Exorcising Hitler (24 page)

We crossed the Rhine on 23 March and for nearly four months we have not spoken to the German population, except when duty has so demanded. The Germans have been told why we have acted thus; it has been a shock to them and they have learnt their lesson.
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In his diaries, the Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, Lord Alanbrooke – hardly known for his levity – announced in jocular fashion after a high-level meeting shortly before the end of the war: ‘Amongst other items, we have appointed Monty as Gauleiter for the British Zone.’
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By late summer 1946 the first Anglo-German marriage had taken place – in the British sector of Berlin – without an act of congress or of parliament being necessary.
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This didn’t mean that the British necessarily ‘liked’ the Germans at that point any better than the Americans or the French or the Soviets did. As occupiers, His Majesty’s Forces could certainly be arrogant, stubborn, even cruel. Particularly in the early stages of the occupation, many willingly excluded themselves from any ‘normal’ relations with Germans, were indifferent to German suffering, or even viewed it with satisfaction. After the British took control of their sector in Berlin, a small German boy of ten or so was caught trying to steal from a British Army mess. A young officer who was present at the time reported on the ‘interrogation’ of the miscreant:

The point is that none of us could have cared a bit for that little boy. He was probably an orphan, his father dead on the Eastern Front, his mother rotting under rubble of the bombed-out ruins, and here he was – starving and risking his life climbing up drainpipes in the middle of a British tank regiment. So what? We didn’t feel any compassion for him or any of the Germans. They had been public enemy number one. So now we commandeered their horses, commandeered their Mercedes, commandeered their women. I would reckon 60 or 70 percent of young Englishmen in Germany thought that way. Most of us were for having a bloody good time and believed we could get away with anything.
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The notion of conquered women as ‘fair game’ was, naturally enough, far more widespread than any official account of the time would have wanted to admit. In his (strongly autobiographical) first novel,
To the Victors the Spoils
(published in 1950), British writer Colin MacInnes gave a warts-and-all account of the lives of the young men of the British Army’s intelligence corps, careening through the newly liberated France and Low Countries and on into Germany in the winter of 1944–5, chasing collaborators, diehard Nazis and war criminals.

MacInnes, who became well known in the 1950s for such works as
Absolute Beginners
,
Mr Love and Justice
and
City of Spades
, had then just turned thirty. The privately educated son of writer Angela Thirkell, closely related through her to British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the writer Rudyard Kipling, in the novel, and in life, he was content to remain a mere sergeant in Field Intelligence. The narrator in the novel is identified only as ‘Sergeant Mac’.

Like his later books, which dealt frankly with London’s youth culture and the exotic underbelly of 1950s and 1960s Soho, as well as MacInnes’ own open bisexuality,
To the Victors the Spoils
pulled no punches and was widely criticised for this at the time it was published. Throughout, the occasional outburst of idealism among his young Nazi-hunters is more than outweighed by their shameless acquisitiveness, their sexual voracity and their amoral quest for cosy ‘billets’. One of them begins by appearing to fall head over heels in love with a Dutch girl, promising her marriage, and then after moving over the border rapidly doing the same with a young German woman in the Rhineland. He never does make his mind up.

As was the case with the American forces, young women hired to clean billets or act as translators are usually the most attractive the team can find. And they make their rules up as they go along, for in effect their powers over the local Germans are limitless. A few weeks before the end of the war, a major of a Civilian Administration unit (Military Government in Waiting), a policeman in peacetime, takes a shine to the attractive assistant of a local Burgomaster. The woman, apparently previously in charge of the meagre rations allowed for Polish forced labourers, makes some racist remarks. The major, who spends most of their conversation staring at her legs, later tries to convince a sceptical anti-Nazi lieutenant of her usefulness:

‘I must say,’ said Lieutenant Adeane, ‘that the powers we’ll have almost frighten me at times. I’ve been reading through the military laws, and some of them are terribly vague and comprehensive.’

‘Oh, don’t get the wrong idea,’ the Major told him. ‘I won’t come down hard on them all, and I might even let some of them off, you never know. But I reckon an old bobby will be able to pick out the hard cases all right.’

‘What worries me a bit,’ said the Lieutenant, ‘is that we’ve invented the laws we’re going to apply.’

‘Well, that’s natural, isn’t it? Thanks, Captain, I don’t mind another glass. You know, I liked that woman over at the Town Hall this morning, didn’t you. I’m almost sorry we’re not staying here, she’d have been just right for the job of Secretary. Quick-witted, practical, and speaks nearly perfect English.’

‘From what you told me, she sounds most unsuitable,’ the Lieutenant said.

‘Oh? And why so, may I ask?’

‘Because she’s an obvious Nazi.’

‘Oh-ho! A Nazi. But so long as she’s not in an Arrestable Category, that wouldn’t matter.’
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In another incident, one of the intelligence sergeants blackmails the attractive female owner of a hotel where they are billeted, using his knowledge of her son’s clandestine presence in the building (a deserter from the Wehrmacht, the young man should have handed himself over to British custody) to force her to sleep with him.

Especially once they are in Germany, there is little respect for either propriety or property. Women are chased, offered the lure of scarce food and consumer goods. And there is outright theft. Desirable motor vehicles are ‘requisitioned’ and furniture, heirlooms and other moveable valuables ‘liberated’:

The things the others had stolen varied with each man’s nature. Some had chosen useless souvenirs (decorated daggers were a favourite), others things of value. Cornelis had got some watches, Walter had Lugers and sporting guns. Cuthbert . . . said, ‘I’ve only helped myself to things of general use – nothing personal. The Opel, you see, and these radios to replace my own that was defective.’

Looting is irresistible to anyone who had not a real indifference to possessions or a rare sense of duty. The opportunities are enormous, and there is no risk during the first few days of the fall of a town, when the old authority is overthrown and the new one not yet established. Even for those who are not thieves by nature, the attraction of what seems at first a delightful game, is overwhelming. As time goes on, the playful looters either see that game isn’t one, and stop, or else go on till it becomes a habit, and their characters change.
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An account of this phenomenon from another contemporary source backs up MacInnes’ judgement:

Some soldiers with a sharper eye for business – officers mostly – looted things for the profit they yielded on the black market in Brussels, the biggest in liberated Europe. Some specialised according to demand. One young officer took adding machines and sporting guns. Another had already taken five car loads of ball-bearings from Germany to Brussels, and made several other trips with slaughtered cows in the back of his car. Cars in particular were at a premium. A 50-year-old British officer explained how to get hold of one. ‘It’s no use going to garages. Field Security and Military Government usually put a sentry on those. What you do is drive around until you see a house with a garage. Then you get the owner and take the key off him. He’s probably hidden the battery and the tyres, but if you show him a little persuasion he’ll cough up quickly enough.’
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At one point during the British advance into northern Germany, it got so bad that, with all the cars that had been ‘requisitioned’ from German civilians, one division’s column had reached twice its usual length, and traffic jams were threatening to bring progress to a halt. On orders from the divisional commander, all cars found to be unauthorised were seized by the military police, driven off into the fields on either side of the road, and disabled by gunfire or through setting them alight, to ensure that they could not be further used – either by British troops or, ultimately, by their unfortunate German former owners.

MacInnes shrewdly analysed the mentality of the invading British soldier, in a way that could be applied with relatively minor differences to any conqueror. He describes driving his unit’s commander, a captain, along a track beside a canal near the front line in northern Belgium. Their truck gets stuck in the winter mud. The ‘Sergeant Mac’ character goes off to seek help from a nearby farm. As he does so, he turns back, seeing the officer as a lonely figure in the darkening plain:

He looked almost exotic, standing in his military mackintosh beside the broken-down truck in the middle of the lonely Flemish landscape. But holding a cigarette in one gloved hand, swinging his map-case slowly by the straps with the other, he seemed unaware of this. Generations of captains had come this way before him, and in whatever place an English soldier finds himself, he is cloaked about with the confident assurance that where he is, he should be, and that it is the alien land, not he, which was strange and foreign.
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When the British took Hamburg at the end of April 1945, plenty of the burghers of this Anglophile city – which as a major North Sea port and a city state with ancient democratic traditions had enjoyed a long and amicable relationship with the United Kingdom – were relieved that they were to be occupied by ‘gentlemen’ from the latter-day birthplace of democracy. They were quickly disillusioned. In the defeated Germans’ eyes, the victors often behaved in a manner both arrogant and officious. To the victor the spoils, indeed.

Mathilde (‘Tilli’) Wolff-Mönckeberg was an anti-Nazi, though firmly patriotic, German woman, then in her sixties, living in Hamburg. Appalled by what happened to her country after 1933, she poured out her frustrations in a long series of unsent letters to her children, three of whom had gone abroad (one daughter had married a Welshman and lived in Britain through the war years, another married a German Jew and emigrated to the USA, while her son became a communist and went into exile, first in Russia and then in South America).

Born to privilege (her father served as High Burgomaster of the city towards the end of the nineteenth century), Frau Wolff-Mönckeberg was a woman who as a teenager recorded in her notebook on a single day in the 1890s: ‘Prince Bismarck to lunch, Herr Johannes Brahms to dinner’. She spoke fluent English and had often visited her daughter in Britain before the war, but she survived the catastrophic bombing of her native city, along with her liberal, Anglophile academic husband – only to find herself bewildered by the attitude of the British occupiers, whose arrival she and her friends had so longed for during the agonising years of the Nazi dictatorship:

People here are already scraping and bowing to the English, trying to find favour. I do understand that W. [her husband] is deeply depressed, has little hope for his own particular world. Now he is disillusioned by the limitless arrogance and dishonesty with which they treat us, proclaiming to the whole world that only Germany could have sunk so low in such abysmal cruelty and bestiality, that they themselves are pure and beyond reproach . . .
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Frau Wolff-Mönckeberg wrote this a little over a week after VE-Day. It was an early reaction, doubtless exacerbated by long years of stress and anxiety that now seemed to have ended in bitter disappointment. In fact, her husband would soon be appointed as Acting Provost of Hamburg University, and within a few months the front-line soldiers (some perhaps influenced by experiences such as the liberation of Bergen-Belsen) gave way to administrators and educators who took a less harsh line, as she would later admit.

Of course, not all of the victors exhibited a blanket hatred of the defeated Germans. Not even the Russians. The behaviour of the Red Army had been unspeakable, and ‘incidents’, particularly in relation to German women, frequent. As one Berlin woman later said of the period after the city fell, ‘We got the impression that in those first four weeks the Russians could do what they wanted. We girls and women had no rights.’
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