Heligoland (32 page)

For all these reasons, on 20 February 1951 the Cabinet’s Defence Committee met with Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and it was decided that Britain should relent.
²
Accordingly, later that week the British High Commissioner in Germany, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, informed Chancellor Adenauer that by 2 March 1952 the bombing of Heligoland would cease and the islanders would be permitted to return.

In reaching that decision the Defence Committee rather assumed it would be able to secure the use of a nearby alternative bombing range. Evidently Savory’s July 1950 debate had been of slight influence in another respect because it was there that the recommendation was made by Lord Douglas-Hamilton that the Grosser (Greater) Knechtsand, near Cuxhaven, could be used as a bombing range. A low-lying mudflat island of some 5 sq. miles, Grosser Knechtsand was situated at the mouth of the Elbe and was nearly submerged at high tide. The channel between the ‘Grosser’ and the Scharhorn had been immortalised in
The Riddle of the Sands
as the spot where the plucky yacht
Dulcibella
was nearly lured to her doom. So keen now was Adenauer to maintain Britain’s ongoing military protection of West Germany that in December 1951 he reached a gentleman’s agreement with London whereby the RAF would be allowed to bomb the Grosser. For a while it seemed as though Adenauer had over-reached himself. Germany’s Parliament, the Bundestag, was decidedly unenthusiastic about the scheme; preferring to deny Britain use of the sandbank it suggested the Shetland Islands instead!

In February 1952
The Times
received a letter from a town councillor of Cuxhaven (which was just 10 miles distant from the Grosser), insisting that there was already serious unemployment in Cuxhaven, and that the town, which earned its living from fishing, coastal shipping and tourism, would be blighted by the new bombing range. Capitalising on the existing disgruntlement of north German fishermen, who had kept a bonfire burning for months near Cuxhaven in symbolic protest against the RAF’s use of the Heligoland bombing range, Prince Löwenstein’s nationalist group, Helgoland-Aktion, switched its attention to the Grosser. In March 1952 it organised a visit by fifty fishing boats to plant United Europe flags there. They organised a petition, signed by a thousand inhabitants of the mainland, which was sent to Dr Adenauer urging him to ditch the bombing agreement, and pledged to impede the Grosser Knechtsand’s military use by stationing a boat close by on sentry duty. In the absence of any official explanation at Westminster, the only opportunity British people had to make sense of what all this meant was in an editorial which appeared in
The Times
on 1 March, skilfully comparing the Grosser with Heligoland. The impending renunciation of British use of Heligoland was right, it said. ‘Bombing and demolitions had rendered the island materially useless; they had not, however, destroyed the sentimental regard in which many Germans hold it. To have refused to relinquish it would have led to endless ill-feeling.’ Nevertheless, there was a price to pay for measures for the defence of Germany. The Bundestag did eventually agree to allow bombing practice on the Grosser, but its reluctance to do so had shown it was not really concerned to honour Adenauer’s agreement; it was ‘more interested in preserving shrimping grounds’. The claim became ironic because two years later Britain waived its remaining rights to bomb the Grosser – a decision which had much less to do with the Cuxhaven townspeople’s objections than with information supplied by ornithologists that such activities were damaging the feeding grounds of seabirds!
³

In Germany, Britain’s relinquishment of Heligoland on 2 March 1952 became a day of national rejoicing. The
New York Herald Tribune
reported that the flag of Heligoland was even raised over Hamburg. Britain had made some concessions in terms of access during its final months of control of the bombing range: in June 1951 German fishing boats were allowed to seek shelter in the harbour when the weather was exceptionally stormy, and in September a few Heligolanders went ashore for a matter of hours to survey the damage. Then, just before the midnight deadline of the handover, some fishermen from Cuxhaven landed, lit bonfires on the island’s southernmost tip and raised the island’s distinctive flag. On the day itself four hundred guests of honour (some of them Heligolanders) were landed by boat. The ceremony re-establishing German administration was a comparatively simple state occasion led by the Prime Minister of Schleswig-Holstein, Dr Wilhelm Lubke, and civil servants from the district of Penningen, to which Heligoland was to be administratively attached. Among the guests was Prince Löwenstein, busily calling for the reintroduction of
Deutschland über Alles
as the German national anthem. Conspicuously, no leading Heligolander was involved in the acceptance. The islanders were merely allowed to be represented by their oldest inhabitant, who expressed thanks for the return of the island.

The proceedings were hauntingly redolent, in some respects, of the handover in August 1890. Grand speeches were made by important German statesmen about Heligoland – which to its people was simply their home. No longer was there a Kaiser Wilhelm to raspingly decree the island to be ‘a strong place in the German Ocean against all enemies who care to show themselves upon it’. Now leading Germans took care to describe it in ambitiously idealistic terms as some sort of model for international conflict resolution. With a certain degree of selective amnesia, Premier Lubke denied that the island had ever been intended to be the ‘Gibraltar of the North Sea’! It should now, he said, ‘be a symbol of new hope, understanding and peace for Germany and Europe’. Chancellor Adenauer, using words which might have been spoken by the Kaiser himself, described the island as a magnanimous symbol of reconciliation: ‘Set in the seas between Britain and Germany, Heligoland will be a token of peace and friendship between the two countries.’ President Theodor Heuss, in a radio broadcast, pledged the island would be ‘returned to peaceful purposes’.

The British government’s failure to send anyone at all to this handover ceremony was all the more dishonourable given that it had been the cause of Heligoland’s desolate condition. The extent of destruction was now more extensive than in 1945, seemingly worse than after the ‘Big Bang’ in 1947. Debris from the once-massive armaments was scattered everywhere. The island’s rugged treeless plateau was pitted with craters. Even the rubble in the towns remained blackened from the RAF’s phosphorus bomb experiments. The island was so littered with explosives that German government officials calculated it would be a further five years before they were cleared and the island made safe to be fully habitable.

Appropriately on an island whose function and origin was maritime, the first object constructed as a matter of priority was a temporary lighthouse. Ingeniously adapted for that purpose was the Red Tower, the only structure still standing. There being no other shelter on the island, for a while bomb disposal experts and construction workers had to live on board a ship berthed in the wrecked harbour. As soon as the handover ceremony had finished, bulldozers set to work clearing the piles of rubble. The entire Unterland was raised in height by one metre. Hitherto it had been so close to the high water mark that floodwaters had been known to reach 300 metres along the street to Heligoland’s only post office. In the preceding months much effort had been expended by the government of Schleswig-Holstein in consulting with architects and representatives of the islanders as to what form the island’s new houses should take. It was agreed that the narrow street plan, and most of the historic street names, should be as before; the houses would remain nestled at the foot of the cliff across the harbour, and also clustered on its southern ridge. However, such was the islanders’ understandable disenchantment with the British that they decided to start anew in terms of the style of their houses. Psychologically wrong-footed, they took a decision some would later regret, to rebuild their homes in an uncompromisingly modern style rather than in the traditional form.

The envisaged cost of making the island inhabitable and reconstructing its civil buildings, hotels and harbours was estimated at between £11 million and £20 million – an immense amount at the time. Heavy shipping charges meant the cost of rebuilding houses on the island was so horrendously high it was equivalent to constructing homes for 20,000 people on the mainland. Nevertheless, such was the sentimental power of the place, in Bonn the coalition and opposition parties were agreed that the reconstruction of Heligoland was an all-German obligation. President Heuss and Chancellor Adenauer, having become patrons of a special Heligoland appeal fund, publicly called upon the already financially shattered German people for contributions in cost or kind. The Federal Government considered issuing a special series of Heligoland stamps, while Heuss and Adenauer endorsed an ingenious scheme whereby fragments of RAF bombs were mounted on wooden shields and sold as ‘Helgoland Plaques’ for the equivalent of 4 shillings each to raise funds.

The sale of these plaques throughout Germany, and presumably in East Germany as well, caused consternation. There was a possibility that some of the shrapnel could contain fragments of blue steel molybdenum, from the tail-fin and nose-cone sections of the experimental bombs the RAF had been dropping on Heligoland. Clumsily trying to deter the spread of these valuable fragments, in February 1954 the British authorities declared that they would be liable for customs duty on the mainland.

For all the German authorities’ declared good intentions, the rebuilding was faltering. In early 1958 Sir Douglas Savory received via Franz Siemens a report by the Frisian Bureau of Michigan showing that, six years after the bombing had stopped, 65 per cent of the Heligolanders were still having to live on the mainland. Few houses had been constructed as practically all the rebuilding had been of maritime installations. Such lack of progress was being worsened by Britain’s unwillingness to provide compensation. Savory was in a quandary: he was no longer at Westminster (having left Parliament in 1955); nor, since Lord Douglas-Hamilton had also stood down, was there any parliamentarian with a detailed knowledge of Heligoland; and besides Savory knew from experience that the Clerk of the House of Commons would deliberately refuse to accept any questions for which the Foreign Secretary could not be held responsible. Therefore, on 18 July 1958, Savory wrote to the Federal Chancellor, informing Adenauer of the concerns of Franz Siemens and all the other Heligolanders.

That helped accelerate the rebuilding programme. The recladding of damaged patches on the walls of the Red Tower in 1962, which was by then a permanent lighthouse, marked the end of the other planned phase of reconstruction. Domestic houses having been rebuilt, the new priority was to re-create public buildings which had formerly been part of the island’s allure for tourists. In due course there appeared a seaside and health resort, an aquarium and a sanctuary for migratory birds. By 1961 a tourist office was established. The rebuilding which had taken place was of such quality that Heligoland had become one of the most modern holiday resorts in northern Europe, and a complete example in miniature of Germany’s miraculous economic regrowth. In sporting terms the island returned to normality, participating in the Inter-island Games – a relatively unknown mini-Olympic competition between various European islands. In yacht racing it became the starting point for a biennial 550-mile race to Kiel. The island also won some renown for hosting the annual ‘North Sea Week’ regatta, which included feeder races from Cuxhaven and Bremerhaven. Being inescapably linked to Germany’s submarine history, appropriately enough Heligoland was used for filming several scenes for the celebrated 1981 television film
Das Boot
. Twenty years earlier crucial footage of the ‘Big Bang’ had been used in the credits of the film,
The Guns of Navarone
, albeit only fleetingly.

Thus it was that Heligoland remained totally forgotten by Britain. To the islanders’ astonishment the British government eventually issued a celebrated expression of sorrow for its gratuitous wartime bombing of Dresden, at the far end of the Elbe – yet the gratuitous postwar bombing of the former British colony of Heligoland was not apologised for, either at the time of the March 1952 handover to Germany or subsequently. But by chance the German correspondent of
The Times
happened to make a visit to the island where he interviewed its Bürgermeister, the former leader of the Heligoland Society, Henry Rickmers. Now aged eighty-one, Rickmers recalls in broken English that in spite of his own bitterness after the war, he had long cherished a hope that it would be possible to re-establish the friendly relations with Britain which existed at the time when the island was under British rule. The 25th and 50th anniversaries of the historic 1890 cession had both fallen during a world war, and 1965 was going to be the first opportunity to celebrate such a jubilee in peacetime. That occasion was, Rickmers knew, being planned as an all-German celebration, so he was not hopeful that consideration would be given to any thoughts of Britain. Nevertheless the journalist was impressed and worked it into his article ‘Heligoland Arises from the Ashes’, which was printed on 14 May 1964. It ended with a recommendation, prompted by Rickmers: ‘Perhaps the seventy-fifth anniversary of its transfer to Germany, when “God Save the Queen” last rang out over the island, could be a worthy occasion.’

The celebration on 10 August 1965 was certainly a great occasion, with a cavalcade of important visitors to the island, of whom the most prominent were the Federal Chancellor, Dr Ludwig Erhard; the Defence Minister; and even the President of Schleswig-Holstein; plus a host of officials and representatives of the German press. Chancellor Erhard had interrupted his election tour of north Germany to sail across from Wilhelmshaven in a corvette, making his first ever sea trip. Arriving just as the Kaiser had done in 1890 to take possession for Germany, he was warmly greeted in fine weather by the island’s inhabitants and many holidaymakers. In spite of some competition, provided by Bremen’s thousand-year celebrations on the same day, the total number of guests on the island on that day was over twelve thousand – or, to put it another way, six guests for every native of the tiny island. From the very outset Erhard used the visit to emphasise the importance of reconciliation, and at the foot of the main landing stage he laid a wreath on the memorial to Hoffmann von Fallersleben, the German poet who wrote the words of the national anthem in August 1841. The Chancellor explained that the words of
Deutschland über Alles
were intended to encourage people to put Germany above the then existing collection of small quarrelling states, and that in the Wilhelmine period a wrong and dangerous interpretation had been put upon the words – that Germany must come above everything else in the world. The important phrase now, he said, in the new national anthem was ‘unity, justice and freedom’.