If Britain Had Fallen (24 page)

This was the man on whose whims and prejudices the fate of every individual in the British Isles would have rested in the autumn of 1940, had Britain fallen, and his name would soon have become as familiar to the vanquished as those of his hero and superior, Hitler. Six’s appearance in those days was a gift to the cartoonists for he was short and bald, with
ears that stuck out, and heavy pebble spectacles that inadequately concealed a pronounced squint, but it seems unlikely that, except in the underground press, anyone would have dared to caricature him.

The Gestapo planned to set up, in addition to Six’s own headquarters in London, provincial offices in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and either Edinburgh or Glasgow, and despite some glaring deficiencies, already indicated, they had prepared for the proud day when they finally hung up their long black raincoats on the hat-stand of requisitioned British offices with meticulous care. Some of their plans for London have survived and will be mentioned later, but the thoroughness with which the occupation had been planned is demonstrated even better by the preparations they had made for the takeover of Liverpool. Besides the more obvious forms of intelligence work and espionage, such as the assembling of useful documents on public sale like the Automobile Association
Handbook
and the
Police Almanack
and the photographing of the whole British coastline by the German airline,
Lufthansa,
during its regular peacetime flights, the Germans, even before the Nazis came to power, had collected every scrap of information that came their way from German residents in Great Britain. They had been helped by the gullibility and good nature of many English people who, in the 1920s and 1930s, genuinely believed that Germany had had a raw deal in 1919 and that the best way to avoid the horrors of another war was to entertain Germans in their own homes. This was the policy that had earlier in 1940 yielded such rich dividends in Norway. Many well-meaning Norwegians in 1919 and the years that followed had generously given shelter to German children suffering from the after-effects of the allied blockade, and others had helped to entertain visiting German lecturers, singers and artistes. They were rewarded in 1940 by seeing the children they had cared for, and the visitors they had applauded, returning as part of the occupation forces, when their knowledge of Norwegian proved invaluable in interrogating captured resistance men. People in England having, unlike the Norwegians, suffered already in one war caused by Germany, had on the whole been more hesitant about extending the hand of friendship, but a substantial number had done so and in Liverpool, as in many places, schools had organised exchange visits in the 1930s, enabling German children to stay in private homes. One Liverpool woman, eleven in 1939, still remembers the firm refusal of her father, an ex-serviceman, to have one to stay before the war on the grounds that ‘Once a German always a German’. When, in 1940, the family were bombed out by ‘the bloody Huns’, he blamed the accuracy of the attacks on Liverpool on these former visitors who had, he believed, taken back to Germany with them maps
and photographs of the docks. He was very probably right. Another popular belief in Merseyside and elsewhere was that the pilot of one low-flying enemy aircraft had been identified as a German apprentice who had worked at a local factory before the war. The truth of this was more doubtful, but it could have happened, for many Germans repaid their hosts by spying on them.

Liverpool, due to its importance as the chief transatlantic port and, later, to its selection as one of the Security Service’s provincial headquarters, seems to have received particularly thorough attention, although similar dossiers were no doubt compiled on other centres. The university, practising the tradition that learning overrode national barriers, was an obvious target and the official
Austauschdienst,
or student exchange service, provided a steady flow of young Germans allegedly eager to drink at this fountain of British culture. The head of one department, which regularly exchanged first-year students, discovered that among those sent to him was ‘a thug of a Nazi who started putting up notices without permission and snooping on the other German students in search of forbidden literature’. In the summer of 1938 the Professor of German, an active member of the Liverpool committee for helping German refugees, returned unexpectedly to his office to find a German exchange student engrossed in the contents of his roll-top desk, in search of information about these unfortunate fellow-countrymen, and the university, though discreetly, since officially Germany was still a friendly power, ended the exchange agreement.

But some spies at Liverpool, especially in earlier years, went undetected. Among them was a future SS leader, Rudolf Thyrolf, who arrived in Liverpool in 1929 to spend the coming academic year there while the Nazis were still bawling and bludgeoning their way to power. Thyrolf, however much he neglected his academic work, did not waste his three terms in England. While other foreign students drank with friends, or laboured at their notebooks, his sharp eye was everywhere and his ear was attuned even in the lecture room to any hint of friendship or hostility towards Germany. On 5 September 1940, with invasion believed to be only days away, his big moment arrived. Now an officer officer
(Hauptsturmführer)
in the SS in Dresden, he submitted to his superiors in Berlin a long report marked ‘Very Urgent!’, on which its recipient, suitably impressed one hopes, duly minuted ‘Pass to Liverpool Commando leader’.

The material on the organisation of the university which Thyrolf had compiled, useful though it was, could have been garnered from any good reference book, but his impressions of the teaching staff were likely to be of real value to a Gestapo officer arriving in a new town, and in 1940
Thyrolf’s reactions, which the intervening decade had not mellowed, might well have served as the death-warrant of some harmless academic. One professor, for example, was described as ‘in his outlook … a typical Englishman, although one can never quite rid oneself of the feeling that he is not of pure Aryan descent … . A cunning and dishonest man.’ Another departmental head was ‘to judge by his appearance … probably of Jewish origin … . In his lectures he often put forward a Socialist-Marxist point of view.’ After such dubious personalities it was a relief to turn to a professor who ‘was … a great admirer of German culture’ and another member of the Liverpool faculty who was also Very fond of Germany, where he went for his holidays, and he had his children taught German’, but unhappily ‘wielded little influence … and had few listeners’. On the Vice-Chancellor of his time, Professor Hetherington, Thyrolf reserved judgment, though he paid the Scots an unexpected compliment: ‘Hetherington is of Scottish origin. He was therefore regarded as clever and businesslike.’

Thyrolf had devoted less attention to his fellow students but he had not found them impressive. ‘The student body was largely made up of the sons and daughters of ordinary middle-class families from the immediate neighbourhood of Liverpool’, he reported. ‘Hard work was the rule in Liverpool, not so much to acquire deeper knowledge as to pass the examinations in the shortest possible time.’

A constant anxiety in many quarters in Britain in 1940 was that those Germans not so far interned would, when the time came, prove loyal to their native country, however vehemently they professed at the moment to oppose it. The Cabinet was told on 10 May, the day that Britain woke up to its danger, that, in addition to 164,000 non-enemy aliens belonging to countries with which Britain was not yet at war, and at that stage of course including Italians, there were 73,000 German citizens in Britain who had not yet been interned. The government feared that each of these was a potential fifth columnist or, at best, a potential collaborator after Germany had won. The Germans running restaurants in Soho, forming brass bands in Birmingham and managing butchers’ shops in Sheffield might indeed be harmless or even actively helping the war effort
while Britain stayed uninvaded.
Once she was occupied and part of Greater Germany, German citizenship, except of course by the Jews, would be resumed and deeper-rooted loyalties than those attaching them to their adopted country might triumph. This at least was what the British government believed and it was also what the German government expected, for one intelligence survey after another identified German nationals in England as future supporters. It was not, as some people supposed, to
show sympathy with Nazism to acknowledge that ties of birth and blood were among the most compelling known to mankind, surviving time, distance and even persecution. The whole history of Germany in the 1920s and of Britain in 1940 had shown that loyalty to one’s country was by no means an out-of-date conception. It could convert Mosley from a sympathiser with Germany to a would-be guerilla fighter against her; and equally it could cause nice, amiable Mr Miller at the pork butcher’s shop to become again Herr Müller, who was a German first and an Englishman second.

Certainly Rudolf Thyrolf, writing in September 1940, devoted a good deal of space to the German community in Liverpool. Before 1914, he recalled, there had been several thousand Germans in the city, including more than 1000 butchers, the classic trade of Germans in England, just as catering, and especially ice-cream vending, was that of the Italians, but by 1930 few were left and ‘those who retained their nationality were the exception’, while ‘only in very few cases did their children speak a word of German’. However, after 1919 ‘new immigrants carried the banner of the German spirit in Liverpool’, the banner flying most strongly around the German Literary Society, whose officers were naturalised Germans, the German Church, which had regular ‘German evenings’ during the week, and the Consulate General, which, however, ‘at any rate up to 1930 did not play a leading role on behalf of German nationalism’.

No Gestapo intelligence report would have been complete without a reference to those legendary enemies, the Jews, the Communists and the Freemasons. In Liverpool, reported Thyrolf with obvious regret—he had, he reminded his superiors, ‘been an active anti-Semite since 1923’—‘the position … in 1930 was the same as in the rest of Great Britain … . Jews everywhere in business and culture, among the teaching staff at the university and in the student body. I got to know a young Jew who wanted to be an officer. This was quite possible. There was no sign of an anti-Semitic movement, although I was particularly on the look-out for it. Only occasionally did one hear a student say, “I can’t stand Jews”.’ The position about Communism was a little more hopeful, for though ‘invitations to Communist meetings were often seen chalked on the roadway or on walls … these small groups exerted no influence’, but Thyrolf’s one good contact, a trades union official who was learning German and who had visited him in Germany in 1936, had proved uncooperative after ‘I had a violent personal argument with him … about the Spanish Civil War, which threatened to bring our friendship to an end’. Freemasonry, however, was a real danger. ‘English freemasonry gives the impression of being a much stronger movement than in Germany. One met them more
often and more openly … . I knew a number of students who were masons at twenty. It was nothing out of the ordinary to be asked by fellow-students whether one was a freemason. A freemasons’ lodge met in the Students Club, the main hall of which was decorated with Masonic emblems.’

Thyrolf had also looked into a number of other suspect organisations. Rotary, because of its international associations, had always troubled the Germans and the intrepid Nazi had penetrated the very heart of the citadel and attended a rotary club lunch; he attached his invitation, carefully preserved, to his report, a curious proof of his bona fides as a spy. Another document which duly found its place in the Gestapo archives was his invitation to attend a social and dance ‘to meet members of the University of Liverpool International Society … . Book day return ticket to Town Green, 1/4’, but this occasion, too, had proved disappointing, the society being ‘fundamentally very nationalistic’, i.e. not pro-German. As for the League of Nations Union, that supporter of Germany’s old enemy, the League, it had done nothing more alarming than ‘holding evening dances’.

Thyrolf was not the only person eager, if England were to be occupied, to get into the act. Other enterprising underlings did their best to cash in on their knowledge of the country and pulled what strings they could to exploit it. Gestapo headquarters seem to have called in August for volunteers to serve there, for on the 22nd its Munich office signalled Section III, responsible for the collection of material on England, in Berlin, that Professor Haushofer had recommended his son, a lecturer in the Faculty of Foreign Affairs in Berlin, as being a useful source of information and ‘through all his connections and his knowledge, fully in the picture on personalities and institutions’. He would, Sturmbannführer Dr Spengler of Section III was assured, be available in due course for interview in Berlin, but he was at present inaccessible, being ‘on a mountain slope near Partenkirchen’. A month later, on 23 September, the Security Service’s Dortmund office teleprinted Berlin that a keen local Nazi, Dr Büchsenschütz, had given in his name. He had, it was explained, escaped call-up into the Forces because the President of Westphalia had wished to retain him as a headmaster, but the call of duty could no longer be denied and ‘Party Member Büchsenschütz’ had offered to put his ‘complete written and spoken command of English’ and his personal knowledge of the country, at the disposal of the Reichsführer SS.

What, one wonders, would have happened if Dr Six’s henchmen, perhaps including Thyrolf, who would have been a natural choice for a post on Merseyside, had one evening stepped from a train at Lime Street station or driven up in their Mercedes, or a captured Rolls, to the Adelphi Hotel,
a likely choice as the German officers’ mess, or the Liver Building, whose modern offices would surely have been taken over by one of the German departments swarming into the city? The Germans, the papers show, had some hopes that the large number of Irish in the city, many of them working in the docks, would have been well disposed towards them, but they seem likely in fact to have found the docks in ruins for one professor in the university learned from an extra-mural class of dock-workers that a plan existed to destroy all the cranes, warehouses and other installations. The Germans themselves deduced from the multi-racial nature of the city, and particularly from the presence of so many Irishmen, that they would find a large number of sympathisers in Liverpool, but one man who had himself worked in the docks from seventeen until the age of forty, and is now a retired official of the dockers’ trade union, is convinced that the German port authorities would have been in for a disagreeable surprise. Dock work, he points out, lends itself to sabotage. ‘A skilled man, of course, strives to ensure that the cargo will not shift, but the same skilled man … forced to work for people he loathed, would equally be able to use his skill to put what is known as a “Glasgow Face” on the cargo, so that to anybody looking at it, it appeared absolutely stable and secure, but under the stress of bad weather conditions … would shift.’ Fragile articles, he believes, would deliberately have been packed dangerously close to cases of heavy machinery, and liquid cargoes, then still largely carried in casks, would have been stowed ‘in such a way that to anybody looking at them they would appear perfectly stable, but they would not be stable at all as soon as the ship got into heavy weather’. This ex-doc-worker suspects, too, that ‘as many of the dockers had a background of years of work in shipyards, or of experience as firemen or greasers in the engine room at sea’, they would also, whenever they got the chance, have known ‘just where to go and what to do’ to damage the ship’s engines and machinery.