5 January 2012
A very happy New Year to all my readers.
For the last 6 months I’ve been researching two international socialists who worked, in a senior position, for the British Control Commission for Germany after the war. I’ve been trying to make sense of what they aimed to achieve, and why, and what was the outcome of their efforts. (See my earlier post on A Collection of Individuals for more details of the method I’ve adopted for my PhD research on British people in occupied Germany after the war).
Austen Albu trained as an engineer at the City and Guilds College (now Imperial College of Science and Technology) and worked before and during the war as manager of the Aladdin Industries factory in West London. In February 1946 he was appointed on a temporary contract as head of the ‘German Political Department’ in the Political Division of the Control Commission. Three months later he was promoted to the very influential position of Deputy Chairman of the newly formed ‘Governmental Sub-Commission’. After leaving Germany in late 1947 he was able to pursue his political ambitions and was elected Member of Parliament for Edmonton in 1948, a seat he held for twenty-six years before retiring in 1974. He was briefly Minister of State at the Department of Economic Affairs from 1965-67, but spent most of his time in Parliament as a ‘Back Bench Technocrat’ and expert on science and technology. He had a long life and died in 1994 at the age of 91.
Allan Flanders succeeded Albu as head of the ‘German Political Department’ from May 1946 to the end of 1947. He could best be described before the war as a professional revolutionary socialist, but in 1943 he applied for and was offered a position as one of three research assistants at the Trades Union Congress (TUC), working on post-war reconstruction. After leaving Germany he went to the United States for a year on a Whitney Foundation fellowship. On his return to Britain he was appointed senior lecturer in Industrial Relations at Oxford University, despite not having a degree or attending any university as an undergraduate. He had a distinguished career as an academic, at Oxford, UMIST and Warwick University, becoming one of the UK’s experts on industrial relations. He died in 1973 at the relatively early age of 63.
As committed international socialists, Austen Albu and Allan Flanders had a very different outlook on life from other senior British soldiers and administrators in occupied Germany (such as those I’ve written about previously on this blog: Field Marshal Montgomery, Generals Brian Robertson, Alec Bishop and Brian Horrocks, Marshall of the Royal Air Force Sholto Douglas, or the former colonial administrator Harold Ingrams). They wanted to change the world for the better, not preserve the established social order and their own privileged position within it. They had no great desire to preserve the power and prestige of the British Empire and did not regard the Empire as a force for good in the world, or the British political, social and economic ‘way of life’ as a model for the rest of the world to follow.
Albu and Flanders were both appointed to their positions by John Hynd, the government minister with responsibility for Germany. Hynd had only recently entered Parliament, winning a by-election in 1944 and it is perhaps surprising that, as a new and inexperienced MP, he had been given such a responsible position. All three had been active in socialist politics before and during the war, in the Fabian Society and various fringe groups that attempted to influence Labour Party policy.
They were also closely associated with German socialist refugees who had fled from Nazi Germany and lived in exile in Britain during the war. Albu had close links with a small but highly influential splinter group known as Neu Beginnen, and Flanders was a founder and leading member of the Socialist Vanguard Group, the British arm of a group founded in Germany with international pretensions, known as the Internationaler Sozialistische Kampfbund, (ISK), usually translated into English as Militant Socialist International.
In my research, I am now trying to work out how these international socialist connections influenced what Austen Albu and Allan Flanders aimed to achieve in Germany and how much power and influence they were able to exert in practice. There were not many committed socialists in senior positions in the British Military Government and Control Commission for Germany, but they had grounds to be hopeful, as a new Labour Government was in power in London, and many former soldiers as well as civilians had voted Labour in the 1945 election, in the hope and belief that everyone, in both Britain and Germany, had to work together to create a new and better world, after the devastation of war.
References
Austen Albu’s personal papers, including his unpublished memoirs Back Bench Technocrat are held at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge.
Allan Flanders’ papers and those of the Socialist Vanguard Group are held at the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University, though unfortunately there is relatively little material available on his time in Germany.
21 July 2011
Every now and then, in my research, I find something surprising and shocking.
I’ve recently read a book first published in 1925, by Katharine Tynan on Life in the Occupied Area. I wanted to know if her view of life in the occupied parts of Germany after the First World War was similar to those given in other contemporary accounts, such Eric Gedye’s The Revolver Republic, and Violet Markham’s A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine. It was and it wasn’t.
Katharine Tynan was an Anglo-Irish writer, a prolific novelist and friend of the poet, W B Yeats. She was born in 1861 and wrote over 100 novels before she died in 1931. In 1922 she and her 21-year old daughter went to live for a little over a year in Cologne, which was then occupied by the British. She didn’t explain why she did so, but her son, Pat, had been one of the first British troops who 'made the trek' into Germany after the Armistice in November 1918 and we can assume she wanted to be near him. In any case, it seems she went as a civilian, not officially as part of the occupation.
She loved her time in Cologne, writing about the flowers in the parks and gardens and how religious the people were…
'You may walk in beauty and have beauty as far as any reasonable eye will wish to see, and if you must look beyond, why, the church-towers of Cologne dominate all the chimneys.'
Only once in Italy did she 'get the same sense of religion' as she did in Cologne.
She described how beautiful and well-behaved the children were…
'Looking at those children could one wish one of them away? They are beautiful children – as beautiful as those St. Augustine saw in the market-place, and always beautifully clean and well-kept…'
In the parks where they played: 'these children look and never touch. Yet they are not automata … They are as fearless as sparrows.'
Her first excursion away from the city to the surrounding countryside was like a trip to fairyland...
'It was an exquisite day. As we went home under the green aisles, [the trees along the roadside] by the sleeping villages, the long line of white posts marking the road brilliant in the head-lights, it was too fine for anything but Fairyland.'
She was surprised above all by the friendliness of the German people, which she found 'strikes you at first as unnatural.'
'We had come to Germany, as most people of the Allied countries must come with an expectation of enmity, open or concealed … The enmity was strangely, inexplicably absent, although we still felt that it must be there and kept saying to each other, as had been often said to us since: "You know they must hate us."'
'At first we certainly thought the friendliness too good to be true, but one got over that. A thousand kindnesses could not be prompted by policy – not the children who brought their puppies in the streets for us to handle and fondle; not the women who stood to smile at us; not the people who laughed at your ignorance of German, so that you were at least as must exhilarated as they.'
Her experience of meeting and talking to other British people in Cologne, especially the wives of officers in the occupation, made her realise that her views were not shared by all. She attributed this to two things she believed she shared with the Rhinelanders: her Catholic faith and her 'Irish temperament':
'I can believe that few of the British Occupation or the civilians of Cologne got so near the people as we did. It is the kneeling at the same altar that makes all the difference, to say nothing of the fact that there is a certain likeness in temperament between the Irish and the Rhinelander.'
None of this surprised or shocked me. The passage that did came in her description of a summer holiday at a seaside resort on the Baltic coast.
They met an American lady married to a German, with a delightful little boy who was 'fuller of the joy of life than any child I had seen up to then.'
The lady was very kind and helpful and she discussed with her how surprisingly friendly she found the Germans. The American lady replied that: 'The Germans have no hate in their hearts. They are not a hating people.'
But there was one thing the American lady was angry about: 'the use of coloured troops in the French Occupation.'
The Germans, Katharine Tynan wrote: 'regarded their presence as something intolerable and unforgivable, and no wonder,' although she personally had no objection, explaining that the French had 100,000 troops as against 8,000 British. Some were Senegalese from Africa but 'oftener the brown-skinned Algerians or Moors, very picturesque, with beautiful colouring… They are, of course, not a negroid type, but very handsome with fine features.'
Her 'American lady' she wrote, was 'very excited about the dark troops', and here is the passage that really did shock and surprise me: what she reported the American lady said next:
'"It is not Christian," she said vehemently, "It is not Christian. I’ll tell you what we do with the blacks in our country. We pour petrol on them and set them afire."'
I suppose I should have known that racial prejudice was very widespread in the 1920s, not only in Germany, but in the US, Britain and Ireland, even amongst otherwise kindly, sympathetic and well-meaning ladies, such as Katherine Tynan and her American friend. But wasn’t this murder she was talking about?
References
Katharine Tynan, Life in the Occupied Area (London: Hutchinson, 1925)
4 July 2011
As a student researching British people in occupied Germany after the Second World War, I was intrigued to read a recent book by Peter Stirk on The Politics of Military Occupation. In this, he proposed the following definition of military occupation as:
“A form of government imposed by force or threat thereof that establishes a type of mutual obligation between the occupier and the occupied, but without bringing about any change in allegiance.”
If we accept this definition, (which seems reasonable to me), this implies that occupation is the de facto rule of the inhabitants of one country, by people appointed and controlled by the government(s) of another country or countries, by the use of force if necessary, usually, but not exclusively, as a result of the invasion, capture and occupation of territory in war.
- It therefore represents the conscious denial of self-government to the inhabitants of the defeated country, on a temporary basis. (There may, of course, be good reasons for this, such as self-defence while the war is in progress, or the need to avoid chaos and anarchy).
- It combines alien rule with military dictatorship and rule by force.
- Though established and maintained by force, there is still an obligation on the occupier to protect the community, arising from the responsibility that goes with assumption of the authority to govern, and a corresponding obligation on the occupied to obey, or at least not frustrate the authority of the occupier. These mutual obligations may often be violated in practice, on both sides, but this does not mean they should not be accepted as the normal standard of behaviour.
Occupation is often presumed to be inherently disreputable; an unstable and illegitimate form of government, unlike two other outcomes of war: a) conquest and annexation of territory formerly held by the defeated government or b) liberation from the rule of an oppressive regime and the restoration of self-government. Occupiers may try to describe themselves as something else - conquerors, liberators or allies - to avoid the charge of alien rule or military dictatorship.
Occupations are often described from the point of view of the occupied, as a period of oppression before liberation and the restoration of a legitimate government – for example Belgium under German occupation during the First World War.
On the other hand, where occupation was followed by a successful annexation, the period of occupation tends to be forgotten, subsumed in the subsequent history of the territory as an integral part of the victorious country – such as the conquest and annexation of California and New Mexico by the USA, following the Mexican-American war of 1846-8.
In some cases, occupation represents the period between the cessation of hostilities, the end of active conflict, and the signing of a peace treaty. However, military occupation of all or part of a country can also continue after a peace treaty is signed, such as the occupation of the Rhineland, after the First World War.
Occupation can also be followed by self-determination and independence. In these cases it comprises a continuum, not a fixed status. For example the degree of control exercised by the occupying power could range from absolute control of all aspects of government, to reserved powers agreed by treaty and enforced by a military presence stationed in a small number of bases – such as the occupation of Germany by the Allies after the Second World War.
In these circumstances, it seems to me that occupation can perhaps be best understood by a comparison with Empire, thinking of the occupied territory as a ‘temporary colony’, administered by the occupier (the imperial power) on behalf of the local inhabitants and expected in due course, by both occupiers and occupied, to acquire full independence as a separate country. That, of course, is a fairly positive way of seeing it. It could also be viewed in more negative terms as a 'temporary colony' controlled and exploited by the occupier for political, economic or strategic reasons.
Occupation is essentially temporary, though it may be prolonged over several decades. It assumes the continued existence of a country, (as a defined area of land), even if that country has no government, the government is not able to enforce its rule in the occupied territories, or the juridical authority of the government is limited to less than would be considered full independence.
Although occupation may appear harsh, the idea was originally designed to limit the arbitrary conquest and annexation of territory following victory and defeat in war, creating a distinction between temporary occupation, and the permanent assertion of authority over a conquered territory, legitimised by a peace treaty.
There have been many occasions when countries, such as France, Belgium, the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan, have both been occupied and have acted as occupiers themselves. This makes it interesting to study attempts to create a set of principles which apply generally to military occupation, and which are fair to both occupiers and occupied. One such set of principles was embodied in international law in the Hague Conventions of 1907, which remain in force today. The relevant section is headed "Military authority over the territory of the hostile state’. It defines occupation as "the authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant," and specifies some principles which limit the absolute power of the occupying authority. See articles 42-56 of the Convention.
Where does my own subject of research, the British Occupation of Germany after the Second World War, fit within a generalised understanding of Military Occupation?
Germany was not treated by the Allies as a liberated country (unlike Austria), and they had no intention of restoring the Weimar Republic as it had been prior to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The British and US had no intention of annexing any part of the country (unlike the Soviet Union and arguably the French), but they did intend to control its future political and economic development, though for how long they could continue to do this, and by what means, were not clear. The declaration of assumption of supreme power by the Allied Commanders at the end of the war included the assertion that the Hague Convention did not apply and they did not consider they were bound by them. The occupation was therefore a fairly rare example of one that was clearly not perceived as liberation and restoration of the previous order, though it was expected to be followed by self-determination and independence, subject to approval of the Allies. Nowadays we would probably call this ‘regime change’. From a British perspective, it seems a good example of occupation as a ‘temporary colony’, that would eventually be allowed independence, in line with British imperial ideas at the time. Remarkably, although at first it was expected that the occupation would last twenty years or more, it all happened very quickly, with an independent West German government created and approved by the Western Allies in 1949, though still subject to the restrictions of an Occupation Statute.
According to Peter Stirk: “Military occupiers have been consistently inadequately prepared for military government, even on those occasions where they have recognised the problem in advance and made great efforts to prepare for it, such as the Allied occupation of Germany and Japan at the end of the Second World War.”
Too often, he continued, occupation has been subject to improvisation. Occupiers have been surprised at the enormity of the task, perceiving its extent as "unprecedented" and complaining about lack of resources and inadequate personnel. This certainly matches my understanding of the British in post-war Germany.
Military occupations in the aftermath of war do occur, and however difficult, there is a good case that a properly organised and regulated occupation is better than the alternatives: unnecessary conquest and annexation that might cause resentment many years into the future, the application of brute force to maintain control or enforce specific policies against the wishes of the inhabitants, or simply walking away after military intervention and doing nothing. All three options were considered suitable, by some people, for post-war Germany, but fortunately never taken further.
The dilemma for the occupier, of course, is that they may still feel threatened by the country they defeated in war, invaded and occupied, or they may dislike or disapprove of the conduct of the government there (perhaps with good reason), but fighting a war does not lead directly to the creation of a new and better government. If the country has been invaded, victory leads to military occupation, with a whole new set of problems and challenges. Peter Stirk defined Military Occupation as a form of government, which seems correct to me, but it is one that contains the seeds of its own destruction, as the purpose of the occupation must be to make itself redundant and hand over control either to the previous government or to a new, legitimate authority. Successful occupations are those that achieve this reasonably quickly. Unsuccessful occupations are those that last longest.
References
Peter Stirk, The Politics of Military Occupation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009)
27 June 2011
I’ve written a few posts on this blog which could be described as theoretical (see What is History?). As historians, we collect a mass of data from our own research and from reading what other historians have written. When we come to write up the results, we have to make sense of it all. What do we include, and what do we leave out? How do we make it interesting and relevant? How do we organise what we’ve discovered so it all logically fits together?
I’ve always liked the idea that (in the opening words of L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between) "the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." We can explore the past in the same way we travel to a new and unfamiliar country or city. We may have a map or a guide-book, or we may prefer to wander around and discover things for ourselves. You could say a historian is like a tour guide, trying to explain to a group of travellers what makes it interesting and relevant; or like a travel writer, describing their own experiences and discoveries to those unable to visit the places themselves.
Taking the analogy a step further, the study of History is similar to Anthropology. Anthropologists observe customs and practices in strange and unfamiliar places and try to describe and interpret them so they make sense to those back home. One noted cultural historian, Peter Burke, has written that he and his colleagues "would confess to having learned much from anthropologists," though he stressed that they now treat all cultures as of equal value, rejecting the old anthropological notion that some were ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’.
‘Thick Description’ is a term used by the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz. In an essay on: ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, he explained that his understanding of the culture of a people was not their "total way of life" or "a storehouse of learning", let alone their art, music or literature, but ‘webs of significance’, writing that:
"Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."
Geertz described how he had taken the term ‘Thick Description’ from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who distinguished between a ‘thin description’ of, for example, a physical action, and a ‘thick description’ which includes the context: when and where the action took place, who performed it and their intentions in doing so. For example, the same physical act of someone "rapidly raising and lowering their right eyelid" could be a nervous twitch, a deliberate wink to attract attention or communicate with someone, or an imitation or mockery of someone else with a nervous twitch or winking. It all depends on the context, the aims of person the performing the action, and how these were understood by others.
This implies there is no clear distinction between description, explanation and communication. All descriptions of human actions and behaviour, except the most trivial, do more than simply relate what happened. They include judgements, assumptions, and explanations of why people behaved as they did, what they were trying to express or achieve in doing so, and for whom. All historians know that the sources they use, typically written documents but also artefacts, images, customs and practices, need to be evaluated not only in terms of what they say, but why they were created, with what intentions, and for whom.
I have long believed that historical sources ‘speak for themselves’ and that a sensitive and intelligent reader or listener can work out for themselves from the text what assumptions or judgements the authors were making. Or if this is not clear, they can at least ask the question and realise that without additional information, the source could be read and understood in different ways. This is one of the things that makes history interesting: there is no one right answer and what happened in the past can be understood and interpreted in different ways.
Most anthropologists seem to believe that despite differences between societies, the human mind is essentially the same and deep unchanging structures of meaning can be discovered if specific behaviour is examined in sufficient depth. Geertz wrote that the aim of the anthropologist was not so much to "capture primitive facts in faraway places and carry them home" like a ‘primitive’ mask or carving to be placed in some ethnographical museum of mankind, but to "draw large conclusions from small" and attempt to explain "what manner of men are these".
As a historian, not an anthropologist, I’m not sure I would go so far. As the name of this blog suggests, I subscribe to the view that the role of history is to discover and reveal the past ‘how it really was’. There is a danger in over-interpreting our data, and the end result can then reveal more of our own prejudices and assumptions, than how people thought and acted at the time. But I do think we can go beyond a simple narrative of the facts (whatever they are) and describe human behaviour – what people thought and did - in context, together with an attempt to understand and explain their motivation, their aims and intentions, and how these changed over time, in response to the circumstances in which they found themselves.
Perhaps this means that writing history can be thought of as ‘thick description’, that places events in context and explains human behaviour through reference to aims and intentions, (what it signifies as some anthropologists would say). If so, what are the implications for how we research and write about our subject? I don’t know the answer to this, but as a start, here are my thoughts on some issues I’ve had to consider, when researching and writing about people’s aims and intentions:
- Whose aims and intentions are worth studying? Some people were more influential than others, but it is not always obvious who the really important and influential people were in any situation. Some may have influenced events through providing information to those who made the decisions. Others simply did what they were told.
- Some exceptional people did not do what they were told. We may have studied the aims and intentions of the policy makers, only to find that the policy was ignored by those responsible for carrying it out.
- Their stated aims and intentions, especially in accounts written or told many years after the events they relate to (such as personal memoirs or oral history interviews), may not have been the real reasons people acted as they did at the time. It is easy to be wise after the event and claim the intention matched the outcome.
- Reasons given at the time for acting in a particular way, (for example in personal correspondence, speeches, official papers or articles in newspapers), can also be misleading and may not reflect the authors’ own views, as they may have said or written what they thought their readers or listeners wanted to hear.
- People may have acted in accordance with unspoken assumptions, which even they were not fully aware of. For example, on several occasions I have come across references to people saying they did ‘what they believed was right’ without elaborating further.
- People may have acted in accordance with the values they held, which in turn were based on their personal and family background, social status, education, moral or religious beliefs.
- People may have acted in their own interest. As the saying goes, you can always find many more good reasons for doing what you want to do, than doing what you don’t want to do.
- People may have acted the way others expected them to act, in accordance with social conventions and expectations, which may vary from one group to another.
- People did not always act rationally. We cannot assume people acted for a particular reason because that now appears, to us, to be the logical thing for them to have done.
- Every individual is unique and it is impossible to understand and describe everyone’s individual motivation. To what extent can we generalise and assume all those in a group shared the same aims, for the same reasons, or explain behaviour through reference to social rather than personal factors?
References
Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997)
Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick description: toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretations of Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1975)
15 March 2011
I’ve written before about the Potsdam Agreement, in August 1945, in which the three Allied victors in the Second World War, Britain, The United States and the Soviet Union, agreed on a set of rules to govern their policy in occupied Germany.
The first clause of the agreement was the establishment of a ‘Council of Foreign Ministers’, of Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, France and China. The role of this Council of the ‘Five Great Powers’ in the world was to prepare peace treaties with the Axis powers, defined in the agreement as the 'enemy states': Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland, as well as Germany, and settle outstanding territorial questions.
The Council met five times before the meeting in London in December 1947 ended in acrimony, without a date being set for the next meeting.
It’s interesting to track what occurred at each meeting, so here is a brief summary. I’m not really sure how to interpret this. The traditional ‘Western’ view is that the British and US had no option other than to go it alone, in the face of Soviet intransigence. An alternative view is that neither the British nor the US were prepared to compromise on their ability to run their own Zones the way they wanted, so they engineered the failure of the negotiations, which, in fact, suited all four of the Allies quite well.
1) London: September 1945
After discussing peace treaties for Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania and Finland, the meeting broke up without agreement. In a statement to the House of Commons, the British Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin, blamed procedural difficulties.
2) Paris: April-June 1946
The first session of the Paris meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers lasted from 25 April – 16 May. The principal topic of discussion was the Italian peace treaty but no firm agreement was reached before the first session was adjourned.
The meeting resumed in mid-June. Agreement was reached on Italy, but there was no progress on Germany and the meeting adjourned after Britain, France the US and the Soviet Union had presented very different proposals:
The French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, advocated the separation of the Rhineland from the rest of Germany and the internationalisation of the Ruhr.
The Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, announced he was in favour of a united Germany and the setting up of central German administrations, [which had been vetoed by the French in the Allied Control Council, on the grounds they were not prepared to agree to a central administration for the whole of Germany, before the future of the Rhineland and Ruhr had been settled.]
The US Secretary of State, James Byrnes, proposed a draft treaty which was intended to guarantee the de-militarisation of Germany for 25 years. Molotov rejected this on the basis that they had not yet ensured that Germany was disarmed in the present, let alone in the future. He claimed that some units of the German army, which had surrendered in the British Zone, had not been fully disarmed and demobilised. [This was partly true. Although they had been disarmed, the units, known as ‘Dienstgruppen’, carried out support tasks for the British army, such as transport.]
The British Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin was concerned about the costs of the occupation. He announced that unless the others were prepared to cooperate economically to ensure that German exports covered the costs of imports [mainly food], the British government would be compelled to ‘organise the British Zone of occupation in Germany in such a way that no further liability shall fall on the British taxpayer.’
The following day Byrnes offered to cooperate economically with any of the other zones willing to do so. After the conference the British accepted the invitation. This was to lead to the formation of the so-called Bizone and the economic fusion of the US and British zones in January 1947.
3) New York: October 1946
The New York session of the Council of Foreign Ministers lasted from 3 November to 12 December 1946. It was preceded by the Paris Peace Conference which lasted from 29 July to 15 October 1946. Agreement was eventually reached on peace treaties for Italy, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland, which were signed on 10 February the following year in Paris.
Discussions on Germany in New York did little more than agree 10 March as the date for the next meeting in Moscow.
4) Moscow: March – April 1947
The Moscow Council of Foreign Ministers lasted from 10 March to 25 April. Having settled peace treaties for the other Axis powers, Germany was now the main item on the agenda.
It was agreed to abolish the State of Prussia, which had survived as a separate state within Germany throughout the Weimar Republic and Nazi Third Reich.
Bidault reasserted the French opposition to creating central administrations [and thereby treating Germany as a single entity, rather than as four separate zones] until the western frontiers of Germany had been agreed and the future of the Rhineland, Ruhr and Saar finalised. Molotov disagreed with both the separation of the Ruhr and Rhineland from Germany and also a decision to allow the French to annex the Saar, which at that time, the British and US would have agreed to.
Bevin presented the British plan for the economic future of Germany, including elements which he probably knew would be unacceptable to the Russians and French: including a decision to proceed with the US in setting up the ‘Bizone’, no reparations from current production [which was one thing the Russians wanted], no four-power control for the Ruhr and no separation of the Ruhr or Rhineland from the rest of Germany.
The new US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, George Marshall asked for a decision on the US proposal for the 25 year disarmament of Germany. Molotov argued this did not go far enough and the discussions lapsed.
After the conference was over, Marshal delivered his Harvard speech on 5 June 1947, setting forth his ideas for an economic ‘European Recovery Programme’ now known as the Marshall Plan.
At first the Russians were invited to participate, but a meeting in Paris between Molotov, Bidault and Bevin, on 27 June, broke up without agreement over the issue of which countries should be invited to participate. In his view only those occupied by Germany or had contributed to the Allied victory should be invited; not ex-enemy states such as Germany.
Bevin and Bidault went ahead anyway and invitations were sent to 22 European countries inviting them to a conference in Paris on 12 July (known as the Conference on European Reconstruction).
Cominform, (the Communist Information Forum) was founded on 22-23 September 1947 at a meeting at which 9 Communist parties were represented, including the French and Italian parties, in addition to those from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
5) London: November – December 1947
Despite ending in acrimony with no date set for the next meeting, progress was made on a few issues including agreement on a new, higher maximum level for German steel production of 10.5 million tons a year. This was something the British had been advocating ever since the Level of Industry negotiations had agreed, in March 1946, on a maximum ‘production’ level of 5.8 million tons, and ‘capacity' of 7.5 million tons; levels the British delegation had always thought too low. It was hoped the new higher level of permitted steel production would enable an increase in exports to offset the costs of the occupation.
The breaking off of negotiations over Germany in London did not extend to Austria, and Foreign Ministers’ deputies continued to discuss this in January 1948. However discussions were postponed indefinitely in May 1948 after disagreement on Yugoslav territorial claims in Carinthia.
Despite its failure to agree a peace settlement for Germany, the Council met again in May and June 1949 in Paris, when they agreed to end the Berlin Blockade. A further meeting in Berlin in 1954 ended in deadlock, but in 1955 a peace treaty was agreed for Austria. In 1971 the four wartime allies met again to discuss and agree the Four Power Agreement on Berlin and in September 1990 they, and the two German governments, signed the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany.
References
Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) (First published in 1983 by William Heinemann Ltd)
Anne Deighton, The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_foreign_ministers
19 January 2011
This blog is about my research, on British people in occupied Germany after the war, not about me personally. But if anyone wonders why I first decided to write the blog and what motivates me to carry on posting, (ever since I published my first post on this blog in October 2005), have a look at my post on Why I write an academic history blog on the website and blog of the History Blogging Project
The project was launched yesterday (18 January 2011) and aims to promote and support UK-based academic historians who either have a blog or are thinking of running one. In particular the project will develop a set of training materials to help postgraduate historians create, maintain and publicise a blog on their research.
If you are a postgraduate student and either have your own blog or are thinking of creating one and are not (yet) aware of the project, do get in touch with the organisers. I am sure they will be glad to hear from you.
14 December 2010
I’ve come to realise that memories of the First World War and its aftermath were an important factor in understanding British policy and actions in occupied Germany after the Second World War. I wrote about this last year in a post on The Watch on the Rhine: the British Occupation of the Rhineland after World War One.
According to his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, Eric Gedye was ‘the greatest British foreign correspondent of the inter-war years’. His book The Revolver Republic, first published in 1930, is probably the best contemporary British account of the Occupation of the Rhineland. Gedye fought in the First World War and was part of the British army advance guard that occupied Cologne after the Armistice in November 1918. After the Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919, he was a member of staff on the joint Allied Rhineland High Commission, but left in 1922. According to his friend and colleague, Vaughan Berry, he married a German woman and as a result was forced to resign and lost his job. He stayed in Germany making a precarious living as a freelance journalist, but when the French invaded the Ruhr in 1923, he was appointed Special Correspondent for The Times.
His dispatches were widely read in Britain and his criticism of French policy and tactics, in encouraging and supporting separatists attempting to establish an independent Rhineland state, probably influenced British government policy, which became increasingly critical of French support for the Rhineland separatists. In the book, he quoted a report in the Guardian newspaper in 1926 that he was leaving The Times to join the Daily Express: ‘it is little exaggeration to credit this journalist [ie Gedye] with quite a large share in the defeat of M. Poincare’s [the French Prime Minister’s] grandiose and imperialist plan.’ Gedye added that it was pleasant to find that his work ‘had contributed in some measure, however slight, to cause the disappointment of those French aspirations to German territory which, had they been successful, must inevitably have led to a repetition of the horrors of 1914-18.’
This comment highlights his view, shared by many other British people in Germany at the time, that the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles and thinly disguised attempts by the French to annex more territory and advance their border to the Rhine, rather than improving security and deterring aggression, could only provoke a desire for revenge and lead to another war.
The title of the book, The Revolver Republic referred to the various desperadoes (as he described them), armed and financed by the French, who tried to seize power and gain control of town halls and municipal buildings in the Rhineland, in a number of attempted Putsches (or coups). According to Gedye:
‘The real “Separatist” movement, headed by a few fools and many gaolbirds, and supported by hired renegades, which, with its “Revolver Republic” as loyal Germans christened the “State” it pretended to establish, was later to drench Rhineland in blood in times of peace, was from start to finish a creation of the French, organized and paid for by their secret service and chauvinist organizations.’
The great mistake made by the Allies, in his view, was not to give more support to the moderate German Social Democratic government, which came to power at the end of the war, after the Kaiser abdicated and German sailors and soldiers mutinied, creating revolutionary conditions in many parts of the country. By imposing harsh conditions in the Treaty of Versailles, supporting separatist movements in the Rhineland and taking advantage of their superior military power in the occupied areas to rule by force, rather than in strict accordance with the law, the Allies fatally weakened the moderate Social Democratic government, set the example of rule by force and paved the way for a revival of nationalism which was to lead to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. According to Gedye:
‘Fascism, Hitlerism, dreamers of revanche and of a new-born militarism – those are the plants which the Allies nurtured in German soil. Democracy, pacifism, international understanding – those are the plants, which springing up after the Revolution, found themselves faced with the withering lack of sympathy and encouragement from the victorious Allies, who had it in their power for several vital years to encourage their growth by moderation and understanding….’
‘All the world knows to-day that British and American statesmanship at Paris [during the negotiations which led to the Treaty of Versailles] tried to stand out for more reasonable treatment for Germany, but was out-manoeuvred by the implacable determination of France to be revenged on her enemy and to push the disruption of the German State to the extreme limit….’
‘Month after month we watched the spontaneous efforts of the German people … to secure and consolidate the ground which had been won for democracy being foiled by Allied severity and distrust.’
Despite (perhaps because of) his pro-German and anti-French views at the time, Eric Gedye was no advocate of appeasement or the re-militarisation of Germany. In 1925 he left Germany to take up a position as Central European correspondent, based in Vienna, where he remained until 1938, working first for The Times, then for the Daily Express, and after 1929 for the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times. Fallen Bastions, another, later, book he wrote about his experiences leading up to the fall of Austria and Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, was a searing indictment of Nazi brutality and the failure of the British government to take a stand and confront Hitler head on. Here is a brief extract of what he wrote then, from a vivid description of the persecution of Jews by the Nazis in Vienna:
‘Mine [his apartment in Vienna] proved a good centre, too, for watching the favourite amusement of the Nazi mobs during many long weeks of forcing Jewish men and women to go down on hands and knees and scrub the pavements with acid preparations which bit into the skin, obliging them to go straight to hospital for treatment.’
In his view, the British government shared responsibility for and was complicit in permitting Nazi brutality, after agreeing to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. He wrote, in an article for a British audience:
‘The whole horrible drama [which he saw and described in Austria] is to-day being re-acted in the Sudeten areas. This time you must not blame Hitler so much. He has three colleagues. The immediate cause of the new horrors is that document signed at Munich on September 30th bearing the signatures of Chamberlain and Daladier as well as of Hitler and Mussolini which says:- “Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany have agreed on the following conditions and procedure and declare themselves individually responsible for their fulfilment.” Plunder, murder, insult, torture, concentration camps, ruined existences, head-hunting, refusal of asylum by the Czechs and brutal handing over of refugees to the Nazis – “individually responsible” are these four Powers, excluding Czechoslovakia but including Britain. Does that disturb your sleep?’
Some Nazis regarded him favourably during his time in Austria, without understanding his real views, (which were always to support the underdog and oppose extremism and violence), because (to quote him writing in Fallen Bastions), ‘in a book written some years before [ie The Revolver Republic], I had tried to arouse public opinion to the criminal follies of Poincaré-imperialism during the occupation of the Ruhr and the attempted establishment of a dummy separatist republic in the Rhineland.…. Apparently my Nazi admirers overlooked one little sentence in my book, written in 1929 to 1930, in which I warned against the dangers of a policy which was “causing a desperate nation to raise an obscure fanatic like Adolf Hitler to the threshold of a Fascist dictatorship under the device of ‘force to meet force’”. Evidently also my dossier did not contain a signed article which I wrote in the Contemporary Review soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. In it I compared the attitude of France and Britain towards the defeated democratic German republic after the war to that of two men, one of whom throughout a sultry summer day stones and torments a helpless dog on the chain, while the other occasionally says deprecatingly, “I don’t think you ought to be so cruel – and also unwise”, although doing nothing to interfere. I added, that when the wretched animal finally went mad under torment and broke its chains, that was not the moment for the inactive onlooker to run forward and try to pet and conciliate the mad dog with gifts. Whatever the dog’s innocence and the fault of its tormentor, there was only one thing to be done to the dog, once it had gone mad.’
The British learnt two different, contradictory lessons from their experience in Germany between the First and Second World War. The Rhineland occupation had failed twice in its supposed aim of preventing another war: it had been both too harsh, and too soft. The occupation had not been strict enough to enforce disarmament and prevent renewed aggression, but the withdrawal of all troops in 1930 had completely failed to promote reconciliation.
References:
G. E. R. Gedye, The Revolver Republic: France’s Bid for the Rhine (London: J. W. Arrowsmith Limited, 1930)
G. E. R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions: The Central European Tragedy (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1939)
Hugh Greene, ‘Gedye, (George) Eric Rowe (1890–1970)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004)
10 November 2010
In my last post, I wrote about an excellent new book, Otherwise Occupied, by Michael Howard who, as a young man in occupied Germany after the war, worked as Intelligence Officer for T-Force, the secret British army unit which obtained material: equipment, documents and technical know-how, from Germany to benefit the British economy.
The book raises the intriguing question of how much the material removed by T-Force was worth in monetary terms. The difference between what Michael Howard and his colleagues thought the value was at the time, and later official estimates, is striking.
In the book, Michael Howard claimed that an internal report, compiled in 1949 by staff who had worked for T-Force, proposed the extraordinary figure of £2,000 million as the total value of material removed by T-Force. He made a similar point in his review, in the RUSI Journal, of Sean Longden’s history of T-Force, regretting that although Longden discussed the issue in his book, he did not ‘hazard a view’ as to the correct amount. An article in the Daily Express, on 9 October 1946, had suggested that the total value of property obtained by T-Force, then less than half-way into its programme, was the lower, but still substantial, amount of £100 million. Longden referred to an interview with a British official, who had said this figure was ‘niggardly’ and at the very bottom end of the scale of what had actually been achieved. This suggests a total figure for the whole programme of well into the hundreds of millions of pounds, if not quite as high as the two billion pounds estimated by Michael Howard’s former colleagues in 1949.
Figures quoted by historians for the total value of reparations obtained by Britain from Germany are very much lower than this. UK official receipts for reparations from Germany after the Second World War totalled just over £30 million. Alan Bullock quoted a similar figure of £29 million, in his biography of Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary.
There would seem to be four possible reasons for this discrepancy.
Firstly, like was not compared with like. Most of the material removed by T-Force by-passed the official system which allocated reparations from Germany among the western allies. This was co-ordinated by an organisation known as IARA, the ‘Inter Allied Reparations Agency’, created on 14 January 1946, consisting of representatives from 18 countries claiming a share in reparations from Germany.
Material obtained on the battlefield was classified as ‘booty’, rather than as reparations, and could be unilaterally removed by the victors for their own use. As John Farquharson has described in an article in the Journal of Contemporary History, the victorious allies failed to agree on exactly what comprised ‘booty’ or a ‘battlefield’ in modern warfare, but eventually accepted the fairly wide definition that booty consisted of: ‘any material of whatever nature and wherever situated’ intended for use in war. In March 1946 a more narrow definition of ‘booty’ was adopted by the British. According to Farquharson:
‘There is no doubt that up to that date [March 1946] large amounts of information, technical research facilities and prototype machines were confiscated as booty by the British authorities in Germany, and that some of what disappeared did not come under the heading of purely military usage. Until 1 January 1946 the war against Japan validated (at least in theory) such actions, but confiscation continued even after that date. … However, it is true that whatever industrial machinery found its way to Britain under this rubric prior to March 1946, thereafter booty excluded such material. Unilateral removals of industrial prototypes and so on were now carried out as reparations, chargeable to Britain at IARA.’
Eventually an official figure of £48,000 was produced, in 1951, for the value of material removed as ‘booty’ (but excluding anything removed before 1 January 1946, when no satisfactory records had been kept). This figure is tiny; less than 1,000th of the £100 million quoted in the Daily Express on 9 October 1946 as the total value of property obtained by T-Force, which suggests that either the value of material removed as ‘booty’ was actually very much higher than this, or there were other reasons for the discrepancy.
A second possible explanation is that the figure quoted in the Daily Express, and the report Michael Howard recalled seeing in 1949, may both have assumed a much higher value for intangibles, (such as documents, patents and know-how transmitted by German scientists recruited by T-Force to work in Britain), than later official estimates, which did not include figures for ‘intellectual reparations’.
During the war there had been a massive expansion in industrial capacity in Britain, to manufacture arms and equipment to support the war effort, so there was no great need for additional industrial equipment such as machine tools. Quality and know-how was a different matter. According to an article in The Times on 10 December 1946, a vast quantity of information was compiled by 10,000 investigators working in Germany for BIOS, the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, supported by Michael Howard and his colleagues in T-Force. 1,400 reports were produced by BIOS on a wide range of industries including agriculture, fisheries, electrical and mechanical engineering, glass and ceramics, metals, mineral, optical and mechanical precision instruments, rubber, textiles and clothing. Industrialists were encouraged to make use of ‘Germany’s war-time advances in science and heavy industry’ at an exhibition, organised by the Board of Trade, which opened in London on 9 December 1946, and then toured the country. According to The Times, 460,000 copies of the reports had already been circulated to various institutions and 490,000 copies sold to individuals. All material was freely available so there was ‘no question of infringement of patent rights by British manufacturers.’
Given the scale of this operation, it is easy to imagine a high value could be placed on the information obtained. From an accounting perspective, however, the intangible nature of these assets and the lack of patent protection could make it difficult, if not impossible, to provide an accurate monetary assessment of how much the material obtained in this way was worth.
A third possible reason for the discrepancy, was that it was in the interest of the British government to minimise the value of reparations booked to their own account, so as not to have to share these with the 17 other Western Allies or with the Soviet Union, which, according to the Potsdam Agreement, was entitled to 25% of the total value of reparations obtained from the British Zone (in addition to 100% of the reparations from their own zone). In his article, John Farquharson described how both IARA and the Soviet Union were suspicious of the official figures produced by the British. IARA expressed ‘grave concerns’ over unaccounted removals by the occupying powers (ie Britain, France, the US and the Soviet Union) and ‘fictitious figures’ were given by the British government to the Soviet Union, at the March 1947 meeting of the quadripartite Council of Foreign Ministers.
Michael Howard was quite forthright in his review in the RUSI Journal as to what he considered had happened. Whatever the correct number was for the value of material obtained by T-Force, he wrote: ‘it was one that His Majesty’s Government intended to conceal…’
‘The parallel operations of the Russians, who were not members of the IARA in Brussels, but took whatever they wanted by way of unilateral reparations as well as booty, were on a scale calculated to have been ten times that of T-Force. As the British had been openly critical of the Russian wholesale sacking of any territory under their control, public disclosure of any definitive figure for our own calculations would have made us appear embarrassingly hypocritical. Any unilateral reparations taken by the British were meant to be declared to the IARA in Brussels and deducted from their multilateral reparations entitlement. In the 1961 final report of the IARA, the British total was shown as $180 million, equivalent at the rate of exchange prevailing in 1946-48 to £45 million. It had already reached that sum by the end of 1946, as shown in their annual report for that year. This meant either that they had not declared much of what had been taken, or that they had declared absurdly low values, or both. If the total suggested in 1949 [by his former colleagues] had been published, they were at risk of being found out in a deception.’
Fourthly, the official figures may have been broadly correct and the estimates by the Daily Express and Michael Howard’s former colleagues exaggerated. This is the conclusion John Farquharson reached at the end of his article, writing that: ‘Britain's tangible gains from Germany did not amount to any great worth … How far the gap was covered by intellectual reparations cannot be determined with any accuracy’ he continued, as patent information was generally published and made available to all and it was not reasonable to expect to UK to book a financial benefit for something that was shared with others. In the same way, he argued, the UK received no royalty payments for the discovery of penicillin or Whittle’s work on jet engines, as the work on both of these was undertaken in the UK, but the benefits shared with other countries. In addition, he wrote, British payments to its own zone in Germany totalled £140 million by April 1947, far in excess of the official receipts from reparations of around £30 million.
References:
Michael Howard, Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany, (Tiverton: Old Street Publishing, 2010)
Sean Longden, T-Force: the Race for Nazi War Secrets, 1945 (London: Constable, 2009)
John E. Farquharson, ‘Governed or Exploited? The British Acquisition of German Technology, 1945-48’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.32, No.1, (1997), pp 23-42
Michael Howard, ‘Review of Sean Longden, T-Force: the Race for Nazi War Secrets 1945’, RUSI Journal, (December 2008), pp 108-110
19th October 2010
I first heard from Michael Howard in October 2008, when he emailed me to say he was personally ‘an alumnus of Nachkriegsdeutschland '46/7’ and asked if I would send him a copy of my MA dissertation on ‘Winning the Peace’. He thought it would be of interest to his U3A (University of the Third Age) group, which was studying the ‘Aftermath of Conflict’ in various times and places.
I was very happy to do so, and since then he has been kind enough to share with me some memories of the time he spent in Germany in 1946-47, as Intelligence Officer for T-Force, the secret British army unit first set up in 1944 to investigate and secure research laboratories and factories by-passed by the front-line troops as they advanced into Germany and which later ‘evacuated’ to Britain a large quantity of equipment, machinery, documents and key individuals and scientists.
Michael Howard has now published his memoirs of this time as Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany. Remarkably, the 67 letters he wrote home between February 1946 and December 1947 were kept by his mother and these letters, reprinted word for word, provide the chronological framework for the book, with the author commenting, explaining and elucidating various points in the letters to provide the context, or to highlight aspects that now appear important or amusing.
As a result, the book has the authenticity of a contemporary record, (he was only 19 years old when he was first posted to Germany), while the commentary helps the story flow and makes it easy to read, explaining the background to events and who were the various people mentioned in the letters.
The book tells two stories, both equally fascinating. The first is his contribution to the history of T-Force, one of the very few aspects of the Second World War which is still largely neglected by historians. At first, as he wrote to his mother, he was pleased to be given a job that was not a ‘liability to the taxpayer’ and the consequences of which had ‘a considerable and direct bearing on our economic recovery'. By the time he left Germany, his work had become his hobby and he carried on ‘evacuating’ material, as his personal contribution to British economic recovery, in the face of increasing resistance from senior officers and administrators, as the world changed around him and the official British policy was to help promote economic recovery in Germany, rather than extracting what they could in the way of reparations.
The second is a love-story, which ended in neither consummation nor tragedy, of his romance with the daughter of the local doctor, whose house had been requisitioned as accommodation for British officers. The doctor and his family were evicted from the house but were allowed to keep the use of his consulting room and the garden. As his relationship with the doctor’s daughter developed he found, as he wrote to his mother, that ‘to sit in the [officers’] mess evening after evening, discussing the three inch mortar, or the war strength of the armoured division, or re-fighting this or that battle, is infinitely tedious. I would rather spend my time talking to a pleasant and intelligent German than a stupid and uncongenial Englishman.’ It is an unusual love-story, because the power of social conventions, on both sides, persuaded them to control their passions and go their separate ways, she to train as a doctor and he to take up his university place at Cambridge. Since then they have stayed in touch, as friends, for over sixty years.
References
Michael Howard, Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany, (Tiverton: Old Street Publishing, 2010)
The book is published by Old Street Publishing. Copies are available and can be bought from Amazon and other web booksellers.