If Britain Had Fallen (47 page)

The role of the occupied countries in the West in Hitler’s Europe was to remain quiescent, while his dreams of glory were to be fulfilled in the East, and they might well have been accompanied by a relaxation of German rule, and a lessening of German depradations, in the other occupied countries. Here perhaps lay the greatest long-term threat to national survival. The best of all prophylactics against contemplating, much less accepting, the idea of a future as part of the new German Empire, was hatred of individual Germans, as many a Pole of Czech could testify. The truth was, however, that most Germans, at least for most of the time, were not hateful. So far was every German governor of an occupied country from being a brutal, unfeeling tyrant, that one at least, Dr Best in Denmark, was constantly in trouble with Hitler for not being stern enough. So far was every German soldier from being a drunken, thieving, bullying brute that, as was seen in the last months of the Occupation in the Channel Islands, the German Army behaved, with rare exceptions, with exemplary restraint. The ordinary civilian, provided he did as he was told and kept well clear of resistance movements, was far less likely to see soldiers brawling drunkenly in the streets and causing wanton damage if he had a German unit billeted in his town, than some Scottish regiments, who gained such an evil reputation in Germany after the war. The German army was the best disciplined in the world and crimes like robbery and rape involving its members were extremely rare and were punished at least as severely as by the American Forces later in the war. In a German-occupied country, unless one belonged to one of a number of suspect groups, including Jews, anti-Nazis and prominent left-wingers, the danger to one’s life was small. Outside these categories, the ordinary civilian living in a target city like Birmingham or Bristol went in far greater danger of being killed in an air raid before the Occupation
than of being shot after it had started. In the Channel Islands not a single British citizen died in front of a firing squad, though a few perished by their own hand or had their lives cut short by privation. It was unpleasant, humiliating, frustrating and sometimes frightening living under German rule but, with the exceptions mentioned and unless one was unlucky enough to be seized as a hostage, it was not dangerous. Nor was daily life necessarily intolerable. The civilian population of Europe, the inmates of the ghettoes and concentration camps apart, were not, for most of the war, kept unreasonably short of food. Rations were not much lower than in Germany itself and at least one occupied country, the ‘model protectorate’ of Denmark, fed a great deal better throughout the war that the people of rationed Britain.

An even greater barrier to keeping fresh one’s sense of outrage at one’s country being occupied was the existence of good-natured individuals in the occupying forces who were a living contradiction of that popular wartime saying ‘The only good German is a dead German’. Two people on the Channel Islands, with every reason to dislike the Germans, can recall instances of not wholly untypical kindness. One policeman who asked a Czech friend, who worked at a German officers’ hotel, to try to obtain some oranges for his sick daughter was given a dozen by the German commandant, who refused to accept payment, and a few days later asked after the child and pressed a large slab of chocolate upon him. ‘He wasn’t a very genial man, but I think at heart he must have been a kind man’, this police officer considers. The Guernsey woman sent to gaol for refusing to say ‘Heil Hitler’ for a rice pudding, was later, when she was visibly pregnant, sometimes given a loaf of bread or a bag of flour as she passed a German barracks on her way home. With the war over, such instances might have multiplied, making it harder to resist the insidious but dangerous temptation to distinguish between ‘ordinary decent Germans’ and ‘those horrible Nazis’.

Such a distinction had in fact been made by successive British governments, which had always been reluctant to admit that the country was fighting the German people at all. Even in 1914 there had been some suggestion that it was the Prussian military clique surrounding the Kaiser who were the real enemy, while Chamberlain in declaring war in 1939 had referred to the need to destroy ‘Hitlerism’ not Germany. Even Churchill tended to denounce ‘the Narzees’ rather than the Germans, and the Germans would no doubt have done their best to exploit this distinction. A typical instance occurred on Guernsey where the officer in charge of a fatigue party sent to cut down the trees in one particularly beautiful garden apologetically told the owners that he had an equally
fine garden at home and that after the war they must unite to keep every Nazi out of power.

It seems highly unlikely that Nazism, as distinct from passive acceptance of German rule, could ever have taken root in the British Isles; certainly it did not in the Channel Islands. The mere word ‘Nazi’ conjures up a vision of a beefy and brainless thug, or a short and sinister sadist, but in fact what made Nazism so formidable was that is exponents were not merely drawn from these groups. During the 1920s and 1930s its claims to be considered as a respectable political theory, leading to an efficient method of government, were taken seriously by many educated people, not only in Germany but elsewhere, and though its book-burning tactics and anti-Semitism were contrary to the whole spirit of academic life, some of its earliest successes were in the universities. In Austria, even before the
Anschluss
in 1938, many students proudly wore a Swastika badge in their lapels, and, even during the Occupation, there was a Nazi group in the university of Copenhagen, while, as has been seen, the Gestapo was largely staffed by men of high academic attainments.

The foundation of Nazi teaching lay in the so-called ‘ideal theory of the state’, stated in its simplest form by the philosopher Hegel and echoed by many subsequent German thinkers: ‘The individual does not exist; only the state exists.’ Applied within the Nazi Party itself this doctrine was interpreted to mean that no individual, whether German or alien, had any rights of his own, and it had hence justified such crimes as the murder of Hitler’s old friend and ally, Ernst Rohm, the sterilisation of the unfit, the carrying out of medical experiments on helpless prisoners, and the attempt to breed perfect Germans from selected youths and girls to ensure the future of the Fatherland. Many, perhaps most, of those who staffed the concentration camps and Gestapo interrogation centres were no doubt depraved monsters, enjoying cruelty for its own sake or utterly indifferent to it, but the experiences of occupied Europe suggest that a few such people are to be found in every country, though Germany itself seems to have had a good deal more than its share. Anyone who has witnessed examples of senseless bullying at boarding school or in the Forces, or who has ever read in the press of cases of cruelty to children or helpless lunatics, will hesitate to assert too confidently that none at all would have emerged in the British Isles. The mass murderer Adolf Eichmann, and many humbler concentration-camp staff, always insisted that they were merely ‘obeying orders’ like loyal and conscientious officials, and the results of recent experiments in the United States, to see at what point a normal man will rebel against inflicting pain upon his fellows when ordered to do so are, to say the least, disturbing. Some
authorities believe that inside almost every innocent-seeming ordinary citizen there is, however deeply buried, a potential gas-chamber attendant, though happily British history has provided no opportunity to put this hideous possibility to the test.
¹

But apart from its appeal to the perverted sadist, who would have welcomed it not for political but psychological reasons, how could Nazism, or at least cooperation with Germany to the point of ceasing active opposition to the new regime, as the price of a less disagreeable daily life, have been ‘sold’ to the British public? The partners in a London advertising agency, to whom the problem was put in 1972, made first the classic observation that ‘one cannot sell a bad product’ and ‘National Socialism as it was projected under the Hitler regime is a product which one couldn’t really market in this country’. But, accepting that the British people would have had no alternative to it, since other parties, if allowed at all, would not have been free to attack the Occupation, these experts believe that ‘one possible route that the Germans might have taken’ would have been to play on the public’s desire ‘for a better way of life’, offering ‘more dignity, more hope for the future, a bit more self-respect’. This was, of course, the basis of the Nazis’ original appeal to their fellow-countrymen, but the British people being basically different from the Germans, the method of achieving this aim would have had to be different. ‘What you wouldn’t do, for instance’, one advertising man points out, ‘is have jack boots and black uniforms and SS regalia about the place’, effective though these had been in Germany. It would have been essential to drop the very name ‘Nazi’, with its unfortunate ‘brand image’, and to replace it by a more neutral one such as ‘The European Commonwealth Party’, thereby giving ‘the British people an opportunity to identify with National Socialism’, the operation of Western Europe as a single economic unit being one of Hitler’s basic intentions.

Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry were past masters at the use of film and short films aimed at indoctrinating the British public into accepting this and similar ideas would undoubtedly have been shown regularly in the cinemas and, once it became a significant medium, on television. Before being shut down in 1939 television had reached no more than 20,000 homes but, with the war over, development would presumably have been resumed in 1940, instead of, as happened in reality, 1946, and it might then have overtaken radio as the chief source of information and entertainment by the late 1940s, instead of, as actually occurred, around 1953.
¹
The commercials making up the campaign designed to promote acceptance of German rule would, the advertising agency believes, have stressed the positive benefits of Occupation, such as the absence of unemployment. One, they suggest, might have involved ‘two fellows sitting on a bus, both middle-class, clerical grey suits … one cheerful, the other pretty miserable’. As the bus passes a Ministry of Labour Employment Exchange, which has no customers, the two men would be heard talking. One, explaining why he looks downcast, would remark ‘I liked it better before.’ The other replies, ‘You must be joking! All that unemployment and those queues, can’t you remember? My missus said she didn’t like to go out because of all the comments she got from the blokes hanging around on the street corners.’ To this the first man, beginning to weaken, replies, ‘I know all that, I often prayed it would get better. … ’ leaving the viewer to make the obvious deduction that under German rule things
had
got better. Similar treatment, this agency suggests, might have been given to technological progress (‘for instance, the whole European Community would be getting to the moon by now, rather than the Americans’), or to the absence of strikes which, though allowed in theory, would in practice have become infrequent, if not unknown, and to the absence of party political strife now there was a dictator to take clear decisions.

An underlying theme of the whole of such a campaign would be that the British and the Germans were not so very different and, in the agency’s view, this might effectively be put across by a commercial about an Englishwoman who had married a German. Worked out in detail, this would show a blonde, glamorous housewife of about twenty-eight, who might in appearance be either English or German, wandering round a typical ‘dream home’ tidying up after her man had left for work, engaging in such reassuringly homely tasks as carrying his egg cup and coffee cup to the sink, and clearing up the mess which her typical family, of three appealing small children, had left all around. The German himself would never appear, though at one point his wife would pick up a photograph of him—showing a pleasant, kindly-looking, reliable type of face, distinguished
only by its German cap from that of a million Englishmen. Over this charming, familiar scene with which vast numbers of women could identify, would be heard the voice of this model housewife and mother:

I married a German boy. It was terrible at first. No one would speak to me. I lost all my friends. I didn’t care. It was worth it.
He
was worth it.

And then, of course, people started to forget a bit. So gradually we made new friends. Kurt gets on well with all of them. Like they do with him.

(She picks up the portrait and looks at it.)

I suppose it’s because basically he’s no different from any Englishman.

(She looks round at the untidy Utter left by the absent Kurt.)

Not really.

This message might then have been underlined by a male English voice repeating the theme of the whole campaign, ‘New people for a new Europe’.

In normal times the British people might have felt able to resist such appeals but life during an Occupation would have been far from normal, as several of those who experienced life under German rule in Jersey would certainly agree. ‘There’s a sort of general numbness that comes over one’, one man remembers. ‘You can’t think, you can’t feel, you don’t know what’s happening. You can’t plan for tomorrow. You’re frightened to talk to anybody and there’s this sort of clamp down on top of you that makes you dry up.’ ‘You developed a fatalistic approach to life’, another resident found. ‘If you went, you went. It was Kismet, there wasn’t much you could do about it. You were quite resigned to the fact either that you were going to stop here, be deported, or shot.’ ‘I should say the worst aspect of the whole thing was the unknown,’ agrees a local businessman. ‘You get a knock, you open the door and somebody would say “Come” and you went and that was that.’ Anyone having to live in such an atmosphere, not for five years, but ten, fifteen or twenty, might well being to feel the attractions of the German offer of stability and security even if he did not succumb to them.