If Britain Had Fallen (43 page)

Apart from the ‘Jerrybags’, whose crime was probably a desire for comfort and company rather than treason, and the anonymous letter-writers, who seem to have been prompted by malice and envy rather than disloyalty, there were in this solitary part of the British Isles which actually experienced occupation exceedingly few who, to quote an eighteenth-century politician, ‘drank of the wine that makes men forget their country’. A few, a very few, tried to trade on working for the Germans to try to obtain preferential treatment, but they were mostly very young. The manager of Boots, having dismissed one young girl friendly with a German security man, ‘was forced to take her back under threats’, and a Jersey policeman remembers how on ‘one occasion … a young boy about fifteen was riding a cycle the wrong way up a one-way street. I asked him what he was up to. He said, “Can’t you damn well read? Look at the back of my mudguard, I’m working for the Germans.” So I told him, “It doesn’t excuse you from obeying the law.” He said, “If you go on at me like that I’ll report you to the Commandant.” I said, “The war won’t last for ever. One of these days I’ll kick you up the backside from here to the Commandant’s office.” I didn’t get any more from him. He was gone.’

In Denmark, Hitler’s ‘model protectorate’, which in many ways was far better treated than the Channel Islands, it was commonly estimated at the end of the war that ten per cent of the population had collaborated to some degree, ten per cent had actively resisted, and the rest had done neither. On the Channel Islands one active resister who was himself sent
to prison estimated the percentage of collaborators on Guernsey at only two per cent. In the whole of the Channel Islands only twelve people were considered for prosecution at the end of the war but in not a single case was the evidence strong enough for a charge to be brought.

Although for the rest of Great Britain the hope of liberation after a successful invasion would have seemed far more remote, all the evidence suggests that in trying to find British people to work with them, let alone for them, the Germans would have faced an equally uphill struggle, for the surviving German documents suggest a truly desperate desire to discover some ‘persons and firms of a friendly disposition towards Germany’ to offset those voluminous lists the Gestapo had compiled of its avowed enemies. To balance the 2500 names on the ‘Special Search List’ there are only some fifty who were even believed to be well disposed towards Germany, and, apart from a German restaurant which many would recognise, apparently included merely because it was German, the documents include not a single well-known person or establishment. Even those on the list are there only because they had been tolerant of Germany before the war; there is no guarantee that they would not have been wholly patriotic once the Germans had landed, as Sir Oswald Mosley, whose name, incidentally, does not appear on the German ‘White List’, says he would have been.

Whenever any potential supporter came to their notice, local Gestapo branches seem to have sent details to Berlin, and typical of those reported in this way, in October 1940 by the Graz section, was an Englishman believed to be living with his sister in the Midlands who had ‘given proof of his objective attitude towards National Socialism’ when lecturing at an Austrian university, while the country was still independent, to such an effect that he had spent a month in gaol as a Nazi courier before being released on the intervention of the British Consul and expelled from the country. He had popped up again later that year, in Germany itself, holding a university post there until forced to return to England on the outbreak of war. Whether or not his attitude had changed since then was not recorded—German intelligence in England was always abysmal.

Another list was compiled in Brunswick a month later by those same devoted officials who had suggested to headquarters that they should remove the Elgin Marbles and the Gutenberg Bible from the British Museum. Ten people or companies were suggested, and someone in Brunswick had obviously lived in Lancashire for six of those named came from the Manchester area, among them a schoolmistress, a judge (married to a German), a firm of calico printers, a member of a company of wholesale druggists, and two private citizens, one a man of unnamed occupation,
the other his married daughter. Elsewhere in the country the Germans looked hopefully in the direction of a City firm of shipping agents (apparently because of their connection with a German firm), an engineer with offices in Victoria in Central London, and most surprisingly, a spinster living in the High Street of a small town in North Wales, though her qualifications were not disclosed.

Since avowed friends of Germany seemed, even to the Nazis, to be distinctly thin on the ground, the Security Service section in Luneberg (which had also discovered such dangerous opponents of Germany as the ‘cigarette adulterator’ and the ‘King of East London’ mentioned earlier) were reduced to drawing up a list of
Critics of Conditions in England,
apparently assuming that these too might be turned into active collaborators. It included the Scottish MP, Captain Ramsay, who was already detained under Regulation 18b and who would surely have been surprised to find himself in the company of a ‘cabaret dancer [who was a] supporter of Mosley’, a ‘Catholic priest, Father——[who] in a review of the anti-Hitler book by Professor Freud described Hitler’s anti-Semitism as a good thing’, a fairly well-known author expelled from the Labour Party for a book contrary to its policy, a former MP, described only as an ‘opponent of Churchill’, the author of a book on the problems of the clergy in rural areas and, most unexpected of all, a member of the staff of the ‘Aberystwyth Agricultural Station’, with an impeccably Welsh name, who ‘is fighting in support of farmers against capitalism’. Far more promising sounds a member of the ‘Ladies Army and Navy Club’, the wife of a colonial Civil Servant, who had been ‘a member of the Fascist League, for years active in propaganda for National Socialism’, and was ‘one of the best propagandists, who has extensive connections’. Alas, however, even this fish had slipped through the net for, the author of this memorandum complained, after recommending her to the ‘Overseas Office’ of the Party in 1936, ‘unfortunately no notice was taken of my request to remain in touch with the lady’.

The main German ‘White List’ containing ‘Addresses and Short Character Sketches of English people friendly towards Germany’, prepared in the Munich office of the Security Service and sent to headquarters on 9 September 1940, contains thirty-nine names, of which seventeen are of women. The criterion for inclusion seems to have been at least one visit to Germany, usually to attend or lecture at a German university, and almost all of those listed appear to have been middle class. No titled person is included, nor anyone who appears to have been a manual worker, although, apart from one clergyman, none of the entries specifies the occupation of the person mentioned. The Germans were, however,
interested, at least to the extent of recording it when they could, in the appearance of these potential contacts and, following the classic pattern of intelligence agents, they scrupulously recorded any emotional attachments their subjects had formed in Germany. The favoured thirty-nine seem, however, to have been a highly conformist, not to say respectable, body and no hint of scandal, much less of deviation, appears against any name. These were not government servants to be blackmailed into spying, but independent, if misguided, private citizens who, if they had collaborated, would have done so out of admiration for Germany and National Socialism.

Heading the list, though it does not seem to have been in any particular order, and receiving the longest entry, was the daughter of the headmaster of a well-known boys’ school in the Home Counties. Of her the unknown informant had written:

Known to me from daily teaching and personal acquaintanceship as a true friend of the new Germany. She showed genuine enthusiasm and real agreement with all its institutions. She evinced genuine admiration for the characteristics of the Germans. Her own character is incorruptible and extremely reliable. She managed, in spite of strong resistance from English circles, to persuade her parents to visit Germany … . Her parents, too, whom I got to know very well, expressed themselves in every way as appreciative and in praise of the Germany of today. They were opposed to the Versailles ‘Diktat’ and in favour of the return to Germany of her colonies. They [had] spent a considerable time … in the former German colonies and told me that none of the natives there had ever forgotten Germany and hoped for their return to German sovereignty. They had repeatedly found this to be so.

Miss——wrote to me in the early Summer of 1939, after her return to England, as follows: ‘I know that, now that I have been in Germany and have got to know this country and its people, I can never again be happy in England.’

Miss——did not have any love affairs which might have given rise to such an attitude.

More susceptible, however, seems to have been the next name on the list, the daughter of a Surrey businessman, a woman ‘small of stature and a very nimble personality’, who had also read for a doctorate at a German university until forced to go home in 1939. ‘She was’, wrote the German who had watched her, ‘a true Englishwoman, but genuinely and obviously devoted to the new Germany and worked hard in her own circles in England for more understanding and sympathy. She became acquainted in Heidelberg with a German who was [a member of a non-Christian religious sect]. She herself belonged to the High Church, but this did not wreck the beautiful friendship which existed between the two people.’ Tributes hardly less lavish were paid to a Cheltenham woman who had taught English in a girls’ school in Heidelberg and was ‘devoted to
Germany with her whole being’ and ‘accepted the world of National Socialism’, another woman, from Berkshire, who had taught English in Munich, a bachelor girl from Knightsbridge, ‘who showed lively interest in German culture’, and a Devon woman who felt ‘it should never come to war between Germany and England’. Some fortunate Nazi had also had the job of escorting around Munich Miss Jean——of Blackheath, a middle-class suburb in South East London, ‘a very winning girl of great beauty’, who ‘returned home a friend of German culture … in the form in which she had experienced it here’.

Besides an admiration for all things German, and the desire to avoid another war, the other most common reason why so many people professed sympathy for Germany was horror at the poverty and despair which mass unemployment and inadequate social insurance and welfare arrangements had bred in Britain between the wars, for the Nazis’ achievements in both fields were impressive. A woman whose home was in Derby, which had not escaped the sufferings of the Depression, was quoted as desiring to see German experience repeated ‘in the social scheme of her own country’, while a Harpenden woman, ‘an upright and straight-forward character in every respect … always spoke with great bitterness of conditions in the English working-class districts’ and was ‘an ardent admirer of the social innovations in National-Socialist Germany’. So was another German sympathiser, from Woldingham in Surrey, who had, it was said, been ‘particularly impressed by the whole system of education’ in Germany and who ‘wanted to see … changes in the social abuses in her own country’.

As their ‘black radio’ activities had shown, the Germans hoped to exploit for their advantage the nationalist dislike which they believed many Scots and Irish to have for the English, and four of the women mentioned lived in Scotland, one of these, who was ‘of Irish extraction’ reaffirming ‘in her letters some years after her return home’ to Edinburgh that she was an ‘opponent of English despotism and of social abuses
in
England’. In Scotland, too, the Germans hoped to contact ‘a patriotic Scotswoman’, living in Ayr, who ‘always bore in mind the evil things which England had once perpetrated on her native country’. In Aberdeen could be found Helen, ‘a true Scot’ who ‘took in everything she saw as there were no such social and educational achievements in her home country’, and in Dumfries, Dorothy, another ‘true Scot’ who ‘often complained about the poor social conditions in England and in her own country and regarded Germany as a model for their modification’. Similar indignation inspired Diana, ‘a very attractive girl of Irish descent’ whose background ‘was the reason for her dislike of the abuses of English power
politics and of the poor social conditions, especially in London’, though she cannot have seen much of these in her everyday life, as she lived in a comfortable part of prosperous Kensington. The only other Irish-born girl on the list lived at a much less impressive-sounding address in Belfast and passionately ‘desired the liberation of Northern Ireland from English domination’.

All the women on whom the compilers of the White List had, politically speaking, set their sights, seem to have had certain characteristics in common. Although their ages are not given, the fact that they were all unmarried and had visited Germany shortly before 1939 either as postgraduate students or to teach English suggests that they were still young, probably in their late twenties. The addresses of most suggest a comfortable background, and certainly there were none from either very poor homes or from particularly wealthy or aristocratic ones. While they might, from the Nazi point of view, have done useful propaganda work in their own circles, it is impossible to see any of them as a potential Fräulein Quisling, especially as the Germans, and the Nazi Party in particular, were basically anti-feminist and never considered women for high office.

Far more potentially important, therefore, were the twenty-two men on the White List, but these, too, were an undistinguished collection, useful perhaps as advisers on local conditions or as Nazi nominees on some recalcitrant council, but not the stuff of which major traitors were made. One of those listed, whose friendship for us was open and honest’, was not a British citizen, since he came from Dublin and was ‘a convinced Irishman and an opponent of English despotism in his country’; one, with a Scandinavian name, living in Surrey, was ‘an Englishman of Danish extraction’, and there was one Welshman, from Glamorgan, who—understandably since he came from one of the areas worst hit by the Depression—’frequently expressed his admiration of [the] social achievements of National Socialism which, he said, were in stark contrast to English conditions’. Six of the twenty-two males mentioned were Scots, all of whom had apparently read theology at Heidelberg, the source of most of the information in the document. It was a Scot who headed the list of men’s names, and also received the longest entry for a male: