After the Reich (48 page)

According to his own short and self-deprecating account, Pakenham believed that he had been appointed because he was a Catholic, and a majority of the Germans in the British Zone shared his religion. This is unlikely to be true: although there is a majority of Catholics in the Rhineland, they are not super-numerous in the Lutheran bastions of Lower Saxony or Schleswig-Holstein. He was appointed in the spring of 1947: ‘I was filled with passionate Christian desire to see justice done to this broken people.’ He was taken to a school in Düsseldorf where some of the three million children in the zone were fainting from hunger. He told them, ‘Never believe the whole world is against you, you’re absolutely right to be proud of being German.’ Pakenham later claimed that the government reined him in after that, but he nonetheless visited Germany twenty-six times during his period of responsibility.
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He did not convince everyone that his intentions towards Germany were utterly benign, however. Franz Sayn-Wittgenstein was outraged by a conversation with him in Frankfurt during which he appeared to extol the virtues of the Morgenthau Plan.
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If Hynd and Pakenham lacked real power it obviously resided with the foreign secretary, Bevin, and his deputy Hector McNeil, the minister of state. There was precious little sympathy for the Germans at the top. Prime Minister Clement Attlee was quite open about it - he disliked the lot of them, but he and his wife had once had a nice German maid. Bevin had not forgiven the German socialists for voting war credits in 1914: ‘I try to be nice but I ’ates them really,’ he said.
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The first military governor was Sir Bernard (later Viscount) Montgomery, with General Weeks serving as his deputy. Weeks established a precedent, intentional or otherwise, of planting men with industrial experience in positions of power in occupied Germany. Apart from a distinguished record in the First World War, he had only ever been a part-time soldier, and had risen to become chairman of Pilkington’s glassworks in 1939. During the Second War he had been appointed to the General Staff, becoming its deputy chief in 1942, ‘a unique position for a citizen soldier’.
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It is unlikely that his dual experience was overlooked in his selection. Britain’s attitude to post-war Germany was to some degree a reflection of its penury. It wanted the fastest possible economic recovery prior to Germany’s being granted independence.
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Montgomery was replaced by the former head of Fighter Command, Marshal of the RAF Sir Sholto Douglas, in 1946. Douglas had been head of BAFO, the British forces of occupation. Like Weeks he was a university-educated man and had sung in the Bach Choir before the war. He had also been in the war industry, having quit the RAF during the inter-war years to work for Handley Page. Douglas presided over the dismantling of the Luftwaffe and oversaw the British entry into Berlin. He expressed a desire to reintroduce ‘normal life’ into Germany, and although one of his first duties was to approve the Nuremberg sentences, he had grave doubts.
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He resigned in October 1947 over the Bückeburg affair.
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His successor was General Sir Brian Robertson, whose father Sir William had been military governor in Germany in 1918. Robertson was born in Simla, and on his mother’s side he came from a long line of Indian Army soldiers. India and the Raj provided some of the inspiration for the British in Germany. The British sense of innate superiority over their former enemy was not lost on the Germans, who grumbled that they had been turned into a
Kolonialvolk
- a colonial people like the Indians. At the beginning, some Germans had even connived at a subservient role, presumably because they believed they would be treated better that way. There was a move by some politicians in Hanover to reinstate the old kingdom, divorced from Great Britain when Queen Victoria ascended the throne.
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That way Hanover would be part of the British Empire, and not of a defeated Germany.
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Robertson had been educated at the same Charterhouse School as Weeks before attending the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.
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He was commissioned in the Royal Engineers - a background he shared with Clay. Unlike Clay, however, he had seen service in the First World War and emerged with an MC and DSO. Between the wars he had taken leave from the army to become managing director of Dunlop in South Africa and had befriended Jan Smuts. His role in the Second World War was largely administrative. He became deputy military governor in succession to Weeks. After the Bonn government was created in 1949 he stayed on as UK commissioner for a further year. Bevin worked well with Robertson, who kept him abreast of what was going on by weekly letters. The official history says Robertson was a ‘firm but compassionate’ interpreter of British policy.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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Another distinguished historian, the expert on the Reformation A. G. Dickens, was editing the
Lübecker Nachrichtenblatt
, aided by the inevitable Viennese Jew.
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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.
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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.
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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 Fehrbelliner 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.
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