Battleship Bismarck (70 page)

And Colonel Faulk it was who helped so many German prisoners to a new start in life. He lives on in the grateful memory of many of them.

Most of all to be remembered in this regard, however, is a captain in the British Army, Herbert Sulzbach, who performed exceptional, indeed quite extraordinary service as Interpreter Officer, Featherstone Park Camp. For his mission in this camp, then viewed by the British as especially important, he had, as the saying goes, won his spurs in previous assignments, first as a staff sergeant, and then a lieutenant at the prisoner-of-war camp at Comrie, Scotland. At the beginning of 1945 around four thousand men found themselves there, among them fanatical Nazis and even members of the Waffen-SS. Sulzbach undertook his task of “reeducation” in countless individual conversations and thought of something special for 11 November, the Armistice Day of the First World War. After he had proposed to the four thousand that they should honor the dead of
all
nations on this day, he administered the following oath to those assembled on the camp’s football field:

Never again shall such murder take place! It is the last time that we will allow ourselves to be so deceived and betrayed. It is not true that we Germans are a superior race; we have no right to believe that we are better than others. We are all equal before God, whatever race or religion. Endless misery has come to us, and we have realized where arrogance leads . . . . In this minute of silence, at 11
A.M
. on this November 11, 1945, we swear to return to Germany as good Europeans, and to take part as long as we live in the reconciliation of all peoples and the maintenance of peace.…
*

Only around a dozen of the prisoners sulked in the huts, while the majority stood motionless outside intoning the salute to the fallen. Herbert Sulzbach’s commentary: “Nazism could be fought, and beaten as early as 1945.” Who was this unusual man?

Sulzbach was born of Jewish parents in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1894. His grandfather had founded the private Sulzbach Brothers Bank there in 1855; his father later inherited it. Herbert had reported as a wartime volunteer in 1914 and was posted to the 63d Field Artillery Regiment in August. He served four years on the Western Front, rising to the rank of lieutenant and earning the Iron Cross I. and II. Class and the Front Fighters’ Honor Cross. In 1935 he published his war diary,
Zwei lebende Mauern
.
†
It received warm reviews, even in
the Brown press, which apparently had not noted its author’s “Jewishness.” But just two years later, with the Nazi persecution of the Jews in full swing, Herbert Sulzbach had to emigrate. The destination of his choice was England, where a paper products factory that he had founded as a filial of his Berlin firm would provide a modest standard of living. In 1938 he had to accept the high risk of a journey to Germany, through the search lists of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt.
*
He still had to bring his wife, Beate, a niece of the great conductor Otto Klemperer, and her sister to England. The atmosphere was filled with tension on both border crossings, but everything clicked. In the following period, German citizenship was withdrawn from him and his wife; they became stateless and, upon the outbreak of war in 1939, “enemy aliens” in England.

An ensuing internment on the Isle of Man, with Nazis and anti-Nazis, a nightmare for them, ended in 1940, after Sulzbach, upon his application, was accepted into the British Army. Various assignments with the pioneers followed until 1944, when an army order came to his attention: “German speakers are urgently sought!” The number of German prisoners of war in the country was growing by leaps and bounds. He talked it over with his wife. On one hand, he wanted to make himself as useful as possible; on the other, he recoiled from coming back into contact with the swastika, which the Germans all wore on their breasts! Sulzbach: “It was actually my wife who persuaded me and told me: ‘You can do it!’” And then he had begun it, the great task which would engage him for years and fill the rest of his life, the task of understanding and reconciliation between German and Briton.

The German prisoners in England between 1944 and 1945, so Sulzbach reported later, were for the most part still fanatical Nazis and still under the illusion that Hitler would win the war. “But of course there was also a row of doubters, indeed anti-Nazis. There was the frightful murder of a Hitler opponent, a sergeant, who was beaten to death and then hanged by fanatical comrades because he had made anti-Nazi entries in his diary, which they had gone through while he slept. Incidentally, the murderers were hanged in the summer of 1945. Then there were doubters and fellow travellers, who were naturally the easiest to convert.”

And what did Sulzbach have to say about Featherstone Park?

At first I let everything come my way. Prisoners entered my office with every imaginable question and concern. Then it was always up to me to bring the conversation around to England and Nazi Germany, and I tried in a few words to point out the difference between freedom and tyranny. The Germans became trusting and reported on their talks with me in the barracks. More and more, I came to be a spiritual counselor or helper rather than anything else that I could or would be. There were hardly any difficulties from the British side in this regard. I had the great luck to have understanding camp commandants, who left me a free hand, then that great man Henry Faulk, and, not least, equally understanding gentlemen in the War Office in London. It wasn’t hard for me to tell stubborn Nazis, fellow travellers and anti-Nazis from one another. Of course, as a born optimist, I may at times have been too easily taken in. But I would rather send someone who did not deserve it home early than do the opposite. On the other hand, as I was also responsible for political classification, I often quite consciously put young men who were still Nazis in levels which stamped them as anti-Nazis and the success was all the greater. After the war’s end it was naturally easier to make doubters and Nazis into normal men. I never actually worked out methods for myself; for I spoke with everybody individually. Perhaps there is still something to emphasize: I have, as a German emigrant, never pretended to be British or changed my name, and in most cases that inspired trust.
*

When I myself visited Sulzbach for the first time, we had a special topic of conversation: the fate of my prewar London possessions. A member of the staff of our naval attaché there in 1938–39, I had not been able to have my personal belongings forwarded to Germany before war broke out. Of course, as a footloose young bachelor I did not have any too much to leave behind. Everything was confiscated, placed in official custody, and eventually auctioned off, and the small proceeds were credited to me. It was orderly enough in its way. In our general conversation Sulzbach weighed a typical finding from his many conversations with other prisoners of war. The Germans needed to “loosen up, loosen up …” I could not contradict him.

The sun was smiling down, a lovely landscape in the young green of early May rushed past, and a warm wind blew in the open windows of the express train from Newcastle to London. In the compartment sat a little group from Featherstone, on a fast ride to the south, itchy with the anticipation of an imminent change in the still somewhat
monotonous life of a prisoner of war. Only three days earlier Sulzbach had informed me and the others of a transfer to a Documentation Center. What we were to do there, he did not explain very exactly, but we would find out immediately upon our arrival. And after leaving the camp at an ungodly hour we reached King’s Cross in London at noon and continued on to Charing Cross and from there to Tonbridge in the county of Kent. An auto brought us to our destination, Prisoner of War Camp 40, Halstead Exploiting Center, built like a youth hostel in the midst of a beautiful scenic panorama. By then it was around 2100, but still light, and we recognized German military equipment captured by the British, apparently naval ordnance—what’s this? we thought; a big question mark immediately took form.

The next day a British officer explained our new assignment. To the booty assembled there belonged countless classified directives, such as descriptions, instructions for use, illustrations, etc., all highly technical and very difficult to put into English—which was precisely what was expected of us. It would surely take a long time, but we already knew that we could not be repatriated before October, in any event.

We Featherstoners looked at each other in surprise. That we would not accept this task was at once clear to most. Officially, however, we asked for time to think it over. The following morning we came forward with our “No” to this task. That afternoon the camp commandant personally tried to change our minds, unsuccessfully. The day thereafter a major from the War Office made a special trip from London to win us over to the project, equally unsuccessfully. “Now that you have taken all this material as booty,” was and remained our reply, “its use is exclusively your affair. We will have nothing to do with it.” Period. This caused no bad blood with the British; they accepted it. The opposing viewpoints were again aired in individual conversations with them in the following days, but nothing changed. Inevitably, we were transferred back to Featherstone Park, which we reentered in the middle of May. After barely two weeks, the Halstead intermezzo was over and we resumed the customary camp life.

The coming months seemed to me to be no more than a transition to the return home to Germany. I attended selected lectures; gave some myself; visited the theater, films, and musical performances in the evening; and hauled out my violin again. A professor of Russian animated me to take a beginning course in that difficult language, so that together with further study of English, again by means of the Pitman shorthand, my days were full enough. Now and again I made
use of the possibility, which had existed at Featherstone Park since the summer of 1945, of working outside camp and without guards, chiefly in agriculture, after signing a promise to return. Volunteers were sent daily to about 250 farms and 18 drainage sites, and already by October 1945 the number of Germans engaged in such outside work reached a total of 850 per day. In 1945 more than 9,000 tons of potatoes were harvested in the vicinity and a large portion thereof was sent to provision the British occupation zone in Germany! Some officers were already living on farms and others in Camp 18’s newly established outside facilities (“hostels”). The results of a year’s drainage work were 450 kilometers of ditches dug or improved and more than 2,500 hectares of waste-or swamp-land converted into productive farmland. I myself went to the farms, undertaking piecework such as whitewashing stalls, but had the greatest pleasure in the drainage of the peat bogs of Sewing Shields, a workplace of the Women’s Land Army. It was a lot of fun to be around those jolly, sturdy girls. There was never the least pressure from the German or British camp authorities to participate in these labors. Many personal relationships sprung up between the Germans and the English population, and the German name still has a good reputation in Northumberland. The ancient Romans had also left occasional projects behind for us. Near Featherstone Park ran the wall built by and named after the emperor Hadrian (117–138
A.D
.) as a frontier fortification of the Roman province of Britannia, 120 kilometers in length, originally with 17 citadels, 80 gateways and 320 towers. The centuries had gnawed at it and it needed restoration everywhere. Also, it was regularly being excavated at some point. Once we were able to visit the thoroughly impressive cathedral in Durham and take part in a divine service there.

Early in October 1946, the first little group left us to return home. At the beginning of November, I learned that my own repatriation was imminent. And early on 5 November, I was put under way as a member of a new group of the homeward bound, intermediate destination: Camp 23, near Sudbury, where we still had to spend a few days as a preliminary to being embarked for Germany. They were days of dreary routine and pure waiting. But eager anticipation arose when, after four days, the names for the first transport home were read out. Transports to the British occupation zone alternated with those to the American. My group departed from Sudbury on 20 November, reached the coastal city of Hull at midday, and was embarked
in the afternoon on the
Empire Spearhead
—what a great name, I thought, it could really befit a large ocean liner! But I was more than satisfied with our modest freighter as the sun shone down on us while she slowly slipped out of harbor.

During the night aboard the
Empire Spearhead
, the last before we saw Germany again, sleep would not come to many. We spent it in conversation or in thought. Some of us could at least return to our former homes, to familiar surroundings, perhaps even to circles of friends—those from the east, myself from Silesia, could not do that. In 1943, on account of increasingly heavy bombing raids, my mother had given up her residence in Berlin and returned to Silesia—not to Hirschberg, the scene of my childhood, but to Bad Schwarzbach in the Isergebirge. In Silesia, outwardly so peaceful, the full gravity of the military situation had not really dawned on her until January 1945; the Reich radio had certainly not suggested it. But when one January day she asked the station master about the state of rail traffic, he had looked at her wonderingly. “Well, if you want to get out of here at all, the next and last train is leaving in an hour.” And she managed to make it, in a great rush, with a little suitcase in hand and otherwise only what she was wearing, not exactly her best things—these she would not expose to the rigors of a wartime evacuation! And so after stopping at a relative’s in Bad Harzburg, with whom, however, she could not stay, she proceeded further into Hanover, where she was now living as a refugee in a small room in a farmhouse at Leeseringen an der Weser. Therefore I belonged to the transport to the British zone.

The
Empire Spearhead
entered Cuxhaven at 1730 on 21 November. We climbed into a train standing ready near the quays and, after a locomotive breakdown lasting three hours, we reached Münster Camp between three and four o’clock in the morning. The halt there lasted only two days altogether. “Paper war”—discharge certificate, rubber stamp, pocket money for the cost of the journey home. All had been made ready for our entry into postwar civil life.