Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  One Ilse Schmidt, ‘a gorgeous 19-year-old brunette with a figure designed to make men drool’, sunbathing on a local pier, when asked by the same reporter for her views on fraternisation, answered: ‘I never had any trouble. Have you a cigarette, please?’

  In fact, it was not until October 1945 that intimate relations with German civilians were actually permitted, but long before that, the order had become a dead letter. The remaining restriction, on marriages with German women, remained until the military authorities finally relented in December 1946. Many thousands of marriages were entered into during the years to come, with around 20,000 German women emigrating to America as ‘GI brides’ between 1946 and 1949.28 It should, however, be added that this was less than a third of the number of British brides who went stateside to join their American soldier husbands during the same period after the passing of the ‘GI Bride’ Act by Congress in December 1945.

  There were also thousands of children born as the result of liaisons that did not lead to marriage, many of them never knowing their fathers. GIs in Germany at that point did not need to pay child support unless they were willing to acknowledge paternity, rendering the obligations of fatherhood entirely voluntary. Many of the children, and their single mothers, suffered severe social exclusion, especially if the children were offspring of relationships with black American GIs.

  On the British side, although restrictions on relations with Germans at first seemed equally uncompromising, they were on the whole relaxed more quickly than in the American-controlled areas. The British attitude in general was both a little more cynical and a little more pragmatic. The British C-in-C and, after VE-Day, Military Governor of the British Zone, Field Marshal Montgomery, although himself rather puritanical in sexual matters, pointed out in a letter to Churchill at the beginning of July that if one couldn’t actually speak to Germans, how was one supposed to change them from Nazis to something better, which was, allegedly, one of the post-war aims? And in any case, the Field Marshal continued, in the manner of a boy suggesting that some schoolyard ‘enemy’ be re-admitted to the fold after being temporarily sent to Coventry:

  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.29

  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.’30 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.31

  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.32

  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.’33

  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.34

  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.’35

  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.36

  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 . . .37

  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.’38

  A schoolgirl who kept a diary at this time recorded the progression of events during the siege with a chilling matter-of-factness:

  22.4. Sleeping in the cellar. The Russians have reached Berlin.

  25.4. No water! No gas! No light!

  26.4. Artillery fire!

  27.4. The enemy has reached Kaiserplatz [in the suburb of Wilmersdorf].

  28.4. Our building received its 4th artillery hit.

  29.4. Our building has approximately 20 hits. Cooking is made very difficult by the ongoing threat to life and limb if you leave the cellar.

  30.4. When the bomb hit, I was at the top of the cellar steps with Frau B. The Russians have arrived. Rapes at night. I not; mother, yes. Some, 5–20 times.

  1.5. Russians are going in and out. All the watches are gone. Horses are lying on our beds in the courtyard. The cellars have been broken into.

  2.5. The first night of calm. We have come from hell into heaven. We cried when discovered the blooming lilacs in the courtyard. All radios must be turned in.

  6.5. Our building has 21 hits. Cleaned up and packed the whole day. At night, storm. Hid under the bed out of fear that the Russians would come. But the building just rattled from the shelling.

  7.5. Swept the street clear. Went to get ration coupons for bread, picked up, cleaned.

  8.5. Swept the street. Stood in line for bread. Report that Papa is still alive.

  9.5. Ceasefire. There is milk for Margit.39

  All the same, reflecting the unpredictable mix of brutality and humanity that so many observers have noted of the Russian character, there were plenty of instances where compassion could be and was shown, and even a kind of odd respect fo
r things German that was not necessarily present among the other Allied troops.

  So, for instance, during the last days of the war, when the bombed-out city of Dresden finally fell to the Russians, a teenage inhabitant of Löschwitz, a pleasant and historic suburb of the city, found himself, to his terror, surprised by two Soviet officers in what he took to be NKVD uniforms. Expecting to be arrested, or worse, he was instead greeted by a polite request, in near-perfect German, for directions to the little summer house overlooking the Elbe where the great German poet Friedrich Schiller had written his famous Ode to Joy a century and a half earlier. The officer and his colleagues were under orders to secure it, as an important cultural monument, from damage during the Red Army’s occupation of the area.40

  On the other side of the city, the fortunes of eighteen-year-old Götz Bergander’s family were favoured by two factors: first that the two Russian maids who worked for the household spoke well to the first Red Army soldiers of the Berganders’ kindness to them; and second – more enduringly – that the family lived in a flat on the premises of the distillery where Bergander senior, a chemist, was technical director. With so much alcohol available, the Russian commander was fearful that his men would get totally out of control. He put a twenty-four-hour guard on the entire production facility, which had the additional effect of protecting the family’s residence as well during the critical, chaotic days when most of the rapes and robberies occurred elsewhere.41

  Although as a Hitler Youth leader he had been pressed into forced labour for a while by the victors, Lothar Löwe, sixteen at the end of the war, recalled that, once the mayhem accompanying the fall of Berlin was over, many ordinary Russians ‘were . . . nice people on a personal level’. The French were worse, in his experience.42 A woman in Berlin noted that ‘the Russians always gave children something to eat, the kids could get anything they wanted from them. They were always very nice to kids, never cruel.’43