempted suicide when the Plot failed but managed only to blind himself, and who was gruesomely hanged with the rest. Frau von Stülpnagel would not hear of special pleading: her husband was just a German, doing his job.28
Despite the lordly nature of their approach, the British had a reputation for being more decent people than the other Allies, but that did not mean they were without sin. Len Carpenter, an escaped POW who had holed up in the Neue Westend of Berlin until the arrival of the Allies, ran a successful business as a black-marketeer and pimp (unpaid, he assures us) to the British occupation forces.29 In November 1947 Speer described one of the British guards in Spandau who had arrived drunk for work: ‘He boasted to his fellows of the vast amount of beer he had drunk, and hinted at pleasant company.’ The party had ended only three hours before. Speer lent him his bed so he could sleep it off and patrolled the corridor lest a superior officer appear. The man was still unsteady on his feet hours later.30
One of the oddest briefs given to the British army occupying Germany was to punish its very soil. This was the case with the island of Heligoland, which had been British for most of the nineteenth century, but which had been acquired by the Kaiser in 1890 in what he saw as his first foreign political coup.31 The island had been heavily armed during the ‘Kaiser’ Reich, and in Nazi times it bristled not only with guns, but also with submarine docks. The RAF destroyed most of the defences as well as the town in a raid of 18-19 April 1945. On 11 May, the Royal Navy made a foray across the waters of the Baltic to see what was left. Despite the pulverising the island had received during the war, the U-boat shelters were undamaged, as was the network of tunnels under the island together with the diesel trains that plied them.32
At Potsdam it was agreed that Germany was to be completely disarmed and that all German fortifications were to be destroyed. For the British that meant primarily the naval forts on the Frisian Islands and Heligoland. British High Command calculated that they would need 48,400 man hours and 730 tons of explosives.33 They began to prepare for Operation Big Bang. When this occurred two years later, on 18 April 1948, it was a literal case of over-kill. Having decided presumably that the previous estimate had been too low, the British set off 7,000 tons of munitions in what was described as the ‘greatest non-nuclear explosion in history’. A huge ‘cauliflower’ of smoke shot up 8,000 feet from the catacombs 180 feet below the surface of the rock, but once the skies cleared it was apparent that instead of eradicating the hated island, they had destroyed a mere 14 per cent of its surface.34
For several years the RAF and the American air force based in Britain continued to use the island as a bombing range. Preparations were made to test the British atom bomb there and trials were made of chemical weapons.35 The idea of using the island for nuclear tests was finally abandoned out of consideration for the population of Cuxhaven, which was only thirty miles away. The German fishermen who had previously caught lobsters off the islands were at last allowed to return to their homes in 1952, largely as a result of a campaign launched by a young theology student, René Leudesdorff.36 The RAF had proved very reluctant to hand over their toy.
Many Germans - above all German women - went to work for the Allies. The sculptress and later nun Tisa von der Schulenburg had fled her native Mecklenburg, leaving behind her the ancestral manor of Tressow and Trebbow, the Schloss where she had lived with her husband, C. U. von Barner. Tisa settled in Lübeck in the British Zone and went to work as a secretary to Heinz Biel, the half-English industry officer in the Military Government. She endured the endless complaints and applications, the dispossessed seeking to repossess, the petitions to restart local businesses from Niederegger Marzipan and Schwartauer Marmalade to the aeronautics company Dornier and the porcelain manufacturers Villeroy and Boch.
Her boss did not impress her. Had he been purely German, she thought, he would have rushed to join the Party. Like most other thinking Germans, Tisa was infuriated by the Fragebogen. She had flown in the face of her noble, Nazi father, married a Jew and gone to England before the war to become an artist.37 She left to serve as a social worker in a British military depot in Glinde near Hamburg. There were two thousand German civilians there, ‘flotsam and jetsam from every party and province. The former leading lawyer and a man who had been consul in Australia mucked in with merchants and workers; it was only about survival, income and bread.’ The only question they asked was ‘How do I survive?’38 The British had promised to give her officer-status and she was responsible to the major commanding. That Christmas the British tried to inject a bit of party-spirit into the depot: ‘the English [sic] failed to understand that we had no desire to dance, we had no desires at all; not to dance or to sing’. The soldiers fed hundreds of children. One of the sergeants told Tisa: ‘The kids bit into the oranges and ate them skin and all, like apples.’ Tisa not unreasonably concluded that these children had never encountered oranges.
The situation deteriorated with the weather that winter. The zone had never been self-sufficient. Even before the war it had produced only half the food it needed.39 Two workers froze to death for want of warm bedding. Tisa managed to locate 200 blankets for 2,000 people - a find that was bound to cause more trouble than it cured. At midday the workers received a thin, evil-smelling soup. An hour later they were hungry again. A hundred men were suffering from dropsy. Big men weighed no more than fifty kilos. One of the British officers allowed them to take the leftovers from the mess - although this was highly illegal. They procured an oven, milk and potatoes and in time they were able to lay on a supplementary meal at midday. The men began to put on weight again. They were over the worst.
Sometimes they walked the fourteen kilometres to Billstedt where there were trains to Hamburg. Trams took them through vast expanses of ruins. Even four years after the end of the war the sight of Hamburg moved the American d
iplomat George Kennan to reflect on whether it had all been worth while: ‘Here for the first time, I felt an unshakable conviction that no momentary military advantage . . . could have justified this stupendous, careless destruction of civilian life and of material values, built up laboriously by human hands over the course of centuries for purposes having nothing to do with war.’40
It was this barren townscape that struck Victor Gollancz during his time in Hamburg. He stayed at British officers’ messes and marvelled at the copiousness of the menus; he went to the town hall and drank rare bottles of ‘magnificent hock’ which a careful concierge had rescued from the Nazis.41 In a hovel he came across the stoic spirit of the north German as they eked out their days under a picture bearing the legend ‘Lerne leiden ohne zu klagen’ (Learn to suffer without complaint). It showed a picture of the Emperor Frederick, who died of throat cancer ninety-nine days into his reign.42
After the Reich Page 35
