If Britain Had Fallen (23 page)

Probably in practice German forces would have been stationed in South
Wales and Southern Scotland, at least during the initial months of deportations and requisitioning, when resistance was to be expected. Later the troops here might have been thinned out (for the Germans Britain always meant England and England meant London) and the mountainous, thinly populated areas of Snowdonia and the Highlands would probably have been almost permanently ungarrisoned, perhaps with occasional ‘sweeps’ to round up any resistance men who might be lurking there. What would have happened to Ireland is even more speculative. With the rest of Britain beaten, Ulster offered little real threat to the Germans and it was perhaps in more danger from its neighbour to the south, which had consistently refused to cooperate with the British government during the summer and had maintained towards Germany a policy of benevolent neutrality. Apart from occasions when it suited them, the Germans were not the people to bother about such niceties as the difference between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. It seems likely that in the long term, especially if, as the Gestapo anticipated, refugees from the mainland fled across the Irish Sea, or British saboteurs used Ulster as a base, the Germans would have occupied both countries. To imagine that they would have stopped at the Border merely because the government of Eire had been careful not to offend is clearly naive.

Once the British people had come to accept the presence of German troops they might not have proved particularly obtrusive. The absolute maximum that the
Sea Lion
planners had contemplated landing to secure the country had been about half a million men and, once the war had been won and Hitler’s thoughts were turning, as they very soon were, towards Russia, the best of the fighting troops among these, say, half, might well have been withdrawn. 250,000 men, though a formidable body en masse, would not have been particularly conspicuous once spread over the country—certainly less so than the million and a half British soldiers who had been stationed there before the invasion or the million or more Americans who were to pass through it in 1944 alone. In many places it might well have been possible to go for months without ever seeing a German.

The military structure through which the Germans planned to rule the British Isles consisted of the two armies of Army Group A, which was to make the actual assault, General Busch’s Sixteenth Army and General Strauss’s Ninth Army, and these names, like that of the Army Group Commander, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt and the Commander-in-Chief, Army, General von Brauchitsch, would rapidly have become familiar to the British civilian. So too, very probably, would those of General von Bock, commanding Army Group B and General von Reichenau, commanding the only Army so far assigned to it, the Sixth, if this, as planned,
was brought in to occupy the south-west. The power to issue occupation regulations was delegated to the Army commanders and in some cases to corps commanders, a corps normally consisting of two divisions, and as there were altogether ten corps in Army Group A and three in Army Group B, there would have been, beside the three Army commanders, thirteen different rulers governing the British Isles.

The Germans planned, too, to bring across the Channel as soon as victory was won a substantial number of administrative troops to man what in military jargon was called ‘the lines of communication area’, which meant setting up supply depots and communications networks, base workshops and hospitals, and the whole elaborate machinery needed to keep a large army fed and ready for action. These were to be responsible for military government outside the areas controlled by the fighting troops, and the Germans had worked out in detail the establishment each local commander needed, which included a section of ‘Secret Field Police’ and ‘1 local defence battalion on bicycles’, a mode of transport for which, like the horse, the Germans had a great respect.

The German military occupation machine was rounded off by ‘The Defence Economic Staff for England’, whose role will be discussed later, and by the Central Security Office, or RSHA, whose most feared arm was the Gestapo. The sign that they had arrived, and that no man’s life was now safe, would have been the appearance of a new poster in a type that was a compromise between familiar British and German Gothic:

Dieses Haus darf nur mit Genehmigung des Befehlshabers der Sicherheitspolizei für Grossbritannien betreten werden.

__________

No entrance without permission of the Chief-in Command of the German Secret Police for Great Britain.

¹
After the war Quisling was shot for treason.

Chapter 9: The Mersey side spies

Your task is to combat … all anti-German organisations, institutions, opposition and opposition groups which can be seized in England … to prevent the removal of all available material, and to centralise and safeguard it for future exploitation.

Instructions to the Representative of the Chief of the Security Police
in Great Britain, 17 September 1940

After the wild beast had killed his prey the jackals arrived to dismember it. The Army’s duty was to defeat the enemy and prevent a military rebellion, the economic staff’s to strip the captured country bare of its resources. The Security Service had a darker, more evil, task to perform—to stamp out any organisations that had harmed Germany in the past or might do so in the future, to root out all undercover opposition, and to impose upon the vanquished, by persuasion or terror, not merely German rule but Nazi culture.

The Reich Central Security Office, or
Reichssicherheitshaumptamt
(RSHA), had been set up only in 1939, when the Criminal Police (i.e. the CID wing of the German Police), the Security Service of the Nazi Party (
Sicherheitsdienst
or SD) and the Secret State Police
(Geheime Staatspolizei)
had been merged into one organisation. The whole of this was often referred to by those outside by the name of this last body, the Gestapo, which specialised in tracking down and interrogating suspected enemies of the regime. The Security Service, while ready enough to call on its Gestapo colleagues when necessary, was largely an intelligence organisation, collecting material of the kind which in Britain might have been assembled by the Special Branch of the Police and by the intelligence departments of the three services. The German system, with no one trusting the man in the next office and with a large number of little overlapping empires, while well calculated to make internal treason difficult, was not likely to promote efficiency in dealings with the world outside. The unclassified material collected for the use of the Armed Forces when they reached Great Britain, described in an earlier chapter, was not unimpressive, especially considering the speed with which it had been got together, but the secret documents prepared by the Security Service for their own use and their internal memoranda give a different picture. At least five different sections at headquarters in Berlin were involved and clearly a good deal of readily available information simply slipped through the net. It is clear, too, that various sections had private filing systems of their
own, and that card indexes of potential suspects had also blossomed in profusion. A conference called by one Section in Berlin in March 1941, six months after the target date for
Sea Lion,
while eager to make plain that ‘in calling this meeting, Section VI did not in any way wish to arrogate to itself the central direction of the planning in regard to England’, revealed how desperate was the need for coordination. Despite the lack of up-to-date information on conditions in the British Isles, it was reported, ‘it frequently happened that diplomats, journalists, etc., arriving in the Reich from London could not be questioned because the Foreign Ministry did not report their arrival … to the HQ of State Security’, while the meeting ended with the chairman, a senior SS officer, remarking with pained surprise that ‘when studying personnel records, he had been struck by the large number of staff proposed who neither knew English nor had ever been in England or abroad or been concerned therewith’. Considering that much of their work involved studying the British press this must have been a formidable handicap.

The same meeting reaffirmed that responsibility for all Security Service planning for England rested on ‘SS Standartenführer Professor Six’, of Section II. He had been appointed at the suggestion, or at least with the approval, of Göring, following the setting up within the Security Service of a special headquarters entrusted with requisitioning ‘the entire results of British aeronautical development and research’ and for seizing particularly valuable items such as machine tools. Since this came within Göring’s special sphere of interest he seems to have used the opportunity to steal a march on his rival Himmler in the obscure backstairs power-struggle that was for ever in progress around Hitler, and to have moved into one area, security in occupied territories, which really belonged to the Minister of the Interior.

On 17 September a formal memorandum was addressed to Dr Six, nominating him Chief of the Security Police in Great Britain on Goring’s authority, and informing him that ‘Reichs-Marshal Minister-President Goring’ had ‘decided … that the Security Police … will commence their activities simultaneously with the military invasion in order to seize and combat effectively the numerous important organisations and societies in England which are hostile to Germany … . Your task is to combat, with the requisite means, all anti-German organisations, institutions, opposition, and opposition groups which can be seized in England, to prevent the removal of all available material, and to centralise and safeguard it for future exploitation. I designate the capital, London, as the location of your headquarters as Representative of the Chief of the Security Police and SD, and I authorise you to set up small action groups
(Einsatzgruppen)
in other parts of Great Britain as the situation dictates and the necessity arises.’

These ‘Action Groups’ consisted of small units of utterly ruthless Nazis who descended suddenly upon an area, tortured and executed known enemies of the regime, and tried to paralyse all opposition before it could begin by taking into ‘protective custody’, without trial, any leading local figures whose arrest might strike terror into the hearts of their potential followers. They later gained an evil reputation in Russia, where many murders were laid at their door and where their equipment ultimately included mobile extermination centres. One of those convicted at the war crimes trials at Nuremberg in 1948 of participation in these massacres—though he escaped with a light sentence and was released long before it expired in 1952—was the man whom Göring had chosen to become security overlord of occupied Britain, Dr Franz Six.

Six possibly appealed to Göring because of his interest, of which he had perhaps already revealed some signs, in acquiring the art treaures of other countries for the Reich, a subject in which the Reichs-Marshal took a personal interest, for many of the finest paintings and works of art looted from France and Holland later turned up in the private collection at his resplendent hunting lodge, Karinhall, where so many susceptible English aristocrats had been entertained before the war. Six’s defence of his later activities in Russia was that he had gone there to place Smolensk Cathedral and other historic churches under his protection, because they contained various gold crowns and other precious objects, and England, with its magnificent cathedrals, offered the prospect of an even richer harvest. Possibly Six owed his appointment to some private understanding with Göring to keep the pick of the crop for him, for though he wrote excellent English, he had up to this time shown no particular interest in that country.

The mere title of ‘SS Colonel Professor Dr Six’ was sinister-sounding enough, but the reality of contact with the man would have been far worse. Six was only thirty-one, but he was already head of the Enemy Information Department (Amt II) of the Security Office when in the first week of September 1940 he was called back from his Action Group, busy in France, to take charge of some forty officers who were to cross to England and attach themselves to divisional and Army headquarters there as soon as the fighting was over, but he had already had a long and impeccable career of service to the Nazi cause. Like many of the most ardent Nazis he was a self-made man who had achieved academic distinction, or at least impressive paper qualifications, despite financial hardship and, one suspects, a somewhat repellent personality. He came from a working-class background
in an industrial town and his education had been interrupted by the need to earn his living and to him, as to many frustrated young men of his generation, Nazism had clearly come like a revelation, to be embraced with the fervour of a religious conversion. Six had joined the Nazi Party when he began to read history and political science at Heidelberg, and he seems to have taken little part in the traditional amusements of German student life in that beautiful old city. His time was divided between his miserable lodgings and the lecture-room, and the Nazi meetings he attended were no doubt oases of colour and excitement in his drab life. In 1934, the year after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he obtained his doctorate of philosophy and took an academic post at the University of Leipzig, where he became an even more active Nazi, which perhaps helped him in 1937 to become a professor at a remarkably early age. In 1939, with war clearly approaching, he was made head of a new faculty of political science at the University of Berlin, designed to give leading Nazis the theoretical knowledge of the Nazi philosophy, and of other countries, that those who had come up the hard way had so far had no chance to acquire, and Six seems to have made a success of it. On the outbreak of war he was placed in charge of the cultural branch of the Foreign Office, and became even more deeply involved in the RSHA, which sent him to France after it fell, and from which he was called back to Berlin to prepare for the invasion of England. When in due course Operation
Sea Lion
was cancelled, Six was found a congenial job as head of Section VII of RSHA, a small department which carried out basic research into such Nazi obsessions as freemasonry and the Christian religion, one of those agreeable ‘soft options’ which the enterprising academic can often find in time of war, and then followed his dubious activities in Russia. He spent much of the last year of the war back in Germany trying to organise an all-European anti-Jewish Congress, a somewhat unnecessary undertaking, one might have thought, considering that Six’s colleagues had by now murdered almost every Jew in Europe. At the end of the war Six disappeared, but was eventually caught and sent to gaol. He last emerged from obscurity in 1961 when he volunteered to appear on behalf of the mass-murderer Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Israel, an offer prudently withdrawn when the Israelis refused to promise that the witness might not also find himself in the dock.