The Allied Occupation of Germany: The Refugee Crisis, Denazification and the Path to Reconstruction 9780755621392, 9781780764658

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MAPS AND LIST OF ILLUSTR ATIONS

Front cover: Detmold, North Rhine-Westphalia, circa 1946 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Germany, Zones of Occupation, August 1945 Greater Berlin, Zones of Occupation, 1945 Lord Cranborne inspecting troops Aerial view of bomb damage to Lübeck, April 1942 Hannover Opera House, 1945 RAF Target Information Damage plot, Hamburg, July/August 1943 Devastation of German Cities bar chart, October 1945 Inmates in Neuengamme Concentration Camp, June 1944 Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, summer 1943 Hamburg, May 1945 German government officials under arrest, Flensburg, May 1945 Requisitioning furniture, Hannover, circa 1946 ‘Entering Germany. Be on Your Guard. Don’t Fraternize with Germans’, 1945 German soldiers receiving a booklet on how they lost the war, 1945

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15. German civilians and British soldiers, Detmold, North Rhine-Westphalia, circa 1946 16. Krupp factory, Essen, 1947 17. Suspected Nazis filling in the Fragebogen in a detention centre, circa 1945 18. Frank Pakenham and William Asbury, 1947 19. German expellees from East Prussia disembarking at Travemünde, circa 1946 20. Camp Boie-Hassendorf, Schleswig-Holstein, 1948 21. Camp Strauer, Schleswig-Holstein, 1948 22. School Ravensbusch, Schleswig-Holstein, 1948 23. Refugees escaping from Soviet Zone to British sector, 1949 24. Poster of the Schleswig-Holstein Help for War Victims, circa 1949 25. Newspaper for East Prussian expellees, May 1948 26. Germany Under Control exhibition poster, 1946 27. Ivone Augustine Kirkpatrick, CMG, 1944 28. War Criminals Report on Petition, 1954 29. Prisoner Remission Board Order, 1955 30. Heligoland before and after demolitions, April 1945 31. Heligoland town after bombardment, 1947 32. Heligoland. Explosion following demolitions, April 1947

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AA ABCA APW BAOR BBC BdV BMG BZ BZR CAB CAC CCG (BE) CDU COGA CSU DBH DHG DKP DMG DP DPs DRC EAC EKD

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Auswärtiges Amt [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] Army Bureau of Current Affairs Armistice and Post-War Committee British Army of the Rhine British Broadcasting Corporation Bund der Heimatvertriebenen British Military Government British Zone (of Occupation in West Germany) British Zone Review Cabinet Papers Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge Control Commission of Germany (British Element) Christlich-Demokratische Union [Christian Democratic Union] Control Office for Germany and Austria Christlich-Soziale Union [Christian Social Union] Deutsche Bewegung Helgoland Deutsche Hilfsgemeinschaft Deutsche Kommunistische Partei [German Communist Party] Deputy Military Governor Deutsche Partei [German Party] Displaced Persons Deputy Regional Commissioner European Advisory Commission Evangelische Kirche

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Evangelisches Landeskirchenarchiv in Berlin Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Freie Demokratische Partei [Free Democratic Party] Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn Foreign Office Foreign Office Research Department Federal Republic of Germany Foreign Research and Press Service Friends Relief Service Foreign Relations of the US German Democratic Republic German Educational Reconstruction, Institute of Education, London HC House of Commons HL House of Lords IA & C Internal Affairs and Communications Division ICTGP Interdepartmental Committee on the Transfer of German Populations IMT International Military Tribunal IRO International Refugee Organisation IWM Imperial War Museum KMP Kingsley Martin Papers KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands [Communist Party of Germany] KRO Kreis Resident Officer LAM Lambeth Palace Library LAS Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, Schleswig LHCMA Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, London L/K Landkreis M-O Mass-Observation, University of Sussex MRCUW Modern Records Centre, Warwick MUA Ministerium für Umsiedlung und Aufbau NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NGO Non-Governmental Organisation NRW North Rhine-Westphalia

ELAB EZAB FAZ FDP FES FO FORD FRG FRPS FRS FRUS GDR GER

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LIST

NSDAP OMGUS ORC PORO PORS POW PDB PUS RAF RC RGO RRC SEN SH SHAEF SHVZ S/K SPD StaK SSW TNA TVA UDHR UNHCR UNO UNRRA WAC WCC WO ZAC ZR

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OF ABBREVIATIONS

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National Socialist Workers Party of Germany Office of Military Government for Germany, United States Overseas Reconstruction Committee Public Opinion Research Office Public Opinion Research Service Prisoner of War Pressedokumentation des Deutschen Bundestags Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State Royal Air Force Regional Commissioner Regional Governmental Office Refugee Resettlement Committee Save Europe Now Schleswig-Holstein Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Schleswig-Holsteinische Volks-Zeitung Stadtkreis Sozial Demokratische Partei [Social Democratic Party of Germany] Stadtarchiv, Kiel Südschleswigscher Wählerverband [South Schleswig Voters’ League] The National Archives Torpedoversuchsanstalt (torpedo testing station) Universal Declaration of Human Rights United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations Organisation United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham World Council of Churches War Office Zonal Advisory Committee Zentrale Rechtsschutzstelle

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Generous grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Luftbrückendank Foundation in Berlin have made this book possible. The German History Society provided invaluable assistance enabling further research trips to Germany. My particular thanks go to Christiane Eisenberg and her colleagues at the Centre for British Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin for their many kindnesses, to Heinz-Gerd Reese of the Luftbrückendank Foundation, and to the following people who generously gave of their time, or helped to locate obscure references and photographs: Dirk Jachomowski at the Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, Schleswig, Jutta Briel at the Stadtarchiv, Kiel, Peter Beier at the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv, Doris Bühr-Engel at the Bundestag Press Archive and Karolin Wendt at the Auswärtiges Amt, Berlin, Hugh Alexander and Paul Sturm at The National Archives, Yvonne Oliver at the Imperial War Museum, Jonathan Sims at the British Library and Sarah Aitchison at the Institute of Education. I am grateful to the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, Staatsarchiv Hamburg, BBC Written Archives, Lambeth Palace Library, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, Churchill College, Cambridge, Nuffield College, Oxford and Special Collections, University of Sussex. I must also thank Paul Oestreicher, Edwin Robertson and David Purdy for sharing their insights on the Occupation. The final section in Chapter 3 first appeared as ‘A “Moral Mandate” for Occupation: the British Churches and Voluntary Organisations in North-Western

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Germany, 1945–1949’, German History, 28, 2, (2010), 193–213. I would like to thank Oxford University Press for permission to republish material from this in these chapters. The idea for this book took shape during my DPhil research at Sussex, and a subsequent fellowship at Humboldt University. I could not have hoped for two more fitting supervisors in Paul Betts and Ian Gazeley, under whom I had the privilege of studying history. My chief debt is to them for shaping much of my own intellectual development. Despite his own time commitments, Paul Betts has always maintained a close interest in the book project, and offered me wise counsel and friendship. Special thanks also to Richard Bessel for his formative suggestions on improvements to the manuscript, Robert Moeller for his constructive comments on an earlier draft, Geoff Eley for his advocacy of the book and Eckard Michels who first introduced me to the untapped and rich potential of the Allied Occupation. Tomasz Hoskins at I.B.Tauris enthusiastically supported this project from the start, and his intuitive editing has made all the difference, as has the copyediting of Sarah Patey. For Alex, Freddie, Charlie and Celia, family who mean everything to me.

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Figure 1. Germany, Zones of Occupation, August 1945. Courtesy of TNA UK, MPI/1/694.

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Figure 2. Greater Berlin, Zones of Occupation, 1945. Courtesy of TNA UK, FO 371/50831.

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INTRODUCTION

In 1945 Germany’s infrastructure was devastated, and its people defeated, destitute and demoralised as the victorious Allies set out to reconstruct a civilised society and reintegrate it into the Western family of nations. This book asks how Britain integrated its liberal values as an occupying power in post-Nazi Germany. Why did a refugee problem in Germany escalate into a humanitarian catastrophe? How could Britain reconcile wartime bombing and post-war demilitarisation with comprehensive and coherent plans for reconstruction? How far did the punishment of war crimes chime with a new mood for reconciliation? This story takes up these and other critical questions by considering the paradoxical legacy of ten years of British rule and analysing its wider impact on Germany’s rehabilitation as a democratic nation. Despite wartime planning for the aftermath of the Second World War, millions of refugees and expellees poured into the Western zones of Allied-occupied Germany from the former eastern European territories. However, Britain’s decision to delegate refugee matters to the Germans while claiming moral leadership exposed a gulf between policy and its consequences for German civilians. Almost 70 years after German populations fled the advancing Soviet army, European Union enlargement and rapidly increasing global migration highlight persistent and as yet unresolved problems concerning future national policy on the status of political refugees, economic and forced migrants, and their access to equal rights of citizenship. The methodology used in this book will be twofold – comparing the relevant British and Military Governments’ policies and actions, and assessing their combined impact on German refugees, expellees and civilian populations from the former eastern and central European territories. In the final chapter, the story shifts its previous focus from British policy and its impact on the 1945–9 refugee and expellee crisis, and addresses

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how the wider consequences of the previous five years left an indelible imprint on the 1949–55 phase of Germany’s occupation. The aim is to shed light on how continuities in British policy impacted on the new German Federal Republic. Moreover, underpinning this book’s central argument is that narratives of British rule over ten years can be explained as a form of militant liberalism, a controlling impulse that underscored key policies in its mission to export democracy to Germany. As the Cold War intensified, Britain sought to recast the uneasy relationship between former enemies into a prospective partnership within a new Western European order. However, the slow return to West German sovereignty failed to erase unresolved grievances over some contentious policies such as industrial dismantling, with its adverse impact on economic recovery, or the prolonged incarceration of German war criminals and delays in implementation of sentence reviews. From 1950 the rationale of these and other policies, which are explored in the earlier chapters, appeared not only to German but to some British observers too both to contradict and obstruct the new British High Commissioner’s stated aim to eliminate all cause of Anglo-German friction. Building on recent research on migration and refugee issues relating to early post-war Germany, and connecting this study to a broader reading of the 1949–55 period of British rule, this analysis of the occupation differs from others in the field by offering a new interpretative pathway into a topic that hitherto has been examined usually from a singular national perspective. This is the first study of the topic comparatively to link British policy and the theories behind it with its reception by Germany and how this impacted on policy, using a wide range of British and German archival sources.1 These shed new light on the fundamental question proposed in this book – was it possible to reconcile British liberal democratic values as an occupying power, and if so, how? It will be shown that since the more traditional historiography of the refugee crisis has tended to concentrate on 1945–50, crucially important links between events in 1943, such as the bombing of Hamburg, that impacted directly on the later problems for evacuees, refugees and the British, largely have been missed by historians. Also sidelined in the existing literature are the roles of the German press in their sustained highlighting of the refugee problem and British reactions to this, and how the functions of the British and German churches inadvertently undermined what the British saw clearly as legitimating their moral mandate as occupiers.

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Much of the formative impetus behind British occupation policy lay in a deeply held conviction that Germany needed to be ‘civilised’, but any claims Britain might advance over its appropriateness to be regarded as the standard-bearer for such a task were demonstrably contradicted by earlier wartime decisions taken by the Allies over agreeing future territorial borders and the homogenisation of ethnicity within those borders. A defeated Germany paid a heavy price in such considerations, for these policies effectively cut the ground beneath millions of German refugee and expellee civilians who lost their homes, their livelihoods, their individual rights and, in many cases, their lives.2 This study builds on this research by offering a closer reading of Britain’s particular role in the early experience of expellees and refugees in one region particularly affected – Schleswig-Holstein. It will be shown that British government responses to the unfolding expellee and refugee crisis were marginalised by its wider occupation policy aims towards Germany and a broader interest in ensuring the future security of Europe. How significant a role did British attitudes and policy play in contributing towards what remains the greatest single forced population shift in European history?3 It has been estimated that the expulsions and the flight of refugees from the advancing Soviet armies starting during the war’s final months and, continuing into the 1950s, accounted for the removal of up to 15 million Germans from their former homelands in eastern and central Europe. It is now generally agreed by historians that of these, some 12.5 million German refugees and expellees found sanctuary in areas west of their previous native lands, and that approximately 8 million settled in what later became the Federal Republic of Germany, as is explained with a chronology of the refugee/expellee problem that opens the case-study in Chapter 4.4 The main differences offered by this approach to existing studies in the field lie in an analysis of the difficulties and contradictions encountered by a British policy that sought to justify its claim of exporting social liberal and democratic values as part of what many might now term as an ‘ethical’ foreign policy mission – a recurring theme discussed in the book. As is repeatedly shown in contemporary public figures’ public pronouncements, archival documents, the secondary literature of the Second World War and the early years of occupation, Britain’s real policy, as Lord Palmerston observed in an earlier age, continued to be ‘the champion of justice and right’. He maintained that as long as England kept herself in the right, and as long as ‘she wishes to permit no injustice’, she would never find herself

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isolated in the world. His dictum was recalled during a key wartime British parliamentary debate on Poland’s post-war future. Conservative MP Victor Raikes went on to say that this principle had continued to be ‘the foundation of our greatness as a nation, that principle has given us the moral leadership of Europe’.5 Nevertheless, three years later, Harold Macmillan, recalling Churchill’s remark in 1945, reminded those responsible for British occupation policy, ‘it is not so much what we say during a war: it is what we do after the war that matters.’6 He may have been reminded too of Ernest Bevin’s comment in 1947 that he saw Germany as ‘still the greatest danger in Europe’, a potent admixture of a Nazi doctrine ‘so deep in Germans’ in combination with ‘national characteristics’.7 As will be shown, Britain’s attitude as an Allied occupier of defeated Germany was largely informed by a more cautious and pragmatic policy than the rhetorical confidence in its sense of moral righteousness might suggest. As a victorious power, those politicians and advisers at various stages in positions to influence Britain’s approach to its occupation of Germany8 barely paused to consider the inherent contradictions underlying Britain’s stated mission; namely, to dismantle one culture of authoritarian militarism only to impose its own bespoke brand of indirect rule that was on occasion cast in a similar mould. As discussed in Chapter 2, despite Churchill’s general election landslide defeat by Attlee, Labour’s foreign policy from 1945 emphasised a willingness to continue with much of the tough and uncompromising post-war policy towards Germany planned for and set in motion during the preceding conflict. This was unsurprising, for the attitudes within the Foreign Office [hereinafter FO] covered ‘a very broad and ideological spectrum’.9 Its instincts were driven by a determination to ensure that Germany could never again threaten Britain militarily, as Germany had waged a war of aggression, murdering and disenfranchising many of its own people as well as millions of others. According to this argument, from many a British perspective, those Germans who had survived were guilty by association, forfeiting the right to be treated by the same standards the British would demand for themselves. This becomes evident in aspects of the wartime area bombing policy, which of itself contributed greatly to the death and displacement of millions of civilians, as is explained in Chapter 2, and directly to the many thousands of evacuees who found themselves in Schleswig-Holstein [hereinafter SH], discussed in Chapter 4. Moreover, as British eyewitness accounts of concentration camp atrocities emerged in May 1945, it was in many ways understandable that public opinion might well harden in

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the shorter term. In one response typical of many British popular reactions towards Germany, the Conservative MP Mavis Tate returned from Buchenwald convinced that: ‘The Hun ambition may be foiled, but the Hun spirit still lives.’ She continued: There is undoubtedly a deep streak of evil and sadism in the German race, such as one ought not to expect to find in a people who for generations have paid lip service to Western culture and civilisation . . . Only with extreme firmness will we eliminate the beast from the German heart.10 This book will show through the case-study in Chapters 4 and 5 that the vast majority of the German refugees who managed to survive the war, expulsion and flight, and later were able to build a new life in the British Zone, did so despite British policy and not because of it. Most were left to fend for themselves by a British policy that had devolved responsibility for refugee matters to the Germans by July 1947.11 The refugee crisis and continuing problems throughout the purview of this book, it will be argued, were casualties of earlier political decisions informed too, as Matthew Frank has shown, by a widespread belief in the principle of population transfers, despite major doubts about its feasibility in practice.12 Britain’s major responsibility had been to win the war, and so it felt the moral right had been earned to delimit its own responsibilities in making the peace. The welfare of German refugees was not one of these tasks. The Control Commission of Germany (British Element) [hereinafter CCG] and British Military Government [hereinafter BMG], the chosen instruments for centralised rule in Germany, effectively devolved the refugee problem still further from Whitehall, but as the crisis grew, this policy rebounded on them. There were, to be sure, several outspoken and dissenting voices in Britain, alarmed by facets of its policy towards Germany during wartime and after May 1945, who persistently advocated a principled policy of magnanimity, reconciliation and even-handedness towards Germany on moral, religious and humanitarian grounds. Opposition to the questionable proportionality of bombing policy, the prolongation of war crimes trials and the marginalisation of German civilians ably demonstrated, on one level, that the traditions of British fair play were still very much alive. However, while regular interventions and appeals by leading public figures in Parliament, the press and at public meetings on moral, religious or

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humanitarian grounds, attempted – sometimes successfully – to prick the consciences of policy-makers, their efforts, critically, were not ultimately matched by any substantive change in policy towards German refugees and expellees. The intercessions by the British churches and the humanitarian agencies on their behalf were therefore only marginally successful, as is shown in Chapter 3.13 As the wartime ‘strategic bombing offensive’ gathered momentum, several high-profile critics of Britain’s increasingly punitive stance towards Germany persistently questioned the Allies’ bombing policy and British policy in particular. Many of the appeals for a policy of greater proportionality and moderation came from leading figures in the Church of England, such as Bishop Bell of Chichester, and the Quaker pacifist Corder Catchpool. Bell’s speeches invoking values of humility and tolerance linked with the deeply held religious beliefs of Victor Gollancz, who became synonymous with the post-1945 extra-parliamentary campaign arguing for a greater humanitarian-inspired response towards Germany. Writers and public intellectuals such as Vera Brittain,14 George Orwell and George Bernard Shaw, and parliamentarians such as the Marquess of Salisbury and Richard Stokes,15 articulated their abhorrence towards what they perceived as British indiscriminate air attacks, and were roundly patronised or castigated by government ministers, such as Sir Archibald Sinclair, for holding such opinions.16 Their views were certainly seen as an embarrassment to the government, who nevertheless sought to present their unwelcome interventions as hindering the war effort or as ‘antiBritish’. The Catholic peer Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent, in his prequel to the government’s reply by Lord Cranborne to the Bishop of Chichester’s appeal was unambiguous: ‘I am an out-and-out bomber, and I approve of the bombing action the Government have taken against Germany, and I hope that there may be more to come’17 (see Fig. 3). Such statements were redolent of a more dominant opinion that further marginalised the opponents of the area bombing policy, for the moral arguments in 1944 and earlier did not revolve around whether area bombing should be regarded as ‘taboo’ but on questions of necessity or proportionality.18 In one of a series of rapid and robust exchanges from November 1944 to January 1945 between Bomber Command and the Air Ministry, who were ‘being pressured by outsiders [the government] not to lose any opportunities to attack priority targets’ – in this case Germany’s oil supplies – the disputes centred around how the war’s end could be most

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Figure 3. Lord Cranborne, Secretary of State for the Colonies, inspecting Cypriot muleteers who served for some months in England after their evacuation from France. Courtesy of TNA UK, CO 323/1740/18.

efficiently expedited. Sir Arthur Harris wrote: ‘In Bomber Command we have always worked on the principle that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing nothing.’19 As we see in Chapter 7, this principle continued to be applied with the appropriation of Heligoland as a British and American bombing range after 1947. The expropriation of the islanders’ homes, or to put it plainly, their summary expulsion, facilitated the task. Criticisms by those who saw British actions as evidence of a revanchist tendency towards Germany did not end once victory had been assured. Amidst the devastation of 1945 Germany, many of the same voices of public conscience, such as Bell, Gollancz, Stokes20 and Kingsley Martin, perceived a moral and spiritual vacuum that had seeped from the British wartime coalition into the Attlee government. They continually reminded those now charged in peacetime with executing policy towards Germany that they shared a collective duty in treating Germany justly. Their target for opprobrium, formerly the bombing of innocent civilians, now moved, logically, to highlight and then pinpoint the harsh realities faced by the German refugee, expellee and indigenous populations. Potsdam’s

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declaration that the ‘transfer’ and ‘resettlement’ should be carried out in ‘a humane and orderly manner’ was frequently invoked as an appeal to Britain’s sense of fair play as well as a reminder of its continuing responsibilities.21 The more refugees’ and expellees’ living conditions deteriorated in the British Zone, the more opponents of the ‘transfer’ policy reacted to the gap between what Potsdam had offered and the reality now unfolding, thus further politicising the issue, as the case-study makes clear. Their disdain for particular occupation policies was fuelled by perceptions of a Britain overly consumed by greed and self-interest, its hard-line approach to retributive justice and a lack of moral courage exacerbated by its abandonment of a Christian conscience, a theme discussed in Chapter 2. Many advocated a policy that would offer practical help to Germany in its efforts to recover from military defeat and to re-establish itself in the international community, rather than one that held up its own model of Western civilised values as a template for Germany whilst imposing a peace that treated it as a pariah people. Germany’s official exclusion from the United Nations [hereinafter UN] Charter as an ex-enemy state was but one example of this contradiction. In the view of many British politicians and the British electorate, the more pressing concern was a lack of sufficient economic means to justify the costs of occupation to British taxpayers, whilst having to provide materially for the vanquished, including the refugees, without the financial means to support Britain, let alone their zone in Germany. Of equal importance to the new British government was its determination to minimise the pace of a German economic revival after 1945. This was as much a matter of Britain trying to shore up its own severely weakened economic power to help maintain its status as one of the major world powers, whilst affording the opportunity to steal a march, albeit temporarily, over a commercial rival, as is examined in Chapters 3 and 5 in the sections on ‘Economic constraints’ and ‘A double mind: dismantling and refugee unemployment’. The policy continuities emerge in Chapter 7. The roots of what became the policy towards German expellees and refugees could be traced back to earlier British responses to Germany that were characterised notably by more wide-ranging and historically defensive attitudes towards her expanding industrial and military power. These perceptions manifested in latent anxieties and certain fault-lines in British–German relations shaped by the years leading up to and including the First World War, and if 1918 marked their watershed, the Treaty of Versailles drew fresh battle lines that entrenched much of the negative

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INTRODUCTION

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tone of suspicion that coloured the relationship during the inter-war years whilst concealing deep-rooted British fears about their ability to compete with a European neighbour and economic rival. In Britain’s eyes, her stand in defeating Nazism 20 years after Versailles represented a victory against tyranny, authoritarianism and militarism – a triumph of good over evil. The result of two world wars provided the moral mandate for the Allies to impose terms of ‘unconditional surrender’, a ‘doctrine’ put forward by Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943,22 one that had profound implications for how Germany and its civilian population were to be treated following military defeat. The continuing justification for adopting a high moral tone with Germany was formally prolonged by an extended Nuremberg Trial and the trials that followed. Despite securing its reputation as a legal milestone in the evolving debate about the accountability of states and individuals for waging ‘wars of aggression’, war crimes, ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘crimes against peace’, Nuremberg bore witness to a somewhat selfaggrandising display of victors’ justice, one that set the benchmark for further military trials as part of the denazification purges. Again, startling contradictions emerge in the contrast between Britain and its determination to pursue the more ‘minor’ war criminals, and its pragmatic policy of denazification, where for all practical purposes, ‘purging and rehabilitation were fused into one and the same process’.23 Its effect was to place former Nazis in key German administrative posts. This theme is explored in Chapter 2, and again in Chapter 7 where we see that the much criticised policy of continued incarceration of many so-called war criminals did not end until 1957, and was shown to be largely self-defeating. It should be mentioned at the outset that this book does not set out to analyse the denazification policy, well documented by others, but rather to address its influence on other areas of British policy-making. As we shall see, there are several explanations for the vast scale of the early post-war German refugee and expellee crisis. These open up the possibility for revised analysis and interpretation. Arguably the most important explanation was the self-limiting scope of British refugee policy. The perfunctory handling of this may have been due to the intensive diplomatic discussions of more pressing concerns bearing on diplomats before the Teheran Conference. Notably, these included negotiations that went through 15 drafts with America and the Russians over the ‘Military Aspects of Any Post-War Security Organization’, and the shape of post-war Europe after Germany’s defeat.24 Discussions took place

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at Dumbarton Oaks to discuss the framework of discussions for such a ‘new world organisation’25 and the role of the UN and territorial compensation for Russia and Poland for land annexed by Germany. This problematic question of territorial ‘reparations’ had loomed large, particularly in Anglo-Soviet relations, since Eden’s visit to Moscow during December 1941 when Stalin repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, pressed Eden to accede to Soviet demands to secure its 1941 north-western borders. Amongst Stalin’s proposals was that East Prussia should be transferred to Poland and German territory to the north of the River Niemen be transferred to the USSR’s Lithuanian republic. Eden made it clear to Stalin that Britain had been asked by the Americans not to agree to any altered boundaries in Europe and that ‘it was premature to attempt a post-war territorial settlement in relation to clause (ii) of the [Atlantic] Charter which laid down that territorial changes should accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’. This tied in with Stalin’s statement of 6 November that ‘we cannot have such war aims as the seizure of foreign territory’.26 Nevertheless, the thorny issue of borders was now firmly established in Allied minds and was one that would eventually have to be settled definitively. As the section in Chapter 5 on refugee organisations shows, the expellees cited the Charter’s clause concerning the freely expressed wishes as ample justification for being allowed to return to their former homelands. With reference to Poland’s frontiers, Eden reassured Stalin that Britain would always ‘be glad to do anything we can to help in reaching an agreement. We want to agree to the frontiers before the Peace Conference, but we have not yet reached that point.’27 He was well aware of Stalin’s reminders of how the Russians were bearing the brunt of heavy military and civilian losses in the common cause of defeating Nazism, and so, whilst not initially capitulating to Stalin’s demands, sought time to consult his government and the Americans. It was the British in February 1942 whose first initiatives paved the way for their June 1942 proposals for territorial changes. In July, the War Cabinet declared that the Munich Agreement was void, and voted for the population transfers where it seemed desirable.28 A consequence of this decision, for example, meant that Danzig and Upper Silesia could be given to Poland. This was part of a policy to ‘homogenise ethnicity in Poland and Czechoslovakia’ that targeted minorities and systematically and effectively ‘radicalised the expulsions policy’29 that would have such a direct impact on the refugee catastrophe towards the end of the war and beyond. Eden’s 28 January 1942 memorandum to the War Cabinet

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on post-war collaboration with the Soviet Union came down firmly in favour of agreeing to accommodate the Russian proposals for fear it might later turn to Germany. Churchill now told Roosevelt that owing to the seriousness of the war situation, the Charter ‘ought not to be construed so as to deny to Russia the frontiers which she occupied when Germany attacked her’.30 Others have seen the population exchanges as a peace move to forestall wars, moves that differed according to the ‘designs of systems’ managers’.31 These early negotiations prefigured the first of the ‘Big Three’ summits at Teheran in 1943 where the post-war territorial alterations were discussed and were effectively rubber-stamped at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945, although not finally recognised by the West until the Helsinki Final Act in 1975.32 These collectively played a major part in determining the fate of the refugees, and their impact on ‘refugee policy’ is analysed in Chapter 2. The lip service paid to refugee questions, and the resulting slow progress in achieving international consensus on minority and human rights that might have provided a better outcome for their interests, reached their nadir by the late 1940s. As is shown in Chapter 6, it was only after 1949 that refugees and expellees gradually began to enjoy a higher priority for positive action among the so-called civilised nations, a legacy by default of the Western Allies’ policy towards Germany. The delays were due in part to the slow process of post-war reconstruction, and of misplaced British fears over the possible resurgence of a nationalist ideology that once more might foment German aggression and therefore pose a threat to world peace. Just as significant in diverting Allied attention from addressing the human costs to war’s victims were the Western Allies’ controlled and gradual rehabilitation of Germany into the new European family of nations, currency reform in the Western zones signalling Germany’s reintegration into plans for Western European recovery,33 and its division as a result of the Cold War. Notwithstanding this, Germany had been collectively called to account. As we see in the Schleswig-Holstein case-study, the region absorbing the highest concentration of refugees and expellees of all the German states in the Western zones in relation to its indigenous population, many refugee civilians felt completely disorientated. They wanted to forget the horrors of the past, to rebuild their lives and return to the places from which they had been forced to flee. A German identification with the landscape and nature became a metaphor for many expellees’ hopes of survival; the ‘abjectness of defeat and destruction . . . led them to

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seek solace, and one of the places where they found it was in nature – the idealized natural world of the local Heimat.’34 Or as Frank Biess put it: ‘Heimat stood for the persistence of seemingly trans-historical values and customs that had remained untainted by the catastrophes of the twentieth century.’35 The reality, in contrast, was large numbers of refugee, expellee and evacuee survivors forced in these early years into protracted struggles for survival with minimal supplies of food and shelter, and with little hope of a return ‘home’. Accommodation was often requisitioned to Military Government and Control Commission staff whose own needs were commonly prioritised. A sometimes heavy-handed style of occupation rule helped perpetuate a widespread sense of total capitulation, feeding into a nascent and peculiarly German sense of guilt and victimhood that official British policy did little to discourage. As has been well documented, refugee associations were banned,36 part of a policy of pragmatic containment that set a benchmark for a more zealous style of military rule that further problematised refugees’ chances of integrating and assimilating into a new and alien environment. Many had lost almost everything, including close family and their home, all integral to their sense of identity. Although the organisation for refugee matters was eventually ‘handed over’ by Britain to the German administration, it was a poisoned chalice, stemming from the earlier crucial phase of occupation that had witnessed a mounting humanitarian catastrophe managed by an improvised, piecemeal approach – as will become clear. This created a recipe for exacerbating larger social problems for refugees and expellees. It is the contention of this book that the delegation of the ‘refugee problem’ to the Germans removed the gloss from some of Britain’s rightly lauded achievements in the early phase of their reconstruction programme, the rebuilding of the railway network being one noteworthy example. Thus, the low political prioritisation of the entire German refugee and expellee question undermined Britain’s credentials as a civilising, democratising and liberating power.

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CHAPTER 1 OCCUPATION POLICY AND GER M AN R EFUGEES: THE CASE FOR R EVISION

The literature on refugees and expellees has tried either to provide a digestible overview of an area of scholarship that is demandingly complex by its very nature, or has sought to address certain very specific aspects – for example, their expulsion, flight, arrival, integration and assimilation. Neither of these two distinct approaches places the entire topic in the wider Anglo-German comparative framework needed to understand these extraordinary events. Likewise, much of the British and German historiography on the British occupation has tended to examine specific aspects of British foreign and occupation policy – for instance, denazification, education, industrial dismantling, reparations, economic reconstruction and the rebirth and rehabilitation of the political parties – without paying sustained attention to, or indeed drawing wider links with, the problematic role of the refugee question in such surveys. As one German-based British official aptly summarised the daunting challenge, ‘the so-called “refugee” problem touches every aspect of Military Government’.1 Such historical approaches, while undeniably valuable, tend to compartmentalise these various major contributory aspects of Germany’s post-war reconstruction at the expense of analyses that might show the importance of seeing the elements as part of an interrelated whole. A unique feature of this book is that it aims to redress the imbalance in the historiography by synthesising the study of the refugee and expellee problem within this broader comparative analytical framework. It is perhaps in recognition

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of the challenges in reconstructing the complexities of this period that much of the groundbreaking German scholarship of the last 20 years or so has looked at regional and locally based studies of refugee integration and assimilation in Germany after 1945, encompassing a broader purview of the refugee problem by focusing on a single town or area. It is thus difficult to offer new interpretations without presenting this wider focus that elucidates the interplay between significant political, diplomatic, economic and socio-cultural factors that impinged upon and exacerbated the refugee and expellee crisis. For this reason, this study examines the occupation in the context of wider British policy, but in Chapters 4 and 5 focuses on one key geographical region within the British Zone – Schleswig-Holstein (SH) – to illustrate how this policy functioned in practice from both German and British perspectives. Amongst the many reasons for choosing this region is that, of all the Western zones, it absorbed the greatest concentration of refugees and expellees as a percentage of its indigenous population. The following sections in this chapter address a wide-ranging historiography, and have been divided so as to reflect the book’s subsequent structure. However, for ease of reference, the literature specific to refugees and expellees has been integrated within the SH case-study and its introduction. As suggested above, the British and American historiography on ethnic German refugees and expellees has suffered by comparison with other aspects of policy more commonly discussed in assessments of British occupation policy. This is understandable in the American case, where historians have preferred to look at aspects of US or overall Allied occupation policy. Consequently, the magnitude of the refugee problem has been insufficiently integrated within this literature,2 often reduced to no more than a general paragraph in most studies, as is shown later in this chapter. German historians have dealt with the topic more systematically, but in their generally more exhaustive studies often concentrate on a single town or location within a particular zone of occupation. Both the German and British historiography on British Military Government and the Control Commission have looked at an entire province or region (Land), but have hitherto excluded discussion of many of the wider moral issues about the implications for ethnic German civilians of wider wartime policy towards Germany that shaped ideas about its later occupation. Instead, attention has focused disproportionately on political debates, decisions and consequences behind the ‘population transfers’, or focused on milestone events such as the conferences in 1941 at Moscow, and later at Teheran, Yalta

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and Potsdam, without analysing the broader questions of the victors’ moral mandate as role models in shaping the post-war settlement. In this sense, the refugee question becomes of central importance to the arguments put forward here. This book also contends that extrapolating the complexity of the crisis requires this broader analytical framework, by placing the refugees and foreign policy within the contexts of British attitudes towards Germany, notions of retributive justice with regard to wartime bombing policy and the Nuremberg Trials, international debates on human rights, the efficacy of the British churches’ and humanitarian organisations’ interventions, and Britain’s adverse economic situation. The case-study is situated within these discussions.

Britain’s ‘moral leadership’ Much of the more recent extensive secondary literature on British foreign policy has reached a broadly consensual position insofar as most historians have rightly argued that Britain’s approach towards a defeated Germany was largely informed by pragmatism.3 Their conclusions are supported by several edited survey collections of foreign policy studies, whose omissions of any chapters concerning the British occupation suggest the greater relative importance attached by policy-makers to other geopolitical priorities, for example, reviving the wartime Anglo-American alliance as a bulwark against anticipated Soviet hegemony,4 or maintaining British superpower status by developing the British Empire’s global network as an alternative power bloc.5 Other historians have emphasised the primacy of Britain’s relationship with the Soviet Union to help evaluate the motivations of Labour’s foreign policy.6 One argues that Labour’s ‘entanglement’ in the Cold War began with the Foreign Office’s decision during the Second World War to secure Britain’s role as one of three Great Powers, and to sustain Britain’s ‘world-wide mission’. Bevin regarded Britain’s world role as beyond question and writes to the Cabinet of the Soviet ‘Threat to Western Civilisation’.7 Others see 1945–50 with Britain no longer a superpower but still a ‘Great Power of the first rank’.8 Most historians concur that the overriding constraint on Britain’s entire post-war foreign policy was the relative decline of its own economic base. There is another view that limitations in the scope of foreign policy were domestically driven. This foregrounds a critique of how hopes were dashed on the Labour Party Left for a more socialist approach to foreign policy, seen here as Britain’s missed opportunity.9 More recently, it was argued that

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Labour’s approach tried, not always successfully, to elide its democratic principles with universal moral norms. This assessment concludes that Labour’s ‘missionary zeal to reform and reshape the world in its likeness, [was] sometimes at odds with its commitment to working through international institutions’.10 To develop a fuller picture of occupation policy, it is necessary to examine published memoirs and diaries to glean the first revealing insights into Cabinet and Foreign Office thinking concerning Germany during wartime when occupation policy was first formulated. Despite interesting accounts by diplomats, framing part of Chapter 2’s discussion of Britain’s ‘civilising mission’,11 these alone do not offer a full picture. Private papers of British officials and advisers closer to the practical realities of life in occupied Germany lend these perspectives added weight and significance, particularly as they witnessed the formulation of key policy decisions in London or by CCG in Berlin. Much of the evidence here, therefore, is drawn from archival papers and documents from post-war government ministers or key advisers on Germany such as Austen Albu, John Hynd and Lord Strang,12 and Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), Churchill’s key wartime scientific adviser on bombing policy13 and other Germany policy matters. These are supplemented by War Cabinet minutes and the cabinet secretaries’ notebooks, the latter only released by the National Archives in 2006–7, and papers of officials such as Sir Maurice Dean, an expert on RAF history who served in the Control Office for Germany and Austria [hereinafter COGA], and was familiar with arguments adopted by such ‘official’ historians as Frankland and Webster, Woodward, Harris and later by Martin Middlebrook. These give sharper focus to FO documents and other official publications on Germany’s treatment after its capitulation. Whilst it is true that America, Russia and France each held their very distinctive views about how Germany should be treated after victory was assured, Britain’s particular stance made as strong, and arguably a more pronounced impact in influencing the course of policies that would determine the future of German refugees and expellees. This book shows that within certain political and diplomatic circles, prosecution of the war entrenched certain rooted negative British attitudes towards Germany whilst further radicalising more preconceived anti-German views of the Vansittartist sympathisers,14 well before the final decisions were taken between 1942 and 1945 over what to do with a defeated Germany. In its wartime propaganda, the American government made clear distinctions

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after 1945 between ‘Nazis’ and ‘Germans’, lending itself to differentiating between ‘guilty’ Nazi leaders and ‘innocent’ German civilians, or as described recently, ‘even at the height of the war, American views of Nazi Germany never coalesced into a well-focused, negative image of the enemy.’15 Consequently, America was the one power to prioritise an expeditious withdrawal of troops ‘with as little political involvement in German affairs as possible’.16 Richard Merritt’s study claims the Germans realised early that if they had to submit to a foreign military power, ‘[Germany] could do worse than have the United States as its occupier’. One reason given was the USA’s early abandonment of ‘bureaucratic pettifoggery’. As we shall see, this contrasted with Britain’s leviathan bureaucracy. He suggests Germans increasingly saw the USA as the most sympathetic of the occupiers to German concerns, particularly when contrasted with ‘vindictive France and the unspeakable Soviet Union’.17 The uniqueness of the British case can also be shown by outlining how the other powers tackled the refugee and expellee question. Britain, more interventionist in German affairs and committed to a lengthy occupation but without the means to finance this, was forced into compromise, as it was not in a position to adopt policies that in reality might have secured better outcomes. Primarily, Britain’s economic dependence on the USA made it difficult for the British to persuade America – which was safeguarding its own interests – to accept a redistribution of further numbers of expellees, as Chapter 5 shows. France, in trying to compensate for its diminished world status in 1945, preached the virtues of its own civilising mission,18 its Germany policy characterised by de Gaulle’s comment that after three invasions in one lifetime, ‘we never wish to see the Reich again.’ Britain hoped that a French occupation zone, proposed by Churchill at Yalta, might reduce its own responsibilities, but the Governor of the French Zone, the Gaullist General Robert Koenig,19 was intent on maintaining its very low refugee and expellee population, despite British pleas for a more equitable distribution, as Chapter 5 also explains. The Soviets, reacting to their own high numbers of refugees and expellees, had to plan for their long-term integration through an active social policy, the redistribution of accommodation and land reform. Redistribution aimed to pass on property from indigenous Germans to refugees,20 very different to Britain’s approach, as Chapter 4’s section on the housing crisis shows. Adolf Birke drew a distinction between British occupation policy success, duly acknowledged in reviving German traditions of self-government and parliamentarism, with continuing British reservations, distrust

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and occasional enmity towards the Germans as people. In his view, the catastrophes of the twentieth century, in British eyes, were closely linked to the idea of German exceptionalism (Sonderweg), a deviation from the ideals of Western democratic principles that fuelled deep British resentments over supporting a former enemy.21 This theme is echoed in reverse by William Wallace who showed how Britain’s adherence to the notion of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism exerted great strains on foreign policy, and that earlier rivalries between Britain and Germany were to overshadow their later successful partnerships.22 Anthony Nicholls took this a stage further, showing how an apparently harmonious relationship at the turn of the twenty-first century has obscured the difficulties, suggesting the need for a more revisionist view of the so-called ‘exemplary’ regime of military occupation,23 a consensus that is shown in many of the earlier ‘official’ accounts by ex-government officials of the day.24 The Federal Republic was born out of defeat, and at the first Bundestag elections, all political parties in Germany were very critical of the British occupation authorities, as the Schleswig-Holstein case shows. For example, the chronic coal shortages and food crises, discussed in Chapter 4, were increasingly blamed on the British. This is hardly surprising, as Britain – Germany’s longest-serving enemy from 1939 to 1945 – had, with their allies, played a major and decisive role in devastating through bombing the zone they subsequently administered, and the consequences of this left enduring scars for the early post-war generation of civilians and refugees. Regarding residual negative attitudes towards Germany, some have concluded that as anniversaries pass, certain stereotypes are reinforced,25 many rooted in attitudes to the experience of war and British reactions to victory in 1945. Tony Kushner has suggested that modern anti-Germanism ‘is one of the most unrecognised and virulent forms of racism in contemporary Britain, scarring the lives of people of both recent and distant German origin’.26 It will be shown that British policy founded on total German capitulation helped to perpetuate such stereotypes. As suggested, many other battlehardened Britons had adopted a fairly unsophisticated view of Germany and the Germans. They knew as much as they cared to about the positive turns in Teutonic culture or history. The subtleties of Innerlichkeit, Geist and many other expressions of Germanness enunciated by Thomas Mann in his June 1945 lecture in Washington’s Library of Congress on ‘Germany and the Germans’ were lost on or misunderstood as alien concepts by the rank and file Englishman.27

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It is for this reason that the book within its central argument shows that the subsequent occupation did little per se to advance future British– German friendship, and certainly did little to help the refugee problems that were left to the Germans to resolve. It is therefore misleading to see the refugee question in narratives emphasising post-war reconstruction successes, such as the rehabilitation of German politics or education. The crisis adversely affected far more German refugee and expellee civilians who struggled to become assimilated into a ‘new Germany’ than those who found themselves better placed to reap the benefits of the 1950s economic boom. Rapid transformations in West Germany’s fortunes thus helped to reflect retrospectively disproportionately greater credit on British achievements. So it is important to evaluate how far occupation policy may have been perceived within Germany as a repressive measure, or even a continuation of hostilities. Examining Schleswig-Holstein’s refugee problem helps to shed new light on this. The relationship between an occupying nation and one under occupation logically leads to considering the moral facets of what has become known as ‘victors’ justice’, germane in analysing the extent to which this concept may have coloured British treatment of German civilians and refugees. The concerted area bombing raids of German cities, the consequent loss of life and displacement of civilians raise difficult moral questions, in particular, the justification for a wartime military policy that failed to differentiate adequately between the acknowledged need to defeat Nazi Germany whilst mitigating the collateral destruction of non-combatant civilians, from the damage wrought on vital civil infrastructure not considered necessary to achieve Britain’s military objectives. In that sense, Britain’s bombing policy on Germany can be described as a failure on its own terms, diverting resources away from crucial areas of the war effort, such as protecting convoys in the North Atlantic in 1941–2, when had each German U-Boat sunk one more merchant ship, ‘the course, perhaps even the outcome, of the Second World War would have been entirely otherwise’.28 Similarly during much of the autumn and winter of 1942–3, although bombers were diverted to help in the Battle of the Atlantic,29 they were B-24s from Coastal Command and not from Bomber Command, despite the Admiralty’s repeated requests to Harris for more resources to be diverted from the air assault on Germany.30 The saturation bombings of Hamburg in late July and early August 1943 present as convincing an argument for examining this issue as did

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those on Dresden 18 months later, revealing a further contradiction in Churchill’s dictum that Britain was not fighting the German nation, only ‘against the leaders and against dangerous combinations’, or in other words, to liberate it from the tyranny of Nazism.31 Clear links will be shown between how aspects of the Hamburg air offensive, by failing to confine itself to military or industrial targets, continued to contribute significantly to the refugee crisis in neighbouring SH some six years later, by further expropriating evacuee and incoming expellee civilians of shelter, food and employment opportunities. The motives, preparations for and the events of ‘Operation Gomorrah’, that claimed 40–65,000 lives, depending on whose estimated figures one uses, whilst destroying one-third of Hamburg and leaving 950,000 to 1 million people homeless, have been assessed variously by British historians, and more recently have been questioned by philosophers.32 What emerges from such wide statistical disparities in civilian deaths, significantly excluded as we shall see from the later refugee and expellee statistics, is that failure to account adequately for the numbers of victims itself became an internationally recognised casualty of the war’s collateral damage. The need to establish suitable yardsticks to measure the successful outcomes of bombing raids, such as ‘The effects of damage to housing’ or ‘Labour required to repair damage to industrial buildings, plant, equipment, stocks and houses’,33 not only reduced human existence in the minds of its strategists to estimated numbers, it illustrated the size of the task facing the victors in rebuilding the country. The story of Germany’s subjection to sustained bombing from 1940 has tapped into a widening public debate in Germany, reflected in a huge German readership,34 and wider debates amongst historians over related moral controversies and the memorialisation of its victims.35 It is interesting that the Dresden bombings, in which at least 35,000 Germans were killed,36 have come to symbolise continuing ethical controversies over the area bombing policies of the Allies’ strategic bombing offensive, when Dresden was but one of 70 German towns and cities targeted by Bomber Command in 1942–5, in which about half their built-up areas were destroyed.37 When Dresden or Hamburg are seen within wider discussions about ‘civilisation’s lust for its own destruction’,38 as was certainly the case with repeated bombings of historic monuments in cities such as Nuremberg where the attacks were not confined to military targets, then the compatibility of reconciling this policy with the idea of saving and liberating a people should be questioned. Churchill felt it

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necessary to instruct his parliamentary under-secretary [hereinafter PUS] to call ministers’ attention to extracts from an exchange of telegrams with Roosevelt about how to present publicly Allied war objectives: Our object is ‘the liberation of Europe from German tyranny’. We ‘enter’ the oppressed countries rather than ‘invade’ them . . . There is no need for us to make a present to Hitler of the idea that he is the defender of a Europe which we are seeking to invade. He is a tyrant and an ogre from which we are going to free the captive nations.39 As victory approached, prolonged discussions between the Allies over how to call Germany to account for its war crimes, with their eventual consensus in order to bring about the Nuremberg Trials, did little to dispel the view that Germany the nation was as much on trial for its guilt as were its ringleaders facing international justice on the four main counts cited in the Nuremberg Charter agreed on 8 August 1945. Despite presiding judge Robert J. Jackson’s claim that ‘crimes always are only committed by persons’,40 the Western Allies’ occupation policy following the further processes of denazification treated German guilt as a collective phenomenon. Richard Overy’s compilation of pre-trial interrogations of those charged with war crimes reveals many of the Allied attitudes to exacting full retribution41 despite the absence of a clear and undisputed body of international law. Of the ‘Big Three’, Churchill alone called for summary execution of those apprehended, and Attlee favoured making capital examples of ‘selected’ senior German businessmen. Only after the Soviets and Americans insisted on a transparent judicial process did Britain accept a full trial as inevitable – justice needed to be seen to be done, and the four counts used in the Nuremberg Charter provided for this. However, this did not prevent Britain’s Attorney General from seeking and obtaining the USA and British legal teams’ approval for pragmatic selection criteria so that named individuals could be coerced to represent entire organisations, for instance the Gestapo or Wehrmacht, purely on the basis that their availability was ensured.42 Nevertheless, as research on the Ravensbrück war crimes trial shows, serious consideration was given to German criticisms of trial procedures and verdicts behind the scenes in London where acute sensitivities prevailed as to perceptions of British justice abroad, as is shown in Chapter 2. Opposition in Germany to such trials was seen as an attack on Britain’s pragmatist denazification policy that aimed to dovetail with its American counterpart.43

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Nuremberg in many ways marked a further sea change in British– German relations, impacting significantly on much of Britain’s developing occupation policy, sometimes negatively characterised by German suspicions of English revanchism. Articles by key protagonists Lord Justice Lawrence and Justice Birkett defending Nuremberg’s principles of justice support this perception.44 More recently, one historian commented that successful claims for the reforming legacy of the ‘crimes against humanity’ charge have been overstated.45 Nuremberg polarised opinions regarding its precedents for post-war international law and its negative possible effects on the re-education of Germany,46 its authority to hold such a wide-ranging remit, its consequent legality,47 and the appropriateness of its verdicts.48 It became a metaphor for the wider judgement of Germany, and the military trials that continued for five further years, parallel reminders to Germans that they were still collectively on probation. As this book makes clear, a clear moral contradiction was created between, on the one hand, the victors’ conviction that both Germany’s unconditional surrender and the Nuremberg Charter provided carte blanche for the Allies to impose collectively and prolong whatever forms of justice they deemed necessary to persuade Germany to see the error of its ways, and, on the other hand, whether this ability to exercise total power through occupation made it all the more incumbent on them to see justice served on behalf of German civilians less able to help themselves. Contemporary commentators, such as Harold Ingrams, argued that Britain’s triumph over Nazism had earned it the moral authority to extend its controlling influence in redemocratising Germany,49 others maintained Britain had long possessed this moral capital as a leading member of the Western family of civilised nations, espousing amongst its foreign policy tenets, ‘a consideration for the feelings of other nations; conciliation and persuasion rather than compulsion’.50 Another common argument, one ignoring the reality of the expulsions, was, ‘Decency is no substitute for policy.’51 Britain, by claiming to export its ‘civilised’ values, became overreliant on its early popularity as a catalyst for democratic political change in Germany, but justifying these claims had to be earned by its magnanimity as an occupying power. Two main themes re-emerge: the concept of imposing a just peace over a defeated enemy, and its compatibility with a policy of allowing mass expulsions. It is hard not to see the refugee and expellee crisis as symbolic of the injustice in holding an entire nation to account, an implication de facto of how occupation could fail those people it purported to

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help. Collectively these forced migrants, although still warranting punishment in the eyes of many, had committed no crimes other than to be German survivors of fascism, their immediate needs arguably as great as any other population grouping in the new post-war order. Occupation policy in reality looked after German citizens living within the German Reich (Reichsdeutsche), and treated ethnic German expellees and refugees (Volksdeutsche) as a distinct grouping somehow beyond their humanitarian duty of care. British bombings of civilians and decisions taken to expropriate Germans of their homeland territories in the East, discussed later, raise issues of what Martin Wight saw as political morality: ‘political ethics have their ultimate sanction in the personal ethics of the politician, and a nation’s honour cannot rise higher than the personal honour of its representatives’. Morality differs from raison d’état by validating the ethical within politics, widening the concept of policy into one that can be imbued with moral values: Political expedience itself has to consult the moral sense of those whom it will affect, and even combines with the moral sense of the politician himself. Thus it is softened into prudence, which is a moral virtue. The occasions for conscientious objection are diminished, since conscience has already had its say in the debate in which policy is shaped.52 Germany collectively continues to acknowledge its guilt, symbolically highlighted in 2006 by Günter Grass admitting his own SS past to a scathing crescendo of criticism from within Germany.53 It seems appropriate that Germany should have built Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, but perverse that the Allies, responsible for shaping policy towards the expulsions, played no part in debates over the capital’s proposed research centre (Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen) to commemorate refugee and expellee civilians’ sacrifices and celebrate later successes in refugee integration. This may be because West German politicians cited the crisis as emblematic of Allied moral hypocrisy, some even suggesting the expulsions as ‘no less a crime against humanity than Nazi war crimes’.54 As mentioned in the Introduction, from 1941, a growing core of leading public figures began to articulate their disquiet over Britain’s bombing policy, arguing that Germany should not be made to suffer a vindictive peace. George Bell’s interventions as an advocate of restraint,

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compassion and conscience are well documented. In April 1941 he wrote to The Times: ‘If Europe is civilised at all, what can excuse the bombing of towns by night and terrorising of non-combatants?’55 Three years later, though totally supportive of Britain’s objective to shorten the war and save British lives, he pointed out such ends could not justify the means employed through indiscriminate area bombing: ‘to justify methods inhumane in themselves by arguments of expediency smacks of the Nazi philosophy that Might is Right’ – in contradiction of Britain’s right to claim to stand for ‘civilised’ values. His pleas for policy to concentrate on military and industrial targets and to do more to spare civilian casualties was strongly supported by Lord Lang who added that bombardment of non-military targets that ‘purposely involve the destruction of the lives and homes of the people’ and whose effects had led to a mood ‘of exultation’, would lead to ‘a very lamentable lapse in the moral outlook of our people’.56 Nevertheless, although Bell’s stance on moral if not only Christian grounds was a constant thorn in the government’s side, Eden for one, ‘refused to take him seriously’.57 Bell urged Eden to make a clear statement that the British would distinguish between the Nazi regime and the German people, and ‘to make it plain that the infliction of stern retribution is not intended for those in Germany who are against the German Government, who repudiate the Nazi system and are filled with shame by the Nazi crimes’. Bell was concerned that while he believed the government did not share Lord Vansittart’s more damning assessment of German recidivism, its failure clearly to repudiate Vansittart’s stance58 sent an equally stark message to German opposition and resistance factions that there was little imminent hope for Germany’s recovery without ‘a deep, spiritual regeneration’. Vansittart was adamant its cure ‘will take at least a generation’.59 Interestingly, after Bell’s letter it took a further seven months before the question of differentiating between Germans and the Nazi state machinery was debated in the Lords.60 This close chronology is notable because Bell wrote less than three weeks after the FO gave their agreement in principle to a transfer of populations without providing humanitarian safeguards for the indigenous and expellee German populations. The need for these exchanges suggests too that little distinction was being made between the Nazi state and German civilians. From the summer of 1945, as news and rumours about the scale and circumstances of the expulsions started to emerge,61 many of the earlier critics of Britain’s bombing offensive continued arguing for a more holistic approach towards Germany, calling too for measures to alleviate German

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expellees’ suffering. One revealed Bell’s commitment to the Church’s central role in the reconstruction of post-war Europe.62 Closely monitoring the deportations of Germans from Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia, he coordinated a deputation led by the Archbishop of York of 20 church leaders of all denominations to discuss the crisis with Attlee in September 1945.63 But although British churches were the only ‘organized force’ in the UK committed to the softening of British occupation policy, particularly with regard to the return of German POWs in 1947 and denazification, ‘the tangible results of their interventions were relatively limited’,64 as we see in Chapter 3. This was despite leading Anglican and Catholic churchmen such as Bell, Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Griffin, the Bishop of Westminster and the Bishop of Nottingham all being able to draw on close relationships with German church leaders to gather first-hand information on the developing humanitarian situation on which to base a case for British policy to become less retributive and more proactive. Pressure from the German churches to influence occupation policy also met with little success. From 1946, the churches, especially the close-knit Catholic bishops, were regular outspoken critics of British government obfuscation and inordinate delays in responding to a rapidly deteriorating humanitarian crisis, compounded by arriving ‘humane and orderly’ refugee transports, and the fact that housing, food, jobs and schools were all urgently needed. Some dioceses even offered to pay for housing if construction materials were provided. The British, however, were more interested in longer-term solutions and resented the Church’s interference, particularly as its policy was not to meddle with Germany’s ecclesiastical affairs.65 Catholic church leaders such as Bishop von Galen, and the powerful Archbishop Josef Frings, who presided over Konrad Adenauer’s funeral in 1967, showing his close links to politics, were especially vocal in condemning these and other interlinked aspects of occupation policy. Von Galen freely blamed the British for the ‘unsettled social conditions’,66 whilst Frings attributed much of the cause of German resentments to British measures such as confiscating houses for their own use, or their petty-mindedness, such as the ban on growing flowers.67 To the government and CCG, refugees were but one of many intractable problems, and church leaders’ pleas for special treatment were routinely disregarded. Remarkably, important scholarship on the broader legacy of the refugee crisis sidesteps the role of the British churches whose messages of hope, as we shall see, were appropriated by the British government to present its

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policies in a more positive light. This omission is replicated in the studies on the relationship between German churches and expellees cited by Andreas Kossert.68 Victor Gollancz, the leading pioneer of the humanitarian campaign in Britain, also found little success in obtaining substantive help from Attlee ‘who gave him scant comfort’.69 Gollancz articulated his disquiet at various British post-war reconstruction policies in a series of books and pamphlets that appeared once hostilities in Europe ceased.70 It was a sign of the need to maximise opportunities to speak out against perceived humanitarian violations and organise effective responses that he published Bell’s If Thine Enemy Hunger, which states that if enmity by the victor towards the vanquished remains, it will be difficult to put Christian principles into practice.71 Although Gollancz utilised his imprint to good early effect, appealing to the same morality and consciences of the British public that Bell was keen to nurture, this was only short-lived, as Frank showed.72 But as Chapter 3 argues instead, their cumulative effect amounted to ‘too little too late’ to undo the humanitarian catastrophe that had already occurred. Organisations from the Quaker-run Friends Service Council to the Red Cross organised various relief initiatives to supplement the severe food shortages. They worked in partnership with German agencies such as Deutsche Hilfsgemeinschaft and the Catholic Caritas, representing various authorities and professional organisations dealing with matters from refugee help to church and social welfare organisations.73 Sadly, here too, this relief activity’s net effect, though coalescing support for a more humanitarian approach towards Germany and acting as an irritant to less forgiving elements within the Labour government, only had a limited impact on improving the refugees’ parlous welfare given the degree to which Britain, despite Potsdam’s Article XIII, was hamstrung by its earlier commitments to Poland and Czechoslovakia and increasing tensions with the Soviet Union. This is well shown by German archival sources in Chapters 3 and 4 that suggest alternative interpretations of Farquharson’s and Frank’s claims. This ‘humanitarian moment’ is developed in the following section’s discussion of minority and human rights, at the heart of evolving moral and legal debates over proposals for a new international organisation. The attenuated process, begun at the Moscow Conference in November 1943, continuing with draft proposals at Dumbarton Oaks in October 1944, eventually led to the 1945 Charter of the United Nations Organisation, in which the Christian Church played a significant lobbying role.74 Delays in

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reaching Allied consensus over even technical matters such as voting and veto procedures did not augur well for hopes that the nations formulating the Charter were necessarily happy to be bound by all its own rules.75 As suggested earlier, Britain’s strategic occupation policy towards Germany mirrored earlier colonial-style attitudes towards indirect rule and how it might be applied in Germany. It is hard to fathom the scale of the refugee problem without realising its links with the importance Britain attached to occupying Germany, believing that ‘the Germans had got what they deserved and that this time, unlike in 1918, they were going to be made to feel the yoke, to submit, to acknowledge that they had been militarily defeated’.76 The Albu, Hynd and Strang Papers support and further develop Noel Annan’s later analysis. For many thousands of refugees and expellees, the feeling of having their identity stripped away was compounded, and even if they managed to survive in their new ‘home’ in the British Zone, they still clung to hopes that one day they might return to Silesia, Brandenburg, Pomerania, East and West Prussia and the other territories from where they had been exiled. For many ‘ordinary’ Germans’, military defeat left them too demoralised, exhausted and materially impoverished to constitute or mount any serious threat to a large occupying force. It would take years for many to recover pride in being German, a discredited identity that the occupation, certainly in its earlier phase, did little to discourage - for instance in its non-fraternisation policy. It is surprising that the substantial literature on specific British occupation policies, particularly by British scholars, whilst engaging purposefully with key reconstruction policies, does not provide the wider overview demanded by a key question in this book – how far did Britain succeed in reconciling its aim of exporting its brand of social democratic liberalism as a civilising blueprint for Germany within an occupation regime that was characteristically both suppressive and repressive in practice? Using the example of the ‘transfers’ and expulsions, seismic population shifts impinging on most aspects of occupation policy, this study reconceptualises the topic, revealing a more human dimension submerged, if not always overlooked, in many previous policy analyses, by superimposing a more macro view of occupation policy over the earlier important but more discrete structuralist studies;77 such works from the late 1970s onwards built on earlier surveys.78 As the older literature shows, excepting important anthologies of studies during the 1990s by Birke and Eve Mayring, and the London Symposium on the British occupation,79 more

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recent British historiography, certainly since the opening of former GDR and Soviet archives, has focused less on the occupation and more on the early period of the Cold War and its origins.80 Anne Deighton highlights the formulation of Britain’s German policy rather than its significance, questioning the importance of Bevin’s role in Germany, and pointing to his preoccupation with other priorities such as Palestine and India, and his anti-Soviet and German stances. Evidence of his instincts to curb the scope of Germany’s revival is well illustrated in the case-study. She points to active roles of senior FO civil servants such as Sir Orme Sargent, claiming their hopes for a united Germany were unrealistic, and that it was more desirable to adopt a united Western approach to save Germany from Communism.81 The coincidence of anti-German and growing anti-Soviet thinking within government after 1945 made formulating a clear occupation policy that much more problematic. After the Soviets joined the Western Allies, hopes had been high within sections on the Labour Party Left for a new post-war relationship, an optimism not shared by leading figures such as Attlee, Dalton or Bevin, more intent on developing a multilateral approach with America towards a new world order based on international institutions. Russia’s subsequent refusal to accept the Marshall Plan and the Cold War solidified this suspicion towards the Soviet Union across the party.82 Bevin worried that an extension of Soviet power would exploit Western Europe’s weak position and so aligned foreign policy with America in rebuilding Western European economic recovery and security, not out of concern for maintaining Britain’s world role, but because he had little choice.83 Seeds of future British–Soviet tensions, sown during Eden and Stalin’s December 1941 discussions over forging a peace equally satisfactory to the Great Powers, were due to Soviet suspicions over a possible ‘Anglo-American peace’, and concerns that measures imposed on Germany would fail to neutralise its future aggressive capability. Labour ministers clearly realised that a further challenge to British claims to preserve its Great Power status after 1945 was the ravaged state of its economy. A major factor in the Allied victory was that they ‘turned their economic strength into greater fighting power’.84 Britain did indeed secure lasting kudos as the only Allied power to resist Nazism throughout the war; ironically, however, it paid a high economic price to win the peace. The abrupt cancellation of Lend-Lease in June 1945 plunged Britain into a dollar crisis, further complications and a resulting impasse developed between Britain and the Soviets in agreeing what

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would be essentially a trade-off between the Soviets sharing the food surplus areas of the agrarian-rich lands of their own zone85 and their demands for reparations from the coal-rich Western zones. Over reparation payments and territorial compensation, Britain was forced to play second fiddle to the USA and the Soviets in the Tripartite discussions on reparations, its economic power ‘ebbing away’86 as its dependency on US aid grew.87 The Soviets too suffered immediate setbacks to their economic growth potential, as did Germany and Japan – economies that ‘were all traumatized’.88 The British government tried but failed to have Germany treated as a single economic unit, which made it difficult to justify continuing and rising costs to British taxpayers,89 a major factor in the growing political and ideological divisions between the Russian and Western Allies that led eventually to German partition. Mistrust of the Soviets’ unilateral approach to securing reparations impacted significantly on the deteriorating refugee crisis, as Russia, who had ‘deceived’90 the Western Allies at Potsdam with their optimistically lower estimates of refugee numbers remaining east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, then reneged on previous agreements over expellee quotas,91 with the British Zone forced into accepting the highest concentration of expellees in the Western zones without adequate means to feed or house them. The relative strength of opposition to ‘refugee policy’ from leading humanitarians, though achieving little more than to underscore official British pleas to stop further refugee transportations, as shown in Chapter 4, is important in explaining the government’s acute sensitivities to public criticism of its treatment of Germany, discussed in Chapter 5, whereas in the case of the Nuremberg Trials, there was a certain inevitability and public acceptance that the Allies should bring to book the surviving figureheads of Nazi aggression. A brief sample of the many articles on the expulsions of ethnic Germans illustrates the point,92 although these appeals had little substantive effect on a situation already at crisis point. Of course, food shortages and subsequent rationing were significant problems for both Britons and Germans after hostilities ended, only exacerbating the more extreme sentiments of British anti-German feeling. Some were quite happy to ‘feed’ Germany as long as they were not disadvantaged themselves. Others argued for retributive justice at Nuremberg for German perpetrators of horrors such as Belsen, many reacting to the first photographs of the camp atrocities displayed in Trafalgar Square by the Daily Express in May 1945 as the Nuremberg Charter was being agreed.93 Revulsion and anger ran high; British sensibilities were shocked

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by the graphic images, as if it had only just dawned on many, in spite of the lessons of 1914–18, that modern state warfare had long since transgressed the boundaries of decency into depravity, with chivalric codes of honour now an anachronism. Recent warm and euphoric recollections of VE Day, a celebration of how good had triumphed over evil, turned instead towards settling old scores. This rapid change in mood was typified by those who spoke of the ‘rottenness of the German race’. Others sought retribution: ‘I don’t think we could ever be hard enough on the Germans’, or, ‘I feel we ought to shoot every German. There’s not a good one among them. We’re too soft.’ These comments, recorded in early 1948, reinforced suggestions ‘consistently’ aired during wartime: ‘I’d like to annihilate the lot of them. They’ve always been a menace to the world’, ‘Make them pay for what they’ve done. They deserve to’, or, ‘We ought really to kill them all, but I suppose we can’t do that’.94 Such views may well have been congruent with a public perception of evidence of German guilt and its being held to account as justified, when ensuing debates began over feeding Germany at Britain’s expense, whose own needs, many argued, were greater. Many asked why British taxpayers were subsidising a guilty nation. This ignored the fact that Germany had less means to produce the wealth to pay for its own subsistence, and was heavily dependent on Britain, itself now increasingly financially beholden to America. Further responses show ‘many readers’ were not singing off the government song sheet that proclaimed Britain’s civilised values and asked for further postwar sacrifices as individual citizens of the world.95

Minorities and human rights Before addressing later the impact of British policy on refugees within the case-study, it is important to evaluate Britain’s response to the crisis in its international context. Many of the more permanent international structures eventually introduced to help safeguard minority rights actually post-date the worst period of the catastrophe in Germany, namely 1945–7. It was only by January 1946, when expulsions of ethnic Germans were fast approaching unanticipated and unmanageable proportions, that the FO’s Reconstruction Department concluded that a possible new international system of minority protection along League of Nations principles was ‘not practical politics in the present world and that its aims can be better achieved by more generalised action under the UN Charter’.96 This was a doubly convenient method of not placing the burden of responsibility

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on any one nation, whilst delaying the process of finding international consensus on practical and enforceable measures. Brian Simpson has demonstrated how Britain’s human rights policy evolved internationally as a key plank of a wider strategy of preserving its pre-eminent status as a leading world power. He shows that the FO, ‘though hostile to any form of special minority protection, did favour the general protection of fundamental rights’ as part of its war aims, although human rights did not appear on the Cabinet agenda until 30 October 1947.97 ‘Minorities’, suggesting smaller numerical sizes of population, now seems a misnomer and contradicted the true position – an almost unimaginably large grouping of peoples. Kenneth Cmiel, tracing the League of Nation’s lack of commitment during the 1940s to individual minority rights, showed how recent historiography highlights this decade’s importance in shifting the focus from minority rights towards a new emphasis on human rights, expressed in the 1945 UN Charter agreed at the San Francisco Conference. This ethos crystallised in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights [hereinafter UDHR], leading to the genesis of the European Convention.98 Mark Mazower shows that only relatively recently have studies historicised the language of human rights within the context of international diplomacy, and concludes that Simpson’s ‘story’ presents the history of human rights in the post-war era as a tale of Great Power hypocrisy.99 The rights regime of the new UN signified a considerable weakening of international will compared to that of the inter-war League of Nations. A new and weaker global organisation, one in which ‘collapsing minority rights into individual human rights’100 would ensure greater appeal to the Great Powers, was an acceptable price to be paid to ensure US and Soviet participation. Britain saw its continuing partnership with the Americans after 1945 as crucial, and despite the Colonial Office’s fury at the prospect of ‘international meddling in the empire’,101 it was evident that ongoing dialogues over reconceptualising human rights offered fresh opportunities to move away from the failed League of Nations model of protecting minorities. The UN Charter’s Article 1, however, promised more than it would deliver: ‘promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion’ was all very well except that its qualification – ‘for all’ – could not be applied to the case of the German refugees and expellees. Germany’s exclusion from the UN therefore need not have been an obstacle to their receiving equal treatment under the Charter. Whether consciously or not, this proposed

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realignment of core humanitarian principles further distanced the Big Three from their collective decisions made well before 1945, when they made it clear to the Czechs and the Poles that the deportation and transfer of ethnic Germans should supersede the protection of international law.102 Edvard Beneš recalls that an ‘in principle’ decision was made by Britain in July 1942 after careful consideration of the Czech proposal to transfer the minority populations from Czechoslovakia. It concluded: In view of what had happened in 1938 and during the war, that at the time of the final solution of our minority problem at the end of the war, the British government did not intend to oppose the principle to transfer the minority population from Czechoslovakia in an endeavour to make Czechoslovakia as homogeneous a country as possible from the standpoint of nationality.103 On returning from Teheran in November 1943 Churchill put forward the British government’s programme to the exiled Polish government for solving Poland’s own ‘ethno-geographical problems’. Part of the plan was to hand over to Poland territory encompassing East Prussia, Danzig and Upper Silesia up to the Oder River. Point 4 stated: ‘All the German population within Poland’s new boundaries to be removed from Poland.’104 Although Churchill and Roosevelt appeared to have reduced Stalin’s demands at Yalta on westward revisions to the Polish–German border, by negotiating a line to be drawn further east up the Oder to Breslau, opening the possibility of avoiding the transfer of even greater numbers of German refugees and expellees, Potsdam put paid to such hopes. Despite British objections, the Soviets ‘got their way’.105 Potsdam’s protocols laid down an allocation of the 2.5 million Germans residing in Czechoslovakia within the Soviet (750,000) and US zones (1.75 million), with the 1.5 million Germans from Poland moved into the British Zone,106 mutually consistent with earlier policies established towards German ‘minorities’ in Czechoslovakia and Poland. As we shall see shortly, the FO policy over ‘transfer of populations’ in the context of the minorities question created a far bigger problem for the majority German population, both indigenous and refugees, who reaped its later consequences as countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia systematically started to expel the Germans from within their borders, or refugees were driven westwards by the rapidly advancing Red Army. With no internationally recognised system of protection or rights yet in

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place for refugees, it is easy to see their immediate survival and future fate hung in the balance, and perhaps more importantly, that the Western Allies could not be held legally accountable for their safe passage to Germany. The UN Charter’s 1941 precursor, the Atlantic Charter, referred explicitly in its eight principles to ‘the right of all peoples’ and to ‘sovereign rights’, but nowhere is there any mention of individual rights.107 Though it is hardly a surprise that Germany, a nation held to account for waging a war of aggression, was de facto excluded from the UN, this one decision surely suggests the true limitations of the proposed ‘international cooperation’. Many increasingly believed Germany’s rise to power and its persecution of the Jews meant human rights henceforth could only be protected internationally, and an ‘effective international organisation [of the peace] is not possible unless it protects basic human rights against encroachment by national States’.108 Thus, with Germany as the example, a case was made to protect all nations in future from any such human rights violations and therefore from themselves. But during the drafting of the UDHR, negotiations over finding international consensus on the organisation’s structure actually diluted individual nations’ accountability. Successive drafts look like an alibi for those decisions of ‘encroachment’ simultaneously being agreed by the Big Three to establish the boundary ‘adjustments’ that had such a profound effect on the rights of the millions implicated by those decisions. In conclusion, the UN Charter achieved little in limiting state sovereignty.109 Nor did the UDHR resolve flaws in such limits.110 Britain had accepted in principle the expulsion of ethnic Germans from eastern and central Europe, and this by default ‘was weakening the case for international protection’.111 Fashioning an organisation precluded creating an effective autonomous body to enforce measures intended to safeguard human rights – collective responsibility provided no guarantees. Amongst Britain’s peace aims in 1939 was the wish to establish a new Europe in which boundary settlements would be agreed by negotiation.112 When Lord Halifax spoke of the Nazis’ ‘denial to men and women of elementary human rights’ in Germany,113 publicly acknowledging that not all Germans should be classed as the enemy, he cannot have known how distorted this principle eventually would become in the sphere of refugee policy. True to the nature of this total war, the Allies could not negotiate with Hitler over Germany’s future and, if Germany lost, it would lose both the war and the peace for its own people. Therefore, in the Allies’ fitful negotiations after 1943 over proposals to move the frontiers

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east and west of the Oder and Neisse rivers to compensate Poland and Russia, the rights of Germans living in the affected territories plainly were not factored into negotiations that gave primacy to reshaping postwar Germany, and honouring Britain’s earlier guarantees to Poland. The UN Charter was only as binding a collective agreement as those signing up to its principles were prepared to allow. As we know, the Western Allies intended for the matter of German refugees and expellees to be dealt with internally by the Germans. But with the Cold War looming, Britain and the USA became ‘increasingly concerned about the tensions between natives and refugees and expellees’. As a result, the International Refugee Organisation’s [hereinafter IRO] remit, ratified by the UN General Assembly in December 1946, ‘explicitly excluded the German refugees and expellees from its jurisdiction’.114 In Germany and Austria, the IRO and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration [hereinafter UNRRA] shared responsibility for care of all Displaced Persons with the exception, perversely, of German Displaced Persons. This book does not address the question of Displaced Persons115 nor by direct association, the role of UNRRA, who as the UN’s first international agency was not asked to protect German refugees under its auspices. The IRO administered a well-organised network of refugee camps, housing and food supplies, providing medical care and assistance in Displaced Persons’ rehabilitation and retraining116 – such organisational advantages were denied to Germans. Difficulties with the Soviets over Displaced Person repatriations meant they always considered the IRO to be a Western instrument as it was funded by the Western Allies, its remit limited to the Western zones. In the IRO’s first budget in 1947, the USA share was 46 per cent (60 per cent by 1949); Britain’s contribution was 15 per cent, and France’s 4 per cent.117 This ‘international’ organisation’s scope in protecting all refugees’ interests was delimited by its statutes’ categories of eligible persons, and its mandate was to provide relief for Displaced Persons and aid the work of repatriation and resettlement originally begun by the military authorities and UNRRA. Therefore, Displaced Persons who were presumed to have a home to return to were not penalised. However, to be a German meant disqualification from any rights, and to be a homeless German classified an individual as a refugee who thus was penalised as beyond the help of international aid, a combined recipe for a humanitarian disaster. Although there were many in Britain (Gollancz, Bell and others) advocating the protection of refugee and expellee interests, it appears this inherent contradiction in the IRO’s role was not questioned.

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CHAPTER 2 ‘GER M ANIT Y AND HUM ANIT Y’

‘The Trouble with Germans’1 British reactions to the Nazi regime’s war conduct towards its own people and its enemies, combined with influential and long-established perceptions within diplomatic circles, government and the British military about the specificity and embedded nature of German aggression, helped create the climate for establishing British occupation policy. As one of the occupation’s administrators in Germany recalled: ‘I grew to think that what we were dealing with was Germanity and humanity, the former being the bad to be corrected and the latter the good to be fostered.’2 Part of the occupation’s driving force, which would impact on policy towards expellees, was Britain’s growing moral outrage at the enormity of Germany’s crimes and a desire for it to be called to account. Well before the full litany of atrocities became apparent, Eleanor Rathbone asked Eden if he agreed that ‘it would be well to discourage the campaign in this country which refuses to make a distinction between Hitlerite Germany and Germany’.3 She worried that the Germans would thereby presume that if they lost the war they would have to pin their hopes on assimilation with Communist Russia. Further debates ensued in 1942 and beyond, concerning suitable ‘retribution’ for ‘German atrocities’. Churchill was asked whether the government was still united with the Allies in its determination ‘to exact punishment for uncivilised atrocities’ committed by German forces, and if such association fell within the Atlantic Charter’s scope. Attlee endorsed the Prime Minister’s earlier statement of 25 October 1941 that ‘“retribution for these crimes must henceforward

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take its place among the major purposes of the war.” The principle of just retribution for such crimes is in no way inconsistent with the provisions of the Atlantic Charter.’4 This cross-party consensus helped escalate calls for greater levels of reprisals in subsequent debates. One MP challenged Eden to warn the German people of the retribution they faced for continuing to support their Nazi leaders and for countenancing the murder of innocent people in the conquered countries. Another asked for ‘a definite assurance that a record of these deeds is to be kept and preserved for after the war’,5 a prescient foretaste of the Nuremberg indictments and beyond. Churchill was urged to take ‘immediate steps’ in concert with America to inform the Germans that owing to the increase in the murder of hostages ‘in violation of international law’, should there be any further such murders of innocent victims, ‘instant reprisals will be taken by the destruction of German cities and towns’. The Conservative MP Sir William Davison maintained, ‘as force is the only thing that appeals to Germans’, it would be undesirable to make any prior announcement of the intention to retaliate. He saw risks in Britain going it alone, but did not ask if his measures would fall foul of the same international laws. Attlee replied: ‘seeking out small villages for destruction’ was not the most effective way to operate the RAF.6 If the more populist sentiments thirsting for revenge for Germany’s war crimes were assuaged by realisation of its impending defeat and total surrender, sight of the first Belsen photographs only whipped up further calls for retribution.7 This mood significantly coloured British Military Government attitudes towards Germans in the occupation’s early stages. By May 1945, 54 per cent of Britons said ‘they hated the Germans’, with 80 per cent in favour of imposing hard peace terms. Its wartime atrocities ‘strengthened the conviction that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Germans and their history. Radical measures seemed called for.’8 Wartime military-issue manuals typecast ‘Jerry’ as ‘a Jekyll and Hyde figure, whose body is inhabited at one and the same time by a berserk demon and an amiable spirit’. This analysis offered ‘a more revealing clue to the German national character than the popular political conception of a nation divided quite simply into completely good people . . . and completely bad people’.9 The record of Nazi aggression and crimes had vindicated earlier widespread suspicions of Germany, whilst perpetuating questions as to ‘the legitimacy of Germany’s existence as a nation state’.10 This had crucial implications for how British policy towards ethnic Germans was developed, pre-eminent amongst its aims being the need to

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safeguard the future security of Europe’s smaller states against any possible resurgence of German imperialist designs. Britain was committed to protecting the interests of its European allies who had lost territory during the war, especially Poland and Czechoslovakia. Such priorities had to recognise the Soviet Union’s own similar demands. Well before the denouement of the Germans’ forced removal, policy principles had been established recasting the status of ‘ordinary’ German civilians, going a long way to predetermining their future disadvantaged classification and status as refugees or expellees – as distinct from Displaced Persons. Central to British policy was its attitude towards the question of a ‘transfer of populations’. Decisions made, held in abeyance, or even those not taken, ultimately detrimentally affected Britain’s ability to anticipate, react or influence the rapidly changing circumstances and course of the crisis, despite Britain’s prior decision that Germany would have to assume responsibility for the problems. CCG’s and BMG’s difficulties were thus exacerbated by long-standing and deep-rooted fears in Britain amongst many wartime and early postwar ministers and advisers that, given the opportunity, there was little new evidence to suggest Germany would not revert to its perceived predilection for militarism, rearm, and present potential further threats to world peace. Such convictions had found ample expression in the ‘unconditional surrender’ terms first formulated at Casablanca. In early 1944, Churchill clarified this further, saying the German people would not be enslaved or destroyed, then appeared to contradict himself by stating the Allies would not be accountable to them by any pact or obligation and would have a free hand in Germany.11 A Gallup poll gauged the public mood on how Germany should be treated. Gladwyn Jebb summarised its findings: ‘any settlement which we may impose on Germany is likely to win popular approval here provided it can be represented as “hard”’.12 Just before Yalta, again somewhat inconsistently in view of his earlier statement, Churchill reminded Parliament that ‘the enforcement of unconditional surrender upon the enemy in no way relieves the victorious powers of their obligations to humanity or of their duties as civilised and Christian nations.’13 Perhaps he was relieving his conscience for any later accusations history might level against his integrity following Britain’s imposition of a ‘hard peace’, and again with his later regrets over British impotence at Potsdam regarding the refugee and expellee question. Those obligations were not lost on CCG policy advisers, such as Robert Birley, who recognised that Germany ‘should find its place as a member of European civilized society’:

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It is important to realise that much that is wrong in Germany is part of what is wrong with our civilisation as a whole. It will bring a much-needed realism in Germany if speakers from other countries and England in particular when visiting Germany would speak of the crisis of our civilisation as one affecting other countries also.14 Not only did the Big Three face practical difficulties in their root and branch reconstruction of Germany, Britain in particular, by proclaiming its own moral code amongst the so-called civilised nations, had by implication if not in law, a duty of care in its role as an occupying power. This extended to its planned treatment of the German civilian population. Britain claimed it was too early to predict conditions on the ground once it assumed control of its zone, and so had long favoured a ‘wait and see’ policy to population transfers over one including some forward contingency planning, but the consequences were disastrous, as the following section explains. The humanitarian implications had never been at the forefront of its thinking, as Potsdam’s Article 13 belatedly made clear, calling for transfers to be conducted in an ‘orderly and humane’ manner, whilst in the same breath urgently mandating the Allied Control Council to report to their governments ‘the extent to which persons have already entered Germany from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary’.15 Potsdam was effectively public acknowledgement that the Allies were no longer in control of their ‘transfer’ policy, already effected by the Poles and the Czechs in April/May 1945 with the summary expulsions (Wildvertreibungen), and apparent by October 1944 when the possibility of organising timely evacuations of ethnic Germans away from the rapidly advancing Red Army and out of East Prussia was severely hampered by a lack of plans as to their exact destination, and because evacuation orders were given too late.16 Not least amongst Britain’s challenges was the need to convince itself that Germany could eventually, with Britain’s guidance reform and return to the family of nations. Such hopes proved short-lived as harrowing eyewitness accounts began to emerge from the concentration camps with reports of diffident responses from some Germans living nearby. Far from drawing a line under the past, May 1945 helped to entrench further a broadly negative official British view of Germany’s reformist credentials. It was a measure of the difficulty of shifting such generalised mythmaking that articles reflecting the anti-German mood abroad appeared in the German broadsheet press nearly four years into the occupation:

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Again and again we hear: German nationalism, German arrogance, complete loss of German memory. And the remarkable thing is that it is not in the French but in the British press that dissatisfaction and disapproval are expressed most frequently and most harshly. We are quite unambiguously given to understand that we are disliked. The unanimity and simultaneousness of these unfavourable comments are such that . . . they must be accepted as public opinion.17 Austen Albu, Deputy President of the Governmental Sub-Commission of the CCG in Germany (1946–7), offered a first-hand and more balanced view of Germany to some reactionary ‘official’ and popular attitudes, although his ability to see CCG’s challenges from both viewpoints still represented a small minority in Whitehall: The one thing I have found here of which I was not really aware is that although the Germans when roused by demagogues are the most nationalistic of peoples, they in fact have little genuine national feeling. They know this and have strong feelings of inferiority about it as well as about their general political incompetence. Hence their great fear that Germany may again be split up . . . Germany herself is no danger to security in any foreseeable future.18 Albu, as we shall see, was not the only government adviser with a more nuanced view of the German character beyond the common stereotypes. His hesitation before accepting the post was significant, despite realising the advantages of being asked to ‘co-ordinate and determine’ governmental and economic policy:19 Chiefly I am very worried about the contradictions of our policy (or lack of it) & the lack of understanding at home (chiefly it seems in the cabinet & due to the bloody mindedness of Dalton). We are in the process of destroying what’s left of [the] German economy.20 He knew the task of rebuilding German society had not resulted in the creation of the Cabinet post that its responsibility merited. One year later, on the point of tendering his resignation, he wrote to J.B. Hynd spelling out the frustrations of working within a Control Commission lacking the political influence back in Britain to match its gross surfeit of staff. Hynd,

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the minister first entrusted as the go-between for CCG and Whitehall, entreated him to stay with assurances of more ‘high level controlling staff’. But Albu’s chief concern was that on ‘quite crucial matters the Foreign Office have departed from the principles which I think both you and I felt were essential here’.21 Although all could see the weight of FO opinion steadily shifting its efforts towards curbing Moscow’s influence, Albu saw other important considerations emerging from Germany’s political and economic development. In his view, Bidault had made the first realistic statement by any Foreign Minister or deputy in describing the overcrowded conditions caused by the arrival of overwhelming numbers of expellees and refugees. Albu had long suspected this, and as the true picture emerged he told Hynd: ‘frankly the arithmetic does not add up.’22 Not only did a dramatic population increase have major ramifications for housing and indigenous food production, it skewed the relation within that population between wage earners and dependents, and between able-bodied men and women. Bidault’s statement was a reality check for British politicians preferring not to dwell on the humanitarian consequences of the ‘population transfers’ agreed four years earlier. Albu’s assessment was candid: We all knew it was a wicked thing to move populations about when we agreed to it, but we did not know then (although I am told a warning was given by the Foreign Office) that we would create a demographic and economic position in Germany which was just impossible.23 Here was a damning admission that policy towards ethnic German refugees and expellees (for which Albu bore no direct responsibility), was not one that any British or Allied politician instrumental in its adoption could claim retrospectively to have pursued with a clear conscience. What needs evaluating is how Britain’s view of Germany impacted on the consequence of its policy decisions to sanction these population transfers and to devolve responsibility to Germans for integrating German expellees. The discussion of public opinion in Schleswig-Holstein in Chapter 5 explains how British–German relations were affected by the ensuing crisis.

‘Transfer of the German Populations’: a political expedient Plans for Allied occupation were first made in early 1941 along with internal government discussions about the post-war treatment of Germany, becoming more formalised into a template of military government rule

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by June 1943.24 Detailed policy papers drafted by and circulated amongst senior Foreign Office officials had followed. These offered potential blueprints for an occupied Germany framing the wider Allied diplomatic negotiations, as talk turned from likely victory to the looming difficulties over how to negotiate a balance between Great Power interests whilst maintaining a strong occupation alliance. Further papers following Germany’s defeat saw a continuing development of many key ideas debated in these earlier discussion documents.25 To that extent, occupation policy was discussed and established well before 1945, helping to explain why the new Labour government had less room for later manoeuvre in its Germany policy. The literature on the reasons behind the proposals for the transfer of German populations is extensive and this book therefore does not dwell on the many research papers and FO memoranda already examined by scholars explaining its rationale and ultimate justification.26 Particularly noteworthy is Brandes’s comprehensive charting of the diplomatic background27 leading up to the decision to move territorial borders at Germany’s expense to compensate Poland and Czechoslovakia for territories seized by Germany, and consequently to sanction the removal, forced or otherwise, of the ethnic German ‘minorities’ living there. Thus of greater relevance, and an element hitherto insufficiently examined, are certain key reports and documents showing how British awareness and acceptance of the perilous implications for German civilians of such a policy progressively led officials and diplomats into distancing themselves from assuming responsibility for its successful outcome, the clearer it became that the German population needed to be returned to within its own borders. This section focuses on two such documents in particular.28 In 2005, Frank argued that: The key to understanding the ambivalence and contradictions that characterised British thinking and responses to the fate of the German populations of Poland and Czechoslovakia . . . lay in the difficulty of reconciling the widespread belief in population transfer in principle with profound doubts about its desirability and feasibility in practice.29 He also showed how the widely canvassed concept of population transfer, using the Greek–Turkish transfer following the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 as a precedent, had led to the received notion that the awkward problem

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of minorities could be solved ‘rationally and constructively by removing the population concerned in an orderly and gradual manner while avoiding unnecessary human suffering and economic disruption’. Yet there was no current practical evidence to support such hopes. The harsh reality for policy-makers and those populations affected was that there was never any realistic possibility that solving the problem of minorities could be achieved in the prescribed controlled manner, later promulgated at Potsdam, so as to avoid human ‘unnecessary’ suffering – the human costs became a necessary and collateral outcome of the policy. Therefore these two positions are mutually incompatible. The question that needs addressing is whether a common belief in such a policy was realistically reconcilable with the ‘profound doubts’ which Frank details within British policy-making circles during the critical years 1940–5 when the FO commissioned feasibility studies before gradually formulating policy to take account of strategic exigencies. Moreover, this analysis argues that these well-documented internal ‘doubts’ and caveats helped oil the diplomatic machinery in its sustained pursuit of a policy that might morally legitimate the government’s conditional acceptance of ‘the application of the principle of transfer of populations in cases where this may be necessary or desirable’.30 And there was a further contradiction in Britain’s attempt to square its desire to adopt a rational and constructive policy whilst avoiding unnecessary human suffering – again, these two positions seem mutually exclusive. Notwithstanding these potential major stumbling blocks, the FO’s reaction to the document, as Birke has shown, was ‘on the whole remarkably positive’.31 The policy was treated ‘as more than just an academic exercise’, as it represented a major component in building the post-war European territorial settlement. For example, British hopes of strengthening the Polish-Czech Federation had to allow for surrendering Polish territory in the East to maintain good relations with Russia while ‘it will have to receive compensation in the west, which can only be given at the expense of the Atlantic Charter.’32 Nor were there reliable precedents for achieving the removal of populations in an orderly and gradual manner,33 as the Greek–Turkish population exchange had shown, with most Orthodox Christians fleeing Turkey for Greece before the ink had dried on the negotiations.34 Although this was the first example of an exchange of populations agreed in a treaty, the authors of the ‘Memorandum on Frontiers’ knew that the Greek–Turkish exchanges had been negotiated and mutually accepted between their governments, whilst those now proposed were quite different, as Germany

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would be forced into accepting measures laid down by the victorious powers.35 Just as significantly, Toynbee and the Foreign Research and Press Service [hereinafter FRPS] expressed misgivings that in the event transfers were imposed on Germany, ‘unprecedented difficulties may arise from her non-co-operation.’36 Potsdam in its own way echoed the fait accompli of Lausanne, some nine months after uncontrolled flight and expulsions had started. Its ‘orderly and humane’ exhortations were effectively political rhetoric concealing its true radical nature. So although the transfer of populations policy was gradually and incrementally fine-tuned from 1942, this did not materially influence its ultimate ratification at Potsdam, by which time events had already rendered futile any hope Britain harboured to exercise material influence in its outcomes. Many questions that would occupy advisers and ministers were aired in John Mabbott’s much cited January 1942 paper on future borders and population transfers. This consultative document sketched out the viability of a post-war bloc of smaller countries in central and south-eastern Europe bound together by common concerns of strategic and economic security. Just as importantly, it linked the challenge of finding a solution to the question of territorial border changes with the possible scenario of exchanging, transferring or retaining populations within certain newly defined, negotiated and rectified European borders. The initial numbers of Germans that might be implicated in any possible ‘transfer’ was estimated at 3–6.8 million.37 In this way, the future German–Polish frontiers (affecting East Prussia, Danzig, Upper Silesia east of the Oder, Upper and Lower Silesia west of the Oder), the German–Czech frontier, (Bohemia, Moravia and Czechoslovakian Silesia), and the Czech–Austrian frontier could be seen as constituent parts of the same problem. Such a far-reaching document had implications for Britain’s later efforts to compensate Poland, and any such proposals first had to be agreed with Roosevelt and Stalin, no easy undertaking as negotiations at Teheran later proved. For the moment, territorial questions were put in abeyance as it was impossible for Britain to make unilateral commitments on territory. Furthermore, the war was by no means yet won, and the exact future shape of Europe was mere speculation. However, the potential benefits to European security of population transfers could be pursued. Discussions between the British and the exiled Czechoslovak government between July and October 1942 made it very clear within the FO that Britain would need to tread carefully in its verbal and written pronouncements on this issue. One particular exchange of minutes

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encapsulates several overlapping concerns: Britain was unable to commit itself to any particular frontiers in post-war Europe; still less was it able to say to what extent it envisaged transfers of population. The early exchanges centred on a Czechoslovak idea linking expulsions with guilt. The FO rejected this on the grounds that to state there was no ‘insuperable objection to the principle that transfers should be based on the expulsion of the guilty’ (a proposal made by Beneš that excluded those million or so Germans already earmarked for expulsion from the Sudetenland) would give carte blanche ‘to any of our Allies to describe every remaining German as guilty and evict him’. Frank Roberts, considered by some as the architect of the FO’s Germany policy,38 concluded that the formula of ‘punitive expulsion’ as articulated by Wenzel Jaksch, leader of the Sudeten Germans in Britain, was not practicable; better to invoke instead the broader expulsions rubric of where ‘necessary or desirable’, quoted above. Sir Orme Sargent’s pragmatic response was prescient in prefiguring one rationale for expulsion prevalent amongst certain of the Allies two years later: All the same, the idea of mass expulsions on the grounds that the victims are guilty of definite crimes against the State has, I suspect, come to stay . . . It would, I think, be a good idea to investigate its possibilities and see how it can be regularised and fitted in with our general policy for the punishment of war criminals, to which we are committed. Sir Alexander Cadogan went a stage further expressing fears ‘that it might lead to the limitation of our right to make considerable transfers of population’, suggesting that the Americans might propose using this ‘remedy’ on a fairly large scale. Eden agreed with Cadogan on both points.39 In searching for common principles to underpin the transfer policy, there was now a clear case, as the FO’s Denis Allen put it: ‘for getting this whole question of the relationship between guilt and transfers clear in our minds’. He candidly drew attention to the likely continuing shift away from an emphasis on arranging transfers on the basis of national selfdetermination, to a future more characterised by ‘political expediency, though attempts will be made to dress expediency up in the guise of “war guilt”, “security” and so on’. This sea change had long been in evidence since the Paris Peace Conference in 1918, for it had already become clear to the brokers of peace at Paris that ‘the minorities question would not

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be solved by maps alone: the ethnographic distribution of the population in eastern Europe was so complex that it defied the most expertly drawn of borders.’40 As mentioned earlier, the FO in planning these ‘transfers’, was well aware of how such ethnographic complexities had to be continuously reassessed against the shifting geopolitical backdrop of 1942, when decisions on ‘minorities’ were also dictated by their other status as enemy peoples. Geoffrey Harrison, another Germany expert with considerable influence within the FO, assumed that the German minorities and outposts ‘we shall wish . . . so far as possible to liquidate’. Nichols, referencing his discussions with Beneš over the question of expulsions from Czechoslovakia, spoke of assessing ‘the number of Germans that must be got rid of’.41 Such use of language, though probably subconscious, calls to mind leitmotifs normally considered synonymous with the deeds of German leaders called to account at Nuremberg and after. Roberts concluded this round-robin by suggesting that transfers wherever deemed necessary or desirable gave Britain ‘a free hand’ to use criteria based on political expediency ‘which seems the only safe basis’.42 These two documents show how soundings taken on pursuing this policy rationale could progress within weeks. What remained constant was an explicit understanding of the desirability of population transfers for ethnic German civilians. Although this situation had not materially changed by the time of the Foreign Secretaries Conference at Quebec in August 1943, the difficulties of how this policy might be achieved within a post-war settlement satisfactory to all the Allies were becoming more evident. Eden was ‘much troubled at the prospect of this proposed meeting’.43 Stalin was interested in discussing two issues, the Second Front and Russia’s western frontiers. Harry Hopkins added a third, the treatment of Germany after the war. Eden presciently pointed out that the question of settling western frontiers and how to deal with Germany were interrelated: If I were to go to meet Molotov or Stalin accompanied by some American opposite number, and first made it plain that there would be no Second Front this year and also made it plain that we had not advanced at all in our consideration of Russian frontier claims, then I thought the meeting would almost certain[ly] do more harm than good.44 In other words, there was recognition at the highest level that although the Soviet Union’s legitimate territorial claims would be met through

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negotiations, these claims would be at the expense of Germany and the Germans residing outside the newly defined borders yet to be agreed. By December 1943, plans were being made under the auspices of the FO’s German Department to consider the mechanics of transferring Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland.45 Five months later the inter-ministerial ‘Interdepartmental Committee on the Transfer of German Populations’ [hereinafter ICTGP] produced its lengthy report. Such a detailed investigation was deemed necessary as ‘doubts were expressed in some quarters whether His Majesty’s Government should advocate a transfer of populations on so vast a scale without further examination of all the issues involved’.46 Despite its far-reaching scope, addressing a range of complex social, economic and political questions arising that would highlight the difficulties lying in wait, it could ‘afford no decisive evidence of the feasibility or otherwise of the transfers here discussed’.47 Therefore it must be argued that Britain, by continuing to seek to protect its right not to limit the potential extent of transfers – as Cadogan, whether consciously or not, had advocated – effectively radicalised this policy. This was hardly surprising at a stage during the war when most Germans were still seen by their adversaries as sui generis indistinguishable from the Nazi regime. In other words, while British policy-makers in 1942 were arguing that the use of guilt criteria was unworkable, by May 1944 they were perfectly reconciled to the notion of how Germany’s guilt could and would be used against its own populations by countries such as Poland and the Soviet Union, who would seek to right the immeasurable injustices suffered at Germany’s hands. The diplomatic exchanges were surprisingly transparent. Roberts, who had always been sceptical ‘of any orderly transfer on the scale suggested by the Czechs and Poles’, praised the ICTGP report for showing clearly ‘all the difficulties inherent in large-scale transfers of populations’, but significantly mentioned one self-evident and politically sensitive scenario for moving the expected millions. He, in common with other FO officials, knew that ‘a great many Germans will move voluntarily from the districts concerned, fearing the wrath to come’. Of course there would be nothing voluntary about their flight. Just as significantly, he said that the difficulties aired in the report should ‘eventually be put before the EAC . . . we should not at this stage take the lead in pouring cold water on population transfers either with the Russians, the Poles or the Czechs.’48 This suggests that postponing any binding commitments was consonant with government thinking throughout evolving policy discussions in 1942–5.

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Oliver Harvey articulated not just why the task might prove insurmountable but concerns over the very real threat of coalescing sympathy in Britain for the fate of a significant proportion of Germans who eventually would be ‘resettled’ in Schleswig-Holstein from the areas provisionally to be returned to Poland:49 As a long-term proposition there is no reason why Germany should not absorb this increase. It is the short term problem involved in the upheaval of whole families and their transfer to a bankrupt Germany and their re-establishment there which is the difficulty . . . The Czech case, which is modest by comparison, is on a very different basis to the Polish . . . In East Prussia, Danzig (and still more on the Oder line) the Germans would be ousted from age-old German lands which the Poles will be annexing from strategic or compensatory reasons unrelated to ethnography. This will not fail to stimulate anti-Polish and pro-German feeling in this country and the United States.50 Harvey’s more cautious tone contrasted with his remarks two and a half years earlier regarding Sikorski’s attempts to ‘“sell” the idea’ to Eden and Churchill to deport the Germans from East Prussia, and give the territory to Poland: Anyway we have Hitler’s authority for mass deportation and it may be a solution. If for Poland, it must also be for Czechs too (Sudeten). One thing I’m sure of, there must be no minorities treaties this time – minorities must either emigrate or else remain without any special privileges.51 Harvey’s comments on minorities treaties had reflected their troubled history since 1921 either as a panacea for assimilation, or for enabling minorities to preserve a distinct identity.52 Indeed the system of protection based on such treaties had been ‘condemned to failure by the inadequacy of its scope’53 within the League of Nations system. Harvey mirrored a more general FO antipathy towards the final text of ‘The Anglo-American Eight Point Declaration’ of 14 August 1941 (later the Atlantic Charter): ‘A terribly woolly document full of all the old clichés of the League of Nations period.’ This final version made no reference to individual rights, nor, in any preceding drafts or the final text, to ‘human

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rights’.54 Sargent succinctly put a further dampener on prospects for a satisfactory outcome: I suspect that these wholesale transfers of population will only be feasible (1) if carried out by the Russians, who will be prepared to act ruthlessly and will not be tied down by any agreed rules and regulations; and (2) if the Germans are removed to Siberia, where they will be forgotten, and not packed into an already over-crowded Germany, where they will be able to maintain a continual agitation to be returned to their native lands.55 Avoiding possible grounds for generating pro-German sentiments had been at the forefront of FO and War Office ‘qualms’ for some months, particularly regarding how transfers might be carried out in as humanitarian a way as practicable. Interestingly, FO officials seemed more anxious that these should not be carried out ‘so brutally as to cause a strong movement of public sympathy for Germany . . .’,56 than exercised by the moral imperative this placed them under as Allies to ensure the duty of care arising from such decisions, and yet also mindful of the opportunity any stories of mistreatment would give to Germany’s own propaganda cause, articulated during discussions at the Armistice and Post-war Committee [hereinafter APW]: To transfer large chunks of German territory to Poland, and expel their populations would ‘produce in Germany a feeling of depression, unfair treatment, hatred etc., and sow the seeds of another war.’ The War Office now are throwing out their chests & posing as devils of fellows, while they rely on us to save them from the consequences.57 Moreover, this illustrated the FO’s difficulties in trying to reconcile so many different interests. Various departments ranging from the Foreign Office Research Department [hereinafter FORD] to the Treasury and the Board of Trade had already expressed an interest in examining how to handle this potentially intractable problem, and Sargent advocated an interdepartmental meeting to agree ‘the machinery eventually to be set up for handling the problem’. Crucially, he drew a distinction between expelled and transferred populations on the one hand, and Displaced Persons and

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refugees on the other, although acknowledging the desirability of harmonising the two areas ‘so as to avoid overlapping and conflicts’: Clearly it cannot be the same machinery, since humanitarian reasons will govern the treatment of refugees and displaced populations, whereas political motives must govern the treatment of expelled or transferred populations.58 It was clear then that by drawing such distinctions, the impulse for assisting Displaced Persons and refugees seeking to leave Germany and to return or to be repatriated to their former homes would be prioritised on humanitarian grounds, whereas incoming Germans – the expelled and the transferred – would be a largely unwanted but necessary outcome of politically expedient measures to help promote post-war stability. As the Schleswig-Holstein case graphically shows, such ‘overlapping’ became inevitable as these different ‘interest groups’, British military and civilian staff in Germany, and a dramatically swollen population all competed for scarce supplies of food, medicine and shelter. On the one hand, British officials feared the Russians, Poles or Czechs might take the law into their own hands and expel Germans ‘inhumanely’, but they appeared to acknowledge openly there was little at this stage they could say – nor would they be prepared to argue forcefully on German civilians’ behalf – in order to mitigate this likely outcome at the time of a peace settlement. In this way, the May 1944 proposals were deliberately couched as a work in progress. Britain did not wish itself or its allies to be tied into assuming responsibility for the solution of the many challenging obstacles, judging it ‘sufficient’ to leave it ‘to the nations concerned, or to any international agency which may be in charge of organising the transfer, to work out the details’.59 Here too was an acute reminder of the enormous financial price that would have to be paid by the victors as well as the vanquished. As Troutbeck, the ICTGP chair, concluded in the report’s recommendations, ‘The United Nations should accept the diminution of Germany’s capacity to make reparation which the transfers would entail.’60 Britain, wishing to reserve its position on the rectification of borders and population ‘adjustments’, was allowing itself to become a hostage to fortune on several fronts. Given the mounting doubts and despite many official misgivings as to the report’s viability, there was nonetheless a lack of decisive opposition

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within Britain’s policy-making unit on principle alone to the likely negative outcomes for German civilians resulting from Allied political expediency. As Frank points out in his analysis of Churchill’s speech on Poland to the Commons on 15 December 1944, ‘when large-scale annexations of territory and populations needed to be sold to the British public, the London Poles, the Dominions or Washington, there was boundless “confidence” in measures or parallels which played down the difficulties involved’.61 At Yalta, Churchill admitted to Stalin that substantial British public opinion was ‘shocked at the idea of moving millions of people by force’. Crucially though, he acknowledged that ‘moving six million Germans . . . might be managed, subject to the moral question, which he [Churchill] had to settle with his own people’.62 In fact, since October 1944, vast numbers had already fled the Soviet army’s westward advance, giving credence to Stalin’s claims that no Germans were to be found in these areas, ‘as they had all run away’.63 If by early 1945 there was growing consensus that there were limits to what the transfer policy could successfully achieve in practice, its true legacy was that by the time it came to put its moral values and principles to the test, there was still no clear definition of where these acceptable limits lay. As victory approached, these debates subsided, with the Allies content to leave issues hitherto considered to have been of prime importance to be concluded at the ‘Terminal’ peace settlement, an unfortunate choice of name for the Potsdam Conference that rubber-stamped the fate of so many more expellees. Perhaps after all, an element of ‘victor’s justice’ had allowed for such a compromise to take root among the Allies. As Timothy Garton Ash acknowledged regarding the decisions on the Oder-Neisse revisions: ‘It is of course true that the Western allies wished to punish . . . Germany – and above all Prussia, the imagined heart of darkness.’64 It will be shown that this was in fact the case, and that clear links can be established between the retreat on principles of justice and fair play and how this found expression in other forms of retribution exacted on Germany.

Victors’ justice: the background to Hamburg 1943 and its aftermath To expand on the central proposition that Britain saw itself in the vanguard of a mission to civilise Germany, apparent tensions and underlying contradictions between Britain’s war aims and its responsibilities as a victorious occupying power need to be understood. Two short case-studies

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help to frame this discussion. Firstly, an assessment is needed of why the strategy to bomb Hamburg in July and August 1943 took little account of the likely losses it would inflict on German civilians, and how Hamburg should be seen in the context of the wider forced migrant issue. Secondly, it is necessary to explain why the continuation of military trials following Nuremberg prolonged and exacerbated the uneasy atmosphere between the occupiers and occupied. Germans saw this as a process of retributive justice that arguably fuelled a mutual belief that victors and conquered were to be regarded as two breeds apart. This served as an ever-present reminder that all the German people were somehow still on trial for the crimes and misdemeanours committed by those already punished. Evaluating different degrees of retributive intent behind individual Allies’ occupation policies is problematic, although the European Allies’ wartime sacrifices tempered any likely epidemic of charitable post-war sentiment towards Germany among foreign policy-makers. British policy was also framed by collective memories of suffering at the hands of German military aggression symbolised by the traumas of Dunkirk and the air attacks on mainland Britain. The Blitz certainly helped to shape an enduring public awareness and acceptance that retaliation in kind by British bombers was not only a prerequisite in trying to defeat Germany, and an equitable form of self-defence, it was also morally legitimated retribution or a just response in extreme circumstances – and the British prided themselves on fairness. Moreover, for many, the ends justified the means, and any public approval for retaliation would surely have helped its other advocates within Parliament and the Air Ministry to argue in its defence as the policy gradually developed, as illustrated by a brief examination of relevant public opinion reports. Press coverage of the London Blitz, which sought to maintain public spirits by encouraging cheerfulness under fire while celebrating the very real heroism and survival instinct of many Londoners, also fired the imagination of the other British towns suffering from the bombings, and who now ‘had to react with equal fortitude, resolution and courage’,65 in other words to maintain and continue to demonstrate virtues constructed as integral to Britain’s self-image. The attacks on British civilians and their way of life helped fuel a growing collective sense of moral capital that legitimated the ensuing ‘reprisal campaign’. Mass-Observation [hereafter M-O] made a ‘more qualitative and crosssectional assessment’ of popular opinion in order to lend some balance to the public reactions calling for reprisals. Following visits by M-O units

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to most of the major ‘blitz-towns’, part of an eight-month-long study, units ‘regularly found the demand for vengeance coming, not from those who had suffered or seen suffering, but from those who had acquired their knowledge at second hand’.66 Tom Harrisson, just returned from installing one such unit in Coventry, recalled reactions to an item following the main evening news, in effect a ‘post-mortem on the reprisals issue’ over the bombing of Coventry. He described how, in the aftermath of the city’s bombing on 14 November 1940: The press and newsreel uproar began. The immediate assumption of journalists and commentators was that the people of Coventry were screaming for the same thing to be done back on Germany . . . ‘This evenings [sic] best news of the war in the air – particularly for the people of Coventry – is that squadrons of British bombers last night made a terrific raid on the city of Hamburg!’67 By April 1941, a Gallup poll found that 53 per cent of Britons would approve if the RAF adopted a policy of bombing Germany’s civilian population; 38 per cent disapproved and 9 per cent were undecided.68 This then would be bombing in the name of the people. Paradoxically, the most intriguing statistics are in the regional variations, showing that those who lived in heavily blitzed areas were: Noticeably less in favour of reprisal bombing, than those in the areas which have escaped the worst of the raids on this country . . . demand for indiscriminate revenge was thus . . . predominantly a demand for revenge of others who had suffered.69 In 1942, a new sample of Britons’ attitudes towards the German people described 20 per cent as ‘very antagonistic’. This covered ‘generalised hatred, belief in retribution, in punishment of the whole nation, and feelings that the German people were not only to blame, but incurable’. There was no statute of limitations on what was meant by ‘retribution’. Half of this group admitted the war had changed their attitude. The welldocumented survey elicited such responses as: ‘I have deep and real hatred of the German people, and think the best German is a dead one’, or: I used to think that the German people weren’t altogether to blame for the war . . . but since the war started I have decided that

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any feelings of pity I might have for them as people must be overruled . . . it would be best for us to exterminate every German, even children of school age.70 Whilst there is no evidence to suggest that these polls in any way shaped British policy, their findings would have left the War Cabinet in little doubt that many Britons would support whatever means the government chose to defeat its arch-enemy. Lord Cherwell’s papers [Frederick Lindemann] reveal much of the earlier War Cabinet thinking about the advantages of area bombing in demoralising the German nation and thus weakening its leaders’ resolve. The impact of bombing on civilians and morale during the Blitz would have been known to the War Cabinet from the government-commissioned reports by Mass-Observation.71 This aspect of Britain’s bombing policy was used as a justification by its proponents in trying to bring as early an end to the war in Europe as possible. Cherwell wrote to Churchill in March 1942 suggesting ‘a simple method’ of estimating what could be achieved by bombing Germany, basing his calculations on the assumption that the RAF could concentrate half of its bombs ‘into built-up areas’: In 1938 over 22 million Germans lived in 58 towns of over 100,000 inhabitants, which, with modern equipment should be easy to find and hit . . . If even half the total load of 10,000 bombers were dropped on the built-up areas of these 58 German towns the great majority of their inhabitants (about one-third of the German population) would be turned out of house and home. Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it more than having their friends or even relatives killed.72 This minute was written the day after the first demonstration of Britain’s new strategy of ‘area bombing’ marked by the RAF’s first night attacks on the historic Schleswig-Holstein city of Lübeck73 (see Fig. 4), soon followed by the first British ‘1000 bomber raids’ that hit various densely populated cities by night, including Cologne, Bremen and Essen.74 The Casablanca Conference that took place 14–23 January 1943 significantly established the basis for US involvement in the air war. The joint British and USA Casablanca Directive following the Conference cited the primary objective as ‘the progressive destruction and dislocation of the

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Figure 4. RAF Damage assessment Sortie following bombing of Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein, 12 April 1942. Photograph shows areas of total destruction amounting to 45–50 per cent of the city, excluding the suburbs. Among important buildings destroyed or severely damaged, was the cathedral, museum and a number of churches. Courtesy of TNA UK, AIR 34/745.

German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened’.75 For present purposes, the significance of the Directive lies in its silence on how the Combined Bomber Offensive was to be conducted, for example the absence of any rules of engagement with regard to the likely effect on Germany’s city-dwellers.76 Its parameters were therefore open to interpretation – and this is what happened – not just between the Directive’s co-signatories but also within

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Whitehall, the Air Ministry and Bomber Command. Sir Arthur Harris evaluated the results of the Conference as having broken down any last moral restraints, thereby giving him a completely free hand in the bombing war.77 Thus Britain was able to sidestep politically the prospect of having to handle awkward moral questions by justifying instead the general bombing of city areas to attack the morale of the German people in an effort to induce their capitulation, and thereby to shorten hostilities (see Fig. 5). The RAF attack on Essen on 5 March 1943 not only marked the start of the ‘Battle of the Ruhr’, it prompted a further minute from Cherwell: ‘For the first time, we have beaten the total tonnage of bombs believed to have been dropped by the Germans on this country in day and night bombing in September 1940.’78 This was far more than formal acknowledgement of the ‘outstanding success’ the official historians referred to regarding the Lübeck attacks the previous March.79 This statement seems as unambiguous in its approval of the RAF having stood up to German air power competitively as it shows Cherwell’s disregard for where the ‘total tonnage’ may have hit. That Cherwell sent a follow-up minute to Churchill a week later also suggests his expectation of a positive response to this news from the Prime Minister.80 In other words, the emphasis was on quantity of bombs

Figure 5. Hannover Opera House, 1945. Damage to the Opera House is highlighted at the top of image by British officials. Courtesy of TNA UK, CN 15-2.

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or their saturation, with no reference to targeting. Bomber Command did not ‘possess the necessary precision to destroy pinpoint targets . . . the greater the success of the general area campaign, the more difficult it became to contemplate any substantial diversion from it’, particularly in view of the ‘positive’ results since the start of the Battle of the Ruhr. By November 1943, ‘the chances of decisive success for the general area offensive had acquired their most promising aspect’.81 Britain had itself suffered bombardment, and this may explain why they held a more radical position than the Americans on suitable bombing targets; significantly, a key House of Lords debate on bombing policy took place in February 1944, with the British bombing offensive on German towns showing no sign of abating. The bare statistics alone on tonnages of bombs dropped highlight the lead role taken by the British up to the end of 1944, after which the payloads were more evenly split with the Americans.82 Between November 1944 and the end of January 1945, the Air Ministry and Bomber Command repeatedly clashed over the most effective strategies to ensure faster German capitulation. This was recognition at policy-making level of the political sensitivity of certain unpalatable truths about bombing and the need to keep public opinion supportive of government policy. At best, the tone of these exchanges can be characterised as no more than civil, at worst, tense, self-justifying and accusatory.83 In reality, use of the terms ‘precision’ and ‘area’ during wartime discussions became hotly contested arguments over semantics. As one government adviser later put it: In the last six months or so the bombing had got right out of hand. The great weapon was in action and no one could stop it and the destruction went on and on . . . In the end there was no discrimination . . . if the aircraft were available and the target was asked for [sic] it got it.84 Such preoccupation with terminology ‘concealed’ that in practice, and despite the pleas for moderation from the wings by George Bell and others, there was little chance the established ‘successes’ of area bombing would or even could ever be suitably recalibrated to fit what was essentially a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon Germany into submission. A pamphlet issued by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) to the British military, part of their preparation for the end of hostilities, shows that by early 1944, in the wake of a sustained escalation in area bombing

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over recent months, some were in a state of denial over acknowledging any possibility that Britain, in its prosecution of the air war, could be failing to uphold the self-proclaimed standards of propriety in warfare it regularly accused Germany of flouting: ‘What would you say to a German who asked . . . ?’ You could then go on to consider how your group would answer these questions, if they were asked by a German civilian (a) ‘Why did you make war against women and children and cultural monuments from six miles up?’ What would your group say to this German? Would they ask him on what grounds he makes this monstrous assertion? Has he ever seen . . . the Focke-Wulf plant at Marienburg, bombed, with devastating precision, by the Americans? Or the Krupps works at Essen?85 This passage also reveals Britain’s sensitivities and defensiveness in seeking to downplay its own role in relation to the ‘successes’ of the American air attacks. Whilst there is much consensus over Parker’s view that ‘Superior resources won the war: the victors had greater numbers of men and women and made more weapons’,86 this wider perspective needs to be set alongside Overy’s assessment of bombing as ‘The Means to Victory’. He concludes that despite the arguments over morality or operational effectiveness, the air offensive proved a decisive element in the ultimate Allied victory,87 but this view, over which there is also substantial agreement, conceals an inherent contradiction: there was logic to Britain’s bombing policy being driven by the primacy of securing victory, but the greater Bomber Command’s successes grew, the more radicalised and thus less discriminating it became in targeting centres of German population (see Fig. 6). And yet military advisers and the government increasingly realised that Germany would eventually capitulate, as documents dated 1942–5 outlining the planned occupation demonstrate. Two days after the Dresden attacks in February 1945, a report on ‘Bombing Accuracy’ was written, bringing together data on German cities covering the period 1941–4, ‘which have provided the only targets consistently attacked throughout the war’, as the basis for comparison. It is worth recalling its introductory rationale: Research carried out in a hurry during war-time for strictly operational purposes, has paid little attention to the needs of anybody

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Figure 6. RAF Target Information Damage plot, Hamburg, July/August 1943. The areas of destruction and damage are darker in colour. Courtesy of TNA UK, AIR 34/615.

making rough historical comparisons at a later date. Consequently several difficulties have arisen . . . samples had tended to be rather small, evidence does not tie together properly . . . attacks which went completely astray are not included so that this note is confined to attacks coming within the gradually changing definition of ‘successful’.88 It suggests that the improvement in accuracy between 1941 when half the bomb tonnage fell within a radius of 7¾ miles on all German targets, to the end of 1943 when this radius was reduced to about two miles, represents an ‘improvement in accuracy of attacks on German cities . . . of the order of 15 times’. Two conclusions can be drawn: first, that such a positive interpretation of bald statistics would have been helpful to a government that, if re-elected, might hope to maintain public support for its policy towards Germany by demonstrating to its critics, if necessary, its efforts during wartime to achieve greater accuracy in the bombing of targets, the cause of so many civilian deaths and population displacements. Second, such a generalised presentation of the ‘facts’ could also serve to show how the important contribution of the bombing campaign

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in securing victory had been achieved with the minimum of casualties. Harris’s comments below on the ‘humane’ methods used on Hamburg are therefore highly significant. The bombing of Hamburg thus has to be seen in the context of earlier escalation and radicalisation of the wider bombing campaign on Germany – it was certainly one of its catalysts. Cherwell was sent a progress report from Harris’s Intelligence Department of the Bomber Offensive. It responded that it was not possible ‘to dogmatise on the degree of destruction necessary to cause the enemy to capitulate’, but was in little doubt that these conditions would be satisfied by the destruction of 40–50 per cent of the ‘principal German towns’.89 Hamburg was one of 20 cities and towns described by Harris as ‘Virtually destroyed’, the level of devastation making these areas ‘a liability to the total German war effort vastly in excess of any assets remaining’ (see Fig. 7). This category contrasted with a further 19 urban areas ‘Seriously damaged’, signifying a

Figure 7. ‘Bomber Command Plans and Drawings – Accuracy of bombing of German cities (Devastation of German Cities)’, October 1945. Note that the devastation to Hamburg exceeded other German cities by a ratio of 3:1. Courtesy of TNA UK, AIR 16/487.

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level of destruction ‘greater than anything we have experienced’.90 Three points can be made: first, Harris’s terminology is indicative of the prioritisation in eliminating any military potential that could later be used against the Allies. Second, it reflects the emphasis on structures without any reference to people. And third, success from a British military and political perspective may also be defined in terms of the propaganda boost by announcing damage levels in excess of those perpetrated on English cities and towns. As has been argued, whilst a policy of retribution per se is not explicit in the documents covering area bombing, it certainly cannot be excluded as a motivational factor behind its execution. Harris’s own summary in 1947 of the Hamburg mission was somewhat downbeat: In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a comparatively humane method . . . the point is often made that bombing is specially wicked because it causes casualties among civilians. This is true, but then all wars have caused casualties among civilians.91 Although Harris believed that bombing was indeed a more humane method, part of a strategy that planners hoped would wear down German resistance more speedily and thus bring the war to a swifter conclusion, this was nevertheless a disarmingly candid assessment of how the necessity to pursue military objectives overrode humanitarian considerations. On 3 May 1945, during a British aerial attack intended to prevent German forces from retreating across the Baltic, two ships, the Cap Arcona and Thielbek, anchored off the coast at Neustadt in Lübeck Bay with over 9,000 prisoners from Neuengamme Concentration Camp near Hamburg crammed into the ships’ holds, were bombed and caught fire. Nearly 7,000 people burned, drowned or were shot as they tried to save themselves. Only 450 survived92 (see Fig. 8), posing profound questions about how bombing constituted a humane method of killing people, and what might be the ‘acceptable’ levels of civilian casualties. The euphemistic and ill-defined use of ‘humane’ is interesting: it evokes the same kind of nebulous language that foreshadowed the ‘orderly and humane’ methods called for at Potsdam. Neillands suggests 59 per cent of his not ‘accurately computed’ estimate of 46,000 dead were women and children, concluding: ‘It was by any standard, a horrific event – hard to justify, terrible to contemplate in later, peaceful years. And yet, at the time, in the context of total war, it may almost have achieved its purpose.’93 Cherwell’s biographer admits controversy still persists concerning the overall justification for the area

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Figure 8. Inmates in Neuengamme Concentration Camp, June 1944. This photograph shows prisoners and slave labourers packing wood shavings; 7,000 of the 9,000 who left the camp on 2 May died on 3 May after a British aerial attack on two German ships in Lübeck Bay. Courtesy of TNA UK, WO 309/871.

bombing policy, partly because it ‘did not achieve the objectives that were originally expected of it – the collapse of German morale and of war production’.94 Middlebrook showed that in some ways area bombing ‘was a three-year period of deceit practised upon the British public and on world opinion’. He added: The deceit lay in the concealment of the fact that the areas being most heavily bombed were nearly always either city centres or densely populated residential areas, which rarely contained any industry.95 This book does not revisit how or why Harris’s reputation, in particular, suffered in the wake of widespread criticism of the so-called excesses of the bombing attacks, exemplified at Dresden, with which his name has become inextricably associated. Despite assurances from his great friend Sir Maurice Dean that his personal reputation was ‘firmly established’ in the Webster and Frankland account of the 25 offensive, Harris was immovably opposed to the suggestion that Frankland should write his

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biography, despite the historian’s positive summing up of the decisive contribution made by Bomber Command to victory, and even though such a monograph would have enabled Harris to rectify certain acknowledged errors, for example, that Bomber Command was not in all respects ready for war on 3 September 1939. Harris cared deeply ‘for the impression given to the country at large & to the relatives of those that did not survive . . . that their efforts & sacrifice were in vain. That I will never forgive’96 (see Fig. 9). The fact remains that the area bombing policy was overall Air Ministry policy, sanctioned and encouraged by the government, as the Cherwell correspondence shows. The decision to embark upon the bombing offensive was taken long before the Cherwell minute was issued, and although Sir Henry Tizard and others criticised Cherwell for the rationale of his March 1942 minute, Tizard, Cherwell’s ‘sworn enemy in the arena of government science’,97 ‘did not fundamentally disagree with the policy of area bombing’.98 Therefore the deceit of concealment to which Middlebrook refers – one can call it hypocrisy – cannot really be levelled at Harris. On the contrary, he was quite open and honest about what took place. In the wake of criticisms of air strikes on Hamburg, Dresden and other urban German targets, those unwilling to discuss or justify the rationale for the scale and intended impact of these attacks could deflect by their silence much of the opprobrium retrospectively directed at the policy onto the

Figure 9. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris at his desk, summer 1943. Courtesy of TNA UK, INF 2/43.

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individual still perceived by many, if erroneously, as its principal architect. For example, Churchill assured Stalin at their meeting in August 1942 that Britain regarded German civilian morale ‘as a military target’. Britain, he said, ‘hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city’.99 However, Churchill when drafting his post-war memoirs and with his still glowing reputation as a war leader to maintain, removed from both The Hinge of Fate and Closing the Ring any reference to this meeting and to the other contemporary documents that show the targeting of civilians. German propaganda depicted RAF pilots as Terrorflieger, making a specific link between the bombing of residential districts to induce a collapse in civilian morale and how bombing fanned a sense of terror amongst the population.100 Paradoxically, if one strategic aim behind the firebombing of Hamburg was to crack German morale, the prolonged attacks must be seen as a failure. Those citizens not forced to flee their homes managed to rally once more, but their overall morale did not crack.101 In this way, the people of Hamburg demonstrated many of the self-same survival qualities, something of their own version of the ‘Blitz spirit’ so deeply etched into British memory.102 By contrast, many of the survivors uprooted by the Hamburg firestorms had been separated from other family members (see Fig. 10), were unable to return to their homes within a reasonable period of time, and faced further daunting challenges.

Figure 10. Surveying the remains of a city, Hamburg, 1945. Photo: High Command Royal Norwegian Forces II Dept. Courtesy of TNA UK, AIR 34/615.

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Chief amongst their new concerns was the worry of how to rebuild their lives in a new rural environment in neighbouring Schleswig-Holstein that must have seemed quite remote from their everyday experiences of urban life, and where they might find it hard to get employment, might encounter difficult living conditions, or could be rejected by or face disapproval from the indigenous German population (Einheimische).103 This was the evacuees’ fate, mirroring many of the problems expellees faced in trying to integrate into their new host environment, as we shall see. On 26 and 27 July 1943, 47,000 of the 250,000 already made homeless filled 47 special trains taking them to the surrounding areas in Schleswig-Holstein (SH). Subsequent air attacks made further train transports impossible.104 By September 1943, Hamburg accounted for 30 per cent of the total of evacuees resettled away from the aerial war zones of Hamburg, Berlin and the Ruhr.105 By 1 April 1947, of SH’s share of 47 people out of every 100 ‘uprooted’ (evacuees, refugees and Displaced Persons), its share of evacuees stood at 18 per cent, significantly higher than any of the other Western Länder. Many had gone to the cities of Kiel and Lübeck, and so the geographical proximity of Schleswig-Holstein to Hamburg played ‘a decisive role’.106 Others had gone to rural areas further afield such as Eiderstedt, giving rise to many of the problems – such as housing space and food rationing – that would later also be faced by post-war German administrators.107 The numbers significantly added to the estimated 1 million plus people who had poured into SH by May 1945.108 Between May 1945 and the end of October 1946, 344,000 people were moved to Hamburg, of whom 201,000 were evacuees and returning soldiers.109 Nonetheless, in November 1948, at least 92,000 evacuees remained in Schleswig-Holstein. Damm, the Landesminister, suggested to Hamburg’s mayor that as its Senate was committed to taking back 10,000 evacuees from Berlin, they were duty-bound to match this number from their neighbours in SH who had already absorbed such high numbers.110 This was another of the many problems German refugee authorities continued to face in an overpopulated SH after 1946 in trying to achieve a more equitable redistribution of their share of refugees, expellees and evacuees within the other zones of occupation. This did not go as smoothly as the situation demanded, as is seen in the case-study in Chapter 5 that evaluates the British authorities’ role in trying to broker a deal. This connection between the events of summer 1943 and the events of more than five years later makes the case for seeing the debates over the civilian bombings in closer parallel with policies that led to the flight and

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expulsion of ethnic German populations. While it would be mistaken to conflate the two issues, this methodology may help historians construct a more comprehensive paradigm of the communality of civilian suffering, and to show that one type of suffering – losing members of family and one’s home through bombing – may not be of a different order of magnitude from another type: loss of life or of one’s home as an expellee. Often those concerned have simply been categorised as ‘victims’ of war, and yet these two types of suffering – moral questions that go to the heart of policy-making – have in the main been treated as discrete entities by historians. In this sense, wartime and occupation policies become interrelated. As has been shown, a common link can be established between the intent, fully acknowledged by policy-makers, that lay behind British attitudes to the ‘transfer’ of the German populations, despite all the protestations and misgivings about its feasibility, and the single-minded pursuit of what Sebald called ‘the war of annihilation’111 in the air bombing campaign, not publicly acknowledged as such. Both policies factored in the awareness that there would be heavy losses of non-combatant lives. The transfers and bombings anticipated a further facet to this rubric – punishment of the guilty parties.

Victors’ justice: Nuremberg and its aftermath By mid-1943, military pamphlets asked: ‘What Would You Do with the War Criminals?’ ‘‘Off with their heads!” said the Queen in Alice in Wonderland. But whose head? And on what charge?’112 Panaceas for Germany’s rehabilitation borrowed metaphors redolent of atrocities purged by the British, such as the Ravensbrück trial:113 Granted that . . . the German nation is subjected to a drastic surgical operation – then . . . the slow experiment of inculcating democracy in Germany may be commenced. But the sine qua non is the surgical operation which must be as thorough and free from false sentiment as are the surgeon and his knife.114 Another juridical conundrum was the ‘Subordinate Official’, and the ‘Generals’ or the ‘German High Command’; both unearthed a further problem of moral relativism: But they will have a ready defence . . . They would turn round on us and bring up the bombing of the German cities. Do we regard

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the head of Bomber Command as a war criminal? There is a retort to be made to the generals; for we cannot allow them to get away so easily with their alibi . . . It is quite true, as they plead, that this war is different from any previous war in its relation to the civil population . . . It is also true that these new conditions of warfare have driven a cart and horse through the rules . . . for the proper conduct of war. But this does not alter that fact that such rules exist and ought to be observed . . . first, in the letter, then in the spirit. We ourselves have been most scrupulous in this respect. The answer to the generals is that ‘total war’ does not excuse deliberate brutality. If the rules do not fit the new conditions, it is their duty, as it is ours also, not to sink to a bestial level but to maintain a sense of decency and to apply it to present circumstances.115 This suggested a common acceptance that the old ‘rules’ for what constituted ‘proper conduct’ no longer existed. However new rules had not yet been codified. Moreover, with no clear definitions of acceptable limits it was problematic for Britain to insist that they had observed ‘scrupulously’ both the letter and the spirit of such rules. As might be inferred from this, some knew that indicting Göring as head of the Luftwaffe for its attacks on Britain might invite comparisons, and that Harris’s role as head of Bomber Command might justify judgement by the same standards. Others, seeking to place British conduct outside such considerations countered this with ‘it was the Luftwaffe which initiated the bombing of cities’.116 Last, how was it possible to define a ‘bestial level’? The Nuremberg Charter thus became a convenient benchmark to quantify and relativise German crimes. The Allies were at liberty to form judgements without any risk they would be held accountable for failing to observe those self-same standards for which Germany was indicted – although Britain ultimately had a ready-made escape clause – the victor’s prerogative to act as judge and jury. Following the Nuremberg verdicts, the Public Opinion Research Service [hereinafter PORS] produced a special report gauging the British public’s reaction: two weeks after the pronouncements, the ‘sensation’ had already worn off as other matters such as the elections drove the trials into the background. But as people reflected on the entire proceedings, further reaction patterns emerged: disapproval at the sentences being carried out by hanging instead of shooting, and a growing body of opinion that felt:

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If the Nuremberg trial is to be an act of justice and not one of mere revenge carried out by the might victor against the helpless and beaten enemy, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by members of the victorious nations too should now be tried. In this connection, many people expressed doubt as to the practicability of the high ideals of international justice set out in the Charter of the Nuremberg court.117 Nor would British prestige have been enhanced in Germany or in Britain had earlier proposals to opt for a faster, more economical method of executing convicted prisoners other than by judicial hanging had become common knowledge. By September 1945, the British Commander-inChief (C-in-C) was expected to make a final decision on using hanging as the preferred method to shooting. However, according to one British expert, this ‘was not practicable at present in Germany’. Hanging required ‘at least 4 hours to be ready’ for the next execution. He observed: ‘In view of the considerable number of executions which may have to take place, this compares very unfavourably to the method of execution by guillotine which (I can state from a check made) is exactly 4 minutes.’ The rate of executions was closely linked to the strain on the executioner: ‘several done rapidly would undoubtedly be less strain than two a day over a considerable period.’ There was the added risk of ‘an error of judgement’ necessitating going through the entire proceedings afresh: The fact that the condemned were Nazi criminals could have no ameliorating effect on the officer concerned and he would be unlikely to face a further execution as a witness . . . the correct and only alternative to death by shooting is the guillotine. Death by decapitation cannot be described as un-British; the guillotine is merely an instrument which ensures that decapitation is effected instantaneously at one blow.118 It was also pointed out ‘executioners [are] available and others could be easily trained at short notice’. The availability of ‘qualified’ Germans compared favourably with Britain’s complement of only one in whom Colonel Paton Walsh had ‘complete confidence’, showing sensitivity in military circles that putting Nazi war criminals to death carried a subtext of exercising judicial revenge rather than the simple administration of justice. The British, by later opting for judicial hanging, may have been

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aware of the public relations pitfalls of using an ‘un-British’ method used extensively by the Nazis on their own people, even if there was the attraction of seconding German labour to execute the orders at their behest. This encapsulates one irony of the Allies adopting a higher morality in their subsequent role as ‘managers’ of the occupation. According to Mass-Observation respondents, there was a risk the Allies generally – and Britain in particular – would be seen to be applying double standards and the possibility that policy towards Germany might pander to the more extreme reactions to the verdicts. Only one in ten was prepared to wait for the verdicts before deciding who was guilty or innocent; 60 per cent of men and 80 per cent of women were convinced ‘everybody on trial [is] automatically guilty’, with half of the ‘small sample’ interviewed ‘spontaneously’ suggesting methods of execution, shooting being the favoured option. A common refrain was: But there was no earthly need for all this fuss anyway because I think they are all guilty anyway. Just think what the Germans would have done is [sic] they had caught Churchill and all our guys, well they would never have behaved like we are doing now, would they? . . . If I could choose I would shoot the lot of them.119 Some proudly aligned the ‘good points’ of Britain with its gold standard justice system, others, perhaps anticipating Nuremberg’s later consequences, thought the trials ‘pointless and [an] unnecessary drain on the taxpayer’s pocket’.120 Those who advocated the need for England to uphold its reputation for fair play accorded with Gollancz’s verdict that Nuremberg’s most serious consequence was ‘the lowering of the prestige of the Western democracies and Britain in particular in the eyes of the Germans. Britain has a reputation for dignity where the law is concerned.’121 He alluded to how the sentences were carried out, the ‘illconceived’ policy and public relations ‘ineptitude’ permitting a press circus to detail voyeuristically the condemned’s final hours – for example, the menu for their last meal – a practice still resonating uncomfortably in today’s supposedly ‘reformed’ international model of respect for human rights. Notable about Gollancz’s reference to ‘prestige’ was the Allies’ need to establish a balance between firmness and fairness, going to the heart of choices Britain needed to make in controlling Germany as occupiers. The PORS report revealed Britain’s sensitivity to German public opinion on the verdicts and sentences. A 24-year-old nurse touched a nerve not just in

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Germany but Britain: ‘Why are the British so anxious to know what we Germans think about the trial? Because they themselves are not feeling too happy about it.’ A 28-year-old tradesman said: ‘Most Germans have during the last year been taught such peculiar lesson[s] by the victorious powers that they cannot but consider the condemnation of Germans only as unjust and one-sided.’122 Whilst demonstrating to the watching world and in particular the German population that crimes would not go unpunished, in many Germans’ minds Nuremberg failed to establish that outstanding accounts had been settled and that the past could now be put behind them enabling them to rebuild their lives. Prolonging the trials until 1949, three years after the Cabinet’s decision to end them,123 put paid to such hopes. After the promulgation of the Basic Law on 23 May 1949, with Article 102 abolishing the imposition of the death penalty by German courts, British CCG courts still retained the right to use the maximum sanction on behalf of their occupation authorities.124 The psychological threat of possible prosecution for wartime crimes and those committed under British occupation should not be underestimated; Germans knew the example made of 22 of its leading figures could not atone in Allied minds for the many more ‘criminals’ still to be prosecuted, or allay suspicions that an irredentist hard core remained spread within a large body of the German population within two factions. The British view was that a largely ill-defined section of Germany’s population was intent on attempting a neo-Nazi revival, as were another military-led group of German generals whose sole purpose was ‘to preserve or reconstitute the officer caste’. The ‘German Generals’, seen as synonymous with Prussian militarism, were one of ‘two main elements in German life which must be absolutely destroyed’.125 But the FO always suspected that the generals would ‘repudiate Hitler and offer their co-operation in the tasks of occupation. Nor are we surprised that they are doing so “in the spirit of Christian culture.”’126 This apparent divergence of views between those fearing resurgent pro-Nazi sentiments, and the FO’s reaction to German military willingness to cooperate with British occupation rule, suggests they feared that such offers concealed more sinister ulterior motives. Those worries, foreseen in occupation planners’ growing realisation of the unlimited scope of further trials, could not be substantiated. It is interesting that the FO interpreted the generals’ ‘offer’ with such scepticism. Decisions were being taken to establish a legal framework to secure convictions for war criminals, and so German appeals for mutual

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understanding of the values of ‘Christian culture’ were unlikely to find much sympathy. Part of the International Military Tribunal’s [hereinafter IMT] case rested on proving German actions had overstepped acceptable moral standards of Western civilisation in part prescribed by Britain as its self-proclaimed leader. This not only raises problems of moral relativism when comparing ‘standards of behaviour’ in armed conflict, but in how we now debate these within a post-Historikerstreit paradigm where, since 2000, most of the ‘stereotypical profiles’ about ‘victims’ have shifted away from Holocaust suffering towards civilian expellees, the bombing of German cities, and more recently, to ‘war children and their mothers’.127 Both the earlier stereotyping and relativising of human suffering within ill-defined population groups and an unhelpful paradigm of ‘perpetrators and victims’ have also diverted attention from other examples. One such high-profile case was the tortuous process following Britain’s belated agreement to bow to American pressure to prosecute three Field Marshals in British custody for war crimes – Erich von Manstein, aged 61, Gerd von Rundstedt, aged 73 and Walter von Brauchitsch, aged 67, as well as Colonel-General Adolf Strauss, aged 68.128 This decision was made despite IMT’s acquittal of the German General Staff and High Command. The men were held captive for several years before the British Cabinet decided to prosecute ‘as a matter of preserving good faith’ and despite growing public and official distaste in Britain for the trials of soldiers.129 The Cabinet took the line that a precedent had been set as those under their command had already been convicted and punished for offences ‘similar to those alleged against these four men’.130 This cut little ice with the growing cross-party opposition to British conduct towards the prisoners. One MP amongst many wanting to stop the proceedings viewed the decision as: ‘something which has, at last, really roused the people in this country to a sense of indecency . . . After all, the good will of the people in Germany is now of some importance to us.’ Continuing retribution, ‘a crowning piece of arrogant power of a conqueror’,131 could no longer be considered a legitimate132 or a pragmatic component of Britain’s role in German reconstruction. German morale reports compiled by the Lübeck (SH) police cite widespread antipathy over continuing the trials in such circumstances, one alluding to the ethics of ‘so-called war crimes trials’, whose prolongation was commonly perceived as a constant reminder of German guilt.133 Repeated references to refugee problems and attitudes towards the occupation, analysed later, were of particular interest to the British

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who suggested the Germans structure a series of questions to assess the public’s mood under headings such as ‘rumours and gossip’ (Gerüchte und Gerede*) on political and economic matters, with a section giving reasons for discontent, unrest and strikes.134 Another showed German and British sensitivities to the continuing war crimes trials: Former officers continue the whispering campaign denouncing the British insistence on placing former FM von M [Manstein] on trial . . . It is feared that the Foreign Office wants to try him for the sole reason of placating Polish demands and that his chances of being acquitted are very bad for the same reason.135 More outspoken critics of British military authorities’ treatment of those still in custody – Canon John Collins, Gollancz, Basil Liddell Hart and Stokes – wanted to send a deputation to see Stafford Cripps, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. If ‘fully convinced that a moral issue is at stake, he will give us the maximum assistance’.136 Cripps refused for, as it was not his department, Bevin ‘would be justly offended’,137 a neat use of protocol to sidestep an awkward situation. Liddell Hart wanted to approach Attlee directly as the press had ‘an extraordinary capacity for self-censorship where awkward issues are involved’.138 Nor did British military authorities distinguish themselves in the weeks before and days after von Brauchitsch’s death.139 German documents record his arrest, the search for evidence, and that he was denied essential medicines although seriously ill.140 Stokes complained of the ill-treatment of these held, such as the lack of an interpreter at the hospital, visiting restrictions and excessive delays in receiving letters due to censorship.141 The British Military Governor too had his concerns. Despite Hugh Dalton’s reassurance in October 1947 that his views would be considered in Cabinet, this was ignored following the generals’ return to Germany. Robertson was convinced that committing ‘these old men’ for trial would have ‘an exactly contrary effect in Germany from that which war crimes trials were instituted’. All sympathies would be for them and the trials ‘will turn them into martyrs’. Moreover, ‘these men are a spent force in Germany’.142 Bevin said that he had taken account of similar views in Cabinet, but could not defend a decision not to try ‘these senior officers’ when many of their subordinates had been tried and executed, as this would provoke ‘severe criticism’ in Britain and in Germany.143 The government line departed from most in the War Office who ‘would be glad

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to see these men “get off” because of the War Office’s sympathy of officers for officers’.144 One article typified opposition to the decision: It is repugnant to good sense and natural moral feeling for the conquerors to try the conquered. From this fundamental objection there is no escape . . . Who shall say when the power of the victorious allies to try Germans shall cease? The age of the accused, the fact that they have been held many years in prison, the lapse of time since the end of hostilities all make it possible for the British Government to call off the trials which assuredly the future will see as a black mark against British justice.145 A further serious issue was at stake – that of due process. Those determined that Britain should adhere to its standards of justice thought it was abusing its power. There was ‘something very shocking indeed about trying men at such a date, without giving them sufficient notice of the detailed charges to enable them to prepare a proper defence’,146 while labelling them ‘“war criminals” . . . is to make still another departure from the principles of British justice, which hold that a man is not guilty until he is found guilty’.147 The defendants were told a Commission would also hear evidence from Germans, many under sentence of death. German defence Counsel protested they had insufficient time to prepare and that Rules of Procedure promised by the military authorities had not been received.148 Attlee justified the delays saying the charges largely relied on affidavits from witnesses awaiting execution and admitted: ‘It is not always easy to obtain statements from such witnesses.’149 Stokes was appalled: The whole idea of holding men in custody under sentence of death for nine months in order that they should give evidence is quite revolting and I am sure I am expressing the views of millions of others when I say I wish you would stop the whole proceedings.150 Debates continued over the numbers awaiting trial on war crimes charges or crimes against humanity and the likely timescale for their completion.151 Shinwell, Secretary of State for War, was asked to abandon the trials owing to the forthcoming von Manstein case, delaying his trial to allow him sight of further documents allegedly still in American hands.152 By the end of June 1949 one of the four was dead and two had been released as medically unfit to stand trial, leaving von Manstein to

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face justice on 9 August,153 raising questions as to his chances of receiving a fair trial. With his ‘small capital’ confiscated he could not meet his legal expenses, and had to defend himself without British counsel, refused as there had been no such provision for other Germans tried as war criminals. It was thought a German defence team of two, already served with over 700 documents and struggling to acquaint themselves with a foreign legal process, would ‘prove wholly inadequate for the defence’, especially as the British were employing four of their own prosecutors. This was not in the spirit of the Geneva Convention safeguarding POWs’ rights to ‘the assistance of “qualified Counsel” in trials’. Gollancz, at pains not to trivialise the actions for which von Manstein was to be tried, argued that justice nonetheless had to be seen to be done: ‘the wickeder the actions, the more necessary, surely, that the accused should be given every opportunity of proving, if he can prove, that he is innocent’.154 This emphasis on proof of innocence further suggests there was already an unspoken presumption of guilt. Jowitt, the Lord Chancellor, replying on Attlee’s behalf, disagreed that only British counsel could defend Germans accused of war crimes and that an exception made in this case might lead to a false conclusion that those already sentenced had not received ‘their full measure of justice’. He proposed taking no further action, brushing aside any claims to the Geneva Convention by those alleged to have perpetrated war crimes in Germany.155 Stewart had already stated that war criminals remained outside its remit as they were either no longer POWs or the offences were not committed as POWs; this was therefore no bar to the proposed proceedings.156 Harold Macmillan was less interested in the generals’ guilt or innocence than ‘the spectacle of an aged German general being brought to trial four years after the total surrender of Germany’. This echoed the protests nine months earlier, ‘justice too long delayed is not true justice’.157 Churchill said the generals’ case should have been settled ‘within a year or two . . . but to go on dragging these things out is simply feeding all the forces against peaceful solution and against passing the sponge across the past, with opportunities for making up ill-will and bad feeling’.158 Distancing himself from the fiasco, Bevin justified government policy by pleading ignorance as to the reasons for the deferment, conceding that ‘the delay was very disturbing to the Foreign Office. I had to press for these generals to be brought to trial.’159 Von Manstein was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 18 years, but was released after four years on medical grounds, calling into

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question the proportionality of his original sentence tariff. In a neat ironic twist, he then served as a senior military adviser to the Adenauer government. By November 1949, of 230 persons convicted and sentenced to death by British military courts, 56 still awaited execution,160 five months after the Basic Law, the ‘Magna Carta of modern Germany’. 161 The hitherto admired ‘civilised’ British justice system was still out of step with a more humanitarian penal code enshrined in the new Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) constitution, seeking to consign to history the punitive extremes of 1933–49. But for the British in 1949 the war was not yet consigned to the past. As is explored in Chapter 7, issues over judicial due process, sentence tariffs and the treatment of war criminals remained causes of resentment in Germany, and increasingly controversial and politicised until the mid-1950s. Hamburg demonstrated Britain’s political indifference to distinguishing between strategic military objectives and non-combatant German civilians, many of whom became evacuees and added significantly to Schleswig-Holstein’s growing refugee population. Nuremberg showed how ultimate military victory, partly facilitated by Hamburg, and Germany’s unconditional surrender, did not license Britain to depart from its principles of fairness, justice and respect for human dignity in its further prosecutions of the ‘German Generals’. How those principles were observed showed that as military occupiers, they remained unaccountable for their actions despite the efforts of Gollancz, Collins, Stokes and others. The attenuated process also showed that by 1949, and the birth of the Federal Republic, Britain was not yet ready to forgive or forget its former enemy’s misdeeds, although there was a clear need to promote better British–German relations to help integrate the FRG within the new comity of nations, and to bolster the Western Alliance against Communist influence. Parliament talked at length to little effect, and whilst German and British public opinion offered a critique of British policy on prosecuting alleged war criminals, there were bigger issues to address, such as Germany’s economic recovery and Cold War politics. A belief in victors’ justice helped shape the character of British occupation policy and so the losers again, as after 1918, were the German people, and by extension, expellees and refugees. Britain planned to govern by indirect rule; what the Germans experienced was magnanimity and a generosity of spirit when it suited the British and a less forgiving, more robust style of authoritarian rule when it did not. As the next chapters explain, the instinct for more direct control became the more dominant of these narratives.

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A predisposition for control The ABCA military training booklets echo the familiar theme of Britain approaching occupation with a core precept that its mission should be a civilising presence. Thus German brutality is juxtaposed with British magnanimity with lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V: ‘there shall be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for’.1 In Shake Hands and be Friends?, the author conflates war with a hard-fought but fair game, the final handshakes a metaphor for a sportingly-conducted contest – values that Britain as the colonial power was proud to project as its own: ‘It is the singularity of the Englishman that after a game, or a battle, he likes to make friends with his opponents and talk their wars over, provided he has won’2 (see Fig. 11). Ivone Kirkpatrick speaking in Nuremberg with Göring about Britain’s strategic bombing campaign thought that it effectively shortened the war, but ‘we had only scraped home by a short head’3 – a horse-racing analogy rationalising mass destruction to mere winners and losers. But after the battle the occupier contemplated a quite different challenge: The German in occupation of a conquered country is notorious, and his brutalities in the conquered countries during this war are without parallel. The British attitude, on the other hand, is one of courtesy and restraint . . . The soldier must show scrupulous courtesy, scrupulous justice . . . He must be ready to establish order by

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Figure 11. Prisoners under guard during the operation to arrest members of the German government. This building was in Muivik, near Flensburg, SchleswigHolstein, where 12 ‘Grade 1’ prisoners were taken, including General Jodl, May 1945. Courtesy of Imperial War Museums, BU 6693.

his authority and not by force . . . He must be careful not to irritate unhealed wounds by arrogant behaviour, because that will foster hatred . . . He must try to show the Germans that the English possess a better philosophy of life than they do, [and] that kindness, courtesy and true appreciation, are not weaknesses but positive virtues.4 Whilst roll-calls of ‘commandments’ were laudable incantations to future Military Government officers and soldiers when the war in Europe was still far from won, calls for ‘courtesy and restraint’ did not prove always to be compatible within the pragmatic constraints of swiftly establishing

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the rule of military law 16 months later, after Germany’s unconditional surrender. There is little evidence of courtesy and restraint in the wording and forbidding visual style of the rash of posters publicly displayed in English and German promulgating the ensuing complex of military laws, ordinances and notices. These served to show German civilians that they would be subjected to a series of controls that were never less than exacting, sometimes harsh, and occasionally self-defeating. As a corpus of regulations they brooked no argument, emphasising responsibilities rather than rights. From late spring of 1945 daily life for many Germans felt more akin to martial law with military rule suggesting a far harder reality than Churchill’s more palatable sounding parliamentary statement might indicate: ‘In general it is our aim that Germans should administer their country in obedience to Allied directions. We have no intention of undertaking the burden of administering Germany ourselves.’5 This disparity between his statement and what actually happened was largely due to the administrative vacuum as there was as yet no newly formed and ratified German organisational infrastructure, and the reference to ‘in general’ suggests British officials knew the eventual handover of authority from occupier to the occupied would not be so straightforward. Sargent said as much to him when suggesting that Montgomery should be asked ‘to submit his early recommendations as to the kind of administration – centralised or local – the four Powers ought to work for in order to facilitate their task’. Churchill’s handwritten note informing Sargent that ‘The matter is urgent’, only pointed to the pressurised task ahead. Setting the parameters for democratisation was precisely the kind of major policy initiative that, for the FO, put the refugee question firmly into the background, especially as Britain wished to delay discussing and resolving outstanding related issues until Potsdam. This seems odd, for Military Government’s overriding objective was to restore stability to protect against the obvious forces of instability – ‘hunger, homelessness and hopelessness’.6 The refugee and expellee crisis should be set against this background, for if life was tough for the indigenous German population, these forced migrants – seen as outsiders and at the most marginalised extremes of the food chain – faced at best an uncertain reality, at worst a parlous existence. One consequence of the immediate transformation in Germany during this transitional period was the need for the Allies to annul Germany’s Third Reich legislation, already abrogated by Britain in December 1944.7 The new military legislation promulgated after May 1945 gave Britain sweeping powers. If Ordinance No. 8, ‘Regulation of Public Discussion

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and Other Public Activities’8 had not already prepared Germans for the highly cautious methods with which the British sought to exercise ‘indirect control’, Law No. 52, for example, ‘The Blocking and Control of Property’,9 gave Germans a sense that a further fundamental right – the right to one’s property – was being withdrawn. As we shall see in the final chapter, British powers under this law continued to be a source of friction for Germans well beyond 1949. It stated: ‘All property [is] subject to seizure of possession or title, direction, management, supervision or otherwise being taken into control by Military Government.’ This was a form of legalised theft, since the German state by its surrender officially ceased to exist on 8 May 1945, signifying that its citizens at a stroke could be deprived of certain basic protections and entitlements with no legal redress. Law No. 52, whose violation was punishable under Article VIII ‘by any lawful punishment including death’, decreed that such everyday possessions as housing, furniture, or particular foods and vehicles could be appropriated or confiscated without explanation, payment or compensation (see Fig. 12). Just taking one of many such examples, fresh eggs, butter and milk could be requisitioned for patients in British military hospitals. Further orders, ordinances and licences amending or pursuant to Law No. 52 were issued.10 Another notorious case was the roundup of Mercedes cars in German civilian ownership.11 The one-sided effect of Law No. 52, giving no rights to Germans, gave carte blanche to elements within the Control Commission or Military Government to abandon ‘courtesy and restraint’ by using their positions to exploit chronic problems such as food shortages. For instance, the incidence of theft was high. The chief causes, or so thought a COGA official, were not the questionable calibre and moral probity of British staff sent to Germany, but ‘widespread drunkenness and looting’. Another suggested that some CCG officials were ‘lazy, inefficient and sometimes corrupt’.12 As might be expected, it is easier to locate evidence of British corruption from German sources that document civilian – both indigenous population and refugee – testimony and complaints. There are plenty of examples in the SH Landrat files of pilfering and financial exploitation at a local level; just to cite one, there was an eyewitness account of two British officers shooting then stealing four pigs from a farmer on the pretext that they thought they were wild boar.13 It is also well known that the British sometimes actively participated in the black market practices that they were so intent on eradicating, as is shown in the SH case-study. Here was proof positive of the principle behind the saying, ‘to the victor, the spoils’. Such practices created the

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Figure 12. German civilians employed by the Economics Department of Allied Military Government requisition furniture from a former Nazi party or SS member’s house in Hannover. British soldiers are present to assist in case of trouble, circa 1946. Courtesy of Imperial War Museums, BU 9646.

impression Britain could do what it liked within its own zone. Germans had no choice but to comply with the myriad regulations as there were stiff consequences, frequently offering the possible invocation of the death penalty for their infraction. By the point when renewal of German political life was under discussion, as Noel Annan, who had joined CCG’s Political Division from Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in 1945 put it: ‘the only Germans who mattered were the bureaucrats who carried out British orders. Military Government saw political parties as a premonition of their own demise.’14

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A handbook was prepared for British Kreis Resident Officers [hereinafter KRO], within which Pamphlet No. 1 offered guidance for officers on ‘Relations with the German Administrations’, one chapter being devoted to a comprehensive overview of ‘British Policy in Germany’ as background information.15 As the case-study in Chapters 4 and 5 reveals, KROs were the vital conduit between German refugee officials and BMG. The handbook contains a pertinent section on ‘Indirect Rule’, describing transitional problems in re-creating an ordered society: Add to this the incurable British colonising instinct of ‘ruling the natives for their own good’, and there was soon the danger that we might have overthrown the Nazi ‘Führer-Prinzip’ only to replace it by the scarcely less totalitarian methods of direct rule. Even if we had wished to do so, we had neither the manpower nor the resources to maintain such a ‘Crown colony’ system.16 As already mentioned, there was a clear perception within the British military and the FO that Germany’s militarism was ‘incurable’ without ‘drastic surgery’. What is of interest here is the suggestion that given better economic resources a Crown colony system may very well have been considered. More significantly, this passage overtly admitted that Britain too needed to curb its own ‘colonising’ instincts if only to prevent accusations it might become too heavy-handed in its style of rule. Indeed there seems to be a tacit admission Britain might need to consider its own ‘re-education’, alluded to by Birley, and the need for such booklets seems to support this. Britain’s dilemma of exporting democratic principles without imposing illiberal conditions resonates elsewhere: ‘we should encourage freedom of speech and expression, so long as the purpose of our occupation is not criticised’.17 It was not British policy ‘to stifle the growth of German individualism and democratic re-education by “mothering” them in the interests of administrative efficiency’.18 However this is what did occur, because of earlier fears and speculation over threats to security. This ‘mothering’ tendency often became selfdefeating by hindering administrative efficiency, as the case-study shows. A SHAEF staff study offered a foretaste of what was to come after May 1945. Civil Affairs public safety officers were primed on their daunting responsibilities in the ‘Control of Refugee and Displaced Persons’. These included the prevention of interference with military operations – especially in the movement of troops and supplies at a time when fighting

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was continuing – of public disorders including riots, demonstrations and atrocities, of pillaging, looting and foraging, and of violation of the orders of the Military Governor or the laws of the occupied territory. As it was assumed that the ‘frequency and serious consequences of these acts will be aggravated by refugees and displaced persons’, the study suggested steps ‘to minimize the evil consequences of the uncontrolled movement of Refugees and Displaced Persons’.19 This suggests a greater prioritisation of a strategy of enforcement over one of collaboration with German officials responsible for ‘their own’ refugees, and anticipated Military Government’s ban on refugee movement once hostilities ceased. Another handbook addressed broader topics of occupation policy, and the pragmatic Paton Walsh foresaw intractable problems with its ‘nonfraternisation’ policy: There is still too much emphasis on the segregation of the conqueror, instead of, where necessary, a restriction on the vanquished . . . In [the] case of ‘fraternisation’ disciplinary action should be taken against both parties . . . But generally they should not be debarred from observing our conduct whilst enjoying our leisure . . . The British soldier has always been our best ambassador in any country; it is an insult to his integrity and his intelligence and commonsense to issue orders which amount to segregation in the conditions which will obtain in Germany. The Germans themselves will construe such action . . . as a sign, not of strength, but of weakness, and as evidence . . . the AngloSaxon race is unsure of itself and becoming decadent.20 The reference to ‘Anglo-Saxons’ was not intended to include Germans. As it transpired, Montgomery’s ‘non-fraternisation’ measure of March 1945 was shown to be at best insensitive and at worst degrading, a manifestation of colonial-style repression that cannot have fostered a healthy environment of mutual respect between Germans and British officials (see Fig. 13). Annan wryly observed that while the Americans found this policy impossible to follow ‘the British did not find it all that hard’.21 Bishop Bell foresaw this in May 1945: ‘the business of making Europe a continent of peaceable peoples requires more than a repressive policy’.22 By July, the Cabinet decided gradually to relax this policy as it was thought to be unhelpful to British interests.23Although the transfer of former colonial officials to Germany from 1945 was the exception, ‘the informal influence of colonial thought on the administrators of Germany was undeniable’.24

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Figure 13. Road sign at Dutch–German frontier, 1945: ‘Entering Germany. Be on your guard. Don’t fraternize with Germans.’ Courtesy of TNA UK, WO 205/1233.

Britain’s main experiences in administering other countries had been in colonial government where ‘direct or semi-direct control’ was often necessary. Whilst it was thought that the British had done most to develop forms of indirect rule and indirect control, there was nevertheless a realisation in military circles that for this method to function in Germany, ‘a profound mental readjustment on the part of all Military Government officers’ would be required as well as ‘considerable patience and tact’. As a back-handed compliment, the author reminds his audience: ‘we should remember that we are dealing with a people who are highly developed in most spheres. Administratively, the Germans have little to learn from us.’ This was at odds with the daily experience of indirect government for German officials who ‘receive their instructions from the occupying power’.25 As we shall see, this gave licence to British officials to persuade Germans to adopt their own ‘tried and tested principles of rule’.26 Consequently, however much certain local military detachment commanders established good working relationships with Germans, the policy to govern by indirect rule, as is seen from its early planning and occupation

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phases, occasionally manifested itself as militaristic high-handedness and arrogance, the very attributes Britain had long used to characterise a panGermanic mentality (see Fig. 14). One military officer wrote to the Kreis administrative office in Eutin complaining that an earlier instruction to give preferential treatment to one individual had not yet been acted upon with the expected level of efficiency, closing with: ‘You will give an explanation of your dilatory behaviour.’27 Such responses, though by no means normative, did little to engender friendly cooperation between British military and German civilian officials, so optimistically referred to in earlier policy documents such as ‘The Regeneration of Germany’ (January 1944). In the meantime, Germans implicitly obeyed and conformed to

Figure 14. During demobilisation at No. 1 Disbandment Control Unit, German soldiers are handed booklets telling them how they lost the war, circa 1945. Courtesy of Imperial War Museums, BU 7504.

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military directives (see Fig. 15). In the main, they knew it was in their interests to do so, and they mainly trusted the British to make good on their earlier pledges to facilitate the introduction of democratic governance, part of Germany’s renaissance and reintegration as a fellow-member within a new European partnership of nations envisaged by the Western Allies. However, the British in 1946 were still very much on their guard despite admitting that ‘so far the Germans have been completely docile’. Following increased demobilisation and the redeployment of British military personnel, CCG’s civilian members were warned of the threats posed by uncivilised German behaviour: At some time in the future there might be trouble with them in some parts of the British Zone. Continued shortage of food and fuel, and a natural objection to the prolonged occupation, may produce incidents. It is not considered that they would be on a large scale, involving pitched battles, but more in the nature of acts of sabotage, or of riots supported by some weapons.28

Figure 15. German civilians go about their daily lives in Detmold, North RhineWestphalia, with British troops looking on, circa 1946. Courtesy of TNA UK, AIR 37/1441.

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Even though Germans already had ‘executive power’ in most refugee matters other than, for example, the supervision of controls to prevent the spreading of epidemics such as typhoid or cholera, much of the British correspondence, as we shall see, continued to be civilising and often patronising in tone, particularly to their requests for reports or replies to questions they felt had not received adequately rapid responses. This form of ‘nannying’, or mothering, was unnecessary as both sides knew the Germans were doing their level best, frequently in extreme and unfavourable working conditions, to run their affairs and manage their resources efficiently, often, as has been well documented, unmatched by the profligate example set by their British counterparts. As if to underline the chasm between victors and conquered, German officials’ requests for responses from their opposite numbers within CCG or BMG administrations often received either no substantive answers nor even a simple acknowledgement, indicative of a combination of competing pressures, lack of time and sometimes a lack of interest, that in German administrators’ minds bordered on arrogance. Albu, who was ‘chiefly occupied with the future political structure of Germany’, captured a telling snapshot of the CCG and FO’s self-image in mid-1946, coinciding with the peak of the refugee influx into the British Zone: I am amazed how vague everybody both here & at home is – and how easy it is to become an expert! But I have made them face the issues for the first time. To do so I’ve had to be the devil’s advocate (i.e. for federalism – which may mean anything). The FO hasn’t a clue outside its own, limited sphere. And everyone here is so busy.29 Although this alleged contrast between British and German efficiency was frequently played up by the British to maintain their authority, it also served to suppress subconsciously many other similarities in a Weltanschauung shared by occupier and occupied. Albu met officers from 8 Corps in Schleswig-Holstein who told him their Commanding Officer ‘practically lived with the Bismarck family; got on very well with the German generals; was hopeless at dealing with the mixed nationalities among the enormous numbers of POWs he had’. But Albu felt out of place among the ‘reactionary officers & utterly reactionary F.O. boys’: Good tho’ they are at their jobs – so many have this militaristic (almost Prussian) repressed emotionalism which makes them give

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vent to the most obscurantist ideas on subjects outside their own jobs. This includes an intense fear of ‘politics’.30 These observations reveal aspects of a strain of thinking still running through the ‘official mind’ of the British civil service and military – some may have found it harder to adapt to their very different peacetime roles. This demanded a different kind of resourcefulness and intelligence in getting the best out of the Germans, namely less of a paternalistic approach, more humility, and greater empathy for the enormous reconstruction problems they faced. It is also well known that a major reason for the administrative delays and over-bureaucratisation on the British side was, ironically, their own surfeit of manpower – they were criticised for unnecessarily wasting British taxpayers’ money, and poor management of staff resources. By the end of 1946, CCG employed 26,000 personnel,31 some five times more than the US Office of Military Government [OMGUS], America’s counterpart organisation. The FO did not expect staffing levels to fall below 7,000 until January 1950, and then only by December 1950 to 3–3,500.32 This, however, is not a specific critique of these two aspects of British organisation but serves to contextualise the genesis of later resentments harboured by the Germans towards the British. These were founded chiefly on perceptions that the British had not helped to deliver the better living and working conditions for expellees and refugees promised, whilst adhering to policies, such as arbitrary requisitioning of living space and essential supplies, that deprived those German civilians with greater immediate needs. The daunting reality for German officials was to organise all aspects of refugees’ social welfare from finding accommodation within strictly prescribed geographical areas to their eventual economic reintegration into their new environment. In the context of ‘refugee policy’, dealt with later, Britain’s primary interest was to maintain law and order and help prevent the spreading of disease. ‘Refugees’ formed a perfunctory codicil to the KRO booklet that claimed it was only decided at Potsdam that ‘all German minorities . . . would be resettled’, with no mention of Britain’s major part in the original decisions regarding the population transfers: ‘Only the future will tell whether these millions of German refugees can be absorbed in the economic and social structure of the new democratic GERMANY [sic] which is being moulded.’33 Such vagueness about the refugees’ and expellees’ futures was indicative of several ways Britain repeatedly tried to distance itself from a demographic crisis long since

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regarded as of Germany’s own making, and therefore a German problem to resolve. Although it is not detailed in the documents, devolving responsibility for refugee matters on to Germans therefore made it implicitly easier for blame to be directed at German refugee officials when tensions arose, as they inevitably did, and particularly in relation to housing and food shortages. This exacerbated the growing climate of crisis management on both sides that by early March 1946 turned into a poisoned atmosphere. Many Germans expressed their sense of déjà vu by articulating what they saw as a betrayal of good faith. The BBC reported widespread hostility to the authoritarian style of the British occupation: ‘Countless listeners have reported to us the new German prayer, “Herr, schick uns bald das 5. Reich. Das vierte ist dem dritten gleich”.’34 By March 1946, wide public awareness of the gathering refugee calamity’s implications for the indigenous German population turned to growing disquiet: ‘Protests to the Potsdam decisions and annexations of territory and mass expulsion in the East have increased in numbers’; this was significant, as it immediately preceded the dramatic acceleration and increase in the arrival of refugee transports in the British Zone. During May and June 1946, the BBC had monitored ‘the very significant rise in the curve of anti-British feeling . . . apparent among all types of Germans, from the diehard Nazi-nationalist to the anti-Nazi democrat.’35 Sir Sholto Douglas, Montgomery’s successor as the British Zone’s C-in-C, recording his ‘sympathy and admiration’ for the ‘sustained and loyal efforts’ of his military staff, freely acknowledged in his 1946 Christmas Message broadcast to British Forces Networks, ‘We have had many difficulties to face during the past year. Nor has the voice of criticism been silent.’36 Of course there is anecdotal evidence to refute or mitigate the negative charges against British officials in Germany, often themselves reactions to the ‘misbehaviour of British troops’ whose actions were more visible – snap judgements turned on ‘minor incidents’. Some criticised British actions, others ‘spontaneously stress[ed] the vorbildlich [exemplary] behaviour of the British soldier’. Much later the BBC revealed one of the important shifts in emphasis of German–British relations during the occupation. Almost 2 million Germans in the zone now had ‘a British friend with whom they could talk things over.’37 Thus were German expectations gradually reduced from earlier hopes that Britain would successfully stage-manage a German recovery, to a more predominant realisation, certainly felt by refugees as well as many Einheimische that they had been left to fight their own survival battles. An early erosion of trust contributed to this sense of betrayal, and then later to resignation that the British would

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not be that helpful, as the following chapters make explicit by examining how the occupation was perceived from dual perspectives. One striking feature from the press reports and German correspondence with CCG is the sense of British remoteness or near detachment. While it is true that Germans had learned to expect such detachment from a bureaucratically anonymous Nazi state, they understood British rhetorical values to offer greater willingness to engage with their problems. Sir William Strang had become political adviser to the C-in-C, Montgomery, and as the direct link to the FO, could advise on the political impact of Military Government decisions. As PUS (German Section), he had played an active role in shaping many 1943–5 occupation policy documents circulating within the FO. The abiding impression conveyed by his 1956 memoirs was that even with the early occupation phase now at a safe remove and German prosperity restored, many in the FO still preferred that Britain play down the extent of Germany’s problems in 1945, despite the unanimity over the scale and potential challenges ahead with its reconstruction. Once characterised by former FO colleague and close friend Gladwyn Jebb as ‘the irreproachable, if somewhat uanapproachable William Strang’,38 Strang lived up to his soubriquet by conveying, perhaps unintentionally, a peculiarly British diplomatic aloofness that could avert its eyes from the distasteful realities of large-scale German privations rather than describing the situation as it really was, evident from his comments following his visit to the British Zone in June 1945, when after only a ‘casual inspection’ of conditions, he concluded that ‘all in all, the Germans of the British zone did not bear the appearance of a broken people’. His rationale was that except during the later months of the war and except perhaps in certain places, the Germans suffered less from the continued strain of war than did the British. Comparative statistics, purely on numbers of wartime civilian dead, do not support this remark.39 He justified his assertion by saying that Germany would be able to draw readily on Europe’s material resources – again, by no means a given at that time. Strang’s tone became more patronising as he surmised the German people still possessed ‘reserves of toughness and endurance’: Here was a formidable and immensely productive people with tenacity of purpose, great recuperative power and undiminished will to work, so formidable that it was reassuring to know that they were now disarmed and harmless and were to be subject to military occupation for who could tell how many years.40

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This, even by generous interpretation, is a sanitised version of events. There is, for example, no attempt to reconcile his view that in principle he did not set the rights of minorities (here, the Sudeten Germans) ‘or the bare principle of self-determination so high in the scale of human values as did some others’ with his acknowledgement that the thought of the influx of German refugees ‘dominated the minds and anxieties of our commanders and military government authorities’.41 From Strang’s lengthy report to Bevin after his tour of the zone with Oliver Harvey in April 1946, and with the number of expellee transports approaching their peak, in contrast with his comments ten months earlier, there is complete silence here on the refugee problem save for an oblique reference that the ‘dominating thought in all minds is food’. Strang recognised that Bevin’s priority was to ensure that the recent reduction to 1,000 calories per head in Germany was intended to help prevent the situation’s complete collapse while grain imports were secured, and his acknowledgement that German refugees were not to be regarded as a special case. But it is hard not to see how vast influxes of expellees would not be linked with the ensuing shortages that necessitated the rationing.42 He devotes more space to praising the ‘efficiency, zest and whole-hearted devotion to their task of our military government detachments’, alluding to BMG’s persistent reluctance to delegate powers to Germans, as British and American policies originally declared they would. It was almost as if Britain enjoyed its paternalistic role: The greater the enthusiasm our detachment staffs have for the business of military government, the greater will be their reluctance to commit the work of administration to German hands . . . Their paternal, if stern attitude to their charges will require a considerable change of outlook on their part before it can be transformed into the attitude of an inspector, which will better befit the functions to be exercised by our detachments in future.43 However, this was not simply a matter of ‘re-educating’ the British military staff, for Strang recognised this was also a problem in the civilian administration at the Control Commission’s main Berlin HQ, where ‘there has been some reluctance to devolve the minutiae of power’.44 This tells us much about British preoccupations with maintaining over-bureaucratised hierarchical structures, and the observation of strict protocols. These caused delays in resolving urgent problems when a situation

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often demanded decisiveness, were not the hallmarks of good or efficient governance, and continued to bedevil the British occupation regime, as we shall see, until their departure in 1955, despite reductions in staff numbers mentioned earlier. What was already by any measurement a catastrophic scenario for refugees and expellees in late 1944 was not substantively alleviated at any stage in 1945–9 through Britain taking the lead or being constructively proactive in refugee affairs, despite their overall responsibility as an occupier; evidence of the effectiveness of specific policies in the case-study corroborates this. The tendency rather was to see the problems primarily from a political position of self-interest, and then respond, when – and only if – provoked by adverse publicity, to the Germans’ problems. By the time Strang published the account of his tenure at the FO and as Britain’s representative on the European Advisory Commission (EAC), as was then customary practice within the diplomatic service, he was keen to gauge early possible reaction, if not quite official approval for its contents, sending drafts to Sir Llewellyn Woodward, who as official historian of British foreign policy in the Second World War remarked he might wish to consider mollifying certain observations implicit in his conclusion: The impression one would get . . . especially from the sentences beginning ‘the appetite for power’ might well be that you have found British government and ministers tempted – ‘falling to the temptation’ to extend the British national domain by chicanery, subversion or aggression.45 Woodward tried to draw the sting from what posterity might infer as Strang’s overly critical assessment of the colonial designs of FO diplomats and officials, suggesting instead that Strang wished to communicate two main points about the FO; firstly, the tensions between ‘the temptations to compromises . . . [and] subservience to mass pressure’, and secondly, ‘the fearful decline in standards of international life’. He realised these factors would have had ‘a particularly depressing effect’ on someone like Strang whose career had coincided with this period of decline. He would have been ‘irked’ or ‘disgusted’ by men who: Willingly or unwillingly – have had to tremble to gusts of ignorant opinion . . . at having to see[?] policies decided on for unworthy reasons – though in the British case sloth and cowardice and acceptance of clichés for wisdom . . . predominated more than aggression.46

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He offered some friendly counsel, which Strang heeded: ‘I suspect the people you talked to w[ou]ld rather not see y[ou]r instructions to them in print.’ Moreover, too much had been made of the need for discretion and secrecy as ‘a major inconvenience from which you are greatly relieved to be free. You haven’t really found it all that irksome to keep quiet.’ This mordant put-down was a reminder to Strang that in some respects, there was little difference between him and those unnamed colleagues whose actions he was intending to critique, although Woodward commended much of the book as of permanent value to historians. His greater criticism was reserved for others: ‘so many of your colleagues have published books [which] are mere empty froth’.47 Elevated to the peerage in January 1954 and perhaps mindful of the need to observe diplomatic protocol by maintaining discretion over past FO decisions, Strang had also his professional reputation and a career as a writer to consider. Official documents covering wartime and the occupation were not yet in the public domain, and so any former FO diplomat reconstructing events without full access to relevant sources was well advised to present a united front by avoiding unnecessary controversy, or risk isolating and possibly alienating former colleagues and confidants such as Halifax, Cadogan or Pierson Dixon.48 There was also a need for continuing positive reflection on Britain’s reputation as standard-bearer for liberal democratic and ethical values throughout the occupation, part of courting the favourable verdict of history. In that sense, the FO’s actions were likely to be particularly scrutinised. Therefore it was logical for Strang, in his review of Northedge’s 1962 analysis of British foreign policy, to challenge his view that Britain was ‘after 1945 perhaps the most unrelenting of all countries towards Germany, with the exception of the Communist states’,49 and to clarify it was France with the Soviet Union – not Britain – who opposed the establishment of all-German political institutions, and America with the Soviet Union – not Britain – who opposed the substantial increase of the level of German steel production. Northedge appears to have evaluated occupation policy more generally in his conclusions while Strang much more selectively in his examples argues for an alternative view in privileging Britain’s role as an enlightened and enabling occupation power. Nor would Strang have agreed with Annan’s conviction that from the moment of unconditional surrender, ‘the Americans were the most humane of all the four powers towards the Germans’.50

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Interestingly, Annan accompanied Strang on his 1945 British Zone tour, allowing him to test for himself ‘the assumptions on which Military Government worked’. Not only did BMG assume that the occupation would last for 20 years, their timeline to develop political activities through a sequence of local, district and finally state elections was so attenuated that the prospect of national parties campaigning seemed remote. The idea was first for the Germans to demonstrate their capacity to behave democratically at each of these three levels. Kurt Schumacher, a future SPD leader, was thoroughly unimpressed by these proposals, telling Annan: ‘Wir sind kein Negervolk’, an unfortunate allusion to German perceptions that they were being treated as inferior beings, even as slaves.51 This observation was important, and coming from Schumacher, highly significant, as he spoke for the millions of Germans likely to react similarly to such demands. Annan’s view, corroborating Schumacher’s reaction, was that this proposed model ‘was unquestionably colonial’.52 Harold Ingrams, a former colonial official in Britain’s Arab territories, and seconded to CCG’s Political Division, was charged with implementing the policy to reconstruct the political system.53 Discussion was first allowed only for Ingrams to then make his own decision in his capacity as KRO, indicative of his greater preoccupation with ‘Germanity’ rather than with ‘humanity’.54 The British policy of retaining a controlling influence has an important bearing on the ultra-cautious, reactionary response of the British some three years later to the prospect of sanctioning German refugee associations as part of Britain’s democratisation policy. Yes, they wanted Germany to empower itself, but within strictly prescribed limits, and without the powers Britain alone could bestow. Responsibility for everything enacted in Germany, from approving legislation or conducting foreign affairs to prohibiting the publication of newspapers, lay ultimately in the hands of Military Governors who ‘exercised supreme power’.55 Their command structure, although labyrinthine, was routed through to the five Regional Commissioners [hereinafter RC] whose job was to administer their own region within the zone. SchleswigHolstein’s first Commissioner was Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Vivian Champion de Crespigny. In many ways he, and in particular his successor William Asbury, epitomised the British aloofness alluded to earlier. Albu and de Crespigny barely exchanged two words over two dinner parties and meetings. To Albu, this Labour candidate for Newark ‘seems a bit dumb – but maybe he’ll suit the peasants of Schleswig-Holstein’.56 This unfortunate analogy showed even a highly educated and open-minded civil servant like Albu was not immune to inopportune anti-German

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sentiments. He later embellished his earlier characterisation with a more even-handed assessment: A rather simple minded socialist; generally considered slightly mad (as the rest of his family) & with strong authoritarian streaks. Actually very friendly and fairly ordinary & a supporter of Gollancz’s humanitarian movements.57 This gives an insight into de Crespigny’s responses to the refugee crisis during his time in office as he seldom acted unless the problems threatened the overall stability of SH. The role of RCs was not just to command authority as the instrument of overall British occupation policy – which meant taking charge of regional civil government with responsibility for the administration of CCG’s regional staff 58 – but to be accessible and empathetic towards humanitarian campaigners such as Gollancz. Although governing by military rule gave plenty of licence to those with a predilection for authoritarianism, and despite performing these Janus-like political functions, de Crespigny and his 1948 and 1949 successors, respectively Asbury, who had served on Sheffield City Council (1924–42) and as its leader (1941–2),59 and Brigadier P.H. de Havilland, found their powers to act on refugee policy were severely constrained. As the case-study shows, all in varying degrees became hostages to events. This is evidenced, for example, in letters from senior German ministers such as Hermann Lüdemann, the SH Landtag’s SPD Ministerpräsident. As we shall see, Lüdemann argued tirelessly that the SH population must be reduced to alleviate acute overcrowding problems, and could only agree to a redistribution of SH refugees to other British Zone regions if there were real prospects of them finding a home and permanent employment and not just temporary shelter.60 During his time in Germany, Albu became a shrewd observer of the machinery of Military Government, CCG and the London-based COGA: The whole of the problem of the governmental structure of the British zone seems to be in a pretty fair mess. And the economic unification with the US zone only adds to the complication. I’m the only person trying to clear it up.61 Other studies have focused on the over-bureaucratisation of Military Government and the CCG and its effects on the efficient running of the zone’s administration. This section has sought instead to shed more

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light on the authoritarian character of British rule by showing that policy implementation was driven primarily by its administrators’ more controlling instincts, and that these were in turn suffused with strong colonial influences. There was an impulse and determination to transmit a sense of British largesse, underpinned by its sense of moral rectitude and the notion that Britain was granting Germany favours its previous conduct did not really deserve. In many ways, these aspects were defining characteristics of the culture of British occupation. Moreover, to British and German officials alike, the occupation was experienced as more of a straitjacket than a way of liberating Germany from its past. The private papers and memoirs of those shaping or witnessing how policy functioned in practice, such as Albu, Annan, Kirkpatrick, Paton Walsh and Strang, show that although Britain’s military occupation was articulated through policy directives disseminated through a centralised chain of command that then diffused instructions via local administrative power centres – the military detachments, later followed by the CCG divisions (e.g. Manpower, Housing, Public Safety) – its exhaustive protocols nevertheless made Britain more susceptible to its impulse to over-manage beyond its remit. This remained an issue long after a qualified form of administrative self-determination was handed over to West Germany in 1949. After the end of Hynd’s ill-fated tenure as minister responsible for Germany in spring 1947, he returned to Hamburg in July 1948 to lecture on ‘National Insurance in England’. Afterwards he was posed a leading question by one of the German journalists present: ‘And how do you think, Mr. HYND . . . can democracy be reconciled with occupation, i.e. how is it possible at all that democratic Germany can develop under an occupation?’ Thereupon the minister answered, ‘Of course it will be difficult for a democracy to develop under an occupation because this will always be dictatorial in some way. However time will improve many things in this respect.’62 Although Hynd was critical of the severity of some British policies, including that towards German refugees, his reply spoke volumes not just for the widespread negative German perceptions of the colonial style of British rule, but equally of British acceptance and discomfiture towards the fresh difficulties occupation rule had created for Germany. What now needs to be evaluated is how Britain was able to project itself as a civilising power but without the financial means to make good on its

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pledges to provide materially for Germany’s needs during the early years of reconstruction.

Economic constraints It has been argued that amongst the major outcomes of military victory, of the Western Allies ‘Britain lost most from the war – the old balance of power, the empire and a dominant role in the world’s economy.’ Britain’s earlier pre-eminence as ‘the major global power’ was lost to America, whose economy was strengthened by the war.63 Nonetheless this should be seen in the context of the ‘vigorous and continuous boom’ that followed after 1945, where also it has been argued that the damage done to the international network of trade and payments did not weaken the international position of the British economy, for example the ‘remarkable’ fact that the approximate 75 per cent increase in the total value of exports in 1945–50 stood comparison with the corresponding five years before the Second World War.64 Similarly, it has also been shown that although the continuation of rationing and austerity policies in Britain after 1945 was central to Labour’s economic policy, Britain ‘was the only food-importing country not to experience a significant reduction in consumption levels’, and that in general terms the British diet was more plentiful than that of Germany and Austria during the early post-war years.65 Although Britain’s increased economic dependence on the USA is of major significance, as we shall see, these latter readings also show that Britain’s situation after 1945 cannot simply be rendered as a tale of continuing sacrifice, through both wartime and post-war years. Rapid changes in the relative fortunes of Britain and the USA caused by the war, and each country’s respective reactions to their new circumstances, forced Britain to re-evaluate carefully its future economic survival strategy. This new reality was underlined in an independent Select Committee Report released on 23 July 1946 detailing the findings of a sub-committee fact-finding mission that had travelled to Germany earlier that month to look at ways of mitigating the actual and potential additional costs to British taxpayers whilst ‘carrying out the obligations undertaken by Great Britain in Germany’. The Select Committee’s document reveals the innate difficulties encountered by Britain trying to reconcile these two competing commitments. Within CCG and British Military Government, there was common recognition that rebuilding the German economy equated to: ‘A modern labour of Hercules.’66 Estimates showed that COGA’s 1946–7

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expenditure would result in a total gross cost to the British Exchequer of £130,774,310, exclusive of occupation costs, resulting in a net cost to UK taxpayers of £80,554,310. Of the total figure, £120.44 million was budgeted for ‘Supplies and Services essential to the Occupation of Germany’,67 a 20 per cent increase on the figures discussed in Washington in November 1946.68 Significantly it was thought that over 80 per cent (or £100 million) of this total, a figure subsequently revised upwards to £125 million,69 would be needed for essential imports for the German population. The remaining balance of nearly £10 million was required to cover the civil administration costs in Germany.70 The report revealed the alarming extent to which the financial burden of maintaining the British Zone during the preceding 14 months from May 1945 appeared to catch British officials unawares and therefore unprepared. It then enumerates the ‘reasons for this extraordinary situation’.71 Among the ‘Recommendations’ lies a clue that achieving military victory against Germany may have occupied British thinking disproportionately more than considerations of the future price for its success: As the charge to the British taxpayer is indirectly affected by the burden on the German economy caused by British occupation, a half-yearly statement should be presented to Parliament clearly setting out the details of the cost of occupation and administration of the British Zone which is falling on German resources, as well as those borne directly by the British taxpayer.72 The loss of Britain’s economic dominance to the USA, coupled with the Labour government’s continuing support for a harsh treatment of Germany, advocated in 1944 and 1945 with root and branch dismantling of the German war economy,73 was to have grave economic consequences for the German population, and in particular for German refugees and expellees. How could Britain hope to make good on its policy to help rebuild Germany without the means to support its claims and with its increasing dependency on America, despite Bevin’s claims that he believed that the £80 million figure could be reduced to £25 million in two years, ‘a surprising and, as it proved, radical misjudgement’,74 and that Britain’s external occupation costs would eventually be debited to the FRG’s budgets?75 A brief outline of the economic situation in Germany reveals a tale of conflicting British priorities that helps shed light on the unfolding story in SH.

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The report also drew particular attention to the following reasons for the alarmingly high estimates. First, the plans drawn up by the EAC at the 1943 Moscow Conference committed Britain to assuming responsibility for occupying and administering an area in north-west Germany of 33,700 square miles with a population of some 21 million. Moreover, Potsdam called for the elimination of Germany’s potential as a ‘military menace’ and the destruction of Nazism before the reconstruction of democratic German life could begin. In Germany’s case, recovery and growth not only required the consent of the occupying powers but the ‘removal of controls on industrial production’, and that Germany be integrated into the European economy.76 This was at odds with certain aspects of Britain’s dismantling policy (discussed in later chapters). Furthermore, its zone historically had not been a self-supporting area in foodstuffs, with SH the only rich agricultural land in the entire zone. Worse still, the flow of food from the agrarian-rich lands of eastern Germany had now stopped. Fourth, the reduction of Germans’ daily calorie ration to 1,052 had seriously damaged productivity and output. Fifth, industrial plant and output were badly damaged by the bombing of German cities mainly located in the British Zone. Under the terms of the Level of Industry Plan for the post-war German economy, it was planned to reduce further the level to around 50 or 55 per cent of the pre-1939 level to meet possible reparations. Finally, the reduction of rations in the British Zone in March 1946 coincided with a decrease in industrial output and coal, the latter caused by worker fatigue and the increased efforts of miners to seek food to feed their families. Critically, two-thirds of the food supplies in the British Zone were being imported at British taxpayers’ expense.77 Britain had long argued that Germany should be made to pay reparations from German exports to ease the tax burden on the British Exchequer of the costs of occupation. Securing payment in this form proved to be unworkable for a number of reasons.78 Significant among these was the impossibility of guaranteeing a prescribed future level of Germany’s likely exports. No new census would be available until 29 October 1946 and there was great volatility in the German population numbers owing to the unprecedented numbers of refugees, expellees and returning POWs. Therefore it was premature to predict the numbers of potentially employable Germans as the basis for such a figure was not yet known. As stated above, and for quite different reasons, a policy of nullifying German military potential by disabling much of its industrial capacity proved largely self-defeating as this only succeeded in delaying

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and limiting Germany’s potential to play an early and significant role in its own economic recovery, let alone recompense the Western Allies for some of their material losses. Any prospects of treating Germany as an economic whole thereby facilitating a more equitable base to apportion different levels of reparations – one that may have given an early stimulus to the German economy – were abandoned as moves to seek Quadripartite agreement foundered. First the French refused to sign up to a plan to which they had not been party, and second, the Soviets had their own very different political and economic objectives for Germany.79 While Britain and America grew ‘increasingly alive to the central importance of German economic recovery in European reconstruction . . . the last thing Russia wanted was a German recovery over which she had no control’.80 In addition, from a purely economic analysis, the Soviets, or ‘the defeated victor’,81 had suffered far greater losses than the Western Allies and were intent on recouping material compensation from their zone as well as salvaging whatever they could from the Western Allies, each of whom had their own conflicting economic priorities and political agendas. Such uncertainties made effective planning more difficult and offered further evidence of the financial albatross hanging around Britain’s neck: the ‘disintegration of the German economy’ following the country’s division into zones of occupation that had effectively given birth to ‘artificial economic frontiers’; the nexus between the lack of food and the inhabitants’ inability to produce sufficient raw materials, food and manufactured goods; and finally, the critical question of the intended length of the occupation.82 Britain found itself in a catch-22 situation. It was acknowledged that the answer to the problem of defraying occupation costs and thus relieving the British taxpayer ‘is one of augmenting German output, thus minimising Germany’s dependence on imports while increasing her capacity to export’.83 Had the Allies agreed to treat Germany as a single economic unit, this objective might have been achievable in the medium term. Failure to find consensus forced Britain to rely on its capacity to expand output within its zone. These challenging obstacles to German reconstruction were only intensified by essentially self-defensive policy priorities, such as the dismantling of industry and denazification, measures that conflicted with the economic imperatives of jump-starting Germany’s much-needed recovery, and therefore its ability to become self-supporting. The task was further complicated by the material consequences of its wartime bombing offensive that had destroyed much of

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the essential basic infrastructure needed to sustain life, such as transport links which could be repaired, as they rapidly were, and the housing to provide for both indigenous and refugee populations, which was lacking. There were other more intangible costs to Britain. These resulted from the decline in German morale. The Select Committee attributed this to ‘the downward spiral’84 caused by shortages of food, coal and consumer goods. There was an overt admission that until morale could somehow be raised, the taxpayer would continue to bear a disproportionate burden. Perhaps too, there was a tacit recognition that the British could not expect the Germans to perform economic miracles under conditions that the British themselves recognised would be a positive disincentive: ‘For until the German has incentives for his labour and objects for which to live he will not do his best work.’85 Dismantling, following demilitarisation, directly affected peoples’ jobs and ‘provoked the most open hostility’86 (see Fig. 16). Denazification had started also to be an unproductive measure in the struggle to maintain morale, one which caused both ‘British prestige and German output [to] suffer equally’ (see Fig. 17). Morale was further eroded by the disclosure that by July 1946 there were still approximately 40,000 Germans confined in internment camps. Some had been there for more than a year, without standing trial, and there was evidence that these numbers, often resulting from denunciations, were increasing. Interestingly, given that the denouement at Nuremberg was still two months away, the Select Committee felt ‘compelled to comment forcibly’ on its internment policy, reasoning logically that ‘if part of the object of occupation is to attract the Germans to the British way of life, this is a singular method of setting about it’.87 All the more so, when it continued in this vein for three further years, with the prolonged incarceration of a significant number of convicted German ‘war criminals’ waiting in vain for their sentences to be reviewed. This continued until 1957, as we see in Chapter 7. Britain’s conundrum in estimating the length of occupation was further complicated by its cautious approach in handing over governmental and administrative responsibility to Germans. A less supervisory attitude towards delegating powers by stages would undoubtedly also have helped the CCG to gain greater control over its staffing costs. By July 1946, British officials realised that this process now needed to be accelerated, for ‘if they are not given an increasing opportunity to manage and govern their own affairs, the rising generation will not learn how to govern themselves’.88 In addition to the CCG’s authorised establishment

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Figure 16. Krupp Factory, Essen, 1947. The industrial conglomerate housed the largest specialist machine-tool facility in Germany, seen here before and after demolition by Disarmament Department. Courtesy of TNA UK, FO 1062/375.

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Figure 17. Suspected Nazis complete the questionnaire (Fragebogen) about their political activities in a detention centre near Hamburg run by the British Army, circa 1945. Courtesy of Imperial War Museums, BU 7358.

of 26,000 Germans on the payroll, there were by June a further 30,584. A reverse logic can be applied to Farquharson’s assertion that this latter figure does not in itself provide evidence of over staffing given that the British ‘wished to exercise close control over the Germans’.89 Surely, this suggests that the British were less prepared to cut their cloth accordingly, as fiscal worries weighed less heavily in occupying authorities’ minds than those that offered their partial solution through delegating more responsibilities to the Germans. The concomitant high level of staffing costs also raised the equally important issue of double standards. How could the government justify

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CCG staff salaries, allowances and transport costs approaching £10 million while virtually all Germans had no choice but to tighten their own belts? This was especially prescient given the Committee’s explicit acknowledgment that the quality of staff appointments was not all it might have been. High numbers were blamed on prevailing conditions of service that led to a ‘sense of insecurity due to the short-term engagement offered’. Recruitment policy had failed to attract sufficient ‘young, efficient men and women, imbued with proper tradition of service and fired with the moral purpose required’.90 This was attributed by one MP with a year’s experience at CCG to there being ‘too many of the wrong people, whose one aim in their life in Germany, is to have as good a time as possible’.91 In other words, one clue to part of the British government’s financial difficulties lay in its failure systematically to appoint quality before quantity – for example, candidates to become KROs had to gain a 60 per cent pass mark in their German examination and, by 1949, the Deputy Military Governor was still being urged to lower the standard.92 Although appointing higher-calibre personnel would have cost Britain more money, staffing duplication elsewhere exacerbated the problems and alienated British and German publics alike. There seemed to be one law for the occupiers and another for the occupied. This becomes evident in the following chapters when examining two critical areas in refugee integration – food and housing. As we shall see also, there are legion examples of the British, as legitimated by Law No. 52, ensuring that their own material needs were met before the Germans’, and before refugees’ most basic needs had been met. By January 1947, 18 months after the end of Lend-Lease, Britain’s economic problems had further deteriorated owing to an imbalance of imports over exports, a global dollar shortage, a balance of payments crisis and high levels of overseas expenditure, especially military. These burdens were exacerbated by one of the worst winters on record, damaging exports and putting intolerable strains on fuel supplies at home where demand had outstripped supply, resulting in a coal crisis. By June 1947, Britain had drawn more than half of its credit loan from America,93 and British officials still took the view that security in Germany should be prioritised over concerns about Britain’s balance of payments,94 barely two years into an occupation that, if financially onerous by mid-1946, was now becoming unsustainable without reliance on American help. The economic merging of British and US zones in January 1947 (Bizonia) was to an extent a pragmatic rescue measure born of Britain’s

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inability to sustain its initial occupation commitments to Germany as one of the Big Three, a status earned largely as the one Allied power whose military and economic commitment had spanned the entire conflict. The advent of Bizonia also showed that British hopes for economic unity, one of Potsdam’s sacred cows, and thereafter an essential component of Britain’s chances of balancing its books, had been an unrealistic goal for a country already so overcommitted in August 1945. The agreement finalised for Marshall Aid two years later thus came not only to Germany’s financial rescue but to Britain’s too. Germany managed to survive and rebuild itself economically despite Britain’s intervention and not because of it. Currency reform in June 1948, whilst signalling a continual improvement in the availability of food in the Western zones, and bringing other economic benefits such as a stimulus to industrial output through the removal of economic controls,95 did little to benefit German refugees. Paradoxically, it heralded a sharp decline in their economic circumstances.96 In particular, the problem of accommodation shortages and unemployment in many rural areas with the highest refugee populations, such as Bavaria, Lower Saxony and SH, increased after the conversion to the deutschmark. Rising rental costs hit employed refugees who could not reclaim this expenditure from the Länder, and exacerbated overcrowding in refugee camps precisely at a time when the authorities were committed to closing them. Ensuing restrictions on government expenditure in the second half of 1948 also led to a decline in living standards in the refugee camps, and prospects of refugee integration were damaged further by a near cessation in housing construction.97 Currency reform had a major adverse effect on unemployment with refugees and expellees making up 35.1 per cent of the 1.5 million total by the end of 1949. Of this total, the unemployed refugees in SH accounted for 58.5 per cent, by some distance the highest concentration within the FRG Länder,98 discussed in the section on dismantling and employment in Chapter 5. Whilst the negative impact of currency reform on refugees cannot be attributed to British occupation policy per se, it was a recovery measure in part born out of an Allied policy towards Germany of economic disarmament, sanctioned by the UK. Notwithstanding the mitigating economic constraints caused by factors such as the Western Allies’ failure to treat Germany as an economic unit, and the impasse over securing reparations payments without first guaranteeing Germany’s future export levels, the Labour government’s wish to protect British taxpayers’ interests might have been better served by cutting back on such high levels of expenditure on its staffing levels and

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bureaucracy in Germany during the extended and critical period of widespread material shortages, discussed later. And as previously stated, it was because CCG/BMG wished to exert more direct control over Germany – a less direct occupation system is usually ascribed to their rule – that there was a tendency to overmanning. In addition, many of Britain’s economic problems were exacerbated by key policy decisions – cautious approaches to re-establishing German industry, and delegating full powers and responsibilities to the German authorities – whilst prolonged denazification affected German morale and slowed productivity. Within this context it is not hard to understand that the protection of German refugee and expellee interests was not at the forefront of planning for German economic recovery. Currency reform is one obvious example of this. More importantly, the economically pragmatic decision to abrogate overall responsibility for refugee care, by delegating all social and welfare matters to German administration, exposed major fault-lines and contradictions between Britain’s stated aims of exporting its liberal democratic values of fair play and how its policy could function in practice. As we shall see, this particular policy turned out to be unworkable as Germans were not given adequate support to accomplish this task. Some attach significance to the parts played by the British churches, high-profile humanitarians99 and the voluntary organisations in advocating, coordinating and providing material aid and assistance where it was most needed. What is at issue in the next section is the extent to which their activities in Germany complemented British policy towards refugees and expellees, and Military Government and the Control Commission’s motivations in relying on their interventions.

The British churches and voluntary organisations: political instruments Given the scale and impact of the refugee problems, it is easy to see why the British government and its administrators in Germany, already struggling to cope with a population and humanitarian crisis, were so keen to enlist the support of the churches and voluntary associations. This was not entirely straightforward, given the problematic moral conflicts arising during the war between government and some high-profile church luminaries. These conflicts were part of the reason for the official British Christian attitudes towards Germany. Bishop Bell was one of the public figures to argue forcefully and repeatedly that the government should not betray the Christian principles of a civilised society in its

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longer-term treatment of Germany following Allied victory. As we know, his heroic appeals failed to carry the day, for example, in moderating Britain’s wartime bombing policy.100 This was in part owing to powerful and influential voices elsewhere within the British Anglican Church, such as Archbishop William Temple, who as mentioned earlier, were making their case simultaneously for an altogether tougher line to be adopted by the Allies, viewed at the time as a necessary component of a short-term policy towards Germany that might pave the way for a softer longer-term approach. Temple, one of 13 British church leaders to put their names to a statement entitled ‘A Christian Basis for Reconstruction’, said there should be ‘such expression of moral condemnation of recent German policy as cannot fail to bring home to the people of that land what is the moral judgement of the world concerning them’.101 Indeed, the question of how both Catholic and Protestant churches worldwide might continue to attempt to press world governments for statutes of limitations to help protect innocent civilians in wartime from indiscriminate attack was no nearer to being resolved six years later at the Lambeth Conference in July 1948. This was despite the imminent and unanimous adoption of the UDHR on 10 December 1948,102 with arguments for civilians’ rights further complicated by the deeply felt threat of atomic weapons. Debates at Lambeth among bishops of the worldwide Anglican churches spelt out some hard choices still facing nation states in armed conflict. From September 1939, any pre-war consensus by lawyers and the military as to the ‘permissible’ or moral limits in the conduct of war had been exposed as a sham. As Bell put it: This unreal and fictitious structure collapsed almost at once . . . [o]nce illegal action was taken by one side, it was swiftly followed by illegal action on the other side. Of course, there was the obliteration bombing which did much damage and was so indefensible from the point of view of existing or pre-existing law.103 This was an intractable problem and church leaders effectively could do no more than support a watered-down resolution, tabled by Bell, that appealed to political decision-makers on grounds of conscience alone: The Conference, noting that the practice of modern warfare since the outbreak of the world war has included the use of weapons involving indiscriminate attacks upon the enemy civilian population, affirms that such use cannot be justified by Christian standards.104

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The Bishop, who in January 1946 had failed to instigate a House of Lords resolution over the continuing removal of German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary,105 argued long and hard for the Conference to table strongly worded resolutions encouraging overall Allied efforts to seek greater reconciliation with Germany and a resolution of the Displaced Persons problem. The Conference knew that in the matter of ‘making peace with Germany’, its guidance was ‘expected by a great many people’. With regard to Displaced Persons, ‘their needs might well be vividly brought before the attention of the Christian community by a resolution under this general heading’.106 Neither had Bell, ‘the champion of the German resistance’,107 met with anything more than polite scepticism from the British government in his support of the anti-Nazi credentials of German church leaders, despite clear evidence of the bravery of those such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller and Theophil Wurm in their opposition to Hitler. These consistent responses by the government illustrated a starker political reality for those, not only inside the Anglican and Catholic churches, who were advocating this more reconciliatory policy with Germany. In other words, it was primarily the state, not the Church, that had the power to wield material influence on any critical political decisions shaped as a result of debates where the British churches had a clear point of view, such as the bombing policy, reconciliation, refugees and displaced persons, humanitarian relief, and so on. In many ways, however, the government was able to appropriate the Christian message of peace, enunciated by Protestant and Catholic bishops at Lambeth, to suit its own purpose.108 So for example, it was quite possible for the FO’s leading political adviser on Germany, John Troutbeck, to argue in January 1944 for the primacy of Germany’s return to Christian values to aid its spiritual renewal: ‘A Christian revival is probably the only alternative to the ideal of national socialism, but the impulse must come from within Germany itself.’109 This sidestepped the question of Britain’s obligations in embracing the same values in its policy-making towards Germany that its critics had identified as cant and hypocrisy. While there was broad support for Troutbeck’s overall plan for German regeneration, Oliver Harvey argued it should not receive wider ‘print’ circulation but be retained purely for internal consumption ‘as being a very interesting but personal view’. He did not wish it to go further ‘as it has not got the Secretary of State’s imprimatur’.110 Interestingly, as Eden’s Private Secretary, Harvey knew the Foreign Secretary’s irritation at Bell’s

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wartime interventions and the latter’s optimistic position on behalf of Germany’s Christian revival. In 1949, Bell reflected on how the Nazi regime had elided religious belief with political doctrine, albeit to quite different ends: ‘National Socialism was in essence a religion expressing itself in politics. Had the people recognized its religious character in time, and opposed it by a stronger religion, mankind would have been spared much.’111 It is against this background that the impact of many articles in the contemporary periodicals that appeared from early 1945 onwards should be evaluated. They commonly argued, above all, for a humane style of occupation. So it was perfectly possible for the Lord Bishop of Gloucester also to argue against the Church’s case with an admission that ‘the identification of Christianity with purely National interests may be largely to blame for this failure of Christian influence’,112 or Kingsley Martin to discuss links between morality and politics.113 Others argued for a more ‘hands-off’ approach by the British. Rennie Smith argued that Germany itself had the chance to play a leading role in the ‘struggle for the achievement of a new human dignity in Europe’: I do not know whether out of Germany a new synthesis for the guidance of Europe will come. But I do know that that it is precisely because such possibilities exist that Germany and the German people are of such significance, both to themselves and to the rest of the world. Could we be . . . on the threshold of a creative era in German public life and policy which, following a destructive one, would do for Germany and the world what Bach and Beethoven did, when God played through them as His chosen instruments of music?114 By spring 1947, there was still little real belief within the CCG that Germany could somehow be ‘repaired from within’ by the palliative balm of Christianity. As an article in the Commission’s British Zone Review put it, the problem had become ‘very complex’: Assuming her [Germany] to accept grudgingly the loss of her power for mischief and complacently our efforts to restore her to life that in itself would mean little unless she searched within herself for the reasons of all that had come to pass, and thus guided herself toward the goal of applied Christianity and humanity.115

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This seemed to acknowledge that expecting redemptive religion to become the standard-bearer of Britain’s civilising mission was not the answer. In that sense, if a return to God had been the panacea to the problem of Germany, other British policies attempting to change society’s Weltanschauung, such as democratisation, demilitarisation and denazification, would have been criticised from within the German churches, as they were ‘not based on the Christian and spiritual revival that the Church leaders advocated’.116 Denazification, in particular, presented a problem for British policy as no one ‘wanted to be accused of controlling the churches’. The decision therefore was made that the Church should purify itself from ‘the cancer of Hitlerism’. George Bell articulated this conundrum by characterising different factions in the German Church: those who resisted the Nazi regime by bravely choosing Christianity over patriotism, those who did little to oppose Hitler, and those who feared for their own safety.117 One way to validate and encourage the worthiness of the British cause was to underline the good news stories as they emerged during the early phases of Germany’s reconstruction. In many ways, The British Zone Review, first published on 29 September 1945, offered an ideal presentational device for British policy-makers and administrators. Its remit was to provide a fortnightly digest of CCG news, and to describe its activities promoting reconstruction within the British Zone. Offering a wider picture of life throughout the zone helped underline the appearance of greater cohesion between different localities. It also offered a neutral space to encourage new, more trusting relationships between its constituent readership, the occupying military forces and the CCG. And it demonstrated, publicly, bridge-building efforts between Britain and Germany on both lay and ecclesiastical levels. Religion was a prominent regular editorial feature; articles stressed that religion could play a major role in papering over the cracks of old wounds. Apart from one early piece describing the foremost task of religion as being ‘to re-educate youth’, 118 these said little about how a more ‘Christian’ pastoral approach to ruling Germany would modify, tangibly, existing occupation policies to both sides’ benefit, other than to remind its audience that Britain was committed to playing a full part in Germany’s spiritual regeneration. John Hynd’s 1946 Christmas Message of ‘thanks and encouragement’, an open letter to Sholto Douglas, reminded BMG and CCG staff: The British Zone is no place for men and women without a mission. I hope that you will be dismayed by criticism: much of it is

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ill-informed, and much of it is mis-directed, but its existence shows that public opinion is alive to the importance of what we are trying to do, and if there are critics, there are many more who have a clear picture of our work.119 This suggests that the challenges of dealing with famine and disease on the one hand, while tackling the rebuilding of Germany’s economic and political life on the other, demanded reserves of almost missionary zeal by Britain’s military and civilian governments. Perhaps this was a call first and foremost on their own inner strength, a far cry from the somewhat complacent ideals that Britain somehow could socially engineer a German ‘change of heart’, a process that needed to flower from within Germans themselves. This partly explains why there was negligible interference by Britain in the post-war restoration of the German churches. It also helps us to understand why General Brian Robertson, Montgomery’s successor as Military Governor, soon recognised that ‘the churches in Germany are unquestionably capable of giving considerable assistance to putting our ideas across to the German people that they have to be treated differently’.120 Thus its in-house magazine editorials focused principally on educating CCG administrations about the importance of religion in Germany and the significance Britain attached to Christianity as a mouthpiece of its moralising mission, part of its agenda to bring liberal democracy to Germany.121 Two examples, one a churchman, the other a politician, show these contrasting approaches at work. It is a mark of just how many problems had beset the British occupation that by the end of 1948, the head of the Anglican Church in Britain, Geoffrey Fisher, realised that the Church’s guidance was increasingly needed both to remind British policy-makers of their duties and to boost British morale. He visited Hamburg to address ‘a very large gathering of CCG personnel’. His emissary had visited Germany 18 months previously, when, in the presence of the Lutheran Bishops Dibelius of Berlin, Stählin and Meiser, he had heard Ministerpräsident Kopf in a speech in Hannover urge close cooperation between Church and state ‘to revive and strengthen the morale of the people’.122 Fisher’s speech was candid in its assessment of the continuing inequitable and awkward relationship between the host country and its now unwanted master. Almost apologetically, he began by saying that when he came to Germany: ‘I never imagined, I was going to tell you how to do your job.’ This is precisely what he then did, outlining as he saw it, their three main responsibilities

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‘to carry the good name of the British people and that is a thing of which we are all proud’. Second, he described in paternalistic terms what they were dealing with: The Borstal Boy of Europe, for that is the kind of state which the German nation is in. The Borstal Boy . . . has been caught and has been sentenced, and has been sent to a Borstal institution. And you are the staff of the institution to whom is committed the care of the Borstal Boy.123 It is not clear how many of Fisher’s audience would have subscribed to his pessimistic view, either that their efforts to ‘reform’ delinquent Germany over three years were not bearing fruit, or that his panacea for the treatment of Germany was consonant with the upholding of standards of British fair play, or Britain’s self-image as the major player in promoting Western civilised values. The patronising borstal analogy was extended to describing a nation being institutionalised against their will, ‘full of suspicion and dislike and hatred’. Yet their hearts and minds still needed to be won to ‘get rid of old habits and to be taught to want to fit into good social order and lead a good decent life’. The CCG’s task was to try to ‘get out of their minds a very natural resentment that you are here at all’. Their ultimate reward would be to witness Germany restored as ‘a good member of the family of nations’. This linked to his final point: the CCG would be responsible for ‘what Europe may be like in thirty, fifty, a hundred years hence’, with Germany once more a great nation. Fisher was very aware that while some could rise to the challenge of performing ‘good works’ thus bettering themselves as humans and as positive contributors to the new Germany, others saw their assignment as ‘being stuck here amidst a rather aimless and demoralised people’. To these people who did not fit in as well and to whom things did not seem to matter as much, there were ‘one or two temptations’: For instance, the temptation of having a bit more power here than you would ever have in England . . . Some of the British wives I have talked to have had the extremely pleasant sense of power of having a servant or two to give their orders to. A thing, which has become unknown in England.124 That Fisher felt moved to expose the undertones of a colonial impulse shows the wider perception of its existence in the British Zone. It was

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also a gentle rebuke to those who thought that treating the Germans in a manner they would not wish for themselves was acceptable. His invocation of more biblical language – their need to avoid temptation – was designed as a corrective against double standards and the prevention of a lowering of Britain’s good reputation in the world, in his view, a primary task of the occupation. Germany must not be allowed to become like Olde England for the English. There is reference here, too, to the undesirability of treating Germany as some colonial outpost. So what was being suggested in a well-publicised speech, and over three and a half years into occupation, was that it was Germany’s Protestant moral reform that was still at issue – no mention here of ‘regeneration’ or ‘spiritual renewal’. There is also an assumption that the Germans had been so used to taking orders that they would be inured to any of the more disciplinarian methods used to aid their reform into ‘good Germans’. But it was exactly this style of ‘us and them’ discourse that progressively influenced more negative German responses to the British, especially those working in the CCG, and undermined morale, as local German police reports in Schleswig-Holstein show. This attitude tells us a great deal about perceptions of the occupation not only in Germany but in Britain. It shows too that the Church was unofficially encouraged in Whitehall to act as an acceptable face of British rule, and its Christian principles could be invoked to make occupation more palatable to both occupiers and occupied. Baron Pakenham, Hynd’s successor as minister (1947–8), a humanitarian and devout Catholic, offered a contrast in styles: churchmen such as Fisher or Bell had licence to speak freely as they were not responsible for policy, whereas the freedom of a government minister to talk candidly of the crisis was constrained by the need to remain diplomatically supportive of policy when speaking out over Germany’s needs. Less than two months into his new post and following five visits to Germany, he submitted a paper to Bevin describing the true situation regarding food shortages: ‘It is a complete illusion to suppose that things are getting steadily better. If anything they are worse than six months ago.’ Bevin persuaded him to withdraw both the paper and his threat to resign his post before it reached the Cabinet for discussion.125 Hynd had announced something similar in the House in January and then in April 1947. Gollancz, who had founded the humanitarian organisation Save Europe Now! in 1946 wrote that any claims that the situation was improving were being ‘treated with derision by the Germans’.

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Pakenham arrived in Germany in May 1947, greatly influenced by the energetic zeal with which Bell, Gollancz, Stokes and others had galvanised the public’s conscience to help Germany: ‘I proclaimed far and wide the message that we, the British Government, stood for Christian principles’126 (see Fig. 18). This was his genuinely felt belief and a statement of his loyalty in the line of duty, but it was politically important too, to project a self-image of ‘Britain the benevolent’ as part of the government’s democratisation agenda. However, for a minister of the Crown explicitly to link policy with God was not only unusual but carried with it substantial political risk, for it morally impelled the government to uphold those principles. Churchill approached him at a 1947 Buckingham Palace garden party, appearing to give the lie to this claim: ‘I am glad . . . that there is one English mind suffering for the miseries of Germany.’ So how could Britain claim to stand for ‘Christian principles’ and be insensitive to German suffering? Churchill’s remark spoke of wider British indifference to Germany’s plight in the face of a greater preoccupation with Britain’s own domestic problems. Attlee, years later, turned down Pakenham’s invitation to become a patron of the Anglo-German Association. His views on Germans had not mellowed with time: ‘You ought to know that I have always disliked the Germans. Vi and I had a German maid we were very fond of – but she was an exception.’127 For all his awareness of the ambivalence towards Germany of such senior parliamentary figureheads from both the Left and the Right, Pakenham persisted in his view that Britain’s role was ‘to assist her [Germany] to develop a peaceful democratic and Christian mind’. As if to emphasise the religious impulse behind British policy, he added that the task in Germany ‘was a Christian crusade or it was nothing’.128 But there is no mention of how such a mission, characterised as such by his predecessor, might offer more practical measures to help those most vulnerable. However, he was popular with many, if not all, Germans who were convinced that he ‘considers his great task in Germany and Austria as a mission of the deepest moral obligation’. As if to underline British politicians’ duty of care in making good on their rhetoric of fashioning a new democratic identity for Germany – part of reconstructing a new cohesive society of all the talents – shortly before Pakenham’s article was published, the minister spoke on ‘Christianity and Politics’ at Kiel University. He said that besides the spiritual vocation, there was no other body within the state other than professional politicians on whose ‘character and moral worth’ the community so depended. He argued that the

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Figure 18. Frank Pakenham in conversation with William Asbury, Regional Commissioner for North Rhine-Westphalia, shortly before the Minister for Germany’s return to London following a visit to the British Zone, summer 1947. Courtesy of David Purdy.

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supremacy of moral law should form the bedrock of Christian wisdom on international affairs, and that politicians should codify ‘the ordinary rules of decent behaviour’, although he conceded ‘the immense difficulties’ needing to be confronted to put these principles into practice. Without realising it he implicitly linked his Christian message to questions of the accountability of the British for the actions or inactions of their country – key to the refugees and expellees – about whose fate Pakenham cared deeply: When one great country is driven by circumstances to occupy another, and holds the latter at its mercy, it holds the position of a trustee. That is how I see our position in Germany. We on the British side, out here, have our duty to our own country – our duty to the world, but never for one moment are we entitled to forget our duty to you remembering that we are all members of the same family – remembering that each one of us is a sinner and that at the last day each one of us will be called to account. On that day our Judge will not be interested by the fact that what we did was or was not done to an Englishman or a German but simply by the fact that it was or was not done to a human being.129 Pakenham’s own political morality was doubted by few on account of his deeply held Catholic beliefs, which enabled him to enunciate the moral responsibility underpinning the British occupation, but the problem persisted that, to all intents and purposes, his was a voice in the wilderness. Set against this background was a far more pragmatic politics pervading almost all aspects of British occupation policy, in which religious regeneration, and the collaborative impetus and admirable zeal of the non-faith-based organisations (many of them voluntary) was but a sideshow to bigger practical political issues at hand, such as unemployment, which such bodies did not have the power to resolve. In a speech and follow-up discussion with Kiel University students, he stated British foreign policy was founded on political moral integrity and that Britain would not swerve from that even at the risk of losing its prestige abroad – a different emphasis from Archbishop Fisher’s later remarks. The German newspaper reporting the event sensed that if Pakenham’s ‘important statement’ had his government’s blessing, then the talk in Germany of ‘too little influence’ would soon stop.130 In reality, Britain’s Labour government, increasingly under attack from within Germany for failing to deliver on its pledges, found it hard

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to succeed in those ‘obligations’ to which Pakenham had referred, hamstrung by its own financial problems, in debt to America and increasingly diverted by its enmeshment in early Cold War politics with the Soviets. From early 1947, the growing divisions with the Soviet Union had reemphasised the opposition of Church of England leaders to Communism and the Soviets: their purpose, along with the British government, was to make every effort to keep the Western zones ideologically free of Communist infiltration. The government became steadily more convinced of the need for religion to assume ‘much greater prominence’ in Britain’s efforts to help forge its vision of a new German democratic identity, part of its own ideological bulwark against fears of Soviet socialism. In May 1948, Ivone Kirkpatrick suggested to the Head of the CCG’s Political Department that ‘the promotion of Christianity in Germany should be regarded as a political aim since it is an obvious method of weaning the Germans away from Nazis and Communism’.131 Notwithstanding these factors, Pakenham, like Hynd before him, was considered rather too independently pro-German by Bevin in particular, but also by Attlee, who acidly told him in April 1948 that: ‘I think it is about time you had a department of your own. I’ve got civil aviation in mind.’132 As the Minister for Germany’s authority was so deliberately circumscribed, Pakenham and his predecessor’s ability to exert any major influence within Whitehall, never mind raising the refugees’ plight, went to the heart of the contradiction between politicians’ and British church leaders’ claims about the Christian inclusiveness of Britain’s ‘moral obligation’. After all, as mentioned earlier, British politicians had been co-signatories to a policy specifically excluding help to German refugees and expellees. Furthermore, Britain’s overtaxed economic capacity could not live up to the high standards of care implicit in such nebulous commitments to Germany, as we shall see. These two factors alone illustrated a wealth of difference between adopting the pragmatic approach towards Germans articulated by political and military leaders on the one hand, and the rather more unconditional and inclusive duty of care advocated by British church leaders on the other. Paradoxically, a desire to export democratic principles did not extend to sanctioning the emerging expellee associations or newspapers whose activities were proscribed for fear of inspiring nascent Communist support, revanchist nationalism and political influence that might divert Germany’s path away from Westernstyle democracy. This explains why the Christian churches in Britain and Germany had an increasingly free hand to spread their doctrines, in the

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hope of providing German refugees and expellees with a more spiritual focus. Notwithstanding the controls and censorship of such public refugee activities, publicity was given to refugee issues in local newspapers. Moreover, the introduction of CCG’s Religious Affairs Branch in late 1946 did not offer much hope for help to either refugees or expellees other than as a form of talking shop for their concerns. Its original remit as a section within the Education Branch was to act as an informed regional and local liaison with the German churches and to disseminate its great influence within Germany. However, given the complexity of church affairs in Germany, the Education Branch soon made it known to the Foreign Office that it felt unable to fulfil this task without being granted a fully independent branch of its own ‘staffed by people who knew what they were doing’.133 But Archbishop Frings considered them ‘without influence and better dissolved’.134 Edwin Robertson, who was seconded to the Allied Control Commission as the British churches’ representative, and was the CCG’s head of Religious Affairs Branch (1947–9), saw its role as an opportunity to represent a country ‘still nominally Christian and whose whole system, life and Government, has been strongly influenced by the churches’.135 Religious Affairs Branch also tried to encourage the German churches ‘to do more about their own refugees’,136 but the British had not helped this particular situation by their earlier policy decisions, and so such words of encouragement did little more than show somewhat belated concern, and possibly frustration too, at a situation largely created by their own government. By early 1949 the far-reaching social impact of the refugee crisis was no nearer to being resolved. The World Council of Churches [hereinafter WCC] Conference took place in Hamburg that February, wholly devoted to German refugee questions. Resolutions called for urgent practical and financial assistance, specifically, dollars with matching funding for a special economic reconstruction programme to create new opportunities for refugees, and implement the social and economic requirements of the Potsdam Agreement’s Article XIII in five specific areas: industry, agriculture and agricultural settlement, emigration and a new distribution of population, education and vocational training, and ‘the task of the Church’.137 Recognising that ‘human want and deprivation had collided with despair, creating a problem on such a vast scale that the German people could not carry this burden or solve the task by themselves’,138 it further stated that: We stand up not only for the recognition of the UN’s public proclamation of human rights, but for its practical application in

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conjunction with a large-scale, internationally planned realisable solution of refugee need by the community of nations.139 Perhaps aware that these objectives might take too long to realise, the WCC identified the importance of refugees and the indigenous population setting aside their mutual doubts, and trying to ‘live together with goodwill in a brotherly way’, by reciprocating any act of help.140 When it came to recommendations ‘that could lead to practical results’, all that emerged was a suggestion that a further smaller working party explore practicalities.141 The WCC and the International Missionary Council had already passed identical resolutions delivered to the UN on 21 September 1948, their principal aim being a minimum declaration on human rights.142 However, the German authorities responsible for refugee matters, and familiar with British officials’ propensity for avoiding quick decisionmaking in the interests of observing bureaucratic protocol, had long since established their own social welfare structure and their own ministries and departments for managing the problem of alleviating the worst effects of the crisis for those most affected by serious ill health, or by lack of accommodation, food and unemployment. They did not really need the all-too-obvious problems to be further identified. Hermann Lüdemann, Schleswig-Holstein’s SPD Ministerpräsident, imprisoned and mistreated by the Gestapo three times,143 was always looking out for an opportunity to argue for a better deal for SH, and pointed out that there was no shortage of existing organisations dealing with the refugee question; on the contrary, the real need was for building capital.144 So it was more out of courtesy and hope rather than in expectation of any sudden British government initiatives that resolutions and recommendations were personally relayed to Robertson and to General Lucius Clay, who was responsible for the US Zone. Robertson was reputedly ‘a good listener’.145 But listening to the daily litany of problems, as many within Military Government and the Control Commission had regularly done, was one thing. Having effective refugee policies was quite another, as the delays and obfuscations over Schleswig-Holstein’s much-needed refugee redistribution will reveal. If Germans had to solve the problems of an increasing refugee population, housing, food and health, what other help could they call on from voluntary organisations and agencies? From early in the occupation, the British helped to coordinate and actively support the efforts of British organisations such as the Red Cross, Save Europe Now and the Salvation

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Army Civilian Relief Team, in helping to distribute food, clothing and essential medical supplies to the wider German population. These activities complemented the work being carried out by teams such as the Danish, Swedish and Swiss Red Cross, and the Mennonites from the USA, and backed up the work of the German welfare committees and voluntary organisations such as the Evangelische Hilfswerk’s Innere Mission and the Catholic organisation, Caritas. In October 1945, BMG ordered SH’s Oberpräsident immediately to establish Welfare Committees at Kreis and parish (Gemeinde) level ‘for the benefit of the refugees’. Housing, clothing, feeding and recreation were to be prioritised.146 The military government explicitly linked such work of the voluntary organisations with the central role envisaged for the British Christian churches in spreading their universal themes of goodwill and unity as the glue to help make Germany a more cohesive society. As explained earlier, Britain saw the churches’ broader role as a natural vehicle for embedding higher spiritual and moral values within German society. As becomes clear in the next chapter, fostering better relations between Einheimische, refugees and expellees was a pivotal component in their successful integration, so endorsing the British churches’ work was seen by Britain as a way to promote greater tolerance and generosity among German citizens. But trusting to Christian charity was never going to be sufficient per se in surmounting the fundamental social and economic problems caused by such massive distortions to the population – practical policies were needed. In this context, it is important to note that the work of Christian charity groups highlighted the gulf between the valiant efforts of the volunteers, very evident to the Germans and therefore potentially embarrassing to the British authorities in Germany, and the lack of a broader political vision from the British that would match Christian goodwill with deeds. Despite the efforts of consecutive regional commissioners in SH, religious policy only helped refugees peripherally within the overall context of refugee welfare. Improving living standards and placing refugee concern centre stage, in the final analysis, came down to German legislative will, encapsulated in the formation of a new Federal Ministry for Expellee Affairs. Nevertheless, the Christian message of giving for giving’s sake and of embracing former enemies – embodied in the apolitical aid agencies’ ethos – was a useful ally to the CCG in helping it, temporarily, to divert refugees’ and expellees’ attention from harder truths they had to confront in rebuilding their lives. It helped too that local British officials’ initiatives to establish links with Britain, for example between Kiel and Coventry in

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1947, succeeded not only in fostering long-term Anglo-German links and friendships, but in pacifying much of the public’s distaste about the plight of the refugees reported in the British press, and so vehemently brought into the public domain by Bell, Gollancz and others. As the unvarnished truth of the refugees’ parlous situation filtered back to Britain, and as the public’s appetite for holding Germany to account for its war crimes was partially satiated by the Nuremberg verdicts, the underlying Christian message of organisations such as Save Europe Now (SEN) and Christian Reconstruction in Europe persuaded many to help as acts of good stewardship. The latter, for example, functioned under the auspices of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Moderators of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Federal Council, with the Bishop of Chichester its joint chairman.147 The convergence of the Christian messages of both the British and German churches became a common refrain on the front line, where it mattered most. In August 1946 de Crespigny outlined the Christian churches’ task as one of ‘immense responsibility’, capable of exerting a profound influence upon Germany and Europe: Your work is essential to the task of government and the two must go ever forward in harmony, with Christian principles as their guiding spirit . . . The Churches in Schleswig-Holstein can set an example to Europe in this matter by proving themselves to be a complete brotherhood of Christian communities serving their fellowmen from the highest principles and inspiring them to put into practice all the things necessary to restore the world into healthy spiritual and material state.148 De Crespigny also launched appeals for clothing directly to Britons through the British press.149 In one case, the Diocese of Sheffield, despite their own severe shortages, sent ten tons of clothing and food. The Daily Telegraph published de Crespigny’s thanks for ‘that magnificent response’. It meant far more than the donors realised ‘to the unfortunates of this area of northern Germany’.150 These were general humanitarian calls for public support for German citizens rather than singling out refugees as a special interest group, although the Quakers’ Friends Relief Service had a team in Germany whose primary concern was to help settle German refugees ‘expelled from New Poland and Silesia’.151 Likewise, CCG’s policy was not to favour any particular church at another’s expense, but to be

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even-handed without denominational or confessional prejudice. A directive to religious affairs officers stated: We are not here as missionaries, but to help the Germans help themselves, i.e. by making available to them every spiritual and material service we can render. It would not even be enough if as a result of our efforts the Churches were filled. We could only feel satisfied if we were sure that the Germans as a whole were practising Christianity in their lives.152 ‘Missionaries’ here is invoked quite differently from Hynd’s and Pakenham’s inferences of the British as ‘colonial’ administrators. While it was the wish of the Religious Affairs Branch to honour their pledge to provide ‘every spiritual and material’ service, in practice, however, economic constraints privileged the supply of the former over the latter, despite valuable material assistance offered by the voluntary sector. Again, it is noticeable there are no mentions of refugees in this four-page document, save a passing comment praising the relief teams of all denominations under the Red Cross’s aegis ‘doing splendid work among the distressed’.153 These statements were in reality little more than presentational devices to demonstrate their support, by association, not just to relief agencies but implicitly to German civilians, showing also how the CCG’s administrators were quick to praise the humanitarian agencies who had stepped into the breach vacated by Britain’s decision for refugee and expellee problems to be excluded from its remit. As a further example, in February 1948, against a backdrop of SH Landesminister Bruno Diekmann’s bleak economic forecasts and another cut in bread rations, the Rudolf Steiner movement persisted in trying to ‘to turn people’s minds from material needs to the spiritual needs of today’.154 Implicit was a forlorn hope among British officials that faith alone might help Germans come to terms with their material privations. But it was left to the Salvation Army team to continue ‘to do valiant service amongst refugees’.155 Indeed, churches of various denominations attracted large numbers at each service, but the credit for restoring war-damaged places of worship, much in demand by Germans, was attributable to the efforts of local German congregations, such as the Anschar Kirche in Neumünster funded by the Evangelische Kirche. Although its capacity was 250, over 1,000 assembled for its reconsecration ceremony, with a new parish created to embrace the nearby refugee camp.156

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In the field of religious policy, Britain largely left it to the Germans to restore their previous religious structural fabric. And yet, the British instinct to interfere never really receded until the FRG was granted conditional sovereign status in mid-1952, and even then, as we shall see, Britain made sure that it retained reserved powers, and thus overall control. How could Whitehall and its German civilian administrations carry out their moral ‘duty’ to Germany, whether or not it was religiously motivated, within a relationship between occupier and occupied that consistently uncovered the bogey of a lingering British mistrust of Germans? For example, some parishes in the UK tried to forge closer links similar to those between Coventry and Kiel. The CCG’s Religious Affairs Section, in full knowledge of this, decided to act, as they had received no prior approach, and declared ‘“adoption” is suspected and has objectionable aspects’.157 This underlying lack of trust, indicative of the contradictions in British indirect rule, seeped into areas where British sanction was still required for quite mundane matters, despite competence notionally residing with the German Land government. For example, Landesbischof Halfmann met Asbury to voice his concerns about the refugees and expellees. He wanted a guarantee of office accommodation within parishes to facilitate important pastoral work. Given SH’s severe overpopulation, he was anxious that the granting of driving licences to priests would not be prioritised lower than providing those working in economic or political offices with transport facilities. Asbury, bizarrely, responded with a lengthy, but irrelevant account of the failed attempt to transfer 137,000 refugees owing to the intransigence of the other BZ Länder, regretting that ‘one does not find the community outlook that one might expect’. Nevertheless, he supported the Military Governor’s natural hesitation in giving these orders as it interfered with what should really be domestic matters for the Germans. This was a preamble to informing him there was nothing he could do to help as all the Bishop’s requests lay within the competence of the German government, and he was ‘quite certain that they would resent my intrusion into these particular matters’.158 This shows that the Military Government in general, and the CCG in particular, could easily revert to their old failsafe method of demarcating lines of responsibility when circumstances so suited. Asbury said he would speak to Lüdemann when they next met, but there is little to suggest that this RC was guided by a sense of moral duty or cooperation, as articulated by Pakenham, Fisher and others, that might have

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occasioned greater preparedness to match the German churches’ collective spiritual and material efforts on behalf of refugees and expellees. After all, with Britain’s blessing, they had done much to provide a religious focus, and had coordinated vital food and clothing efforts, and this had helped to assuage some of the economic concerns that so beset CCG. As a coda to this, the Evangelisches Hilfswerk held a centenary celebration of the Innere Mission on 22 September 1948 in Rendsburg. Asbury attended the afternoon celebrations in the town’s theatre, and ‘his presence was very greatly appreciated’.159 However, in Schleswig-Holstein religious leaders’ eyes he was seen now increasingly as little more than a benign figurehead, although from a British perspective, he was a government representative, so keeping up appearances was important, and presentation was all. German churches’ links to the aid agencies were more than useful to the British cause, not just in distributing aid, but in suggesting a unanimity of British–German purpose in a religious civilising mission, and demonstrating the centrality of Germany’s spiritual regeneration in policy. By the time of the conference of the World Council of Churches in August–September 1948, it was clear that Britain’s direct contribution and influence had become increasingly peripheral, as initiatives for religious cooperation to aid refugee care were subsumed into the wider efforts of international churches. This prompted the Military Governor’s letter to Bevin on how to address present and future demographic challenges: Germany’s population problem and its solution have far-reaching importance for British policy in the next 20 years. The question is also of some topical interest in view of the attention which has been called to it by the Hamburg Conference of the World Council of Churches just ended.160 This placed the refugee problem centre stage, so it is interesting that Robertson suddenly felt he should ‘give some impression of the scope and nature of the problem’161 by summarising the major problems from its 22-point memorandum. This implied that in updating him on particular aspects of the ‘problem’ with which Bevin was unfamiliar, he hoped, unsuccessfully as it transpired, that the Foreign Secretary would now give the issue higher political priority. Curiously, although late in the day, the churches through the WCC showed how different faiths could come together in a single cause, a unity of purpose so markedly absent, as we see later, in the Western Allies’ failure to agree population redistribution quotas.

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This section has identified contradictions between the British churches’ rhetorical persuasiveness in helping the government to underpin and present its moral and Christian mandate to rule Germany, and the government’s policy vacuum that offered few practical policies. It has also revealed major differences among church leaders, Whitehall ministers and military and civilian officials in Germany in their assessments of how charitable they should be in their treatment of Germany, even though, as we have seen, religion began to assume greater importance for the British as the Cold War intensified. The main obstacle to success was that the British churches did not instigate or manage to modify government policy on refugees, nor did the British voluntary and humanitarian organisations. Moreover, there was widespread pessimism among the relief workers about how little had been achieved in material terms.162 Their combined efforts were rather a coalition of organised relief initiatives designed to plug gaps left by a policy that did not recognise German refugees and expellees as falling under its remit. The British churches’ influence on German refugee life was thus peripheral to the efforts undertaken by the Germans. Britain’s policy of governing by indirect rule both collided and conflicted with its more dominant impulse to control Germany through more direct means. British Military Government laws and ordinances show that restoration of civil liberties in Germany was not a British priority, whatever the official rhetoric may have suggested. Maintaining law and order assumed far greater importance in British minds than responding to the growing impact of earlier decisions that had marginalised refugee hopes of integration into their new environment. Asserting Britain’s civilising mission was largely driven by the memory of its colonial past. Antipathy towards CCG grew as Germans increasingly saw that the occupying administration routinely put its own needs first. Appropriating the healing message of the churches and facilitating the work of the voluntary organisations, whilst helping to present the occupiers in a positive light and diverting attention away from Britain’s own economic difficulties, provided little in the way of material improvements for refugees. To that extent the churches unwittingly helped to undermine the moral mandate of the British, and this is now examined in relation to its impact on refugees, expellees and refugee policy.

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CHAPTER 4 A R EGION IN CR ISIS: SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN

Introduction Britain’s own sense of its moral leadership has been examined as a central theme of its Germany policy. The next two chapters contextualise this further by focusing on the complex story of the refugee and expellee crisis in Schleswig-Holstein, the region perhaps above all others in the Western zones forced to withstand the greatest burdens following the forced migration of first German refugees, then expellees. They present a brief chronology of these problems before the population transfers of ethnic Germans started in early 1946 to situate this case-study in its broader setting, and then a summary of the social, economic and political composition of SchleswigHolstein after 1945. In particular, this chapter’s sections on the camps, housing and food crises illustrate the uniqueness of the British case, as do the sections in the following chapter on population redistribution, dismantling and unemployment, and refugee organisations. In Theodor Schieder’s documentation of the flight and expulsion of the ethnic German populations he charted the first flight of German refugees from East Prussia in the face of the Soviet advance in the autumn of 1944. Further mass forced migration followed between January and April 1945 as the Red Army advanced towards the Oder-Neisse Line. These comprised Germans from areas in the west of Poland (formerly the Generalgouvernement and Warthegau) and from East Brandenburg. Mass refugee migration continued from mid-January, mainly by sea, with East Prussians, then at the end of January with further refugee movements from

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Danzig-West Prussia – again, largely by sea – and from East Pomerania in treks via land and then the sea ports. As many as 900,000 refugees were shipped to the West from Danzig and east Pomeranian ports between the end of January and the end of April, many to Schleswig-Holstein.1 A map from the Schleswig-Holstein Social Ministry in December 1948 shows the places of origin as well as the numbers of incoming refugees.2 Often quoted is Reichling’s figure of 4.4 million ‘National Germans’ (Reichsdeutsche) – those who had lived in those areas east of the OderNeisse Line that had formed part of Germany on 31 December 1937; these were principally Silesians, East Prussians, Pomeranians and East Brandenburgers. Sudeten Germans made up 1.9 million of the 3.5 million ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) – those Germans living as minorities in foreign countries such as Poland, the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Danzig, the Soviet Union, Rumania, Hungary and Yugoslavia. It is important to note that these figures do not differentiate between expellees and refugees. Neither state governments nor the occupying powers made ‘any meaningful distinction’ between those who fled from the Red Army or those expelled from their homes, with the term ‘refugee’ generally used to describe all Germans who fled or who were expelled as a result of the war and its aftermath.3 Before 1945, Schleswig-Holstein, then part of Prussia, had one of the highest concentrations of Nazi Party members in Germany. Several of those who performed key roles in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, part of Himmler’s 1941 plans for the war of annihilation in the East, had been former leading civic and police functionaries in Schleswig-Holstein.4 After Germany’s surrender and the process of denazification, a transition followed from British Military Government to the establishment of a regional German administration in February 1947. At the first Landtag election on 20 April 1947, the SPD polled 43.8 per cent, the CDU 34.1 and the SSV 9.3 per cent. Given that this region had been such a Nazi stronghold, this was nevertheless a surprisingly high figure for the Social Democrats.5 With regard to its religious base, figures for 1946 show that the influx of expellees and refugees had barely altered SH’s predominantly Protestant base of 87.9 per cent of its population. The comparable 1946 totals for the Western zones were 50.2 per cent Protestant and 45.7 per cent Catholic.6 With regard to its economy profile – SchleswigHolstein was historically one of Germany’s poorest provinces – much of its commercial output had been dominated by agriculture, however many of the refugees and expellees were either ‘too old, too young or too infirm’

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to be absorbed into farming.7 With many of its pre-war industries, such as iron foundries, now restricted, after May 1945 labour priorities were redirected to creating employment in the auxiliary building trades to tackle the housing situation in bomb-damaged urban areas, as the majority of its rural areas had escaped the worst physical effects of war. In addition to a need for agricultural workers, other labour shortages included clothing manufacture, especially shoes, and shorthand-typists.8 Employment opportunities for expellees and refugees were found predominantly in clothing manufacture and in textiles.9 Although there were problems specific to Schleswig-Holstein, especially regarding its high quota of expellees in relation to its indigenous population, this study addresses why there was such a significant gap between British rhetoric and British actions, and how this made explicit the damage to Britain’s reputation as an occupation administration claiming to be introducing democratic values to Germany. An atmosphere of mutual mistrust gradually developed as it became clear that the British were unable to deliver on the substance of their reconstruction pledges in the key areas of food, housing and employment, and that these impacted on all Germans, not just expellees and refugees. Thus the focus here is on the Germans’ expulsion and flight, and the impact on refugee and indigenous populations, before we then discuss the continuing emergency’s impact on British policy in three key areas: population redistribution, industrial dismantling and expellee organisations. British administrators were as concerned with gaining the Germans’ respect as they were in helping them to find solutions to seemingly endless and often difficult problems that were not entirely in the Germans’ gift to resolve. Respect for the occupying power was eroded further as the crisis escalated. When refugee problems became more intractable and needed decisive leadership from within CCG or from Whitehall, British officials increasingly looked towards their ready-made escape clause, a safety mechanism allowing them to say that it was incumbent upon the Germans to find the answers to refugee issues, or that any reproach levelled at British actions, or inactions, for particular problems was somehow attributable to German actions. This was inconsistent with the statement of intent made in 1945 at the Deputy Military Governor’s Conference that the ‘so-called “refugee” problem touches every aspect of Military Government’. Consequently, the British were blamed increasingly for having failed in their duty of care towards Germany and for being indecisive. Their reputation was further tarnished as they were repeatedly

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caught between two stools of first having delegated executive powers to Germans, but then still seeing the need to scrutinise, supervise or prescribe their activities more closely than was felt necessary by the German authorities. This tension grew more obvious with Britain’s dismantling policy and attitude to expellee associations. German government officials in SH mostly tolerated this interference, aware that non-cooperation could result in further controls being introduced, thus slowing their own efforts to improve refugees’ and expellees’ conditions. But as we shall see, there were vocal and influential critics of British policy. Much new evidence for this uneasy relationship and the growing tensions has come to light through British Kreis Resident Officers’ Reports, whose 61 files span a three-year period from late 1946 to 1949. Their cumulative significance has been overlooked by historians. Even a welcome new British study of refugees in post-war Germany makes only a cursory use of the KRO observations,10 missing an opportunity to locate unique British eyewitness perspectives within the wider analysis of the refugee problem. This is important, as with such an extensive chain of command within BMG and CCG, many policy discussions and decisions taken higher up in various British administrative HQs were based on a failure to account for such first-hand observations of local conditions that varied considerably. These documents therefore afford a more accurate view of the fluctuations in the crisis at an informed local level. Because report circulation was limited to CCG HQ in Kiel, these were not routinely seen and analysed by anyone ranked higher than the Deputy Regional Commissioner [hereinafter DRC], as the initialling in the minutes and on many of the actual reports shows. When necessary, the deputy would have acted as a filter to his Regional Commissioner (RC) for any significant matters arising. Robertson, the Military Governor, only received one monthly report from his RCs,11 and thus would not have had sight of them. That they did not play a more active role in shaping British policy, despite providing regular detailed snapshots of many key aspects of the refugee situation as a whole, indicates at the very least a missed opportunity by the RCs to monitor, for example, the deteriorating living conditions. An obvious question arises: why were many recurring comments and suggestions apparently filed away into obscurity, and not acted upon at a higher political level in Berlin, Lübbecke (in North Rhine-Westphalia) or London? The more general historiography on the expulsion, flight and ‘transfer’ of the German populations is enormous and equally varied in scope, building on a variety of archival sources and through personal witness accounts

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and earlier work by historians such as Schechtman12 and Schieder.13 The first Encyclopaedia of Migration14 includes a chapter on German refugees and expellees in Germany and Austria after 1945, recognising the ever-present relevance of refugee status, forced migration and the stillpresent cancer of ethnic cleansing or ethnic-religious conflict within the context of state violence.15 Refugees have been described as ‘the forgotten of history, the abused of politics’.16 These issues are now given increasing significance by modern historians and sociologists as defining characteristics17 of the post-Cold War era. More recent refugee literature deals more generally with the absorption of the refugees into Germany,18 the Western zones of occupation,19 or a particular Allied zone. Some focus on aspects of the crisis in particular regions within each zone, such as Bavaria (US),20 others on single towns such as Hameln in Lower Saxony in the British Zone (BZ).21 Such studies enable greater in-depth study of documents from the respective historic administrative areas of Land, Provinz, Regierungsbezirk, Landkreis, Stadtkreis or Gemeinde.22 Flight, integration and assimilation23 are recurrent themes, as are key aspects of refugee integration, for example via their religious orientation – an investigation of the Catholic Church’s reaction to the arrival of expellees and refugees places German measures and policies introduced after 1949 in the international context of the UDHR.24 Further perspectives have varied from those of expellees, often in the form of refugees’ testimony,25 or of host populations who had to accommodate them. Robert Moeller’s account of historians’ treatment of the ‘Expulsion of the Germans from East-Central Europe’ combines a more general overview with an account humanising the experience with fragments of personal testimony.26 The approach here lends itself to his more macro/micro approach. Only by concentrating on smaller areas – here SH – can one explain the scale of difficulties encountered by indigenous and refugee populations, and assess the effectiveness of policy in managing this protracted crisis. German historiography over the past 25 years of socio-economic and political reconstruction and refugee integration is less extensive than for other regions within the BZ.27 This is possibly because it was geographically by far the smallest of the three regions wholly under British control, representing only 4.4 per cent of Germany’s entire land mass, 15.9 per cent of the British Zone, or 6.3 per cent of the Western zones, and also because there has been more attention on Lower Saxony, possibly on account of its overall higher refugee and expellee numbers.

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These criteria, however, fail to account for one crucial factor – Schleswig-Holstein absorbed the highest concentration of refugees of all the German Länder in the Western zones as a percentage of its indigenous population. This is important when assessing how far such a shift in demographics was factored into policy calculations by Britain. By April 1947, for example, the share of expellees and refugees in SH constituted 47 per 100 inhabitants.28 By the 29 October 1946 census, Schleswig-Holstein’s overall population had increased from its 17 May 1939 level of 1.590 million to 2.651 million, a rise of 67 per cent.29 By 1948, the increase when compared with 1939 figures had topped 70 per cent.30 Even by June 1949, when the worst of the crisis had passed, the refugee population still represented over 38 per cent of the total, and 12 per cent of the refugees were ‘still living in sub-standard non-winterised camps’.31 In addition, over the last 20 years, the refugee problem has been covered through wider-drawn perspectives of its impact in both West and East Germany.32 Recent literature, though valuable to our understanding, is also notable for accenting histories gathered from the personal recollections of refugees in keeping with much of the more recent turn towards cultures of memory and remembrance. This seeks to preserve the testimonies of ‘first generation refugees’ whilst they are still alive, particularly those who would have been children at the time of the expulsions. Neither is this historiography exhaustive in covering specific localities.33 Micro-studies often focus either on the towns or cities in SH where expellees settled, such as Kiel, or on groups arriving from the East, such as from Pomerania, and their varying struggles to integrate within the Land.34 One such volume offers interesting comparisons between studies of single towns: contributors examine a range of topics, such as the clothing trade, the integration of ‘foreigners’ in schools, and evidence in burial records of discrimination towards refugees and former concentration camp inmates.35 In another study, links are drawn between the RAF bombings of Kiel and its shipbuilding industry, the effects on its citizens, and how efforts were made to rebuild the city and reconstruct lives from the devastation. Further chapters examine the financing of Kiel’s social housing, the reconstruction of Husum, and ask whether the changing structure of the Hamburg of 1938 and 1950 represent ‘continuity or change’.36 Connections are also made between the wartime bombings of Germany, the flight of the refugees and their later integration, in an exploration of their broader impact throughout Germany.37 The refugee question also appears as an integral component of the post-war history

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of the Nazi era in another recent reappraisal. This approach places the occupation and refugees within a longer retrospective survey, suggesting Germany was more than aware it had been the architect of much of its own tragedy, although coming to terms with this in the immediate aftermath was not a straightforward process.38 German historiography shows no shortage of focus on various singular aspects of the refugee issue in SH. What has been lacking, however, is any interconnected synthesis setting out to link Britain’s policy of promoting its democratic principles with its approach towards minorities and human rights, the wartime bombing of civilian targets and the obvious consequences for its occupation policy towards German refugees and expellees. These issues have only recently become a focus of historical research, but without making the links explicit. This book seeks to rectify this omission while addressing the suggestion of one historian of SH, who in mapping future research challenges said that both the causes and consequences of the expulsions needed investigation, for example the issue of apportioning blame and ‘recriminations’ over their wartime planning.39 This explains the work that was done during the late 1980s and early 1990s on the role of the British in SH,40 and research on topics such as the re-establishment of the CDU, the German civil service, DPs and reeducation within the British Zone, and the more recent work on expellee associations. Kurt Jürgensen in particular dealt with organisational structures and functions of the CCG and BMG within SH, but without analysing the background to British policy or the refugee issue. A more vivid picture of the early occupation period is conveyed in its extensive section devoted to Gerhard Garms’s eyewitness photographs. This contrasts with the small section on the two major expellee movements affecting SH during 1945 and 1946, Operations ‘Influx’ and ‘Swallow’ whose function only outlines the more powerful story expressed in the images of the everyday lives (Alltagsgeschichte) of Kiel refugees.41 This case-study builds a broader analysis of wider concerns that put great strains on indigenous and refugee German populations, such as housing and food shortages, the need for an equitable redistribution of refugees in other Länder, and the issue of dismantling and its effect on unemployment. As so much of the literature reflects the distinctly separated ‘operations’ of British military rule and the CCG on the one hand, and German responsibilities for refugee affairs on the other, there is almost nothing analysing the impact of the refugee crisis on British policy. This is partly because responsibilities for refugee matters were handed over to

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the German authorities relatively early during the occupation following rising tensions in British government circles regarding not only the rapidly rising occupation costs but rising public disquiet over Britain’s handling of the food, fuel and housing crises. What emerges from official FO and German documents is that British policy, following its initial militaryled phase – when the military government was far closer to problems ‘on the ground’: refugee transports, transit camps, maintaining law and order, the prevention of looting or measures to forestall the spreading of disease – progressively recedes into a more background supervisory role, essentially reacting to events. This reflected the increasing presence of the CCG monolith, merged in 1946 with a scaled-down BMG staff. The CCG bureaucracy was far more removed from the problems and far more an administrative presence. Mounting difficulties eventually informed Attlee’s decision in February 1947 to assume overall combined responsibility with Bevin for German affairs, previously delegated to two ministers without Cabinet portfolio, Hynd, and his successor, Frank Pakenham. Delegating the German problem did little to shift growing perceptions in Britain and Germany that the occupation policies as a whole had exacerbated what was already a humanitarian catastrophe largely beyond Britain’s sole control with regard to expellees, despite Hynd and Pakenham’s continuous calls for humane treatment that had received such lip service at Potsdam. Most accounts of the crisis instead examine how German public officials responsible for refugee affairs attempted to tackle the contiguous problems of food, health, housing and unemployment. We have to go to British FO sources and early post-war ministerial and advisers’ papers to locate much of the evidence for this drift of refugee policy into an unsatisfactory no-man’s-land where German officials, despite being told they were responsible for refugee affairs, were never permitted sufficient autonomous authority to cope with the huge burden of responsibilities placed upon them. This is clear even from a cursory review of the German sources. British institutions were especially sensitive to public opinion, as evidenced by CCG’s public opinion and morale reports that document German reaction to various aspects of British rule. Often written in a detached, heavily annotated and prosaic style, the occasional paragraphs included on ‘refugees’ seem indicative of British CCG and military officials’ tendency to distance themselves from these problems. The morale reports are only occasionally referenced in the German literature. The BBC

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played an important role from 1946 in eliciting German reaction to its broadcasts that were useful to CCG.42 FO files document the ongoing problems of food, health and housing within the British Zone from a British perspective, increasing concerns over how to ‘manage’ adverse public opinion, and thus cast light on important aspects of the refugee situation. It was not until January 1949, when wider evidence emerges of the recent ‘considerable amount of interest being displayed in the German refugee problem in the western zones of Germany’, that a working party was set up to report to the Foreign Secretary ‘setting out the problem in detail and the suggested remedies’. Among information requested was the reciprocal reaction of the indigenous German population to refugees, whether any hostile attitudes were ‘latent or open’, and whether ‘the majority of the refugee population are already in employment and in receipt of an economic wage’.43 This particular document is startling in revealing how remote British politicians had become from the problems, and the lack of information coordination between various CCG directorates and Whitehall after nearly four years in Germany. The Landesarchiv also houses an important sequence of reports on German and refugees’ morale, rather more revealing than their British Public Opinion Research Office counterparts at Kew, and which updates the work done in the 1980s on German attitudes towards the British occupation based on the regional British Political Intelligence Summaries. These revealed how from an acceptance of military occupation, by summer 1947, ‘the mood of the German population [had] changed to one of intense criticism of the British’.44 This study into popular ‘attitudes’ focused on food, economy and denazification, but only made passing reference to the implications for refugees with regard to the calorie and ration cuts ordered by March 1946: ‘The situation was particularly difficult in SH with the influx of refugees.’45 These next two chapters show that severe hardships for expellees and refugees continued up to – and with regard to the housing problems, well beyond – the FRG’s formation in 1949. This challenges the myth still perpetuated in so much of the British and American historiography, which tends to focus disproportionately on the severe problems of 1945–6, thereby underplaying the longevity of a crisis that continued through 1947 and well beyond. The German-based files document this different narrative in stark terms. The manifold problems caused by vast numbers of migrant Germans and non-German emigrant populations (Displaced

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Persons) had a significant impact on the ability of the British to plan and maintain effective influence on those expellee and refugee matters still under their control and supervision, such as housing. The Kew files reveal inconsistencies in the application of statistical methods to determine issues, such as population saturation levels and available housing space. This reflected the difficulty during the occupation firstly of gathering and secondly manually coordinating information and intelligence across a large and heavily bureaucratised system of military government, before disseminating the mass of assembled data locally where arguably it was most needed. This frequently resulted in delays that made the eventual appearance of such reports at regional and local level virtually superfluous. More importantly however, the nature of the file correspondence was indicative of British administrators who from the outset were beset by a wide range of other overarching headaches from the black market to public health.46 To British officials, refugee concerns in this context were an unwanted additional burden – a crisis needing management. This is apparent in dedicated files on the protracted negotiations over how to disperse the large numbers of refugees, who could not be housed in SH, to other parts of the British Zone and the other Western zones.47

Sudden transitions: ‘Operation Swallow’ and the official transports What was the impact of the arrival in SH of such large numbers? In November 1945, BMG wrote to SH’s Oberpräsident Theodor Steltzer with ‘guidelines’ for German refugee committees to adopt when assuming all responsibilities for the future handling of expellee and refugee movements. These responsibilities were comprehensive, ranging from assessment of how many could be accommodated within the municipality or Kreis, compilation of refugee numbers, the establishment of transit camps, procurement of necessary personnel and the means for refugees’ care: housing, food, upkeep and medical care. The province was responsible for contributing 85 per cent of these associated costs, for which they would receive a 75 per cent subsidy from German Reich funds.48 This organisational blueprint, whilst placing the burden of the refugee problem in German hands and appearing theoretically sound, took too little account of how the so-called ‘orderly and humane’ transports of expellees called for at Potsdam might function in practice.

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The largest ‘admittance of population’ into the British Zone of 1.5 million expellees from Poland was Operation Swallow, beginning 28 February 1946.49 Military Government reports gave detailed accounts of the refugees’ expulsion, which often took the form of a general eviction notice promulgated as a poster. The Poles had few qualms about giving Germans minimal notice of eviction – from six to twelve hours to as little as five minutes to pack up only the belongings they could carry. In addition each refugee was permitted to take up to RM 500 (this was later raised to RM 1,000).50 Some described being taken from their beds and thrown out onto the street, others told of being robbed, assaulted or tricked into giving up possessions, often by Poles, in order to gain access to the trains or ships that would take them into the British Zone. As accounts of the expulsions and transports are well documented in the literature, this section discusses only one or two examples, seeking rather to highlight aspects that had a particular bearing on the ensuing refugee problems in SH. In a German ‘health’ report for Pöppendorf Transit Camp, covering one week of Swallow transports in late March, ‘Almost every patient complained about maltreatment by Poles traces of which are still visible in many instances.’51 To give some idea of numbers of refugees potentially affected, the Kiel committee for social affairs and refugee matters put the then current numbers of Swallow refugees in SH at 325,000.52 Many German complaints of brutal treatment, including robbery, violence and beatings, were attributed to Poles aged 16–18 who belonged to armed militias.53 This was corroborated by another report which described complaints from expellees robbed of their money and savings-books by Polish train-guards during the journey to Stettin.54 The British had no jurisdiction over the Polish authorities and so were unable to do more than issue an instruction for refugees not to part with their cash.55 Ironically the Poles, who had good reason to be indebted to Britain’s advocacy in restoring much of the territory lost to Germany, now made it much more difficult for Britain to supervise the transit points and mitigate some of the chaos of the mass ‘orderly’ transports. Once the refugees and expellees were off Polish soil, they were no longer Poland’s problem (see Fig. 19). A document from SH’s Welfare Ministry, ‘The Distressed Condition of Refugees in Schleswig-Holstein’, lays bare many of the mounting intractable refugee problems conceded in FO documents. This report detailed the perilous population, health and accommodation crises now rampant, highlighting in particular the plight of Swallow expellees who were lacking ‘the most common and primitive necessities

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of life’. Swallow was pertinently described as ‘a harmless name for one of the most cruel actions’. This ‘action’ included Germans expelled from Pomerania, Brandenburg and Silesia, east of the Oder and Neisse rivers. It is instructive to read a German view of the method and effects of these ‘orderly’ transfers six months after they began: The expulsion was almost with effect from immediate (within 10 or 20 minutes). Much of them had to suffer severely by ill-treatment and mental anguish. They all carried little luggage only or nothing at all; everything else was deprived of them before. Their bodily condition was deplorable . . . they did not obtain the necessary food for the maintenance of their bodily strengths. Mostly, fit men were held back by the Poles, sick and weak old men and children, however, were expelled inconsiderately. (Oldest registered expellee = 94 years of age – births and cases of death on route [sic] were not rare).56 According to this report up to 25 per cent of these expellees were underfed, 12 per cent lice-infested, 22.1 per cent needed medical help and assistance, and of these 8.1 per cent had to be sent to the special ‘Influx’ hospitals,

Figure 19. Expellees from East Prussia disembark by ship on arrival at Travemünde, near Lübeck, circa 1946. Displaced Poles were repatriated on the return journey. Caption erroneously describes these as displaced civilian refugees. Courtesy of Imperial War Museums, HU 57097.

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part of the transit camps where refugees were held pending their dispersal into different Kreise. Many problems had been exacerbated during their lengthy journeys. Train overcrowding was commonplace, typically with 35 people travelling in each of a train’s 55 box wagons, including a high proportion of elderly and infirm. Many died during or following such journeys, often owing to meagre food rations issued by the Poles that violated the agreement they had signed to help prevent this occurring.57 Those boarding steamships sometimes fared better with their food rations as it was usual for them to receive ‘a hot meal once daily whilst on the boat’. The transit camp commandant remarked that the general appearance of expellees was ‘slightly better, probably on account of better accommodation, food and rest on the steamers’.58 A month later, representations were made by the Deputy Military Governor’s (DMG)’s office to the Polish Military Mission regarding Swallow. He complained of ‘the unfair proportion of old, very young and useless people received . . . The proportion of useless people received is still distressingly high as will be seen by . . . 179,137 of the 355,449 Expellees received into this Zone.’59 This reaction towards expellees as ‘useless’, appears in other documents, and betrayed British anxieties that as the overwhelming proportion were elderly, women and children, their arrival might hamper efforts to reintegrate expellees speedily into an economically productive life and hinder the wider economic regeneration of their zone. By July 1946 further transports were unsustainable and de Crespigny, SH’s Regional Commissioner, requested of the Deputy Military Governor ‘an immediate diversion of Refugee trains from this Region’. He was particularly concerned about population saturation figures laid down by the Refugee Branch in June that now had been exceeded, the related detrimental effects on available floor space per head of population and consequential difficulties over water supplies and sanitation. He summarised the deterioration: ‘the refugee situation is causing me grave concern, and has now reached the stage where I consider it essential that immediate action be taken’. Ultimately, what the RC would argue for was a ‘readjustment of population’ in SH.60 This notion of redistributing refugees, as we shall see, was fraught with practical difficulties and met with obdurate resistance, largely from other BZ Länder, but also from the Americans and the French. By late July 1946 a temporary suspension of further influxes of expellees and refugees into the British Zone was finally agreed, due largely to the lack of available accommodation, the need to concentrate on ‘the clearance of Transit Camp “bottlenecks”’ on

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arrival and improving welfare arrangements.61 Nonetheless, with SH still required to absorb 100,000 refugees (the balance of their original commitment), future prospects of the region being able to absorb more into a now saturated population – with the aid of devolved and functioning political, economic and social structures to implement Britain’s reconstruction goals – appeared bleak at best. De Crespigny’s deputy went a step further a month later, recommending that ‘all further influx of refugees should cease’, even if it was not possible to halt operations Swallow or Wasp. (Operation ‘Wasp’ was the agreed like-for-like exchange of BZ refugees with the US and French Zones.) Swallow, due to stop officially in January 1947,62 six months after the deadline for the final 10 per cent of arrivals ‘scheduled’ at Potsdam,63 was not finally wound up until 26 July 1947.64 By this time, as we shall see, the economic, social and cultural infrastructure in SH had suffered significant collateral damage caused by these perpetuating and uncontrolled population movements, and the consequences would prove impossible to rectify in the medium term.

Holding operations: transit camps and refugee camps Owing to anticipated severe overcrowding problems in rural as well as urban districts, a system of transit camps run by German authorities had been put in place to handle the processing and controlled dispersal of refugees and expellees into the receiving Kreise. Those who could not be housed within the housing space occupied by the indigenous population had to be ‘temporarily’ quartered in the many camps, barracks, huts or even schools in SH, accommodation that was in no way fit for purpose, and certainly not designed with long-term occupancy in mind. It was a fundamental principle of both British and American Military Government housing policies that expellees should not be accommodated in refugee camps on a long-term basis, for fear of their political radicalisation.65 Although the camps accommodated a relatively small proportion of forced migrants overall, those living in war-damaged urban areas were more likely to be in camps, making the closure of camps in towns and cities such as Kiel and Lübeck harder to achieve than in rural areas. However, Connor’s point that the numbers of refugees and expellees in camps in Schleswig-Holstein had fallen to 7.8 per cent of its refugee total by June 1948, in common with reductions elsewhere in the US and British zones since 1947, assumes lesser significance as we know that many SH camps remained open well over a year later and beyond.66 This caused

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resentment amongst Germans as many refugees spent far longer in the camps than they had been led to expect by the British, simply because there was nowhere else for them to be housed. This section does not analyse the wealth of existing data about life in these camps, or comment on the population movements to and from – here too, there is an existing literature.67 Although valuable work has been done in foregrounding the refugee issue by focusing on lives in the refugee camps by drawing attention to the isolation of individual refugees and the marginalisation of their interests, such everyday histories have not analysed these key aspects within the broader paradigm of occupation policy.68 So the focus here is to understand why these camps became emblematic of the wider festering sore of the ongoing refugee crisis, and their continuing presence a stain against the reputation of the occupying forces. Put another way, whilst Britain was happy to take the plaudits, many of them justified, for its role in rebuilding an economically successful Germany, the camps’ longevity showed that a major plank of Britain’s Germany project was unrealistic. Firstly, it was flawed by the decision to delegate refugee policy to the Germans without first agreeing to and planning for realistic quotas for what SH could reasonably accommodate. Moreover, notwithstanding Britain’s own economic impoverishment after nearly six years of war, its reputation was impugned in failing to match its positive reconstruction rhetoric by alleviating basic housing problems that would have closed many camps sooner. To re-emphasise this point, by December 1949 these camps, and school and ex-Wehrmacht barracks, were still home to many thousands of expellees,69 a clear indicator that the crisis was far from over, that SH was still struggling with the long-term impact of its own population increasing by 70 per cent (1939–48),70 and importantly, still with the highest percentage of refugees per head of indigenous population in Germany. By December 1949, 10,000 expellees were still living in barracks in Lübeck, the highest quota in barracks (Massenquartiere) of any Kreis, while the more remote northern Kreis Südtondern housed 9,000 out of a population of 32,880 expellees, the highest percentage of SH expellees still ‘vegetating in camps’.71 KRO reports detailing the refugee and Displaced Person situation in 1949 put this into sharper relief. For example, with CCG’s energies diverted towards the transition to a High Commission – part of the handover to full German government under the Occupation Statute – one KRO, although aware of the plan to resettle 2,200 refugees in the

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French Zone, said: ‘whilst this is a step in the right direction, it will only mean a slight improvement in the appalling conditions obtaining in the Lübeck refugee camps’.72 The same officer who in February 1949 had ‘at last given up all hope of any improvement in this Kreis’, reported two months later: ‘12,000 still live in conditions of appalling squalor in rapidly deteriorating hutted camps and they are likely to remain there until the huts collapse on top of them’.73 It is clear that this was no isolated case, rather a sad and continuing refrain, and common to the great majority of camps in SH, as so many monthly returns reveal, for example the living conditions ‘remaining deplorable’ in the 47 camps in one rural Kreis containing 4,763 refugees, or another observing that ‘many private billets of refugee families are still pretty unpleasant, often owing to the low-grade quality of the available accommodation’.74 The corresponding German report of an examination of living conditions throughout the camp system in the same Kreis for the identical period stated that on average there were three people living in each very small space,75 conditions more reminiscent of 1946, euphemistically singled out by many as the crisis year. A German-made documentary film of the refugee camp Schloß Eutin appeared in late 1948 with a pamphlet entitled Das Flüchtlingsproblem (The Refugee Problem), giving the lie to the idea that conditions steadily improved from 1947. Both contained harrowing images of the refugees’ daily existence and provided disturbing proof of the intractable nature of some of the hurdles still to be surmounted in reconstructing their lives (see Figs 20–2). It is ironic that the film was made with the cooperation of CCG’s Information Services Division, since Landkreis Eutin’s KRO wondered whether ‘this kind of film, and a pamphlet such as Das Flüchtlingsproblem could one day be twisted and turned against the Occupying Powers as evidence showing the conditions that were either forced upon the Germans or at least allowed to happen’.76 His intuition of criticisms to follow proved to be uncannily close to the mark. Again, these KRO reports not only offer compellingly detailed accounts of the unfolding refugee and expellee situation locally, but much broader evidence of the low priority levels given by the British to resolving refugee issues they felt justified in saying had now been devolved to the German authorities. This ‘on the ground’ intelligence informed subsequent visits by the RC to the Kreise, and was referred to during the visits, but as can be seen in the overwhelming majority of the ‘Action Taken’ columns, most remained free of marginalia or were rarely acted upon, to the extent

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Figure 20. ‘Refugees in their “home”’. The quiet hour – 11 in a room . . .’ Camp Boie-Hassendorf, Bosau, Kreis Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein, 1948. Photo: Urbahns. Courtesy of TNA UK, FO 1006/54.

of there being little evidence of follow-up discussion taking place with the relevant German officials. British officials higher up the chain of command were more habitually concerned with management exercises in damage limitation, or ensuring minimal adverse publicity on matters such as camp conditions, which could generate lasting damage to British prestige not only from German perspectives but amongst wider world opinion. For example, CCG officials usually nervously anticipated the visits of dignitaries from Britain, be they politicians such as Hynd, or those attached to NGOs such as Gollancz and SEN. The Labour MP Jack Jones spent two days in SH in September 1947. He was shown a camp in Neumünster said to be typically well organised but it ‘suffers from general extreme shortage of medical and all other supplies’. On his return to London he wrote to Bevin: ‘Germans in charge of [the] camp should be taken to task because of terrible conditions prevailing there.’ The FO responded requesting a report by the following day: ‘the Secretary of State

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Figure 21. ‘Granny and her Christmas tree – there are no cupboards in this camp in Holstein, and frequently clothes are gnawed by the rats which are hungry too’, Camp Strauer, Bosau, Kreis Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein, 1948. Photo: Urbahns. Courtesy of TNA UK, FO 1006/54.

is anxious to know why such conditions have been tolerated’. The holding response from CCG HQ in Berlin was defensive: ‘CCG is well aware that conditions of refugees in Schleswig-Holstein are far from satisfactory. [The] whole question of refugees in British Zone receives constant attention both by ourselves and [the] German authorities.’ What is interesting here is that CCG then did investigate thoroughly, but rather than asking the German authorities to explain the poor conditions in Neumünster, CCG’s preferred line was merely to draw the Land government’s attention to this particular camp, and yet they received a full report from SH’s RC three months later. This suggests that CCG in responding ‘to specific allegations’, were worried about Jones’s findings being leaked in the Commons and the British press, and how this highlighted a much more endemic problem of intolerably poor camp conditions. Not only might it imply some lack of duty of care on CCG’s part, but the effect of apparently upholding Jones’s observations by criticising the Germans for

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Figure 22. Refugee children, School Ravensbusch, Gemeinde Stockelsdorf, Kreis Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein, 1948. Photo: Urbahns. Courtesy of TNA UK, FO 1006/54

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a situation that could not be reasonably attributed to German negligence would be further to damage German morale, already at a low ebb. This one episode also shows how far Whitehall distanced itself from direct involvement in refugee matters in Germany.77 Robertson as Deputy Military Governor was sufficiently concerned about maintaining British ‘prestige’ to issue a rallying cry to staff he described as ‘our noble selves. Ourselves as a nation, as a Control Commission and as individuals.’ His lengthy speech revealingly covered such major aspects of occupation policy as denazification and democratisation but made no mention of the refugee problem. He continued: Our difficulties are temporary. Our greatness is enduring . . . Ever since I have been in Germany people have been telling me that our prestige in this country is going down. I dare say these people are right . . . It is not that I think for one moment that the Germans love us . . . I am not quite sure that I want them to do so, but I do think that our prestige is still an asset of very great worth . . . I know it to be a fact that the Germans respect the sincerity of our intentions.78 This last sentence is significant, for the longer the refugee crisis wore on, the less British good intentions per se were equated with prestige in German minds. They demanded constructive policies. But as we see in the next chapter, on three issues of major concern to refugees – population redistribution, employment and refugee representation – they were to be disappointed.

Populations in flux: unauthorised arrivals, evacuees, returning POWs A compelling reason for highlighting Schleswig-Holstein is because its absorption of the highest density of refugee and expellees in the Western zones better illustrates the true nature of consequential problems faced by German authorities and how British administrators responded to the unfolding crisis. This section does not comment on how changing statistics affected SH, but provides an overview of how certain issues arising were handled by comparing British with German responses. These show that the ballooning population stalling British reconstruction efforts continued to take the CCG by surprise more than the Germans. This is

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unexpected, given that British post-war planners were sceptical about the feasibility and negative impact of transfers of populations. Thus even the most blinkered of CCG officials could have foreseen that Germany would have trouble housing or feeding itself even before the arrival of millions of refugees and expellees. Several de Crespigny speeches to German officials on the refugee problem, though stopping short of accepting any responsibility for British decisions that may have contributed to the present crisis, were tinged with genuine personal regret and empathy for the wretched plight in which the refugees found themselves. In notes for a speech to the Landtag, he described their plight and future status as ‘near to my heart’. Addressing his staff he recalled how he had encouraged the wives of British officials in SH, if not employed in British welfare work, to consider working in hospitals and camps to help the refugees.79 But there was palpable nervousness in the corridors of British power about his rather too outspoken sympathies. In correspondence with Robertson regarding his proposed broadcast on the population explosion in SH, the DMG asked de Crespigny to ‘reconsider’ his rather too frank assessment: I know how keenly you feel the difficulties of the population problem in Schleswig-Holstein, but such emphasis as you have laid on this subject in your script tends to become criticism both of the Commander-in Chief (for the distribution of population in the Zone) and, by implication, of H.M. Government (for accepting the policy of the transfer of populations.)80 De Crespigny, anxious to avoid having such a charge levelled at him, sought to distinguish both Robertson’s and Sholto Douglas’s awareness of his problems from that of the ‘Divisions’ of CCG who ‘have not always recognised the true position’. Henderson, his able deputy, sought to soften this undermining to his authority, suggesting he might turn the humiliation to his advantage. He had: Amended the script as requested, in the light of the implications the DMG had read into it !!! . . . that as it is purely statistical, if the DMG reads it as he must have done, perhaps his reading is correct and that it would only go to emphasize what his divisions have never recognized that there has been an injustice to S-H. Just a thought, Sir, that may not appeal to you!!!81

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These exchanges suggest British officials at the highest level, whether Robertson and Douglas in Germany or their masters in London, Bevin and Attlee,82 either found it hard to face up to the realities of the worsening refugee situation, or did not regard it as of great enough significance within overall German policy to intervene or act decisively. This explains why Attlee’s Ministers for Germany, first Hynd then Pakenham, the latter in particular a vocal supporter of British intervention in the humanitarian challenge of the refugee crisis, were largely ignored by Whitehall.83 Civil servants felt they had far greater problems to deal with than refugees in Britain’s broader strategic vision of how to promote a German recovery within the new Cold War order. Besides, as emphasised earlier, British policy stipulated the refugee problem was not only a German problem to solve but that somehow, even in defeat, Germany a priori was held responsible for its genesis largely owing to Hitler’s earlier expansionist policies. The Germans, however, left to pick up the remnants of Britain’s piecemeal policy, were already more exercised by the practicalities of managing the ensuing difficulties. Statistics show that of SH’s 67 per cent (and rising) population increase since 1939, by December 1947 its share of refugees and evacuees to the indigenous population only fell marginally from the April total of 47 to 42.7 per cent, or 1,133,623 from a total population of 2,655,564. The proportion of refugees consistently remained a far higher concentration than for other Länder in the Western zones. Although Lower Saxony had higher refugee numbers (1,757,811), its share in relation to its population at December 1947 was far lower – 26.8 per cent. Put in context, SH’s figures compare with a corresponding Bizonal (British and American) refugee and expellee population of 7,197,919 in December 1947, or equivalent to 18.1 per cent.84 By September 1949, the 39.4 per cent proportion of refugees to indigenous population in SH had not decreased markedly from those figures at the end of 1947 quoted above,85 whilst 53 per cent of the 51 towns and cities in SH showed population increases over a ten year period of 90 to 163 per cent.86 From the September 1950 census, SH’s overall population increase of 63.3 per cent since 1939 still ranked highest of all 12 Federal Republic provinces or sectors.87 These refugee numbers show a marked increase from April 1946 statistics, when the refugee percentage in all categories then residing in SH was 27.2 per cent from a total population of 2,498,000.88 This was reported by Lt. Col. Stebbing, or ‘Stabbing’, as he was laconically

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referred to in German refugee administrative circles,89 a leading British official in SH’s Refugees Section, one of whose roles was to brief the RC on how population figures were affected by fluctuations such as refugee dispersals and the impact on housing. July 1946 figures related the population to available housing space. Again, SH fared markedly worse than other BZ regions. Its population had increased to 2,765,000, leaving it with a further 97,000 refugees to absorb to reach its ‘saturation figure’ of 2,862,000, which would further reduce its average living space per head of population from its current meagre level of 5.2 sq. metres.90 The rising levels of refugees to indigenous population did not herald the end of the worst of the crisis in early 1947, as is implied by studies that focus on the earlier and most concentrated phases of population transfers from Poland (Operation Swallow) during the first half of 1946 – but not on their later consequences – or on the well-documented 1945–6 period of humanitarian aid.91 This changing ratio actually deepened longer-term problems for the region, continuing to exacerbate poor living conditions for the entire population of SH with regard to how already overstretched resources, especially in vital areas of housing, food supplies and employment, could best be managed and equitably divided up for all Germans’ benefit, including refugees. If these factors alone represented a huge challenge to stabilising SH, there were further demographic pressures on a critical situation stretched to breaking point by the continuing influx of ‘unauthorised arrivals’ from the Russian Zone, from Denmark, evacuees, particularly those who had fled Hamburg during the bombing devastation of summer 1943 and who could not return owing to housing shortages, and returning POWs. As one Kiel-based British official with one eye on the shortage of jobs for refugees put it: This question grows more acute daily. It is accentuated by the constant influx of relatives and others illegally crossing from the Russian Zone . . . It is quite a common thing for a person to seek permission for relatives to join them, be refused the permission, and yet later be joined by those relatives few of whom are of any economic value.92 Another, in Lübeck, reported the ‘increasing flow of refugees from the East, many of whom are unregistered and thought to be adopting criminal methods to gain a living’.93

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Here criminality is implicitly conflated with unregistered refugees with only hearsay for evidence. It is true that illegal crossing of zone frontiers represented one of the Germans’ biggest headaches, particularly with regard to how those entering would be made to leave the British Zone. In August 1947 the Ministerpräsidenten of the British Zone sent a delegation to the Military Governor the same day as SH’s Minister President Lüdemann wrote to de Crespigny saying: ‘German Refugee Administrations are no longer in a position to cope with the tasks under their responsibility.’94 Having had no reply, Landesminister Damm sent a detailed summary of the problems arising to the SH Regional Governmental Office. As a first example, the Americans had already sealed their own eastern boundary and the BZ German administrations were unanimous in calling for the same method to be used in both zones in order to solve the problem. However, Damm, the Refugee Minister, observed that if US Military Government ‘is not handling the question in the same spirit’, the British Zone would be ‘inundated’ while the US Zone with fewer refugees ‘will be spared’. Second, SH found itself in further difficulties from an earlier decision to reroute 75 per cent of the illegal crossers from both the Danish and Russian borders into Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia [hereinafter NRW] that met with little cooperation from fellow-BZ Länder. However, no substantive reply was received to these representations, other than Stebbing’s suggestion that some of the ‘illegal crossers’ be accommodated in an already overcrowded Pöppendorf Transit Camp together with four other smaller auxiliary camps, and the frontier be sealed. Anxious to act swiftly, the Germans needed to know whether Stebbing’s message ‘can be taken as an answer’.95 By December when CCG, now more concerned about public order and looting than conceiving a comprehensive redistribution plan, met to discuss an emergency strategy, it was estimated that around 500 persons per week were crossing over from the 65-milelong Russian Zone frontier with Schleswig-Holstein with every intention of remaining there (see Fig. 23). It was thought that since the Russians had started labour registration, many of the younger men were arriving ‘for fear of being directed to the uranium mines’.96 The two-part emergency plan, codenamed ‘Operation Caravan’, was tabled for two reasons – beside, that is, the worries over continuing numbers of refugees arriving from the Soviet Zone, with negotiations between East and West irretrievably broken down. First, it was to address CCG’s growing concern over what to do with the so-called ‘anti-social’ illegal refugees, and second,

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Figure 23. Refugees escape from the Soviet to the British sector, 1949. A still from the banned Cold War German documentary, Asylrecht (Right of Asylum). Courtesy of Imperial War Museums, MH 31291.

to effect the dispersal of quotas among other BZ Länder. The term ‘antisocial’ was frequently used by the British, although there were no fixed criteria about what it defined or any practical action to be taken. One suggestion was to distinguish such individuals from those who ‘were suitable to fit into the structure of industry and society of the western zones’, so that ‘the proven anti-social elements [could be returned] to their place of origin’.97 How a place of origin might be established was unclear. William Asbury, de Crespigny’s successor, reminded Bruno Diekmann, Lüdemann’s deputy, that authorisation was in place for the illegal refugees’ immediate transfer to other British Zone Länder and suggested the temporary use of Pöppendorf, and a more sceptical Lüdemann favoured the use of Munsterlager in Lower Saxony, as he had no wish to overburden SH’s expenses on refugees further, beyond the existing obligation to unite families under the Braunschweig (Brunswick) Agreement (see next chapter). After protracted correspondence on how best to manage the increasing illegal influx, estimated by Diekmann to have risen to over 100 per day, Lüdemann and Asbury eventually agreed to establish a central camp for illegal border-crossers from the Soviet Zone, the costs to be borne by

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all the BZ Länder.98 Lüdemann, already preoccupied with the logistical problem of returning ‘anti-social elements’ to the Soviet Zone, but also keen to define what the British hitherto had failed to do, wrote to Asbury, SH’s new Regional Commissioner, seeking assurances: Political refugees, the sick and old persons, and youths, must, in no case be affected by such measures. Only such vagabonds and criminal elements as constitute a danger to the political and economic life of the Western Zones, shall be sent back.99 Difficulties in integrating additional influxes of population into a region struggling to exist on barely adequate accommodation, food supplies and consumer goods made all economic planning for reconstruction and renewed stability that much harder. A brief glance at the impact on local areas shows why. Kiel reported that ‘the number of refugees continues to increase, whilst conditions do not improve’, while many Kreise reported the still very poor accommodation situation caused by refugees – many of them ‘illegal’, outnumbering permanent inhabitants in areas of highdensity population such as Rendsburg, Pinneberg and Stormarn – by no means uncommon in SH. As Pinneberg’s KRO observed in November 1948, ‘the continual arrival of refugees hinders every planned improvement’.100 Given the growing refugee problems visible to all, a policy of nominally delegating authority for refugees to Germans, but without giving their well-organised administrative machinery executive powers to agree and execute inter-Länder transfers, was always likely to fail. Following an agreement between SH and NRW that an equivalent of the daily flow of refugees into SH would be transferred to North Rhine-Westphalia, Alec Bishop, its new RC and Asbury’s successor, clarified the objective: to arrange the transfer of these people in a less haphazard manner, and to ensure that, by relating the movements to the employment vacancies in this Land, they can be properly settled into the economy, instead of being put into refugee camps.101 That Bishop needed to write in such terms shows that the Control Commission too held a measure of responsibility for the many previous failed attempts to resolve the internal resettlement of refugees, both legal and ‘illegal’. This could never be simply the German problem they wanted it to be when close cooperation between BZ Länder and their German

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counterparts was a vital prerequisite for more effectively managing these problems and the major question of population redistribution, Caravan being one such element. As explained earlier, there was a direct correlation between the bombings of Hamburg in summer 1943 and the impact of its large evacuee population on the growing refugee crisis in SH. There is also a link between the communality of civilian suffering, shared by the victims of bombing and of expulsion. So there is a case, within the conceptual paradigm of ‘victors’ justice’, for viewing the debates over the bombing of civilians as interlinked with FO policy debates that resulted in the civilian population expulsions one year later and the transfers that followed. This argument is not taken up by Krause who focuses more on the German experience of bombing, and less on the agency for the events of 1943.102 Another discussion of refugee integration states that the rural destinations for expellees in SH were already occupied by considerable numbers of evacuees from the bombing (Bomben-Evakuierte).103 The Hamburg evacuees, often referred to by the German authorities as the Ausgebombten – literally those bombed from their homes – formed a significant numerical element of the wider overall refugee problem for British and German authorities. For practical purposes they were refugees in all but name and subject to many of the same privations and shortages experienced by the ‘official’ expellee and refugee populations. Lüdemann met Asbury in July 1948 to try and resolve the urgent accommodation and finance issues of ‘130,000 bombed-out Hamburgers still at large in SH’, another example of Lüdemann’s adroit use of English in trying to win over British sympathies. Asbury pointed out this was not merely a zonal but a tri-zonal matter and suggested that he make his representations to Frankfurt, hardly the official vote of British support Lüdemann needed.104 The ‘Summary of the German Social Ministry’ measures for the return of the Hamburg evacuees further show that there was no offer of help from the British authorities. Some German reports estimated the numbers as still somewhere in the range of 90,000–120,000 towards the end of 1948, a significant proportion of the overall German refugee totals.105 Over two years prior to this, Refugees Section, seeking additional accommodation for Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg evacuees ‘unable to return to their pre-war homes’, had called for ‘no further burden to be placed on Schleswig-Holstein’.106 It took a further three years before a final decision could be made by the West German Länder that guaranteed the acceptance of the evacuees not just in Hamburg but throughout Germany.107

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Large numbers of ‘unauthorised refugees’ had further knock-on effects for CCG’s decision-makers. Reports estimated that some 100,000 ex-POWs would return to SH, and it was ‘hoped to set up a rehabilitation centre to initiate them into conditions and life in Germany at present’. One view was that ‘only genuine political refugees and those with near relatives in SH should be accepted’.108 But who would define ‘genuine political refugee’, and how? This seems a clear reference to Britain’s wish to play an influential role in encouraging anti-Communist opinion, even if it meant taking in more refugees. Equally, references to ‘anti-social elements’ mentioned earlier could allude to those with pro-Soviet sympathies of whom Germany wished to rid themselves.

Harsh realities: housing, public health, food, the black market By moving such numbers of German refugees and expellees into Schleswig-Holstein, prior to 1945 the most depopulated and predominantly rural region in the British Zone, British officials hoped for a higher proportion of readily available accommodation in areas unaffected by bombing, for example on farms. They hoped too that productivity from its former agrarian economy would help the BZ to feed itself. Both aspirations proved to be false dawns. Schleswig-Holstein was simply too small to absorb an influx on this scale, and given Britain’s parlous economic situation, it was not in a position to offer the scale of material support that Germany had expected or needed to start its own slow process of revival. But notwithstanding Britain’s own financial problems, such speculative policies had nevertheless rendered it a hostage to fortune, and the Germans increasingly would now look to the British for answers to the major problems that ensued from these unrealistic hopes. A major reason for the continuing existence of the camps was the poor housing situation. Whilst comprehensive analysis of the impact of the housing crisis is beyond the scope of this book, the focus here is on the extent of British responses to an ever-present problem and their effectiveness in the eyes of the German authorities. Amidst the chaotic conditions following Germany’s surrender, BMG knew that conditions for indigenous and refugee populations would become much harder with the arrival of further large numbers. It was not unusual for the proportion of refugees, evacuees and those who had been bombed out of their homes to outstrip the resident population. Kreis Segeberg had a residing population

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of 53,671 on 1 March 1945, and already contained 19,017 ‘incomers’, 35.4 per cent of the total; 12 months later this percentage had increased to 97.2, and by 1 July 1946, it had tripled to 117 per cent.109 This last statistic was one of many throughout SH contributing to the decision taken a few weeks later to suspend Operation Swallow. The grave implications for future availability of living space were clear, as had been foreseen by the British some months earlier: ‘Det Comds [Detachment Commanders] and German officials must accustom themselves to the fact that no German can henceforth live in comfort [and] what 3.7 sq metres of accn [accommodation] really means.’110 Concerned to ensure that the Germans were properly forewarned and could do their best to prepare for this reduction in living space, BMG instructed their German counterparts to set up a civil infrastructure whose task was to supervise refugee accommodation, food and clothing, together with the dispersal of refugees evenly throughout their Kreis, with at least one refugee nominated as a member of every Kreis Housing and Accommodation Committee. They were also to ensure that: The German householders are playing the game by the refugees, i.e not retaining the dwelling house for themselves and relegating refugees to inferior accn [accommodation]. It must be brought home to all the Germans that this is a humanitarian duty towards their own Kith and Kin and that any householder not treating his refugees fairly or concealing or withholding accn, will be liable to be evicted and have his house handed over to the refugees.111 This last instruction raises three important issues. Firstly, the contradiction between British instructions for ‘German householders’ to adopt the fair and ‘humanitarian’ treatment towards refugees that the government had played its part in denying them through their population transfer policy; secondly, the contradiction manifest in BMG’s requisitioning policy on accommodation that adversely impacted on the availability of much-needed housing by depriving those most in need – British staff did not have to tolerate such parsimonious floor space; thirdly, British recognition of tensions that would arise between ‘natives’, expellees and refugees as a result of housing shortages. This last point was clearly troubling Oberpräsident Steltzer when he met de Crespigny in October 1946. Amongst topics discussed were ‘Housing conditions and Refugees’. Steltzer spoke of the widespread ‘bad conditions’

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for refugees, saying the problems in SH were beyond local resources and that complaints persisted about stocks of consumer goods being held back. The RC did not respond to the first point – Britain was neither able nor willing to foot the German bill for repairing damaged housing. But housing problems were not just lack of funding, but also how those resources were allocated, as discussed later in relation to BMG’s detested requisitioning policy. Steltzer was also considering asking the local inhabitants to ‘adopt’ individual refugee families. De Crespigny judged this sensible, an initiative that he had tried to encourage during his sporadic tours of the Kreise. But he felt this scheme would be better coming from the Ministerpräsident.112 This is again unsurprising: given incipient tensions between natives and refugees, if CCG were seen to encourage such a proposal, many Germans might have accused Britain of being responsible for the ill-conceived ‘refugee policy’, and of using this initiative as a cynical means of distancing themselves from their own share of responsibility for the worsening housing crisis exacerbated by requisitioning. On 1 April 1947 the average housing space for each SH inhabitant stood at 5.5 sqm (square metres) – or 1.5 persons for each living space – compared with 5.9 in NRW and 7.0 in Lower Saxony. Only Hamburg was equivalent with 5.4 sqm, however its share of refugees to total population was only 4.9 per cent, insignificant against SH’s 45.5 per cent.113 The importance of the refugee share of population cannot be overemphasised, as this had a major impact on costs that had to be absorbed by each Land, and logically, this reduced the amount of money available for repairs or renovation to existing housing stock. In SH’s case the costs for refugees alone were estimated at 33.72 per cent of the total budget or RM 76 per head of population. By contrast, the corresponding expenditure by Lower Saxony, with its greater numbers of refugees, was significantly lower at 18 per cent of budget or RM 24 per head, roughly one-third of SH’s per head costs. NRW’s share of the total spent on refugees was just 7 per cent.114 By November 1949, the figures for available housing space showed little improvement. This is seen in the SH Social Ministry’s figures of actual living space for each Kreis, averaging 5.52 sqm per person or 2.1 persons to each living space.115 Overcrowding was exacerbated by other problems such as leaking roofs and lack of privacy,116 with ‘conditions in private houses even worse than those in camps’. This was mirrored in Lübeck where shortage of habitable accommodation was largely due to a lack of repair.117 By December 1947, available living space for inhabitants of Norder and Süderdithmarschen

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had fallen to 2.8 sqm, 2.9 below the standard laid down in Art. XII of CCG’s Housing Law No. 18. This was not an isolated case, as it was pointed out that ‘much of the housing space in all Kreise is below the standard laid down in Law 18’.118 It was normally the hard-pressed Wohnungsamt (Housing Office) that became the first port of call for refugees and German civilians. Officials were ‘at the end of their tether, not only do they have nothing to give but complaints and appeals for better accommodation are bitter and numerous’.119 By April 1948 and despite a much milder winter than had been forecast widely after the three preceding it, reports of the lack of improvement in housing conditions, coupled with building materials still being in short supply, continued to be a regular refrain.120 There seemed no end in sight to the pervasive misery, and this sense of hopelessness progressively gnawed at civilian morale. The RC and relevant CCG divisions saw the reports on the deteriorating situation, but it is clear that despite their pessimistic prognosis, the RC’s role was limited to lending a sympathetic ear as explained earlier. It was left to the Germans to demand a rethink of policy, if necessary through making a case for intervention at British governmental level, by making it clear that the only sure method of materially alleviating the housing problems was to seek authorisation for a permanent redistribution of the population on a more equitable basis throughout the Western zones. Lüdemann, hoping to capitalise on Pakenham’s ‘particular interest’ in the refugee problem, wrote to the new Minister for Germany following his visit to Kiel: [The] resident population and refugees are living crammed together in overcrowded rooms the furniture of which, in many cases, makes a mockery of elementary human requirements. The concentration of people in Schleswig-Holstein has gone so far that an inter-zonal re-adjustment of population appears indispensable.121 How British policy responded to this suggestion is discussed in the next chapter. For now, the word on many Germans’ lips was ‘resettlement’. As one British official graphically summarised it in early 1949, showing that little headway had been made over inter-Länder or zonal agreement about this proposed remedy: ‘This problem is becoming more and more like a game of chess without any empty squares . . . [the] only solution will be a wholesale resettlement of refugees.’122 The Housing Officer from Rendsburg, one of the most densely refugee-populated Kreise, wrote an eight-page memorandum in desperation to the Land government with

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its proposals. It concluded: ‘with the continuation of present conditions the Housing Committee can no longer take responsibility for living conditions in the Town’.123 Nor did Britain wish to be saddled with the problem, and so they kept reminding any German who approached them, for example with the SH Landesregierung proposal to set up a Regional Housing Inspectorate, that ‘the housing of Germans is a matter entirely for the German authorities. We guide the policy of refugees only in so far as determining what refugees shall come into Germany and their distribution between Länder.’124 If the housing situation was perhaps the most intractable problem facing Germans, there is no doubt that this was made more difficult by the British policy of requisitioning buildings for their own use. This had a major impact on reducing available dwelling space and therefore refugees’ chances of being moved from camps into more permanent housing. Houses, farms, barns, hotels, garages and cars125 were confiscated or sequestered, often at short notice, from Germans across the social spectrum, including bomb victims, as early as May 1945, together with furniture, domestic appliances and countless other household items.126 Landkreise records from Eutin show lists of properties including schools127 cleared for occupation by British troops or staff. The problem was that not all requisitioned accommodation was subsequently claimed and so remained empty.128 This aspect in particular caused great resentment amongst German officials who more often than not had to bear the brunt of indigenous Germans’ and refugees’ frustrations at the conspicuous wastage of scarce resources. What made matters worse were the number of houses still empty once army units left as the British presence devolved from a military to a civil administration. This was still happening in 1948: A large number of houses requisitioned by previous Army unit in Itzehoe [are] still empty. When it is finally agreed to derequisition these houses, there will be a general re-shuffle of refugees . . . to relieve farmers, who have great difficulties in finding rooms for their workers.129 In November 1948, following inspections by BMG and Housing Office representatives in Pinneberg, rumours of a fresh requisitioning of houses were met with anger and dismay. The Germans were angry at what they saw as Britain’s inflexibility and insensitivity towards German problems coupled with their cavalier self-indulgence at the expense of those whose

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needs were demonstrably greater. Military Government demanded that if dwellings of five rooms and a bathroom did not exist for their families, these would have to be built ‘in spite of the prevailing and increasing emergency in housing affairs’. The town of Pinneberg was alarmed that with ‘the constant arrival of refugees’ it would be impossible adequately to accommodate the existing owners and their tenant occupants – the refugees. An emergency resolution was passed by the town’s council: ‘The inspection of houses . . . with a view of requisitioning same for families of the Occupation Forces have not only caused unrest amongst the population but indignation as well.’130 The Mayor’s intervention hit a nerve higher up the British chain of command, and the RAF’s ‘demand’ for houses in Pinneberg was whittled down to four. Unfortunately this example was an isolated incident. The KRO was minded to record: ‘it is by this practical expression of help and understanding of the German problems that the spirit of good will is fostered’.131 His mild rebuke suggests that British military or civil officials with little or no first-hand experience of local day-to-day problems could benefit from listening to those with greater in situ knowledge of actual conditions. The problem was that KROs were often the solitary British voices arguing for better civilian and refugee conditions but without the seniority of rank to instigate regular CCG policy reviews on major matters such as requisitioning, even when complementary evidence corroborated by colleagues’ reports pointed to an obvious need for greater flexibility with policy. Their intelligence was rarely acted upon unless the local authorities or senior Land government figures intervened. For example, in Schleswig the local authority took it upon itself to protest directly by telegram to the Prime Minister, other government members and those who they felt would support their opposition to this policy (such as Pakenham, Stokes and Gollancz). Asbury as RC was very defensive, as was his predecessor, about his authority being undermined by German officials going over his head, and called in Damm, Minister for Reconstruction, to demand an explanation.132 Within a few months, the RC ruefully referred to what had become ‘this vexed question of requisitioning’. The result was CCG’s decision to cease requisitioning in the case of married families from 30 July 1948;133 However, this was of no benefit to the many existing resident occupants and refugees who were either widowed or single. In January 1949, in Rendsburg, living space had been requisitioned by the occupation authorities with 102 British now

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occupying space formerly inhabited by 565 Germans,134 yet the previous month’s report had clearly stated: ‘No report in this Kreis can fail to take account of the problem of the continued influx of refugees.’135 Refugees also had to be moved out to make room for British military staff and their families to be housed. Risks to public health added further complexity to the refugee and expellee question. The British had assumed initial responsibility for controlling population movements between the Länder and SH Kreise136 to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases and possible epidemics. Also well documented is that rudimentary housing conditions partially caused by lack of wood and other building materials increased the risk of infectious diseases spreading, also in the refugee camps. On one of the RC’s Kreise visits it was pointed out that camp arrangements did not allow for the efficient segregation of infectious diseases, owing to a shortage of building materials.137 The November 1946 survey of public health in SH, designed to report refugees’ living conditions in preparation for the coming winter, made grim reading: ‘The picture as a whole is bad and unsatisfactory.’ This conclusion was serious enough even without any recorded typhoid pandemics. The report documented the dramatic rise in tuberculosis cases: 1945 figures recorded a fivefold increase on 1939 totals, with cases for January to July 1946 already close to the 1945 total, refugees in this latter period accounting for 56 per cent of the total. Public Health Branch wrote to the Land’s German Welfare Office to ensure that ‘on outstanding medical grounds’, Special Public Assistance payments should continue to be paid by the Germans without interruption for those tubercular patients particularly at risk.138 Living conditions, ‘particularly overcrowding and undernourishment’ were also attributed as causes behind the spread of diphtheria.139 The British were concerned enough about the deteriorating situation, and how this might reflect on their competence to manage, to issue a widely circulated directive detailing steps to be taken by the German Medical Authorities to put in place a comprehensive Winter Health Plan to safeguard public health. The instruction, also sent to Refugees Branch, covered all logistical requirements from identifying probable areas of increased illness, sourcing trained personnel, hospital beds and equipment, to transport, coal, sanitation and feeding arrangements.140 However, less than two months later on 1 January 1947 complete responsibility for public health was handed over to the German authorities.141

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If securing permanent accommodation for refugees and public health presented two constant difficulties for German officials, then problems of sourcing and distributing fairly adequate food and clothing supplies were no less urgent. Shortages or uneven allocation of these basic essentials also created risks to public health whilst further eroding low civilian and refugee morale. The politics of agrarian management of the British Zone have been well documented. Britain, for example, had hoped that if Germany was treated as one entity for economic purposes, as agreed at Potsdam, this would help maximise food production and facilitate food transfers among the four zones. These hopes were thwarted as the Soviets could not supply grain from pre-war surpluses in lands east of the Oder-Neisse, since placed under Polish administration, and also by Britain’s decision to reverse German farming’s practice of concentration on animal husbandry over mixed arable crops. This then exacerbated a continuing food crisis.142 Clearly Britain could not be held solely accountable for circumstances that had conspired against it such as its own dire economic situation and rationing, or the bad German harvests. But British problems were by no means just about overextending itself financially or to do with bad luck. It contributed greatly to its own misfortunes by a combination of speculative or inadequate planning, of which refugees were unwitting victims, and by itself becoming a victim of what Diekmann later diplomatically described as its early ‘cautious politics that avoided radical changes’. Refugees and expellees suffered from this British approach, as is shown in the following chapter. ‘Certainly the atmosphere was full of mistrust . . . a mixture of lethargy and rebellion within.’143 This assessment from an informed and measured German perspective suggests a very different reading of British political rhetoric. The implication is that such caution often remained hidden beneath the bullish oratory that accompanied it, and was therefore often found to lack corresponding actions, clear from de Crespigny’s address at the 2 December 1946 opening of the first Landtag. Among many tasks that BMG wanted to help overcome were ‘the alleviation of immense refugee need, the dreadful housing emergency, improvement in totally inadequate foodstuffs and clothing supplies’.144 As the record shows, de Crespigny did care about the refugees’ plight and did his best to help where he could, but all too often the magnitude of the tasks ahead were beyond the RC’s gift to effect any quick transformation of fortunes. That said, Britain compounded an already precarious food situation that was already being managed on a hand-to-mouth basis through poorly managed public relations.

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Aware that blame for the continuing severe shortages was increasingly being levelled by Germans at the British authorities for not making good on their earlier assurances, Robertson wrote to all RCs in January 1947. He suggested it should now be made clear to the German administration that fuel, food and other commodities were matters for German decisionmaking. Thus this became a convenient moment for the British to distance themselves from further criticism as so much responsibility for matters, including food and fuel supplies, were now devolved to the Germans: It is especially important now to avoid making promises of preferential treatment in such matters as fuel and food in certain areas, or to certain sections of the German population. In the past such promises have been made . . . and in all cases have been based on the best reasons: but it has been found by those ultimately responsible that the fulfilling of the promises was a difficult matter.145 Perhaps this advice was not seen by Hynd who three months later, and with little evidence of any substantive improvement or grounds for optimism, made a further statement to the effect that the food situation had never been better. According to one report, this ‘was received with bitterness’.146 SEN expressed its disquiet at what it saw as irresponsible pronouncements.147 No doubt Hynd wished it so, but in reality the situation was anything but ‘better’ as only weeks earlier, de Crespigny had been forced to take the unusual step of telephoning the Military Governor at night to discuss an emergency contingency plan as matters ‘had reached a rather serious stage’.148 Britain’s growing credibility problem with the Germans is highlighted by taking into account that, in June 1947, the Americans and the French agreed to implement their own school-feeding programme within their zones, ironically started by Britain in February 1946. Targeting those most in need greatly helped refugees and expellees, as unlike the British scheme, the modified version included children living in rural areas,149 pertinent to Schleswig-Holstein as many lived outside urban areas. Space precludes more detailed discussion of the food shortages that continued through 1948 and well into 1949. Suffice it to say that in January 1948 when Diekmann, the Landesminister for Food, Agriculture and Forests, produced his first of seven reports also delivered as speeches on the state of nutrition in SH and Germany, this did not offer an optimistic scenario for German civilians now experiencing their third cut in food

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rations in as many years. In Diekmann’s opinion there was not the slightest hope (‘die geringste Hoffnung’) that after three years of food rations the promised calorie level of 1,550 could be maintained. By October he predicted that ‘millions of people will go hungry in the New Year . . . Everyone will admit that the present in no way adequate rations can only mean hunger for many.’ Another speech that month on the particular food problems in SH was pointedly entitled ‘Collective Responsibility’.150 If Diekmann’s prognoses were sober analyses offered as fact and not as anti-British propaganda, CCG responded very differently to German press reports, which they regarded as little more than overt criticism of British policy. Two newspaper articles, ‘The fairy tale concerning a scarcity of bread and fats in the world’ and ‘The perpetuation of hunger’ appeared in the Norddeutsches Echo in February 1948 only days prior to the launch of Britain’s own publicity campaign ‘in order that the facts of the present food situation might be much better known to the German people’. Asbury, in post as Regional Commissioner for a month, was irritated by the second article’s prominence in its leader column, and instructed both licence holders and its editor to appear at his office to offer an explanation. Despite the editor’s protestations that his findings had been gathered from an expert on economic affairs, Asbury, with powers to close down the paper, was furious at the Germans’ failure to ‘state the facts’: ‘There can be no doubt that either of these articles constitute an attack on the Occupying Forces. In my view they are deliberately – I say deliberately – offensive.’151 In truth the British were less interested in defending American and French sensibilities than preserving their own prestige in Germany. ‘Prestige’, to the official British mind, was paramount to its self-image domestically and internationally, and helped to feed its sense of moral and cultural elitism as the cradle of Western civilisation. Prestige equated with wanting to be seen to do a worthwhile job in Germany, and when criticisms of CCG’s own statements, actions or inactions were articulated or implied, for example by criticisms in both Houses of Parliament or in a public arena such as the press, then pride swiftly turned to anger, no more so than in the face of German criticisms. The sustained attacks on Britain’s failure to meet the challenges arising from the expulsions and resulting refugee conditions, by not taking appropriate action, became a major catalyst for its later unpopularity, certainly from a German viewpoint. The British cared deeply about their popularity and were perennially prickly about perceived slights against their cultivated image as benevolent occupiers.

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This last point is borne out by an incident in April 1948 when CCG were able to announce some rare good news for ‘the normal consumer in this Land’ that stocks to meet the 7,000 grams bread ration, an increase of 500 grams, would be made available in May following an additional allocation of imports covering the shortages up to 1 July. A minute recorded CCG’s piqued criticism of how inefficiently, in their judgement, supplies hitherto had been collected from the farms and distributed by the German Ministry of Food and Agriculture, given that food imports from overseas had reached their highest ever: ‘It is the intention to keep the German authorities in the dark about it for the purpose of teaching them a lesson.’152 It is not clear how a decision to withhold this information could promote better British–German relations, already strained owing to the myriad problems already described. Differentials in bread ration scales, with SH and Lower Saxony on a lower scale than other Bizonal Länder who each received 8,000 grams, finally ended on 30 June 1948. The SH Landtag had unanimously adopted a motion in May protesting that a cut in the normal allocations was without justification and was ‘affecting especially the suffering normal consumers and the fugitives’.153 With the Norddeutsches Echo episode, CCG had wasted a further chance to gain some political capital from its role in the alleviation of the grain crisis. This may have helped to enhance its own tarnished image for failing to deliver on its pledges to help ease overcrowding and to expedite agrarian reform to improve the food situation. Related to the problems of food distribution was an upward spiral of a flourishing black market in consumer goods and other essential items where demand for items from clothing, footwear and household goods to watches, radio sets and forged ration cards outstripped supply. Expellees brought little cash with them, though not out of choice, and few were yet employed or able to pay the inflated prices. In July 1946, the Refugee Resettlement Committees reviewed current methods of supplying controlled consumer goods. It was felt that too much priority had been given to diverting goods to the refugees at the expense of the wider population. Its recommendations to BMG’s Chief of Staff for SH concluded that the population should be treated as a whole. Rather than drawing a distinction between the indigenous population and refugees, Germans were to be treated as falling into three categories, defined as ‘a) Destitute i.e. living on Public Relief, (Refugee or indigenous), b) Persons with “proof of need” and means to purchase, (Refugee or indigenous), c) “The rest”, i.e. equipped, no proof of need, etc.’154 The decision to safeguard the worst-hit

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refugees did not address refugees’ particular vulnerability to unpredictable black market forces. This was not helped by BMG turning a blind eye to the role of its own personnel in fuelling this market. It had set an early tone by condoning their purchase of dairy produce directly from farmers. This gave farmers a ready-made explanation for failing to forward quotas to central controlling points for onward distribution. Controls therefore were ‘practically impossible’.155 Monthly Black Market Reports were introduced in January 1946 and in its second issue IA & C Division wrote: ‘It is apparent that occupational troops are still actively engaged in the black market. They are also the principal buyers of illegally distilled spirits, the production of which appears to be increasing.’156 Problems continued throughout 1946 with forged ration cards, coupons and identity papers widespread. Refugees and evacuees, to whom special permits were issued for essential household commodities, were unable to obtain supplies, often because they were bartered for food by shopkeepers.157 The Control Commission had devolved responsibility for controlling the black market to Germans, but in practice it was ready to use its own powers to challenge Germans’ competence over imposing sanctions or even interfere with their autonomy when the situation so warranted. The DMG warned RCs in May 1947: Black market is admittedly a pestilence which is bound to be epidemic during a period of scarcity . . . essential to check it by the application of ruthless measures . . . the present is a very appropriate time for such a drive. There is very little evidence that the Land governments are taking any effective steps at present.158 Robertson was convinced that German penalties for offences, especially in rationed goods, were an insufficient deterrent, and reminded RCs that Law No. 50 existed for this purpose, but only where the ‘extent of the offence is such as to endanger the normal supply of materials or products vitally necessary to the population’. Its Legal Department wrote to Ministerpräsidenten reminding them that the law allowed for punishments ‘up to penal servitude for life’.159 However, CCG’s Enforcement Officer for the SH and Hamburg Regional Food Team quickly recognised the successes of their counterpart Enforcement Section in the German Regional Food Office, ‘acknowledged as one of the most efficient in the British Zone’.160 This is borne out by figures for the last five months

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in 1946 showing that of 1,244 successful convictions in SH during the period, German courts accounted for 69 per cent, BMG’s 31 per cent. December’s report from Eckernförde recorded the ‘lively barter trade between British soldiers and the Germans’.161 Robertson’s May 1947 summation of how German officials were performing their duties did not address how some of his charges might mitigate these problems and lighten the Germans’ task. This situation could be turned to British advantage: by sleight of hand a scheme was introduced shortly afterwards whereby black market cigarettes confiscated in CCG courts could be issued to KROs who could then apply for sufficient quantities for official entertainment purposes. This was theft metamorphosed into an official perk: ‘By the introduction of this scheme the KRO, it is anticipated, will be relieved of the predicament of supplying cigarettes for [the] entertainment of Germans from his own personal ration.’162 German reports also record complaints of British summarily seizing and sectioning off gardens, picking fruit and vegetables for their own consumption or, as cited earlier, officers shooting pigs they then confiscated under the pretext that they were wild boar.163 A surfeit of black market consumer goods badly depleted the Germans’ morale and was nothing short of disastrous for refugees with little money to pay for essential items, even at non-black-market prices. This contributed directly to the increasing tensions between indigenous populations and refugees, where there existed an atmosphere of mutual ambivalence through fault-lines opened up by politically predetermined demographic changes to Germany. What has never been discussed is how the British seemed to be unaware that their policies may have been a contributory factor to these tensions, and how this will have made it harder for them to influence any improvement in civilian relations as part of their civilising mission.

Uneasy relations: indigenous population, refugees and the British Morale reports compiled by German police authorities in SH from August 1946 to July 1948 provide a more rounded and vivid sense of how escalating problems impacted on many Germans than can be gleaned from counterpart British-authored summaries for SH (‘The Mood of the German People’). British reports documented more general public concerns and reactions, but were at variance with German police versions,

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which detail specific worries in far greater depth. For example, there are frequent reports on the impact of food shortages as the chief cause of civilian dissatisfaction in 1946 and 1947, whereas in 1948 the focus turns to complaints about dismantling, the economic situation and currency reform. Particularly striking here is how refugees’ particularly vulnerable circumstances are continually highlighted. German reports were formatted into sections with the first two devoted to: public opinion, rumours and gossip on political and economic matters; and reasons for dissatisfaction, unrest and strikes. The first months document how the public, and especially refugees, reacted to severe hardship with swingeing food and fuel shortages, and poor living conditions. Morale was low as ‘public opinion refuses to understand why food allocation is so meagre when higher rations have been promised after the harvest’. By January, ‘the many criticisms of the bad state of supplies had become a flood’.164 Lübeck’s Police Chief wrote to CCG to reproach the BMG department responsible for nutritional economic planning. As a result of the ‘catastrophic’ food situation, morale had sunk to its lowest since the end of the war.165 By early 1947, a population ‘that had become apathetic’ (stumpfsinnig)166 began to lay blame for the problems on the British, resulting in longer-term damage to relations as sympathy for their occupiers eroded. Accusations in one report showed how much resentments had escalated: The victorious powers were toying with the German people [‘Spielzeug’] and wanted to increase their need so that the population, already 20 million Germans too high, might die. People recently optimistic looking at the future now felt completely the opposite and it was for this reason that the majority of the refugees saw its interests beyond German borders.167 A few days later, anger and bitterness came to the surface once more: a trust in the occupying power that has turned to deep mistrust on account of Germany’s catastrophic situation . . . promises of the victorious powers for an imminent improvement in living standards for the German people are no more than empty words. The following month, emphasis on responsibility for the ‘catastrophic food situation’ had noticeably switched its attacks against the victorious powers

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to ‘the British Government’. This mounting sense of injustice was reinforced by a hunger demonstration by 25,000 people in Lübeck.168 Neither German nor FO files appear to contain any British response to these accusations, adding weight to many German suspicions that as victors, the British felt it was not incumbent upon them to defend their record. By June it was reported that ‘they were lacking not only the understanding of the daily existence of the struggling population but the will to offer them any real support’. Two months later it was recorded that ‘early sympathies that were shown towards the Occupying power have sharply decreased’, and the following month: ‘the main cause of general dissatisfaction was the inadequate food situation and the uncertainty for the coming winter in this area’. The mood darkened with the news that CCG had broadcast on radio and reported in the newspapers, ‘the months of January and February 1948 would witness the worst food situation since the end of the last war’.169 By late autumn, morale was ‘in permanent slide’ (im dauernden Abgleiten), the mood now ‘hopeless’. A shortage of living space compounded by the refugee issue weighed strongly on everybody’s minds – as much with the indigenous population as with refugees. Echoing the Segeberg report in March, the German police reports on morale said this problem could be solved either by allowing refugees to return to their homelands or for them to be transferred to their preferred Land.170 This suggests there were widespread social, economic and cultural difficulties to come, not just in integrating refugees but in reintegrating indigenous German citizens, many struggling to adapt to their changed living circumstances. By February 1948 trust in the American and British radio broadcasts promising ‘liberation from fear and need’ had turned to the realisation that exactly the opposite had occurred. Morale was at rock-bottom. Morale reports cited a population more than doubled by refugees and expellees living ‘under the most miserable conditions of food and accommodation’.171 It is hard to see how CCG could reconcile its earlier broadcast warnings to the Germans of yet worse food problems with continuing rhetoric of how it proposed to liberate them from fear and need. The reality of how British and German priorities seemed to be mutually at odds came home to the Germans the following month when the Travemünde population, and especially the refugees, responded angrily to the blowing up of buildings that in their view, with only a little trouble and expenditure, could have provided good sound homes.172 By May, a consensus had grown that the economic problems were being compounded owing to the lack of

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authority of the Länder governments and zonal authorities. Although there were two authorities in Germany, CCG and the German administrations, ‘the real decision-making powers in all important matters lies only and solely with the CCG’.173 As the debates concerning the redistribution of refugees, dismantling and employment will show, this assessment of how tightly the British still controlled these policy areas proved accurate. Two British SH morale reports for March and early April 1948 again show just how far apart in emphasis were the differing German and British perspectives of priorities. Whilst one German report highlighted the shortages and the implications for the lives of the wider population, including refugees, its British counterpart, without mentioning refugees, had a different focus: ‘the most welcome and widely discussed news was the increase in rations . . . the majority were appreciative and hoped for even further improvements in the future.’174 This disingenuous misreading of the mood in SH (and elsewhere in the BZ), chimes more with self-congratulatory propaganda intended for internal consumption, such as found in British Zone Review, than with serious analysis of the looming challenges posed by continuing and very visible social problems. The same inconsistent use of facts occurs in the next report, claiming a sudden sea change in the public mood: ‘the turmoil of the immediate post-war phase to a new deal in the economic sphere, particularly in employment morale, seems to have been more rapid than commonly believed possible beforehand’. The food crisis is not even mentioned in the British report, and currency reform is predicted to cause only ‘a certain amount of unemployment’.175 As seen from Landesminister Diekmann’s statements from the German reports, and as will be shown by comparative unemployment figures, the evidence shows the reverse to be the case. In contrast, the corresponding KRO report was more candid. It showed that for refugees ‘the general situation continues to be deplorable. Buildings are deteriorating and equipment is wearing out with no hopes of replacement.’ February’s analysis of the food cuts says ‘statements as to future improvement of the food situation are met with derision’.176 As we have seen, widespread expressions of German loss of faith in the British, coupled with evaporating hopes for an improving future, damaged Britain’s moral claims of continuing legitimacy as an occupying presence. Also important from German perspectives was the corrosive psychological damage of promises perceived to have been broken, and so it is telling that neither of these legitimate grievances found their way into the sanitised, ‘official’ accounts contained in the more widely circulated ‘The

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Mood of the German People’. This is because the less varnished KRO reports presented greater challenges to the resolve of more remote senior CCG officials by describing bleak circumstances as they were rather than pandering to CCG’s more wishful but ultimately deluded claims of a rapid transformation in Germany’s ‘employment morale’. It has been stressed that a deterioration of key aspects of the refugee problem such as housing, food and the black market, were in large part self-inflicted by the British. Refugee policy that could have been but was not delegated to the Germans, such as inter-Kreise population transfers,177 adversely affected the ability of German administrations to function effectively. The British also lost support through their combined military and civil service obsessions for overbureaucratisation and overcomplicated legislation, invariably delaying and often postponing decision-making, highlighting confusion over legal interpretation, and delaying the communication of key policy rulings. The following example shows how. One common difficulty was non-refugees’ unwillingness to accommodate expellees under their own roof as they knew there was no clear mandate for German refugee officials to make them comply with their requests. As one officer put it, ‘the Civil Administration lack[s] legal authority to force occupants to accept refugees. A reply on the legal aspect is awaited from Legal Branch.’ He highlighted another cause of tensions: ‘the resentment of the original inhabitants at the overcrowding prevents the natural absorption and numerous appeals to Military Government to settle quarrels are still received’.178 However, it took five months for de Crespigny to react to this by writing to Lüdemann, and then it was to censure the German civil administration. Whilst recognising that ‘difficulty is often experienced in persuading householders to accept refugees, and it appears that in a number of cases the public are taking up an attitude of defiance against German Housing Offices’, he insisted a legal framework did exist and that German Housing Authorities were encouraging such attitudes of defiance by failing to prosecute those disobeying orders to vacate housing space for refugees.179 Such resistance concerned the British, since the integration of refugees with the indigenous population was another unplanned for if not unforeseen legacy of its German population transfer policy, and so opened them to further criticism. De Crespigny resorted to the provisions of Control Council Law No. 18 of April 1946, so drawn up as ‘to make reasonable provision for the protection, expansion, survey, allocation and utilization of existing housing space’. Under Article XIII, the maximum penalties for

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non-compliance with its provisions were one year’s imprisonment and/or fines up to RM 10,000.180 The validity of the RC’s blanket judgement must be questionable when evidence exists that CCG were contributing to the problem: ‘Procurement of better accommodation is hampered by the light sentences received in CCG Courts when householders are prosecuted for refusing to admit refugees.’181 Further evidence emerged to highlight the British failure to recognise that the population transfer policy – with its logical subsequent marginalisation of expellees and refugees – might be a substantive cause of the widespread poor indigenous population and refugee relations: it was discovered that shopkeepers had been supplying inferior garments to refugees. This was ‘another example of the fact that refugees are still regarded as aliens, and as they have no material sources to fall back upon and few black market contacts in comparison with those of the native, their lot is an unenviable one’.182 CCG’s early and ultra-cautious objections to refugees forming their own associations or organisations did little to improve relations between ‘native’ and refugee, or to endear either to the British. What was urgently required was an unambiguous directive on Law No 18. It seemed clear that ‘apart from the uncooperative hostility of the local population towards the refugees, the wording of CCG’s Housing Law No.18 is open to conflicting interpretations which have been sustained by Land, Kreise and Gemeinde authorities’.183 As to Law No. 18’s vulnerability to differing interpretations, the FO minutes for the relevant file contain nine pages of complex legal arguments that reverberated between Kiel and Legal Branch for two months. Although this law allowed for how Germans should direct exchanges of dwellings, where appropriate to ensure a better distribution of housing space, its remit did not appear to extend, as CCG’s Manpower Housing Section hoped it would, to sanctioning German authorities to effect a wider redistribution of population from beyond the Kreis where both resident occupier or refugee was already allocated. The legal department argued repeatedly that such powers were covered under the law. Eventually SH’s Regional Governmental Office asked if inter-Kreis transfers had ever been discussed at higher level, i.e. at Regional Commissioner or RC deputy meetings. They had not.184 It seems somewhat illogical that nobody within CCG’s SH bureaucracy discussed the wider implications of how to cope with the continuing serious problems over refugee accommodation. One reason may well be because they knew that their own responsibilities had been delimited by transferring the onus for finding solutions onto the Germans.

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Notwithstanding this, Lüdemann’s letter to de Crespigny would not have made CCG feel any more comfortable about how to dispose of a difficult issue. He addressed possible initiatives, including redistributing refugees according to professional qualifications, and suggested setting up four transit camps to facilitate large-scale transfers. He reconfirmed that, although his Land government lacked the requisite authority, he looked to CCG to provide a swift ruling so that urgent steps might be taken to effect the much-needed population redistribution in SH. The delay in the RC’s response implies that CCG were stalling as it was now clear that despite Law No. 18, a major rethink on policy was being requested by the Germans who had thought through its modus operandi.185 This question of a redistribution not just within SH but across the British Zone is dealt with in Chapter 5 by analysing the impact of the crisis on policy. The purview here does not permit a comprehensive review of indigenous population/refugee relations. Suffice it to say that there is substantial evidence of significant problems continuing well into 1949 throughout SH, typically with minimal input from the British side. Here are just three examples. In April 1948 Lauenburg reported: ‘refugees are still not being absorbed in the communal life and the old inhabitants do all they can to prevent this’.186 Another report hints at just how removed from life’s realities were those British officials with the most regular contact with Germans. Some refugees were ‘living at loggerheads with the native householders. On investigations it is found that there are faults on both sides, and where it is obviously impossible to smooth the troubled waters the refugee is moved to another place.’187 A year later in Norderdithmarschen, there was ‘distress among the refugee population’ because of rising unemployment and low refugee relief payments. The native population took it upon themselves to seek redress from refugees ‘unable to afford the rent for their rooms and the price of fuel and electric current. House owners in some cases are taking legal action against the tenants.’188 As the Occupation Statute approached in spring 1949, one British observer summed up how much the refugee problem, a source of constant irritation, had come to cast a shadow over, then dominate, British reconstruction politics: ‘The perennial refugee incubus continues to bulk largely in local minds to the exclusion of much evident interest in bigger events.’189 This recalled CCG Manpower Division’s telling remarks regarding the ‘so-called “refugee” problem’ impacting on every sphere of Military Government. Four years on from the DMG Conference in June 1945, little had materially changed to transform a ‘problem’ into a success.

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It would take the sustained efforts of a new German Federal Government, the emergence of a new genuinely democratic refugee politics, and the continuation of refugee reform started by the early Land governments to begin to deal with this problem and reconstruct a more enduring trust between two apparently diverse populations who shared one nationality. Through 1949 and beyond, in the minds of many individual residents or families, refugees remained an unwanted reminder of the losses of the past and not a welcome augury of the new life being built in Western Germany. What is unique to the analysis of the crisis set out in this chapter and the next is that discussing the causes and consequences of critical aspects of the crisis in Schleswig-Holstein provides necessary linkage not only to many of the moral questions raised earlier, but to the continuities in other areas of British policy-making during the post-1949 era of its occupation. This crisis therefore helps to shed light on the broader political issues that undermined the solution to worsening problems, and exacerbated British–German tensions.

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CHAPTER 5 CR ISIS COMPOUNDED: GER M AN R EACTION AND THE IMPACT ON POLICY

This chapter analyses how British policy coped with the growing refugee and expellee crisis, and the extent to which it was prepared or able to adapt its policies to help improve the situation for the German population. There were particular competing and contradictory difficulties faced by Britain in its handling of the refugee problem. With the political decision already taken to delegate its overall responsibility to Germans, refugee policy not only became a secondary concern within Britain’s overall policy towards Germany, it failed to be properly integrated within overall occupation policy. This is also a story of failure of political will. The consequences of this were disastrous, since delimiting overall British responsibility for such a large question – but without first giving the Germans requisite executive powers in certain critical areas – created greater problems than it solved for both indigenous and refugee populations. This hampered CCG’s ability to run its zone effectively. It also created difficulties in building effective relationships with German officials, in turn putting additional strain on British–German relations, as refugee problems persisted up to and beyond the Occupation Statute and the FRG’s formation. To shed further light on the critically important contradictions in British policy, this chapter highlights three key challenges facing the occupier, and examines whether its decisions – or indecision – could be reconciled within the wider aims of reconstruction policy. The first

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challenge was how to square Britain’s resolve to control and manage any population movements in SH with a failure to recognise and sanction the region’s pressing need to secure a more equitable redistribution of refugees within SH as well as throughout the Western zones. This inequitable population distribution was in evidence by late 1946 from census figures compiled in October, but the German Länder and refugee authorities were not given necessary executive powers by Britain to act on this issue until it was too late, when Military Government was persuaded finally to appeal for help directly to their American and French opposite numbers. The second was how to harmonise Britain’s stated intention to help rebuild Germany’s economic prospects with its dismantling policy, which impacted negatively on the hopes of improving refugee employment. The third was how to reconcile Britain’s stated wish to promote refugee integration with its long-running fears about refugee dissidence and its parallel ban on the formation of refugee organisations. These three policy dilemmas show that the refugee crisis can be assessed in terms of how British political will, and any demonstrable failure of its occupation policy, can be evaluated in the light of the conditions pertaining in Germany. They also reveal the extent to which such circumstances provide mitigating evidence to set against any failure of policy evident in British responses to the catastrophe and towards those most affected: German civilians, both indigenous and forced migrants. The uniqueness of the British case is well illustrated in the following sections on population redistribution and dismantling that discuss American and French policy on similar issues, as well as the USA’s approach to expellee associations. Although problems that severely impacted on refugees, such as the housing crisis, were self-inflicted by Military Government and the Control Commission – for example, the unpopular requisitioning policy that regularly privileged prioritisation of their own needs before those of the German population in most need – the refugee crisis remains a story that often unearths more complex questions about intent than it provides conclusive answers. However, much of the history of this particular crisis is dominated by wider political exigencies, which regularly trumped frequent German experiences of a series of interrelated difficulties that in their view would have been handled much more effectively had Britain demonstrated greater political resolve in ameliorating the humanitarian crisis. At issue here is to show how many of the mounting problems for the occupying administration discussed earlier were allowed to deteriorate. In the eyes of many Germans, the apparent lack of progress in improving

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conditions in SH contributed towards a growing sense of betrayal – had their belief that Britain would make good on its rhetoric to help rebuild Germany been misplaced? This chapter therefore examines the extent to which CCG attempted to alter German perceptions of British mismanagement, or altered or adapted its policies to improve the situation, and to what effect. It also evaluates, in the context of the British approach to various competing policy priorities, the degree to which Britain succeeded in facilitating German authorities’ efforts to introduce measures to help reintegrate refugees.

Civilising the Germans? German responses to the British This section explains further causes of increasing German frustrations and mistrust of the British, helping to foreground the discussions on policy that follow where the British struggled to show consistency in their directives. The central question here was Britain’s rhetoric on setting the liberal democratic standards it wished Germany to embrace, but which appeared to achieve precisely the opposite. For example, SH’s Regional Commissioner was alive to the ironies of the housing problem: To what extent are we going to live in our congested and difficult conditions because we feel we must keep the balance vis-à-vis the German population? If we live in too much luxury here it will be un-British. People will think we are setting a bad example; people will repeat what I have just said about being Ambassadors, so I would ask you to be forbearing about the accommodation.1 The fact that de Crespigny needed to comment so openly in this way shows the common perception that many British military and civilians expected to put their own needs before those of the Germans, but also CCG’s awareness that their own behaviour was under scrutiny by the Germans. If Britain hoped to civilise the Germans then surely both sides had to play by the same rules. Whilst German refugee administrations had little choice but adapt to the difficult conditions, as we have seen from the morale reports, the longer the occupation continued without substantive improvements in conditions, the more complaints about British policy and behaviour came to the fore from ordinary civilians. Despite the fact that German newspapers could only publish under a British Military Government licence and were then subjected to strict

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controls over what could be printed, newspapers such as the SchleswigHolsteinische Volks-Zeitung [hereinafter SHVZ] and the Kieler Nachrichten 2 were able to report on factual aspects of the occupation and the refugee crisis as well as joining political discussions internationally with regard to Germany’s future recovery. Although freedom from threat of possible closure depended to a large degree on maintaining self-censorship, SHVZ nevertheless ran a readers’ letters column from 1946 and this forum highlighted many of the refugee problems, often poignantly. One particularly common theme of the expellees’ distress was their sense of injustice at their fate.3 Others were upset there was no equal distribution of available resources. Letters arrived from those billeted in rural areas, unhappy at having to survive on fruit and vegetables without receiving the same rations of fat, meat and bread as those living in the larger towns, and pleading on behalf of all others in the same situation. One wrote: ‘It is time that people also started to think about us.’4 The following month, another wrote that refugees were not being accorded the same treatment as other Germans, and that since the family had arrived from the Soviet Zone, their experience of refugee relief measures ‘in every instance has been negative’.5 The theme of refugees as ever being treated as ‘second-class citizens’ was repeated by a group of refugees living in an inn, writing to thank Kiel’s Mayor, Andreas Gayk, for his impassioned speech about the current critical situation in SH and the impact on the refugees. They hoped that his appeal would ‘find an echo in all Christian government spheres of the victorious powers’.6 They cited the innkeeper who had given them coal and apples, for which he had refused to take payment, advising them to hold onto their money. There was an unhappy response to ‘the major hardship and injustice’ of the decision recently made in Berlin to cut tax relief to refugees and those bombed out of their homes by distributing the tax burden equally across the population.7 Two years into the occupation, complaints about injustice had turned to anger. One correspondent spoke for many when describing the daily queues for hours on end to receive their ‘pitiful rations’ (Elendsrationen). She quoted Gollancz’s dictum that when people are treated badly they either achieve little or are given to greater anger impulses that lead to human destruction: The victorious powers are lighting the path to human destruction, that is to say they have destroyed the German people. We have been locked into an unheated iron cage. From time to time we are

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thrown a hunk of bread so we don’t die of starvation so fast. We are not allowed to visit our closest relatives if they live in another sector of our great German prison . . . Our path is full of thorns. But one day the sun will also shine on us when women abroad will not only hear our cry but when they too will cry out to us.8 Complaints did not emanate solely from the press or vox populi. De Crespigny questioned ‘the reliability and integrity’ of the SH government based on ‘a number of utterances made, the terms of which are unacceptable to us, which have indicated a degree of hostility and non-cooperation with Control Commission policy. It is an attitude which I feel is growing, and is party political.’ He felt leaders of the various parties and those responsible for influencing public opinion should be called upon to define clearly their attitude towards Control Commission policy on a zonal basis.9 But the refugee question, from a German perspective in late 1947, had yet to become overtly party political. All parties, including the ruling SPD, were united in seeking solutions to the problem, and the Control Commission was under pressure to take its share of the responsibility in improving conditions. Decisions about how to redistribute refugees more equitably within the British Zone became an increasingly pressing concern for CCG and thus for the SH Landtag, but whilst the Western powers and the German authorities talked about finding an equitable solution, in truth, none wanted any more refugees. The Germans were also adept at playing on their particular sense of victimhood at having lost their homeland;10 this helped to reinforce their case for resettling more refugees out of SH. However, neither administration had final jurisdiction, as such an agreement was subject to inter-zonal negotiation on the overcrowding problems and to SH’s inability to absorb the continuing influx of refugees. Lüdemann wrote to Asbury pointing out a serious omission in the Tagesspiegel report of McNeil’s House of Commons statement in January 194811 that economic conditions and overcrowding ‘make it impossible to accommodate in the British Zone, in a civilised and humane manner, any further refugees beyond those whose transfer has already been agreed’. The report, crucially, had omitted to include that: ‘My Noble Friend will do all that he can to discourage further influxes of refugees.’ Asbury confirmed that this had been said but not reported. We do not know, however, whether this was specifically censored by CCG, but we do know, not least from the large numbers of unauthorised arrivals in SH and elsewhere in Britain’s

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zone, that the British government were powerless to do more than ‘discourage’. Public opprobrium both in Britain (Gollancz, Stokes and others) and in Germany on the disastrous outcome of the ill-fated transfer policy, and the impotence of the government and CCG to turn back the clock on the decisions made, were both well documented. Asbury’s further remark clearly reveals government and CCG sensitivity to this: Mr. McNeil was, of course, restating the policy of H.M.Government, and it is not correct to suggest that the statement referred to was putting on record for the first time the view of the Government on this subject. It should be unnecessary to add that the present difficulties are fully recognised by the Military Governor, and that every effort has and is being made to alleviate the present deplorable situation in Schleswig-Holstein.12 An indication that the FO and CCG were losing the battle of hearts and minds with the German Land government, and public opinion, came into sharp focus with the publication on New Year’s Eve of a glossary of pejorative names or idioms for CCG officials, or for policies that had failed. CCG was known as ‘Zäh-Zäh-geh! The emphasis lies on the last word [go]’, ‘Schleswig-Holstein’ was synonymous with there being no possibilities for refugees or means for them to escape, and ‘Yesterday’ signified the ‘fundamental concept of Old English present-day policy’. Amongst these slogans was a caricature of ‘Mr. Asbury’, SchleswigHolstein’s RC, as ‘the Pontius Pilate of Schleswig-Holstein’.13 This did not go down well. Asbury had claimed recently that regarding refugee resettlement within the Western zones ‘the refugee question can only be resolved internationally’.14 As discussed in the section on food in the previous chapter, he took newspaper criticisms of the difficult situation in SH, however factually-based, to be attacks on British policy. He summoned the SHVZ’s editor and its licensee to attend a meeting in connection with ‘some insulting references to the British that appeared in your newspaper yesterday. I do not know whether you have any explanation or excuse to offer.’ The editor claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that had he understood the British meaning of the term, naturally he would have done everything to prevent its publication. Asbury remained unconvinced, particularly as he also noted the glossary term ‘Preller’ (SH’s Economics Minister) translated as someone who cheats or avoids their responsibilities

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or liabilities. The licensee in turn was ‘astounded that a remark which we thought was harmless was taken by you as insulting. In Germany we look on Pontius Pilate as a man who tried to save Jesus Christ from the Cross.’ Asbury, who had to decide whether to use his powers to prevent further publication, declared: I cannot think of a more insulting reference to any individual than to refer to him as Pontius Pilate . . . I do want to make it perfectly clear to you that I am the representative of His Majesty’s Government and His Majesty’s Government will be respected as long as I am here. Insulting me as plain Mr. Asbury with no responsibilities is something entirely different from insulting me as the representative of His Majesty’s Government.15 The episode is significant in showing how the British believed their continuing presence was a force for good in helping SH and facilitating the wider reconstruction project discussed earlier. They maintained they had always worked in the interests of German recovery and therefore deserved respect, even gratitude, rather than humiliating public criticism. That a newspaper with wide circulation could lampoon the British in such ways suggested that there existed a German perception that many of their actions as occupiers had been contrary to the spirit of Britain’s selfimage as co-guardians and executors of Germany’s rehabilitation within Western civilised society, a civilisation within which Bevin saw Britain as ‘the chief protagonists’.16 Their presence in Germany was apparently becoming unwelcome. Asbury’s hubristic reaction shows it was not enough for the British to command respect, they wanted to be loved, an indication of how out of touch they had become with the popular mood in SH. Nor would he have endeared himself further to its leading politicians such as Lüdemann and Diekmann, or fostered a spirit of mutual trust, had they discovered their private telephone conversations had been intercepted and recorded by CCG. It is worth quoting from the transcript of one telephone call in early 1948 where Diekmann (‘2’), describes how he had met with Asbury who asked him about health, trade union and education matters, denazification and paper allocations. Lüdemann (‘1’), had expected more: 1: And not a word about the refugees? 2: No, no.

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1: That is just wonderful, he doesn’t appear to know that we are the Land of the refugees. 2. Quite. 1: Then you should play on it as long as the Zonal Advisory Council [ZAC] exists . . . It has nevertheless [received] instructions from the British Government to formulate proposals on the refugee question. This has not yet been carried through.17 The memorandum’s subject reveals acute British sensitivities to outside perceptions of their handling of the crisis, and German criticisms of British inertia over the lack of a proactive refugee redistribution policy. Many Germans regarded this as the single biggest obstacle standing in the way of successful reconstruction in the British Zone in general and within SH in particular. CCG had already distanced itself further from taking the lead in opening negotiations with the other BZ Länder on refugee redistribution by delegating another all-party German committee, the Zonal Advisory Committee (ZAC), merely to ‘formulate proposals’. This only delayed decision-making at a time when CCG needed to conclude agreements on an equitable distribution policy within the British Zone, and then bizonally with the USA. Lüdemann was concerned that ‘of the problem as a whole they have still expressed no opinion’.18 By 1949, editorial coverage started to cite reports of suicides by refugees. In the absence of official suicide statistics, this is not to suggest that these reports were indicative of a wider trend, merely to show that the decision of the German press to highlight certain instances was a sign that, for some expellees, years of poor living conditions and pessimism for the future had finally taken their toll. A 57-year-old from Stettin, who since 1946 had lived in mass accommodation at the Holm refugee camp, was found dead on the gas oven of the communal kitchens.19 Further such reports – one expellee from East Prussia killed himself together with four of his five children20 – were still coming through in the autumn. The longer the refugee crisis continued, the more open, the criticism of British policy became. SH had become known as ‘the West German poor house’, or ‘the small Land with big worries’.21 Refugee groups grew increasingly vocal about the apparent lack of priority being given to alleviating the immediate housing problems.22 This issue had also acted as a catalyst for growing calls for the Allies to renegotiate the line of the western OderNeisse that might give realistic hopes to those refugees who wished to return to their former homes.

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Accusations by Germans that those who worked for the British were collaborators was a further telling blow to the occupier’s self-image as a civilising influence, another sign that British stock had reached its nadir and that the strength of anti-British feeling still ran high. There were reports of a German party where one woman ‘to the great embarrassment of her hostess, openly declared that anybody who went to the UK for any reason was a collaborator’.23 Another cited a case where a German man was refused a post in the Military Government, where his wife worked, because KRO evidence suggested ‘an increasing tendency to treat employees of Military Government as collaborators’. This was not an isolated incident: there had been other instances where those made redundant by CCG had encountered ‘difficulty in finding new employment’.24

Low priorities: population redistribution and crisis management This section discusses how Britain managed the growing population crisis, and shows why its decision to delegate responsibility for refugees to Germans was flawed: it devolved these responsibilities, but did not provide the necessary autonomy to enable German officials to negotiate population redistributions with the other Länder. CCG’s decision to retain its own refugee committees greatly complicated and slowed the process of agreeing how to solve the crisis, as the Germans had to solve already seemingly insuperable difficulties with one hand tied behind their backs. The British Zone’s ability to feed Germany became increasingly dependent on an economic merger with its American counterpart, and it became obvious that SH was constrained from developing its own policy to deal with the consequences of overcrowding without first obtaining agreements from the other British Zone Länder to absorb a greater share of refugees and over which they had no political jurisdiction. Britain also needed to secure US and French cooperation in accepting that refugee redistribution was an issue that could only be resolved equitably if all three Western zones shared responsibility for tackling the refugee overpopulation problems, an unrealistic scenario given that these zones did not function as a single economic entity as had originally been hoped, so that each was intent on protecting its own spheres of economic interest.

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To a large extent, neither the British government nor CCG provided much-needed backing early or consistently enough to facilitate the Germans in these tasks. There were admittedly plenty of discussions from June 1946 about how it might be possible to ‘readjust’ the population within SH as well as organise refugee redistribution beyond the region. But the unpalatable reality, from a German perspective, was a catalogue of delays, red tape and a series of changing and confusing objectives caused by Britain’s unwillingness to put complete control of refugee policy into German hands. What ensued was a prolonged tale of crisis management. CCG’s role was simply as an organisational instrument of official British policy, and whilst there were several aspects of the care and welfare of refugees ‘of interest to the Control Commission’, in reality what they offered the Germans was limited to coordinating the work of CCG branches, voluntary societies and welfare organisations concerned with the refugee problem, cooperating with the appropriate German authorities and investigating such refugee problems as might be referred to them. Even more revealing is that a committee was not set up for these purposes until October 1947, by which time there was already a clear statute of limitations whereby German refugees ‘are absorbed into the German economy and controlled by the State Refugee Office [Landesflüchtlingsamt] and are therefore not a direct Control Commission responsibility’.25 There was therefore no direct incentive for the British to campaign on the refugees’ behalf for better conditions, which early redistribution would have achieved. In fact, less than six months later this particular committee was wound up following its third meeting on 19 May 1948, as the RC had decided that once the movement of populations was completed, and this initiative was still far from certain, there was no longer any justification for a joint committee, as the ‘problems connected with the absorption of the refugees into the community in which they are now living, are entirely matters for the German authorities’.26 As will be revealed, even the smallest official population movement did not start before May 1948. Arp, the Landesminister for Reconstruction and Employment, had suggested in January 1947 during one of the Regional Commissioner’s Kreise visits that all housing and refugee problems be governed by a Bizonal Board. De Crespigny’s deputy judged this ‘a very sound suggestion and probably the only way . . . to achieve a redistribution of population in the combined Zones through German direction’.27 This idea was not actively discussed for a further 11 months, neither were there any

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immediate substantive proposals tabled save the DRC’s suggestion in April 1947 of convening an ‘Ad Hoc Committee’ to discuss refugee redistribution and to recommend a readjustment of the refugee population.28 The best that the British could offer by way of a proactive policy initiative was the RC’s suggestion to the Landtag the following month that following yet another ‘exhaustive factual survey of the refugee situation’, CCG was now in a position to alleviate the burden on the productive resources of SH by promising plans for a fuel reserve ‘against possible emergencies next winter’.29 The more pressing the need for CCG and German authorities to agree on a comprehensive plan, the slower the wheels of the dual refugee bureaucracies seemed to turn. The Minister Presidents of the German Länder convened a conference in Munich on 7 June to discuss a way forward. They passed a resolution on the refugee problem providing ‘for equal distribution of refugees and speedy re-uniting of separated families’. Technical implementation of the resolutions was transferred to a newly formed body composed of representatives of all Länder, and the SH Land government agreed to ‘initiate without delay’ all necessary measures. The representatives were then invited to attend a two-day Conference of Ministers on Refugees in Bad Segeberg the following month, at which the RC was invited to give the opening address.30 It is significant that only two weeks earlier, de Crespigny wrote to Lüdemann seeking recommendations on how to best effect a ‘redistribution of the refugee population’ in SH.31 The Germans had produced no lack of recommendations, however they still required CCG approval. Bad Segeberg was important in establishing principles for an equitable ‘re-adjustment of the population in Germany by equal distribution of refugees’. German ministers were agreed that only a Control Council Law ‘would effect a really just distribution of all refugees within the four Zones’. In order to expedite this process, delegates were unanimous that the scheme should start in the British Zone, the numbers to be based on each region’s capacity. They submitted a case to CCG, based on available housing space statistics, for 400,000 of SH’s refugees to be transferred to Lower Saxony.32 In addition, it was agreed at Bad Segeberg in July 1947 that 139,000 evacuees currently in SH should be returned to their place of origin – 82,000 to Hamburg, 44,000 to North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony, 9,000 and 4,000 respectively to the American and French zones.33 At a further meeting in November 1947 to progress this resolution, the British Zone Länder as well as refugee officials from the US and French zones reiterated their agreement to receive these 139,000

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evacuees,34 although it is unclear whether German officials regarded this as a potentially equitable redistribution. There appeared finally to be some positive momentum in initiating the first part of the refugee relief process, although the French absence from Bad Segeberg was to hinder later moves for a larger redistribution. Hopes for the initial process were short-lived as Diekmann, who had convoked the Bad Segeberg Conference, still needed authorisation from Berlin via de Crespigny for CCG first to rubber-stamp and then to empower the newly established working party of the German refugee administrations to carry out the agreed distribution scheme, not just within the BZ but with the other Western zones should this become necessary – which it did, but with unforeseen consequences.35 The Minister Presidents met again in August at Hamburg, concluding that because of the differing attitudes of the British and Americans on certain key points arising from resolutions reached in June at the Munich conference, the German refugee administrations were ‘no longer in a position to cope with the tasks under their responsibility’. They requested that their detailed case be made directly in an appeal to the British Governor, Sir Sholto Douglas, another sign that they realised de Crespigny’s hands were tied.36 The RC wrote to Lüdemann in October complaining that he still awaited a reply to his July letter with the Land’s redistribution proposals, but it seems clear the Bad Segeberg initiatives had since superseded the need for his reply. Instead what the Germans wanted was an unambiguous response from Berlin to their clear proposals. De Crespigny, who had attended Bad Segeberg, was more concerned with how ‘to alleviate distress’ within SH and to ensure Lüdemann realised that ‘it is obviously undesirable that the people of the Land does not know where the responsibility lies for any failure in this respect’.37 The question of redistribution was not discussed, a sign that longer-term measures were still not on the British agenda at a local as well as Military Governor level. Lüdemann tried to explain to the RC the unavoidable logic that ‘excessive pressure on the existing population’ and de Crespigny’s hopes of alleviating distress should be understood as being mutually inclusive. Of the 178,000 refugees and expellees who in April lived in camps and other mass accommodation unfit for human habitation, 137,415 still faced the same conditions. Lüdemann and his officials had made exhaustive but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to improve this situation, and he therefore argued that redistribution within SH would not achieve the necessary improvement without more far-reaching social and economic measures

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that ‘would safeguard living and work-places’.38 It was becoming clear to Lüdemann that such measures were a still distant prospect and that the British were stalling, and an impasse developed between the German and British positions, transparent from the RC’s reply. He conceded that ‘a final solution of the refugee problem can only be achieved by a large transfer of population out of the Land’, but persisted with CCG’s party line, despite the Minister President’s persuasive contrary arguments, that substantive improvements in refugee living conditions could somehow materialise by redistribution from within.39 Indeed two months earlier de Crespigny had made representations that the refugees should be put into the hands of ZAC, who reiterated Arp’s comments from January 1947 ‘that any final solution must . . . be Bi-Zonal’. ZAC were unequivocal that the 137,000 refugees living in ‘sub-normal accommodation’ should be transferred to other regions before the winter. De Crespigny, yet to convince his superiors of the need for immediate action, was pleased by ZAC’s unambiguous position: ‘this was most encouraging as it was very important that we had the backing of the ZAC’.40 It was agreed that the Segeberg Working Party be recognised and entrusted with implementing ZAC’s proposals including the legislative aspects.41 De Crespigny was grasping at straws, for ZAC’s ability to act as a catalyst in influencing seismic shifts in British refugee strategy hitherto had been ineffectual at best, given that refugees were but one of many problems faced by British administrators. Nonetheless the possibility now presented itself for senior CCG officials such as Robertson, the DMG, to take up this issue with the Americans, thus opening the way for the Germans to carry out the necessary measures if an agreement could be struck. As we shall see, finding consensus with the USA and France proved to be extremely difficult. The fact that it was only at the beginning of 1948 that this aspect of Bizonal collaboration was tabled by the British, with the refugee crisis arguably at as critical a stage as it had been in 1946, is a measure of how little thought had been given to this practical aspect of German reconstruction as part of Britain’s wartime post-war planning. A Bizonal central administration for refugee matters was not formed until February 1949, when Robertson wrote to Bevin describing the refugees and expellees as ‘a class apart’ from the indigenous population, and concluding that a ‘marked improvement’ in their physical conditions was needed to prevent their political radicalisation.42 A new Tripartite Commission was formed the following month by the three Military Governors,43 but it was

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only then that a redistribution of refugees was put forward by the working party in a series of report recommendations to alleviate the problems. There are a number of noteworthy problems about the 26 March document. First, the Commission declared that the situation urgently needed to be taken in hand by the German authorities; however, as seen in Schleswig-Holstein, the Germans had long since pinpointed the problems in suggesting that one potential solution lay in negotiating a fair redistribution throughout the western Länder, only to be told by the British to look at a redistribution within SH, a scenario the Germans advised could not work given such chronic overcrowding. Second, it seems the Western Allies were taking another opportunity to place on the record their lack of responsibility for the deteriorating refugee problem, and as we shall see, by July 1949, the delays in moving more than small numbers of refugees and expellees had been held up by British delays in agreeing to issue the relevant orders. Third, it was indicative of how Britain, despite SH’s chronic problems in particular, felt constrained from lobbying for the refugees, as they wished to avoid being seen as unduly favouring them over the native population. If any deals were to be struck with the USA or France on redistribution quotas, it was clear too that potential difficulties first needed to be ironed out through talks amongst the BZ Länder. Unfortunately, with the breakdown of the last Conference of Foreign Ministers in London on 15 December 1947, symbolising a now irreparable chasm between East and West and signalling the end of hopes for a peace treaty with a united Germany, the opportunity for such talks quickly evaporated, as CCG officials suddenly anticipated the possibility of a steady influx of large numbers of refugees from the Soviet Zone into the British Zone. What concerned them was ‘at the worst, the influx of refugees might be such as ultimately to cause a breakdown of the civil administration in the zone, with all the chaos which would result from that’. Despite the difficulties in negotiations with the Soviets in London, and although early control of a possible new influx was considered essential by Military Government to prevent such a breakdown, CCG felt it important to cover themselves and reiterated that ‘the responsibility for dealing with this problem was primarily a German one’. Yet the German administration in SH had hitherto been kept in the dark about CCG arrangements, until it was realised that KROs would need to undertake extensive local reconnaissance and put ‘certain high level German authorities in the picture’.44 It later transpired that German officials responsible for refugee matters had attended a Caravan conference in Lower Saxony and had been invited to formulate

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a plan. As the British minutes ruefully admitted, they ‘had given thought to the possibility of a large influx of illegal refugees, even before we had commenced any serious planning on the subject. But we have not held a conference with the Germans and have not asked them to make a plan.’45 Meanwhile, senior staff met at Kiel HQ to discuss how to respond to an obvious danger that ‘something approaching a panic might start in the Russian Zone and further East’, resulting in an increase in refugees that would be ‘out of all manageable proportions’.46 For beleaguered Schleswig-Holstein, hopes for progress on this issue were now stalled as CCG sought to react to the as yet unsubstantiated threat of a sudden increase in refugee numbers throughout the British Zone. In the context of plans barely hatched to alleviate the emergency in SH and the British Zone, what ensued exemplified a brand of crisis management and trademark of the British occupation. They were the ones who were close to ‘panic’. Bishop, the Deputy Chief of Staff, was asked by General Robertson, Douglas’s successor from November 1947 as Military Governor and C-in-C, to formulate exigencies for a further mass influx of refugees. Bishop met senior staff to consider an appropriate response should this materialise, identifying two problems: the need for an ‘Emergency Refugee Plan’ and the redistribution of refugees from SH, both plans now falling under one umbrella strategy – Operation Caravan. The first part dealt with illegal frontier crossing and was already hampered by the other two British regions’ refusal to accept any illegal refugees. The Americans had agreed in principle to take a proportion of these, but their acceptance needed US Military Government measures to enforce this pledge. The French would be urged to take a proportion of refugees still arriving in SH, part of the emergency plan to divert further refugees from SH except whilst in transit. With regard to redistributing refugees from SH, the previous meeting had accepted ZAC’s plans for the 137,000, bar NRW, who objected on the grounds that any plan would be met ‘with passive resistance’.47 The reality was that these planning elements were now dwarfed by a larger question for which there was no intelligence, and nobody knew the answer. How many more would arrive? Bishop told Robertson that it was ‘at present, impossible to make even an approximate estimate of the numbers of refugees likely to be involved’. Therefore Caravan would have to plan for the possibility of half a million more refugees, Lower Saxony and NRW each having agreed to absorb up to 250,000.48 This was more bad news for SH, for Bishop argued that attempting to put into operation any such redistribution of 137,000

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refugees concurrently with an emergency plan was uneconomical in both transport and administration. Consequently, he recommended that redistribution ‘should be postponed until it was clear whether it would be necessary to put into effect our emergency plan’. SH’s HQ representative had little choice but to agree with this opinion.49 The Germans, it is not unreasonable to speculate, might well have disagreed. So it seemed that the SH refugees’ hard-earned lifeline, a long-awaited planned redistribution, would be holed at source and then submerged by the deadweight of British pragmatic cost benefit analyses. Based on Bishop’s conclusions, it is hard to see how the Military Governor’s subsequent decision not to delay the move of the 137,000 on account of Caravan50 was attainable if the forecast numbers materialised. In the absence of data on possible numbers, Caravan was doubled in scope from a single reception phase of half a million refugees into a second phase of a further half a million refugees, of whom one-third would be added to each of NRW and Lower Saxony’s quotas, the remaining third to SH.51 It seemed inconceivable that having agreed to lighten its already considerable refugee burden,52 SH should now be faced with a substantial net increase, even if 137,000 were able to leave eventually, should their onward accommodation be assured. Of this there was no guarantee, given past experience, and it was now even less likely given housing pressures elsewhere in the BZ. So when Brigadier Henderson, SH’s new acting RC, responded to Lüdemann’s draft plan regarding the proposed movement of refugees, he merely stated that Robertson had approved their recommendations and this question should now receive ‘urgent consideration’ by Land governments. There was no mention of Caravan. Aware of the current poor state of morale, the Acting RC instead chose to offer the Germans better news by informing Lüdemann that in future all unofficial refugees entering SH would be transferred daily into NRW, thereby cancelling the previous arrangement which had decreed that 75 per cent would be transferred in equal proportions to the other British Zone Länder.53 Again, there was no mention of the spectre of a further mass influx from the Soviet Zone that would have made this initiative obsolete, nor any recognition that this earlier agreement had been problematic, as NRW on several occasions had refused to accept their share, with SH’s Minister President urging Franken, the SH Minister for Labour, Welfare and Public Health, to establish ‘what help they could expect’ from the Military Governor

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to enforce the agreement.54 How the new scheme was expected to work better and help refugee resettlement was not up for discussion. As fears of the mass influx subsided, further more modest emergency measures were tabled under the scheme Neue Heimat, whereby Lower Saxony and NRW agreed to take 5,000 refugees each before the end of March 1948, news that was ‘very welcome’.55 This plan too proved a false dawn, foundering on a decision to programme a larger scheme where a further 5,000 refugees would be moved to each Land in the US Zone (15,000) with 1,000 going to Hamburg and 500 to US-administered Bremen. As explained earlier, an agreement was yet to be negotiated with Clay, the US Military Governor, and so it was hardly a shock when the USA objected to receiving its share in early March. This was a major setback for British SH officials who were clear that ‘no real improvement in the refugee situation can be effected except by a substantial transfer of population out of the Land’. Despite the C-in-C’s overoptimistic directive in December 1947, and regardless of the USA’s reluctance to accept the 9,000 refugees as laid out in the original plan, there were still wider accommodation problems holding up the Germans’ logistical arrangements for the transfer of 137,000.56 Negotiations with the Länder continued, but the British held the Germans responsible for the ‘very little progress’ that had delayed the implementation of Caravan. On the other hand, scant recognition was given to the logistical obstacles they had asked them to surmount in order to accomplish this Sisyphean task. There was a sense that this original plan was ‘unlikely to be implemented unless a direct order on the subject is given by the Control Commission to the German authorities concerned’.57 In the wider context of a policy that was chasing its tail, even the resettlement of 26,500 would have been considered a step in the right direction and raised refugees’ hopes, but as one KRO observed, ‘The failure, or postponement, of the plan to move some 26,500 refugees from the Land during March has caused bitter disappointment.’ American intransigence or the ‘non-acceptance of additional refugees’ as it was politely described, was known about almost two months earlier.58 The British now had to respond to Lüdemann’s candid observation that ‘he expected little improvement’ even if the Americans could be persuaded to cooperate. This was because he would be unable to convince them that Britain’s zone had more refugees in relation to its population while NRW, bordering the US Zone, had only a very low percentage of refugees.59 Lüdemann

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had made a persuasive case to Douglas that steps needed to be taken to reduce the SH refugee population, and the C-in-C undertook to investigate the possibility of resettling a proportion in the French Zone, having recalled General Koenig’s in-principle agreement to accept an unspecified number. Robertson was pressed to take this up with Koenig directly.60 In May 1948, Robertson wrote to his French opposite number requesting his agreement to accepting refugees into his zone. He reminded Koenig of their recent discussions at a CCG-convened meeting to discuss the interzonal transfer of refugees; these had broken up with no agreement but with Koenig consenting to a joint study by experts to examine the possibilities.61 Koenig then backtracked on his earlier undertaking, probably due to other issues on his mind, such as France’s protracted resistance in accepting international control over the Ruhr industries.62 And so when Robertson later also wrote to Clay suggesting the formation of an interAllied working party,63 he again encountered resistance, with discussions delayed and necessary impetus lost. It was important for the German government to ensure the refugee question remained on the British agenda, and Lüdemann, alive to taking his opportunity, told Asbury of his meeting with Robertson when he had reiterated, once again, the ‘particular distress’ in SH. The DMG promised he would write to Clay that day, telling him that Koenig now showed ‘some inclination’ towards taking some refugees. Lüdemann continued: Otherwise I think your experiences are very often much the same as mine, and no doubt you, just as I do, point out the particular poverty and distress here in this Land and each time the answer is ‘We accept your statement. We regret it very much and we shall see what we can do about it’.64 Asbury offered no substantive answer, for as we have seen, such comments had reflected either a standard British platitude to deflect German anger and frustration, or their sometimes flustered or defensive responses to a crisis they well knew had no easy panacea. For their part, the Germans were shrewd enough to see how quoting back British officials’ vague promises of help could perhaps embarrass Britain into greater efforts on their behalf, echoed too in the rhetoric of the expellee organisations. Meanwhile, postponements of Neue Heimat turned into cancellations and it was obvious to many that the scheme was fast becoming a public relations embarrassment for the British, as was described by one KRO

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witnessing the fallout among refugees. Some had given up their jobs based on promises that they would be resettled, predominantly in the US Zone: There is great disappointment that the promised exodus of refugees did not take place. 3425 had volunteered to move . . . Then it was all cancelled. These setbacks make the CCG official on the ground appear a bigger fool than he really is. They also cause a loss of prestige.65 The British government saw its prestige abroad as a key component of its ability to negotiate the most favourable terms for Britain. Maintaining its reputation for carrying out its stated policies in Germany (here, refugee integration) was also central to its purpose of convincing Germans of its executive competence. Bevin had made a similar link in the Cabinet over a civil aviation enquiry that showed the government in a poor light: he thought it: ‘v[ery] prejudicial to f[oreign] policy issues – prestige of Gov[ernmen]t’.66 Robertson finally issued orders via the RC to Lüdemann that 5,000 refugees must be transferred to both NRW and Lower Saxony by 31 August 1948,67 an arbitrary and, as it transpired, unrealistic deadline with insufficient thought given to its practicability. Cracks appeared in this new more assertive line almost immediately, as was shown in one Kreis where refugee volunteers for the Neue Heimat scheme were told the day before their scheduled departure that they they were going nowhere.68 The same happened in Kreis Steinburg with refugees scheduled to leave on 15 July, and the order rescinded the preceding day, causing ‘great unrest and uncertainty amongst officials and refugees’. This prolonged the suffering for refugees still expecting that promises would be honoured, although the previous month it was reported that ‘any rumour of the transfer of refugees to other Länder is received with scorn’.69 For many, the first transports to NRW did not begin until July 1948,70 so refugees had to remain on standby for at least six months and be ready to leave at any time. The anxieties of whether and when expellees and refugees would be leaving SH, to unknown destinations, despite assurances they would find better conditions, offered barely more comfort than the uncertainties they had faced on arriving in SH three years earlier – they were becoming refugees twice over, even if it was not expressed in such terms. Furthermore, the Military Governor’s direct order did little to increase cooperation from either NRW or Lower Saxony. As reports of ‘great

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dissatisfaction’ over the conditions filtered back to SH in September, many refugees withdrew their applications to leave. The perception of one SH Kreisdirektor was that German authorities were either ‘trying to sabotage the resettlement of refugees by accommodating them badly’,71 or had not made adequate preparations to receive them. In another not atypical case, one refugee who had left behind a trade that had supported his family arrived to find they had been allocated an empty 10 sqm room, with no employment prospects or schools for his children. His complaint reflected the mood amongst several Neue Heimat refugees that the chaotic way the transfers had been handled had made a bad situation much worse: Our willingness and your promises induced us to go . . . We have left everything behind and have now nothing, only because we thought we could improve our lot. And we even did not get to the place we thought we would get to. I think you must have known all this. This district is overpopulated (180%) and more people are pressed into it. To my way of thinking this is a crime, because this transfer has robbed us of the last we had, our courage. All of you can be sure that you will hear more from me, because the damage I suffered, and not I alone but all of us, is very great and irreparable.72 There was no easy way to verify how many refugees had been transferred from one Land to another. SH authorities stated that by October 3,530 refugees had been transferred, but Lower Saxony claimed that it had already taken more than its share.73 Further negotiations between the two appeared to have agreed on an acceptable compromise figure, but by December, there was still ‘a difference of opinion’ between the Länder, so that the transfer operation was ‘now at a standstill’. Matters were far worse in NRW where only 581 out of the 5,000 had so far moved.74 When Lüdemann met the RC in July 1949, agreement to transferring what Lüdemann rightly called ‘a mere handful’ was still no nearer. Robertson wrote to General Bishop, now NRW’s RC, to say that if agreement could be reached between them and SH, he was ‘prepared to rescind’ Douglas’s original directive. Lüdemann, who estimated that NRW could accommodate at least 600,000 refugees,75 was incredulous at how long it had taken for the British to agree to issue this order. Bishop was concerned by the ‘very haphazard manner’ in which refugee movements had occurred, wishing instead to relate these to available employment vacancies. He focused on how, within a matter of weeks, this responsibility would be

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‘resting fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the Federal Government’.76 This partly explains the delays and why it was never simply down to the two Länder to negotiate a compromise: there were additional conditions to satisfy, set by the British, for a complex process of reintegration they had long claimed was a German responsibility. If there were so many difficulties over 5,000 refugees, what hopes for resolving the much larger problem of how to persuade the French and the Americans not just to accept significantly larger numbers of refugees, but to put any resulting agreements into effect? The inherent problems in reconciling the respective policy agendas of the Western powers are beyond our remit here. However, in linking with the earlier points that showed the British to be in a weak position when making promises to SH, it should be said that on 31 March 1949, the respective Military Governors met to discuss the transfer of 300,000 from Bizonia into the French Zone.77 Lüdemann had raised the question of distribution quotas from SH with Robertson,78 Clay and Koenig. Robertson told him that Koenig had agreed to accept circa 100,000 refugees from Bizonia who wished to settle there with their families or take up work in the zone. Koenig agreed to take a total of 300,000 (including those referred to above), provided that satisfactory arrangements could be made for apportioning between the Western zones the financial burdens involved in transferring and supporting them. There were two problems: first, French Military Government hitherto had only approved the transfer of 29,000 refugees and their families, and furthermore, this agreement was still subject to ratification by Länder governments. Asbury concluded his response to the Minister President: ‘“Refugees” are of course a subject entirely within the competence of a West German Government and I have every hope that such a Government will ensure that they are equitably distributed.’79 The problem was that refugees’ hopes were again falsely raised by the British. With high unemployment throughout SH, many leaped at the chance of leaving in expectation of a more secure life in the French Zone. Three examples illustrate this. Eckernförde had already received 5,000 volunteers and foresaw ‘no difficulty’ in finding the requisite 8,600, whilst in Steinburg, 6–7,000 refugees applied for transfers. In Südtondern, where 8,800 out of its 35,000 refugees were to move out, many showed ‘every willingness to leave and get a chance of work’. In Segeberg, even rumours of 200 being allowed to leave heightened expectations.80 But in an echo of Bishop’s earlier hesitation during the NRW debacle over matching refugees to available posts, the Resettlement Committee of

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Baden-Württemberg decided to take only ‘those families fit for work’, and as we have seen, the great majority of refugees comprised either men or widowed women without a trade, the elderly or children still too young to work. To the hopefuls of Süderdithmarschen this ‘caused much disappointment’.81 This was the tip of the iceberg, as it emerged that only 570 had left SH for the French Zone in July. Further trains were expected to leave twice weekly from both SH and Lower Saxony during August for Württemberg-Hohenzollern; however, their other Länder, Rheinland-Pfalz and Süd-Baden, announced they would be unable to accept their quota of the first 120,000 refugees ‘owing to financial difficulties’.82 Between 8 July and 3 December 1949, a mere 15,000 refugees had left for the French Zone in 47 transports;83 5 per cent must be seen as a poor return on what had been agreed by the Military Governors nine months earlier.84 The various committees set up by CCG in its advisory capacity since June 1946 – Refugee Resettlement Committee, Refugee Committee, Coordination of Relief Committee and its Sub-Committee, ZAC and the Central Office for Refugees, to name five – all preceded the first Operation Caravan discussions in December 1947. Caravan, the emergency plan synonymous with moving 137,000 SH refugees living in primitive conditions, was never implemented, despite hard evidence that by December a further 500 refugees were crossing weekly from the Soviet Zone into SH, with this trend likely to continue. This number of committees could be seen as suggesting that Britain had a purposeful refugee policy, and that its administrators, if not managing the problems through realistic and planned policies, tried at least to keep the lid on the situation. It could, however, suggest that CCG’s stock response to a crisis was to institute a new committee with a new reporting procedure. This method of putting off big decisions by creating further layers of bureaucracy was indicative of an institutionalised style of crisis management. Committees delayed the need for any one individual to act, or take responsibility for a problem that they consistently reassured themselves was not a British one. Over the course of the immediate post-war period, evidence accumulated during the occupation that, with no significant improvement in refugees’ basic living conditions, Britain needed to rethink its refugee redistribution strategy within its wider occupation policy. Whilst the refugees remained a problem of conscience for British officials, who freely continued to acknowledge this ‘was the most serious difficulty with which we had to contend’,85 or was first among the ‘2 great problems to solve’

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in SH,86 their conscious choice to delegate responsibility for refugees to Germans had contradictorily reduced British political incentives to act as a more powerful advocate for German refugees’ hopes. CCG’s higher power echelons in Berlin were aware that the Americans and French would seek to protect their own zones’ interests first, so their political resolve shied away from persuading the Western Allies to give this issue earlier priority, or to respond in more than token ways to their requests for help.87 Robertson did not visit SH to inform himself of the situation at first hand until just before writing to Koenig on 31 May 1948. Many of Britain’s difficulties in securing external cooperation were therefore self-inflicted.

A double bind: dismantling and refugee unemployment Britain’s policy of industrial dismantling in Germany stemmed in part from its obligations under the Potsdam Agreement to secure reparations from Germany. For example, 25 per cent of dismantled plant in the Western zones was meant to go to the Soviet Union, with substantial quotas going to its neighbouring countries who had suffered significant losses under German occupation. Reparations were inextricably linked with the main principles of Britain’s policy towards Germany, and dismantled industrial plant was also seen as a potentially important asset in the industrial rehabilitation of Europe. For its part, Britain wanted to create a political situation that would remove any possibility of a revival of Germany’s aggressive foreign policy. Moreover, it also sought to stimulate growth in German production and trade, thus enabling it to become selfsupporting, and make repayment to the Allies for expenditure incurred during the occupation. However, Britain’s policy eventually contributed directly to a reduction in employment opportunities, and this impacted negatively on refugees’ prospects of finding work. Before we discuss how this related to Schleswig-Holstein, it is worth drawing together the threads of how policy was conceived in London and how this was perceived in Germany. Revised proposals were published in August 1947 for the Level of Industry Plan in Bizonia, the core objective being to remove industrial capacity ‘which might be reasonably regarded as contributing to German war potential, but at the same time to leave an industrial capacity sufficient for the German people to achieve and maintain a decent standard of living’.88 This plan reduced the numbers of industrial plant designated

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for demolition by CCG in March 1946 from 1,636 to 682; of these 496 were in the British Zone, and 302 were classed as List A ‘war plants’ (Rüstungswerke). The British number appears high when one considers the numbers of businesses or works scheduled for dismantling in Bizonia: the American Zone total was 185, the French Zone total 236. However, it was generally accepted, two and a half years after Germany’s surrender, that ‘disarmament is virtually complete in the British Zone’.89 George Bell, by no means the only British figure concurring that the 302 factories should be demolished in the British and American zones, saw no justification for dismantling industrial installations that were not on List A, and that therefore could help achieve Britain’s stated objectives for German economic recovery. Bell identified the measures as contributing to ‘the crisis of confidence’ prevalent in the zone: ‘what the Germans in the British Zone undoubtedly see is a whole series of restrictions, prohibitions, negations and chains. What they do not see and what they crave is a plan.’ This lack of planning was corroborated by the Select Committee: ‘Your Committee are impressed by the necessity for the clearest possible directive on British policy in Germany at the highest level and throughout the organization. All concerned should be quite clear as to what they are attempting to do.’90 One speaker urged the government to produce ‘a flexible plan’ which allowed for review if errors were made in dismantling decisions, others were not persuaded that ‘dismantling ought to take place’, or that it ‘can be anything but bad in its effects’.91 There were explicit links between CCG’s dismantling policy and the crises in housing and the refugee camps. Bell quoted a letter from Paulke, the Evangelical Lutheran Bishop of Lübeck, drawing the Lords’ attention to CCG’s decision to blow up a number of air-raid shelters in Lübeck, already demilitarised in 1945 by cutting windows and other apertures in them that made them vulnerable to blast, and adapted for use as dwellings. An opportunity to make good some of the losses in dwelling space had been missed, and this decision did nothing to help the 18,000 or so refugees ‘encamped in appalling conditions outside the town as there is no possibility of getting dwellings for them’.92 What Bell highlighted was a further example of British policy-making insufficiently thought through to allow greater flexibility and speed of decision-making according to circumstances on the ground, in this instance a chronic housing crisis for the majority of the population. This greatly eroded German faith in Britain’s pronouncements of its positive efforts to help Germany. The argument should be restated that when it came to prioritising

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between destroying accommodation, albeit basic, that could have been put to beneficial use but was perceived instead by the British authorities as a hypothetical future threat, the politics of fear won out over faith shown towards the Germans’ desire to rebuild their social infrastructure. In German minds as well as in Bell’s view, refugee problems seemed not to figure large in British calculations. The government’s announcement of a new dismantling order for war plant and industrial plant surplus to the Bizonal Level of Industry Plan as a part of its reparations commitments was greeted with dismay in Germany, where many observers could see neither the sense nor the fair-mindedness of Britain’s approach in reconciling their aim of putting the German economy back on its feet whilst simultaneously pursuing dismantling measures against firms that were demonstrably ‘peaceful’ (Friedensbetrieben).93 More worryingly for British prestige in Germany, many Germans were long convinced that the real purpose behind the Level of Industry Plan and reparations plans was to suffocate German competition in world markets ‘for the sake of our own selfish interests’.94 With the publication of the dismantling lists, one Intelligence Summary spoke of a policy: Strongly decried by everyone, and held up as a method by which Germany is being eliminated from competitive production . . . Generally, the impression is given that the Occupying Powers are known to be deliberately obstructing any attempts the Germans may make to rehabilitate themselves . . . in order to obtain the former German export markets for their own use.95 It should be said that regarding dismantling by the Western powers, the USA had suspended its own programme of dismantling some 18 months previously, partly in response to the Soviet Union reneging on its side of the Potsdam commitments.96 Whether or not the allegations above can be substantiated cannot be discussed here. What is important is that this report was indicative of a common perception that Britain was seeking to take advantage of Germany’s economic weakness. So thought not only British parliamentary supporters of Germany, such as Stokes, but also prominent German politicians, such as Gayk, who spoke for many of those civilians directly affected, and Hans Schlange-Schöningen, the head of the German Economic Council.97 So also did German public opinion, gathered from Intelligence Summaries as above, and it was allowed to gather weight in German minds. As we shall see, this added significantly

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to the atmosphere of mistrust discussed in the previous chapter and contributed to the ebbing confidence. For example, the Holmag Works in Kiel, a factory once used for manufacturing torpedoes and now employing 1,800 people ‘making diesel locomotives and other peaceful articles’, was scheduled for dismantling as a Category 1 plant (List A). As the first order was given to workers by management to start dismantling the first batch of machines, the men decided to go on strike. The buildings were occupied by German police to forestall possible sabotage, and the Lüdemann Cabinet nearly tendered their resignation over the issue when they thought they would be blamed for the hostility and resentment caused by the dismantling order. The workers eventually agreed to return to work, but according to the CCG report: ‘will not touch dismantling, which they describe as “making their own coffins”’.98 Their protests were supported by Stokes, Gollancz’s close ally and a long-standing critic of various aspects of the government’s treatment of Germany, who resorted to a direct approach to the Military Government’s Custodian for the Holmag factory.99 Holmag’s iron foundry was in the news again nine months later with a criticism that failure to remove two disused blast furnaces scheduled for reparations was ‘hindering the provision of peacetime industry and prolonging unemployment among the local workers’. Mayhew, responding on Bevin’s behalf, sought to downplay the significance of this by saying the furnaces were of ‘very small value’, denying that their retention was exacerbating unemployment, and claimed a request from the local German authorities to substitute these for other furnaces was under consideration.100 Andreas Gayk made a speech during Kieler Woche in which he outspokenly criticised Britain’s dismantling policy: ‘Those who continue today to dismantle peaceful works in Germany are dismantling German democracy.’101 He stated that although Britain had eliminated Germany’s capacity to rearm by demolishing old factories and plants that could potentially be used for non-peaceful means, dismantling was having an adverse effect on SH’s economic infrastructure by depriving many Germans of employment opportunities, when some factories, it had been suggested in Britain, could be transferred sensibly to civilian production.102 Gayk’s tone was measured, given that little over a year earlier, he had said that the Kiel workforce had shown willingness to ‘cooperate in a sensible dismantling scheme’, but he nonetheless hoped that they would have the courage to ‘do everything in their power to hinder the senseless destruction of their work-places’. Appended to the speech was a note from

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de Crespigny’s deputy informing him that he had spoken to a German delegation assuring them ‘a plan was in process of being worked out, and that until it was firm they must not believe rumours, nor jump to conclusions’.103 Asking the Germans not to believe rumours was akin to fantasy, as gossip was part of the fabric of daily life in the British Zone over nearly all aspects of occupation policy, fuelled by delays in British decision-making and a lack of independent news reporting. Understandably anxious to secure the best possible outcomes for themselves, the Germans were perfectly adept, when so required, at exploiting rhetoric and rumours to their own ends. One KRO recounted the German rumour that CCG organised trade shows to find out which firms were manufacturing products likely to compete with England in world markets and then close them down.104 Thus it is easy to see how the rumour mill endemic to the BZ could present the British dismantling policy so loosely that, instead of upholding the image of Germans using all means at their disposal to rebuild their 56105 destroyed cities, it would feed fears that Britain had a Machiavellian plot to keep the Germans in the poorhouse of Europe. Stokes’s lengthy exchanges with Mayhew in Parliament on the Level of Industry Plan give further credence to this. Stokes questioned the government’s fallacious assumption that by reducing Germany’s overall capacity of general engineering to a level no higher than 50 per cent of its 1936 capacity, it was possible to produce sufficient mechanical excavators. Stokes’s point was simple: the FO’s argument – that the level of Germany’s permitted output was based not on output levels but capacity potential – was a ‘trick’ to cover up for the government’s ‘usual silly incompetent argument’. The Germans, more concerned with the policy’s practical impact, protested that these measures made ‘the carrying out of the reconstruction programme impossible’. Stokes argued it was impossible to rebuild Germany unless it was allowed a sufficient number of excavators, and that the very means whereby towns and cities could be cleared were being destroyed: I can assure him [Mayhew] that they are not capable of producing more than 50 percent of their total 1936 capacity. These villains in the Foreign Office have so messed them about, that they are incapable of producing sufficient machines. All this talk about the difference between capacity and output is simply an official quibble in order to get out of a jam.106

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In June 1948 it was announced that further demolitions would take place. This news was greeted in the Landtag ‘like a thunderbolt’ as it had been hoped that the question of continued dismantling (demontage) had been settled. Despite Diekmann’s statement that everything had been done to dissuade Military Government, he was informed that the decision was final, with CCG ordering part of the buildings at the torpedo testing station (TVA) at Surrendorf to be blown up. The SPD introduced a motion ‘strongly protesting and warning Military Government emphatically against this policy of economic restriction and destruction’. The CDU maintained it was impossible to rebuild Germany ‘on such a contradictory policy’, and their spokesman Schröter hoped that ‘conquerors would see reason at last’. The motion was passed unanimously and it was decided to send a telegram to Bevin protesting against this decision and at the ‘undignified treatment’ of the Landtag delegates.107 In a parliamentary answer to Stokes, Bevin maintained that no order had been given yet for the demolition of the surface buildings of the testing station, and a report from an Anglo-German working party into how these buildings might best be used was still under consideration.108 A protest meeting was held in Kreis Eckernförde where Ratz, President of the Landtag, argued that if it was not considered necessary to destroy these installations during wartime, what possible threat could they pose now, three years after hostilities had ceased? He articulated the prevalent mood of ‘despair’: one moment they were being told of their ‘re-admission amongst the nations’, only for this to be contradicted by the ‘senseless’ destruction of ‘what is vital for us’.109 Ratz continued: The blow struck by the dismantling and blowing up is not directed against the Nazis, but just hits those elements of our nation that that are willing to stretch out their hands for a pacific reconstruction . . . [They] do not understand the reasons for demolishing property which is vital for the redoubled population since that population cannot live without having a chance to work.110 Four months later, the three testing stations in Surrendorf remained empty and locked but had yet to be demolished pending Robertson’s final decision. The significance of CCG’s failure to determine on these and a further 40 large buildings in Eckernförde, for example, at Siemens-Schuckert, was that their policy of neither demolishing nor allowing them to be used for other peaceful purposes not only removed any possibility of employment

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for 10,000 workers,111 but also missed an opportunity to create new habitable housing space for refugees. Last-minute appeals by the Landtag were given short shrift by Robertson, and demolitions began on 7 December 1948, despite part of the German labour force deputed to carry out the task walking out in protest. This was only of minor concern to the British who had already secured the service of Poles willing to undertake the demolitions. Although German opinion was in consensus that the buildings should be used for housing refugees and new industries, public demonstrations took place in a mood of apathy in Kiel, Schleswig and Flensburg. This enabled Hector McNeil to underplay the symbolic significance of the walkouts in his response to a request for a parliamentary statement on the demonstrations simply by saying they ‘come to nothing’.112 In a show of dissent, however, the German authorities passed resolutions ‘breaking off social contact’ with the British113 following Military Government’s final decision, which was greeted amidst ‘a storm of protest’, particularly from the SPD and trade unions, whose resolution warned against ‘the carrying out of a scorched-earth policy’. Whilst Lüdemann’s and Schröter’s speeches were ‘calm and reasoned’, Gayk was ‘extremely hostile’ and reiterated the SPD’s recent decision to sever contact with Britain.114 The political fallout of ‘the British government’s final and irrevocable decision’ spilled over into 1949 and beyond, with Germans now worried that the East Bank buildings in Kiel Harbour, 15 miles away, would suffer a similar fate. British administrators in Kiel, less concerned with the economic or strategic aspects of the case or ‘the rights and wrongs of the arguments put up on the German side’, were more interested in what the political parties were thinking and saying and what action was being contemplated, especially as the policy now crossed German party political lines with potential for fomenting further unrest amongst both indigenous and refugee populations. Likewise, one key reason why Britain continued to limit the scope of refugee organisations was to dissipate adverse reaction to other policy decisions – on food, housing and so on – that hitherto had so disadvantaged refugees, as we see shortly. As SPD chairman, Gayk wrote to the Labour Party at the House of Commons, saying that basic information supplied to the government about the purpose of the underground factories ‘is absolutely false’. Gayk emphasised that after the removal of all machines from ammunitions plants, naval shipyards, and torpedo manufacturing, assembling and testing plants, what had remained were empty workshops and administration buildings, ‘the most valuable asset[s] for our policy of providing jobs for

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the expellees’. As a result of Bevin’s Commons statement on 30 June 1948 that no order had been given for the demolitions, ‘new hopes arose in the hearts of the tens of thousands of the expellees here’. The dismantling crisis needed to be seen in the context of SH having absorbed 1.2 million expellees against a native population of 1.4 million, so that ‘the basic aim of every labour policy in this country has to be not only to house and shelter these people, but to bring them into jobs’. For that purpose, he argued, a large amount of industrialisation was necessary, and so every machine and suitable building must be put to maximum use towards this end, given that no less than 38 per cent of SH’s tax revenues had been deducted to pay for occupation costs in the previous year, further depleting their already ‘utterly insufficient’ financial resources. He begged them to send a parliamentary investigation committee, and issue a moratorium on all further demolitions pending the committee witnessing and investigating the situation at first hand.115 It is important to realise why job creation had become such a dominant political issue in SH, and how even the possibility of 10,000 new jobs, had both Eckernförde and other installations at Lübeck and Kiel been saved, would have made a significant difference to SH prospects as well as giving refugees grounds for hope for their futures (see Fig. 24). As Diekmann emphasised one year later in a speech to expellees, SH still needed to create 100,000 new jobs.116 Since the end of 1948, unemployment had been rising. In January 1949, the figure had reached 133,000, up 18,000 on the previous month. By the end of March the total had risen to 169,000, up 14,000 over the month. By mid-May it was 184,000, one month later 187,895. By mid-July, it reached ‘an all-time high’ of 189,000, and it was not until August that the figure of 192,000 was predicted to plateau, largely due to a recovery in the building trade.117 The proportion of unemployed people in the Western zones trebled in the 18 months following currency reform, affecting the refugees far more than the indigenous population. Schleswig-Holstein was by far the hardest hit region, with an overall increase in unemployment to 26.3 per cent of the total population between June 1948 and December 1949. Figures for refugee employment in SH extrapolated from these Federal Ministry of Employment statistics show that of the 221,184 total out of work on 31 December 1949, 58.5 per cent were refugees – again far higher than elsewhere in Western Germany. This last figure needs to be seen against SH’s refugee population of 34.9 per cent of the total.118

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Figure 24. Poster of the Schleswig-Holstein Hilfe für Kriegsopfer, circa 1949. This was designed to shift indigenous German misconceptions that refugee war victims were work-shy. Its headline reads: ‘I can still work. I still want to work’. ‘Help me and my comrades make a new start’. Courtesy of Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, Abt. 605 Nr. 646.

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Gayk’s letter was not sent by CCG to London until 29 December, and when the government did respond via the RC, demolitions had already begun four days earlier. Their reply was essentially a lengthy rebuttal of Gayk’s claims, and a self-justification of their policy, driven by the belief that if Britain’s declared intention to demilitarise Germany was to have any meaning, this would be seen as the key test case. The Labour government was determined not to send a parliamentary investigation committee to Germany,119 convinced that the Germans were intent on pursuing a policy of deliberate obstruction against demilitarisation and that a visit of this nature would merely encourage German belief that they could muster further public opinion against British policy. Against all the evidence to the contrary, Labour claimed its policy regarding the treatment of industrial and military buildings in Germany was ‘extremely liberal’, with the British implacable that as long as the TVA in Eckernförde Bay remained,120 with its unique status in Germany as a research establishment into underground warfare, and because of its ‘vital part’ in the submarine campaigns of both world wars, ‘it is a direct threat to the security of this island. We should be failing grievously in our responsibility to the nation . . . if we did not see to it that the war potential of Eckernförde was finally destroyed.’ Gayk’s humanitarian plea on the refugees’ behalf was not addressed, although it was agreed some buildings would be retained for use as temporary housing ‘in our desire to alleviate so far as we could the particular difficulties in Schleswig-Holstein’,121 but which was hardly the full scope of measures argued for by the SPD. It was an indication of Britain’s awareness of the strength of feeling on this issue that British officials thought it worth giving Land representatives an opportunity ‘to feel that they had been consulted before a final decision was made’ on the dismantling, thus giving them a chance at least to understand better some of the adjudications made. From both a tactical and political point of view, this might have been beneficial also for creating the impression ‘that they had gained certain concessions’, as well as enabling them to quote facts rather than conjecture in their speeches and press articles.122 As we can see, the challenge for the British had developed into a psychological battle for winning over hearts and minds, however calculating the means employed to achieve this, and their approach here was consistent with their core aim of steering German attitudes towards their own democratic principles by suggesting, falsely, that Germans were somehow participating in making their own decisions on this and other important issues such as refugee population redistribution. The reverse

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was the case, as underlined again here. By June 1949, Bevin acknowledged that the First Lord of the Admiralty’s proposal to destroy two docks in Kiel ‘were already calculated to cause difficulties with the Western Germans, particularly in Schleswig-Holstein, at a time when good relations between them and the Western Occupying powers are essential’. Bevin decided that the demolition decision by the Overseas Reconstruction Committee [ORC] should be reconsidered having consulted with Robertson who, following a meeting with the RC, had argued for their retention on the grounds of economic desirability and political expediency.123 Although Bevin said the FO was not consulted on this matter, previous examples have shown that the instinct to continue with dismantling remained stronger in Whitehall than concerns over the impact on German employment or morale. It shows too that communication between the Military Governor and the FO was somewhat fragmented. Therefore dismantling, when not purely restricted to List A war plants where there was prima facie evidence that their retention might threaten future security, or when plant removed from sites was not used subsequently to contribute directly towards Soviet reparations, was not consonant with the British vaunted spirit of fair play, a cornerstone of their objective to steer the growth of German democratic culture. But the more that the British hoped to show they were empowering Germans to exercise their own democratic right of free speech, the more they saw their own grip being loosened in the war of public opinion. Kit Steel, Robertson’s political adviser, wrote to Asbury about the problem ‘of how to put our view across to the Germans in the present rapidly changing state of our relations with them’. The exchanges show that the British, despite conviction in their own position, nevertheless found it problematic to make a convincing case against the SPD’s pleas for common sense to prevail. Steel brushed aside the need for finding mutual understanding as the British were already well-acquainted with German views. He judged rather that there had never been a greater need for the Germans to show greater understanding, for ‘our chances of inoculating our own ideas directly are decreasing . . . the Germans are increasingly ready in general to turn down what is presented to them openly as the British point of view’.124 Asbury responded that neither intellectuals nor politicians in SH could understand Britain’s point of view regarding the validity of the demolitions, and warned that ‘we shall have a much greater outcry’ following a final decision on East Bank, Kiel: ‘When this problem is disposed of, we shall find that the Germans will be much more vocal on the question of the transfer of refugees.’125

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After four years of peace and with the demilitarisation programme generally agreed to have been completed, Britain was not just practising the ‘cautious politics’ of the early years of occupation, as Diekmann had suggested – it was, certainly in German minds, obstructing Germany’s economic regeneration potential. The British saw it differently. They were not ready to accept the evidence of Germany revoking its Nazi past, and so felt irritated by SH obstructing their policy. Schlange-Schöningen, highly regarded by both British and Americans for his work as head of the German Economic Council, in his speech at a CDU meeting in July 1949, talked about the need for increased production. The KRO, commenting that he spoke ‘in a very fair and objective way’, reported him saying that ‘on the one hand they [the English] pretend to help Germany, on the other they continue to dismantle her factories’.126 Even Lüdemann, also respected by the British for his diplomatic equanimity as well as his energy and political abilities, was outspoken in his anger at decisions he found ‘incomprehensible’: Our appeal to British Military Government and beyond that to the world, failed to produce any results. In absolute disregard of the true facts we have been accused of ‘nationalism’ and even ‘militarism’ for having taken a stand for the preservation of basic needs for existence. It is the fate of conquered peoples to face misunderstanding, slander and abusive language . . . the world would be spared much distress, if the peoples would succeed after each war in joining hands in a period of reconciliation and better co-operation.127 In an attempt to forestall similar plans for the future of Kiel’s East Bank, he said plans for its peaceful redevelopment were in hand, and expressed the hope ‘that this time Military Government will show more understanding and pay more regard to the vital needs of our Land’; here too, thousands could find employment instead of burdening SH’s unemployment assistance and relief funds. He was sure that ‘the working masses in Great Britain would react in the same manner if facing the same difficulties’.128 So while German political rhetoric generally favoured tempered language that advocated reconciliation and cooperation, even if this tone was not always reflected in the press – for example the row over the SHVZ publication of a lexicon of pejorative nicknames for CCG policies129 – British government rhetoric, in contrast, often referenced ‘militarism’ or ‘nationalism’, and continued to be suffused with a tone of

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suspicion directed at German motives, even in 1949. In her lengthy justification of the government’s policy over the TVA at Eckernförde, Labour’s Parliamentary Secretary said: ‘if our intention to demilitarise Germany is to have any meaning, it would be impossible to leave these powerful and elaborate constructions intact’.130 This comment suggests just how politicised the dismantling question had become within Britain’s bogey of demilitarisation, a lynchpin in Whitehall’s holy grail of eradicating the possibility of nationalist resurgence by symbolically detonating any remaining foundations, often without distinguishing fairly, in German minds, between present or future threats posed. In this sense, dismantling continued to resonate uncomfortably alongside Bomber Command’s Strategic Air Offensive obliteration of German industrial infrastructure. Put another way, what had been an understandable wartime objective continued well after 1945, to be conflated in policy-makers’ minds with an official assertion of Germany’s potential military menace. This was never substantiated, and in view of Germany’s unconditional surrender, it must be seen as questionable. Dismantling played a major role in fracturing fragile bonds of trust in British–German relations in SH, and beyond. By August 1949, the longrunning controversy of demontage was still ‘very much alive’. The British stance, as originally defined by Bevin, of the demolitions being necessary in the interests of British security, was again criticised and full coverage was given to German statements from abroad criticising the policy.131 This became a no-win situation both for the Germans in their hopes for a more balanced policy, and the British whose determination to see this through came at a political cost to their reputation for fair-mindedness on which they had so long relied.

Divergent ambitions: expellee organisations and refugee identity The Western Allies, drawing on the ambiguities of Potsdam, hoped to win over German loyalties in the early phase of the Cold War by suggesting that there might be scope for a revision of the 1937 frontiers marked by the Oder and western Neisse rivers in a future treaty.132 It thus helped to ground the official basis of the expellees’ hopes of a right of return to their homelands, a move later endorsed and cultivated by the new West German government and the main political parties. The SPD, CDU/ CSU and FDP also all demanded the return of the eastern territories.133

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Although Bevin reiterated that the transfer of German territory to Poland was still under discussion, FO memoranda from early 1947 suggest that border revision was not regarded ‘as a serious possibility’.134 This reinforces the idea that the British were quite prepared to use expellees’ aspirations as a lever to suit their purposes within a larger political game over which the Germans had no say. This was a further contributory factor in escalating refugee resentment and encouraging the very politicisation Britain wanted to suppress. British plans for refugees and expellees to assimilate fully into life in SH and elsewhere in their zone were irreconcilable with the Western Allies’ 1946 decision to ban the formation of any politically motivated refugee party, a ban not lifted in the British Zone until March 1950.135 General Clay argued that the existence of a refugee party would hinder USA objectives of ‘assimilating’ refugees in the West.136 Analysing the assimilation plan in refugee politics in the US Zone, Grieser concluded that the Americans’ determination to push through the notion of an ‘assimilation policy’ (Assimilierungspolitik) did little to promote refugee integration.137 Linked with this was Military Government’s initial policy decision suppressing refugee groups that tried to form with the object of protecting individual rights they perceived had been removed de facto by their expulsion or migration from the eastern territories. But as discussed below, the Americans were first to liberalise the policy that proscribed both refugee groups’ freedom of association and their right to form organisations. On the other hand, the British took longer to reconcile their fear that expellees’ potential vulnerability to political extremism might ‘crystallize into dissident and disruptive groups’.138 When the policy ban on expellee organisations was later relaxed by the British, but with preconditions placed on the German authorities that effectively straitjacketed the scope of such associations, expellees were disempowered further from having a decisive say in their own future. They had to rely on help from the main German political parties, which each claimed to best represent their aspirations while in reality appropriating their cause to gain more votes;139 their varying degrees of success are well documented elsewhere. The suppressive stance of the British towards official refugee representation was, however, for all practical purposes, at odds with and divergent from their hopes of helping refugees and expellees to integrate. The perception was allowed to harden amongst expellees that withholding what they saw as basic democratic rights was discriminatory and disadvantaged them in relation to the indigenous populations. In this

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sense, the ban on refugee parties pursuing political objectives placed a heavy burden on the mainstream political parties to integrate refugees. Connor’s focus on how refugee interests were handled by the political parties, however, only briefly addresses the relationships between refugee groups and the British occupation authorities, specifically BMG’s rejection in early 1948 of an application by an ‘all-party’ Refugee Committee in Lübeck to hold a conference on the refugee problem.140 Suffice it to say that expellees steadily grew to believe they would fare better if they had their own party in order to make their voices heard, but as these hopes faded, instead they had to wait and see which side would benefit them most. They ‘would like to be pro-west, and still dislike the Russians, but feel that economic pressure may still force them back to the East’.141 In reality, although expellees also felt let down by the main political parties for their continuing material problems, the threat of a return to the East remained for most a rhetorical device to pressure both German politicians and the Western Allies to return lands lost through border revisions that had benefited Poland and the Soviet Union at Germany’s expense. Although Länder governments had possessed executive responsibility regarding refugees since 20 February 1947 under Article II Paragraph 3 (ii) of Ordinance No. 57, Military Government still reserved the right to exercise emergency legislative powers under Schedule B, Item 10 of the same Ordinance. On 19 June 1948, the RC ordered that licensing and control of refugee organisations should henceforth devolve to SH’s Land government within the provisions of Ordinance No. 122. However, it was incumbent on the Land to ensure that each association publish its aims and objectives ‘which must be limited to welfare and cultural matters, and that no activity outside the terms of these aims and objects is undertaken’. This was only one of ten specific criteria required by applicants seeking a licence, another of which was to supply comprehensive data on members of the association’s managing committee and those responsible for management – names, profession, address, place of residence ‘before they left their homes’, refugee group, denazification certificate and proof of good reputation. It was emphasised this new policy in no way affected Ordinance No. 12 (Political Parties) and that Military Government would still retain its overriding powers to ban any organisation under Ordinance No. 122, including the right to apply the penal provisions under Article II 3(b) on conviction for any activities or omissions outside the terms of the aims and objects approved. The CCG Court’s powers to impose any sentence, other

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than death, were left deliberately open,142 showing the latitude open to the British authorities in interpreting any perceived breaches. By circumscribing the organisations’ remit around ‘welfare and culture matters’, which the British hoped would help to quell refugees’ immediate dissatisfaction at living conditions and to stabilise future prospects for integration rather than return migration, the conditional devolution of powers to grant licences did not give the Land government the necessary latitude to authorise refugees to develop their own organisational structures to reflect their different needs, which varied according to the conditions particular to their different locations throughout SH. In truth, the new criteria were a legacy from the 1946 British policy which was to proscribe refugee associations altogether. In July 1946, CCG’s Kiel HQ was asked to issue instructions as to policy on ‘Refugees’ Unions’, and if any such organisations were to be permitted, what their functions and aims might be. The Internal Affairs and Communication Division of CCG was unequivocally opposed to the idea, and thought there should be no variation in British policy which forbade their formation.143 Britain’s eventual devolution of licensing to German control in June 1948 – although subject to their political caveat – was not in reality a liberalisation of policy, and contrasted with the Americans’ more liberal approach. In November 1947, US Military Government had granted refugees and expellees the right of freedom of association (Koalitionsrecht) and with this, the right to form their own organisations, on condition that their political activities were linked to existing recognised political parties. This was guaranteed for all political parties under the US Zone’s constitutional framework.144 CCG’s continued reliance on the comprehensive, and what they hoped would be successful, assimilation of refugees into cultural and political life became an overarching characteristic of their refugee policy, and so when in 1948 they were first approached to sanction the establishment of the Bund der Heimatvertriebenen [hereinafter BdV], it was pointed out that official policy was still against the establishment of special organisations, and that to grant approval ‘would defeat policy and keep refugees as a separate organism’.145 The British saw potentially large coalitions of German expellees united in a collective sense of injustice as a potential threat to the zone’s stability, and thus were anxious to forestall any nascent expellee politicisation for what they viewed as subversive ends. These fears were never substantiated, and so expellee groups’ resentment over what they perceived as British overreaction puts CCG’s aversion to criticism in a different light. For example, since early 1947, East Prussian

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and Pomeranian organisations, who represented the largest numbers of expellees in SH, had been peacefully petitioning CCG to return to their own homes.146 As it became clear these hopes would not materialise in the foreseeable future, there were increasing demands by refugees for an organisation to ‘represent their needs and demands’.147 Expellees saw the need to secure a representative public platform as their basic democratic right, and so very publicly sought recognition and legitimisation within the developing German political landscape. Not content to be regarded merely as pressure groups campaigning for better conditions or for the return of their lost lands, they did not consider political, social welfare or cultural objectives as being mutually exclusive – as did the British. For example, the Vereinigung der Ostvertriebenen tried to form in various municipalities in Husum before applying to the Landesregierung to obtain their formal permission. The KRO instructed the Kreisdirektor to inform each branch that they were illegal until such permission had been obtained. He continued: ‘whilst these people profess to have purely cultural motives, if they are permitted to form they will have to be closely watched, in order to prevent their developing their organisation into a political one’. One month earlier, using powers that were still vested in Military Government [Ordinances Nos 57 and 122], he had instructed the Kreisdirektor to attend any meeting the Vereinigung might hold and report verbatim exactly what they proposed. German functionaries had unwittingly become the eyes and ears of the British. The Landrat reported back with some uncertainty that this might be ‘the first stage of a political party for refugees’148 (see Fig. 25). However, by refusing to acknowledge the interconnected nature of their aspirations, or to recognise refugees’ and expellees’ status politically, the British showed how much they feared triggering a groundswell of revanchism or demands for territorial border revisions that they themselves had suggested might be negotiable with the Russians and Poles at some later date. The elaborate system of checks and balances on associations imposed by the British were also designed to ensure that refugee groups would not be co-opted as cover by those still harbouring Nazi sympathies, despite the conclusion of denazification proceedings on 15 February 1948. This followed the issue of the Clearance Certificate (Entlastungszeugnis) for all those persons previously classified in Categories III and IV under the provisions of Article VI of Denazification Ordinance No. 79.149 As further insurance against expellees becoming potential troublemakers, germane to satisfying CCG’s requirement for applicants to provide proof of ‘good reputation’,150 certificates of good

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Figure 25. Newspaper produced by East Prussian Heimatvertriebenen from the frontier Kreis of Stallupönen. Stallupöner Tageblatt, Malente, Schleswig-Holstein, 24/25 May 1948. Front cover. Its four pages contained a programme of events including a church service, concert and a poem, Heimat. Malente is c.35 kms north of Lübeck. Courtesy of Landesarchiv Schlewig-Holstein, Abt. 761 Nr. 8.

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conduct (Polizeiliches Führungszeugnis) had to be obtained by all those, such as Helmut Zander, who wished to become members of refugee organisations. Zander, originally from Kreis Schlochau in Pomerania, applied to become Kreis chairman of the Eckernförde Interessengemeinschaft der Ostvertriebenen (later the BdV).151 He had been categorised in the lowest risk denazification Group V, and received his Enlastungszeugnis on 8 March 1949, yet his sustained and subsequently successful efforts in galvanising strong support among refugees who voted for him en bloc – with 10,000 out of 44,000 votes – to represent them at the 1949 elections were never taken seriously by the British. Although they accepted that ‘his success has certainly provided a clear idea of the feelings of the refugees’, it was emphasised to him and the BdV that: Military Government is not likely to recognize the refugees as a separate party, because they have nothing new to offer; their activities can be sponsored by members of existing parties and finally there is no intention of creating a wedge between the refugees and the local inhabitants.152 The KRO also revealed that Zander’s main pitch for recognition and support was to say that ‘by their obstinacy Military Government has forced the refugee candidate to stand as an Independent’. Zander’s convincing counterargument against aligning the BdV with an existing party candidate, and based on promises already broken by the main parties, was that none could or would obviate the need for representation over particular refugee problems. Simply put, CCG’s marginalising approach towards this and the other expellee organisations flew in the face of their democratising success in ensuring the first fair and free party elections in early 1947. If it was considered reasonable to continue to allow the Deutsche Partei’s propagandistic ‘open championship of the Nazi course’, and a possible amalgamation with the DKP,153 it seemed inconsistent policy not to recognise a refugee party. Allowing organisations the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech at members’ meetings, albeit closely monitored, was only of limited help to Military Government’s overall popularity. Indeed, it was acknowledged six months earlier that due to a combination of high unemployment, dismantling of the TVAs and the threat of more refugees from Sylt, ‘there is probably more ill-feeling and general contempt of Military Government in Stadt Eckernförde from the local population than in other Kreise in the Land’.154

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Such efforts in ‘taming the expellee threat’ only succeeded in radicalising many refugees and expellees, who felt disenfranchised and unable to improve their social and economic standing through an effort of collective will. This had further unintended repercussions for the British in exacerbating poor relations between refugees and the native population. For when refugees had earlier complained of ‘not being properly represented on local Refugee Committees’,155 it was clear that CCG’s rigid policy of allowing only apolitical expellee organisations assisted German political parties to resist any electoral nominations of refugees – instead, they hoped themselves to represent expellees’ interests and so widen their own electoral appeal. Refugee candidates would moreover have damaged the appeal of the German parties for the native population, whose vote was at least as important as the expellee vote, although their respective needs in many ways sharply differed. Many of the former, if not radically anti-refugee, had only helped refugees out of self-interest, for example, in securing additional farm labour, or to ring-fence their own living standards, as was shown earlier. The instinct for self-interest within the indigenous population was exploited by the SSW in Kreis Husum, who were able to launch a policy of ‘Get rid of the refugee’, thereby setting all refugees there against them. The slogan nonetheless ‘undoubtedly appeals to many Husumers’ who it was feared would consequently vote for the SSW.156 Little surprise then that nine months later in the same Kreis, the KRO recorded that the BdV had ‘become very “political” . . . I had noticed politics were being discussed rather freely.’ Its leader’s attention was drawn pointedly to the terms under which they had been allowed to form, in the hope that his ‘rather strong hint might have the desired effect’.157 Banning such a large and influential organisation merely for expressing a political view was not an option as it would have achieved little other than further alienating those whom the CCG claimed to want to help. The BdV,158 as the largest of the umbrella expellee organisations, was a natural home for those who felt threatened either by the radical policies of parties such as the SSW or the DKP or by the considerable weight of Einheimische refugee-sceptics, or for those who felt marginalised by Britain’s repressive policy towards refugee organisations and viewed the BdV as a safe haven. The steady recruitment of more politicised expellees within such a potent and influential pressure group as the BdV, who under the banner ‘Back to Germany’ invoked the pledges of the Atlantic Charter by demanding ‘the right to live in their native countries

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in the East in accordance with free and democratic principles’,159 created a further problem. Quite apart from showing once again expellees’ quickwittedness in challenging the inclusive claims of Western liberal rhetoric, their clamour to be treated fairly and democratically did not chime with the Western Allies’ propaganda for a united Western Germany to act as a bulwark against Communist ideology. It also showed that Britain was worried about the threat of expellees being tempted, in their tens of thousands, by perceptions of better standards of living in their provinces of origin, albeit now under Soviet control. This issue was highlighted in the Commons following questions about permission recently given for an association to include German exiles representing German interests in the Balkans. The FO tried to stonewall by stating that licensing and control was now a German responsibility, but this only prompted further probing at Westminster: Does my honourable friend not realise that to allow associations to be established, which have as one of their objectives [the] revision of the existing arrangements for the frontiers of Germany, is highly unsatisfactory, and that they must be made to concentrate on the job of looking after refugee problems if the position is to be helped? Mayhew, the Under-Secretary, disingenuously replied that if there was ‘any evidence of revisionist propaganda’, he would look into it. As we saw, there is plentiful evidence that border revision was a core precept of these organisations,160 a key reason why their political activities were so closely scrutinised. Nonetheless, these concerns were not transmitted by the FO to CCG who, certainly at regional level, would have been familiar with these demands from the KROs’ attendance at and monitoring of refugee association meetings and rallies. The BdV and other smaller organisations also functioned as an effective forum to enable more coordinated and concerted pressure to be applied to CCG for equality of welfare treatment after the SH Landtag passed the Law on the Mitigation of Refugees’ Distress on 27 November 1947. This contained provisions still directly within British competence, such as ‘Accommodation’ [Law No. 18] (Paragraph 3), or indirectly, as per the clause on ‘Rights in professional life’ (Paragraph 5),161 where unwavering British intervention in defusing discrimination by Einheimische towards refugees would have supported the German authorities’ often vain efforts to carry out Britain’s integration policy – as we saw with the tensions concerning the

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giving up of accommodation to refugees. The British were never entirely enamoured by aspects of this law and voiced their disquiet: ‘it is obvious that certain provisions of the Decrees strengthen the position and the rights of the refugees. These objections have been pointed out by this office to the Land Ministry concerned.’162 This startling response again shows the reluctance to empower refugees. But in voicing concerns over German measures that, for example, gave refugees the same rights of employment, granting of trade licences or admission to the professions, the same rights of residence and accommodation as the indigenous population (Paragraph 2), or equal rights to claim social insurance against public insurance institutions (Paragraph 8), CCG also had to confront the reality that refugees were the innocent victims of a bad bargain. It also had to accept that improving their status might increase demands for their ‘human rights’ as individuals and rights of return to be legitimately recognised. Expellee organisations also campaigned for their right to receive emergency relief payments under the Immediate Aid Law (Soforthilfgesetz), lobby for the introduction of an Equalisation of Burdens Law for refugees (Lastenausgleich),163 or the closure of the hated refugee camps.164 Had the British earlier pursued a more liberal policy towards sanctioning refugee associations, this would have helped to defuse such latent tensions and to deflect growing criticism of their administrative competence. For example, the Economic Council passed the Soforthilfgesetz on 1 December 1948, but eight months later, war victims ‘and particularly the expellees have been waiting in vain for the provision being put into existence by Military Government’.165 CCG’s policy line was either a calculated gamble in the knowledge they retained necessary powers to proscribe the refugee organisations’ activities, or was a complete miscalculation insofar as the policy alienated many more Germans than it won over. Although expellees felt badly misled by German politicians’ promises, it was not the Germans who originally established the ground rules either in the populations transfer policy or in the response to expellees’ requests for political autonomy. Despite CCG HQ receiving constant applications for the formation of refugee blocks with full political rights for participating in the forthcoming elections, British policy maintained that refugees ‘should either express their views on the local authorities as independent members or through one of the recognised political parties’.166 It was reported that ‘the growth of refugee organisations continued to cause alarm at Regional HQ’, whilst in Stormarn ‘there was a growing uneasiness about the

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increasing activity of refugee organisations which were causing a tense situation’.167 Expellees encouraged to stand as independents, although unlikely to secure support in sufficient numbers to challenge the larger political parties – the SPD, CDU, KPD, DKP or the DP168 – were likely to bring together the more vocal expellee groups into greater refugee proactivism on behalf of their particular Koalition, of whom there continued to be many applying for licences to the Ministry of Resettlement and Reconstruction. Several fledgling Kreisvereine were founded in Kiel between 7 November 1948 and 3 January 1949, for example, including the Hilfsgemeinschaft der Pommern, Die Ost-Preußen-Hilfsgemeinschaft, Die Hilfsgemeinschaft der Schlesier and Die Hilfsgemeinschaft der Danziger und Westpreußen, Der Bund der Neumärker. Memberships ranged from 69 (Neumärker) to 1,300 (East Prussians). All received official status on 28 February 1949.169 This sudden surge of political activism was not lost on the Land government who became ‘apprehensive of the potential power of such organisations in politics’, and decided to tighten up the control of their activities,170 aware of the consequences of falling foul of CCG’s strict ‘welfare and culture’ criteria. By detailing the tortuous processes in vetting each individual within each organisation, from assessing the denazification classification, to further scrupulous investigations into each individual’s background and credentials to hold office, before final ratification and pro-forma authorisation (Zulassung), the German Social Ministry’s files of the applications from many small and larger organisations throughout SH show just how careful the authorities were to follow Britain’s licensing policy directive. The Germans were nonetheless keen to safeguard at least the right of refugee groups to exist in the future, and to enable them to preserve their sense of cultural autonomy, reflecting the particular regional identities of those who had fled or been expelled. In this they were successful in that they were able to establish their own political party once the ban was lifted in March 1950, as mentioned earlier. It took three years from when its putative chairman, ‘G.K’, was cleared of any Nazi connections on 14 February 1947 for the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft in Eutin to receive its authorisation from Landesminister Damm in January 1950.171 Of 43 organisations that had applied in 1948,172 nine were licensed the following June with the proviso that ‘they do not pursue any political objects but promote the cultural and social requirements of their members only’.173 By June 1949, only 12 associations were considered eligible for Zulassung from 60 refugee organisations whose applications were still extant.174

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In the light of this, and given Britain’s overriding powers of veto on all applications, CCG intentionally overstated the threat of these organisations, largely from its fear of expellees and refugees rejecting the Western model of democracy, as defined by Bevin in his discussions with Marshall in December 1947,175 and because of worries that Communism might provide answers to their economic impoverishment. Bevin was concerned that high unemployment in Western Germany ‘would provide a breeding ground for communism’.176 These fears proved unfounded: the KPD was overwhelmingly rejected by the expellees at the August 1949 Bundestag elections, recording just 3.1 per cent of the vote in SH.177 With no actual discussions taking place over possible border revisions with Poland, and with strict controls preventing the movement of refugees from where they were billeted, fears that relaxing the ban on expellee associations might threaten this status quo by turning growing demands for a right to return to their former homes into collective action to make this reality were also overplayed. After all, within the licensing regulations, it was clearly stated: ‘On principle, associations will only be licensed if their activities do not go beyond the Kreis level’,178 hardly an ideal basis for organising effective political networks regionally, let alone nationally. By analysing three key areas of British policy – population redistribution, dismantling and refugee associations – we have seen that Britain’s responses contradicted their wider aim and claims of promoting expellees’ and refugees’ integration within the British Zone. As German Länder authorities and those representing refugee interests saw CCG fail to engage proactively with the problems, thus dashing earlier German expectations that Britain would remain true to its mission statement of aiding reconstruction with positive measures, so hopes faded and turned to a more widespread sense of betrayal and anger amongst both migrant and indigenous populations in SH. This might have been mitigated had Britain been more proactive in its efforts to persuade the Americans and the French to see the refugee and expellee question less from their own positions of self-interest, more as a problem requiring urgent multilateral solutions.

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CHAPTER 6 OCCUPATION POLICY AND THE CIVILISING MISSION: A COMPROMISING LEGACY

The central premise of this book has been to question Britain’s record in reconciling its vision of exporting liberal democracy with its sanctioning of a policy of forced migration for German refugees and expellees after May 1945. It has shown that the practical consequences of approving the ‘Transfer of the German Populations’ in wartime had catastrophic and long-term consequences for millions of Germans, creating serious rifts between indigenous and migrant populations forced to compete for basic material resources, employment opportunities and – additionally in the case of the expellees – rights of self-representation. Was British foreign policy justified in claiming throughout the 1945–9 period that its occupation was a standard-bearer for Western civilised values? As we have seen, these two positions proved irreconcilable as particular policies were put into place during wartime and after hostilities ceased, and this significantly undermined Britain’s ability to make good on its pledges. One such undertaking implicated in Britain’s civilising mission was its duty of care towards German civilians, but this was contradicted by other deeply felt British arguments that Germany was the author of its own misfortunes, and thus bore responsibility for the continuing restrictions and hardships it would have to endure as a defeated nation. This principle had important implications for how far its policies towards the new Federal Republic government could be liberalised before 1955 when the Control Commission finally left Germany. Many questions

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remained unresolved in 1949 regarding the status of German sovereignty, and their consequential effects are addressed in the final chapter. Crucially, as we shall see, the symbolic transfer of powers to Germany in September 1949 did little to shift certain idées fixes about Germany amongst both Labour and Conservative hardliners. This more punitive instinct would prevent a substantive revision of its policy in key areas, such as the requisition of Heligoland for use as a bombing range and the expulsion of the island’s inhabitants, controversies over war crimes sentencing reviews, and industrial dismantling. Moreover, lingering concerns over Germany’s recidivist potential, however ill-founded, meant that for practical purposes the Federal Republic was not yet sufficiently trusted as a new European partner, causing further tensions in policy over its rearmament. Evidence of this was the three-year period taken to officially end Germany’s status as an enemy state. Consequently, the British occupation adopted a new Janus-like persona, alternating between liberalising policies in a piecemeal fashion and yet maintaining control with a caution redolent of the old military-style regime – a form of militant liberalism for the new political era essentially still driven by the military rule book of the pre-1949 period of British occupation (see Fig. 26). The Bonn Treaty in May 1952 and the growing political imperatives for Eden’s government to enlist Adenauer as a key defensive ally against Soviet expansionism gave the lie to an outdated rationale for prolonging Germany’s place in the political wilderness. Even so, Britain’s policy grip was only gradually loosened, and then not unilaterally. From the vantage point of 1949, ABCA’s advice to troops in 1944 offered a prescient metaphor for the inherent moral contradictions encapsulated in Britain’s policy on German expellees and refugees. This analogy was to have unforeseen and unfortunate consequences across key policy areas during the second phase of its occupation: In past occupations British troops have established a fine tradition and won great respect by their fair and correct behaviour. At no other period of our lives are our personal actions likely to have such a vital influence on other people and on the future of the world as they will have during the term of the next occupation.1 Before examining the wider moral legitimacy of British rule after 1949, it is important to assess its cumulative legacy of policies that contributed directly to the scale of the refugee and expellee crisis. The first

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Figure 26. Poster for Germany Under Control, London 1946. Poster design: Leslie Reece. The exhibition was sponsored by the Ministry of Information, an important conduit to promote the work of the Control Commission in Germany. Courtesy of TNA UK, INF 13/224.

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was Britain’s decision in 1942 to sanction such an unprecedentedly large transfer of populations, which gave rise to widespread growing concerns within the FO about their practicability before hostilities ceased. There was therefore no realistic prospect of realising these in the ‘orderly and humane manner’ later agreed at Potsdam, by which time large uncontrolled expulsions had already occurred. Second, the 1943 bombings of civilians in neighbouring Hamburg substantively increased the numbers of evacuees and refugees in SH, adding considerably to that already overburdened region’s difficulties in housing and feeding both its indigenous and the new refugee populations. The British Strategic Air Offensive, which for all practical purposes did not distinguish between German civilians and combatants, directly contributed to the later crisis in SH. To that extent, Britain’s bombing ‘successes’ over Hamburg and other major cities and towns made its reconstruction plans harder from 1945. This link between cause and effect is rarely made, usually for political reasons, since the decision to bomb Hamburg often is explained away as a necessary exigency of war. Linking the bombing of civilians with political decisions that led to the refugees’ and expellees’ flight and expulsion therefore addresses awkward questions about the retributive element within British policies, and casts Britain’s civilising mission in a different light. Third, we have seen that the concept of ‘victors’ justice’ was established as a central and defining element of Britain’s occupation policy, as prospects of defeating Germany militarily became more certain. This hardened into a form of exacting continuing retribution, one of Attlee’s stated war purposes, and – as was highlighted by the discussions leading up to the decision, supported by Bevin – to continue with the prosecution of the elderly German generals years after IMT had finished its work in bringing former war leaders to justice. This was despite acknowledgement and concern within the Cabinet, articulated by the Lord Chancellor, that British public opinion was tired of war trials, and would be ‘perturbed’ to see ‘3 old and sick men arraigned months after surrender’.2 In Germany, General Robertson felt undermined by an apparent disregard of his views in the Cabinet regarding the potentially counterproductive effects of proceeding with the trials.3 Fourth, although Britain decided to exercise a form of indirect control over Germany, CCG retained the right to exercise more direct forms of control and frequently chose to interfere in policy matters already delegated to German executive responsibility. This was in spite of their realistic assessment that they ‘had neither the manpower nor the resources’ to

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maintain such a system in their zone. Although CCG created a system of inspections to ensure the Germans were implementing British-approved policy in order that in certain administrative areas Germans could appear to have ‘almost complete executive power, and our control of policy is reduced to a minimum’,4 the reality was very different, with control very much a guiding principle of British occupation politics. British policy on refugees and expellees was a prime example of this. Within the overall government policy towards Germany, their integration was marginalised by more overarching policy concerns in helping to reshape the new European order. Control was once again at the forefront of Cabinet discussions over the impending Occupation Statute, and this critical argument is developed in the final chapter. The Scottish Secretary, speaking for many, said: ‘One day we shall have to take the risk of allowing G[ermany] to re-emerge.’ The Lord Chancellor argued for a form of words that reserved Britain’s powers, effectively giving Britain the ‘Power of disallowance’, but without advertising this fact to the Germans. This would avoid having to ‘prescribe all the things they can’t do’. Bevin was concerned that: ‘Unless we retain control, we may get [the] wrong kind of policy emerging in Germany. My view has bn [been] cautious in handing over control to Germany.’5 Diekmann’s assessment about the inherently cautious nature of British policy was apposite. Fifth, the UK’s own domestic difficulties and growing economic dependency on the United States meant that much of the humanitarian work in providing material aid for refugees was left to the charitable offices of the English and German churches in concert with the voluntary organisations. This weakened CCG’s claim that it was doing all it could do to help ameliorate the refugee problem, when its role was chiefly one of coordinating assistance from non-government sources. The Military Governor did not write to Bevin until February 1949 to spell out the true magnitude of the crisis, concluding that CCG’s ability ‘to shape the course of events is strictly limited and diminishing’.6 This remark was redolent of a refugee policy hamstrung by earlier inflexible policy exigencies that had effectively disenfranchised millions of German forced migrants. Sixth, there was also a perception among many German refugees and expellees that the British, as the case-study illustrated, were quick to place their own immediate needs before those whose lives they were there to help rebuild, as when BMG requisitioned the most habitable dwellings. German refugee authorities were expected to formulate their

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own solutions in surmounting the critical challenges posed by the mass population movements to create the opportunities for future social cohesion. They received immediate aid, especially food, clothing or medical supplies, from voluntary and charitable institutions outside Germany such as the International Red Cross, the Hilfswerk der Evangelischen Kirche der Schweiz7 and the Mennonites, or church organisations representing Quakers (such as the Friends Relief Service (FRS)), Methodists, Lutherans and Catholics. Essential supplies arrived from Britain through SEN, the Salvation Army and Anglican dioceses, the latter in response to newspaper appeals launched by the Regional Commissioner in SH. Moreover, a combination of planned policies, in particular the transfer of populations and the decision to delegate responsibility for refugees to Germans without putting into place the means to help improve their conditions – in contrast to what was done by the Western Allies to provide for DPs whose feeding requirements were taken on by the IRO – led progressively to a series of unplanned-for consequences. These started with the Wildvertreibungen and the so-called controlled transports of refugees that followed in early 1946, but were hard to enforce. This situation created a growing problem of overcrowded refugee camps with an acute and general shortage of available housing for a rapidly ballooning German population. Added to these problems were poor health and sanitation in the British Zone. Insufficient forward planning resulted in many more ‘unauthorised’ migrants coming into the British Zone, partly as a result of increasing difficulties in reaching binding agreements with the Soviets over the intractable problems of reparations. This hindered Britain’s ability to react quickly to German refugee officials’ pleas to move expellees into less crowded areas within and outside its zone, where there might have been better prospects of finding shelter, food and work. For example, the French Zone had received only a small number of refugees but nonetheless responded negatively to the first belated British appeals for help over its own severe population problems, especially in SH. French unwillingness to cooperate stemmed largely from not wishing to add to unemployment in its zone and its resistance to plans for the Ruhr industries to have wider international control. With Britain’s own precarious financial position, Britain’s Military Governor was also in a weak bargaining position in his efforts to persuade the USA authorities to accept their greater share of refugees. In addition, Britain considered Germany still constituted a real and present threat to European security, despite its unconditional surrender

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and the terms imposed. Germany’s hopes of being able to rebuild its industrial base to provide a crucial means of paying its own way were proscribed by Britain’s policy over dismantling and reparations, which destroyed significant amounts of plant that would have aided the process of economic regeneration and provided much-needed jobs for migrant and indigenous populations. Dismantling impacted adversely on the housing crisis, as structures suitable for conversion into accommodation for refugees were blown up, contributing directly to continuing lowering of German morale. Attlee’s Chancellor, Cripps, put his finger on the dilemma and differing views within the Cabinet on its Germany policy regarding explicit contradictions between dismantling, reparations and recovery: Cardinal point = our attitude to G[ermany]’s place in W[estern] Union. If we count her as an ally, max. industrial strength. But if we think it more important to keep industry at lowest point consistent with viability, we must take a diff[erent] line. Dalton and Bevin took a tougher line. Dalton emphasised that the ‘fundamental need is to keep G.[ermany] weak’ – and Chapter 7 returns to this theme. Bevin thought that the German level of industry far exceeded what was needed for a ‘normal economy’, citing the ‘12m[illion] forced labour taken to build these plants while Europe lay prostrate’.8 Britain’s policy of proscribing expellee organisations can be seen not only as a reaction to British fears that refugees’ material deprivation might promote their coalescing into larger organisations that in turn might turn to Communism, but within their overall negative assessment of Germany’s potential threat to peace in Europe. This threat was neither substantiated nor did it materialise, as evidenced by the post-1951 spectacular policy U-turn that paved the way to rearming Germany. Britain’s cautious stance continued well after the ban on these organisations was relaxed by the USA occupation authorities, who were regarded overall – at least by one informed British onlooker – as the most humane of the four powers,9 and the one power, as mentioned in Chapter 1, who prioritised ‘as little political involvement in German affairs as possible’.10 It has been contended that British policy, driven – especially on redistribution, dismantling and refugee organisations – by a negative mixture of fear and caution, was selfdefeating in helping refugee integration into the BZ. These factors left Britain a hostage to fortune, causing greater instability in its zone, and fomenting greater German resentment towards the

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occupying administrations. Various problems that could not be quantified or planned for in advance – such as America’s decision to end Lend-Lease, which severely impacted on Britain’s ability to feed its own inhabitants and the German population, and the severe foodstuffs shortages after disastrous German harvests, which contributed to a burgeoning black market – therefore exacerbated a refugee problem into a full-blown crisis, as Britain’s financial dependency on America increased and grain shipments from the Soviet Zone failed to materialise. These conditions had other undesired and unplanned-for consequences, namely the marked deterioration into toxicity of relations between the indigenous population and expellees. Some have argued that Bevin, the FO and Chiefs of Staff were the predominant influences in foreign policy decisions, rather than Attlee and the Cabinet.11 This influence is not evident from their engagement with a refugee problem that was never properly integrated within German policy. The FO struggled with other priorities.12 Although the government’s successive Ministers for Germany, Hynd13 and Pakenham, engaged with and empathised with Germans having to bear the human costs of the crisis, particularly Pakenham, their roles carried little political weight, and they were perceived ultimately by Germans as both marginalised by His Majesty’s Government, and under pressure to toe the party line. But on a central issue of interest to all Germans, the need to increase food supplies, Pakenham threatened to resign on a point of principle as he felt unsupported by Bevin.14 Bevin’s input in particular to German refugee policy was conspicuous by its absence, as revealed through four years of cabinet secretaries’ minutes from 1945. There is just one note to Attlee recording his meeting with Dalton and Hynd in September 1946 to discuss a paper on refugees and DPs in Germany originally prepared for the ORC. Its unanimous conclusions deemed it unnecessary to submit a further paper.15 It was only in May 1949 that Bevin, who had ‘for some time been considering’ Robertson’s and others’ suggestions to go to Germany, decided to visit Berlin to inspect progress on the air-lift.16 Frank Roberts claimed that Bevin always paid ‘the most careful attention’ to General Robertson’s advice,17 but when the Military Governor only raised the issue of policy after the WCC’s 22-point plan regarding solution of the refugee plan, there was no response; refugees were never considered a policy priority, and the absence of dialogue in the preceding period between Robertson and Bevin supports this. The FO and Bevin’s hands-off approach to the crisis created a policy vacuum between London and CCG. However, BMG and CCG have received

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greater criticism for failures of government policy in effecting the wartime coalition’s policy on transfers of ethnic German refugees, without having put in place a realistic plan that may have mitigated the worst of its consequences. Foreign policy on refugees was a conscious renunciation of Potsdam’s dictum that the government, and thus by extension the FO, shared a humanitarian duty of care towards German expellees. It reflected the deteriorating conditions that overall responsibility for German policy was returned to Bevin’s and Attlee’s direct control in early 1947. This addressed mounting challenges of what to do about Germany’s future while building a strong Western Union to defend against Communist influence, since the Soviets were increasingly regarded by Bevin as a far more dominant threat than Germany. Despite this, expellees and refugees continued to pay a heavy price, a consequence of ill-conceived British policy during 1945 and 1946 and its ‘delegation’ from 1947 that failed to respond to Germany’s difficulties in coping with its increasing problems. Moreover, Germany’s economic situation only improved marginally following Britain’s zone fusion with the USA and the introduction of Marshall Aid. Currency reform hit refugees and expellees especially hard. Perhaps this is why Bevin, who according to Churchill’s and Attlee’s Private Secretary ‘for all his virtues liked to take the credit for most things’,18 kept his own counsel on the refugee issue, both in Cabinet and in Parliament. Whilst the early years of the catastrophe helped to focus ensuing wider international discussions on minority rights, leading to the collapsing of this issue into human rights, the desire to move towards a new international code of human rights was essentially a watered-down compromise constructed to ensure American and Soviet participation.19 To this extent one must wonder: did the refugee laws after 1948 give new teeth to the 1945 UN Charter’s purpose of realising ‘international co-operation in the solution of . . . other humanitarian problems’?20 Or was their legacy one of a failure of collective international will to uphold multilateral and globally recognised standards of ‘civilised’ behaviour? Minority rights were not considered paramount in drafting the UDHR nor were rights of asylum. The absence of clear statements on both had obvious negative implications for refugees’ and expellees’ future prospects of recourse to an internationally recognised level of protection under international law. In the controversy over its final drafting, minority protection remained a contentious issue to the last. Britain thought ‘it was wholly inappropriate to refer to such a right in the declaration’.21

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A motion was adopted effectively excluding mention of minority rights in the 10 December 1948 final Declaration, but allowed for its further consideration retrospectively. Britain, USA and France were among 24 countries supporting this motion by refusing to acknowledge the existence of any such minority problem. If they believed this to be so, it seems disingenuous to have been so determined to oppose its inclusion. The French failed to include an amendment to place the onus of responsibility on the UN to secure rights of asylum. Britain, earlier at pains to emphasise that the UDHR placed it under no legal obligations, strenuously opposed the principle in Article 27 that political refugees seeking asylum had a right to admission. It pressed successfully for an amended version to read: ‘Every person has the right to seek, and to enjoy, in other countries, asylum from persecution.’22 As is manifest well over 60 years later, the conundrum of reconciling rights to asylum with state sovereignty and maintaining immigration controls persists as a live and often contentious global issue. The nature of these negotiations on minority rights made it explicit that those countries drafting the final Declaration were as much concerned with preserving their own sovereignty and jurisdiction over refugees and asylum, as they were intent on forging a new universal and radical blueprint for human rights. Preservation of national self-interest signalled a further missed opportunity. For although Germany had long been symbolically excluded from the new UN family as a pariah nation, as it was after 1919 with the League of Nations, the UNO’s credibility for impartiality might have been greater had they signalled their intent to give the UDHR more weight during this process, by brokering some form of symbolic political representation for German refugees and expellees and as a gesture of reconciliation towards a society now at the mercy of its former enemies, especially as the refugee problems in Germany were still very much in evidence as 1949 approached.23 The suppression and banning of expellee associations by the Western Allies, who were anxious to avoid unrest and dissidence amongst refugees, did little to endear Britain’s occupying civilian administration to these ‘minorities’. A longer-term challenge was to facilitate forced migrants’ social and economic integration with new measures promoting their assimilation into the nascent FRG. Measures were introduced by the West German authorities, first the Soforthilfgesetz, effected in 1949. This provided financial loans for refugees, paving the way for the Lastenausgleich, passed in 1953 by the West German parliament. This provision offered ‘partial compensation for

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material losses suffered by expellees and others particularly damaged by the war’ as well as special government housing programmes and a targeted policy of redistribution of refugees from the most overcrowded refugee areas into other parts of West Germany. Furthermore, the FRG reversed the earlier suppressive phase on independent expellee associations by actively encouraging them. The best known of these organisations (the Bund der Heimatvertriebenen) underwent a series of name changes before emerging in 1958 as the Society of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenenen or BdV). German politicians quickly realised the importance of including expellee representatives in the administration responsible for the Lastenausgleich, leading to the formation of a new Federal Ministry for Expellee Affairs. Public funding provided to the expellee organisations, and further progress on aiding integration, was achieved by the 1953 Federal Expellee Law making it incumbent upon the FRG to promote expellees’ cultural heritage.24 To many non-German eyes, this succession of progressive measures in German policy-making on refugee matters has played, one suspects, a subsidiary or even minor part in the more newsworthy success story of Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ (Wirtschaftswunder) that contributed so markedly to the new respect accorded it internationally by dint of and in recognition of its meteoric rise in fortunes during the 1950s and its rapprochement with the West. But without implementation of a concerted German policy to create structures and adopt measures that helped rehabilitate and enfranchise many refugees and expellees, it is clear that the benefits of the Wirtschaftswunder and opportunities for renewed prosperity would not have been so widespread and impressive; after all, by 1950 there were some 8 million German expellees in the Federal Republic, 16.1 per cent of the population. The major successes in integrating and assimilating German refugees from the 1950s onwards were attributable to German resolve and endeavour. Much of the public and political discourse in Britain has largely continued to be both lazily misinformed and confused in respect of refugee and expellee issues, as witnessed by the lingering pervasive culture that finds it easier to emphasise German war guilt and then conflate this with further enduring national stereotypes.25 For the legacy of the Holocaust refugee survivors in Britain has long been the dominant narrative in discussions about ‘German refugees’, preferring to overlook the fate of ethnic German refugees and expellees remaining in Germany, many of whom were also victims of Nazism. Such attitudes are in turn bound up with the more recent socio-cultural and economic problems

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Britain has faced with rapidly increasing European and global competition in the labour market and the shrinking of its manufacturing base. This new landscape has become a fertile seedbed for a vocal lobby that sees the panacea for achieving renewed prosperity for Britain in striving for greater political, economic and cultural independence from Europe. This does little to advance current debates surrounding immigration, which often engender fear and misinformation, nor to help the cause of legitimate refugees, asylum seekers26 and economic migrants striving for equal rights of citizenship, assimilation and representation within the host nation. Now, as was the case in the aftermath of 1945, a sense pervades that refugees are excluded from the political processes of societal regeneration – Kushner’s ‘the forgotten of history, the abused of politics’. Britain’s mission to present its liberal democratic values to the world as congruent with new global humanitarian principles still appears to miss the moment to absorb the wider lessons of the German refugee crisis. Perhaps such amnesia is redolent of an impulse to forget less comfortable memories of British rule at that time. This may be a function, first, of how earlier British hopes gave way to resignation, and second, of how hopes were displaced onto the Germans, who subsequently received credit for successfully integrating refugees and expellees. The scale of the post-1945 crisis, attributable to political decisions to treat refugees and expellees as a category apart from indigenous Germans and Displaced Persons, thus depriving them of the same standards of humanitarian care, has fuelled the ‘them and us’ culture, a feature of current policy debates, not only in Britain but in France and the USA. In 2003 Johannes Rau, then President of Germany, who three years earlier had spoken out on overcoming current uncertainties and fears over immigration in Germany,27 called for new European dialogue on the sufferings of the expellees half a century earlier; all who engaged with it ‘need[ed] to acknowledge the unvarnished truth about themselves’. Rau suggested other nations must take their share of responsibility for past events. Germany had made great strides in coming to terms with its own considerable role in the refugee catastrophe. However, the international community and Europe in particular would never understand ‘the disaster that engulfed the whole of Europe’ without viewing these events in their wider context: Torrents of charges and counter-charges . . . have no place on the agenda because that is behind us now, and anyone seeking to revive that sort of approach will drag us back into the vicious

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circle . . . Without forgiveness there is no future. Forgiveness does not obliterate guilt.28 Diekmann too, reflecting on the refugee problem over 50 years earlier, had been well placed to speak with authority on Allied responsibility for the depth of the crisis.29 Perhaps it is because the refugee and expellee narrative was so insufficiently integrated into this wider picture from a British perspective that the many political, military and administrative participants who shaped occupation policy prefer to recall its claims to ‘soft forms of power’.30 For Britain still chooses to accentuate the occupation’s positive achievements in which it played a more positive and successful role – such as with Germany’s democratisation – than recall and defend a darker legacy for which the Big Three share collective responsibility, the pursuit of a policy of mutual accommodation towards Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary that encouraged the homogenisation of ethnicity within those countries. The ‘population transfers’ created the more radicalised conditions that led to the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of Reichsdeutsche and Volksdeutsche refugees and expellees, who died during flight, deportations and their aftermath. It is a reflection of the ever more intractable and growing global problems caused by forced migration that the post-war comparison with Germany reminds us usefully that occupying another country to introduce liberal democratic values as part of a policy of reconstruction is not always well received by a host population, or ultimately seen as successful, if unaccompanied by adequate measures to safeguard those principles on behalf of all those who live under a military occupation and are subjected to its rule. It is in this context that the British occupation provides an important historical precedent for and sheds new light on debates over recent British governments’ difficulties over immigration policy in general and the marginalisation of refugees and asylum seekers in particular.31 Moreover, the recent moral controversies regarding wartime bombing raids on Germany, abuses of human rights in occupied Iraq following its 2003 invasion, and the moral justification for eight years of military occupation, regarded by many as the catalyst for escalating civilian discontent, violence and ethnic division that resulted in the flight of over 2.2 million Iraqi refugees,32 strengthen the argument for historicising such links. While the material position for refugees and expellees ameliorated considerably after 1950, due in large part to the West German social welfare initiatives mentioned above, other equally controversial policy issues,

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critically, remained unresolved and now assumed equal prominence in the minds of many West German civilians across the political spectrum and within the German ecumenical establishment. The nature of the formal relationship between the new West Germany and Britain may have been in a state of transition in the autumn of 1949, but the reality was that a new state under Adenauer’s new CDU government was trying to establish itself while still under the strictures of occupation. Britain’s occupation policy 1945–9 was underpinned by a consensual conviction in reinforcing its mandate in moral terms as a central component of its civilising mission. The final chapter links this critical characteristic to the remaining years of its occupation in West Germany. It addresses how Britain adapted to its new role after the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 by evaluating its performance with regard to the continuities in policy from which it then found it hard to liberate itself, and by extension, West Germany.

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CHAPTER 6 OCCUPATION POLICY AND THE CIVILISING MISSION: A COMPROMISING LEGACY

The central premise of this book has been to question Britain’s record in reconciling its vision of exporting liberal democracy with its sanctioning of a policy of forced migration for German refugees and expellees after May 1945. It has shown that the practical consequences of approving the ‘Transfer of the German Populations’ in wartime had catastrophic and long-term consequences for millions of Germans, creating serious rifts between indigenous and migrant populations forced to compete for basic material resources, employment opportunities and – additionally in the case of the expellees – rights of self-representation. Was British foreign policy justified in claiming throughout the 1945–9 period that its occupation was a standard-bearer for Western civilised values? As we have seen, these two positions proved irreconcilable as particular policies were put into place during wartime and after hostilities ceased, and this significantly undermined Britain’s ability to make good on its pledges. One such undertaking implicated in Britain’s civilising mission was its duty of care towards German civilians, but this was contradicted by other deeply felt British arguments that Germany was the author of its own misfortunes, and thus bore responsibility for the continuing restrictions and hardships it would have to endure as a defeated nation. This principle had important implications for how far its policies towards the new Federal Republic government could be liberalised before 1955 when the Control Commission finally left Germany. Many questions

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remained unresolved in 1949 regarding the status of German sovereignty, and their consequential effects are addressed in the final chapter. Crucially, as we shall see, the symbolic transfer of powers to Germany in September 1949 did little to shift certain idées fixes about Germany amongst both Labour and Conservative hardliners. This more punitive instinct would prevent a substantive revision of its policy in key areas, such as the requisition of Heligoland for use as a bombing range and the expulsion of the island’s inhabitants, controversies over war crimes sentencing reviews, and industrial dismantling. Moreover, lingering concerns over Germany’s recidivist potential, however ill-founded, meant that for practical purposes the Federal Republic was not yet sufficiently trusted as a new European partner, causing further tensions in policy over its rearmament. Evidence of this was the three-year period taken to officially end Germany’s status as an enemy state. Consequently, the British occupation adopted a new Janus-like persona, alternating between liberalising policies in a piecemeal fashion and yet maintaining control with a caution redolent of the old military-style regime – a form of militant liberalism for the new political era essentially still driven by the military rule book of the pre-1949 period of British occupation (see Fig. 26). The Bonn Treaty in May 1952 and the growing political imperatives for Eden’s government to enlist Adenauer as a key defensive ally against Soviet expansionism gave the lie to an outdated rationale for prolonging Germany’s place in the political wilderness. Even so, Britain’s policy grip was only gradually loosened, and then not unilaterally. From the vantage point of 1949, ABCA’s advice to troops in 1944 offered a prescient metaphor for the inherent moral contradictions encapsulated in Britain’s policy on German expellees and refugees. This analogy was to have unforeseen and unfortunate consequences across key policy areas during the second phase of its occupation: In past occupations British troops have established a fine tradition and won great respect by their fair and correct behaviour. At no other period of our lives are our personal actions likely to have such a vital influence on other people and on the future of the world as they will have during the term of the next occupation.1 Before examining the wider moral legitimacy of British rule after 1949, it is important to assess its cumulative legacy of policies that contributed directly to the scale of the refugee and expellee crisis. The first

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Figure 26. Poster for Germany Under Control, London 1946. Poster design: Leslie Reece. The exhibition was sponsored by the Ministry of Information, an important conduit to promote the work of the Control Commission in Germany. Courtesy of TNA UK, INF 13/224.

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was Britain’s decision in 1942 to sanction such an unprecedentedly large transfer of populations, which gave rise to widespread growing concerns within the FO about their practicability before hostilities ceased. There was therefore no realistic prospect of realising these in the ‘orderly and humane manner’ later agreed at Potsdam, by which time large uncontrolled expulsions had already occurred. Second, the 1943 bombings of civilians in neighbouring Hamburg substantively increased the numbers of evacuees and refugees in SH, adding considerably to that already overburdened region’s difficulties in housing and feeding both its indigenous and the new refugee populations. The British Strategic Air Offensive, which for all practical purposes did not distinguish between German civilians and combatants, directly contributed to the later crisis in SH. To that extent, Britain’s bombing ‘successes’ over Hamburg and other major cities and towns made its reconstruction plans harder from 1945. This link between cause and effect is rarely made, usually for political reasons, since the decision to bomb Hamburg often is explained away as a necessary exigency of war. Linking the bombing of civilians with political decisions that led to the refugees’ and expellees’ flight and expulsion therefore addresses awkward questions about the retributive element within British policies, and casts Britain’s civilising mission in a different light. Third, we have seen that the concept of ‘victors’ justice’ was established as a central and defining element of Britain’s occupation policy, as prospects of defeating Germany militarily became more certain. This hardened into a form of exacting continuing retribution, one of Attlee’s stated war purposes, and – as was highlighted by the discussions leading up to the decision, supported by Bevin – to continue with the prosecution of the elderly German generals years after IMT had finished its work in bringing former war leaders to justice. This was despite acknowledgement and concern within the Cabinet, articulated by the Lord Chancellor, that British public opinion was tired of war trials, and would be ‘perturbed’ to see ‘3 old and sick men arraigned months after surrender’.2 In Germany, General Robertson felt undermined by an apparent disregard of his views in the Cabinet regarding the potentially counterproductive effects of proceeding with the trials.3 Fourth, although Britain decided to exercise a form of indirect control over Germany, CCG retained the right to exercise more direct forms of control and frequently chose to interfere in policy matters already delegated to German executive responsibility. This was in spite of their realistic assessment that they ‘had neither the manpower nor the resources’ to

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maintain such a system in their zone. Although CCG created a system of inspections to ensure the Germans were implementing British-approved policy in order that in certain administrative areas Germans could appear to have ‘almost complete executive power, and our control of policy is reduced to a minimum’,4 the reality was very different, with control very much a guiding principle of British occupation politics. British policy on refugees and expellees was a prime example of this. Within the overall government policy towards Germany, their integration was marginalised by more overarching policy concerns in helping to reshape the new European order. Control was once again at the forefront of Cabinet discussions over the impending Occupation Statute, and this critical argument is developed in the final chapter. The Scottish Secretary, speaking for many, said: ‘One day we shall have to take the risk of allowing G[ermany] to re-emerge.’ The Lord Chancellor argued for a form of words that reserved Britain’s powers, effectively giving Britain the ‘Power of disallowance’, but without advertising this fact to the Germans. This would avoid having to ‘prescribe all the things they can’t do’. Bevin was concerned that: ‘Unless we retain control, we may get [the] wrong kind of policy emerging in Germany. My view has bn [been] cautious in handing over control to Germany.’5 Diekmann’s assessment about the inherently cautious nature of British policy was apposite. Fifth, the UK’s own domestic difficulties and growing economic dependency on the United States meant that much of the humanitarian work in providing material aid for refugees was left to the charitable offices of the English and German churches in concert with the voluntary organisations. This weakened CCG’s claim that it was doing all it could do to help ameliorate the refugee problem, when its role was chiefly one of coordinating assistance from non-government sources. The Military Governor did not write to Bevin until February 1949 to spell out the true magnitude of the crisis, concluding that CCG’s ability ‘to shape the course of events is strictly limited and diminishing’.6 This remark was redolent of a refugee policy hamstrung by earlier inflexible policy exigencies that had effectively disenfranchised millions of German forced migrants. Sixth, there was also a perception among many German refugees and expellees that the British, as the case-study illustrated, were quick to place their own immediate needs before those whose lives they were there to help rebuild, as when BMG requisitioned the most habitable dwellings. German refugee authorities were expected to formulate their

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own solutions in surmounting the critical challenges posed by the mass population movements to create the opportunities for future social cohesion. They received immediate aid, especially food, clothing or medical supplies, from voluntary and charitable institutions outside Germany such as the International Red Cross, the Hilfswerk der Evangelischen Kirche der Schweiz7 and the Mennonites, or church organisations representing Quakers (such as the Friends Relief Service (FRS)), Methodists, Lutherans and Catholics. Essential supplies arrived from Britain through SEN, the Salvation Army and Anglican dioceses, the latter in response to newspaper appeals launched by the Regional Commissioner in SH. Moreover, a combination of planned policies, in particular the transfer of populations and the decision to delegate responsibility for refugees to Germans without putting into place the means to help improve their conditions – in contrast to what was done by the Western Allies to provide for DPs whose feeding requirements were taken on by the IRO – led progressively to a series of unplanned-for consequences. These started with the Wildvertreibungen and the so-called controlled transports of refugees that followed in early 1946, but were hard to enforce. This situation created a growing problem of overcrowded refugee camps with an acute and general shortage of available housing for a rapidly ballooning German population. Added to these problems were poor health and sanitation in the British Zone. Insufficient forward planning resulted in many more ‘unauthorised’ migrants coming into the British Zone, partly as a result of increasing difficulties in reaching binding agreements with the Soviets over the intractable problems of reparations. This hindered Britain’s ability to react quickly to German refugee officials’ pleas to move expellees into less crowded areas within and outside its zone, where there might have been better prospects of finding shelter, food and work. For example, the French Zone had received only a small number of refugees but nonetheless responded negatively to the first belated British appeals for help over its own severe population problems, especially in SH. French unwillingness to cooperate stemmed largely from not wishing to add to unemployment in its zone and its resistance to plans for the Ruhr industries to have wider international control. With Britain’s own precarious financial position, Britain’s Military Governor was also in a weak bargaining position in his efforts to persuade the USA authorities to accept their greater share of refugees. In addition, Britain considered Germany still constituted a real and present threat to European security, despite its unconditional surrender

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and the terms imposed. Germany’s hopes of being able to rebuild its industrial base to provide a crucial means of paying its own way were proscribed by Britain’s policy over dismantling and reparations, which destroyed significant amounts of plant that would have aided the process of economic regeneration and provided much-needed jobs for migrant and indigenous populations. Dismantling impacted adversely on the housing crisis, as structures suitable for conversion into accommodation for refugees were blown up, contributing directly to continuing lowering of German morale. Attlee’s Chancellor, Cripps, put his finger on the dilemma and differing views within the Cabinet on its Germany policy regarding explicit contradictions between dismantling, reparations and recovery: Cardinal point = our attitude to G[ermany]’s place in W[estern] Union. If we count her as an ally, max. industrial strength. But if we think it more important to keep industry at lowest point consistent with viability, we must take a diff[erent] line. Dalton and Bevin took a tougher line. Dalton emphasised that the ‘fundamental need is to keep G.[ermany] weak’ – and Chapter 7 returns to this theme. Bevin thought that the German level of industry far exceeded what was needed for a ‘normal economy’, citing the ‘12m[illion] forced labour taken to build these plants while Europe lay prostrate’.8 Britain’s policy of proscribing expellee organisations can be seen not only as a reaction to British fears that refugees’ material deprivation might promote their coalescing into larger organisations that in turn might turn to Communism, but within their overall negative assessment of Germany’s potential threat to peace in Europe. This threat was neither substantiated nor did it materialise, as evidenced by the post-1951 spectacular policy U-turn that paved the way to rearming Germany. Britain’s cautious stance continued well after the ban on these organisations was relaxed by the USA occupation authorities, who were regarded overall – at least by one informed British onlooker – as the most humane of the four powers,9 and the one power, as mentioned in Chapter 1, who prioritised ‘as little political involvement in German affairs as possible’.10 It has been contended that British policy, driven – especially on redistribution, dismantling and refugee organisations – by a negative mixture of fear and caution, was selfdefeating in helping refugee integration into the BZ. These factors left Britain a hostage to fortune, causing greater instability in its zone, and fomenting greater German resentment towards the

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occupying administrations. Various problems that could not be quantified or planned for in advance – such as America’s decision to end Lend-Lease, which severely impacted on Britain’s ability to feed its own inhabitants and the German population, and the severe foodstuffs shortages after disastrous German harvests, which contributed to a burgeoning black market – therefore exacerbated a refugee problem into a full-blown crisis, as Britain’s financial dependency on America increased and grain shipments from the Soviet Zone failed to materialise. These conditions had other undesired and unplanned-for consequences, namely the marked deterioration into toxicity of relations between the indigenous population and expellees. Some have argued that Bevin, the FO and Chiefs of Staff were the predominant influences in foreign policy decisions, rather than Attlee and the Cabinet.11 This influence is not evident from their engagement with a refugee problem that was never properly integrated within German policy. The FO struggled with other priorities.12 Although the government’s successive Ministers for Germany, Hynd13 and Pakenham, engaged with and empathised with Germans having to bear the human costs of the crisis, particularly Pakenham, their roles carried little political weight, and they were perceived ultimately by Germans as both marginalised by His Majesty’s Government, and under pressure to toe the party line. But on a central issue of interest to all Germans, the need to increase food supplies, Pakenham threatened to resign on a point of principle as he felt unsupported by Bevin.14 Bevin’s input in particular to German refugee policy was conspicuous by its absence, as revealed through four years of cabinet secretaries’ minutes from 1945. There is just one note to Attlee recording his meeting with Dalton and Hynd in September 1946 to discuss a paper on refugees and DPs in Germany originally prepared for the ORC. Its unanimous conclusions deemed it unnecessary to submit a further paper.15 It was only in May 1949 that Bevin, who had ‘for some time been considering’ Robertson’s and others’ suggestions to go to Germany, decided to visit Berlin to inspect progress on the air-lift.16 Frank Roberts claimed that Bevin always paid ‘the most careful attention’ to General Robertson’s advice,17 but when the Military Governor only raised the issue of policy after the WCC’s 22-point plan regarding solution of the refugee plan, there was no response; refugees were never considered a policy priority, and the absence of dialogue in the preceding period between Robertson and Bevin supports this. The FO and Bevin’s hands-off approach to the crisis created a policy vacuum between London and CCG. However, BMG and CCG have received

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greater criticism for failures of government policy in effecting the wartime coalition’s policy on transfers of ethnic German refugees, without having put in place a realistic plan that may have mitigated the worst of its consequences. Foreign policy on refugees was a conscious renunciation of Potsdam’s dictum that the government, and thus by extension the FO, shared a humanitarian duty of care towards German expellees. It reflected the deteriorating conditions that overall responsibility for German policy was returned to Bevin’s and Attlee’s direct control in early 1947. This addressed mounting challenges of what to do about Germany’s future while building a strong Western Union to defend against Communist influence, since the Soviets were increasingly regarded by Bevin as a far more dominant threat than Germany. Despite this, expellees and refugees continued to pay a heavy price, a consequence of ill-conceived British policy during 1945 and 1946 and its ‘delegation’ from 1947 that failed to respond to Germany’s difficulties in coping with its increasing problems. Moreover, Germany’s economic situation only improved marginally following Britain’s zone fusion with the USA and the introduction of Marshall Aid. Currency reform hit refugees and expellees especially hard. Perhaps this is why Bevin, who according to Churchill’s and Attlee’s Private Secretary ‘for all his virtues liked to take the credit for most things’,18 kept his own counsel on the refugee issue, both in Cabinet and in Parliament. Whilst the early years of the catastrophe helped to focus ensuing wider international discussions on minority rights, leading to the collapsing of this issue into human rights, the desire to move towards a new international code of human rights was essentially a watered-down compromise constructed to ensure American and Soviet participation.19 To this extent one must wonder: did the refugee laws after 1948 give new teeth to the 1945 UN Charter’s purpose of realising ‘international co-operation in the solution of . . . other humanitarian problems’?20 Or was their legacy one of a failure of collective international will to uphold multilateral and globally recognised standards of ‘civilised’ behaviour? Minority rights were not considered paramount in drafting the UDHR nor were rights of asylum. The absence of clear statements on both had obvious negative implications for refugees’ and expellees’ future prospects of recourse to an internationally recognised level of protection under international law. In the controversy over its final drafting, minority protection remained a contentious issue to the last. Britain thought ‘it was wholly inappropriate to refer to such a right in the declaration’.21

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A motion was adopted effectively excluding mention of minority rights in the 10 December 1948 final Declaration, but allowed for its further consideration retrospectively. Britain, USA and France were among 24 countries supporting this motion by refusing to acknowledge the existence of any such minority problem. If they believed this to be so, it seems disingenuous to have been so determined to oppose its inclusion. The French failed to include an amendment to place the onus of responsibility on the UN to secure rights of asylum. Britain, earlier at pains to emphasise that the UDHR placed it under no legal obligations, strenuously opposed the principle in Article 27 that political refugees seeking asylum had a right to admission. It pressed successfully for an amended version to read: ‘Every person has the right to seek, and to enjoy, in other countries, asylum from persecution.’22 As is manifest well over 60 years later, the conundrum of reconciling rights to asylum with state sovereignty and maintaining immigration controls persists as a live and often contentious global issue. The nature of these negotiations on minority rights made it explicit that those countries drafting the final Declaration were as much concerned with preserving their own sovereignty and jurisdiction over refugees and asylum, as they were intent on forging a new universal and radical blueprint for human rights. Preservation of national self-interest signalled a further missed opportunity. For although Germany had long been symbolically excluded from the new UN family as a pariah nation, as it was after 1919 with the League of Nations, the UNO’s credibility for impartiality might have been greater had they signalled their intent to give the UDHR more weight during this process, by brokering some form of symbolic political representation for German refugees and expellees and as a gesture of reconciliation towards a society now at the mercy of its former enemies, especially as the refugee problems in Germany were still very much in evidence as 1949 approached.23 The suppression and banning of expellee associations by the Western Allies, who were anxious to avoid unrest and dissidence amongst refugees, did little to endear Britain’s occupying civilian administration to these ‘minorities’. A longer-term challenge was to facilitate forced migrants’ social and economic integration with new measures promoting their assimilation into the nascent FRG. Measures were introduced by the West German authorities, first the Soforthilfgesetz, effected in 1949. This provided financial loans for refugees, paving the way for the Lastenausgleich, passed in 1953 by the West German parliament. This provision offered ‘partial compensation for

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material losses suffered by expellees and others particularly damaged by the war’ as well as special government housing programmes and a targeted policy of redistribution of refugees from the most overcrowded refugee areas into other parts of West Germany. Furthermore, the FRG reversed the earlier suppressive phase on independent expellee associations by actively encouraging them. The best known of these organisations (the Bund der Heimatvertriebenen) underwent a series of name changes before emerging in 1958 as the Society of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenenen or BdV). German politicians quickly realised the importance of including expellee representatives in the administration responsible for the Lastenausgleich, leading to the formation of a new Federal Ministry for Expellee Affairs. Public funding provided to the expellee organisations, and further progress on aiding integration, was achieved by the 1953 Federal Expellee Law making it incumbent upon the FRG to promote expellees’ cultural heritage.24 To many non-German eyes, this succession of progressive measures in German policy-making on refugee matters has played, one suspects, a subsidiary or even minor part in the more newsworthy success story of Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ (Wirtschaftswunder) that contributed so markedly to the new respect accorded it internationally by dint of and in recognition of its meteoric rise in fortunes during the 1950s and its rapprochement with the West. But without implementation of a concerted German policy to create structures and adopt measures that helped rehabilitate and enfranchise many refugees and expellees, it is clear that the benefits of the Wirtschaftswunder and opportunities for renewed prosperity would not have been so widespread and impressive; after all, by 1950 there were some 8 million German expellees in the Federal Republic, 16.1 per cent of the population. The major successes in integrating and assimilating German refugees from the 1950s onwards were attributable to German resolve and endeavour. Much of the public and political discourse in Britain has largely continued to be both lazily misinformed and confused in respect of refugee and expellee issues, as witnessed by the lingering pervasive culture that finds it easier to emphasise German war guilt and then conflate this with further enduring national stereotypes.25 For the legacy of the Holocaust refugee survivors in Britain has long been the dominant narrative in discussions about ‘German refugees’, preferring to overlook the fate of ethnic German refugees and expellees remaining in Germany, many of whom were also victims of Nazism. Such attitudes are in turn bound up with the more recent socio-cultural and economic problems

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Britain has faced with rapidly increasing European and global competition in the labour market and the shrinking of its manufacturing base. This new landscape has become a fertile seedbed for a vocal lobby that sees the panacea for achieving renewed prosperity for Britain in striving for greater political, economic and cultural independence from Europe. This does little to advance current debates surrounding immigration, which often engender fear and misinformation, nor to help the cause of legitimate refugees, asylum seekers26 and economic migrants striving for equal rights of citizenship, assimilation and representation within the host nation. Now, as was the case in the aftermath of 1945, a sense pervades that refugees are excluded from the political processes of societal regeneration – Kushner’s ‘the forgotten of history, the abused of politics’. Britain’s mission to present its liberal democratic values to the world as congruent with new global humanitarian principles still appears to miss the moment to absorb the wider lessons of the German refugee crisis. Perhaps such amnesia is redolent of an impulse to forget less comfortable memories of British rule at that time. This may be a function, first, of how earlier British hopes gave way to resignation, and second, of how hopes were displaced onto the Germans, who subsequently received credit for successfully integrating refugees and expellees. The scale of the post-1945 crisis, attributable to political decisions to treat refugees and expellees as a category apart from indigenous Germans and Displaced Persons, thus depriving them of the same standards of humanitarian care, has fuelled the ‘them and us’ culture, a feature of current policy debates, not only in Britain but in France and the USA. In 2003 Johannes Rau, then President of Germany, who three years earlier had spoken out on overcoming current uncertainties and fears over immigration in Germany,27 called for new European dialogue on the sufferings of the expellees half a century earlier; all who engaged with it ‘need[ed] to acknowledge the unvarnished truth about themselves’. Rau suggested other nations must take their share of responsibility for past events. Germany had made great strides in coming to terms with its own considerable role in the refugee catastrophe. However, the international community and Europe in particular would never understand ‘the disaster that engulfed the whole of Europe’ without viewing these events in their wider context: Torrents of charges and counter-charges . . . have no place on the agenda because that is behind us now, and anyone seeking to revive that sort of approach will drag us back into the vicious

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circle . . . Without forgiveness there is no future. Forgiveness does not obliterate guilt.28 Diekmann too, reflecting on the refugee problem over 50 years earlier, had been well placed to speak with authority on Allied responsibility for the depth of the crisis.29 Perhaps it is because the refugee and expellee narrative was so insufficiently integrated into this wider picture from a British perspective that the many political, military and administrative participants who shaped occupation policy prefer to recall its claims to ‘soft forms of power’.30 For Britain still chooses to accentuate the occupation’s positive achievements in which it played a more positive and successful role – such as with Germany’s democratisation – than recall and defend a darker legacy for which the Big Three share collective responsibility, the pursuit of a policy of mutual accommodation towards Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary that encouraged the homogenisation of ethnicity within those countries. The ‘population transfers’ created the more radicalised conditions that led to the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of Reichsdeutsche and Volksdeutsche refugees and expellees, who died during flight, deportations and their aftermath. It is a reflection of the ever more intractable and growing global problems caused by forced migration that the post-war comparison with Germany reminds us usefully that occupying another country to introduce liberal democratic values as part of a policy of reconstruction is not always well received by a host population, or ultimately seen as successful, if unaccompanied by adequate measures to safeguard those principles on behalf of all those who live under a military occupation and are subjected to its rule. It is in this context that the British occupation provides an important historical precedent for and sheds new light on debates over recent British governments’ difficulties over immigration policy in general and the marginalisation of refugees and asylum seekers in particular.31 Moreover, the recent moral controversies regarding wartime bombing raids on Germany, abuses of human rights in occupied Iraq following its 2003 invasion, and the moral justification for eight years of military occupation, regarded by many as the catalyst for escalating civilian discontent, violence and ethnic division that resulted in the flight of over 2.2 million Iraqi refugees,32 strengthen the argument for historicising such links. While the material position for refugees and expellees ameliorated considerably after 1950, due in large part to the West German social welfare initiatives mentioned above, other equally controversial policy issues,

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critically, remained unresolved and now assumed equal prominence in the minds of many West German civilians across the political spectrum and within the German ecumenical establishment. The nature of the formal relationship between the new West Germany and Britain may have been in a state of transition in the autumn of 1949, but the reality was that a new state under Adenauer’s new CDU government was trying to establish itself while still under the strictures of occupation. Britain’s occupation policy 1945–9 was underpinned by a consensual conviction in reinforcing its mandate in moral terms as a central component of its civilising mission. The final chapter links this critical characteristic to the remaining years of its occupation in West Germany. It addresses how Britain adapted to its new role after the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 by evaluating its performance with regard to the continuities in policy from which it then found it hard to liberate itself, and by extension, West Germany.

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CHAPTER 7 THE JANUS FACES OF OCCUPATION, 1949 –55

As we have seen, many historians have tended to focus on the first four years of the occupation, assessing the birth of the Federal Republic as its effective demise, and implicitly that September 1949 drew a line beneath British rule in Germany. It did not. Narratives of recovery from 1945 pain to mid-1950s prosperity underplay the difficult transition up to and well beyond the Bonn Treaty in May 1952, when West Germany was granted sovereignty but with many restrictions still in force and subject to British military jurisdiction. Although in the minds of British officials still employed within the Control Commission, if not for the many forced migrants still in refugee camps and unemployed, the worst depredations of the refugee and expellee crisis could be consigned to the past, after four years of occupation there were several major issues all impacting on the refugee problems needing to be confronted. This chapter addresses the wider impact of British occupation on these broader policy issues. They included the highly symbolic question of officially ending the state of war, the continuation of war crimes trials, Heligoland, an island used as a bombing range since 1947 following the expulsion of its inhabitants, industrial dismantling, and limitations on industry, demilitarisation, and requisitioning of private property. Much of the evidence here is sourced from German Foreign Ministry documents, the Evangelical Church and private papers of its ministers, and a wide cross-section of German newspapers correlated with correspondence and policy statements of British politicians in London and Germany, and commentary in the British broadsheet press. This period is a story of how lingering memories of Germany’s past continued to colour

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defensive British policies. On the day the British Control Commission left West Germany, the Manchester Guardian wrote: ‘The Germans are not likely to remember with gratitude the Allied Military Governments and Control Commissions . . . Occupation Governments scarcely expect to be popular . . . But today’s obituary notice of the British occupation will pass unnoticed.’1 This verdict challenges a familiar British myth that its time in Germany represented a force for good, and that Germany’s repair and recovery were somehow largely attributable to its policies. Such a myth brought into sharper relief continuing German perceptions of the need for Britain to balance the rule of law with justice, and to exercise its power and control whilst taking greater account of individual freedom and rights. Britain’s mixed record of success in this critical psychological battleground to win German hearts and minds suggests one compelling reason for the never entirely relaxed relations that have existed between the two countries since 1945. As Anthony Nicholls says, Germany and Britain always appear to approach closeness but somehow never quite seem able to achieve it,2 attributing this largely to the legacy of two world wars. By 1949 Britain’s need to heal its many diplomatic fractures with Germany now faced new imperatives to restore German sovereignty, to revise the Occupation Statute with its many reserved powers, and incorporate Germany as a peaceful member of the European community, outlined in the Petersberg Agreement between the Western Allies and the Federal Republic in November 1949.3 This chapter argues that British policy, despite new High Commissioner Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick’s twin goals in 1950 to integrate West Germany into ‘the comity of nations’ as a pivotal European ally, and to ‘eliminate all causes of Anglo–German friction’,4 spoke more of a reflex among policy-makers to retain status, power and control in Germany over issues where they were reluctant to relinquish jurisdiction (see Fig. 27). It suggests too that British rule may also be symbolised as a form of militant liberalism. British foreign policy prioritised the Soviet threat, the relationship with the United States, Commonwealth trade and Empire.5 This reflected as much Britain’s reluctance to confront its diminishing global power as a determination to protect West Germany’s democratic base from the threat to Western interests of Soviet expansionism. Problems did not evaporate merely because a military government was replaced in 1949 by a new High Commission. Superficially this structural shift between the occupier and occupied suggested the dawn of a new relaxation of policy. Many West Germans viewed this transition as less clear-cut. Headlines like ‘Between

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Figure 27. Ivone Augustine Kirkpatrick, 1944. Formerly attached to the British Embassy in Berlin, the future British High Commissioner in Bonn was instrumental in creating the Allied Control Commission 1944–5. Courtesy of TNA UK, INF 2/44.

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War and Peace’ (Zwischen Krieg und Frieden) captured the mood. Moreover, with new threats to global stability as seen in Korea, a new dialogue was needed to heal the wounds of the past in order to help West Germany to establish itself as a secure, stable and prosperous society. Potsdam failed to draw a line under six years of conflict, freezing prospects of an early thaw in British–German relations. Debates over West German rearmament and its role in a European Defence Community re-exposed British fear and mistrust – exemplified by the issues examined next – that sat awkwardly with Bonn’s hopes of gaining sovereign status and achieving settlement, by peace treaty, of all outstanding issues.

‘Is the war now over?’ A Western Powers study group met on 4 July 1950 to consider revising the 1949 Occupation Statute and make recommendations to the Foreign Ministers’ September meeting in New York for ending the state of war with Germany. The Western Allies hoped for consensus on giving Bonn more control over its foreign relations. Greater sovereignty would profoundly alter its legal relationship with the Allied powers, thus necessitating the Statute’s revision.6 Lawyers had to remove ‘inconvenient anomalies’ without, crucially, ‘undermining in any way the basis of the occupation and the Allies’ right to retain necessary controls’.7 Britain distinguished between the persistence of a state of war in its domestic law and ‘the actual state’ of relations with Germany.8 France thought that war should be considered as having ended on 8 May 1945 when the Nazi state surrendered unconditionally and therefore ceased to exist. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (hereinafter FAZ) asked ‘Will the state of war be ended?’9 Throughout the year from July 1950 articles repeated this refrain. Whilst the Allies sought unanimity, German newspapers grew tired of symbolic ‘peace’ declarations, refocusing their fire on how laws effective from May 1945 were now ‘outdated’ in democratic politics, whereas other issues such as rights legislation, frontiers and reparations, still awaited resolution.10 From West Germany’s perspective, an end to hostilities – sought since September 194911 – was psychologically more important than diplomatic recognition of its Foreign Ministry, described in most German newspapers as the ‘small revision’ or ‘small step’ of 6 March 1951 allowing it to conduct its own foreign policy.12 When Holland formally ended hostilities in May 1951, one newspaper saw it as a mere bureaucratic alteration from the Germans’ former enemy status.13 Others presciently observed how much

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easier it was to go to war than to negotiate ‘the thorny path’14 to peace, or were convinced that the Allies would view a declaration purely as a formality. Bonn recognised the significance of altering its relationship with the occupiers as a step to normalising its political relationships,15 liberalising the economic controls such as the freedom to engage in a profession16 or lifting property controls. However, the British government’s announcement reserved ‘a great many rights over former enemy property’. Only a fully ratified peace treaty could rescind these.17 It was no real surprise that Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison, after a visit to Adenauer, referred somewhat glibly to a possible early announcement as reaching a ‘friendly understanding’. Germany’s press expected no practical outcomes from such visits. Their conclusion was realistic. Morrison sought a basis for greater equality ‘as an important and active partner in Europe’.18 What he meant was how West Germany might contribute armed forces to a collective defence system. This was problematic given a precarious economy, with manufacturing and trading restrictions in force, and the ambivalent views of British politicians19 and church leaders, who feared nascent militarism, echoed by both the SPD and the Evangelical Church.20 This revealed itself for example in the opposition amongst German youth to remilitarisation. As well as Britain’s uneasiness over rearmament, a wider problem was its less than wholehearted commitment to Europe. Morrison’s predecessor Ernest Bevin did not respond positively to Churchill’s demand that West Germany be admitted to the Council of Europe, and rejected British participation in the Schuman Plan for integrating its coal and steel resources, reinforcing Adenauer’s antipathy towards the Labour government. Even by October 1951, with the Conservatives now in power, Churchill made it clear to Adenauer that Britain saw itself as a global power, its focus on Commonwealth, Empire and a relationship with America, rather than on Europe.21 This explains tepid press reaction that ending enemy status did not deliver the bigger prize of a peace treaty.22 Although on 9 July 1951 the Western Allies among 50 states declared the war ‘over in practice’ in a juridical sense, full peace terms were not on the table.23 Some pointed to a psychological boost: ‘since yesterday the British occupation soldiers no longer see us as enemies’;24 President Truman welcomed ‘a new and logical step on the road to the final restoration of German independence’;25 and Adenauer declared that ‘this announcement gives us cause to be happy’.26 Others, like Vice-Chancellor Franz Blücher, sensed a chance to reopen a

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contentious issue where the declaration was silent, an amnesty for certain German war criminals in British-administered gaols.27

German war criminals Britain proclaimed justice and fair play as a benchmark of its liberal values. A transparent, swift sentence review process would have enabled it to make good its pledges and maintain global prestige. The opposite occurred. This is odd, as historians now generally accept that the Western Allies and Soviets were more interested in prosecuting crimes against their own military than crimes against humanity,28 yet many still in British custody were indicted from 1947 for crimes against humanity. West Germany viewed a possible amnesty as a barometer of its integration as an equal partner. From summer 1950 Kirkpatrick’s announcement of a comprehensive sentence review prompted prolonged press speculation until 1954 of ‘an act of mercy’29 (Gnadenaktion) for inmates. Some were still under sentence of death, a fact that public opinion found hard to accept not least as the 1949 Basic Law (Grundgesetz) had repealed capital punishment in German courts.30 Moreover, proceedings against less high-profile prisoners, such as military chauffeurs indicted for conspiracy, calls into doubt the soundness of judgements expressed in Evangelical Church documents that give a unique perspective on the planned reviews from an ecumenical perspective. Oberkirchenrat31 files cite serious allegations of breaches of due process by British military courts dating back to when the trials began in 1945. Defendants were given at most a few days, sometimes only hours to prepare their written trial defence. All charges were in English with no German translation provided for the accused, the trials were conducted in English and no written or verbal reasons were given for judgements. By 1952, many still had not received a written summary of their judgement.32 In April 1951 it was announced that arrest without legal warrant, and internment without trial in a ‘secret prison’ of those suspected of espionage ‘or other activity directed against the British forces of occupation’ would continue.33 Over 50 years later in Britain, denying rights of Habeas Corpus using security exigencies to detain ‘terror’ suspects without charge reveals a striking precedent. The Evangelical Church led by Niemöller was sufficiently worried about the ‘legal violations’ (Rechtsverstöße) against prisoners that its Foreign Department proposed writing to the Bishop of Sheffield stressing such abuses,34 part of the Justice Ministry’s early

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1952 plan to approach Churchill directly. Niemöller alerted a receptive British Council of Churches to the problems in December 195035 and an International Red Cross paper nine months before had stressed German prisoners’ rights under the 1929 Geneva Convention. The Justice Ministry was keen for allegations not to be traced to its document ‘so as not to lose the initiative in these matters’.36 With denazification not producing the substantive sentence reviews by 1952 that Bonn had hoped for and anticipated, clergymen such as Hannover’s Landesbischof Lilje hoped the combined steps would dovetail with Allied talks on the Occupation Statute and Germany’s role in Western Europe’s defence.37 In spring 1950, Adenauer, anticipating potential flashpoints in the rearmament debates, said that two necessary preconditions to prepare the ground were the ‘cessation of the defamation of the German soldier and a satisfactory settlement of sentences for war crimes’. It took over nine months to begin the sentence reviews. Deciding to do so when Kirkpatrick did was well timed, as NATO foreign ministers were due to agree proposals in December on Germany’s contribution to defence.38 He told Adenauer in November that 240 German nationals were still held in Zuchthaus Werl, the British-administered prison east of Dortmund, with around 160 sentenced for murder or maltreatment of Allied nationals and POWs in concentration camps.39 He claimed all cases had been re-examined the previous year, 66 resulting in reduced sentences and 28 in release.40 He promised another ‘comprehensive review’41 during 1951, but his pledge precluded reviewing any of the judgements. Perversely, the January 1949 first review was considered ‘final . . . no further reviews except under exceptional circumstances’. A year later Britain agreed amnesty for those over 65 and unfit for imprisonment, and to introduce a parole system.42 The Justice Ministry wanted Britain to adopt an ‘integrated and active’ amnesty policy in line with the other Western powers. It sought legal distinction between those cleared by denazification and other criminals held in custody, and a new committee to examine the rights of public officials not convicted of any crime and who without this clarification were guilty under new German law.43 The German Evangelical Church’s (hereinafter EKD) Hilfswerk, under the auspices of its humanitarian aid organisation, tried to interpret the legal complexities of Allied Control Council Law No. 10 on war crimes sentencing and members of criminal organisations. It had to be well briefed on legal minutiae if efforts to secure at least better prison conditions were to succeed. To be noticed by the British

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government needed more than polemics on the duty of care and Christian conscience invoked by crusaders like Victor Gollancz and George Bell. In September 1951, 37 Hamburg lawyers representing prisoners petitioned the Justice Ministry’s Central Office for Legal Protection (Zentrale Rechtsschutzstelle). Bonn considered that some inmates were unjustly indicted. Inter-departmental correspondence called them ‘Deutsche politische Häftlinge in Werl’ (German political prisoners) or by their more usual moniker, ‘so-called German war criminals’.44 A prominent lawyer lobbied Adenauer who replied that only ‘general issues’ were discussed on his short London visit.45 Hitherto hopeful articles shifted to criticism of British obfuscation and delay. One articulated the German government’s irritation at Britain’s handling of the trials (Bonn kritisiert britische Kriegsverbrecher-Prozesse), another that ‘legal principles had been sidestepped’ (Rechtsgrundsätze nicht beachtet).46 Doubts over verdicts and prison treatment went to the heart of disquiet at the decision to review only sentences. Stung by criticisms of a new, tougher prison regime – with arbitrary limits on Christmas parcels and prisoners’ tobacco sure to inflame resentments – Kirkpatrick rebuked Adenauer: I have no doubt that you were unaware that such statements were being published on behalf of your Government and that in the light of your conversations in London with Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eden you will deprecate the public exchange of official recriminations on this delicate topic. Our purpose, as Mr. Churchill explained to you, is to find a dignified and satisfactory solution. But our intentions are likely to be frustrated if these polemics continue . . . I am refraining from any detailed reply to these statements, some of which I can prove to be inaccurate, and I sincerely hope that you will take steps to prevent any repetition.47 Predictably, the press leaped at the chance to respond: ‘Kirkpatrick protests against anti-British propaganda’,48 raising the obvious question of how a private letter had been leaked. Moreover, betraying Kirkpatrick’s discomfort at the politicisation of the issue only fuelled speculation among German politicians, church leaders and a public alerted by his review announcement and statements by the DP,49 FDP50 and leading church figures. All saw any review as a new yardstick of even-handed justice. Theophil Wurm, the Bishop of Württemberg’s Evangelical Church, commented publicly on Manstein’s situation in summer 1950, then in June 1952 was compelled to

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write an open letter to Prime Minister Churchill arguing that the ‘remains of the spirit of Nuremberg must now be put to rest’.51 Six months earlier, he had been approached by the Association of Returning Soldiers (Der Verband der Heimkehrer) to do all he could to improve conditions in Werl.52 Cardinal Frings met Kirkpatrick, a fellow Catholic,53 in November 195054 and, as part of the Justice Department and Foreign Ministry’s campaign to use the churches to lobby Churchill for a pardon by Christmas 1951, was requested by the EKD to make corresponding representations.55 As part of this initiative, Bishop Dibelius of Berlin reminded Churchill of Kirkpatrick’s announcement in January 1951 that there was no man in prison for war crimes whose sentence he ‘would not be prepared to review in view of the changed circumstances’. No decision had been made on petitions submitted by 210 German nationals. Dibelius wanted the time served prior to sentencing to be included, as was the practice in 1947, and for Britain to grant Christmas leave to seriously ill prisoners, the elderly and the very young. Careful not to encourage any misinterpretation of Kirkpatrick’s statement, the British authorities in Wahnerheide stipulated that petitions must not include statements on the question of guilt. The Germans adhered to this (see Figs 28 and 29).56 However, Churchill’s ‘dignified and satisfactory solution’ had to satisfy honour on both sides, with Britain still divided on this issue. Kirkpatrick’s pledge to look at all cases caused ructions within the then Labour Cabinet. Hartley Shawcross, Attorney General and Britain’s Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg, was perturbed that the ‘Communists and other opponents’ of rearmament and critics of British proposals were exploiting talk of sentence reviews to accuse Britain of ‘rearmament of the Nazis’. In October 1952, somewhat anachronistically, he viewed such reviews as ‘appeasement’.57 Attlee and Bevin quietly took Kirkpatrick to task for overreaching his authority in adjudicating on appeals for clemency.58 So, in order not to reveal any policy split between Downing Street and the High Commission, it was presented as a ‘misunderstanding’ attributed to off-the-record comments at a press lunch. Kirkpatrick’s delegated powers were swiftly withdrawn in June 1951.59 After October 1951, with discussions for European defence delicately poised, a Conservative administration needed to salvage an embarrassment for Britain threatening its prestige abroad. This enabled Anthony Eden to depart from Bevin’s hardline stance. Equally irritating to politicians of both main parties were attempts of Anglicans such as Bell, Bishop of Chichester, to sway Labour into abandoning its policy:

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Figure 28. War Criminals Report on Petition. This followed a further review of original sentence of 4 June 1948 for prisoner held in Werl Prison, 22 June 1954. Courtesy of TNA UK, FO 1024/12.

This is not a time, [and] nor are the British people a people to keep vanquished military leaders and their compatriots in continued captivity. It is not the kind of policy which our great soldiers and sailors, from the Duke of Wellington onwards, would be likely to endorse . . . The cases of all war criminals now in British custody

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Figure 29. Remission Board Order, for prisoner held in Werl Prison. Note the final release date of 6 June 1955. Courtesy of TNA UK, FO 1024/12.

are, we are told, under steady review; but we can be too stiff and slow. Apart from the exceptional cases . . . the day has surely come for a general amnesty.60 Bell, amongst the few consistent and outspoken opponents of wartime area bombing, had argued for a less punitive occupation policy with public figures like Gollancz, Labour MPs Richard Stokes and Frank

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Pakenham, former Minister for Germany from 1947, later moved by Attlee into the Ministry of Pensions as a reward for his ‘rather too proGerman views’, as we saw. Most conceded that perpetrators of war crimes should be punished. But the more reactionary reflex in Britain demanding justice, even retribution, had moderated by 1948. That the original tariffs of 11 Wehrmacht generals and higher-ranking soldiers sentenced in May and June 1947 were reduced later suggests British military courts may have imposed unreasonably high sentences, and that reviews were more pragmatically motivated. Not all in government were happy about the revisions, ranging from death sentences commuted to 10 or 21 years, as in former Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring’s case, from 18 to 12 years for Erich von Manstein whose particular case was discussed in Chapter 2, or life to 21 or 10 years.61 Frank Roberts, the key Foreign Office strategist in formulating Britain’s policy towards Germany, thought that the FRG should have some say in the disposition of its convicted war criminals. In January 1952, because of persistently bad press, officials from Zentrale Rechtsschutzstelle visited the Werl prisoners to inspect conditions. They advised the Foreign Ministry that owing to blanket press coverage of its penal system, it might be prudent ‘to let matters rest for the moment’62 given the slow negotiations over the Statute and rearmament. This was a diplomatic way to stop short of overtly criticising British policy without dismissing charges of mistreatment fuelled by leaked interviews, letters and photographs evading prison censorship. The allegations gained credibility after the visit of EKD Synod President Wilm of Westphalia, resulting in denials by the High Commission’s legal adviser as economical in their disclosures as they were disingenuous. Attempts to discredit Wilm backfired, and he complained to Kirkpatrick. It was confirmed that he was allowed access to individual prisoners in a separate room should they request an audience, but it was not mentioned that any meetings must take place in a British official’s presence – it was unsurprising that internees were reluctant to unburden themselves of troubles. The adviser’s response that none accepted the chance of a ‘human and Christian conversation’ (menschliches und christliches Gespräch) was intended to infer contentment on the part of the prisoners. To Wilm’s knowledge, German authorities still had no sentencing documents and state lawyers were no wiser as to specific crimes. What ‘shook’ him most was the British refusal to take a senior clergyman’s word.63 As we know, prestige and saving face was central to Britain’s image, which is why they closed ranks.

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Kesselring sought Adenauer’s approval for a committee of MPs to visit Werl ‘to acquaint themselves with the circumstances relating to war criminals’, believing they and the British public were insufficiently informed of the full facts about the trials. The Foreign Office blocked his letter saying they could not transfer their responsibility for war criminals to Bonn and wanted to spare the Chancellor any embarrassment.64 Whitehall was concerned not to reignite adverse public opinion in both countries, as debates on Manstein’s age and ill-health had started in 1948, a year before his trial. By September 1952, 116 lower-profile prisoners still awaited news of their review.65 Kirkpatrick was only too aware that integrating Germany as a signatory to the European Defence Community Treaty was essential to assuaging public opinion, and Eden in London was under growing pressure ‘to finish with the war criminals issue for good’. A pretext was found to release the two most prominent prisoners by arranging negative medical assessments for Manstein, who had a history of eye trouble, and Kesselring, who was to be granted medical parole for an exploratory operation for cancer.66 However, hopes that Britain might profit from this show of magnanimity were dashed by the response of Werl’s governor when two soldiers escaped. Because of the police’s ‘lack of cooperation’67 in hunting down and turning in the German escapees, Colonel H.S. Meech withdrew inmate privileges across the board. These ranged from cutting compassionate leave for long-term inmates, suspending normal leave except when under escort, and restricting incoming parcels to the Christmas period only. Moreover, there were further delays to incoming prisoners’ mail, justified as ‘normal penal practice’ to allow for scrutiny of all letters, and the German Red Cross was refused prisoner access, which was in breach of inmates’ human rights. Such a reaction by a British official to the German police’s failure to cooperate or collaborate suggested that Britain’s policy was not quite as reconciliatory as it projected, and ignoring as it did basic principles of loyalty to one’s own fellow countrymen. This was shown by an amnesty petition with over 500,000 signatures from six Länder.68 In late 1953 many papers reported worsening prison conditions since the new governor’s arrival that April. British Information Services disingenuously dismissed all allegations as ‘abusive articles’, as no prisoner meeting the new Commissioner, Sir Frederick Hoyer Millar, had complained.69 Nevertheless, due to such adverse public opinion, mixed prison boards

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were established in November 1953 to review all outstanding cases. And so in May 1954 Hoyer Millar was able to call upon an independent panel to investigate future problems.70 That said, the last two prisoners were only freed in July 1957 when Werl closed for good.71

Heligoland and sovereignty Just as controversial, and a sustained cause of friction for seven years, was Britain’s handling of the Heligoland issue. British policy there cemented a German view that politicians were impervious to public opinion. The fate of this 2½-mile-long island of 2,500 inhabitants held stark reminders of occupation and the trauma of wartime area bombing. Britain was able to invoke Law No. 52, on this occasion as a means to requisition the island as a bombing range. Germans all too familiar with the requisitioning privations of the 1945–9 phase of occupation saw this decision as a form of legalised theft and a removal of the islanders’ rights to self-determination. Historians of the occupation period have not given this story its deserved prominence as a symbol of the continuing stranglehold of British rule, which yet appeared to allow the Federal Republic to self-govern. How did it escalate from local into national resentment and a diplomatic stand-off? Heligoland was once in British possession. It was taken from Denmark in 1807, held until 1890 then given to Germany in exchange for Zanzibar. It was disarmed by the Allies in 1919 and the islanders evacuated in 1914 returned.72 After 80 per cent of its buildings were destroyed on 18 April 1945 in one bombing attack by 1,000 British planes73 (see Fig. 30), on 12 May inhabitants were ordered to leave so the island could be used as a peacetime bombing practice target area by the Royal Air Force and US Air Force. Inhabitants were allowed to take only what they could carry, thus forcing them to lose their possessions, an ironic echo of the summary expulsions of German populations from eastern and central Europe. During six House of Commons sessions on Heligoland January–July 1950, several MPs maintained that the worst destruction took place in wartime. This was not the case, as the most devastating bombing, known as ‘Demolition of the Fortifications on Heligoland (Operation “Big Bang”)’,74 and described by one eyewitness as ‘a horrifying picture of senseless desolation’ had occurred on 18 April 1947 (see Figs 31 and 32, not as printed).75 While the demolition of former U-Boat bunkers and an underground tunnel system may have achieved British demilitarisation objectives it was nevertheless unclear that the island retained any strategic

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Figure 30. Heligoland. The island before and after bombing demolitions, 18 April 1945. Courtesy of TNA UK, CAB 66/65.

offensive capability in modern maritime warfare. Bombings continued unabated until 28 February 1952 when Kirkpatrick told Adenauer that the island would cease to be an RAF practice target at midnight.76 This timing anticipated a political imperative to reach agreement on the island’s future before the Bonn Treaty, but the question persists as to why Heligoland was not returned to West Germany in September 1949. The many Land and Federal documents show how seriously this issue was taken by the German government, rather more than in Britain – initially. There was cross-party opposition to British policy,77 and lengthy Bundestag debates, six between January and September 1950 alone. As the dispute worsened, the British broadsheet press revealed growing and considerable opposition to Labour’s policy. In Germany, barely a day passed without negative publicity. The Foreign Ministry were concerned Heligoland

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Figure 31. Heligoland: remains of the town after bombardment by British and American air forces, 1947. Courtesy of TNA UK, ADM 1/25850.

could derail progress being made in German–British rapprochement.78 During the debate on 14 February 1951, German politicians cited rhetoric coming from Westminster of an imminent resolution to remind British Secretaries of State for War and for Air, John Strachey and Arthur Henderson, Defence Minister Emanuel Shinwell, and Kirkpatrick of the difference between statements of hope or intent, and definitive action. Symptomatic of German frustrations was the ironic suggestion that Britain turn its bombing sights on the Orkney and Shetland Islands – after all the latter had only 27 inhabitants and both were much closer to home.79 The German perception was that Heligoland was a soft target. Air Minister Aidan Crawley claimed it best suited British purposes and that it was hard to find alternatives. A Tory minister, summing up many parliamentary colleagues’ views, said that pilot training was ‘presently more important than the discomforts to a few Germans’.80 This was more

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Figure 32. Explosion following ‘Demolition of the Fortifications on Heligoland (Operation “Big Bang”)’, 18 April 1947. Courtesy of TNA UK, ADM 228/48.

than political point-scoring. It underlined instead Bonn’s wider difficulties, despite its own internal political consensus, in winning the wider argument with Britain on its own, and by extension the islanders’, rights to self-determination. Moreover, despite Germany’s still fragile economy there was a pressing need to mitigate the human and material costs of displacement and reconstruction with progressive social measures. The island’s unemployed evacuees badly needed assistance to help them pay for high healthcare and pension costs, and the provision of still scarce housing. This was a national issue and far from straightforward to resolve in the short term, as Länder, like Bavaria, with its own severe unemployment problems, had absorbed large numbers of refugees, redistributed German expellees and returning POWs unable to return to bomb-damaged urban areas and who were still awaiting resettlement.81 By the end of 1949, unemployment in the Western zones had risen nearly 2 per cent over the previous six months to over 10 per cent of the total. Unemployment in Britain’s zone represented nearly 55 per cent of the 1,558,469 total, the American, 40 per cent, contrasting with just

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under 5 per cent in the French Zone. The proportion of refugees out of work was 36.3 per cent of the total unemployed.82 Schleswig-Holstein, closest to Heligoland, and since 1946 absorbing the highest ratio of expellees in the Western zones as we saw, had particular incentive to persuade Britain to rethink. In March 1951, 26 per cent of its registered working population were still unemployed.83 It felt obliged nevertheless to show solidarity and offer employment to the islanders. Diekmann, the former Economics Minister and now the region’s Minister President, noting reports ‘with great concern and deep regret’, asked Adenauer to appeal again to Kirkpatrick.84 The government decided neither to address nor to defuse widening German resentment at an ill-conceived policy whose sole purpose was the military expedient of maintaining RAF readiness in the event of a Soviet attack. Understandably, British fears of such threats were undoubtedly fuelled by Cold War propaganda on both sides of the Atlantic, but this rationale at best misunderstood and underestimated, and at worst ignored the depth of feeling growing in Germany over the effects of its policy. Not only were many civilian livelihoods at stake, with all hotels and homes requisitioned for military and private use, but Germany was being asked to pay for the costs of the island’s occupation. The local fishing industry was driven out after first 6 then 20 boats were bombed.85 Moreover, symbolic landmarks, including church and cemetery, were flattened. In May 1950, following German criticism, Britain ordered that no bombs be dropped within 1,000 yards of the cemetery.86 With no resolution in sight, German protest now turned to direct action. Two Heidelberg University students occupied the island, planting Federal, Heligoland and European flags.87 Another group planted a blue flag of world peace with its white Picasso dove emblem. Eventually, all were forcibly removed amidst a blaze of headlines about Britain’s heavyhanded response. During the students’ occupation, High Commissioner Kirkpatrick issued Ordinance No. 224, making it illegal for unauthorised persons to access the island. However, this measure merely introduced ‘a flavour of the ridiculous . . . The authority of the Occupying Power is intended to be passing out of use, and surely should not be unleashed save for vital purposes on great occasions.’88 A Control Commission court sentenced seven ‘island-invaders’ to three months in prison for having no written authorisation.89 More demonstrations were planned. These actions became a cause célèbre by catapulting minor but symbolic incidents into the public eye, coalescing support among German youth. The British did

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not foresee how this would play out diplomatically, although some West German papers, perhaps with one eye on the possible damage to Bonn’s negotiations with the Allies on mitigating the Statute, were keen to portray young sympathisers as Communist agitators. This may explain the EKD’s qualified public support. The Hamburg leader of another eight young protestors determined to restore the cemetery, and sent a telegram to Bishop Dibelius asking him to send a priest to perform a dedication. He replied with a blessing to send them on their way with a caveat that ‘the Evangelical Church’s role was not that of a reserve unit for political adventurers’ (Bei aller Liebe zu Helgoland – Evangelische Kirche ist keine Hilfstruppe für politische Abenteurer).90 Dissenting voices in Britain helped Germany’s cause. In January 1951, Schlange-Schöningen, appointed in 1950 to run West Germany’s new General Consulate in London, met Sir Henry Vaughan Berry, Control Commission’s Commissioner for Hamburg from 1945. Berry, with firsthand knowledge of the difficulties in rebuilding trust and hope, wrote to The Times, his verdict damning: Heligoland is a perfect example on a small scale of how not to deal with Germany. All the considerations . . . leading us now to revise our attitude . . . have been perfectly well known . . . for the past three years, but it is not until the Germans have started to take direct action . . . we have taken the slightest notice of their sentiments. It is . . . hoped . . . a different spirit will prevail in the general negotiations . . . [T]he fundamental German demand, upon which all Germans are united, is one of equality of status, in the civil not less than in the military sphere, and the former is probably more urgent . . . If we expect to secure the willing cooperation of the German people, this demand . . . will have to be met sooner or later, and political wisdom lies in granting it quickly and generously rather than having it extorted from us bit by bit.91 Schlange-Schöningen sent this to Adenauer, saying he had thanked Berry for speaking out. A shrewd judge of official British opinion, he envisaged help from broadsheet newspapers as a first step to offering ‘concrete concessions’ to the German people. Heligoland, he said: Must of needs [a]ffect mass sentiment in Germany in a very serious manner . . . Either Germany is really granted the ‘equality of status’

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or one should give up all hope of integrating German soldiers in a Western security defence system. He was convinced that this would be ‘solved with magnanimity or not at all’.92 The Times saw British policy as ‘a political embarrassment which it would be well to discard’, adding further fuel to the flames by endorsing the government’s tough stance that ‘it [Heligoland] is not bombed for amusement’.93 Only in June 1951 did the British Chiefs of Staff produce five alternative target areas for bombing practice. Again, Kirkpatrick pressured Adenauer with ‘the very great importance to the whole defence of Western Europe of suitable practice bombing ranges for the air forces of the western allies’. This disingenuously conflated West Germany’s desire to integrate with the implication that any undue delay from Bonn in consenting to an alternative due to ‘any minor objections’ would undermine the defence of Western Europe.94 Although Britain was ready to ‘meet the objections of German opinion by abandoning the use of Heligoland’, the devil as ever was in the detail. Adenauer was only guaranteed its release by 1 March 1952 on condition that he agreed to Britain transferring its attentions to a new site, so there was no change of policy. Preferred locations were the sandbanks 3.5 sea miles off the coast between Bremerhaven and Cuxhaven. Three large hospitals lay nearby and shipping on the coastal route between the Rivers Weser and Elbe was at risk. Although the RAF would consider regulating bombing periods to ‘eliminate any risk’, these were not reassurances that local populations with memories of area bombing wanted to hear, as State Secretary Hallstein inferred to Kirkpatrick.95 Cuxhaven’s inhabitants were ‘extremely worried’ (höchste beunruhigt) about a switch to Großer Knechtsand. Their protest meeting decided the new Hamburgbased Deutsche Bewegung Helgoland (DBH) should include objections in their campaign to have the RAF leave and the island returned. Heligoland was losing its regular summer income from 90,000 visitors. The nearby coastal town of Cuxhaven had 1.5 million visitors. Moreover, there was huge anxiety, articulated in the DBH letter to Adenauer, that the bombardments would decimate its crab and sea fishing industry.96 Fishermen, with their livelihoods threatened, staged protest journeys prompting the headline: ‘We fish in spite of the bombs’.97 In January 1952, Bonn debated SchleswigHolstein’s plan to rebuild Heligoland98 at a cost of DM 50–80 million.99 Informed that the RAF was to restart bombing Heligoland, Adenauer told Kirkpatrick that with a replacement target agreed there seemed

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no reason to resume this action. With negotiations almost complete, it would only revive the entire problem, awakening ‘the resentment of the German population’ which could only harm German–British relations.100 Kirkpatrick’s response was terse and barely civil. He did not need to repeat well-rehearsed arguments to Adenauer, rather, as the 1 March handover was imminent it was paramount for the Chancellor to consent without delay to avoid any training interruption so that the RAF and the US Air Force stationed in Britain could use either target. Repeating his message of seven months earlier he warned ‘how deeply unsatisfactory an impression would be made in my country and elsewhere if for any reason the Federal Republic should prove unwilling to accept the inconveniences which the establishment of the alternative bombing would involve’.101 Implicitly, he claimed, Britain was acting in good faith with concessions, so Bonn should reciprocate. Although British diplomacy talked of Germany’s status as an equal partner, it was given no choice on Heligoland. The impasse nearly derailed relations with London. Finally, Germany had made its point, so Adenauer decided to let matters rest. The day bombardments stopped Germany’s press stressed that justice had prevailed. The FAZ wrote, ‘joy and satisfaction after seven nasty years’; others, the ‘violated rights’ of the Atlantic and UN Charters, or Heligoland, ‘a symbol of Germany’. The Times was more downbeat, recording ‘a disproportionate source of disturbance to relations between Britain and Germany’. Britain underestimated the ‘sentimental regard’ many Germans held for the island. Its ‘renunciation was wise [as] to have refused would have led to endless ill-feeling, however insubstantial the cause’.102 As with the ill-starred war crimes issue, British pragmatism did little to advance reconciliation.

The straitjacket of dismantling If the plight of Heligoland symbolised Germany’s lack of sovereignty, and its partial destruction was a constant echo of wartime trauma, the Western Allies’ policies of dismantling, limiting and deconcentrating industry all combined to delay the natural pace of economic reconstruction. So did the requisitioning of housing, land and property, trading restrictions, restraints on competition,103 and costs of British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) forces, paid by Bonn until June 1953.104 Germany paid nearly 92 per cent of monthly occupation costs, in Britain’s case a disproportionately high DM 210 million per month.105 Paradoxically, one premise of demilitarisation,

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that economic strength must be neutralised by decentralisation and decartelisation to reduce Germany’s military potential, proved a stumbling block for the Allies when negotiating for its rearmament, since a key element of the plans was the premise that the Federal Republic should be financially responsible for meeting its own costs. September 1949 represented more a symbolic than a substantive lessening of British rule in the transfer from Military Government to a form of self-government with limited powers. The policy of demontage was central to the real constraints on West Germany’s autonomy. Germany did not control her own economy. Despite growing unemployment, industrial plants continued to be dismantled, particularly in the British Zone, with uncertainty over the Ruhr’s future. The new Adenauer government was prepared to sign the Petersberg Agreement, thus acceding to the international Ruhr authority that controlled the production and distribution of coal and steel. The quid pro quo was the Western Allies’ agreement to start to reduce and then to suspend dismantling of industrial plant, so resented by German employers and trade unions. They viewed this policy as anachronistic, unreasonable and unsustainable at such a delicate stage in Germany’s reconstruction and at a moment that was intended to usher in a new spirit of Anglo–German rapprochement. The Petersberg debates highlighted SPD and CDU differences on how to regain greater political equality. Kurt Schumacher’s SPD generally favoured a more intransigent approach towards the occupiers than Adenauer, who favoured a more circumspect policy of ‘small steps’ to extract more concessions.106 Adenauer welcomed French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman’s May 1950 plan for the joint European management of coal and steel production as based on principles of equality. This suited the Western Allies’ aim to maintain control over West Germany through institutional integration, but as the Chancellor soon realised, politically, it represented a first step to economic assimilation. The SPD’s priorities still focused on reunifying Germany rather than lobbying for the integration Adenauer saw as vital to Bonn’s status as an acceptable partner in the Western Alliance.107 Given the importance of integration to European stability it was perverse that modifying this policy did not remove Britain’s right to dismantle or destroy electric furnaces considered inessential to the function of key steel works, synthetic oil and rubber plants. These works, such as August Thyssen-Hütte, Duisberg, Charlottenhütte-Niederschelden,108 and Watenstedt-Salzgitter in Brunswick, were important sources of employment and exports. The High Commissioner’s April 1951 report showed

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earlier caps on productive capacity in such industries still in force 18 months later.109 Nor, as had been promised, were there relaxed restrictions on the size, speed and tonnage of merchant shipbuilding. Dismantling was high on the agenda at Adenauer’s meeting with Kirkpatrick six months earlier when he demanded that relief measures on forbidden and restricted industries and controls on scientific research be lifted. Kirkpatrick said that Adenauer could count on amendment of controls on shipbuilding and scientific research.110 However, six months later only the latter had been amended.111 After news of more dismantling, it was noted that British rhetoric and practice were not analogous.112 Adenauer wanted Kirkpatrick to reconsider the impact of large job losses at Watenstedt-Salzgitter through the dismantling of its main furnace, and of Dortmund-Hoerder Hüttenverein’s 10,000 ton hydraulic press, which was part-removed and shipped to England. Two Labour MP’s protested.113 Widespread opposition was ignored and Adenauer’s request denied.114 FAZ, always quick to spot any dissenting views within the House of Commons, projected back the MPs’ verdict of ‘untimely and foolish’.115 The EKD opposed dismantling. Writing to Dibelius, the Church Chancellery said ‘how little the British occupation authorities acknowledged the Church’s contribution to German public life’, and stressed the ‘pronounced cool attitude’ of high-profile Control Commission officials to leading evangelical ministers on demontage. That Bevin and North RhineWestphalia’s Commissioner General Bishop, a committed Evangelical Christian,116 were sent copies of this correspondence, and not General Robertson, Kirkpatrick’s predecessor as Britain’s High Commissioner, shows the Chancellery’s frustration at their lack of influence. For their part the Americans and French were happy for an ‘exchange of views’. With the problems in Britain’s zone it was suggested that it might be wise for Robertson and Dibelius to meet to promote better dialogue.117 Hints of an imminent end to dismantling were viewed sceptically, mainly because of these two high-profile cases. Speculation increased and Brigadier Lingham, Bishop’s successor, promised a definitive answer in February 1951. Hüttenverein was earmarked as the last ‘victim’ of demontage.118 The original purpose behind dismantling was to pay Soviet war reparations. These effectively ended due to a breakdown of reciprocal agreements such as grain shipments from the Soviet eastern zone. Continuation of the policy after 1949 was driven by an essentially defensive reflex to ensure that the Western Allies and especially Britain’s competitive edge over Germany were maintained, and by unsubstantiated fears of resurgent

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German militarism. For demontage to stop, Britain explicitly said that a decisive end to demilitarisation was needed, such as the blowing up of former bunkers and barracks. This begs the question of how it was possible to be definitive that demilitarisation had ended, given lingering residual fears within the British government of the possibility of German remilitarisation and the concomitant risk posed to European security. In any event, Britain’s announcement was too late to save key industrial installations and plant. The conspicuous waste of thousands of tons of dismantled or scrapped industrial plant subsequently unused for reparations enraged many, ‘contributing to the strongest German resentment of the British occupation authorities’. Nor was the announcement regarding Hüttenverein definitive.119 Kirkpatrick told Adenauer in April 1951 that after a review of the ‘prohibitions and limitations upon industry’, there was now a new Agreement on Industrial Controls120 thereby easing some of the previous limitations. Significantly however, its rationale was to facilitate production of materials ‘for the common defence of the West’. The sub-text was Cold War realpolitik dictating that the Western Allies set aside insecurities over the pace of economic recovery and harness German expertise and manpower into a partnership of mutual interest. But amendments to remove German steel production restrictions were not signed until the end of July 1952 when the treaty constituting the new European Coal and Steel Community came into force.121 Ending dismantling did not improve the economic outlook, and restraints on industry’s recovery process inhibited the contribution to European defence. Handelsblatt described six years of reparations politics as ‘the lead weight of demontage’, another identified how ‘serious consequences’ of DM 5.6 billion losses in capacity had decisively weakened German productivity.122 Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard forecast that industry damaged by reparations required adding a further DM 150 million to the 1951–2 domestic budget, with a minimum DM 850 million in remontage credits for the industries damaged by reparations.123 There was another sting in the tail. Britain asked Bonn to buy or lease back 16 dockyards in Hamburg, Kiel, Lübeck and Flensburg, confiscated after 1945 as reparations.124 At an asking price of DM 17.6 million (£1.5 million), Bonn could not approve such expenditure. Moreover, 68 cranes would be removed from Hamburg’s docks for transport to London, resulting in 2,000 jobs lost making ship diesel engines. This caused ‘great indignation and bitterness towards the English’. The FAZ, not known for hyperbolic editorials, called it ‘Beuterecht’ (looting rights).125 Hamburgers

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reacted to the docks’ being blown up as personally as they felt each bomb hitting neighbouring Heligoland. One labelled the English ‘Russians with creases in their trousers’.126 On 1 August 1952 the Bundesregierung decided to buy back 16 of its floating docks for DM 14.7 million,127 payable in three annual instalments. Nine would be returned to private owners, and seven owned by the German navy would be sold as partial compensation to Britain. Humiliating as it was to capitulate, as Christ und Welt said, ‘Hamburg without shipbuilding would be like Essen without Krupp or Stuttgart without Bosch and Mercedes’.128 Empty or demolished factories and famous shipyards such as Blohm & Voss of Hamburg, founded in 1877,129 were painful reminders that war does not pay. Already unhappy at the removal of its assets, Hamburg resented deeply and felt insulted at being asked to pay for their return. The press was unequivocal in its condemnation. This policy was wrong, punitive, financially crippling and must stop, in order to demonstrate the new spirit of European understanding.130 Older suspicions of Britain’s real motives to constrain German economic regeneration did not shift with transition to the Bonn Republic. Controls were unamended by May 1952, and Military Governor Robertson’s blandishments in 1948 that Germans were ‘a civilized and Christian people’ rang hollow for the many unemployed and homeless civilians. The infamously disliked Law No. 52, ‘Blocking and Control of Property’ was a good example that fundamental individual rights and freedoms were still controlled by the occupier. It was imposed on 8 May 1945, and stipulated that all property and everyday goods were ‘subject to seizure of possession or title, direction, management, supervision’ by Military Government. It is well documented that elements in the military, abandoning the ‘courtesy and restraint’ that was expected, exploited this law’s sweeping powers ‘without explanation, payment or compensation’. From 1946 the Foreign Office accepted that some Control Commission officials were ‘lazy, inefficient and sometimes corrupt’.131 Germans saw confiscations (Beschlagnahmungen) as analogous with the confiscation of Heligoland and the removal of its population. These prioritised British interests, fuelling tensions, as in October 1950 when Commissioner Bishop requisitioned 325 homes for British officers’ families to strengthen troop numbers. Barracks that had housed homeless refugees, businesses and schools since 1945 were surrendered.132 Germans were angered by the many confiscated buildings that still lay empty. Nearly a year later, worried by housing shortages and many buildings still unoccupied, the Finance Ministry wanted to review all requisitioning. Highlighting the plight of the displaced, it argued that

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external pressure to contribute to European defence was incomprehensible133 as replacing requisitioned housing needed DM 45 million or DM 50,000 per dwelling.134 Recognising the problem, in January 1952 Britain ordered that compensation claims for requisitioned property up to the end of 1947, from cinemas to petrol stations and swimming pools, be submitted by a deadline of mid-February.135 There are clear links between the housing shortages and Control Commission’s well-publicised overstaffing and extravagant expenditure,136 a legacy of the years up to 1949 when 26,000 were on the payroll, five times more than the US Military Government, as we saw in Chapter 3. Duties carried out by the army in the US Zone were performed by 10,000 British civilians.137 Slow draw-downs in staff showed that for many, life had become quite comfortable. The culture of overbureaucratisation and inefficiency was anatomised in Britain’s broadsheets: Plenty . . . came out to Germany under the impression . . . the Occupation . . . would last 20 years and service . . . might be dignified with the title of a career . . . only the lucky few . . . have been given ‘long-term’ ten-year contracts.138 Germans were familiar with this. One newspaper headline listed the High Commission plans to reduce servants,139 others, that ‘the dream of a life of luxury is over’ (Der Luxustraum ist ausgeträumt),140 reacting to the summer 1951 order for all British generals to vacate their Rhineland castles, their home for the last six years and seen as a preventable and soft target for German criticism.

Epilogue I have set out to show that eliminating all causes of friction ‘whilst resolutely defending our legitimate interests’, as Kirkpatrick recalled his task in 1950, were both unrealistic and unsustainable aims in the changed political circumstances pertaining to West Germany from September 1949. In January 1952 the High Commissioner said there was no difference that had not been settled.141 Germans viewed it differently. The war criminals issue dogged Britain until 1955, as did the bitter legacies of Heligoland, requisitioning, dismantling and the cartelisation policy. With regard to the latter, Adenauer put it succinctly: ‘freedom of competition is the most important basis of [the] social market economy’.142 Continuing restrictions damaged industry because of the need to refinance dismantled

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and destroyed plant crucial to West German recovery. All these issues impinged upon and were interlinked with Bonn’s ongoing task to secure full democratic rights and self-determination for all its citizens. British policy to marginalise its refugees and expellees was incentive enough. There are many who continue to claim that the policy ends justified their means, pointing to notable early British successes such as their transformation of Germany’s police, the restoration of an independent judiciary, the creation of a responsible trade union movement143 and the delegation of full parliamentary democracy. There are others, however, who maintain that these achievements were not capitalised upon in other areas of occupation policy as fully as they might have been. If we assess the legacy of the occupation in terms of how rhetorical claims by policymakers matched their subsequent actions, then there can be little doubt that Britain’s exclusionary policy on German refugees and expellees vividly illustrates perhaps its most significant lost opportunity. However, as we have seen, there were many others. Britain’s policy strategy in 1944 was to govern in Germany by ‘indirect rule’ in order to ensure that Germany was re-educated to take full responsibility for its own rehabilitation into the comity of nations. After 1949, however, British insistence on continuing to maintain direct control on key policies, and the lengthy delay in granting Germany qualified sovereignty, paradoxically contradicted the self-same democratic values it had sought to embed into West German political culture and society at large. West Germans looked forward to enjoying the greater political and social freedoms they believed had been earned from their enduring acceptance of the attenuated realities of the occupation and a common desire to rebuild for the future. But the British predilection for cautious policies, which as we have seen were sometimes demonstrably illiberal in their scope, in combination with ‘the inflexibility of bureaucracy’144 that was widely resented by German politicians and civilian populations, both refugee and indigenous alike, progressively dampened and then eroded Germany’s optimism that it might quickly regain the greater autonomy and autarky for which it had patiently prepared. Critically, the efforts of the British military and Control Commission bureaucrats either retained in Germany or drafted in to oversee a gradual transition of powers, and just as importantly, to win over sceptical German hearts and minds, were thwarted by the ‘elephantine memories’145 of those who lived through ten years of Allied occupation. Their task was not helped by the emergent geopolitical realities in Europe. From the start of the Cold War, Britain needed to adapt its foreign

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policy to deal with the threat posed by the Soviet Union. Moreover, its moral authority as an occupying nation had been undermined from five years of attempting to justify increasingly anachronistic and unpopular policies, and its mandate had been undermined further by its economic weakness, as we saw in Chapter 3. Such factors compromised Britain’s relations with the Bonn government. Although the moral and economic debates on German rearmament have not been the focus here, this issue encapsulated another of the manifest contradictions in how Britain sought to export its liberal democratic values, compromised by shoring up its own aims for securing greater political hegemony within the new European alliance. Difficulties in establishing a new spirit of AngloGerman rapprochement were compounded further by the primacy that both sets of diplomats attached to their contrasting relationships with America, and furthermore, Germany’s aim to secure an equal status with France. From after the formation of the Federal Republic, through the negotiations leading to qualified German sovereignty in 1952 and up until the Control Commission took its leave of Germany in 1955, Britain struggled to reconcile itself to this vision of equality.146 The demoralisation of comprehensive defeat and surrender in 1945, and the consequential material and psychological privations experienced by German civilians wearied from a daily diet of stringent regulation, controls and supervision over many years, left a pervasive and indelible imprint on the German psyche. Assurances by British officials in the early years of the occupation of imminent measures to alleviate the housing crisis, and to increase food rationing and employment opportunities etc., had not materialised as Germans had been led to believe they would. Disappointment and then disillusionment set in as the perception was allowed to take root that policy and action did not match. For the Western Allies, reconstruction priorities dramatically shifted from the earlier unanimity of purpose and will in defeating Nazism, to insulating Germany from the threat of encroaching Soviet influence. Definition of ‘the other’ rapidly shifted from Germany to the Soviet Union. Although British foreign policy mirrored this sea change at the outset of the Cold War, it is remarkable that the practical effects of its occupation policy remained out of kilter for so long. Underlying suspicions about German recidivist potential lingered, with little rational logic to support such fears – empty, rusting former factories and filled-in former dockyards testified to a new imperative to reconstruct a landscape for German hopes. For if the occupation became a metaphor for British pragmatism, it also evolved into a symbol of control fuelled by caution.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. V. Koop, Besetzt – Britische Besatzungspolitik in Deutschland (Berlin, 2007). A useful, more general account of the major themes of Britain’s occupation. 2. P. Ther, ‘The Integration of Expellees in Germany and Poland after World War II: A Historical Reassessment’, Slavic Review, 55, 4 (Winter, 1996), 779–805, 785. In 1994 Rüdiger Overmans estimated the numbers of deaths following expulsion at 600,000, based on actual documentation of 400,000 deaths; cf. P. Ahonen, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe 1945–1990 (Oxford, 2003), p. 21. Ahonen cites Reichling’s estimate of 1.5 million deaths – see G. Reichling, Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen, 2 vols. (Part I) Umsiedler, Verschleppte, Vertriebene, Aussiedler 1940–85 (Bonn, 1986); (Part II) 40 Jahre Eingliederung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Bonn, 1989), Part I pp. 34–5. 3. M. Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, repr. edn (New York, 2000), p. 216. 4. P. Ahonen, After the Expulsion, p. 15. Ahonen cites Schieder’s data on refugee and expellee numbers, see pp. 20–1; T. Schieder (ed.), Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, 8 vols, repr. edn (Munich, 2004); Reichling, Die deutschen Vertriebenen; cf. Reichling’s figure of 7,665,000 who arrived in western Germany, in D. Levy, ‘Integrating Ethnic Germans in West Germany: The Early Postwar Period’, in D. Rock and S. Wolff (eds.), Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic (New York/Oxford, 2002), p. 32; Ther, ‘The Integration of Expellees’, 784. Ther estimated 12 million German expellees. 5. Hansard, HC, ‘Poland’, 15 December 1944, cols. 1478–1578, 1498. 6. Hansard, HC, ‘Germany and Austria’, 4 August 1947; cf. Hansard, HC, 18 January 1945, col. 1003. 7. The National Archives [hereinafter TNA], CAB 195/5, CM 15(47), ‘Foreign Affairs and Defence’, 3 February 1947, p. 91; cf. TNA, CAB 66/41, Memorandum, ‘Germany’, WP (43)421, 27 September 1943. Eden suggested the only realistic policy would contain ‘severe or very severe elements of repression […] [but] aims ultimately at the re-admittance of a reformed Germany into the life of Europe’. 8. See p. 18.

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9. K.O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 235, 254–5. 10. M. Tate, ‘More on Buchenwald’, The Spectator, 4 May 1945, cited by A.J. Nicholls, ‘The German “National Character” in British Perspective’, in U. Jordan (ed.), Conditions of Surrender – Britons and Germans Witness the End of the War (London, 1997), p. 26. See chapter 2 for a good account of the prevailing view of Germans at that time; J. Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890, repr. edn (London, 2007), pp. 207–8. 11. A. von Seggern, ‘Großstadt wider Willen’: Zur Geschichte der Aufnahme und Integration von Flüchtlingen und Vertriebenen in der Stadt Oldenburg nach 1944 (Münster, 1997), pp. 92–3. 12. M.J. Frank, ‘Britain and the transfer of the Germans from East Central Europe, 1939–47’, (D.Phil. diss., Oxford, 2005), published as Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Population Transfer in Context (Oxford, 2007). Frank builds on Detlef Brandes’s work, in particular, D. Brandes, Der Weg zur Vertreibung, 1938– 1945: Pläne und Entscheidungen zum ‘Transfer’ der Deutschen aus der Tschechoslowakei und aus Polen, 2nd edn (Munich, 2005). 13. See F. Graham-Dixon, ‘A “Moral Mandate” for Occupation: The British Churches and Voluntary Organizations in North-Western Germany, 1945–1949’, German History, 28, 2 (June 2010), 193–213, where this argument is explored further. 14. V. Brittain, Seed of Chaos: What Mass Bombing Really Means (London, 1944). 15. A.C.Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime? (London, 2006), esp. pp. 179–87 and 197–205. Grayling’s title has been used before – see University of Sussex Special Collections [hereinafter M-O], Kingsley Martin Papers [hereinafter KMP], 30/4, ‘The Dead Cities Revisited’- an article by an unnamed correspondent witnessing the devastation in Germany in 1946. 16. Ibid., p. 197. Sinclair was Secretary of State for Air 1940–5. 17. Hansard, HL, ‘Bombing Policy’, 9 February 1944, cols. 737–55, col. 746. 18. See I.G. Garrick Mason’s review of Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities in Times Literary Supplement, April 28, 2006, p. 26. 19. Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London [hereinafter LHCMA], The Papers of Sir Maurice Dean [hereinafter DEAN], 3/3/1, letter from Sir Charles Portal to Sir A. Harris, 12 November 1944; Harris to Portal, 1 November 1944. His comments on ‘“Notes on Air Policy” to be adopted with view to rapid defeat of Germany’, by Deputy Supreme Commander 26 October 1944. 20. See J. Farquharson, ‘“Emotional but Influential”: Victor Gollancz, Richard Stokes and the British Zone of Germany, 1945–9’, Journal of Contemporary History, 22, 3 (July 1987), 501–19; M.J. Frank., ‘The New Morality – Victor Gollancz, “Save Europe Now” and the German Refugee Crisis, 1945–46’, Twentieth Century British History, 17, 2 (January 2006), 231–56. 21. B. von Oppen (ed.), Documents on Germany under Occupation, 1945–54 (London/ New York/Toronto 1955), p. 107. The document ‘Agreement between British and Polish representatives, Combined Reparation Executive, on the Transfer of

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22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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German Population from Poland’, 14 February 1946, in reference to the transfer, excludes the words ‘closely supervised and controlled’, and ‘gradual’ in its formulation of ‘orderly and humane’, included in an earlier draft. See TNA, FO 934/5, file 43, see A.W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford, 2003), p. 325. D. Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London, 2004), p. 323. L. Kettenacker, Germany since 1945 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 18–19, cites Lutz Niethammer’s study of denazification in Bavaria, Entnazifierung in Bayern: Säuberung und Rehabilitierung unter amerikanischer Besatzung (Frankfurt am Main, 1972). Gladwyn, Lord, The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn (London, 1972), p. 136. See esp. chapters 8/9 on ‘Post-War Planning’ and ‘Preparing for Peace’. M. Mazower, ‘The Strange Case of Human Rights, 1933–1950’, The Historical Journal, 47, 2 (2004), 379–98, 391. L. Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. II (London, 1971), pp. 220–2. See Chapter XXVI, sections (i) (ii) and (iii), pp. 220–43. Ibid., p. 232. TNA, CAB 65/27, ‘War Cabinet Conclusions’, WP 42(86), 6 July 1942. TNA, FO 371/30835-C7210/326/12, Eden to Masaryk, 5 August 1942. I am grateful to Detlef Brandes for his insights on the radicalisation of the expulsions policy; cf. D. Brandes, Conference paper, ‘National and international planning of the “transfer” of Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland’, Removing Peoples: Forced Migration in the Modern World (1850–1950), University of York, 20–22 April, 2006, in R. Bessel and C.D. Haake (eds.), Removing Peoples: Forced Migration in the Modern World (Oxford, 2009), pp. 281–96. Woodward, British Foreign Policy, vol. II, pp. 236–9. Eden’s memorandum was approved by the War Cabinet on 9 February. See also TNA, FO 954/25A, Soviet Union; Cabinet Paper, ‘Mr. Eden’s visit to Moscow’, 5 January 1942. D. Bloxham, Conference paper, ‘Forced Population Movement in Europe, 1875– 1949’ (see note 29), published as ‘The Great Unweaving: The Removal of Peoples in Europe, 1875–1949’, in Bessel and Haake, Removing Peoples, pp. 167–208. T. Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (London, 1994), p. 221. Morgan, Labour in Power, p. 389. D. Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London, 2006), pp. 309–10. F. Biess, Homecomings; Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton/Oxford, 2006), p. 66. For example, P. Ahonen, ‘Taming the Expellee Threat in Post-1945 Europe: Lessons from the Two Germanies and Finland’, Contemporary European History, 14, 1 (Feb. 2005), 1–21; F. Buscher, ‘The Great Fear: The Catholic Church and the Anticipated Radicalization of Expellees and Refugees in Post-War Germany’, German History, 21, 2 (2003), 204–24.

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Chapter 1 Occupation policy and German refugees: The case for revision 1. TNA, FO 1051/204, Deputy Military Governor’s Conference – Functions and Organisation of the Refugee Branch (App. A), 8 June 1945; letter from Manpower Division requesting the deferral of organisational decisions pending further discussion of their paper, 9 June 1945. 2. For example, K. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995, transl. B. Hundiker (Oxford, 2006). Previously published as Die Umkehr-Deutsche Wandlungen 1945–1995 (Munich, 2004). 3. See especially, A. Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary (London, 1983); D. Dutton, Anthony Eden: A Life and Reputation (London, 1997); M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Road to Victory, vol. 7 (London, 1986); Winston S. Churchill–Never Despair, vol. 8 (London, 1988); K. Harris, Attlee (London, 1982); Morgan, Labour in Power. 4. R. Ovendale (ed.), The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Governments 1945–1951 (Leicester, 1984), p. 7. See also W.I. Hitchcock and P. Kennedy (eds.), From War to Peace: Altered Strategic Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (New Haven CT/ London, 2000). 5. M. Dockrill and J.W. Young (eds.), British Foreign Policy 1945–1956 (London, 1989), p. 2. 6. See D. Reynolds, From World War to Cold War (Oxford, 2006). 7. P. Weiler, ‘British Labour and the Cold War: The Foreign Policy of the Labour Governments, 1945–1951’, Journal of British Studies, 26, 1 (January 1987), 54–82. 8. D. Sanders, Losing an Empire, Finding a Role: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Basingstoke, 1990), p. 291. 9. J. Saville, The Politics of Continuity: British Foreign Policy and the Labour Government, 1945–46 (London, 1993). 10. R. Vickers, The Labour Party and the World, Vol.1: The Evolution of Labour’s Foreign Policy 1900–51 (Manchester, 2003), p. 197. 11. In particular, those of Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Alexander Cadogan, Pierson Dixon, Oliver Harvey, Gladwyn Jebb, Hugh Dalton, Ivone Kirkpatrick. 12. The Papers of Austen Albu [hereinafter ALBU], John Hynd [hereinafter HYND] and Lord Strang [hereinafter STRANG] are at Churchill College, Cambridge [hereinafter CAC]; The Papers of Frederick Alexander Lindemann [hereinafter CHERWELL], later Viscount Cherwell of Oxford, are at Nuffield College, Oxford [hereinafter NUFFIELD]. 13. LHCMA, DEAN 3/4/3. Lord Boothby, in private correspondence in 1967 with Noble Frankland over the Dresden raids that turned into a public disagreement, saw Lindemann as the real architect of Britain’s bombing policy. See Boothby, The Times, 18 October and Frankland, 20 October 1967. 14. For example, the Marquess of Donegal, cited by K. Jürgensen in, ‘British Occupation Policy after 1945 and the Problem of “Re-Educating Germany’”, History, 68, 223 (1983), 225–44, p. 226.

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15. N. Gregor, ‘Politics, Culture, Political Culture: Recent Work on the Third Reich and its Aftermath’, Journal of Modern History, 78 (September 2006), 643–83, 672–3. Gregor’s review article cites Michaela Hönicke Moore’s discussion of American responses to Nazism 1933–45, in A. Steinweis and D.E. Rogers (eds.), The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and its Legacy (Lincoln NEB, 2003). 16. R.L. Boehling, A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reform and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany: Frankfurt, Munich and Stuttgart under U.S. Occupation 1945– 1949 (New York/Oxford, 1996), p. 269. 17. R.L. Merritt, Democracy Imposed: U.S. Occupation Policy and the German Public, 1945–1949 (New Haven CT/London, 1995), p. 267; cf. p. 260. According to a US nationwide opinion survey in September 1951 (‘Treatment of Germany by the Individual Allies’), responding to whether actions by the Western powers since 1945 had advantaged or disadvantaged West Germany, the US was rated as ‘by far the most solicitous towards Germany’s well-being’; 55 per cent said US actions advantaged Germans, Britain’s approval rating was 13 per cent and France’s 4 per cent; 15 per cent felt that US policies had disadvantaged Germans, with Britain 44 per cent and France 60 per cent. 18. R. Torriani, ‘Nazis into Germans: Re-Education and Democratisation in the British and French Occupation Zones, 1945–1949’, (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, 2005), pp. 60–4. 19. B. Genton, Les Alliés et la Culture: Berlin 1945–1949 (Paris, 1998), pp. 4 and 57. De Gaulle’s remarks were made in autumn 1945: ‘Figurez-vous que nous sommes les voisins de l’Allemagne, que nous avons été envahis trois fois par l’Allemagne dans une vie d’homme et concluez que nous ne voulons plus jamais de Reich. Voilà ma réponse.’ 20. P. Ther, ‘Expellee Policy in the Soviet-occupied Zone and the GDR: 1945–1953’, in Rock and Wolf, Coming Home to Germany? p. 56. 21. A.M. Birke, Britain and Germany: Historical Patterns of a Relationship (London, 1987). 22. W. Wallace, ‘Foreign Policy and National Identity in the United Kingdom’, International Affairs, 67, 1 (Jan. 1991), 65–80. 23. A.J. Nicholls, Fifty Years of Anglo-German Relations (London, 2000); cf. Nicholls’ Always Good Neighbours–Never Good Friends? Anglo-German Relations 1949–2001 (London, 2004). 24. See note 11. 25. See T. Hughes, The Image-Makers: National Stereotypes and the Media (London, 1994); G. Staerck and M.D. Kandiah (eds.), Anglo-German Relations and German Reunification, Centre for Contemporary British History Witness Seminar Programme (London, 2003). 26. T. Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester/New York, 2006), p. 187. 27. T. Mann, Rede Über Deutschland Und Die Deutschen (Berlin, 1947), pp. 24–5. Mann’s lecture took place on 6 June, celebrating his 70th Birthday. 28. John Keegan, quoted in Reynolds, From World War to Cold War, pp. 106–7.

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29. R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York/London, 1997), p. 116. 30. I am grateful to Ian Gazeley for clarifying this distinction. 31. Churchill often invoked this theme; cf. passage on the opening of the Teheran Conference, when asked by Stalin what was to happen to Germany, W.S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 5 (London, 1952), p. 330. 32. C. Webster and N. Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany 1939– 1945, vol. II, Endeavour Part 4 (London, 1961); A. Harris, Bomber Offensive, repr. edn (London, 2005); M. Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg: The Firestorm Raid, repr. edn (London, 2002), p. 360. Middlebrook estimates civilian deaths at 55,000; A. Förster and B. Beck, ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and World War II: Can a Psychiatric Concept Help us Understand “Postwar Society?”’ in R. Bessel and D. Schumann (eds.), Life After Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge/Washington DC, 2003), p. 28. The authors cite Koser-Oppermann’s estimate of 40,000; Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, cites at least 45,000, p. 20; Lowe quotes 42,600 from a US Strategic Bombing Survey (TNA, AIR 48/19), K. Lowe, Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943 (London, 2007), p. 228. 33. C. Webster and N. Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive, vol. IV, Annexes and Appendices (London, 1961), pp. 286–7. 34. J. Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg (Berlin, 2004). 35. L. Kettenacker (ed.), Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (Berlin, 2003). See also B. Niven, ‘The GDR and Memory of the Bombing of Dresden’, in B. Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, 2006). 36. M. Krause, Flucht vor dem Bombenkrieg: ‘Umquartierungen’ im Zweiten Weltkrieg und die Wiedereingliederung der Evakuierten in Deutschland 1943–1963 (Düsseldorf, 1997), p. 32. Krause puts the figures of civilian dead at c.35,000; R. Evans, Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History, and the David Irving Trial (London, 2002), after considerable discussion in chapter 5, Evans also estimates 35,000, pp. 159–60; Reynolds, however, estimates ‘at least 50,000’, Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 480. 37. Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive, vol. IV, pp. 484–6; cf. R.A.C. Parker, Struggle For Survival: The History of the Second World War (Oxford, 1990) p. 153. 38. M-O, KMP, 30/2. A theme argued by New Statesman’s editor in an unpublished manuscript following bombing raids on Nuremberg with 11 main RAF Bomber Command attacks August 1942–March 1945, resulting in 51 per cent destruction to its built-up ‘Target’ Area; cf. Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive, vol. IV, p. 486. 39. NUFFIELD, CHERWELL, F248/5, Minute from Sir Edward Bridges to Private Secretary to Paymaster General, 13 January 1944, ref. Telegrams P.M to the President, 4 January 1944 and Roosevelt’s reply in agreement, 5 January 1944. 40. P.R. Betts, ‘Germany, International Justice and the Twentieth Century’, History and Memory, 17, 1/2 (Autumn 2005), 45–86, 60.

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41. R. Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (London, 2001), p. 35; on this point, see especially A. Neave, Nuremberg: A Personal Record of the Trial of the Major Nazi War Criminals in 1945–46, repr. edn (London, 1980); B.F Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (New York, 1977); A. and J. Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial (London, 1983); D. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford, 2001). 42. Overy, Interrogations, pp. 6–23. 43. U. Schmidt, ‘“The Scars of Ravensbrück”; Medical Experiments and British War Crimes Policy, 1945–1950’, German History, 23, 1 (2005), 20–49, 21. 44. Justice Lawrence, ‘The Nuremberg Trial’, International Affairs, 23, 2 (April 1947), 151–9; Justice Birkett, ‘International Legal Theories Evolved at Nuremberg’, International Affairs, 23, 3 (July 1947), 317–25. 45. Bloxham, ‘Forced Population Movement’. 46. Of those in favour of Nuremberg’s ‘aims’, see J.H. Morgan, ‘Nuremberg and After, Part I’, Quarterly Review (April 1947), 318–36; ‘Nuremberg and After, Part II’, Quarterly Review (October 1947), 605–25. 47. Of those who questioned Nuremberg’s ‘motives’, see F.A.Voigt, ‘Nuremberg’, The Nineteenth Century and After (November 1946), 252–8. 48. M-O, File Report 2424A, ‘Note on Nuremberg 27.9.46’. 49. For example, H. Ingrams, ‘Building Democracy in Germany’, Quarterly Review (April 1947), 208–22. Ingrams had been Controller-General Administration and Local Government Branch, CCG, see Chapter 3. 50. A. Bryant, ‘Factors Underlying British Foreign Policy’, International Affairs, 22, 3 (July 1946), 338–51. 51. ‘British Policy in Germany’, New Statesman and Nation, 18 May 1946, 351–2. 52. M. Wight, ‘Western Values in International Relations’, in H. Butterfield and M. Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London, 1966), pp. 125–6, 128. 53. See reviews of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel: I. Brunskill, ‘An added ingredient – Germany’s chronicler feeds his critics with the life he forgot’, Times Literary Supplement, 29 September 2006; N. Ascherson, ‘Even Now’, London Review of Books, 28, 21, 2 November 2006. 54. Betts, ‘Germany, International Justice and the Twentieth Century’, pp. 64–5. 55. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 179–80; cf. R.C.D. Jasper, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester (London, 1967), pp. 276–9: ‘after so much suffering there was a temptation to use our growing strength ruthlessly and in a spirit of vengeance’. 56. Hansard, HL, ‘Bombing Policy’, 9 February 1944, cols. 737–55, cols. 744 and 748. Bell failed to persuade Archbishop William Temple to speak at this debate in support of Bell’s opposition to the policy’s apparent disregard for civilian casualties: ‘I am not at all disposed to to be the mouthpiece of the concern which I know exists, because I do not share it.’ See E.H. Robertson, Unshakeable Friend: George Bell and the German Churches (London, 1995), p. 92. For press reaction to Bell’s speech see Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 197–8; Jasper, George Bell, pp. 278–9.

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57. On this point I am grateful to Paul Oestreicher, formerly Director of the Centre for International Reconciliation, Coventry Cathedral, and member of the Church of England’s general synod. 58. Bell’s letter to Eden, 25 July 1942, cited by R.C.D. Jasper, George Bell, pp. 271–2; R. Vansittart, Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London, 1941). 59. Vansittart, Black Record, pp. 15, 54 [original emphasis]. 60. Hansard, HL, ‘Germany and the Hitlerite State’, 10 March 1943, quoted in G.K.A. Bell, The Church and Humanity (London, 1946), pp. 95–109. 61. See letter on ‘Mass Expulsions of Germans’, New Statesman and Nation, 21 July 1945, p. 34. 62. See Robertson, Unshakeable Friend. 63. Jasper, George Bell, p. 293. The meeting with Attlee was on 13 September 1945. See also pp. 288–314. 64. F. Spotts, The Churches and Politics in Germany (Middletown CT, 1973), p. 72. For a wider discussion, see G. Besier, Kirche, Politik und Gesellschaft im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2000). 65. Spotts, The Churches and Politics, p. 62. 66. Ibid., p. 63. 67. Ibid., p. 65. 68. A. Kossert, Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945 (Munich, 2008), pp. 408–9. 69. Morgan, Labour in Power, p. 255. Cites two letters from Attlee to Gollancz, 17 December 1945 and 25 January 1946. 70. For example, V. Gollancz, Our Threatened Values (London, 1946); What Buchenwald Really Means (London, 24 April 1945); The New Morality (London, 22 August 1945); Germany Revisited (London, 1947); Leaving Them To Their Fate: The Ethics of Starvation (6 April 1946); cf. J. Collins, ‘The World’s Need’, in My Brother’s Keeper: A Broadcast Series on Christian Responsibility (London, 1946); Farquharson, ‘“Emotional but Influential”’. 71. The Bishop of Chichester, If Thine Enemy Hunger (London, 1946). 72. Frank, ‘The New Morality’. 73. E. Glensk, R. Bake and R.O. von Wrochem, Die Flüchtlinge kommen: Ankunft und Aufnahme in Hamburg nach Kriegsende (Hamburg, 1998). The DHG was founded at the suggestion of the British Military authorities on 18 October 1945. 74. J. Nurser, For All Peoples and All Nations: Christian Churches and Human Rights (Geneva, 2005), esp. chapter 6, pp. 93–107. 75. Simpson, Human Rights, esp. pp. 258–68, ‘Anxieties Over Domestic Autonomy’ and ‘Clipping the Wings of the United Nations’. 76. N.G. Annan, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany (Ithaca NY, 1997), especially chapter 8, p. 147. Annan worked for wartime British intelligence and for a year in the BZ, witnessing some of the high-level decision making on occupation policy. 77. J.E. Farquharson, The Western Allies and the Politics of Food: Agrarian Management in Postwar Germany (Leamington Spa, 1985); A. Hearnden (ed.), The British in

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78.

79.

80.

81.

82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91.

92.

269

Germany: Educational Reconstruction after 1945 (London, 1978); N. Pronay and K.W. Wilson (eds.), The Political Re-education of Germany and her Allies After World War II (London/Sydney, 1985); B. Marshall, The Origins of Post-War German Politics (London, 1988); I.D. Turner (ed.), Reconstruction in Post-War Germany: British Occupation Policy and the Western Zones, 1945–55 (Oxford, 1989). F.S.V. Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government: Central Organisation and Planning (London, 1966); M. Balfour and J. Mair, Survey of International Affairs, 1939–1946: Four-Power Control in Germany and Austria (Oxford, 1956). A.D. Birke and E.A. Mayring (eds.), Britische Besatzung in Deutschland: Aktenerschliessung und Forschungsfelder (London, 1992); A.F.M. Bance (ed.), The Cultural Legacy of the British Occupation in Germany: The London Symposium (London, 1997). For example, M. Folly, Churchill, Whitehall and the Soviet Union, 1941–1945 (London, 2000); see especially D. Reynolds, The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives (New Haven CT, 1994); ‘From World War to Cold War: The Wartime Alliance and Post-War Transitions, 1941–1947, The Historical Journal, 45, 1 (2002), 211–27. A. Deighton, The Impossible Peace: Britain, The Division of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford, 1990); cf. D. Reynolds’s review article, ‘Britain and the Cold War’, The Historical Journal, 35, 2 (June 1992), 501–3. Vickers, The Labour Party and the World, pp. 172–3; Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary, pp. 843–4. Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary, pp. 843–5. Overy, Why the Allies Won, p. 325; also M. Harrison, ‘Resource Mobilisation for World War II: The USA, UK, USSR, and Germany, 1938–1945’, Economic History Review, 41, 2 (May 1988), 171–92. Farquharson, The Western Allies, pp. 3, 30. A. Cairncross, The Price of War: British Policy on German Reparations 1941–1949 (Oxford, 1986), p. 231. Territorial reparations discussed in Chapter 5. See B.J.C. McKercher, Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Global Pre-Eminence to the United States, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, 1996). M. Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge, 1998), p. 38. H. Dalton, Memoirs 1946–1960 (London, 1962). On reducing payments to Germany, see pp. 101–2, on his unwillingness to give any more dollars to Germany, and the need to cut dollar imports, p. 269. TNA, FO 371/46816-C9236/95/18, Minute from Orme Sargent, 3 December 1945, and Alexander Cadogan’s comments, 4 December 1945. TNA, FO 371/55617-C9041/143/18, Minute from John Troutbeck, ORC(46)74, ‘The Problem of the German Refugee Populations in the British Zone’, 29 July 1946. The principal agreement dated 21 November 1945. A.G.B. Fisher, ‘The Human Bottleneck’, International Affairs, 22, 4 (October 1946), 533–540; R.H.M. Worsley, ‘Mass Expulsions – 1’, The Nineteenth Century and After (December 1945), 270–4; ‘Mass Expulsions – 2’, The Nineteenth Century and After (February 1946), 90–6; F.A. Voigt, ‘Orderly and Humane’, The

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93.

94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

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Nineteenth Century and After (November 1945), 193–205; ‘Dark Places’ (February 1946), 49–55; ‘C.A.M’, ‘Heirs of Potsdam: The Tragedy of Expelled Germans’, 4 (Jan.– Dec. 1948), 446–53; P. Galliner, ‘Germany’s Refugees’, New Statesman and Nation (3 September 1949), 240–1. M-O, File Report 2565, incl. F20C, F30C, M25B, M35D, M45B*, H.D. Willcock (ed.), ‘Attitudes to the German People’, 23 February 1948, pp. 4–10. *Indicates sex [M/F], age and class [A/B/C/D] Ibid. ‘Should We Let Germany Starve?’, Picture Post, 28, 13 (29 September 1945), 25–6. Letters relate to photojournalist Lorna Hay’s reports following her fiveweek tour of Germany, for example, ‘Would They Worry About Us?’ and ‘Let Them Suffer’. In contrast, ‘Hate Must Die’ called on Britain to take a generous lead in reviving efforts towards a better future for Europe. See ‘Report on Chaos’, Picture Post, 28, 11 (8 September 1945). Simpson, Human Rights, p. 326. He cites TNA, FO 371/57116-U786, brief for the UK delegation, Protection of Minorities, 1 January 1946. Ibid., p. 336. K. Cmiel, ‘The Recent History of Human Rights’, American Historical Review, 109, 1 (2004), 117–35, pp. 128–9. Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph’, 380; cf. P. Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia, 1998). Mazower, ibid., 388. Ibid., 389. Ibid., 387. J.B. Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfers in Europe 1945–1955 (Philadelphia, 1962), p. 60; cf. TNA, CAB 65/27, ‘War Cabinet Conclusions’, WP42(86), 6 July 1942. Schechtman, ibid., p. 185. Churchill’s document dated 22 January 1944. D. Reynolds, Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century (London, 2007), pp. 126, 146. von Oppen, Documents on Germany, ‘Control Council Plans for the Transfer of the German Population to be Moved from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland into the Four Occupied Zones of Germany’, 20 November 1945, pp. 89–90. Of the remaining balance of 6.65 million Germans to be moved, the Soviet Zone was to take 2 million from Poland, the US Zone 500,000 from Hungary, and the French Zone 150,000 from Austria plus c.250,000 refugees from the US Zone domiciled formerly in the French Zone. Simpson, Human Rights, p. 179. The Charter was issued on 14 August 1941. Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph’, 385, quoting American political theorist Quincy Wright. Bloxham, ‘Forced Population Movement, 1875–1949’. J. Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century (New Haven CT/London, 2006), p. 118. Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph’, 389.

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112. Simpson, Human Rights, p. 159. 113. Idem., quoted from The Times, 8 November 1939. 114. R. Schulze, ‘The German Refugees and the Expellees from the East and the Creation of a Western German Identity after World War II’, in P. Ther and A. Siljak (eds.), Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944– 1948 (Lanham MD, 2001), p. 313. On p. 322, he quotes TNA, FO 945/374, ‘Constitution of the International Refugee Organization and Agreement on Interim Measures to be taken in respect of Refugees and Displaced Persons’, parts 2 & 4; L. Holborn, The International Refugee Organization: A Specialized Agency of the United Nations: Its History and its Work, 1946–1952 (London/New York/Toronto, 1956), pp. 183, 185, 186 for IRO assuming no responsibility for ethnic Germans, and pp. 196, 206, 207, 211, 357 on refugees’ eligibility for Displaced Person status. 115. For more recent scholarship on this, see P. Gatrell (ed.), ‘World Wars and Population Displacement in the Twentieth Century’, Contemporary European History, 16, 4 (November 2007). 116. Holborn, The International Refugee Organization, p. xiv; P. Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The United Nations and the Quest for World Government (London, 2006), p. 149. 117. T. Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2005), p. 29.

Chapter 2 ‘Germanity and Humanity’ 1. P. Dukes, ‘The Trouble with Germans’, Current Affairs, 49, 14 August 1943. Produced by Army Bureau of Current Affairs [hereinafter ABCA] to provide troops with information and advice on what to expect in Germany – see S.P. Mackenzie, British Politics and Military Morale: Current Affairs and Citizenship Education in the British Army, 1914–1950 (Oxford, 1992). 2. Ingrams, ‘Building Democracy in Germany’, p. 209. 3. Hansard, HC, ‘German People (British Policy)’, 4 March 1942, col. 621; cf. Hansard, HL,‘Germany and the Hitlerite State’, 10 March 1943. 4. Hansard, HC, ‘German Atrocities (Retribution)’, 19 May 1942, cols. 24–5; ‘German War Crimes (Retribution)’ 20 July 1944, cols. 471–77; cf. M-O, KMP 29/8. S. Hobhouse, ‘Retribution and the Christian’, rev. and repr., Hibbert Journal (July 1942). He opposed Archbishop Temple’s doctrine of ‘just retribution’, advocated as ‘the expression of all-embracing love’. 5. Hansard, HC, ‘German Atrocities (Retribution Warnings)’, 1 July 1942, cols. 183–4. 6. Hansard, HC, ‘German Atrocities (Retribution Warnings)’, 30 July 1942, cols. 684–5. 7. For example, see R. Dopheide, Kiel, Mai 1945: Britische Truppen besetzen die Kriegsmarinestadt (Kiel, 2007), p. 127. One who helped liberate Bergen-Belsen, speaking in 1989 shortly before his death, said ‘he hated the Germans until the end of his life’ [all following translations from German are my own].

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8. A.M. Birke, Deutschland und Großbritannien: Historische Beziehungen und Vergleiche (Munich, 1999), p. 2. 9. L. Birch, ‘What We’ll Find in Germany’, Current Affairs, 62, 12 February 1944, pp. 14–15. 10. Ibid., p. 12. 11. L. Woodward and M.E. Lambert, Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. V (London, 1976), p. 369. Prime Minister’s statement, 22 February 1944. 12. TNA, FO 371/39202-C13673/13673/18, ‘Gallup Poll on British public, opinion on treatment of Germany’, Jebb minute 14 October 1944. Refers to findings published in News Chronicle, 5 October 1944. 13. Hansard, HC, ‘War Situation and Foreign Policy’, 18 January 1945, col. 424. 14. K. Jürgensen, ‘British Occupation Policy after 1945’, p.237. He cites R. Birley, The German Problem and the Responsibility of Britain: The Burge Memorial Lecture, 3 December 1947 (London, 1947), pp. 10, 28. Birley was Educational Adviser to the Military Governor. 15. von Oppen (ed.), Documents on Germany, pp. 49–50. 16. R. Schulze, Conference paper, ‘Flight and Expulsion of German Populations after the Second World War’ – 3rd Balzan Workshop, ‘Displacement and Replacement in the Aftermath of War, 1944–1948’, Birkbeck, University of London, 18–19 September 2006. 17. CAC, ALBU 12, 26/6, E. Friedländer, ‘Germany: Unpopular Nation No. 1’, Die Zeit, 13 January 1949. 18. CAC, ALBU 11, 25/5, Albu to O’Neill, 20 January 1947. Albu was appointed by Deputy Military Governor [hereinafter DMG] General Sir Brian Robertson. 19. The Governmental Sub-Commission’s remit covered political, internal affairs & communications (local government, police, education and religious affairs) and manpower divisions within CCG. 20. CAC, ALBU 12, 26/7, Albu to Mrs. Albu, 26 March 1946 and 14 June 1946. Dalton’s antipathy towards Germany is well documented. 21. CAC, ALBU 11, 25/5, Albu to Hynd, 26 March 1947; ALBU 11, 25/5, Hynd to Albu, 20 March 1947. 22. CAC, ALBU 11, Albu to Hynd, 26 March 1947. 23. Idem. 24. TNA, FO 371/34460, ‘Military Occupation of Germany’, 22 September 1943, refers to War Cabinet’s discussions of Eden’s and the Ministry of Air Production’s 16 June 1943 proposals for the occupation of Germany after its defeat, see WP(43)217 and WP(43)248. 25. For example, TNA, FO 371/34460-C10653, ‘Post-War Settlement: Policy in Respect of Germany’, 19 July 1943; FO 371/34460-C11296, ‘Germany’, 27 September 1943; FO 371/34462-C14087, ‘The Re-education of Germany, 17 November 1943; FO 371/39093-C257, ‘Regeneration of Germany’, 7 January 1944 (dated 3 December 1943, then amended); FO 371/46880-C535, ‘The Failure of Democracy in Germany’, 7 February 1945.

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26. Cf. Birke, Deutschland und Großbritannien; K-D. Henke, ‘Der Weg nach Potsdam. Die Allierten und die Vertreibung’, in W. Benz (ed.), Die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten: Ursache, Ereignisse, Folgen (Munich, 1995); L. Kettenacker, Krieg zur Friedenssicherung: Die Deutschlandplanung der Britischen Regierung während des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Göttingen, 1989); A. Tyrell, Großbritannien und die Deutschlandplanung der Allierten 1941–1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1987). 27. Brandes, Der Weg zur Vertreibung. 28. See TNA, FO 371/30835-C10043/326/12 and FO 371/39092-C6391/220/18. 29. Frank, ‘Britain and the Transfer of the Germans’. 30. TNA, FO 371/30835-C9161/326/12, Frank Roberts minute to Philip Nichols [British Ambassador to Czechoslovakia] ref. Memorandum – ‘Future of Czechoslovakia: Transfer of Populations’, 27 September 1942. 31. Birke, Deutschland und Großbritannien, p. 171. 32. Idem. He cites TNA, FO 371/30930-C2167, Minutes from ‘Memorandum on Frontiers’. 33. Arnold Toynbee, Director of the FRPS think -tank was asked to produce a position paper on territorial borders with ethnographic considerations given lower priority. The Greek–Turkish exchange was to be used to aid a comparative assessment in assessing the proposed new population transfers. Note by Ronald, 2 January 1942, FO 371/32481-W335, cited by Birke, Deutschland und Großbritannien, p. 164. 34. B. Clark, ‘Half-Infidels’, review of M. Mazower’s, ‘Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey’, London Review of Books, 3 August 2006; also Birke, Deutschland und Großbritannien, pp. 168–9. 35. Birke, Deutschland und Großbritannien, p. 169. 36. Idem. He cites FO 371/30930, ‘Memorandum on Frontiers’. 37. TNA, FO 371/30930-C2167/241/18, J.D. Mabbott, ‘Memoranda on Frontiers of European Confederations and Transfer of German Populations’, 20 February 1942. See Toynbee to Ronald, 12 February 1942 with above reference. 38. See Birke, Deutschland und Großbritannien, pp. 266–78. 39. TNA, FO 371/30835-C9161/326/12, Nichols to Roberts, 21 September 1942; Allen’s and Roberts’s minutes, 27 September 1942; Sargent’s and Cadogan’s minutes, 29 September 1942; Eden minute, 1 October 1942. 40. Mazower, Dark Continent, p. 53. 41. TNA, FO 371/30835-C2151/69/42, Nichols to Roberts, 16 October 1942. 42. TNA, FO 371/30835-C10043/326/12, Nichols to Roberts, 16 October 1942; Minutes following by D. Allen, 22 October; G.W. Harrison, 27 October; Roberts, 29 October; initialled without comment by Strang, 30 October. 43. TNA, FO 954/2- CON/43/5, Eden to Cadogan, 19 August 1943. 44. Ibid. 45. See Brandes, Der Weg zur Vetreibung, p. 274. The first committee meeting was on 7 December 1943. For a survey of the work of ICTGP, see pp. 271–301; cf. Kettenacker, Krieg zur Friedenssicherung.

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46. TNA, FO371/39092-C6391/220/18, J.M. Troutbeck, Introduction, ‘Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on the Transfer of the German Populations’, 12 May 1944. 47. Ibid. 48. TNA, FO 371/39092-C6391/220/18, Roberts minute, 17 May 1944. The EAC [European Advisory Commission] was established after agreement at the Moscow Conference, 19–30 October 1943, to Eden’s proposals to form a committee as a ‘clearing-house’ for European problems of common interest; cf. L. Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. II (London, 1971), p. 589. 49. E. Lendl, ‘Wandel der Kulturlandschaft’, in E. Lemberg and F. Edding (eds.), Die Vertriebenen in Westdeutschland, vol. 1 (Kiel, 1959), pp. 468–9. Figures for expellees coming to Schleswig-Holstein initially taken from 13 September 1950 figures of 300,000 from East Prussia and 70,000 from Danzig. These totals have recently been revised upwards, to 329,600 and 78,600 respectively out of the Schleswig-Holstein total of 1,030,500 or almost 40 per cent, U. Danker and A. Schwabe, Schleswig-Holstein und der Nationalsozialismus (Neumünster, 2005), p. 167. This is developed further in the introduction to Chapter 4 and the casestudy. 50. TNA, FO 371/39092-C6391/220/18, Harvey minute, 19 May 1944. 51. J. Harvey (ed.), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (London, 1978), p. 55; 25 October 1941 diary entry. 52. Simpson, Human Rights, p. 126. 53. Ibid., p. 134. 54. Ibid., p. 179. Simpson cites Harvey’s War Diaries, p. 31. 55. TNA, FO 371/39092-C6391/220/18, Sargent minute, 30 May 1944. 56. TNA, FO 371/34460-C11913/279/18, ‘Future of Germany: Transfer of German populations’, Con O’Neill minute, 12 October 1943, and Troutbeck minute, 20 October 1943. 57. TNA, FO 371/39092-C9721/220/18, ‘Transfer of German Populations’, Troutbeck minute reacting to APW Minutes of 20 July 1944 meeting. 58. TNA, FO 371/34460-C11913/279/18, Sargent minute, 28 October 1943 [added emphasis]. 59. TNA, FO 371/39092- C6391/220/18, Troutbeck minute, 16 May 1944. 60. Ibid., Troutbeck’s ‘Conclusions and Recommendations’ to ICTGP report. 61. Frank, ‘Britain and the Transfer of the Germans’, especially, pp. 96–8, 108. 62. M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 7, p. 1189. 63. Idem. 64. Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name, p. 221. On pp. 542–3, he footnotes Churchill’s communication to Attlee of 3 August 1945 expressing regret about the Western Neisse, and his first Commons speech as Opposition Leader on 16 August when referring explicitly to the fate of Germans east of the Oder-Neisse line, admitting: ‘it is not impossible that a tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself’.

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65. M. Connelly, ‘We Can Take It’: Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (London, 2004), pp. 145–9. Connelly cites War Illustrated, 3, 17 January 1941, and 10 April 1941; T. Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz, rev. edn (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 221. 66. M-O, File Report 2565, ‘Attitudes to the German People’, 23 February 1948. 67. Ibid., M-O, File Report 2565 [original emphasis]; also Krause, Flucht, pp. 23–5. 68. Ibid., M-O, File Report 2565. Gallup poll, News Chronicle, 2 May 1941. 69. Ibid. [original emphasis]. 70. Ibid [original emphasis]. 71. A. Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, repr. edn (London, 2002), pp. 132–3. 72. NUFFIELD, CHERWELL, G193/1 and G193/2. Cherwell minute to Prime Minister on Bombing Policy, 30 March 1942. 73. See R. Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London, 2006), pp. 74–6. This attack provoked Hitler’s retaliation in April 1942 in the ‘Baedeker’ air raids on Exeter, Bath, York, Norwich and Canterbury. 74. Krause, Flucht, pp. 26–32. The attacks took place on 28 and 29 March 1942. 75. Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, vol. II, pp. 12–13. 76. Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, p. 25. 77. Krause, Flucht, p. 28. Cites H. Rumpf, Das war der Bombenkrieg: Deutsche Städte im Feuersturm (Hamburg, 1961). 78. NUFFIELD, CHERWELL, G197/4, ‘Bomber Command Operations’, Cherwell minute to Churchill, 19 March 1943. 79. C. Webster and N. Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939– 1945, vol. I (London, 1961), p. 393; cf. Krause, Flucht, p. 27. 80. NUFFIELD, CHERWELL, G197/5 9, ‘Bomber Command Operations’, Cherwell minute to Churchill, 26 March 1943. 81. Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, vol. II, p. 47. 82. Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, vol. IV, pp. 456–7. 83. LHCMA, DEAN, 3/3/1, Harris to Portal, 1 November 1944, ‘Notes on Air Policy to be adopted with view to rapid defeat of Germany’. The correspondence exchanges continued to 24 January 1945 prefiguring Dresden. 84. LHCMA, The Papers of Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart, 15/15/27, ‘Chester’ Wilmot notes from interview with Professor Solly Zuckerman on ‘Allied Bombing Policy-Bombing of Germany’, 21 April 1946. Zuckerman attended most major discussions on bombing policy, carrying out research into the effectiveness of bombing and the nature of the bombing weapon’s use. 85. Birch, ‘What We’ll Find in Germany’. 86. Parker, Struggle For Survival, pp. 131–50, p. 131. 87. Overy, Why the Allies Won, pp. 101–33, p. 133. 88. NUFFIELD, CHERWELL, G204/1 and G204/2, Note on ‘Bombing Accuracy’ to Paymaster General, 16 February 1945. 89. NUFFIELD, CHERWELL, G197/20, Harris to Cherwell, 8 December 1943. 90. Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, vol. II, p. 47. They cite Harris’s minute to Churchill, 3 November 1943.

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91. Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 177. 92. www.kz-gedenkstätte-neuengamme.de. ‘Stages of camp clearance’, last accessed 27 June 2012. I am grateful to Iris Groschek at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial for this point. 93. R. Neillands, The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939–1945, repr. edn (London, 2004), p. 241; Sven Lindqvist claims that about 50,000 died on one night alone – 27 July 1943, see S. Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (London, 2001), not paginated, see item 202. Parker’s citation of 787 heavy bombers despatched by Bomber Command to Hamburg that day suggests Lindqvist’s figures may be not implausible – see Parker, Struggle For Survival, p. 155. 94. A. Fort, PROF: The Life of Frederick Lindemann (London, 2004), see chapter 12, p. 244. 95. Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, pp. 343–4. 96. LHCMA, DEAN, 3/3/3, Dean to Harris, 8 August 1962; Harris to Dean, 17 August 1962; Dean to Harris, 28 August 1962. 97. Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 201. 98. LHCMA, DEAN, 3/4/3, N. Frankland letter to The Times, 20 October 1967. 99. Reynolds, In Command of History, pp. 322 and 397. He cites removal of ‘Moscow: The First Meeting’ from The Hinge of Fate paraphrased by Deakin, April 1950, CAC, CHUR 4/279/245; cf. W.S. Churchill, The Second World War, 6 vols. (London, 1948–54), vol. IV, p. 432. 100. Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, p. 336. 101. Ibid., p. 350. 102. For an authoritative German civilian eye-witness’ account of the aftermath of the bombings and their effects on Hamburg’s population, see H.E. Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943, transl. and foreword, J. Agee (Chicago/London, 2004). Only Nossack and Heinrich Böll fulfilled W.G. Sebald’s ‘criteria for a responsible literature in the face of total destruction’, p. xii. 103. Krause, Flucht, pp. 134–42. 104. Krause, Flucht, p. 123. He cites E. Hampe, Der Zivile Luftschutz im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Dokumentation und Erfahrungsberichte über Aufbau und Einsatz (Frankfurt, 1963). 105. Krause, Flucht, p. 178. 106. Ibid., pp. 188–9. Kiel accepted 130,000, Lübeck 43,000 and Flensburg 14,000. See Tabelle 10, p. 99, Tabelle 20, p. 188. 107. Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein [hereinafter LAS], Abt. 320.4, Eiderstedt, Nr. 1928. See for example, Reichsverteidigungskommissar SH to Landräte and Mayor of Schleswig re: the Hamburg Katastrophe and its implications for SH, 16 September 1943; re: housing space, Landrat to Regierungspräsident, Schleswig, 7 September 1943; re: numbers to be issued food cards, 21 September 1943; Landrat to Mayor of Eiderstedt re: numbers to be issued food cards, 21 September 1943.

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108. U. Carstens, Leben im Flüchtlingslager: Ein Kapitel deutscher Nachkriegsgeschichte (Husum, 1994), p. 5. Pohl concurs with Lüdemann’s 1949 statistics showing an increase in Schleswig-Holstein’s population: 1,589,267 (17 May 1939) to 2,723,580 (1 January 1949), an increase of 1,134,313 or 71 per cent; H. Lüdemann, Die Flüchtlinge in Schleswig-Holstein (Kiel, 1949), cited by K.H. Pohl, in T. Herrmann, K.H. Pohl (eds.), Flüchtlinge in Schleswig-Holstein nach 1945: Zwischen Ausgrenzung und Integration (Bielefeld, 1999), p. 1. 109. Krause, Flucht, pp. 202–3. He cites Horstmann, Die Wanderungen im Bundesgebiet 1950, in Mitteilungen aus dem Institut für Raumforschung, Nr. 14, pp. 1–37. 110. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr. 4444, Damm to Brauer, 26 November 1948. 111. W.G. Sebald, ‘Air, War and Literature: Zürich Lectures’, in On the Natural History of Destruction, transl. A. Bell (Penguin, 2003), p. 77. 112. LHCMA, The Papers of Brig. E.J. Paton Walsh [hereinafter WALSH], v/2/1, ‘Today and Tomorrow – Britain in Europe: The Trouble with Europe During the War Just after the War to End Wars – 1’, The British Way and Purpose, No. 15. Sixteen pamphlets were produced between November 1942 and April 1944; cf. various military guides or summaries, e.g. WO 208/3007, ‘Germany basic handbook’, April – July 1944, TNA, WO 208/3013, ‘Who’s Who in Nazi Germany’, May 1944, WO 208/3205, ‘Inside Germany’, January – May 1945; also, ABCA’s Current Affairs. 113. Schmidt, ‘The Scars of Ravensbrück’. 114. Dukes, ‘The Trouble with Germans’. 115. LHCMA, WALSH, The British Way and Purpose [added emphasis]. 116. G.P. Chapman, ‘Armies of Occupation’, Current Affairs, 60, 15 January 1944. Chapman was the officer responsible for publication of the ABCA pamphlets. See Mackenzie, Politics and Military Morale, p. 98. 117. Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick [hereinafter MRCUW], The Gollancz Papers [hereinafter GOLLANCZ], MSS.157/3/GE/1/19, ‘Public Opinion Research Section – Special Report: Reactions to Verdicts in Nuremberg Trial III and Göring’s Suicide and Executions!’ undated. 118. LHCMA, WALSH, IV/1/16, ‘Death Sentences on War Criminals’, letter to Legal Division, Lübbecke, 15 September 1945. 119. M-O, File Report 2424A (M30B, M45C, M50C), ‘Note on Nuremberg 27.9.46’, shows there was a major revival of interest at the end of the trial. Sample size not supplied in File Reports. 120. Ibid. 121. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/GE/1/17/1, ‘Some thoughts on the Nuernberg [sic] Trials, Verdicts and Executions’, undated [October 1946?]. 122. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/GE/1/19. 123. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, p. 53. 124 ‘Today in the Zone: Death Penalty’, British Zone Review [hereinafter BZR], 20 August 1949 (Bunde, 1945–1949); Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, repr. edn (Bonn, 1995), p. 64.

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125. TNA, FO 954/10-GE/45/53, Sargent to Churchill, 11 May 1945. Responding to General Thomas’s 2 May letter to Churchill, written on behalf of ‘the many generals and Staff Officers of Camp II’, Sargent restates Churchill’s view on how the Generals should be treated. Note too that the ashes of those executed were scattered in rivers to avoid possible shrines to martyrs. 126. Ibid. 127. N. Stargardt, ‘The Historikerstreit Twenty Years On’, German History, 24, 4 (2006), 587–607, 597. 128. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, p. 46. 129. Ibid., pp. 41–9. 130. Hansard, HC, ‘German Generals (Trial)’, 26 October 1948, col. 74; cf. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/PR/8/59, Gollancz to Liddell Hart, 20 October 1948. 131. Hansard, HC, 26 October 1948, ibid., col. 84. 132. BBC Written Archives Centre [hereinafter WAC], E1/748 Foreign Office, G. Burgess [FO] to Boyd at Britain Broadcasting Corporation [BBC], 5 July 1948. Trials of Germans accused of offences against British and Dominion troops were to be completed by 1 September 1948, the same deadline for claims for extradition of German war criminals for trial in other countries, this process to continue until all cases had been heard. 133. LAS, Abt. 320 Segeberg, Nr. 175, Monatsbericht über die deutsche Moral, Polizeigruppe Lübeck to Public Safety Group, HQ Lübeck, 820HQ/CCG BAOR, 26 May 1948. (‘Im deutschen Volke erheben sich mehr und mehr Stimmen, die sich gegen die Führung der sogenannten Kriegsverbrecherprozesse gegen Deutsche wenden’.) Reports produced monthly December 1946 to February 1949. 134. Ibid, for example, Stimmungsbericht über die deutsche Moral, Polizei-Inspektion Bad Segeberg to Polizeigruppe Lübeck, 13 September 1947. *Gerede is modified from the earlier, more colloquial Klatsch in early 1947, perhaps to indicate the value of these new reports. 135. TNA, FO 1005/1859, Morale Report, Schleswig-Holstein, ‘The Mood of the German People’, 25 May–12 June 1949. 136. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/56, Collins to Gollancz, 18 October 1948. Cripps regarded Gollancz highly. 137. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/59, Gollancz to Liddell Hart, 20 October 1948. Liddell Hart, an expert on the defendants’ cases, was refused an audience for not being a Labour member. 138. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/60, Liddell Hart to Gollancz, 21 October 1948. He was irritated the papers had ‘soft-pedalled’ over von Brauchitsch’s recent death from a further heart attack. 139. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/83i-iii, Charlotte von Brauchitsch to Liddell Hart, 31 October 1948. He was refused a German doctor and interpreter before he died, as was his widow’s request to take his ashes from Hamburg to Hohenrode where her family had arrived as Silesian refugees, ‘with insults that were unprintable’. 140. LAS, Abt. 320, Eutin Bd.2, Lt. Col. Seeliger to the Landrat, 26 and 27 August 1945.

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141. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/64/2, Stokes to Bevin, 25 October 1948. Visits were limited to relatives – visits to friends outside the camp in England had been allowed. Despite his request (unacknowledged) to visit the ‘German Generals’ on his own, the Military were instructed to be present. Their private money was withheld pending denazification which could not be completed until after their trials; cf. resumé of their detention and possible trial, Hansard, HC, 26 October 1948, cols. 57–84. 142. TNA, FO 800/467, Robertson to Bevin, Telegram No. 1554, 7 August 1948. 143. TNA, FO 800/467, Bevin to Robertson, CG3319/26/184, 24 August 1948. 144. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS/157/3/PR/8/59, Gollancz to Liddell Hart, 20 October 1948. Gollancz stated Collins’s opinion. 145. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/78, Catholic Herald, 19 November 1948 responding to Liddell Hart, Gilbert Murray, Gollancz and Stokes’s letter to The Times regarding the trial. 146. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/94/1, Gollancz and Stokes to Attlee, 20 December 1948. 147. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/93, Stokes to Stewart, 1 December 1948. 148. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/97, Stokes to Attlee, 4 January 1949. 149. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/101.ii, Attlee to Stokes, 7 January 1949. Defence Counsel was told orally on 10 December of the intention to set up the Commission, and given ten days’ notice that German evidence would be heard. The ‘holding charges’ were received 1 January. 150. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/102, Stokes to Attlee, 14 January 1949. 151. Hansard, HC, ‘Germany (War Crime Trials)’, 28 March 1949, col. 829; 937 persons charged with war crimes, 683 acquitted or sentenced to shorter prison terms, 148 charged with crimes against humanity, 138 acquitted or sentenced to shorter prison terms; also, 2 March, col. 42. Bevin confirmed three awaited trials for war crimes, 19 others on charges of crimes against humanity. 152. Hansard, HC, ‘Field Marshal von Manstein (Trial)’, 17 May 1949, cols. 247–8; ‘Field-Marshal Manstein (Defence)’, 28 June 1949, cols. 971–2. 153. Von Brauchitsch died 18 October 1948, von Rundstedt and Strauss were released July 1948 and 19 May 1949 respectively due to ill health. 154. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/137 ii, Gollancz to Attlee, 27 June 1949. 155. MRCUW, GOLLANCZ, MSS.157/3/PR/8/157, Jowitt to Gollancz, 27 July 1949. 156. Hansard, HC, ‘German Generals (Trial)’, 26 October 1948, col. 73 Michael Stewart was Under-Secretary of State for War. 157. Hansard, HC, ‘Foreign Affairs’, 21 July 1949, col. 1577. 158. Ibid., cols. 1599–600. 159. Ibid., cols. 1591–2.

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160. Hansard, HC, ‘Germany (War Crimes)’, 28 October 1949, col. 193. 161. Kettenacker, Germany since 1945, p. 45. The Bundestag’s first meeting took place 7 September, with the first government formed 15 September 1949.

Chapter 3 Realities of the occupation 1. Chapman, ‘Armies of Occupation’. 2. Idem. 3. I. Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle (London, 1959), p. 196. Kirkpatrick created the Allied Control Commission in 1944–5, becoming PUS for German Affairs in 1949 and High Commissioner in Bonn from 1950. Eden too was fond of cricketing metaphor; Oliver Harvey describes his reaction to a lack of American sensitivity over the Atlantic Charter negotiations: ‘A.E [Eden] feels that F.D.R [Roosevelt] has bowled the P.M. a very quick one – such a document should have been communicated in advance’; War Diaries of Oliver Harvey, p. 31, cited by Simpson, Human Rights, p. 179. 4. Chapman, ‘Armies of Occupation’. 5. Hansard, HC, ‘Germany (Administration)’, 15 May 1945, col. 2645. 6. Annan, Changing Enemies, p. 162. 7. LAS, Abt. 320.3 Eckernförde, Nr.2560, Military Government Law No. 1, 19 December 1944. 8. LAS, Abt. 320.3 Eckernförde, Nr.2560, Ordinance No. 8, effective 15 September 1945. 9. LAS, Abt. 320.3 Eckernförde, Nr.2560, Military Government Law No. 52, promulgated 18 September 1944. Cf., ‘Law 52: Blocking and control of property’, Military Government Gazette, vol. 1 (CCG [BE], 1945–9), pp. 24–7. 10. Ibid., for example, General Order No. 4, 1 December 1945 and Ordinance No. 38, 3 July 1946. 11. LAS, Abt. 320, Husum, Nr.1441, Public Expenditure Branch, CCG, FIN/22, 149(PE), Memorandum, Col. A.P. Henderson, ‘Finance Division Technische Vorschriften No. 99’, 8 May 1947. Discussion on compensation due to owners of sequestrated Mercedes; this initially had to be funded from German sources. 12. TNA, FO 371/5578, Minutes by P. Dean, 23 October 1946, responding to telegram from Strang, and minute by N. Reddaway (COGA), October 1946, cited by J.E. Farquharson, ‘The British Occupation of Germany 1945–46: A Badly Managed Disaster Area?’ German History, 11, 3 (2003), 316–38, 331. 13. LAS, Abt. 320 Segeberg, Nr.175, Landrat to KRO, Bad Segeberg, 30 August 1947. The incident took place 19 August. 14. Annan, Changing Enemies, p. 156. 15. CAC, ALBU 10, ‘Handbook for Kreis Resident Officers’. 16. Ibid., pp. 50–1; cf. General Robertson’s recognition in 1948 [undated] that ‘there is very little possibility of our staying indefinitely in Germany as a benevolent colonial authority’, cited by Jürgensen, ‘Re-Educating Germany’, p. 243.

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17. CAC, ALBU 10, ‘Handbook for Kreis Resident Officers’, p. 48; cf. section on ‘Political Life’. 18. Ibid., p. 51. 19. LHCMA, WALSH, IV/1/9, ‘Displaced and Refugee Persons in Occupied Countries’, 2 April 1944. The document sets out the distinction between Refugees and Displaced Persons. 20. LHCMA, WALSH, IV/1/7, ‘SHAEF Post Hostilities Handbook’, Paton Walsh to A/Chief Legal Division, 25 November 1944. 21. Annan, Changing Enemies, p. 147. 22. G.K.A. Bell, ‘More Than Conquerors’, in The Church and Humanity, p. 243. His sermon was in San Francisco Cathedral, 27 May 1945. 23. P. Meehan, A Strange Enemy People: Germans Under the British 1945–1950 (London, 2001), p. 42. 24. R. Torriani, ‘Nazis into Germans’, p. 143, and pp. 132–45. 25. ‘G.V.B’, ‘Government By Indirect Control’, British Zone Review, 1, 20, 22 June 1946, pp. 1–2. Certain areas were by contrast subject to direct control, including restitutions, reparations, demilitarisation, Military Government Courts and Displaced Persons. 26. Torriani, ‘Nazis into Germans’, p. 137. Cites L. Kettenacker, ‘Britische Besatzungsherrschaft im Spannungsverhältnis von Planung und Realität’, in Birke and Mayring, Britische Besatzung, p. 18. 27. LAS, Abt. 320 Eutin, Bd. 3, Memorandum, G.B. King, HQ Mil Gov L/K Eutin 224 HQ CCG/BAOR to Kreisverwaltung Eutin, 1 November 1946 enclosing copy letter of 18 September 1946; Oberkreisdirektor’s reply, 9 November 1946. 28. LHCMA, WALSH, IV/1/17, Office of Deputy Military Governor memorandum to all civilian members of CCG, September 1946. 29. CAC, ALBU 12, 26/7, Albu to Mrs. Albu, 2 July 1946. 30. CAC, ALBU 12, 26/7, Albu to Mrs. Albu, 3 August 1946. This exchange shows a further irony of Britain’s desire to pursue the German Generals. 31. LHCMA, WALSH, IV/1/II, ‘Second Report on Select Committee on Estimates Session, 1945–46’; cf. Meehan, A Strange Enemy People, p. 61, gives British total as 24,785, USA as 5,008; Farquharson, ‘The British Occupation’, p. 327; in 1946, 10,000 British staff performed duties carried out in the US Zone by the Army; cf. TNA, FO 800/466, ‘Maintenance of British occupation forces in Germany’, FO to Washington, 12 October 1947. Total costs for Armed Forces, CCG (BE) and FO’s German Section were estimated at £81.016 million for 1947, reducing to £56.066 million in 1948. The vast majority of this budget decrease was on military expenditure, CCG’s costs only fell from £19.25 to £15.5 million. 32. CAC, ALBU 12, 25/5, Mayhew to Albu, 12 December 1949. In 1947, after Bevin incorporated it into the FO, German Section’s staff totals alone were 1,700; cf. Kirkpatrick, Inner Circle, p. 213. 33. CAC, ALBU 10, Handbook for KRO [added emphasis]. 34. WAC, E3/275/1, ‘Random Notes from the Mail No.14’, 18 March 1946. ‘Lord, send us the Fifth Reich soon, the Fourth is the same as the Third.’

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35. WAC, E3/275/1, ‘Random Notes from the Mail No.13’, 13 March 1946; ‘Evidence on the German Audience for British Broadcasts’, 6 June 1946; 6 July 1946. The January–June 1946 correspondence population sample sizes were 1,653–3,412. 36. BZR, 4 January 1947, p. 18. 37. WAC, E3/55/2, ‘Audience Information: Public Opinion – The German attitude towards the British’, 18 October 1949. 38. CAC, STRANG, 4/1, Jebb to Strang, I January 1939, and on his retirement, 18 November 1953; Gladwyn, The Memoirs, p. 40. 39. Jordan, Conditions of Surrender, p. 149. Of Germany’s estimated 5.25 million war deaths, 500,000 were civilians. Great Britain’s losses were 386,000, of which 62,000 were civilians. 40. W. Strang, Home and Abroad (London, 1956), pp. 226–32. 41. Ibid., cf. pp. 123, 232. 42. TNA, FO 945/21, ‘Notes on visit to British Zone in Germany’, Oliver Harvey’s 25 March 1946 report mentions nothing about the refugees despite describing food as ‘the principal anxiety of everyone we saw’. 43. TNA, FO 945/21, ‘Sir William Strang’s Tour of the British Zone’, Strang to Bevin, 23 April 1946. The tour took place 16–21 March. 44. Ibid. 45. CAC, STRANG, 3/3. Woodward handwritten comments to a subsequent redraft of Home and Abroad, 12 May 1956. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. CAC, STRANG, 3/5. Strang, formerly PUS for Germany at the FO, reviewed Kirkpatrick’s memoirs. He also reviewed Woodward’s ‘official history’, Daily Telegraph, 10 August 1961. 49. CAC, STRANG, 3/7. Strang’s book review appeared in Public Administration, spring 1963. 50. Annan, Changing Enemies, p. 145. 51. Ibid., p. 157, cited by Marshall, The Origins of Post-War German Politics, pp. 90–104. ‘We are not a negro people’. 52. Idem. 53. Torriani, ‘Nazis into Germans’, p. 143. 54. See quotation introducing Chapter 2. 55. Kirkpatrick, Inner Circle, pp. 217–18. 56. CAC, ALBU 12, 26/7, Albu to Mrs. Albu, 16 May 1946. 57. CAC, ALBU 12, 26/7, Albu to Mrs. Albu, ‘Eckendorf’ [Eckernförde], SchleswigHolstein, 14 July 1946. 58. British Zone Review, ‘The New Regional Commissioners – They will be in charge of civil government’, 1, 18, 25 May 1946, pp. 12–13. 59. Ibid. 60. TNA, FO 1006/286, Landesregierung SH to de Crespigny, 26 October 1947; Lüdemann to Regional Commissioner SH, 17 January 1948. 61. CAC, ALBU 12, 26/7, Albu to Mrs. Albu, 14 August 1946.

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62. CAC, HYND, 3/15, ‘Hynd Gives an Answer to German Problems’, Hamburger Echo, 24 July 1948. Bevin moved Hynd to the Ministry of Pensions. 63. Overy, Why the Allies Won, pp. 326–7. 64. A.S. Milward, The Economic Effects of the Two World Wars on Britain, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 1984), pp. 16, 60, 72. 65. I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption 1939–1955, repr. edn (Oxford, 2004), pp. 38–9. 66. BZR, ‘A.A.S’, ‘Reconstructing German Economy: A Modern Labour of Hercules’, vol. 1, 8, 5 January 1946, pp. 10–11. 67. LHCMA, WALSH, IV/1/11, ‘Second Report from the Select Committee on Estimates – Session 1945–46, The Control Office for Germany and Austria (Expenditure in Germany)’ (London, 1946), p. 5. 68. TNA, CAB 130/14, ‘Anglo-American Discussions on Germany’. These took place 30 October–10 December; cf. Cairncross, The Price of War, p. 151. 69. Cairncross, idem. 70. LHCMA, WALSH, IV/1/11, ‘Select Committee on Estimates’, p. 5. Salaries and Allowances under Subhead A2 – £8,040,000, Transport – £850,000, Uniforms, clothing and outfit allowances – £730,000. 71. ‘Select Committee on Estimates’, pp. 4–6. 72. Ibid., p. 19. 73. Cairncross, The Price of War, p. 230. 74. Ibid., pp. 147–8. He cites TNA, CAB 128/5, CM(46)25, 18 March 1946. 75. Ibid., p. 234. 76. B. Eichengreen, ‘Institutions and Economic Growth: Europe after World War II’, in N. Crafts and G. Toniolo, Economic Growth in Europe since 1945 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 55. 77. ‘Select Committee on Estimates’, pp. 4–6, 10. 78. Cairncross, The Price of War. This remains the most comprehensive analysis of British reparations policy. 79. Ibid., pp. 149–50; cf. Farquharson, The Western Allies, pp. 32–3. 80. Ibid., p. 232. 81. Harrison, The Economics of World War II, pp. 268–301. 82. ‘Select Committee on Estimates’, p. 9. 83. Ibid., p. 10. 84. Ibid., pp. 14–15. 85. Ibid., p. 15. 86. Marshall, ‘German Attitudes to British Military Government’, p. 667. 87. ‘Select Committee on Estimates’, p. 15. I am grateful to Richard Bessel for his point that Britain imprisoned fewer Germans per capita than the other occupying powers. 88. Ibid., p. 17. 89. Farquharson, ‘The British Occupation’, p. 328. 90. ‘Select Committee on Estimates’, p. 17. 91. Farquharson, ‘The British Occupation’, pp. 330–2.

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284 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

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TNA, FO 1006/20, Minutes of DMG meeting, 4 April 1949. B. Pimlott, Hugh Dalton (London, 1995), p. 480–2, pp. 477. Cairncross, The Price of War, p. 177. W. Carlin, ‘Economic Reconstruction in Western Germany, 1945–55: The Displacement of “Vegetative Control”’, in Turner, Reconstruction, pp. 67–92. I. Connor, ‘The Refugees and the Currency Reform’, in Turner, Reconstruction, pp. 301–24. Ibid., especially, pp. 306–9. I. Connor, Refugees and Expellees in Post-War Germany (Manchester, 2007), p. 43. See Farquharson, ‘“Emotional but Influential”’; Frank, ‘The New Morality’. See Lord Cranborne’s response to Bell’s speech, cols. 750–5, Hansard, HL, ‘Bombing Policy’, 9 February 1944, cols. 738–55. G.K.A. Bell, ‘Memoir’, in Canon A.E. Baker, William Temple and His Message (Harmondsworth, 1946), p. 32. Simpson, Human Rights, p. 456. LAM, Bell Papers, LC174ff, ‘Report of the Lambeth Conference: Plenary Session’, 27 July–5 August 1948, 28 July, p. 26. Ibid., 27 July 1948, p. 32. Frank, ‘The New Morality’, p. 253. The experience left him more and more disturbed about the decline in the public conscience. Ibid., p. 34. Bell does not mention refugees and expellees – only Displaced Persons – a reference probably intended to cover the generic phenomenon of uprooted peoples. Torriani, ‘Nazis into Germans’, p. 223. Graham-Dixon. ‘A “Moral Mandate” for Occupation’. TNA, FO 371/39093-C257/257/8, ‘The Regeneration of Germany’. Ibid., Harvey’s note, 1 January 1944. The Lord Bishop of Chichester, ‘The Church in Relation to International Affairs’, International Affairs, 25, 4 (October 1949), 405–14, 410. A.C. Gloucester, ‘The Christian Attitude to the War and the Peace’, Quarterly Review, 283, 563 (January 1945), 16–28, 26. K. Martin, ‘Morals and Politics’, New Statesman and Nation (15 June 1946), 423. R. Smith, ‘Concerning Germany’, Quarterly Review (October 1946), 504–20, 520. ‘W.A.B’, ‘Christianity and the German: The Hard Road That Must Be Walked’, BZR, 10 May 1947; p. 4. ‘The Clergy’s Attitude to German Problems’, BZR, 8 June 1946, cited by Torriani, ‘Nazis into Germans’, p. 236. E.H. Robertson, Unshakeable Friend: George Bell and the German Churches (London, 1995), pp. 116–18. ‘R.L.S’, ‘Religion’s role in a new Germany’, BZR, 10 November 1945, p. 3. J.B. Hynd, ‘A Christmas Message – from The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to The Commander in Chief’, BZR, 21 December 1946, p. 3 [my added emphasis].

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120. TNA, FO 945/180, Robertson to Street, 12 June 1946, cited by T. Lawson, ‘The Church of England and the German Past, Present, and Future: A Case Study in the International Search for a Usable Past’, in G. Schaffer and M. Riera (eds.), The Lasting War: Society and Identity in Britain, France and Germany after 1945 (Basingstoke, 2008) p. 199. 121. See ‘Religion in Germany Today’, BZR, 29 November 1947, pp. 1, 6; ‘E.H.R’ [Edwin Robertson], ‘The Church in German Life: Work of Religious Affairs Branch’, BZR, 19 February 1949, pp. 1–2. 122. LAM, Fisher Papers, ff. 187–95, A.S. Duncan-Jones to Archbishop Fisher, 13 June 1947. He also visited Flensburg as guest of de Crespigny, SH’s Regional Commissioner, to discuss the Danish minorities problem in South Slesvig. 123. G. Fisher, ‘Archbishop of Canterbury’s Visit to Zone’, BZR, 28 December 1948, pp. 6–7. Fisher’s address was delivered in Hamburg on 29 November 1948. ‘Borstal’ is defined in Chambers English Dictionary as ‘an establishment for the detention of young adult delinquents’. 124. Idem. 125. TNA, FO 800/466, Memorandum, Pakenham to Bevin with handwritten note, 23 June 1947, and minute dated 26 June 1947 from Pierson Dixon stating paper withdrawn after meeting with Bevin that day. 126. F. Pakenham, Avowed Intent: An Autobiography of Lord Longford (London, 1994) p. 3. 127. Ibid., pp. 104–5. 128. Pakenham, Baron, ‘Why are we in Germany?’ BZR, 25 October 1947, pp. 1–3. Speech to Foreign Press Association, London, September 1947. 129. TNA, FO 1006/98, ‘Christianity and Politics’, Pakenham address at ChristianAlbrechts-Universität, Kiel, 19 September 1947. 130. Rhein-Ruhr Zeitung, article [undated] cited in ‘German Opinion’, BZR, 25 October 1947, p. 15. 131. Torriani, ‘Nazis into Germans’, pp. 243–45. Cites TNA, FO 1049/1282, Kirkpatrick to Steel, 5 May 1948. 132. P. Stanford, Lord Longford: A Life (London, 1994), pp. 218–19. 133. Robertson, Unshakeable Friend, pp. 122–3. 134. Spotts, The Churches, p. 70. 135. E.H. Robertson, ‘The Church in German Life – Work of Religious Affairs Branch’, p. 1; cf. ‘Remembrances of the Work to the Religious Affairs Branch 1947–1949’, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, 2 (1989), 59–63. 136. Robertson, ‘The Church in German Life’, p. 1. 137. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.645, ‘Resolution (revised German text)’ on Conference on German refugee questions’, Hamburg, 22–25 February 1949. 138. Ibid., Die Aufgabe der Kirche, ‘Reports and Recommendations’. 139. Idem. 140. Idem., ‘jede grosse und kleine Tat der gegenseitigen menschlichen Hilfe zu suchen und zu fördern’.

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141. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.645, Elfan Rees, Flüchtlingsabteilung des Oekumenischen Rates der Kirchen to Lüdemann, 7 April 1949. 142. Nurser, For All Peoples and All Nations, pp. 163–4. 143. P. Steinbach and J. Tuchel (eds.), Lexikon des Widerstandes (Munich, 1994), pp. 126–7. 144. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.645 – Nr.1167 Vw.1, Lüdemann to D. Niemöller, Brüderrat der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland, 30 April 1949; I/Mo/Pe/Q3/660/49 – Niemöller to Lüdemann, 8 March 1949. 145. Author’s meeting with the Revd Edwin Robertson, London, 26 February 2006. Robertson was Head of CCG’s Religious Affairs Branch, 1947–9. 146. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4916, Oberpräsident der Provinz Schleswig-Holstein to Regierungspräsidenten, Landräte and Oberbürgermeister, ‘Welfare of Refugees’, 18 October 1945. 147. Institute of Education, German Educational Reconstruction [hereinafter GER], 8/4/8, 20173, de Jonge [Field Officer for Germany] to Milch, 30 December 1946. 148. TNA, FO 1006/98, ‘Regional Commissioner’s Speech at Combined Churches’ Congress, Schleswig-Holstein’, 20 August 1946. 149. TNA, FO 1006/92, Memo Social Welfare Section, Public Health Branch to de Crespigny, ‘Parcels received from England responding to Regional Commissioner’s Appeal’, 7 January 1947. 16,081 items of clothing were collected 15 November–14 December. 3,409 were distributed to Kiel, Rendsburg, Neumünster and Plön. 150. TNA, FO 1006/92, de Crespigny to the Diocese of Sheffield, 24 December 1946; de Crespigny to Bishop of Sheffield, 20 December 1946; Sheffield to de Crespigny, 26 December 1946. 151. GER, 8/4/7, Friends Relief Service [hereinafter FRS], 25785, FRS to Hirsch [GER], 25 July 1947. 152. TNA, FO 1006/92, Gwynne, Religious Affairs Branch, to de Crespigny, enclosing ‘Directive to Religious Affairs Regional Officers’, INTR/73111/RA, 28 December 1946. 153. Ibid. 154. TNA, FO 1006/28, KRO Monthly Report, Kiel Group HQ, 25 February 1948. 155. Ibid. 156. TNA, FO 1006/28, KRO Monthly Report, Kiel Group HQ, 23 March 1948. 157. TNA, FO 1006/62, KRO Monthly Report S/K Kiel, 26 April 1948. Crawley in Sussex adopted Jacobi Evangelische Kirche, an early example of the ‘twinning’ of German and British towns. 158. TNA, FO 1006/628, ‘Notes of Meeting of Regional Commissioner with Landesbischof Halfmann’, 16 April 1948. 159. TNA, FO 1006/70, KRO Monthly Report L/K Rendsburg, 26 September 1948. 160. TNA, FO 1030/119, Robertson to Bevin, HQ/11102/6/2/Sec, 26 February 1949. Refers to attached Memorandum, ‘The Refugees and the Demographic Problem presented by Western Germany’. No FO response is recorded.

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161. Ibid. 162. M.J. Frank, ‘Working for the Germans: British Voluntary Societies and the German Refugee Crisis, 1945–1950’, Historical Research, 72 (2009), 157–75.

Chapter 4 A region in crisis: Schleswig-Holstein 1. Schieder, Die Vertreibung der deutschen, vol. 1, pp. 1–59, p. 58. 2. Danker and Schwabe, Schleswig-Holstein und der Nationalsozialismus, p. 167. These figures include 338,000 refugees from East Pomerania, 329,600 from East Prussia, 78,000 from Danzig, 80,900 from Poland and 59,700 from Silesia. 3. See Connor, Refugees and Expellees, pp. 8–21; Silesians numbered 2.053 million, East Prussians 1.347 million, Pomeranians 891,000 and East Brandenburgers 131,000; by the Potsdam Conference in July–August 1945, 700,000 to 800,000 Germans had been driven out from the former Sudetenland with similar numbers from Poland. In Poland’s case, this excludes 3.5 million German refugees who fled before the Russian army offensive, first into East Prussia in October 1944, then Silesia, eastern Pomerania, and the Neumark in January 1945, see Naimark, Fires of Hatred, p. 111. 4. Danker and Schwabe, Schleswig-Holstein und der Nationalsozialismus, p. 165; Hinrich Lohse, former Gauleiter and Oberpräsident in Schleswig-Holstein, recruited several SH public officials and NSDAP functionaries to form his occupation administration in the East. 5. Ibid., pp. 140–6. Others included: Dr. Otto Heinrich Drechsler, former Mayor of Lübeck who became General Commissar of Latvia, Hinrich Möller, former Police Director of Flensburg who became Chief of SS and Police for Estonia, and Walter Schroder, formerly Lübeck’s President of Police who became Chief of SS and Police in Latvia. 6. Connor, Refugees and Expellees, pp. 74–5. Protestants made up 89.6 per cent of the 1939 population, Catholics, 3.8 per cent (1939) and 6.8 per cent (1946), this increase is mainly due to expellees and refugees from Silesia and East Prussia; cf. I. Connor, ‘The Churches and the Refugee Problem in Bavaria 1945–49’, Journal of Contemporary History, 20, 3 (July 1985), 399–421, 404. 7. ‘Squeezing a Quart into a Pint Pot’, BZR, 17 August 1946, p. 16. 8. ‘G.T.’, ‘Vocational Training Scheme’, BZR, 26 June 1948, p. 19. 9. M. Frantzioch, Die Vertriebenen: Hemnisse, Antriebskräfte und Wege ihrer Integration in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin, 1987), pp. 218–19. Frantzioch quotes Reichling’s November 1951 statistics, showing 1,329 refugee clothing businesses of more than 10 employees, 43 expellee clothing and 445 textile concerns. 10. Connor, Refugees and Expellees, pp. 29, 35, 45, 79. 11. TNA, FO 1006/95, Asbury to Robertson, 8 March 1949. 12. J.B. Schechtman, European Population Transfers 1939–1945 (Oxford, 1946); M.R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1985). 13. Schieder, Dokumentation der Vertreibung.

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14. A. Bauerkämper, ‘Deutsche Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene aus dem Osten in West – und Osdeutschland und in Österreich am Ende und nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg’, in K. Bade, P.C. Emmer, L. Lucassen 2nd J. Oltmar (eds.), Enzyklopädie Migration in Europa vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Paderborn/Munich/ Vienna/Zürich, 2007). 15. M. Mazower, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’, American Historical Review, 107, 4 (October 2002), 1158–78. 16. Kushner, Remembering Refugees, pp. 15ff. 17. For example, Judt, Postwar, pp. 19–32; M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, 2005). Mann cited no fewer than 36 countries or island groups with continuing ethnic and religious conflicts in 2003. More can now be added, such as Congo, Kenya and Zimbabwe. 18. For example, Benz, Die Vertreibung; R. Schulze (ed.) Zwischen Heimat und Zuhause: Deutsche Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in (West)Deutschland 1945–2000 (Osnabrück, 2001). 19. Typically, Ahonen, After the Expulsion, and Rock and Wolff, Coming Home to Germany? 20. I. Connor, ‘The Churches and the Refugee Problem in Bavaria, 1945–49’, Journal of Contemporary History, 20, 3 (July, 1985), 399–421. 21. M. Krug and K. Mundhenke, Flüchtlinge im Raum Hannover und in der Stadt Hameln 1945–1952 (Hildesheim, 1988). 22. LHCMA, WALSH, II/2/6, ‘Civil Affairs Staff Centre; Syllabus of Regional Instruction – Germany; The Administrative System – Third Series’ CA/6/552. These administrative areas correspond to Federal State or region, province, district of government, county, county borough and parish or ward. 23. See R. Schulze, ‘The German Refugees and Expellees from the East and the Creation of a West German Identity after World War II’, in Siljak and Ther, Redrawing Nations. 24. Buscher, ‘The Great Fear’. 25. A. Lehmann, Im Fremden ungewollt zuhaus: Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in Westdeutschland, 1945–1990 (Munich, 1991). 26. See R.G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (London, 2003), Chapter 3. Moeller frequently cites refugee testimony from Schieder’s Dokumentation der Vertreibung. 27. For example, K.H. Pohl (ed.), Regionalgeschichte heute: Das Flüchtlingsproblem in Schleswig-Holstein nach 1945 (Bielefeld, 1997); R.L Wertz, Die Vertriebenen in Schleswig-Holstein: Aufnahme und Eingliederung, rev. edn (Kiel, 1988). Earlier German historiography on SH is not discussed here, e.g. B.G. Lattimore, Jr., The Assimilation of German Expellees into the West German Polity since 1945: A Case Study of Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein (The Hague, 1974). 28. Reparationen, Sozialprodukt, Lebensstandard: Versuch einer Wirtschaftsbilanz, Nr.3, Part 2 (Bremen, 1948), see tables pp. 12, 14, 17 and map, p. 13. At 1 April 1947, Schleswig-Holstein’s total was around 1 million and Lower Saxony, 1.8 million. Only Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the Soviet Zone had a higher concentration

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29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

289

of refugees and expellees, with 49 to every 100 inhabitants, and with SH, was the only other region to double its rural population from 1939–October 1946. Of other British Zone Länder, Lower Saxony’s share was 36 per cent, North Rhine-Westphalia’s 13 per cent, Hamburg’s 7 per cent. Ibid., p. 17; cf. Monthly Statistical Bulletin of the Control Commission of Germany (British Element), 2, 5 (May 1947), p. 7. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, Nachlaß Hermann Lüdemann, C3187, H. Lüdemann, Die Not eines Landes: Denkschrift über Schleswig-Holstein, 1948. TNA, FO 1006/288, Memorandum from Major-General W.H.A. Bishop to Karl Arnold, Minister President North Rhine-Westphalia, 15 June 1949: ‘Military Government Instruction with regard to the acceptance in Land North Rhine/Westphalia of Refugees entering Land Schleswig-Holstein’, file refs. 29A and 29B. For example, Connor, Refugees and Expellees; Frantzioch, Die Vertriebenen; D. von der Brelie-Lewien, H. Grebing, R. Schulze (eds.), Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte: Bilanzierung der Forschung und Perspektiven für künftige Forschungsarbeit (Hildesheim, 1987); M. Schwartz, Vertriebene und ‘Umsiedlerpolitik’: Integrationskonflikte in den deutschen Nachkriegs-Gesellschaften und die Assimilationsstrategien in der SBZ/DDR 1945–1961 (Munich, 2004). For example, A. Heyer, Aufnahme und Eingliederung der Heimatvertriebenen und Flüchtlinge in ehemaligen Kreis Eckernförde (Kiel, 1987); S. Schier, Die Aufnahme und Eingliederung von Flüchtlingen und Vertriebenen in der Hansestadt Lübeck: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchung für die Zeit nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg bis zum Ende der 50er Jahre (Lübeck, 1982). K. Hupp, Als die Flüchtlinge nach Kiel kamen: ein Gefüge von Bildern und Szenen lebendiger Erinnerungen an Hungerjahre und Integration (Husum, 2000); K. Papke, Vertrieben aus Pommern – neue Heimat Schleswig-Holstein: Erinnerungen 1944–1956 (Kiel, 2001); W. Diercks (ed.), Flüchtlingsland Schleswig-Holstein: Erlebnisberichte vom Neuanfang (Heide, 1997). Herrmann and Pohl, Flüchtlinge in Schleswig-Holstein nach 1945. M. Oddey and T. Riis (eds.), Zukunft aus Trümmern: Wiederaufbau und Städtebau in Schleswig-Holstein nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Kiel, 2000), Chapters 1–5. Krause, Flucht. See Danker and Schwabe, Schleswig-Holstein und der Nationalsozialismus, Chapter 7; S. Hübner’s essay on refugee housing construction during the Nazizeit in Oddey and Riis (eds.), Zukunft aus Trümmern, pp. 272–87; also, K. Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, repr. edn (New York, 2000). H. Grieser, ‘Forschung zur Vertriebenenproblematik nach 1945: Schwerpunkte und Desiderate’, in Pohl, Regionalgeschichte heute, pp. 67–79, p. 69. K. Jürgensen, Die Briten in Schleswig-Holstein 1945–1949 (Neumünster, 1989); Birke and Mayring, Britische Besatzung. This was followed by K. Jürgensen, Die Gründung des Landes Schleswig-Holstein: Der Aufbau der demokratischen Ordnung in SchleswigHolstein während der britischen Besatzungszeit 1945–1949 (Neumünster, 1998). Jürgensen, Die Briten, pp. 34–5. Photographs are pp. 121–2.

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42. For example, WAC, E3/54, ‘Audience Research: German Listening Panel Reports 1948/49’; E3/55/2 ‘Audience Research German Service, File 1B (1949)’; E3/275/1, 2 and 3 ‘Germany Audience Research Reports’; E1/766/2 ‘Listening to Allied Broadcasts’. 43. TNA, FO 1050/1135 ‘Tripartite Working Party on German Refugees’, Appendix C to TWPR/P (49)3, 25 January 1949. 44. B. Marshall, ‘German Attitudes to British Military Government’, Journal of Contemporary History, 15, 4 (October 1980), 655–84, 655. 45. Ibid., p. 661. 46. For example, TNA, FO 1006/344, ‘Black Market, 1946–1947’; FO 1006/382, ‘Black Market, vol. I, 1947–1948’; FO 1005/383, ‘Black Market, vol. II, 1948– 1949’; FO 1006/308, ‘Public Health Policy 1946/47’; FO 1006/497 ‘Public Health – Sanitation/ Vermin Destruction, 1945–1948’. 47. See TNA, FO 1006/285 and FO 1006/286, ‘Re-adjustment of the population vol. I: 1947–48’, and ‘vol. II: 1948–49’; FO 1006/287, FO 1006/288, ‘Operation “Caravan” (influx of refugees), vol. I: 1947–1948’, ‘vol. II: 1948–1949’. 48. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4889, Memorandum, Brig. G.P. Henderson, 312 (P) Det. Mil Gov to Oberpräsident für die Provinz Schleswig-Holstein, 29 November 1945. 49. von Oppen, Documents on Germany, p. 89. 50. TNA, FO 1052/324, ‘Third Report on Operation Swallow’, Mil.Gov.Det.709 (R) to Hannover HQ, 30 April 1946. 51. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4884, Memorandum ‘Health’, Influx German HQ to Mil. Gov.Det.508(R), Lübeck, 2 April 1946. 52. Stadtarchiv Kiel [hereinafter StaK], 33689, Minutes of meeting, Hauptamt Kiel, Ausschuß für soziale Verwaltung und Flüchtlingsfragen, 13 March 1946. 53. TNA, FO 1052/324, ‘Third Report on Operation Swallow’. 54. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4884, Memorandum, ‘Influx’, German HQ to Mil Gov 508, 8 May 1946. 55. TNA, FO 1052/324, Memorandum ‘Refugees- loss of cash’, Mil Gov Det.504/720 Hannover, 19 March 1946. 56. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.643, Die Flüchtlings-Notlage in Schleswig-Holstein (Bad Segeberg, 1946). 57. TNA, FO 1052/324, ‘Third Report on Operation Swallow’. 58. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4547, ‘Reports on Swallow Transports 12–15’ and ‘15–19,’ 8 Corps Dispersal Point Camp to Influx German HQs, Lübeck, 13 April 1946. The first report, signed by British and German officials, tells of two women whose health checks on arrival revealed stab wounds sustained from Polish civilians who boarded their train to loot expellees’ possessions. 59. TNA, FO 1006/711, DMG to Political Division, ‘Refugee Saturation in Schleswig-Holstein’, 8 June 1946. 60. TNA, FO 1006/282, de Crespigny to Robertson, ‘Refugees’, 13 July 1946. 61. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4889, Note from Amt für Volkswohlfahrt, 23 and 30 July 1946; cf. FO 1006/282, Memo CoS to Secretariat HQ Mil.Gov. Schleswig-Holstein, ‘Refugee Influx-Schleswig-Holstein’, 29 July 1946.

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62. TNA, FO 1006/282, Memorandum, DRC to Secretariat, ‘Redistribution of Refugee Population in the Region’; TNA, FO 1006/10, Minutes of DRC’S meeting REGCOM/M(47)3, 21 January 1947. 63. von Oppen, (ed.), Documents on Germany, p. 90. 64. Frank, ‘Britain and the Transfer of the Germans’, pp. 339–40. By late January 1947, 1,155,887 Germans had been transferred from Poland out of the 1.5 million expellees Britain was formally obliged to accept under Operation ‘Swallow’. 65. Connor, Refugees and Expellees, p. 30. 66. Ibid., pp. 33–5; he later quotes 478 refugee camps (Landesverband SchleswigHolstein statistics) at November 1949, p. 103. 67. For example, Carstens, Leben im Flüchtlingslager; U. Carstens, Die Flüchtlingslager der Stadt Kiel: Sammelunterkünfte als desintegrierender Faktor der Flüchtlingspolitik (Marburg, 1992). 68. Carstens, Leben im Flüchtlingslager. 69. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.1093, Kieler Nachrichten, 28 December 1949 accounts for 494 camps in 21 Kreise; cf. U. Carstens, ‘Wie lange dauert ein Krieg, wenn er zu Ende ist?’, in G. Paul, U. Danker, P. Wulf (eds.), Geschichtsumschlungen: Sozial – und kulturgeschichtliches Lesebuch Schleswig-Holstein 1846–1948 (Bonn, 1996), p. 275. Carstens suggests that by April 1950 there were 728 ‘Kriegsfolgenhilfelager’ [KFH-Lager] in SH occupied by 127,756 people. 70. StaK, Nachlaß Diekmann [hereinafter DIEKMANN], Bd. 20, H. Lüdemann, Aufbau im Flüchtlingsland (Kiel, 1948) pp. 8, 10; see also LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4917. 71. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr. 1093, Kieler Nachrichten, ‘in Lagern vegetierenden Menschen’. 72. TNA, FO 1006/53, KRO Monthly Report S/K Lübeck June 1949, 24 June 1949. 73. TNA, FO 1006/53, KRO Monthly Reports S/K Lübeck April 1949, 23 April 1949 and [undated] February 1949. 74. TNA, FO 1006/74, KRO Monthly Report L/K Süderdithmarschen July 1948, 24 July 1948; FO 1006/67, KRO Monthly Report L/K Segeberg for period ending 25 April 1949. Although the 4,763 are described as ‘refugees’, it is likely that they were expellees. The terminology used by Allied and German authorities 1945–49 ‘was neither consistent nor uniform’, Connor, Refugees and Expellees, pp. 20–3, p. 22. 75. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.4992, Bericht der Prüfung der Flüchtlingslager im Kreise Süderdithmarschen, 6–14 July 1948, July 1948 [undated]. 76. TNA, FO1006/54, KRO Monthly Report L/K Eutin December 1948, 23 December 1948. The documentary maker was Deutsche Dokumentar Filmgesellschaft. 77. TNA, FO 1032/2174, Telegrams FO to CCG, 5 October 1947; CCG to FO, 8 October 1947; RC (SH) to CCG 16 December 1947. Jones visited 18–20 September. 78. TNA, FO 1006/93, ‘Verbatim Notes of Speech by Deputy Military Governor to Staff on 31.7.47’.

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79. TNA, FO 1006/98, undated speech notes 1947; ‘Verbatim Report of Regional Commissioner’s Talk to Staff’, Empire Cinema, Kiel, 14 November 1947. 80. TNA, FO 1006/93, Robertson to de Crespigny, 6 June 1947. 81. TNA, FO 1006/93, de Crespigny to Robertson 12 June 1947; Henderson to de Crespigny [undated] June 1947 [original emphasis]; transcript de Crespigny’s broadcast, ‘Problems of Military Government in Land Schleswig-Holstein’, 26 June, 194; cf. unedited version 12 June 1947. 82. TNA, CAB 195/4; CAB 195/5; CAB 195/6. Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook’s minutes for 1946, 1947 and 1948 show there were no specific agenda items or mentions in the Cabinet of refugee problems in Germany during tabled discussions on Germany. It is unlikely that unavailable minutes for CM(47)51 to CM(47)70 (25 May–11 August 1947) when Brook was absent through illness, or CM(48)55 to CM(48)66 (29 July–25 October 1948) would reveal any such discussions. 83. TNA, FO 1006/93, de Crespigny to Pakenham, 10 June 1947. He describes the refugee problem as ‘the greatest which we have to face in my Region’. 84. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.644, MUA figures, 18 December 1947; cf. Reparationen, Sozialprodukt, No.3, p. 12, estimating SH’s share of expellees/refugees at 47 per cent at 1 April 1947. 85. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.492, ‘Flüchtlinge in Schleswig-Holstein’, 2 November 1949. Refugees total was 1,059,348. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.457, ‘Geesthacht am stärksten übervölkert’, Kieler Nachrichten, 11 October 1949; cf. TNA, FO 1039/119, ‘Resident Population and Refugees – Appx ‘A’, shows 38 per cent ratio of refugees to population in SH at September 1948. 86. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.457, ‘Geesthacht am stärksten übervölkert’, Kieler Nachrichten, 11 October 1949. 87. Germany: Report of the British High Commissioner, 1 October – 31 December 1950, No. 1 (London/Bielefeld, 1951). Lower Saxony’s 49.7 per cent increase ranked next highest. 88. TNA, FO 1006/711, Memorandum Stebbing to CoS, ‘Population Statistics’, 7 June 1946. 89. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4889, Minutes of German Welfare Committee [Volkswohlfahrtausschuß] conversation with Mil.Gov.Det. 508(R), 22 March 1946. 90. TNA, FO 1006/282, ‘Comparative Population and Housing Figures for the British Zone’. Figures from Housing Division, 4 July 1946. 91. For example, Frank, ‘Britain and the Transfer of the Germans’, pp. 320–40; G.D. Cohen, ‘Between Relief and Politics: Refugee Humanitarianism in Occupied Germany, 1945–1946’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43, 3 (2008), 437–50. This special issue of the journal, devoted to relief work post-1945, helps redress this imbalance, citing Matthew Frank’s article in Historical Research, ‘Working for the Germans: British Voluntary Societies and the German Refugee Crisis, 1945–1950’, see J. Reinisch, ‘Introduction: Relief in the Aftermath of War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43, 3 (2008), 371–404. 92. TNA, FO 1006/27, KRO Monthly Report Kiel HQ, 27 October 1947.

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93. TNA, FO 1006/32, KRO Monthly Report Lübeck HQ, 24 July 1947. 94. TNA, FO 1006/94, Lüdemann to de Crespigny, 29 August 1947. 95. TNA, FO 1006/287, Damm to Sir James Acheson, received 3 December 1947. Stebbing’s message received 27 November. 96. TNA, FO 1006/287, Minutes of meeting re: Operation ‘Caravan’ to discuss Lübeck Conference Agenda, 12 December 1947; cf. V. Gollancz, Germany Revisited, p. 18. De Crespigny already had told Gollancz that incoming refugee numbers fleeing the Russian Zone were ‘not less than 700 a week’. 97. TNA, FO 1006/288, Bishop to Military Governor/C-in-C, 25 February 1949. 98. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.645, Lüdemann to Asbury, 26 January 1949; TNA, FO 1006/288, Asbury to Diekmann, 27 October 1948; FO 1006/288, Diekmann to Asbury 16 October 1948. 99. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.645, Lüdemann to Asbury, 26 January 1949. 100. TNA, FO 1006/62, KRO Monthly Report S/K Kiel, 23 November 1948; FO 1006/20, Minutes of DRC’s Conference for KROs, 10 December 1948; FO 1006/60, KRO Monthly Report Stormarn, 24 December 1948; FO 1006/76, KRO Monthly Report Pinneberg, 24 November 1948. 101. TNA, FO 1006/288, Bishop to Asbury, 15 June 1949. 102. Krause, Flucht. 103. A. Herzig, ‘Die Flüchtlingsproblematik als “normales” Minderheitenproblem? Einige grundsätzliche Überlegungen’, in Pohl, Regionalgeschichte heute, pp. 63–5. 104. TNA, FO 1006/149 Meeting Asbury and Lüdemann, 30 July 1948. 105. Cf. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4444, Report from Stadtkreisverwaltung Lübeck, 15 January 1948, mentions 120,000 evacuees; Landkreisverwaltung Eiderstedt, 1 December 1948 mentions 100,000; cf. Landesminister Damm to Mayor of Hamburg, 20 November 1948 – estimates 92,000 evacuees in SH at 1 September 1948. 106. TNA, FO 1006/711 Stebbing memorandum of 7 June 1946. This combined estimated figure was 158,000; FO 1006/282, Stebbing to Secretariat ‘Accommodation for Evacuees’, 2 August 1946. 107. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4438, ‘Entschliessung zur Aufnahme der Evakuierten und Ausgebombten’, 25 and 26 August 1949. 108. TNA, FO 1006/12, DRC Conference REGCOM/M(48)6, 17 February 1948. 109. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.643, Landrat Auhagen to Amt für Volkswohlfahrt, Schleswig, 8 July 1946; cf. Reparationen, Sozialprodukt, Nr 3, p. 97. Statistics for 1946 estimated demand for homes in the four Zones – 3 million (British Zone), 2.2 million (US), 1.7 million (Soviet), 300,000 (French) and 500,000 in Berlin. 110. StaK, 34153, ‘Refugee Accommodation’, Major Close, Comd 909 Mil Gov Det to Oberbürgermeister, Kiel, 22 September 1945. 111. Idem. 112. TNA, FO 1006/97, Minutes of meeting Steltzer and de Crespigny, 15 October 1946. 113. TNA, FO 1006/282, Appx. B, ‘Refugee Redistribution in Schleswig-Holstein’ ref. minute 12525/9/HQ, 24 April 1947; cf. increase from 29 October 1946 to 47 per cent figure at 1 April 1947.

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114. TNA, FO 1006/282, DRC memo, Appendices ‘B’ [average housing space] and ‘C’ ‘Comparative figures indicating cost of refugees in the Länder’, 24 April 1947. 115. LAS, Abt. 605 Nr.492, ‘Die Fläche, Bevölkerung bzw. Abnahme und Wohnlage in Schleswig-Holstein’, 3 November 1949; cf. FO 1006/282, Appx. A, Brief for Regional Commissioner, ‘Comparative Population and Housing Figures for the British Zone,’ 4 July 1946: SH averaged 5.2 sqm. 116. TNA, FO 1006/35, KRO Monthly Reports Flensburg HQ, 25 September 1947 and 25 July 1947. 117. TNA, FO 1006/32, KRO Monthly Report Lübeck HQ, 25 August 1947. 118. TNA, FO 1006/42 KRO Monthly Reports Itzehoe HQ, 25 October and 25 December 1947. 119. TNA, FO 1006/42 KRO Monthly Report Itzehoe HQ, 25 November 1947. 120. TNA, FO 1006/56, KRO Monthly Report L/K Lauenburg, 22 April and 27 May 1948. 121. TNA, FO 1006/93, Lüdemann to Pakenham, 21 June 1947. 122. TNA, FO 1006/63 KRO Monthly Report S/K Kiel, 24 January 1949. 123. TNA, FO 1006/71 KRO Monthly Report L/K Rendsburg 23/12/48–25/1/49. Wohnungsamt memorandum to Landesregierung 12 January 1949. Expellees from east of the Oder-Neisse and refugees from the Russian Zone in Berlin numbered 36.4 per cent of the population at 1 January 1948, TNA, FO 1006/286, ‘Schleswig-Holstein: Zusammensetzung der Bevölkerung’. 124. TNA, FO 1006/286, Zonal Executive Offices CCG to Zonal Office of the Manpower Adviser ‘Refugee Accommodation’ 4 January 1949. 125. LAS, Abt. 320 Eutin Bd.6, for example, the Mercedes-Aktion of November 1945 when 13 cars were confiscated in Kreis Eutin that had neither been paid for nor officially requisitioned nine months later. 126. LAS, Abt. 320 Eutin Bd.5, for example, Frau ‘A.H’ of Eutin, 6 July 1945; Dr. ‘H. P’, Kiel to Landrat Oldenburg, 13 March 1946. 127. LAS, Abt. 320 Eutin Bd.5, for example, Schule Albert Mahlstedtastrasse 28 sequestrated by Landrat ‘L’ for BMG, 9 June 1945, list of items drawn up by ‘C.H.P.H’, 8 October 1946. 128. LAS, Abt. 320 Eutin Bd.5, Landrat to Bürgermeister, Eutin, reported nine requisitioned properties, 15 May 1945; report to Landrat of 12 requisitioned properties 28 July 1945, 13 August 1945. 129. TNA, FO 1006/78, KRO Monthly Report L/K Steinburg, 22 April 1948. 130. TNA, FO 1006/76, Bürgermeister Koehn to KRO L/K Pinneberg, 20 November 1948. 131. TNA, FO 1006/77, KRO Monthly Report L/K Pinneberg, 24 January 1949. 132. TNA, FO 1006/628, Minutes of meeting Asbury and Damm, ‘Requisitioning in Schleswig’, 5 March 1948. 133. TNA, FO 1006/149, Verbatim of meeting Asbury and Lüdemann, 30 July 1948. 134. TNA, FO 1006/71, KRO Monthly Report L/K Rendsburg, 23 December 1948–25 January 1949.

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135. TNA, FO 1006/70, KRO Monthly Report L/K Rendsburg, 26 November–26 December 1948. 136. For example, LAS, Abt. 320 Eckernförde, Nr.2561, Military Government Notice ‘British Zone of Control Schleswig-Holstein and Hansestadt Hamburg’. 137. TNA, FO 1006/99, ‘Points for discussion between Regional Commissioner and Chief of Staff’, S/K Lübeck, 9 & 10 June 1946. 138. LAS, Abt. 761 Nr.4908, Public Health (Social Welfare) to Amt für Volkswohlfahrt, ‘Sonderunterstützung für bedürftige tuberkulöse Patienten’, [undated] June 1946. Acknowledgment by Oberpräsident to HQ Mil. Gov, Kiel, 18 June 1946; cf. FO 1006/92, ‘Report on the Inspection of Public Health throughout Schleswig-Holstein’, 13 November 1946. Note, however, that comparing thirdquarter figures for 1946 with 1947, there was a 40 per cent increase in ‘Notifiable’ typhoid cases throughout the BZ while increases in tuberculosis cases more than doubled, Monthly Statistical Bulletin, 2, 12 (December 1947), p. 26. 139. Ibid. 140. TNA, FO 1006/308, ‘Winter Health Plan 1946/47’, Memo Public Health Section [I A & C Branch], 28 September 1946. 141. TNA, FO 1006/121, ‘Public Health Act 1946–48’. 142. Farquharson, The Western Allies, pp. 27, 30, 58–9. Nor was the condition of agriculture east of the Oder sufficient to generate post-war surpluses. 143. StaK, DIEKMANN, Bd.2, Nr.11, Aufsatz, ‘Der Aufbau der parlamentarischdemokratischen Ordnung in Schleswig-Holstein nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: 1945–1947’ (Kiel, 1967) – (‘vorsichtige Politik, die radikale Änderungen vermied. Gewiß war die Atmosphäre mit Misstrauen erfüllt . . . in einer Mischung von Lethargie und innerer Auflehnung’.) 144. Idem. (Er umriß die Fülle der Aufgabe, bei deren Bewältigung die Militärregierung helfen wolle: Linderung der unermeßlichen Flüchtlingsnot, der furchtbaren Wohnungsnot, Besserung der völlig unzureichenden Nährungsmittel – und Kleiderversorgung’.) 145. TNA, FO 1006/92, Robertson to BZ Regional Commissioners, 18 January 1947. 146. TNA, FO 1006/31, KRO Monthly Report Lübeck HQ, 24 April 1947. 147. GER, 9, SEN 31774/10 and 11, Information Bulletin No. 2 ‘Less Food Since Merger’, 27 February 1947. Hynd stated in the House of Commons: ‘the full scale of rations of 1550 calories for normal consumers in the British zone of Germany is being honoured apart from one or two isolated instances.’ Gollancz commented: ‘This statement is false. It is flatly contradicted by officials of the Control Commission who visit this office, as well as a mass of written evidence . . . Does Mr. Hynd realise the damage he is doing by statements which are greeted with bitter derision by the Germans . . . ?’ 148. TNA, FO 1006/93, de Crespigny to Douglas, 26 March 1947. 149. Connor, Refugees and Expellees, p. 28. 150. StaK, DIEKMANN, Bd.5, Nr.26, from ‘Reden, Originale 1948–1950’, ‘Bericht über die Ernährungslage’, 31 January 1948 and 29 October 1948. The other four reports appeared between March and June, then February 1949.

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151. TNA, FO 1006/628, Notes of Meeting of Regional Commissioner with A. Oertel, L. Boechmann and E. Leyer, 1 March 1948. 152. TNA, FO 1006/412, Brownjohn [pp. Chief of Staff, Berlin] to Asbury, ‘Schleswig-Holstein Grain Position’, 3 May 1948; CCG Food and Agricultural Advisory Staff to RGO, ‘Grain Situation’; 29 April 1948; Minute sheet 28 April 1948; Asbury to Deutsche Gewerkschaft Bund, 14 April 1948; Asbury to Brownjohn, ‘Bread Rationing’, 8 April 1948. Differentials in bread ration scales with SH and Niedersachsen on a lower scale than the other Länder in Bizonia, ended 30 June 1948 following the 3 May SH Landtag Declaration. 153. TNA, FO 1006/412, ‘The Declaration of the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag relating to the Food Situation,’ 3 May 1948; Diekmann to Asbury, ‘Bread Ration in Niedersachsen and Schleswig-Holstein’, 14 May 1948. 154. TNA, FO 1006/282, Minutes of Refugee Resettlement Committee meeting, Kiel, 8 July 1946. 155. TNA, WO 171/8101, Mil. Gov. Report, ‘Food and Agriculture (Appx. F)’, 30 June 1945. 156. TNA, FO 1005/1840, Public Safety Branch ‘Black Market Reports’, February 1946. 157. TNA, FO 1005/1840, ‘Black Market Report’, August and September 1946. 158. TNA, FO 1006/382, Robertson to RCs, ‘Distribution of Food’, 20 May 1947. 159. TNA, FO 1006/382, Robertson to RCs, ‘Black Market Offences’, 12 July 1947; Legal Department to Ministerpräsidenten, 2 August 1947; cf. Legal Dept SH Government to Ministerpräsident, ‘Fighting of black marketing and of illegal building’. Under the Kriegswirtschaftsverordnung the death sentence may be imposed in ‘particularly grave cases’, 2 August 1947. 160. TNA, FO 1006/382, Freeman to REO, SH Region, ‘Distribution of Food’, 4 June 1947. The Food Office was subsequently incorporated into the German Ministry for Food and Agriculture. 161. TNA, FO 1005/1840, ‘Black Market Report’, August, September, October, November, December 1946. 162. TNA, FO 1006/382, ‘Cigarettes confiscated in CCG courts’, RC Memo to Administration Group, Kiel, 15 July 1947. 163. LAS, Abt. 320 Eutin, Bd.5, Landrat to BMG re: ‘H.D’, 11 June 1945; LAS, Abt. 320 Segeberg, Nr.175, Der Landrat to KRO, 30 August 1947. 164. LAS, Abt. 320, Segeberg Nr.175, ‘Stimmungsbericht’, Der Leiter der 20. Polizei- Inspektion to Pol.-Distrikts J in Neumünster, 19 November 1946 and 19 January 1947. 165. LAS, Abt. 320, Nr.175, ‘Monatsbericht über die deutsche Moral’, Der Chef der Polizei Lübeck to HQ CCG S/K Lübeck, 26 February 1947. 166. LAS, Abt. 320, Nr.175, ‘Stimmungsbericht’, Der Leiter der 8. Polizei-Inspektion Bad Segeberg to Chef der Polizeigruppe Lübeck, 18 February 1947. 167. LAS, Abt. 320, Nr.175, ‘Monatsbericht über die deutsche Moral’, Der Leiter der Polizei-Inspektion, Bad Segeberg to Chef der Polizeigruppe Lübeck 21 March 1947. This applied in particular to those wanting to return to former homelands now occupied by Poland.

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168. LAS, Abt. 320, Nr.175, ‘Monatsbericht über die deutsche Moral’, Polizeigruppe Lübeck to Public Safety Group HQ Lübeck 820 HQ CCG , 26 March and 26 April 1947. 169. LAS, Abt. 320, Nr.175, ibid., 26 June, 26 August and 26 September 1947. 170. LAS, Abt. 320, Nr. 175, ibid., 26 November 1947. 171. LAS, Abt. 320, Nr.175, ibid., 25 February 1948. 172. LAS, Abt. 320, Nr.175, ibid., 24 March 1948; cf. an earlier report of ‘incomprehension at the dismantling measures against peaceful firms’, 27 October 1947. 173. LAS, Abt. 320, Nr.175, ibid., 26 May 1948. 174. TNA, FO 1005/1859, ‘Morale Report: Schleswig-Holstein: The Mood of the German People’, 1–27 March 1948. 175. Ibid., 12 March–4 April 1948. 176. TNA, FO 1006/33, KRO Monthly Report Lübeck HQ, 25 March 1948. These reports were usually seen by SH’s Deputy Regional Commissioner and if necessary, the Regional Commissioner. 177. This restriction helped CCG’s control over the coalescing of refugee/expellee groups into larger organised entities. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.1, ‘Licensing and Control of Refugee Organisations’. 178. TNA, FO 1006/41, KRO Monthly Reports Itzehoe Group, 25 January/25 February 1947 [original emphasis]. 179. TNA, FO 1006/285, ‘Re-distribution of Refugee Population in Land SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN’, de Crespigny to Lüdemann, 3 July 1947. 180. Military Government Gazette, vols. 4–35 (CCG [BE], 1947–49). 181. TNA, FO 1006/41, KRO Monthly Report Itzehoe Group, 24 June 1947. 182. TNA, FO 1006/26, KRO Monthly Report, Kiel Group, 24 June 1947. 183. TNA, FO 1006/35, KRO Monthly Report Flensburg HQ, 25 October 1947. 184. TNA, FO 1006/285, Minute sheets, 15 October–12 December 1947. See minute 54, 18 November. 185. TNA, FO 1006/285, Lüdemann to de Crespigny, 26 October 1947 and de Crespigny to Lüdemann, 24 November 1947. 186. TNA, FO 1006/56, KRO Monthly Report L/K Lauenburg, 22 April 1948. 187. TNA, FO 1006/46, KRO Monthly Report L/K Eiderstedt, 24 May 1948. 188. TNA, FO 1006/73, KRO Monthly Report L/K Norderdithmarschen, 23 May 1949. 189. TNA, FO 1006/30, KRO Monthly Report S/K Flensburg, 25 April–24 May 1949.

Chapter 5 Crisis compounded: German reaction and the impact on policy 1. TNA, FO 1006/98, ‘Regional Commissioner’s Talk to Staff’. 2. Both newspapers first published on 3 April 1946.

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3. LAS, Abt. 320 Nr.173, Segeberg, ‘O grausame Ungerechtigkeit’, 8 May 1946. 4. ‘K.K’, Hohwacht, ‘Die Flüchtlinge auf dem Lande’, SHVZ, 14 August 1946, reprinted 21 August. 5. ‘B.N’, Eckernförde, ‘Wer gilt als Flüchtling?’, SHVZ, 7 September 1946. 6. Die Flüchtlinge aus dem Dorfkrug Groβenaspe, ‘Dank an zwei Menschen’, SHVZ, 5 October 1946. 7. ‘H.S’, Preetz, ‘Herabsetzung der Steuerlasten für Flüchtlinge’, SHVZ, 18 January 1947. 8. ‘I.H’, Kiel, ‘Zwei Jahre ohne Frieden’, SHVZ, 10 May 1947. 9. TNA, FO 1006/94, de Crespigny to Robertson, 9 October 1947. 10. K. von Oppen and S. Wolff, ‘From the Margins to the Centre? The Discourse on Expellees and Victimhood in Germany’, in B. Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 193–4; there is a large recent literature on the victim mentality of Germans after the war. Cf. Ahonen, After the Expulsion; Evans, Telling Lies About Hitler; Kettenacker, Ein Volk von Opfern?; Moeller, War Stories. 11. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4890, Lüdemann to Landesdirektor Müthling quoting from Der Tagesspiegel article of 29 January 1948, 15 February 1948. 12. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4890, Lüdemann to Asbury 20 February 1948; Asbury to Lüdemann, 27 February 1948. McNeil, a loyal defender of Bevin’s foreign policy, was described as ‘Bevin’s henchman’, see Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary, pp. 327, 340. 13. ‘Der ganz kleine Brockhaus’, SHVZ, 31 December 1948, also in TNA, FO 1006/631. 14. ‘Flüchtlingsfrage nur durch internationales Handeln losbar’, Kieler Nachrichten, 24 December 1948; copy in TNA, FO 1006/4. 15. TNA, FO 1006/631, ‘Notes of Meeting of the Regional Commissioner with Herr Rickers’, 1 January 1949, and ‘Notes of Meeting of the Regional Commissioner with Herr Ratz’, 3 January 1949. Both Rickers, the editor, and Ratz, the SHVZ licensee and SPD President of the SH Landtag, also interviewed at length, insisted there could be only one possible interpretation of these terms, and that Preller himself would have taken it ‘as a joke’. Asbury replied that in an English newspaper such allusions would be actionable. 16. For example, P.T. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (Ann Arbor MI, 2006), p. 217, Bevin to Marshall December 1947: ‘We must also organize and consolidate the ethical and spiritual forces inherent in this Western civilisation of which we are the chief protagonists.’ 17. TNA, FO 1006/626, Memo Regional Intelligence Officer to Asbury, ‘Telephone conversation Luedemann/Diekmann concerning Refugees’, 15 SchleswigHolstein Intelligence Office, 312 HQ CCG, 8 March 1948. The call was intercepted on 14 February. 18. Ibid. 19. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4917, ‘Selbstmord in der Massenunterkunft’, Lübecker Nachrichten, 26 February 1949.

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20. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.457, ‘Die Vorgeschichte einer Tragödie’, Kieler Nachrichten, 11 October 1949; ‘Ein Vater gibt den Kindern Gift’, Hamburger Abendblatt, 10 October 1949. 21. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4917, ‘Schleswig-Holstein: kleines Land mit grossen Sorgen’, Die Neue Zeitung, 25 May 1949; LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4890, ‘Schleswig-Holstein, das westdeutsche Armenhaus – eine Denkschrift über die Not der Flüchtlinge’, Kieler Nachrichten, 7 May 1949. 22. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4917, ‘So kann es nicht weitergehen’, Flensburger Tageblatt, 15 March 1949. 23. TNA, FO 1006/45, KRO Monthly Report Husum, 23 March 1949. 24. TNA, FO 1006/55, KRO Monthly Report L/K Eutin, 23 July 1949. 25. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4889, Acheson [pp. RC] to Franken [Minister for Labour, Welfare and Public Health], HQ Land Schleswig-Holstein Refugee Committee, 23 October 1947. 26. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4889, Henderson to Damm [Minister for Resettlement and Reconstruction], HQ Land Schleswig-Holstein Refugee Committee, 11 May 1948. 27. TNA, FO 1006/99, Henderson to RGO SH, 25 January 1947. 28. TNA, FO 1006/282, Memorandum Henderson, ‘Refugee Re-distribution,’ 24 April 1947. 29. TNA, FO 1006/98, de Crespigny speech to Landtag, 8 May 1947. 30. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.657, Lüdemann to de Crespigny, 18 July 1947; cf. Abt. 605, Nr.657, ‘Entschließung zur Flüchtlingsfrage’, 7 June 1947. 31. TNA, FO 1006/285, de Crespigny to Lüdemann, 3 July 1947. 32. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4890, Lüdemann to de Crespigny, 29 August 1947. 33. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.657, ‘Entschließung zur sofortigen Entlastung SchleswigHolsteins’, 25 July 1947. Refugee officials attended from Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg and the US Zone. 34. TNA, FO 1006/287, Regional Governmental Office’s Notes from Conference, 24 November 1947. 35. TNA, FO 1006/285, Diekmann to de Crespigny, 1 August 1947. 36. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4890, Landesregierung Schleswig-Holstein to de Crespigny, 29 August 1947. 37. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4890, ‘Neuverteilung der Flüchtlingsbevölkerung im Lande Schleswig-Holstein’; TNA, FO 1006/94, de Crespigny to Lüdemann, ‘Redistribution of Refugee Population in Land Schleswig-Holstein’, 9 October 1947. 38. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4890, Lüdemann to de Crespigny, 26 October 1947. 39. TNA, FO 1006/285, de Crespigny to Lüdemann, 24 November 1947. 40. TNA, FO 1006/11, Minutes Deputy Regional Commissioner’s Conference, REGCOM/M(47)43, 11 November 1947. 41. TNA, FO 1006/287, RGO’s notes from Conference on 24 November 1947. 42. Schulze, ‘The German Refugees and Expellees’, in Ther and Siljak, Redrawing Nations, pp. 307–25, 313–14. He cites TNA, FO 1030/119, ‘The Refugees and

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43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

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the Demographic Problem presented by Western Germany’, 28 February 1949. The document is dated 26 February. Idem., see Clay to Robertson, 8 March 1949, in principle agreement to Robertson’s summary, the appointment of German commission to look at refugee problem, and proposing Trizonal Refugee Committee to deal with this until Federal Government established; TNA, FO 371/76533, ‘Report to the Military Governors by the Tripartite Working Party on German Refugees,’ 26 March 1949. TNA, FO 1006/287, Memorandum Maj-Gen Stratton CoS, HQ BAOR to Army Formation Commanders, ‘Operation Caravan’, 19 December 1947, copied to the four Regional Commissioners, 29 December 1947. TNA, FO 1006/287, Minute, folio 39, 12 January 1948. TNA, FO 1006/287, Notes of RGO’s meeting, 23 December 1947. TNA, FO 1006/287, ‘Draft Brief for Meeting at Lübbecke: Refugees-Operation “Caravan”’, 12518/34/GOV, 15 December 1947. TNA, FO 1006/287, ‘Emergency Refugee Plan (Operation Caravan)’, Bishop to Robertson, 19 December 1947. Ibid. TNA, FO 1006/287, Minute sheet, folio nos. 25/26, 19 December 1947. TNA, FO 1006/287, Memorandum Air HQ British Air Forces of Occupation to Air HQ (Unit) BAFO and RAF Stations, and for information to HQ BAOR and HQ CCG, Lübbecke, ‘Operation “Caravan”’, BAFO/S.2098/Org., 23 December 1947. TNA, FO 1006/287, Memorandum Chief Manpower Officer to Housing Branch, ‘Registration of Refugees’, 24 January 1948. Statistics for 1 December 1947 showed 1,215,500 refugees and evacuees in SH; cf. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.644, ‘Übersicht über die Veränderung der Einwohnerzahlen von 1939 bis 1947’, 18 December 1947. Ministry of Resettlement and Reconstruction figures reported refugee population at 1,133,623 or 42.7 per cent of population. Lower Saxony’s total was 26.8 per cent and NRW’s 7.1 per cent. TNA, Henderson to Lüdemann, 1 January 1948. This arrangement, known as the Brunswick Agreement, also allowed for families to be reunited. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4890, Präsidialkanzlei, Landesregierung Schleswig-Holstein to Franken, Ministerium für Umsiedlung und Aufbau, 29 November 1947; Ministerpräsident to de Crespigny [undated] probably 29 November 1947. TNA, FO 1006/43, KRO Monthly Report Itzehoe HQ, 25 January 1948. TNA, FO 1006/269, ‘HQ Land Schleswig-Holstein Monthly Report 14’, February 1948. TNA, FO 1006/269, ‘HQ Land Schleswig-Holstein Monthly Report 15’, March 1948. TNA, FO 1006/36, KRO Monthly Report Flensburg HQ, 25 March 1948; FO 1006/15, ‘Replies to points raised at Regional Commissioner’s Conference at Kreis Group HQ Flensburg’, 3 February 1948. TNA, FO 1006/149, ‘Brief summary of discussion between the Military Governor, Lüdemann and Diekmann’, 18 May 1948.

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60. TNA, FO 1006/626, Telegram Douglas to Robertson, 21 May 1948. 61. TNA, FO 1032/2174, Robertson to Koenig, 31 May 1948; Koenig to Robertson, 18 June 1948. CCG’s meeting took place 21 January 1948. 62. TNA, CAB 195/6, CM33(48), 27 May 1948, p. 171; CM39(48), 14 June 1948, p. 183. 63. TNA, FO 1032/2175, Robertson to Clay, 26 November 1948; Robertson to Koenig, 26 November 1948; Clay to Robertson, 4 December 1948; Koenig to Robertson, 14 December 1948. 64. TNA, FO 1006/149, Verbatim notes of meeting between Asbury and Lüdemann, 4 March 1949; cf. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4533, Asbury to Lüdemann, 25 October 1948 – ‘I shall continue, as I have done in the past, to take every opportunity of emphasising to the Military Governor . . . the distressing situation that exists in this Land and the urgent need for taking some remediary action.’ 65. TNA, FO 1006/72, KRO Monthly Report L/K Norderdithmarschen, 25 April 1948. There were 42,313 refugees and 43,497 residents, a 49 per cent refugee proportion. 66. TNA, CAB 195/5, CM95(47), 15 December 1947, p. 394, ‘Civil Aviation: Tudor Aircraft Enquiry’ and criticism of BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation). 67. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr. 4533, Asbury to Lüdemann, 7 June 1948; LAS, Abt. 320 Eidersdtedt, Nr.2304, Franken to Kreise und Kreisfreie Städte, ‘Aktion “Neue Heimat”’, 24 June 1948. 68. TNA, FO 1006/74, KRO Monthly Report L/K Süderdithmarschen, 24 July 1948. 69. TNA, FO 1006/78, KRO Monthly Reports L/K Steinburg, 22 June and 22 July 1948. 70. TNA, FO 1006/54, KRO Monthly Report L/K Eutin, 28 July 1948; cf. FO 1006/60, KRO Monthly Report Stormarn, 23 July 1948. 71. TNA, FO1006/74, KRO Monthly Report Süderdithmarschen, 23 September 1948. 72. TNA, FO 1006/54, KRO Monthly Report L/K Eutin, 26 October 1948. 73. TNA, FO 1006/143, ‘Weekly News Letter No. 29’, 18 October 1948. 74. TNA, FO 1006/143, ‘Weekly News Letter No. 32, 9 December 1948. 75. Monthly Statistical Bulletin, vol. IV, 7 (July 1949). As at 1 October 1948, NRW’s share of refugees to resident population was 9 per cent, SH’s 41.4 per cent; cf. StaK, DIEKMANN, Nr. 24, ‘Rede vor Vertriebenen’, 28 June 1950 who agreed with Lüdemann’s figure of 600,000 who ‘had to be resettled’ outside SH, but did not specify NRW. 76. TNA, FO 1006/149, ‘Notes of Meeting of Regional Commissioner with Ministerpräsident Lüdemann’, 4 July 1949. 77. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4532, Amt für Fragen der Heimatvertriebenen to Landesflüchtlingsverwaltungen, 2 April 1949. 78. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.645, Diekmann pp. Lüdemann to Robertson, ‘Taking over of Refugees from Schleswig-Holstein’, 23 September 1948.

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79. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4532, Asbury to Lüdemann, 5 May 1949. Asbury had referred Lüdemann’s question directly to Lt. Gen. Sir Gordon Macready, British Chairman of the Bipartite Control Office in Frankfurt. 80. TNA, FO 1006/50, KRO Monthly Report L/K Eckernförde, 23 July 1949; FO 1006/79, KRO Monthly Report L/K Steinburg, 22 July 1949; FO 1006/40, KRO Monthly Report L/K Südtondern, 24 July 1949; KRO Monthly Report L/K Segeberg, 22 July 1949. 81. TNA, FO 1006/75, KRO Monthly Report L/K Süderdithmarschen, 25 August 1949. 82. TNA, FO 1006/16, ‘Conference of the Military Governor: 177th Policy Meeting’, 11 August 1949. Robertson chaired this meeting. 83. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4532, ‘Ergebnis der Umsiedlung im Jahre 1949’, IX-42.Az.65901, 26 November 1949. 84. By September 1950, the 364,196 refugees in the French Zone comprised 6.6 per cent of its total population, compared with 856,943 in SH alone – 33 per cent of the total BZ population, calculated from ‘Refugees in the West German States, 13 September 1950’, Connor, Refugees and Expellees, p. 19. 85. For example, TNA, FO 1006/97, ‘Meeting between Regional Commissioner and [German] Cabinet,’ 30 August 1947; cf. p. 15 – CCG statement on 9 June 1945: ‘so-called “refugee” problem touches every aspect of Military Government’. 86. TNA, FO 1006/98, de Crespigny’s handwritten notes for speech to journalists, 5 June 1947. The other problem cited was ‘industrial re-activation’. 87. The Bad Segeberg Ministers’ Conference on the refugee problem had been compromised by the decisions of the French and the Soviets not to attend. See TNA, FO 1006/97, minutes of meeting, de Crespigny and Lüdemann, 7 August 1947. 88. Hansard, HL, Earl of Listowel, ‘Address in Reply to His Majesty’s Speech’, cols. 153–5, 22 October 1947. 89. Reparationen, Sozialprodukt, Lebensstandard, Anlage 7: Die Industrie, p. 31; Schleswig-Holstein’s total was 44, 40 of which were classed as ‘war plants’. For the French Zone’s list (Demontageliste), see Nr.1, pp. 110–112; Hansard, HL, The Lord Bishop of Chichester, ‘Germany’, col. 590, 12 November 1947. 90. Ibid., cols. 589–97, 12 November 1947. 91. Ibid., Lord Balfour of Inchrye, col. 602, Lord Rennell, col. 606, Lord De Lisle and Dudley, col. 612. 92. Ibid., The Lord Bishop of Chichester, cols. 592–3. 93. LAS, Abt. 320 Segeberg, Nr.175, ‘Monatsbericht über die deutsche Moral’, 27 October 1947. 94. Hansard, HL, Earl of Listowel, 22 October 1947, col.154. 95. TNA, FO 1006/106, C.E. Oates, No.23 Sub-Area Intelligence Office- Itzehoe, ‘Monthly Security/Political Summary,’ 28 October 1947. 96. TNA, CAB 195/4, Cabinet Secretary Minutes, CM48(46), 16 May 1946. 97. See p. 206 regarding Schlange-Schöningen’s July 1949 speech to CDU. 98. TNA, FO 1006/269, HQ Land Schleswig-Holstein, Monthly Report No. 9, September 1947.

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99. TNA, FO 1006/94, Douglas to Pakenham, CCG/3400/C-in-C, 1 October 1947; Douglas to de Crespigny, 312/14051, 1 October 1947. Douglas reacted to Stokes’s intervention: ‘I really think it is intolerable that a Member of Parliament should set out to work against Military Government and undermine our authority in this way. Stokes is, of course, entitled to his views, but he should . . . use the legitimate and proper means to advance them.’ 100. Hansard, HC, ‘Cupola Furnaces, Holmag’, 30 June 1948, pp. 205–6. 101. TNA, FO 1006/98, Mayor Gayk’s speech at ‘Kiel im Aufbau’, 16 September 1947. 102. Hansard, HL, Lord Strabolgi, ‘Address in Reply to His Majesty’s Speech’, cols. 92–4, 22 October 1947. 103. TNA, FO 1006/91, Memorandum from 15 Schleswig Holstein Intelligence Office ‘Political Speeches’, 24 June 1946. Gayk’s speech was at a public openair meeting in Kiel, 13 June 1946. Henderson’s note dated 30 June. 104. TNA, FO 1006/32, KRO Monthly Report Lübeck HQ, 28 October 1947. 105. Cf. Parker’s estimate of 70 destroyed ‘towns’, Struggle for Survival, p. 153. 106. Hansard, HC, ‘Germany (Dismantlings)’, 23 September 1948, col. 1224. Christopher Mayhew was Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. 107. TNA, FO 1006/143, ‘CCG Weekly Newsletter No.23’, 18 June 1948. Landtag session, 14–15 June 1948. 108. Hansard, HC, ‘Torpedo Station Eckernforde’, 30 June, 1948, pp. 204–5. 109. TNA, FO 1006/350, ‘Protest Manifestation against the blowing up of the TVA East, Surrendorf, Kreis Eckernförde’, 18 June 1948. 110. Ibid. 111. TNA, FO 1006/377, ‘Minutes of Meeting of Inner District Directorate,’ Hamburg, 25 October 1948. 112. Hansard, HC, ‘Demolitions, Kiel’, 13 December 1948, p. 97. 113. TNA, FO 1006/13, ‘Minutes of Meeting of Deputy Regional Commissioner TVA Situation,’ REGCOM/M/48/30, 8 December 1948. 114. TNA, FO 1006/205, 15 Schleswig-Holstein Intelligence Office, ‘Monthly Political Notes for November 1948’, 10 December 1948. Extraordinary session of Landtag , 5 December 1948. 115. TNA, FO 1006/95, Gayk to Parliamentary Labour Party, 19 December 1948. 116. StaK, DIEKMANN, Nr.24, ‘Rede vor Vertriebenen’, 28 June 1950. 117. TNA FO 1006/13, Regional Commissioner meetings, REGCOM/M/49/3 2 February, M/49/7 30 March, M/49/10 12 May, M/49/12 22 June, M/49/13 13 July, M/49/15 10 August, M/49/16 24 August, M/49/17, 7 September 1949. Statistics taken from CCG’s Manpower Division. 118. Connor, Refugees and Expellees, pp. 42–3. Refugee unemployment is calculated from the Statistisches Amt des Vereinigten Wirtschaftsgebietes (ed.), Statistische Unterlagen zum Flüchtlingsproblem No. 5, and Bundesministerium für Arbeit (ed.), Entwicklung und Ursachen, p. 6. 119. TNA, FO 1006/95, Gollancz to Hynd requesting that a small delegation of Labour MPs conduct an inquiry into demolition proposals to verify British claims, 12 January 1949. Asbury only saw a copy on 22 February.

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120. The TVA installations comprised three torpedo testing stations. 121. TNA, FO 1006/95, Carol Johnson, Secretary Parliamentary Labour Party to Asbury, 11 January 1949. 122. TNA, FO 1006/631, Memorandum C.A. Dick, Regional Intelligence Officer to Regional Commissioner, ‘Political developments in Schleswig-Holstein since commencement of TVA demolitions’, 4 January 1949. 123. TNA, FO 800/467, Bevin to the Lord Privy Seal, copied to Attlee, 21 June 1949. ORC’s meeting took place 14 April. 124. TNA, FO 1006/95, Steel to Asbury, 8 February 1949. 125. TNA, FO 1006/95, Asbury to Steel, 18 February 1949. 126. TNA, FO 1006/45, KRO Monthly Report L/K Husum 29 July 1949. SchlangeSchöningen spoke about production, a controlled economy, prices and the refugee problem. 127. TNA, FO 1006/4, Lüdemann speech at the Landtag, 7 February 1949, copied to Asbury 8 February. 128. Ibid. 129. TNA, FO 1006/631, ‘Das kleine Brockhaus’, SHVZ, 31 December 1948. 130. TNA, FO 1006/95, Johnson to Asbury, 11 January 1949. 131. TNA, FO 1006/16, ‘Conference of the Military Governor – 177th policy meeting,’ 11 August 1949. 132. P. Ahonen, ‘Taming the Expellee Threat in Post-1945 Europe’, Contemporary European History, 14, 1 (February 2005), 1–21, 5. 133. Connor, Refugees and Expellees, p. 119. 134. Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary, p. 267. He cites TNA, FO 371/64504/13596, memorandum in preparation for Council of Foreign Ministers Meeting, 3 January 1947. 135. Connor, Refugees and Expellees, p. 100. He cites T. Schäfer, Die SchleswigHolsteinische Gemeinschaft 1950–1958: Mit einem Beitrag zur Entstehung des ‘Blocks der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten (Neumünster, 1987). 136. Ibid., p. 130. 137. Cited by Grieser, ‘Forschung zur Vertriebenenproblematik nach 1945’, in Pohl, Regionalgeschichte heute, p. 71. 138. Ahonen, ‘Taming the Expellee Threat’, 1. He quotes Robertson to Clay, February 1949 [undated]. 139. TNA, FO 1006/40, KRO Monthly Report L/K Südtondern, 21 August 1948. Dr. Karntz was a self-appointed leader of the refugees. Neither Kreistag nor Gemeinde allowed him on their committees as he was reputed to ‘court favours from the more gullible refugees.’ 140. Connor, Refugees and Expellees, p. 122. Cites TNA, FO 1006/482, HQ Land Schleswig-Holstein to HQ Groups Kiel, Flensburg, Itzehoe, 3 March 1948. 141. TNA, FO 1006/68, KRO Monthly Report L/K Plön, 18 June 1948. 142. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.1, Franken, Ministerium für Umsiedlung und Aufbau to the Kreise and non-Kreis Towns, IX-41-Bz.9200, ‘Licensing and Control of Refugee Associations,’ 20 October 1948. He cites the legal basis for licensing

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NOTES

143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149.

150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158.

159.

160. 161. 162. 163.

305

and control as ordered by the Regional Commissioner, 23711/4/GOV, 19 June 1948. Ordinance No. 122 was promulgated 15 January 1948, see StaK, Nr.704461, Amtsblatt der Militärregierung Nr.22. TNA, FO 1006/10, ‘Minutes of Meeting of DRC’, REGCOM/M(46)19, 2 July 1946. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.4, Franken, Memorandum to Min. für Umsiedlung u. Aufbau, IX/IV Az.7/8, 15 January 1948. TNA, FO 1006/269, HQ Land Schleswig-Holstein Monthly Report [undated] March 1948. TNA, FO 1006/34, KRO Monthly Report L/K Südtondern, 6 January 1947. TNA, FO 1006/106, No. 3 Sub Area Intelligence Office – Itzehoe, ‘Information Summary No. 17,’ 21 March 1947. TNA, FO 1006/44, KRO Monthly Reports L/K Husum, 23 November and 22 December 1948. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.6, L/K & S/K Flensburg/Husum/Lauenburg/ Norderdithmarschen, Memorandum Chair – Denazification Panel – Public Safety (Special Branch), 312/G/5624, 7 November 1947. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.1, ‘Licensing and control of Refugee Associations’. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.5 Eckernförde/Eiderstedt/Eutin. The association was also known as Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Ostvertriebenen. TNA, FO 1006/51, KRO Monthly Report L/K Eckernförde, 23 August 1949; cf. KRO Reports 24 March and 23 May 1949. Ibid., KRO Report 23 August 1949. The DP no longer campaigned under the cover of the CDU. TNA, FO 1006/51, KRO Monthly Report L/K Eckernförde, 25 February 1949. TNA, FO 1006/26, KRO Monthly Report Kiel Group, 26 March 1947. TNA, FO 1006/44, KRO Monthly Report L/K Husum, 23 September 1948. TNA, FO 1006/45, KRO Monthly Report L/K Husum, 24 June 1949. M. Stickler, ‘Ostdeutsch heißt Gesamtdeutsch’: Organisation, Selbstverständnis und heimatpolitische Zielsetzungen der Deutschen Vertriebenenverbände 1949–1972 (Düsseldorf, 2004). Stickler’s political history of expellee organisations focuses on the BdV, the central expellee group. TNA, FO 1006/51, for example, KRO Monthly Report L/K Eckernförde, 27 June 1949. Around 1,000 refugees met under BdV auspices 13 June 1949, sending this resolution to the Foreign Ministers’ Paris Conference via Zonal Executive Committee of refugees. Hansard, HC, ‘Germany: Refugee Association, Hannover’, cols. 847–9, 22 November 1948. TNA, FO 1006/283, ‘Laws and Ordinances Gazette for Schleswig-Holstein, No. 1,’ Kiel, 21 January 1948. TNA, FO 1006/283, Memorandum HQ Land Schleswig-Holstein 23904/7/ Gov, ‘Law on the Mitigation of the Refugees’ Distress’, 10 June 1948. For example, LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.5, Notgemeinschaft der Heimatvertriebenen von Schlotfeld – Schlotfeld über Itzehoe/Holstein, 13 July 1949; On Lastenausgleich, see

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164.

165. 166. 167. 168.

169. 170. 171.

172. 173.

174. 175.

176. 177. 178.

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M. Hughes, ‘Just Desserts: Virtue, Agency, and Property in Mid-TwentiethCentury Germany’, in M. Berg and M. Geyer (eds.), Two Cultures of Rights: The Quest for Inclusion and Participation in North America and Germany (Cambridge/ Washington DC, 2002), pp. 167–88. For example, TNA, FO 1006/53, KRO Monthly Report S/K Lübeck, 28 July 1949. Ostdeutsche Landsmannsschaft held an ‘extremely well attended’ meeting where they demanded Lastenausgleich, the return of their Heimat and the closing of all refugee camps. TNA, FO 1006/45, KRO Monthly Report L/K Husum, 25 July–25 August 1949. 700 attended the meeting of the BdV in Husum on 31 July. TNA, FO 1006/143, ‘Weekly Newsletter No.28’, 20 September 1948. TNA, FO 1006/205, ‘Monthly Political Summary’, 17 September 1948. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.10 Stormarn/Südtondern/Flensburg, ‘Zulassung’, 27 July 1949 for Heimatsverein Ostpreußen e.V. Ahrensburg, Kreis Stormarn, founded 17 April 1949 with 322 members. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.11 Kiel; cf. Abt. 761 Nr.12 Lübeck. Landsmannschaft der Ostpreußen in Lübeck membership stood at 1,800 on 20 December 1948. TNA, FO 1006/205, ‘Monthly Political Notes for October,’ 12 November 1948. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.5. The application was lodged with the Ministry 4 July 1949 with the clearance of its senior officials – three Chairmen, a Proprietor and Treasurer – still pending. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr.1, ‘Liste der Flüchtlingsorganisationen, die beim Ministerium für Umsiedlung und Aufbau die Zulassung beantragt haben’, [undated] 1948. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr. 1, Franken memorandum to Ministerium Umsiedlung und Aufbau, ‘Licensing of Refugee Associations,’ Abt.IV-IX-41–9200, 10 June 1949. LAS, Abt. 605, Nr.646, Diekmann to Asbury, 24 June 1949. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, p. 217, He cites FRUS 1948/III: 1–2. Bevin proposed creating a form of Union in Western Europe backed by the US and the Dominions. As soon as circumstances permitted, Spain and Germany should be included, ‘without whom no Western system can be complete’. Connor, Refugees and Expellees, p. 130. Cites TNA, FO 944/318, Bevin to Dean Acheson, 9 June 1949. Ibid., p. 123. LAS, Abt. 761, Nr. 1, ‘Licensing and control of Refugee Associations’.

Chapter 6 Occupation policy and the civilising mission: A compromising legacy 1. Birch, ‘What We’ll Find in Germany’, see note on ABCA, p. 271, note 1. 2. TNA, CAB 195/6, CM(47)48, ‘War Crimes: Trials of German Generals’, 5 July 1948, pp. 224–5.

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3. TNA, FO 800/467, Robertson to Bevin, 7 August 1948, Bevin to Robertson, 24 August 1948. 4. CAC, ALBU 10, KRO, ‘Handbook for Kreis Resident Officers’. 5. TNA, CAB 195/6, CM81(48), ‘Germany: Occupation Statute’, 15 December 1948, pp. 353–5. 6. TNA, FO 1030/119, ‘The Refugees and the Demographic Problem presented by Western Germany’. 7. Carstens, Leben im Flüchtlingslager, p. 58. E.g. the Swiss Evangelical Church alone provided 214,569 kg of food to Kiel. 8. TNA, CAB 195/6, CM82(48), ‘Reparations and Humphrey Committee’, 22 December 1948, pp. 357–60. 9. Annan, Changing Enemies, p. 145; cf. U. Gerhardt, Soziologie der Stunde Null: zur Gesellschaftskonzeption des amerikanischen Besatzungsregimes in Deustchland 1944– 1945/46 (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), pp. 271–2, ‘To promote German democracy, we must not create resentment amongst the population that boycotts democracy.’ General Clay’s reply to a reader upset by his article, ‘Clay pardons a million young Nazis’, New York Times, 3 July 1946. 10. Boehling, A Question of Priorities, p. 269. 11. A.W. Elsby, ‘British Foreign Policy towards the Soviet Union over Germany in the immediate post-World War Two Period: A causal analysis’, (D.Phil. diss., Sussex, 2004); cf. F.K. Roberts, ‘Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary’, in Ovendale, The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Governments, pp. 25, 39. Having determined his policy, Bevin had ‘the weight and authority’ to carry his views in the Cabinet where he was always fully supported by Attlee. He was always careful to cover himself by consulting first with the Prime Minister, even over relatively minor matters. 12. Kirkpatrick, Inner Circle, pp. 206ff. On returning to the FO in 1949 as PUS for German Affairs, Kirkpatrick recalled the noticeable decline in FO efficiency due to increased staff numbers, relative inexperience of staff, and greater workloads leading to a decline in minuting and drafting standards – set out in a memorandum to Sargent. 13. See TNA, FO 371/55617, ORC(46)74, Hynd highlights the particular problems in Schleswig-Holstein in Cabinet memorandum, ‘The Problem of the German Refugee Populations in the British Zone’, 26 July 1946. 14. TNA, FO, 800/466, Pakenham to Bevin, 23 June 1947. 15. TNA, FO 800/466, Bevin to Attlee, PM/46/139, 26 September 1946. 16. TNA, FO 800/467, Bevin to Attlee, PM/49/79, 5 May 1949. 17. Roberts, ‘Ernest Bevin’, in Ovendale, Foreign Policy, p. 35. 18. J. Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, vol. Two: 1941–April 1955, repr. edn (London, 1987), p. 272. 19. M. Mazower, ‘Martin Wight Memorial Lecture’, University of Sussex, 24 November 2005. He explicitly underlined this point; cf. Mazower’s ‘Strange Triumph’. 20. L. Woolf, ‘The United Nations’, Political Quarterly, 16, 1 (January–March 1945), 12–20.

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21. Simpson, Human Rights, p. 450. 22. Ibid., pp. 448, 450–2. 23. C. Haase, ‘In Search of a European Settlement: Chatham House and BritishGerman Relations, 1920–55’, European History Quarterly, 37, 3 (2007), 371–97, 385. Chaput de Saintonge, CCG’s Head of Government Structure Branch 1948–9, advocated going beyond the British notion of ‘freedom rights’, so that values in the UN Charter’s Preamble could be incorporated into the Basic Law (Grundgesetz). 24. Ahonen, ‘Taming the Expellee Threat’, 3–5. 25. For example, R. Emig, Stereotypes in Contemporary Anglo-German Relations (Basingstoke, 2000). 26. For example, C. Boswell, European Migration Policies in Flux: Changing Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion (London, 2003). 27. K. Jarausch, Die Umkehr: Deutsche Wandlungen 1945–1995, p. 342. Rau made his ‘Berliner Rede’ in 2000. 28. J.S. Faulder, vice-chairman of the British-German Association, ‘Lives Remembered’, The Times, 10 March 2006. Rau addressed the League of Expellees at the ‘Day of the Homeland of the League of Expellees’, Potsdam, 6 September 2003. 29. StaK, DIEKMANN, Nr.22, Speeches 1948–53, Entwurf zum Thema ‘Flüchtlingsprobleme ohne Illusionen’, p. 4. Undated, probably 1949–50. 30. A.H. Beattie, ‘Beyond “Restoration”? Assessing and Accounting for West German Liberalization and Democratization’, European History Quarterly, 38, 1 (2008), 101–13, 110. 31. An Independent Asylum Commission report found the treatment of asylum seekers coming to Britain fell ‘seriously below’ the standards of a civilised society, A. Dawar, The Guardian, 27 March 2008; cf. R. McKibbin, ‘Pure New Labour: Ross McKibbin despairs of Gordon Brown’, London Review of Books, 4 October 2007, 17–18. 32. G. Chatélard, Conference paper, ‘A Quest for Family Protection: The Fragmented Social Organisation of Transnational Iraqi Migration’ – ‘Dispossession and Displacement: Forced Migration in the Middle East and Africa’, British Academy, 29 February 2008. She quotes UNHCR’s latest estimates.

Chapter 7 The Janus faces of occupation, 1949–55 1. Pressedokumentation des Deutschen Bundestags (hereinafter PDB), 850–2, ‘British Take Their Leave of Germany’, Manchester Guardian, 11 May 1955. 2. A. Nicholls, ‘Ups and Downs in Anglo-German Relations, 1949–2008’, paper at Großbritannien-Zentrum, Humboldt University, Berlin, 28 May 2009. 3. Hansard, HC, Foreign Affairs Debate, 28/3/50, cols. 215–16. The Petersberg Agreement was signed 22 November 1950.

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4. Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle, p. 220. Kirkpatrick, previously based in the German Section of the FO, took over from former Governor of the BZ, General Sir Brian Robertson. 5. Nicholls, Always Good Neighbours p. 17. 6. ‘West to sift issue on Bonn’s status’ New York Times, 3 July 1950; cf. ‘Zwischen Kriegszustand und Frieden’, Hamburger Freie Presse, 5 July 1950. 7. PDB, 840–0, ‘Ending state of war with Germany’, Manchester Guardian, 4 July 1950. 8. ‘End of the War’, The Times, 10 July 1951. 9. ‘Wird der Kriegszustand beendet?’ FAZ, 22 August 1950. 10. ‘Beendigung des Kriegszustandes’, Die Zeit, 5 October 1950. 11. ‘Allies, Bonn to end state of war soon’, 2 June 1951. They lobbied for Germany’s pre-1945 debts to be written off. 12. Auswärtiges Amt Politisches Archiv (hereinafter AA) [Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Federal Republic of Germany Political Archive], Abt. II, Bd. 277, A1989, No. 13 ‘Deutsche Pressestimmen zur Revision des Besatzungstatuts’ – ‘Ein Schritt voran . . . ’, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 7/3/51. DM 22.8 billion was discussed; ‘Wenn die “kleine Revision” genutzt wird’, FAZ, 7/3/51; ‘Ein kleiner Schritt’, Westfalenpost, 7 March 1951. 13. ‘“Die Entfeindung” von Deutschen’, Die Welt, 17 May 1951. 14. ‘Der dornenvolle Weg vom Krieg zum Frieden’, Die Neue Zeitung, 7 July 1951. 15. ‘Vor dem Ende des Kriegszustandes’, FAZ, 9 July 1951. 16. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1344. ‘Gewerbefreiheit’, 26 May 1952; ‘Zwischen Krieg und Frieden’, Rheinische Post, 9 July 1951. 17. ‘End of the War’, The Times, 10 July 1951. 18. ‘Bald Ende des Kriegszustandes’, Mannheimer Morgen, 22 May 1951. 19. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 942, A9157, Security of Germany, 9 August 1950. ‘The whole idea [of ‘rearming Germans’] is painful not least to the British Government who [sic] so conscientiously dismantled the capacity of the Ruhr to make weapons of war.’ 20. For example, Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin (hereinafter EZAB), ZA 5082/09, 81/1/1, Niemöller to Dibelius, 28 March 1951. 21. Nicholls, Always Good Neighbours, pp. 16–17. 22. For example, ‘Der Deutsche ist kein Feind mehr’, Mannheimer Morgen, 27 July 1951. 23. Ibid., Rheinische Post, 9 July 1951; cf. ‘46 Staaten beenden den Kriegszustand’, Die Welt, 10 July 1951. 24. ‘Psychologisch beendet’, General-Anzeiger, 10 July 1951. ‘ . . . praktisch beendet’. 25. ‘Der Kriegszustand wird beendet’, FAZ, 10 July 1951. 26. ‘Wir können uns freuen’, Die Welt, 10 July 1951. 27. ‘Adenauer bezeichnet die Beendigung des Kriegszustandes als Beginn neuer Periode’, Die Neue Zeitung, 11 July 1951.

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28. See P. Heberer and J. Matthäus (eds.), Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes (Lincoln NEB, 2008). 29. PDB, 810–3/2, ‘Gnadenloses Werl’, Der Fortschritt, 1 April 1954. 30. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1344, A3304, 26 May 1952. ‘Jurisdiction, Criminal Proceedings’, Under Article 6, no death sentences were to be passed. 31. This was the highest administrative body within some evangelical Land churches. 32. EZAB, Bd. 1, 2/2504, ‘Kriegsverbrecher’ (Ref. IV OKR Ranke, Bonn)‘England’. 33. PDB, 820–5/1, ‘Right of Habeas Corpus Denied’, Manchester Guardian, 9 April 1951. 34. EZAB, 2/2506, Bd. 3, Dr. Schwarzhaupt to Ranke, 1128/52, 15 February 1952 re: Werl’s prisoners. 35. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2087, A6310, ‘Schreiben an die Kirchen anderer Länder’, Der Rat, Evangelische Kirche (EKD), 6 December 1950; ‘Das IRKK und der Beistand zugunsten der strafgerichtlich verfolgten Deutschen’, Hoffmann to AA, 21 March 1950. 36. EZAB, 2/2506, Bd. 3, Ranke to Schwarzhaupt, B311.IV, Denkschrift des Bundesministeriums über Werl, 22 January 1952. 37. EZAB, 2/2506, Bd. 3, Lilje to Koch, 1 December 1951. 38. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, p. 167. 39. PDB, 810–3/11, The Times, 3 December 1952; 810–3/2, 938 war criminals went before British courts, 219 resulting in death sentences. Of these, 160 were executed, The Times, 1 November 1952. These were mainly camp guards, commandants, soldiers and smaller numbers of Waffen SS. 40. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2087, A6309, ‘Aufstellung der in der westlichen Ländern wegen Kriegsverbrechen Angeklagten bzw. Verurteilten Deutschen’. Werl held 379 at 1 April 1950. America freed 91 from Landsberg, France, 69 from Wittlich, p. 59; cf. [810–3/11] The Times, 3 December 1950. 41. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, p. 167; Bd. 2100, ‘Mitteilung an die Presse’, 999/50, 23 November 1950. 42. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, British aide-mémoire, undated, probably 1 January 1950. 43. EZAB, 2/2506, Bd. 3, Oberkirchenrat Ranke [EKD Chancellery] to Oberkirchenrat Mensing, Düsseldorf, 3/8/51; on interpretation of Law 10, W. Seelmann-Eggebert, H. Volkmann [both were lawyers] to Ranke, IV, 21/3/51, 20/2/51, 17/10/50; Ranke to Wurm, Stuuttgart, 2330/IV, 7 March 1950. 44. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6404, Letter from Hawranke to Adenauer, 4/12/51, Hoppe pp. Adenauer reply, 21 December 1951. 45. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6403, ZR to AA, ‘Kriegsverbrecher in Werl’, undated, September 1951; Hoppe to ZR, 28/12/51; ZR to AA Abt. II, 15 November 1951. 46. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6404, Die Welt, 17 December 1951; FAZ, 15 December 1951.

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47. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6405, Diplomatische Korrespondenz, Nr.216, Kirkpatrick to Adenauer, 18 December 1951. 48. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6405, Die Neue Zeitung, 20 December 1951. 49. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6403, Die Welt, 28 October 1950. The statement by the DP was made by Bundesminister Hellwege. 50. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6404, ‘FDP gegen Werler Haftpraxis’, Die Welt, 7 December 1951. 51. ‘Bischof Wurm plädiert für Manstein’, Der Mittag, 19 August 1950; cf. PDB, 810–13, ‘Bischof Wurm appelliert an Churchill’, Rheinische Post, Düsseldorf, 26 June 1952. 52. EZAB, 2/2506 Bd. 3, Der Verband der Heimkehrer to Wurm, 17 December 1951. 53. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1262, A2927, ‘Personalien und Lebenslauf des neu ernannten Britischen Hohen Kommissars’. Kirkpatrick, born 1897, was educated at Downside and Oxford. 54. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6403, Die Welt, 18 November 1950. 55. EZAB, 2/2505, Bd. 2, Brunotte, Kirchenkanzlei EKD, to Dibelius, 30 November 1951. 56. EZAB, 2/2506, Bd. 3, Dibelius to Ranke, 17 December 1951; see 2/2505, Bd. 2, Dibelius draft letter to Churchill, undated December 1951. For example, Holland included the amount of sentence already served. 57. PDB, 810–3/11, ‘Appeasing the Nazis: Shawcross attacks’, News Chronicle, 28 October 1952. 58. TNA, PREM 8/1570, Bevin to Attlee 17 February 1951, Attlee to Bevin 16 February 1951, Younger to Shawcross 7 February 1951 et al. 59. PDB, 810–3/11, The Times, 30 October 1952. 60. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6403, Bell to The Times, 18 August 1951. 61. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6403, ZR to AA, ‘Deutsche politische Häftlinge in Werl’, 15 November 1951. Kesselring’s sentence was commuted due to the uncertainty regarding the law on reprisals; 335 Italian civilians were executed following the murder of 33 Germans outside Rome by partisans. 62. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6405, Gawlik, ZR to AA, ‘Gefangene in Werl’, 10 January 1952. 63. EZAB, 81/1, Bd. 3, Bathurst to Präses Wilm 24 January 1952 referencing Wilm’s letter of 27 December 1951; Wilm to Kirkpatrick, 12 February 1952, Wilm to Dibelius. 64. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 2108, A6405, Legal Adviser [Bathurst] to AA [State Secretary Prof. Hallstein], L15/6/289, 2 February 1952. 65. ‘Noch 116 warten in Werl auf Freiheit’, Westdeutsche Allgemeine, 11 September 1952. 66. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, pp. 167–9. 67. ‘British tighten jail rules for war criminals’, New York Herald Tribune, 28 November 1952. 68. ‘Was sagen Sie zu “Werl?”’ Ruhr-Nachrichten, 5 January 1952. 69. PDB, 810–3/2, British Information Services, ‘Werl Prison’, 20 November 1953. 79 were kept in Werl, 288 in Landsberg, 75 in Wittlich, 1 November

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312

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

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1953; ‘British Statement on German War Criminals’, Manchester Guardian, 21 November 1953. PDB, 810–3/2, ‘Custody of German War Criminals’, The Times, 20 May 1954. The review panel comprised three members. PDB, 810–3/2, ‘Werl wurde geschlossen’, Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden [Düsseldorf], 12 July 1957. PDB, D030–8/30, Bd. 3, ‘Naked isle is German again’, Daily Herald, 4 March 1952. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 429, A8344, 19. Sitzung Bundestag, 1/12/49; Bd. 432, A7249 and A7250, 187 Sitzung, 23 January 1952; 42 pages record the debate at this sitting of German Parliament on the Heligoland question. TNA, ADM 228/48, ‘Report on the demolition of the fortifications of Heligoland carried out by Naval forces on 18 April 1947’, dated 1 June 1947 AA, Abt. II, Bd. 429, A8347, Prof. D.L. Savory’s speech in the House of Commons on ‘Heligoland’, 28 July 1950, col. 2. AA, Abt II, Bd. 432, A7251, ‘Mitteilung an die Presse’ [Press Release], Nr. 248/52, 28 February 1952. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 430, A7240, Bundestag 117. Sitzung, 14/2/51; Bd. 432, A7250, 187. Sitzung, 23 January 1952. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 429, A8346, Strohm to Holzapfel (Member of the CDU Parliamentary Party), 10 October 1950. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 430, A7240, Bundestag 117. Sitzung, 14 February 1951, p. 4475. Walter (DP Parliamentary Member). Of the 67 Orkney Islands, 30 were inhabited. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 429, A8345, ‘Helgoland bleibt Bombenziel’ [name of newspaper not given], 11 May 1950. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 429, A8344, Bundestag 19. Sitzung, 1 December 1949. In addition to those forced to leave Heligoland, there were 2,500 evacuees from Kreis Pinneberg in SH and Cuxhaven in Lower Saxony. See, I. Connor, Refugees and Expellees, pp. 42–3. These totals, extrapolated from Work Ministry statistics, were 54.98 per cent in the BZ, 40.11 in the American Zone and 4.91 in the French Zone. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1262, A2929, Report of the British High Commissioner, January–March 1951. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 429, A8346, Minister Präsident Diekmann [SH] to Adenauer, Bd. Nr. 1677/50 L3 Dem., 10 June 1950. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 429, A8344, ‘Fischkutter beschossen’, FAZ, 6 February 1950; A8346, ‘Fischerboote bei Helgoland bombardiert’. Die Welt, 24 June 1950. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 429, A8346, Strohm to Holzapfel CDU, 10 October 1950. The order was given 3 May 1950. PDB, D030–8/30, Bd. 1,‘Flaggen über Helgoland’, Frankfurter Neue Presse, 22 December 1950; cf. FAZ, 28 December 1950. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 430, A7239, ‘Heligoland’, The Times, 9 January 1951. PDB, D030–8/30, Bd. 2, D030–8/30, ‘Drei Monate Gefängnis für InselInvasoren’, Die Welt, 7 March 1951.

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313

90. PDB, D030–8/30, Bd. 1, 030–8/30, ‘Picasso-Taube über Helgoland?’ Die Welt, 26 February 1951. 91. PDB, 030–8/30, Bd. 1, ‘Bombing of Heligoland’, The Times, 15 January 1951. The negotiations were over a new European defence force and Statute. 92. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 430, A7240, Schlange-Schöningen to Bundeskanzleramt, Tgb. Nr. 153/51, 75/51/78, 16 January 1951; Schlange-Schöningen to Vaughan Berry, 15 January 1951 93. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 430, A7239 ‘Heligoland’, The Times, 9 January 1951. 94 AA, Abt. II, Bd. 430, A7242, Kirkpatrick to Adenauer, 5 June 1951. 95. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 431, A7245, Ward to Adenauer, 24 August 1951. 96. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 431, A7246, Killus, DBH, to Adenauer, 14 November 1950. 97. AA, Abt. II, Bd, 431, A7246, ‘Wir fischen trotz Bomben’, Hamburger Abendblatt, 27 November 1951. A protest meeting took place 9 November 1951. 98. AA, Abt. II. Bd. 432, A7250, 187. Sitzung, 23 January 1950, pp. 7948, 7950, 7951. 99. PDB, D030–8/30, Bd. 3, ‘Vor dem Wiederaufbau von Helgoland’, FAZ, 26 January 1952. 100. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 432, A7250, 213–07 II/1281/52, Adenauer to Kirkpatrick, 16 January 1952. 101. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 432, A7250, 213–07 II/1175/52, Kirkpatrick to Adenauer, 25/1/52. Adenauer was requested by the British government to agree a suitable new target 102. PDB, 030–8/30, ‘Helgoland’, FAZ, 1/3/52; ‘Insel unserer Zuversicht’, Kasseler Post, 1 March 1952; Helgoland: ein Symbol Deutschlands’, Westdeutsches Tageblatt, 1 March 1952; ‘Heligoland Returned’, The Times, 1 March 1952. 103. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1344, ‘Freedom to engage in a Trade or Profession’/‘Freedom of Professions’ pp. 157, 163. 104. PDB, 820–5, ‘Cost of British Troops in Germany’, Manchester Guardian, 11 June 1952. 105. PDB, 820–5, ‘British Troops in Germany – future cost of maintenance’, The Times, 28 July 1952. 106. Kettenacker, Germany since 1945, pp. 54–5. 107. Ibid., pp. 56–7. This became known as ‘The Six’ – France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries. 108. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 266, A1957, ‘Protocol of Agreements on the Petersberg on 22/11/52’, AHC P.R 27, 24 November 1952. 109. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1262 A2929, Germany – Report of British High Commissioner: Final Issue, Jan–March 1951; cf. Bd. 1447, A3670, Allied High Commission Law 24, ‘Controls of certain articles, products, installations and equipment’, 11 April 1950. 110. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1299, Aufzeichnung des vortragenden Legationrats Dittmann, 21 November 1950; cf. Adenauer, Erinnerungen 1945–1953, Band 1, (Stuttgart, 1965) p. 391. 111. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1452, A3687, ‘Decision no. 12’, AHC Official Gazette, 18 April 1951.

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112. PDB, 810–2, ‘Und es wird weiter demontiert’, Ruhr-Nachrichten, 6 September 1950. 113. PDB, 810–2, ‘Davies nimmt im Unterhaus zu Demontage-Protest Stellung’, Die Neue Zeitung, 13 December 1950. Ian Mikardo and Reginald Paget in the House of Commons. 114. PDB, 810–2, ‘Allierte lehnten ab’, Industrie-Kurier, 24 November 1950. 115. PDB, 810–2, ‘Unzeitgemäß und Töricht’, FAZ, 15/12/50; Westdeutsche Rundschau, 16 December 1950. 116. EZAB, 2/2431, Kunst to Dibelius, 3 March 1950. 117. EZAB, Bestand 2, 2/2431, Kirchenkanzlei der EKD, Superintendent [Dean] Kunst to Dibelius, 3 March 1950. 118. AA, Abt. II, 810–2, ‘Brig. Lingham: Demontagen sind jetzt beendet’, Bonner Rundschau, 20 January 1951. 119. PDB, 810–2 ‘Demilitarisierungsstopp kommt zu spät’, Rhein-Zeitung, 13 September 1950; cf. ‘Wird dei Demilitarisierung eingestellt’, FAZ, 11/9/50 120. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1448, A3674, Kirkpatrick to Adenauer, AGSEC(51)563, 2 April 1951. 121. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1448, A3675, Kirkpatrick to Adenauer, AGSEC(52)702, 28 July 1952. 122. PDB, 810–2, ‘Die Auswirkungen der Demontage’, Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 3 October 1951; ‘Das Bleigewicht der Demontage’, Handelsblatt; ‘Demontagen hatten schwere Folgen’, Hannoversche Presse, 3 October 1951. 123. PDB, 810–2, ‘Erhard beantragt Remontagekredite’, FAZ, 27 October 1951. 124. PDB, 810–2, ‘Re-Demontage’, FAZ, 5 January 1952; ‘Bonn gegen Rückkauf’, FAZ, 8 January 1952. 125. PDB, 810–2, ‘68 Kräne sollen abtransportiert werden’, FAZ, 5 March 1952, ‘Empörung uber die Engländer’; cf. ‘Beute oder Demontage’, Handelsblatt, 5 March 1952. 126. ‘Probefall Hamburg’, FAZ, 22 April 1952. 127. PDB, 810–2, ‘Bonn kauft Docks zurück’, Die Welt, 2/8/52; ‘Dock-Rückkauf geregelt’, Die Welt [This equated to £1.25 million] 26 August 1952; ‘DockRückkauf geregelt’, Handelsblatt, 27 August 1952. A and K agreed terms in June. 128. PDB, 810–2, ‘Die Docks bleiben in Hamburg’, Christ und Welt, 24/7/52. For a detailed discussion of British policy in Hamburg, see A. Kramer, Die britische Demontagepolitik am Beispiel Hamburgs 1945–1950 (Hamburg, 1991). 129. PDB, 810–2, ‘Tragödie einer Hamburger Werft’, Hamburger Freie Presse, 22 September 1950. The Blohm and Voss factory covered 14,000 sqm. 130. PDB, 810–2, ‘Reservate des Unrechts’, FAZ, 19 March 1952. 131. F. Graham-Dixon, ‘Civilising the Germans: British Occupation Policy and the Refugee and Expellee Crisis, 1945–1949’, (D.Phil. diss., Sussex, 2008), pp. 81–2. 132. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1388, ‘Vor neuen Beschlagnahmungen’, Bonner Anzeiger, 4 October 1950; cf. PDB, 820–5, 13,269 buildings were handed back 31 July 1948–31 December 1950, FAZ, 5 April 1951.

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315

133. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1388, ‘Bonn für die Freigabe der beschlagnahmter Gebäude’, FAZ, 28 August 1951. 134. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1388, ‘Friedlich unter einem Dach’, Die Welt, 15 September 1951. 135. AA, Abt. II, Bd. 1388, ‘Entschädigung für Besatzungsgeschädigte’, Bonner General Anzeiger, 23 January 1952. 136. Manchester Guardian, May 11 1955, debates the lavish lifestyle of some senior Control Commission members. 137. Graham-Dixon, ‘Civilising the Germans’, p. 87; cf. Manchester Guardian, 11 May 1955, cites a total of 32,000 CCG staff. 138. PBD, 850–2, ‘Decline of British Control Commission’, Manchester Guardian, 5 February 1951; ‘Cuts in British Staff in Germany’, The Times, 9 May 1951. At September 1951 there were 2,800 employees. A reduction to nearer 2,000 was expected by April 1952. 139. ‘Einzelheiten der Sparmaßnahmen des britischen Hochkommissariats’, Die Neue Zeitung, 30 October 1951; PBD, 850–2, ‘Britische Besatzung soll sparen’, Hamburger Echo, 14 July 1951. 140. PBD, 820–5, Westdeutsche Zeitung, 11 August 1951; cf. ‘Gegen Luxusgenerale’, Ruhr-Nachrichten, 28 July 1951. 141. PBD, 850–2, ‘Britain’s stake in Europe’, The Times, 24 January 1952. 142. AA, Abt. II, Bd.1344, A3306, Germany No. 1 – Documents Relating to the Termination of the Occupation Regime in the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn 1952, Paris 1954 (London, 1955), ‘Freedom to engage in a trade or profession’ 25 May 1952. The Cartel Policy was repealed on 23 October 1954. 143. Annan, Changing Enemies, p. 158. 144. Kirkpatrick, Inner Circle, pp. 200–1. ‘In some cases we were the victims of our own good nature . . . ’ 145. Manchester Guardian, 11 May 1955. 146. Nicholls, Always Good Neighbours, pp. 26–7.

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Stanford, P., Lord Longford: A Life (London, 1994) Steinbach, P. and Tuchel, J. (eds.), Lexikon des Widerstandes 1933–45 (Munich, 2004) Stickler, M., ‘Ostdeutsch heißt Gesamtdeutsch’: Organisation, Selbstverständnis und heimatpolitische Zielsetzungen der deutschen Vertriebenenverbände 1949–1972 (Düsseldorf, 2004) Ther, P.,’ Expellee Policy in the Soviet-occupied Zone and the GDR: 1945–1953’, in D. Rock and S. Wolff (eds.), Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic (New York/ Oxford, 2002) Ther, P. and Siljak, A. (eds.), Redrawing Nations – Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (Lanham MD, 2001) Turner, I.D. (ed.), Reconstruction in Post-War Germany: British Occupation Policy and the Western Zones, 1945–55 (Oxford, 1989) Tusa, A. and Tusa, J., The Nuremberg Trial (London, 1983) Tyrell, A., Großbritannien und die Deutschlandplanung der Allierten (Frankfurt am Main, 1987) Vickers, R., The Labour Party and the World. Volume 1: The Evolution of Labour’s Foreign Policy 1900–51 (Manchester, 2003) Wertz, R.L., Die Vertriebenen in Schleswig-Holstein. Aufnahme und Eingliederung, rev. edn (Kiel, 1989) Winter, J., Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven CT/London, 2006) Zweiniger-Bargielowska, I., Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption 1939–1955 (Oxford, 2000)

Articles Adamthwaite, A., ‘Britain and the world, 1945–9: The view from the Foreign Office’, International Affairs, 61, 2 (Spring 1985), 223–35 Ahonen, P., ‘Taming the expellee threat in post-1945 Europe: Lessons from the two Germanies and Finland’, Contemporary European History, 14, 1 (Feb. 2005), 1–21 Ascherson, N., ‘Even now’, London Review of Books, 2 November 2006 Beattie, A.H., ‘Beyond “Restoration”? Assessing and accounting for West German liberalization and democratization, 1945–1965’, European History Quarterly, 38, 1 (2008), 101–13 Betts, P.R., ‘Germany, international justice and the twentieth century’, History & Memory, 17, 1/2 (Autumn 2005), 45–86 Brunskill, I., ‘An added ingredient: Germany’s chronicler feeds his critics with the life he forgot’, Times Literary Supplement, 29 September 2006 Buscher, F., ‘The great fear: the Catholic Church and the anticipated radicalization of expellees and refugees in post-war Germany’, German History, 21, 2 (2003), 204–24 Clark, B., ‘Half infidels’, London Review of Books, 3 August 2006 Cmiel, K., ‘The recent history of human rights’, American Historical Review, 109, 1 (Feb. 2004), 117–35 Cohen, G.D.,’Between relief and politics: Refugee humanitarianism in occupied Germany 1945–1946’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43, 3 (2008), 437–50

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Connelly, M., ‘The British people, the press and the strategic air campaign against Germany, 1939–45’, Contemporary British History, 16, 2 (Summer 2002), 39–58 Connor, I., ‘The churches and the refugee problem in Bavaria 1945–49’, Journal of Contemporary History, 20, 3 (July 1985), 399–421 Dawar, A., ‘UK’s asylum system “marred by inhumanity”’, The Guardian, 27 March 2008 Farquharson, J.E., ‘The British occupation of Germany 1945–6: A badly managed disaster area?’ German History, 11, 3 (1993), 316–38 Farquharson, J.E., ‘“Emotional but Influential”: Victor Gollancz, Richard Stokes and the British Zone of Germany, 1945–49’, Journal of Contemporary History, 22, 3 (July 1987), 501–19 Faulder, J.S., ‘Lives remembered’, The Times, 10 March 2006 Frank, M.J., ‘The new morality: Victor Gollancz, “Save Europe Now” and the German refugee crisis, 1945–46’, Twentieth Century British History, 17, 2 (January 2006), 231–56 Frank, M.J., ‘Working for the Germans: British voluntary societies and the German refugee Crisis, 1945–1950’, Historical Research, 72 (2009), 157–75. Garrick Mason, I., ‘Logics of war’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 April 2006 Gatrell, P., (ed.), ‘Population displacement in the twentieth century’, Contemporary European History, 16, 4 (November 2007) Graham-Dixon, F., ‘A “moral mandate” for occupation: The British churches and voluntary organizations in north-western Germany, 1945–1949’, German History, 28, 2 (June 2010), 193–213 Gregor, N., ‘Politics, culture and political culture: Recent work on the Third Reich and its aftermath’, Journal of Modern History, 78 (September 2006), 643–83 Haase, C., ‘In Search of a European settlement: Chatham House and British–German relations’, European History Quarterly, 37, 3 (2007), 371–97 Harrison, M.M., ‘Resource mobilisation for World War II: the U.S.A., U.K., U.S.S.R., and Germany, 1938–1945’, Economic History Review, 41, 2 (May 1988), 171–92 Jürgensen, K., ‘British occupation policy after 1945 and the problem of “re-educating Germany”’, History, 68, 223 (1983), 225–44 Marshall, B., ‘German attitudes to British Military Government 1945–47’, Journal of Contemporary History, 15, 4 (Oct. 1980), 655–84 Mazower, M., ‘The strange triumph of human rights 1933–1950’, The Historical Journal, 47, 2 (2004), 379–98 Mazower, M., ‘Violence and the state in the twentieth century’, American Historical Review, 107, 4 (Oct. 2002), 1158–78 McKibbin, R., ‘Pure New Labour: Ross McKibbin despairs of Gordon Brown’, London Review of Books, 4 October 2007 Reinisch, J., ‘Introduction: Relief in the aftermath of war’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43, 3 (2008), 371–404 Reynolds, D., ‘Britain and the Cold War’, The Historical Journal, 35, 2 (June 1992), 501–3 Reynolds, D., ‘From World War to Cold War: The wartime Alliance and post-war transitions, 1941–1947, The Historical Journal, 45, 1 (2002), 211–27 Robertson, E.H., ‘Remembrances of the work to the Religious Affairs Branch 1947– 1949’, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, 2 (1989), 59–63 Schmidt, U., ‘“The scars of Ravensbrück”: Medical experiments and British war crimes policy, 1945–1950, German History, 23, 1 (2005), 20–49

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Stargardt, N., ‘The Historikerstreit twenty years on’, German History, 24, 4 (2006), 587–607 Ther, P., ‘The Integration of expellees in Germany and Poland after World War II,’ Slavic Review, 55, 4 (Winter 1996), 779–805 Wallace, W., ‘Foreign policy and national identity in the United Kingdom’, International Affairs, 67, 1 (Jan. 1991), 65–80 Weiler, P., ‘British Labour and the Cold War: The foreign policy of the Labour governments 1945–1951’, Journal of British Studies, 26, 1 (Jan. 1987), 54–82

Interviews (unrecorded) Oestreicher, Revd. Dr. P., 23 January 2006 Robertson, Revd. E.H., 23 February 2006

Conference papers/lectures Bloxham, D., ‘Forced population movement in Europe, 1912–49’: ‘Removing peoples: Forced migration in the modern world, 1850–1950’, University of York, 20–22 April 2006, published as ‘’The great unweaving: The removal of peoples in Europe, 1875–1949’, in R. Bessel and C.B. Haake (eds.), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford, 2009) Brandes, D., ‘National and international planning of the “transfer” of Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland’ – ‘Removing Peoples: Forced Migration in the Modern World, 1850–1950’, University of York, 20–22 April 2006, in R. Bessel and C.B. Haake (eds.), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford, 2009) Chatélard, G., ‘A quest for family protection: The fragmented social organisation of transnational Iraqi migration’ – ‘Dispossession and Displacement: Forced migration in the Middle East and Africa’, British Academy, 28–29 February 2008 Mazower, M., Martin Wight Memorial Lecture, University of Sussex, 24 November 2005 Nicholls, A.J., ‘Ups and downs in Anglo-German relations, 1949–2008’, Centre for British Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, 28 May 2009 Schulze, R. ‘Flight and expulsion of German populations after the Second World War’ – 3rd Balzan Workshop, ‘Displacement and replacement in the aftermath of war’, 18–19 September 2006, Birkbeck College, University of London

Doctoral dissertations Elsby, A., ‘British Foreign Policy towards the Soviet Union over Germany in the Immediate Post-World War Two Period’, D.Phil. diss., University of Sussex, 2004 Frank, M.J., ‘Britain and the Transfer of the Germans from East Central Europe, 1939– 1947’, D.Phil. diss., University of Oxford, 2005, published as Frank, M.J., Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context (Oxford, 2007) Graham-Dixon, F., ‘Civilising the Germans: British Occupation Policy and the Refugee and Expellee Crisis, 1945–1949’, D.Phil. diss., University of Sussex, 2008 Torriani, R., ‘Nazis into Germans: Re-Education and Democratisation in the British and French Occupation Zones, 1945–1949’, Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2005

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INDEX

ABCA pamphlets and preparations for end of hostilities, 58, 77, 220, 271n1 Adenauer, Konrad, 27, 220, 232, 237, 313n101 antipathy to Labour government, 237 dismantling, economic impact of controls on industry, 255–8, 315n142 Britain’s Heligoland policy, 247, 250, 252–3 war crimes trials’ sentence reviews, 239, 240 Albu, Austen, 18, 29, 96 attitude to FO policy, 41 passim, 272n18 CCG and Military Government, 94–6 Dalton’s economic policy, 41 FO militaristic attitudes, 87–8 Transfer of German Populations, 42 passim Allied Control Council, 40, 169, 183, 239, 313n109 Allied negotiations to move frontiers, 35 Anglo-American alliance, 17, 30 partnership, 33, 237, 260 Anglo-French relations, see France and French Zone Anglo-German relations, see also Federal Republic of Germany and Germany, 10, 24, 72, 85, 89–90, 129, 163, 172–3, 204, 207, 234, 236, 247–8, 253, 260

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racism, 20, 94 Anglo-Soviet relations, see also Soviet Union and Soviet Zone tensions, 4, 12, 28, 30, 117, 259–60 Annan, Noel, 29, 81, 83, 93–4, 96, 268n76, 307n9 Area bombing of Germany Air Ministry, 6, 8, 53, 64 Allied policy, 3, 6, 20, 22, 59, 62–3, 246, 275n84 Bomber Command, 21, 22, 58, 59, 61 (Fig. 7), 64, 207, 266n32, 266n36, 266n38 bombing accuracy, 59–62, 246, 247 (Fig. 30), 248 (Fig. 31) Bombing Offensive, debates, 8 passim, 58, 222, 246 bombing policy and targeting of civilians, 9, 21, 25, 26, 58, 60 (Fig. 6), 62, 63, 66, 107 British policy critics and supporters, 8–9, 21–2, 25–6, 55, 58, 63–4, 106–7, 108 moral arguments, 8, 21–2, 58 morale, effect on Germany, 55, 56, 63, 65 memorialisation of victims, 22 night attacks, 55 Asbury, William, 94, 95, 115 (Fig. 18), 123–4, 150, 151, 152, 158, 162, 177–9, 190, 193, 205, 298n15, 301n64, 302n79 Association of Returning Soldiers (Der Verband der Heimkehrer), 241

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THE A LLIED OCCUPATION

Atlantic Charter, 12, 13, 35, 37–8, 44, 49, 214, 253 Attlee, Clement, 6, 23, 30, 37, 73, 226 assumes responsibility for Germany with Bevin, 133, 227 German generals and decision to prosecute, 222 on Germans, 114, 117, 244 realities of refugee crisis, 147 relationship with Bevin, 307n11 war criminals’ sentence reviews and clemency appeals, 241 August Thyssen-Hütte, Duisberg, see dismantling Baden-Württemberg, 194 Bad Segeberg Conference, 183–4, 299n33, 302n87 ‘Baedeker’ air raids, 275n73 Basic Law (1949), see Federal Republic of Germany Bavaria, 130, 249 British Army on the Rhine (BAOR), 253 BBC German reaction to broadcasts, 89, 133–4 Bell, George, Bishop of Chichester, 8, 9, 25–6, 106–9, 113, 114, 240, 284n106 amnesty for war criminals 241–3 area bombing of Germany, 58, 107, 243, 267n55 church leaders’ resistance to Hitler, 108, 110 church’s role in reconstruction of Europe, 27 conscience and morality of British public, 28 dismantling policy, 196–7 expulsions from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, 108, 121 policy to promote peace in Europe, 83 Belsen, camp atrocities, 31, 271n7 Beneš, Edvard, 34, 46, 47

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Berlin, 2, 66, 91, 111, 129, 143, 176, 184, 195, 226 refugees from Soviet Zone in Berlin, 294n123 Bevin, Ernest, 6, 17, 30, 91, 113, 124, 142, 179, 185, 191, 226, 298n16, 301n66 antipathy to Germans, 117 assumes responsibility for Germany with Attlee, 133, 227 caution in handing over control to Germany, 223 decision to prosecute German generals, 73–4, 222 dismantling, 198, 200, 201, 205, 207, 255 other foreign policy priorities, 32, 226 high unemployment as incubator for Communism, 218 realities of refugee crisis, 147 relationship with Attlee, 307n11 Soviet Union as greater threat, 30, 226 transfer of German territory to Poland, 208 war criminals’ sentence reviews and clemency appeals, 241 West Germany’s admission to Council of Europe, 237 Bidault, Georges, 42 Birkett, Justice Norman, 24 Birley, Robert, 39–40, 82 Bishop, General Alec, 151, 187–8, 192–3, 255, 257 Bishop of Chichester, see Bell, George Bizonia, 105, 181, 182, 185, 193, 195–6, 197, 227 black market, 80–1, 135, 163–5, 226 Black Market Reports, 164 Blohm and Voss, Hamburg, see dismantling Blücher, Franz, 237 bombing of Germany, see Area bombing Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 108 Bonn Treaty, 220, 233, 247

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INDEX Brandenburg ethnic German expellees, 137 Brauchitsch, Walter von, 72, 278n138, 279n153 Bremen, 55, 189 Bremerhaven, 252 Breslau (Wroclaw), 34 Britain anti-Germanism, 7, 20, 30, 31–2, 38, 39, 40–1, 94, 114, 248, 272n20 Blitz and German air attacks, 53–5, 65 bombing of Germany, see Area bombing of Germany British-German relations, see AngloGerman relations civilising mission and values, 4, 5, 14, 18, 19, 24, 26, 29, 52, 76, 77, 87, 96, 106, 110, 112, 124–5, 165, 175, 177, 179, 181, 215, 219–22, 232, 257, 298n16 commitment to Czechoslovakia, 28 commitment to Poland, 28, 36, 45 contribution to IRO budget, 36 controlling economic revival and suppressing competition, 10, 100, 197–9, 225, 253–7, 258–9 costs of occupation to British taxpayers, 10, 31, 70, 97–9, 100, 105, 281n31 criticism of government and Occupation authorities, see Germany delegation of refugee problem to Germans, 3, 7, 14, 88–9, 128–9, 223, 302n85 economic dependence on USA, 19, 97–8, 223, 226 ending the state of war with Germany, 233, 236–7 failure to treat Germany as single economic unit, 31, 100, 105 fair play traditions, 7, 10, 52, 53, 70, 76, 106, 112, 205, 207, 238 fear of rebirth of German militarism, 6, 7, 10, 50, 71, 82, 195, 206–7, 223, 224–5, 236–7, 256, 260

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jurisdiction over Polish authorities, 136 liberal democratic values, 4, 93, 106, 175, 220, 230–1, 238, 260 militant liberalism, 4, 29, 220, 234 moral leadership, 6, 17, 40, 72, 77–8, 93, 162, 191 moral mandate, 4, 11, 17, 111, 116, 125, 220, 230, 260, 262n13 no distinction between Nazi Germany and Germany, 6, 7, 37, 48, 85, 206, 213, 236, 241 policies as occupying power, 4, 5, 82, 127, 237 policy on refugees, see ‘delegation of authority to Germans’ prestige, risks to and value, 69, 70, 101, 116, 142, 145, 162, 191, 197, 238, 241, 244 reconciliation, 3, 108, 206, 228, 253, 268n57 retribution for wartime atrocities, 8, 9, 10, 32, 37, 67ff, 72 UDHR drafting and minorities, 228 British High Commission, see also Kirkpatrick, Ivone and Hoyer Millar, Frederick, 4, 234–5, 241, 244, 254–5 British Military Government, 7, 14, 77–96, 259 attitudes to Germans, 38 black market and military personnel, 135, 164–5 denazification, see denazification Indirect Rule (Control), 6, 29, 82, 83–4, 94, 125, 204, 222–3, 259, 281n25 laws and ordinances, 78 (Fig. 11), 79–83, 85–6, 104, 125, 164, 209, 211, 220, 250, 257–8, 280n9, 280n10, 305n142 non-fraternisation policy, 29, 83, 84 (Fig. 13) powers to ban refugee organisations, 209, 225

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THE A LLIED OCCUPATION

British Military Government (Continued ) powers and governance in Germany, 79, 83–5, 85 (Fig. 14), 94, 133 reconstruction and the occupation’s achievements, 14, 21, 140, 231, 244–5, 259 requisitioning policy, 14, 81 (Fig.12), 154, 157–9, 165, 174, 220, 223, 233, 237, 246, 250, 253, 257–8, 280n11, 294n125, 294n127, 294n128 unemployment in Zone, 249–50, 255 Brittain, Vera, 8 Cadogan, Sir Alexander, 46, 48, 93 Caritas, 28, 120, 224 Casablanca Conference, 7, 55 Casablanca Directive, 55–6 Catchpool, Corder, 8 Charlottenhütte-Niederschelden, see dismantling Cherwell, Lord, 8, 55, 57, 61, 64, 264n13 Christian Democratic Party (CDU), 127, 132, 200, 206, 207, 217, 232, 254, 302n97, 305n153 dismantling, 200–1 Christian Reconstruction in Europe, 121 the Church, see also World Council of Churches Anglican Church leaders’ opposition to Communism, 117 British Christian attitude to Germany, 8, 106–7, 114, 120 British churches’ inability to influence refugee policy, 125 British Council of Churches, 239 British and German churches undermine legitimacy of occupation, 4 Christianity in Germany as a political aim, 117 Christian churches’ lobbying at UNO, 28 Evangelical Church (Evangelische Kirche), 122, 237, 251, 286n157, 238, 239, 240, 251, 255

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German Catholic bishops’ criticism of occupation policy, 27, 128 German churches’ influence on occupation policy, 27, 108 German Protestants’ moral reform, 113 Lutheran bishops, 111, 196 promoting a revival of Christian values in Germany, 108–11 reconciliation towards Germany, 7, 108 Religious Affairs Branch liaison with German churches, 118 response to humanitarian crisis, 27, 117, 223 twinning parishes 123, 286n157 Churchill, Winston, 6, 13, 19, 57, 114 advisers, 18, 55 demand for West Germany’s admission to Council of Europe, 237 deporting Germans from East Prussia to compensate Poland, 49 General election defeat, 6 German civilian morale as military target, 65 German self-government under occupation, 79 Germany’s unconditional surrender, 39, 76 German generals’ trials, 75, 278n125 Nazism, 22, 23, 266n31 regret over fate of expellees, 39, 274n64 reputation as war leader, 65, 276n99 retribution for war atrocities, 37–8 speech on Poland (December 1944), 52 war objectives, 23, 39 war criminals, due process and treatment of, 238–41 Yalta Conference, 19, 34, 52 Clay, General Lucius, 119, 189–90, 193, 208, 300n43, 307n9 coal shortages, see Food and coal shortages Cold War, 4, 13, 30, 36, 117, 125, 147, 207, 250, 256, 259–60

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INDEX Collins, Canon John, 73, 76 Cologne, bombing attacks, 55 colonialism and the Occupation Colonial Office, 33 colonial style of rule, 29, 77, 83, 92, 96, 112–13, 122, 125 feasibility of Crown colony system, 82, 280n16 proposed colonial model, 94 transfer of former colonial officials, 83–4 Conference of Foreign Ministers, London, 186 Control Commission of Germany (British Element), 7, 14, 39, 80–1, 86 bureaucracy, manpower and costs, 41, 88, 90, 91–2, 95–6, 101, 103–4, 105–6, 129, 133, 194, 258–9, 281n31, 283n70, 315n138 Christian principles, 106, 109, 111, 113, 114, 117, 121–2, 284n115 denazification policy, see denazification democratisation policy, see Germany demolitions of industrial plant and dismantling, 195–6, 199–200, 204, 253–7 departure from Germany, 219, 234, 258, 260, 315n142 devolving control for black market to Germans, 164 public health policy, 159 powers and governance in Germany, 18, 87, 129, 152, 177, 182–3, 297n177, 187, 209–10, 211, 218, 221 (Fig. 26), 250, 304n142 power of veto on refugee organisation applications, 218, 225, 297n177 re-education of Germany policy, 24, 82, 110, 118, 132 refugees’ unions, 210 Regional Commissioners’ remit, 94–5, 129, 168–9, 224, 282n58 Religious Affairs Branch, 118, 121–2

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right to impose death penalty after 1949, 71 scepticism at religion as vehicle for British values, 109–10 Control Office of Germany and Austria, 80, 95, 97–8 Coventry, 54, 120 Cranborne, Lord, 8, 9 (Fig. 3) Crawley, Aidan, 248 Crespigny, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Champion de, 94–5, 121, 138, 146, 149, 150, 154–5, 160, 161, 168–9, 171, 175, 177, 183–5, 286n149, 292n83, 302n86 Cripps, Stafford, 73, 225, 278n136 CSU, 207 Currency Reform, 13, 106, 168 impact on refugees, 105 passim, 202, 227 Cuxhaven, 252 Czechoslovakia expulsions of ethnic German minorities, 27, 34, 40, 47, 108 loss of territory, 39, 45 minority populations and border revisions, 12, 34 proposed deportation of ethnic Germans, 34, 40, 45, 48, 49, 51, 231, 270n106, 273n30 proposed deportations linking expulsions with guilt, 46 territorial compensation, 28, 39, 43 Dalton, Hugh, 30, 41, 73, 225, 226, 269n89, 272n20 Damm, Walter, 66, 149, 158, 217 Danzig (Gdan´sk) ethnic German minorities, 127 Munich Agreement and Poland, 12 refugees from, 127 territorial compensation, 12, 34 Davison, Sir William, 38 Dean, Sir Maurice, 18, 63 decartelisation, see dismantling demilitarisation, see Germany

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336

THE A LLIED OCCUPATION

democratisation, see Germany denazification, 11 passim, 15, 99, 100, 134, 145, 179, 217 aim to align with Americans policy, 23 collective guilt, 23 contradictory to Christian and spiritual revival, 110 denunciations, 101 impact on morale, 101, 106 impact on productivity, 106 impact of British churches, 27 process, 127, 239, 279n141 required Clearance Certificate for refugee associations, 209, 211–13, 305n149 Third Reich, annulment of legislation, 79 war criminals sentence reviews, 239 Denmark, 148, 149, 246 Detmold, 86 (Fig. 15) Deutsche Bewegung Helgoland, (DBH), 252 Deutsche Hilfsgemeinschaft, 28 Deutsche Partei (DP), 213, 217, 240, 312n79 Dibelius, Bishop, 111, 241, 251, 255 passim Diekmann, Bruno, 122, 150, 200, 206, 231 Bad Segeberg Conference, 184–5 British policy, 160, 179–80, 223 dismantling as demilitarisation, 200 on expellee and refugee unemployment, 168, 202, 250 food rations, 161–2 disarmament, see demilitarisation; dismantling dismantling 4, 98, 233, 258 Agreement on Industrial Controls (1951), 256 August-Thyssen-Hütte, Duisberg, 254 Blohm & Voss, Hamburg, 256–7, 314n129 British critics of policy, 196, 197, 198, 207, 255, 314n113

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Charlotten-Hütte-Niederschelden, 254 Dortmund-Hoerder Hüttenverein, 255–6 dismantled plant to Soviet Union as reparations, 195, 197–8 effects on economic regeneration, 99–100, 132, 195–6, 198, 199–200, 225, 253, 253–7 French Zone, scheduled businesses for dismantling, 196 government dismantling order for war plant and surplus industrial plant, 195–7 housing and refugee camp crises, 196, 202, 225 industry, decartelisation, controls and restrictions, 253–8 means to demilitarisation, 99–100, 195–6, 199–200 means to Soviet reparations, 255–6 refugee unemployment, 10, 98, 101, 105, 132, 168, 174, 195, 200–2 removal of controls on industrial production, 99, 237, 253–7, 260 repeal of cartel policy, 315n142 shipyards and dockyards, 201, 256–7 Siemens-Schuckert, 200 tensions caused, 101, 128, 129, 132, 166, 174, 196, 197, 198, 200, 207, 213, 254–5, 297n172 US Zone, scheduled businesses for dismantling, 196, 197 Watenstedt-Salzgitter, Brunswick, 254–5 Displaced Persons (DPs), 36, 39, 108, 132, 134–5, 140–1, 224, 226, 230, 281n19 Dixon, Pierson, 93 Dortmund-Hoerder Hüttenverein, see dismantling Douglas, Sir Sholto, 89, 110, 146, 184, 190, 192, 303n99 Dresden, bombing of, 22 passim, 59, 63, 64, 266n36

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INDEX Dumbarton Oaks, 11–12, 28 Dunkirk, 53 EAC, 48, 92, 99, 274n48 East Brandenburg refugees, 126–7 East Pomerania East Pomeranian refugees and expellees, 127, 211, 217 East Prussia East Prussian refugees and expellees, 126–7, 137 (Fig. 19), 180, 211, 217 failed evacuation plans for ethnic Germans, 40 territorial compensation, 12, 34 economic miracle, West Germany, 229 Eden, Anthony, 12, 26, 30, 38, 47, 220, 261n7, 280n3 deporting Germans from East Prussia to compensate Poland, 49 visit to Moscow (1941), 12 war criminals sentence reviews, 240, 241 Eckernförde Bay, see torpedo testing stations Entlastungszeugnis, see Denazification Clearance Certificate Equalisation of Burdens Law (Lastenausgleich), 216, 228–9, 306n164 Erhard, Ludwig, 256 Essen, bombing attacks, 55, 57, 59 Estonia ethnic German minorities, 127 European Coal and Steel Community, 256 European Defence Treaty, 236, 245 collective defence system, 237, 239, 241, 256, 257–8, 313n91 evacuees, 4, 6, 65–6, 76, 145, 147–8, 152–3, 164, 183–4, 222, 249, 293n105, 300n52, 312n81 expellees, see also refugees, 3, 5 black market, 163 estimated deaths, 261n2

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numbers removed from former homelands, 5, 270n106, 294n123 ‘Operation Swallow’, 135–9, 148, 154, 291n64 ‘Operation Wasp’, 139 proposed Berlin research centre, 25 return to native homelands, 29, 180 seeking political legitimacy, 211 summary expulsions (Wildvertreibungen), 40, 224 expellee associations, 12, 14, 94, 129 Atlantic Charter, 214–15 British the last to lift ban, 208, 225 Certificates of Good Conduct, 211, 213 denazification, 211, 213 Der Bund der Heimatvertriebenen, 210, 213–15, 229 Der Bund der Neumärker, 217 Der Bund der Vertriebenen, 229 Die Hilfsgemeinschaft der Danziger und Westpreußen, 217 Die Hilfsgemeinschaft der Pommern, 217 Die Hilfsgemeinschaft der Schlesier, 217 Die Ost-Preußen-Hilfsgemeinschaft, 217 East Pomeranian help organisations, 211 East Prussian organisations, 211 licensing and control, 209, 215, 217 Ostdeutsche Landsmannschaft, 306n164 perceived threat to British Zone’s stability, 210, 225 petition to return to former homelands, 211, 216 rights to peaceful assembly, 213, 305n159 Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft 217 Vereinigung der Ostvertriebenen 211 Western Allies’ ban on politically motivated refugee parties, 208, 212 (Fig. 25) FDP, 207, 240 Federal Republic of Germany, see also Germany, 4, 5, 20, 76, 172, 193, 219, 232, 280n161

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338

THE A LLIED OCCUPATION

Federal Republic of Germany (Continued) abolition of death penalty by West German courts, 71, 310n30 British refusal to transfer responsibility for war criminals, 244–5 Basic Law (constitution), 71, 76, 238, 308n23, 310n30 buys back docks and confiscated plant from Britain, 256–7, 314n127 costs of Allied occupation, 253 criticism of dismantling policy, 255–7 criticism of Britain’s handling of war crimes’ trials, 240, 244 criticism of Britain’s peace declarations 236–7 Federal Ministry for Expellee Affairs, 229 Foreign Ministry campaign for war criminals amnesty, 241, 244 opposition to British policy on Heligoland, 246, 247–8, 250–3, 257, 312n73 rearmament, 225, 236–7, 239, 244, 260, 309n19 refugee and expellee economic and social integration, 13, 228, 231, 249 reintegration as Western ally 76, 86, 215, 234, 238, 254, 260, 306n175, 313n107 sovereignty, 4, 123, 220, 233–4, 236, 246–7, 249, 253, 260 threats to German-British relations, 247–8, 259–60 war criminals amnesty petition, 245 Fisher, Archbishop Geoffrey, 27, 111ff, 113, 116, 123 FitzAlan of Derwent, Viscount, 5 Flensburg, 78 (Fig. 11), 201, 256 accepts refugees, 276n106 Danish minorities problem in South Slesvig, 285n122 Denazification Panel, 211, 305n149 food and coal shortages, 20, 80, 86, 91, 100, 113, 133, 166

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British Zone not self-sufficient in foodstuffs, 99, 160, 181, 295n142 decreases in coal and industrial output, 99 effects on German morale, 160, 166 food shortages, 160–3, 166–7, 226 bread ration scales, 163 rations for expellees, 138, 166, 176 rations for consumers in British Zone, 295n147 Foreign Office agreement to Transfer of Populations policy, 26, 34, 222, 231 ‘Armistice and Postwar Committee’, 50 distinction between Displaced Persons and refugees, 50–1 efforts to curb Soviet influence, 42 fears that expellees see better life in Soviet Zone, 215 fears of ‘inhumane’ expulsions by Russians, Poles and Czechs, 51 ‘Foreign Office Research Department’, 50 views on German militarism, 71 Germany policy, 6, 18, 93, 226, 244, 257 ‘Interdepartmental Committee on the Transfer of German Populations’, 48, 273n45 manpower and roles of officials, 30, 281n32, 307n12 ‘Memorandum on Frontiers’, 44 refusal to transfer responsibility for war criminals to FRG, 245 Research and Press Service (FRPS) 45, 273n33 Reconstruction Department, 32 ‘Transfer of the German Populations’, evolution of policy, 42–52 Foreign Ministers’ meeting, New York, 236 Foreign Secretaries’ Conference, Quebec 47

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INDEX France civilising mission, 19 contribution to IRO budget, 36 refusal to treat Germany as economic entity, 100 resistance to international control of Ruhr industries, 190, 224 resistance to refugee redistribution, 138 UDHR drafting and minorities problem, 228 French Military Government and French Zone of Occupation dispute over acceptance of refugees, 193, 195, 224 British appeals to accept redistribution of refugees, 174, 181, 185–6, 190, 193–5 exchange of refugees with British Zone, 139 German perceptions of occupiers, 19, 265n17 implementing school-feeding programme, 161 plan to resettle refugees, 140–1 ratio of refugees to population, 302n64 returning evacuees from SchleswigHolstein, 183–4 scheduled businesses for dismantling, 196 unemployment, 249–50 Friends Service Council, 28 Friends Relief Service, 121, 224 Frings, Archbishop Joseph 27, 118, 241 Galen, Bishop von, 27 Gaulle, General Charles de, 19, 265n19 Gayk, Andreas, 176, 197–9, 201, 204, 303n101 Generalgouvernement, see Poland Geneva Convention, 75, 239 German Communist Party (DKP), 213, 214, 217 German Economic Council, 197, 206, 216

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Germany see also Federal Republic of Germany Allied policy after defeat, 18 Allied internment policy and impact on German morale, 101 black market, German police reports, 165 criticism of Nuremberg Trials procedure, 23, 240 criticism of British government and occupation authorities, 20, 80, 89 passim, 110–11, 128–9, 157–8, 162, 165, 168, 175–81 passim, 191–2, 196, 197–8, 200, 201, 205–6, 207, 213, 226–7, 246, 256–7, 259–60, 297n172 demilitarisation, 3, 99–100, 110, 195–6, 198, 204, 207, 225, 233, 246, 253, 256 democratisation, 24, 79, 86, 94, 96, 101, 110, 114, 117, 127, 145, 213, 259 denazification, see denazification economic burden caused by Occupation, 97–101 dismantling policy, impact on morale, 200, 205, 213, 256–7 Evangelical Church, see the Church food shortages and effect on German morale, 160, 166 Foreign Ministry (Auswärtiges Amt), 236 German suspicions of revanchism, 24 housing and effect on German morale, 166, 169–71, 188, 192 no mandate to compel civilians to house refugees, 169 morale, German police reports, 72–3, 165–7, 260, 278n134, 296n167 partition, 31 public health, see public health reunification, 254 ‘special path’ (Sonderweg), 20 revision of 1937 borders to win German loyalties, 207

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340

THE A LLIED OCCUPATION

Germany (Continued) territorial compensation to Poland and anticipated reaction, 50 unconditional surrender, 11, 24, 39, 76, 79, 93, 207, 224, 236 war guilt, 25, 48 Gestapo, 23, 119 Gollancz, Victor, 9, 28 passim, 76, 95, 114, 121, 176, 240, 243 Britain’s humanitiarian response to crisis, 8 criticism of reconstruction policies, 28 dismantling policy, 303n119 Nuremberg Trials, 70, 75 opposition to requisitioning, 158 Save Europe Now! 113, 119, 121, 142, 161, 224 Göring, Hermann, 68, 77 Grass, Günter, 25 Griffin, Cardinal, Bishop of Westminster, 27 Halifax, Lord, 35, 93 Hamburg, 164 bombing, 4, 21, 22 passim, 60–1, 60 (Fig. 6), 61 (Fig. 7), 64ff, 65 (Fig. 10), 76, 222, 266n32, 276n93 dismantling, 256–7 evacuees to Schleswig-Holstein, 66, 148, 152 passim, 293n105 living space allocation and share of refugees, 155 ratio of refugees and expellees to population, 289n28 returning evacuees from SchleswigHolstein, 183 shipbuilding and dockyards, 256–7 Hameln, 130 Hannover, 57 (Fig. 5), 81 (Fig. 12) Lilje, Bishop, 239 Harris, Sir Arthur, 9, 21, 61, 62, 64 (Fig. 9), 68 bombing as more humane method, 62 Hamburg, 62 historian, 18

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reputation, 63–4 Harrison, Geoffrey, 47 Harrisson, Tom, 54 Harvey, Oliver Atlantic Charter negotiations, 280n3 fears coalescing sympathy in Britain for expellees, 49 passim, 282n42 Bell’s wartime statements, 108–9 1946 tour of British Zone with William Strang, 91 Havilland, Brigadier P.H. de, 95 Heimat, 14 expellee associations demand right to return to homelands, 211, 306n164 expellee perceptions of a better life in Soviet-controlled lands, 215 Heligoland, 6, 220, 233, 247 (Fig. 30), 248 (Fig. 31), 249 (Fig. 32), 258 British justification for bombing policy, 246 bombardment and use as RAF bombing range, 246–50, 252–3 expulsion of the islanders, 246, 312n81 FRG asked to pay for occupation of island, 250 islanders’ rights to self-determination, 249, 250–2 loss of tourism income, 252 requisitioning of island, 246, 257 Helsinki Final Act, 13 Henderson, Brigadier, 146, 188, 303n103 Hilfswerk der Evangelischen Kirche der Schweiz, 224, 307n7 Himmler, Heinrich, 127 Historikerstreit, 72 Hitler, Adolf, 23, 35, 49, 71, 108, 110, 147 Holland, 236, 311n56 Holmag Works, 198–9, see also torpedo testing stations Holocaust Memorial, Berlin, 25 Hopkins, Harry 47 housing crisis, 133, 153–9, 224, 249

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INDEX Control Council Law No. 18 provisions, 155–6, 169–71, 215 demand for homes in the four zones, 293n109 effect on German morale, 156, 169–71, 192, 260 impact of demilitarisation, 196 impact of dismantling, 196–7, 201 impact of refugee population figures on housing, 148 impact of requisitioning, 157–9, 223, 257 priority to create employment in building, 128 reduction in living space area for Germans, 154, 169–71, 293n113 refugee camps as symptom, 139–45 passim, 184 Hoyer Millar, Sir Frederick, 245–6 Humanitarian and voluntary organisations, 8, 17, 28, 106, 116, 119–22, 125, 182, 223–4, 239 human rights collapsed into minority rights, 33, 227 expellees’ rights, 214–15, 216, 230 violations and the UN Charter, 35 Hungary ethnic German expellees, 108, 127 expulsion of ethnic German minorities, 40, 231, 270n106 Hynd, John, 18, 29, 41–2, 96, 110–11, 113, 117, 122, 133, 142, 147, 307n13 food situation in Germany, 161, 226, 295n147 Immediate Aid Law (Soforthilfgesetz), 216, 228 industry – controls and restrictions, see dismantling Ingrams, Harold Britain’s moral authority, 24 implementing policy to reconstruct German political system, 94 Innere Mission, see Evangelische Hilfswerk, 120, 123

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International Refugee Organisation (IRO), 36, 224 Iraq military occupation and refugees, 231, 308n32 Jackson, Robert. J., 23 Jebb, Gladwyn, 39, 90, 272n12 Jones, Jack, 142, 143–5 Jowitt, Viscount (Lord Chancellor), 75, 222, 223 Kesselring, Albert, 244, 245, 311n61 Kiel, 66, 129, 148, 156, 307n7 Committee for Social Affairs and Refugees, 136 conditions for refugees, 151, 176 dismantling of East Bank buildings in Harbour, 201, 205–6 dismantling of Holmag foundry, 198–9 dismantling, 201, 205, 256 expellees, 131, 132 RAF bombings, 131 refugee camps, 139 Kirkpatrick, Sir Ivone, 4, 96, 234–5, 235 (Fig. 27), 258, 280n3, 315n144 Adenauer dialogue on economic impact of dismantling, 255–7 Christianity as a political aim, 117 criticisms of Adenauer 240, 253 Foreign Office efficiency, 307n12 Heligoland policy 247, 250–3 sentence reviews for war criminals 238, 239, 241–2, 244 strategic bombing, 77 Koenig, General Robert, 19, 190, 193, 195 KPD, 217, 218 Korea, 236 KRO (Kreis Resident Officers) as evidence of relationship between Germans and British, 129 Krupp Works, Essen, 59, 102 (Fig. 16), 257

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THE A LLIED OCCUPATION

Labour government, 28 Christianity as a political aim, 117 conflicting policy priorities, 105–6 dismantling, parliamentary investigation refused, 204 hopes for new post-war relationship with Soviet Union, 17, 30 less room for manoeuvre in Germany policy, 43, 116–17 overtaxed economic capacity, 97–9, 100, 117 rationing policy and food consumption levels, 97 tensions over sentence reviews for war criminals 241 Labour Party, 17–18, 30, 201, 207 Lambeth Conference, 107, 108 Landsberg Prison (US Zone), 310n40 Lang, Lord, 26 Latvia ethnic German minorities, 127 Lausanne Treaty, see Foreign Office, ‘Transfer of the German Populations’ Greek-Turkish population exchange as precedent, 43–5, 273n33 Lawrence, Lord Justice Geoffrey, 24 League of Nations, 32, 33, 49, 228 Lend-Lease, 30, 104, 226 Level of Industry Plan, 99, 195, 197, 199 Liddell Hart, Basil 73, 278n137, 278n138 Lingham, Brigadier, 255 Lindemann, Frederick, see Lord Cherwell Lithuania ethnic German minorities, 127 territorial compensation, 12 Lower Saxony 130, 149, 150 agreement to absorb refugees from Schleswig-Holstein, 183, 187–9, 191–2 bread rations, 163 expenditure per head on refugees, 155 living space allocation for refugees, 155 ratio of refugees and expellees to population, 289n28, 292n87, 300n52

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GERMANY

returning evacuees, 183 Lübeck, 66, 148 accommodation shortages, 155 bombing attacks, 55–6, 56 (Fig. 4), 57 dismantling, 196, 202, 256 food shortages, 166–7 refugee camps, 139, 140 Lüdemann, Hermann, 95, 119, 149, 150, 152, 156, 169, 171, 177, 179–80, 184–5, 188–9, 191–3, 198, 201, 206, 301n64, 301n75 Mabbott, John, 45, 273n37 Macmillan, Harold, 6, 75 Mann, Thomas, 20, 265n27 Manstein, Erich von, 72, 73, 74–6, 240, 244, 245 Marshall Plan, 30, 105, 218, 227 Martin, Kingsley, 9, 109 Mass-Observation, see public opinion, Britain Mayhew, Christopher, 198–9, 215 McNeil, Hector, 177–8, 201, 298n12 Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 288n28 Meech, Colonel H.S., 245 Meiser, Bishop, 111 Mennonites, 120, 224 Methodists, 224 minorities targeting of, 12, 228 orderly removal of populations, 44, 88 rights, 28, 32, 227 treaties, 49 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 47 Montgomery, Field Marshal, 79, 83, 89, 90, 111 Morrison, Herbert, 237 Moscow Conference, 16, 28, 99, 274n48 Munich Agreement, 12 NATO, 239 Nazi doctrine, 6, see also denazification Neuengamme Concentration Camp, 62 (Fig. 8)

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INDEX Neumünster, 122, 142, 143, 286n149 Nichols, Philip, 47, 273n30 Niemöller, Martin, 108, 238–9, North Atlantic, Battle of, 21 North Rhine-Westphalia, 129, 149, 151, 255 agreement to absorb refugees from Schleswig-Holstein, 187–9, 191 expenditure per head on refugees, 155 living space allocation for refugees, 155 objects to receiving refugees, 187, 193 ratio of refugees and expellees to population, 289n28, 300n52, 301n75 returning evacuees from SchleswigHolstein, 183 Nottingham, Bishop of, 27 Nuremberg Trials, 11, 23 passim, 31, 47, 70, 76, 77, 121 British sensitivity to German public opinion on verdicts and sentences, 70–1 Charter, 23, 31, 68 cost to British taxpayers, 70 German morale reports, 72–3 Gestapo and Wehrmacht, 23 International Military Tribunal, 72, 222 methods of execution, 69–70 moral contradictions, 24, 70 precedent for international law, 24 principles of justice, 24, 69 role in re-education of Germany, 24 USA and Britain’s approval of indictment selection criteria, 23 as victors’ justice, 11, 24 Occupation Statute, 140, 171, 173, 223, 234, 236, 239, 244, 251, 315n142 Oder-Neisse Line, 126, 160, 274n64, 287n4, 294n123 border revisions, 34, 52, 180 Oder and Neisse rivers, 31, 34, 137, 207 Orwell, George, 8 Overseas Reconstruction Committee, 205, 226

GrahamDixon_Index.indd 343

343

Pakenham, Frank, 113, 114–17, 115 (Fig. 18), 122, 133, 147, 156, 226, 243–4 British government and Christian principles, 114 duty as occupation power, 116 opposition to requisitioning policy, 158 threatens to resign, 226 Palmerston, Lord, 5 Paris Peace Conference (1918), 46–7 Paton Walsh, Colonel, 69, 83, 96 Peace treaty, 186, 236–7 Petersberg Agreement, 234, 254 Poland Churchill’s speech (December 1944), 52 expulsion of ethnic German minorities, 40, 49, 108, 121, 127, 136, 148, 231, 270n106, 274n49, 287n2, 287n3 Generalgouvernement, 126 loss of territory, 39 militias, 136 Munich Agreement, 12 Polish volunteers to demolish industrial installations, 201 post-war future, 6 proposed deportation of ethnic Germans, 34, 48, 51, 262n21 surrendering Polish territory to compensate Russia, 44 territorial compensation, 12, 34, 36, 43, 45, 49–50, 136, 208, 209, 211, 218 Polish-Czech Federation, 44 political morality, 25 Churchill on morality of forced removal of Germans, 52 Pakenham’s Catholic morality, 116 Pomerania Pomeranian refugees, 127, 131 ethnic German expellees, 137 Pöppendorf Transit Camp, 136, 149, 150 Population transfers, see Foreign Office, Transfer of German Populations

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344

THE A LLIED OCCUPATION

Potsdam Conference, 9, 10, 13, 28, 62, 79, 88, 89, 118, 139, 197, 207, 236 allocation of German expellees to occupation zones, 34 Britain forced to accept highest expellee quota of Western powers, 31 British impotence, 3, 133 economic unity in occupation zones, 105 elimination of German military potential, 99 estimate of refugee numbers, 31 ‘orderly and humane’ transfers [Art. 13], 10, 40, 52, 135–8, 222, 227, 262–3n21 Population Transfers initiated by, 40, 45 POWs convicted of murder or maltreatment of Allied nationals 239 returning POWs 27, 87, 99, 145, 148, 153, 249 safeguarding POW rights, 75 Prussia, 52, 127 Prussian militarism, 71, 87 public health, 133, 135 expellee maltreatment and poor health, 136–8 fears of typhoid and cholera epidemics, 87 threats caused by food and clothing, 160 Winter Health Plan, 159 public opinion, Britain Blitz and retribution, 54 Control Commission public opinion and morale reports, 133–4, 168–9 Control Commission, 315n136 Gallup poll on post-war treatment of Germany, 39 Mass-Observation on Blitz, 53–4, and Nuremberg, 70 need to retain public support for bombing policy, 58

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GERMANY

public and official opposition to Heligoland policy, 247, 251, 253 Public Opinion Research Service, 68–9, 70–1 towards Germany, 6, 38 war crimes, 32, 222 Quakers, see Friends Relief Service and Friends Service Council Raikes, Victor, 6 Rathbone, Eleanor, 37 Rau, Johannes, 230–1 Ravensbrück war crimes trial, 23, 67 Red Cross (International Red Cross), 28, 119–20, 224, 239 re-education of Germany, see Control Commission of Germany refugees, see also Expellees black market, 163 camps and barracks, 131, 139–45 passim, 142 (Fig. 20), 143 (Fig. 21), 144 (Fig. 22), 184, 257, 291n66, 291n69, 291n74 delegation by Britain to German authorities, 3, 7, 14, 88–9, 128–9, 173, 223 differentiating German citizens and ethnic German refugees, 25 dismantling, impact on refugee camps, 196 dismantling, impact on expellee population, 202 forced migration in face of advancing Red Army, 126–7 housing shortages, see housing crisis impact on British Military Government, 15, 128 numbers removed from former homelands, 5, 229, 261n4, 270n106, 287n4 ‘Operation Caravan’, 149–50, 152, 186–9, 194

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INDEX relations with German civilian population, 66, 79, 89, 119, 120, 132, 134, 153, 154, 157–8, 169–71, 176, 208, 214, 215–6 rises in infectious diseases, 159 self-limiting scope of British policy, 8, 11, 128–9, 190, 194–5, 281n19, 292n82 social welfare needs, 87, 88 suicides, 180 unemployment and labour shortages, 10, 128, 133, 192, 195, 200–2, 203 (Fig. 24), 213, 224, 250, 255, 257, 303n118, 312n82 refugee associations, see expellee associations reparations, 15, 31, 99–100, 105, 195, 197–8, 205, 224, 225, 236, 255–6, 307n8 Rheinland-Pfalz, 194 Roberts, Frank, 46, 47, 48, 226, 244, 273n30 German Department at the Foreign Office and mechanics of Transfer policy, 48 scepticism at Czechs’ and Poles’ suggested Transfer policy, 48 Robertson, General Sir Brian, 111, 119, 129, 145–7, 161, 164–5, 185, 187, 190, 192, 195, 200, 222, 223, 226, 255, 257, 296n159, 300n43 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 13 Casablanca Conference, 11 US war objectives, 23 Yalta, 34 Royal Air Force, 38, 54–7, 60 (Fig. 6), 131, 158, 246–7, 250, 252, 253 Rudolf Steiner movement, 122 Ruhr, Battle of the, 57, 58, 66 Ruhr industries, 190, 224, 254, 309n19 Rumania ethnic German minorities, 127 Rundstedt, Gerd von, 72, 279n153 Russia, see Soviet Union

GrahamDixon_Index.indd 345

345

Russian Zone, see Soviet Zone of Occupation Salisbury, Marquess of, 8 Salvation Army, 119ff, 122, 224 San Francisco Conference, 33 Sargent, Orme, 30, 46, 50, 79, 278n125 Save Europe Now! see Gollancz, Victor Schlange-Schöningen, Hans, 197, 206, 251, 302n97 Schleswig-Holstein, 5 black market 164–5 bread rations, 163, 296n152 Christian Democratic Party (CDU), 200–1, 206 denazification, 127, 287n4, 287n5 dismantling, 302n89 economic profile, 127–8, 287n9 elections, 127 employment opportunities, 128 evacuees from Hamburg, 6, 66, 76, 222, 276n107 expenditure per head on refugees, 155 food and clothing shortages, 160–3 geographical size, 130 living space allocation for refugees, 155 high expellee and refugee concentration, 16, 131, 139, 147, 187, 274n49, 277n108, 287n2, 288n28, 292n84, 300n52, 301n75, 302n84 occupation policy in, 16 plans to rebuid Heligoland, 252 refugee camps, 139–45 passim religious base, 127, 287n6 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 201, 204, 205 unemployment, 250, n118 Schröter, Carl, see CDU Schumacher, Kurt, 94, 254 Schuman, Robert Schuman Plan, 237, 254 SHAEF, 81 uncontrolled movements of refugees and DPs, 82–3

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346

THE A LLIED OCCUPATION

Shaw, George Bernard, 8 Shawcross, Hartley, 241 Sheffield, Bishop of, 238 Shinwell, Emanuel, 74, 248 shipyards, see dismantling Siemens-Schuckert, see dismantling Sikorski, Vladislav, 49 Silesia ethnic German expellees, 137 Silesian refugees, 127 territorial compensation to Upper Silesia, 12, 34 Sinclair, Sir Archibald, 8 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 94, 95, 119, 127, 177, 200, 201, 204, 205, 207, 217, 237, 254, 298n15 Soviet Union anti-Soviet thinking in Labour government, 30 Conference of Foreign Ministers, London, 186 demands for territory, 39 economic objectives in Germany, 100 ethnic German minorities, 13, 48, 127 expellees’ antipathy towards Russians, 209 expulsions of ethnic German minorities, 27 grain surpluses, 31, 99, 160, 226, 255 ideological divisions with Western Allies, 31 Moscow Conference, 16, 28, 99, 274n48 policy towards German refugees, 19 proposed deportation of ethnic Germans, 34, 48, 50, 51 Red Army advance, 5, 34, 40, 126 reparations, approach to securing, 32, 100 reneges on expellee quotas, 31 reneging on Potsdam commitments, 197 refusal to accept Marshall Plan, 30 shape of post-war Europe after Germany’s defeat, 11

GrahamDixon_Index.indd 346

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GERMANY

Teheran Conference, 11, 13, 45, 266n31 territorial compensation, 12–13, 36, 39, 44, 47, 209, 211 threat to Western civilisation, 17 Yalta Conference, 34, 52 Soviet Zone of Occupation German perceptions of occupiers, 19, 19n17 illegal arrivals in Schleswig-Holstein from Russian Zone, 149–52, 152 (Fig. 23), 186, 187, 188, 194, 293n96 SSW, 214 Stählin, Bishop, 111 Stalin, Josef meeting with Eden (1941), 30 territorial claims, 12, 34, 48 Second Front and Russia’s frontiers, 47 Yalta Conference, 34, 52 Stebbing, Lieutenant Colonel, 148, 149 Steel, Sir Christopher “Kit”, 205 Steltzer, Theodor, 135, 154–5 Stettin (Szczecin), 136, 180 Stokes, Richard, 8, 9, 73, 74, 197, 243, 279n141 opposition to dismantling policy, 198–9, 303n99 opposition to requisitioning policy, 158 Strachey, John, 248 Strang, Lord William, 18, 29, 90–4, 96, 282n48 CCG and devolution of power, 91 role shaping occupation policy, 90 1945/1946 tours of British Zone, 90–1 German refugees as a special case, 91 Strauss, Adolf, 72, 279n153 Strategic Bombing Offensive, see Area Bombing policy, British Süd-Baden, 194 Sudeten Germans Sudeten German expellees, 91, 127, 287n3

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INDEX expellee association (Die Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft), 217 Jaksch, Wenzel and Sudeten Germans in England, 46 proposed expulsion of Sudeten Germans, 46, 49 Surrendorf, see torpedo testing stations (TVA) Sylt, 213 Tate, Mavis, 7 Teheran Conference, 11, 13, 34, 45, 266n31 Temple, Archbishop William, 107, 267n56 territorial compensation and border revisions, see Czechoslovakia, Danzig, East Prussia, Germany, Lithuanian Republic, Poland, Russia, Upper Silesia Tizard, Sir Henry, 64 torpedo testing stations, 198, 200–1, 204, 207, 213, 304n120 town twinning, 120–1, 286n157 Toynbee, Arnold, 45, 273n33 Travemünde, 137 (Fig. 19), 167 Troutbeck, John, 51, 108 Truman, Harry, 237 unconditional surrender, see Germany unemployment, see also refugee unemployment unemployment in Western zones, 249–50, 254 United Nations General Assembly, 36 role of, 12, 228 UN Charter, 10, 32–3 passim, 35, 36, 227, 253, 308n23 United Nations Organisation (UNO), 28, 36, 228 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), 36 United States of America

GrahamDixon_Index.indd 347

347

contribution to IRO budget, 36 denazification policy, 23 dismantling policy programme, 197 economic hegemony, 31 prioritising withdrawal of troops, 19 UDHR drafting and minorities problem, 228 resistance to redistribution of refugees, 138 wartime distinctions between Nazis and Germans, 18–19 US Air Force, 246, 253 US Military Government and US Zone of Occupation bombardment of Heligoland, 246, 248 British appeals to accept redistribution of refugees, 174, 181, 185, 189, 195 democratisation, 307n9 exchange of refugees with British Zone, 139 German perceptions of occupation regime, 19, 265n17 illegal refugees from Soviet Zone, 149 implementing school-feeding programme, 161 manpower, 88, 258, 281n31 objection to accept agreed share of refugees, 189, 191 liberalisation of refugee groups’ freedom of association and right to form organisations, 208, 210, 225 plans for assimilating refugees, 208 returning evacuees from SchleswigHolstein, 183–4 scheduled businesses for dismantling, 196, 197 unemployment, 249 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 33, 107, 130 drafting, 35, 227–8 Upper Silesia, see Silesia

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348

THE A LLIED OCCUPATION

Vansittart, Robert, 26 ‘Vansittartism’, 18 Vaughan Berry, Henry, 251 Versailles, Treaty of, 10–11 V.E. Day, 32 victors’ justice, 11, 21, 52–67, 67–76, 81, 87, 152, 222 war criminals, 4, 74 delays in executions, 76, 310n39 disputes over lack of due legal process, 74, 238, 240, 244–5, 279n141, 279n149 Germans confined internment camps without trial, 101 prolongation of sentences, 11, 238–46 passim, 258, 310n39, 310n40 prolongation of war crimes trials, 7, 53, 71 passim, 72, 74, 233, 278n132, 279n151 reintegrating Germans into administrative posts, 11 secret prison, 238 sentence reviews and clemency appeals, 4, 101, 238–41, 245, 242–3 (Figs 28 & 29), 244–6 soundness of convictions, 238, 240 War Office, 50, 73–4 Warthegau, 126 Watenstedt-Salzgitter, Brunswick, see dismantling Wehrmacht, 23, 140, 244 Wellington, Duke of, 242 Werl Prison, 239, 242–6, 310n40 West Prussia, 29 refugee migration, 127 Western Allies agreement over territorial borders, 5, 209 ban on formation of politically driven refugee parties, 208, 228 controlling West German economic revival, 237, 256

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GERMANY

failure to agree population redistribution quotas, 124, 195 failure to treat Germany as single economic unit, 105 formalising end of hostilities with Germany, 236–8 hopes for consensus on German control of foreign relations, 236 ideological divisions with Soviet Union, 31, 76, 186 lack of legal accountability for refugees, 35–6, 186, 195 limits on German industrial capacity, 99–100, 256 Petersberg Agreement, 234, 254 policy towards Germany, 13, 19n17, 207, 215, 265, 274n64 pressure from expellees to return lost lands, 209 provision for DPs, 224 rehabilitation and reintegration of Germany, 4, 13, 76, 86, 215, 234 sovereignty for Western Germany, 4 war crimes prosecution policy 238 wish to punish Germany, 52 Western civilisation and values, 10, 72, 112, 162, 179, 219 Wilm, Synod President, 244 Wittlich Prison (French Zone), 310n40 Woodward, Sir Llewellyn, 92–3 World Council of Churches, 124 German refugee question, 118–19, 226 recognition of UN’s proclamation of human rights, 118–19 Wurm, Theophil, 108, 240–1 Württemberg-Hohenzollern, 194 Yalta Conference, 13, 16, 19, 34, 39, 52 Yugoslavia ethnic German minorities, 127 ZAC (Zonal Advisory Council), 180, 185, 187, 194 Zuckerman, Solly, 274n84

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