Exorcising Hitler (50 page)

Unlike the Americans, who initially showed a strong moral/ideological aversion to keeping Nazis in offices or in comfortable jobs in industry and commerce, the British tended to see former Nazis as above all a potential security problem. The Americans also had a large pool of German speakers to draw on, be they ‘Aryan’ German-Americans or German-Jewish refugees who had made their home in the US after 1933. With the exception of émigrés like George Clare and his colleagues, who tended to be inserted into obvious areas where German-language skills were required, most British officers remained resolutely monolingual, and the civilian officials who were increasingly brought in to oversee German industry, as expropriations of companies progressed during 1946, were little better.

One advantage the British undoubtedly possessed was General Sir Gerald Templer. Aged forty-six and with a successful war record behind him as a divisional commander, Templer was appointed Director of Military Government – largely responsible for the day-to-day running of the British Zone – by Montgomery in March 1945, initially with a staff of only fifty officers.
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Something of a martinet, and certainly a man of great energy and determination, Templer specialised in challenging complacency. In the words of a colleague, the historian Noel Annan, then a senior intelligence officer: ‘Military Government officers who had previously spent happy hours commandeering the best houses and stocking up the messes with wine and schnapps, found themselves working late hours reconstituting the German administration and putting Templer’s plans into operation.’

Not that all of this solved Germany’s post-war problems in any short order. Here is Annan’s verdict on one particular burst of energy on General Templer’s part:

Horses were gathered at three centres and sent by train to the main agricultural areas; 800 railway bridges and 7000 miles of track were repaired by the end of the year [1945]. But the food crisis did not disappear, the black market raged, and people left work to deal in it or went to farms to barter their possessions.
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On the other hand, without such leadership, things might have been even worse. Templer would go on to become the organising genius of a successful British campaign against the communist uprising in Malaya, a model for counter-insurgency efforts from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

Annan, based in Berlin and speaking fluent German, wrote a number of very influential reports. He was in a good position to observe the vices and virtues of the British handling of their slice of the defeated Reich, and to compare the British view of the country’s problems with the rather different perspectives held by the Germans themselves.

Annan was also on close terms with the Political Adviser to the Military Governor, Sir William Strang, who had risen from a humble state-school background to the heights of the Foreign Office’s elite. ‘He looked,’ recalled Annan, ‘like a confidential clerk, but if he considered his opponent on the other side of the table obstructive he became a terrier and tore his arguments to shreds.’

Annan accompanied Strang on a tour of Germany in October 1945. It was assumed, he reported, that the occupation of Germany would last for twenty years, during which time the Germans would have to learn to rule themselves again slowly and from first principles. Accordingly, a former colonial civil servant, Harold Ingrams, was drafted in and set up appointed councils of supposedly reliable Germans, drawn from business men, trade unionists, religious leaders, lawyers and so on, all over the zone. Little initiative was expected of them. They were there, Annan recalled, essentially to carry out British orders.

Ingrams was apt to treat Germans as if they were a specially intelligent tribe of Bedouins. Discussion in the shady tent was permitted until the Resident Officer struck the ground with his stick and gave his decision. This attitude exasperated the Germans.

Kurt Schumacher, the Hanover-based anti-Nazi who quickly became the leading figure in the post-war Social Democratic Party, was outraged. ‘
Wir sind kein Negervolk
’ (‘We are not blacks’) the fiery former concentration-camp inmate told Annan.

The overriding object of Military Government was to make things work, to keep their zone stable.

. . . The British were technocrats. They preferred the status quo. From the start they regarded the SPD (Social Democratic Party) with suspicion, because the left endangered the status quo. ‘It therefore had to be discouraged and it was.’ Works councils were forbidden, Nazis might be turned out of their flats by the British, but not by zealous Germans. Some city administrators tried to compel known Nazis to clear rubble: Military Government forbade it. When a committee of concentration camp victims was formed to supervise releases from the camps it was at once banned . . . There was therefore no sense of a new beginning. When Military Government called on the ordinary German citizen to help them distinguish between repulsive, fervent Nazis and merely nominal members of the party, the ordinary German citizen replied ‘
Ohne mich
’ – count me out.
⁴⁰

The appearance of denazification in the British Zone was, in fact, superficially similar to that in the American Zone: the interminable
Fragebogen
, the five categories of Nazis, and of course the arrests of those thought to have been serious supporters of the Hitler regime. However, the British, uninfluenced by the beady-eyed social engineers of the Frankfurt School, did not compel all Germans over eighteen years old to fill out the
Fragebogen
, as in the American Zone. It applied only to those employed by or seeking employment in public offices and enterprises.
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This rule led to some bizarre anomalies. George Clare, involved with denazification for the media and entertainment branches in post-war Berlin, reported the scene that greeted him when he entered his office one day and found it full of people who in the unenlightened 1940s were still called midgets:

Tiny men and women standing on the chairs around the big table were bending over it filling in their Fragebogens; another group in the middle of the room agitatedly discussed in squeaky voices whether such questions as ‘Did you serve in the general or Waffen SS?’ or ‘What was the last rank you held in the Wehrmacht?’ needed to be answered by them at all; two little chaps, obviously fed up with this nonsense, practised handstands in a corner and as there were not enough chairs for so many – some were reading their questionnaires lying comfortably on their tummies on the carpet.
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It turned out that these artistes were part of a troupe known as the ‘Lilliputians’ from a well-known circus. Clearly someone had decided that since they performed for the public they counted as security-sensitive media operatives and therefore needed to be checked for political reliability.

Like the Americans, though rather more reluctantly, the British introduced German involvement, setting up ‘denazification panels’ in January 1946. There was even a German appeal body, although the British could and did overrule its decisions if they felt it necessary.

By June 1946, 66,000 Germans had been arrested and placed in civil internment camps or, in the most serious cases, prisons. In a month, 24,000 were cleared, leaving 42,000 still detained. Five hundred were put on trial. Over the entire two years and a bit after VE-Day, two million
Fragebogen
were evaluated and some 350,000 Germans excluded from office.
⁴³

British policy was less rigorous than the American, but it was also slow and it was inconsistent, which in some ways was worse from the point of the view of the German population. The inconsistency was remarkable.

In 1945–6, in the British-occupied province of Oldenburg, 41 per cent of those involved in food production and distribution, 31 per cent of railway employees and 30 per cent of postal employees were dismissed because of their Nazi records. The pattern was followed elsewhere in the same zone. So, for instance, a highly efficient local potato merchant in the North Rhineland by the name of Paul Kistermann – his role in food distribution admitted even by the British authorities as vital to his large, semi-rural community in a time of hunger and shortages – had his licence withdrawn because of past Nazi involvement. The result was that – again as the British themselves admitted – ‘immediate ill effects were felt’.
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Meanwhile, in bizarre contrast, only 9 per cent of teachers and 8 per cent of police officials in Oldenburg were sacked.
⁴⁵
Given the high proportion of Nazis known to have been active in both these latter professions, the contrast is absurd and in its way quite sinister.

As for the slowness of the British denazification, it was not only the job prospects of ex-Nazis that were blighted. The civil internment camps where many were held while awaiting processing were truly grim places, often crowded and unsanitary, with ration allocations for inmates dropping to 900 calories per day – more serious for detainees than for the rest of the civil population, who were also kept on dangerously short rations but could at least forage and trade and grow their own food.

Although the British-run internment camps were not comparable with those where wretched millions had been incarcerated, tortured and murdered during the years of the Nazi regime, they were scandalous by the standards which the Western Allies had themselves set (the Soviets, as we shall see, were a very different matter). A House of Commons committee condemned the state of the camps and pointed out that it was damaging the prestige of the British occupiers as well as doing nothing to ‘attract Germans to the British way of life’. A senior Military Government official conceded that these lengthy detentions without trial were ‘not compatible with the professed restoration of the rule of law and the professed abolition of Gestapo methods’.
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It must be admitted that there were, in fact, cases where precisely those ‘Gestapo methods’ were being used by British military men and officials operating in the name of justice and security. No. 74 Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) was opened in June 1945 at Bad Nenndorf, a once-elegant spa town near Hanover. The unit was housed in a hotel centred around a
Schlammbad
(mud bath) complex, with the rooms formerly reserved for guests undergoing expensive health cures now fitted with special steel doors and functioning as cells. The aim was initially to detain and interrogate suspected former Nazis or SS members who might become involved in post-war resistance activities against the occupiers.

Not only did No. 74 Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre rapidly become a torture centre used against ex-Nazis, but in surprisingly short order, considering that the Soviets had been British allies so recently, also against suspected communists agents and infiltrators. Inmates were tormented with cold, with whippings and beatings, with sleep deprivation, with threats against their wives and children (justified by the perpetrators on the grounds that such threats were never carried out), with starvation, and even with the use of ‘thumb-screws’ and ‘shin-screws’. Some weighed less than 100 pounds when investigators finally gained access to the detention centre. Three died as a result of their privations.

The strange thing was that many of the victims were not even German. One, allegedly a Frenchman, turned out to be a Russian intelligence agent. Others were Germans who had crossed from the Soviet Zone and, appalled by what they had witnessed, offered to spy for the West. They were tortured to see if their defection was genuine. One detainee, who had previously spent two years in Gestapo captivity, declared afterwards: ‘I never in all those two years had undergone such treatments.’

It might have been a clue that all the German inhabitants – including many homeless refugees – were expelled from Bad Nenndorf when the Centre was opened. However, it was the death of an internee and the serious illness of others in January 1947 in a local hospital that caused the alarm to be raised and the London government to send over a police inspector to carry out an investigation. The result, to the intense embarrassment of the British, was news coverage, the closure of the camp and a court martial.

The commander of the Bad Nenndorf camp was forty-five-year-old Colonel Robin Stephens, known as ‘Tin Eye’, a former luminary of the Peshawar Division of the Indian Army turned MI5 officer. Stephens was put on trial along with several of his interrogators. It turned out that Bad Nenndorf had become a dumping ground for soldiers subject to suspended sentences for assault or desertion, a group liable to be less inhibited in the use of violence than your usual Tommy. Several of the interrogators were also German-Jewish émigrés, and others Polish and Dutch in origin, and therefore hardly likely to go easy on their captives.
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The shameful story of Bad Nenndorf became known in a bowdlerised form at the time of the court martial (only in the twenty-first century did the Freedom of Information Act allow journalists to make it fully public), but for Germans in the British Zone it was one among many instances that tended to give rise to a certain cynicism.