After the Reich (49 page)

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 diplomat 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

The British were not frank about demontage. In theory they washed their hands of it, but demontage was carried out in the British Zone on behalf of client states. German industrial installations were shipped out to Greece and Yugoslavia - which received equipment from Krupps.
⁴³
Demontage was controlled by the Allied agreement of 24 January 1946 which established the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency, or IARA. America had ended the Lease-Lend Agreement six months before and presented Britain with a colossal bill, demanding cash on the nail. The British press was antipathetic to demontage, and the Americans were shocked at every British attempt to remove plants. Some of it could be written off as ‘booty’ which was not controlled by IARA, and in other instances it could be excused by the need to dismantle Category I War Plants (that way they were able to take home much-needed naval installations).
⁴⁴

The Soviets were desperate to grab what was left of the Ruhr. The British were supposed to hand over 10 per cent of what was produced. After 1948 those deliveries were stopped. Krupps in Essen was the property of
all
the Allies, but Clay in particular was keen to keep the Soviets out. Parts of the Krupps empire had fallen to the Poles in Silesia and the Russians in Magdeburg. Jet planes, wind tunnels and other interesting bits of military equipment were lifted out of the country as quickly as possible. In other instances Category I was stretched to include plants that might later offer competition with British industries. The Germans smelled a rat and suspected that they were seeing the implementation of the Morgenthau Plan. This led to attacks on CCG officials. Once or twice the British actually started up a valuable branch of German industry. One case in point was Volkswagen in Wolfsburg. The Nazis had intended their ‘People’s Car’ or ‘Kraft durch Freude Auto’ (Strength through Joy car) to become the property of every decent German, and money was docked from their pay for that purpose, but by the time the war started only two had been built and the factory was turned over to war work. The British started the project up again, with Major Ivan Hirst at the wheel, and made 10,000 ‘beetles’ before October 1946 largely for their own needs. The car became ‘the wheels of the British occupation’.
⁴⁵

Gollancz watched demontage in the Ruhr and in Hamburg Docks. The removal of Hoechst from Dortmund threatened to ruin what was left of the city. In Hamburg large parts of the Bloem and Voss shipyard had been blown up. It was a short-sighted policy that removed the possibility of work for the starving people, and wantonly destroyed useful property. Despite statements by Hynd, Germans were being turned out of their homes. There was a terrible shortage of space: in Düsseldorf the average home amounted to 3.2 square metres. Meanwhile the British swanned around in an ugly way (although they did not force the Germans to walk in the road like the French). ‘The plain fact is that there are two worlds in Germany today, the world of the conquered and the world of the conquerors. They meet at the peripheries, but their hearts beat in an inhuman isolation.’
⁴⁶

Tisa von der Schulenburg’s sister-in-law Charlotte found a moment to return to her late husband’s family house at Trebbow while the British still clung to the westernmost reaches of Mecklenburg. She reported to the CO, whom she found in one of the guest rooms looking out on to the lake. Over his head hung a portrait of Charlotte herself and the children. She waved the pass she had obtained in Plön. ‘Ah, the lady in the painting,’ he responded laconically. Everything had been moved by the refugees and soldiers and nothing looked right any more. She was not allowed to take the children’s beds, but she did find the family porcelain - Meissen, Nymphenburg and Schlaggenwald - and by a ruse was able to enlist some soldiers to carry it out to the lorry she had got hold of. She found the beds she was looking for in the forester’s house, as well as Fritz-Dietlof’s armchair. She was able to retrieve a typewriter, a gramophone and some of her bedlinen. That night she and the children ate their frugal soup off the finest china. The next day was 28 June and the British yielded their toe-hold in Mecklenburg to the Russians.
⁴⁷

Ten-year-old Karl-Heinz Bohrer had seen little of the occupying armies since he was ‘liberated’ by American troops at Remagen. At the end of 1945 he was taken to Cologne to visit his estranged mother and the doctor she lived with. He had left the Rhineland city in 1943. Now it was completely transformed. In the centre not a single building was intact. As there was no shelter in Cologne, he went to live in southern Westphalia. At once he was aware of the British. They had already put their stamp on German life, in the same way as the other occupying powers. He recalls the pleasure of tinned sardines, white bread and black tea. The British army seemed to him to be more professional and ‘more military’ than the American. Its soldiers were calm, where Americans were noisy; he felt he had nothing more to fear. At school they learned English.