Heligoland
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Spreading their activities down to the water’s edge the dismantlers then flattened the seaplane base, including its hangars and stranded aircraft. By July 1920 they were hard at work preparing to demolish the dry dock and the west mole. The sides of the dry dock were blown up and the foundations of the moles were destroyed by explosives, and the winter gales, always heavy, soon made them little more than a mass of ruins. The main harbour entrance was sealed by huge 2-ton blocks dropped from a floating crane. The retaining walls around the reclaimed ground created by Tirpitz, on which stood the dockyard building, were pierced to allow the sea to suck out the millions of tons of sand brought from the Elbe for its formation. Thus the whole place appeared to have been wrecked in such a manner that no new harbour could be constructed on the site. Over at Dune a battery of antiaircraft guns, a signal station and searchlight were similarly destroyed. Eventually, on 1 June 1922, the entire work of orderly destruction was completed, the last act being the immobilisation of the diagonal tunnel from the Unterland to the Oberland. All the while, conscious that they would need to be able to prove to the Inter-Allied Commission and the outside world that the fortifications had been razed, the Royal Engineers had been accumulating an impressive photographic record of their demolition activities. This was gathered into a vast leather-bound album which they took with them when the Commission departed in 1922.2 It seemed that British interest in the island could henceforth surely be only sentimental and historical.
No sooner had the British departed than it became apparent that the destruction of the sea walls could already be having a potentially devastating effect on the island. The moles and port installations had been razed below the level of low water. The sole exception was part of the long west mole. Some 300 metres of this, nearest the Sudhorn – the southernmost rocky tip of the island – was spared to protect the weather side of the fishing-boat harbour. However, the rest of the unprotected areas of Tirpitz’s reclaimed dockyard land were visibly being gnawed away by the sea. If the sea walls were not restored, in just a few years as much as a quarter of the island could be washed away. Even the lifeboat station was at risk. Somehow the islanders managed to patch up enough of the vulnerable deconstructed remains to stem the depletion.
The islanders did what they could to attract visitors back to Heligoland, building a football pitch for soccer enthusiasts, a public swimming pool and, for more discerning visitors, a tennis court on the Strand promenade. Ugly stumps of steel and concrete – the scars left by the Allies’ systematized demilitarisation – remained, but even so the tourists started to return. The reintroduction of the Dover– Heligoland yacht races also helped to put a shine on the island’s tarnished kudos. Gradually the numbers of trippers grew and by the early 1930s Heligoland was welcoming some 30,000 visitors a year – more than before the First World War. Fewer than ever were British, but such was the lingering affection for England in the island that visitors could still stay in the Hotel Victoria or the Hotel Queen Victoria, and enjoy an evening’s entertainment at the Queen Victoria-Bierhalle.
Map 7 In contravention of the Versailles treaty, during the 1930s Germany commenced Project ‘Hummerschere’ (lobster claws): an ambitious scheme to create a German Scapa Flow by building on Heligoland’s 1729 shallows. In 1938 Hitler himself visited Heligoland to see how work was progressing – and even walked down the High Street – but the project was never completed. (Helgoland Regierung)
In the midst of all this, there was also a revival of the nineteenth-century tradition of intellectuals gaining exceptional flashes of inspiration on Heligoland; this happened when the German scientist Werner Heisenberg visited the island in June 1925 to do some research and recover from flu. One night he had an idea and he went for a stroll along the Oberland cliff-tops overlooking the Lower Town to consider it further. Not far from the grounds of Government House, where Arthur Barkly had handed over the island thirty-five years earlier, he developed the brilliant mathematical theory that became known as the uncertainty principle. It explained the structure of the hydrogen atom and although he was only twenty-four at the time of the discovery it eventually won him the Nobel Prize for Physics.
The initial impact on Heligoland of the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party was economic. In Hamburg alone there had been 173,000 unemployed as recently as 1932. But in 1933 Hitler’s efforts to ease the economic crisis meant increased affluence on the German mainland and tourism on the island flourished. This time the visitors were more affluent than ever, eager to spend their new-found wealth in the island’s numerous drinking places and in the expensive gift shops that lined the Lung Wai, the main street leading up from the landing stage. In the Kaiserstrade trippers could purchase collectable pictures by the Heligolander Franz Schensky, an internationally renowned underwater photographer who specialised in beautifully dramatic pictures of the island in rough weather. Other scenes he depicted were of traditional fishing boats, such as the elegantly functional shallow schooners and ketches favoured by the islanders, irrespective of the sophistication of the tourists.
During a celebrated speech on 21 May 1935 Hitler unilaterally repudiated the clauses demanding the disarmament of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. It was he who alleged that agents of the German Navy at Versailles had tricked the Allies into sparing the fishing-boat harbour at Heligoland – and thus the demilitarisation had never really been carried out! The commencement of the refortification of the island meant the islanders’ peaceful existence was shattered. Soon the German Navy uncovered the funicular railway tunnel leading from the harbour to the Oberland, and set about rebuilding the fortifications that had been there in 1918. To establish beyond doubt Germany’s command of the seas around the island, and thus of the outer estuaries of the Weser and Elbe, huge 12in and 6in guns were mounted in turrets on the cliff-tops. Those large naval weapons, situated some 200ft above sea-level, were capable of firing shells some 40,000 yards. Impressive though they were, in fact the island was actually less well armed now than it had been in the First World War. Instead of eight 12in guns, it had only three, mounted in single turrets in what was called Batterie Schröder at the northern end of the island.
Hitler’s next step was to implement an epic plan to use the newly fortified Heligoland not just as an anti-aircraft fortress, but as a centre for the creation of a gigantic new naval base to rival Scapa Flow, the Royal Navy’s strategic anchorage in the Orkneys. Codenamed ‘Project Hummerschere’, the scheme was the brainchild of Admiral ‘Dr’ Erich Raeder, the commander of the German Navy (1928–43), who was already achieving some renown as the strategic rebuilder of Germany’s naval might. In effect Raeder was trying to recreate Heligoland as it had been in 1629, according to the famous map. In the seventeenth century the two halves of the island, called Rock Island and White Cliff, were linked by a natural causeway which had been swept away in a ferocious storm in 1721. Instead of building another causeway, Raeder intended to create a giant lagoon, some 4 miles long and 2 wide, with huge claw-shaped areas of land on either side – hence the name of the project, as Hummerschere means ‘lobster claws’. The eastern arm, to be developed by extending Sandy Island northwards, would also serve as a Luftwaffe air base.
By 1937 Raeder’s plan had been approved and construction work was in progress. The building of tunnels and underground chambers, by dynamiting and drilling, at the southern tip of Heligoland’s Oberland produced many thousands of tons of excavated rock spoil. This appears to have been carted to the north-west corner of the main island and used for land reclamation. Dumped behind a sea wall it began to enlarge the area of the island by several hectares. Extending north from the ‘Lange Anna’, the northernmost tip of the main island, was built a kilometre-long mole which would, Raeder planned, serve as the west sea wall of the north dockyard. Over at Sandy Island a parallel mole, the Dünendamm West, was also extended northwards. Into the segments behind the breakwater were brought thousands of tons of sand dredged from the Loreley Bank several miles off
shore. According to one legend of Atlantis, many centuries earlier this had formed part of the once huge island of greater Heligoland. Bizarrely, history was now being reversed. Enchanted by this scheme, Hitler visited Heligoland to inspect the huge construction works. He landed at the edge of the Unterland, just as the Kaiser had done, and walked along the main street. The date of this visit was 23 August 1938 – just a month before the Munich Crisis.
Under the Treaty of Versailles Germany was forbidden to rearm Heligoland. Article 115 clearly stated: ‘These fortifications . . . shall not be reconstructed, nor shall any similar works be constructed in future.’ Hitler, however, had no intention of abiding by the Treaty. In 1936 MPs at Westminster started asking parliamentary questions about the rumoured refortification. The first shot in what was to become an increasingly intense assault on the Conservative government’s policy of appeasement with regard to Heligoland was fired on 13 July by the relatively unknown Commander Locker-Lampson MP. He sought to discover from the Foreign Secretary whether Britain had any right to inspect the island or whether that had been waived. He received a vague response from a junior Foreign Minister, Viscount Cranbourne. Astonishingly, Cranbourne, like Arthur Balfour, was also a relative of the late Premier, Lord Salisbury.3 Far from reassured by the reply, just two weeks later other MPs pressed further, wanting to know details of Germany’s apparent contravention of the terms of the Treaty: ‘What representation has been made to Germany on the matter and what reply has been received?’ Determined not to be lured into a position of picking a diplomatic fight with Germany on the question of the island, this time Anthony Eden himself answered. He acknowledged that the action of the German government was unilateral, but said that he did not propose to deal with this question separately since to do so might prejudice the negotiations which had just been set in train for a western pact.
The clouds of war were already gathering in March 1939 when the Prime Minister received a letter from Somerset Maxwell MP, wanting to know what reports he had received about the rearmament of the island. A polite reply, sent from the Foreign Office on Neville Chamberlain’s behalf, stated that Britain’s position had not altered from that set down by Eden in 1936, and went on: ‘Subsequent developments have shown clearly that no useful purpose would be served by taking up this matter with the German Government.’ Official documents now prove that considerable attention was given to the drafting of that reply, even the Admiralty being asked for its opinion.4 The file on this matter shows that: ‘According to a secret report which the Admiralty would not wish to be quoted, “Certain alterations” are now being made in the fortifications and they understand heavier guns are being installed. Some British Naval officers had been there last summer for regattas and had been able to see the position for themselves.’
Although the Admiralty knew what was happening on the island, scarcely anyone else in Britain did. There were several reasons why Heligoland had faded from public view. After the death of William George Black, the mantle of the island’s champion ought to have fallen to Erskine Childers, the yachtsman-author who knew those waters so well. But, quite unbeknown to the Royal Navy, just before the Cuxhaven Raid he had become passionately involved with Irish republicanism. Although he had fought for the British in the Boer War as an enthusiastic imperialist, Erskine’s lurch towards Irish republicanism was largely the work of his glamorous new American wife Molly Osgood, a prominent Boston-society Anglophobe. In July 1914 the couple had smuggled a huge cache of rifles from the Flemish coast to Ireland in their sleek ketch-rigged yacht Asgard, which Molly’s parents had given to them as a wedding present. Amazingly, within a month of that gun-running episode Britain was at war, and Childers soon found himself sent to the German Bight for the raid on Cuxhaven in December 1914. In 1922 he was executed by the Free State for treasonable activities, which made him something of a hero in southern Ireland, but his death deprived Heligoland of a potentially influential benefactor. Heligoland’s tenuous links with Ireland have never been wholly severed. Asgard, somewhat implausibly described by an Irish minister as ‘the most influential vessel in Irish history’, survived – neglectfully kept in a Dublin prison yard – and is being controversially restored to a fully-rigged condition.
One crucial consequence of the timing of the hand-over of Heligoland to Germany, many years before the modern British Commonwealth of former colonial nations began to take shape in the late 1920s, was that from that time on colonial history books almost invariably omitted to mention that Heligoland had ever been a British possession. A clear example of this can be found in the works of Professor Somervell, who was at that time a most popular historian of the British Empire. His works were read by a generation of students and other educated people who went on to become influential in public life. Highly significantly, in 1930 the first edition of his bestselling book The British Empire referred to Heligoland as an ‘uninhabited sandbar’. Subsequently, as the book went through several editions and reprints during the next few years, mention of Heligoland was gradually phased out, until by the fifth and final edition in 1942 it had ceased to be mentioned at all. It was as if there had never been any British involvement with Heligoland.
The question of why the island should have been swapped at all in 1890 was fleetingly considered in the 1920s by Lady Gwendolen Cecil, Salisbury’s daughter, who published a selection of his letters. Intriguingly, despite her privileged access, she claimed that there were no clues to his innermost thoughts on that matter. Also getting into print at this time were edited selections of Queen Victoria’s letters; these certainly mentioned her opposition to the swap, but no British historian thought to use this as a basis to question Britain’s record on the island.
Once the Versailles Treaty had been signed, and Heligoland’s political future thereby put beyond Westminster’s influence, parliamentary interest in Heligoland had virtually come to an end. From the mid-1920s, and for many years thereafter, almost no questions regarding the island – except on the subject of rearmament – were asked in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Once the fortifications were dismantled, the island and the activities of its inhabitants ceased to receive any attention in the British national newspapers. It would be many years before The Times mentioned it at all. Nazi intimidation meant that even in 1935 a reporter sent to the island by the American journal National Geographic had to be careful not to be caught taking photographs. The last Englishman to write about a visit to Heligoland was the pioneering naturalist Ronald Lockley, who landed there in October 1936 to see the famous migratory bird-trapping centre which had originally been created by the controversial ornithologist Heinrich Gätke. In his book I Know an Island (1938), Lockley produced an account of that pre-war trip, eerily redolent of William George Black’s 1911 article for the National Review. He reported that when not ringing birds at the Fanggarten (he tagged an astonishing 752 birds of many species in just a day) he did what he could to explore the island, but found huge areas, most notably the fortress and the docks, fenced off with wire and ‘Verboten’ notices. Indeed, the non-military space had become so restricted that on fine summer days, when the ferries arrived and discharged thousands of sightseers, there could be as many as nine thousand people thronging the narrow streets. As the ferries docked, the crowds were so thick that no one could move one way or the other. Walking room was limited to the streets and the promenade around the island.
In such circumstances, most locals either remained at home or struggled to the 400-seater cinema. The films, which were changed weekly, usually included a newsreel and perhaps two or three propaganda films proclaiming the Nazi cause. Outside there would occasionally be demonstrations by some political organisation, which all young people had to attend. Almost every day a new ‘thought’ would appear on the notice-boards on the staircase joining the Upper and Lower Towns. ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘Return our Colonies’ were the most burning themes. There would also be entreaties to ‘Fly your Swastika’ and obey patriotic laws and etiq
uette.
But such exhortations were meaningless against the power of the sea. On 27 October 1936 Lockley witnessed a great gale approaching from the west. The waves leapt in billows over the naval base and swept into the streets of the Lower Town. No steamer could approach the island. In the space of just a few hours nearly half of Sandy Island was swept away; many people watched through telescopes as the buildings upon it crumbled and slid into the sea. Finally came the news that the lightship Elbe 3, positioned between Heligoland and Hamburg, had capsized and sunk with all hands. Lockley, a seasoned mariner, chillingly noted: ‘The whole shallow sea was perfectly white, as I have never seen in the white water of the Atlantic in its worst mood.’ Later, when the storm had subsided, he took a ferry to Cuxhaven. As it passed the forlorn anchorage where the lightship had gone down, preparations were already being made to install a new vessel. Poignantly, the Heligoland ferry paused for a moment and lowered its ensign in honour of those who had died.
At the outbreak of the Second World War in early September 1939 Britain’s approach to fighting in the Heligoland Bight differed markedly from its conduct there in the First World War. Now the main weapon against German forces were aircraft not ships, but their activities were restricted by Neville Chamberlain’s insistence that they operate within the terms of the 1923 Rules of Air Warfare, meaning they ought not attack civilian targets. Heligoland might otherwise have been attacked on the first day of the war by Hampden light bombers which overflew it that very afternoon. On 29 September 1939, eleven Hampdens in two formations were sent to search for naval targets. Six aircraft bombed two destroyers, but without scoring any hits. The second formation of five aircraft did not return. A German radio broadcast later declared they had been set upon by a ‘hornet’s nest’ of fighters and all the Hampdens had been shot down, killing eighteen of their twenty-four crew, including the squadron commander. The RAF eventually came to realise that the bombers’ movements had been detected by ‘Freya’ radar installations on Wangerooge island and Heligoland.5