If Britain Had Fallen (25 page)
More open resistance in Liverpool, however, as everywhere else, would probably not have lasted long once the Germans had taken over. ‘It’s nice to think we might have been heroes, but I’m sure we would have done just what we were told to do’, believes one of those who held a key position on the five- or six-strong Emergency Committee, which met daily at the Town Hall, and the thought of responsibility for the unprotected civilians in their care clearly weighed heavily upon all those in authority. Sir Joseph Cleary, a future Lord Mayor of Liverpool and then a member of the council, also has no illusions about the council being able to defy the Germans. ‘I suppose,’ he believes, ‘the council would have had to suffer or tolerate German occupation … knowing victory
would come … . We would need a structure of government, we would need our social services, we would need the city, in that context we would have gone on controlling the city to the best of our ability in the interest of the citizens. But I still feel that come what may and no matter what the risk might have been, I could not have carried out policies which would have meant the deporting or executing of Jews or any other minority.’
Another member of the council at that time, and also a future Lord Mayor, Harry Livermore, would have escaped the agonising official dilemmas of his colleagues but would have had far worse difficulties of his own, for he was a Jew. Although he is sure that local people ‘would have helped as much as they could’, as experience in other countries made clear it was difficult to hide wanted people for long, and ‘if the Nazis got here,’ he is convinced, ‘I was as good as dead.’
Chapter 10:
Whatever happened to Nelson?
The Sector has been notified by people who know England of the following cultural items, the safeguarding of which would in their opinion be in Germany’s interests.
Memorandum addressed to Section III of the
Security Service, 11 November 1940
Anyone who had not visited Central London for several weeks after the arrival of the Germans and who now walked down the Strand or Charing Cross Road towards Trafalgar Square would have been troubled as he approached it by the sense of something missing. Not merely would the sandbagged machine-gun emplacements and debris of the recent battle, and the placards exhorting the public to ‘Lend to Defend the Right to be Free’, have gone, but in the middle of the square would have been a stretch of newly paved terrace occupied by the pigeons—and nothing else. Nelson’s Column, 170 feet high and erected in 1843 at a cost of £50,000 raised by public subscription, would have gone, leaving nothing behind it but a scar in the ground. With it would probably have vanished the four great bronze lions which had once flanked its base, designed by Sir Edwin Landseer and representing the very epitome of Victorian security and taste, and the fountains in which revellers had splashed on Bonfire Night, Boat Race Night, Mafeking Night, Armistice Day 1918 and many another national occasion. For Hitler, desiring some visible proof of his victory over the British and delighted to be reminded that he had succeeded where Napoleon, thanks to Nelson, had failed, planned to remove the whole edifice to his own capital.
The suggestion occurs in a document bluntly entitled ‘Plans for England’, prepared within Department III of the Security Service on 26 August 1940. ‘There is no symbol of the British victory in the World War corresponding to the French monument near Compiègne’, wrote its author persuasively. ‘On the other hand, ever since the Battle of Trafalgar, the Nelson Column represents for England a symbol of British naval might and world domination. It would be an impressive way of underlining the German victory if the Nelson Column were to be transferred to Berlin.’ It seems only too probable that the idea would have appealed to Hitler and that, by Christmas 1940, despite the formidable engineering
problems involved, Nelson would have no longer looked down Whitehall towards the Houses of Parliament but over the tops of the lime trees in Unter den Linden towards the Reichstag and Hitler’s Chancellery.
The same Londoner who had gazed aghast at a Trafalgar Square without Nelson would probably have been conscious of a flurry of activity around the National Gallery, with heavy pantechnicons, driven by British drivers but escorted by lorry-loads of German troops, pulling up one after another to be loaded with heavily crated objects, and then driven off towards Victoria for transport to the Continent. The same helpful Gestapo department which had earmarked Nelson’s Column for removal had also prepared lists of art treasures which Germany should take into its ‘protection’. ‘Special team required for British Museum’, it advised, in a style of telegraphic urgency. The immediate targets should be the National Gallery in London and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the first concern should be to retrieve a ‘selection of Germanic works of art in the widest sense of the term, also Rubens and Rembrandt, etc.’. Since Rubens, though born in Germany, had lived most of his life in Flanders and Rembrandt was a Dutchman, this was certainly interpreting ‘Germanic’ in a very wide sense, though it does throw some light on the curious German desire to establish a moral claim, however dubious, to property which they were in fact stealing by armed robbery. The same strange reasoning presumably prompted another suggestion. It went almost without saying, Department III implied, that items associated with the painter Holbein and the great musician Handel should be sent back to Germany, but so too should the ‘works, products, etc.’ of such lesser-known figures (at least to the British public) as ‘the astronomer Herschel of Hanover, buried at Greenwich’ and ‘the orientalist Max Muller, buried in Oxford’.
The inability of the Germans to see themselves as others saw them, namely as the greatest thieves in the history of Christendom, was revealed in another suggestion in the same paper, that Germany should set herself up as the policeman of Europe and ‘for reasons of external policy’ organise the ‘return of stolen works of art and scientific articles to their original owners’ (possibly Elgin Marbles to Greece, mummies to Egypt, others things to Japan, South America, France, etc.) – where they would presumably have filled some of the gaps left by items already plundered by the Germans themselves.
The list of sources of loot drawn up in August was, the Security Service realised, by no means up to their usual comprehensive standard and other offices throughout Germany were invited to put up suggestions, just as they had been asked to recommend people with special knowledge of
Great Britain. The Brunswick office responded with a will, submitting a ‘shopping list’ of art and literary treasures worth millions of pounds, ‘the safeguarding of which … would be in Germany’s interests’. Gestapo headquarters had already agreed that a ‘special team’ was required for the British Museum, and the informants in Brunswick recommended that, to begin with, it should not merely seize ‘Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible and Gutenberg’s 36-line Bible’, both, of course, almost priceless, but ‘many early printed books’ from the King’s Library (a section of the Museum), and ‘a very large and world-famous collection of old manuscripts of the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, German, French, Italian, Flemish and English schools’, from ‘the manuscript salon’ and ‘the Grouville [i.e. Greville] Library’. The plunderers would round off their day’s work by seizing those few items to which Germany could perhaps lay some slight claim, such as the ‘famous collection of autographs, including letters from Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm I and Kaiser Friedrich III’.
The cultural locusts from Berlin then proposed to move on to Trafalgar Square, stopping at the National Gallery to seize all the Rembrandts, a painter for whom Hitler seems to have had a special admiration, before travelling on across London to ‘the South Kensington Museum’, meaning the Victoria and Albert, where the curators were to be called on to surrender ‘sculptures by Leonardo da Vinci [and] early printed books and famous prints of the Kelmscott Press and the Doves Press’. Surprisingly, no mention was made of the Tate Gallery, perhaps because the Nazis officially considered most modern art decadent, or of other major treasuries of art, such as the Wallace Collection, perhaps because it did not occur to anyone in Brunswick to suggest them. No doubt other Gestapo officers, whose replies to the appeal from Berlin have not survived, would have filled in this and other gaps.
In fact few of the items listed by the Germans were where they believed them to be, since the most precious items from the great museums and galleries had been evacuated at the outbreak of war to various country houses, a quarry in Wales and other safe spots, but it would not have taken the Germans long to discover these hiding places and unless, which seems unthinkable, their custodians had preferred to destroy them rather than see them leave the country, the fact that they were already crated and stacked would merely have made their removal easier. No doubt, too, since the Gestapo instructions said that the National Gallery and other buildings were to be stripped, something would have been removed from them, even if only the single picture displayed each month to remind the British public of the riches it was missing, or the much-criticised examples of British modern art acquired under the Chantry
Bequest and lying undisplayed in the basement beneath the Tate, an action which might have saved future curators some embarrassment.
On items worth seizing outside London, the Brunswick office of the Gestapo was less well informed. It recommended the ‘Reference Library, Piccadilly, Manchester’, as ‘one of England’s most famous libraries’ and hence worth serious scrutiny by the Germans’ bibliophilic task force, while other teams of experts, it suggested, ought to visit ‘the Archaeological Museum, Cambridge, and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford’, where ‘antiquities are preserved which, judging from their character, are from Lower Saxony’. These presumably were also to be restored to their native earth, several thousand years after first being interred in it.
But it was not only the art galleries which would have echoed to the heavy tread of uniformed Gestapo officers and the softer and perhaps even more sinister footsteps of their civilian-suited advisers. Victims of their own propaganda, the Nazis believed that London was the centre of a whole network of anti-German conspiracies, which it was the duty of the Security Service to root out. The most urgent task lay at the Home Office which contained records ‘on all foreigners in England’, including ‘Irish Nationalists, Moscow agents, German emigrants such as Brüning, Hanfstängl, etc.’, as well as ‘political prisoners … detained since the beginning of the war on the ground of friendship with Germany’, but the officers in charge of the search there were also warned to look out for evidence of ‘the beginnings of an English Gestapo, only recently established by Anderson’. This notoriously humourless and solidly Conservative ex-Civil Servant, promoted by Chamberlain to the post of Home Secretary, would surely have been surprised to learn that ‘personnel attach great importance to the apprehension of Minister Anderson, a real rogue’. Other Gestapo men would meanwhile have been busy at the nearby Foreign Office in search of ‘Vansittart, the Head of the Intelligence Service’, Sir Robert (later Lord) Vansittart, the leading anti-Nazi in the diplomatic service, whom, due to his opposition to appeasement, Chamberlain had ‘kicked upstairs’ to be his Chief Diplomatic Adviser in 1938 and then ignored, ‘his brother-in-law, Sir Eric Phipps, previously Ambassador in Berlin … his private secretary, Norton, a younger man (possibly recruited? [i.e., to the British Secret Service])’ and ‘Leeper, racial expert, carried out propaganda’, also ‘Deputy Secretary of State Cadogan’. All these public servants were no doubt patriotic Englishmen but their supposed connection with the intelligence service seems questionable. The future Sir Reginald Leeper had indeed worked in the Intelligence Bureau of the Department of Information in 1917, but had had a conventional
diplomatic career since and a few years later, in 1944, was to incur the wrath of the left in Britain, as an alleged right-winger, during the anti-royalist revolution in Greece, while if Sir Alexander Cadogan was involved in espionage no hint of the fact appears in his otherwise remarkably indiscreet diary. The man in the greatest immediate danger of all appears to have been the author and former diplomat, Harold (later Sir Harold) Nicolson, then a backbench MP who, while others in London society and the House of Commons were losing their heads about von Ribbentrop and his friends, had firmly kept his. Nicolson was under no illusions what his fate would be if the Germans landed, and had indeed written to his wife on 26 May that he had secured a ‘bare bodkin’ in the shape of poison, with which to kill himself rather than be captured. The Gestapo had, of course, no knowledge of this and seem to have imagined that he would obligingly have given them the benefit of his expert advice. He was, noted the author of a paper modestly entitled ‘Tips for Operations against England’ on 6 September, ‘one of the most knowledgeable Englishmen to get hold of in this connection’, as he had taken ‘part in the Versailles negotiations’ and more recently been ‘a contact point for Anglo-American propaganda’.
More surprising were some of the Gestapo’s other immediate targets. They included Sir Nevile Henderson, who as British Ambassador in Berlin until the outbreak of war had been the weak and willing tool of Chamberlain’s appeasement policies, and ‘Benett of the Royal Institute’, presumably the ‘Royal Institute of International Affairs’, a body of which most Englishmen had never heard but one to which, as will be seen, the Germans attributed enormous influence. ‘Important as a contact point’, the same memorandum advised, ‘is an otherwise unknown Stock Exchange jobber, Anderson, [with a] house in Portman Square’. The Gestapo clearly considered this house, which otherwise makes no appearance in the history of the period, a centre of anti-Nazi intrigue. The leading opponent of Hitler, Brüning, had, they believed, lived there at one time and contacted there not merely the ever-dangerous Vansittart, but also ‘Dr Michael’ of the
Münchener Neueste Nachrichten,
a South German newspaper, ‘who had been an émigré in London since 1935’. The Gestapo had an obviously well-founded fear that all these enemies of the Reich might not wait tamely to be captured. It was, they advised, ‘advisable to get hold quickly of pictures of all Englishmen to be arrested’, and once they were caught there was an obvious source of information to be exploited. ‘When arresting Englishmen’, the future staff of the London office were told, ‘it is important to apprehend their servants. Every distinguished Englishman has a valet, often an ex-regular soldier, who is usually
exceptionally well informed on the private and official affairs of his master.’
