On January 17 1947, a book review by
George Orwell appeared in Tribune. “I
hope everyone who can get access to a copy will take at least a glance at
Victor Gollancz's recently published book, In Darkest Germany,” he wrote, and continued: “It is not a
literary book, but a piece of brilliant journalism intended to shock the public
of this country into some kind of consciousness of the hunger, disease, chaos and lunatic mismanagement prevailing in the
British Zone.
The British
themselves, Orwell conceded, were not having a great
time either (and they were about to have a much worse one, as some of the
worst winter weather in history was just ahead). Even so, Orwell thought it
remarkable how unaware the British were of what was happening in Germany. With In
Darkest Germany, Gollancz aimed to tell them.
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| Eilbek, Hamburg, in 1945 (Imperial War Museum/F/O J. Dowd) |
Victor Gollancz is remembered today as a publisher, and was a significant one. He had produced Orwell’s first books among others. In the later 1930s they had political differences, and Gollancz had not taken Homage to Catalonia, which cast doubt on the account of the ‘official’ Left – but Gollancz himself would split with them over the Nazi-Soviet pact. Henceforth he was to be as much an activist and polemicist as a publisher. The Nazi regime was an early target. As early as 1933, the year Hitler came to power, he produced a pamphlet by Labour peer Dudley Marley, The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror. In 1942 he published one of his own, Let My People Go, in which he argued that “a million or two” Jews had already been murdered in Europe, and that six million would die. Yet in the postwar years Gollancz, who was Jewish, would devote considerable energy to call for better treatment for German (and other European) people.
In October and
November 1946 Gollancz made a six-week visit to the British Zone. The resulting
book, In Darkest Germany, was based
on the letters, public and private, that he wrote during the visit. It could
therefore be rushed out quickly on his return. Nonetheless one is impressed at
the speed with which it was done, at a time when books were set in hot metal
and there were also austerity regulations for book production. The book is 128
pages, plus 144 photographs – the latter would each have required an individual
block to be made. Despite this, the book
was out in January 1947. Moreover, my own copy shows it to be a second
impression in the same month – suggesting that sales had been brisk.
The pictures are
stark. Plates 4 and 5 are the heads of men lying on hospital beds. Plate 8 is a
full-length picture of a naked man from the back; it is captioned, “Emaciation,
not oedema. 56, looked 70. Was clearing rubble and got half heavy worker’s
ration.” Plates 14 and 15 show boys of
about 10 or 11, though they may be older. They are stripped to the waist
(according to the caption, at the author’s request). They are thin; their ribs show, and they are
clearly undernourished.
Neither is the
text easy reading, although the facts have long passed away. In Hamburg,
Gollancz reports, about 100,000 people were suffering “from hunger oedema or
the equivalent”. In the same city, he
stated, “active lung tuberculosis is at least five times as prevalent as before
the war, and may even be 10 times as prevalent.” The reasons for the growth in
TB, he argued, were twofold – malnutrition and overcrowding: “In the British
zone 12,000 people with open, infectious tuberculosis live in the same room
with others – sometimes in the same bed with children.”
He does not quote
a source for these figures, and they should be approached with caution. The
100,000 for hunger oedema was questioned at the time by doctors working with
the UN Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Historian John Farquharson,
writing in the 1980s (‘Emotional but Influential’: Victor Gollancz, Richard
Stokes and the British Zone of Germany, 1945-1949), has also said that it
was not credible, and has pointed out that the overall death rate did not
reflect such a number. He has also challenged other statements by Gollancz in
the book, including the allegation that prevalence of TB had risen fivefold. In
general, Gollancz’s numbers are open to question.
But there was
clearly hunger. Gollancz cites a survey under British auspices of around 1,000
Hamburg postal employees in which the incidence of hunger oedema was found to
be 17% amongst males and 9% amongst females. Reproducing one of his own
letters, he also gives a figure of 13,000 hospitalized cases of hunger oedema
for Düsseldorf in September; this apparently was also challenged, so he goes on
to point out that the British colonel in command of the Düsseldorf district had
said that the number of non-hospitalized cases was nearly double that.
The reason for this was not hard to see, according to Gollancz. The standard ration (that is, for people not doing heavy work) had recently been increased but was still just 1,550 calories, in contrast to the 2,650 that UNRRA had stated as necessary for “full health and efficiency” in a normal population. (Today Britain’s NHS says men need about 2,500 to maintain body weight, women about 2,000.) However, most people in Düsseldorf were not even getting 1,550 calories a day as most basic foodstuffs were in short supply. Gollancz went so far as to say that those who could not or would not supplement their rations on the black market were managing on 400-1,000 calories a day. Once again, it is not clear where he got these numbers; he is perhaps giving his own observations – but sometimes he is able to quote more official figures:
In
the Control Commission’s information room at Bünde there is a chart ...showing
a graph of seven diseases with March 30 1946 as the first date and September 14
as the last. Scarlet fever is about the same... diptheria is a trifle higher,
gonorrhea considerably higher, syphillis much higher, tuberculosis about a
third higher, and typhoid nearly double. But what really matters is a more
generalised degeneration in the health and strength of the whole community.
A British health official, thinking
Gollancz to be a visiting politician, let fly at him in a mess in Hamburg one
afternoon. “What on earth are you politicians up to? ...Do you realise what’s
going on here?” he asked. “An epidemic of any kind would sweep everything
before it. ...If you...don’t do something about it two problems that seem to
have been worrying you will be solved. The size of the German population and
manure.”
*
There can be no doubt that the refugees
from the east worsened the situation. Gollancz recounts being shown a list of
the clothing needs for those in Schleswig-Holstein. He calls them “expellees”
and they will have included some who were literally expelled from what had been
eastern Germany, but one suspects that many will have arrived earlier as part
of Operation Hannibal, the German navy’s mass evacuation of the Eastern regions
in the last few months of the war (an extraordinary story little-known outside Germany). However they had arrived,
they numbered 1.2 million out of Schleswig-Holstein’s 3 million population and
needed 200,000 men’s overcoats, a million pairs of shoes, 800,000 undergarments
and half a million blankets. Gollancz visits a ship and a camp in which
expellees are housed, and sees “mostly stretchers, wooden bunks, and bundles of
sordid beclothes on the floor: indeed ...I don’t recollect seeing a single
bed.”
Not that the people of Hamburg were
doing much better; Gollancz enters one building and finds a woman and her four
children living in a single room. The husband is a prisoner in Russia. Nearby,
a couple, their seven children and a dog are living in a two-room makeshift
shelter totalling 200 sq. ft.
Rebuilding was clearly urgent. According
to Gollancz, the cement works in the British Zone had a capacity of 7.7 million
tons. But 25 cement works, accounting for about half of this total, were
threatened with closure as reparations.
This was an iniquitous facet of the 1945 Potsdam four-power agreement
under which plant and assets were not only to be seized as reparations, but
also destroyed if they could be used in the future to make war. Cement could be
used to construct docks for U-boats, fortifications etc., so must not be
allowed – although it was not clear how ordinary Germans were to be housed
without it.
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| Lighter with a map of the British zone (Imperial War Museum) |
This lunacy extended right across large
parts of the economy, affecting even food production. Thus 13 fishing vessels
at Bremerhaven had been used during the war as minelayers; the Germans wished
to return them to their real purpose, but the British would not permit it. In
another case, a fishing vessel was a metre longer than the permitted length.
The Germans offered to reduce the vessel’s size, but the British refused and
blew it up instead. “Meanwhile, the wretched German fish ration has been
reduced,” writes Gollancz, “and we complain that the cost of feeding Germany is
almost more than we can bear.” He quotes
other examples of this crass stupidity, and others were raised in a Commons
debate on the occupation on November 27 1946, in which his reports were
debated.
Gollancz regarded the destruction as
wholly irrational – including the shipyards. He would, he said, be asked
whether he had forgotten the weapons that Blohm & Voss had built. No, he said, and indeed he had
warned of the dangers of fascism in the 1930s (as we’ve seen, this was true).
“But I say that if there is one absolutely certain way of making a repetition
of the last few years inevitable, it is to acquiesce in this godless
destruction, and to drive a whole people, with whom we have to live, into
hatred and despair.”
Why had the British Zone, with its 23
million inhabitants, got into such a state? Was this an act of revenge by the
British for a war that they had not wanted? Many British people were deeply
angry with Germany well into my own lifetime (I was born in 1957). Was this a
mass punishment-beating?
*
The evidence, at least for the British
Zone, strongly suggests otherwise. To be sure, the Germans were not the flavour
of the month. But there was genuine public concern in Britain about their
conditions; much of it was humanitarian, and it was reflected in Parliament and
in the Press. It is especially evident from the support Gollancz had for his
campaign, which had begun in earnest only a few months after the war had ended.
It focused initially on the mass expulsions of Germans from Poland and
Czechoslovakia. The campaign was driven by vivid descriptions in the Daily Herald and the News Chronicle of the scenes around
Berlin’s Stettiner Bahnhof, where refugees were arriving from the east.
The skill and energy with which Gollancz
latched onto these events as a humanitarian cause has been recounted in an
interesting and engaging 2006 article by Matthew Frank, The New Morality (Twentieth Century British History, 17:2). Frank describes the startling extent to which
Gollancz managed to mobilise the chattering classes, and a big chunk of the
political establishment on both right and left. Gollancz asked people to send
in a postcard pledging their willingness to give up ration points in support of
German refugees. Within just over a week he had received 20,000. One wonders
how many signatures would have been received had one been able to respond
online.
By mid-September 1945, according to
Frank, the issue was receiving extensive coverage right across the British
press, even the right-wing dailies (apart from the Beaverbrook group. And one
newspaper that did support the campaign headed its leader “Feed the
Brutes”). On the left, supporters
included J. B. Priestley, not an obvious enthusiast for the Germans; in fact he
was so sympathetic to the USSR that Orwell later fingered him as a
fellow-traveller. Nonetheless Priestley wrote a dispatch from Berlin for the News Chronicle. “Whatever happens to the
German people this winter ...the world conscience must see to it that the
children of Germany do not starve,” he rumbled.
To be sure, not all of this was compassion. Frank makes it clear that much of it was based on the argument that an epidemic or disorder in the British Zone meant trouble for Britain, for it would spread. Nonetheless there was a strong humanitarian undertone. The wave of sympathy and/or self-interest reached a peak at the end of November 1945, when Gollancz’s Save Europe Now (SEN) held its inaugural meeting at the Albert Hall. The crush was so great that there were two overflow meetings in the nearby church of the Holy Trinity, Brompton. The speakers included such diverse figures as the former Conservative minister Bob Boothby and the young left-wing MP and journalist Michael Foot. Matthew Frank is unimpressed, seeing the moral crusade less as a humanitarian movement than as an affirmation of Britain’s image of itself. This is not entirely fair – but there is truth in it. However, what the SEN episode does suggest is that the British establishment, and for the most part the people, did not want unnecessary suffering for the Germans, however self-inflicted it might be. Their attitude was probably summed up in Noel Coward’s flippant satire from 1943:
Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans
When our victory is ultimately won...
Let's be meek to them
And turn the other cheek to them
And try to bring out their latent sense
of fun
… don’t let's be beastly to the Hun.
*
The British, then, had no wish to make
the Germans in their Zone miserable. So why the shambles?
Surprisingly little has been written
about the British occupation of north-west Germany, an area of 23 million
people. This is beginning to change as interest grows in the entire post-war
era, and modern scholars of the occupation, such as Christopher Knowles, are
not always so bleak about it. But Gollancz was right that the Germans under
British occupation faced terrible hardship (though conditions elsewhere in
Germany were scarcely better). There were several reasons. Perhaps the Attlee
government simply did not pay enough attention to Germany. It was extremely
busy – not just with Germany but with the crisis in India, which looked likely
to explode at any minute if no agreed path to independence could be found.
Britain was still fighting in both Greece and Palestine. She was also broke;
much of her gold reserves had been spent on the war, and the US had insisted,
as part of its postwar loan agreement, that sterling be convertible within a
few years. This was a huge financial bomb waiting to go off, and the occupation
of north-west Germany was costly (in the end, reparations would cover just 2%
of its cost). At home, labour shortages in the mines restricted coal supplies
and would immiserate everyone in the winter of 1946-47, still one of the worst
in Britain in living memory.
Moreover, the British found the Zone in
a terrible state, not least because of their own bombing. In a 2014 article in History
and Policy (Germany 1945-1949: a case study in post-conflict reconstruction),
Knowles – who is one of the few modern researchers to have published widely on
the occupation – states that 66% of the houses in Cologne were destroyed, and
in Düsseldorf 93% were uninhabitable; figures that confirm Gollancz’s own
impressions. The housing shortage was exacerbated by German refugees from what
had been eastern Germany and from other parts of central and eastern Europe
where Germans were no longer welcome. Meanwhile, the country was full of
displaced persons, often former forced or slave labour brought forcibly to
Germany by the Nazi regime. All were walking somewhere. Knowles quotes Ivone
Kirkpatrick, a British diplomat who later became head of the Foreign Office,
describe his first impressions of Germany in 1945; there were “hundreds of thousands
of Germans on foot, trekking in all directions … as if a giant ant-heap had
suddenly been disturbed.”
The British authorities were also
hamstrung by the Potsdam agreement in the summer of 1945, under which the
four-power occupation had been agreed in detail. Potsdam had decreed the
“orderly” transfer of populations (it was anything but orderly) but also had
clauses on reparations and demilitarization. Clause 3(i) called for: “The
complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany and the elimination or
control of all German industry that could be used for military production.” It
was this clause that had led to the orgy of bureaucratic destruction that
Gollancz had described. In fact, the agreement stated that Germany could retain
industries essential for war to the extent that it needed them for its prewar
peacetime economy. However, there was also a provision for reparations that was
effectively a license to loot. Moreover it was specified that 10-15% of
industrial plant from all three Western zones should be dismantled and sent to
the USSR, meaning that even if the British had decided to remove nothing as
reparations for themselves, they would still have had to dismantle some plant
that the Germans really needed to keep.
There were other constraints. The
Potsdam Agreement stated that occupied Germany should be treated as a single
economic unit, but not everyone cooperated. Eventually, frustrated, the British
and Americans would merge their zones. In 1948, failure to agree with the USSR
on currency reform, among other things, would lead the Western allies to clear
the way for the creation of the Deutschmark in the three western zones. At the
time of Gollancz’s visit, however, the British zone was effectively an economy
on its own. An industrial region, it could not import sufficient food from
areas further east that had supplied it, even those that were still part of
Germany – which they were often not. In fact, according to John Farquharson,
Attlee responded to Gollancz’s criticism of food shortages by blaming the USSR,
saying that the regions under their occupation were not sending food to the
industrial Ruhr as they always had. The Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin,
apparently agreed. Moreover all of this should be seen in the context of the
sheer size of the British Zone. It was the largest of the four. The Russian and
US zones had 17 million inhabitants each against the British zones 23 million;
the French zone, just five million. It must also have been the hardest-hit by
the RAF’s own bombing, containing as it did Cologne, Hanover and the Ruhr as
well as Hamburg.
In fact, the British occupation deserves
a more nuanced examination. It gets one from Christopher Knowles, in his 2017
book on the British zone (Winning the Peace: TheBritish in Occupied Germany, 1945-1948).
Knowles’s approach is to look at the occupation through the experience of a
number of British soldiers and civilians who took part in it – a method known
as ‘collective biography’. The danger of this is that one’s choice of witnesses
may colour one’s assessment. In this case, however, it seems to work well. And
Knowles makes a good case for a more balanced view.
Field-Marshal Montgomery’s mandate when he took control of the British Zone was that agreed between the allies at Potsdam – to demilitarize, denazify, deindustrialize and democratize Germany. It is hard to see how the third aim was compatible with the others, given that (as Gollancz noted) Germans needed to feed and house themselves. But Montgomery’s policy quickly changed to one of reconciliation and reconstruction. As Knowles notes, this was in part pragmatism; the British could not afford to run the zone and needed the Germans to start exporting and earning so that they could do so themselves. But Knowles’s account shows that there were also more generous impulses at work. This is clearly evident with men like Sir Henry Vaughan Berry, the civilian Commissioner for Hamburg from 1946 to 1949, who forged an excellent working relationship with a new elected city council. British officials also opposed the merger of the German social-democratic party, the SPD, with the Communist Party, and promoted the development of a free press (Knowles recounts how one junior officer, John Chaloner, founded what went on to become Der Spiegel).
But Knowles does not ignore the food and housing shortages, the tensions that sometimes arose between the British and the Germans, or the neocolonial attitude the British sometimes showed to the occupied. In fact he points out that some of the British administrators were from a colonial background, and had a tendency to impose their idea of how things should be done on the natives. Neither were some of the British, including the odd senior officer, above a little light looting.
*
In any case, although the British administration in Germany faced a difficult situation, some of its problems were of its own making.
For a start, not everyone was as punctilious on Potsdam as the British, who (as Gollancz saw) could have taken it a little less literally. As the Conservative Bob Boothby put it in the Commons debate in November: “Are we going to continue to sabotage industrial production in the British zone in Germany... by carrying out the terms of an Agreement which most of us believe the other signatories are making not the slightest attempt to carry out?”
Besides, the British administration was not always up to it. This has been discussed in a 1993 paper in the journal German History (11:3) by John Farquharson (The British Occupation of Germany 1945-6: A Badly Managed Disaster Area?). Farquharson describes how authority was vested, after some confusion, with the Control Office for Germany and Austria, or COGA, which was based in London. (There was also a British Zone of Occupation in Austria, centred around Klagenfurt in Carinthia.) Not only was COGA not in Germany; it was headed by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, John Burns Hynd, who almost never went there, did not have Cabinet rank, and did not impress his contemporaries. According to Farquharson, British staff in the Zone itself referred to COGA as “Hyndquarters”. (Hynd was later succeeded by Lord Longford, but in practice much of the authority was to remain with the military governors of the Zone – initially Montgomery – succeeded later by Marshal of the RAF Sholto Douglas).
The quality of the British control
commission staff in Germany itself was mixed. They had no future when the
occupation came to an end, and they would have to return to Britain, where the
best jobs would already have been taken. So it was hard to get the best people.
Farquharson quotes a London civil servant as saying in 1946 that they were
mainly “a highly-paid army of retired drain inspectors, unsuccessful
businessmen and idle ex-policemen.” Farquharson also refers to heavy drinking
after wartime abstinence, and corruption (“Officials were making hay while the
sun shone, as there was no real future in Germany”). Some of this may have been
unfair. Some of it may have been all too fair. One staff member was the former
star record-breaking pilot of the early 1930s, C.W.A. Scott; unable to handle
loss of fame as the war approached, he struggled in later years, and eventually
joined the control commission staff in 1946, perhaps for want of something
better. Soon after arriving, he blew his brains out.
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| British Army of the Rhine headquarters in Germany (Imperial War Museum) |
Gollancz himself encountered attitudes amongst the control commission staff that he did not like. “Though there are many fine exceptions, the general attitude varies from a disgusting offensiveness, through indifference... to that humane and almost unconsciously superior paternalism which is characteristic of the “white” attitude to “natives” at its best.” He quotes examples of misuse of privilege: a hairdresser keeps a British wife waiting for 20 minutes, and the next day is warned that her premises may be requisitioned; there are separate queues at the cinema. The building of a new headquarters and facilities in Hamburg, when the materials and labour were desperately needed to rehouse Germans, was especially iniquitous – the more so in that it was to require eviction of numerous Germans. (In Winning the Peace, Knowles quotes an estimate that it was expected to require the eviction of some 6,000 families.)
The Hamburg Project, as it was called, was later much downscaled. But Gollancz may not have been wrong about some of the attitudes amongst the occupation forces. Knowles records how one NCO asked his commanding officer for permission to marry his German girlfriend and was told, “Look, I’d rather you married a wog.” One remembers the remark that Benn Levy MP made in the November 1946 Commons debate: “It is not good for a nation to be conquered. But it is also not good for people to be conquerors.”
*
In
Darkest Germany was not
the end of Gollancz’s campaign. In August 1947 he was back in Germany; on his
return to London he penned a 40-page pamphlet, Germany Revisited, in which he reported that, “during the Spring
and Summer... rations for the normal
consumer of about 1,000 calories or even considerably less were common...”.
“For 25 percent,” he added, the diet is a daily experience of dull and
devitalising misery.” He once again expounded on shortages of underwear,
shocking housing, wanton acts of destruction under the guise of reparations or
demilitarisation, and the lunatic bureaucracy of denazification. One wonders
how the British administrators in the Zone saw him; probably as a pompous pain
in the arse.
But in the end, of course, Gollancz and the British administration were both moot. Most Germans would have known that their own behaviour had got them into this situation and that they themselves would have to find a way out of it. And they did. In 1948 a currency reform ushered in the Deutschmark in the three Western zones, and the next year saw assumption of power by the new republic. From then on, the British army was only nominally an army of occupation; in reality, it became part of Germany’s defences. It finally left in 2019, and will now likely be remembered chiefly as a traffic hazard. Meanwhile the Germans rebuilt their country with lightning speed. Many individual Germans may have had another, longer, private journey, summed up perhaps in Heinrich Böll’s novella, The Bread of Those Early Years. But that journey they took alone.
What should we make of Gollancz’s
extraordinary crusade, 70 years on? Like Orwell himself, he should not be seen as some
sort of secular saint. (One remembers Orwell’s own comment in Reflections on Gandhi: “Saints should
always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”) Although Gollancz split with the Communists
after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he had hitherto supported them, despite mounting
evidence of their real nature from the war in Spain. His April 1945 pamphlet What Buchenwald Really Means, which
appeared to pin as much blame for Hitler on the British as on the Germans, was
premature and ill-judged, and drew a stinging rebuke from an Austrian former
prisoner, Franz Burger. Some of his statements in In Darkest Germany were
exaggerated and were from unreliable sources; as we have seen, his estimates of
hunger oedema and TB prevalence were likely simply wrong. Gollancz may also
have been something of a gadfly, flying from one fight to another. By 1948 he
had moved on to other causes, including relief for the Middle East and
eventually the abolition of capital punishment. In The New Morality, Matthew Frank quotes him thus: “‘There is nothing
so depressing’, Gollancz once told a veteran of one of his many campaigns, ‘as
a movement which has attained its aims’.”
As for In Darkest Germany, it is a museum piece; it was not reprinted
after 1947, and is today very hard to find. Victor Gollancz Ltd is now part of
Orion, and publishes science fiction and fantasy. There is a Victor Gollancz
elementary school in Berlin, but one wonders if the pupils, or residents of the
Gollanczstraße in which it stands, know who he was.
 |
| Victor Gollancz in 1947 (John Gay/National Portrait Gallery) |
One of the many, often upsetting,
photographs in In Darkest Germany is taken in a hospital. It is a
high-key print lit by a window that is just out of shot to the right; soft
light catches the white blanket and sheets on the iron bed, on which there is a
young boy. The caption reads: “Child of 10 dying from TB in the Town Hospital,
Düsseldorf.” Above the bed stands a balding man with a moustache, round
dark-rimmed glasses and a professorial air; he is dressed in a dark winter coat
and scarf. It is hard to read his expression, but his distress seems real. One wonders who his successors are today, and
how many figures there are in modern British life who have made so clear a
decision to serve good over evil.
