Educating the Germans: People and Policy in the British Zone of Germany, 1945–1949 9781472509550, 9781474204217, 9781472511539

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
1. War-time Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany
2. The Occupation and the Evolution of Control in Education
3. Policy in Practice: Opening the Schools, Emergency Teacher Training, Re-educating Youth
4. Policy in Practice: Opening and Supervising the Universities
5. School Reform
6. University Reform
7. Culture, Adult Education, Women’s Affairs
8. The Achievements of British Occupation Policy in Education
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Educating the Germans

‘Vicky’ (Victor Weiss, 1913–1966)

Educating the Germans People and Policy in the British Zone of Germany, 1945–1949 David Phillips

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 This paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © David Phillips, 2018 David Phillips has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover illustration: The British Military Governor, Sir Sholto Douglas, visiting a Hamburg school together with Heinrich Landahl. © bpk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-­party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-0955-0 PB: 978-1-3501-4574-0 ePDF: 978-1-4725-1153-9 eBook: 978-1-4725-1116-4 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books, visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Harry Judge

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations Preface Introduction 1 War-­time Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany 2 The Occupation and the Evolution of Control in Education 3 Policy in Practice: Opening the Schools, Emergency Teacher Training, Re-­educating Youth 4 Policy in Practice: Opening and Supervising the Universities 5 School Reform 6 University Reform 7 Culture, Adult Education, Women’s Affairs 8 The Achievements of British Occupation Policy in Education Notes Bibliography Index

viii x xi xv 1 7 31 93 157 203 225 253 291 309 343 355

Illustrations Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the list below and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Figures Frontispiece: ‘What we need, sir, is a peace to end all peaces.’ ‘Vicky’ (Victor Weiss), 1913–66 © Solo Syndication 0.1 German civilians queuing under British control to see a film on Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald © bpk. 1.1 John Troutbeck © NPG. 1.2 Con O’Neill, courtesy of Baroness Onora O’Neill. 1.3 Professor E.R. Dodds © NPG. 1.4 Ivone Kirkpatrick © NPG. 1.5 S.H. Wood, the founder of ‘German Educational Reconstruction’, courtesy of Susan Wood. 2.1 Map of the British Zone of Occupation 2.2 Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, General Sir Brian Robertson, John Hynd and the Regional Commissioners © Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein (Lash Abt.2003.2 Nr. 4139). 2.3 German mothers walking their children to school in Aachen, 6 June 1945. Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images. 2.4 CCG Main HQ, Lübbecke. 2.5 Structure of the Control Commission. 2.6 Organization of Education Branch. 2.7 Donald Riddy, courtesy of Susan Holland. 2.8 Robert Birley with Adolf Grimme, courtesy of Rachael Hetherington. 3.1 ‘The Danger of Fraternisation.’ 3.2 Adolf Grimme and Heinrich Landahl in London at the Control Office. Blick in die Welt, 4. 3.3 Children returning Nazi textbooks © Photo by Keystone-France/ Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images. 3.4 Ellen Wilkinson visiting a German school © Pathé News. 3.5 Children receiving soup at school © bpk.

5 19 20 24 26 28 32

41 48 50 51 55 57 73 101 116 118 125 126

Illustrations

ix

3.6 Sholto Douglas and Heinrich Landahl in a Hamburg classroom © Staatsarchiv Hamburg (720–1/343–1/01723–8a). 131 3.7 Donald Riddy, John Maud and Walter Forsyth in an elementary school in Hamburg, courtesy of Susan Holland. 132 3.8 School classroom (Cologne) © BFI. 132 3.9 Children helping with repairs to their school in Cologne © BFI. 133 3.10 Young Germans arrested by a British soldier © bpk. 147 4.1 Major James Mark, courtesy of Timothy Mark. 158 4.2 Robert Birley and Lord Pakenham listening to Rektor Kroll, courtesy of the late Harry Beckhough. 164 4.3 Former University Education Officers at a conference in Oxford, 1982 © David Phillips. 177 4.4 Scale of bomb damage, TH Aachen. 179 4.5 Students working on street repairs in Cologne, courtesy of Harry Beckhough. 191 5.1 Adolf Grimme’s plan for school reform. 204 5.2 ‘The German Educational Ladder.’ 206 6.1 Lord Lindsay of Birker, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, courtesy of Stuart Lindsay. 239 7.1 Die Brücke, Cologne, © BFI. 265 7.2 ‘Das Gerücht’ (‘Rumour’). 268 7.3 Generational exposure to the politicized organization of youth 270 7.4 Helena Deneke, by kind permission of the Principal and Fellows of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. 284 8.1 T.H. Marshall. Monthly Report of the Control Commission for Germany (British Element), 1950 299

Tables 2.1 3.1 3.2 4.1 7.1

Experience of the Occupation. Closing and reopening of secondary schools. Condition of young people, 1947. Student numbers. Monthly attendance figures, 1946–47, Die Brücke.

50 108 128 188 268

Acknowledgements The research on which this study was based was made possible by the award of a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellowship. I am grateful to the Trust for its generous support. My thanks are due to several people related to those who played important parts in educational affairs in post-­war Germany who have provided me with documents and photographs, especially John Riddy and Mrs Susan Holland (son and daughter of Donald Riddy), Baroness Onora O’Neill (daughter of Con O’Neill), Timothy Mark and Virginia Mark (son and daughter of James Mark), Susan Wood (daughter-­in-law of S.H. Wood) and Stuart Lindsay. I owe a great debt of gratitude in retrospect to the many former education officers who worked with Education Branch of the Control Commission after the War and whom I got to know in the early 1980s. They were very generous with their time and helped me with access to a wealth of information and reminiscence. Their contribution to a three-­day conference I organized in Oxford in 1982 was invaluable. Librarians and archivists of many institutions have assisted me with access to books and documents. I am grateful to the staff of the Bodleian Education Library (in particular to Shehzad Naqvi), and to the librarians of Nuffield College, Oxford, of Exeter College, Oxford, of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, of the German Historical Institute in London, of the Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung, Berlin, and of the University Library of the Humboldt University in Berlin. The archivist of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, staff of the National Archives in Kew, of the Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, of the City University, London, and of the Institute of Education, University College London, have been especially helpful. I was also granted access to the Riddy papers in the Hauptstaatsarchiv, Hamburg. Bernd Scharr of the bpk-Bildagentur in Berlin helpfully provided me with photographs, as did Bettina Dioum of the Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein in Kiel. I am grateful too to the National Portrait Gallery and the British Film Institute for permission to use images from their collections. Dr Katharine Campbell (daughter of Lord Douglas of Kirtleside) and Dr Christopher Knowles have assisted me with many questions, as has Alan Phillips, who found not easily accessible biographical data for me. Dr Arthur Hearnden helped me with several questions about individuals involved with education in post-­war Germany. And I am as ever grateful to my wife Val for her support and for accompanying me on many a visit to the archives in Kew, and to Dr Harry Judge for much stimulating conversation. David Phillips, July 2017

Abbreviations ACA

Allied Control Authority

ADC

Aide-­de-camp

AEK

Archiv des Erzbistums Köln

A&LG

Administration and Local Government (Branch)

AStA

Allgemeiner Studentenausschuß

AUT

Association of University Teachers

BAOR

British Army of the Rhine

BDM

Bund Deutscher Mädel

BG

‘Blaues Gutachten’ (Gutachten zur Hochschulreform)

BULNS

British Universities League of Nations Societies

BZR

British Zone Review

CAB

Cabinet (Papers)

CCG (BE) Control Commission for Germany (British Element) CD

Civic Development

CDU

Christlich-Demokratische Union

COGA

Control Office for Germany and Austria

DAAD

Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst

Det

Detachment

DFD

Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands

DFG

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

DMG

Deputy Military Governor

EA

Educational Adviser

ECI

Education Control Instruction

ECO

Education Control Officer

EIGA

Education Instruction to German Authorities

Abbreviations

xii Elac

Electroacustic (factory building, Kiel)

FDJ

Freie Deutsche Jugend

FO

Foreign Office

FORD

Foreign Office Research Department

GER

German Educational Reconstruction

GStAPK

Geheimer Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz

GUZ

Göttinger Universitäts-Zeitung

HC

House of Commons

HJ

Hitlerjugend

HL

House of Lords

HMG

His Majesty’s Government

HMSO

His Majesty’s Stationery Office

HRK

Hochschulrektorenkonferenz

IA&C

Internal Affairs and Communications (Division)

IoE

Institute of Education

JCS

Joint Chiefs of Staff (Directive)

K Det

Kreis Detachment

KLV

Kinderlandverschickung

KPD

Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands

KMK

Kultusministerkonferenz

LK

Landkreis

Mil Gov

Military Government

Napola

Nationalpolitische Lehrsanstalt

NSAHB

Nationalsozialistischer Altherrenbund der Deutschen Studenten

NSBDT

Nationalsozialistischer Bund Deutscher Technik

NSDAP

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei

NSDDB

Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Dozentenbund

NSKK

Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrer Korps

NSLB

Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund

NSV

Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt

Abbreviations NUT

National Union of Teachers

NWDR

Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

PID

Political Intelligence Department

POW(s)

Prisoner(s) of War

PWE

Political Warfare Executive

RAMC

Royal Army Medical Corps

RB

Regierungsbezirk

REO

Regional Economic Office(r)

SA

Sturmabteilung

SCAEF

Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force

SED

Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands

SETT

Special Emergency Teacher Training

SHAEF

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

SO

Senior Officer

SPD

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands

SS

Schutzstaffel

TES

Times Educational Supplement

TG

Townswomen’s Guild

TH

Technische Hochschule

TNA

The National Archives

UCL

University College London

U(E)CO

University (Education) Control Officer

UNESCO United National Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation UNRRA

United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administratioin

VHS

Volkshochschule

WEA

Workers’ Educational Association

WGPW

Women’s Group on Public Welfare

WI

Women’s Institute

xiii

Abbreviations

xiv WO

War Office

WRK

Westdeutsche Rektorenkonferenz

WRNS

Women’s Royal Navy Service

ZEAC

Zonal Education Advisory Committee

ZER

Zonenerziegungsrat

Preface I do not know whether it has ever before been the avowed intention of an occupying power to try to alter the characteristics of a defeated nation by influencing its educational system.1 The overwhelming complexity of the documentation with which a researcher working on the British Occupation of Germany has to contend is described in a recent study of war crimes investigations and trials. Andrew Williams writes of becoming besieged, of information accumulating around him ‘like slag heaps of books and boxes of notes and dust-­coated piles of printed statements’, of mundane records and of those that ‘came alive in the reading’, some records being ‘capable of revealing character and tension and high emotion’.2 Such experience will resonate with that of anyone attempting to unravel the British approach to the task of ‘reconstructing’ education in the British Zone of Occupation in the years following the German surrender. The scale of the material available to the historian of the period is daunting. Before the release of the files of the Control Commission in 1984, researchers already had access to voluminous archival material in Foreign Office, War Office and other files in the National Archives at Kew. Once the files of the operation in Germany eventually had become available, a remarkable project was undertaken by German researchers to create a detailed inventory describing their contents, the eleven-­volume Control Commission for Germany, British Element: Inventory 1945–1955 (Akten der Britischen Militärregierung in Deutschland: Sachinventar 1945–1955) that has become an indispensable tool for those investigating British policy in post-­war Germany. Published in 1993 and edited by Adolf M. Birke, Hans Booms, and Otto Merker, with the collaboration of the German Historical Institute in London and the Hauptstaatsarchiv of Lower Saxony in Hannover, the Inventory lists approaching 27,000 surviving files (out of a total of about three million),3 most of which are as they were when they left Germany. They have not been obviously sanitized and many are in a sorry condition: often pages are torn or crumbling or missing altogether; there is much duplication and overlap; documents referred to have sometimes gone astray; correspondence is out of sequence; carbons of the most insignificant office routine are unnecessarily preserved and bulk out the contents. In this respect they are quite unlike the Foreign Office papers of the period, which are meticulously ordered. (Ivone Kirkpatrick writes at length in his memoirs of his efforts at the time to eradicate untidy files in the Foreign Office.)4 But as working documents the files provide the fullest insight into day-­to-day policy formation and implementation in the Control Commission. Volume 4 of the Inventory lists those files relating to the work of Education Branch. Some 222 files (Nos. 10792–11014) come under this heading, but many more files on education and

xvi

Preface

education-­related topics can also be found, for example, under ‘Religious Affairs’, ‘Youth Matters’, ‘Women’s Affairs’, etc. These documents in the National Archives have provided the principal source for this present account. Aside from material in other archives in England and Germany, I could also draw upon information provided by British officers who worked with Education Branch. In 1982 I was able to bring several of them together at a three-­day conference in Oxford during which they could share their experiences with researchers. All the discussions were recorded and a full transcript was made. They and other lebende Quellen (‘living sources’) contacted at the same time provided information through separate interviews and correspondence, including the Educational Adviser to the Military Governor, Sir Robert Birley. The accounts of those personally involved with policy and its implementation have thrown valuable light on the evidence deducible from the archives, despite the warnings in a Russian saying (most recently and effectively recalled by Julian Barnes) about those who ‘lie like an eyewitness’. Memories are often unreliable, but so too are the written records in many instances. *  *  * Occupiers come in diverse guises. There are the aggressors, fighting their way into a country declared to be their enemy and in fact their victim; there are the benign liberators, freeing a population from an acknowledged tyrannical government; there are those who have the task of occupation thrust upon them as a result of military and political allegiances; there are others who seize opportunities to assume control through annexation where there is political weakness or a power vacuum. Sometimes an occupation is carefully planned; sometimes it happens with little or no forethought. Sometimes its aims are clear; sometimes there is drift towards an unspecified and unspecifiable endpoint. Periods of occupation vary – from a brief and temporary span of time in which aims (punitive or benevolent) can be quickly achieved, to many years or even permanence. There are familiar examples of all of these types: the Nazi invasion of so many European nations; the occupation of Iraq; the Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe; the actions of colonizing powers in all parts of the world throughout the ages. The Allied Occupation of Germany following the Second World War was one effected by conquerors rather than liberators, though many among the population were relieved to have been freed from the oppression of a regime which could not be democratically removed from power. Opponents of Nazism who were politically powerless suffered a common fate with those who had been its supporters: they had to come to terms with the verdict that the nation bore a collective guilt. The victors at the outset understandably adopted a morally superior position, not normally reflecting on what they individually would have done in the position of the ordinary ‘unpolitical’ German swept along by the tide of events. *  *  * The British involved with policy and planning for education in post-­war Germany fall into several groups, interacting in various, often complex, ways. There were the politicians: John Hynd and Frank Pakenham. There were the military men, principally Bernard Montgomery, Sholto Douglas and Brian Robertson. And there was a succession of Foreign Office staff: John Troutbeck, Con O’Neill, Ivone Kirkpatrick and others attached

Preface

xvii

to the Foreign Office like Professor E.R. Dodds of Oxford working during the War on planning for education in post-­surrender Germany. And perhaps most importantly in terms of implementation of policy there were the administrators and advisers: Donald Riddy, then Robert Birley and T.H. Marshall, and a large number of dedicated British Control Commission staff members working in Germany with Education Branch. Alongside these key actors there were many non-­official but influential individuals who wanted ‘to do something for Germany’: people like the publisher Victor Gollancz, a host of academics including Lord Lindsay, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and the redoubtable Oxford Germanist Helena Deneke, and visitors from all walks of life who wrote reports and gave their support to initiatives of many kinds. The part played by these individuals was of huge importance, and they will figure prominently in the story of what the British tried to achieve in education in Germany during the Occupation. That story is one of people and their interpretation of policy. Those concerned with education in occupied Germany were engaged in an unprecedented undertaking. Robert Birley, Educational Adviser to the Military Governor, described their task in an address of September 1948 as ‘an educational experiment which is probably unique in history’, an attempt at the intentional systematic turning-­around of the whole educational system of another country by occupying forces. The aim of this present account is to describe how that ‘turning around’ was attempted. Policy for the ‘re-­education’ of Germany emerged with increasing urgency during the final stages of the War and had formed clear theoretical shape by the beginning of the Occupation. It was left to the many committed British men and women of Education Branch of the Control Commission to develop strategies for its implementation and appropriate tactics for the solution of the numerous and complex practical problems they faced on a day-­to-day basis. The Occupation falls into periods that reflect the progression of policy. In what follows I have described the story of the educational work in Germany along the lines of the chronology suggested by the political scientist Wolfgang Rudzio:

1. Preparation for the Occupation; 2. Purely military administration up until September 1945; 3. Administration by the Control Commission; 4. From the beginning of 1947 a period in which the British had a negative right of veto but handed civil administration to German authorities;

5. From 1949 the function of the High Commission under the Occupation Statute.5

The main chronological divisions after 1945 come with the changes in the nature of control at the end of 1946 and with the coming into effect of the Occupation Statute in 1949. Thereafter, until 1955, the role of the British altered significantly, with the Military Governor becoming a High Commissioner. After the Federal Republic achieved full sovereignty on 5 May 1955, representation in Germany was through a British embassy in Bonn. A cultural mission replaced a role in education that had been moving from control and supervision to advice. The principal focus of the present study is on the phases culminating with the establishment of the High Commission in 1949.

Introduction

Re-­education is a horse born of ignorance, out of arrogance, and with such a pedigree it will never win a race.1

In 1967 the first post-­war Rektor of Cologne University looked back on his experiences during the British Occupation of Germany. Joseph Kroll was a classicist. He had been Rektor of the University before, in 1930–31, and as the War drew to a close he had appointed himself head of the University again – in the autumn of 1944, during the interim period before the occupying forces arrived. Since he was relatively untainted by Nazism – even though he had been a member of the Nazi lecturers’ association,2 and of the Nazi social welfare and family aid organization for the racially pure3 – he was re-­ appointed by Konrad Adenauer, the mayor of Cologne, to whom he was personally close. He seems to have avoided the usual denazification process, being asked merely to provide a curriculum vitae in which he stated that he had withdrawn into himself during the Nazi period.4 (The explanation contained in the term ‘internal emigration’, innere Emigration, to describe this phenomenon of a personal withdrawal, a distancing from politics, was to become common during the processes of denazification.) What Kroll had to say in his interview over two decades later is revealing about the nature of Allied policy in occupied Germany, especially as it related to education: Re-­education was a foolish programme in which there was an amusing presumptuousness on the part of the victors. The Germans themselves very enthusiastically drove out National Socialism and its wanton ideologies. After the horrific end of the War the Germans did not need anyone to help in this, National Socialism had killed itself. The crazy ideologies of Hitlerism aside, according to what models could the Allies have dared to re-­educate us? After their own war atrocities and with their post-War thinking – through the Morgenthau Plan and the policy of industrial dismantling – where should they have got the right to ‘educate’ the Germans from? Seriously pursued, re-­education would have been a terrible disgrace.5

It would be easy to dismiss such a statement as arrogant and self-­serving. But it highlights the fundamental problem the Allies faced in their approach to educational reconstruction in Germany. Nazism would have to be eradicated in order for a new

2

Educating the Germans

Germany to emerge from the devastation the War had caused. The population would have to be persuaded to think anew about behaviour in all walks of life and at every level of responsibility. Policy on how this might be achieved, however, faced the challenge of balancing imposition and persuasion; it emerged at a slow pace during the War, gaining momentum only when it became apparent that Germany would be defeated and given further impetus as it was realized, at a late stage, that there would be no German government structures in place to respond to the Allies’ demands. The Potsdam Agreement declared that ‘German education shall be so controlled as completely to eliminate Nazi and militarist doctrines and to make possible the successful development of democratic ideas’.6 This was to be done through a process of ‘denazification’, a purging of the teaching force at all levels, and one of ‘re-­education’, the contested term that was used freely by some, especially in the early phases of the Occupation, but strongly rejected as inappropriate by others who came to be concerned with the practicalities of education in the British Zone. Only after denazification, and once re-­education had made progress, could there logically be hope for the democratization called for in the Potsdam Protocol. These, then, were the three strands of policy: denazification; re-­education; and democratization. A series of policy directives before and after Potsdam made clear that some form of re-­education underpinned by the encouragement of democratic thinking was fundamental. But the very notion of being ‘re-­educated’ was clearly offensive to an established professor like Kroll. The full professor, the Ordinarius, had a prominent status in German society and was held in high regard by colleagues and students alike: that such figures might be ‘educated’ by an occupying power was intellectual anathema to them. And yet considerable blame could with reason be attached to the German professoriate. There was a long history of not just acquiescence but willing participation on the part of professors in many of the more deplorable aspects of Nazi ideology – from the writing of Nazi-­inspired textbooks and the development of crude pseudo-­ sciences such as racial hygiene to participation in medical experiments on concentration camp victims. One of Kroll’s erstwhile colleagues, the quickly appointed dean of the medical faculty, had eventually to stand down since he had been a member of the Cologne higher court for ‘hereditary health’ (effectively racial hygiene) and an advocate of forced sterilization.7 The Cologne medical faculty had been particularly nazified. (Kroll would say that otherwise the University was ‘not infected with the spirit of National Socialism’ – nicht vom NS-Geist infiziert8 – though early reports on the academic staff in Cologne clearly suggested otherwise.) If there could be doubt about the efficacy of the policy of re-­education as far as an intellectual elite was concerned, there was just as much doubt about re-­educating the general population. Reading documents in the National Archives in Kew I was at first baffled to discover a note in German in a file of 1947 bearing the date 4 December 1977. This was clearly a bizarre filing anomaly, it seemed. But it quickly became obvious that it had actually been written in 1947 and deliberately postdated to 1977. The writer, on hearing that the work of Education Branch was to continue once control over education was handed back to the Germans (from 1 January 1947), had sent it from England to Miss J.F. Ridding, who was then working in the Westphalian town of Siegen as an Education Control Officer. She appended it to one of her regular official

Introduction

3

reports, ‘for amusement and serious reflection. I hope its irony is not in any way prophetic’, she wrote. The note, written as a spoof newspaper article in the ‘Siegerländisches Nachrichtenblatt’, imagined her leaving her post in Germany some thirty years later: Miss J.F.R., the last British element of the CCG, has left our beloved homeland. She had come to us thirty years ago [. . .]. The hearts of everyone flew out to her from the start. [. . .] Today we escorted her to the station. The veterans’ band, which Miss R. had established with her tireless energy, played ‘Muss i denn, muss i denn, zum Städtle hinaus . . .’, while their grandchildren strewed flowers in the path of this English woman who loved children and flowers and who had grown into an imposing personality in our midst. For the last time we saw the trusted and well-­ worn blue cap with the CCG badge, brightly polished now for the first time to mark her leave-­taking. Then the train moved off and disappeared from our touched and saddened eyes. The band made a tight about-­turn and marched playing snappy tunes back to the town square. There our trusty housewives ceremoniously hoisted what they had faithfully kept and now had newly washed and ironed – their swastika banners. Heil . . . 9

Because of its strategic railway junction, Siegen had been very heavily bombed in the final stages of the War, and resistance was such that fighting there lasted until 3 April 1945, barely four weeks before Hitler’s suicide. But otherwise there is no reason to suppose that the town was any different from most others under British Occupation. What the writer of the note to Miss Ridding was expressing, of course, was a sense of unreality at the prospect of ever turning round the German mentality and so a disbelief in the policy of re-­education. From the 1930s on there had been a proliferation of studies arguing that Germany was almost irredeemable, that aggression and brutality were endemic in the national character, that only a harsh post-­war treatment would have any effect. Prominent among the political voices in Britain arguing for an uncompromisingly tough approach in policy on post-­war Germany was that of Lord Vansittart, chief diplomatic adviser to the British government, whose Black Record (1941) sold some half a million copies. (Vansittart had his American counterpart in Henry Morgenthau, whose plan for Germany envisaged reducing the country to an agrarian economy.) Change would take at least a generation, Vansittart argued.10 In the extensive literature on what would need to be done with Germany once victory was secured, there was much discussion of re-­ education. The term ‘re-­education’ is flawed in several respects. First, it is problematic linguistically. The prefix ‘re-‘ has two senses in English: it indicates a repetition of a state or an action, and so signifies doing something again. And it can also mean doing something differently, and so turning it around. It was used in both senses in post-­war Germany. The first sense created more problems for the occupiers than the second. In German various terms were used, prominent among them Umerziehung, the prefix um- having the sense of turning around. (Wiedererziehing was also used, and is closer to the first sense of ‘re-­education’, the prefix wieder- meaning ‘again’.)

4

Educating the Germans

The second flaw is political-­philosophical in nature. What right does any nation have to impose a new way of thinking on another nation? This question is especially important in the context of the policy of democratization fundamental to the approach to Germany of the western Allies. The abuse of power in all the appalling aspects of the Nazi regime served above all to demonstrate what can happen in conditions of extreme autocratic control. And yet the Allies now found themselves in an autocratic position, having complete power over the whole population. In the western zones that power was on the whole exercised responsibly, but the means by which responsible authority made itself felt created dilemmas for Military Government and Control Commission staff at all levels. A Military Government Directive on local and regional government early in 1946 recognized that administration in Germany was ‘entirely executive’ and therefore authoritarian: for as long as it was to last, it would have to take the form of ‘benevolent despotism’. But because there was as yet no popular representation, responsibility lay with both Military Government and newly appointed German officials to acquaint themselves with the views of the population to ensure that their representations and needs were met. Military Government officers bore a particular responsibility since it was only they who could be expected to be ‘entirely impartial’.11 The assumption of such impartiality is understandable politically but raises questions as to the de facto position of Military Government staff within a context of supreme authority and a commitment to implement official policy. Again there is a dilemma: how can any occupiers with authoritarian/autocratic power be perceived to represent the ideals of democracy? And even if such a perception of their role could be realized, how could they suddenly reverse their own conditioning, their thinking and training over a long period of extreme hostility and treat their enemy with benevolence? British public opinion during the War, as D.C. Watt puts it, had ‘lost its ability emotionally to distinguish between Germans and Nazis’.12 Montgomery had no qualms about his role as Military Governor. It was to issue orders. At a meeting with Control Commission staff in May 1945 he outlined his approach: I adopt the ‘Chief of Staff ’ principle. I keep clear of all argument and discussion about details. I never attend a conference which is assembled to decide on what is to be done. If I assemble a conference it is to give out orders. I sit back, keep in personal touch with commanders, concentrate my attention on the major issues on which everything depends, but avoid being cumbered with detail. My deputy Chief of Staff has complete authority to give decisions on all matters of detail.13

The message is clear. There will be commands and decisions that must be obeyed and a staff that will concern itself with the practicalities of their implementation. Con O’Neill of the Foreign Office cheekily intimated in connection with one of Montgomery’s pronouncements to the German people that this style of doing things was uncomfortably akin to the Führer principle.14

Introduction

5

Since the failure of Weimar democracy could be attributed at least in part to the new style of government being forced upon the country ‘under the guns of the enemy’,15 the imposition of democracy (however understood) was always going to be a problem during the Occupation. Michael Balfour’s concise description summarizes the dilemma: ‘The British were very conscious of the fact that the faith which they wished to propagate involved a disbelief in the value of imposing faiths by order.’16 We might recall Rektor Kroll’s question ‘where should [the victors] have got the right to “educate” the Germans from?’. The immediate answer would be that a country that had instituted so much misery and brutality on such a scale gave the Allies an obvious moral justification for a policy of re-­education requiring a recalcitrant and reformed nation to admit its collective guilt: the Allies might have, as the French put it in a new interpretation of colonial intentions, a mission civilisatrice. A further flaw in the term is the impossibility of ‘re-­educating’ a whole class of people. It might be possible to re-­educate an individual, but the re-­education of whole sectors of society would not be achievable. Anna Mosolf of the Hannover ministry put the problem succinctly: I do not believe that ‘a people’ or ‘the young’ or ‘women’ can be educated or re-­ educated; only the individual can be educated.17

Figure 0.1  German civilians queuing under British control to view a film on the Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald concentration camps.

6

Educating the Germans

In the early months of the Occupation, before an elaborated re-­education strategy could be developed and implemented, German citizens were required to file past the decomposing bodies of concentration camp victims, and to attend films on Belsen and Buchenwald. British soldiers would control the queues outside cinemas showing these films. Re-­educating people in such ways was a dilemma for anyone who thought seriously about the paradox involved in using imposed measures to do so.18 ‘Re-­education’ quickly became for many a counter-­productive concept, and they deliberately avoided its use. Birley asserted during a lecture in 1975 that he himself never used this ‘horrible word’ and did what he could to persuade others to avoid it, though it is clear that he did in fact use the term on various occasions.19 Even as late as April 1947, however, and after control over education had been restored to German authorities, John Hynd, the minister responsible for German affairs was correcting himself in the House of Commons, preferring ‘re-­education’ to ‘education’: ‘German education – we visualise it in the Control Commission as the re-­ education of Germany’, as he put it.20 A recent commentator on the British in Germany after the War regards re-­education as an aspiration rather than a policy,21 and yet it is firmly embedded in war-­time policy documents and was seen by one historian of Germany as a central strand of the British approach to the Occupation: as a principle it ‘was at the centre of British occupation policy, the positive core and inspiration of the Control Commission’. 22 The following chapters will describe how ‘re-­education’ was gradually turned into a policy of proceeding by example, of facilitating democratic government and administration, of what one visiting academic in the British Zone would call ‘gentle advice and quiet suasion’.23

1

War-­time Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

It has often been said that General Staffs prepare not for the next but for the last war.1 My belief was that the British government during the War [. . .] had no policy beyond unconditional surrender. What they were to do with the unconditional surrender when they got it, I really don’t think they thought about it. As for serious policy instruction, there was absolutely none.2 I found The War Office amiable, but blissfully unaware of what lay before them.3

The post-­war control and administration of Germany involved complex inter-­ relationships. At the highest level the Allied governments had reached agreements through a series of meetings, culminating in the Potsdam Conference of July–August 1945, whose Protocol became a blueprint for the Occupation but before which western occupying forces had been in German territory for some eight months. Military government in the British Zone, as Germany began to be occupied, was the responsibility of the Secretary of State for War through the Civil Affairs Division of the War Office. The Control Commission for Germany (British Element) was being actively prepared in London and would move to Germany once the ‘fighting in’ stage had been completed and arrangements could be made for appropriate main and local headquarters to be established. There had naturally been significant Foreign Office involvement in policy planning for post-­war Germany, but initially, in October 1945, the Control Office for Germany and Austria was established outside of the Foreign Office, with John Hynd, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, in charge. In 1947 the German Section of the Foreign Office would come into being and the Foreign Secretary would take over ultimate responsibility for the Control Office, whose head, Lord Pakenham, would be based in the Foreign Office. Even when it became clear during the War that the Allies would be victorious and eventually that an unconditional surrender would be demanded, it was anticipated that their orders would be carried out by German authorities at national, provincial, and local levels. It was assumed that some kind of German government machinery would be in place. The reality of having to deal with a complete lack of

8

Educating the Germans

any kind of German administration came as something of a shock to those who had been steadily formulating policy in education, an aspect of future policy on Germany that was given increasing attention as an Allied victory became more certain but also one that was predicated on there being German authorities who could be given orders.

Allied conferences and statements4 The United States, even before entering the War, had committed to the ‘final destruction of Nazi tyranny’ in the terms of the ‘certain common principles’ of her government and that of the United Kingdom formulated in the Atlantic Charter, the Roosevelt-Churchill declaration published on 1 August 1941. This general statement of intent was welcomed by the Soviet Union and the European Allies, and the ‘Declaration by the United Nations’ of 1 January 1942 gave the Charter the further support of more than twenty governments that subscribed to its ‘common progamme of purposes and principles.’ One contemporary judgment of the Charter and its consequent agreements was that never in any previous conflict had ‘a wide alliance [been committed] during a war to so substantial and so widely agreed a programme’.5 The Atlantic Charter was followed by a series of Allied conferences and agreements, building on its fundamental principles. All of these conferences and the statements that ensued from them were unsurprisingly concerned for the most part with larger issues of the peace, with territorial change and stability, with international co-­operation during and after the War, and with disarmament. In the memoirs of Churchill and Eden there is no detailed mention of plans for the practical measures to be adopted during a period of occupation. Even as late as January 1945 Eden recorded that Germany was ‘a subject on which [Churchill] was still unwilling to take decisions’.6 In the earliest days of victory Churchill’s practical thoughts on the Occupation still centred on military matters. But a minute to the Secretary of State for War dated 30 April 1945 and asking among other things for an estimate ‘in a simple form’ of manpower requirements and a statement of ‘the broad basis you have taken and the system upon which it is proposed to act’ contains something in the nature of a general policy statement. Churchill says he had ‘not yet given a final decision on any of these points while the war was going on’, but the minute ends with a statement of British policy in its broadest terms: Of course we must make the Germans govern themselves and face their own future, instead of lying down and being fondled by us and the United States.7

In a later minute for the Foreign Office Churchill points indirectly to the potential problems of control: We will never be able to rule Germany apart from the Germans unless you are prepared to let every miserable little German school-­child lay its weary head upon your already overburdened lap.8

Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

9

A cornerstone of the British approach was to be precisely a concern to move as swiftly as possible to a situation in which the Germans would be competent to assume responsibility for their own future democratic government. President Roosevelt would refer to the ‘Four Freedoms’ when summarizing the peace programme: Disarmament of aggressors, self-­determination of nations and peoples, and the Four Freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.9

And such general principles would be reiterated on future occasions. The Anglo-American Casablanca War Council of January 1943 established the principle of unconditional surrender which was to be endorsed by the Moscow Declarations of the Four Powers in November of that year.10 The Teheran Conference which followed discussed the establishment of a peace-­keeping international organization for the post-­war world. The Yalta Conference of February 1945 finalized the arrangements for the zonal division of Germany (including provision for a French zone), the preparatory work having been undertaken by the European Advisory Committee set up in London in 1943.11 But it is the Potsdam Conference of July 1945 that produced the final guidelines for the Occupation. The Protocol of the Conference contains a statement of the four-­fold purpose of the Occupation:

(i) The complete disarmament and demilitarisation of Germany and the

elimination of all German industry that could be used for military production [. . .] (ii) To convince the German people that they have suffered a total military defeat and that they cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves, since their own ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance have destroyed German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable. (iii) To destroy the National Socialist Party and its affiliated and supervised organisations, to dissolve all Nazi institutions, to ensure that they are not revived in any form, and to prevent all Nazi and militarist activity or propaganda. (iv) To prepare for the eventual reconstruction of German political life on a democratic basis and for eventual peaceful co-­operation in international life by Germany.12 This same section of the Protocol contains the first statement to be found in the official declarations emanating from the Allied conferences which relates specifically to education: German education shall be so controlled as completely to eliminate Nazi and militarist doctrines and to make possible the successful development of democratic ideas.13

10

Educating the Germans

This statement within the framework of the Protocol gave the question of education in occupied Germany a prominence equal to that of the judicial system (the only other comparable subject to be given a full paragraph to itself in Section II on ‘Political Principles’); it sanctioned control and complete measures to eliminate Nazi influence; and it established the principle of development along democratic lines (though, of course, ‘democratic’ lines could be interpreted in a wide variety of ways). As the first proper official Allied statement on the subject it may appear vague, but in not specifying the detail of how it might be interpreted it allowed the Allies considerable operational flexibility. Certainly this section of the Protocol was frequently quoted in the immediate post-­ war period. Harry Beckhough, British University Officer in Cologne, remembered it as the nearest to a brief that he was given. Edith Davies, who served with Education Branch from 1945 and stayed on in Germany in other capacities until 1969, could still quote the text some thirty-­seven years later as the statement of British educational policy in Germany.14

Vansittart and Morgenthau Alongside the negotiations at the highest level, discussions on the future of Germany continued on various other planes. A lively debate on what to do with Germany continued throughout the war years in the polemical literature of all persuasions and under the aegis of the main political parties and groups like the Fabian Society, the Trades Unions, and the Communist and Independent Labour Parties. Much of this literature15 was produced as a reaction to the publication in 1941 of Vansittart’s Black Record.16 He had been Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1930 to 1938, and he was a brilliant civil servant of remarkable – and, for his political masters, discomfiting – prescience. His constant warnings about the German menace had caused so much embarrassment that he was moved in 1938 to the sinecure post of Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the Foreign Secretary, which position he held until 1941. Black Record, originally a series of seven radio broadcasts, is a powerful piece of invective, written in a racy and popular style. It sets out to describe Germany’s conduct towards her neighbours, but the intellectual force of Vansittart’s argument is prejudiced throughout by his sensational oversimplification and by his unstintingly ironical comments. One fairly random quotation will give an impression of the style: I read in a German newspaper a week ago: ‘The English should know by now that we never joke.’ Yes, we know. For a German even to see, let alone make, a joke it must be about as long as it is broad. Hitler, the ex-Kaiser, Bismarck, away back into the dank record, you will find nothing but a procession of mirthless braggarts ruling over dreary robots.17

This is little more than caricature, but it had the popular appeal which found a natural audience in war time, and the pamphlet quickly sold half a million copies.

Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

11

So strong was Vansittart’s attack on Germany that it was even suggested that he was really a German sympathizer whose fierce polemics were designed to inspire a pro-German reaction.18 Certainly Black Record caused others to write more balanced accounts of the issues, among them Harold Laski and Victor Gollancz.19 Vansittart felt that ‘Vansittartism’ was little more than common sense, and he vigorously denied all charges of racialism. But Germany would have to be treated with toughness: Vansittartism says that [German militarism] must be brought to an end and by force. The end must be final but it need not be barbarous.20

On education Vansittart talks of ‘150 years of mis-­education’ in Germany: Vansittartism says that the German nation has got to be disarmed and re-­educated; and every honest and reasonably well-­informed man knows perfectly well that the Germans will do neither of their own accord, or without supervision. We have trusted them once – most unwisely. To do so again would be a crime against humanity. But there is no inhumanity in re-­education.21

Black Record had spoken of the need for Germany to undergo ‘a deep, spiritual regeneration’: she will have to undergo the most thorough spiritual cure in history; and part of that cure will have to be self-­administered. It will have to comprise a complete change of heart, mind and soul; of taste and temperament and habit; a new set of morals and values, a new, a brand-­new way of looking at life.22

The ‘change of soul’ would take ’at least a generation’,23 and such a change would have to be fundamental, ‘no mere administrative or technical tinkering can be permanent’. Vansittart offers practical solutions in the more reasoned arguments contained in his later writings. Bones of Contention, for example, includes a chapter on ‘Reform and Precaution’ which advocates the notion of los von Berlin (‘break from Berlin’), a policy of decentralization which would place the administration of most public departments in the hands of municipalities, counties and provinces: ‘the guiding principle should be that responsibility should rest as far as possible with the local government’:24 The Allied occupation should encourage all German aspirations or attempts at self-­government [. . .] It will not be the business of the Allies to impose any form of government at anyone’s behest, but to see fair and free play for all legitimate and innocuous tendencies. 25

This is close to what eventually emerged as official British policy, and there is in Vansittart’s description a hint of the compassion that guided much of the local

12

Educating the Germans

implementation of that policy. But Vansittart closes Bones of Contention with his habitual warnings: Do not forget. Remember what I have written [. . .] Forget – and forgive – when there is a different Germany, not before. And that will not be soon.26

Vansittart clearly made a forceful impact on public opinion during the War, though after victory and unconditional surrender (which was the outcome he wanted – his main fear was of a compromise result) there was no role left for him. His style and influence may be traced, however, in the policy of non-­fraternization and also, for example, in the Allied propaganda films made for the occupying forces.27 Vansittart says that it took him three years to succeed in getting Black Record published in the United States. The reluctance of American publishers to take it on was due in part to America’s late entry into the War; Vansittart’s harshness of approach, however, found its American counterpart in the ideas of Henry Morgenthau, President Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, whose name, like Vansittart’s, became associated with another war-­time ism. Morgenthau is remembered principally for his proposals for the pastoralization of Germany after defeat. Anthony Eden dismisses his simplistic Plan with the contemptuous remark: Large areas of the Ruhr and the Saar were to be stripped of their manufacturing industries and turned into agricultural lands. It was as if one were to take the Black Country and turn it into Devonshire.28

But Roosevelt was attracted to Morgenthau’s proposals, and they found favour for a while with Churchill too. Following the Teheran Conference of November 1943 Roosevelt had aligned himself more with the uncompromisingly ruthless attitude of Stalin towards Germany than with Churchill’s more balanced approach. Stalin wanted Germany de-­ industrialized, whatever the consequences, and of course the dismantling of German industrial plant was to become a reality during the course of the Occupation. Morgenthau was a close friend of Roosevelt, who called him, no doubt affectionately, ‘Henry the Morgue’. In August he revealed to the President the contents of the SHAEF Handbook for Military Government in Germany, the proofs of which he had acquired.29 Roosevelt declared himself in a memorandum of 26 August 1944 to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson against what he felt was going to be a too lenient approach to Germany: This so-­called ‘Handbook’ is pretty bad. I should like to know how it came to be written and who approved it down the line. If it has not been sent out as approved, all copies should be withdrawn and held until you get a chance to go over it. It gives me the impression that Germany is to be restored just as much as The Netherlands or Belgium, and the people of Germany brought back as quickly as possible to their pre-­war estate.

Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

13

It is of the utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation. I do not want them to starve to death but, as an example, if they need food to keep body and soul together beyond what they have, they should be fed three times a day with soup from Army soup kitchens. That will keep them perfectly healthy and they will remember that experience all their lives. The fact that they are a defeated nation, collectively and individually, must be so impressed upon them that they will hesitate to start any new war.

Here Roosevelt quotes passages from the Handbook that had caught his disapproving eye, including some that relate to government and administration, among them: ‘Your main and immediate task, to accomplish your mission, is to get things running, to pick up the pieces, to restore as quickly as possible the official functioning of the German civil government in the area for which you are responsible . . . The first concern of military government will be to see that the machine works and works efficiently’. ‘The highly centralized German administrative system is to be retained unless otherwise directed by higher authority’. ‘Wherever possible, removals and appointments (of civil servants) will be made by Military Government officers acting through German officials who are vested with this authority under German law; nothing will be done which would unnecessarily disturb the regular German civil service procedure or deprive the official or employee to be removed of any ultimate rights to which he may be justifiably entitled under German law, after cessation of military government.’

The President concluded the memorandum with a rejection of any kind of soft approach to Germany: There exists a school of thought both in London and here which would, in effect, do for Germany what this Government did for its own citizens in 1933 when they were flat on their backs. I see no reason for starting a WPA, PWA or a CCC 30 for Germany when we go in with our Army of Occupation. Too many people here and in England hold to the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place – that only a few Nazi leaders are responsible, That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people as a whole must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.31

In the event, it was too late for the Handbook to be withdrawn: American troops would be in Aachen, the first German city to surrender, by October. With the President’s approach to Germany progressing in this way, scope was created for Morgenthau to develop his Plan, which was to be discussed at the second Quebec Conference in September. Churchill’s reaction was initially hostile, but he was

14

Educating the Germans

won over (mainly for fear of prejudicing the provision of American aid for the post-­ war period) and gave his support to the plan. On 15 September 1944, Churchill and Roosevelt met to discuss the prevention of German re-­armament, and initialled an agreement that concluded: This programme for eliminating the war-­making industries in the Ruhr is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.32

Eden and Cordell Hull, US Secretary of State, were alarmed at what had been agreed. Eden told Churchill that the War Cabinet would never consent to the proposal.33 The State Department eventually rejected it, and Roosevelt succumbed: the plan was dropped in October. Eden’s unequivocal opposition finally carried the day with Churchill. Thereafter, however, the Plan’s existence became publicly known, and its spirit lived on in the guiding policy directive of the American Occupation known as JCS 1067. Morgenthau’s views on re-­education were simplistic. (They involved, for example, a plan to swamp German schools with former officers of the Allied armies.)34 Morgenthau envisaged35 that institutions of higher education would not be reopened for a considerable time. He did not hold out hope for the success of reform initiatives: ‘For many years to come [Germany’s] schools and colleges will be nothing but a disappointment to believers in freedom. Such believers will be strongly tempted to attempt a revolution in German education. They can try, but they should not be too upset if they achieve little progress.’36 He adds, however, that ‘so far as education is concerned, the Germans will have to do most of that themselves’. The importance attached to plans for a ‘Carthaginian’ peace at a relatively late stage of war-­time planning was of some concern to those hoping for an approach to Germany that would be based on the principle of reconstruction rather than destruction. JCS 1067, adopted in June 1945, was generally punitive in tone, but less so in the sphere of education, where it required the closure of all educational institutions, the development of a programme ‘designed completely to eliminate Nazi and militaristic doctrines and to encourage the development of democratic ideas’ (wording echoed in the Potsdam Agreement), the purging of Nazi personnel, and the interim establishment of training programmes.37 Once the War ended, there was to be no lack of advice about how to treat Germany. In April 1945, a lady from Haverford, Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to Winston Churchill proposing that the German language be abolished: ‘the people at home in Germany, who have deprived others of so much, might be deprived of their mother tongue in punishment.’ Germans could be given six months to acquire a working vocabulary in another language and would be ‘heavily fined’ if heard speaking German . . .38

Directives on education Donald Riddy, the eventual head of the British Education Branch of the Control Commission, recalled being given a directive which outlined the policy he was to

Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

15

follow. The directive in question was probably that dated 21 November 1944, the ‘Directive for Military Government of Germany Prior to Defeat or Surrender’, Section XIX of which covered Education and Religion.39 It begins with a statement of the policy of the Supreme Commander (General Eisenhower) to ‘eradicate Nazi-­ism and German militarism in all their aspects from the German educational system’. Military Government personnel were tasked with four immediate responsibilities:

a. It is your responsibility to take the following actions: (i) to close all educational institutions except boarding schools and orphanages in which, however, you will prohibit all teaching.

(ii) to insure [sic] that German authorities impound all school textbooks which incorporate Nazi or militaristic teaching.

(iii) to remove all active Nazis, ardent Nazi sympathizers, and militarists from educational positions.

(iv) to take steps preparatory to the re-­opening of schools. b. Supreme Headquarters will be responsible for furnishing you with emergency textbooks. No other books may be used without permission of this Headquarters.

The section on control assumed that some form of educational administration would be in existence: You will exercise control and direction of the existing German educational system to the extent necessary to carry out the above policy and to avoid, as far as possible, an increase of administrative difficulties and any complications of the task of Military Government. You will exercise control and direction, employing personnel of the existing German educational system in so far as possible as purged or freed from Nazi influence.

Plans were to be put in place for the reopening of elementary schools, with priority given to the first four school years. Steps were to be taken to prepare for the reopening of secondary schools and higher education institutions. Active Nazi or ‘militarist’ officials were to be dismissed in line with categories included in an appendix to the directive (the ‘black’, ‘grey’ and ‘white’ lists). Schools’ buildings and equipment should not be used for other purposes: ‘Steps will be taken to direct German authorities to make emergency repairs to school buildings.’ Nazi educational organizations and special schools would be abolished. No new educational organizations would be founded without the approval of Supreme Headquarters. Teachers would be instructed to eliminate from their teaching anything glorifying militarism in all its aspects, promoting Nazism and the achievements of Nazi leaders in any way, favouring discrimination in race or religion, or being unfavourable to the United Nations. All Nazi youth organizations would be abolished and no new organizations would be founded without approval. The body responsible for adult education (Deutsches Volksbildungswerk) would be abolished. On denominational education, there was in general to be no interference:

16

Educating the Germans You will not intervene in questions of denominational control of German Schools or religious instruction in German Schools except insofar as may be necessary to insure [sic] that religious instruction and the administration of such schools conform to such regulations as are or may be established for all subjects and all schools.

The purge of German educational personnel would be conducted on the basis of a categorization (black, grey, white) of their association with Nazism and its crimes. Those whose positions placed them on the black list would be dismissed without notice or compensation. They ranged from war criminals to heads of universities and of teacher training colleges appointed under the National Socialist regime: They were: (a) Persons listed as war criminals by the United Nations. (b) Reich ministerial officials of the rank of Ministerialdirektor or higher. (c) Present or past administrative officials of all grades in the N.S.-Lehrerbund, the N.S..D.-Dozentenbund, and the N.S.D. Studentenbund, together with persons who have at any time held the office of Dozentenführer or Studentenführer in a university. (d) Present or past administrative officials in the NSDAP of the rank of Ortsgruppenleiter or higher. (e) Present or past members of the S.S., other than conscripts to the Waffen-SS. (f) Present or past officers of the S.A., the N.S.K.K., and the N.S.F.K. of the rank of Sturmbannführer (in the N.S.K.K. Staffelführer) or higher. (g) Present or past leaders of the H.J. or B.D.M. (h) Persons who act or have acted as agents of the Gestapo or the Sicherheitsdienst. In addition, existing Rectors (Führer) of universities and Heads of Teachers’ Training Colleges will be dismissed from their rectorships or headships if they were first appointed to those offices under the National Socialist regime. In respect of any other educational offices they may hold, they will be placed on the Grey List. (Note. Persons employed as teachers or administrators in Napolas, Adolf-HitlerSchulen, or other prohibited institutions, will automatically lose their present employment. They will not be re-­employed in an educational capacity unless their suitability for employment is established after searching enquiry.)

The grey list covered ‘persons against whom there are reasonable positive grounds of suspicion’. All would be required to complete a questionnaire (the Fragebogen). Those in sub-­groups (a), (b) and (c) should be suspended pending investigation. The Grey List consisted of the following categories: (a) Schulräte of all grades and educational administrative officials of the rank of Regierungsrat or higher, who entered the educational administrative service under the National Socialist regime. (b) Teachers in all types of school who held or have held the office of Jugendwetter, or after 1937, Vertrauenslehrer.

Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

17

(c) Headmasters and headmistresses of secondary schools, and heads of institutions for adult education, who were appointed to their present offices under the National Socialist regime. (d) Headmasters and headmistresses of schools of all other types, who were appointed to their present offices under the National Socialist regime. (e) University professors, Directors of Institutes, and curators (Kuratoren) of universities, who were appointed to their present offices under the National Socialist regime. (f) Present or past administrative officials of all grades of the following National Socialist professional organizations: N.S.D-Ärztebund, N.S.-Rechstwahrerbund, N.S.-Reichsbund für Leibesübungen, Reichsbund der deutschen Beamten. (g) Members of the NSDAP. (h) Present or past commissioned officers of the S.A,, the N.S.K.K., and the N.S.F.E., below the rank of Sturmbannführer (in the N.S.K.K., Staffelführer). (i) Persons who in their public speeches or writings have actively and voluntarily propagated National Socialism, militarism or racialism. (j) Other persons against whom there are reasonable positive grounds of suspicion.

This was a very comprehensive list, allowing suspension or investigation of a huge number of individuals. But there are some oddities. First, the list seems not to take account of Nazi membership before 1933. Some of the most committed Party members had joined before Hitler came to power. Secondly, it potentially includes anybody the military authorities chose to add. Thirdly it includes all NSDAP members, despite the knowledge that in totalitarian regimes all kinds of pressure is brought to bear on ordinary people to join political organizations if they do not wish to risk losing their jobs. After the March 1933 election, there was a rush to join the Party now that Hitler had secured full power. And there were large numbers of so-­called ‘Muß-Nazis’, those whose positions more or less required Party membership. (This became, however, a widespread excuse during denazification processes.) The White List contained the names of persons inside Germany whose character, professional standing, experience and political reliability render them especially suitable to be placed in positions of special responsibility, and in particular to act (a) as temporary educational administrators and/or advisers, pending the establishment of a regular administrative system; (b) as acting Rectors of Universities, pending regular elections by the Senate; (c) as acting Heads of Teachers’ Training Colleges.

A copy of the White List among Donald Riddy’s papers40 contains 514 names, mostly those of professors, with some teachers and headteachers. Among those included, unsurprisingly, are Adolf Grimme, Heinrich Landahl, Emil Wolff, Hermann Rein, Rudolf Smend, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Bruno Snell and Max Pohlenz, personalities whose names figure in the story of occupied Germany.

18

Educating the Germans

The Directive constituted a detailed checklist of what the early occupiers were expected to achieve. It was to be succeeded by many other documents updating the policy, but in essence the instructions it contained represented the status quo of educational policy not only in the final months of 1944 but also beyond into the Occupation. *  *  * The beginnings of the eventual education policy in education are to be found in early references to the need to ‘re-­educate’ the German population. From 1940 onwards there was mention of a ‘reorientation’ or ‘re-­humanization’ of the German people, as perceptions moved from there being no quarrel with the ordinary people of Germany to an acceptance of guilt by association of the voters who had brought the Nazis to power.41 The urbane Orme Sargent, assistant under-­secretary at the Foreign Office, commenting on a passage (subsequently dropped) in the draft of Nevile Henderson’s Final Report of 1939,42 put the case succinctly: To contrast the virtues of the people with the vices of their rulers at once leads to the counter-­assertion that whatever their virtues may be the German people have a very definite vice of choosing vicious leaders and of following them both willingly and blindly. It is really impossible to maintain that the German people are being governed by a small minority against their will.43

The collective responsibility of the German population for the forces which had caused Nazism to flourish was to be strongly reaffirmed – most notably by Morgenthau in the United States and Vansittart in Britain. A very widely distributed pamphlet published by the US Society for the Prevention of World War III in the spring of 1944 made the same argument as Sargent’s: The truth is that the masses of the German people, with their old militarist indoctrination and the deep-­rooted ideology of the ‘master-­race’, have followed their present political leaders readily and faithfully.44

The notion of Germans’ collective responsibility – later to be developed into that of ‘collective guilt’ – was repeated in many texts analysing the ‘German problem’ during and after the War. Gradually, as planning during the War progressed, the term ‘re-­education’ became firmly established, though there was often concern about its appropriateness. What was it that people would be re-­educated for? The simple answer was ‘democracy’, but that slippery concept needed to be defined if the ‘re-­education’ designed to result in it was to be meaningful. It is said that at one Four Power meeting after the War each delegate was asked to define democracy. Once they had done so the British member remarked that he could only reconcile the divergent conceptions of democracy he had heard by defining it as what four Powers could agree to inflict on a fifth.45 The German historian Kurt Jürgensen saw the three pillars of emerging policy towards Germany as ‘re-­education’, ‘responsible government’ and the ‘federation’ of

Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

19

Germany.46 He points to the significant role of two talented Foreign Office figures, John (Jack) Troutbeck and Con O’Neill, both of whom made a considerable contribution to an understanding of what ‘re-­education’ might entail. Troutbeck (1894–1971) had been chargé d’affaires in Prague at the time of the German invasion and was a determined anti-­appeaser. For most of the War he had been seconded from the Foreign Office to the Ministry of Economic Warfare; he was appointed adviser on Germany in October 1943 and became responsible for the co-­ordination of planning for the eventual Occupation. O’Neill (1912–1988) was a prize fellow of All Souls, Oxford. He had been a third secretary in the British embassy in Berlin in 1938–39, but resigned over appeasement. (He was apparently ‘carpeted’ by Sir Horace Wilson, pre-­eminent among the so-­called ‘guilty men’ of appeasement, for stating his opinion on the danger Hitler represented.47) After a spell with the Army intelligence corps during 1940–43, he returned to the Foreign Office, but was to resign again in 1946 to become a leader writer for The Times.48 He was ‘one of the outstanding diplomats of his generation. His intellect was impressive, his reasoning always a masterpiece of logic, and his analysis of any situation penetrating and accurate.’49 His command of German was excellent. O’Neill was Troutbeck’s deputy. Troutbeck produced a ‘Memorandum on the Regeneration of Germany’ in December 1943, and O’Neill put together a ‘Memorandum on the Re-­education of Germany’ in early 1944.50 Troutbeck’s Memorandum argued that Germany could either make an important contribution to a ‘world system’

Figure 1.1  John Troutbeck, German specialist responsible in the Foreign Office for coordinating planning for the Occupation.

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Educating the Germans

Figure 1.2  Con O’Neill, Prize Fellow of All Souls, Oxford and brilliant Foreign Office policy analyst. safeguarding the security and prosperity of all – or she could wreck it. The mainstay of a settlement with Germany would be consent. A bankrupt Germany, as he recalled the Foreign Secretary had pointed out in 1941, would poison her neighbours. ‘Hence the emphasis laid on the necessity to re-­educate the German people.’ Measures necessary for the treatment of Germany after the collapse, designed to ‘promote Germany’s willing acceptance of the new democratic order’, would be: To occupy and disarm the country, to detach large areas from it and perhaps expel their populations, to exact punishment and reparation for the injuries inflicted during the war, to destroy the existing system of government and insist on its replacement by another more to our liking, to purge the administration and for a time to exercise a strict control over the whole administration and economy.51

Though Troutbeck remained sceptical about the prospects for a future democratic Germany, he saw hope in a revival of the Christian tradition, envisaging a particular role for the churches:

Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

21

The real foundation of the Nazi system has been the teaching of generations of prophets who have gradually diverted German thought right away from the Western and Christian traditions. The regeneration of Germany can only start from the creation of a new outlook.

He summarized his position on regeneration in six points: (a) The regeneration of Germany will be a tremendous task which, even if accomplished at all, will be a matter of decades rather than years. It involves breaking a tradition that has been built up over generations and putting something else in its place. A Christian revival is probably the only alternative to the ideal of national socialism, but the impulse must come from within Germany itself. All we can do is to facilitate and encourage it. (b) The Germans must have a vested interest in peace. Therefore their economy must not be unduly depressed. In particular they must be kept employed. (c) They will also need some form of ‘circuses’ to take the place of those provided by military display, and some innocent outlet for the herd spirit.52 (d) They must be encouraged to regard themselves as responsible citizens and not merely as blindly obedient servants. (e) We for our part must above all show firmness in insisting on the execution of our terms. Indecision will merely strengthen the irreconcilables. But firmness is not inconsistent with ordinary courtesy. (f) We must avoid any action of which we may ourselves be later ashamed.

This example of Foreign Office thinking in December 1943 contained the germs of eventual policy (facilitation and encouragement, responsible citizenship, ‘impulses’ from within Germany), but it seems very undeveloped and unrealistic, even in the context of imagining that there would eventually be some kind of settlement with Germany. Alongside this essay in anticipating what might need to be done, much consideration was given to the notion of re-­education. Kurt Jürgensen regarded O’Neill’s Memorandum as ‘the authoritative guide for the re-­education of Germany’;53 it was to form the basis of a directive for SCAEF 54 and was incorporated into a War Cabinet paper of 27 January 1944.55 The paper rehearses provisions laid down in the Military Manual of Civil Affairs concerning the closure of educational establishments, the removal of objectionable matter from syllabuses, books and maps, the purging of staff, and the need for close inspection. And it recalled a War Cabinet paper of August 1943 on the future of Germany in which an important general principle was established: It must be understood that any scheme for the re-­education of Germans, young or old, by means of text-­books, teachers, censors or advisers supplied by the United Nations may be ruled out as futile. [. . .] Efforts from without to convert

22

Educating the Germans the Germans will merely harden their unrepentant hearts. Germans alone can re-­educate their fellow countrymen, and Germans will make the attempt only if they are themselves convinced that the future of their country lies in co-­operation with her neighbours.

Various unofficial committees involving émigrés and working on new textbooks (though not named, the organization ‘German Educational Reconstruction’ would have been chief among them) had been given no official encouragement. The paper sets out five assumptions: (a) For some time at least after the war there will be very great interest in Germany in the ideas of the victors and the principles of popular democracy. (b) For some time at least after the war there will be a strong tendency to reject all the methods, standards and doctrines of National Socialist education, and a somewhat less strong tendency to replace them with the methods, standards and doctrines of popular democracy. (c) On the other hand, both democratic ideas and democratic educational methods will lose much of their appeal if we appear to be trying to force them down the Germans’ throats, and especially if we appear to be trying to impose them as part of a system of Allied Military Government. Such an attempt would only produce resentment and reaction towards nationalist ideas and a nationalist system of education. (d) The main difficulty in reforming German education is likely to be found in the body of German teachers. And the most unteachable teachers may well be found not in the elementary schools, but in the secondary schools and the Universities. (e) It should, however, be possible to appeal to the professional interest of many Germans by introducing them to new and better text-­books and techniques of teaching.

The aims would be to avoid any increase in administrative difficulties, to eradicate Nazi, nationalist and militaristic elements in education, to re-­establish respect for ‘objective facts’, and to foster popular democracy, especially freedom of opinion, speech, the press and religion. And the methods by which these aims could be achieved were described on the assumption of there being German authorities in place, including the central Ministry of Education and the ministries of education in the German states. Control should be ‘indirect, invisible and remote’: ‘We should appear to guide rather than lead, to influence rather than to initiate.’ It would be better to lay down what should not be done and otherwise leave the Germans ‘to do what they like’. The ‘machinery of education’ should be interrupted as little as possible. Textbooks, especially in history, must be taken out of use and Germans must produce replacements, though ‘we must be prepared to do a certain amount of stop-­gap work’. Control must be exercised over the appointment of teachers, but there should be no placing of foreign teachers in German schools. There will be demand for books and films

Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

23

produced in Allied countries. Co-­operation with responsible elements among the Germans should be secured and contacts established with educational and literary circles in Allied countries. Finally, the propaganda of education will depend on the behaviour of Allied troops and importance will attach to any booklets prepared by the military. While the paper was positively received, General Stanley Kirby had some suggestions to make before a directive was prepared for SCAEF. A short-­term policy should include a reconstructed curriculum and syllabus for schools and universities, lists of textbooks should be produced indicating which ones should be withdrawn immediately and those that might be progressively withdrawn as substitutes became available, and that a black list of teachers should be prepared. Further, a small working group should be constituted ‘to make concrete preparations’.56 In March, Troutbeck chaired a meeting at the Foreign Office to give further consideration to the re-­education of Germany. SHAEF, the War Office, and the Board of Education were represented, and Duncan Wilson (of the Political Intelligence Department), the sociologist T.H. Marshall, and E.R. Dodds (of the Foreign Office Research Department), and O’Neill attended. Serious consideration of what the re-­education of Germany might entail in practice was now proceeding rapidly. One important consequence of the work of Troutbeck and O’Neill was the setting-­up in May 1944 of a working party under the chairmanship of Professor E.R. Dodds. Dodds had worked on education in Germany first in Oxford in Arnold Toynbee’s Royal Institute of International Affairs research department, the ‘Foreign Research and Press Service’, and later in its transformation into the Foreign Office Research Department (FORD) in London.57 Dodds was Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford and a Student (‘Fellow’, in otherwise normal Oxford usage) of Christ Church, Oxford. Born in 1893, the Irish Protestant Dodds had shown a distinctly rebellious side in his youth: he was expelled from Campbell College, Belfast, for ‘gross, studied and sustained insolence to the headmaster’, and he had had to interrupt his undergraduate career in Oxford as a result of his support for the Easter Rising. Politically, he was well to the left. And he combined his outstanding scholarship – he had succeeded Gilbert Murray in the Regius chair, and was Murray’s nominee for the post, beating Maurice Bowra to it – with a commitment to play a part in public life. His election was controversial, owing to his unconventional past and his left wing views, and he was uncomfortable in Oxford, but in addition to his academic standing he showed many attractive qualities: ‘his sharp mind and lucid exposition of knotty problems, the modernity of his culture, his obvious social concern, and the absence of any sort of talking down to the audience – all this made him a natural charmer of serious youth.’58 Included in Dodds’s working party were representatives from the Foreign Office, the War Office, the Political Intelligence Department, and SHAEF. Later they were joined by Grayson Kefauver, consultant to the US State Department on educational reconstruction.59 O’Neill and Duncan Wilson were members. The working party had thirteen meetings, concluding its work in November 1944.

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Educating the Germans

Figure 1.3  Professor E.R. Dodds, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford. Ivone Kirkpatrick, at the time with the Political Intelligence Department in Bush House, had expressed reservations about the standing and usefulness of the working party, and Troutbeck wrote to him to outline its brief: 1. To prepare from all available sources lists of German teachers of all kinds who may have to be dismissed. 2. To prepare for the provision of text-­books and educational material of all kinds, including school broadcasts, to fill the gap left in German schools by the banning of Nazi text-­books. 3. To secure through P.W.E. [the Political Warfare Executive], financial authority for the incurring of expenditure on such text-­books and educational material. 4. To get new text-­books written where necessary, and either published in this country or third countries; or to make similar preparations for re-­producing existing German text-­books now in use outside Germany or formerly in use in Germany. 5. To arrange with S.H.A.E.F. for the transport, distribution and where necessary production in Europe of such material.60

Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

25

The first task on Kirkpatrick’s list involved the committee – and largely Dodds himself – producing the ‘white,‘grey’ and ‘black’ lists of categories of German individuals on which decisions about instant dismissals were made during the early stages of the Occupation. Many individuals on the white list were to be sought out and persuaded to assist in the crucial tasks of educational reconstruction. *  *  * Ivone Kirkpatrick (1897–1964) was head of Chancery in Berlin from 1933 to 1938 and like Troutbeck and O’Neill had been a critic of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. He later worked as director of the foreign division of the Ministry of Information and in 1940 as controller of the BBC’s European services under the Political Warfare Executive.61 He had interviewed Rudolf Hess after his flight to Scotland in 1941 and was to interview Hermann Göring in Germany after his arrest. After much further responsibility in the Foreign Office after the War, he succeeded Robertson as High Commissioner in Germany (1950–53), returning to the FO as Permanent UnderSecretary in 1953.62 Kirkpatrick had the task in August 1944 of ‘constituting’ the British Element of the Control Commission, i.e. of recruiting and training its staff. ‘It was a difficult, thankless task,’ he recalled. In preparing the way for the administrative machinery necessary to support the Military Governor, he was the civil representative; his military counterpart was Major-General Stanley Kirby (1895–1968), who was to become Deputy Chief of Staff of the Control Commission in 1945. And the ‘parent department’ of the Control Commission was the War Office, ‘blissfully unaware of what lay before them’.63 Kirkpatrick had problems gaining proper priority for his preparatory work. He was reporting in February that the Ministry of Labour was going to obstruct attempts to recruit technical or scientific experts, since its priority was to satisfy the demands of industry and government service at home: ‘I do not think it fair to hold me responsible for raising the Commission on an adequate footing and at the same time to tell me that the Ministry of Labour will make it their business to obstruct the necessary recruitment.’64 *  *  * Towards the end of 1944 a potential legal issue was raised that threatened to derail an aspect of education policy. It was effectively dismissed by O’Neill. General Kirby wrote to Troutbeck in November on the subject of producing textbooks for emergency use in German schools, a task with which Dodds’s working party had been charged. Education Branch had sought legal advice on the matter, and the acting chief of Legal Division had responded to the effect that during the pre-­surrender period any interference with the educational system of a country would be contrary to international law: ‘It may be necessary under the peculiar circumstances to be found in Germany, but that is a matter for a definite decision on the Cabinet level, and nothing in the way of interference should be undertaken without express Governmental authority.’65 Kirby wished to know whether he was acting within the policy of the government. O’Neill minuted:

26

Educating the Germans

Figure 1.4.  Ivone Kirkpatrick, pillar of the Foreign Office who became Sir Brian Robertson’s successor as British High Commissioner in Germany. The legal opinion here quoted seems to me (with respect!) to be absolute nonsense. The Commander of occupying forces can take any action necessary to ensure the security of those forces. The principle, applied e.g. to discriminatory laws or to education, may be a bit of a fiction. But we have always intended to apply it in this way. General Eisenhower has already issued a proclamation closing schools and a law suspending discriminatory German legislation. He had ample Governmental authority for so doing.66

Troutbeck’s reply to General Kirby, based on a draft by O’Neill and on opinion from Sir William Malkin and Patrick Dean (respectively senior and assistant legal adviser to the FO), describes the situation regarding ‘interference’ in education during the early, pre-­surrender stages of the Occupation: We think your Legal Adviser is taking a somewhat narrow view of the situation. A Commander of forces of occupation is entitled under International Law to take

Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

27

action necessary to the security of those forces. To apply this principle e.g. to education or to laws discriminating against Jews, may be a bit of a novelty; but so is the impregnation of the young with Nazi ideas, and we have always intended that the principle should be applied in this way. Indeed a sound case could be made out for holding that it would be really detrimental to military security for Nazi doctrine to be taught in schools in occupied areas. Moreover, to allow this to be done in territory for whose administration we were responsible would be quite inconsistent with many pronouncements of the Allied leaders. In any case, General Eisenhower has already issued a proclamation closing schools and a law suspending discriminatory Nazi legislation. He had ample Governmental authority for so doing. The directive on which his action was based was, as you will remember, carefully considered by the appropriate authorities over here before it was issued by the Combined Chiefs of Staff. We ourselves were, it is true, a bit doubtful about the wisdom of closing schools; but in any case our doubts referred rather to the post-­surrender than to the pre-­ surrender period, and were based on considerations of policy, not law.67

This effectively stopped any further doubts about the legality of interference in education in Germany. With that potential policy hiccup out of the way, planning resumed its course and policy was firmly in place during the time that British troops were beginning to occupy parts of Germany.

‘German Educational Reconstruction’ (GER) Alongside the official planning for the future of education in Germany, there was one significant group of individuals that came to represent the insider view of the possibilities, and especially that of German émigrés. In the course of 1941, Sydney Herbert Wood (1884–1958), Principal Assistant Secretary in the Board of Education since 1939, had the idea for an initiative that would result in considerable achievements in planning for education in a post-­war Germany. Most of the friends of S.H. Wood and his wife Phyllis after 1930 were from other parts of Europe, mainly Germany and Austria, principally through Wood’s role as a Board of Education representative on the British Council.68 The Woods, and a handful of German refugees, came together to form an organization to be known eventually as ‘German Educational Reconstruction’ (GER). S.H. Wood was familiar with the educational scene in pre–1933 Germany and knew the reforming Prussian Minister of Education, Carl Heinrich Becker.69 He had been urging for something to be done to prepare for German teachers and social workers to return to Germany after the War: it was clear to him that such people could potentially play a significant part in a new Germany. His urgings met with no success at higher levels, and so, encouraged by his wife, he decided to take on the task himself. Without any support, financial or otherwise, from official sources, Wood set about making contact with like-­minded German teachers and social workers who had begun meeting in London to examine the failings of the Weimar Republic and the subsequent emergence and dominance of National Socialism.70 GER was founded in 1943. Its first president was the social reformer, women’s rights activist and independent MP Eleanor

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Educating the Germans

Figure 1.5  S.H. Wood, the founder of ‘German Educational Reconstruction’.

Rathbone (1872–1946), who had been an active anti-­appeasement campaigner, and its board was chaired by Wood. Fritz Borinski (1903–88) and Werner Milch (1903–50) served as its secretaries and proved very effective in promoting the society’s ideals. They were succeeded by the maverick Erich Hirsch. The political theorist, former Principal of King’s College, London, and Cambridge professor, Sir Ernest Barker (1874–1960) succeeded Eleanor Rathbone following her death in 1946. He in turn was succeeded by Sir Charles Morris (1898–1990), philosopher, headmaster, and ViceChancellor of the University of Leeds. Until its disbandment in 1958 GER was to be very active in taking the initiative as far as education in Germany was concerned. It was often something of an irritant to Control Commission and especially Education Branch staff, but its work was important enough, and it attracted the attention and support of so many prominent people that it could not easily be ignored. (Stafford Cripps thought GER was a ‘good way of trying to influence the re-­education of German youth’, and recommended to Anthony Eden in February 1944 that it be encouraged.71 But a Foreign Office minute was bluntly

Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany

29

dismissive: ‘There are other & more deserving causes than this for charity & I doubt if these Germans are the right people to re-­educate their compatriots.’72 Borinski described GER’s tasks in terms of explanation, preparation, collection and contacts. It organized conferences, arranged study groups, lectures, and training courses, published pamphlets, memoranda and Lesebogen (short selections from various writers intended for emergency use in German schools), and made contacts with officials planning for the Occupation, from the autumn of 1944 and later with the Control Commission. In addition to its engagement with émigrés it worked with German prisoners of war in England. Borinski was an authority on adult education, and that focus was especially evident in GER’s activities, as was vocational training. Once the work of Education Branch began in Germany, GER helped with the supply of books and periodicals and became a kind of pressure group in its contact with Control Commission staff, much to their annoyance on some occasions. Hirsch in particular was something of a problem.73 Up to the beginning of the Occupation, GER, despite its small size and lack of resources, was a forceful independent think tank on education in parallel to the secret planning happening in London at Norfolk House and elsewhere as an embryonic Education Branch was emerging. Its principal focus was on schools and young people. By the end of 1944 it had established five study groups, dealing with adult education, the school system, nursery schools, the youth movement and youth employment, and youth welfare. Later a sixth group was formed concerned with the universities.74 In the same year GER had produced a plan for educational reconstruction on the assumption still that there would be a period of transition between war and peace. This covered: schooling, including vocational education; youth welfare; pre-­school education; the youth movement and youth organizations; adult education and emergency education camps (visualized as covering re-­education). GER was able to attract the great and the good to support its activities, and the list of speakers at its conferences is something of a who’s who of leading and up-­andcoming academics of the day. 75 The secretariat’s surviving correspondence files run to several dozen boxes in an archive of some 30,000 documents: it had clearly captured the imagination of many in England who wished to ‘do something for Germany’. GER’s further activities are examined in Chapter 2.

2

The Occupation and the Evolution of Control in Education

No one had realised the full scope of the German catastrophe. There are some things the mind cannot imagine on its own.1 ‘If only you’d given up in 1940, none of this need have happened.’2 Here was a pretty pickle!3

Conditions in the Zone A.J.P. Taylor described the Second World War as ending ‘raggedly’.4 In Germany the end was particularly ragged. Technically, the hostilities with Germany ended on 8 May 1945, but large tracts of the country had been occupied by Allied troops months before and were under military control, with forms of interim ad hoc German local administration put in place by the occupiers. Much was initially achieved in the British Zone by American troops who were the first to arrive – in Aachen, for example – and adjustments had to occur once they withdrew in order that the British military could take over within the agreed borders of the Zone. The British Zone comprised the north-­western part of Germany. Bremen and Bremerhaven remained an American enclave within its territory. The French Zone had been carved out of an area in the south, with similar-­sized territory ceded from the US Zone. Mechanisms had to be put in place by the Allies for the administration of a territory of 355,934 square kilometres (to take Germany as a whole), with a fluctuating population of some 66 million. The British Zone, the third largest geographically (97,698 square kilometres), had the largest population (some 22.3 million, a third of the total population of Germany.) And it was also the densest, with 228 persons per square kilometre, the average for the four zones being 185.5 The statistics of population change between 1939 and 1948 would show how considerable disparity between the regions of the Zone had developed: Nordrhein-Westfalen:  +4.9% Niedersachsen:  +43.7% Schleswig-Holstein:  +70% Hamburg:  –14% (Hamburg had been 80% destroyed)

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Educating the Germans

Figure 2.1  Map of the British Zone of Occupation.

Con O’Neill visualized the population problem to be ‘as if the whole population of Scotland and Ireland had been moved to England and into an England which had nowhere to put them, where [. . .] nothing was working, more than half the housing in the cities had been destroyed’.6 The population of the Zone was about half that of England and Wales, and it was the equivalent of about two-­thirds of their geographical size. According to the census of October 1946, about 7 million people lived in cities with large numbers of inhabitants (200,000+) that had suffered heavy bomb damage. There were some 2.5 million refugees. (Under the terms of the Potsdam Agreement, the British Zone had to absorb 1.5 million ethnic Germans from Poland beginning in the spring of 1946.) And the imbalance in the ratio of men to women was of the order of 100:121.7 By September 1950 the percentages of refugees in the Länder of the British Zone ranged from 7.2 per cent in Hamburg (where half the housing had been destroyed) to 33 per cent in Schleswig-Holstein. (For Lower Saxony the figure was 27.2 per cent; for North-Rhine Westphalia 10.1 per cent.8)

The Occupation and Evolution of Education Control

33

Germany in 1945 – ‘Year Zero’ (Stunde Null), as it was called – was a country ‘reeling and rocking on its feet’.9 Devastation, especially in the cities and other large urban areas, was on an unprecedented scale. German towns were ‘Pompeiis petrified by the volcano of modern war’.10 The British Zone had suffered particularly badly: it was said that the Americans had the scenery, the French had the wine, and the British had the ruins. Housing in the British Zone was in a far more perilous state than in the other zones. Some 22 per cent of the pre-­war living accommodation had been totally destroyed (the comparable figure for the US Zone was 14 per cent, for the French Zone 10 per cent, for the Soviet Zone 7 per cent); 35 per cent was damaged (compared to figures of 21 per cent, 15 per cent and 12 per cent respectively in the other zones); only 43 per cent was undamaged (compared to 65 per cent, 75 per cent, and 81 per cent in the other zones.)11 For the German population as a whole, it was reckoned that some 26 million people had lost their homes. A relief worker recorded in December 1945 that nearly every visitor to the ruined cities of Germany ‘seeing the population going about its business among apparently uninhabitable ruins’, would ask ‘Where on earth do they live?’.12 One calculation was that after the requirements of the CCG and the Army had been met, the minimum space allowed per German person was four square metres. This meant that ‘in a room where everything has to be carried on in health or in sickness, the floor space for each person could be covered by two ordinary beds’. In the autumn of 1946 this minimum was reported to be normal for many families in Cologne and Münster.13 The larger urban centres had inevitably suffered proportionally greater damage to housing: in Hamburg, Hannover, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Dortmund, Essen and in smaller towns like Osnabrück, Aachen, Münster and Paderborn, such damage was well above the average, approaching 75 per cent in some cases. The situation was exacerbated by the unavoidable but fiercely contested practice during the Occupation of requisitioning, not just for military and civil government administrative purposes but also to provide living accommodation for Control Commission staff. A phrase book of the time, written by Germans for Germans with little or no English, included some potentially useful sentences relating to requisitioning and gives a flavour of the impact on the German population: – – – –

May I enter my house? May I use the kitchen? How many persons shall be quartered in this house? My dwelling has been confiscated.14

Finding food and shelter and fuel for cooking and heating was the preoccupation of all citizens (mostly elderly people, women and children: the huge imbalance in the population was obvious, and visitors to the Zone would often comment on the absence of men on the streets.) All municipal services had ceased or were severely interrupted (sewage and other waste disposal, water, gas and electricity supply) and coal production and supply was precarious. Local transport was not functioning; railway services were rudimentary since track and bridges were widely destroyed, the latter principally

34

Educating the Germans

by retreating German forces. Nazi administrators had melted away. Hunger and sickness were rife. There was a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, a condition that Durkheim describes in the term anomie, a state of ‘normlessness’. One visitor to the Zone wrote of the ‘bedraggled and apathetic listlessness of the inhabitants’.15 An uncomprehending German woman quoted in the 1945 documentary film The True Glory could say reproachfully: ‘If only you’d given up in 1940, none of this need have happened.’ Even without normal means of transport, hundreds of thousands were on the move: soldiers returning to shattered homes and broken families, released prisoners-­of-war seeking basic shelter, clothing, and nourishment, displaced persons and refugees from a dozen countries moving in all directions. Over twelve million Germans were expelled from eastern Europe. In addition, some 850,000 ten to fourteen-­year-olds were in special camps, and a further million children under ten in foster families, having been evacuated through the Kinderlandverschickung (KLV). The process of bringing them all back to their families would last until the summer of 1946.16 The calorie allowance for German civilians was 1,550 in September 1945, though according to one calculation the average civilian calorie intake during 1945 was only 1,412.17 Writing in 1946, when it was hoped that the calorie count of 1,550 might be raised to 1,800, Victor Gollancz cited 2,650 calories as being recommended by UNRRA for the maintenance of full health and efficiency in a normal population.18 And he quoted the November 1946 House of Commons Report of the Select Committee on Estimates which argued that a diet of 1,200 calories might be characterized as slow starvation and one of 1,550 as ‘no better than even slower starvation’.19 An earlier report of the Select Committee (July 1946) had mentioned 1,052 calories a day as the normal civilian’s ration in the Zone. There had even been a reduction from 1,550 to 1,014 on 4 March, with a later increase of thirty-­eight calories.20 As Kurt Koszyk has argued, with such low calorie rations processes of democratization could not be convincingly implemented.21 By the time of the Committee’s eighth report (October 1947), the calorie count was still only 1,550. Malnourishment was obvious in the hollow and drawn faces of the population. In April 1946, Fenner Brockway MP could write of ‘the frequency of ill-­looking faces, grey and yellow, lines running from eyes to mouth, protruding cheek-­bones . . . Never anywhere else have I seen these gaunt features passing with such regularity.’22 Brockway calculated that one in five people he encountered on the streets of Hamburg showed such signs.23 In November 1946 a member of the House of Lords recalled his experiences during a visit to Germany three months earlier: I have found in Hamburg people who were unable to take me to a street in the town in which they had lived all their lives because they could not recognize places or tell where they were in the shattered heaps of bricks that surrounded them. In Hanover a bare quarter of the normal accommodation was capable of giving any shelter at all. In town and country the average floor space for all the needs of life for an individual is only seventy-­two square feet, and in that computation children only count as one half and babies not at all – very much the computation which is adopted by our own railways. All communications had broken down, and famine

The Occupation and Evolution of Education Control

35

was obviously on the threshold. Famine follows every war. So far as that is concerned, I think that it is right to say that all the physical factors in the problem before us at the present moment were perfectly clear a year ago.24

Yet alongside all of this chaos there were by stark contrast areas seemingly untouched by war and its aftermath. ‘There are parts in central Germany’, Patrick Gordon Walker observed in February and March 1945, where one can drive for an hour or two and get the impression of a country preserved – well-­worked fields, trim farms, and villages intact with only an occasional exception. Small towns, even, are often intact.25

Such country areas were to be the frequent destination of those desperate to barter for food. The German verb hamstern and the noun Hamsterfahrt (to forage; a foraging trip) describe the harried visits city dwellers would make to the countryside once trains were running again in order to barter for goods unavailable in the devastated areas. A black market economy quickly developed, with cigarettes becoming a normal currency of exchange. The usual parameters of life no longer existed: the moral order had collapsed as people struggled to survive. The young in particular were seriously at risk. On top of all the human misery of the first eighteen months of the Occupation, the winter of 1946–47 was to bring weather conditions that would create even greater hardship for German families. In late October lowest temperatures were at minus 4 centigrade; by mid-December they had reached minus 10, in the HannoverBraunschweig region minus 18. In the second week of January some areas recorded temperatures of minus 18 to minus 20; by the end of February for the first time since 20 January temperatures were just at freezing point; not until the second half of March was mild weather experienced.26 Professor E.R. Dodds, staying in a ‘small carpetless & slightly sordid hotel bedroom’ in Göttingen with a delegation of the Association of University Teachers in January 1947, reported that the weather was the coldest he had met anywhere: ‘30 degrees of frost yesterday and probably more tonight.’27 The extreme cold was bad enough, but coupled with the appalling housing conditions in the towns and cities, lack of heating materials and severe food rationing, life for many thousands of Germans was desperate. The occupiers often had mixed emotions. On the one hand they were fully aware of the appalling nature of the Nazi regime and of the guilt by association of the voting population, despite protestations that there was little the normal citizen could do to prevent the excesses of Nazism. A punitive, ‘Carthaginian’ peace would not have seemed inappropriate in the circumstances. (Roosevelt had concluded during the Teheran Conference that all Germans were equally culpable.) And there was for some time a reluctance to provide for the physical wellbeing of the population. On the other hand, however, and consonant with the policy of re-­education and democratization, the occupying forces knew that compassion was a vital factor in getting people on side and demonstrating that there were alternatives to the brutality of the regime that had caused the miseries all Germans now had to endure.

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Educating the Germans

Fenner Brockway – visiting the Zone in 1947 – describes hating the luxurious atmosphere of the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg: ‘I can’t help thinking of the people who are walking on the pavement from which we are divided only by a wall. Those people, with one in five starving . . .’28 The broadcaster Raymond Baxter, in Germany in the winter of 1946–47 with the British Forces Network in Hamburg, described people ‘dropping in the streets from deprivation, hunger and exposure’: ‘ruination, death and defeat formed the inescapable image of Hamburg that winter.’29 Goronwy Rees accompanied Sir William Strang on a tour of the Zone in May, 1945. Strang, a prodigious Foreign Office mandarin, was political adviser to the Military Governor. Rees describes Strang being ‘irked by the grandeur imposed on him by his ambassadorial rank’ and talks of his assistant despairing at Strang’s indifference to the ingenious means he devised ‘to increase his master’s comfort, prestige and dignity’.30 Michael Foster, who had left his post in Oxford to lecture at the University of Cologne, reported (implicitly disapprovingly) on the comfort in which he was living in the city in March 1949: If you saw my centrally-­heated flat, and the comfort in which I live, I’m afraid austerity is not the word which would spring to your lips.31

The dilemma here was constant throughout the Occupation. If qualified people were to be recruited to work in Germany, they had to be offered reasonable working and living conditions, but this was inevitably at the expense of the German popula­­­­ tion and it understandably caused considerable resentment. In Hamburg during 1946 a proposal to build a huge complex to house British soldiers and their families, with the consequent eviction of over 6,000 Germans, caused such unrest that it eventually had to be abandoned, despite an initial political determination to see the project through.32

The Military Governors At the apex of control in the Zone after the cessation of hostilities was Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Commander-­in-Chief of the British forces, who entered Germany with the 21st Army Group and was to become the British Military Governor, with counterparts in the other three zones (Eisenhower, Koenig and Zhukov in the American, French and Soviet zones respectively); together these four constituted the Allied Control Council. In Berlin, the four commanders-­in-chief formed the Allied Kommandatura, responsible for the four sectors into which the city was divided. Between them, as Military Governors and Commanders-­in-Chief, they had responsibility for the whole of Germany, for every aspect of life in the devastated country. Montgomery insisted in his memoirs that he had not been trained to handle anything like the situation he encountered at the time of the German surrender. He faced what he calls the ‘pretty pickle’ of having to cope with 1.5 million prisoners of war, a million German wounded without adequate medical supplies to treat them, a million civilian refugees from the east, and other displaced persons; in addition

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transport and communication had come to a standstill, as had agricultural production and industry; food was scarce; there was a serious risk of famine and disease. ‘And to top it all there was no central government in being, and the machinery whereby a central government could function no longer existed.’33 Montgomery saw his strategy for the government of the Zone in four phases. In phase one Corps District Commanders would be responsible for military government through their staffs; in phase two Regional Commissioners would be trained to take over from Corps District Commanders; in phase three the Regional Commissioners would no longer be Military Governors; and in phase four members of Military Government detachments would transfer to civilian status. Once phase four was complete,‘the Germans would be governing themselves, subject to a general supervision by us, and the head of the administration would be a civilian, not a soldier’.34 This step-­ by-step progression towards a restoration of responsibility to the German authorities was consonant with the general line of policy that understood the inevitability of a withdrawal of military control and a gradual move to civilian government, subject to what Montgomery described as ‘progress made in demilitarisation, denazification, and the foundation of a democratic system of administration’.35 The principal administrative responsibility in the British Zone lay eventually with General Sir Brian Robertson (1896–1974), the second Deputy Military Governor,36 who would later become Military Governor himself and subsequently (from 1 September 1949) the first British High Commissioner in Germany. Robertson described Montgomery as giving ‘very personal attention and impulse to [education] from the start, because he placed great importance on the matter of youth’.37 And indeed one of Montgomery’s early proclamations to the German population, in August 1945, was specifically concerned with education: 1. The Nazis debased your German education. They sought to pervert the minds of your children. They hid from them true things. They gave them wrong values. They taught them to despise freedom and tolerance and to admire violence and oppression. 2. The Nazis were thwarted only by victorious battles fought by my troops and their great Allies. 3. I intend to have the wrong they did put right. 4. First, your schools and universities will be re-­opened as soon as possible. It is no easy task. Nevertheless, schools in some parts are already re-­opening and more will re-­open in the next month or so. By 1st October all available schools (except Nazi ones) should be functioning again. 5. Three things are needed before the schools can re-­open; adequate buildings, sufficient teaching materials, trustworthy teachers. 6. Schools which can be repaired will be repaired. Those which have had to house my troops, or displaced or homeless persons, or vital administrative services, will be cleared as circumstances make this possible. 7. The text books with which the Nazis poisoned the minds of your children will not be used again in schools. I am having reprinted as an emergency measure books formerly used in your schools. New books, written by Germans in

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 ermany and reflecting a wholesome spirit, are coming along. They will be G printed as fast as possible.   8. The teacher shortage will be serious. I shall tolerate no teacher in the schools whose record will not stand the most searching investigation. Teachers wrongfully dismissed will be re-­instated. I shall release those teacher prisoners-­of-war who are worthy to co-­operate in the re-­education of your sons and daughters.   9. Despite these steps, part-­time schooling in many areas is likely to be inevitable for a long time. To remedy this, first priority will be given, once the children are back under healthy influence at school, to the training of new teachers and the re-­training of old. 10. The reputation of your Universities fell low in the world’s esteem under the Nazis. Their buildings suffered severe damage during the war. I shall allow no professor or lecturer to continue in office who prostituted his gifts in the service of Nazism. Buildings will be restored where possible. 11. I shall encourage Adult Education. The aim should be free discussion between German men and women of all conditions, faiths and ages. 12. My long-­term aim is that, through a happy school life, German boys and girls should grow into worthy citizens of Germany and the world. Their independence of mind must make them secure against false doctrines of force and tyranny. You German men and women must learn your responsibilities, too, especially for what is done in the name of the community in which you live. 13. In all this we shall work with the Americans, the Russians and the French. 14. I shall impose on you no foreign principles of education nor methods of teaching. You will be free to experiment, to try out new ideas. My officers will help you. But I shall tolerate no return to Nazism, militarism, or aggression in any form. 15. You German fathers and mothers must do your part to win back your children to a saner way of life. I shall help you. You must help me. That is my order.

The detail here – in the terse and unambiguous language typical for Montgomery (who has been described as showing a ‘boy scout naïveté’ during his time as Military Governor38)– was a clear summary of educational policy at that stage: it shows that the main elements of the British approach had cohered from the preparatory work undertaken during the final months of the War and the early months of Occupation and had been reinforced by the Potsdam Agreement. The Foreign Office mandarins had fun with the text. One minuted on 28 August that paragraph 10 on the damage inflicted by Anglo-American forces was perhaps ‘a trifle unnecessary, especially in the context of a statement about the moral decline of education under the Nazis’. O’Neill added: ‘If you must have the ‘Führerbefehl’ technique, I agree it couldn’t be better done.’39 Another minute read: ‘This is the Hitler touch all right!’ and it was recorded that the Secretary of State had written to Montgomery about such messages. By the time of Montgomery’s message, considerable progress had been made by the military officers who constituted the first wave of the British presence in Germany, some of whom regarded themselves as members of an education branch in embryo. In early August 1945 Montgomery broadcast a staccato personal message to the population of the Zone. In it he announced the start of the second stage in the

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‘rehabilitation of Germany’: it was his intention that the German people ‘should have freedom to get down to [their] own way of life; subject only to the provisions of military security and necessity’. He would help them ‘to eradicate idleness, boredom, and fear of the future’. Restrictions on freedom of the press would be relaxed, trades unions and political parties could be formed, local self-­government would be restored, the judicial system would be reorganized, public meetings and discussions could be held, and the fraternization rules had been relaxed: Members of the British forces are now allowed to engage in conversation with the German people in streets and in public places; this will enable us to have contact with you and to understand your problems the more easily.

Educational provision in the form of club activities would be an early priority: Your children are at present lacking juvenile organizations, on a voluntary basis, for the purpose of religious, cultural, health or recreational activities. Educational facilities will be provided at a relatively early date.40

Montgomery was succeeded on 1 May 1946 by the distinguished Royal Air Force commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas (1893–1969). Douglas, renowned as head of Fighter Command, served first as head of the British air forces of Occupation under Montgomery, becoming Military Governor in May 1946. He describes in his memoirs how Montgomery had prepared for the British government a memorandum on the situation in Germany but had for obscure reasons not arranged for Douglas to be shown a copy.41 He knew of its existence only when it appeared in Montgomery’s Memoirs. As a briefing paper for the incoming Military Governor it would have been of considerable help. What faced Douglas was one of the most difficult periods of the Occupation, with the worst winter on record and its consequences for the German population, increasing political difficulties with the Russians, the creation of ‘Bizonia’ and the ‘dereservation’ of various areas of control (including education). Douglas wrestled with the decisions he had to make about clemency after the verdicts at Nuremberg, and he was deeply disturbed at having to sign death warrants. He decided to retire in November 1947, concluding in his reflections on his period as Military Governor that it was ‘the unhappiest period of my entire official life’.42 When Douglas left Germany he was succeeded on 1 November 1947 by the person who had been involved with high level policy since the earliest stage of the Occupation – his deputy, General Sir Brian Robertson. Robertson had been in Italy in 1945 as Alexander’s Chief Administrative Officer and was ‘suddenly sent for’: ‘I didn’t speak a word of German, I’d never been in the country before. [. . .] I knew nothing about the situation at all, nothing, nor had I taken any part [in] the great preparatory work that had been carried forward in London.’43 Montgomery thought very highly of Robertson’s administrative abilities, having worked with him in the North Africa campaign and observed how in his role in Italy he had ‘quietly gathered the reins into his very able hands’.44

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O’Neill would also enthuse about Robertson’s qualities. He was ‘the outstanding personality on the British side throughout the occupation of Germany’. He understood the practical problems of Occupation better than either Montgomery or Douglas and ‘really took charge and control of the whole political and administrative side’. He was a man of great personal authority. He looked the part. He was a large, tall, determined man, fairly slow in speech but very determined, very systematic in his thinking. [. . .] He worked to a programme. He set objectives, short-­term objectives, month by month, and he timed them and he achieved them. [. . .] He read the papers. He really took a lot of time to understand every subject thoroughly.45

O’Neill became head of Robertson’s political staff and was impressed that the General knew as much in their fields as his economic, financial, industrial, and legal advisers ‘and they couldn’t get away with anything which he didn’t check and comment on and challenge, and he was often right’. Major General Sir Alec Bishop (1897–1984), head of the Public Relations and Information Services Control (PRISC) division and from 1946 Robertson’s Deputy Chief of Staff,46 considered that it was ‘the great good fortune of Germany’ to have Robertson as Military Governor. Despite ‘a rather austere manner’ he was ‘the most kind, charming, agreeable personality, and he really had great brain and great understanding’. Most importantly, he had made a deep impression on Ernest Bevin, who asked him to report to him personally on a regular basis and let him know how he as Foreign Secretary might help with problems in Germany.47 The close relationship between the two men was an important factor in terms of political and administrative problem-­solving, and it was not influenced in any way by Bevin’s socialism. Robertson insisted that ‘Ernie Bevin [. . .] never pushed me that way’.48 For each of the former Provinces a Regional Commissioner was appointed. For Nordrhein-Westfalen this was William Asbury, for Hamburg Sir Vaughan Berry, for Schleswig-Holstein Air Vice-Marshal Champion de Crespigny, and for Niedersachsen first Brigadier Armytage and later Lieutenant-General Sir Gordon Macready. Macready described the Commissioners as A banker and financier who had helped to look after Labour Party funds and incidentally had a considerable knowledge of Germany dating back to World War I occupation days; a Socialist stalwart of Sheffield Town Council who had been elected Lord Mayor, but had not taken up the position owing to his wartme duties as a Regional Defence Commissioner, in which he had done yeoman work; an Air Vice-Marshal of a particularly well-­known Conservative and sporting family, possessing advanced leftish ideas, mingled with international and dictatorial leanings, who had stood for Parliament as a Socialist and lost his deposit; and lastly a soldier with over thirty-­six years’ service in a wide variety of spheres.49

Macready regarded himself as an ‘oddity’ in the group, since he alone was not ‘a staunch adherent of the Labour Party’.

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Figure 2.2  Key figures in the Control Commission, together with Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster John Hynd. In the front is General Sir Brian Robertson (far left); next to him (l. to r.) John Hynd, Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas and Hugh Champion de Crespigny (Land Commissioner for Schleswig-Holstein). Behind them are (l. to r.) Brigadier Armytage (Niedersachsen), Vaughan Berry (Hamburg), and William Asbury (Nordrhein-Westfalen).

The Control Office and its ministers It is a very difficult thing to administer a foreign country.50 There needed to be a government minister in charge of German affairs in London. Prime Minister Attlee’s choice fell on John Hynd (1902–1971), MP for Sheffield Attercliffe since 1944 and a former railway clerk and trades union official. He assumed office on 4 August 1945 as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, outside the cabinet, heading the Control Office for Germany and Austria (COGA), which was then part of the War Office but became an independent department in October. Though the Foreign Office had some very experienced and high-­ranking German specialists, it was not equipped actually to run things. James Mark, who served as the Private Secretary to Lord Pakenham, Hynd’s successor, saw the setting up of the Control Office as a compromise solution: the Foreign Office wanted to keep control but hated administration and would have been incapable of running something as elaborate as the Control Commission.51 Once Hynd assumed charge, the Control Office was often referred to disparagingly as the Hyndquarters. (Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin ‘never liked John Hynd, and regarded him as a bit of a nuisance’;52 he was known to refer to

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him as ‘that ‘Ynd’.) Hynd was not an obvious choice. He had no experience of foreign affairs and his education had been limited, as he put it, to ‘seven years at an elementary school plus evening classes and copious reading’.53 It seems that one factor that might have influenced Attlee in choosing him was that he had taught himself German: surviving film footage shows him making a tolerable effort at a speech in the language. He was to hold the post until April 1947, when he moved to the Ministry of Pensions and thence into political oblivion. There was some criticism of putting important responsibilities in the hands of a junior minister. Oliver Lyttelton MP raised the question of the London-­based administration of Germany in the House of Commons in July 1946. He argued that ‘it is undeniable that no clear-­cut policy by His Majesty’s Government has so far emerged or been enunciated, whatever the excuse may be. No one today could give more than the vaguest and most general reply to this sort of question: Is our occupation of Germany likely to last for a decade or a generation? Is Germany to become an industrial nation again? Is our policy punitive or constructive?’54 There was a problem with coordination between two or three ministries involved with German affairs and those with responsibility in Germany. Hynd was ‘a junior Minister, with a sinecure office in the first instance’, who had to balance conflicting interests in Whitehall: If ever there was a need for a true coordinating hand in these matters, it is here. I do not think that this task should have been entrusted to a junior Minister. The hon. Gentleman must, I am sure, have something of the sensations of a minnow floating about amongst the whales. I sympathise with him. I should like to see in the higher administration more of the hand of senior Ministers, such as the right hon. Gentleman the Foreign Secretary, [. . .] whose worst enemy would never describe him as a minnow.55

This proved to be what was to happen a little under nine months later. Hynd was a worthy but undistinguished politician. James Mark saw him as ‘well intentioned’ but ‘pretty unimpressive’, as ‘conscientious’ but ‘not particularly winsome’: ‘he didn’t know people.’ Noel Annan, who served in the Political Division of the Control Commission, described him dismissively as ‘a simple, decent trade unionist who at first gave the impression that the revival of democracy in Germany depended on elections being conducted on the same lines as was current in the National Union of Railwaymen’. He ‘could not make the transition to ministerial rank: Bevin fairly speedily got rid of him’.56 Statements of educational policy were made frequently and repetitively. Most referred only to the British Zone, but Hynd was asked by Major Tufton Beamish in the House of Commons in May 1946 if the occupying powers were agreed on the principles for the re-­education of Germany and on school syllabuses and whether re-­education was proceeding ‘on broadly similar lines’. Hynd replied: Re-­education in all four zones follows the same broad pattern. A number of general principles have been agreed, including common standards for selection of students for universities, availability of higher educational establishments for students from

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all zones, and common policies for denominational education and religious instruction in schools. The detail of the syllabi is not constant throughout the four zones nor indeed in the British zone as regional variations inevitably arise owing to traditional considerations and the scope given to local initiative.57

The Allied Control Authority Coordinating Committee had produced Directives covering procedures to be followed in all four zones. In January 1946, for example, the Committee recommended that all educational institutions, agencies and organizations with formerly national functions should be controlled in such a way as to serve the needs of all four zones.58 In May agreement was reached on sanctions to be applied against students and professors carrying out fascist or anti-­democratic propaganda: ‘Any person, whether a student or a professor, who spreads in any way whatsoever militaristic or Nazi doctrines, or who hinders the carrying out of democratic doctrines, must be expelled from the higher educational institution.’59 Similar sanctions were agreed in July against managerial and administrative staff so behaving. A handwritten Foreign Office memo attached to the directive says: ‘Let us hope that “anti-­democratic doctrines” are not given too wide a definition. The directive will no doubt be applied sensibly in the three western zones.’60 It was already clear that the Russians would go their own way. Hynd had come under increasing criticism for not improving the food supply in Germany, and it was time for him to be replaced. It had been agreed that Bevin as Foreign Secretary would assume responsibility for Germany and that the Control Office (previously transferred from the War Office in October 1945) would now come under the Foreign Office, with effect from April 1947. Macready described Bevin as seeming ‘to have a thorough dislike for Germany and all things German’.61 He is supposed to have said ‘I tries to like them but I ‘ates them really’ and he only visited Germany once during his tenure as Foreign Secretary. Lord (Frank) Pakenham (1905–2001), an amiably eccentric Labour politician and one-­ time Oxford don, was offered the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, answerable to Bevin for all matters concerning Germany. There was both strength and weakness in this new disposition: weakness to the extent that Hynd had had access to the cabinet as head of a department; strength inasmuch as Pakenham was much closer to the Foreign Secretary. Pakenham recalled in an interview in 1978 that: ‘Hynd was in the awkward position of running a weak department which was rather squashed by the Foreign Office. I was in the position of being inside the Foreign Office. More like the Minister of State is today.’62 Sir Maurice Dean in London, the civil servant head of the Control Office, and General Sir Brian Robertson in the Zone (at the time Deputy Military Governor and head of Military Administration) were both very pleased with this development, which provided access to Bevin who was, in Dean’s words, ‘a fount of power’.63 Pakenham embarked on his duties with a zealous enthusiasm. ‘Never was anybody offered a chance to which his whole being made a more ardent or passionate response’, as he was to write in retrospect.64 So keen was he to set foot on German soil for the first of his eventual twenty-­six visits to the Zone (roughly one a fortnight65) that he jumped from the Lancaster bringing him to Berlin before the steps had been put in place, contriving to collide with them as he performed what was called in the press ‘the Pakenham leap’. His glasses were knocked off and his forehead was cut, a ‘somewhat

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unusual arrival for a British Minister in an Occupied Territory’, as he described it. Without any proper forethought, rather typically for him, he said to the assembled journalists: I come to Germany in a spirit of good will. I am a believer in Christianity, both as regards justice and mercy. In this job I shall attempt to apply Christian principles, not forgetting the past but with my eyes mainly on the future. I am particularly interested in the youth of Germany.’66

These words caused anxiety among his officials, but they were clearly spoken from the heart, and went down well among Germans, as would many of his later compassionate statements, made impromptu during official visits. Robert Birley recalled that he would ask his interpreter, Berta Hochberger, to ‘manipulate’ her translations of Pakenham’s speeches if he said anything that would cause problems.67 There were worries about Pakenham’s deeply held Christian beliefs getting in the way politically, but he would later argue that the fact that he was a Catholic was seen as advantageous in dealing with German Catholics (Adenauer prominent among them), Hynd having got on badly with them.68 And his views on Germany were often at odds with those of Bevin, who in due course, despite his patience with the younger man, influenced Attlee’s decision to promote Pakenham to head his own department (of civil aviation) in June 1948 and so contrived to get him out of the way. ‘I think [Bevin] got a bit [. . .] embarrassed by me fairly soon and much more so as time went on’, he later reflected.69 Sholto Douglas, however, wrote affectionately of Pakenham’s compassionate understanding of German problems, and saw the difficulties with Bevin as stemming inevitably from the detached and impersonal stance that Bevin as Foreign Secretary had, necessarily, to adopt, Germany being only one of the many international problems he had to cope with.70 After leaving his post as Chancellor of the Duchy Pakenham ‘went on fighting for Germany’: ‘I kept on making a nuisance of myself about Germany. But I doubt if I did much good.’71 (His successor, Lord Henderson, 1891–1984, was to have a diminished status as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary.)

Establishing administrative structure in the early months Administratively the Zone consisted of the four Prussian provinces of SchleswigHolstein, Hannover, Westphalia and Rhine. With the creation of the French Zone the southern part of Rhine Province became the responsibility of the French, and the North Rhine territory was eventually combined with Westphalia. Hamburg was to come under separate administration. And so the four principal administrative regions in the Zone were Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Hannover (from November 1946 Lower Saxony) and North Rhine-Westphalia. Each was under the command of a regional commissioner. Below the Land level – the term Land replaced Provinz – the administrative units were the regional government, the Regierungsbezirk, and the local government Kreis. At

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the beginning of the Occupation military Kreis detachments (known as ‘K dets’) performed remarkable tasks by establishing local civil administrations. The K dets were essential in linking the higher levels of authority with individuals with local knowledge. Once British and American troops crossed into German territory and the urgent task of establishing control over civil affairs could begin, it was recognized that such control would be most effective at a local level, developing progressively as the military advanced further into Germany. And so the Bezirk or Kreis levels of administration were key as far as any early developments in education were concerned. An immediate requirement for the occupying forces was to identify individuals who could assist in the construction of local administrative machinery through which Military Government directives and regulations could be implemented. The Supreme Commander’s Proclamation No.1 had ordered officials to stay in their posts: All officials are charged with the duty of remaining at their posts until further orders, and obeying and enforcing all orders or directions of Military Government or the Allied Authorities addressed to the German Government or the German people. This applies also to officials, employees and workers of all public undertakings and utilities and to all other persons engaged in essential work.72

Again, the assumption even at this time was that there would be some kind of governmental machinery in place. By the end of May 1945 nearly 200 local administrations were operational in the Zone, controlled by as many military Kreis detachments, which had accompanied the occupying troops. Raymond Ebsworth, who was to work in the local government division of the Control Commission, described how on 7 May 1945 he found what he calls the ‘nucleus of a German Regierungsbezirk administration’ in Aachen, established by the Americans from whom the British were to take over on 16 June: As the Allies advanced, some kind of municipal and village authorities had been hastily set up, but here in Aachen democratic-­minded Germans had already been found to man this higher level of government under Allied supervision.73

Eisenhower recalled how the first experience of military government in Germany was gained in Aachen: This showed us the kind of problem that we were apt to meet later on when the occupation had extended deep into Germany. The situation was new and difficult, and became more acute because of our policy of non-­employment of Nazis for any government work. In much of our necessary public utility work it was only the local Nazis who had sufficient knowledge to be of assistance.74

Party members were dismissed as quickly as possible and others were quickly trained to take their place.

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A second post-Occupation Oberbürgermeister in Aachen, Wilhelm Rombach, had been appointed by the Americans and was running the city administration.75 And this was happening before the War had ended. Ebsworth describes how he and his fellow officers operated: Each of us had his own particular function – food collection, police recruitment, emergency housing and so on – but no staff, for the very good reason that we intended the Germans to run their own affairs as soon as possible, with the British officers acting as controllers and supervisors. Each of them thus had the same immediate problem: to find Germans who were prepared to carry out Allied orders.76

Ebsworth wondered where the Nazis were. Michael Balfour (1908–1995), who was to serve from 1945 to 1947 as Director of Public Relations and Information Services in the Control Commission, describes how they ‘simply melted away’. The problem for the occupiers was that the policy of leaving things to German authorities had provided no guidance on how they should be chosen.77 The Joint Chiefs of Staff directive 1067, issued in April, required that In the imposition and maintenance of such controls as may be prescribed by you [i.e. the Commander-­in-Chief] or the Control Council, German authorities will to the fullest extent practicable be ordered to proclaim and assume administration of such controls. Thus it should be brought home to the German people that the responsibility for the administration of such controls and for any breakdowns in those controls will rest with themselves and German authorities.78

The Military Manual of Civil Affairs in the Field had been put together with rather different expectations of what the occupiers would actually find ‘in the field’ and was couched in terms to fit a variety of situations. It offered little help on the recruitment of local administrators: . . . Officials who have fled or who are removed must be replaced but careful selection of substitutes will be necessary. Capacity is a better qualification than sympathy in a candidate prepared to serve, provided his political or moral record is not adjudged a bar.79

Finding people who would be content to serve subject to Military Government requirements proved difficult, not least because there were fears of retribution. But questions of suitability clearly provided the major challenge: The key to the problem was, naturally, the selection of a Bürgermeister. A schoolmaster might be selected, or a local business man, an ex-­official dismissed by the Nazis, even someone who had worked under the Nazis provided he was believed to have retained sufficient independence of outlook. Sometimes the priest assumed responsibility until a more permanent appointment could be made. [. . .]

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At first few appointments were confirmed because scarcely one experienced administrator in Germany could claim an altogether immaculate record. As more territory was occupied suitable candidates grew more numerous.80

In Aachen there was much criticism of the first civic administration, under Oberbürgermeister Oppenhoff (sworn in on 31 October 1944) and with the Bishop of Aachen playing a significant éminence grise role in the background. Saul Padover of the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Division, reported in condemnatory terms on the way the Military Government team had approached the appointment of Oppenhoff and his nine fellow mayors with special responsibilities. The team’s first consideration was functional rather than political, and its aspiration, in Padover’s view, was primarily to be judged on its efficiency in getting things done: An M.G. team, therefore, will employ almost anybody it believes capable of putting a town on a functioning basis. Thus Nazi sympathizers, Party members, or German nationalists, are appointed by M.G. as the only available specialists. These specialists, who look extremely presentable and have professional backgrounds similar to those of M.G. officers, then place their like-­minded friends in secondary positions. As a consequence, M.G.’s initial indifference to the politics of the situation leads in the end to a political mess. Then comes the complicated attempts by C.I.C. [Counterintelligence Corps] to weed out the undesirables, and M.G. officers find themselves in the unpleasant position of having either to defend Nazis or of starting all over again.81

The Bürgermeister with responsibility for schools came in for particular criticism. He was ‘a professional Church politician and an extreme nationalist reactionary with an embittered hatred for the Allies (moreover he had not seen the inside of a school for half a century)’.82 As far as schools were concerned, in addition to the problem of establishing a suitable administrative structure there was the obvious task of repairing buildings and providing furniture and materials. Textbooks were urgently needed, and by March 1945 some 20,000 were being printed in anticipation of the reopening after Easter of an elementary school. Of about 1,200 children between the ages of six and ten, many had never been to school. Earlier, citizens of Aachen had offered textbooks which were found to be completely unsuitable and unusable since they glorified the Nazi military: in one illustration a boy was depicted saying that when he grew up he wanted to be a major in the S.A. An American detachment officer reported that most children in Aachen had not had any formalized schooling for almost a year; he had received many requests from parents to re-­open schools quickly, and a small German committee was appointed to plan for schools to start again. There were enormous problems with finding suitable textbooks and with staffing, but ten schools were able to re-­open on 4 June 1945. Twenty-­two teachers were teaching 1,300 elementary school children in the first four grades. This was some four months before the ‘normal’ expectation that schools would re-­open on 1 October.83

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Figure 2.3  Schools in Aachen were among the first to re-open. Here mothers are seen walking their children to school on 6 June 1945. The British officer Major L.H. Sutton, who took over responsibility for education from the Americans in Aachen, reported that the work of Major Bradford of the US Detachment appeared ‘outstanding’: the Americans had ‘followed the Manual etc very closely which shows I think that the instructions are sound and workable’.84 The directive to the Commander in-Chief of the US Occupation forces, known as JCS 1067, of April 1945, echoes in its section on education statements in previous policy documents: a. All educational institutions within your zone except those previously re-­ established by Allied authority will be closed. [. . .] b. A coordinated system of control over German education and an affirmative program of reorientation will be established designed completely to eliminate Nazi and militaristic doctrines and to encourage the development of democratic ideas. c. You will permit the reopening of elementary (Volksschulen), middle (Mittelschulen) and vocational (Berufsschulen) schools at the earliest possible date after Nazi personnel has been eliminated. Textbooks and curricula which are not free of Nazi and militaristic doctrine shall not be used. [. . .] d. It is not intended that the military government will intervene in questions concerning denominational control of German schools, or in religious instruction

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in German schools, except insofar as may be necessary to insure that religious instruction and administration of such schools conform to such Allied regulations as are or may be established pertaining to purging of personnel and curricula.85

JCS1067 was frequently cited as a basic statement of policy. It contained all the elements that were to inform the approach of the British in Germany in the initial stages of their work: closure of institutions; basic control; purging of staff and textbooks and curricula; interim arrangements for the reopening of schools and institutions of higher education; and non-­intervention in denominational matters. Further documents provided the operational detail. A handbook produced by the Control Commission for Kreis Resident Officers in 1946 explained in a section on indirect control that all essential functions of government had had to be exercised by Military Government officers at the beginning of the occupation: since Germans ‘were accustomed to being governed from above, and had neither the wish nor the ability to accept responsibility for the drastic improvisations often necessary to recreate an ordered society, they accepted this state of affairs with apathy, if not with relief ’. But it pointed out the dangers in what it called the ‘incurable British colonising instinct of “ruling the natives for their own good” ’, since the FührerPrinzip could be replaced by ‘the scarcely less totalitarian methods of direct rule’. Executive responsibility had been handed over to the Germans as soon as conditions allowed, and a fundamental principle had to be observed: [T]he principle which must be kept in mind is that Germany must save herself by her own exertions, and that the German authorities must, as far as possible, be responsible to their own citizens for the reconstruction of their land, within the limits laid down by the occupying powers, but it is emphatically not our policy to stifle the growth of German individualism and democratic re-­education by ‘mothering’ them in the interests of administrative efficiency.86

The bases for the administration of the Zone were situated in small towns in Westphalia, including Lübbecke, Bünde, Herford and Minden, all of which were within easy reach of Bad Oeynhausen (called ‘Bad Oyster’ by many a soldier), where the headquarters of 21 Army Group were located and near to Gut Ostenwalde, where Montgomery had his residence. Situating zonal headquarters in a large city was out of the question owing to high levels of destruction and overcrowding, but the dispersal of bases around the centre of the Zone in this way was also problematic. Michael Balfour says it was ‘like trying to rule England from Malvern, Ledbury, Tewkesbury, Worcester, Pershore, and Evesham’.87 Van Cutsem described the unsuitable location of the Headquarters of the Control Commission in a number of hopelessly overcrowded small towns, which entailed the geographical separation of its component parts and of the Headquarters of the various Divisions, as well as an endless succession of moves in the endeavour to find more suitable accommodation and communications for the build-­up in progress.88

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Figure 2.4  CCG Main HQ Lübbecke. [Source: BZR I (3) 27 October 1945.] There was a good chance that some Germans would hardly encounter anyone connected with Military Government. In a survey of experience of the Occupation in the four zones in 1945, 47 per cent of those asked said that British troops had been ‘little noticed’ (wenig bemerkt). In the other zones the figures were (for American, French, and Russian troops respectively): 36 per cent, 28 per cent, and 4 per cent). Overall this gave a figure of 32 per cent for the adult population. Comments ranged from the neutral or positive (‘They didn’t appear at all’, ‘I didn’t come into contact with any occupying authorities except that once a Tommy gave my children some chocolate’, ‘I have not met such kind people for a long time’) to the negative (‘The soldiers behaved like robbers at our farm. They searched for everything and stole what they could make use of. Mainly watches’, ‘I had imagined that things would be better. After their promises I believed they would have been more just’, ‘As a woman I was hit by an Englishman’).89 The survey was conducted in June 1950 among some 2,000 people in the Federal Republic (including West Berlin but excluding the Saarland). The question asked was: ‘What, generally speaking, was your experience in 1945 when the country was occupied?’ The results were: Table 2.1  Experience of the Occupation In Zone occupied by: British Troops American troops (%) French troops (%) Russian Troops (%) (%) Unpleasant Pleasant Noticed little

37 16 47

49 15 36

65  7 28

[Source: Noelle & Neumann, The Germans. Public Opinion Polls 1947–1966, 218.]

95  1  4

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Whenever there was criticism of the British occupiers, an exception was made for those who worked in Education Branch. They seem to have been egregiously acceptable to the German population in all that they did. But the German people became increasingly disillusioned as their expectations of the Occupation failed to be met. In the spring of 1947 Brigadier Van Cutsem could write of the ‘increasing apathy and hopelessness’ of the Germans: ‘their first typical reaction of willingness to serve Military Government in every way appears to be giving place to bitterness and resentment that the miracle [of improving their condition] has not been performed.’ This was the same Van Cutsem who produced a list of ‘do’s and don’t’s for dealing firmly with the German population (see Chapter 3).90

The Control Commission The structure of the Control Commission for Germany (British Element) was complex. The chain of command consisted of a not very clearly delineated sequence from Military Governor and Commander-­in-Chief via Chief of Staff and Deputy Military Governor, Chief Administrative Officer, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer; then indirectly President, Governance Sub-Commission – Deputy President – Specialist Adviser. Then there were administrative arrangements in the regions (Berlin, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Schleswig-Holstein, Niedersachsen – Hamburg) and the Regierungsbezirke in Nordrhein-Westfalen and Niedersachsen. Robertson described the organisation in Germany as ‘the whole machinery of government in miniature’.91

Figure 2.5  Structure of the Control Commission. [Source: F0371/55578.]

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Staffing the Control Commission posed many challenges. It was effectively an additional civil service with conditions distinct from those in place in England; posts ranged from high-­ranking positions (chief administrative officer, political adviser or educational adviser to the military governor, for example) to those at secretarial, technical and other support levels. Questions about recruitment were asked in Parliament from time to time, since there was concern about the calibre of those appointed, not least as a result of emerging press reports of high-­living, black-­market profiteering, and other misdemeanours among the British in Germany. On the whole, however, the staff of Education Branch were held in very high regard: they were ‘notable for their idealism and their dedication’.92 Charles Wheeler recalled that the ‘stars of the Control Commission were chiefly in its Education Branch’93 and Patricia Meehan, who had also worked in the British Zone after the War, could describe Education Branch as ‘unique in the Control Commission’: its staff had ‘the inestimable advantage over most other officials of the Occupation of familiarity with the language, history and culture of the country’. Most ‘had known a different Germany’.94 Hynd was asked in February 1946 to give information about the total officer establishment, its present strength, and whether the most suitably qualified officers were being attracted. Officer grades (service and civilian) were unlikely to exceed 8,000, Hynd replied. The strength was 6,456 (2,327 civilians; 4,129 armed forces officers).95 In a debate in March, Lt-Col. David Rees-Williams MP put a number of points about the staff of the Control Commission and the general difficulties of administering an occupied country with no government structure in place. Who are these people, these officers who have this immense power? There are 23 million Germans for whom my hon. Friend is responsible. To control them he has 6,456 officers. No one can say that is too many. [. . .] The military officers were recruited mainly as volunteers. The civilians, of course, had to be advertised for in various ways during the war. As I remember only too well, it was almost impossible to get men of the right calibre to go out to Germany. One can imagine that local authorities were not at all anxious to release men of first-­class ability to go out to a foreign land for an unknown period. Therefore, without wishing to be in any way unfair to these officers, who have done their best and done a good job, one can say that they are not in all cases of first class calibre. One could not expect them to be. That does not stop us from getting the best men in now, and that is the main purpose of my raising this subject. [. . .] There is no reason why we should not get first class men today.96

The conditions of employment, he argued, were not likely to attract ‘really first-­class men’: ‘we must face the fact that we want a civil service in Germany on civil service lines. If my hon. Friend does that he can get good men to go out there.’ Rees-Williams was followed in the debate by Maurice Edelman MP, who argued that the British civilian and military staff in Germany were ill-­equipped to deal with administration and government: [T]he Control Commission, and Allied Military Government, are today doing a task for which they were not designed. We remember how, during the war, as the

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troops moved forward G.5, or Civil Affairs, or Military Government moved up behind in order to carry out the transitional task of government, a transitional task which lasted as long as there was no civil administration of the people whose territory was temporarily occupied. The officers who were entrusted with the administration were people who very often had only had brief specialised courses in the conduct of civil affairs; they had had short and intensive periods of study on how to run a town and how to administer its public offices. They were qualified to deal with the immediate tasks of administration but were incapable of acting as long-­term administrators. The whole question of the long-­term administration of any country has always rested, and will always rest, in the hands of the trusted representatives of the country to be administered.97

Not surprisingly, there was instability in the staffing of the Control Commission. Some found their postings uncongenial and returned to the UK fairly quickly. Bevin was asked in November 1947 about Sir Norman Smith and his predecessors as Deputy Chief Administrative Officer (Policy). Smith had been in Germany for about a month; his predecessors, Armytage and Von der Heyde, had held the post for about eight months and two-­and-a-­half months respectively. During the six months ending 30 September there had been 1,598 resignations. Major Guy Lord MP asked Bevin: ‘Is it not rather a distressing state of affairs that some of our best men in Germany are leaving because they are so dissatisfied and exasperated by the policy or lack of policy which is imposed upon them? Is it not a fact that it is a most distressing state of affairs and that many more are going for the same reason?’ Bevin’s response demonstrated the uncertainty that still enveloped plans for the future of occupied Germany: I do not think it is due to lack of policy. When there is a state of flux, as there is in Germany, how can we have a complete fixed policy? It is impossible. What I am concerned about is to get to a position in Germany when I hope we shall have some idea of what the period of occupation is likely to be, and then, when we are in that position, to offer terms with some degree of security. Up to now, I have not been in that position.98

Lord Longford (as Pakenham later became) was asked in 1978 about the standing of CCG staff: ‘There were every sort of person. There were quite a number of crooks [. . .] stories of looting by quite high people, apart from lower down, and I dare say [. . .] such events happen [. . .] in most occupations.’ On the other hand there were people of ‘the utmost nobility’, ‘devoted social working women’ [sic], ‘a lot of extremely high minded people’; and there were ‘a lot of soldiers and businessmen who were just what you might call average types.’99 His Military Governor, Sholto Douglas, recalled in his memoirs that by the summer of 1947 ‘there were appearing in certain sections of our national Press [. . .] vindictive suggestions and personal allegations about looting levelled against even those of us who were in the most senior appointments’.100 The wording here is very careful: Douglas had left office in November 1947 embroiled in a controversy known as the SchaumbergLippe Affair, after the family who owned Schloss Bückeberg in Westphalia, from which

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large quantities of silver, together with paintings and other valuables, had been removed for the use of high-­ranking British officers. The matter was officially investigated and a journalist’s report on it appeared in the Daily Mail in July 1947.101 In the House of Lords Pakenham spoke of the ‘mean and quite unsubstantiated attacks [. . .] on our people in Germany’, deprecating an article describing ‘a typical member of the Control Commission as a “spiv” ’.102 Sefton Delmer wrote insultingly of what he called the ‘Gauleiters’ trained in Wimbledon to become civil affairs officers in Germany – they had been ‘weeded out by their C.O.s and posted to the Gauleiters’ course to get rid of them’.103 He had no time for such people working with Information Services Control. In general, Education Branch officers were not included in such negative criticism. Robert Birley would always praise them in any public or official forum, while at times being disparaging in private.

Donald Riddy and Education Branch Education Branch was situated in Bünde, a town of some 34,000+ inhabitants, situated 20 kilometres north of Bielefeld. The Internal Affairs and Communication Division (IA&C, of which Education Branch was a part) was based there, as were two others: that for Prisoners of War and Displaced Persons, and Political Division. By late July 1945 several streets in Bünde and about 300 houses had to be evacuated to accommodate CCG staff. A row of houses in the neighbouring community of Ennigloh was also requisitioned. The evacuated area in Bünde was cordoned off, and could only be entered by German citizens on presenting appropriate passes.104 In November 1946, Education Branch would move to Berlin; in April 1947, it would move back to the Zone, this time to Bad Rothenfelde. The impression gained from the large number of surviving Education Branch files is of an extraordinarily complex operation bedevilled by bureaucracy, uncertainty, duplication, understaffing and general frustration. The uneasy relationship between the military and the civilian staffs added to the problems, as did the complexity of the lines of communication between London and the Zone and Berlin, between the various Control Commission divisions and branches, and between British and German authorities. Documents had to be translated; interpreters had to be employed. There was much scope for confusion. Reports had to be written on a regular basis by town and Kreis Detachment officers; they often contained information that was already well known and so were destined only to be filed away.105 The newly appointed German administrative staff were called upon to provide Education Branch with detailed information requiring extensive surveys and inquiries. Data were being collected on a regular basis to inform decision making by Donald Riddy (in charge of Education Branch) and his colleagues. A note of September 1945, which was followed up only to be quickly dismissed, outlined the scale of the problem: 1. It is felt that too many demands for returns are being sent to the German authorities.

The Occupation and Evolution of Education Control

Figure 2.6 Organization of Education Branch.

2. At the moment the RB education authorities have 5 ‘surveys’ on hand. (1) a monthly report (2) comparison of numbers in 1939 & 1945 (for 1 Corps) (3) survey of children in school and those requiring schooling (4) survey of necessary repairs to buildings (5) Teacher Training in 1939, & requirements for 1945/6 3. This involves much work by Kreis Schulrats [sic], who are generally old, handicapped by lack of transport and length of time required for transmission of letters &c. The Kreise are in many cases large areas. 4. It is, to a certain extent, interfering with the work they should be carrying out, and hindering the re-starting of education. 5. The German authorities find the returns called for very complicated.

55

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Educating the Germans 6. Returns should be simpler, with notes on their completion, and ‘co-­ordinated’. It would seem that they are sent out without due consideration of educational administrative experience.106

The survey of necessary repairs to buildings alone would have been an onerous task with the limited resources available to the German authorities in the prevailing conditions. It might, however, have been rather more urgent than statistical comparisons with 1939. Kultusminister Adolf Grimme reported in early June 1946 that he was having to make do with six hours of sleep and was surprised that he could manage even that.107 An over-­accumulation of data is evident in the many hundreds of bulging CCG files on educational issues. There is many a tetchy memorandum attached to correspondence, and scarcely disguised irritation in communications among some CCG staff. Tempers were easily frayed. Thus we observe Donald Riddy fuming at an attempt by the Central Office for Industry in the British Zone to take control of vocational education at a time when responsibility for education was about to be passed to the Länder authorities108 and objecting to memorandum by a colleague in the Administration and Local Government Branch which ‘[rested] upon a complete misconception of the function of education, which I am afraid has characterized the [IA&C] Division in the last four months’.109 Or his staff member Mr Rayne complaining that an initiative in education in citizenship was being launched by PR/ISC without any reference to Education Branch.110 Or Robert Birley at a later stage annoyed with someone who had ‘dined with Sandie Lindsay at Balliol’ asking him for ‘the gen’ on the German Technische Hochschulen so that he could prepare for a lecture. (Birley fumed that this was as if a top civil servant at the Ministry of Education were asked for the gen on Manchester, etc.) Minor irritations might well be normal in many branches of government, but in post-­war Germany they were a symptom of the frustration CCG staff experienced on a daily basis in dealing with the heavy and clogging burden of administration and the need for interpretation into action of the steady flow of statements of policy. Awareness and observation of status was always a concern, so that in most correspondence between and among CCG and Foreign Office staff the precise job descriptions were given and addressees were meticulously adorned with their full titles and post-­nominals. The military were used to such niceties. And they had to tolerate the notionally equivalent Army ranks bestowed upon the civilian staff, who were required at first to wear hated blue battledress uniforms with CCG insignia and an epaulette band reading ‘Civilian Mil Gov Officer’. ‘CCG’ was dismissively rendered as ‘Charlie Chaplin’s Grenadiers’ or ‘Complete Chaos Guaranteed’.111 In addition to coping with their day-­to-day tasks of supervising educational provision in Germany, the staff of Education Branch had to make arrangements for visitors to the Zone, to prepare briefs for ministers needing to reply to questions in parliament, and to respond to queries on a large variety of topics from observers in the UK. In September 1945 Main Headquarters in Germany had to reply to a question from the Scottish Education Department, forwarded by Riddy, as to whether the use of German script in newly opened schools in Germany was (a) obligatory, (b) voluntary,

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or (c) forbidden.112 Such inconsequential and time-­consuming matters were clearly an irritation to hard-­pressed CCG staff. Donald Riddy had the day-­to-day task of running Education Branch from its very beginnings. Born in 1907 in Bedfordshire, Donald Charles Riddy was educated at Bedford Modern School and at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he read French and German, graduating with a double double first. He then taught modern languages, becoming head of a school department and eventually one of His Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. ‘I had done some administrative work in those posts,’ he recalled in 1978, the year before he died, ‘but that was far removed from living in a foreign country and having a part in the control of their education system.’113 According to his later account of how he came to be appointed to head the nascent Education Branch of the Control Commission, he was called to London by the Director of Establishments in the new Ministry of Education (instituted by the 1944 Education Act) and told about the plans

Figure 2.7  Donald Riddy, Director of Education Branch, in pensive mood on 27 June 1946. He inscribed this photograph ‘Said he to himself: I suppose things could be going worse – it is difficult to see how, though!’

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for the control of education in Germany once the War was over. A meeting was arranged with the Minister, R.A. Butler, who told Riddy that he wanted someone to work ‘with the soldiery’ and ‘act as a kind of personal representative of his [with] the right of direct access to him and through him to the Cabinet . . . I was by now being translated to a very high level and was somewhat bewildered when he said that he would rather like me to do this job.’ ‘I was all too conscious of my unworthiness for the job, after all I’d got no kind of experience that would entitle me to control German education.’ He recalled that his role, to begin with, was to be that of ‘adviser’, but ‘when no adviser was appointed I gradually found myself taking over the job of working out the plan that I had drawn up’. Mention of the role of ‘adviser’ was probably an oblique reference to the fact that the original intention had been to appoint someone else, a member of the Indian civil service, to be Director of Education Branch. Riddy was consequently to be described for some time as ‘Deputy Director’. The person in question was John Sargent (1888–1972), formerly Director of Education in Southend and Essex, Educational Commissioner and from 1942 Educational Adviser to the Government of India, but he could not be released from his post. The name of the broadcaster and economist Professor Lindley Fraser (1904–1963) was also mentioned, but he was ruled out because he had been a BBC German news commentator, under the aegis of the Political Warfare Executive, and so was associated, unhelpfully in this context, with wartime propaganda.114 The Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Professor E.R. Dodds, recorded that he was approached by the Foreign Office (in November 1944) to become educational ‘Adviser at Control Level’, since, as he put it, there was dissatisfaction ‘with the quality of the personnel it had been able to recruit for the educational side of “Mil. Gov” ’. He declined the offer, recalling rather grandiosely that: ‘In such a job with such a team the most that could be hoped for was a series of makeshift short-­term answers to long-­term questions.’115 Among the personnel with whom Dodds had dealings was Lieutenant-Colonel E.R. Gayre. He was an active member of Dodds’s committee on the re-­education of Germany, as a SHAEF representative. Gayre (1907–96) was working on education at SHAEF Headquarters. He had apparently had some success in dealing with educational issues in occupied Italy, first as ‘Educational Adviser’ with Military Government, subsequently as ‘Director of Education’ with the Allied Control Commission for Italy during 1943–44, and was regarded for a while as a future education supremo in Germany. His work in Italy had been praised, and officials in the Foreign Office had found him ‘helpful and intelligent’. In his Who’s Who entry he described himself as ‘Chief of Education and Religious Affairs, German Planning Unit, SHAEF, 1944’.116 He was in line to be ‘responsible, at least in the early stages of the occupation, for implementing policy in regard to the purging and reforming of education in Germany’.117 Gayre appears, however, to have held unacceptable racialist views – he was friendly with and approved of the notorious racial theorist H.F.K. Günther (Rassen-Günther – ‘Race-Günther’, 1891–1968) – and he was also something of a self-­important fantasist, reinventing himself at various intervals. (Having changed his surname from Gair to Gayre, he would later style himself ‘Robert Gayre of Gayre and Nigg’.) It was argued in the Foreign Office that there were doubts about his academic qualifications,118 and inquiries revealed that though he claimed to be an anthropologist he was disowned by the Royal Anthropological Institute.

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Dodds took the trouble to report on Gayre’s book Teuton and Slav on the Polish Frontier (1944), and increasing concerns about giving him any responsibility in the sensitive area of education reached a high level, with Sir Alexander Cadogan writing to Sir Frederick Bovenschen, joint permanent under-­secretary of state at the War Office, to set out the disquiet of the Foreign Office and to ask that serious consideration be given to the desirability of Gayre’s continuing in his post.119 At least one US officer on Gayre’s staff was ‘disturbed about the character and qualification of his chief ’, and Gilbert Murray was said to be expressing anxiety that Gayre should be involved with German re-­education, given the character of his book.120 Kirkpatrick had minuted that it was ‘intrinsically undesirable that a man with this record should be employed on educational matters concerned with Germany. Apart from that there is almost certain to be a row [with the Americans] if HMG do continue so to employ him’.121 Dodds reported that ‘Germans will read [Gayre’s] book with interest, to find out what manner of man it is who has undertaken to “re-­educate” them’.122 The book draws on Günther’s work, in particular including a sixteen-­page series of illustrations based on editions of Günther’s Rassenkunde and showing skulls and profiles of racial types.123 A short piece on Gayre appeared soon afterwards in the New Statesman and Nation which also included a dig at Kirkpatrick (described as ‘a cynical reactionary in politics’). The author of the comments, who had heard that Gayre might become ‘Chief Education Officer’ in Germany, wrote: ‘I first heard of Gayre as the only Englishman who agreed with the racial philosophy of the Nazis. [. . .] [He] bases his views about the post-­war world on strictly racial lines. I cannot believe that this appointment can really be made.’124 Gayre’s involvement at this important stage of planning is indicative of the general problem of finding individuals qualified to undertake the sensitive work required. Of Sir Frederick Bovenschen it has been said that shortcomings in military government while he was in office were the result not of the decisions of his committees but arose ‘primarily from mistakes in staffing’.125 The proposed appointment of Gayre seems to have been an egregious example of such mistakes. This gives the impression of an administrative shambles, even before the work in Germany had begun. Someone was urgently needed to mastermind the efforts in education in Germany. That someone had to be knowledgeable about Germany and its educational history and to be competent in German. It was not unreasonable in the circumstances to look to the ranks of His Majesty’s Inspectors for such a person, and Riddy seemed a good choice. And yet there was still dissatisfaction and an expectation that a more prominent figure might emerge who could head the operation, with an efficient deputy who would be the principal implementer of policy. It would be some time before Riddy would be given the status initially intended for someone else. Riddy’s eventual confirmation as Director was not to prove straightforward, however. Discussion involved both the Foreign Secretary and the Minister of Education, but the real decision rested with the powerful Foreign Office duo of John Troutbeck and Ivone Kirkpatrick. A minute of 22 February 1945 by Troutbeck (1894–1971), at the time head of the Foreign Office German Department and involved since October 1943 (as adviser on Germany) in planning for the Occupation, suggested, ‘as our own educational world has fallen down on the business’, that a Canadian might be found for

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the post: ‘I should like to make one more attempt before throwing our hand in.’ Troutbeck showed a haughty disdain for the new Ministry of Education and a mandarin’s concern to ‘place’ appointees within an established hierarchy: I have nothing against Mr Riddy whatever. He seems to me, from what I have seen of him, a conscientious, efficient and painstaking official. But to entrust the re-­ education of Germany to a man who up to a few months ago was no more than a minor inspector of schools – holding a rank lower than a first secretary – would be regarded, and justly, as a clear proof that we are not taking this business seriously. It seems to me perfectly deplorable that the Ministry of Education can do no better than that.126

Oliver Harvey (Foreign Secretary Eden’s Private Secretary) minuted ‘I favour reluctantly accepting Mr Riddy of whom Mr Kirkpatrick speaks well’. Butler wrote to Eden on 14 February, having canvassed the views of the Vice-Chancellors of Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities: ‘The correspondence has not . . . yielded any probable candidate whose qualifications would not be better than those of Mr Riddy.’ He proposed that Riddy should continue ‘at present without prejudice to the appointment of someone senior if a suitable candidate can be found’. He added in his own hand: ‘I am sure that we should have somebody suitable or go on as we are. It is a most awkward & difficult job.’ A draft was prepared for Eden to reply to Butler approving Riddy’s appointment: My dear Rab, [. . .] It is rather disappointing that no suitable candidate can be found. In the circumstances it seems to be that the best thing would be to appoint Mr Riddy, who I understand is doing excellent work, to the post. I feel it might be rather unfair to him to ask him simply to carry on without prejudice to the appointment of someone senior if a suitable candidate can be found. You mention Professor Lindley Fraser, but quite apart from the question of his availability I understand that Kirkpatrick (who is at present the civil head of the British Element of the Control Commission and who knows Professor Fraser well) is inclined to think that Riddy would do the job better than he. In these circumstances I feel inclined to appoint Riddy definitively to the post; and if you agree I shall proceed to authorize Kirkpatrick to do so.127

Riddy found himself a week later drawing up a war establishment in Norfolk House at 31 St James’s Square. He had help from ‘high military officers’ and some guidance in the directive he was given which stated the principles on which the control of education in Germany should be based: This was a very admirable document, It had only one snag about it from my point of view. It presupposed that the appearance of Allied armies at Germany’s frontiers would mean that Germany would surrender. We would therefore take over a

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Germany that was a going concern. Education Branch would be established in Berlin, the German Minister would be given certain orders and told to do certain things and they would be done. The principles were sound enough, the main one being – which would have been obvious to anyone who’d thought the thing out, I suppose – that the control would have to be indirect.

Here Riddy identifies the fundamental problem with war-­time planning. Wars had usually ended with negotiated settlement, with a peace treaty of some kind. At an early stage of the War such an outcome of the hostilities was anticipated. But with time it became clear that the aim would have to be the unequivocal defeat and surrender of Germany. Even so, it was expected until it was almost too late that some kind of German government and administrative machinery would be in place once Germany had lost the War. Much planning had been undertaken on that basis. Planning was turned on its head once unconditional surrender became a reality. Riddy had to decide how to begin the huge task of organising an embryo Education Branch while based in London. He started with staffing (which was to prove a constant concern for him: he would be frequently arguing for a sufficient complement of people to work with him) and with concerns about the potential needs of schools – buildings, equipment, books. In the event the task of physical reconstruction was the greatest immediate challenge, and it is not surprising that it came immediately to Riddy’s mind as the priority when he looked back on his role in Germany. He was soon summoned to SHAEF Headquarters in Versailles, together with American officers who had been working with him. Records show that Riddy was present at a meeting at SHAEF chaired by Brigadier General McSherry on 13 November, when a working group was set up ‘to formulate and agree upon suggested policies and instructions, the provision and training of officers, the supply of textbooks and teaching materials and other matters in the field of Education as might be of assistance to G–5 SHAEF and to the Army Groups’.128 Riddy recalled: ‘We were told that our job was to produce a technical manual for the Allied armies moving into Germany on education and religious affairs. [. . .] We produced this technical manual which was issued in February 1945.’129 At the meeting it was agreed that final revisions would be made to the chapter on education and religious affairs in the Handbook and that the production of the technical manual should be the next priority. It would be produced in instalments according to the needs in the field, and the emphasis would be on elementary education in the first instance; suggestions for the technical manual would be made ‘within a week, if possible’. Secondary and vocational education would be ‘third priorities’. Later in November a revised version of the Directive was sent from SHAEF for Army Group Commanders.130 It began: It is the policy of the Supreme Commander to eradicate Nazi-­ism and German militarism in all their aspects from the German educational system. It is unlikely that this object can be fully achieved during the Supreme Commander’s period of responsibility. Nevertheless, everything possible should be done to initiate the process.

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School buildings and equipment would not be used ‘except as required by military necessity’. This would prove to be a major problem, since in the event many buildings were indeed used by the military, and for a considerable period. All Nazi educational organizations and schools (Adolf Hitler Schulen, Napolas, Ordensburgen) would be abolished and their records and property sequestered. German teachers would be instructed to eliminate from their teaching anything that: a. Glorifies militarism, expounds the practice of war or of mobilization and preparation for war, whether in the scientific, economic or industrial fields or the study of military geography. b. Seeks to propagate, revive or justify the doctrine of Nazi-­ism or to extol the achievements of Nazi leaders. c. Favours a policy of discrimination on grounds of race or religion. d. Is hostile to, or seeks to disturb the relations between any of the United Nations. Any infringement of these provisions will be cause for immediate dismissal and punishment.

Nazi youth organizations would be abolished, as would the Deutsche Volksbildungswerk, which had been responsible for adult education. An appendix to the Directive provided details of the black, grey and white categories into which German educational personnel were to be divided. After twelve months of educational reconstruction in the Zone, a summary of the problems still existing made gloomy reading, despite the many advances made: The first year of occupation has [. . .] provided practical experience of the problem, which before could be only imperfectly appreciated. It has focused attention on three main aspects:(a) the profound ignorance of the vast majority of the Germans, even in those sections of the community where enlightenment might be supposed to reside, of what has really gone on in and outside Germany since 1933; (b) the almost equal lack of understanding of the basic concepts of democracy and of the purpose and use of its commonest institutions; and (c) the unsuitability of many German teachers and professors to be effective agents in the education of German youth and to the ideals expressed in the long-­term objective above, an unsuitability resulting partly from their own professional training, even where this took place before 1933, partly from what may for the sake of brevity be called their German character.131

Once Riddy moved to Germany, he was closely involved with policy making at all levels. There is evidence that he would draft speeches for Montgomery, who habitually called him Philip. He proved himself to be a master of detail, showing a profound understanding of the many issues with which he was confronted.

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Ellen Wilkinson and the Ministry of Education It is surprising that the new Ministry of Education in London, established by the 1944 Education Act, did not play a more significant role in educational reconstruction in Germany. HMI Donald Riddy had of course been recruited to Education Branch, first in London and then in Bünde. And the first Minister of Education in the 1945 Labour government, the formidable and popular Ellen Wilkinson (1891–1947), had written about Germany in the 1930s132 and understood the scale of the tasks the staff of Education Branch were facing. According to Edith Davies, she had put education in Germany ‘high on her list of priorities’ after taking office. But implementing the 1944 Act – especially planning for raising the school leaving age from fourteen to fifteen – and her later involvement with the founding of UNESCO, undoubtedly consumed most of her energies: she was to die in office aged fifty-­six. She visited Berlin and the Zone in her first months as Minister, apparently impressing on Davies and her colleagues the importance of their work to the children of Germany, and arranging for the introduction of ‘a modest school meal’.133 Something of her ingrained dislike of convention was evident when she kept addressing a brigadier as ‘captain’: after this was pointed out to her she said she only knew the ranks in the Fire Service, of which she had gained intimate knowledge as a parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Home Security during the War.134 Wilkinson was in Germany from 2 to 6 October 1945. She was met by Riddy and, like many others, stayed at the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg. Her extensive report on the visit impressed the civil servants who read it: it was wide ranging and cogently argued, and it covered issues beyond those associated with education.135 She mentioned the two principal aims in the early stages of education policy: to set up ‘an acceptable and efficient German administration’ (‘largely completed’ at this stage); and to get the German administrators to open the schools ‘in reasonably tolerant conditions’. She had learnt that Education Branch was short of staff, Riddy having fifty-­ four Control Officers ‘in the field’ and estimating that an additional 113 were ‘urgently needed’. Of particular interest, however, are her impressions of various school visits. ‘On the whole’, she writes, ‘the teachers whom we saw at work made a favourable impression, though the discipline seems to me unnecessarily strict for small children’. Con O’Neill noted in the margin of the report at this point ‘The German tradition’. (He found Wilkinson’s report ‘very interesting and readable, not merely on education’, and hoped that it would lead to more assistance from the Ministry of Education to Education Branch.) Her impressions of the schools she visited will be referred to in Chapter 3.

Consolidation of policy and development, 1947–49 It is now three years and 3 months since the end of the war, the beginning of the Occupation of Germany and the beginning of an educational experiment which is probably unique in history.136

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In July 1946, General Robertson summarized in his evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Estimates what had been achieved in education in Germany so far: We have a staff which devotes itself exclusively to this subject, and an official who has been very carefully selected for the purpose, and they got very busy very quickly when we took over this country. I might also add that Field Marshal Montgomery gave very personal attention and impulse to this matter from the start, because he placed great importance on the matter of youth. The schools have been reopened with, I think, remarkable rapidity. [. . .] There have been, of course, certain physical difficulties. To start with, a great many of the schools were destroyed and, owing to the general destruction of housing, a certain number of schools were being used for purposes other than that for which they were intended. That was the first big difficulty. The second big difficulty was that there were, practically speaking, no teachers, because all the teachers who were there were teachers of the Nazi regime; they had to be removed, and the building up of a teaching staff has been extremely difficult, but very great progress has been made in it. The third big difficulty is the difficulty of books, because clearly all the school books had to be gone through; the majority of them had to be discarded. Reproduction of school books is a very difficult matter because of the shortage of paper and so forth, but those difficulties have been largely overcome, and I think that statistics show that the education of the children of Germany has been revived to a satisfactory degree – I would say, to a very satisfactory degree. The universities also have been re-­opened and are going well. They suffer from lack of accommodation and from the other difficulties to which I have referred, and they naturally require very special attention, because the training of the young adolescent or of the youth is a matter to which one must pay even more attention under present circumstances than to the training of the children. If things are going to go wrong during the next few years, it will probably be the young fellows in the universities who will make them go wrong. We have a teacher training scheme to fill in the gaps created by the de-­nazification, and we are working out a scheme of scholarships at the universities. We have asked the Zonal Advisory Council to study that problem carefully, including the free education of those who are likely to make teachers.

The period 1947–49 begins with the handing-­over of control over education, as a ‘dereserved’ subject, to German authorities, and it ends with the emergence of the western zones as the Federal Republic of Germany and those of the east as the German Democratic Republic. It includes the creation of Bizonia (the economic fusion of the British and US Zones), the drama of the Berlin Airlift, and the currency reform. In terms of the tasks in education, it sees the early reconstruction work transform further into advice, encouragement and persuasion as a future independent Germany is envisaged. The work of Education Branch would eventually be wound down, but first it was given added impetus by the arrival of Robert Birley as Educational Adviser to the Military Governor and diminished by the departure of Donald Riddy.

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In February 1948, after he had left his post in Germany, Riddy took part in a radio discussion in the United States with William Henry Draper, Under-Secretary of the US Army and formerly economic adviser to General Clay in Germany, and John W. Taylor, formerly chief of the Education and Religious Affairs Branch of the US Office of Military Government for Germany (with whom Riddy had worked for a year in London prior to D-Day.) What was still needed to ensure the peace, he argued, was a change of outlook in the Germans who were going to run the economic machine. But ‘I don’t like this word “re-­education”; to me it implies that the indoctrination which the Nazis used in their schools is also a form of education’. The Germans in the British Zone had been given the fullest possible scope for action – ‘that indeed itself was part of their re-­education’. The aim was to encourage the individual pupils to think for themselves, form their own judgments and act accordingly. ‘We thought it very important to build from the bottom upwards. We are less impressed by high-­sounding directives emanating from a Minister of Education than the fact that the ordinary teacher in the schools accepts those ideas and is willing to carry them out.’ In addition: There aren’t enough [good] Germans to go round for all purposes. To take the educational sphere alone: we want the best men and only the best in as Ministers of Education, as Rectors of universities, as heads of teacher training colleges, as heads of the schools, and indeed as individual teachers. And I think there is only going to be one solution to this: the young men have got to be brought forward. And that won’t be a very easy problem in Germany, because there [is] a natural sort of suspicion of the young men. A German minister told me that most of his colleagues regarded a German inspector under the age of 45 as a positive danger because of his youth.

Practical problems still abounded too: At the time I left Germany, to give each German child one sheet of foolscap paper a day, for arithmetic, history, art, German and all the other subjects together, would require four times the amount of paper there is for all educational purposes – teachers, universities textbooks, etc.137

Ordinance No.57 and Education Branch Riddy’s final year in Germany had been severely troubled by problems concerning the future of Education Branch. With the planned dereservation of education from 1 January 1947, there were inevitable questions about his future role and that of his staff. Members of the Branch held strong views on the timing of such a change, with many expressing their outright opposition, especially if there was to be a diminution of the British role in education. The Occupation was costing the British government some £80 million in 1946–47. It was inevitable that there would be a gradual winding-­down of the controls exercised in Germany partly for reasons of cost and partly as a further step in the progression

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towards the creation of an independent and democratically elected German government. The provisions of Ordinance No.57 meant that from the beginning of 1947 control over certain areas would be handed over to German authorities: the legislatures of the Länder would have powers to make laws in particular domains subject to their implementing ‘fundamental principles’ laid down by Military Government. Such laws would be presented to the Regional Commissioner for approval. The Ordinance listed twenty subjects excluded from the competence of Land legislatures and further lists of subjects where emergency powers were exercised by Military Government, those temporarily excluded from the competence of Land authorities, and those required to follow ‘fundamental principles’. The latter list did not include education, though Control Council Directive No.54 of 25 June had set down ‘basic principles for the ‘guidance’ of Zone commanders and the Allied Kommandatura in Berlin. And so December 1946 saw the beginning of the end of direct control over education in the British Zone, and the lead-­up to the publication of Ordinance 57 caused considerable problems for Donald Riddy. Education Branch staff expressed concern about this handing over of control to German authorities. For many of them, the basic work of reconstruction was by no means complete and the change in their status had come far too early. In November 1946, a meeting of the staff of the Branch took place, and Riddy’s deputy sent him an outspoken memorandum summarizing their discussions. The whole future of education in Germany was now at stake, it recorded, and staff members were united in support of any action Riddy might take to retrieve the position, whether or not their individual futures were to be affected by whatever he might do. Despite the high praise the Branch had received from the Control Office, it was argued, the latest developments went against Riddy’s accounts of its work and needs to the Chancellor. The staff would have confidence in working under the Regional Commissioners if the Educational Adviser (as it was suggested Riddy should now be called) had direct access to the Deputy Military Governor and could advise him. A Cultural Affairs Division should be set up and an interview with the Deputy Military Governor (General Erskine) was now needed. If the Director feels that he can get no satisfaction or encouragement in this question, it would seem to [the staff of the Branch] that the only course open to him is to resign.138

Riddy should return to England and enlist support from people like Cardinal Griffin, the Bishop of Chichester, Victor Gollancz, Kenneth Lindsay, the Standing Committee of Youth Organisations, Lord Montgomery, Lord Lindsay, Lord Chorley, Lord Aberdare, Miss Deneke, Archdeacon Bickersteth and Mr Birley. People ‘like’ them would presumably have been others among the great and the good concerned to help in Germany. The strength of dissatisfaction was such that the whole Branch was prepared to resign (individually, since for civil servants to do so en masse would have been legalistically problematic.) The memorandum concluded:

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[The Branch members] wish to offer you their sympathy in the intolerable situation which has arisen, and would like to express in this more formal way, what you know already – their conviction that the case of education in Germany, for which you and they have worked all this time, is for you, as for them, more important than any other considerations.

A private letter to Riddy of 19 November from Ian Carlisle of Textbook Section, who was at the Branch meeting, demonstrates the scale of the problems: [. . .] during the past few days I have noticed a very general feeling of despondency, which has been expressed with criticism. I believe I am right in saying that these very deep misgivings as to the future would not be allayed by any assurances as to how the Regional Commissioners or even the D.M.G. intend to interpret and implement the proposed changes. Only a reversal of the policy to hand over such far reaching powers in Education to the Länder Governments would give the required assurances. Moreover members of Ed Br feel that Educationists at home, as soon as they become aware of the facts and their implications, will be gravely concerned at present developments. Unless we do everything possible to protest against these at this stage, we shall be held – and justifiably – to be indirectly responsible. Conversely they feel that any firm stand against these threatened developments would have the full support of all sound enlightened forces at home. We are more convinced of this because this attitude has been expressed by a number of people in other Divisions to members of Education Branch during the past few days. And of course any such action which you took along these lines would have the full support of the members of Ed Br. Might I make a suggestion as to how the gap between yourself and members of Ed Br might again be bridged? At the forthcoming meeting you should lay before members – with complete detachment – the results of your conversations with the Regional Commissioners and General Erskine. You should then ask members to decide whether these assurances have in any way altered their formerly expressed conviction that the matter must be now fought at the highest possible level in London. If they decide that in spite of your conversations with the Regional Commissioners and the DG, it is still necessary for you to resign and fight the matter as a free person, you should intimate your willingness to do so. I feel convinced that if the decision is left to the members of Ed Br, they will only make it in what they believe to be the interests of the Branch and yourself, I feel that if matters are conducted in this way, there will be every opportunity of regaining the confidence of the Branch, which has understandably been to some extent lost through the developments of the past few weeks.

He adds that ‘at the coming meeting’ he wished to put these questions: Under the proposed new arrangement what guarantees have we of the following points:

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68 1. 2. 3. 4.

Control of personnel – appointments & dismissal – at the leading levels. Control of Text Books Control over what is being taught in schools. How far, if at all, was the advice of Education Branch sought before the decision about the transfer of powers was taken?139

Riddy put together a very personal statement in which his despair is clearly evident. It has been made clear to me that Education Branch is to cease to be in the very near future. I myself am to be deprived of all administrative and executive responsibility and to become the so-­called Educational Adviser to the Chief, having the support of a very small staff indeed. Education will henceforth be regarded as nothing more than a secretariat function, coming under a Chief Secretary who will be directly responsible to the Chief of the Division. [. . .] The proposed change is calculated to reinforce the very evils we should be seeking to remove, evils which have called for recent outspoken criticism in the House and the press at home. [. . .] [I]t would be a great mistake to assume that the re-­education of Germany is a mere administrative problem. [. . .] To persuade the Germans to a new way of life, to alter their character moulded by history, tradition and (very importantly) their education system is a very different matter. For one thing, it involves the maximum personal contact with Germans. Which is why the weight of Education Branch Main HQ should be in the Zone, not in BERLIN at all. For another, there are no precedents on which to draw (or at any rate no very promising ones.) [. . .] I see no likelihood of the new organisation working smoothly, quite apart from the inherent weaknesses in the system. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that, if the experience of the last few months is any indication, I and my staff might as well go home.

His advice was rarely sought, and when it was it was apparently only so that it could be rejected; there was failure to take action on matters vital to the Branch, even when help was specifically asked for (in the supply of paper, for example); only through the support of General Bishop of PR/ISC was it possible for attention to be paid to the work needed with the eighteen to thirty age group. He concluded: I would like to say that I believe the record of Education Branch, despite its understaffing from the beginning, will bear comparison with that of any other Branch or Division of CCG. I hear high praise of it from almost every visitor (the most recent being the Bishop of Chichester). Its record during the last months

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however begins to look less well, and soon the question must be asked why. The time has come for us to show by positive deed that we are in earnest about our resolve to carry out one of the few clauses of the Potsdam agreement that, so far as I know, has never been criticized: German Education shall be so controlled as completely to eliminate Nazi and militarist doctrines and to make possible the successful development of democratic ideas. But the decision must be taken quickly, before the situation becomes irretrievable through the loss of invaluable and experienced officers either by resignation or redundancy (following on the recent decision to cut the small existing establishment by a further 15%.)

Riddy included a statement on his personal position: As a result of all this, my personal position is rapidly becoming intolerable. I am having to neglect important work to fight battles that should need no fighting. I am having from loyalty to my superiors to defend to my Branch policies and methods, or the lack of them, which I know to be wrong. I am losing their confidence. Only last week I was faced with a memorandum speaking about a resignation ‘en masse’, a gesture which would have very serious repercussions in view of the personal connexions the members of the Branch have, the contacts they have established over here, and their general sincerity of character. I fear I shall not much longer be able to hold them, particularly at a moment like this when I have to be away from the office so much on my travels to Berlin and the Regions.

A later document in Riddy’s hand reveals his frustration at lack of consultation and at failure to take his advice, as well as his difficult relationship with the head of I&AC Division. He had ‘not a sight of the Ordinance on the Transfer of Power to the Länder’ until he went to Berlin and asked for it personally. A letter to him of 30 October 1946 from Julian Simpson, the Australian Chief of IA&C Division who had taken up his £2,000 a year post in May,140 is indicative of the problem: You will have seen from the speech of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs that by the 1st January 1947 it is intended to hand over the responsibility for education to the Land Governments.141 It will be necessary, therefore, for the Land Governments to enact some form of legislation as a matter of urgency. What form that legislation is to take is under consideration here. Our object must be to ensure that it is in accordance with the principles that hitherto have governed our policy in connection with education. Once, however, we hand over the responsibility to the Land Governments, whilst we can tell them what they must not do we may have to rely upon persuasion in so far as the things we want them to do are concerned. As it is not proposed that the future Central Government of Germany shall have any direct control over education it would seem to follow that whatever the

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Educating the Germans Headquarters of Military Government may do with reference to it, must be done by virtue of their position as the Occupying Power. Clearly it will be necessary for the Regional Commissioners to discuss these matters with the Ministers Präsident and Ministers of Education, and I am sure they will welcome your assistance and support at these conversations. Before setting on this, however, I think you and I should discuss the whole matter and, as I cannot leave Berlin at the moment, I hope you will find it convenient to visit me here in the course of the next few days, Meanwhile, I expect you are turning over in your mind the consequences so far as your Branch [is] concerned, that will flow from this policy decision of H.M.G., and naturally I am anxious to discuss this with you as soon as possible. I also wish to discuss an idea I have concerning the setting up of governing bodies for the principal education institutions.

This letter makes no attempt to disguise the fact that Riddy had been bypassed in whatever discussions had taken place about the intention to make education a dereserved area of operation, and it must have been something of an insult to Riddy’s position as head of a branch that had achieved so much by this time, and that had so much still to do. Riddy’s note describes his difficult personal relationship with the IA&C chief and the latter’s attitude towards Education Branch: The Chief is determined to obliterate Education Branch. [This] may be due to a purely personal dislike of me, which undoubtedly exists, but it goes deeper, I am convinced. Why otherwise should he be so set upon the elimination of the REO and Tech & Adult Section, and indeed call for a justification of Youth Section’s very existence? If it were only personal, he could easily have me removed. Why also should he refuse to entrust Education Branch with the working out of the Bureau of Education in Citizenship scheme, setting out all sorts of specious objections, but none that could carry weight for one moment with an impartial judge. By taking this line, he has done the cause in Germany incalculable harm.

Though there are elements here of Riddy’s touchy and impatient personality, the frustration at the behaviour of his superiors in Berlin, distant from the day-­to-day tasks of educational reconstruction in the Zone, is understandable. Against this unhappy background, and with the arrival in April 1947 of Robert Birley, it became clear, as Arthur Hearnden has put it, that ‘Riddy had to go’. This proved to be the case during the summer. On the question of the timing of the hand-­over to German authorities of control over educational matters there was considerable concern among Education Branch officers. Tom Creighton, later to serve as Robert Birley’s assistant in Berlin, expressed his strong views on the subject in a letter to Professor Dodds: Educational reform is rendered doubly difficult by the fact that we have lately divested British Military Government of its most important power, the right to

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control education, over which the Germans now have unrestricted rights and the education officers only advisory functions. There are a lot of arguments on both sides about this [. . .], but I am clear in my own mind that the right if difficult answer is a stronger education service and very full control, not the despairing abandonment of control.142

Some university officers also held strong views on the matter, especially since they felt that by the end of 1946 their work on fundamental reconstruction was not complete. Caroline Cunningham in Kiel considered it ‘ill-­conceived and far too early. To say I was shocked when I heard is to put it mildly’. Harry Beckhough in Cologne felt that the German authorities were not ready for such a change: The universities were to be given more freedom to rule themselves, leading to Angst, internal squabbles and destruction of real forward progress for years.

Others noticed no difference and regarded the transition as a natural process, a logical development of established good relationships. Peter Whitley in Berlin saw that there was ‘an obvious change in our modus operandi; – i.e. “influence” rather than “control” ’. When the new arrangements came into effect, Robertson wrote to the Regional Commissioners and Chiefs of Divisions with information to be transmitted to every officer of the Control Commission. He described the general change: We shall in future intervene . . . only to the extent necessary to ensure the purposes of our occupation. Very briefly, our purposes are to prevent the revival of Germany as an aggressive power and to encourage her revival as a democratic and peace-­ loving member of the comity of nations . . . CCG will cease to issue more than broad policy directives . . . At lower levels . . . our officers will inspect, assist, when their assistance is invoked, and report to Region HQ: they will issue no executive instructions themselves.

He recognized that some officers would find it difficult ‘to loosen the fingers of their grasp on the German machine’: But they must do so. If they attempt to hang on when they should let go, they will defeat our policy and will cause embarrassment in our relations with the Americans.

The German authorities welcomed Ordinance 57. A sense of the new beginning it signalled can be seen in a message from Christine Teusch, Minister of Education in Nordrhein-Westfalen, sent a year after the new arrangements came into force and triggered by a perception that some schools were being unco-­operative. It imagined the most positive co-­operation between the British and German administration in Germany. The English translation is idiosyncratic in many places, but is worth quoting as a description of how the new dispensation in educational governance was perceived by someone at the top of educational administration:

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Educating the Germans [T]he British Education Officers have no more the character of controllers of the German School Administration, nor of the teachers employed by it. Their task is moreover that of advisers and it is their concern to assist in the reconstruction of the Education and instruction of our Land. In the administration of the schools (Schulverwaltung) this co-­operation is carried through in a spirit of mutual confidence and is based on frank discussions of professional questions. It is of great value to the German administrative officers to hear the point of view of the British Educationalists on questions of pedagogic principles, and to be able to inform themselves of the way such questions are dealt with in England, without a foreign solution being pressed on them. The friendly co-­operation of the British and German Educators – based fully on freedom – serves at the same time the common task of the Educators of all peace-­loving nations, to develop a spirit of reconciliation and co-­operation for the benefit of mankind. Up to this date the amicable co-­operation has only been carried through partly by some schools and by their staff or teachers. It is my wish that all teachers should co-­operate with the British Education Officers in the same spirit of goodwill as Education Administrative officials do, and to discuss together as colleagues questions regarding education and instruction.143

Robert Birley With the initial phase of physical reconstruction in education well under way, it was felt that a further initiative in education was necessary to boost its status. There was still talk of upgrading Education Branch to a Division, but Robertson was against the creation of further administrative units. In January 1947, the Minister of Education, Ellen Wilkinson, sent the Foreign Secretary a memorandum on education in the British Zone (dated 20 December 1946) written by Robert Birley, then headmaster of Charterhouse, following a visit he had made to Germany. She had discussed his visit with him and had asked him to write a memorandum. She found Birley to be ‘a man of great ability and real educational knowledge’.144 She also sent a copy to John Hynd. On the strength of this opportune visit and the involvement of the powerful quartet of John Maud (Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Education), Wilkinson, Bevin and Hynd, it was not surprising that Birley was thought of in connection with a post in Germany that might raise the profile of educational policy and its implementation. A Foreign Office note of 30 December 1946 – so preceding Wilkinson’s note to Bevin – indicates that Robertson had suggested appointing Birley to a new post as ‘Educational Adviser with enlarged responsibilities over Re-­education generally’.145 Birley’s name was being canvassed several weeks before Hynd announced his appointment, on 12 February 1947: he would be ‘Adviser on Education to the Deputy Military Governor and will co-­ordinate, supervise and inspire all re-­educational work in the British zone of Germany, whether it is carried out by the Education Branch or by other branches of the Control Commission. [Mr Riddy], the present head of Education

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Figure 2.8  Robert Birley, Educational Adviser to the Military Governor. Next to him is Adolf Grimme, Education Minister of Niedersachsen. Branch, whose admirable work is known to many Members of the House, is remaining to assist Mr. Birley.’146 Born in 1903, Robert Birley was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford, gaining a first in history in 1925. He then taught at Eton, moving to Charterhouse as a young headmaster in 1935. He quickly became known as a leading figure in the Headmasters’ Conference and demonstrated an easy charm as he moved among the upper echelons of British society. He served on the Fleming Committee which reported in 1944 on the association between the Public Schools and the general education system. The work of this committee brought him into further close contact with establishment figures: its members included the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. It also brought him to the attention of influential people in the then Board of Education. Birley had been positioning himself as someone with important points to make about the future of Germany. He had written a letter to The Times on 5 May 1945 on the subject of re-­education: ‘Would it not be well to consider the problem of re-­education,

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and especially to decide what kind of country we expect a “re-­educated” Germany to be?’ The real crime of the German people was to have allowed the Nazis to rise to power; they were politically irresponsible; the future should be built on the foundation of a rediscovered national tradition; the Germans must ‘learn to respect the Slavs’. ‘Perhaps the acid test of German re-­education will be their readiness to accept the Czechs and the Poles as people with cultures and traditions of their own.’ In August 1945, he was corresponding with (old Rugbeian) Julian Bickersteth about the ‘admirable plan’ of restarting the élite Salem School (founded in 1920 by Kurt Hahn) ‘under anti-Nazi German teachers’, especially with the help of Hahn, who would be ‘better fitted’ than ‘most German teachers’ to inculcate in pupils some sense of responsibility. What he had to say in more general terms was unsurprising: It seems to me that we must face the issue that we shall be responsible for the actual education of German children, at least for a good many years. One of the causes of the Nazi’s [sic] rise to power was the inadequacy of German education, one of the ways in which they secured the retention of power was their control of education. We cannot leave a vacuum. If we do, it may well be filled by some type of Nazism.147

Birley was later to visit the British Zone (for twenty-­six days, from 5 November to 2 December 1946) at the invitation of (old Etonian) John Maud and to write the report on his experience which had so impressed Ellen Wilkinson. He also produced an article for The Times following that brief visit. To his credit, he later came to regret not checking the information he had used in this hastily written piece.148 The recommendations in Birley’s Memorandum were described – with typically faint praise – as ‘sensible and familiar’ by an official in the Foreign Office. Birley had made sure that his ideas on education in the Zone gained wider publicity by publishing the piece in The Times which contained, as a note in the Foreign Office file points out, the gist of his Memorandum. Duncan Wilson of the FO’s German Department noted: Most of Mr Birley’s points are good; and some of them could be met (some have in fact been met) by increasing the burden on the British taxpayer. But he does not show any appreciation of the material difficulties involved, e.g. in getting newsprint or books with kroner in Sweden.

There is an impression of edginess evident in many a Foreign Office minute on such reports by outsiders. An occasional original aperçu was sometimes given credence and even followed by action; but often (as here) there is a tone of weariness in the terse minutes of the civil servants who had to spend time reading such documents and making comments. For Birley’s Memorandum contained little that was original or especially perceptive. It is a mixture of observation, anecdote and high-­minded posturing. Written some eighteen months after the work of Education Branch in Germany had begun and after the staff had struggled throughout that difficult period with all of the issues it raises, the report would not have gone down well with Riddy and his colleagues.

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Some of Birley’s major points were: ‘The material conditions for a successful educational system do not exist.’ ‘As a general rule it may be said that teaching in the British Zone has not gone back to the days of the Weimar Republic. It has returned to the time of Kaiser William I.’ ‘Except for the publication of about one and a half million readers and arithmetic books, very little has been done yet to supply the schools with books.’ ‘Elementary Education in many parts of the British Zone now depends on the supply of more shoes.’ ‘[Secondary Education] is in an absolutely desperate state.’ ‘It can hardly be expected that men and women trained as teachers in the days of the German Empire [. . .] will be able to provide an education suitable for a democratic community.’ ‘History lessons consist of monologues from the teachers, whose views are often those current before the First World War, interrupted occasionally by questions to the pupils, who are expected to answer by repeating exactly what the teacher has said.’ ‘The teaching of English is receiving an almost embarrassing amount of encouragement from the German educational authorities. We are doing nothing to assist them.’ ‘There is a great opportunity to create a new status for Universities in the British Zone, which may make them an example to all Germany.’ ‘[The universities] must be brought into touch once more with the work done in Universities in other countries and we have a special responsibility to restore their intellectual links with English thought and scholarships [sic]. We are not doing so.’ [On internment, denazification, and the dismissal of teachers]: ‘We are creating in the British Zone all the necessary material for a Frei Korps [sic] in the future.’149

Kaiser Wilhelm I was King of Prussia from 1861, and German Emperor from 1871 until his death in 1888. The production of 1.5 million ‘readers and arithmetic books’ in the prevailing conditions would not have been an insignificant achievement, but in fact over 9.9 million textbooks (about 2.25 per child) had been published between July 1945 and March 1947, despite shortages of paper, printing ink and binding material, let alone the difficulties of identifying suitable content.150 In a paper for the Cabinet, Hynd reported (in April) that 9 million textbooks had been produced by January 1947. There was provision in the Zone for the training of 15,000–20,000 teachers in one-­year emergency courses. History teaching might well have been as dull as Birley implies, even given his inability to understand German, but the teaching style – pupils being expected to ‘learn the lesson’ and to repeat what they are taught – was simply the

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normal expectation in German schools and proved resilient. (Birley’s only experience of teaching of course had been with a male academic elite in very privileged schools, quite different even from traditional English grammar schools.) Contact was already being re-­established with British universities. And the recreation of Freikorps (as properly spelt: volunteer paramilitary units) was hardly a serious probability. In a lengthy peroration Birley mentions the ‘enormous’ difficulties, sees German youth ‘without hope or purpose’, describes ‘an intellectual and spiritual famine’, finds the Germans looking ‘despairingly to us to help’ (‘At present we are doing very little’), and argues that the British education officers are not being given the opportunity to do what they feel to be necessary. (On this latter point he writes that ‘an ordinary Education Officer spends at least three quarters of his time on denazification and on fighting his own side to secure materials for his schools, and not more than a quarter on what should be his real task, doing all that can be done through Education to restore Germany to a healthy frame of mind.’) He concludes: ‘The magnitude of the problem is not realised in this country.’ Birley’s recommendations focused on the provision of shoes and textbooks, teacher training, sending ‘fifty of the best English Books [sic] of recent years’ to Ministers of Education for distribution to teachers, the need for Germans to be able to buy English and Swiss newspapers, the possible publication of a monthly review containing English articles translated into German, the removal of all those under the age of twenty in internment camps to a special camp ‘where a specific experiment in their re-­education should be carried out’, the provision of learned journals for higher education institutions, and the sending of an educationist with experience of British universities to make proposals for their future government and control: ‘It would be essential, of course, that he should have some knowledge of German Universities in recent times.’ It is difficult to comprehend why such an unexceptional document, replete with statements of the obvious, misconceptions and egregiously unoriginal proposals, should have attracted so much attention to Birley. The Memorandum shows signs of having been put together hastily and does scant justice to the abilities of someone with valuable previous experience both of evaluating education as a member of an important national commission and of putting together a study of Czechoslovakia which was published in the series Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs.151 In particular, it fails to set out any kind of blueprint for the establishment of ‘a healthy frame of mind’, which remained no more than a lofty notion. Yet echoes of Birley’s memorandum are to be found in a report to cabinet by Hynd of April 1947.152 *  *  * The Governors of Charterhouse allowed Birley to take up the post in Germany soon after the end of the school term. (They had not agreed that he might be seconded, and so Birley had had to make the decision to resign as headmaster.) After his appointment was announced, the Conservative MP and old Carthusian Sir Waldron Smithers responded ‘Thank Heavens’ when Hynd confirmed in a question from him that Birley would be leaving Charterhouse ‘altogether’. John Maud wrote Birley an effusive letter on his ‘magnificent’ decision on 3 February, anticipating his appointment to be raised in Parliament: ‘The next thing to expect (& I know you won’t need to

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be warned!) is a nice friendly Question in the House, when the news breaks, designed to throw blame & discredit on H.M.G. for thus introducing the snobbishness (& worse) of the Public School System into poor Germany.’153 The Home Secretary (a former teacher and NUT activist) told Birley in a flourish of hyperbole that no one in the country could command greater confidence in the post ‘on the proper filling of which so much of the future happiness of mankind depends.’154 Tom Creighton wrote to him that he had not heard ‘a single word of criticism’ in Berlin of his appointment: I am sure that Riddy and his branch are pleased about it and do really see the need for such a step and welcome it because they are interested in the job. I am sure that you will find him really anxious to be loyal and honest enough to see, himself, the necessity of the appointment.155

Some two months later there were further observations in Parliament on Birley’s suitability. He was of course ‘a man of great integrity and educational achievement’, said Squadron-Leader Ernest Kinghorn, but His job in Germany is something quite different from that of the running and working of a public school in this country. For instance, he is to have full responsibility to advise the Deputy Military Governor on all aspects of educational life in Germany in all the schools and universities, and in adult education. It is perfectly clear how important a job of that kind will be for the Germans and ourselves. He is, in other words, going to decide, for the rest of the lifetime to all of us here, whether our children are to face some recrudescence of Kaiserism or Nazism, if that educational system in Germany is not run in a proper, democratic and progressive manner.156

Why was not someone with experience of state-­sector schools chosen, or someone with a degree in German and with knowledge of German affairs and culture? ‘One does get the impression from [a profile in] the ˝Observer˝ that this job was given out on an old-­school tie basis, rather than on the facts of experience and qualifications.’ (General Robertson was educated at Charterhouse.) ‘Did [Hynd] try to secure the services of one of His Majesty’s inspectors, one of the chief education officers or the head of one of our maintained grammar or modern schools?’, asked the Labour MP John Corlett. Hynd replied with a simplistic statement of the obvious: ‘I agree entirely with the hon. and gallant Member for Great Yarmouth [Kinghorn] that German education – we visualise it in the Control Commission as the re-­education of Germany—is an entirely different problem from the running of an English public school.’157 He was ‘entirely responsible’ for suggesting Birley’s appointment, and had selected him on the basis of his work in education, not only in connection with the public schools but also ‘on the results of certain researches that he had made into German education.’ No doubt these ‘certain researches’ consisted of the Memorandum sent to Ellen Wilkinson on the basis of Birley’s brief visit to the Zone in the previous year. Birley’s duties as Educational Adviser were outlined by Robertson in August 1947:

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Educating the Germans Responsibilities of the Educational Adviser 1. The success of the British occupation must ultimately largely depend upon the effect we make on the German mind and outlook. If our efforts to exert a good influence on the Germans and to present the British point of view are to succeed they must be co-­ordinated and directed by a bold, comprehensive and consistent policy. This work of co-­ordination and direction will henceforth be the responsibility of the Educational Adviser. This responsibility lies mainly in the fields of education, cultural affairs, the control of information and relations with the Churches, but the full presentation of our attitude and point of view to the Germans frequently involves the work of Divisions and Branches not directly concerned with these functions. 2. To enable him to exercise this co-­ordination and direction, the following rights and functions will from henceforward be vested in the Educational Adviser: (i) He may require from all Divisions and Branches information, planning and action which seem to him necessary for the end in view. (ii) He may summon any meeting he thinks useful. In view of the importance of sound opinion in such the Chief of the Division or Branch invited to such meetings should either attend himself or ensure that he is represented by someone of real experience. (iii) Any Division or Branch of the Control Commission taking any action or considering any major proposals calculated to be of influence within the sphere of the Educational Adviser will refer such action or proposals to him for advice and guidance before they are implemented. Such reference will not interfere with normal consultations with other Divisions or Branches or with existing rights of access to higher authorities.158

These responsibilities constituted a powerful brief, and it is clear that Riddy was sidelined by the appointment of someone given such authority. Robertson said that Birley’s appointment would ‘give a boost to the Commission as a whole’ and that it was doubtful ‘that there would be room for both [Riddy] and Mr Birley at HQ’. Not surprisingly, Birley’s appointment created a very difficult situation for Riddy. His son recalled Mrs Riddy’s ‘acerbic commentary on contemporaries and official recognition after his supersession by Birley’ and that Riddy ‘came away from Germany with poor memories’.159 James Mark remembered Riddy as a ‘genial soul’ but ‘pretty irritable’ and ‘sensitive to his own dignity’. ‘He couldn’t stand the head of the IA&C Division’ and felt that he should have his own division.160 Birley arrived in Germany as Educational Adviser on 23 April 1947. He wrote to his father that his first four weeks in the post had been ‘easily the busiest, and about the most interesting’ he had ever had.161 He was living in a very large house (vacated by Julian Simpson, the departing head of the IA&C Division). It was ‘really too palatial, but it will be all right for the moment’. He had spent a couple of weeks meeting people and finding out about the ‘whole immense organization’ and had been ‘getting some ideas’ about his job. He had returned to London for further conversations with the

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Commander-­in-Chief and Pakenham. His thoughts on what might need to be done in education were being further developed: We are, I believe, setting about Education in the wrong way, trying to influence every branch of it, and so doing very little, instead of concentrating on the points where we really can make a difference.

By 2 July Birley was asking for more staff and putting forward an ambitious and self-­ evidently unrealizable programme for his time as Educational Adviser. At the top of his list were universities and secondary schools, German youth and adult education. For Birley ‘higher education’ still implied, in what was an outmoded sense of the term, both universities and secondary education. Here, his ambitions were nothing less than to aim at thorough reform. His task would be: The conception and, assuming that Länder Governments can be influenced, the realisation of a complete reform of German Higher Education, in Universities and Secondary Schools. The weaknesses of the present system are made clear by abundant evidence. It is hardly possible to exaggerate them. Unless a reform is carried out during the period of British occupation, it must be accepted that German Higher Education will remain a fruitful field for the re-­growth of totalitarian, militaristic and nationalist forces.162

There was a genuine worry about an element of extremist views in the universities at this time, but it was hardly of an order to support such a view of the future recrudescence of the forces which the Potsdam Agreement was designed to eliminate. For youth problems, Birley envisaged putting young people to work and reforming vocational education, a field in which the Germans had a far more developed history than the British. He would aim at: A fresh approach to the problem of German Youth, which is at present without any hope for the future, and may very soon turn to Communism, as its only salvation. This approach will include large-­scale schemes for: (i) Setting German Youth to work on practical tasks of reconstruction. (ii) Building up an entirely new system of vocational training and apprenticeship, to meet the changed demands of German industry.

The first suggestion here was wholly impractical beyond what was already in place. (Many students were already involved in clearing rubble, and not just from university sites.) The second was unnecessary, since German traditions in vocational education were sufficiently strong. On adult education, Birley wanted to see A radical change in the German system . . . so as to extend its influence to the working-­classes and to the 20–35 age group. At present . . . these sections of the

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Educating the Germans community are quite untouched; and the ‘lost generation’ (age group 20–35) presents a problem which cannot be ignored. I am considering a proposal to establish residential colleges, on the lines of Wilton Park, in the Zone.

‘Residential colleges’ – whatever they might have been in this context – would hardly have touched the ‘working classes’ or the disaffected twenty to thirty-­five age group, especially if they were set up ‘on the lines of Wilton Park’, which was a unique institution not designed to be a model for general adult education. The further ‘particular tasks’ Birley identified were a mixed collection: countering the apathy and depression among miners on the Ruhr; the re-­education of ‘ex-Nazis’; soliciting help from ‘various foreign countries’ and UNESCO and encouraging visits to and from the Zone; enlisting the support of the German intelligentsia; cooperation with authorities in the American and French Zones (divergence from the US Zone should be ‘corrected promptly’); and schemes to secure ‘wider and more effective assistance from members of the Control Commission and their families in the work of re-­education’. He expanded on this latter point in a way unappreciative of the efforts of Education Branch staff, who had surely been doing precisely what he thought not to be the case: The success of our occupation must depend in no small measure on the impact which the individual British make on the Germans, in social contacts and in voluntary spare-­time activities. I am convinced that many members of the Control Commission would contribute far more than they do at present, if they were given a lead from above and had a better understanding of the situation, [. . .] I therefore hope it may be found possible to arrange short residential courses, where the various factors governing our policy can be expounded by experts and where at the same time officers from Regions can put forward suggestions, in the light of their experience.

There is in this early document something of the simplistic judgments in Birley’s earlier efforts to list the priorities in educational policy. What is evident is a tendency to focus on activities that he saw as his special forte: discussion, getting important people on side, intellectual leadership, and the analysis of events and issues in wider contexts. There is little evidence of detailed strategic planning and much that is absent: elementary education; school meals and children’s clothes and shoes; textbook revision and the paper shortage; buildings, overcrowding, and shift teaching; teacher training; women’s organizations, among other omissions. And there is no proper recognition of the huge achievements so far of Riddy and the staff of Education Branch. But perhaps none of this is surprising, given the way in which Birley’s function in Germany was perceived. Eden and Butler had been unable to find the inspirational person they wanted to guide educational policy in Germany. Instead, and by default, they had in the person of Riddy someone who was demonstrably able to get on with the practical policy implementation that was needed in the emergency situation that faced him when he arrived in the Zone. Now, with much of the early reconstruction work well advanced – but by no means completed – it was time to return to the original intention, and move policy oversight into a new phase. Once Birley had settled into his role and

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found a way to exploit his personal strengths, he was able to exert influence, both in the Zone among senior members of the Control Commission, and more widely among those with power in the UK. At a meeting of Chief Education Officers in early July, Birley made a surprise statement: The EA said he wished first to make an announcement of great importance for Education Branch. The Ministry of Education had put very strong pressure on Mr Riddy to return to his work with HM Inspectorate in England and had now recalled him after three years’ service for German Education. The EA was certain that Mr Riddy’s work in Germany would go down in the history of British education: it was something quite unique and of which there was every reason to be proud. Mr Riddy had devoted himself unsparingly to his task, and the re-­ educative value of his work with the Germans, particularly in the ZER, was immense. One of his great achievements had also been to foster in England, without the help of any publicity from this side, the growth of a gradual realization of the importance of Education in Germany. Mr Riddy would return to England in September, but he would not sever his connection with Germany, since he would leave again almost at once to attend the meeting of UNESCO in Mexico City in November as a member of the British Delegation. There was every hope that the question of Germany would be raised at that meeting, and it would consequently be a very important occasion, since there were tremendous possibilities for Germany in connection with UNESCO. It was essential that the British Delegation should include someone with first-­hand knowledge of Education in present-­day Germany, and there was no-­one better qualified in this respect than Mr Riddy.163

There is a whiff of cant here. Attending a UNESCO meeting in Mexico as part of a delegation could hardly be imagined to be more important than the work Riddy had done in Germany. The supposed ‘pressure’ put on him by the Ministry of Education was in fact a matter of convenience designed by Birley to get him out of the way. Proof of Birley’s manipulation of Riddy’s departure can be found in a letter to his father of 26 July 1947: I am having a very difficult time at the moment over what is always the most unpleasant part of a job. I decided quite soon that the Director of Education Branch would have to go. He has many excellent qualities. He is very hard working, he knows the German educational system from A to Z, but he has no imagination, he uses up far too much paper, he cannot give his staff their heads, and he is a bad judge of men. I know that the Ministry of Education . . . wanted him back, so I said that he had better be recalled.164

Birley had wanted Tom Creighton (the chief education officer in the British sector of Berlin) to replace Riddy, but Creighton had argued that he was not a good administrator.165 Birley responded that ‘Education Branch could profit from some

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really bad administration’, and while Creighton was willing to take on the role, Robertson insisted on the appointment of Brigadier R.V. Hume, Regional Government Officer in Niedersachsen.166 Hume was succeeded by Herbert Walker, who had been his deputy. Birley worked closely with Creighton, who was to serve as his deputy in Berlin. Birley also manipulated the departure of Riddy’s deputy, Montague Simmons (1902–86), who was ‘very offended indeed at what he [considered] his supersession’ and who was supported by ‘a good many of the Headquarters staff ’. He was ‘a nice chap, but without the least bit of drive or leadership’. Moreover, Birley had no praise in July 1947 for other Education Branch staff: The personnel of the Headquarters are, on the whole, a second-­rate lot of men and women, and if some of them were to resign I should not be sorry to see the last of them, though I should be hard put to it to find any successors. I don’t suppose they will, though, when it comes to the point. I shall have a very uncomfortable time until next January. After that I feel quite confident.167

He had written in November 1946 that a ‘job of appalling difficulty’ in Germany was being managed ‘by a number of men who are working too hard with a real devotion to it, and with far too little recognition’: ‘I can see that there are some third-­rate people in some sections of it, but I don’t think they are in Education’.168 At least the staff of Education Branch were judged in the intervening months to be only second-­rate. By the end of 1947, Birley was writing to his father about there being a ‘fair chance’ that the fellows of Balliol would ask him to be the next Master and that on a visit to Eton the Provost and others ‘came very near saying’ that he would be asked to be the next headmaster.169 And so his thoughts were already beginning to be on leaving Germany. Riddy proved to be one of the unsung heroes of educational reconstruction in Germany. John Hynd referred in Parliament to his ‘admirable work’ and quoted his ‘remarkable achievements in the reorganisation of German education’. Many years later Birley, recalling his own arrival in Germany, would pay tribute to Riddy’s considerable accomplishments: It was not a matter of my coming and finding the foundations of our work very well laid. What I did was to come and walk into a fully built house, and one very well built too and very well furnished.170

The generous interpretation of such praise – given that Birley had engineered Riddy’s departure from Germany – would be that Riddy had accomplished what Birley would not have been capable of, namely to administer education with the necessary bureaucratic efficiency. As Birley’s biographer puts it, he could never have associated himself with the sterility of what can pass for good administration’.171 What is more telling in retrospect,

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He never claimed to understand the intricacies of the German educational system and was not, as legend is inclined to have it, the architect of its reconstruction.172

Birley was perceived to have made a success of his time in Germany, but it is still by no means obvious why he especially was appointed to such a prominent role. His association with Robertson, through Charterhouse, surely clinched the matter, as the critical MPs had picked up. Birley asserted in an interview in 1978 that he ‘knew Germany pretty well before the War’, yet his experience seems to have been limited to time spent on the continent between Rugby and Oxford in 1922. He was not competent in German: even well into the post he was capable of consistently misspelling a key term like Berufsschule (vocational school.)173 These appointments seem curious in retrospect. Hynd was a politician of worthy but undistinguished ability. But given the scale of the problems he had to deal with he achieved much in the reconstruction phase of the Occupation. Pakenham was too eccentric – too religious and emotional to be taken seriously by everyone. James Mark described working with him as ‘a slightly comic nightmare’.174 And yet – though it often created problems for Mark and others – his very passion could be inspirational: his charm and sincerity were clearly very appealing. Riddy was another worthy appointment, but he was of insufficient perceived status to justify, to the satisfaction of some, the level of his responsibilities. However, he oversaw the construction of educational policy from shadowy guidelines to physical realities with impressive administrative efficiency and farsightedness. And Birley had obviously been appointed through an old boys’ network and on the basis of a flair for personal promotion and being in the right place at the right time. The choice, under a Labour administration, of a public school headmaster for such a role seems bizarre. (Half of Attlee’s first cabinet had only had an elementary education; under a third, including Attlee, had attended public schools.) Hynd had to defend himself in the House of Commons against the charge of appointing Birley on an ‘old school tie’ basis.175 But Birley was seen as inspirational, by the British and Germans alike, and carried the kind of effortless authority that came naturally to someone with his educational background and easy access to people in high places. Controlling the future of Germany in general and the development of education in particular was thus put in the hands of men with significant power and authority, but in some cases with problems of credibility in terms of qualification for the offices they held. Their political masters literally kept their distance: Attlee visited occupied Germany only once after Potsdam (during the Berlin Airlift in 1948) and Bevin could not find the time to travel to Germany until 1949, when he went to Berlin.176 Both admitted that they disliked Germans. Mostly it was left to those lower down the hierarchy to solve the many practical problems at all levels of educational provision. A principal leitmotif in Education Branch correspondence and memoranda is the insistence that educational aims in Germany could only be reached through influence, achievable by means of personal contact, support, discussion, encouragement, and example. The role of individual education officers ‘in the field’ was critical, not least

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because they had the local knowledge and the direct lines of communication with teachers and administrators charged with delivering policy where it mattered – in the schools and universities, in the training colleges, and through adult education (both formal and informal). Many of these officers were left to get on with their work, in the British tradition of pragmatic independent decision making. In the circumstances of the time tolerance of a degree of autonomy on their part was inevitable, but on occasions it caused disquiet. Richard Hinton Thomas reported in July 1945 on the ‘attitude’ of education control officers. An unreasonable policy of independence vis-à-­vis the Control Commission was becoming evident, he observed: ‘Again and again one hears the comment that Education Officers in the field know the situation and that [the] Control Commission is theoretical and academic.’ He cited the case of Major Beattie in Göttingen, who had arranged for the election of a replacement Rektor without authority and who had been having discussions with ‘leading Church authorities, including Bishop August Marahrens of Hannover’: In my presence Major Beattie arranged with the Rektor of Göttingen University for the election of a Rektor to replace the present one, who, though elected under Mil Gov, was elected on a very provisional basis and by an unrepresentative Senate. Certainly, the time must come for a new election. However, if an Education Control Officer at a time decided by himself and without reference to the general situation instigates a further election, it seems to me that he radically interferes with policy matters that are no concern of his. He creates a situation which effectively is irrevocable. He regards Marahrens as a very desirable representative of the German evangelical church. When I commented that I was surprised to hear this since the general view was that he was far from desirable, Major Beattie’s comment was that we at Control Commission did not understand the complexity of the position and that, if we did, we should take a different view. As far as I know, Major Beattie has not acted on these views of his; but discussions of the kind which he has obviously carried out are in my view prejudicial to our long-­term objectives.

(Marahrens (1875–1950), a friend of Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, was un­­­ doubtedly an unashamed and fawning admirer of Hitler. He had ordered pastors in his diocese to swear an oath of allegiance to the Führer in the spring of 1938.177 Marahrens is criticized not only for the ambivalence of his relationship with National Socialism but also for the racist views evident in some of his pronouncements. Beattie was guilty rather of ‘excess of zeal’ than of a desire to be difficult. Otherwise he was ‘competent, incisive and efficient’.178 There were to be further instances of Beattie’s egregious behaviour (see Chapter 4.) But as the main stages of engagement with education drew to a close with the establishment of a German government, the head of the Informal Education Section wrote to Birley to extol the qualities of the education control officers:

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Experience [of Anglo-German work] has shown me that our E.C.O.’s on the ground are the cream of the Commission. [. . .] They [ECOs], and others like-­minded, have grasped the idea that getting the Germs to do things with them, talk about things, share things, play games, go to places together, worship together with their Brit friends is the real answer to the problem of mutual understanding, the problem of projecting the way of life as we know it and of getting the best out of the Germ way of life. [. . .] The real value of our presence here in Germany lies in the personal and voluntary contacts being made every day by altruistically minded people.179

Birley had placed great faith in discussion groups, and there were early initiatives to allow such groups to develop. ECOs and UECOs would organize frequent such meetings, as would more senior individuals: they were a simple device to make contact with the younger generation particularly, but also with leading individuals contributing to the revivification of life in the Zone. A list put together in March 1947 indicates the topics suggested for Anglo-German discussion groups: Can we distinguish between Propaganda and Publicity? The Learning of modern foreign languages is the best method of knowing other peoples There is no good or bad: it is only our minds that make it so Youth must serve – not be served Does a State system of education (as opposed to a private system) really succeed in producing the good citizen? The entry of women into the professions has not led to a closer cooperation between men and women The ineffectiveness of the ‘man of action’ is more apparent than ever, since the war (1939–1945) ended More industrial and agricultural production and greater material wealth are not a panacea of success and prosperity, unless accompanied by a corresponding improvement in intellectual standards Sport should be 99% fun and 1% exercise – nothing else Education is mainly developing inherent qualities, rather than imposing ideas from outside.180

*  *  * The contribution that self-­motivated individuals could make to the support of schools can be seen in the experience of two British teachers who had moved to Germany. Christopher Fyfe taught in a Düsseldorf school in 1948. Looking back on his experience he was – unusually for the time – scornful of Control Commission officers; they were

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‘ex-Majors and strange ladies who wanted to reconstitute the German educational system by introducing Winnie the Pooh’ : I remember this lady telling me at great length how the dreadful thing about the Germans was that they’d all had Grimms’ fairy tales, which were so cruel, and that they ought to have nice things like Winnie the Pooh. So she was working on some sort of syllabus to be introduced into the German schools. [. . .] I always kept away from these people, I thought they were such lunatics.181

Fyfe simply wanted to teach and ‘to identify with the German people I was working with’ not to be a part of the Commission machinery. A similar critical stance was adopted by the Germanist Ruth Harvey,182 who had given up her post as a young lecturer at Westfield College in order to work with Education Branch in Berlin. Her letters home provide a detailed and lively account of her experience. She described her impressions of a visit Pakenham made to a Berlin school: I must tell you about Lord Pakenham’s visit to my school, as I desire to record my impressions of a most comical and dreadful occasion before they get blurred. I got there early, of course (or rather, he was late) and found the Headmaster, my Hauptschulrat and various police Inspectors dithering up and down with excitement at the school door. We went in and chatted about various things till suddenly someone pelted into the room crying ˝They come! They come!˝ And down the corridor came the most incredible procession – Lord P. in front (he is larger than I thought, incidentally) surrounded by Louise Schroeder (Mayoress of Berlin), Ernst Reuter (prominent figure in City Parliament), May (Head of Public Education Dept.) and other notabilities, cavorting about, rubbing their hands, smiling anxiously and generally beating their foreheads on the ground before the Great Man. (The visit had been laid on entirely between Lord P. and the Germans, which explained their extreme desire to oblige.) In the rear came the most awful riff-­raff of Pressmen, wireless reporters and so, tripping over yards of microphone flex, edging and grinning sheepishly and generally getting in the way. Lord P. demanded to see a class and we all flocked into a classroom where the babies were being taught the alphabet. The room seemed full of people so I kept well in the background and enjoyed the role of spectator. The teacher began to instruct his charges about the letter B in a voice trembling with emotion, while the whole entourage gasped and seethed with anxiety and desire to please. The children were reduced to such a state of excitement by all this doo-­dah that they went on saying B loudly at intervals throughout the proceedings, in and out of season, while Lord P. put up a real “Act˝ – he recited a little speech about his 8 children, which was reverently translated by one of the court, and then was photographed in various attitudes:- ˝Lord P. with child˝, ˝Lord P. with child and blackboard˝, ˝Lord P. speaking˝, ˝Lord P. patting child on head˝, etc. while the microphone-­bearer hovered round collecting each syllable. Then we all flocked round into another classroom – more recited speeches, more photographs:- ˝Lord P. listening to children singing˝ and so on. Then, after a total visit lasting about 20 minutes, he concluded that he had gained an adequate

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impression of Elementary Education in Berlin, went out through lines of saluting policemen, women gibbering with agitation, and tumbling children, and drove away in his large limousine. My Hauptschulrat and I went back together to our respective offices and exchanged astonished and caustic remarks about the exhibition we had just seen. A doubly regrettable show, first, because it shows that the Germans haven’t got rid of one atom of their headlong servility to People in Authority or of their craving to blossom in the shadow of the Great; secondly, because Lord P. must be a much ˝wetter˝ or vainer man than I had thought, to permit himself to be surrounded by this ridiculous homage, or to imagine that that sort of auto-­apotheosis against a setting of school-­children is any sort of substitute for investigating what conditions are really like. However, it’s none of my business.183

Berlin Special conditions applied in Berlin. There was an Education Committee of the Allied Kommandatura, consisting of the chief education officers of the sectors into which the city was divided. The German administration in Berlin was not separate for each sector, but centralized in the city’s municipal authority, the Magistrat, and so education could in principle be treated as a whole. The Russians had been quick to begin denazification and to appoint school superintendents in the twenty district education offices; schools were reopened in emergency measures as early as 11 June 1945, since Russian policy was to begin the process of educating children along ‘anti-­fascist, democratic’ lines as quickly as possible, in contrast to the western Allies’ concern to cater first for their material well-­being.184 Birley considered this ‘a remarkable feat of organisation’.185 The provisional guidelines for the reopening of schools (Vorläufige Richtlinen für die Wiedereröffnung des Schulwesens) established basic principles. All teachers active in fascist or militaristic affairs were to be dismissed immediately. Others dismissed by the Hitler regime would be re-­employed, as could those with proven antifascist records but without training as teachers, who would become support teachers (Hilfslehrer) either supervised by experienced teachers or trained in special courses. All pupils should register with schools; teachers and administrative personnel were required to take part in rubble-­clearing and reconstruction work and to remove Nazi schoolbooks, pictures and emblems. Soviet films for children were to be shown, and reading, writing and arithmetic were to be taught without textbooks. All parents were free to decide about religious education in additional classes. Lectures were envisaged for teachers to retrain them in anti-­fascist thinking. The elementary education department of the Magistrat was charged with preparing new textbooks and producing guidelines for the teaching of German, history, geography and biology. These provisional guidelines were agreed before troops of the western Allies arrived in Berlin, and they served as the basis for policy in all four sectors.186 Denazification policy in the Soviet Zone and in Berlin meant that of 39,346 teachers available at the end of the War, some 20,000+ were dismissed because of membership of the NSDAP. Large numbers of newly trained teachers (Neulehrer) had to be employed, and many former Party members had in due course to be reinstated as

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shortages became acute.187 In June 1945, there were 128,000 children of school age and 2,663 available teachers; the ratio of teachers to pupils was therefore of the order 1:48.188 In the early stages of the Occupation the Allies endeavoured to work together in Berlin, though there was, as Birley put it, ‘a continual tussle between the need to find agreement somehow and the desire of the different powers not to compromise too far their political and cultural ideals’.189 Decisions about the nature of the schools had to be approved both by the education committee and by the Kommandatura, and so there was no scope for fundamental change in the individual sectors of the city, where the principal role of Occupation officers was to give advice.190 Reaching agreement about religious education was a significant accomplishment for the western Allies: they secured the right of access to schools of teachers of religion, despite Soviet wishes. Significant too, at a later stage, was the agreement reached to allow the creation of private schools, again against Russian wishes. On the teaching of history there was no agreement, and so history was suspended in the school curriculum until the events of 1948 obviated the need for consensus. The intention to control the University of Berlin in the way universities in the Russian Zone were controlled, created insoluble problems and eventually resulted in the creation in the US Zone of the Free University, about which there were considerable doubts among the British. Birley summarized the problems: We felt that it might serve to weaken the resistance of the old University if many of its best professors and students withdrew from it; we doubted whether it was wise to take on this commitment just as Berlin was facing the difficulties of the blockade; we were anxious about the financial basis of the University; above all we did not feel it was wise to add to the number of University students who might well find it difficult later on to find jobs.

The new university, carefully nurtured by the Americans, served as a challenge to Soviet intentions. It became something of a symbol in the east-­west confrontation, ‘ideally suited to contesting Soviet and East German Communist control of young minds’, as the historian of the Free University puts it.191 With its founding there were now two western universities in Berlin, the Technische Universität serving as another kind of symbol in technology and also increasingly in liberal studies, and leading the way in terms of instituting a studium generale. Birley described it as ‘as bulwark of liberal education’: ‘I have always claimed that it is [. . .] perhaps the most important University now in Europe.’192

Trouble with ‘German Educational Reconstruction’ The June–July 1947 issue of the GER Bulletin contained a report by the Secretary Erich Hirsch on a three-­week visit to Germany he had made from 14 May to 6 June. Some sections of the report provoked a strong reaction at Education Branch and regional headquarters.

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There was a graphic account of children begging: My very first experience in Germany constituted one of the most heart-­rending danger signals, illuminating the grave perils to which the moral standards of the young are exposed under present conditions. From the frontier, at Bentheim, all the way to Rheine, a stretch of approximately twenty miles, hundreds, even thousands of children lined the railway track, begging for food. Very frequently, fathers or mothers could be seen crouching in the distance. Later I was told, these parents were waiting to sell in the black market the enormous quantity of buns and sandwiches British soldiers in the passing trains were throwing to their begging children. What is to become of children to whom this is the first taste of life?

Hirsch referred to the lack of clothing, and especially of shoes: One single item may suffice to reveal the stark inadequacy of clothing: more than half of the schoolchildren are without shoes. In summer, this may not appear an undue hardship, but there is no responsible person whose heart is not filled with a terrible fear of the coming autumn and winter.

Birley wrote a long letter to Sydney Wood pointing out that while it was accurate to say that 50 per cent of schoolchildren were ‘inadequately shod’, it was more accurate to say that between 4 per cent and 10 per cent were without shoes. Hirsch reported the suggestion that slates and styles might be provided, since there was such a serious lack of writing materials, but this, he wrote, had been ‘turned down by the Economics Department’. The Economic Sub-Committee responded that considerable encouragement had been given to the production of slates, especially for educational purposes and that allegations to the contrary were without foundation.193 Birley, who had described passages in the report as ‘hysterical’, wrote to John Churchill at the Foreign Office in an attempt to avoid a recurrence: I do not want Hirsch out here again – yet awhile at any rate. But I do not in any way want to cold shoulder G.E.R., and I suggest that they might be asked to send out someone else for the next visit.194

Later Wood’s wife Phyllis was to cause annoyance to Brigadier Maude in Hannover. She had had a meeting with Adolf Grimme without Maude’s knowledge; Maude wrote in a letter to Birley that Mrs Woods had been ‘busy being busy’, that she was ‘ineffective’ as a lecturer, and that he wished ‘she and her kind would not meddle; at any rate without consulting us first’.195 There was clearly something of a problem in terms of the relationship between Education Branch and GER. GER of course had finished the main tasks of its original mission with the end of the War and the return of émigrés to Germany. It was now moving on to a function that mirrored some of the work of Education Branch, with members who must surely have felt that they knew far more than most CCG staff about education in Germany. But GER lacked de facto official status, and it was

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dependent on Education Branch for approval of many of its activities, especially when it came to gaining approval for visits to and conferences in Germany and seeking permission for Germans to travel to the UK. Birley and others were careful to try to keep the relationship with GER positive and supportive, but it is clear that it was at times very strained. The Hirsch incident was an irritating and time­consuming digression from the day-­to-day work of Education Branch, which involved precisely trying to solve the kind of problems that Hirsch had exaggerated in his report. Birley wrote in diplomatic and conciliatory terms to Hirsch: I hope you will not think Education Branch ‘touchy’ on the matter, but the one thing we ask is that anyone who comes out shall make sure of verifying his information by referring to someone in authority before he publishes it. A visitor gets inundated with complaints and criticisms, and some of them are baseless, or, at least, points to which a not unreasonable answer can be given. He may even get such a complaint or criticism from someone who inevitably does not know the full facts. I can speak about this as an old sinner myself. I came out here as a visitor in November 1946 and wrote an article in ‘The Times’ which included one or two statements which I had been told out here and entirely believed, but which were inaccurate and which I ought to have checked up. I read it through again the other day and felt annoyed with myself, and I do not think it was just because I was not in a reasonable position about German education then, while I am now.196

Later in 1948, T.J. Leonard of Textbook Section was writing to Herbert Walker about a report on GER and ‘German so-­called Socialist Groups’: ‘now that our friend Hirsch has succeeded in worming his way into the Jugendamt, Land Niedersachsen’ the information might be of interest: Hirsch at the time was contemplating one of his periodical visits to Germany, during which he vilified Education Branch behind their backs. Hearing of his intended visit, I visited Intelligence Division and gave them a copy of the report. They were interested and said they would have been glad to have kept this man out of Germany, but as he had obtained permission from the Foreign Office, there wasn’t much they could do. I had better leave off here as I shall be saying something that will do me no good. How we British do ask to be kicked! – and it does not all come out in the wash as we fondly imagine.197

Hirsch was later to cause further annoyance to Birley, who was at this stage back in England as Headmaster of Eton. A letter from Hirsch to John Churchill at the Foreign Office had quoted Birley as saying that a GER project, the ‘German Harvest Scheme’, was ‘the most valuable part of the work done by British Educational Authorities in Germany’. Birley wrote to Hirsch on 14 March 1950 and made clear what he actually thought was the most valuable contribution the British made in Germany:

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[What Hirsch attributed to me] would be an absurd over statement. I could not possibly have made it at any time. I have no doubt at all what is the most valuable part of the work done by British Education Authorities in Germany. It is the ordinary day-­to-day work by Education and Youth Officers in direct contact with German teachers, educational and youth officials, and leaders of Youth Organisations. I am sure I have never said anything contrary to this view.198

The German Student Harvest Scheme, started in 1947, had been an initiative of the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Agriculture, and voluntary groups, and was taken over by GER in 1948.199 GER continued until 1948, organizing study visits and exchanges and conferences and focussing on what was its main strength: the cultivation of personal relations for the sake of the common good. Despite being (or perhaps because it was) an irritant to Education Branch, it probably did more good than harm.

3

Policy in Practice: Opening the Schools, Emergency Teacher Training, Re-­educating Youth

It is no exaggeration to say that after the surrender in May, 1945, the German educational scene was one of more or less complete chaos.1

Understanding the German character British soldiers entering Germany were warned: ‘You are about to meet a strange people in a strange, enemy country’.2 In the planning for engagement with the German population following the defeat of Germany, much consideration was given to understanding the German ‘character’. The various handbooks produced during the War for the eventual use of the occupying forces contained basic information about Germany, its history and traditions, and its people. And Allied troops crossing into Germany in the final months of the War were provided with officially produced short guides or ‘pocketbooks’. The texts of most of these publications were of necessity brief and unsophisticated, aimed at a wide readership with little or no assumed knowledge of the topics covered. Both the American and British publications made reference to young people and their education. The 1944 US Pocket Guide to Germany, over a million copies of which were printed, suggested that particular care be taken with young Germans aged fourteen to twenty-­eight: Since 1933, when Hitler came to power, German youth has been carefully and thoroughly educated for world conquest, killing, and treachery. [. . .] The young German, through his most impressionable years, has been taught that the strong are entitled to pick on and destroy the weak, that it is noble to squeal on a pal, or even snitch on a member of one’s own family, that if you can win by cheating it’s just as good as winning any other way, that a promise or word of honor given is to be kept only as long as it suits its purpose and can be broken at any time. He has been taught to torture and stand torture. He has been told over and over again that he is a member of a master race and that all other peoples are his inferiors and designed to be his slaves.

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[. . .] He will not change overnight when the Armistice is signed and the shooting stops. He won’t be converted immediately in the towns and villages you occupy behind the lines as you advance into Germany, [. . .] For your own safety and the safety of your comrades never for an instant forget that he is the victim of the greatest educational crime in the history of the world. From childhood, in all his schools, he has heard one teaching: that force, ruthlessness, and blind obedience to the Führer will carry him and the German people to a position of dominance over all other people of the world. By hearing this doctrine constantly repeated throughout his formative years, he has come firmly to believe in it. Action according to such teaching, silly as it sounds, is a habit with German youth today. You must be prepared to recognise it. Other American and Allied representatives, when the peace is made, will concern themselves with the cure for the German disease – to destroy forever the German physical power and will to attempt world conquest, Your own duty is to be aware of the facts and to protect yourself at all times.3

Here the youth of Germany are described both as victims of a perverted education system, which might imply that sympathetic treatment by the occupiers would be required, and as dangerous products of that system, suggesting that they should be treated with great caution and suspicion. This was one of the paradoxes with which the Allies struggled in Germany. The commentary in Frank Capra’s film for American soldiers leaving for occupied Germany issued more explicit warnings about the youth of Germany: Guard particularly against this group. These are the most dangerous. German youth. Children when the Nazi Party came into power. They know no other system than the one that poisoned their minds. They are soaked in it. Trained to win by cheating, trained to pick on the weak. They’ve heard no free speech, read no free press. They were brought up on straight propaganda, products of the worst educational crime in the entire history of the world. Practically everything you believe in they have been trained to hate and destroy. They believe they were born to be masters, that we are inferior, designed to be their slaves. They may deny it now, but they believe it and will try to prove it again. Don’t argue with them. Don’t try to change their point of view. Other Allied representatives will concern themselves with that. You are not being sent into Germany as educators. You are soldiers on guard. [. . .] The German people are not our friends. You will not associate with German men, women, or children.4

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This kind of message was repeated in Don’t be a Sucker in Germany!, a booklet issued to US troops in May 1945: Don’t believe there are any ‘good’ Germans in Germany. Of course you know good Germans back home. They had guts enough and sense enough to break away from Germany long ago because they couldn’t go along with German militarism and intolerance. Don’t believe that it was only the Nazi government that brought on this war. Any people have the kind of government they want and deserve. Only a few people bucked the Nazis. You won’t meet them; the Nazis purged them long ago.

There was also a warning about children: Toward children, you’re wrong again. You’ve generously given them chewing gum and candy all across Europe. Don’t do it now. All kids aren’t friendly and innocent. Yell ‘Achtung’ (attention) at a bunch of these kids and watch them snap-­to. That’s how they’re trained. For what? You guess. A kid can carry messages. A kid can shoot you just as dead as a grown man. Some German kids have been trained for underground work, espionage and sabotage.5

Also in 1945, US soldiers entering Germany were issued with the pamphlet Can the Germans be Re-Educated? After sketching German history, the text focuses on education, recognizing the strong tradition of publicly supported schools which provided a model for admiration ‘in most other civilized countries’.6 It then covers Nazism and poses the question as to whether post-­war Germany will want to be re-­educated. The co-­operation of the Germans will not be guaranteed, for four reasons: ‘defeat is always humiliating and occupation by enemy armies is still more so’; some will be reluctant to co-­operate lest they be branded quislings; foreign interference in the education of the younger generation will be resented: ‘Inasmuch as some supervision of the schools is a necessary part of re-­educating the German people, we can expect to incur antagonism because of it’; and it will be feared that the Allies will be more concerned with ‘a subtle form of subjection and of continued control’ than with peace and mutual well-­being.7 The British texts contained messages along similar, if often more muted, lines. Germany, the British soldier’s pocketbook, was produced in 1944 and made brief mention of children and their education under Nazism: Little boys and girls in the Hitler Youth have been encouraged to denounce their parents and teachers if they let slip some incautious criticism of Hitler or his government. [. . .] Worst of all, perhaps, it has been drummed into German children in the schools and Hitler Youth that might is right, war the finest form of human activity and Christianity just slushy sentiment. By cramming children’s minds with Nazi ideas and preventing any other ideas from reaching them, Hitler hoped to breed a race of robots after his own heart. We cannot yet judge to what extent this inhuman plan has succeeded.8

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The SHAEF Handbook, designed for a more specialist readership, reflected on the ‘spirit’ of National Socialist education: The main Nazi influence in education has been one of spirit. They have caused the study of things German to be emphasized; they have laid great stress upon physical education and have brought about the ‘politicalization’ or ‘Nazification’ of the curriculum. They have segregated the Jews into special schools and have practically closed the learned professions to them. They have introduced ‘political reliability’ (politische Zuverlässigkeit) as a criterion of admission to certain school types, to school leaving and state examinations. In their own words, ‘the creation of the political, National Socialist human being’ has been their goal.9

But beyond what was contained in the handbooks and guides there were also more developed attempts to probe deeply into the German psyche. Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Dicks RAMC had worked for two-­and-a-­half years on the psychiatric interrogation of hundreds of captured servicemen in an attempt at what he would describe as ‘a new approach to political psychology’. In early 1944 he had written a study on ‘The Psychological Foundations of the Wehrmacht’10 and in January 1945 produced an analysis of ‘National Socialism as a Psychological Problem’, in which five ‘types of attitude’ to Nazism were posited on the basis of information collected from a sample of 600 interviewees. The types were: (a) Fanatical, whole-­hearted Nazis (10%) (b) Believers with reservations (25%) (c) Unpolitical men (40%) (d) Passive anti-Nazis (15%) (e) Whole-­hearted anti-Nazis (10%)11

By this reckoning, we might deduce that some two-­thirds could be judged to be relatively untainted ideologically. Later Dicks described the ‘unpolitical’ group as ‘the grey, plodding mass of cannon-­fodder who took their cue from the leaders’ and the ‘passive anti-Nazis’ as ’diffidently hedging, on the whole on the side of the angels, and of course more so as the issue of the war became certain’. And he presented a severe judgement of the German character, slipping easily into caricature: Our typical German is earnest, industrious, meticulous, over-­respectful to authority, docile and kow-­towing, tense and over-­polite, but a little martinet and unpleasantly ferocious in his dealings with those he can dominate. His anxiety to know his place in the social hierarchy, his touchy insistence on paying and receiving due respect to title and rank, his love of uniformity and regimentation and his incapacity to cope with the unexpected are also familiar. His queer sentimental far-­away romanticism and gushing, his brooding search for the depths strike a discordant note in this picture of striving efficiency. We are jarred too by his rigidity of outlook, by his intellectual blinkers, and by his cavalier treatment of his womenfolk, in both senses – the contempt and the polite veneer with which he

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attempted [sic] to camouflage it. And lastly, in this thumbnail sketch, his martial swagger – his rabid nationalist arrogance and self-­adulation especially when in the mass, and his resentful, jealous accusations of all his neighbours of evil designs upon his so innocent nation and incomparable Fatherland, so wrongfully misunderstood and so uniquely great. Democracy, the essence of which is peaceful government by discussion among equals, found little response in German hearts during the short periods when it was officially the rule of the country; because rivalry, heat, one might say emotional anarchy destroyed it, despite all that the reasonable men could do – and there are reasonable Germans.12

Dicks was a serious investigator, however, and his wartime reports were read with considerable interest. But far greater attention was paid to an extraordinary paper written by Brigadier van Cutsem on ‘The German Character’.13 Ivone Kirkpatrick approved van Cutsem’s paper. In recommending that it be widely distributed – as in the event it would be – Kirkpatrick (who had spent the period 1933–38 in Berlin as Head of Chancery) gave the impression that little had hitherto been known about the character of the Germans: It is an odd thing that we should have lived alongside Germany for centuries without knowing much about the German character. But it is a fact; and so we have been giving thought to the problem of enlightening the staff of the Control Commission.14

This appears quite strange, since the ‘character’ of the Germans had quite obviously been dissected by British observers and those from many other nations over a very long period, in publications ranging from the scholarly and serious to the popular and frivolous. Analysis of the ‘German character’ was by no means a new or rare phenomenon. The problem here, however, is that attempts to describe the ‘character’ of a whole nation will always be open to criticism in terms of easy stereotyping and obvious prejudice. Van Cutsem’s paper is a bizarre undertaking which attempts precisely to ascribe common characteristics to the whole population of Germany. However, it does contain some aperçus that would conceivably have been of potential use to those seeking to understand ways in which the German population might react to the Occupation. Here is van Cutsem on obedience to authority: Allegiance to authority is given in return for anticipated success and the material benefits flowing from it. Thus the failure of the leader and what he stands for cannot be condoned. Nothing is too bad for the fallen idol; he is turned against and held to blame for all Germany’s misfortunes. In this way the individual German himself escapes moral responsibility by a simple process of finding a scapegoat and shifting the blame. Thus he says ‘he was never a Nazi or “political” ’, but was ‘forced to obey’ and ‘was lied to and betrayed’. He is deeply aggrieved, full of complaints, the innocent victim of the wiles of others.15

This kind of reaction to Hitler and Nazism was to become commonplace amongst those seeking to exculpate themselves during the process of denazification.

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But perhaps the most interesting part of van Cutsem’s paper is the final section, which provides a summary list of do’s and don’t’s. The ‘do’ list contains twelve pieces of advice: Do give orders be firm see orders are carried out promptly and to the letter, and ensure severe punishment if they are not drop immediately and heavily on any attempt to take charge or other forms of insolence play your part as a representative of a conquering power and keep the Germans in their place display cold, correct and dignified curtness and aloofness [The original draft had ‘curtness, aloofness and contempt’] remember the Germans will try to arouse and to organise sympathy towards themselves, and that the main cause of dissatisfaction will be because they have lost the war be on your guard against attempts to curry favour at the expense of our Allies – the Germans will depreciate us to them. Do take immediate action to stop such attempts and see that the results are publicly known use English in your official dealings with the Germans learn German and all you can about Germany and the Germans try to find out facts for yourself all you can to create a lasting impression, by convincing the Germans of the superior ability, determination and strength of others [The original draft had ‘superior cleverness, ability, determination’]

The ‘don’t’ list in many instances relates directly to advice in the ‘do’ list: Don’t make requests be weak try and be kind or conciliatory; it will be regarded as weakness be put off or led into arguments, discussion or ‘agreements’ be imposed upon or put up with the second best, or show any aversion to another war if Germany does not learn her lessons this time show hatred: hatred will be interpreted as a sign of fear, the Germans will be flattered and their inferiority complex will disappear let any natural sympathy in what you may see affect your sense of proportion, and thereby forget what the Germans have done to others without shame or repentance

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take anything a German says in the course of duty at its face value and don’t accept a word of honour in such circumstances. Don’t trust members of former ruling classes including émigrés try to air your knowledge of German rely on influential German officials or private persons to give facts to you imagine that you will know everything after a few months or that the German character will have changed in this time.

Van Cutsem’s text was very well received, and once it became known about there was a flood of orders for multiple copies from the various branches planning their work in Germany. But taking his advice too literally came to create problems in relationships, with junior officers dealing with senior German figures in peremptory ways that were not appropriate to the fostering of good relationships. Major Beattie’s orders to the distinguished anti-Nazi Education Minister Adolf Grimme, only recently released from imprisonment (see below), are an example of such misplaced authority. James Mark recalled how, within the context of the powers of Military Government, a high-­ranking German could simply be summoned by a junior CCG officer. On his first visit to the University of Münster (in July 1945) he sought to discover the attitude in Westphalia towards the financing of the University: I was told, ‘Send for the Oberpräsident’ (the official head of the German Provincial Administration). I did (I hope with appropriate courtesy), and he came. I could not, at that time, have sought an interview with him.16

Donald Riddy made a circumspect attempt to unravel the character of the Germans: Obviously all Germans are not of a single type. Nevertheless certain characteristics do appear more commonly in Germans than in the British people, just as others are to be found more rarely. As an example mention might be made of the very strongly marked tendency to push an argument to its ultimate logical conclusion, which makes extremism common and compromise hard to achieve. This desire to penetrate towards ‘absolute’ truths, which often expresses itself in cloudy language, may explain their fondness for grandiose schemes, more in keeping with a ‘tausendjähriges Reich’ than the rubble and poverty of the next decade or so. On the other side, it may account for the patience with which they seem to bear indescribable hardships. It is in any case extraordinary that a people with so much practical ability in some directions should take so unpractical an attitude when facing certain problems, especially those of a human character.17

In a later interview Riddy was to refer to a lecture by a distinguished German professor given once at a conference in Bad Godesberg, in order to make the same kind of point, seeing something positive where the normal reaction might be to regard such characteristics in a negative light. The lecture was apparently on the topic Die Stellung des Menschen im Weltall (‘The Position of Man in the Cosmos’):

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Well, there were some who might have thought the position of man in the ruins of Hamburg and what not would be a bit more to the point. But this lecture [. . .] does show that although there were all the material problems of the present, the Germans did have this astonishing capacity to look beyond something that was outside the present. It enabled them to bear some of their woes in a way that surprised a large number of us.18

Alongside the views of those working in the Foreign Office or later in the Control Office and in the Control Commission, there were numerous British and American publications offering on the one hand evidence of how unreformable the Germans were and on the other advice as to how to deal with them. One such was the American publication Know Your Enemy (1944), by T.H. Tetens, which summed up the German nation in five damning points: 1. The German people have proven that they are always ready to support the criminal policies of their governments and to fight to the limit for the realization of their Pan-German plans of world conquest. 2. The German people have shown that they are politically immature and in no way capable of democratic self-­government. 3. The German people lack completely the necessary respect for the rights of other nations. They have not shown any signs that they are willing to give up their overbearing claim of being the master race and are willing to take their place in a peaceful community of nations. 4. The German people, in their aggressive militarism and fanatic war spirit, have been and are a permanent threat to all peaceful nations. 5. Their striking lack of self-­criticism has so far prevented the German people from acknowledging the wrongs they have committed, For this reason, there has never been in Germany any feeling of repentance, any desire to make amends, or any hope for a sincere change of mind.19

The solution offered to cope with such a nation was that The unresisting and misguided mass of the German people should be given a chance to become an acceptable member of the community of nations, after a firm and intelligent guardianship has brought about their necessary reformation.20

Many similar publications could be cited. Together they served to paint a picture of the German character that ranged from hopeless unreformability whatever the post-­ war circumstances to hopeful potential under new democratic conditions.

Non-­fraternization A logical extension of the warnings against trusting any German in the documents prepared for soldiers about to enter Germany was a policy of non-­fraternization: one

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Figure 3.1  ‘The Danger of Fraternisation.’ sign at the border read ‘You are now entering Germany. There will be no fraternization with any German’. A placard produced by the British forces in April 1945 attempted a lame rationale for such a policy.21 (Figure 3.1). Field-Marshal Montgomery wrote four ‘letters’ to his troops on non-­fraternization.22 The first, issued in March 1945, contained detailed instructions: I want every soldier to be clear about ‘non-­fraternisation’. Peace does not exist merely because of a surrender. The Nazi influence penetrates everywhere, even

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into children’s schools and churches. Our occupation of Germany is an act of war of which the first object is to destroy the Nazi system. There are Allied organisations whose work it is to single out, separate and destroy the dangerous elements in German life. It is too soon for you to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Germans: you have a positive part to play in winning the peace by a definite code of behaviour. In streets, houses, cafes, cinemas, etc., you must keep clear of Germans, man, woman and child, unless you meet them in the course of duty. You must not walk out with them, or shake hands, or visit their homes, or make them gifts, or take gifts from them. You must not play games with them or share any social event with them. In short, you must not fraternise with Germans at all.

A text on non-­fraternization from the CCG (BE) Army Division office in Princes Gardens dated 28 May 1945 and signed by Major-General C.A.West,23 argues for adherence to policy as outlined in the SHAEF Military Occupation Handbook and is explicitly critical of what Montgomery had said in a talk to CCG staff four days earlier. Montgomery had spoken of the British soldier’s propensity for ‘putting his feet under the table’ in private houses in off-­duty hours and of the difficulty of re-­educating the Germans if fraternization was not to be allowed. The text states that the SHAEF orders had been drawn up by very experienced officers, familiar with Germany and its history, and it quotes statements from two ‘educated German civilians’ whose views might help to reinforce SHAEF policy. Both of them took a sanguine view of the German character and rejected fraternization: The British are too friendly and kindhearted, you judge everybody by your own yardstick. I can still remember the last occupation; in our area we had a Belgian Force who instituted curfew hours and justly made us feel that the consequences of war are bitter. Away in Cologne, however, under British occupation, life continued almost better than pre–1914; no curfew, few or no restrictions, and we used to speak of Cologne as ‘paradise’. You Allies will pay heavily for this if you don’t alter your outlook.You must have done with this fraternisation. Carry out General Eisenhower’s words, ‘stern but just’ or you will have another nasty mess on your hands in twenty or so years’ time. My countrymen are all to blame for the war. They will tell you with tears in their eyes that they just had to obey their leaders. Don’t be taken in by this attitude. The only salvation for Europe lies in Great Britain. The Americans will, after all, withdraw after a time to the U.S. but Germany must be occupied for two generations as this Nazi poison has bitten into the bones of the whole nation. A people inured to obedience admires, even in its conquerors, nothing but coldness and severity; the nervous character of the German yields before threats, while it interprets a conciliatory attitude as a sign of weakness and cowardice.

West’s text then expresses extreme scepticism about the chances of re-­education, arguing that ‘full knowledge of Germans and their character is required before anybody sets out to re-­educate them. To suppose that the homely and friendly qualities of the British soldier will accomplish anything towards this re-­education, is to live in a world of dreams’. He goes on to argue for generous periods of leave to mitigate the temptations to ‘put their feet under the table’ in German homes. West ends with a warning:

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To modify this policy however slightly at so early a stage in the occupation will unquestionably be regarded by the Germans as winning the first round in that interval of time which we call peace and which to them is merely an interlude in the permanent and unceasing struggle between nations for power.24

Montgomery wrote to Sir James Grigg, Secretary of State for War, on 5 June 1945 to argue that the German population must be told ‘the form’: ‘We must tell the German people why we do not fraternise with them, and why our soldiers do not talk to them and smile at them.’ It was necessary, however, to ‘let up’ in phases: ‘We cannot expect the soldier to go on snubbing little children’: the British soldier should not be regarded by German children ‘as a kind of queer ogre’. He proposed that normal greetings should now be exchanged with Germans in the streets and that troops should be allowed to talk to and play with little children under eight years of age. At the same time concern about non-­fraternization was being expressed by Churchill. A message from the Prime Minister was relayed to Montgomery by his assistant Private Secretary, Jock Colville, the day after: All the accounts reaching here seem to show that the policy of non-­fraternisation is not working well, especially in Berlin, where it is contrasted with the Russian methods. It is clear that this sort of thing could not go on very long. I note with pain that a number of British officers and men are awaiting trial by [Court Martial]. I shall not be able to agree to such a policy.

Montgomery responded: I have been urging for some time that we should relax our orders on non-­ fraternisation. But I have had no success; it took me a long time to get agreement to exclude little children from the order, even after the Americans had done so. [. . .] I have some 20 million German civilians in the British Zone. You cannot re-­educate such a number of people if you never speak to them. The Germans have had their lesson; we have not spoken to them for two months. I consider we should now withdraw the ban on fraternisation; intimate relations should be discouraged; the exact methods must be left to Commanders-­ in-Chief.25

In the same month Montgomery wrote a second letter to his troops, restating that the earlier orders would remain in force, but with the exception that they would no longer apply to ‘small children’: ‘Members of the British Forces in Germany will be allowed to speak to, and play with, little children.’ In July he permitted ‘conversation with adult Germans in the streets and in public places’. And on 25 September his fourth letter cancelled all the non-­fraternization orders, though members of the armed forces would not be billeted with German families and would not be permitted to marry Germans.

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The original orders were in any case clearly being breached, since it was essential to engage with the civilian population in the everyday running of all aspects of control and administration. General Sir Brian Horrocks provoked criticism when he gave a tea party for a large number of German children at the schoolhouse (being used as the soldiers’ mess) in Eystrup, Lower Saxony, in August 1945. According to a newspaper report, Horrocks had told his divisional commanders to do the same: ‘He thinks that if we are to bring democracy to the Germans we must begin with the children.’26 He had ordered all units in his corps ‘to do everything they could to help the German children’. ‘It became common in the villages’, he recalled later, ‘to see a khaki-­clad figure hand in hand with a small flaxen-­haired child on either side. Parents began to come up to the men and thank them for being so kind to their children.’27 At the party a British soldier performed conjuring tricks, there was a Mickey Mouse film, and the children were given ‘a fine tea’ and took home Naafi chocolate and sweets. The newspaper account of the event reported somewhat implausibly that some of the children went home singing ‘There’ll always be an England’.28 Minutes in a Foreign office file on the matter, while recognizing that ‘this kind of thing’ might be resented, recorded that it was ‘difficult to believe that it’s really very wicked’ and that there was no wish to ‘butt in on what the military do’.29 Nevertheless, Horrocks was ordered by his superiors to cease activities involving German children. Non-­fraternization, it was argued, was intelligible as soldiers advanced into Germany, but was likely to hinder the policy of re-­education, especially since it limited contact to Germans ‘of the official class who were . . . more infected by Nazism than the rest’.30 Patricia Meehan describes ‘a system of “apartheid” ’ that existed in the Zone.31 The military and CCG staff worked in enclaves and had their own messes, canteens, clubs and other facilities in which to mingle amongst themselves. Contact with ordinary Germans could therefore be minimal. But restricting contact with children and young people was a mistaken policy, given what the British were hoping to achieve in terms of education. And day-­to-­day contact with the adult population required the normal civilities of human interaction if ‘re-­education’ was to have any chance of success.

Recruitment and training of Education Branch staff James Mark wondered, when looking back on the work of Education Branch, why there was not a systematic attempt to recruit staff from the education service in Britain. Manpower Services recruited civil servants from the Ministry of Labour, for example; Public Safety recruited from various police forces. He assumed that secondments – recruitment would have had to be done by secondment, since there were no permanent career prospects for those working for the Control Commission – were not feasible because local education authorities were short of people and were reorganising (following the 1944 Education Act).32 This is borne out by correspondence between Control Commission headquarters and the War Office in August, 1945. A war establishment of fifty ECOs had been agreed by the Treasury at this stage and it had been planned to advertise the posts after discussion with the Ministry of Education. But the Ministry was against advertising, since it wanted to avoid ‘unsettling in any way

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teachers and administrators employed in the State education service’: instead recruitment might be facilitated through the appointment boards of universities and personal contact. But the response from universities was disappointing and so advertising was the only option. The matter by this stage was very urgent if Montgomery’s policy to open schools by 1 October was to be implemented.33 Civilian recruitment happened in Germany and London, through the Civil Establishment Officer and the Control Office respectively. The armed forces had their own procedures, and their members formed the bulk of those recruited. Of a sample of 232 CCG officers counted in mid–1946, 51.7 per cent were from the Army and 16.8 per cent were civilians. (The rest were Navy and Air Force officers.)34 Staff appointed to work with Education Branch were held in general high regard. They were ‘teachers, lecturers, administrators, educationists with a wide variety of interests, all with at least some knowledge of Germany, its language and institutions’.35 Berta Humphrey spoke of Education Branch attracting the ‘nicest’ people.36 Riddy’s judgement was ‘if there is any credit to the British side for what was done in the early years of the occupation it was entirely due to these dedicated people.’37 Raymond Ebsworth’s view was that ‘even the most destructive critics of the work of the Control Commission made reservations about the work of Education Branch’.38 When asked about whether they had been trained after being offered posts, some former education officers said that they had had no training at all before starting their work in Germany. Geoffrey Bird, University Officer in Göttingen, insisted that he had had ‘no brief whatsoever from anybody’ and so just got on with things once he arrived in the University.39 Caroline Cunningham said she was ‘just let loose in Kiel to get on with things’.40 Geoffrey Carter, however, reported favourably on an ‘inspiring’ four-­ week course he had attended in Bünde, before being posted to Hannover. The course he attended from 25 March to 17 April 1946, run by Colonel F.C. Horwood,41 Regional Education Officer for the Province of Hannover and for Braunschweig and Oldenburg, and Edith Davies, working at Education Branch headquarters, was the first of its kind and covered a very wide range of topics. Throughout there were German language classes and tests. There were lectures inter alia on the German mentality and psychology, the nature and function of military government, the objects and methods of education control and Education Branch, the past and future of regional and local government, descriptions of the regions of the Zone, the history of Germany before and during the Weimar Republic, the situation in the various types of school and in the universities and other Hochschulen, teacher training, textbooks, school broadcasting and films, denazification, women and education, the work of Public Safety Branch, German welfare services, youth activities and welfare, the church in Germany, the work of Manpower Division and Religious Affairs Branch, physical education and sports, the work of a Kreis Detachment, and ‘the ECO in the field’. In addition there were school visits. Those teaching the course included some prominent Education Branch figures: Donald Riddy, Edith Davies, Eric Colledge, Jeanne Gemmell, Geoffrey Bird and Walter Forsyth. As part of the course Carter was set forty problem questions; a few examples relating to university matters and administration show the range of topics for which he was being prepared:

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A University Institution is prepared to accept a student who has been favourably screened. Is any other Branch to be consulted before admission? A DP comes to see you. He wants to study at a German University. What do you tell him to do? You are asked whether Ukrainian students, now stateless because they do not wish to return to USSR, have their fees remitted at Hochschulen. What answer do you give? One of your German officials wants to go to the American Zone for official purposes. You agree this is desirable. He passes you an application for a travel permit. Whom do you approach? You think one of your typists is worthy of upgrading. What do you do? One of your German officials has a big job on hand and wants to work late in his office for a few nights. He will thus be out after curfew. How do you ensure that he will not be arrested?

His pencilled-­in answers to these questions were respectively: Manpower; apply to University – tell him to go to UNRRA Welfare Officer who sends his request; don’t take application, which must go to Public Safety at Kreis level; Camp Commandant, who deals with German authorities; Public Safety.42 Many prospective members of Education Branch who were intending to work with schools in Germany were trained at such special courses. During their training they were set similar fictional exercises, one of which, called ‘Obernapheim’, postulated a complex situation in a town where there existed a Mittelschule and a Napola.43 The Napola had 200 boys on its roll, and this number was afforced by a further 200 evacuees from a boys’ Oberschule (academic secondary school) in Cologne and a Heimschule (boarding school) near Düsseldorf. The Heimschule boys had been accommodated as boarders. The teaching staffs had been amalgamated but not yet ‘purged’: among them were two teachers on the black list and two on the grey list and three ex-­officers. There had been some hooliganism directed against billets occupied by British troops, and it was believed that boys from the schools were responsible. A nearby youth hostel was housing fifty of the boys from the Heimschule. The only other school in the town was a Mittelschule (middle school). The training exercise started with a strangely worded question: Write down in approx chronological order the titles of the officials and/or offices you would approach, where you would expect to find them, and what you would say to them during the first 48 hours.

By ‘chronological’ was meant, presumably, ‘sequential’ or ‘hierarchical’. Answers were to include the following: (a) What German authority you propose to make responsible for the school. (b) Whether you propose to disentangle the three schools or leave them together. (c) How you would deal with the prevention of outbreaks of hooliganism. (d) How you envisage the reorganisation of the school as a hostel.

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(e) What masters and pupils you would get rid of. (f) How you would ensure that your orders were carried out.

Lectures would have explained the different lines of responsibility for educational management in Germany, and candidates would have known what a Napola was, and what characterized a Mittelschule, an Oberschule and a Heimschule, Equally, they would have been told about the black, grey and white lists and so would have known which staff members were to be dismissed. And so some of the exercise might have tested knowledge of the school system, but points (c), (d) and (f) were not quite so straightforward and were not susceptible to ‘correct’ answers. A further exercise, ‘Godesberg’, concerned the control of secondary schools. Course members were asked to imagine three situations with which they would have to deal. The first concerned a private secondary school whose head teacher refuses to allow his school buildings to be used to house a Volksschule (elementary school). What do you say to him? The second situation involved a Belgian Adolf-Hitler-Schule whose Nazi teachers refused to return to Belgium. What do you consider should be done with them? Whose job is it to do it? And the third had to do with the reopening in reduced form of two secondary schools some four months later: You suspect that in [one of the schools] a good deal of subversive propaganda is being put across in various clandestine forms. The following instances have been brought to your attention: (a) Pupils are being taught to memorise patriotic and militaristic poems by Arndt and others. When questioned they learnt them from an anthology they found at home. (b) A debating society has been organised by the senior boys. The motions out forward seem to be harmless, but you have reason to believe that the society is merely a disguised form of Hitler Jugend ‘Heimabend’. The headmaster clearly anticipates an inspection and has laid his plans accordingly. He is in fact anxious to provoke a ‘casus belli’ with the authorities in order to put them in a position of forbidding an institution which professes to be of a democratic nature. How would you deal with these matters?44

Both of these training exercises were intended to bring about a close personal involvement with education at an individual institutional level. It appears that the exercise on secondary education was associated with a detailed checklist of problems and instructions as to how they should be resolved. The partially surviving list indicates the extraordinary detail in which the tasks of Education Branch officers had been anticipated.

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Table 3.1  Closing and reopening of secondary schools ‘A’ Closing of Secondary Schools Action Required

By whom carried out Essential Preliminaries

Remarks

Closing of all secondary German authorities in day-­schools order of Military Government

Troops will not be ubiquitous. Some schools may escape closure. Careful consolidation of Mil Govt Detachment reports by Edn Offs and staffs will be necessary. Temporary schools must also be closed. Mil Govt should be asked to incl closure of schools in detachment reports.

Impounding of books and school aids; collection of education salvage; inventories thereof

German authorities on Provision of adequate orders of Mil Gov in storage conjunction with ECO accommodation and, where required, transport. Provision of labour for collection and inventories.

Where convenient boarding-­school working-­parties might be used on these tasks. German Edn authorities must consolidate inventories and forward to SHAEF. NB Copy should be required for Provinz.

Transformation into temporary hostels of: i AHS ii Napolas iii Deutsche Heimschulen iv Schülerheime and similar boarding establishments v Private boarding schools or seminaries vi Any secondary dept of a KLV

i Mil Govt will give general Orders for closure of schools ii Transformation into hostels will be responsibility of Bezirk or Stadtkreis until Provinz is functioning. Edn offrs will exercise close supervision.

One of the Edn Offr’s thorniest tasks. Close liaison with (ref Preliminaries columns) – i local Edn Adm authorities possibly Public Safety [. . .] ii Public Safety and Security (Edn Branch), possibly Relief and Displaced Persons iii Labour (mil Gov), and D Lab (Army)

i Verification by Edn offrs that impounding of books and school aids has been effectively carried out. ii Edn offr must ascertain that after vetting sufficient staff of all kinds will be left to run hostels. iii Edn offr must ensure that organization of working-­parties is efficient.

[A section of the checklist is missing from the file at this point] ‘B’ Preparatory to re-­opening of Secondary Schools Action required

By whom carried out

Essential preliminaries Remarks

Elimination from schools of all objectionable features of NS inspiration

German adm edn authorities at Provinz level or, failing them, Bezirk. Failing both, under Mil Gov arrangements

Edn Branch to draw up list of objectionable features e.g. portraits of Hitler, Hakenkreuze, NS slogans

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Elimination of racial, religious and political discrimination among pupils and staffs

German authorities, directed by Edn Branch

Complete information regarding school entrance and routine regulations etc. and staff conditions of service. Consultation thereon with Legal Div, and Allies if necessary

Useful if a clear directive regarding discrimination were issued to all adm officials and heads of schools by Oberpräsident

Completion of Fragebogen by all prospective secondary teachers and administrators; and consequent purging of personnel

Fragebogen to be distributed by and returned to German edn authorities

Adequate communications; it may well take a month to assemble the completed Bögen in a much bombed Bezirk. Presumably Security (Edn Branch) arrange for distribution

Can the monumental task of examining these forms possibly be done at Berlin? Will not any cases have to be investigated locally? Suggest that, since Provinz adm staff will already have been in office some time when re-­opening of secondary schools is imminent they should be entrusted with first screening

Payment of school staffs German authorities in Agreement with Allies Überweisung system is and of education officials conjunction with as to rates of pay the best, if possible (preparation for) Finance Div and Edn Branch Finance Officer Ensure that Abt, für höheres Schulwesen, or the substitute authority, is adequately staffed for tasks of administration and inspection

German administration authorities at instance of Education Branch

Acceptability of new officials in conjunction with Security (Edn Branch)

Ensure that Dirigent/ Mil Gov in conjunction Agreement with Allies Leiter (a Regierungs-­ with Edn Branch and other departments direktor) of Abt für of Edn Branch höheres Schulwesen is precisely instructed as to

Some at least of secondary school hierarchy will have already been installed prior to re-­opening of elementary and intermediate schools A letter should be prepared for signature by SCAEF or deputy and to include a form of ack

Provision of monthly Edn Branch secondary school inspection report from Oberschulräte, or failing them, the relevant Schulräte

Agreement with Allies Draft of form, if not regarding nature of already in existence, could form. Agreement with be begun now other depts. Of Edn Branch

Provision by Germans of Request made by Edn returns regarding Branch through ECO textbooks and salvaged edn materials

Agreement with Allies Transport, money and if re-­allocation is to be labour necessary for any centralized distribution or redistribution

(Continued)

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110 Table 3.1  (Continued)

‘B’ Preparatory to re-­opening of Secondary Schools Action Required

By whom carried out Essential Preliminaries

Remarks

Provision by Germans of: i lists of suitable books and aids. Ii numbers of school children in locality requiring secondary education and at what type of school Iii proposals regarding repairs to and provision of buildings, incl former boarding schools.

i ECO to obtain and forward to SHAEF ii ditto iii German authorities, Acquisition of buildings from Property Control via ECO

Transport, money and labour necessary for carrying out the German proposals as amended by us.

Notification to e.g. Bezirk that Provinz is again functioning as secondary school edn authority

Mil Gov in conjunction Verification that comns Letter from Senior Mil with Edn Branch will in fact allow Gov Offr of Provinz Provinz to resume would suffice functions

Provision by Germans of Submission of plan to plan regarding double be required by ECO banking of pupils or teachers where necessary Provision by Germans of To be required by ECO proposed curricula

Permission by SCAEF to Edn Branch re-­open secondary school

Manual requires submission of curricula within 14 days of opening. This is too late. Previous ?? would be valuable. Agreement of Mil District Cmnd. Availability of pupils, staff and buildings

Procurement of emergency textbooks from SHAEF Allocation of AHS and Napola pupils to other schools

Germans supervised by ECOs

Decision regarding re-­opening of Deutsche Heimschulen and Wirtschaftsoberschulen

Edn Branch

[Source:  FO1050/1284.]

Important that these pupils should be scattered and their whereabouts recorded

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Those who attended the training sessions would have been well prepared through exercises of this kind to face the practical tasks awaiting them in the Zone. Accompanying lecture details indicate that participants were fully informed about the historical development of secondary education in Germany and about the issues covered by the detailed checklists of problems and their solution.

The re-­opening of schools: Early stages In the third week of May 1945, Military Government officer Captain Richard Hinton Thomas conducted some remarkable interviews in Flensburg. Hitler had named Grand Admiral Dönitz as his successor, and Dönitz, following Hitler’s suicide on 30 April, had formed an acting government in the town which was to last until 23 May, having lingered on after the various stages in the process of unconditional surrender. One of those interviewed by Thomas was the notorious Dr Wilhelm Stuckart, formerly Staatssekretär in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, now assuming a temporary and essentially powerless role in Dönitz’s cabinet as head both of the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Education. Stuckart, born in 1902, had joined the NSDAP as early as 1922 and rose to the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer. He was one of the architects of the Nuremberg Laws, actively supporting the euthanasia of children born with disabilities and the sterilization of Mischlinge (people of mixed race), and he took part in the Wannsee Conference of January 1942.45 He was eventually put on trial, imprisoned, later released, and was to be killed in a suspicious car accident in 1953. Thomas asked Stuckart what he thought was the most decisive factor in educational life in Germany. Stuckart replied immediately that nothing was so important as the ‘radical deterioration of youth’ (‘Verwilderung der Jugend’): It was imperative, [Stuckart] stated with all possible emphasis, to open schools with the minimum delay. In his opinion the situation was so urgent that not even the absence of teachers should be allowed to delay the re-­opening; if textbooks were not available, then teachers should be told to manage without them. Already, he said, before the surrender there had been what amounted to an almost complete cessation of all schooling.46

Thomas’s questioning of Stuckart and others was part of the early intelligence gathering necessary to understand the scale of the problems in education that the occupying forces would face on the ground in defeated Germany. And the essential task of reopening schools had been long anticipated in the preparations for the occupation of German territory: the target date for schools in the Zone to start again was 1 October. *  *  * Captain John (Jack) Boyce was among the first Army officers to become involved in educational reconstruction in mid–1945, around the time the Education Branch Headquarters moved to Germany. He had crossed into the country during the earliest

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period, characterized in the war-­time planning as ‘of a first-­aid nature’. Two phases in work in education were envisaged: destruction (of all manifestations of Nazism and militarism, during the ‘fighting-­in’ period); and reconstruction (in which Germans would play a leading part, under supervision.)47 The ‘instrument’ of Military Government, as Donald Riddy was to describe it, was the Detachment, which could be of any size from four officers to any multiple of four, with the addition of functional specialists as necessary. The smallest consisted of two officers for general administration and two for public safety; the largest comprised (in May 1945) 70 officers.48 Detachments were established at every level of administration from Province (‘P’ dets) to Kreis (‘K’ dets).49 One Kreis Resident Officer (KRO) described his domain in 1947: a district of some 150,000 people, including one town of 40,000 which was 50 per cent destroyed50 and fifty-­eight villages. He saw his task as advising, observing and reporting on local affairs; he had weekly meetings with the mayor and the town clerk to hear about local problems and to pass on information; ‘Most of us are now pretty good at speaking German,’ he reported, though at these meetings there was usually an interpreter present, to avoid misunderstandings. Among his duties were regular school inspections. In the previous winter schools in the Kreis had been closed since there was no coal; large numbers of children had no shoes and so were unable to go to school. One meal a day was being provided. Serving with a Military Government Detachment in northern Germany, Boyce had the initial task of feeding surviving concentration camp victims and refugees, and his frequent letters home reveal the harrowing complexity of the problems he faced in conditions of much muddle and uncertainty: ‘the administration from above is not of the best so that things are liable to change suddenly and without warning. I’ve always managed to cope so far but it’s a bit of a strain never being able to follow a system for very long at a time.’51 Having been a schoolteacher before the War, he was anxious to move into work in education, but – to his evident annoyance – administrative confusion delayed his posting from the ruins of Braunschweig to the ruins of Münster and then to Minden (mostly spared from destruction), where he found himself appointed ‘S.O. 3 Education and Religion for the [Regierungsbezirk] Minden – an area about the size of an English county’: It means setting up the complete German educational administration all over again, getting rid of the Nazi element from among teachers and officials. I hope to have some of the Schools ready to start by the end of the month but it is a slow business, and damaged buildings and evacuated children complicate the process. I am told by German officials that they have some children of nine years of age in the area who have never been to school for more than a few months.52

He had observed ‘the most complete chaos imaginable’, when he took the opportunity to go into an unoccupied school building in April: ‘books, glass and furniture shattered and mixed up together, everything ransacked and German helmets and equipment flung around all over the place.’53 At the beginning of August he was trying ‘to spur the German administration on to further efforts as they seem a bit casual’, but by the end of the month – by which time Education Branch HQ had been established in Bünde in

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Westphalia – he could report to his wife that about 168 schools had been opened, with ‘more coming along every day’. Edith Davies (1909–95) was a very active education officer in Germany from August 1944. Before being recruited by Donald Riddy, she had been a teacher of German at a girls’ grammar school. She remembers Riddy explaining that ‘one of the main planks of [British] policy would be to enlist as soon as possible the co-­operation of those Germans who had perforce to go underground or suffer demotion’.54 She made her way to Bünde with about twenty colleagues. A preparation for her work before she left London was the Military Government Handbook of German Education which she regarded as her ‘bible’. Her main responsibility was for Gymnasien, but she had also to inspect Volksschulen before a specialist arrived from England. ‘Our powers were very great’, she recalled.55 Her first task was to travel from town to town in the Zone to evaluate the state of school buildings and to get to know head teachers. School buildings were up to 80 per cent destroyed: she recalls Adolf Grimme saying at the first conference of head teachers and officials: ‘Wir stehen vor dem Nichts’ (‘we stand before a void’).56 Davies had to check syllabuses in all the future Länder of the Zone: most were taken over from the Weimar period, but that alone did not mean that they were acceptable: she asked herself, had aspects of Weimar helped to prepare the way for Hitler and were such aspects reflected in the pre-Nazi curriculum? She worked closely with some of the leading German education officials, whom she names since their outstanding work for the youth of Germany needed to be recognized. They were: Carl Möhlmann (SchleswigHolstein); Ernst Merck and Emmi Beckmann (Hamburg); Günther Rönnebeck (Hannover); Adolf Bohlen (Westfalen); Luise Badenhewer (Nordrhein); and Gertrud Panzer (British sector of Berlin).57 Each provincial capital in the Zone had an education office with about five control officers, responsible individually for schools, teacher education, vocational education, universities and youth affairs. Davies describes, as an example of her work, the reopening of the Graf-Spee-Schule in Kiel. This involved conversations with Regierungsdirektor Carl Möhlmann, who had submitted forward-­looking syllabuses that did not solely depend on Weimar examples and that would also be valid for the rest of Schleswig-Holstein. The school buildings were relatively undamaged, the teaching staff were politically uncompromised, but there were no textbooks: teachers had to find their own sources. While she and her colleagues did not imagine that one education system could be ‘propped up’ by another, nevertheless there was much that might be learnt from British experience in education. Co-­operative meetings were arranged with German educators to discuss British intentions, and courses were run for German and British teachers. Leading personalities were sent to England to experience British practice at first hand, and some British educators were invited to Germany to make contacts and plans for the future.58 Looking back on her work in Germany in the early years of the Occupation, Edith Davies concluded that the guiding principle was to work as closely as possible with German educators since only by doing so could her work have lasting value. What resulted, she felt, was mutual respect and a willingness to learn from each other.59 So close was the relationship between an individual education control officer and local Germans responsible for education that

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one visitor to the Zone said that ‘as far as he could see, the Control Commission consisted of a collection of British people fighting each other on behalf of their own particular Germans’.60 As was the case with many of her colleagues, what Edith Davies achieved in Germany was remarkable, given that her only previous experience of managing anything was as a schoolteacher in Maidstone. *  *  * Soon after the Occupation began, there was a sufficient level of ad hoc localized German administration to allow the collection of information on which plans for educational reconstruction could be based. Prominent educationists who had fallen foul of the Nazis were identified and persuaded to take up senior positions, chief among them Adolf Grimme and Heinrich Landahl, both of whom were to play a significant role in educational reconstruction and reform, in the Hannover Provinz (later Niedersachsen) and Hamburg respectively. From April 1946 the new Minister für Volksbildung in Schleswig-Holstein was to be Wilhelm Kuklinski (1892–1963) and in what became Nordrhein-Westfalen the formidable Christine Teusch (1888–1968) was appointed Kultusminister in December 1947.61 The Länder of the British Zone were well served by these early appointments. Adolf Grimme (1889–1963) was an educationist of immense distinction. His career had taken him from school teaching to the highest office in education in the pre-Nazi years, that of Prussian Minister of Education, a post he assumed on 31 January 1930 as the successor to the famous Carl Heinrich Becker. He was removed from office in July 1932, became active in the German resistance movement, was arrested by the Nazis in 1942, put on trial in 1943, sentenced to three years in prison, and was fortunate to escape the death penalty. He was released in May 1945 after British troops had occupied Hamburg, and following calls from Landahl that he had been unjustly imprisoned.62 With the British in charge in the Hannover region, he was the obvious choice to oversee educational development. But as in the case of some other prominent individuals, he was initially treated with scant respect by the military authorities. His letter of appointment from the Oberpräsident of the Provinz Hannover (dated 2 August 1945) had named him ‘Kommissarischer Regierungsdirektor’ (acting government director) and pointed out that this was not a permanent post and that his remaining in office would depend on the satisfactory conduct of his duties; it reminded him that the Military Government reserved the right to dismiss him for other reasons, should that prove to be necessary.63 As if that was not enough, Major A.J. Beattie (aged thirty-­one, and with the status of S.O.2) wrote to the fifty-­five-year-­old Grimme from the Hannover Regional Headquarters (16 October 1945) in the bluntest military language: 1. Further to our conversation this morning, I confirm instructions for the future conduct of business between this Headquarters and your Department. 2. You will deal direct with me on all matters of policy and affairs of more-­thanaverage importance. You will NOT deal with my subordinate officers on these matters. 3. You will meet me in my office each Monday morning at 10.00 a.m. to discuss current problems as laid down in para 2 above. In case of your being unavoidably

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absent, you will send a representative empowered to act in your name. I understand that this representative will be Dr. Zierold. 4. You will appoint representatives to deal with my officers as follows:– one representative for school buildings and equipment (Capt Jackson) one representative for school textbooks and teaching aids (Capt Jackson) one representative for Personnel questions (F/O McKeever) You will inform me of the names of these three representatives by 20 Oct 45.64

After he had left Germany to pursue his academic career as a classicist, Beattie wrote to Grimme from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. ‘Despite the peculiar and delicate circumstances in which we were compelled to work last year’, he said, it had always been a pleasure to deal with him and those like him: It is now a particular pleasure for me to address you no longer as an officer in an occupied country but as a colleague active in the work of education. [. . .] I fear that in Germany many hearts still despair of the revival of education, more especially in view of the political and economic difficulties that beset all cultural activities. [. . .] Yet the triumph of culture and enlightenment in Germany seems to me the supreme goal for us who are alive today, whether German or British. It was in that belief that I approached my duties in Hannover (although this may often have been hard for a German to discern!).65

Beattie had a pompous writing style; he had sent Grimme a long-­winded discourse on the importance of youth for the future of Germany, in which he crassly dismissed the worth of those – like Grimme of course – who had opposed the Nazis, ‘however bravely’: Personally I would rather see a young university graduate, without technical qualifications or experience but with liberal ideas and imagination, employed in an administrative office than any man who has been the helpless witness of past misfortunes, however great his intellectual merit and however bravely he may have played his part as a Nazi-­gegner [sic].66

In the same letter Beattie had written that ‘there were not many other voices in the British Zone that could speak with such clarity and authority as [Grimme’s] on educational matters’. When Grimme was later invited by GER to come to England together with Senator Heinrich Landahl of Hamburg, Beattie wrote warm letters to him and welcomed him to Cambridge.67 Heinrich Landahl (1895–1971) had been headmaster of the progressive LichtwarkSchule in Hamburg, a school based in the principles of the Reformpädagogik movement, from 1926 to 1933 and was active politically, becoming briefly a member of the Reichstag. He was forced in 1934 to retire early. Thereafter he withdrew from public life until becoming Schulsenator in Hamburg in 1945. Together with Grimme he played a

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Figure 3.2 Adolf Grimme and Heinrich Landahl at the London Control Office, 1946. [Source: Blick in die Welt, 4.]

leading role in educational reconstruction and reform in the Zone and was regarded with great respect by the British. Once an embryonic German educational administration was in place, mapping of the availability of buildings and teachers had to be done quickly. In June, for example, a survey of available schools and teachers in Land Braunschweig was undertaken by hard-­pressed German authorities and forwarded to the Headquarters of 30 Corps. The figures for elementary schools showed for the town of Braunschweig that nine buildings were fit for immediate use, twelve needed minor repairs, seven major repairs, and four had been completely destroyed; for the rest of the Land the figures respectively were 357, 17, 11, 3. Of the 694 teachers available in both the town and the Land (in contrast to 1,598 in 1939), some 531 had been members of the NSDAP (60 per cent); their average age was fifty-­two. The number of schoolchildren (all types of school) was ‘not yet known’. The percentages of NSDAP members in the other types of school were: Mittelschulen: 70 per cent; technical schools: 59 per cent; secondary schools: 52 per cent.68 Before those data were collected, a Military Government survey, reported by Major M.H. O’Grady at the end of May, had described some of the problems. O’Grady’s report began superciliously: As a result of conversations, preliminary reports, and items of information from various sources, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the problem of re-­ starting German Education will be one of manpower. Accommodation will be inferior, textbooks stereotyped and dull, but teachers will be desperately short, even if high-­powered professors are compelled to drop Relativity and come down to the three simpler Rs.

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For the Hannover Provinz a preliminary survey outlined teacher availability: Teachers available against reasonable requirement: 60% Teachers likely to be acceptable to us: 40% Of sub-­para (a) under 40 years of age: 12½% Average age of (a): 50–55

The situation in elementary schools in Landkreis Borken – not felt to be particularly bad, perhaps better than other areas – provided an example of staffing problems: (a) Pupils Teachers NSDAP Members Pupils per 1 teacher

1942 10,265 198 103 51.5

1945 12,388 171 not given 72

(b) It is NOT likely that many of the NSDAP members were enthusiasts as this is a 95% R.C. area and religion probably bears greater weight than Nazism. Even assuming, however, that not more than 20 have to be dismissed for real Nazism, that leaves a position of 1 teacher per 81 pupils. (c) A straightforward division by 2 suggests that we could re-­open on a basis of:

1 teacher per 40.5 pupils

but it is likely that if one keeps in mind the Nazi family increase campaign, there are more pupils under 10 than over, and anyhow, when we come to re-­open the 10–14 grades we shall be back at the figure of 81.

The conclusion was that although the first four years of elementary schools could be opened in due course, ‘we shall probably come to a full stop in the process of starting all Education’. In terms of suggested lines of action, the obvious need was stated to be obtaining more teachers and preparing for their training: ‘In theory this is the Germans’ headache, but I consider that it is on a parallel with the Police and Food situations, where we are taking positive steps towards rehabilitation.’69 From a hurried report in early June from the Regierungsbezirk Aurich (in Hannover Provinz, later Niedersachsen), we gain a picture of some of the initial action taken. Six Schulräte (school inspectors/officials) had been dismissed and replaced by non-Party members who had been ordered to nominate Schulsachbearbeiter (specialist officials in charge of schools) in every community. It was hoped that they would be able to provide information on the political activities of teachers in their areas. German authorities had been ordered to store all existing textbooks in one locked room in every school. Finding suitable teachers was a major task: From preliminary investigation it seems that few of the qualified teachers available will be acceptable on political grounds. It is felt that in order to ensure the eradication of Nazism it will be necessary, not only to appoint some who are not qualified teachers, but also, as an emergency measure, to employ some of the former Oberschulen and the Mittelschulen teachers even in the Grundschulen.70

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Figure 3.3  Schoolchildren handing in Nazi textbooks. In mid-July 1945 Donald Riddy was fully occupied with the early work of Education Branch once it had moved to Germany. He wrote to Canon Julian Bickersteth: I am very busy as you can imagine. Can you picture what it would be like administering England with no railways, hardly any telephones, almost every bridge down, and in addition keeping in contact with three other national administrations? I am loving it, though, even if it does mean practically no spare time and very little sleep.71

A few days earlier he had reported that the thirty Education Control Officers working in the Zone had been tasked with advising Military Government detachment commanders on the reconstitution of ‘essential German educational authorities’. Such authorities had been established at Land, Provinz, and Regierungsbezirk levels. They in turn had been asked to conduct surveys and they had distributed Fragebogen (denazification questionnaires) to all the teachers available. Twelve Grundschulen (for pupils aged between six and ten) had reopened in Stadtkreis Aachen and permission had been given to reopen a further twenty in Landkreis Aachen and twenty-­seven in Hamburg. In Hamburg, with a population of 100,000 children, some 1,200 elementary school teachers had been vetted and found to be acceptable; no grave shortage of teachers was expected in Hannover. In Kreis Lübbecke and in Herford (Westphalia) only twenty such teachers were deemed ‘suitable’; there were only 260 suitable teachers for 72,000 children in Land Braunschweig. In Schleswig-Holstein 7,000 teachers had

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completed Fragebogen, but ‘Public Safety officers are unable through pressure of work to process them’. In Hamburg 127 school buildings had been put to other uses (nineteen as hospitals, thirty-­three for Military Government purposes); only seventy-­nine were available. In Land Braunschweig, by contrast, 366 elementary school buildings were ‘ready for immediate use’.72 On the general situation regarding the use of suitable buildings Riddy later wrote that ‘some of the buildings pressed into service have nothing to commend them except the absence of an alternative’.73 Riddy listed a number of observations: (a) The staff dealing with Education in Military Government 11 is numerically inadequate for the volume of work. (b) There is a shortage of ECOs which will become serious as soon as schools are re-­opened to any extent. (c) The process of getting German education working again is made extremely difficult by lack of adequate means of communication and transport. (d) The success of our control of German education will depend largely on our ability to keep unworthy members out of the teaching profession. The standards adopted in vetting appear from external evidence to be dangerously varied. (e) A decision about denominational education is urgently required. A request was made by this Branch, when a paper on the Concordat was submitted to the Foreign Office, that the whole question should be reconsidered. (f) The problem of providing sufficient emergency textbooks by 1st Oct. is a serious one by reason of its magnitude and the inadequacy of communications.

On teacher training, Riddy reported that no steps had yet been taken, apart from thirty-­two teachers under training in Stadtkreis Aachen.74 Teaching assistants had to be trained quickly, in provisional three-­month courses, to make up for the shortage of Volksschullehrer (elementary school teachers). In 1939 the average number of pupils per teacher in Volksschulen in the whole of Germany was forty-­three; the post-­war target figure was considered ‘on pedagogical grounds’ to be about thirty-­five. In 1946 and 1947, however, the figure was sixty and more pupils per teacher. (Even by 1951 the figures had only decreased to 49.8 in Nordrhein-Westfalen, 50.3 in Schleswig-Holstein, and 53.7 in Niedersachsen.)75 Permission to reopen schools was conditional upon certain undertakings, as exemplified in the case of Grundschulen (primary schools) in Düsseldorf: 1. Permission is given for the reopening of the Grundschulen in Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf, subject to an undertaking given by the German authorities that: (a) No textbook, other than an emergency textbook, will be used in the schools, unless it has been specifically approved by this HQ. (b) No educational films will be shown in the schools other than those whose titles appear on approved lists issued by this HQ. (c) No teaching aids of any kind will be employed until written approval for their use has been given by the Education Control Officer. [. . .]

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Educating the Germans Lists of teaching personalities or education officials should contain, in addition to surname, first names, date and place of birth and normal place of residence, in order that the persons may be checked against the latest personality information held at this HQ.76

A news report in August 1945 indicated that according to the Control Commission German schoolteachers wishing to be employed in the British Zone were required to sign a declaration pledging themselves not to teach anything associated with Nazi doctrines or harmful to the cause of the United Nations. The declaration read: I understand that the fundamental principles upon which the schools are to be opened are: That there will be no teaching of anything which glorifies militarism; which seeks to revive or justify the doctrines of National Socialism or the achievements of the National Socialist leaders; which favours a policy of discrimination on grounds of race or religion; which is hostile or seeks to disturb the relations between any of the United Nations; which propounds the practice of war or mobilization or preparation for war – whether in the scientific, economic or industrial fields – or which promotes the study of military geography. Physical training will not be expanded to, or retained at, a point where it becomes equivalent to pre-­military training.77

O’Neill minuted: ‘Gratifying that this comes straight from our directive!’78 The report was indeed an accurate account of what was required in the directive in question, dated 14 August. In addition, the directive went into detail about ‘military features in any programme of physical training or sport’: (a) shooting or weapon training of any kind, practice with simulated weapons, but not including such generally accepted athletic pursuits as javelin, discus and hammer throwing and weight and shot putting; (b) any tests or series of tests failure to accomplish which might reasonably be expected to cause the performer physical injury; (c) route marches, squad drill, unarmed combat; (d) manoeuvres or games designed to give training in the use, for military purposes, of natural features.

The directive was to be retained and displayed in the head teacher’s office, and teachers were required to sign a statement to the effect that they had read and understood it as well as a more detailed text which stated that the Supreme Commander did not intend to interfere in matters concerning the curriculum except in regard to the requirements that education should be free of Nazi and militaristic tendencies and which reiterated what was in the directive.79 Consideration had even been given to the question of private tutoring by individuals who had not been through the denazification process. As with dismissed university teachers who, it was feared, might continue to engage with former students by offering private tuition, there was a danger of unapproved teachers exerting insidious influence

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through private tuition, and so interim permission was officially granted in approved cases. Fräulein Lotte Behn, for example, was just such a case: she was authorized by Military Government, Charlottenburg, on 1 August 1945 to give private lessons in French and English ‘pending her reinstatement as teacher at the Ina-Seidel-Schule’.80 A report on the reorganization of education in all zones for the period 8 May to 15 September 1945 recorded extraordinary progress in the British Zone: The only zone that has so far registered any considerable progress in the actual re-­ starting of school education is the British. About a million children (roughly half the estimated total of children of school age) were at school in the British Zone at the end of August. Early in September, 80–90% of the children between six and ten in the N. Rhine Province and Westphalia were receiving education, though only half the 1940 number of schools were open. This is a remarkably high figure in view of the dislocation and destruction in that area. Hamburg had slightly more than half its elementary schools open (for Grundschule children) at the end of August, and, while the proportion in Hanover was not quite so high, in Oldenburg it was 70%. Reliable statistics for the other districts are lacking. Only a small number of senior elementary school children were at work and there have been isolated reports of secondary schools opening in the zone.81

In fact, by the end of August in the Zone, some 3,000 schools had been opened on a full-­time or part-­time basis, providing an education for about 500,000 pupils. By the end of October 7,300 schools were open for 1,414,400 pupils. At the end of 1945 11,250 schools were teaching some 2,250,000 pupils. But there were severe shortages in some parts of the Zone. Riddy reported in September that: In Flensburg, for example, there are no school buildings at all available for normal purposes. In the Blankenese district of Hamburg only four rooms are available for 82 elementary school classes not to mention secondary school children, and at Bergedorf in another part of the city all the school accommodation for 7,000 children has been requisitioned for hospital purposes.82

By the end of 1945 the situation in Hamburg was described in statistical detail as follows: Elementary schools (Volks-, Mittel- and Hauptschulen): 262, catering for 49,513 pupils (41,916 half-­time; 33,103 less than half-­time). No. of teachers: 2,916, with a further 70 required. Secondary schools: 40, catering for 11,295 pupils (4,212 half-­time, 1,417 less than half time). No. of teachers: 712, with a further 238 required. Vocational schools and courses: 37, with a further 6 shortly to be reopened, catering for 33,600 full-­time students and with a staff of 786. There were two kindergartens, for 4,896 children, looked after by 476 teachers. The University had 1,030 medical students, 820 in law or political economy, 690 in philosophy, 560 in mathematics and natural science, and 30 in pharmacy.

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Adult education was ‘in full swing’. The Hamburg Volkshochschule had reopened on 3 December and approximately 8,200 people were attending lectures and courses, 50 per cent of them aged between 16 and 25. Special lectures were being given to former members of the Wehrmacht in hospital.83

At the beginning of 1946, however, some elementary school children were still not in school, since suitable buildings were not available. An extension of the already existing ‘shift’ system in some areas was therefore formalized in an Education Control Instruction (ECI) that argued that this solution should be used to maximum effect, varying according to local circumstances and making use of all types of school buildings. German authorities were in some cases ‘too rigid’ in allocating school accommodation. Education Control Officers would satisfy themselves that all school accommodation ‘of whatever nature’ was being fully used.84 *  *  * Jack Boyce’s satisfaction with the positive progress in the area for which he was responsible mitigated somewhat his annoyance at the general disorder and what he saw at an early stage as the neglect of education: I’ve completely lost that awful feeling of frustration I’ve had for so long in the army, because although I’m still a captain, this job is a far more important one than most. One gets rather dispirited when one thinks how neglected this side of the job has been. You notice it especially when it is compared with the staff allotted to material things such as Property Control or Trade and Industry where everyone is a Lt Col or a Major! But then England never did have much opinion of anyone who was concerned with the non-­material things I’m afraid.85

Shortly afterwards he was promoted from captain to major, taking obvious pleasure in signing his first document with his new rank. Status was clearly an important issue in the Occupation period, and it caused a lot of irritation. Before his promotion, Boyce had written that ‘the blokes here are all very quiet and much older than I am – nearly all Majors or Colonels – Education of course is the lowest rank of all, as you would expect!’86 And later he returned to the subject: This job which we are doing (there are about five of us, each with a Regierungs Bezirk [. . .]) is meant to be a Major’s but apparently we shan’t get the promotion because we haven’t yet volunteered to stay on. [. . .] I can’t understand how they can send these Control Commission people out for a definite job and for higher pay and yet we who have had the uncertainty of these last six years still don’t know where we are.87

There was an understandable tension between those who had been among the first to grapple with the immediate problems of occupation and those who had been recruited in England to go out to Germany in rather better paid posts (and with appropriate Army ranks) to fulfil specific duties. The military who had been prepared for their role in

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Germany by the War Office’s Civil Affairs Directorate and who fulfilled their function as occupiers with great efficiency were understandably disconcerted when civilians recruited to the Control Commission staff arrived to take over from them.88 Those who were recruited in Germany direct from the Army clearly had more hands-­on experience, as was the case with Ronald (Ronnie) Haig Wilson, later to play a significant role in adult education in Germany, who described how he was ‘lent out’ by his Army unit but was still ‘fed and watered’ by the Army: ‘But for all practical purposes I got my daily assignments from British Military Government for Schleswig-Holstein.’ His work ‘involved collaboration with the embryo, and I stress embryo, because they were well under establishment, branch of the Education Control Service for the British Zone’. Wilson applied to the British Zone recruiting office and was interviewed ‘for the best part of a day’, sent back to the UK to be demobilized, and then returned to Germany with civilian status. ‘There weren’t very many people who did this sort of thing, [. . .] being locally recruited from the British armed forces in Germany, but there was a steady stream.’89 Jack Boyce’s views on the Germans with whom he dealt wandered between justifiable contempt and sympathetic understanding. In April he wrote: ‘One can’t help feeling rather pleased that the Germans here [in Nordsulingen, near Hannover] are sweating with fear – particularly because of the Russian ex POW[s].’90 In July he expounded on an encounter with Germans reacting to Nazi textbooks: This morning I went to see some books which the local council wanted to destroy on account of their Nazi attitude, but they thought we might like to have some as articles of historic interest. I duly went along and was amazed at the way they took the books from the shelves, read the title and if it was a juicy one chuckled as if they had found a new risqué book in a very respectable library.91

He goes on to accuse them of a lack of moral sense and moral courage, and he returns to the subject at greater length in a later letter: I find more and more that I am coming to dislike these people and their attitude to things. I can’t imagine how they can ever pull themselves out of the mess into which they have got themselves. And everywhere you go it’s the same thing that you hear – We couldn’t help it, it was the Party. We didn’t want to join but we had to. It wasn’t the Wehrmacht who blew all the bridges it was the Party. He didn’t want to take the office in the Party but they forced him to. We didn’t know anything about the concentration camps, the German nation can’t be held responsible for them – it was the S.S. They have drifted for so long that they have lost all sense of the individual being responsible for anything. I suppose in a few years’ time it will be not the Versailles treaty they moan about but the Party and they will produce books to show that these chaps weren’t Germans at all but a gang of International Freemasons just trying to break up the German nation. Some of the stuff I read produced by the Nazis is just as stupid and crazy.92

Stephen Spender reported in early September on a visit to the Zone. He had found the Germans living ‘in a mental vacuum’. Konrad Adenauer had told him that he

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considered what he called geistige Probleme (‘mental/spiritual problems’) to be just as important as the problems of rebuilding Cologne. Spender considered that German youth was ‘confused, disillusioned, nihilistic, distressed, rather than straightforwardly Nazified’. His dominant impression was of confusion. And while the concentration so far had been on opening schools for ten- to fourteen-­year-­olds, it was of great importance to educate young people aged fourteen to twenty-­four, ‘because the crucial struggle for the future of Germany is going on in their minds’. There was the danger of ‘providing the Germans with no mental food’.93 Lieutenant Colonel Noel Annan visited Westphalia and North-Rhine Province in mid-October and reported on the school situation in Aachen: The Education Officer gave us a most interesting account of the progress made in opening the schools. Four thousand children were receiving full time education, eighteen thousand half time and twelve thousand less than half time. Of the thousand teachers required, about half were available and suitable. School councils of parents had vetted teachers: as a result very few teachers thus selected had to be turned down by Military Government, and not a single teacher who had been admitted to membership of the Nazi Party was employed. Extension lectures for adults by university professors had also begun. Although the region was ninety-­five per cent Catholic, denominational education had not been started. The Bishop of Aachen had adopted a most reasonable attitude, in contrast to some of his brethren east of the Rhine. He professed to understand Military Government’s difficulties which arose from the lack of school buildings, and had expressed himself satisfied with the scheme whereby priests were admitted to the schools to give religious instruction. Except for eight private schools, no secondary education was yet available, and the university buildings were too badly damaged for it to open. The enormous damage to the town hampered Military Government’s endeavours. Though the children appeared each morning spotlessly clean, their physique was bad. School meals had been planned, but at present the food was not yet available. The most difficult group to handle were the adolescents of thirteen or fourteen; those of seventeen and eighteen were serious minded, Parish priests were beginning to run youth organisations.94

One school that the first Labour Minister of Education, Ellen Wilkinson, visited in early October 1945 was built in 1930 for 600 elementary and 600 secondary schoolchildren, and now had 1,300 and 1,200 pupils respectively in its two parts. She observed the beginnings of school meal provision: After spending a few minutes in a badly damaged elementary school, which was not weatherproof and where it was too cold to keep children for longer than three hours at a time, we went on to see about 300 children receiving a midday meal. This meal, which we were told provided 400 calories, consisted of soup with carrot mash and vegetable sausage. It was only possible to provide meals of this kind for children who were officially classed as undernourished. The number was estimated at 6% of the school children in Hamburg.95

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In August 1946 it could be reported that a school in Münster was providing a daily meal for its 1,400 pupils aged six to fifteen, attending school on a shift basis (either morning or afternoon): lessons were interrupted by the arrival of urns of soup and tins of biscuits. In North Rhine Province, about 670,000 meals of vegetable or milk soup per month were being provided, supplementing children’s diet by some 300 calories per day. Teachers supervising the meals were also eligible for these basic meals.96 An elementary school in Berlin visited by Ellen Wilkinson, designed to take 900 children, was attended by almost that number being taught on a two-­shift basis. Wilkinson commented on the food and clothing of children in Spandau: . . . we saw first an elementary school which had been badly damaged. There was no glass in lots of the windows and it was very cold. Most of the children were under-­ nourished. The average breakfast, where it existed, seemed to consist of ersatz coffee (without milk) and one or two slices of plain bread, sometimes with a little lard; for the evening there was usually soup or potatoes. The clothes worn by the children were on the whole quite good except for the shoes.

Finally, she was taken to see a secondary school, where she observed a bizarre lesson. The school building was:

Figure 3.4  Minister of Education Ellen Wilkinson visiting a German school in 1945. (film still)

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Figure 3.5  Children receiving their daily ration of soup at school.

so badly damaged that it will be quite impracticable to use it during the winter. It was a fine day, so two classes were being held in the open air. The younger class was learning about Asia Minor, but we had no time to discover why the subject matter under discussion at the moment of our visit was the Salvation Army.

On her way back to London via Brussels Wilkinson was delayed by bad weather over Croydon, and she took advantage of an opportunity to see the film The True Glory: ‘It was in some ways a fitting conclusion to the tour, and we were able to appreciate to the full the unconscious irony of the comment made in the film to a British officer by a German woman: “If you had given in in 1940, none of this would have happened”.’97 The unrepaired damage to school buildings was in some cases so bad that there was a danger in the autumn of 1945 that schools recently reopened would have to be closed. In November, the commander of 714 (P) Detachment in North Rhine Province visited schools in Essen ‘which were windowless and where the children who had been in school for four hours were long past the stage where they could absorb any ideas, in addition to suffering acute physical discomfort’. The Oberpräsident of the Province was given firm instructions from the provincial Military Government headquarters: The following orders will be repeated to all Schulräte for absolute compliance: (a) Classes must be dismissed by teachers whenever, in their opinion, conditions have deteriorated beyond the normal standards of comfort.

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(b) In unheated or windowless schools no session will last more than 3 hours. (c) The new warming exercises [. . .] must be introduced as soon as possible.

If these conditions were not observed, schools would be closed. Every endeavour should be made to ensure at least a minimum of instruction ‘subject to humane considerations’.98 In the case of Göttingen, several school buildings had been used for other purposes for some time during the War, in some instances as hospitals and now in addition as emergency accommodation for refugees and displaced persons and even for German prisoners of war. The Oberschule für Mädchen (high school for girls) for example, had been requisitioned for use as an emergency hospital and as a collection point for refugees. When eventually it could be used as a school again, it was necessary to disinfect the buildings, but this could not be done until glass was found for the shattered windows: without glass, no disinfection; without disinfection, no medical approval for schools to reopen. Some 1,000 square metres of glass were needed for school buildings in Göttingen.99 When they were able to return to their classrooms, the teachers at the Oberschule für Mädchen found that teaching materials and equipment of every kind had disappeared, leaving very little teaching apparatus with which to plan lessons. It was reported that glass ‘may become available’ for schools in Essen at the beginning of December 1945, that 70 per cent of schools now had their quota of coal and that orders had been issued about the dismissal of classes and the duration of lessons in unheated or windowless schools. No food was as yet available for schools in Essen, though an instruction from the Control Commission on the introduction of school meals in the Zone was being issued ‘this week’.100 Ellen Wilkinson found time in 1945 to record the narration for a Pathé News film on educational work in Germany.101 In it she covered the main issues: The legacy of Hitler’s Germany lies heavy on Europe’s children. Nazism poisoned the younger generation. In my recent visit to Germany I saw a new kind of education which we hope will combat the evil effects of Hitler’s cradle-­snatching such as the Allies discovered. [. . .] Not often in history has a conqueror made it his first job to educate the children of the conquered. But that is what Allied administrators are doing in Germany, and a colossal task it is.

She spoke of health checks (for tuberculosis, rickets), school meals (the usual bowl of soup), the first signs of malnutrition, the shortage of schools (not surprisingly making re-­education difficult), open air classes, teacher shortages, replacement of textbooks, children’s help with ‘getting their schools ship-­shape again’, plenty of games (‘not the flag wagging and military parades of the past but simple children’s games common to all nations’). ‘We are not putting Germany’s Youth before the welfare of our British children, but the hope of future security in Europe depends on training these young minds in the ways of peace and justice.’ A sense of the conditions of young children can be found in a statistical report of May 1947 on elementary school children in Hildesheim:

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Table 3.2  Condition of young children, 1947.102 Total inhabitants:

982, 203

%

No. of children born in RB

119,385

No. of refugee children Orphans Children with one parent Father dead or missing Father POW Father out of work Father incapacitated by war

49,693 1,085 16,143 17,020 11,871 5,445 3,581

17.2 0.6 9.1 10 7 2.9 2.3

81,853 35,104 16,386 21,004 10,446 32,483 1,355 29,068 44,126

46.5 20.3 9.7 12.2 6.3 19.1 0.6 17.4 26.1

3,215 18,488 95,329 15,769 57,707 39,537 19,763 23,794 9,284 31,338 73,880 19,811 14,258 56,596 3,148 19,153 38,369 55,035 24,040 8,511

1.7 11 56.8 9.2 34.3 23.2 11.6 13.4 5.2 17.4 45.6 11.6 8.4 33.1 1.7 11 22.6 32.5 13.9 5.2

22,004 10,950 4,499 8,053 52,475 56,931 4,953 759

12.7 6.3 2.3 4.6 30.7 33.7 2.9 0.4

FOOD Live on normal rations Receive school meals Self suppliers Part self suppliers Go to school without breakfast Only dry bread to eat before school No warm midday meal Undernourished Been ill between 1.7.46 & 31.12.46 CLOTHING No shirt Only one shirt More than one shirt No shoes of own Only one pair shoes More than one pair shoes With shoes not repairable Absent because no shoes No stockings Only one pair stockings More than one pair stockings Stockings beyond repair No underclothes More than one set No suit of clothes or dress No overcoat No gloves Only one pair cloves More than one pair gloves Using borrowed clothes HOMES Using one room as bedroom Sleep in kitchen Sleep on the floor Have no bed Sleep alone in bed Sleep together with others Share bed with more than 1 person Have no possibility of heating at all

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BOOKS No Fibel (primer) No exercise book No reading book No hymn book No catechism No Bible No New Testament No song book No atlas No slates

33,990 95,307 41,013 50,492 54,254 51,547 53,300 91,826 75,630 49,368

20.3 56.3 24.4 29.6 31.9 30.2 31.3 54.3 45 29

TRAVEL Have more than 2 kms to go to school

6,215

Use a bicycle

157

Use a bus

442

Use a train

182

Progress in providing schools with an essential minimum of materials and equipment was painfully slow. In the summer of 1947 a teacher in Göttingen described the problems: No books, no exercise books, no sketchbooks, no pencils, no gym equipment and no PE kit – can you imagine how paralysing all this alone must be for our teaching, how all children’s working together and independently is curtailed or made impossible? And how much time wasting it means, for example, to write all reading material, all homework, all songs on the blackboard and for it to have to be copied down? Copied down – on what? On small till receipts, on the backs of pages from calendars, on bills, on wrapping paper.103

Statements of policy Riddy and his staff were called upon at frequent intervals to provide statements describing current educational policy in the Zone. In December 1945 he formulated immediate and long-­term objectives: An immediate and a long-­term objective underlie the work of this Branch. The immediate objective is to secure the earliest possible resumption of German educational activity whilst ensuring the elimination of National Socialist, nationalist and militaristic doctrines, principles and methods. The long-­term objective is to endeavour through the German educational system to awaken in Germans, individually and collectively, (1) a sense of responsibility for what is done in the name of the community in which they live;

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Educating the Germans (2) a respect for objective fact and for freedom of opinion, speech, the press and religion; and (3) an interest in the ideas of representative government;

and to prevent the recrudescence of National Socialism, aggressive nationalism and militarism in any shape or form.104

One aspect of possible policy that had been conclusively decided in the preceding months was the question of uniformity in education, beyond the boundaries of the Zone. Hynd had suggested on one of his visits that such uniformity might be desirable. Riddy wrote to the I&AC Division on 17 November: In most educational matters it would be thoroughly undesirable to secure any detailed measure of uniformity for the whole of Germany. Broadly speaking almost the only uniformity that could be desired would be in (i) standards of teaching (which can be secured only through the establishment of an independent central inspectorate, which the Germans have never had and which it would certainly be premature to suggest for a long time to come) and (ii) equality of educational opportunity, which is as much a matter of politics as of education.105

This led to an exchange of views which effectively ended any further push for a policy that would have run counter to the essential regional control of education which still characterizes educational provision in Germany. The only time Germany had had a central ministry was during National Socialism. Robertson wrote to Hynd in November: 1. . . . I have now had this proposal examined by the Education Branch and have come to the conclusion that detailed uniformity is not desirable. 2. The Central Ministry of Education was a Nazi institution, prior to that teaching being largely decentralised, as it is in England. You will be aware that in England considerable latitude is given to, and encouraged in, local authorities in the preparation of curricula, the selection of text books and the method of teaching. In France the reverse holds good and hard and fast rules are established. The only way of ensuring that strict uniformity in matters of this nature was being achieved would be to establish a central inspectorate. I do not think this desirable. 3. There are, however, certain matters relative to education on which uniformity is desirable. These are notably: (a) a common examination standard for all Germany (b) common principles for the training of teachers (c) central control, in the interests of efficiency and economy of such matters as the production of educational films.

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4. Unfortunately, it seems probable that it will be impossible to secure practicable agreement on the examination point. Information available suggests that the Russians, working through Moscow trained Germans, are converting the German Educational system in the Russian Zone to Soviet ideas. If this is so in fact, it will lead to the disappearance of the Secondary School as we understand it, and consequently also to the disappearance of the most usual means of entry to Western Universities. 5. I feel therefore that on balance our best course is not to raise the issue by presenting a special paper aiming at unified overall educational policies, since this might result in our having to accept principles which run contrary to normal British practice. Each of the points outlined in para 3 can, and will, be raised in the Allied Education Committee when the time seems favourable. This committee is now getting into its stride and has already achieved agreement on the difficult subject of religious education in publically maintained schools.106

This balanced response is indicative of the pragmatic reasoning that characterized the British approach to education in the Zone. The Soviet Zone and future German Democratic Republic aside, the principle of Land-based autonomy (Kulturhoheit) was to be firmly established and to endure in the Federal Republic up to and after Unification.

Figure 3.6 Sholto Douglas and Heinrich Landahl in a Hamburg classroom.

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Figure 3.7  Walter Forsyth, John Maud and Donald Riddy in an elementary school in Hamburg, June 1946.

Figure 3.8  School classroom in Cologne 1948 (film still).

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Figure 3.9  Children helping with repairs to their school in Cologne 1948 (film still).

School textbooks A crucial task, for which considerable planning had taken place in London during the War, was the approval and production of school textbooks. Nazi textbooks in all subjects were unusable. Textbooks from the Weimar years were from the outset seen as a possible substitute, yet they too were often deemed to be unsuitable. Riddy had given Major T.J. Leonard the task of investigating Weimar textbooks and an analysis was made of some 300 microfilmed copies of German textbooks, provided for the most part by Teachers College, Columbia University, and partly by Swedish sources and British libraries. Riddy sent to the Ministry of Education in November 1944 a document on the use of Weimar textbooks: In assessing a book from the point of view of reprinting with allied approval, note should be made of those containing passages objectionable because of their a. tendentious statement; b. praise, even implied, of military might and force; c. extreme nationalism;

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Educating the Germans d. pan-Germanism and expansionism; e. distortion of history and geography by selection or emphasis; f. complaints about the Treaty of Versailles and its consequences to Germany.107

Also during the War, Professor Dodds had chaired the first meeting of a sub-­committee on textbooks for German and Austrian schools. This committee had received reports on the Weimar textbooks that had so far been examined and it was agreed that those considered acceptable should be made ready for printing and that an effort should be made to find one agreed textbook for each class of elementary schools and lower classes of secondary schools in history, geography, German (reading) and biology.108 In the event, it seems, only eight books published before 1933 were eventually found to be suitable for use in the primary classes of Volksschulen.109 Shortage of paper and binding materials made the production of teaching material in large amounts difficult, but the members of the Textbook Division of Education Branch made swift and impressive progress. A list of criteria was produced to judge the suitability of any textbook: No book may be approved which: a. Glorifies nationalism. b. Seeks to propagate, revive or justify the doctrines of National Socialism or to exalt the achievements of National Socialist leaders. c. Favours a policy of discrimination on ground of race, colour, political opinion or religion. d. Is hostile to any of the United Nations, or tends to sow discord among them. e. Expounds the practice of war, or mobilisation or preparation for war, whether in the scientific, economic or industrial fields, or promotes the study of military geography or military history. f. Encourages cruelty and morbidity. g. Encourages extreme nationalism.110

The curriculum in German schools was to a great extent textbook-­based, and so textbook revision was critical for a revised curriculum. In the early stages of the Occupation officers of Education Branch were charged with the task of checking the syllabus guidelines (Richtlinien) for each subject. Edith Davies describes how teachers of various subjects ‘would be asked to submit sources for all their notes, even for dictations, songs, hymns and recitations’.111 By the end of October 1945 one-­and-a-­half million vetted pre–1933 reading and arithmetic textbooks had been distributed for use in elementary schools, on the basis of two children sharing. German authorities were setting up textbook committees in Hamburg, Hannover, Düsseldorf and Münster with the task of encouraging the writing of new teaching material for publication.112 Ian Carlisle, the then head of Textbook Division, explained in Early 1946 how the new textbooks were approaching the task of overcoming the effects of the

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ideology which had permeated not only Nazi textbooks but also those produced before 1933: A new Lesebuch [reader] submitted from Hamburg indicates that the German education authorities themselves are aware of the need for a complete change of direction. The book does not ignore the terrible conditions in which the German child now lives. Instead it seeks to explain these to him by showing that the constant fight between the forces of good and evil ends in the ultimate victory of good, of law and order, over chaos. It brings this home to the child through a series of allegories, drawing on every source of mythology – classical and Nordic, among others. The implication is inescapable. Any sound teacher will be able to make it clear to his pupils.113

Riddy had proposed inserting a statement in each newly published textbook in order to ‘explain to the Germans what we are doing, and [. . .] forestall many of the criticisms which are bound to arise when the books make their momentous appearance.’ He produced two draft versions which were discussed with Con O’Neill, who preferred the shorter text, suggesting that Riddy’s sentence ‘Its issue by the Supreme Commander does not imply that he regards it as entirely suitable from a pedagogical point of view or that its contents are free from objectionable features’ might be amended to read ‘Allied Supreme Commander’, ‘otherwise German schoolboys may think it has been published by Hitler!’ The eventual version, to be found in all the early textbooks produced, read: 1. This text-­book is one of a series which is being published by order of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force for emergency use in German schools in the area occupied by his Forces. 2. It has been selected after a thorough examination of the books in use in Germany before the Nazi accession to power. It is a text-­book of German authorship and has been reprinted without textual alteration. 3. Its issue does not imply that it is entirely suitable from an educational point of view or otherwise. It is merely the best book which could be found in the circumstances and must serve until Germany produces better text-­books of its own.

Later in the Occupation, the simple statement Genehmigt für den Gebrauch in Schulen durch Control Commission for Germany (B.E.) (‘Approved for use in schools by the Control Commission . . .’) was used. Textbook Section was able to make some 50,000 volumes available in what were called ‘source libraries’ (Quellenbibliotheken) distributed throughout major towns in the Zone and in Berlin. The purpose of these libraries was ‘to enable publishers, textbook authors and teachers to compare and see for themselves how in other countries, Britain in particular, textbooks are written and produced’. The stock included titles in pedagogy, history, economics, sociology, psychology and juvenile literature.114

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There is no doubt that the work of Textbook Section was of great importance, urgently necessary, and carried out efficiently and effectively. But the very nature of such work is problematic. The removal of the ideological content of the textbooks under the Nazis was absolutely correct, but the replacement of that content with material either of a bland neutrality or belonging to another kind of ideology was potentially problematic too. In the Russian Zone, of course, one kind of indoctrinating and propagandistic content was directly replaced by another just as unacceptable to western thinking.

School broadcasting Plans for school broadcasting from Radio Hamburg were already being made in July 1945. By early August the intention was to have a daily slot of forty-­five minutes, divided into two twenty-­minute sessions and a five-­minute news commentary. The education authorities in Hamburg had been asked to set up a Schools Broadcast Advisory Committee to consider programmes and to nominate ‘suitable Germans . . . subject to Military Government approval’ who would be permanently employed on the preparation of scripts. Help was being sought from the Central Council for School Broadcasting in London. In October an Education Control Officer, four Hamburg teachers, a Radio Hamburg producer and a typist met to plan a series of school broadcasts in the Zone. On 12 November the first programme was on the air.115 There had been doubts that school broadcasting could begin at all. Ralph Poston of the Broadcasting Control Unit in Hamburg reported late in September that progress was unsatisfactory: only Hamburg teachers had been involved; no comprehensive plan had been worked out; the notion of a ‘series’ with an underlying idea was lacking (apart from in the plans for programmes in English); the German chairman of the Committee for School Broadcasting had told him that the intention was to arrange broadcasts of the pre–1933 kind, i.e. ‘bright and chatty programmes which would liven up the school hours but not be “lessons” in the full sense of the word’. Because of his concerns, Poston met with Heinrich Landahl who had then given instructions to the effect that officials work full-­time on preparing ‘proper’ courses of school broadcasts, that a ‘proper’ plan be worked out, and that broadcasts be ready to start on 15 October.116 By April 1946 three short series of programmes had been produced, each lasting six weeks. The early broadcasts were for pupils in Volks-,, Mittel- and Oberschulen. On weekdays, two lessons of twenty minutes were broadcast, each ending with the planned five-­minute news items in a form appropriate to children. The programmes were repeated in the afternoons to accommodate shift teaching. The subjects covered were music, English, German, history, geography, science, gardening and personal hygiene. The programme from February to April 1946 included broadcasts divided into two main topics per day:

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Monday: 9.15 English: Student Songs of Britain; 9.40 Music: The Folksong; 10.00 What’s New for Young People Tuesday: 9.15 Animals Around Us; 9.40: Living Landscape, Living Language; 10.00 News for Young People Wednesday: 9.15: From Beethoven’s Studio (The 6th Symphony); 9.40 German. Language as Means of Expression; 10.00 News for Young People Thursday: Be Healthy Through Daily Personal Hygiene; 9.40 Science: The Railway; 10.00 News for Young People Friday: English: Books You Might Like to Read; 9.40 Old Customs and Habits; 10.00 News for Young People Saturday: 9.15 The Garden; 2.40 The Struggle for Progress; 10.00 News and Preview of the schools broadcasting programme for the coming week.

Each week over a six-­week period the major topic was divided into sub-­themes. ‘Books You Might Like to Read’, for example, covered Drinkwater (Robertson of England), Goudge (City of Bells), Walpole (Jeremy and Hamlet), Galsworthy (Forsyte Saga), Kerome (Three Men in a Boat), and Hardy (the short story ‘Absentmindedness in a Parish Choir’). Accompanying booklets provided teachers with advice on how to use the programmes and notes on the contents.117 There were many problems in the early stages of broadcasting to schools: transmission and reception, recruitment and training of staff, restricted office space and studio facilities, shortage of recording equipment, lack of paper for booklets and programmes, ignorance of the wishes and needs of schools, the dearth of radio receivers, ‘a whole profession . . . untrained in the use of broadcasting’, and ‘the unwillingness of the conservative-­minded to welcome any innovation’. Some 80 per cent of schools were originally without radio receivers, but the situation was vastly improved when a Military Government instruction to German authorities required them to provide receivers to all schools with an electricity supply. At the beginning of February school broadcasting had the status of a ‘major’ department of Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, thus ‘an instrument of education [had] been created outside of the control of all central, regional or local authorities’. The future for school broadcasting was looking very positive in the spring of 1946, though a German inspector was reported as complaining that the talks on gardening had instructed children on what to do rather than ‘leading them gently on to the philosophy of gardening’.118 The 1,000th broadcast aired in November 1946.119 English broadcasts had been given a generous slot in the schedule. ‘English I’, based on the grammar book Fundamental English, used in German schools, had a focus on pronunciation of simple words and phrases; ‘English II’ was aimed at children with a good basic knowledge of the language. Control Commission staff were persuaded to take part in the recordings, as were members of Hamburg theatrical societies.120 A film on school life in Cologne, made in 1948, includes footage of a schools broadcast for the teaching of English being recorded. The script is extraordinarily banal and pedestrian, utterly lifeless and uninspiring and read at a remarkably slow pace, with pauses between words. Here is one exchange:

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Meals·are·a·problem·these·days. As·soon·as·you·finish·one·meal·you·must·begin·to·think·about·the·next·meal. I’ve·just·heard·that·some·potatoes·have·arrived·today. The·little·shop·at·the·corner·has·some.121

This no doubt reflected the state of the art in foreign language recordings in the late 1940s, and perhaps it was as inspirational in the prevailing conditions as the script writers intended. What is clear, however, is that the broadcasts were welcome to young people deprived of contact with the outside world and now given an opportunity to develop foreign language skills.

Denazification It is not the questionnaire, but rather the person who ought to be examined.122 The eradication of all physical traces of Nazism was a much easier task than the denazification of individuals proved to be. Monuments and symbols could be destroyed, streets renamed, institutions closed down, organizations disbanded and propaganda silenced, but purging the workforce and removing ideological allegiance from people’s minds were challenges of a quite different proportion and complexity. Some 8.5 million Germans had been members of the National Socialist Party. In Ian Kershaw’s view, denazification was ‘not just daunting; it was completely impracticable’.123 The most obvious challenge was one that had not been fully anticipated. There could be an uncompromising determination to assess and categorize individuals’ past devotion to the Nazi cause and to exclude from employment all those whose pasts were unacceptable. This was done through analysis of the information provided by German citizens in a detailed 131-item questionnaire, the Fragebogen. But the disqualification of people not deemed to be war criminals from holding positions of importance for the reconstruction of Germany created considerable problems. The dilemmas might be illustrated by a theoretical example: if a university’s medical faculty was to be denazified, what would the occupying power do if the only available clinical gynaecologist had been a high-­ranking party official? (The medical faculties had been particularly nazified.) As soon as an exception was made for such a contingency, a precedent would be established for other fields of expertise. To take an actual example, analogous problems were experienced by those responsible for mining. Harry Collins recounted that at the time of the devastating Monopol Grimberg disaster, which cost over 400 lives in February 1946, there was nobody in authority at the mine – the mines had been ‘denuded of their technical personnel, their senior management’ as a result of denazification.124 Some 333 mining officials had been dismissed in the British Zone in the first six months of the Occupation; a few weeks after the disaster 313 had been reinstated. The tragedy, the worst in German mining history, has been seen as marking a policy turning point, from retribution to paternalism.125

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In the US Zone the uncompromising provisions of Military Government Law No.8, ‘Prohibition of Employment of Members of Nazi Party in Positions in Business Other than Ordinary Labor and for Other Purposes’ (effective from 26 September 1945), made the employment in any business enterprise of former members of the Nazi Party in a supervisory or managerial capacity unlawful. A draft directive from the Allied Control Authority on the ‘Removal from Office and from Positions of Responsibility of Nazis and of Persons Hostile to Allied Purposes’, issued in November 1945, required the removal from public or semi-­public office of all persons who had been more than nominal members of Nazi Party. Con O’Neill described this move with characteristic acerbity: ‘As an example of systematic and meticulous imbecility it would be hard to beat’: ‘I hope that we shall be under no illusion that a policy of this kind is anything but the sheerest madness.’126 He guessed that the categories of persons scheduled for mandatory or discretionary removal and exclusion from any office other than that of ordinary labourer would include around 60 per cent of Germans of working age. Some 200,000 people in jobs of responsibility (mainly civil servants and others in official and industrial posts) were dismissed by the British. As far as teachers were concerned, instructions issued in July 1945 described the categories on which decisions about dismissal were to be made: Teachers who were at any time officials of the party, or rank and file members who joined before 1933 will be removed from office and will NOT again be permitted to teach, since they thus fall within the mandatory removal category. Teachers who joined the party after the accession to power of the Nazis in 1933 fall into three classes:– (a) Th  ose who took an active public part in NSDAP activities, and are therefore comparatively easy to identify, will be removed from office and not again permitted to teach. (b) Th  ose who took NO part in NSDAP activities, but were active in Nazi teaching in school, will be removed from office and not again permitted to teach. (c) Th  ose who took NO active interest whatever either publicly or in school in NSDAP activities will NOT be removed from office but will be allowed to continue teaching, when schools are reopened.

It was recognized that the ‘indiscriminate lumping of all teachers who were members of the NSDAP into the removal category’ had to be avoided, since it would severely limit the number of schools that could be reopened.127 The process of determining whether individuals could be declared formally denazified involved their completing the complex form, known always by the German term for a questionnaire, Fragebogen, which became one of the German words occupying forces knew even if their knowledge of the language was limited to basics. There was a certain irony in relying on form-­filling. Hitler’s racial discrimination policy rested on the completion of a form, the Fragebogen zum Nachweis der arischen Abstammung (‘Questionnaire on Proof of Aryan Descent’), requiring information as

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far back as great-­grandparents in order to determine the racial background of individuals. Many thousands who had been through that degrading racial identification process found themselves having to go through a political filtering procedure reliant on personal information-­gathering by means of another questionnaire. And in more general terms the older population had already been ‘re-­educated’ under the Nazis and were not well disposed to be re-­educated again.128 ‘Remarkable to relate’, as Kershaw puts it, ‘not everyone told the truth in their entries.’129 Those who were deemed employable could be given what the Germans called their Persilschein, their ‘certificate of cleanliness’, a clean bill of political health, made whiter than white as by the eponymous washing powder. Consequences of the denazification process were experienced in many domains, as a commentator of the time reported: The difficulty of locating trained and competent substitutes, free from Nazi taint, has been one of the greatest obstacles to immediate and peremptory Denazification. Shortages were particularly acute in the initial days of the occupation, and were especially significant in the upper public office brackets, in the technical services, and in the teaching profession.130

Ruth Harvey (1918–80) had given up her post as a young lecturer at Westfield College, London, in order to work with Education Branch in Berlin. At first she was in charge of the schools in Charlottenburg but later became responsible for all the schools in the city. In her letters home, she described wrestling with denazification decisions, a task that at the age of twenty-­nine she found very distressing: Dismissing a bunch of teachers because of denazification rules. Oh misery! They are cases where we all know the rules to be unjust, and we can’t alter them – so I have to turn a nice set of young teachers on to the streets to get embittered and go to pieces because one of them was a ‘Brownie” leader when she was 12, another was put into the Party by his guardian when he didn’t even know it had happened, and so on. The most hateful and stupid part of all my work here, I think. I know the denazification was necessary & that in many cases it hits the right people. But I also know that any scheme that forcibly shoves people into paper categories is bound to be unjust in a great many others. In any case we all know that the people who have to be dismissed are at least honest in so far as they have actually written in on their questionnaires what they did do, whereas all the clean-­sheet people who are passed ‘No objection’ in many cases are just as bad, only they have suppressed their Nazi activities & we can’t prove them.131 An enormous and heartbreaking job. Heartbreaking, because the regulations with their cast-­iron inflexibility neglect all human factors and are unjust quite as often as they are just: enforcing rules which you feel to be both foolish and wicked is bad enough on paper anyhow, but when it means deliberately destroying the career of some unhappy boy or girl sitting looking at me over the top of my office desk waiting for me to sign the papers to have them chucked out of their jobs – well, on

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the mornings when I’m not feeling too bright in any case, it makes me feel almost physically ill. Although I know I have no choice in the matter at all, as the rules have to be followed, I struggle round after a loop-­hole as long as I possibly can; and in the meantime, the Kommandatura, instead of bringing in the Youth Amnesty as it is in force in our Zone, wastes meeting after meeting in a sort of arid pretence of co-­operation which doesn’t hide in the least the fact that nobody has the least intention of going to meet anyone on any point whatsoever. And enormous, because of the numbers involved and the intricacy of the regulations. Thus at the present moment I have to vet statements from every single one of the private and trade and vocational schools in our Sector saying whether they have any ex-Army officers on their staffs, and if so, all about them. Or again I have to investigate the records of the 300 teachers of Scripture in the schools in the Sector and find out whether they have been Nazis. The Church authorities measure this by a peculiar and not very trustworthy scale of their own, and I have no choice but to go the long way and do them all myself. And this sort of request (issued from Public Safety) can be multiplied ad lib.132

The Fragebogen was an exhaustive document, requiring information among other things on Nazi party affiliations, Nazi ‘auxiliary’ organization activities (including the HJ, NSDStB, NS Lehrerbund, Deutsches Frauenwerk, NS Alherrenbund, Deutsche Studentenschaft), on whether the position of Jugendwalter (youth adviser) in a school had been held, on any titles, ranks, medals, testimonials or other honours from Nazi organizations, on ‘writings and speeches’, on employment history from 1 January 1930, on sources and amount of income, on military service, on journeys outside of Germany since 1937, and on political affiliations before and after 1933.133 It was easy for individuals wittingly or unwittingly to fail to record details which could not easily be checked. And the checking, first by Public Safety Branch, where British police officers were employed, and later by German authorities, was often undertaken in inadequate conditions. In July 1945, it was reported that owing to lack of British personnel in Braunschweig, Public Safety was having the Fragebogen processed by ‘one Fräulein Bente’. A clerk to a British officer, ‘more than half German herself ’, was also undertaking processing work.134 In October and November 1945 Riddy had to prepare responses for Hynd to questions in the House of Commons on denazification. In October he provided information in connection with a parliamentary question to the effect that the number of teachers in the British Zone and formerly employed by the Nazis who had now been arrested, dismissed or otherwise refused employment was 9,690. The number presently employed was 34,329, with 13,595 whose cases were still under consideration. He drafted a reply to another question by George Thomas MP asking if the Chancellor was satisfied that denazification was not being impeded by the fact that roughly 80 per cent of teachers employed by the Nazis were now employed under British authority. This calculation was clearly based on the previous figures, which suggested that 22 per cent had been refused employment. Some 41,660 teachers were now employed, and Riddy’s draft stressed that no teacher was employed ‘whose connection with National Socialism is known or can be shown to have been at the most more than nominal.’

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Their continued employment was dependent on their ‘loyal observance of the letter and spirit’ of Military Government regulations. Evidence had been collected from Fragebogen returns and other sources of information: the authorities had dossiers relating to some 18,000 persons formerly connected with teaching, covering those listed as ‘white’ as well as those categorized ‘black’. Riddy continued: It is not claimed that this method can be entirely accurate, but the work of individual investigation which has always been contemplated as necessary (and is even now beginning) is comparatively slow, as will be appreciated.

He felt that progress in this matter was satisfactory and that there was no reason to suppose that the work of denazification in the British Zone was being impeded as a result of employing teachers.135 Hynd used Riddy’s information in his reply in the House of Commons on 27 November, dismissing Thomas’s figure of 80 percent and quoting 11,567 as the number of teachers refused employment, with about 14,530 awaiting decision.136 Two days later, Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Forsyth, responsible for intelligence in Education Branch, sent a message on denazification to ‘P’ dets in Kiel, Hannover, Münster and Düsseldorf and to Berlin.137 Forsyth describes the situation in detail: 1. A general and healthy interest is being shown in U.K. to-day in the progress this Branch has made in Denazification. At present the interest is being expressed in the form of criticism, in the House of Commons, in the Press and by private individuals. It is therefore essential that all officers of this Branch should know more about the true position than the critics themselves. 2. It was clear to this Branch even before its arrival in Germany that denazification would be a lengthy and difficult business. 3. In the first SHAEF and Mil Gov phase and later, Army Commanders were insisting that the children should go back to school as soon as possible as a contribution towards the solution of their security problem. 4. In anticipation of this, two denazification phases were planned by Education Branch in conjunction with Public Safety and C.I. [Combined Intelligence] ‘Phase A’ Consists of preliminary denazification by means of Fragebogen by which the more obvious Nazis are dismissed from office. Up to 15 Nov 45, 67,757 teachers had completed Fragebogen in the British Zone. To carry out the processing of these questionnaires has been a considerable effort at Detachment level where both Public Safety and Education Branch officers could only consider this as a part of their work. After the processing at Detachment level the Fragebogen are sent to Branch HQ where a further processing takes place with, in addition, a comparison of the answers filled in by the teacher with the personality records which the Intelligence Section has been collecting from all sources since September 1944. (Records of over 18,000 German teachers are indexed to date and this number is being steadily increased.)

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Any German whose past was not considered satisfactory according to Policy Directive No.8, was immediately dismissed or refused employment. The preliminary results achieved in ‘Phase A’ (which continues) show the following position as at 15 Nov 45:Total number of Fragebogen sent in: 67,757 Number of teachers employed or approved for employment: 41,660 Number of teachers whose cases are still under review: 14,530 Teachers dismissed or refused employment: 11,567* NB These figures are for Secondary and Elementary School Teachers only. * This figure, of course, does not include those who, fearing the consequences of their past, did not send in applications. 5. A recent Directive produced by B.A.O.R. and more severe than Policy Directive No.8 is now in force and will shortly, it is thought, be superseded by a still more severe quadripartite directive, the implementation of which will necessitate a complete re-­processing of all Fragebogen submitted and which will therefore lengthen ‘Phase A’ until after ‘Phase B’ is in full operation. ‘Phase B’ This is the phase in which the past and present conduct of the individual teacher is closely investigated. Clearly every teacher of 68,000 or so cannot be investigated in six months or a year and the process will continue throughout the occupation, but the definite rejection of 11,567 teachers already in ‘Phase A’ has been a valuable contribution towards decreasing the work of ‘Phase B’ and therefore towards the speeding up of denazification generally. 7. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION Taking into consideration the personnel available and the time since the setting up of Mil Gov, denazification has proceeded satisfactorily. All teachers are given employment on a temporary basis only and therefore are liable to supervision and investigation by this Branch, by P.S. and by C.I. To meet with the heavy demands of denazification in ‘Phase B’ increased establishment for the Intelligence Section has been applied for; of the extra officers obtained, some will specialize in University denazification and some in School. ‘Phase B’, although not in its full stride has naturally begun since many individual investigations have already been made.138

As posts were filled and schools were reopened there were inevitably personal tensions surrounding denazification. School staff members knew who among their colleagues had been enthusiastic party members and such knowledge could be used to powerful effect. Elisabeth Voigt, the newly appointed head teacher of the WilhelmRaabe-Schule in Lüneburg, received a letter from a former colleague at the school, Dr Erna Stamm, who had been interned for sixteen months, had now been released and was due to appear before a denazification court to ascertain whether she had been an idealist Nazi member of the NSF and the NSLB or had joined for her own advantage, and if she

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had broken her professional code of honour and abused her appointment as a teacher. Dr Stamm, now in Wesermünde (which together with Bremen was in the US Zone), had asked for a testimonial and in the course of a long letter about her affection for the school and her former colleagues had said that she regretted nothing. She wondered if she dared move to the British Zone: ‘Here the Americans are still constantly dismissing teachers and other civil servants.’ The head teacher replied on 17 March 1947: Fantastic reports about your Nazi activities in Meppen had reached us here. [. . .] I’m sorry that I can’t meet your request regarding a character reference, since even back then I regarded your influence on our girls as not good and if – after everything that has happened in the meantime that even you must have understood – you are sorry about nothing, I can do nothing to ensure that you become a teacher again.139

Given the dearth of teachers in the Zone and the difficulties in finding individuals with an untainted past, it was not always easy to follow the example of the head teacher in Lüneburg.

Emergency teacher training Nowhere were the problems more difficult of solution than in the matter of the training of teachers.140 As repairs to school buildings progressed, more and more children could be accommodated and it became imperative for more teachers to be trained. The teacher:pupil ratio was unacceptably high at the time schools began to reopen, nearer 1:70 than 1:60, according to George Murray.141 In May 1946, it was estimated that there was a shortfall of some 15,000 teachers in the Zone. Men and women rather older than normal for those entering the profession would now be trained in ‘Special Emergency Training Courses’, aimed at those aged between twenty-­eight and forty. These courses would take place over a period of three years, with targets of 5,000 for 1946/7, 7,500 for 1947/8, and 2,500 for 1948/9.142 Each special college would train about 200 students. (Twenty-­five buildings would be needed in 1946/7, thirty-­seven or thirty-­eight in 1947/48, twelve in 1948/49.) Their staff would comprise teachers who: (a) were never members of, or candidates for membership in the Nazi party or leaders or active members of any associated Nazi organisation; [. . .] (b) were never regular officers in the German Armed Forces; (c) do not otherwise fall into the mandatory Removal categories of the Directive of the Allied Control Authority on Denazification; (d) are deemed capable of training candidates for the teaching profession in a democratic spirit.

For 1946/7 some 334 teachers would be required; for 1947/8 501; for 1948/9 167. The precision evident in all of these calculations is remarkable.

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The students would have to be ‘deemed capable of educating youth in a democratic spirit’; they would ‘have such personal qualities and experience as justify the expectation that they will become useful members of the teaching profession’, for which purpose possession of the Abitur (school-­leaving certificate awarded at the end of the Gymnasium) would not be regarded as indispensable. They must not come under categories (a) to (c), as demanded of their teachers. They would be awarded grants to cover maintenance and subsistence and support for dependants. Their salary on completion of the course would be the same as that for a teacher entering the profession at age twenty-­eight, with appropriate increments for each extra year for those aged over twenty-­eight. Pensions too would be calculated as if an individual’s teaching career started at that age. Special committees would be established for the selection of teachers and students. It was made clear to the German authorities that the requirements for selection in the case of teachers excluded regular officers in the German armed forces and that officers were similarly excluded in the case of students. By June it was reported that some 4,000 teachers were already in training for employment in elementary schools.143 By late August the number of applicants was very high, far in excess of the places available.144 There had been concern about the exclusion of former regular officers from the SETT scheme. Grimme saw a discrepancy in the policy, inasmuch as regular officers were not excluded from universities, where they could train as secondary school teachers: There were many suitable, highly-­qualified and politically acceptable people among former regular officers; many young men had become professional soldiers solely in order to avoid joining Nazi organisations.145

Senator Landahl argued also for exceptions in respect of those who had only been applicants for Party membership. Riddy’s response was to argue that since the training scheme was a quadripartite agreement, the British Zone could not act unilaterally in making exceptions. In November the German teaching staff was still seen as ‘the basic re-­educational problem’. The pre–1945 staff, after appropriate screening, could be described as ‘often technically competent’, but Whether they can shake off the traditions of their own education and instill into their pupils a love of freedom of which they themselves had no practical experience for many years is another matter.146

Each teacher, taking those in nursery, elementary and secondary schools together, had at this stage an average of fifty-­seven pupils in a class; their average age in some areas was over ‘and in none far short of ’ fifty. The analysis of one observer of the time, Helen Liddell, Secretary of the Information Department of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, was bluntly critical of the available teaching workforce in Germany: The teaching profession now consists of elderly men and women who were in their prime during the Weimar period and are sometimes described today as ‘Hitler’s

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rejects’, or of young teachers, without experience, who were themselves educated during the Nazi period. The older teachers were either in retirement from 1933 to the beginning of the war, or teaching in accordance with Nazi theory and practice, although not as active Nazis. They are inevitably educationally out of date, and therefore too high a proportion of inferior ‘academic’ education is perhaps still being provided on the old lines.147

By June 1946, nineteen elementary training colleges were open, with 3,240 students. The ratio of normal (two-­year) courses to emergency (one-­year) courses was roughly two to one. Those completing emergency training would be ready to start teaching in October. Places for an additional 5,000 older students would be available from September, to bridge the gap between the very young and the ‘unduly large number’ of elderly teachers. Three secondary school training colleges were training 270 students. In both types of training institution there was a ‘curious dualism’ between ‘intense pre-­ occupation with abstract thought’ and ‘rigidly defined’ methods for teaching individual subjects. And so there was much that needed to be done in terms of rethinking the style and content of teacher education: l l l l l

teachers should be brought into contact with newer educational ideas; there should be more objectivity and realism in their training; more attention should be given to the education of non-­academic children; there should be greater realisation that education is a continuous process; there must be a deeper understanding that education is for life and that ‘there are many realms in life for which the best equipment is not pure philosophy’.148

Twenty-­four teacher training colleges were open by November, running 4,221 ‘normal’ courses and 418 special courses, taught by a staff of 492.149 Writing of the need for a ‘complete change of spirit’ in teacher education, George Murray recalled that ‘fumigation of public buildings was the order of the day. [. . .] But, as far as some of the Nazi colleges were concerned it was possible to detect in this process as much pre-­occupation with exorcism as with hygiene.150 Despite all of the efforts, Birley could conclude as he left Germany in the summer of 1948 that very little had been achieved in terms of the democratization of the ‘framework and content’ of education in Germany. Only a small number of teachers have yet been trained . . . It would have been impossible to do this in three years’.151

Re-­educating youth out of school Most young people experienced 1945 not just as the collapse of National Socialism but also as the destruction of the German nation, an experience that produced a deep sense of shock, betrayal and uprooting.152 The most dreadful thing that happened in Germany under Hitler was the perversion of young Germany. The most alarming obstacle for our hopes for Europe is the state of mind of the German youth.153

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The Nazi Minister Stuckart’s warning to Richard Hinton Thomas of the dangers of the ‘radical deterioration of youth’ were all too prescient. So many young people had been without schooling for long periods; so many of them lacked parental authority since so many fathers were absent; and so many had to help their families to survive in the appalling material conditions that prevailed throughout the Zone, with unemployment a huge problem (one third of the unemployed in Germany were young people), that it is small wonder that the young lapsed into petty crime and delinquency. Stealing, foraging for food and fuel, and engaging in black market activities of all kinds became the norm for many disoriented young people struggling to survive in the conditions of exceptional misery. In 1947 delinquency levels in the Zone were reckoned to be three times those for the pre-­war years.154 A British delegation representing youth organizations reported after a visit to the Zone in October 1946 that the structural breakdown of what had been a civilized nation was ‘spiritual’ as well as physical and economic: The spiritual ruin, especially of youth, is greater than the physical havoc, and [. . .] the physical breakdown itself, while actually brought about by the war, is fundamentally the outcome of the spiritual disorder of the German people.155

Young people born between 1922 and 1930 have been described as occupying a special historical and political-­psychological position in post-­war Germany. Too young

Figure 3.10  Young Germans arrested by a British soldier.

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to have voted for Hitler and too young to have had any influence in party or Army, they had effectively known only Hitler’s Germany.156 Those aged eighteen to twenty-­three have been seen as ‘the most promising of German youth’, ‘the only Germans free from complicity in the Hitler régime’.157 The youth organizations’ delegates observed that people over thirty tended to seek continuity with Weimar Germany and to ‘ignore’ the Hitler period.158 A younger generation, however, recall the Hitler period and look back with longing to its order, material benefits and its sheer efficiency. [. . .] Their lament is ‘Hitler gave us much – democracy gives us nothing’.159

German soldiers were known to say to the young: ‘Enjoy the war – the peace will be dreadful.’160 An eighteen-­year-old upper secondary schoolgirl described her confused identity: I see that everything I believed in, the people who led us, the kind of state they created, and the army that defended this state – that all of that has been destroyed. I find it difficult to be able now (after just a year) to discard my whole education in order to begin again on a ‘free democratic basis’.161

So impregnated were they with the ways of thinking systematically drilled into them during the Nazi period – membership of branches of the Hitler-Jugend had been made compulsory for both boys and girls aged between ten and thirteen by a law of 1936 – that a generation of young people could only think along the lines of their indoctrination. They demonstrated too an unusual solidarity: they were a ‘unified youth, with mentality, attitudes and values that transcended differences of class and religion’.162 A visiting British lecturer reported on a vacation course at the University of Cologne that ‘the only serious complaint against the British University control seemed to be that students were not allowed to MARCH down to the sports field’.163 A member of Education Branch summed up the problems faced by young people who have to unlearn before they can begin to learn, who have to pull down before they can begin to build, who having been betrayed have to learn to trust, and having lost all hope have to find hope again, and to attempt this colossal task with insufficient food, insufficient clothing, insufficient warmth and few even of the elementary comforts of life.164

An exchange of letters in the British Zone Review in January 1946 illustrates a range of views on German youth among the British occupying forces. Rear-Admiral H.T. Baillie-Grohman queried the optimism of those who did not think that there was a ‘lost generation whose conversion or re-­education was hopeless’. Judging from his experience, even if you took German boys of about 12 or 13 and put them in English Schools for three or four years you would still not eradicate from many of them the

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fundamental Nazi ideas which have been ingrained in them. How much more difficult then will it be to eradicate these ideas when still surrounded by their own environment, friends and so on, and with only the faintest contact with the British Forces of Occupation?165

This provoked several letters in response, most arguing precisely for a more constructively positive approach to young people and their problems, with Colonel R.V. Hume (later to work as Birley’s deputy in the Zone and as Director of Education Branch) insisting that the term ‘re-­education’, ‘with its smug implication of superiority and patronage’ was taboo in Regierungsbezirk Hannover.166 Bailie-Grohman later made a reasoned appeal for more to be done to establish youth clubs for girls.167 *  *  * Donald Riddy stated in March 1945 at a meeting in London that active and anxious thought was being given to youth movements in Germany, the conditions governing their formation and the part it was hoped they might play. It was agreed at this meeting that education officers should ‘go slow’ as far as youth movements were concerned, but that local groups for cultural, religious or recreational purposes should be encouraged, if military commanders so wished. There were, however, some concerns: We must beware of those who had humble positions in the HJ and who came forward as high-­minded idealists interested in Youth. It was essential that any form of fanaticism or emotional idealism be avoided and that the groups turn to practical ways of reconstructing their towns and villages. Our function would be to give the Germans a chance of working out their own salvation. We must be on our guard against an officer caste growing up in Youth Groups.168

Montgomery was consistent in his prioritization of youth matters. In July 1945, he outlined what needed to be done: The German Youth We have a fertile field here and must make the most of it. The present chaos of German education presents both a grave danger and a great opportunity. There is a common delusion that no organisation should be started for fear it might be directed to military channels. Among the first things to be suppressed by Hitler were the Church’s youth work and the Boy Scouts. The stronger such organisations are, the stronger the bulwark against Nazism. The best antidote to bad ideas is to possess good ones.

Service chaplains should make contact with German clerics, aiming at consultation, the exchange of views, and encouragement: ‘The Church is possibly one of the few

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bridges of confidence between the two countries that is not down.’ Encouragement would be given to start scout troops, clubs and classes. Notification to the Germans The Germans work best if they are given definite orders by some person whom they can identify. They will not respond in the same way to orders which come to them from ‘Military Government’, or from a ‘Commission’. We must issue a series of Messages or Proclamations which will tell the Germans what we are going to do, and will demand their co-­operation. These must be issued by ‘The British C-in-C’, and must be signed by me. The German people understand this, and will do what they are told.169

Following these policy injunctions, a proposed address by Montgomery to the German people went through several drafts and each had the stamp of his unmistakable voice, almost sermon-­like in its mixture of moralizing and admonition: Youth 1. Since the abolition of the Nazi Party your children, your young men and young women, have been freed from the tyranny of the Hitler Youth. 2. You know well what the Hitler Youth was and did. How it removed your children from the influence of home and church. How it turned the normal healthy pleasures of childhood and adolescence to the service of a wicked cause. 3. That is now all finished. 4. For some months many of you have been able to get to know your children, perhaps for the first time. They have got to know you. This is all to the good. 5. But the time has now come for positive action. As you know your schools are being re-­opened. I have also decided to encourage your boys and girls to join into groups and clubs for cultural, recreative or other laudable purposes. 6. How will these groups and clubs be different from the Hitler Youth, which I am determined never to allow to return? In many ways. 7. First and foremost they will be different because of the spirit that must inform them. There must be no glorification of war, violence or oppression. 8. Second, membership will be voluntary. 9. Third, no adult will be permitted to play any part in the activities of the groups and clubs, whose record shows he was a convinced Nazi or a professional organiser of youth under the Nazis. 10. Lastly, the clubs and groups must have a healthy purpose. The purpose will not be healthy unless it takes account of the just claims of the individual child, his

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home, his school, the community in which he lives and the greater community which is the world. 11. I want German men and women of goodwill to come forward to help these groups and clubs to form. The task will not be easy. Those who really want to play a part will not, however, stand alone. They will be helped by all who care for the young and want them to grow into healthy, reliable, chivalrous men and women. It is a great field fitting for the labours of the churches. And I shall encourage officers of mine, experienced in dealing with youth, to lend a hand. They will not however organise your youth for you. That duty is yours and yours alone. 12. One last word. Let these groups be virile. Let their aims be wholesome and simple. Let them be such that they will help to strengthen the family bond; that your children in them will learn the joy that comes from willing service in a powerful cause. There is so much that the young can do of use to themselves and others. Never more than at this time. They can help the sick and aged. The older ones can assist in field and garden; they can do their bit to clear your devastated towns and villages. They can work together or just play together – particularly valuable would be team games played in the right spirit, in which victors are not arrogant or losers humiliated. 13. So your boys and girls will learn the secret of the true Christian community.170

Within a week of his July statement, Education Branch turned Montgomery’s instructions into a plan for the resumption of youth activities, which required all Landräte (Land councillors) and Oberbürgermeister (lord mayors) to reconstitute a Kreisjugendamt (Kreis youth office) in their areas responsible for registering, encouraging and generally supervising youth activities. The role of members of the occupying forces would be ‘advisory and in the background’.171 An Ordinance on youth clubs laid down requirements for their formation, for application procedures, for the role of adult members, for youth sections of clubs for adults, and for penalties in the case of infringements. By January 1946 courses for youth organisers were taking place. Major A.L. BickfordSmith, Head of the Youth Section of Education Branch, attended a course at the Stephansstift in Hannover in January 1946 organized by Pastor Johannes Wolff, head of the Landesjugendamt.172 Some thirty-­five to forty Kreis youth workers attended, including about eight women; they were mainly either Social Democrats or Confessional church members who were said to be first ‘at loggerheads’ but who ‘settled down together’ during the course. Professor Otto Haase,173 like most of the other speakers, harked back to the pre–1933 or even pre–1914 youth movements (folk songs, youth hostels, hiking) and talked of a Wiederbelebung des Wandervogels (‘revival of the old Wandervogel movement’). Much faith was placed in folk song and dance. Bickford-Smith queried whether the urban youth of Germany was really devoted to such activities as he could imagine the kind of reception they would get in an English club. Some admitted that young people in towns did in fact prefer the foxtrot to the folk dance. One woman questioned the wisdom of emphasising folksongs and folkdances after the vast use made of them by the Hitler Youth, but she was a voice crying in

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the wilderness and none of the others would hear of giving their beloved Volksgut [folklore] a rest.

Considerable interest was shown in what was said about English youth movements and the audience grew to twice its normal size at this point in the programme. There was general acceptance of the ban on political education in clubs, but one speaker said ‘If a boy wants to make a model tank in the woodwork group and I explain why he shouldn’t, I am talking politics’. Bickford-Smith concluded his report with scepticism about the course’s emphasis on folklore, classical music and ‘serious reading’, as well as its tendency to look back to pre-Hitler ideas on youth work. There was interest in progress made in other countries since 1933 but a lack of information: ‘They go back to the old ideas because they know no others.’ The most encouraging sign was an increased understanding of other people’s views and a willingness to profit from their experience.174 Soon after, Education Branch was arranging a central training course in Hannover for German youth organizers from the whole of the Zone.175 Thirty Germans from places throughout the Zone attended and were given instructions on how to run youth clubs on democratic lines. They visited the club at Bad Pyrmont, ‘considered to be one of the most progressive’ in the Zone.176 In Cologne the Detachment Commander had taken a personal interest in youth activities: by March there were four main groups active in the city.177 *  *  * In developing a policy towards the youth of Germany, the Occupation authorities had to develop strategies to deal with a generation of young people mostly not in full-­time education. Schoolchildren and students also of course counted among ‘youth’, but it was mainly those aged fifteen to thirty, whose time was not principally taken up with schooling or vocational training or higher education, who were of most concern to British and German authorities responsible for youth matters. It was hoped that those helping with the formation of youth groups would have past experience of youth activities, but that was not always possible. Ken Walsh had been a schoolteacher in Bristol during the War and had worked at Bletchley Park. When his name was put forward to the Control Commission he was sent to Westphalia to work initially with Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives, but he soon became involved with work in education in the town of Arnsberg. Asked if he knew anything about youth work, he said he did not, but since all the other local posts in education were filled and Montgomery (as was recognized, keenly interested in youth matters) would soon be visiting, he had to immerse himself quickly in youth policy. This kind of experience was not uncommon for CCG officers who would find themselves suddenly taking on a brief for which they felt themselves unprepared or unqualified. Walsh was to stay in Germany until 1959. He recalled how organizations for Catholic and Evangelical youth were quickly active again, and the Social-Democrat Falken (‘Falcons’) and the pro-­communist Freie Deutsche Jugend were re-­established, the latter in the Soviet Zone. Sports groups (often with British Army support) and trades union-­based groups appeared, together with the controversial Bündische Jugend, with its roots in the Wandervogel movement. The German Youth Hostel Association

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was also soon active again. Co-­operation between the groups was Walsh’s aim: ‘We had some success and there was no relapse into the conflict between Catholic, Protestant and Socialist groups which had led the way for the Hitler Youth.’178 Walsh describes the organizational structure within Regierungsbezirk Arnsberg in which he worked. This was in the southern part of Westphalia and had a population of 3.5 million. An Area Youth Officer (Bezirksjugendpfleger) was nominated, and this appointment led to that of District Youth Officers (Kreisjugendpfleger) in each Kreis (twenty-­five in all). In every Kreis a District Youth Council (Kreisjugendring) was established, together with a Youth Office Committee (Jugendamtausschuß). Walsh aimed to visit each Kreis at least once a month and to attend meetings of the committees.179 This was an exemplary type of administrative arrangement, allowing the localities to operate independently but within a well-­defined structure, and with someone with overall responsibility who had access to higher authorities. Walsh calculated that there were about 200 youth officers working at Zonal, Land and Bezirk levels. Apart from work with youth groups, these officers were involved with a range of welfare activities: ‘the distribution of food and equipment in the early days, the running of camps, relief teams, the treatment of delinquent youth, the approved schools, the introduction of probation, the setting up of child guidance clinics.’180 In something of a parody of his own style, Montgomery gave specific orders to corps districts in November 1945 on the establishment of clubs for young people. The procedure for the drive to establish youth activities was: Mil Gov select a good German to run the youth organisation in each place. Mil Gov give his name to the local Army unit: where there are troops. The Army makes contact with the German and helps him get on with it: and supplies the ‘drive’. Where there are no soldiers, the German will have to get on with it himself. No existing schemes to be disturbed by the above. If any good organisation is already in being, leave it alone.

The division of responsibility was: Mil Gov appoints the German and supervises his work. Mil Gov is definitely responsible. The Army supplies the help: and the ‘drive’ behind the whole business. The German civilian (see par 4) gets on with the job and runs the club.

For the time being, scout groups would not be permitted.181 The ban on scouting was not in fact lifted until the middle of 1948 in the British Zone.182 In the town of Celle near Hannover the first scout groups were formed in early June, before formal permission was applied for in September. Because of the ban on uniforms, an unobtrusive version of scouts’ normal attire was devised, consisting of a white shirt and a grey neckerchief. The boys had to make do with the short black cord trousers of the HJ-Pimpfe since

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nothing else was available; their first camp took place in the summer holidays of 1948.183 The Celle group belonged to the Bund freier Pfadfinder (Federation of Free Scouts). The first licence for scouting to be resumed in the American Zone had been issued in 1946, when the Bund Deutscher Pfadfinder (BDP) was founded in Bavaria.184 The key early policy document on youth matters was Education Control Instruction No.10 of August 1945, ‘Plan for the Resumption of German Youth Activities’, which established the guidelines for beginning youth work anew. Only strong voluntary youth groups formed for religious, cultural or recreational purposes would be encouraged; though the scout movement would have seemed an obvious model, for the present it would not be recognized in Germany by Military Government, but it was hoped that youth groups might be started ‘on the same lines’.185 The policy was elaborated in the British Zone Review in April 1946. There should be as wide a variety of youth groups as possible, rather than ‘one unified and uniform state youth movement’. These groups should grow ‘organically out of the wishes of the young people themselves’, an approach consonant with the ‘bottom-­up’ approach that characterized British policy. Groups had to register with local youth offices and have their proposed programmes, aims and constitution scrutinized for approval. Anyone over the age of eighteen had to be screened, and ex-­regular Wehrmacht officers were not allowed to become involved with youth work in any way. Racial or religious discrimination was quite naturally banned, but church groups could be limited to boys and girls of one denomination. Again quite naturally in the context of general Allied policy, all forms of military or paramilitary training were proscribed.186 The requirement that there should not be a unified and uniform state movement, had to be re-­emphasized in Berlin. Tom Creighton described the British position (of not licensing more than six youth organizations) in a letter to the Chief of Political Division in November 1946: [T]he least desirable of all solutions [. . .] would be the existence of a large number of small competing youth movements at odds with one another in the small area of Berlin. ‘die Zersplitterung der deutschen Jugend’ [the fragmentation of German youth] is, considering the German tendency to partisan intolerance and extremist controversy in all things, a very real danger which should be avoided at any price except the creation of a single authoritative state-­controlled and exclusive youth movement.187

The unified Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) had been founded in March 1946, with Erich Honecker later in the year appointed as the first chairman of its Central Council, and was to grow in strength and occupy a key place in the educational ideology of the German Democratic Republic. It was decided at an early stage that the wearing of any badge by a German would not be permitted, since badges were classified as uniform.188 Anything that might remotely recall the regimented and uniformed Hitler-Jugend or Bund Deutscher Mädel was out of the question, and officers were alert to prevent any infringements. There was a complaint about a possible resuscitation of the German scout movement when a group of about twenty-­four young boys in uniform were observed marching in

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formation in Lübeck in September 1945, but it turned out after investigation that they were harmless Polish youngsters.189 The aim was to encourage groups on the lines of the British club movement, which ‘offers excellent opportunities for training in democratic self-­government [. . .] where internal administration is in the hands of a members’ committee’. Unlike German models, focussed on just one kind of activity, ‘each [British] club offers a wide variety of activities, catering for the mental, physical and spiritual needs of its members’. An account of one such club for about sixty men and sixty women aged eighteen to twenty-­ five set up in a Military Government building describes a wide range of activities of the kind that would have been normal in an English town. The only problems reported were a reluctance on the part of individuals to volunteer and a degree of puzzlement about accepting a majority vote. This particular club charged one Reichsmark a month for its twice weekly meetings.190 Miss Ridding, Education Control Officer in Kreis Siegen, reported her mixed views on youth activities there in December 1947. She visited an evangelical ‘so-­called youth group’ whose ‘whole proceedings reeked of hypocrisy’ but found a sports club bringing together youth from four villages to have what in her view so many groups lacked – an educational purpose. Other groups listened passively to lectures. In one, a vicar’s wife spoke at great length to twenty-­five girls on the life history of the founder of a Lutheran sisterhood; they ‘sat in serried ranks, paying more attention to their knitting than to the speaker’. Elsewhere twelve boys and fourteen girls sat on opposite sides of a ‘shockingly lit’ classroom listening to a seventy-­eight-year-old talk about the town ‘as it used to be’: a young man seemed be some kind of leader but was overshadowed by the speaker. A local Jugendpfleger addressed young teachers on what they could do to support youth work in their villages, the aim being to occupy the young, to provide an outlet for their energies after school hours ‘as an antidote to the Tanzboden’ (dance floor), and to offer some relief from cramped conditions in overcrowded homes.191 One example of the kind of activity organized in the Zone is provided by the institution of summer camps. During the course of the summer of 1946, a boys’ and a girls’ camp were arranged in Duisburg. The hope was to cater for some 8,800 young people who would stay for ten days in groups of 400. The aims of the camps were to provide a fresh-­air holiday with reasonable food, to encourage membership of youth organizations and greater understanding between them, to foster responsibility and self-­reliance, and ‘to assist the positive side of Mil. Gov.’s work by making the camp not merely enjoyable but also inspiring’.192 By the end of August 1946 there were about thirty-­five permanent summer camps in the British Zone, together with a larger number of camps which were semi-­permanent. ECOs and Landesjugendämter (Landbased youth offices) were responsible for their organization, the military had provided equipment and tents, and the British Red Cross had given considerable help. At this stage it was estimated that some 150,000 children would have experienced some form of summer camp. Though the camps were largely recreational in nature, there was a clear underlying purpose: ‘Some interesting experiments in democratic procedures’ were being tried. ‘If these camps are doing nothing else they are assisting in levelling the emotions of the young people so that they may prove more receptive to the ideals and principles of re-­education.’193

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Such camps, operating in the summer, fulfilled most of the expectations of youth group activity. In the winter months, there were difficulties. In Schleswig-Holstein, where by October 1946 over 500 groups were in existence and a further 140 awaiting approval, youth officers struggled with lack of accommodation and the means to heat the buildings that were available. And sports equipment was in short supply: that formerly belonging to the Wehrmacht could be used, but not stocks from the HitlerJugend, since everything belonging to that banned organization had been confiscated. In addition, as an account in the British Zone Review made clear, there was considerable irritation at the ‘extraordinary amount of red tape involved’ in getting youth groups approved, the shortest time taken was reckoned to be two months. As a result youth work was ‘often brought nearly to a standstill’.194 Creating new frameworks for work with young people outside of formal education provided many challenges for the occupiers, but the policy guidelines for youth work had been established at an early stage and for very good reasons. and the efforts at implementation, which depended on individual and collective effort often on a makeshift basis, were typical of the positive approach of many enthusiastic British officers seeing hope in the future of a younger generation emerging from the darkness of Hitler Germany and the depredations of the War.

4

Policy in Practice: Opening and Supervising the Universities

A couple of lorry-­loads of window-­glass at present is worth more to a university than a new research laboratory in normal times.1

Major James Mark took on the task of reporting on the state of universities of the Zone a few months after the cessation of hostilities. Born in 1914, Mark had studied German at Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as at the Universities of Munich and Münster, and had also served with the Intelligence Corps from 1940 to 1946.2 Not yet demobilized, he went to Germany ‘to look for a job [. . .], to see if I could find something useful to do’.3 His formal appointment was ‘S.O. II, Education, Mil. Gov. 11. Main HQ, 21 Army Group’.4 As a fluent German speaker, and with his knowledge of Germany and of two German universities, his involvement with higher education issues at an early stage of the Occupation was especially propitious. This was soon recognized by the German authorities: at the re-­opening ceremony of the University of Bonn, he was described as ‘linguae Theodiscae et litterarum Germanicarum [Existimator]’ (‘a [good] judge of the language and literature of the German people’). Mark was asked to inspect universities by the art historian Ellis Waterhouse, who was based in Bad Oeynhausen and dealt with Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives, overseeing the return of works of art that had been stolen and trying to preserve important buildings from misuse. ‘He said to me: “Well, you know about universities, why don’t you go and look at them? Nobody else is!’ ” This was ‘in the very early days, when things were not organized.’5 There is in this recollection an impression created by many another participant in the early work of the British in Germany after the War, that of a kind of informal happenstance. With few authoritative instructions to go by, it seems, individuals could often decide on their own priorities. Mark describes the improvisation and ‘makeshift relationships’ that were the only way of operating in what was an atmosphere of ‘abnormality and provisionality’.6 Mark was to play a prominent part in a wide range of issues concerning education in the Zone. He remained the authoritative voice on the universities in Education Branch until Eric Colledge (1910–99)7 assumed responsibility as head of Universities Section. After he was demobilized in April, 1946, Mark spent over a year with the rank of Principal in the newly formed Control Office, subsequently becoming Private Secretary to Lord Pakenham. In 1948, he moved to the Treasury.

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Figure 4.1  Major James Mark. The British Zone had six universities: Kiel, Hamburg, Bonn, Cologne, Münster and Göttingen. In addition there were the Technische Hochschulen of Aachen, Braunschweig and Hannover and various other institutions of higher education, including the Bergakademie (Mining Academy) of Clausthal-Zellerfeld. A memorandum on the re-­ opening of German Hochschulen of June 1945 described North-Western Germany as ‘to some extent an academic training ground for the country as a whole’: in 1924 nearly 40 per cent of students in higher education were enrolled at institutions wholly or partly within the British Zone.8 In Berlin, the Technische Universität (as it became, founded as the Technische Hochschule in 1879) was situated in the British Sector of the city. The prestigious University of Berlin, the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, founded in 1810 through an initiative of Wilhelm von Humboldt, was in the Soviet Sector and was to be renamed the Humboldt University. (The Freie Universität was founded in the American Zone and opened in December 1948.) The universities and other higher education institutions of the Zone were all closed when Mark undertook his survey. There is of course the intriguing question as to whether a university can actually cease its activities altogether. Academics at least can continue with their research and scholarship when buildings are closed and even when libraries and laboratories are destroyed. All teaching, however, was suspended, together with its support services. At the universities he inspected Mark was able to contact remaining staff, including – to take Münster as a representative example – the Rektor and Pro-Rektor, the Kurator (the Ministry official responsible for the University), Deans of Faculties, the University Librarian and other officials. When he visited the University of Münster (from 6 to 17 July 1945), Mark found that it had lost nearly all its buildings except for most of the clinics and medical

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institutes (protected during the War by the Red Cross), ‘a considerable, but not altogether crippling, proportion of its books and equipment’ (including some three-­ fifths of the library holdings), and 60 per cent of its staff (‘though a considerable proportion of its deficiencies can be made good’.)9 The house in which he had lived as a student was buried in a mound of rubble and no longer identifiable. In Hamburg (24–31 July) ‘comparatively few’ buildings would have to be completely rebuilt, but many were in need of extensive repairs; very little had been lost in terms of books and equipment, and no more than 10 per cent of the staff were ‘away’ (‘excluding Nazis whom the University proposes to dismiss’). He was not able to predict how many more people would have to be dismissed, but the losses could ‘be made good, at least in part, by the employment of men dismissed by the Nazis and professors of other universities at present in Hamburg’.10 In Kiel, during the first week in August, Mark reported that almost all the university buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged. Some 80 per cent of the books and equipment had been saved, but the university library had lost two-­fifths of its holdings. On the teaching staff he made some rough calculations: It is difficult at present to get a clear picture of how many men are likely to be available. 63 of the 160 are still in the German armed forces or outside the British Zone and news has been received of only a few. A few men formerly dismissed by the Nazis may become available and a certain number (probably not more than 20 at the outside) of lecturers from the Russian Zone are in Kiel and might be employed at least temporarily. The University’s own judgements on the political eligibility of its staff are undoubtedly too lenient; only 11 are definitely regarded as deserving dismissal. Assuming that rather over half the absentees return by 1 Nov and that 20–25% have to be dismissed (my scrutiny of the available Fragebogen indicates that the proportion will not be higher) rather over 100 of the old staff should be available for teaching.11

The University Control Officer for Kiel, Caroline Cunningham, described it as ‘the most heavily nazified, because it was a frontier university’. ‘It was not a happy place. I was not happy there, and I don’t think anyone else was happy.’12 The main building of the University of Cologne was ‘only slightly damaged’, but the clinics and scientific institutes were all badly or severely damaged. Well over half the books and apparatus in medicine and natural sciences had been lost. On staffing, Mark could report that the University was calculating the return of all those at present absent. But this, he felt, was ‘unjustifiably optimistic’. Potential dismissals, however, were much higher than the 20–25 per cent calculated for other universities: the University considered that ‘up to 40% are unemployable or else doubtful cases’. In Mark’s view a number of the ‘doubtful cases’ would probably not be dismissed. He estimated that 60 per cent of the normal staff might be available again by November.13 Bonn was severely damaged. Its main building had been destroyed during the town’s worst air raid on 18 October 1944, the anniversary of its founding in 1818, and only the outer walls remained.14 Not one of its fifty buildings escaped unscathed.

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Göttingen, however, was relatively unharmed, later housing the Rhine Army College for British Troops as well as its own students.15 In common with all universities, however, it was to struggle financially, with consequences for the ability of students to undertake necessary research. In 1949 the budget for teaching materials was 80 per cent lower than pre-­war levels. What is more, the costs had more or less doubled.16 Even before a comprehensive assessment of the physical damage the universities had suffered could be properly undertaken by those working in Germany, bids were being made for the university-­level training of people who might help to fill gaps in the manpower necessary for the smooth running of the Zone, such was the urgency to begin planning for future needs. Colonel J.B.C. Grundy of Education Branch in London – his base was in Earls Court – had produced a memorandum in June 1945 in which he listed the interest of various branches and divisions of the Control Commission in reopening the universities. Medical Branch had argued for the institution of five-­year courses in medicine, for 5,400 students (so that 1,000 would qualify each year) and for three-­year courses in dentistry (for at least 1,000 students, so producing 250 qualified dentists a year). Legal Division wanted the early re-­opening of law faculties, because of the shortage of suitable judges, prosecutors and attorneys. Economic Division put the case for agricultural and commercial Hochschulen, while suggesting that the re-­opening of technical research laboratories and institutes be postponed. Education Branch desired the early re-­opening in particular of the higher education institutions involved in teacher education. There were ‘strong and obvious grounds’ for reopening departments in which forestry, mining, architecture, structural engineering, and pharmacy were taught. And it was argued that the adequate staffing of secondary schools would not be possible until a supply of university graduates was available, ‘unless graduation at a university is to cease to be a necessary qualification’, in subjects ‘not corrupted by Nazi teaching’ (German, History, Geography, Biology).17 To several of these desiderata Grundy listed objections. Were so many dentists needed? The teaching of law was problematic. The training of teachers had never been regarded as a Hochschule activity. Veterinary science etc. were subjects principally taught at Technische Hochschulen. ‘The need for secondary teachers is no doubt pressing, but it cannot be supplied in the orthodox manner until universities are re-­ opened in all faculties.’ Grundy was no expert in these matters and was unhelpfully pedantic in distinguishing the universities from other types of higher education institution. ‘Tired of sinecures’, he was soon to leave for a post with the British Council in Helsinki.18 Many of these issues were in any case still somewhat academic at this stage. The priority was to put measures in place to deal with the immediate task of accommodation and physical reconstruction and to open the universities and colleges to students as quickly as could be managed. By 15 October, Education Branch had been able to report that plans were in place to reopen most higher education institutions. Hamburg would reopen for all faculties by around 20 October and for 2,500 students. Kiel might start in November for Clinical Medicine in Schleswig, but the reopening of the whole university would depend on the state of the ELAC buildings. These buildings, which had housed the ‘Electroacustic’

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factory, were crucial for the successful re-­opening of the University. They had enough space for teaching purposes, but also and crucially, large kitchens and dining rooms, so that a Mensa (student canteen) could easily be established and provide for student catering.19 When the University opened on 27 November, more than a third of the students were studying medicine. Next in terms of numbers came philosophy, law, economics and theology.20 In Münster the Faculty of Catholic Theology was about to reopen, to be followed ‘in the next fortnight’ by Medicine, Law and Political Economy. Philosophy and Evangelical Theology were ‘not likely to function in more than a rudimentary form’ during the next semester. The students were expected to number 1,200. In Cologne all faculties were likely to start work by 25 October, although there would be limited teaching in Medicine and Natural Sciences. At that time the University considered that teaching staff could be assured for the number of students expected (not likely to exceed 2,000.) All faculties in Bonn would reopen during October, for some 3,000 students, most of whom would come from Bonn and its environs and so would not need special accommodation. Two converted air raid shelters were available ‘as transit billets’.21 For Cologne, a radio announcement called on the dispersed academic staff of the University to report to the Rektor and announce their intention either to return or not to do so. PR/ISC was asked not to give the impression that the University had been reopened or that a re-­opening had been decided upon.22 For the Technische Hochschulen, the expectation was that Braunschweig and Hannover would reopen within the next ten days for about 1,000 and 650 students respectively, and that Aachen would offer only some instruction in Mining and Architecture and would accept only local students. The Bergakademie in ClausthalZellerfeld, the Veterinary College in Hannover, and the Medical Academy in Düsseldorf would all reopen within the next ten days, for 500, 350, and 600 students respectively. By March 1946 the position in the six universities of the Zone could be summarized, rather incompletely, as follows: Göttingen (17.9.45) 4,296 students (22% women) All faculties open; 12 students’ clubs approved by Military Government. Münster (3.11.45) 1,250 students Faculties of theology, law and economics, and medicine open; faculties of philosophy and natural science giving special courses only; only limited number admitted for chemistry and pharmacy. Bonn (6.11.45) 2,500 students (20% women) All faculties open. Hamburg (8.11.45) All faculties open.

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Kiel (27.11.45) 2,000 students All faculties open (more than one-­third of students in the medical faculty. Cologne (12.12.45) c.1,500 students (20% women) All faculties except medicine open23

At this time, ten percent of university places were being reserved for displaced persons who lived in special camps and so could be counted in addition to those for whom accommodation was available. The opening dates for the Technische Hochschulen were: Braunschweig:  12 November 1945 (1,200 students) Aachen:  27 December (246 students) Hannover:  ‘early January’.24

Permission was given on 3 November for the Medical Academy in Düsseldorf to reopen. Earlier Mark had reported that the application to reopen was inadequate and that the Rektor should be instructed to prepare, within a week, the kind of report Military Government called for. If the information was not available, the Academy could not be regarded as being in a fit state to open.25 Academics who had been persecuted under the Nazis would be reinstated. An early resolution of the Rektoren made the position clear. They would be reinstated in their former posts, or, if these are filled, in posts of equal rank; if they are not fully employable, suitable provision shall be made for them., in particular the rights and emoluments of emeriti. If their former posts are at present vacant, they shall be kept open for them. It is the moral duty of all German Higher Education Authorities, Universities, Technical Colleges and their Faculties to fulfil this obligation.26

It was a prodigious accomplishment to open the universities and other higher education institutions so quickly. The complexities of repairing buildings, re-­establishing libraries and providing necessary equipment for laboratory work were challenging enough, but in addition teaching and administrative staff had to be found and vetted, and the processing of student applications dealt with as fairly as possible. Structures were in place by early 1946 for all institutions to resume teaching and research, and to begin to undo the effects of many long years of political interference and indoctrination.

The first rectors in office From 1942 to 1944, the Rektor in Cologne was the dermatologist Friedrich Bering (1878–1950). Although he had fought hard to keep it open, he had decided that the

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University should be closed in October 1944, having seen much damage inflicted on its clinics and other buildings in the latter stages of the War. His house had been bombed, and his second son had been killed in Italy. He suffered a nervous breakdown at the end of October. When the War ended, he was suspended from teaching and eventually declared entlastet (exonerated) by a denazification panel. Bering was exceptional insofar as his reputation had not been unduly compromised under the Nazis. (He had joined the Party in 1933.) Joseph Kroll assumed control as Rektor in Cologne in late 1944, following Bering’s breakdown, and was to stay in office for an unusually long period, until 1950. From 1945 to 1946 he also had the role of Dezernent (head of department) for ‘education, schools, art and science’ (Erziehung, Schule, Kunst und Wissenschaft) of the town of Cologne and became a member of the first parliament of Nordrhein-Westfalen. He was described by Harry Beckhough, the British University Control Officer who had to deal with him, as a ‘petty dictator’.27 A report from the Cologne Intelligence Section reported of Kroll: ‘He stands to attention before himself every morning.’28 When Pakenham visited the University in February 1948 Beckhough reported on the ‘astonishing form of the Rector’s welcome’: ‘Welcome to the front’. In fact, the first few minutes of Professor Kroll’s speech (no other professors said a word during that half hour in the senate room) were a form of Kroll’s pseudo-Homeric rhapsody. The Chancellor was likened to a General coming out of his HQ, away from his map room and staff to visit his ‘front-­line soldiers’ here in the West. Needless to say there was dead silence whilst his speech was made. We were all holding our breath wondering what was coming next, but fortunately the subject was soon changed by a welcome interruption from the Chancellor.29

The authoritarian Kroll was to remain a controversial figure, not only as far as the British authorities were concerned but also among members of the professoriate in Cologne.30 A visiting lecturer from Durham University reported of Kroll: ‘The only person I could not quite understand or size up was the Rector of the University, Dr Kroll.’31 But Oliver Harvey, visiting the Zone with William Strang, found Kroll to be ‘a man of strong personality and great ability’ and ‘strictly non-­political’.32 Landahl called Kroll ‘ein Herr von betonter Eleganz’ (‘a gentleman of pronounced elegance’).33 Elsewhere in the archives there is an unsigned note of a meeting with Beckhough on 3 April 1946 which records simply ‘Kroll – very much favoured by Mil Gov. Highly desirable that he remains in office’. In Kiel the physiologist Professor Ernst Holzlöhner (1899–1945), named in April 1945 to take office as Rektor of the University, had been dismissed in line with policy to remove all Rektoren from their posts if they had been elected under National Socialism. They were automatically included in the ‘black’ category. Holzlöhner had been an active Nazi in Berlin and after his move to Kiel in 1934. He committed suicide in June 1945 and attempted too to kill his family: his eleven-­year-old daughter died; his wife and another daughter survived the carbon monoxide poisoning to which they were subjected. He left behind a statement of uncompromising extremism, described

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Figure 4.2  Robert Birley and Lord Pakenham listening to Rektor Kroll holding forth in the senate room of Cologne University, 1948. On the right is Berta Hochberger, Birley’s interpreter. in the files as ‘a useful reminder that the fanatic is to be found among the cultured classes too’: At the beginning of this war, my wife and I realised that we could only win this war or would have to kill ourselves and our children. This knowledge has been confirmed. We had to do a gambler’s throw and now we have lost more than money and property, friends and relatives. We lost Hope and Freedom. Life for life’s sake is not worth living. The following facilitated the logical end. 1.  We shall travel in the best company, because everywhere the best men have died and the worst are left over. This goes for all people in particular and humanity in general. The conquerors are the Bolsheviks and the Yankees.

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2.  The best ideas have the least vital power now-­a-days within humanity. The program of National Socialism is more honest and more decent than the swindling programs of the Internationale and the theologies of the usurers. 3.  The history of Germany for the last thirty years shows no divine but a satanic principle. Has not Germany been the experimental ground of an insane angel who cultivated thereon Belief and Hope, Devotion and readiness to Sacrifice, only to produce additional Grief and Misery. The world of the conqueror stinks of rottenness and idiocy! I will spare my children the disgrace of being maltreated by revengeful Jews!34

In this case, counting Holzlöhner among the ‘cultured classes’ was spectacularly inappropriate. He had supervised low-­temperature experiments on concentration camp inmates and would undoubtedly have been convicted eventually of war crimes. Despite his background he had only been placed in what was category 3 through the denazification process, among the ‘lesser offenders’: nearly all other medical professors in Kiel were placed in category 5, ‘exonerated persons’.35 Holzlöhner relates his suicide to his dismissal from the rectorship: ‘After having been dismissed now, I am only responsible for my family.’ Holzlöhner was succeeded by the neurologist Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt (1885– 1964), whose name lives on in the term for the serious neurodegenerative condition known as ‘Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease’. Creutzfeldt had been director of the Nervenklinik in Kiel and through his work there was implicated in Nazi euthanasia policy. He was dismissed by the British after only six months in office, having been in conflict with the authorities over his wish to allow more former Army officers to study at the University.36 There is a report in CCG files of an interview with Creutzfeldt which is revealing about his personality: I had an interview with Prof. Creutzfeld [sic] and along with ECO 312 (P) Det visited the ELAC buildings and University Clinics. He was senior psychiatrist to the German Navy and appeared for his interview in Naval uniform with decorations. He is a man very difficult to sum up at a first meeting. He appears to have considerable intelligence which he does his best to conceal, and, having tried to pull a fast one, seems naively delighted to have been forestalled. At the same time he appears to have little practical sense of what is and what is not possible, and his estimates of the time required to complete repairs seemed wildly over-­optimistic. Not a Nazi, but to be trusted only as far as he can be seen.37

The head of Universities Section, Eric Colledge, who consistently misspells Creutzfeldt’s name, expressed strong views on his suitability as Rektor in a report of April 1946: The more I see of Kreuzfeld, the more I am astonished that he could ever have been appointed rector; and there can be no doubt that we are seriously compromised in

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the eyes of the better elements in the university by the fact that he is regarded, inevitably, as our nominee and protégé. He has deliberately disregarded all the advice and instruction which I gave him on my last visit three months ago. [. . .] To depose him will not be difficult. To find a better successor will be very hard. We met the deans and their representatives, and I cannot say that there was one among them whom I would willingly see in office.38

Colledge concluded his report with a condemnation of the situation in Kiel: I should not advise anyone to go to Kiel without also going to Hamburg. Otherwise, he will return with the impression that the decision to re-­open the universities in the British zone was ill-­advised. But what has been achieved already in Hamburg should be possible in Kiel too, if we and those Germans on our side will have the courage of our convictions.

Caroline Cunningham, the University Officer in Kiel, remembered Creutzfeldt as an arch-­authoritarian and obstructionist. Instructions to the Rektor of 22 October 1945 reveal something of the tone of communications from Military Government when things went wrong in Kiel at this early and somewhat confused stage. A Kiel professor had told a reporter from Radio Hamburg that the University would reopen on 1 November with 600–800 students: It will be made clear to Professor Behrens that he has no right to make such a statement for publication on his own responsibility, especially as the statement is based upon pure conjecture. He will also be made to understand that he has incurred the severe displeasure of Military Government, who do NOT approve such undisciplined action.

Information regarding the University of Kiel would only be issued by the Rektor himself and the text of any statement would always be given to the Education Control Officer.39 A further communication of the same date contains a formal instruction concerning the way in which the Rektor should be elected: 1. It is the wish of Control Commission for Germany that University Rektors shall be elected by the body which normally performs this function. 2. You will, therefore, offer yourself for election in order that your appointment may be suitable confirmed.

Against the word ‘wish’ there is the handwritten amendment ‘order!?’.40 Creutzfeldt’s successor, Erich Burck (Dean of the Classics faculty during the War, which would have put him in the catch-­all ‘grey’ category), held office briefly, from spring to summer 1946, and was the subject of special investigation. Riddy wrote of him to Lt. Col. Forsyth (in charge of intelligence at Education Branch):

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The fact that Dr Burck was Dean, etc., does not, of course, qualify for mandatory removal, but I note that he is also described as a Professor of History. This fact alone does not qualify for removal, but I think anybody who was allowed to teach history under the Nazis must be regarded with more than the usual caution.41

Burck (1901–94) was, however, a classicist, an expert on Livy, rather than a conventional modern historian. His Fragebogen42 was re-­examined. Caroline Cunningham, wrote a long report on him just a few weeks into his rectorship. She concluded: It would be fair to say that so far he betrays definitely democratic tendencies which, if properly cultivated, might provide that sorely needed leaven in the Kiel University lump. His interest in the workings of democracy is not purely academic. He is most anxious to see democracy infused into the German spirit, but in this he tends to be a little precipitate and hence somewhat over-­complacent about the difficulties inherent in such a process. So far he has not yet seen any of his big democratic schemes (e.g. the Studentenschaft) working, and he is inclined, like most Germans, to think that a blue-­print is synonymous with its satisfactory execution. Time, in the form of some slight set-­back, will no doubt provide the proper corrective.43

But in 1982 she recounted how Burck was dramatically arrested, during a visit by Lord Beveridge, for falsifying his Fragebogen: it was ‘a very very unpleasant affair’, as she recalled.44 A diary entry by Richard Samuel recorded Caroline Cunningham’s difficulties with the professoriate: Sat. 19 Oct. [1946] . . . (Kiel) . . . tea with Miss Cunningham . . . Insuperable difficulties with University. Second Rektor had to be sacked because of irregularities on Fragebogen. Caroline Cunningham has to be careful as a police dog not to be done in by the professors, Outwardly they are charming, but they try their hardest to delay or gloss over or get their way surreptitiously.45

It was only with the third Rektor, the musicologist Friedrich Blume, that the regular one-­year period of office was re-­established. In Kiel. Blume had been denazified as unbelastet, though during his assessment there was considerable analysis of the contents of a book he had written on music and race.46 During the vital first two years after the end of the War it had clearly not been possible to install in Kiel rectors with a wholly unblemished past. Caroline Cunningham, a highly competent Germanist, recalled a farcical situation with the Regional Commissioner, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Champion de Crespigny (1897–1969), once Burck’s short period as Rektor terminated. The Commissioner knew no German. There was one occasion when I prevented him from doing something which I thought was very silly, simply out of ignorance on his part: when we lost Burck, he

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sent for me one day, and he said: ‘I’ve got the answer to the problem of your whatever he’s called.’ [. . .] I said: ‘the Rektor.’ He said, ‘Yes. I think we’ll appoint a Professor Jellinek.’ [Cox & Phillips, Transcript, p.117.]

Cunningham had to remind him that there was a university constitution and that he could not behave in this way without causing huge problems. ‘He hadn’t a clue,’ she said: ‘I used to go and have dinner with him, out in his castle somewhere, from time to time, but he wasn’t the least bit interested.’ In Hamburg the pharmacologist Eduard Keeser (1892–1956) served as Rektor from 1941 until June 1945. He was dismissed for his Nazi activities in September but re-­ employed as a professor in April 1946. (In 1933 he had signed the vote of allegiance to Hitler from German professors – Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Universitäten zu Adolf Hitler – most of whose signatories were from Hamburg, Göttingen, and Marburg.) His successor was the untainted Professor of English Emil Wolff (1879–1952), who had been Rektor previously, in 1923/1924. He served for a two-­year period, from 1945 to 1947. He did not make a good impression on Stephen Spender and Richard Crossman, who visited him on 5 October and subjected him to a gruelling interview on the future of German politics. Spender recorded that he ‘seemed a man remarkably lacking in distinction. It was difficult to interview him for he had no views on any subject whatever’.47 William Strang described him as ‘old and infirm’.48 Dodds found him to be ‘as vague, humorous and charming as the old fashioned English professor at his nicest: not an appropriate figure to preside over the ruins, but an attractive one’.49 In an impassioned and flowery speech at the reopening of the University on 6 November 1945, Wolff spoke of the undiminished spirit of the University during the dark days of Nazism: Many of its members quietly continued working on their task of academic research and teaching without allowing themselves to be blinded by the turmoil of the day or by fanatical false doctrines. As night penetrated deeper and deeper during the War it remained a place of gentle and friendly light that still illuminated the path of many citizens of Hamburg for a time and nourished the strength of spiritual resistance and mental self-­assertion in an environment of moral neglect and the constant threat of death.50

On such a formal occasion it was expected that speeches would be uplifting. Wolff was a good German and a proper choice as Rektor, but the problem here is that he appears to be commending the innere Emigration that was one of the strongest criticisms levelled against the professoriate. Those who stayed in post during the Nazi hegemony, despite in many cases their formal unconnectedness to Nazi organizations and their doctrines, nevertheless were supporting an institution that had long since reneged on its fundamental obligation to the pursuit of truth. Professor E.R. Dodds reported a meeting he had had in 1947 with the distinguished classicist Max Pohlenz of Göttingen: ‘On seeing me the old man plunged at once into an eager discussion of Greek philosophy, exactly as if all that has happened since 1933

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were an irrelevant and essentially unimportant interruption to our real business of scholarship. I suspect this is a common attitude with the older men – delightful but also irresponsible.’51 Professor Paul Kahle, who had taught in Bonn before the War, analysed this problem in relation to what he called the Nazi abrogation of the parliamentary system in the universities, with the Minister controlling the Rektor who controlled the Deans. Their appointments were for much longer periods than had traditionally been the case. Without the power to vote and so to reach majority decisions, academics distanced themselves from university business: The Professors who were not Nazis – and that was the great majority – disassociated themselves as far as possible from Faculty and University, where they were completely unable to change anything, and limited themselves to teaching and research work; they only came to meetings of the Faculty when there were on the programme matters with which they were directly concerned.52

Professor Kroll in Cologne had by his own account behaved in similar fashion. In Göttingen the classicist Hans Drexler (1895–1984), who had succeeded as professor a Jewish post-­holder forced to retire on anti-Semitic grounds, served as Rektor from 1943 to 1945, when he was dismissed for his involvement with Nazism and never again employed as a university teacher. He had been leader of the Göttingen NSDozentenbund, and the author of Nazi publications;53 he was also removed from the Göttingen Academy. There were shaky post-­war beginnings in Göttingen. Eric Colledge reported on the inaugural meeting of the Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften in Göttingen in early November 1945. In an address to the meeting Herbert Schöffler, the Professor of English, expressed the view that ‘allied propaganda’ on concentration camps was ‘cant’ – he used the English word: designed to soothe the British conscience by persuading them that Germans shared a common guilt, and that therefore such measures as the bombing of dams and the destruction of Dresden were justifiable; and he went on to say that unless the Nuremberg trials were the last of their kind, it would be hard for the Germans to believe in our good faith for the future.

Such remarks were problematic enough in the circumstances, but worse was to come in a less formal afternoon session, when Schöffler made a speech in English ‘which was in the worst of taste, touching with elephantine lightness on the strained relations between the Allies, and appealing for pity for unhappy, ill used Germany’ and for assistance so that he could resume his old contacts in England. Colledge reported that it was ‘hard to think of a worse emissary of the German universities at the present time than Professor Schöffler’. (Later, the Germanist F.P. Pickering, who served with the Control Commission, recalled that in Göttingen ‘huge audiences’ listened to the mediaeval historian Percy E. Schramm (1894–1970) review the recent past and pose the question ‘Who was responsible?’54)

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[Schramm’s] account – as the work of a professional – was no doubt‘wissenschaftlich’, which to a German audience would in context be synonymous with ‘historical’. The British University Officer consulted his superiors but there was nothing to be done. German respect for ‘Wissenschaft’ would in the circumstances not have risen to the task of considering any other reading of history, least of all from an inevitably prejudiced British or American historian. I do not suggest that all Göttingen or anyone in Göttingen would still consider the lecture to have been scholarly and objective; it may have failed in its purpose both then and now. It was an attempt at any rate so to ‘make’ history that it could be confessed by some, and not easily unmade by others.55

It was suggested that Schöffler be ‘given a rocket’ by Major Beattie and the Education Control Officer L.H. Sutton – ‘a V2 for Schöffler certainly’, as a note in the files indicates. But situations like this posed difficult problems. Colledge was clear that Schöffler should not be dismissed, despite other adverse reports on his lectures to students. Schöffler apparently had a good record as an anti-Nazi and had been removed by the Nazis from his post in Cologne: ‘his dismissal by us would be claimed as proof that we cannot tolerate hearing unpleasant truths.’ That was a realistic assessment of the individual case, but beyond that there must have been the wider concern that British policy was to encourage democracy and to proceed by example. Freedom of speech – especially in the university context – was surely fundamental to such policy. Determining the boundaries of what might legitimately be said was not at all straightforward, despite the obvious dismay at Schöffler’s inappropriate behaviour.56 In the same report, Colledge describes problems with the rectorship in Göttingen which also touched on forms of expression. Rudolf Smend (1882–1975) had been dubbed a traitor by some of the students since he had signed, as a member of the University Council, a manifesto of the Evangelical Church of 19 October 1945 in which the ‘community of guilt’ of the German people for the War and the events preceding it was confessed to. Smend wished to resign so that he could defend his action. ‘Why, if he was free as Rector to sign the manifesto, he is not equally free now to say why he did so, is not clear’, Colledge argued, adding that Smend was ‘not a strong man’ and that his difficulties were being exacerbated by the insistence of Education Branch that on matters like the formation of student societies ‘he should say what he thinks, whereas he wants to be sure that what he thinks is acceptable to all sides before he admits that he thinks it’. (Colledge also found it ‘disquieting to hear Smend speak without equivocation of “National Socialist Students” in the present student body’.)57 So – Schöffler was rebuked for speaking his mind, while Smend was criticized for not doing so. In the previous week in Hamburg, Senator Heinrich Landahl had been speaking at the re-­opening ceremony of the University. In his address he made a special plea for open discussion, for the real exchange of thought and opinion: Taking your opponent as seriously as you take yourself, respecting his views as you would your own, and wrestling with him in honest disagreement – that leads to

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clarity for both sides, whether your two standpoints end with agreement or clear division.58

That, of course, was the hope of British policy in Germany, and Landahl’s unremarkable example of it throws the Schöffler case into sharp contrast. It demonstrates again the problem of balancing the power and control in the hands of the occupiers with the right to freedom of expression of the occupied. It was proposed that the physiologist Hermann Rein (1898–1953) should succeed Smend. He too was not free of associations with National Socialism. (He had signed the vote of allegiance to Hitler from German professors in 1933, and took part in October 1942 in the Seenot conference at which the experiments on prisoners in Dachau were described.59) Colledge recorded: ‘We should consider carefully whether we should not ask Rein, if we decide that we should be better off with him as Rektor, to make some public statement that would show that so far as politics are concerned he is not less acceptable to us than Smend.’ Rein served from 1946 to 1948, when he was succeeded by the eminent law professor Ludwig Raiser (1904–1980), who would later become President of both the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Wissenschaftsrat. In Bonn the mineralogist Karl Franz Chuboda (1898–1976) had served as Rektor from 1939 to 1945. He had been the Gaudozentenbundführer (regional university teachers’ leader) of Cologne/Aachen since 1938. Chuboda fled Bonn during the allied advance in early 1945; after a conversation with him in an air-­raid shelter during an attack he had named as his successor Theodor Brinkmann (1877–1951) since, Chuboda argued, Brinkmann was unbelastet and had good English.60 Brinkmann was approved by the Americans and set about preparing for the university to reopen.61 In March the Americans put in place a provisional five-­man committee to run the town’s affairs, including oversight of the University. That committee remained in place until August.62 The physicist Heinrich Matthias Konen (1874–1948), who had been forced to retire in 1934 because of his membership of the Zentrumspartei, was Rektor from 1945 to 1948, serving also in 1946–47 as Kultusminister in Nordrhein-Westfalen and thereby becoming his own superior. Birley would describe him as ‘ a very bad man’: ‘I have always suspected him, apart from the fact that he is harmfully reactionary. I had taken the precaution of putting in as University Officer at Bonn a young man who I knew would find out anything to be found out, and he did.’63 In early January 1946, Eric Colledge reported that the then University Officer in Bonn, Captain Brann, regarded Konen as ‘anti-British and full of duplicity’. Colledge’s view was that despite his shortcomings (he was ‘woolly-­minded, long-­winded and in some respects slipshod’) he had been ‘in a mysterious way, surprisingly efficient’, especially in looking after displaced persons and getting in touch with refugees: Colledge told Brann that ‘if he could produce a convincing case against Konen we should not hesitate to dismiss him’.64 Konen, who had stood down as Kultusminister in December 1947 under pressure from his own party, was dismissed on 1 April 1948 for irregularities concerning admissions to the University. The numerus clausus in place had been breached,

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and proper attention had not been paid to the political background of the student body. It was found in an examination of sixteen students admitted to study dentistry, that four had been professional Army officers, two NSDAP members, one a member of the NS-Frauenschaft, one an NSDAP- and one an SS-Anwärter.65 Konen was succeeded briefly by the theologian Martin Noth (1902–68) in 1948 and then by another theologian, Theodor Klauser (1894–1984) who served from 1948 to 1950. In Münster, following the long period in office (from 1937 to 1944) of the botanist Walter Mevius (1893–1975), the pathologist Herbert Siegmund was appointed Rektor in 1944–45. Mevius received plaudits from his colleagues, but there is also evidence that he acted against individuals not toeing the Nazi line. He blocked the appointment of an old Catholic Centre Party candidate on the grounds that his attitude to National Socialism was put at risk by the ‘many black [= Catholic] secret channels’ in Münster: ‘One must not bring any Catholics to Münster. Only old enemies of the Catholic Centre Party belong here.’66 Siegmund had taken part in 1942 in the notorious Seenot conference. The church historian Georg Schreiber (1882–1963) was the first post-­war Rektor during 1945–46. He was followed by the physiologist Emil Lehnartz (1898–1979), who served from 1946 to 1949. The Bergakademie in Clausthal-Zellerfeld – a mining college with a history going back to 1864 (or 1775, if its predecessor institutions are counted) – was able to begin some teaching again on 1 October 1945. In December Professor Gerhard Krüger was appointed Rektor by the British authorities. The Academy’s buildings were in reasonable order, with relatively little bomb and artillery damage, but many of them were being used for other purposes. Some equipment had been confiscated. A group of professors had got together to undertake preliminary clearing of the buildings that could be made available, and research activity slowly resumed. Geoffrey Bird, who was responsible as University Officer for the Bergakademie as well as for the University of Göttingen, recalled a farcical incident at its reopening. Like other officers, he was accustomed at this stage of the Occupation to make public statements in English. At the formal reopening ceremony, he said: ‘I am sure you students will fully appreciate the difficulties which the staff here have had to face in reopening the Academy.’ The interpreter produced a German translation which said ‘In the face of this staff here you will fully understand the difficulties we had in reopening this Academy’. This not surprisingly produced loud applause from the students and hostility from those academics who did not understand English.67 In all, these were shaky beginnings. Staffing university administrations was a constant problem and resulted in considerable instability: in particular the choice of suitable rectors was clearly very difficult and in some cases mishandled. There was frustration on all sides, but a general willingness to restore the institutions to something like their pre-Hitler standing, though that would not be enough to satisfy those expecting fundamental reforms. After he left Germany in 1946, Colledge wrote a depressing account of the situation in the German universities. ‘A schematic denazification’, he believed,

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is not achieving its objects, [. . .] what is needed, much more than the removal of minor officials of Nazi organizations who are as negative now as then, is the introduction into every sphere of German society of men of a moral stature and a European point of view, who can, by their example, their teaching and their influence, reduce those of their colleagues who were willing to compromise themselves with the Nazis to an extent when they would no longer represent any danger. [. . .] I can truthfully say that the men and women whom I have met who approximate to the intellectual standards which are required to lead the German students during their present intellectual dilemmas are very few indeed.68

This was to be a view expressed by a British delegation led by Professor Dodds in early 1947.

The University Officers At each university in the Zone a British officer was appointed to ensure that policy was being followed and to oversee its development. They began to be recruited towards the end of 1945. It was realized that universities were highly sensitive places and by their nature very specialized, and so having an officer in place in every such institution was thought to be a wise strategy. Liaison with other countries was also going to be an important task, and the universities could not easily be overseen by an officer responsible also for schools.69 The title of the officers appointed was originally ‘University Control Officer’ (UCO); later they were called ‘University Education Control Officer’ (UECO), and finally, at the beginning of 1947, ‘University Education Officer’ (UEO). These young people – some were just thirty-­two when they took up their posts – found themselves responsible for the overseeing of all aspects of the life of their institutions. Ludwig Raiser, who served as Rektor in Göttingen from 1948 to 1949, described their role as that of a commissioner (Kommissar) with powers of supervision and direction. He recalled that the university officers respected academic freedom and self-­government and were predominantly sensible and – in the context of the many practical needs of those early years – often very helpful people.70 Most of them knew Germany and could speak excellent German, and many had some kind of background in education, especially as schoolteachers in the UK. Though there seems to have been no systematic attempt to recruit people with such qualifications – once they presented themselves they were quickly identified as the right people to work with the universities in Germany. Geoffrey Bird (1907–1996) had been demobilized after six years in the Army, mostly with the Intelligence Corps, and was sent to Göttingen in late December 1945, aged 38. He was fluent in German, and he knew the University well, having been an exchange student there in the summer of 1928 and English Lektor in 1929–31. He had ‘absolute power’, with the task of ‘rehabilitating’ the academic staff, dealing with the admission of students, and encouraging a return to normal university life.71 He was given no brief on

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his duties. Asked to do so retrospectively in 1982, he put together a comprehensive list of responsibilities: (a) To check and approve the appointment of academic and administrative staff, and the admission of students, avoiding, as far as possible, the appointment or admission of active Nazis (not to check academic qualifications, which was the responsibility of the German authorities). (b) To support and encourage measures to enable the University to return to normal academic life. (c) To gain the confidence and co-­operation of the Rektor and Staff and discuss with them the educational policy and aims of Education Branch. (d) To find and get to know younger Dozenten who wished to work towards the development of a democratic Germany in which the influence of the universities would play an active role. (e) To elicit from staff and students new views on the aims of Allied policies and to pass on any suggestions or criticisms to Education Branch. (f) To help as far as possible in the provision of materials and equipment necessary for the University to carry out its proper functions, and to interpret its problems to Education Branch. (g) To organise informal discussion groups with students and young Dozenten to help them to gain knowledge of the outside world, from which most of them had been isolated since childhood. (h) To encourage and advise students in organising their own affairs, such as the formation of a student union, (AStA), and to help them in understanding democratic procedures. (i) To help where possible with the problems of accommodation and student welfare. (j) To interview candidates for visiting studentships or lectureships at British universities. (k) To arrange, with the help of the Foreign Office, for visits to the University by university teachers, writers, scientists, theatre groups, etc., from the UK, and ensure that they met the appropriate members of the University.72

In addition he vetted newly submitted doctoral theses. In the absence of a formal brief for his duties, he gained insight into policy and common operational problems at regular meetings with other university officers, at which the head of Universities Section would speak. This was first Eric Colledge (who took over from James Mark, effectively in charge of university matters before Colledge’s arrival), and later Robert (‘Bobby’) Herdman Pender. Birley was later to write that everyone who worked with Geoffrey Bird ‘recognised the extraordinarily close relationship he had

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with the staff and students of the university and the amount of work he put in to help them’.73 A visitor to the University of Göttingen, the pharmacologist Professor F.R. Winton of University College London, recorded his impressions of the work Bird was doing: I cannot say that I made a close study of the work that [Bird] was doing at the University, but I had a long conversation with him in which he described this work, and I had a considerable number of opportunities of checking as to how his work impinged on that of German workers in the University. My general impression is that he is doing a very good job of work and that the Germans cordially welcome his help. Nevertheless I must put on record that I was sorry to find that this work was all either negative (i.e. in the sense of being concerned with the possibility of vetoing applications of University students, or appointments to the academic staff) or neutral in the sense of facilitating transport for German, and in my own case British University workers. It seemed to me that there are several opportunities for positive leadership to be given by the British Education Officer in guiding the Germans through the difficulties which prevent more successful achievement. For example . . . the technical difficulties concerned with experimental research and the totally inadequate library facilities in so far as the German knowledge of the literature of other countries is concerned. It may, however, be that if one knew more, these difficulties would appear insuperable.74

Valerie Dundas-Grant (1923–2016) became Geoffrey Bird’s assistant in Göttingen in 1948. She had read modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford, had spent two-­and-a-­half years with the WRNS on special duties and as a linguist, and had been working in Göttingen with Intelligence Division, having been trained for her role with the Control Commission in a general introduction course at Bletchley Park. She was later Assistant University Education Officer in Bonn and eventually Education Officer, working also with schools. She saw her task, quoting Geoffrey Bird, as ‘encouraging as much contact with the outside world as possible’; she worked an eight-­ hour day, five and a half days a week, ran discussion groups with equal numbers of German and British participants, and in addition to what she was asked to do by Regional and Zonal Headquarters, used her own initiative in carrying out ‘the general task’, as a ‘self-­propelled fieldworker’. In Bonn she was more involved with schools, running several study groups for teachers and student teachers, and she gave a series of well attended lectures at the local branch of Die Brücke, the British Information Centres.75 Herbert Walker (as Director of Education Branch) described her duties in a testimonial for her: As assistant to the University Officer she had to make contact with students and the younger lecturers of the University, in order to encourage a critical, enquiring spirit regarding political, social and educational problems; to further international exchanges of students, and assist in the organisation of International Students’ Conferences.76

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Harry Beckhough77 (1914–2015) was the University Officer in Cologne. He described his responsibilities at the time as supervising the whole academic life of the institution, subjecting the teaching staff and especially the administration to critical examination, and ensuring that denazification was properly carried out by those responsible so that, as he put it, no dangerous elements penetrated the teaching body.78 Of a list of six duties he put together when looking back on his work in 1982, five were concerned with denazification of staff and students. The sixth involved ‘assisting in physical recovery and rebuilding’, in which he was also fully engaged.79 ‘We were all left very much to our own devices,’ he recalled, without real guidance or help, to undertake individually a task which, if assessed in terms of military or civil service operations, would have established for each university at least two senior officers with a minimum of six juniors and proper equipment [. . .] which had to be fought for continuously by each of us alone and unaided, certainly in those vital first years.80

Though Beckhough was critical of Rektor Kroll and his unnaturally prolonged period of office, he felt that Kroll respected him – his being in military uniform seemingly appealed to Kroll’s appreciation of discipline and organization. Beckhough ‘would trust nobody’: Though I found few actual Nazis or Nazi sympathisers or fellow travellers amongst the staff, I found plenty of closed-­in, ultra-­conservative and nationalistic minds looking backwards to what they regarded as their halcyon days pre–1933 and refusing to open their eyes and minds to a better and more democratic future.81

Ray Perraudin (1911–95) recalled being given no written instructions when he took up his post at the University of Münster, but he could quote from a retrospective description of his duties provided in a testimonial for him by Herbert Walker when Chief Education Officer in Nordrhein-Westfalen. They included: the enforcement of Allied policy in the University, especially concerning denazification and the maintenance of a numerus clausus on admissions; attending meetings of the Senate, where he was to represent the views of Education Branch on matters for debate there; making contact with professors and lecturers (Dozenten); establishing international exchanges; getting to know the student body and encouraging the formation of student associations; selecting professors, Dozenten, and students for visits to other countries; acting as a link between the University and the outside world; and the organization of international summer courses.82 On the question of control, he explained: Perhaps it was taken for granted that I should ‘control’ the University – but with control I have no doubt there was the implication that I should encourage and help the re-­development of the University, the teaching staff and the student body on the assumption that such encouragement and help would be along the democratic lines of our country.83

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Figure 4.3  Former Education Officers, pictured in 1982. Clockwise from top left: Joan Bird, Geoffrey Bird, Valerie Dundas-Grant, Harry Beckhough, Ray Perraudin, Geoffrey Carter, Muriel Lambert (formerly Brown), Edith Davies, Caroline Cunningham.

Perraudin left to succeed Harry Beckhough in Cologne. His replacement in Münster from August 1948, James Alldridge (1910–82), described his duties as making and maintaining contact with German education authorities and teachers at all levels, both officially and informally/socially, informing his contacts about education in the UK, arranging visits of UK education officials and teachers and reciprocal visits by Germans. Everything was done entirely in German and ‘all that I talked to the Germans about and encouraged was made to appear to come from the Germans’. He received no prior training, either in the UK or Germany.84 The indomitable Caroline Cunningham (1907–97) went out to Bünde in the summer of 1945 to be in charge of the information office of Education Branch. She had a first-­class degree in German from the University of Liverpool and had spent two

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years as a student in Munich as well as a year in Vienna. Before the War she had taught at University College London and, from 1935, at the London School of Economics, and had been involved from 1943 to 1945 in analysing German propaganda for the Political Intelligence Department. Early in 1947 Eric Colledge sent her to Kiel, where she took over responsibility for the University from the Education Control Officer Lt. Colonel A.H. Wilcox, who told her ‘keep them all at each other’s throats and you’ll have nothing to do.’ She received no training and was given no brief. She believed that for fifteen months she did not have a single day off. Rektor Creutzfeldt, she recalled, had ‘the utmost disdain’ for her, but she would prove to be more than a match for him.85 As far as interpreting policy was concerned, she saw her role as principally that of a benign facilitator: [The universities] were to be democratized, whatever that was supposed to mean, apart from eliminating overt Nazis and subduing where possible Nazi revival. Given the situation in Kiel where both staff and students were on the verge of starvation I regarded trying to feed the starving, sick and homeless as far more important than preaching a few democratic shibboleths. Where it was possible to inculcate in a minor way that there were other means of getting things done apart from dictatorial methods, I did so, such as getting the AStA going, which I guided, though left the students to make their own mistakes. Once they brought these problems to me, which they did pretty smartly, it was then possible to point out why they had happened. In getting student societies going one of the biggest difficulties was that the executives wanted either to fine or exclude members who didn’t attend regularly. It was exceedingly difficult to explain that freedom of choice to attend or not depended on the quality of what the various societies offered. It was exceedingly difficult to wean students away from the idea of compulsion.86

Some three-­quarters of the buildings of the Technische Hochschule in Aachen had been destroyed. Arthur Edwards was not appointed as UECO there until October 1946, aged almost forty-­one: he felt that the university had been overlooked by Military Government; though it was the smallest, it had the ‘biggest worries’ of all the western Hochschulen. Any oversight was possibly due to the fact that the term Technische Hochschule was often mistranslated as ‘Technical High School’, with the result that its status was not appreciated by those with no German who were involved with material support, etc. Changing the name to Technische Universität (as was to happen in Berlin) was discussed, but the Rektor argued that since generations had fought for proper recognition and respect for the term Technische Hochschule it would not be right to abandon it solely for reasons of expediency.87 Records of the Control Commission show evidence that this was the case: ‘high school’ in British and American usage would have created quite the wrong image in the minds of people responsible for deciding any priorities for the support of institutions but without detailed knowledge of Germany and higher education. Edwards had been brought up in Munich, attending a Gymnasium there, taking the Abitur and later the diploma in electrical engineering of the University of Munich.

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Figure 4.4  Scale of bomb damage, Technische Hochschule Aachen. [Source: FO1050/1373]

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During the War he was trained as an interrogation officer and went to Germany after six weeks of training, as an Officer Interpreter. He ‘happened to be’ at Education Branch as a member of the interpreter pool, when it was discovered that there was no UEO in Aachen at a critical time when there was a flurry of criticism of the Technische Hochschule in terms of its being a hotbed of Nazism. Its closure was being demanded. His foremost duty in Aachen, as he saw it, was ‘to keep the University alive’. Most of his time was taken up with pleading for permits of all kinds, for building materials and especially for coal, and he cultivated connections with voluntary relief organizations whose help was invaluable. I received anyone connected with the University who wanted to see me, whether by appointment or just by walking in and sitting down in my outer office which soon resembled the waiting room of a busy legal practitioner whose clients had seen better days. ‘Business’ improved still further when ‘Denazification’ reached the University. To avoid injustices due to language difficulties – most of the investigators spoke no German – I investigated every case before sending the papers on to the decision making authority. For this purpose I read everything the academic staff had written right back to their doctor’s theses.

He had many an employee of the Technische Hochschule coming to him to say that ‘some professor or other had never really been a Nazi at heart’, but he did not resent the time spent on investigating such information, since ‘apart from hunger and the cold, the fear of being dismissed was the main reason why the staff could not give of their best.’ He had no difficulties with enforcing the numerus clausus on admissions, ‘since no one could have got more than 1,000 students into what remained of the university buildings’. As a result of ‘all these routine matters’ Edwards felt that he had become an integral part of the institution, attending senate meetings ‘without asking or being asked’. His nickname in Aachen was ‘The Grey Eminence’, ‘not exactly flattering, but still indicating some respect’. He had been given no brief – ‘Grey Eminences don’t need briefs’ – but he remembered Herbert Walker, his chief in Nordrhein-Westfalen, telling him ‘Make them into good Europeans’. (He also recalled Walker asking, ‘Why is it that whenever the Germans lose a war someone comes along and ballyrags their universities?’) Geoffrey Carter (1914–97) was appointed as UECO in Hannover in April 1946 aged nearly thirty-­two. On his return from active service in India in December 1945, he was posted to an Army holding unit in Bielefeld, and so it had been quite easy for him to seek out Education Branch in Bünde. His responsibility was for the Technische Hochschulen in Hannover and Braunschweig and for the Tierärztliche Hochschule (the veterinary college) in Hannover. As a child he had been educated in part at a progressive international school in Dresden whose staff included A.S. Neill, and he stayed when the school moved to Austria; after studying at St John’s College, Oxford, he had taught science and mathematics (in German) in Switzerland. In Hannover, alongside dealing with the repair of buildings, the organization of accommodation, the

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reassembly of books and equipment and the elimination of Nazi elements in the teaching staff, he tried to deal with the German staff philosophical problem, i.e. why had German universities failed to cope with Nazism? How could one throw off the harmful state control of universities? How could one create more contact between university professors and their students than German tradition had allowed in the past?88

Carter continued to exercise his benign authority in the Technische Hochschule Braunschweig well after 1947, when the UEO’s role was supposed to be largely advisory. He would make use of his power of veto over all matters affecting the institution, ensuring right up to 1950, for example, that it was he who should decide whether or not to authorize student societies, in which he took a particular interest. He annulled the rectoral election of July 1947 on the grounds that it had been arranged ‘behind his back’. It seems that he took exception to anything that smacked of disrespect or lack of information or the by-­passing of his authority on the part of the leadership of the Hochschule.89 One of the roles Carter took very seriously was that of checking students’ backgrounds and ensuring that their societies were democratically managed and not political in nature. He recalled his belief that the Altherrenverbände (former [male] students’ associations) had exercised great influence in the German universities and that such influence ‘fostered the Nazi spirit’. If one eliminates Nazi philosophy, one asks how far a university should be under central government; how far should it be under the authority of its own seniors; how far should the students have any authority? How far is student authority educative or does it comprise mainly agitation for the short term advantage?90

On the control of student numbers (numerus clausus), which was also a matter that preoccupied him, he reported that the universities found ways of avoiding the rules, and that he consequently found them difficult to enforce. ‘Is it better to have “educated” unemployed or uneducated unemployed? The more students matriculated the more universities were pleased in spite of very crowded lecture rooms.’ Carter did much to help displaced persons connected to the institutions for which he was responsible, arranging for payments of twenty-­five marks a week to be made to examination candidates who were no longer matriculated and attending lectures.91 His guidelines for the setting up of student societies were clear and sensible. And he did not interfere with the running of the student welfare organization, the Akademisches Hilfswerk, which was crucial in supporting the student body.92 Rainer Maaß sees the relationship between the students in Braunschweig and the occupiers as ‘critically distanced and self-­confident’. For those not involved in the AStA or other student groups, Carter remained an unknown quantity with whom they had no contact. Scarcely one of the students studying in Braunschweig between 1945 and 1950 that Maaß interviewed could remember him. However, in his dealings with students he was seen as engaging them with the process of re-­education without exercising his authority

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unduly. His attitude to them was understanding and unobtrusive and so prevented the emergence of any significant resentment towards the occupiers.93 Peter Whitley (1916–99) said he ‘just slipped into Germany by the back door’. In August 1945, he had been transferred to Military Government in Berlin for the final nine months of his Army service and later arranged to be seconded from the home civil service to the Control Commission, joining A&LG Branch in January 1947. Its head, Julian Simpson, invited him to meet Birley, whose assistant he became in April of that year, based in Berlin and acting as ‘an odd combination of ADC (residential), desk officer/private secretary and roving researcher (viewed with the utmost suspicion by the moguls and mandarins of Education Branch!).’ From August 1948 until March 1950 he was UEO in Berlin, spending some 90 per cent of his time with responsibility for the Technische Universität in Berlin, but also looking after three smaller Hochschulen. He was modestly dismissive of his background and experience: My ‘background’ was negligible and my ‘experience’ virginal. I was (in UECO terms) a generalist among specialists & an amateur among professionals. [. . .] prima facie therefore I was comparable to Caligula’s horse (but possibly I had imbibed something at [Birley’s] dinner table – & at my desk in his ante-­room’.)

His interpretation of policy was Broadly – the gospel according to Lindsay (especially, ‘up the juniors’; damn the Ordinarien; and more social/political responsibility & less vassalage to the State).94

Only occasionally did he have to intervene in the running of the University, but he did recall ‘ticking off ’ Rektor Kurt Apel: ‘I told Apel, man-­to-man, that he was putting everyone’s back up, and losing out generally, by his hectoring and autocratic demeanour’: Apel puffed out his cheeks and went purple in the face . . . but then had the good grace to mutter, ‘Im Großen und Ganzen bin ich Ihnen sehr dankbar, Herr Vittlei’ (‘On the whole I am very grateful to you, Mr Vittlei’).95

Whitley was only in his early thirties at the time. The professors, he felt, were ‘almost by definition, reactionary, and entrenched’. Apel, however, has been described as belonging to ‘a nucleus of energetic, democratically minded and closely allied academics’.96 Muriel Brown,97 born in 1917, had studied German at the University of Reading and had taught in a girls’ grammar school in Leicester. In September 1945, at the age of twenty-­seven, she began work as a Grade 3 education officer in Bünde, moving in 1946 to Regional HQ Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, where she stayed until 1950. In Bünde she helped mainly in Universities Section, where she gathered information about the state of the universities and Hochschulen and dealt with various administrative matters, including writing the minutes of the Conference of Hochschulrektoren in 1946. In Düsseldorf she acted as coordinator of information from Bonn, Cologne, Münster and Aachen, accompanied visiting lecturers, made arrangements for German academics

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and students to attend courses abroad, and helped to procure building materials. She also had contact with the Kunstakademie (the Academy of Art, where she negotiated the admission of DP students) and the Medizinische Akademie, took part in discussion groups in the local branch of the British Information Centre – Die Brücke – and organized a vacation course at the Medizinische Akademie. Much of her work ‘just emerged’, as she put it. She saw British policy in education generally as an attempt to widen horizons and in the universities in particular to put the younger Dozenten and the students in touch with educational developments and culture in other countries, especially the United Kingdom. *  *  * An impression of the range of activities in which the University Officers were involved can be gleaned from the minutes of their conferences. At the first conference (3 April 1946), they discussed the screening of students, the return to Germany of refugee scholars, geological survey teams, the import and export of books, and the requisitioning and derequisitioning of buildings. Other issues debated included regulations concerning displaced persons, limitations on numbers of students to be admitted in the next semester, student representation and associations, rectoral elections, university newspapers, a scheme to provide English visiting and permanent lecturers, and summer courses.98 The UEOs saw one of their main functions as establishing as much contact as possible with other universities through, for example, invitations to visiting lecturers, vacation courses, and student exchange programmes. Individual German universities were encouraged to contact universities in the UK ‘with a view to exchanging ideas and to institute an exchange of University newspapers’, and inter-­university links were proposed, reflecting at this point the associations and connection of individual University Officers: Bonn :  Oxford, Glasgow and Edinburgh Hamburg :  Wales Münster :  Cambridge Kiel :  London School of Economics Göttingen :  University College London Cologne :  Bristol

In September 1946, Lord Chorley, Vice-President of the Association of University Teachers and Professor of Commercial and Industrial Law at the London School of Economics, attended a universities conference in the British Zone. When he returned to the UK he wrote a report criticizing some of the UECOs for lack of experience and administrative skills. Nevertheless he was impressed by their industry and enthusiasm: The Officers of the Control who are occupied with the Universities whether at headquarters at Bünde or in the field are young men enthusiastic about their work, and as far as I could judge of sufficient competence. Some of them are obviously

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men of considerable ability and judgement. For the most part they are lacking in administrative experience and [the] work of some showed signs of amateurishness. Very few of them had had any experience of University work except as students, and those who have been University teachers are too young to have taken part in University administration. On the technical side of University reconstruction they are therefore badly placed for giving advice and are hardly able to judge whether a good line is being taken. It is here I think that they particularly need expert advice.99

This part of Chorley’s report was dropped from the published version in The Universities Review, in which there is a more cautious statement about the work of the UECOs: [University Control] is fortunate both at Bünde and in the universities themselves to have secured the services of a number of enthusiastic young officers who fully appreciate that the future of Germany and of the peace of the world depends in no small measure on the work which they are doing. Of all the Departments of Military Government, they have met with least criticism, and I should imagine that no other part has been so acceptable to the German people, or those sections of it with whom they are working.100

The UECO is ‘a benevolent if sometimes stern pater familias’ and his function as an intermediary and negotiator is stressed: ‘The University authorities give high praise to the Control Officers for their invaluable assistance, and these I thought quite genuine about it.’ The work of the University Officers was widely appreciated, and they played an indispensable part in the post-­war reconstruction of higher education in the Zone. In contrast to many Military Government and CCG staff who knew no German and had no prior experience or knowledge of Germany, they stood out as exemplary representatives of the British occupiers.

University vacation courses101 An aspect of the University Officers’ work that was widely appreciated was the institution of university vacation courses. During 1946–48, hundreds of British lecturers agreed to travel to Germany to speak to students, and the university summer vacation courses organized by UEOs were particularly successful. They had started in 1946/47, and by the summer of 1948 there was a very full programme of courses. In that year all Hochschulen of the British Zone apart from Kiel and the Medical Academy in Düsseldorf102 (where courses were cancelled owing to lack of funds) ran courses of two to three weeks’ duration during the period 20 July to 12 September. Thirty-­five lecturers from the UK, and forty-­six from Germany were involved, as well as twenty-­ one from other countries. Some 175 UK students attended, as did 136 from other countries; 663 German students took part. The average age of student participants was as high as twenty-­four years seven months.103

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Each university had taken a general theme for its course: Göttingen:  Recent Trends in Educational Theory and Practice Braunschweig:  Economics, Politics, Sociology, Modern Literature and the Film Bonn:  European Society in the Last Hundred Years Miinster:  Tradition and Progress Aachen:  Science and Engineering, the Common Heritage of Mankind Cologne:  Modern Cultural Developments of Europe Hamburg:  Modern European Thought and Culture

Among the lecturers were several prominent British academics: Lord Lindsay, the Master of Balliol College, Oxford; Father Copleston and M.R.D. Foot of Oxford; Humphry House of Newcastle; and the Germanists Dr Erich Heller of Cambridge, Professor Gillies of Leeds, and Dr Mainland of Sheffield. The Münster course in August 1947 spread over sixteen days and included addresses by the Rektor, the Minister President of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Herbert Walker, a student representative and the University Officer, and involved lectures (centred on the theme ‘The World and its Problems as seen from without Germany’) from German, French, American, Swiss, Swedish, Italian, Dutch and British participants (among the latter Asa Briggs, Robert Auty, Vera Brittain and the Germanists Leonard Forster and F.P. Pickering) and it included exhibitions, music and many discussion sessions. The main talks and the addresses were later made available in printed form. Geoffrey Bird felt that the Göttingen course had been successful in forming valuable contacts and as an organizational venture (a group of students had formed an administrative committee) and A.W.J. Edwards reported that the course in Aachen had provided the students there with similar valuable experience in the delegation of authority. Valerie Dundas-Grant remembered the enthusiasm of the German participants. Harry Beckhough felt that the first vacation course organized for Cologne and Bonn students at Burg Wahn (Cologne) in the Spring of 1947 was one of his greatest successes. Geoffrey Bird recalled: the immediate impression was that [the German student participants] felt a new world was opening for them. They were undoubtedly deeply thrilled by the contacts with fellow students from the outside world, and there was much discussion on political and social matters, and exchange of information and ideas. I feel that the contacts thus made must have had a lasting influence on their lives.

Peter Whitley arranged a course in the summer of 1949 ‘widely acclaimed by the participants, especially the TU students’, and its success encouraged him to continue: The intellectual stimulus was considerable. But the main thing was the external contact; Western Berlin, more than the Zone, was cut off from the outside world, and there had never been anything like this in Berlin before. I included some students on the planning/steering committee, and this they greatly appreciated.

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One of them told me later . . . that this very fact – the ‘Occupying Power’ inviting them to sit round the table as colleagues and equal partners had caused some of them totally to reject the nationalistic ideas they had hitherto been privately harbouring.

A.W.J. Edwards felt that it was not so much a question of the courses making an impact on the students as of the students making an impact on the courses: ‘I am still astonished at their good humour, courtesy and tact, not to mention their genuine interest in the subjects which frequently were outside the scope of their own studies.’ The cancellation of the Düsseldorf course in 1948 led the students to take a leading part in the planning and organization of a highly successful course a year later, determined as they were to overcome the indifference of the Rektor and most of the academic staff and the difficulties created by what were described as ‘personal animosities between members of the [Medical] Academy administration, the town administration and personalities on the teaching staff ’. Eric Colledge was one of the speakers: he returned from the University of Liverpool to talk (in English) on the modern English novel.104 Despite the general view that the courses were on the whole a success, there were criticisms. Individual lecturers were asked to send in reports to the Foreign Office. The efficiency of local organization and the travel arrangements were clearly at the mercy of the vicissitudes of the time, but there were serious complaints from many lecturers on these fronts. There is evidence too, in a long report prepared by W.E. Morse, lecturer in Modern Russian History in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of London University, and elsewhere, that some fundamental problems (none of which was the fault of the University Officers) had affected the success of the Göttingen course (at which he spoke on the subject of the English Revolution, 1688–89). Morse’s comments centred on the uneasy relationship between the intellectual and social aspects of the course, the seriousness of attitude of the participants (he quotes one student as remarking that ‘all the German students inscribed themselves for the Course in order to feed well and . . . the “foreigners” in their turn had come only to “have a good time” and to improve their German’) and the lack of understanding of the nature of the course on the part of some of the German professors (‘there was a slight overdose of German metaphysics’). He described too the educational atmosphere at Göttingen and criticized both the Brotstudium (career-­focused study) and carpe diem attitudes of the students, the pre–1914 outlook of the older professors, and the nationalistic flavour of the history teaching. M.R.D. Foot felt that the Bonn course had been ‘friendly to the point of sentimentality’, and he criticized the apparent lack of Control Commission policy on universities and the lack of opportunity to make real contact with Germans (let alone students and lecturers). In this connection Dr W.F. Mainland of Sheffield wrote of the ‘irksome . . . well-­meaning supervision of military individuals’: Having to change trains at Hamm, I entered, as was my custom in travelling about Germany, a 3rd-­class compartment. I was somewhat surprised when an officer in the Army of Occupation with whom I had chatted at the railway-­station came along the platform, and having quietly asked what class of ticket I had, invited me

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to join him in his compartment. I accepted his friendly invitation, but was naturally embarrassed as there were other civilians around me; and I asked him ‘Are we then not supposed to travel third class?’ I may never know the source of the authority behind his reply: ‘We don’t like you to.’ In relation to the pressing matters of the moment this is, on the surface, ludicrously small; but as an accredited visitor of civilian status trained to understand what is said around me in Germany and with long practice in discreet response, I am chagrined that an army officer with no knowledge of the German language, or of myself, should attempt to hamper me or any like me in the absorption of views and opinions which might well contribute to the progressive work of British authorities in their arduous task.105

(With the equivalent rank of major-­general, Birley would take pleasure when travelling by train in being entitled to a whole sleeping compartment to himself.) Professor Arthur Hutchings (Music) of Durham University (writing of the Cologne course) reported that he found ‘as usual . . . the company of two Germans most attractive’ but saw ‘certain traits showing themselves directly the numbers increased to three’. Professor Edward Hughes (History) of Durham was worried that in Braunschweig the students felt in discussion that he was acting as a stooge of the Foreign Office. Somerville Hastings MP (visiting Münster) was of the same opinion: ‘I am quite sure that not one of the German students believed a single word of anything that I or any other British lecturer had to tell them.’ More positively, the Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, wrote of the ‘admirable’ work being done by Education Branch: in Münster and Berlin, he felt, ‘even the Germans, who in general are very little appreciative of what is being done for them, are grateful here’; and Father Copleston (in Cologne) remarked on a lack of resentment and a general willingness to engage in rational discussion. Dr Edgar Stern-Rubarth (who was in Münster) spoke of ‘well-­nigh unanimous praise’ for work in education. The UECOs were on the whole complimented; George Murray, who collated the lecturers’ reports, felt that the UECOs had been put ‘in a class by themselves in comparison with the efforts of other links in the chain of organization’. The aims of the vacation courses were sometimes somewhat vague, and many lecturers complained that they had not been properly briefed. E.W. Hughes of Leeds felt the object of the courses to be to ‘put over the British way of life’ by objective example rather than by instruction. George Murray proposed in his report that it should be made clear whether the aim was ‘to exchange views or put across the British Way or democratise the Germans’ and whether the British students should play the part of ‘democratisers, proselytisers, or merely good companions of the moment and pen-­friends in the future’. On the whole, Murray observed, the ‘British Way’ aspect was the most profitable line to adopt: . . . one of the deepest impressions made on the Germans in these courses was the contact they were able to make with British methods of lecturing, discussing and debating. They admired the frank and easy manners of the British participants, their tolerance, their humour, their appreciation of the other man’s point of view, their refusal to talk down to the Germans or to suggest anything that implied ‘re-­

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education’. What the British participants put across was done more by example than by instruction.

Clearly the University Officers were playing a vital part in this important aspect – at a delicate period of the Occupation106 – of their role as advisers and enablers.

Admission of students The number of students in universities in the British Zone reached over 26,000 by the Winter Semester of 1947, thereby restoring the student population to something like the level of the immediate pre-Nazi period. Students who had been active or reserve Army officers were a controversial group. Almost every fourth student in the universities and other Hochschulen of the British Zone fell into this category by the summer of 1946. In the French Zone, the percentage of such students was 15.6; in the American Zone 19.1, in the Soviet Zone 3.1.107 There was originally a ban on the matriculation of former active officers (introduced in November 1946) precisely because of their relatively high representation among the post-­war student body and as a result of unsatisfactory reports on their attitudes. In an unpublished note of reservation in the 1947 report of the Association of University Teachers on universities in the British Zone,108 the academic lawyer Lord Chorley had described the exclusion of former regular Army officers from the youth amnesty (which otherwise applied to all those born after 1 January 1919) as ‘typical of the illiberal spirit in which the denazification process is being carried through’. The ban should be lifted: The amnesty to students excludes notorious Nazis and any amnesty to ex-­regular army officers should be similarly limited. Indeed, public opinion in this country in supporting the denazification proposals when they were first put forward did so under the impression that they would be limited to notorious and dangerous Nazis and not carried down to the categories of technical offence which have been included in practice.109

Table 4.1  Student numbers.

Kiel Hamburg Göttingen Münster Cologne Bonn Totals

Winter Semester

Summer Semester

Winter Semester

1930 2389 3746 3851 4149 5616 5612 25363

1939 941 1521 1153 1957 2418 2515 10515

1947 3241 5060 5410 3844 3600 4977 26132

[Source: Samuel & Hinton Thomas, Education and Society in Modern Germany, 176.]

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The Control Commission’s response to such concerns in the AUT Report indicates a general hesitation about admitting former German officers to universities: It must . . . be stated that the problem of the former regular officer is far more complicated than might be assumed from the argument set out in the Report, For our part, we are by no means happy with the present position, It cannot be too strongly emphasized that we are concerned, not with former regular officers, but with former regular German officers. As a whole, the latter do not constitute promising material with which to build a peace-­loving Germany.110

The ban was lifted in February 1947. *  *  * University students were subject to the same privations as the rest of the German population: hunger, cold and housing chief among them. In Kiel lectures had taken place in the Winter Semester of 1945–46 on board four ships in the harbour which were being used as working and living accommodation for staff and students. The ships were later exchanged for barracks, but long before the replacement accommodation could be made habitable.111 A coastal steamer was still housing 120 women in July 1946: they slept on bunks and had to work and cook in crowded and uncomfortable conditions.112 Caroline Cunningham started a collection of clothing for students, got a cobbler’s shop started, and organized supplies of cod liver oil.113 Rektor Hermann Rein in Göttingen described the day-­to-day difficulties that everyone in the University had to endure: the right of all involved in intellectual activity to be alone was impossible because of the shortage of housing; lack of heating and light bulbs and the frequent power cuts made working a misery. Equipment of all kinds needed for lectures and experiments could not be found.114 The University Control Officer in Göttingen, L.H. Sutton, described the typical situation: About one in ten [students] can get hold of a text-­book and read it in a warmed room. Those who are lucky to find both a book and a seat are likely to find themselves suddenly sitting in the dark, as the current has been switched off. Those who try to study in their lodgings cannot normally get any place to themselves, due to over-­crowding and the strict rationing of electric current.115

In November 1945 Sutton was writing to the Rektor with a list of student requirements, among them laundry, shoe repairs, evening work space and paper.116 In Cologne in the bitterly cold Winter Semester of 1946–47, 16 per cent of students had no overcoat, 23 per cent no gloves and 25 per cent only one pair of shoes.117 At the same time in Bonn, it was found that of 4,174 students examined, over half (2,190) were 10–20 per cent and eighty-­four more than 30 per cent underweight. Some 4 per cent of the student population were diagnosed with tuberculosis and a further 33 per cent with conditions resulting from undernourishment.118 In Münster in 1947 only 6.5 per cent of male and 13.2 per cent of female students had a normal body

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weight.119 ‘Probably no other generation of students had ever been so very affected by lack of food, lack of clothing, and lack of housing.’120 The New Statesman journalist H.N. Brailsford, visiting German universities in 1947, wrote of the ‘hungry, listless faces of students too debilitated to pay attention’ while they listened to a lecture by Karl Jaspers.121 The Werkstudent – the student working to support study at a university – became ‘a common type’, but there were no jobs to be found in shops and factories: students were working where possible as casual repairmen and mechanics, as office workers, sometimes as interpreters, where possible as private tutors.122 They were also actively engaged in rebuilding their universities, first on a voluntary basis, then as a compulsory contribution to the reconstruction work. In the Technische Hochschule Hannover, for example, those wishing to matriculate contributed 600, in some cases 1,000, hours of such labour. From 1945 to 1948 the students involved each worked for an average of 500 hours, making a total of 222,000 hours devoted to rubble clearing and reconstruction.123 Students were enlisted to help with reconstruction in Bonn in August 1945; from the Winter semester student involvement with the procurement of wood for heating was made compulsory; from January 1946 students were working alongside specialist craftsmen for forty-­eight hours a week over 125 days – they were paid seventy Pfennigs an hour and later allowed an extra calorie ration.124 Studying amid the ruins was a challenge to which those admitted to the universities and Hochschulen responded with courage and conviction. Most of the first post-­war generation of students proved resilient in the face of the many hardships they endured while ensuring that life at the German universities could begin a new and more honourable chapter. But there were cases of disquiet, revolt and extremism that caused considerable concern at times. In early 1946, investigations of nationalism at universities in the Zone were undertaken, in the face of critical press reporting, starting with a contested account in the Hannoverscher Kurier of 30 November 1945 to the effect that the political attitude of the students in Göttingen was ‘influenced by Nazi ideas’. On 29 January 1946, the Frankfurter Rundschau reported the view that 20 per cent of the students in Göttingen were ‘pure Nazi’ and 60 per cent sympathetic to Nazism. The ban on the Hitler salute was described as ‘undemocratic’. In November 1945 an American HQ intelligence report on Göttingen had recorded that A lecture on the ‘Moral and Economic Basis of a World of Peace and Justice’ was open to all faculties and drew about 400 listeners. The lecturer sharply attacked the Hitler regime which, he said, had thrown the whole world into disaster. The students reacted very unfavourably to the lecturer’s thesis and almost the entire audience got up and walked out during the lecture. The lecturer could only conclude with difficulty.

The municipal council in Aachen had demanded the closure of the Technische Hochschule since it was a fascist institution. A British sergeant had – unwisely – asked students to write an essay on their impressions of the Nuremberg trial and they had refused, arguing that it was ‘beneath their dignity’ to do so. A press report wrote of the students saying that in Nuremberg the laughing victorious powers were sitting in

Policy in Practice II

Figure 4.5  Students working on street repairs in Cologne.

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judgment of their former Führer, that the proceedings lacked legality; this was a show trial and an act of propaganda.125 A paper investigating the reports on ‘nationalism’ at German universities concluded: (a) The majority of the students are politically apathetic. They look upon the university as the gateway to a profession which will give them some security and comfort in a ruined world, In achieving this goal it is in their view wiser not to concern oneself with politics (b) At some of the universities a minority of nationalist-­minded students has made its influence felt. Very few of these can be considered Nazi. (c) The teaching staffs consist to a disproportionate extent of old men, a large number of whom come from conservative or nationalist circles. Such men are retained because it is difficult, if not impossible, to find suitable men to take their places. So long as the selection of students was in the hands of such men it was only to be expected that candidates with good war service would be given preference over those with anti-Nazi views.

Riddy reported that on various occasions Education Branch officers had taken action ‘as quietly as possible’ to reprove those who ‘though technically outside the scope of the denazification policy, seemed to us none the less to be teaching doctrine which, to an impartial observer, could be regarded neither as true or acceptable’. Action ‘of a private nature’ had also been taken to repress discrimination ‘by the authorities’ against ‘progressively-­minded students’.126 Figures were produced on the composition of the student body: (i) 98% of the male students have served at least one year in the Armed Forces. 12.2%, 10.8% and 7.5% have served for 6, 7 and 8 years respectively (ii) 26.3% are ex-­reserve officers; 4.5% are former regular officers. (iii) 67.4% are 26 years old or under; 52.9% are between the ages of 22 and 26. An insignificant number is over 32. (iv) Over 65% come from middle-­class families, the children of civil servants, teachers, business-­men, officers or landowners. A bare 6% are of working-­class origin.

The present generation of students came from ‘just those classes which were the backbone of the National Socialist and Nationalist parties’. Unless something were done to recruit working-­class students, the universities might well remain ‘strongholds of nationalism and of the anti-­democratic forces’.127 Geoffrey Bird’s predecessor, L.H. Sutton, wrote in January 1946 what he called a ‘Discourse on the University of Göttingen’, summarizing his views on education policy in Germany, that was taken seriously at a high level.128 Riddy had to respond to it in a five-­page letter to the Chief of IA&C Division. Sutton describes the fictitious case of one ‘Hans Löwe’, who uses the traditional form of protest during a lecture: With an effort he forced himself to listen to the words of the Professor, ‘this utterly senseless useless war, for which it is only just and right that those responsible

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should at this moment be standing their trial at Nuremberg’. A sudden wave of self-­pity swept over Hans. He was more than usually cold [. . .] and his only pair of boots [. . .] was beginning to let in water. [. . .] Suddenly a fit of anger seized him. What right had an elderly professor who had spent the whole war with his books and his classes to pronounce such a judgement? He and his fellows had fought and endured for what they believed to be the defence of their Fatherland. [. . .] In his misery, anger and disillusionment, Hans followed the old student tradition and shuffled his feet.

Later, Sutton imagines, a harassed Field Security officer was coping with some urgent messages: ‘reported incident during a lecture’, ‘ – the Commander views with concern’, ‘ – a report is required immediately’.

This fictionalized account clearly had its origins in actual events. Later in the text Sutton writes ‘Nobody can learn to form a balanced judgment in the Hannoverscher Kurier and the latest rumours from the Mensa’. And his device proved a powerful way of sending a message about the causes of unrest. It caused a flurry of responses from Riddy and others, as did a report on the University of Hamburg, handed to Hynd during one of his visits to the Zone by Karl Meitmann (1891–71), local SPD head. In translation it began: The present position at the University of Hamburg is best described by the following two facts:- a body of lecturers composed almost entirely of men who held office during the last 12 years; a body of students, the large majority of which openly confess to emphatically nationalist ideas. Both these elements react upon one another, since it is impossible for the men hitherto in office to make their selection in conformity with the principles of the new era while the students on the other hand are already beginning to use the lectures for demonstrating their political convictions.129

The text then instanced alleged individual cases of unacceptable behaviour and concluded: It is not going too far to assert that Hamburg University will prove to be the birthplace of future German nationalism, unless decisive steps are taken for the regeneration of the students and lecturers. It would be political suicide to ignore this fact, for it is from these circles that a new class of political leaders – a nationalist reaction – will arise. The social position of these leaders would once more enable them to contribute decisively to the destruction of German democracy for the second time.

Brigadier Armytage responded in detail to all the charges, finding Meitmann’s report ‘grossly exaggerated and, for the most part, a misrepresentation of the facts’.130 But there

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was a certain uneasiness about the general impression that all was not well with admissions and the stance of the professors. The Labour MP Fenner Brockway knew Meitmann, and visited him when he was in Germany in April. The British had been welcomed as liberators, he told Brockway, especially by the working class, and a friendly atmosphere had prevailed up to the end of 1945. Since then there had been a change of attitude, largely due to food shortages and to lack of housing and the slow rate of industrial recovery.131 A degree of unrest and reaction among the student body was not to be unexpected in the circumstances, and there was probably exaggeration of the instances cited and the politics of the individuals concerned. Nevertheless, perceptions were growing in the spring of 1946 that the universities were in need of serious reform.

Denazification Geoffrey Bird recalled that ‘if the appointment of everyone who had been technically a member of a Nazi organization had been disallowed there would have been very few qualified university teachers left’.132 This provoked criticism from Tom Bower in Blind Eye to Murder, who described: ‘a remarkable naivety and susceptibility to the charm and explanations of former Nazis on the part of intelligent men. It is the simplicity one might expect from the third-­raters and duds recruited during the war, but not from academics.’133 But Bird’s essentially pragmatic point simply described the scale of the practical problems faced in education as in so many other fields and had nothing to do with being charmed by former Nazis. He had to ensure that the University was sufficiently staffed for it to be able to operate to the benefit of its students under his benevolent supervision. Mistakes were certainly made in allowing people with compromised pasts to continue in post when their appointments were not essential or in appointing ex-Nazis as a result of insufficient checks on their former activities. There were notorious examples of individuals in the universities who were belastet (‘incriminated’; ‘burdened with a guilty past’) slipping through the net, but the enormous scale of the denazification effort inevitably meant that mistakes were made. Some of the problems with denazification can be illustrated by cases which were the subject of much difficult decision making for the officers of Education Branch. George Murray could report in December 1945 that vetting the staff of Göttingen University was not yet complete: The Fragebogen of the original applicants were submitted for evaluation in July of this year. Only recently have the doubtful (grey) categories (about 80 in all) been handed back to Mr Sutton [University Officer in Göttingen], with comments by FS [Field Safety], for his decision. The result has been that many of the appointments made by September are only now being reviewed and some of these may well prove to be undesirable. The evaluation of the doubtful cases requires a considerable amount of time and labour for it involves the consultation of records, interviews, search for unbiased opinions etc. In the meantime the staff is continually being increased and the same procedure applies for recent additions. The Fragebogen are piling up. Mr

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Sutton has asked for help in processing the Fragebogen, al least till the original staff has been purged. This task would appear to be of urgent importance for there is at least one clear-­cut case of a Professor who was appointed in August and who is definitely undesirable (Prof. Plischke).134 There may well be others.135

Decisions about dismissals were dealt with through precise orders to Germans in official positions. In January 1946 Murray wrote to the Rektor of Göttingen University with curt instructions about what was required: 1. Attached as appendices to this letter are lists of the University staff, as supplied by you, showing those who (a) may be provisionally employed (b) are politically undesirable and will NOT be employed. 2. Those under (b) who are still employed will be dismissed forthwith. 3. Those who are employed by you but whose names do NOT appear under (a) will also be dismissed forthwith. If their names do NOT appear under (b) they may fill up Fragebogen and re-­apply for their posts. They will NOT be re-­instated until approval has been given by Mil Gov. 4. Appeals against dismissal will be addressed to 126/1002 Det, Mil Gov, Göttingen and will be in the first instance in WRITING ONLY. 5. You will report what action has been taken as a result of this letter.136

On the same day the Rektor was instructed to dismiss students whose names were on a list provided by Murray. Evidence on individual academics was collected from five sources: completed Fragebogen; Kreisleiter files; personnel files kept by the Kurator; records obtained from MCC Kassel137; and the opinions of Military Government officers and ‘reliable professors’: The facts and opinions obtained from these five sources were considered sufficient for a decision to be made in all cases, combining expediency with some measure of truth and fairness. It must be admitted, however, that in some cases injustices will have been done since that is inevitable in ‘paper’ vetting. It is hoped that such cases will be rectified when the appeals machinery is set in action.138

In a report on a visit to the Zone, Stephen Spender wrote of the Germans being ‘still frightened of the Nazis’ who, they believed, were ‘still in strong positions in the English Zone’. In Bonn, for example, We arrested the Rector . . . but we took no steps against the other Nazi professors; in the case of Professor Schulman, who was an active Nazi in the University we actually employ him because he happens to be an expert on Malaria. Now when the anti-Nazi professors see us doing this kind of thing they also foresee a time

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when the Nazi professors will regain their ascendancy and when the anti-Nazis will be victimised.139

Apart from describing the British Zone as the ‘English’ Zone – who else ever did so? – with typical disregard for accuracy Spender manages to get Schulemann’s name wrong and to believe that he was still employed. Spender’s was a very poor account of intellectual life in the Zone, written with the intention of publishing his impressions, as he did when back in the UK.140 The publicity given to his account of denazification caused palpable irritation on the part of Control Commission staff. In November it was reported that the process of denazification at Bonn University had been carried out ‘in the normal way’ and that some 30 per cent of the personnel there had been dismissed. Werner Schulemann (1888–75) had been suspended but allowed to continue his laboratory work as a result of support from the medical authorities of the BAOR.141 The consequence of Spender’s comments was a flurry of correspondence about what to do in the case of Schulemann, which had become, according to James Mark and owing to Spender’s activities, ‘not merely a local, but almost an international cause célèbre’.142 Schulemann had given his inaugural lecture in SA uniform,143 and had been (as he admitted in his Fragebogen) an Obersturmbannführer in the SA. He had been head of the research department at IG Farben in Elberfeld. In December Riddy reported that Schulemann had been finally dismissed and was debarred from both teaching and research and that it was recommended that he should not be permitted to live in Bonn or in any other town which might provide him with the opportunity to continue ‘clandestine research or private teaching’.144 Some two months later, Eric Colledge wrote a long defence of what Riddy had proposed: 2. [. . .] To take the example of only one university town, Göttingen, according to the information of our officers there, is still populated by almost all the dismissed professors; and we are told and can well believe that the influence which they exercise on the students and on their former colleagues is most undesirable and is causing grave embarrassment and difficulty to those in the university who are really trying to eradicate Nazism there. 3. It must be remembered that the majority of the men concerned would not, because of their age and training, be easily employed in non-­technical occupations: and if they are to remain idle, as the majority of them have been up to now, [. . .] they would be much less dangerous in places where they are not known and where there are not large numbers of students for them to disaffect.

Colledge goes on to quote a statement issued by the International Committee for the Study of European Questions which had appeared in The Times on 12 February 1946, and to argue that IA&C Division was being put on the spot: 4. [. . .] The statement deals with the question of denazification, complains that the measures so far undertaken in Germany are insufficient, and continues:

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This applies to nearly 1,000 professors appointed by the National Socialist Regime in more than 50 universities to teach such subjects as Racial and National equality, geography of vital spaces, the science of Chemical Warfare, etc. It must be emphasised that if such men remain free to continue teaching behind the scenes the same principles as they supported for more than twelve years in the universities of the Third Reich, all attempts to re-­educate the German mind will be doomed to failure 5. [. . .] We think it reasonable to expect that the Division will very soon be called upon to say what measures have been undertaken to encounter the problems which the statement deals with. If the further step which we advised of requiring dismissed professors to leave university towns were undertaken, we think that we should be better able to ensure those interested that conditions are better than the International Committee states.145

This memorandum provoked a response which went to the heart of the dilemmas involved in imposing the will of the victor in the context of a policy of re-­education essentially concerned with the promotion of democratic principles. The reply was drafted by Mr F. Foley of Public Safety Branch: [. . .] 5. [. . .] Are we prepared to agree that if there was no lack of transport and no shortage of accommodation it would be good government to embark on a policy of banishment or forced residence, not as a punishment, but as a method of avoiding the infection of the minds of youth and others? 6. Banishment or forced residence would seem to be an admission that the democratic faith and ideals are so weak that a few ex-­professors, if left where they are, are capable of counteracting and destroying the teaching of the old and new democratic teachers, that the students, all of whom were screened before being admitted to the University, are of such inferior intellectual stamina, and are such tender plants that they will inevitably become infected of they come into outside contact with the former professors. 7. Is it sound policy, and is it conducive to the development among youth of independence of thought, which was prohibited during the Nazi regime, to limit freedom of thought and speech in a University town to such an extent that students are precluded from hearing other theories of political economy, philosophy and history? Is it intended to abolish political history? Is it wise to be Nazi and undemocratic in order to teach democracy with safety? 8. Would it not be preferable to encourage the present professors to go over to the offensive, and to confound the ex-­professors not by ignoring Nazi philosophy, but by exposing its fallacies and by instilling clear democratic thought into the minds of their students?

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9. If it is decided to banish these ex-­professors from their University towns, Military Government will be called upon to do the job. Is it not preferable for us to keep out of these things? 10. Banishment and forced residence are normally objectionable to the British sense of justice. We protest against it every day when it occurs in other countries. It is absolutely objectionable when it is done without trial or hearing. It was, and still is a common fascist and totalitarian practice. 11. Machinery for dealing with security matters is already available. Is it desirable to extend the meaning of the word “security suspect’ and to start a new category of ‘security semi-­suspects’ or something of that nature? 12. I venture to think that it would be more profitable to us if we allow the Germans, or even force the Germans to fight their own political and intellectual revolution. The more public affairs are discussed by them in public – a right they have not had for many years – the sooner healthy and stable political conditions will develop in Germany. 13. I would prefer Education Branch to be informed that we are opposed to banishment, or forced residence, in the case of ex-University teachers.146

This is the kind of reasoned intellectual response that might have been convincing. Schulemann was by all accounts unacceptable, but to use unacceptable means to deal with a person deemed unacceptable seemed to undermine the basic tenet of the British in Germany: to proceed by example and to promote democratic ideals. Riddy responded by arguing that Foley’s arguments would be admirable when applied to a country with a democratic government but that that was far from being the case in Germany. He had asked his officers dealing with universities to provide more accurate information on the situation with denazification. On the Schulemann affair he was unequivocal: [. . .] We were recently perturbed to hear that in spite of the unanimous recommendation of all the officers of Mil Gov concerned at Bonn (Public Safety, Health, Field Security and Education) that Schulemann should not continue to reside there after his dismissal both from his teaching post and his research work at the University, they have been overruled and he has been allowed to return there. No-­one whom we at this Headquarters have consulted has not been of the opinion that Schulemann’s influence on the University and the town is most undesirable; and now there is the additional factor that in the eyes of the Germans Schulemann has won and Mil Gov has lost.147

A letter to Schulemann had been prepared on 9 March by the Headquarters of Military Government for the North Rhine Region setting out the terms of his being allowed to continue his research in Bonn: 1. You are permitted to reside in Bonn for the purpose of completing your treatise on the cure of malaria.

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2. You will NOT visit, for any purpose, the premises or annexes of Bonn University. 3. You will NOT associate in any way with, or attempt to influence, any professor, member of the staff, or student of Bonn University. 4. You will conduct yourself in a manner respectful to Military Government and its officers.148

On 21 March, Riddy was still reporting his frustration at not being successful in having Schulemann removed from Bonn.149 Later in the month it was reported, not surprisingly, that the Regional Education Officer in North Rhine Region was ‘having difficulty in keeping himself in line with the conflicting orders issued from CCG Bünde as regards [the Schulemann case]’.150 It eventually emerged that without Riddy’s knowledge Schulemann had been informed by Education Branch that he could stay in Bonn; then he was told to leave and so removed himself to Düsseldorf. In Düsseldorf he inveigled a Military Government officer with the rank of colonel to give him permission to return to Bonn. Sorting all of this out took several months and involved much acrimony between Education Branch and Public Safety officials: ‘Complete Chaos Guaranteed’ indeed. Schulemann was working again by 1950, retiring as emeritus professor in 1956. The example of one Paul R. is illustrative of the detail into which Public Safety officers would go to investigate Nazi affiliation. He had been convicted by a Control Commission court for omitting to provide full details of his membership of Party organizations: While he did not belong to the NSDAP, [he] was an enthusiastic member of the following affiliated organisations:- NSV (stellv. Jugendführer), NS-Lehrerbund, NS-Reichskriegerbund (Vorstandsmitglied), Reichsluftschutzband (Unter­ gruppenführer), Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland (Bezirkswart), NSBeamtengemeinschaft. (His conviction by Control Commission Court was the result of omitting to give the required details in respect of the two last named bodies). A number of photographs in possession of Public Safety (Special Branch) disclose that [R.] was inordinately fond of posing in public on every possible occasion, proudly flaunting his Nazi uniform. He followed the Nazi creed blindly and never offered any opposition either by word or deed to the Nazi regime. In the opinion of Public Safety (Special Branch) such an individual is eminently unsuitable to teach the youth of the German nation.151

Professor H.’s political affiliations were listed as: Member of the Nazi Party (1937–45) Member of the S.A. (1933–36) Member of the N.S.V. (1939–45) Member of the N.S.B.D.T. (1935–45) Member of the Reichsdozentenschaft (1934–45) Member of the N.S.D.D.c.B. (1935–45)

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He had been judged by a German Denazification Committee for ‘discretionary removal’; the verdicts of a German Denazification Panel and of Intelligence Branch, Cologne were ‘not recommended for employment’ and ‘recommended for dismissal’ respectively. The verdict of Public Safety was ‘to be dismissed’. Though he said that he was always ‘wrapped up in his academic studies’, he was regarded by people who knew him to have been ‘a typical turncoat who dabbled in politics only to ensure his own promotion’. He was accordingly dismissed at the end of March 1947. Denazification was one of the most challenging tasks of the early Occupation, and there was clearly relief when it was placed in the hands of German authorities. Whether, as one commentator puts it, ‘a veil of forgetfulness was allowed to settle over all but the very worst offenders’,152 efforts were made to ensure that no-­one was employed in education whose past made them unsuitable. No doubt mistakes were made, but the process at least made it clear what was expected of those who would be in positions of influence as far as the young were concerned.

Discussion groups and Birley’s ‘Dozenten Scheme’ University officers would routinely invite academics and students to meet them informally for discussions. Regional Commissioner Vaughan Berry, for example, would invite groups of students in economics to his house in Hamburg, including the young Helmut Schmidt: ‘Like all Germans they wanted to talk in the heights and depths of everything.’153 The British Zone Review reported a plan for Anglo-German discussion groups in January 1947. A British person would act as ‘sponsor’; there would be a maximum of thirty people in each group; meetings would be held with Germans ‘on their own ground’; English would probably be the language used; topics fro discussion should avoid controversial subjects and should be of current interest (‘housing, food, education reform, films and music’); speakers would make it clear that their views are their own ‘and by no means those of the British authorities’; the structure of meetings could vary: set debates would ‘wean the Germans from the habit of crushing minority opinion’. One of the aims should be ‘ to encourage the Germans to examine scrupulously all information and opinion in order to separate truth – no matter how unpalatable – from prejudice, however flattering’. As for the British involved, they would gain an understanding of German problems from the German viewpoint.154 Ralf Dahrendorf recalled the impression that the opportunity for discussion made on him as a young man: What I remember most . . . is contact with people who are now forgotten, who were then captains, majors, in the army, who had chosen to invite groups of young people to come more or less regularly for discussions. And discussion was the one thing that was literally new to us at the time, discussions in which different views were expressed, and I could mention names like Captain Wolseley and Captain Luxton who . . . will certainly not be remembered in the annals of Occupation – and yet they may have done as much or more than some of the better known people.155

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Birley made a habit of such meetings: in July 1947, he wrote of having some twenty students to supper together with British guests and of his intention to repeat the experience ‘quite often’.156 One of Robert Birley’s achievements in higher education in the Zone was the setting up of his ‘Dozenten Scheme’. This involved Dozenten (non-­professorial academic staff) spending at least a year as senior members of British universities. They were chosen by Education Branch and all expenses for their visit were paid from British funds. In the UK the scheme was administered by the British Council. Riddy described the purpose of the scheme in the summer of 1947: I shall not attempt to deny that my main object in making this proposal is to give some men, who, we believe, may be the leaders of German University Education in the future, the chance of coming to know what a British University is really like, in the hope that this will cause them, in due course, to lead the quite necessary reforming movement in Germany.157

By the end of September 1947, up to fifteen Dozenten had been accepted by British universities. Peter Whitley remembered Birley’s view that the Germans selected for the scheme would be able to bring new ideas and life to their universities; they would ‘carry weight at home and effect change from within’.158 Among the British academics who spent time lecturing at German universities, two in particular stand out. Sir Ernest Barker (1874–1960) of Oxford was a visiting professor in Cologne during the winter semester of 1947–48, having been invited by Professor Kroll, who wanted to have a British specialist in political science on the staff. His comfortable living in Cologne seemed to him ‘somehow wrong’: he had a heated house ‘and maids’, and the use of a Volkswagen with driver. Barker lectured in English to audiences of about 200, providing summaries in English and German. He was particularly impressed by the depth of discussion in his weekly colloquium, where ‘deep moral issues’ were debated.159 He found his students ‘passionate about intellectual and political ideas’: [T]hey took me deep. They could dive more readily than we English do into the recesses of consciousness: they were more ready to wrestle with abstract conceptions: they had a greater welcome for pure ideas.160

In common with many senior Control Commission staff members, Barker and his wife would encourage discussion with students, inviting them to tea in small groups. The Oxford philosopher Michael Foster (1903–59) resigned his post at Christ Church in order to teach in Cologne for two years, from 1948 to 1950. He had known Germany before the War and, it seems, wanted to contribute something to the renewal of academic life in the country. Though he had written to Dodds of the comfortable conditions in which he was housed, it appears that he occupied only a converted bathroom, the rest of the house he was assigned being occupied by students and others. His time in Cologne was seen as a contribution to the restoration of academic interchange between the two countries. According to Isaiah Berlin, he ‘became

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interested in and probably devoted to Germans, or some Germans, and enjoyed his work in that city, and took some time to come back to Oxford because he so loved being there’.161 Birley later wrote to the Dean of Christ Church to express his appreciation of what Foster had achieved in Cologne: His going to Germany was exactly what was needed. The danger was that before long our efforts in the Control Commission would begin to appear patronising. This was a much greater danger than that they would seem to be a continuation of ‘occupation’. Nothing could have been less patronising than his tenure of office in Cologne.162

Such engagement with the outside world, however limited in scale, was welcomed by the new generation of German students and did much to widen their horizons. Both the overtly enthusiastic Barker and the complex Foster – the latter variously described as ‘austere’ and ‘isolated’ (Oscar Wood), ‘puritanical and buttoned up’ (A.J. Ayer), ‘gloomy’ (Robert Blake), ‘a cat that walked by himself ’ (Isaiah Berlin)163 – were able to show by example different ways of engaging with argument that were undoubtedly refreshing in the early years of post-­war university life in Germany.164 *  *  * The reopening of the German universities so quickly in 1945 was achieved in the face of considerable odds. And the many problems that Education Branch officers had to deal with were by no means solved at the point when control was handed back to German authorities. Some argued that the transfer of power came far too early, and perhaps it did as far as the possible introduction of radical change is concerned. But radical change, change of any serious kind, could only have happened if there was a willingness on the part of the universities themselves to reform. Reform efforts would be made in 1947 (from without) and again in 1948 (from within), but with mixed success. Colledge had concluded pessimistically that there was ‘only a handful of German professors who represent any kind of moral force’. The students, however, were ‘always more willing to listen to their vanquishers than they are to the men who stayed behind in the universities whilst they were fighting, some of whom are now so injudicious as to preach the iniquities and the shortcomings of the present student generation’.165

5

School Reform

Controversy has raged on almost every issue concerning the schools.1 While it would certainly have been possible to take a more forceful line and impose the new structures which the Germans were reluctant to accept, this would equally certainly have met with determined resistance.2

Despite the desperate material and staffing conditions in the British Zone in the first phase of the Occupation, when schools were closed and the very basics had to be put in place before they could reopen, the education system was not a tabula rasa which could be designed in any way decided upon by the occupiers. Nazi institutions were closed down, and other types of school opened perforce on long established lines: there was no alternative to this pragmatic strategy. Questions of reform, though keenly desired in some German quarters, were largely on hold until a degree of stability was established and changes could be agreed through decisions by elected German authorities and in keeping with the principle of creating conditions in which such decisions could be made with British support. After full responsibility for education was restored to German authorities in January 1947, the British retained the right of veto, but in the event it was hardly ever used to any significant extent. There were German educationists who felt passionately that any opportunity should be seized to attempt to initiate reform, if only in order to register ideas for the future. It was not unnatural that those who had taken a lead in school reform during the Weimar years and seen their ideas repressed after 1933 should think that their hour had come in 1945.3 Among them was the impressive figure of Adolf Grimme. As early as August 1945, before schools had been officially reopened, he brought together a group of like-­ minded educationists (among them Heinrich Landahl) to discuss the reconstruction of the school system. The result was the so-­called Grimme-Plan.4 Grimme argued for a reduction of curricular content and in favour of relevance and a recognition of reality and experience and of basic values and moral behaviour. He wanted – on what he called ‘social and psychological grounds’ – common basic types of school, catering for different types of ability. The Volksschule and Berufsschule (vocational school) would be for those with practical and craft (praktisch-­handwerklich) skills, the Mittelschule and Oberschule would serve those of a practical/theoretical bent (praktische Anlagen mit theoretischen Neigungen),5 and the Gymnasium would suit those with theoretical/ scientific (theoretisch-­wissenschaftlich) skills.6 This way of conceiving the structure of a

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school system in relation to notions of aptitude had its roots in 1930s psychology and was reflected in the 1944 Education Act in England and Wales; much later the German Rahmenplan of 1959 used similar descriptions to describe the then existing school system.7 For Grimme, each of the three educational pathways would be of equal worth: there would be no höhere Schule (‘higher’ school, the term used for types of secondary school), since theoretical ability was not to be rated higher than practical ability. The Grimme-Plan envisaged bringing the Gymnasium and the Mittelschule closer to the concerns of ‘practical life’ through a weekly ‘study day’ (Studientag) and ‘work day’ (Arbeitstag) respectively. And it proposed that the Abitur should not be the sole qualification for admission to the university: there should be a so-­called Philosophikum, a six-­month work and study period in a Landjugendheim (rural youth centre), access to which would also be available to those who had completed the Mittelschule or a Fachschule (technical school/college). During this period young people would have to demonstrate their social and intellectual competence to undertake university study. Notable in Grimme’s plan is the inter-­relationship between the different school types following completion of the four-­year Grundschule, the ‘permeability’ (Durchlässigkeit) which was to be a characteristic of the school structures which emerged in the Federal Republic and which became so firmly established as a principle that it provided a powerful argument against a common or comprehensive secondary school (Gesamtschule). Of interest too is the importance attached to modern languages in all school types. Grimme was a philologist who had studied French; as Prussian Minister he had signed a regulation establishing French as the first foreign language for höhere Schulen in Prussia.8 And an aspiration to reduce the number of school types to a common basic structure had been in

Figure 5.1  Adolf Grimme’s plan for school reform.

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evidence since the mid–1930s. (The Nazi Reichsminister Bernhard Rust had begun a simplification of the numerous school types in 1937.9) These early idealistic proposals were not surprising, given the defeat of Nazism and the opportunities a fresh start supposedly offered. And they were also not surprising coming from someone who had founded in Hannover an early branch of the somewhat utopian Bund entschiedener Schulreformer (‘League of Radical School Reformers’, 1919–33) led by the passionate and temperamental Paul Oestreich.10 What Hearnden calls the ‘preoccupation with the creation of a school community that would simulate the social situation of the adult world’11 was a key strand in the thinking of the Reformpädagogik movement of the Weimar Republic. Other aspects of the movement presaged Soviet policy in the Russian Zone, especially the eventual creation of the polytechnical school. The various types of school in existence once Nazi institutions had been eliminated were summarized in a SHAEF directive.12 They were: Elementary schools (Volksschulen), including Grundschulen or Unterstufen and Oberstufen [lower and upper levels of] der Volksschulen; Hauptschulen; and Mittelschulen Secondary schools (höhere Schulen), including Oberschulen, Aufbauschulen, and Gymnasien Vocational schools, including Berufsschulen (part-­time) and (Berufs-)Fachschulen (full-­time)

The obvious shortcoming in this kind of structure was the limiting nature of an elementary education. Pupils would stay at the Volksschule until the school-­leaving age, when they would continue with part-­time vocational education. A secondary education was accessible only by a limited minority, an intellectual elite who could demonstrably benefit from higher forms of learning. There was perceived to be less need for Kopfarbeiter (brainworkers).13 In Nazi Germany secondary school fees had been higher than those for grant-­aided schools in England. Dodds calculated that the standard fee was 240 Reichsmark a year (about £16): in the majority of English schools on the Grant List fees were below £12.12s.14 In 1948, Education Branch’s Brief for Official Visitors to Germany included a diagram showing the structure of the ‘German educational ladder’, which demonstrated how the various types of provision could be seen in relation to each other. From around the middle of 1947, reform proposals with more chance of success than Grimme’s plan began to be widely aired. They included a six-­year primary school, abolition of school fees, adjustments to school curricula, administrative decentralization, local school management and – very significantly – denominational education. A British influence could be detected in each of these general areas for reform.15 It is significant that England had recently experienced a long period of debate about the future of its school system, resulting in the landmark 1944 Education Act, designed to create greater opportunity through the abolition of elementary schools, through free differentiated secondary education, and by means of a number of welfare measures.

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Figure 5.2  ‘The German Educational Ladder.’ [Source: Brief for Official Visitors to Germany, Education Branch, 1948.] Vexed religious questions had been addressed in a way that found the agreement of the churches. And all of this had been done during the War, under a coalition (national) government and led by a Conservative politician, R.A. Butler, President of what was then the Board of Education. Following his visit to England in 1946, Grimme reported that he was surprised at how close the proposed German reforms were to those recently introduced in England.16 George Murray, who served with Education Branch from 1944 until 1956, saw British policy in Germany as inevitably reflecting the principles in official reports and White Papers in England from the Hadow Report of 1926 (on the education of the adolescent) to the 1944 Education Act.17 There was clearly interest on the part of some German authorities in the organization of teaching in English schools. Riddy wrote to the Ministry of Education in London in March 1946 to ask for documentation on school timetables and subject time allocation that he could provide to the ministry in Braunschweig: ‘One of the things German authorities do need to understand is that is not necessary for everybody to do the same work as everyone else. These authorities are showing a really keen interest in the outside world just now (we hope the same will be true before long of the teachers!), and it would be a great pity not to take advantage of the fact.’18 In December 1946, the CCG Main HQ in Lübbecke

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was requesting 1,800 copies of two Ministry of Education pamphlets: ‘The Nation’s Schools’ and ‘A Guide to the Educational System of England and Wales’.19 The principle of Land autonomy in education was firmly established and defended from an early stage: centralization was out of the question. That notwithstanding, however, several bilateral zonal committees were convened, bringing together British and German education specialists and covering adult education, elementary and intermediate schools, secondary schools, teacher training, textbooks, school broadcasting and visual aids. The first meeting of the Zonal Education Advisory Committee (ZEAC) took place on 4 June 1946 at the headquarters of Education Branch.20 Present were Riddy, Grimme, Landahl, Josef Schnippenkötter (Düsseldorf) and Dr Schauer (Secretary of the Schulreferententagung, the conference of school officials). Riddy was anxious to bring German authorities into consultation with Education Branch much more than in the past, and it was imagined that the group would meet once a month with him. Its role would be limited to making recommendations; it was important, he emphasized, to preserve the educational autonomy of the Länder and Provinzen. Future meetings discussed among other matters vocational education, the ninth school year for secondary schools, the special emergency teacher training scheme, education for citizenship with special reference to broadcasting programmes, the shortage of footwear for schoolchildren, the training of sports teachers, discussion groups and the clarification of the term ‘active officer’ (which had been raised in connection with the emergency teacher training scheme). The final meeting was held in Bünde on 15 October.21 By autumn 1946 an overarching Zonal Education Council (Zonenerziehungsrat) had been established, a German committee whose membership comprised the Ministers of Education of the British Zone. And so barely a year after schools had been reopened, German bodies were overseeing developments with the support and encouragement of British officials, who were now preparing for a different kind of role. In these early developments can be seen the beginnings of bodies which would evolve into institutions still existing in the Federal Republic. Following the initial period of physical reconstruction and denazification, and once power in educational matters had been restored to the German authorities through Ordinance No.57, strategies to guide future educational policy could be developed, within a context of further close co-­operation between British and German officials. A significant impetus for reform came with Control Council Directive No.54 of 25 June 1947 which outlined the basic principles for democratization of education in Germany. Its ten points were described by George Murray as representing ‘one of the more positive and helpful pieces of educational policy guidance to issue from the Allied Control Council’.22 The Directive was published at a time when implementation of its principles could not be imposed on the German authorities, but its aims were such as could be achievable ‘by Allies and Germans working in partnership at a common task of equal importance to both’.23 1. There should be equal opportunity for all. 2. Tuition, textbooks and other necessary scholastic material should be provided free of charge in all educational institutions fully supported by public funds which cater mainly for pupils of compulsory school age; in addition, maintenance grants should be made to those who need aid. In all other educational institutions,

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including universities, tuition, textbooks, and necessary material should be provided free of charge together with maintenance grants for those in need of assistance. 3. Compulsory full-­time school attendance should be required for all between the ages of six and at least fifteen – and thereafter, for those pupils not enrolled in full-­ time educational institutions, at least part-­time compulsory attendance up to the completed age of eighteen years. 4. Schools for the compulsory periods should form a comprehensive educational system. The terms ‘elementary education’ and ‘secondary education’ should mean two consecutive levels of instruction, not two types or qualities of instruction which overlap. 5. All schools should lay emphasis upon education for civic responsibility and a democratic way of life, by means of the content of the curriculum, textbooks and materials of instruction, and by the organization of the school itself. 6. School curricula should aim to promote understanding of and respect for other nations and to this end attention should be given to the study of modern languages without prejudice to any. 7. Educational and vocational guidance should be provided for all pupils and students. 8. Health supervision and health education should be provided for all pupils and students. Instruction will be given in Hygiene. 9. All teacher education should take place in a university or in a pedagogical institution of university rank. 10. Full provision should be made for effective participation of the people in the reform and organization as well as in the administration of the educational system.24

The Russians had originally proposed the insertion of a principle requiring uniformity: In view of the common language and culture of the German people, it is necessary to introduce throughout Germany, a unified system of education which would ensure the same level of knowledge on all subjects [. . .] in all types of schools in the country.25

Not surprisingly this was unacceptable to the US, French, and British members of the Allied Control Authority Coordinating Committee. In July Riddy drafted an explanatory memorandum on the Directive. He emphasized its compatibility with Ordinance No.57, which had outlined the conditions for the transfer of power in education to the Länder authorities and with it the possibility for them to initiate reform. Regional Commissioners would be able to judge the adequacy of any legislative proposals against the principles listed in the Directive, which could be used as the basis for advice. Riddy then commented on the individual principles. Equal opportunity for all should not be taken as an excuse for the ‘levelling-­down’ of standards: it did not imply

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that every child should receive the same kind of education. Principle 3 was problematic inasmuch as raising the school leaving age would prejudice those in school up to age fourteen, because of the shortage of qualified teachers and suitable buildings; ‘It is NOT our intention that children should have to spend nine years in covering ground that in normal circumstances would take only eight.’ (Raising the school leaving age in England and Wales from fourteen to fifteen was provided for in the 1944 Education Act.) But Riddy went on to argue that raising the age of compulsory school attendance would be one way in which the Land governments could demonstrate their preparedness to introduce reform. Deferral of the date of implementation in any Land legislation would be the answer, a similar device having been used in the 1944 Education Act. (The Minister had been given special powers to defer the change for two years, so that in England and Wales the school leaving age was not raised to fifteen until 1947.) Principle 4 involved a fundamental change in the structure of the school system, envisaging, as again did the 1944 Act, that elementary education should form separate, consecutive stages as part of a ‘comprehensive educational system’. Its importance could ‘hardly be over-­estimated’: [This principle] is not of course inconsistent with the spirit of the principle that separate schools should continue to exist with widely divergent curricula for post-­primary children of different abilities and aptitudes. But standards in such matters as accommodation and staffing should be the same in all types of school catering for senior children, AS FAR AS IS CONSISTENT WITH THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE DIFFERENT CURRICULA AND THE NATURE OF THE INDIVIDUAL SCHOOLS. Unless the danger is to be incurred of [. . .] ‘levelling-­down’, [. . .] a considerable time must elapse before the principle is seen in full operation in the schools. But this is no reason why the problems should not at once be tackled with vigour in accordance it is suggested, with a plan for progressive administrative action.

Riddy noted the similarity with the 1944 Act. Before he left Germany to take up the post of Headmaster of Eton, Birley sent a lengthy memorandum to Robertson. Its subject was ‘Prospects of a democratic order in Germany with special reference to Education’, dated 24 July 1948 and copied to the Chief of Staff and the President of the Governmental Sub-­commissions. Robertson was clearly disconcerted by Birley’s verdict on progress in Germany towards a fundamental aim of the Occupation, the democratization of politics and administration in Germany. On 6 August Robertson wrote to Sir William Strang to emphasize that the opinions in the memorandum were Birley’s and not his, either as an individual or as head of the Control Commission. Birley’s verdict on education was critically blunt: Very little has yet been done to democratise either the framework or the content of German Education. It would have been impossible to do this in three years. For instance, only a small number of new teachers have yet been trained.

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This judgment seems to undervalue all of the considerable work of Riddy and the staff of Education Branch and to throw into question what Birley himself had achieved since his controversial appointment. It is small wonder that Robertson was irritated. Yet similar criticism was to be found among those who were closer to work in education in the localities. The education report for Düsseldorf for March 1948 was especially gloomy in its assessment: It is [. . .] difficult to discern a positive trend in educational purpose, amid such a welter of slogans and counter slogans. Citizenship, self-­government, political education, education to [sic] responsibility, community purpose are terms which fall glibly from the tongue of teacher and administrator alike, but only in a very small minority of schools have they been to any extent realized. The individual school can do little however in the face of the lack of faith of the general public in the administration, the failure of school committees to face their responsibilities, the attitude of Schulräte to teacher training methods and institutions, the deplorable political and religious squabbling over appointments, etc., which should be determined purely on a basis of qualification and ability. In short the establishment of a community purpose within the school is an extremely desirable thing but what chance has a child of making use of training received in such an atmosphere, when the facts of life and government present him with such a complete contrast in leaving school? We must not allow ourselves in Education Branch to be deluded by the magnificent compliments we have received from all sides on the cultivation of such splendid relations with German teaching and educational administrative staff. The present lamentable situation with regard to the functioning of Schulausschüsse [school committees] (or for that matter most forms of representative local government e.g. police committees) should suffice to show us that the job of reeducation does not begin and end with schoolchildren. This is a situation unlikely to be alleviated by lectures as at present delivered in Volkshochschulen on local government which are usually perfect examples of the blind leading the blind.26

In brief, in this officer’s view, the administration could not bear the weight of implementing the measures it had enthusiastically supported. As a very concrete example of lack of more fundamental progress, it was reported from Aachen in the same month that a Nissen hut had been procured for the villages of Kleinhau and Grosshau, where children had had no education since September 1947, when their temporary building was burned down.27 Though much had been achieved in physical reconstruction, in re-­establishing an administrative framework for overseeing schools, in teacher training, and in general reform proposals, there were still considerable problems which undermined efficiency at all levels. *  *  * The West German Rahmenplan (‘Framework Plan’) of 1959 dismisses the reform efforts of the Allies: on the whole, it states, they underestimated the particular

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conditions in Germany and in addition their proposals were determined by very different ideas on education.28 George Murray wrote a memorandum in February 1950 outlining what had been achieved in school reform.29 He made the point at the outset that the task had been not only to undo the harm done by Nazism but also to compensate for the failings of Weimar reforms, most of which were not put into practice: in effect there had been some twenty-­five years of frustration and malpractice. In the British Zone particular emphasis had been placed on four of the principles: free tuition, textbooks and teaching aids; the training of teachers at university level; the sanctioning of private schools; and the lengthening of elementary schooling from four to six years.30 Murray was later to summarize the provisions of the Hamburg School Law passed on 23 September 1949 which reflected all ten points of Directive No.54 ‘to a greater or lesser extent’ and aimed at realizing the four principles it had singled out as being of special importance: (a) The 6-year Grundschule (b) Free tuition (c) Free materials (d) Financial aid for deserving pupils (e) Compulsory full-­time education extended to age of 15 (f) Optional 13th school year (g) Teachers to be trained at University (h) Private schools allowed (i) Co-­education to be aimed at.31

Reiner Lehberger argues that the Hamburg reforms took up or developed all Weimar reform proposals. They constituted a ‘far-­reaching shift’ and a ‘democratic new beginning’.32 In early April 1949, Birley wrote yet another account of educational developments in the Zone, giving an overview of progress in educational reform in individual Länder. In a letter to Robinson he reiterated the aim in educational policy to make Germany a peace-­loving democratic state, achieving a harmony between belief in the value of independent thinking and a respect for the beliefs of others on the one hand and a sense of responsibility for the actions of the whole community on the other.33 There were two main obstacles to the kind of educational reform that might enable this aim to be achieved: (i) A traditional attitude of mind in the teacher, in school or university, which prevents the development of an individual point of view or a sense of social responsibility in the pupils, and (ii) the part played in party politics in educational administration, educational appointments, etc. This leads to the wrong attitude by the administration towards a school, which is not allowed the freedom necessary for it to become an educative community, and it lowers the whole standard of the teaching profession.

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There was hope that greater egalitarianism would break down the educational traditions which were adverse to reform; the school system was out of step with social trends in western Europe and would need to change (as had been the case in England): ‘Otherwise the German University and Secondary School will tend to become more and more reactionary, socially and politically.’ In Nordrhein-Westfalen the educationally conservative element was stronger than an any other Land in the Zone. Its dominance, supported by the CDU and the Catholic Church, would ‘make impossible the realisation of the changes in German Education which we desire’. There was ‘a remarkable change in general atmosphere’, finding expression in a serious reaction to the report of the 1948 University Commission. Nevertheless much patience would be needed before the schools would be affected by the change of atmosphere, which had only been made possible, Birley felt, by the dismissal of Education Minister Heinrich Konen. His dismissal was ‘an action which went nearly to the limits of our powers under Ordinance 57, and might be said to have been hardly in the spirit of it’. But Birley considered that developments in education in the Land vindicated the policy expressed in Ordinance 57. Niedersachsen had suffered a severe blow in losing its Kultusminister Adolf Grimme who had left to head North-West German Radio (NWDR): this was ‘the most severe blow suffered by Education in the Zone during the last two years’. The financial stringency of the currency reform was hindering progress, though the new school law, soon to be issued, seemed to be sensible. In Hamburg the new school law was ‘satisfactory from our point of view’, but its introduction without full public discussion and as ‘an avowedly party measure’ was unfortunate. Schleswig-Holstein had passed a satisfactory new law a year ago, though again it was ‘ a purely party measure’ and no attempt was made to gain the support of the opposition. Currency reform had created financial problems. And there was much else that was unsatisfactory: The disappearance of a separate Ministry of Education may be necessary on financial grounds and will, perhaps, not make a very great difference. But appointments in Educational Administration are now regarded almost wholly from a political angle; most of the best men – and there were some very good ones in the Land – have been forced out, and the whole educational machine is over-­ centralised.

Birley regretted not keeping control over appointments in Schleswig-Holstein for longer: Ordinance 57 came too soon. This was a mixed picture of progress in the Zone, and Birley was at pains to point out that the variations evident ought not to be seen as a judgment on the ‘comparative standards’ of Education Branch officers in the Länder. What is strange in his analysis is his critical approach to the politics of educational policy, as if in some moral sense there should not be a political divide in such a subject. It is true that most recently in England there had been huge consensus on educational reform, and consensus was clearly desirable in the difficult context of post-­war Germany, but respecting division of opinion is an essential prerequisite of the democratic ideal that was a cornerstone of British policy and Birley saw himself as pre-­eminently a defender of

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open debate and respect for difference of opinion. He concluded, still on the subject of political division: Although there is a good deal of undesirable party political influence in German Education from the side of the C.D.U. and although it is quite easy to find educational reactionaries among the S.P.D. and easier to find educational nationalists, I think it is broadly true that (i) our difficulties with the C.D.U. are more likely to arise from the fact that they tend to support a reactionary view of education, and (ii) our difficulties with the S.P.D. are more likely to arise from the fact that they far too often regard education from a most rigid party point of view.

Denominational education Looking back in 1978 on the achievements of the British during the Occupation, Hellmut Becker, the then Director of the Max Planck Institut für Bildungsforschung in Berlin (and son of the reforming Prussian Education Minister Carl Heinrich Becker) posed a number of rhetorical questions on the efficacy of British policy, including the controversial issues surrounding denominational education: Was it right to allow the State-­supported expansion of the confessional school and thereby present the Federal Republic of Germany with a twenty-­year long controversy over this question, which was not fully resolved until the 1960s? Was it right to begin again establishing the confessional primary school (konfessionelle Volksschule) and the traditional German grammar school (Gymnasium), basing these on the values of the pre-National-Socialist era, without considering what part these values might have had in the nation’s downslide into National Socialism?34

The British authorities in fact devoted considerable efforts from the very beginning to understand and reach agreement on denominational issues. Education Branch began with responsibility for both education and religious affairs, and its members had a profound appreciation of the place of religion in education. Both the War Office and the Foreign Office were fully cognizant of the issues. A letter from the War Office circulated early in September 1945 in response to a request from the Control Commission for guidance on the Reich/Vatican Concordat of 1933 indicates an understanding of the practical problems: 2. . . . the Control Council cannot be considered to be bound by the provisions of the Reich/Vatican Concordat as the terms were concluded by the ex German Government and a Foreign Power. 3. . . . the Control Council, and Military Government in the British Zone should not enforce the terms of the Concordat. The Allied authorities should exercise

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control as they think necessary, over such matters as appointments, and may use if appropriate the lines laid down in the Concordat. 5. Applying these observations to the particular question of denominational education, the only practicable solution is that decisions should be taken by German local or regional authorities. Although this will probably lead to inconsistencies within the British Zone it cannot be helped at the moment. Any anomalies which arise will have to be sorted out by the Germans at a later date.35

Education Branch confirmed this general approach: Our policy is to leave it entirely to the Germans to settle the issue of denominationalism and as soon as recognized representative Governments are formed, either for Germany as a whole or those parts which may be considered autonomous, they will be able to give their attention to this extremely vexed question and settle it in conformity with the wishes of the German people themselves.36

No doubt this kind of pragmatic policy is what worried Hellmut Becker some thirty-­ three years later, but it was formulated out of necessity, in the context of the general turmoil of the time, and its underlying principle at this stage was to place ultimate decision making unequivocally in the hands of German authorities. The Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Frings, saw things otherwise. Writing to Montgomery in September 1945 he asserted the right – supported by the Pope – to ‘maintain and establish’ Catholic schools on the basis of the 1933 Concordat. In many cases, he argued, schools had been re-­opened as interdenominational schools ‘even in places where local conditions did not warrant them’.37 In November 1945, a message was sent from Education Branch to the provincial education detachment in Münster concerning denominational education in the town of Hamm. A report had been received to the effect that the mayor of Hamm had ‘organised’ denominational schools there on the grounds that there were only Catholic children in Hamm – ‘a statement which is not borne out by the figures recorded here’. But even if the mayor was correct, ‘his action could not be based on any existing Mil. Gov. Directive or Education Control Instruction’. The detachment officers were asked to investigate and it was pointed out that the question of denominational education had recently been discussed in Berlin and that an Education Control Instruction was imminent.38 The Concordat was eventually deemed to be ‘in abeyance’, which did not imply that ‘it could not be revived or held to be binding on a responsible German government or its guardians’.39 It was remarkable in terms of the guarantees it appeared to give to the Catholic Church. Several of its articles referred specifically to education, among them: Article 21 Catholic instruction in the grammar, high, trade, and continuation schools is a regular part of the curriculum and is taught in accordance with the principles of

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the Catholic Church. It will be the special care of religious instruction to inculcate patriotic, civic and social consciousness and sense of duty in the spirit of the Christian faith and moral code, as in the case with the instruction in other subjects. [. . .] The church authorities have the right to investigate whether the pupils are receiving religious instruction in accordance with the teachings and requirements of the Church, the opportunities for such investigation to be agreed upon with the school authorities. Article 23 The retention and establishment of Catholic schools remains secure. In all parishes in which parents request it, Catholic grammar schools will be established if the number of pupils and the general school situation in the community seem to justify a school run in accordance with the requirements of the State covering schools in general.

The principle of parental preference provided it did not result in conflict with the rules governing school provision generally, though eventually reneged on by the Nazis, was established as a clear precedent for the expectation after 1945 that it would form the starting point for decisions about denominational schooling.40 Since the Nazis had not legislated for the changes they had imposed, ‘the situation as they left it . . . presented no legal handicaps to those who were faced with the problem after 1945’.41 Churchmen of all persuasions saw the churches as having a crucial role in a future democratic Germany. Here is a view from the Bishop of Chichester during the War: That there is a faith more powerful than the Nazi faith, the strong stand taken against the Nazis before and during the war by the Confessional Church and the Catholic Church in Germany makes plain. There are also teachers and professors, dismissed by the Nazis from universities and schools, who are ready to give their aid. Beyond all doubt it is the help of such teachers and professors, and of the leaders of the Confessional Church and of the Catholic Church, which should be invoked and encouraged by the liberators of Germany in the vital task of the moral and spiritual renewal of the German nation, and especially of German youth.42

By early December 1945 detailed quadripartite agreement had not been finally reached on how to deal with the denominational issue, though instructions to German authorities were in draft form and the religious affairs committee of the IA&C Directorate had recommended that In matters concerning denominational schools drawing on public funds, and religious instruction in German schools which are maintained and directed by various religious organizations, the appropriate allied authority should establish in each zone a provisional regulation adapted to the local traditions, taking into account the wishes of the German population in so far as these wishes can be determined, and conforming to the general directives governing the control of education. In any case, no school drawing on public funds should refuse to children

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the possibility of receiving religious instruction, and no school drawing on public funds should make it compulsory for a child to attend classes for religious instruction.43

In January 1946, it was decided by quadripartite agreement that parents should express their preferences with regard to whether or not their children should attend denominational schools. ‘Education Instruction to German Authorities [EIGA] No.1’ on ‘The establishment or re-­establishment of denominational elementary schools drawing on public funds’ begins with an admission that the difficulties encountered in restarting educational provision precluded any earlier settlement of the problem of re-­ establishing denominational elementary schools. While any final settlement would have to await the establishment of a representative government, on a temporary basis German authorities would establish single-­denominational schools in areas where such schools existed at the time the Nazis came to power if: (a) the parents of the children concerned so desire, and (b) the number of children to attend each school if established will be sufficient to ensure reasonably efficient organization, having regard to the general standards of education in the area, provided always that local conditions permit.

A further Instruction (EIGA No.2) spelled out the policy in full detail and provided a blueprint for provision: 1. German Education Authorities in the British Zone of Occupation will observe the following regulations for Religious Instruction in Elementary Schools (including Mittel- and Hauptschulen) and Secondary Schools drawing on public funds. 2. Religious Instruction will be part of the normal curriculum for all pupils, except that (a) no pupil will be required to attend periods of Religious Instruction against the wishes of the parent, or against his own, insofar as the pupil is entitled under existing German Law to decide for himself in this matter; and (b) where Religious Instruction is given in accordance with the tenets of a particular denomination, no pupil of another denomination will be permitted to attend such Instruction without the consent of the parent, or where appropriate of the pupil himself, given in advance in writing: 3. Religious Instruction will be taught in the normal school hours and, unless circumstances make an exceptional arrangement desirable, in the school buildings. Any such exceptional arrangement will require the approval of Military Government. 4. Unless Military Government approval is secured to some other arrangement, organized Religious Instruction will be given to pupils of minority denominations if the number of children concerned would have been regarded as sufficient for such purposes in the Authority’s area before the advent to power of the Nazis.

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5. German Education Authorities may make any or all arrangements for the teaching of Religious Instruction in concert with the appropriate ecclesiastical authorities, provided that such arrangements do not conflict with the provisions of this or any other Military Government instruction, regulation or ordinance. 6. No teacher on the regular teaching staff will be required to give Religious Instruction against his or her will, but any periods of Religious Instruction given by a teacher on the regular teaching staff will be counted for all purposes as normal teaching periods. 7. Persons other than teachers on the regular teaching staff may be employed or permitted by German Education Authorities to give Religious Instruction provided that in each case they have been and are approved as teachers by Military Government. 8. Throughout this Instruction the term ‘parent’ means the person having under German Law the right to determine the religious education of the child or, if authorised by such person to act on his or her behalf in the matters covered by this Instruction, the person having the actual custody of the child. 9. A copy of paras 2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8 above will be displayed in a prominent position in each of the schools to which this Instruction applies.

At about the time this EIGA was issued, Riddy wrote to the Ministry of Education in London with the curious information that the Deputy Military Governor (Robertson), when visiting Education Branch, had said ‘he thought H.M. Government’s policy was against Religious Instruction in English schools’.44 Riddy was of course fully aware of the importance attached to religious education in the 1944 Education Act, in which it appears as the sole formally prescribed subject on the school curriculum. That Robertson was ignorant of such an important matter affecting education in England casts some doubt on his grasp of educational issues generally, though in education as in others among the many areas for which he was ultimately responsible in Germany, he relied on specialists like Riddy to brief him and to draft statements on his behalf. Riddy was to broadcast on denominational education, together with a German, following a radio announcement on the topic on 1 February.45 In March a telegram from Military Government HQ for the Hannover region on ‘the denominational schools parents’ vote’, expressed ‘widespread concern this issue not fully understood by parents. Newspapers have not sufficient circulation in rural areas. Wireless talks still most effective means but in view of shortage of sets, imperative that prior announcement made of talks so that parents may gather to hear them. Request make urgent representations for more wireless talks with adequate prior notification.’46 Riddy provided a brief historical account of denominationalism in his comprehensive report on educational developments in Germany of July 1946. There had been no common policy with regard to denominational education in Germany up to 1918. In Prussia (and so in most of what became the British Zone) the schools were almost entirely single-­denominational in character, with teachers and pupils sharing the same denomination or faith: Catholic, evangelical, old Lutheran, Jewish. In the Weimar

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Republic, schools were to be organized without regard to denomination, unless – and provided that this basic principle was not put at risk – there was sufficient parental support in a locality for a single-­denominational school to be established. There were years of political wrangling on this issue, and no relevant and binding legislation could be agreed upon. During the Nazi period, denominationalism was for a time tolerated and even given impetus through the 1933 Concordat with the Catholic Church, but eventually, denominational schools were opposed and abolished, though no corresponding legislation was passed to formalise the position.47 During 1935–36 especially a propaganda war was waged against denominational education, with placards proclaiming ‘One People, One Reich, One Führer – One Community School’, ‘He who sends his child to the denominational school, wrongs his child – and interferes with the unity of our People’, ‘We do not want Catholic or Evangelical schools, we want the school of Adolf Hitler’.48 Led by the press and Alfred Rosenberg, the campaign was effective in removing denominational schools and abolishing or undermining all religious instruction in the curriculum. A new type of school emerged, the Gemeinschaftsschule (community school), described by one prominent Nazi as the Nationalsozialistische Bekenntnisschule (‘National Socialist denominational school’), ‘the denominational schools of the Nazi creed’, as a note by Education Branch put it.49 That ‘prominent Nazi’ was Alfred Bäumler (1887–1968), ‘court philosopher’ in Rosenberg’s Department and responsible for ideological education. The German community school, Bäumler said, ‘is something quite different from the mixed-­ denominational school of the Liberals and Marxists . . . it is the Nazi denominational school, i.e. it educates every young German in all subjects in the spirit of Nazism in order that he may confess the faith of Adolf Hitler’.50 Grimme outlined the status quo for denominational education in a radio broadcast to German parents in February 1946. He asked, ‘What is the defining characteristic of a denominational school?’ In the evangelische Bekenntnisschule all teachers are Protestant (evangelisch); in the Catholic schools all teachers are Catholics. And in each type the teaching is based on denominational foundations. Alongside the confessional schools is the christliche Gemeinschaftsschule (Christian community school) or Simultanschule, in which teachers of both confessions are to be found. In such schools the teaching, apart from religious education, is überkonfessionell (inter-­denominational, ecumenical) but not non-Christian, since it rests on the Christian foundations of both religions. Parents have the right to exclude their children from religious education. And in addition there is the weltliche Schule (secular school) which has no religious education and which exists only in small numbers.51 The Weimar constitution of August 1919 had attempted to lay down that the normal school type would be free of denominational allegiance. Article 146 does indeed state that pupils’ predispositions and inclinations are critical, and not the religious faith of their parents, and it adds that within communities faith-­based Volksschulen could be established so long as proper school provision was not adversely affected.52 (Article 146 was criticized by the Weimar Internal Affairs Minister as containing compromise within compromise.53) Grimme pointed out that the Nazis did not succeed in removing denominational schools, and that for a time the 1933 Concordat gave Catholic schools further legal security. (The actual position was that the Reich Ministry ‘shrewdly refrained from issuing a single

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order formally abolishing denominational education’.54) Grimme says that a British officer likened the resulting confusion of school types in Germany to a jungle. If the military government now asked parents whether they wished their children to attend a denominational school, it was because of a will to create clarity and to end such ‘jungle conditions’. Grimme encouraged parents to complete the denominational school questionnaire, which presented them with the possibility of stating a clear preference: I ----- being resident at ----- in the Gemeinde/Stadtkreis of ----- desire that the child/children named above shall attend an elementary denominational school of the ----- denomination if it becomes possible to establish such a school within reasonable distance of the child/children’s home.55

The printed version contained some detailed explanatory notes, but there was still confusion. Some parents, for example, thought that the Gemeinschaftsschule was a reintroduction of the Nazi school type so designated: Contentions have been made that parents were invited to vote simply for the Gemeinschaftsschulen and not for Christliche Gemeinschaftsschulen. Many in their ignorance assumed that a Gemeinschaftsschule excluded religious instruction and associated the term Gemeinschaftsschule with the uniform imposition of this type of school by the Nazis. The churches took full advantage of this prejudice.56

Such misunderstanding was not surprising, given that the Nazis used the device of ‘a bogus popular election’ to ensure the desired result in favour of the Gemeinschaftsschule: ‘every method of threat and intimidation’ was used.57 The questionnaire was headed ‘The filling in of this form is voluntary. Only complete it if the establishment of the [sic: not ‘a’] denominational school is desired’ (. . . wenn die Einrichtung der konfessionellen Volksschule gewünscht wird). Those in favour of the Gemeinschaftsschule were told not to complete it. The parental vote, which took place between March and June 1946, was later analysed on a regional basis. For Nordrhein-Westfalen the results in terms of school type as of 15 March 1947 were: l l l

Undenominational (Gemeinschaftsschulen): 1,097 (329,321 pupils) Catholic: 3,026 (509,311 pupils) Evangelical: 1,091 (295,516 pupils)

Parents’ preferences in this case were very clearly in favour of traditional Catholic and evangelical denominational emphases in the schooling of their children, but a meeting of the town council of Dortmund reported by Handel Edwards at Land headquarters in Düsseldorf indicated heated political division on the issue. The four members of the majority SPD expressed especially strong views: (a) The SPD would prefer Gemeinschaftsschulen run on Christian lines. (‘If the Churchmen had attended such schools the present situation would not have arisen because there would be greater tolerance’).

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(b) By resurrecting the denominational schools question at such a time, Mil Gov was putting a cuckoo’s egg in the German nest. It was clear that the Allies were trying to prevent Germany’s recovery, by forcing her schools back to the mediaeval state of affairs where education was dominated by the Church. The Church could be as much a dictator as could Hitler. (c) It was absurd and wrong for the Church to claim the right to influence the teaching of all school subjects. One speaker supposed there would be religious gymnastics and religious arithmetic in church schools. If the church school child worked out the cost per week of a daily meat ration of 20 Pfg as being RM 1.40, his sum would be marked wrong since he was not allowed to eat meat on Fridays. (d) Nevertheless [the] SPD was willing to abide by the law; they had shown their willingness by opening 18 big denominational schools already. (e) It was laid down that denominational schools must be opened where (i) it was the wish of the parents, and (ii) in so far as this could be done without jeopardising education. As to (i), the wishes of the parents were not accurately known since the ballot on the question had not been fair. Clergy and church workers had distributed and collected ballot papers; and (ii), the town educational officials were best able to judge whether education would suffer, and they said it most definitely would. Also health would suffer (longer journeys, worse buildings, more shifts, insufficient fuel). (f) Neither parents nor teachers wanted denominational schools. The Church alone wanted them. (g) The SPD protested strongly against the undemocratic procedure of the Regierung [Land government] and the Kultusministerium [ministry of education]. Mil Gov required local authorities to deal with educational administration. The higher authorities could only intervene when local authorities neglected their duty. The neglect could be proved here.

The CDU members’ views were generally more muted and supportive of the general direction in which the issue of denominational schooling was moving: ‘The parents’ will was known. The ballot was fair. The Church had a right to use its influence (Cries of “No”)’. A KPD member doubted the ability of parents to decide responsibly: The question of denominational schools should not be decided entirely by parents’ wishes. Not all parents were sufficiently responsible to have a valid opinion, for ‘Vater werden ist nicht schwer, Vater sein ist aber sehr’ (to become a father is not hard, but to be a father is very hard’).

The meeting resolved to protest against the involvement of the Land government and the Kultusministerium: the provision of denominational schools should be a matter for the town. That aside, however, an essential prerequisite was lacking: ‘an absolutely unobjectionable proof of the parents’ wishes – something which can only be obtained by a secret ballot carried out without pressure’.58

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Education Minister Christine Teusch was accused by the KPD of constructing new barriers between children through her support for confessional schools. She replied ‘Mit meinem Herrgott springe ich über jede Mauer’ (‘Together with my God I can jump over every wall’).59 For Schleswig-Holstein overall results showed a minority in favour of denominational schools, though Catholic voters were in favour. The Chief Education Control Officer summarized the Ministry’s attitude: 1 The non-­denominational State-­provided school is the form required in the Land; 2 The views of the Roman Catholics are known and are deprecated; 3 Claims of the Catholics are to be rejected on grounds of lack of accommodation, equipment and anything else that can be put forward.60

In Niedersachsen the voting resulted in some 1,750 elementary schools becoming confessional. ‘While the CDU has protested in cases where Confessional schools were not set up (e.g. on financial or accommodation grounds), the SPD has protested in cases where they were to be set up.’61 The situation in Hamburg was rather different, as described by the Chief Education Control Officer there: The Schulbehoerde discussed EIGA No.1 with the leaders of the Protestant and R.C. Churches in Hamburg. All agreed that denominational schools closed by the Nazis should be re-­opened: in Hamburg these constituted only R.C. schools, as Protestant schools had long since been handed over to the State, owing to lack of funds. No vote was taken, as complications might have arisen thereby on legal grounds, owing to the existence of the law enacted in 1870, which recognised only State schools in Hamburg. Church leaders of the districts of Harburg, Altona and Bergedorf were consulted and were of the opinion that there would be no dissension among the population if no vote were taken.62

For Berlin the school law passed in July 1948 established the non-­denominational Einheitsschule as the normal school for the city, but it allowed ‘those denominational schools which had been authorized before the promulgation of the Law to continue in existence and also . . . for . . . ‘a small additional number’ to be established in the future’.63 By this stage it is clear that the denominational question was by no means settled. Birley had an informal meeting with Cardinal Frings on 16 August 1948. In Birley’s words, Frings said that his great difficulty in education was with the S.P.D. who were irrevocably opposed to the views of the Catholic Church on the subject. He said that the S.P.D. were a great danger. I suggested that the K.P.D. could not be left out of the account, but he replied that the Communists were not formidable in his diocese. He added, ‘The S.P.D. are more dangerous than the K.P.D.; they are our real enemy’.

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Frings said that he disapproved of the British attitude towards Confessional Schools. He claimed that in his diocese 90% of the parents were in favour of Confessional Schools. He said that the Simultanschule was no solution, and he blamed the British for even giving parents the opportunity to send their children to schools other than Confessional Schools as it put wrong ideas into their heads.

The Catholic Church had produced a document on school reform, and Birley’s view was that while no official cognizance could be taken of it, some direct approach to Frings might be worth considering. Frings was ‘a major force in Education in our Zone’, but the chances of persuading him to take a more reasonable view were slender. Birley felt that since education was now a matter for the Länder he was able to speak more freely than if education were still controlled. He hoped that by presenting Frings with some specific points the kind of conversation he had had with him might be avoided, it seemed to have ‘little value except as entertainment’.64 The document on school reform65 set out firm parameters on denominational education. Religious education must be a regular school subject, with its very own domain (ureigenstes Gebiet) in the curriculum. It must not simply be an additional subject alongside other subjects; it must be a starting and central point of the work of schools and give all school subjects meaning and content. The agreements reached in the Concordat provided a constitutional and legal basis for a resolution of these questions between the state and the church and were the definitive factor for the proper place of religious education in all types of school. One topic of concern was the Catholic Church’s opposition to the abolition of school fees (Schulgeldfreiheit) in secondary schools. Handel Edwards reported a conversation he had had with Domprälat Wilhelm Böhler (1891–1958), who was later to represent the German bishops on church matters during the preparation of the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz). Böhler argued that while he would support in every way assistance to needy parents for gifted children it was not his opinion that such assistance should be given to parents who could pay for the higher education [i.e. secondary schooling]. This took the responsibility away from the parent and handed it over to the state. [. . .] He opposed the general removal of fees [. . .] on the grounds that it gave the power of deciding into which school gifted children went into the hands of the wrong section of the community. The socialist ideas in Germany always included a high degree of centralization and this centralized power had always been a danger because the German people are, and always have been in their history, completely ‘unpolitisch’ [unpolitical].

On being pressed further, Böhler said that he objected to the general abolition of fees partly on the grounds that it gave into the hands of officials and into the hands of schoolmasters what was the rightful responsibility of the parents. [. . .] He had no very high opinion of the average German schoolmaster and admitted that even local priests were inclined to be dictatorial in their methods but that the Church could control them, whereas the

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State would support the dictatorial methods of the individual Beamte [civil servants].66

He feared also that the abolition of fees would endanger the future of Catholic private schools. In a covering letter, Edwards wrote that the question of confessional schools had never been mentioned or discussed officially between Military Government and the Church in Nordrhein-Westfalen.67 Birley grew concerned about what Robertson might say when asked about denominational schools. The Military Governor said that he would reply on this point that he had no views to express, as he considered it a matter for the German Governments to decide for themselves.

The Political Adviser, Christopher (Kit) Steel, believed that the CDU had in mind including in the Basic Law reference to parents’ right to send their children to a confessional school. I said that I thought we ought to be careful. The Concordat . . . was in abeyance and its status was far from clear. I felt that, if we said now that we disinterested ourselves in the matter, we might find ourselves in a difficult position later on. If the Government of one of the Länder in the British Zone abolished all Confessional Schools, the Vatican would almost certainly intervene and raise the question of the Concordat. In that case, we might find it necessary to take a direct interest in a matter which we had said we should leave entirely to the German Governments.68

Robertson agreed not to commit himself. Early in 1949 Hubert Howard of the Roman Catholic Section of Religious Affairs Branch sent Birley a copy of an article he had written for the Branch’s Monthly Bulletin on the attitude of the Catholic Church to the new German constitution. Howard was concerned about some of the information being sent to the Foreign Office: ‘Unless a full and true appraisal of the Catholic position is supplied, I cannot see how the Foreign Office can be expected to understand either the seriousness or the validity of the conflicting claims.’69 This led to a lengthy exchange of views and not a little mutual misunderstanding. George Murray, who knew more about the issue than most officials, strongly recommended a disinterested approach to denominational questions: For a variety of reasons it would be impolitic for this Branch to reach any ‘conclusion’ on such a subject as denominational education in Germany. The problem is an international one in which very naturally the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches are closely interested. Any official view adopted by the C.C.G. would inevitably have a bearing on our relations with the Churches and the political parties – to the detriment of one or the other. It would also be related either directly or by implication to the Concordat signed by the Vatican and the

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German Government of 1933. The validity of this Concordat is at the moment uncertain. In any case it is felt that the whole problem is one which must be left for the Germans to decide for themselves and that the Control Commission should not, therefore, take sides in the matter.70

In early 1950 Murray recorded his dismay at how matters had developed in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Papers on the draft constitution raised ‘some of the fundamental issues in German education’, including The well-­worn confessional question which, as we had anticipated, is going to cause more trouble in NR/W than in all the other Länder put together. The cleavage between CDU & SPD, between Church & State, between a confessional system and an interdenominational one could not be more clearly reflected than it is in the majority/minority clauses of the draft Bill. Nor could the principles of anti-­confessionalism be better shown than they are in the ADLLV comments. The two opposing points of view are so divergent that it is difficult to believe that any compromise is possible.71

A survey of 3,600 adults in the British Zone and the western sectors of Berlin, undertaken in September 1948, reported that almost all of those surveyed agreed that children should receive religious instruction in schools: nine out of ten were in favour. Slightly more than one in twenty were opposed and slightly less than one in twenty were undecided. Few Protestants were opposed, and even fewer Catholics, opposition being largely voiced by those with no religious beliefs and those of other beliefs. Fifteen out of twenty men and eighteen out of twenty women with SPD sympathies were in favour; so were almost 100 per cent of CDU and Zentrum supporters. Few KPD supporters (mostly women) were in favour. ‘Education appeared to have little influence on opinion’.72 The policy formulated in the autumn of 1945 was very wise: leave it to the local or regional German authorities to decide what to do about denominational education, despite the inevitability of disagreement and confusion. Of the many questions in education where the exercise of control was problematic, denominational issues ranked very high and were to continue to be hotly debated in the future Federal Republic.

6

University Reform

Probably no institutions in Germany sinned more grievously against the democratic way of life and the spirit of disinterested inquiry than its universities during the heyday of National Socialism.1 We have watched a great country, once justly proud of her scientific achievements, abandoning her belief in reason, pouring scorn on the disinterested pursuit of truth, expelling a quarter of her own distinguished scholars, persecuting the scholars of the territories she had invaded, rendering science servile, humiliating the profession of learning, and lowering the whole level of civilisation2.

The German university was a particular challenge for the occupiers. Academics might be expected to have independent minds, to value truth, to defend free speech, to be critical of nationalism and militarism, to distrust political nostrums, to abhor the cult of personality. The German professoriate had failed in terms of all such expectations. Those who could not bear the nazification of what were in many cases world-­renowned institutions went into exile if they could; others sought refuge in their research and scholarship, keeping as low a profile as could be managed; many became silent but acquiescent fellow travellers (substituting acquiescence for independence of thought, as Julian Huxley put it in 19413); far too many signed up enthusiastically to the perverted philosophy which soon permeated all aspects of university life. The German professoriate under Nazism provides a case study of how not to respond to tyranny: it exemplified many of the failings identified by Timothy Snyder in his 2017 study of the phenomenon: obeying in advance, not defending institutions, tolerating the one-­party state, accepting symbols, neglecting ethics, keeping a low profile, allowing language to be perverted, etc.4 The German university had once been an institutional model for the world of academe: the duality of its principles of freedom to teach and learn and the close association of research and teaching (Lehr- und Lernfreiheit and Forschung und Lehre) gave it an unrivalled status. Its undoing under Nazism was tragic for international scholarship. It had ‘lost in essentials the signs of a free institution’.5 An egregious act of faith in Nazism could be seen in the willingness of German professors to put their names to a declaration of allegiance to Hitler in 1933, following a gathering in Leipzig at which laudatory speeches were made by leading academics, notorious among them Martin Heidegger. This event was not without precedent,

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since 1914 had witnessed the ‘intellectuals’ manifesto’, among whose signatories some two-­thirds were professors.6 But the 1933 declaration, which included – to take universities that were to be in the British Zone – the names of many professors, Privatdozenten, and other academics in Hamburg (167) and Göttingen (51), was of a different order. It was an outpouring of passionate enthusiasm for the new order. Its starting point, an ‘Appeal to the Intelligentsia of the World’, called for universal support for Hitler: German science appeals to the intelligentsia of the whole world to cede their understanding to the striving German nation – united by Adolf Hitler – for freedom, honour, justice and peace, to the same extent as they would for their own nation.7

And the speeches by individual academics – including Martin Heidegger – reinforced the general message addressed in particular to German voters. Eugen Fischer (1874– 1967), Rector of the University of Berlin and a specialist in racial hygiene, began his contribution by praising Hitler and his achievements: The German nation has built a house for itself. In the magnificent swing of the last few months we have seen it grow and rise. A mighty architect has designed it and is instructing us all how to help in the building. His will fills and lifts up the nation of 65 millions, a nation re-­constructing its home on the old lands inherited from their fathers.8

The theologian Emanuel Hirsch of Göttingen (1888–1972), whose Rector’s address in 1933 was on National Socialism and the University, declared ‘one flag – we all salute it, one man – we all follow him’; the agriculturalist Arthur Golf of Leipzig (1877–1941) spoke of Hitler’s being ‘sent by God to the German nation’. The sheer crassness of the speeches makes them barely readable, especially in their inadequate English translations. That academics could prostitute their intellectual independence by writing such banal material (aimed also at an international readership) is astounding – even given the general sentiments of the time and the strength in Germany of the political and emotional rejection of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. This committed posturing by prominent academics was of course indicative of why British observers were so concerned about the nature of the German professoriate and the future of university education. During the second phase of the Occupation, two significant investigations into the German universities were initiated in the Zone. Professor E.R. Dodds had turned his attention to the German university while working on German education during the War.9 In 1941 he put together a long and thoroughly researched ‘Memorandum on the German Universities in Relation to German Politics’, drawing on a wide range of German-­language sources.10 After analysing the universities under the ‘old Empire’ and the Weimar Republic, Dodds provides a summary sketch of the National Socialist university and its philosophy. The fundamental function of education was to create National Socialists; the task of the ‘Macht-Universität’, described by Adolf Rein in his Die Idee der politischen Universität,

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was to produce German citizens. Dodds (not quite accurately) recalls that the inscription ‘To the eternal spirit’ on a university building in Heidelberg was changed in 1936 to ‘to the German spirit’.11 The National Socialist university had ‘set its face against Western liberalism, individualism and rationalism’, so argued the Professor of Law Rektor Paul Ritterbusch of Kiel;12 the discovery of truth, said the National Socialist educationist and honorary Obersturmbannführer Ernst Krieck,13 was not an end but a means; and the Professor of Ancient History in Göttingen, Ulrich Kahrstedt,14 spoke chillingly in January 1934 of the day having come to make a vow: We renounce international science. We renounce the international republic of learning. We renounce research for its own sake . . . We teach and learn the sciences, not to discover abstract laws, but to sharpen the implements of the German people in competition with other peoples.

What might be done in the face of established opinions such as these, vigorously supported by a politicized student body? In the final part of his memorandum Dodds makes some suggestions for university education in a future German state. He begins with the saying (attributed to Napoleon but widely used in a German version) ‘Wer die Jugend hat, hat die Zukunft’ (‘he who has the young has the future’), a maxim, he says, whose principle was adopted too late in 1918 and by the politicians of Weimar, but one that was understood from the beginning by the Nazis: National Socialism presented itself as the fulfilment of that revolt of youth against middle age, idealism against complacency, the creative forces of the future against the dead hand of the past, which had begun in Germany about the turn of the century.

The characteristic of policy based on strengthening a hold over the young was indoctrination, and in the event of a German victory in the War that policy and its practice would be extended all over Europe. The future of education in Germany in the case of British victory was still uncertain, but Dodds made two points which he felt were clear: (a) No German Government can be acceptable to this country which is content to leave unaltered the existing German educational system. (b) On the other hand, no reform can be effectively enforced except by a German Government and with the willing support of some substantial section of the German people. Without such support, a foreign government can destroy education, but it cannot re-­educate. It can impose new textbooks and new curricula; but whatever guarantees of ‘political reliability’ it demands from the teachers, it cannot control the spirit of the teaching, still less the reactions of the taught.

This support, he argued, could only be found in the ‘industrial working class’, not in the middle class, the Mittelstand, Hitler’s ‘foremost source of strength’, and not in the upper and professional classes, who would prefer ‘a return to the class university of the nineteenth century, with an intellectual outlook based on devotion to God, Country

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and pure Wissenschaft, a social life based on Korps, Kneipe and Mensur, and a guaranteed monopoly of the best jobs’. The support of the industrial working class could be secured for a reform policy that would provide free places in secondary schools and scholarships to universities. German opinion was in favour of such reform, and though it would be expensive, ‘it might pay the conquerors to make it financially possible’. Then denazification of schools and universities could happen without provoking nationalist reaction: ‘the Nazi nominees would be removed not as enemies of Great Britain but as enemies of the German people’: In the universities the obvious immediate steps would include the dissolution of the Party organisations, the liquidation of Studentenführer, Dozentenführer and Party-­nominated Rektoren, the elimination of bogus sciences like ‘Rassenbiologie’, bogus scientists like Günther15 and bogus philosophers like Krieck, the abolition of racial and religious discrimination, and the restoration of full academic freedom in purely academic matters like the award of the doctorate.

While fanatical Nazis would be dismissed, ‘the very numerous trimmers whose conversion to Nazism dates from 1933 might be given the opportunity of a second conversion where suitably qualified successors were not available’. The future university cannot be divorced from politics or the requirements of a planned economy: The contemporary world has no room either for a university which concentrates exclusively on the training of future researchers or for one whose sole aim is to impart traditional culture to the gentleman amateur. The university of the future can and should continue to train researchers and impart culture; but if it is to survive it must also (a) provide society with practising specialists in many increasingly differentiated fields, and in numbers corresponding to the social demand, (b) provide the State with citizens conscious of their social responsibility and capable of applying an independent intelligence to contemporary social and political problems. Failure to satisfy these conditions was slowly killing the Weimar university before Hitler assassinated it.

Here Dodds’s political views clearly take over from his focus on the German university: his vision was for the future of higher education generally, with reform in Germany envisaged alongside reform elsewhere. His position was that of a convinced internationalist, concerned for the ‘intellectual basis of European security’. Student exchanges on a large scale should be organized; visiting professorship posts (lasting for one, two – at most five – years) should be a requirement for universities in Britain, France and Germany, and they should be ‘internationally financed’. Finally, in something of a flight of fancy, Dodds proposed a ‘single-Faculty postgraduate university for teaching and research in economics, political theory and institutions, sociology, statistics, public administration, international law, etc.’ whose diploma would be compulsory for those seeking civil service posts in the three countries. ‘The project

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bristles with difficulties’, Dodds admits, ‘but if they could be overcome, an important step would have been taken towards the realisation of the idea of a common Europe’. In the same year (1941), Dodds published a ‘Macmillan War Pamphlet’, Minds in the Making, an authoritative analysis of education in Nazi Germany which includes commentary on what had happened to the universities: the purging of academics and of the student body, the remodelling of the constitution of universities according to the Führerprinzip, and the status of all university teachers as civil servants under the absolute control of the Ministry. Dodds would also address audiences on education in Germany on a number of occasions during the War.16 As the end of the War approached, he was playing a significant role in post-­war planning, in particular through his chairmanship of committees on re-­education and textbooks.

The report on German Universities of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) The biggest mistake we made in the educational field in Germany.17 The most far-­reaching impact that Dodds made on the question of university reform in Germany came in the form of the report of a delegation to the British Zone of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) in the bitter cold of early 1947. (Dodds was the AUT’s President at the time.) The AUT had previously reported on the German universities, two years before Hitler’s accession to power. That report, published in 1931, was based on an AUT delegation’s visit to Berlin, Göttingen and Hamburg. Despite several problems with misspelt German terms, it was a thorough account of the post-First World War German university, covering most aspects of control and administration, finance, teaching and learning, appointments and student life. It contained no summary or concluding section, and critical observations, or at least findings that imply unfavourable contrast with British experience, must be sought within the text. Such observations include the relative lack of extra-­mural activity (apprehension in Germany about any ‘ “popular” treatment of cultural subjects’), the small number of women in university posts, the lack of any real equivalent to British student ‘hostels’ (halls of residence), and the dangers inherent in the right of academics to teach whatever they wished (Lehrfreiheit): there appears to be a need for the establishment of a stricter co-­ordinating authority in the academic control of the university, to safeguard general interests, and to prevent abnormal development in certain directions where energetic heads of department may tend to lose a sense of proportion.18

Overcrowding was a problem (‘ a university career in many cases is a symptom of unemployment’; ‘discipline is weakened, and individual contacts between teachers and taught, with all the restraint and guidance therein implied, are rendered more difficult’19) and the general lack of advice and personal contact with lecturers and professors was of concern:

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The complete absence of tutors and similar advisers is undoubtedly a disadvantage which is only partially overcome by the issue of booklets containing advice to students. No doubt it fosters the spirit of self-­reliance, but it was admitted to us that the first year of life in a university was largely unproductive of definite progress towards a clear goal, because of this absence of guidance, and we are convinced that the weaker characters are definitely at a disadvantage under the system of Lernfreiheit, although the ‘survival of the fittest’ may be to the advantage of the latter and perhaps of the country as a whole’.20

Dodds had annotated his copy of the Universities Review in which the report appeared. The main sections that seem to have gained his attention were those concerned with control and the role of the Kurator, and university finance. These themes were to be revisited in the AUT’s 1947 report. James Mark, who had played such a significant role in the formulation of policy towards the German universities, approached the AUT in the summer of 1946 to ask if a representative could be sent to a universities conference in the British Zone in September and if a delegation might be appointed to inquire into the universities of the Zone. Lord Chorley, the AUT Vice-President, attended the conference in question and recommended that a delegation should go to Germany to give advice on ‘a number of technical issues’ on which the Control Office urgently needed assistance.21 The terms of reference for the delegation were limited to giving such advice and to the consideration of what steps might be taken to renew relations between British and German universities.22 All except one of the members of the delegation could speak German, and they covered between them the main faculties: Arts: Professor E.R. Dodds (Greek, Oxford) Professor J.A. Hawgood (History, Birmingham) Mr A.H.J. Knight (German, Cambridge) [In the event, Knight was unable to travel to Germany] Professor R. Pascal (German, Birmingham) Law: Professor Lord Chorley (Law, London School of Economics) Pure Science: Professor R.C. McLean (Botany, Cardiff) Social Science: Professor T.H. Marshall (Sociology, LSE) Medicine: Professor C.H. Browning (Bacteriology, Glasgow) Technology: Mr D. Martineau Tombs (Electrical Engineering, Imperial College, London)

Included among the delegates were Dodds’s predecessor as AUT President, the Birmingham professor Roy Pascal (1904–80), a prominent Germanist of avowedly Marxist

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views, and T.H. Marshall, for whom Dodds had worked in the Foreign Office Research Department and who was later (1949) to be appointed Educational Adviser to the Military Governor in succession to Robert Birley. The historian John Hawgood (1905–71), also from Birmingham, had headed the German Section of the Foreign Research and Press Service and had worked in the Political Intelligence Department and the Political Warfare Executive. (He had been a member of Dodds’s working party on re-­education in 1944.) Chorley wrote a report on his preliminary visit to the Zone in which he was critical of the Rektoren: they were elderly, some were out of touch and lacking in vitality; they and the professors seemed ‘to look back to the period before the First World War as the great period of German university life, and to long to return to it’. They wished to be freed of state control, but Chorley saw danger in allowing them too much freedom. He says he was informed that in several of the Universities the senates are dominated by small and reactionary cliques of elderly professors and that complete independence might well lead to a state of affairs less satisfactory than that which existed under the generally liberal administrations of the Weimar Republic.

In the published version this statement is modified, the professors being described as ‘not men of the world, nor of a progressive outlook’.23 And Chorley adds that it was obvious ‘that for the most part they are not ideally suited to the job of rebuilding the universities.’ But the fact that the Land authorities were unwilling to relinquish their right to make professorial appointments was ‘a vital issue of academic freedom’ and one of considerable concern. He identified two areas in which help was needed: (1) the provision of the ‘apparatus of education’: textbooks, paper, scientific equipment. (2) The re-­establishment of contact with academics in other countries – not only personal contact through exchange visits and similar arrangements, but also academic contact via journals and other publications.

There were many similar calls at this time for practical assistance on such lines. Victor Gollancz had been in Germany in October and November 1946 and published a long checklist of steps to be taken to counter the ‘intellectual isolation’ of Germany.24 Eric Colledge, writing also in The Universities Review at the same time as Chorley, called for ‘the counsel and conversation of European scholars’, to break down the ‘spiritual isolation’ of Germany: more visitors from abroad, provision of books and periodicals, exchange of students.25 Though he was clearly critical of much that concerned the universities of the Zone, Chorley felt that a delegation of the AUT would be able to make a fruitful contribution which would be of help both to the Control Office and to the German universities. The AUT delegation spent thirteen days in Germany, from 3 to 15 January 1947. One group visited Göttingen, Hamburg, Kiel, the Technische Hochschule Braunschweig and the TH Hannover; another visited Bonn, Münster and the Medical Academy Düsseldorf.

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Together they visited the Technische Universität in Berlin and the University of Berlin (in the Russian Sector). They were unable to visit the TH Aachen and two universities in the US Zone (Frankfurt and Marburg) owing to the adverse weather conditions. Dodds described to his wife his accommodation in ‘a vast and super-­elegant bed chamber in the villa of a Nazi cement manufacturer’ in Hamburg, a ‘small carpetless and slightly sordid hotel bedroom’ in Göttingen, and a ‘quite pretentious hotel in Hamburg’. The weather was appalling (one delegate suffered frostbite), and there were frequent cuts in the electricity supply. He said in a talk in Oxford that he had seldom spent a less enjoyable fortnight. Caroline Cunningham entertained delegation members in the Officers’ Club in Kiel and recalled falling foul of the club committee for inviting Germans: it was felt that Dodds’s reindeer-­patterned pullover could only have been worn by a German. He later summed up his impressions of the delegates’ work: It was in many respects a gloomy visit. Yet the prospect was not all gloom: one had the invigorating sense that by the united efforts of two peoples a new and saner order was being created out of the shambles.26

And he contrasted the prolix seriousness of the German officials with the attractive amateurishness of the British control officers: This afternoon [in Hannover] we met our first German – a fluent Ministerialrat, who addressed us very thoroughly for 2 hours on the administrative problems. I thought him as much superior in ability to our rather amateur CCG chaps as he was inferior to them in personal charm. If the light had not gone out he would probably be talking still.27

The delegation had its draft report ready by the middle of March. James Mark felt that it should be published with certain alterations: some passages ‘might be more tactfully phrased’. But it had value in terms of future policy-­making: The weaknesses indicated are not, of course, new discoveries, though the statement of them is admirably clear, but the report contains so many constructive suggestions as to serve as a basis for future policy.28

In the event a number of changes would be required before the report could be published. The delegates decided, despite their stated terms of reference, to concentrate on one principal question: ‘What measures are necessary to enable the German universities to play their part in a new democratic Germany?’ In line with British policy, their recommendations included developments which only the Germans could bring about, but at the outset they expressed in forthright terms their doubts that reform would emerge from the universities: We feel that we should place in the forefront of our Report our strong and unanimous impression that no radical and lasting reform of the universities which

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we have visited is likely to come about on the sole initiative of the universities themselves.29

The reasons for this judgment constituted internal and external manifestations of the same ‘social fact’: (i) The German universities are at present controlled, so far as internal affairs are concerned, by groups of senior professors whose average age is high, whose academic ideals were formed under conditions very different from today’s, and whose capacity for responding to new circumstances is therefore likely to be in general small. (ii) The social structure of the universities is bound up with that of the secondary schools, and both of them with the traditional structure of German society as a whole, so that reform of the educational system is unlikely to be brought about save in the context of a much wider movement of social reform.30

Such open criticism of those in charge of the universities, coming in the early months of the period when control over education was handed back to the Germans, was not likely to be well received. The delegates conceded that some Rektoren were ‘young in vigour and ideas’, but they had little influence, and like-­minded successors would be difficult to find. Current initiatives to deal with such matters as a broader student intake, free places, and student grants were felt merely to scratch the surface of problems which were deeply rooted. The future might lie in three aims: 1 the encouragement of younger teachers of the right kind by means of quicker promotion, better financial status and more say in university policy; 2 closer association between the universities and public opinion and ‘movements outside their walls which tend to create a healthier social structure’; 3 the creation of means by which foreign opinion might influence German university life.

The first aim here had to do with the position of the non-­professorial university teachers, the so-­called wissenschaftlicher Nachlaß, whose voice was drowned out by the professoriate, but who might in future play a defined part in decision-­making. The second and third aims, with their political overtones, were less clear in terms of any potential solutions to the problems the delegates had identified. The report goes on to describe the material needs and practical problems facing both students and academics. In particular the serious lack of printing paper needed to be addressed. Failure to improve material conditions in the universities would have severe consequences: Until we can provide the minimum material facilities without which education, in the academic sense of the word, cannot be effectively carried on, no policy of political ‘re-­education’ can possibly be expected to succeed.

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Denazification is dealt with in Section IV of the report. The fears were (1) that there were certainly cases where academic staff had been treated unfairly; (2) that some people, however, had been treated too leniently; (3) that when more staff were urgently needed it was regrettable that some specialists were prevented from working, especially if they were regarded by their colleagues as harmless; (4) that dismissals might result in the growth of reactionary nationalism. The delegates reported the view of a few people that ‘some university departments could only be denazified by being closed’. Chorley wrote a note of reservation on denazification which was not included in the published version of the report. The policy was ‘profoundly wrong’ in his view; it had created ‘instability and frustration’ in the universities of the Zone and this was one of the most serious psychological hindrances to recovery. He writes of examples of teachers who were outstandingly progressive in their views but who had been suspended because of a harmless membership of some Nazi organisation while others who were regarded as unreliable by the U.E.C.O’s remained in their posts because they had refrained from any formal connection with the Nazis.

Denazification made the recruitment of younger academics a huge problem: Chorley argued for an end to the whole process, suggesting an end date of 31 August, with the exception of ‘notorious and dangerous Nazis’.31 On university governance the delegates made a number of suggestions. They did not advocate a change in the tradition of universities being under the Land ministry, despite the opinions expressed to them that there should be a greater degree of autonomy and self-­government. What was needed was a balance between ministerial and university power. They quote from Abraham Flexner’s classic comparative text of 1930, Universities: American, English, German: Generally speaking, the German arrangement works best when a strong Ministerialdirektor or ministry negotiates with a strong faculty: both being strong, deliberation takes place, and out of deliberation between equals, a sound result usually emerges.32

The roots of the problem went very deep, they argue, in a statement that adds to the critical undertones of the text: The conservative, nationalistic, and even reactionary attitudes noticeable in many of the German universities to-­day, and passionately denounced by left-­wing circles and trade unionists, reflect the social structure of the German people and the mentality of certain social classes; they cannot be wholly removed until that structure and that mentality have been changed.

Political democracy would have to become a reality, and democratic methods would have to be adopted on both sides: the aim would be that ‘new democratic forces, if and when they appear, can enter the universities and exert a direct influence over their policy.’

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The delegates proposed the setting up of university councils with an academic and a non-­academic element. Such councils would advise the minister, and help to bridge the gap between the universities and the world at large. Their composition would be representatives of the universities and the ministries and of other branches of education, political parties and certain public bodies (churches, trades unions, chambers of commerce, professional organizations). Prominent individual citizens might also be co-­opted. This was a proposal that would be developed in the work of a further commission in 1948. The delegation made clear that the infusion of a ‘new spirit’ into the German universities would depend essentially on the non-­professorial staff whose numbers, power, and status needed to be improved. ‘As a class’, they were ‘deeply infected with traditional prejudices and inhibitions’: they have been cut off for many years from foreign research and foreign thought, and in many cases have worked only in a Nazi-­dominated atmosphere; they have never been able to discuss their own problems freely amongst themselves.

Regulations on retirement should be strictly observed; the return of refugee scholars would not make up for deficiencies, though efforts should continue to be made to offer them guest professorships; the prejudice against appointing women to university posts would be countered by inviting more British women to lecture in Germany. The social composition of the student body was seen by the delegates as a major issue. A broader social base could be achieved through free secondary education and a generous system of competitive entrance examinations. Since German students were generally ill-­informed about events outside Germany and lacked discussion skills when it came to social and political problems, it was suggested that ‘social studies’ should be promoted: more especially, chairs of social and political science should be established and non-­specialist lecture courses should be introduced. The delegates concluded the main part of their report with the gloomy comment that they did not regard their recommendations and suggestions ‘as being more than palliatives for the long-­standing and deep-­seated disorder of German academic life which reaches back to the nineteenth century’. This was a disorder not of the universities alone, but of the whole educational system of the country, and in their view it could only be solved on this wider basis and inter-­zonally. They recommeded that an international educational commission should be appointed, comprising experts from Europe and America, perhaps collaborating with UNESCO, and taking evidence in the manner of a Royal Commission. Here was the germ of the idea that led to the appointment of the 1948 University Commission described below. In the final section of their report, the delegates address contacts between British and German universities, arguing for exchanges, lecture tours and improved access to journals and books. The final paragraph expressed some hope for the future: We are not solely or chiefly concerned with restoring to the German universities their function as factories of specialized research. Our concern is rather to replace a narrowly German outlook by a European one, and thus to reintegrate German science and scholarship into the intellectual life of the European community.

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Many of the Report’s proposals, indeed its whole tone, reflect Dodds’s ideas. He and Pascal were kindred spirits and it appears that they in fact were the principal authors. Pascal has described how he put together a first draft which was then revised by Dodds.33 The delegates met Riddy and other Education Branch members before leaving Germany. They were unanimous in identifying two evils resulting from ‘(i) the creation of an academic proletariat by allowing more students to study than could later be found suitable jobs’ and (ii) ‘the denial to some students of the opportunity to study’. The second was in their view the lesser evil.34 Tom Creighton, Birley’s assistant, wrote to Dodds to congratulate him on the report (’marvellous how many nails it hits upon the head’) and to express his frustrations with the efforts in education. He was not optimistic about what might be done in light of the delegation’s recommendations: I think all possible vigilance among people like yourself in England [. . .] will be needed to see that any Government organisation does anything about it. Birley is a great help, but he certainly will need support at home and will have a lot of hard battles to fight against the inertia over here and the false proportions in which regular soldiers and more still civil servants tend to see German problems. Our main object is becoming more and more to save the British taxpayer’s money and to clear out as quick as we can, in official circles.35

A meeting was arranged with Pakenham, Birley and Riddy in London in August. Pakenham found the AUT Report ‘excellent’, and Birley described it as ‘of remarkable value’. The Control Commission in the shape of Education Branch and of Riddy in particular, had produced comments on the delegate’s draft, beginning with an endorsement of the Report’s finding ‘that no radical and lasting reforms are likely to be initiated within the zonal universities’.36 Birley later changed his mind about the AUT Report. The German universities had reacted unfavourably to a document produced ‘by a delegation of foreigners’.37 Moreover, its coming so soon after control had been handed back to German authorities was a serious mistake.38

The 1948 Commission on University Reform If only we had followed that report we might have saved ourselves many hectares of broken glass.39 Whatever the impact of the AUT Report was on thinking about the future of the German university, it was soon overtaken by what became a famous report from a German commission appointed in 1948 by the Military Governor, General Sir Brian Robertson. This was the so-­called ‘Blue Report’ (Blaues Gutachten), entitled Gutachten zur Hochschulreform.40 The report received widespread publicity, despite the curious and off-­putting statement on its inside front cover that it was published ‘as a manuscript’

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and that reprinting it, even in extracts, was forbidden.41 The explanation for this was that the Commission had agreed that this precise warning should be included in the first roneoed bound copies (with limited circulation) of the report, a necessary precaution before the final version was published. The printer clearly included the warning by mistake in the published version. In the context of full and open discussion about the future of the German universities in 1948, this was a pitiable error. An unsigned and undated Foreign Office note produced during 1947 talks of the urgent need for university reform in the Zone.42 This was necessary in the view of the Educational Adviser, all university control officers, and the AUT delegates. Six major reforms were needed: (a) the enlargement of the Senate and Faculty Councils to include a higher percentage of the younger non-­professorial staff and thus to increase their influence and diminish that of the aged; (b) the establishment of an Association of University Teachers; (c) the promulgation of new regulations, both for the Doctor’s degrees and admission as lecturers; (d) the introduction of the system of ‘block grants’ with special provision for increasing the salaries and security of tenure of lecturers and assistants and thus making them more independent of the professors; (e) the introduction of new courses of study, possibility of new faculties – social science, pedagogy, etc.; (f) the establishment of a Standing Advisory Committee on Universities in each Land, consisting of representatives of the universities, the Ministry, other branches of education, e.g. Adult Education and Secondary Schools, the political parties, certain public bodies such as trade unions and the professional associations.

There was concern about the elderly professors who ruled the universities: they would be unlikely to support any reform initiatives that diminished their power coming from outside (as with the AUT Report), and so it was suggested that ‘the more progressive Germans themselves’ should come up with proposals. A commission of inquiry should be set up to report to the Commander-­in-Chief ‘on the extent to which [the universities] are making their full contribution to the establishment of a sound democratic society and education in Germany’ and the measures that might serve to increase such contribution. The appointment of what was to be the Studienausschuß für Hochschulreform was one of Birley’s principal achievements in the Zone. The Times Educational Supplement reported Birley’s reasons for establishing the Commission in terms of social exclusiveness: One of the first needs, as Mr Birley pointed out in announcing this commission, is to break down the social exclusiveness of education, which has been in Germany almost as severe as that of the military class itself. It is a good thing for common mortals to be in awe of a great professor, but it is his mind they should reverence,

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not his social rank. The rigid class stratification in Germany has been supported by the educational system, whose ladder has been closed to the working classes generally.43

In a letter to the Rektoren of the Zone, Birley wrote of the Commission’s task to report how the universities might contribute to the development of a healthy democratic society and education in Germany and what measures might be adopted to further this aim. There should be co-­ordination between the universities and other Hochschulen, without the need for uniformity and regulation. He mentioned the relationship between the university and the Land and the state, finance, student admissions and the recognition of qualifications in other parts of Germany. And he talked of the British procedure of appointing a royal commission when institutions of great public interest face problems. The main feature of such commissions is that they were in no respect political or law-­making or judicial bodies and that they were independent of all state, local, political and other authority. Much was made of the royal commission model, which served to enhance the standing of the commission. Its German members were afforced by two foreign appointments: Lord Lindsay (1879–1952), Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and the Swiss Professor Jean Rudolf von Salis (1901–96) of the Technical University, Zürich. Birley had been an undergraduate at Balliol and was twice to be considered for the Mastership.44 Identifying Lindsay as someone who might make a contribution to the commission’s work would have been natural, given the Master’s undoubted national standing and Birley’s closeness to Balliol. Lindsay had stood as an independent antiAppeasement candidate in the famous 1938 Oxford by-­election against the Conservative Quintin Hogg and was an individual of outstanding moral authority. Isaiah Berlin wrote of him I thought him wrong-­headed in some ways but a great public figure – a man of the most unusual moral and psychological power – who had perhaps missed his vocation in being a philosopher at Oxford when he might have been an unforgettable statesman of the highest order and Gladstonian moral significance. What I felt then, and feel now, is that if some enormous injustice were committed in England, as it were a Dreyfus case, and a voice were needed to command immense moral authority, he had such a one and perhaps nobody else in my time did.45

Maurice Bowra identified similar qualities in Lindsay: his ‘redeeming virtue, which could not be praised too highly, was that he could rise to big occasions as almost nobody else in Oxford could’.46 At first Lindsay was minded to decline the invitation to serve on the commission, but he reasoned that if any job were to be rewarding, it would be this one. He told Amy Buller that Germany was the central problem: ‘If I could make some contribution there I would do anything’.47 He was not able to be present at the Commission’s first meeting, but after that undertook the strenuous journey, flying from Northolt, on every necessary occasion and played a full part in the discussions. At the second meeting of the Commission, which seems from the minutes to have been

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Figure 6.1  Lord Lindsay of Birker, Master of Balliol College, Oxford.

dominated by Lindsay, several of the ideas with which he was associated were floated: his concept of a new type of university, as exemplified in the proposals for the new University College of North Staffordshire (Keele) with which he was at this stage deeply involved and whose first Principal he became; his desire to open the universities to students from a broader range of backgrounds; his wish to ensure strong links between the university and society; and his views on the relationship between teaching and research (being himself generally scornful of the dominance of research.) Several of those invited to give evidence were people known to Lindsay who represented a range of British experience potentially of interest for the Commission’s work. Von Salis was well known for his weekly radio broadcasts during the War, Weltchronik, in which he expressed his anti-Nazi views, to the great annoyance of the German government. In his memoirs he recalls Birley saying at the Commission’s first meeting that a Swiss member was the ‘guarantor of freedom’ (der Garant der Freiheit).48

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Lindsay and Von Salis were each paid the considerable sum of £500 for their work on the Commission. (The average annual income per capita in the UK at the time was just under £456.) The Studeinausschuß was to be a German commission, and so there was a question about the status of the two foreign members. It appears that they were full members of the commission in all respects but one; they had no voting rights. Since the Commission on no occasion had to vote, however, this distinction was unimportant. To chair the Commission, Birley’s choice fell on Henry Everling (1873–60), a leading Hamburg socialist (arrested several times during the War) who was Director General of the German Cooperative Wholesale Societies (Großeinkaufsgesellschaft deutscher Konsumgenossenschaften) a post to which he had been appointed by the British authorities. Everling was a member of the important Zonenbeirat (Zonal Advisory Committee), and he had been suggested to Birley by Heinrich Landahl. In his letter inviting Everling to chair the Commission, Birley expressed his optimistic belief that it could lead to a turning-­point in the history of German education. Its appointment is a proof of our acceptance that Germany herself must undertake the reform of her education system.49

In his letter to Everling, General Robertson described the Commission’s brief: Specifically I am asking the commission to examine the contribution which the universities and Colleges are now making to the development of a democratic society and education in Germany and to submit to me any recommendations it may see fit as to ways in which this contribution might be increased.50

The other members of the Commission were Dr Joachim Beckmann, Councillor of the Evangelical Church; University Lecturer, Düsseldorf Professor Friedrich Drenckhahn, Director of the Pädagogische Hochschule, Kiel Dr Robert Grosche, Roman Catholic Dean of Cologne; member of the Kuratorium of the University of Cologne Professor Otto Gruber, Technische Hochschule, Aachen Professor Katharina Petersen, Director of Primary and Intermediate Education, Ministry of Education of Niedersachsen Professor Bruno Snell, University of Hamburg Dr Franz Theunert, Association of German Trade Unions Professor Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker, Max Planck Institute of Physics; Honorary Professor, University of Göttingen Dr Walter Reimers (Secretary)

Once most of the members had agreed to take part, a ‘Policy Instruction’51 was issued to announce the setting-­up of the Commission and to describe its terms of reference:

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APPOINTMENT OF A COMMISSION OF ENQUIRY TO EXAMINE THE NEED OF REFORMS IN UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES OF UNIVERSITY STATUS IN BRITISH-OCCUPIED GERMANY 1. In view of the Military Governor’s particular interest in the well-­being and reform of education in the British Zone, and of his desire to promote it, and in view of the integral importance of the Universities in any educational system, he has decided to appoint an independent Commission of Inquiry to report to him upon the Universities and Colleges of University status in British-­occupied Germany. 2. The terms of reference of this Commission will be to investigate the present condition of the Universities and Colleges of University status in the British Zone and the British Sector of Berlin; to report to the Military Governor on the extent to which they are making their full contribution to the democratic development of the German nation, and to recommend any measures which may appear necessary to increase this contribution. It will be appointed, and its individual members will be nominated, by the Military Governor. 3. Since the responsibility for educational matters has been handed over to the German Authorities, it is not intended that this Commission should prescribe measures, the adoption of which would be obligatory. But in order that an objective and independent view of the Universities may be presented to the Military Governor and to the German Authorities and public, it is desired that the question should be examined by an authoritative body, representing diverse sections of German opinion along with the impartial viewpoints of observers from other countries. 4. The composition of the Commission will be as follows: 6 German members 1 British member (who will be a man of standing in the British academic world, and not a member of the Control Commission) 1 Neutral member not of British or German nationality. All members will have full and equal voting-­rights. The chairman will be nominated from among the German members by the Military Governor. 5. The Commission will have full legal powers to call witnesses and to take evidence. Its report will be made public. 6. It will be required to present its report within six months of its appointment by the Military Governor.

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7. Internal (Reichsmark) expenditure of the Commission will be financed from Zonal funds whilst any external sterling costs will be met in accordance with arrangements to be made separately with the Foreign Office.

Unfortunately ‘Policy Instruction’ was translated in Nordrhein-Westfalen as ‘Police Guidelines’ (Polizei-Richtlinien)! A correction was issued – belatedly – by the Ministry towards the end of June, but at a period when considerable efforts were being made to avoid any question of control or imposition or interference, such an elementary mistake in translation was especially counter-­productive and irritating. The distinguished physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007) – only in his thirty-­sixth year – delayed his decision to join the Commission. He was finally persuaded to accept the appointment by Geoffrey Bird, the University Officer in Göttingen, but did not take part until the sixth meeting of the Commission.52 At this stage Everling was anticipating a unanimous report. Prälat Dr Robert Grosche (1888–1967) also had misgivings about joining the Commission. His name had been included in a White List of people believed to be antior non-Nazi put together by the SHAEF Psychological Warfare Division in December 1944: he was described as being anti-Nazi and a left-­wing Centrist.53 Grosche had been critical of the British Occupation, expressing his exasperation to Stephen Spender, who visited him in Cologne in the summer 1945: I must admit that I am disappointed with your occupation. I listened to the BBC before the end of the war, and I saw your leaflets. In your propaganda – which I took to be different from that of Goebbels – you always insisted that you stood for freedom of self-­expression and for discrimination between the Nazis and the antiNazis in Germany. Yet you have not fulfilled your promises. Of course, I didn’t expect the Occupation to be anything but hard, but I did expect that you would support intellectual freedom, that you would bring an atmosphere of liberty, of idealism and of vital new ideas to us.54

Grosche confided to his diary that he had doubts about taking part in the Commission’s work if it was an ‘English’ commission, but that he would do so in the interest of the universities. He would fight against any attempt to remove the universities’ autonomy or to encroach upon the essence of ‘diese geistige Republik’ (‘This republic of the mind’).55 The classicist Bruno Snell, described by Peter Whitley as one of the most charming Germans he had met – ‘fresh-­minded, receptive & humorous’,56 was to begin with the only Ordinarius on the Commission, and so a body charged with reform affecting the universities was to be represented by just one tenured university professor. Birley had been concerned about this, and wrote to Everling in June to propose Professor Johannes Stroux, at the time Prorektor of Berlin University, together with Weizsäcker. In the event, Stroux, who had been the first Rektor of the University after the War,57 did not join the Commission, despite the Soviet authorities agreeing to his participation, and so, as Birley had feared, the universities were not ‘represented as fully as originally intended’.58

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Two of the commission members had pasts which should have made their appointment questionable. Friedrich Drenckhahn (1894–1971) had come to the attention of British officers and was seen as an appropriate representative of teacher training, but his record under National Socialism was by all academic standards very disturbing. Kürschners Deutscher Gelehrten-Kalender for 1940–41 lists among his publications – along with similar papers – ’Das Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre vom 15.September 1935 im Lichte der volkswissenschaftlichen Statistik’ (1936).59 This publication, unsurprisingly, does not appear in his entry in Kürschner for 1950. Drenckhahn had developed a National Socialist approach to mathematics teaching which would have been abhorrent to Birley and to Lindsay and his fellow members of the Commission. His works were not simply standard academic publications with sops to the prevailing ideology, but fulsome contributions to the development of the bogus science of Rassenkunde. It seems nobody noticed.60 Drenckhahn was a member of various National Socialist organizations (NSV, NSLB, NSDDB, NSAHB) and signed the 1933 vote of allegiance of German professors to Hitler (Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Universitäten und Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler). Drenckhahn was in awe of Lindsay, who later tried to help him when he was transferred from Kiel to Flensburg and who treated him kindly. Berta Hochberger, Lindsay’s interpreter, recalled Drenckhahn declaring ‘Der Hochadel kommt!’ (‘Here comes high nobility!’) as Lindsay approached61 and Lindsay wrote to his wife from Hamburg that After dinner Drenckhahn came up to my room. He has written some more papers, unburdening his soul of the obvious at great length, but he is a dear, so kind and modest.62

In 1947 Birley had been approached by Mr Wilcox in Kiel with a curious and implausible tale that Drenckhahn, in order to remain in his post, had been asked to join the SPD. He had said that ‘just as he in the Nazi time had felt that an educationist should not be tied to any political party, but should be unbiased and free to develop his ideas in the best way, and had therefore declined to join the NSDAP, so for the same reasons he felt unable to join the SPD.’63 The Regional Commissioner had even been prepared to issue a mandatory order to the effect that Drenckhahn should remain in his post. Wilcox advised that the Ministerpräsident should be informed how much it was regretted that the services of Professor Dr. Drenckhahn are in future to be confined to the limits of one college, and that a man of such progressive and broadminded ideas could not be kept at the Head of his Department; how much good could be done by this man, who had already brought SchleswigHolstein to the forefront in Teacher Training, if he could be retained and given full co-­operation by the administration.

This degree of misplaced support for an individual on the part of CCG staff was of a kind – had it been realized at the time – to add fuel to the criticisms of what the British

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were doing in Germany. But it is clear that there was no proper information to hand on Drenckhahn’s past, despite the fact that even a cursory glance at his entry in Kürschner would at least have demonstrated the need for further investigation before he was appointed to membership of an important commission. Drenckhahn was apparently in his element as a member of the commission. One report on its work talked of the ‘peacockry’ of some members, a ‘gentle flaunting of their personally brilliant tail-­ feathers in the face of Military Government’: Drenckhahn was ironically described as ‘the busiest, the most pressed for time, the deep thinker, the rapid traveller, the Commission’s earliest enthusiast’.64 The other member about whom there should have been doubt was Otto Gruber (1883–1957). He had been Rektor of the Technische Hochschule, Aachen during 1934– 37 and Prorekor 1937–46. His rectorship alone would have put him in the category of those to be immediately dismissed. When his record in Aachen is examined, it emerges that he wanted to nazify the institution, that he praised Hitler, and that he gave full support to the usual Nazi ideologies.65 Although he avoided being a Party member until 1937, his allegiance to Nazism seems beyond question. Recent studies have shown that Gruber had not in fact escaped the attention of the British in Aachen. His savings and salary had been stopped, but in February 1946 his previous rights were restored retrospectively from 1 August 1945. On 30 October 1947 he was given his ‘clearance certificate’ at the end of his personal denazification process.66 There was clearly a serious failure in intelligence gathering in the case of these two appointments, however distant their engagement with National Socialism seemed by 1948. Birley’s commission is tainted in retrospect by their inclusion. The setting-­up of the Commission was widely welcomed. The young Helmut Schmidt (born in 1918), then chairman of the German Socialist Students’ Federation (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), wrote to Everling to welcome his appointment and report the socialist students’ view on university reform: We consider a reform of the university to be one of the most pressing necessities in the field of German cultural policy – at the same time it is one of the questions most difficult to resolve, and this alone because of the immensely strong conservative elements in the universities themselves which will oppose a progressive development with all their powers.67

This unequivocal criticism of the conservative nature of the German universities clearly echoes the tenor of the AUT report, and it recurs throughout the debate on the future of higher education in the British Zone and elsewhere. The first meeting of the Commission took place on 21 April. Birley talked of the Commission’s freedom (but lack of executive power) and of its task to make suggestions. As part of its procedures it might produce a questionnaire. Then he withdrew and took no further part in the Commission’s work. A questionnaire was quickly put together and sent to all Rektoren and to prominent individuals, student organizations, and church representatives, as well as to universities and other institution in other zones. It consisted of thirty-­six questions, listed under six headings: Idea and Task of the University68; University and State; University and Society; University Constitution;

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Teaching Body; and Students. The questions under ‘University Constitution’ were as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Which organs of the university constitution do you regard as necessary? Do you regard the post of Kurator as necessary? What function should the Rektor have? Do you have suggestions to make on the position, composition, and powers of the senate? Do you have suggestions on the composition and rights of the faculties as self-­ governing bodies and the position of the deans? Do you have suggestions on the position of the lecturers (Dozenten)? Should the participation of students be part of the university constitution? Do you have further suggestions to make in this section?

Starting with a questionnaire was not the wisest move. It resulted in 132 identifiable responses (a return of only some 17 per cent). Some were very brief; some dealt only with selected questions; the longest reply covered nineteen sides.69 The German population had had its fill of such inquiries, from the Nazi ‘Proof of Aryan Descent’ questionnaire (Fragebogen zum Nachweis der arischen Abstammung) to the Allies’ denazification Fragebogen. Form-­filling for the Control Commission’s data-­collecting was a frequent demand made of the universities in the Zone. And so it was not surprising that Ludwig Raiser, Rektor of Göttingen University, reacted with some scepticism: The Commission on University Reform appointed by the British Military Government has begun its work. With a big questionnaire of course. Let us hope that it will think in more original ways about data collection. Otherwise we might fear that even its proposals will turn out to be less original. Nobody will be served by an increase in the flood of paper with which the theme ‘university reform’ is overflowing.70

The Dean of the medical faculty in Munich said that the incessant filling of questionnaire returns did not promise much for university reform.71 There were complaints about the short time for responses – the date on the questionnaire was 26 April, and replies were required by 10 June. The University of Kiel was particularly critical, expressing in one of its responses its suspicion of British influence: The appointment of such commissions from among the broader public corresponds to English custom. It naturally presupposes English conditions and above all an English mentality; history has sufficiently demonstrated how disastrous the effects of any schematic transfer of foreign practices and institutions must be on other organic forms of behaviour of a different nature.72

The questions were put together too quickly and so lacked precision in many cases. The Professor of Philosophy and retired Ministerialrat Dr Johannes Thyssen of Bonn complained that almost every one of the three dozen questions was highly complex

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and that any changes to the present situation should only be proposed on the basis of detailed study and not on that of a vote based on the questionnaire returns. But despite the shortcomings the questions normally provoked long and careful responses. In analysing the replies, the Commission’s secretary, Walter Reimers, could only record: ‘Here we have the most varied suggestions’.73 Over 70 per cent of the respondents answered ‘yes’ to the first double question: ‘Do you consider a reform of the university to be necessary and possible?74 This alone demonstrates a widespread will to see higher education reform of some kind, though a number of the positive replies contain a degree of equivocation. The Commission members were conscious that they had been appointed as a quasi royal commission, and they went about their duties with a tireless zeal, no doubt unconscious of the fact that royal commissions are notoriously a device to delay reform, to give the appearance of doing something in the expectation that a slow process of investigation will result in no decisions at all, or at least in decisions for a future administration to deal with. The Commission’s programme was exhaustive – and exhausting for some of its members, especially for the seventy-­year-old Lindsay, who was not in good health. (He died a little over four years after the Commission started its work.) Its task was accomplished in under seven months. The timetable of the Commission’s activities, from its first meeting on 21 April to the press conference on 30 November that launched its report, the Gutachten zur Hochschulreform, demonstrates the comprehensive nature of its investigation. Commission members visited Bonn, Cologne, Aachen, Münster, Göttingen, Hannover, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Braunschwieg, Hamburg, Kiel, Munich, Tübingen and Darmstadt. In each case they took evidence from the Rektor, Senate, Dozenten and students of the institutions they visited. They interviewed, among others, Sir Walter Moberly (Chairman of the University Grants Committee, the Germanists Professor W.E. Collinson of Liverpool University and Professor Elsie Butler of Cambridge, Adolf Grimme and Heinrich Landahl, Helmut Schmidt, Amy Buller and representatives from women’s organizations. The Commission’s files are voluminous. They contain records of all the meetings, and of all the interviews conducted, as well as drafts of each part of the final report, as put together by Commission members. It is possible to trace every step in the process from initial data collection to the final draft.75 The resulting shape of the report reflected the emphasis the Commission gave to topics that were not necessarily an implicit part of its original brief: Introduction (The Problem of University Reform; The University and Society; The Task of the University Today) The University and the State University Constitution (Teaching Staff; University Council; Senate and Faculty; Finance) The Student Body (Access to the University; The Student and the University) Studium Generale Examinations (Academic Examinations; State Examinations)

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Technical Universities (Common Elements; Differences) Teacher Training Colleges Adult Education Relations of the Universities with Other Countries

‘Studium Generale’ – in this sense a compulsory course of general studies outside of the student’s specialism – was a topic espoused passionately by Lindsay. After retiring as Master of Balliol, he was to become the first Principal of the new University of North Staffordshire (Keele), whose pioneering ‘foundation year’ for new undergraduates would be a unique feature of university courses at the time. Adult education was also one of his keen interests, and one in which Balliol College had played an important part since the 1870s. With Gruber and Drenckhahn on the Commission, it was not surprising that technical universities and teacher training colleges should have dedicated sections in the report. A lot of time was devoted during the Commission’s deliberations to discussion of women students (Frauenstudium), but no specific section of the report was devoted to the topic. When asked about this, Reimers said that it was actually a self-­evident matter for the Commission. (‘Das war für uns eigentlich selbstverständlich’).76 This is a curious omission, given the efforts made by British authorities in Germany to promote women’s organizations and to recognize the important role that women played in post-­war Germany, and given too the input of Katharina Petersen – its only woman member – to the Commission’s work. *  *  * At the start of its report, in its section on the problems of university reform, the Commission states its unanimous view that while a reform of the universities was both necessary and possible, any purely institutional reform would have limited effects. As to the task of universities, they should ‘serve mankind by teaching the truth about the real world arrived at through scientific study’. This implied that there must be a responsibility to society alongside the mission to extend the bounds of knowledge. This was very akin to Lindsay’s thinking and to the Balliol tradition. Four proposals are then listed that would underpin the ambitions implicit in the remainder of the Commission’s recommendations: 1. That university education should be made much easier of access to those of insufficient means. 2. That relations should be improved between the universities and all sections of society, and that this could best be brought about by setting up a University Council. 3. That the teaching staff should be expanded. 4. That a genuine ‘education’ should be fostered, and that the unity of culture should be emphasised by means of a ‘studium generale’.

The Commission rejected the complacency that would deny any need for reform. The universities had not kept up with social change and they focused too much on training

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the ‘specialist intellect’ rather than the ‘whole man’. They were tending ‘to break up into aggregates of specialist institutes’. The historian of Keele University has noted that much of the Commission’s report is ‘pure Lindsay’,77 and even in the first few pages it is apparent that Lindsay’s ideas had had an impact on the Commission’s thinking. Though the notion of a ‘studium generale’ was not unknown in Germany, it was innovative in the form that Lindsay envisioned (with Keele very much in mind.) One statement agued idealistically for the centrality of social awareness for both students and professors: The universities would be more alive to their lack of coordination with contemporary society if professors and students were in closer touch with practical life and if they had studied the nature of social life as part of their university discipline.

A useful specialist must also be a useful human being. Practical experience of future professions should come before or during university study. During theoretical study there must be encouragement of interest in things outside of the student’s specialism. This might in some degree need to be imposed. The ‘scientific spirit’ needed to be diffused beyond the university. This could be achieved through four measures: 1. Universities must fulfil their obligations towards students not intending to be researchers. 2. They must re-­establish closer links with the secondary schools. 3. Graduates need ‘refresher’ training after they have begun their professional life. 4. The universities should further adult education, in collaboration with relevant bodies.

Starting with the explicitly social tasks of the university established the tenor of the report and set up echoes of some of the issues raised in the AUT’s text. In a section on the idea of a university, the Commission argues that university activity is only justified in terms of its rendering service to man. Research must not be foremost; research and teaching must be one: ‘the teachers should not only transmit knowledge, but should educate in the true sense of the word.’ This meant that more emphasis should be placed on teaching. While freedom of research and training was a principle that must be safeguarded, there was a limit to such freedom ‘set by the responsibility of all research and teaching for the welfare of one’s fellow-­men’. The opening section of the report concludes with the statement, not further developed, that ‘there are some institutions in Germany which are called universities but which hardly merit the name’. The report’s principal recommendations concerned the setting up of university councils and advisory councils, a block grant to universities, the rights of non-­ professorial teaching staff and students, the institution of a studium generale, and the widening of the social basis of the student population. Press reports began to appear in December and were almost exclusively positive. The report and its recommendations were variously described as ‘revolutionary’, ‘a

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milestone’, ‘an excellent basis’ for reform’, ‘perhaps the most important positive contribution to spiritual renovation’, and ‘an important event in German history’ if acted upon.78 Birley wrote to Robertson in December 1948 with the unsurprising comment that the Commission’s success was due in his opinion to the choice of the members. He personally had only chosen Lindsay and among the Germans Petersen, Beckmann (’useful, but not outstandingly so’) and Theunert. The others were the choice of Education Branch. Although Birley had wanted someone else from Göttingen, Geoffrey Bird had insisted that Weizsäcker was ‘the right man’: he had made an outstanding contribution to the Commission’s work. ‘The choice of members was a real test of the Branch, from which, I feel, it emerged with great credit.’79 The next step was to discuss the Report’s recommendations with representatives of the ministries and the universities. It was not going to be an easy ride. Lindsay’s son wrote to him about what it was feared would happen: Several people have come to me. and said ‘do please tell your Herr Vater that if these proposals are just submitted for the consideration of the Universities, the Professors will build a solid front of reaction and fight tooth and nail to have them turned down. And they will succeed’.80

In January 1949, the report was discussed at a conference in Hamburg attended by ministers of education and Rektoren from the three western zones and chaired by Adolf Grimme, substituting for Heinrich Landahl, who was unwell. By this stage Grimme was the Director of Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, and he announced Birley’s imminent departure for Eton. He spoke of the importance of the meeting in the context of the history of cultural policy in the whole of Germany.81 The meeting focussed on the teaching staff, the notion of a studium generale, and the institution of university councils. The meeting started badly when Bürgermeister Brauer condemned the idea of the president of any university council being appointed ‘for life’. It turned out that he had understood the appointment would be until death rather than retiring age.82 This was not the first example of such linguistic confusion in the Zone. Weizsäcker introduced a discussion of the teaching body. There was initially considerable opposition to the proposal to create Studienprofessoren (‘professor tutors’ as the English translation has it), largely on the grounds that universities would thereby become mere vocational schools. The interventions of several Rektoren reinforced the conservative view of the status of the Ordinarius and the centrality of Wissenschaft. Ludwig Raiser argued that the status of professors would not be injured if they had assistants who could help with teaching, ‘nor would this destroy the unity of the university’. Weizsäcker compared the objectors to ‘harassed mothers of large families who rejected the offer of help in the house’. The conference should not quarrel about names but on the principle of introducing a new tier of university teacher. There was mixed reception to the proposal to introduce a studium generale. Theodor Litt of Bonn, the first speaker to be applauded, said that ‘the German universities had utterly failed in the past, and that the professors had more to learn than the students

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and needed the Studium Generale quite as badly.’ Minister Christine Teusch of Nordrhein-Westfalen regarded a studium generale as essential and said that it would involve a reform in secondary education. On the question of university councils there was similarly divided opinion. Kroll of Cologne – who referred not uncharacteristically to his university as ‘well-­nigh perfect’ – said that its Kuratorium fulfilled much the same function. Franz Boehm of Frankfurt argued that a university council ‘would be as much disliked by the outside public as the University undoubtedly was’. The Rektor of Munich, Walther Gerlach, said that it was bad enough having a Minister to deal with: it would be worse to have a President, ‘serving for life’. Raiser of Göttingen was applauded for a reasoned speech in favour of a university council. Grimme closed the meeting, saying that ‘almost every speaker had admitted, openly or by inference, that the German Universities needed reform’. Birley concluded that the meeting, the first of its kind in the Western Zones, showed how seriously the question of university reform was being taken. The task now was to try to persuade Ministers and universities to adopt some of the proposals as soon as possible. The atmosphere was ‘more favourable than we had dared to hope’ and it would be important in particular to capitalize on the good will of Frau Teusch and Ludwig Raiser, ‘both of whom spoke with real courage and committed themselves a long way.’83 The delegates left the meeting with the intention of keeping the discussion alive and in some cases encouraging the experiments at implementation called for by Birley. Soon there were signs that some of the Commission’s recommendations were being put into effect. Nordrhein-Westfalen was determined to be the first Land to implement some of the Report’s proposals. There were plans to introduce a Hochschulrat (University Council, whose President would be the Rektor) and a Hochschulbeirat (University Advisory Body) and to create a studium generale which would run concurrently with a student’s main studies. These developments had been supported by Frau Teusch in mid-February.84 Niedersachsen set up a small commission to make proposals for the introduction of Hochschulbeiräte, the creation of Studiendozenturen, and the incorporation of a studium generale into university regulations. By June 1949 a studium generale was being tried out at Bonn University and at the Technische Hochschule in Braunschweig. Meetings on the suggested way forward had taken place between the universities and the Länder authorities in all the universities of the Zone. By the winter semester of 1949–50, all students at the Technische Universität in Berlin were attending such courses in their first year. The first meeting of a Hochschulbeirat at Hamburg University was held on 15 June 1950, its members representing a wide range of public interests.85 It was clear that the Report was being taken very seriously. Jürgen Fischer, one-­time General Secretary of the Westdeutsche Rektorenkonferenz, felt that the spirit of the report could be traced in all the reform proposals that followed it, and he could show that of the fourteen main proposals of what he called the ‘magna carta’ of university reform efforts, ten would be adopted in full or in part, two would fail as a result of shortages, one would become redundant as things developed, and only one would be totally rejected (that on university councils).86 The Commission’s report was a very positive step in the direction of change, and it remains one of the most successful initiatives in the spirit of British policy in the Zone and one of which Birley was

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justifiably proud. This was what Birley was particularly good at: coming up with a big idea and inspiring people to go with it. Most importantly in this case, the commission was seen to be German. No criticisms were levelled at the presence of two foreign members, whose standing was such that their independence was beyond doubt. Lindsay emphasized the importance of the Commission’s statement of the function of a university: ‘the pursuit of truth through research and teaching in the service of man.’ The ‘worth’ of the pursuit of truth lay in such service to the wider community. The fragmentation of university study was to be remedied by the studium generale, and the ‘service of man’ was already being met in the technical universities. So keen was Lindsay to see universities in a new and different light that he could conclude: ‘If I had to choose between the American university system with its great variety and its frequent lapses from any standard, and the German with its exclusive occupation with a high standard in research, I should choose the former.’ 87

7

Culture, Adult Education, Women’s Affairs

Culture, libraries and the British Information Centres The rebuilding of German education and the steps taken towards the re-­education of the German people were among the brightest of the British achievements.1

Publishing, the press, radio, cinema and other aspects of cultural life When one is trying to alter the way people think one cannot afford to neglect the things they read and hear.2 The re-­invigoration of cultural life in the Zone was urgently desirable when the Occupation began, despite shortages of funds and materials, and it had been the subject of considerable forethought and provisional planning in London, in which Con O’Neill had played a leading part. Work had started as early as the end of 1942 and the beginning of 1943 in the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). A committee of representatives from the BBC, the PWE and the Ministry of Information had been formed and had produced plans for the press, radio, literature and film production. From 1944 there was joint planning with the Americans in the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF. Thereafter the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office concerned itself particularly with documentary and news-­related films. The Information Services Department of the Control Office was also actively engaged with the detail of cultural policy. In the Zone, responsibility for cultural affairs eventually lay with the CCG’s PRISC (Public Relations/Information Services Control) Group.3 The work of ISC was associated with the intentions of ‘re-­education’, but largely distinct from education in the sense of the responsibilities of Education Branch. Its Director was Michael Balfour who oversaw the censorship and licensing. (PR was largely responsible for information for the outside world about what was happening in Germany.) In each of the former corps areas and in Berlin Information Control Units (ICUs) were established, divided into departments dealing with press, publications, theatres, music, live entertainments and (initially) films. In addition, an intelligence and research section, working also on behalf of radio in Hamburg, surveyed listener, reader and audience responses.4 The war-­time development of policy for cultural affairs was bound up with activity in propaganda aimed at Germany, in which prominent individuals including Hugh

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Dalton (as Minister of Economic Warfare and Special Operations), Sefton Delmer (as a supreme practitioner of ‘black’ propaganda) and Richard Crossman (as Director, German Region, PWE since August, 1941), were engaged. Crossman (1907–74) had been broadcasting (in German) since the beginning of the War and became fully involved with black propaganda as the War progressed.5 During 1944–45 he served as Deputy Chief, PWD SHAEF. Newspapers, book publishing, theatre, concerts and film gradually started again in the Zone. Public libraries were opened on a new footing. There was a general hunger for culture of a kind denied to the population under the Nazis and a particular desire for reading matter. By March 1946, over 100 publishers had been granted licences: the works of many authors who had been proscribed under the Nazis were beginning to reappear, and books revealing life and thought in other countries were in particular demand.6 In 1946, the sixty-­year-old publisher Ernst Rowohlt began producing cheap copies of novels printed on thin paper in tabloid newspaper format (11.5 x 15 in.) on a rotary press, for fifty Pfennigs (as compared to the average price at the time for novels of six marks.) The first to appear were Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (In einem andern Land), Kurt Tucholsky’s Schloß Gripsholm, and Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes.7 The publisher’s statement to readers put this initiative in a wider context: There is a whole generation of young people who know nothing of the literature before 1933 and who have also heard no voices from abroad. [. . .] The libraries have been laid waste, books have been destroyed or burnt on bonfires. This is why we are trying to bring to readers – in large print runs and at a cheap price – some essential works of German and foreign literature, knowledge of which is necessary in order to learn to think again in a European context.8

Two new publications under British aegis had a considerable popular readership and were designed to introduce the ‘outside world’ to Germans deprived of information about other countries and about developments generally in politics and culture: the profusely illustrated magazine Blick in die Welt and the more soberly produced serial Neue Auslese. Following the example of Reader’s Digest, Neue Auslese only published in German translation articles and essays that had originally appeared elsewhere. Edited by Bruno Adler (1889–1968), who had worked for the German service of the BBC during the War, it appeared monthly and was published by ISC Branch in a joint enterprise with the Americans. The first two issues included pieces by George Bernard Shaw, Clement Attlee, Robert H. Jackson (US Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg), J.B. Priestley, the historian Denis Brogan and the novelist Rumer Godden.9 Up to the end of 1945, there were mostly ‘controlled’ newspapers, produced by the military authorities. An account in the British Zone Review described how such newspapers operated: German editors of controlled papers draw their news from controlled directives sent down to them from PR/ISC HQ via Press sub-­sections of Information Control Units; they have to carry as ‘mandatory’ occasional features and frequent news items of particular interest to Control Commission divisions or local Mil.

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Gov. authorities; and they have to submit all copy to a British officer before going to press.10

Licensed newspapers, though still partially controlled, had more freedom. After a slow start, forty local newspapers had been licensed by April 1947, according to plan but much later than in the US Zone. The very first newspaper to be licensed in the British Zone (by the Americans at this stage) was the four-­page weekly Aachener Nachrichten, on 24 January 1945. From its fifth issue – and following the wishes of the British authorities – it appeared with a subtitle to the effect that it was authorized by the military authorities.11 The first paper licensed by the British was the Braunschweiger Zeitung on 8 January 1946. Newspapers ran only to about four pages in small format, and owing to lack of newsprint they only appeared twice a week, and so there was nothing approaching normal press production. The licence involved agreeing to a set of rules, starting with a probation period involving policy and security censorship, after which there was ‘post-­publication scrutiny’, with no censorship but a check to ensure compliance with the rules.12 Die Welt, the first issue of which had appeared on 2 April 1946 (by which time a dozen licensed papers were in production), was the first zone-­wide newspaper to be published.13 It suffered, however, from being perceived by Germans as an organ of the British authorities, and its circulation, after a peak of one million copies, was to drop as a result.14 The subtitle of Die Welt originally read (present author’s translation) ‘Non-­ party newspaper for the whole British Zone. Published by Authorisation of the British Authorities’. There were later variations, until the subtitle was dropped altogether in July 1949. The journalist Sefton Delmer, whose work on creating a new newspaper (the stillborn Norddeutsche Zeitung) and newspaper agency in Hamburg came to an abrupt end after disagreements with Military Government, had warned in a policy paper against using the press to promote British ‘culture’: The projection of Britain will be in the hands of the British occupying forces. What impression the Germans form of Britain will depend on the behaviour of our troops and of the British Military Government personnel. Newspaper articles and radio talks in praise of Parliamentary Government, Cricket, Fox Hunting, Steak and Kidney Pudding, and Anthony Trollope will do little to alter the picture of Britain conveyed by our khaki ambassadors. Nor will it make the Germans any readier to behave as we want them to behave.15

Among the many magazines and periodicals to emerge in the Zone, Der Spiegel stands out. It was first published in Hannover on 4 January 1947, as a successor to the magazine Diese Woche. After a troublesome start in the hands of Military Government staff, when objections were made about its critical comments, Diese Woche was transferred to German ownership under its licensee Rudolf Augstein (1923–2002), who renamed it Der Spiegel. It proved so popular that it would sell for fifteen Reichsmark on the black market, its cover price being only one Reichsmark. Paper shortages meant that only 15,000 copies of each issue could be printed at the time, and so the magazine quickly gained scarcity value.16 Among publications with an educational interest were

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the monthly Die Sammlung, which began in October 1945 and covered ‘culture and education’,17 and the Göttinger Universitätszeitung, which started in December 1945. The first journal in comparative education, the International Education Review, which had been nazified under Alfred Bäumler, resumed as UNESCO’s International Review of Education in Hamburg only in 1955, under the distinguished comparativist Friedrich Schneider who had been ousted as co-­editor in 1934. ‘For Schneider and the new editors, it was as if the IER expired at the end of 1934, with the subsequent years under the Nazis erased from all memory.’18 Before the end of the War, selected British films were being processed and subtitled for eventual distribution in Germany. The first of such films were in German cinemas by September 1945, and by June of 1946 some thirteen were available, including Fanny by Gaslight and Blithe Spirit. Subtitling was gradually replaced by dubbing, Brief Encounter being the first film to have a German soundtrack,19 though reactions to this particular film were extremely negative. German film production, which had formerly been so innovative, started up again. The first film produced in the British Zone was the popular In Jenen Tagen (‘In Those Days’), the first so-­called Trümmerfilm (‘rubble film’), which dealt with questions of collective guilt through the experience of a motor car and its owners since 1933.20 The newsreel Welt im Film was produced by British and American authorities for compulsory screening in cinemas. It was controlled by a joint newsreel board which met in Munich. In 1947 it was reckoned that more than four million people went to the cinema each week in the British Zone, and so there was a huge audience which could be targeted. Welt im Film had started production before the end of the War, its first issue being released as early as 18 May 1945. Much of its has been described as ‘schoolmasterly’ and its contents as consisting of a lot of ‘sports, novelty or whimsical items’, but survey evidence showed it to have been acceptable to most cinema goers. That notwithstanding, it appears that less appreciative words were sometimes sung to the Welt im Film theme music: Haut sie raus, den Tommy Haut sie raus, den Ami Haut sie raus, den Russki Haut sie raus, das alliierte Pack!21

The main difficulty with Welt im Film was that the well-­intentioned objective of providing up-­to-date news was entangled with re-­educating the population and with what sounded like Allied propaganda. German audiences were used to newsreel propaganda, and so might be forgiven for an element of scepticism when watching ‘official’ material that was being compulsorily screened at a time when no alternatives were possible or permitted. Roger Smither sees films as being competently made reflections of policy rather than ‘valued instruments of its implementation’.22 Other aspects of cultural life such as theatre productions and concerts were also subject to the granting of licences through sections of the Cultural Relations Branch. Control was said to be necessary largely in order to ensure that artists had freedom of

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expression and were not subject to ‘latent remnants of Nazi ideology or of other warping influences’. Censorship was relaxed in early 1947 when a regime of post-­ production oversight was introduced. At the end of that year German advisory committees for theatre and concert events were established in each of the Länder, with one central book publishing committee for the whole of the Zone. Members of the general public formed a quarter of each committee, with the rest consisting of professionals representing employers and employees in the arts.23 Public broadcasting was an urgent priority, starting with Radio Hamburg, the only radio station operating in the Zone at the start of the Occupation. Within twelve hours of arrival in the city, on 4 May 1945, the British team responsible had started the station broadcasting again, initially relaying bulletins from the SHAEF transmitter in Luxembourg and German programmes from the BBC, as well as Military Government orders and announcements.24 It was renamed Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) on 22 September and from its early stages was generously assisted by the BBC, especially in the recruitment of staff with broadcasting experience and fluent German.25 In June, German staff were recruited to work on programme production. Hugh Carleton Greene was appointed to run the station, doing so from October 1946 until 1948. Greene (1910–87), a future Controller General of the BBC, was an inspired choice. His knowledge of Germany and the Germans was second to none, and he was a fluent speaker of German. He had worked from 1933 to 1939 first as a journalist in Munich and later as Berlin correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, and then with the German Service of the BBC during the War. When he was forced to leave Berlin in May 1939, he famously shouted as his train pulled away from Friedrichstraße station ‘Ich komme als Gauleiter zurück!’ (‘I’ll be back as Gauleiter!’). During his time in Hamburg Greene was successful in creating a positive sense of independence among the staff of NWDR. He recalled how people in Germany seemed long afterwards to remember his statement ‘I am here to make myself superfluous’.26 That sense of independence required the absence of any ‘ “democratic control” of broadcasting by some form of supervisory committee representing the party machines’: supported by Military Government, Greene insisted on this principle and so the political parties were excluded from any influence over the control of broadcasting so that NWDR achieved ‘a position of independence hitherto unknown in German broadcasting’.27 The station was to operate on the lines of the BBC Home Service and to tread very carefully where ‘re-­education’ was concerned: To retain its audience and to build effectively a new tradition in German broadcasting, Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk must not be too obviously concerned with the re-­ education of the audience, or even with any obvious attempt to raise its cultural standards. Entertainment will not be too obviously ‘edifying’, and information not too obviously ‘instructional’. Excessive attention by Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk to the political and historical re-­education of the Germans will destroy its credibility, and it follows that overt presentation of ‘world’ and ‘British’ views of current and past events should be conveyed to the German public mainly by other means.

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The re-­education of the German people is the direct, though by no means exclusive, concern of the BBC German Service. The projection of Britain in the widest sense of the term, must be one of the main tasks of any BBC service to Europe, and will contribute directly to the end of re-­education. To function efficiently even as an instrument of Military Government, and much more as a long-­term means of influencing the German mind, Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk must not unduly increase the proportion of British official announcements and relays from outside Germany to programmes originated by Germans on the spot. Control Commission policy, for instance, should be explained by Germans; and regular relays, as opposed to occasional relays of special programmes, should generally be avoided.28

Listed among the features of BBC German programmes were ‘Talks and discussions intended to re-­introduce Germans to the values and traditions of Western Christian civilisation, and to correct past German distortions of the facts of history’. As a result the BBC was to become ‘associated with pedagogic “re-­education” and “guilt mobilisation” ’, whereas NWDR was perceived by many Germans as ‘the authentic voice of the vanquished under occupation’.29 The BBC’s German Service broadcasts were introduced with ‘Here is England’: a bizarre choice, given that the broadcasts of William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) to Britain during the War began with the chilling phrase repeated three times, ‘Germany calling’. During the War BBC broadcasts to Germany had been regarded as a trusted source of news by those tuning in to them clandestinely: it had been BBC policy to broadcast bad news first in order to establish a reputation for truthful statement.30 The standing of the BBC in this regard gave Greene and his team a distinct advantage in initiating NWDR. Greene’s successor would be Adolf Grimme, of whom Greene thought very highly.31 NWDR could count five million listeners by 1951, and was to become fully independent in 1955. In addition to all of this activity, a succession of visits from prominent individuals from all spheres of life outside of Germany, including those in the arts, added to the picture of cultural life in the Zone. Though there is a distinct impression that some of these individuals were ‘swanning’ their way through Germany for personal advancement, many made a lasting impression on their audiences and served to reinvigorate thinking in their special areas. Among them was T.S. Eliot.32

Public libraries The German public library was the victim of its Nazi past.33 It was in line with British re-­education policy to ensure that the people of Germany had access to reading material, especially of a kind that had been denied to them during the Nazi period. Books – particularly those by Jewish authors – had been publicly burned in grotesque ceremonies like that conducted in the Opernplatz in Berlin in 1933, giving credence to Heine’s fateful warning that where books are burned

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in the end people are burned (‘wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen’). Heine had seen books being burned in Bonn in 1819: his works disappeared in German anthologies published after the rise of Hitler. Strong arguments were made for making public libraries available again, and they began to be reopened at the beginning of September 1945. Library officers were sent from London to help with the process. Order No.4 of the Control Council, published on 13 May 1946, required owners of circulating libraries, bookshops and publishing houses to hand over to the occupying authorities (a) All books, pamphlets, magazines, files of newspapers, albums, manuscripts, documents, maps, plans, song and music books, cinematographic films and magic lantern slides (including everything intended for children of all ages), the contents of which include Nazi propaganda, including Nazi ‘racial’ theories and incitements to aggression, as well as those containing propaganda directed against the United Nations; (b) Everything which contributes to military training and education or to the maintenance and development of war potential, including school text books and teaching material for all types of military educational institutions, as well as various instructions, directions, statutes, maps, diagrams, plans, etc. for all types of troops and branches of the services.34

In addition, those responsible for state and municipal libraries, heads of universities and other higher education institutions, research bodies and all kinds of schools were ordered to remove all such literature ‘having collected it in complete order in specially allocated places, together with the relevant cards from the card index system of the library’. Control Council Order No.4 had had a long gestation period. It had been mooted in February 1946 and drafts were produced. When Riddy got wind of what was being proposed, namely the destruction of virtually all publications, he wrote in some dudgeon to the Deputy Chief of IA&C Division, complaining of ‘a shocking lack of coordination in the workings of our organisation of control’. Education Branch had never been consulted about the matters with which the Order was concerned, and the principles contained in it were ‘in absolute contradiction’ to original British Policy as found in Directive No.8: ‘You will not, as a general principle, require the withdrawal or removal of any books in the libraries of Universities.’35 The effects of the Order would be lamentable: It will mean [. . .] that no German scholar in the future will be able to have access to many of the most valuable original documents of Nazism, and therefore no authentic, well-­documented criticism of the Nazi régime can be expected from the Germans. The result will be to defeat the very purpose of our Occupation, since it is surely accepted on all sides that ultimately the re-­education of the Germans must come from the Germans themselves, even though they be directed and controlled by the Allies.36

Riddy’s annoyance was justifiable on grounds of the needs of future scholarship alone. But there was a further problem, and one which particularly worried the Americans.

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Purging libraries on the basis of blacklisted titles and instructing people as to what they might read smacked of precisely the intellectually unacceptable attitudes and policies of totalitarian regimes. This paradox – one among many during the Occupation – was never properly resolved and it caused many a headache for CCG officers committed to encourage democracy in cultural life. At an earlier stage, Con O’Neill expressed concern at reading a Reuter’s report of 17 October 1945 on the purging of books from public libraries. It read: No books by authors who enjoyed patronage under the Nazi regime are now available in public libraries within the British zone, and a German Committee under Allied orders is producing a black list of German and foreign authors whose works may in future be banned. Writers whose works are most likely to be suppressed include the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Hans Zoeberlein who wrote ‘Belief in Germany’ and Oswald Spengler who is best known for his ‘Decline of the West’. All three wrote on strongly nationalist themes likely to be repugnant to the Allies. It is probable that the standard textbook on strategy, [C]arl von Clausewitz’s ‘On War’ will also be banned. In all, some 2,200 authors, novelists, writers of children’s books and on cultural, scientific and political subjects may be placed on the black list.37

O’Neill reacted with characteristic clarity: We have always taken the view that the best way to make Germans go on reading undesirable books is to attempt to impose an absolute ban on their circulation or possession. Such a ban can never be effective, and merely gives the books an interest they would not otherwise have. Preventing the publication or sale of such books is another matter; it is the witch-­hunt against books already published which seems to us mistaken. This view was embodied in one of the old Policy Directives – see paragraph 8 of Directive No.27. I myself would not ban ‘Mein Kampf ”, let alone Clausewitz.38

This resulted in an exchange of letters and memoranda to clarify the situation, which was in line with O’Neill’s first paragraph. It seems that a list of books which the Germans had rejected as ‘objectionable’, acting on British officers’ description of the types of books that should be discarded, had been confusedly regarded as a British ‘black list’.39 A clarification came a few days later, in response to a Four Power agreement apparently to exchange ‘black lists’ of books: We possess no ‘black list’ and it is not our present purpose to issue one. The reasons for this are: (a) the practical impossibility of compiling a list which would be inclusive of all objectionable books. (b) we believe the principle of banning or prohibiting the reading of specified books is psychologically unsound. (c) the impossibility of enforcing banning regulations.40

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Any kind of purging or banning was problematic even at this early stage of the Occupation, and ran counter to Policy Directive 27, as O’Neill had pointed out and Robertson now confirmed. Paragraph 8 of that Directive stated: Confiscation of copies of objectionable books after they have reached the hands of booksellers, libraries and members of the public may be necessary in particularly serious cases but should be most sparingly resorted to, owing to the difficulty of effective enforcement, and to the fact that measures of this kind are liable to defeat their own object, by calling attention to and arousing interest in any work so treated, thus aggravating the mischief they are designed to prevent.41

He suggested either deleting the text altogether or adding: Germans may, however, be encouraged to remove books of certain specified categories from public or private libraries and bookshops, and if necessary be instructed to remove them from public libraries and bookshops.

At a time when clarity was needed, this was an unfortunate example of muddle and confusion. *  *  * The Volksbüchereien, typically small local libraries, had suffered like others from bomb damage, though in some places their stocks were relatively intact. Bielefeld’s public library lost 50,000 books, Essen lost 163,00 volumes in its main and branch libraries. More damage was done by invading troops and through vandalism.42 Large numbers of unacceptable books had to be removed, though the procedures for doing so were hampered by the fact that librarians had become unemployed as a result of denazification. (It was not forgotten that many librarians had previously been dismissed as a result of nazification.) Three times as many applicants as there were places available had applied to train as librarians.43 The Westdeutsche Büchereischule started in Cologne in the summer of 1946; special courses were available in Berlin between 1946 and 1948; and from November 1948 there were courses for librarians running in Hamburg. It was understandable that more attention should be paid to public libraries than to specialist academic libraries: their potential to influence at least some of the population – even if only ten per cent – was far greater, as had been evident in such libraries under National Socialism.44 The poet Stephen Spender was more familiar with Germany than most observers and, like W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, had intimate knowledge of German cultural life in the 1930s. His accounts of post-­war Germany, however, caused considerable irritation in Education Branch, as was the case with his involvement with the Schulemann affair; having this ‘tall, shambling, red-­faced, innocent’45 loose in the Zone was an unwelcome distraction to its hard-­pressed staff who had to deal on a daily basis with so many urgent practical problems. It is something of a mystery why Spender should have been asked to undertake, under the aegis of PID, investigations first of

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German intellectual life and the universities, and later of German libraries, the latter of which he did with stupendous lack of success in September 1945. But he had been determined to go to Germany and had succeeded, at his second attempt, to persuade the Control Commission to employ him. On arrival in Germany he made for the officers’ mess in Benrath, where he enjoyed ‘excellent claret with dinner, liqueurs’.46 Unrelenting problems with the car he was assigned prevented visits in his schedule, and he was quite unable to complete the task. His heart in any case was not in it, and it is clear that this – and his previous visit – provided him more with personal opportunities to renew contact with his friend Ernst Robert Curtius and to assemble impressions for publication than for serious CCG business. ‘I could never make up my mind’, he wrote, ‘whether I approved of the policy of “purging” libraries of Nazi books’.47 And his approach to the undertaking was extraordinarily casual: The German library system is very complicated, and I never fully grasped it, as, owing to the fact that my car was nearly always broken down, I was not able to carry out my work and my inquiries into libraries at all satisfactorily. Also I lost interest in it rather soon.48

Spender recalled that the librarians were ‘not difficult to deal with’. He quoted (in differing versions in different texts) an assistant librarian in Aachen saying ‘with that air of ambiguous complicity which was characteristic of the more intelligent German officials’49 that she understood what was required, viz. removing the Nazi books and making them available only to students for historical research – just as books by socialists and Jews had been removed under the Nazis and made accessible only to students writing anti-­socialist and anti-Semitic texts.50 *  *  * All of these developments, though not formally part of education policy as overseen by Education Branch, provided something of a re-­orientation in thinking for those seizing the opportunities that they offered.

The British Information Centres The centres were used extensively and no doubt made a lasting contribution to Anglo-German understanding.51 One of the most significant developments, designed specifically (though not exclusively) with the needs of the adult population in mind, was the introduction of Information Centres. In March 1946, it was proposed that ‘information rooms’ be set up in the British Zone. An American library had opened in the Kleiststrasse in Berlin at the beginning of the month, containing books in English published in the United States and used mainly for reference. Visiting it in mid-March, a British officer reported that it was ‘a bona fide effort to help the Germans and was not attempting to put across American propaganda’.52 Propaganda in the sense of a ‘systematic scheme for the

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propagation of a particular dogma or practice’53 was, however, precisely what the centres throughout occupied Germany were to be about: promoting the way of life in the countries of the occupiers as part of the process of re-­education. In May 1946 when the question of free access to the centres was being discussed, it was argued that paying for access was ‘a slight come-­back to the charge that the whole idea is merely overt propaganda (which it is!!!)’.54 Following the American initiative, arrangements were put in place for film and photographic material on British cultural life, the British Empire, everyday life in Britain, and ‘Britain at war and Britain’s bomb damage’ to be collected with the help of the British Council and sent to Berlin. Later a production unit comprising draughtsmen, layout artists, designers, photographers, and translators was to be set up in the Zone to produce displays and exhibitions using material sent from London. An exhibition in the first British centre was opened in the Schlüterstrasse in Berlin on 27 March by Major-General W.H.A. Bishop, Chief of the PR/ISC Group. ‘I will try to speak in German’, he noted in the margin of his text. He explained that the Berlin information room was the start of the experiment and that it was proposed to establish similar rooms in the principal towns of Germany. They would provide a picture of life in Britain and in the countries of the British Commonwealth. Facets of British life displayed in the first exhibition were the British countryside, the homes of the British people from the cottages to the historic houses. Trade and industry, agriculture, education, and the British Broadcasting Corporation are also illustrated. You will see, too, pictures of the destruction which the war brought to London and other British towns, as it has to many of the countries of the world. You will see pictures illustrating the effect of the world shortage of food on England, pictures of British housewives who are now drawing a smaller ration than during the war, standing in a queue to draw the small ration for themselves and their families.

Bishop expressed the hope that the initiative would help to break down the isolation enforced on the German people by the Nazis and contribute to ‘understating between all nations of the world’.55In early April he was describing the aim of the information rooms as ‘not so much to put across British propaganda, but to provide the German people with a window from which they can see something of life under British democracy.’ By this stage the Americans had eight libraries in their zone and in addition twelve smaller reading rooms. Bishop argued that there was ‘no better or cheaper way of spreading British culture and introducing knowledge of the British way of life.’ His plan was to start libraries and reading rooms in Berlin, Hamburg, Lübeck, Kiel, Hannover, Braunschweig, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Bonn, Göttingen and elsewhere – perhaps a total of twelve.56 A little later he was reporting that Kingsley Martin had offered 500 complimentary copies of the New Statesman for the centres and that A.P. Wadsworth, editor of the Manchester Guardian, would provide 500 copies weekly of his newspaper.57 Hynd had reported in the House of Commons in November 1945 that it was common policy within the Zone that all kinds of English newspapers be ‘handed over to English-­speaking Germans for their education’.58

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By 23 April a considerable number of centres of all kinds had opened in large towns, and those of Stadt- and Landkreise. At the same time the aim of the Information Centres (as they were henceforth to be known) was stated to be: (a) To provide factual knowledge of Britain and the British way of life which is easily accessible to Germans of all classes. (b) To stress the free nature of the British Commonwealth of Nations. [It was pointed out that the status of a dominion needed constant emphasis: ‘colonies and protectorates, being more complicated subjects, will not be dealt with, especially as any reference to “Colonies” is a sore point with Germans’.] (c) In a degree to make known to Germans the progress and achievements of the Control Commission in the British Zone of Germany and the British Sector of Berlin.

Newspapers could be provided from messes in the Zone, but not on a reliable basis. In mid-May Lamont of the Berlin Information Control Unit reported that: ‘what we get is very much “what is going”. 601 Mess may give us a “Times” one day and wrap the Director General’s lunch in the next issue.’59 In June only ten messes out of forty had replied to a request to draw up a list of all newspapers available for redistribution to Information Centres. The British Zone Review reported in October 1946 that on the streets of Hamburg or Berlin, a British daily newspaper could be sold for as much as five shillings, such was the appetite for news from outside of Germany.60 John Hynd told the House of Commons in October that he had selected a wide range of newspapers and periodicals for display in the Information Centres: The Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, Daily Graphic, Observer, Daily Herald, News Chronicle, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Worker, Manchester Guardian, Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Nineteenth Century, New Statesman and Nation, Illustrated London News, Picture Post, Punch, Horizon, Geographical Magazine, Catholic Herald, Times Literary Supplement, Spectator, Sphere, Lancet and Church Times.61 Die Brücke (‘The Bridge’) was the term that came to be used for the centres, collectively and individually; it symbolized their role in creating links and connections, in ‘bridging the gap’ between Germany and the outside world. It seems that this overarching title was used first in Hamburg. It had ‘great poetic appeal’, according to a report of August 1946: The average German does not know and no one can tell him whether it is a bridge joining Britain to Germany in the expectation of better things or merely a bridge leading from his present despair; time will show what kind of bridge it will be. Meanwhile, this title captures the imagination and [. . .] directs German thought westwards.62

Die Brücke was also the title of a magazine containing translations into German of articles originally published in the British press which the Information Services Division produced for the Centres.63 It started in September 1946, when 200 examples were printed every two weeks. Later it appeared weekly, and by January 1948 7,000 copies were being produced. In July 1948 production was at the level of 9,000.

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Figure 7.1  ‘Die Brücke, Cologne: ‘Die weltumspannende Lesehalle’ (‘The world-­wide reading room’). [Source: BZR, 2 (4), 27 September 1947, 4.]

Opening an exhibition at Die Brücke in Berlin in December, Brigadier W.R.N. Hinde spoke of a bridge ‘over which knowledge, ideas, hopes and inspiration are transported to Germany from Britain and the rest of the world’. Though he hoped that a regular supply of newspapers and periodicals would be possible, he pointed out to his audience – in line with the aim to remind the German populations of the problems also endured in Britain – that British publishers were facing practical difficulties: ‘No nation can recover quickly in the field of human thought what the wastefulness of war has destroyed.’64 Robertson wrote to the Permanent Secretary of the Control Office in mid-May 1946 to ask for financial support for the Centres: Preparations are being made for the institution in the British Zone of Germany, and in the British Sector of Berlin, of British Information Centres. It is intended to institute these Centres in towns with a population of 50,000 or over, including all those which have Universities and technical high schools [= Technische Hochschulen]. The target is 60, which it is hoped to reach within the next six months. Everything possible is being done to save money and manpower by employing Germans throughout, and by collecting most of the English reading

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matter from CCG and BAOR messes. It will, however, be necessary to arrange a supply of certain publicity material, periodicals and books, essential to make the Information Centres a success. As you are aware, there is a widespread demand amongst Germans to inform themselves regarding the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth. This was illustrated by the reactions of the people of Berlin at the Information [Centre] recently opened in the British Sector, which is still drawing paying visitors at the rate of between 600 and 1,000 a day. It is most desirable that this interest should be exploited, and everything possible done to provide a high level of display. Photographic exhibitions would be built round themes such as the British Parliamentary system, the life of a British housewife, a Londoner’s day, life in an industrial community, the British Transport system, school children at work and at play, British adult education, The Dominions, British social services, and the BBC. The material necessary for such displays can only be obtained in London, where it is provided by such organisations as the Central Office of Administration, the British Council, and various public bodies and corporations.65

Robertson went on to point out the importance of the Centres to what he called ‘our scheme for re-­education’. The exhibitions seem to have been put together as professionally as possible in the circumstances. But there were criticisms. A letter from G.W. Houghton in the Control Office to the chief of PR/ISC, Berlin concerning an exhibition has ‘execrable English’ scrawled over it, and – quite rightly – ‘eh?’ against a sentence intimating that a small exhibition on ‘English Parliament Today’ was being planned.66 Later the same better informed hand has written ‘1707!’ against ‘English’ in the title – which was still being used by F.N. Soulsby – for this exhibition.67 That those responsible – at least three officers in this case – should think that there was such a thing as an ‘English’ parliament is difficult to comprehend. There were three types of Centre. Category A Centres contained exhibition and reading rooms, a library, a studio cinema and ‘facilities for full information, instructional and cultural programmes’. Those in Category B had exhibition and reading rooms; and Category C Centres had single reading rooms. Finding suitable buildings for the Centres was a considerable problem, and as a result most early Centres were of the Category C type. But progress was rapid: some forty Centres were in operation by the end of 1946, and over sixty by the middle of 1947.68 In April 1947 the Control Office was being asked about the future position of the Centres. At this stage there were about twenty Centres in the US Zone, established on a long-­term basis on the understanding that they would remain after the end of the Occupation. Although they did not cover such a wide field as those in the British Zone, it was argued, they were well equipped with ‘an extensive variety of literature of which the Germans take every advantage’. With the fusion of the two Zones, future policy should be more closely allied.69 The purposes of the Information Centres were described as twofold:

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(a) To enable the German people to bridge the gap, created by the War, between Germany and the outside world, thus enabling members of the German public to know and appreciate the way of life in Western Democratic countries. (b) To enable the German people to understand opinion in Great Britain today, and so to appreciate the policy underlying British action in Germany.70

Centres in smaller towns attracted proportionally more visitors than those in large cities, where there were other attractions available, and the statistical evidence on frequency of usage tends to show that more visitors came to the heated Centres when the weather was colder. They were certainly cosy places of refuge from the depredations of everyday life in the Zone. It was argued on the one hand that: ‘It is not against the object of the Centre if it is used by Frau Bloch for no other reason but that her feet are aching after standing in a queue for two hours. Even if she does not consciously look at anything in the Centre, the seed may nevertheless be sown.’71 On the other hand Lamont emphasized three weeks later – not doubt toeing the official line – that the Centres would definitely not cater for random visitors sheltering from the rain or resting their feet. A report on the Centres in August 1946 argued against the creation of a ‘club’ atmosphere by providing armchairs: ‘Long narrow tables with small upright chairs would accommodate more people and provide less inducement to somnolence’.72 The Hamburg Centre was opened in July 1946. By 1949 the number of visitors each day had reached 1,200; by March 1950 the figure was 2,020. There were four lectures a week, attended on average by 120 people. In the early years, topics for the lectures included the history of The Times, women’s affairs in England, English expectations of local government, and aspects of British economic policy since 1930.73 By March 1948 the Centre was experiencing difficulty in accommodating the numbers wishing to take advantage of it. There was room for some 600 visitors, but over 900 were crowding into its limited space, especially during the peak hours of 10.00 a.m. to 12.00 noon and 3.00 to 4.00 p.m. The Centre served as a cinema, giving three shows a day for schoolchildren who could choose their own films (attendance during February was 17,492), as a place where people could listen to radio broadcasts from Norddeutscher Rundfunk and the BBC German service, and as a lecture room used regularly by women’s organizations and youth groups. It had two reading rooms and a library of over 2,500 books.74 The cost was twenty Pfennigs per visit for use of the cinema and reading rooms only, or three Reichsmarks if visitors wished to use the library and take out books. Some 800 people had taken advantage of such full access. Students, schoolchildren and former prisoners of war and certain other ‘deserving cases’ were allowed free access. (There was no charge in Schleswig-Holstein, since 47 per cent of the population were refugees.75) Eleven British newspapers were being flown out every day and there was a wide selection of magazines and periodicals. The first Category A Centre in Westphalia/North Rhine was opened on 25 August 1947 by the Regional Commissioner. This Centre had British newspapers and periodicals, technical and cultural magazines, American, Swiss, French, and Dutch newspapers and magazines, a lending library of more than 1,000 books and sixteen mm cinema projectors. It was visited by 1,800 people in the first two-­and-a-­half days

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Table 7.1  Monthly attendance figures, 1946–47, Die Brücke. 1946

1947

July: 37,000 Aug: 35,000 Sept: 55,000 Oct: 114,000 Nov: 119,000 Dec: 117,000 Nov: 119,000 Dec: 117,000

Jan: 113,000 Feb: 105,000 Mar: 125,000 Apr: 156,000 May: 163,000 Jun: 171,000 July: 196,000 Aug: 181,000

Figure 7.2  ‘Das Gerücht’ (‘Rumour’.) Suggestion for a poster contrasting the ‘rumour of the week’ with ‘the actual facts’. [Source: FO1056/110.]

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and 250 books were loaned out.76 Total monthly attendance figures for the period July 1946 to August 1947 had risen steadily: The attraction of the centres was indisputable. Films were very popular (especially for school groups), newspapers were devoured and books (especially fiction) were avidly borrowed. (In mid April 1948, it was recorded that Hugh Trevor Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler was in great demand in every Centre in Nordrhein-Westfalen.) The Centres clearly had a propaganda function in terms of presenting Britain as an exemplar of parliamentary democracy and freedom of the individual, British institutions being displayed as successful models of a kind that might be emulated, even if this was deniable. They provided too an opportunity to present the work of the Control Commission, to explain why measures had been taken that affected the lives of the population. And in this connection they could help to deal with rumour. One proposal to counter misinformation was for a poster repeating the ‘rumour of the week’ together with ‘the actual facts’. (Figure 7.2) (The churches were also enjoined to quell rumours: Cardinal Frings agreed in June 1946 to help, through messages from pulpits, to scotch the rumour that food in the British Zone was being exported to England.77 More goods were being rationed in Britain in 1947 than during the War.) The Americans developed their Amerika Häuser and the French their Instituts Français.78 Eventually British centres were opened in the US and French zones,79 and the notion of setting up cultural centres on a permanent basis was firmly established. In January 1948, it was reckoned that some 2.9 million visitors had used Die Brücke since the opening of the first Centre in the spring of 1946.80 During 1948, some 4,000–5,000 books per month were sent to the coordinating office of the Centres.81 In October 1949 it was reported that the Educational Adviser would henceforth take over responsibility for the Centres, with a consequential reallocation of personnel and finances.82 The British Centre in Hamburg was attracting more, and younger, people using it for the first time in its new building in 1950: this was a ‘noticeable change for the better’.83

Adult education The [German] adult education specialists [. . .] were not persuaded to accept the nostrums of a self-­styled democratic English liberal tradition. By some alchemy of self-­determination, resistance and receptivity they evolved their own structures.84 While the British authorities in Germany regarded attention to German youth as an early priority, it was also recognized from the initial stages of the Occupation that the education of adults was a critically important aspect of re-­education policy. Schoolchildren and students had been ideologically conditioned by Nazism and needed to be taught differently and to develop independence of thought and action. Young people outside of formal education were also in need of support and encouragement: together with full-­time students they were subject to the Jugendamnestie (youth amnesty) and so excused the rigours of denazification.85

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Adults had been responsible for voting for the Nazi Party and would be voting again in local and zonal elections during the Occupation and later when it came to choosing a new German government. It was deemed vital to put in place measures to encourage democratic thinking and behaviour among an adult population that had seen much suffering in the 1920s and 30s, during the War, and now amid the ruins, and that had been subject to long periods of indoctrination. Fritz Blättner depicted the extent of the problem in a table first published in 1946 (see Figure 7.3 below). In his very simple analysis, those born after 1900 are shown to have been exposed to the politicized youth movement (politisierte Jugendbewegung) over prolonged periods. Only the generation born in 1895 (aged 55+ in 1946) would have avoided such exposure. For Blättner, the critical age range is fifteen to twenty, shown in his table with cross-­hatching. The generation educated before 1920 was influenced by the older ‘individualistic and romantic’ youth movement (here simply Jugendbewegung). Thirty-­year-­olds were already shaped by NS ideology in 1933; the twenty-­five-year-olds had had ten to twelve years of NS education through school and the HJ or BDM; twenty-­year-olds had had a similar education for six to ten years; and fifteen-­year-olds had had their education so far under NS and HJ/BDM influence, but were noch offen (still open to influence). Blättner’s analysis was a necessary reminder of the scale of the problems facing those dealing both with youth issues and with the future of adult education. Germany had a long tradition of adult education, especially through the institution of the Volkshochschule, designed for the (advanced) education of adults. This type of provision for adults was rooted in the Danish Folkehøjskole as conceived in the 1830s by the philosopher/theologian and educationist N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872). The rationale of such an institution in Grundtvig’s time lay in the desire to educate adults for their part in society, and it became a model for other Nordic countries

Figure 7.3  Generational exposure to the politicized organization of youth.86

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while also inspiring its manifestation in Germany. In addition there were adult evening classes and a variety of clubs and societies, especially those specifically designed for women. The Nazis – inevitably – disbanded the Volkshochschulen. After 1945, adult education experienced considerable expansion: in 1932, for example, there had been little more than 200 evening adult education centres (Abendvolkshochschulen) in Germany; by 1956 there were more than a thousand in the young Federal Republic.87 Towards the end of the Occupation one of the key players in adult education in the Zone, C.I. Knowles,88 described the British conception of adult education for the Zone. It was the further education of the individual after formal school-­days are over, made necessary by the enormous expansion of the horizon of the present-­day world, and the need to create a human being who shall be able to develop his personality to the full while at the same time realising his responsibility to and playing his full part in the work of society.

Voluntary participation was a prerequisite: while the state had an important role, adult education must fall outside the general educational work of ministries, whose task was to inspire and guide and offer financial support.89 The role of the state, at least in the form of newly appointed German officials, was perceived rather differently at the beginning of the Occupation. An early policy document defined what the functions of adult education should be: (a) to fill the gap in the general cultural background, in particular of the younger generation, whose sole education and emotional training took place under the Nazis; (b) to give all adults, through free discussion, a chance of sound reorientation – spiritual and political; (c) to give adults sufficient sound mental equipment to prevent them from foundering in the spiritual anarchy which may quite easily develop under present conditions.90

The German authorities would be responsible for organizing adult education and for achieving these aims, advised by local committees. It was hoped that the measures would ensure democratic and ‘realistic’ adult education. But most people would not have experienced any adult education, or if they did, it will have been before 1933 in quite different circumstances. Present German officials, uncertain about how Military Government will react to their suggestions, will put forward ‘timid and backward-­ looking’ proposals. So far there had been evidence of a poverty of ideas and of a ‘suspicious’ desire to please. Suggestions had been limited to English classes and lectures on Goethe’s lyric poetry: Such self-­centred discussions, carried on without proper contact with ideas from the outside world, would encourage certain attitudes of mind among the Germans which would not necessarily be in the interests of Allied Control. There will

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inevitably be much discussion of the internal problems of Germany. Unless these are placed in their proper perspective, i.e. alongside a knowledge of the problems of other countries, it is more than likely that the result will be a mood of escapism and muddle-­headed and dangerous isolationism.

It was essential therefore to make use of talent available within the garrisons and among CCG staff to introduce ‘outside’ ideas, including those ’from our point of view’. Subjects covered would not be political: they should touch on art, music, general social problems and experiments, educational theory and philosophy, literature and ‘possibly’ history. It should be said that it is fundamental to the whole suggestion that the scheme should not be forced upon the German authorities, but that facilities should be granted to them if they make a spontaneous request. This has already [October 1945] been forthcoming.

Education Control Instruction No.21 of 26 November 1945, ‘Resumption of Adult Education’, had prescribed arrangements for the immediate implementation of Military Government policy. It began: 1. Wherever local conditions permit, German Authorities should be required forthwith to submit plans for the resumption of Adult Education at an early date. 2. There is no intention to dictate the lines along which Adult Education should develop in Germany. Nevertheless a form must be adopted at this stage which, while allowing the freedom necessary for healthy development, will permit of adequate control. 3. The above points should be made quite clear to German Authorities who should be told what form short-­term proposals should take in order to meet with Mil Gov approval.91

Local committees should be established to consider the need for adult education in their areas. Their function should be ‘to initiate and receive requests from interested voluntary organizations for any form of Adult Education. The [committees] should, in fact, act as a sieve or sponsoring body to Mil Gov Education Control Officers’. Control would always be applied with a light touch. For example, the material for lectures, talks, and debates which formed part of local committee schemes approved by Military Government would not be subject to ‘pre-­censorship control’, but it would be important for Education Control Officers to keep in touch with what was happening. The first committee and the first post-­war Volkshochschule were established in October 1945 in Springe, near Hannover.92 In July 1946, a small team of His Majesty’s Inspectors, led by Mr T. Jack, reported on adult education in the British Zone and in the British Sector of Berlin following a tour of three-­and-a-­half weeks. Their report provides something of a snapshot – albeit rather incomplete – of provision fifteen months after the War ended. The HMIs’

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recommendations start by describing the ‘sombre’ impression that Germany made on visitors. The catastrophic physical destruction was not the only kind of breakdown: There is the broken humanity as well, the ‘bombed out’, the émigrés, the deportees, the ex-Wehrmacht; there is a great dearth of good administrators and teachers; and there is the general breakdown of social, economic, political and cultural life. As a consequence of all these breakdowns, the Germans, outwardly quiet and apathetic, are in a highly emotional state. Their past has brought disaster; their present is appalling; have they a future, or is there nothing to look forward to but chaos and dark night?93

‘Fumbling and limited’ though the Volkshochschule was, it constituted the biggest contribution to adult education and needed sympathetic and constructive control: a ‘mental blood transfusion’ was required. There were four unexceptional recommendations in the Inspectors’ thirty-­seven-page report: (1) a flow of competent and well-­qualified lecturers from Britain was needed, perhaps in association with the universities of the Zone, who might be awakened to their extra-­mural responsibilities; (2) German administrators and teachers should be allowed to visit Britain to learn about British provision for adult education; (3) a small British team should be seconded to work alongside German organizers and teachers in the Zone; (4) the supply of books and paper for books was important. At this stage ‘a great many’ Kreise still lacked adult education committees, and where they existed there was initially a reluctance to include women in them (this was now ‘being overcome’). But there were encouraging signs of growth. The Report draws attention to expansion in Berlin, where development was the most systematic: in 1932 there was only one Volkshochschule in the city, with 10,000 students; now there were twenty in the four sectors, with 73,000 students. In the British Zone there were fifty-­five Volkshochschulen, with 50,000 students. The Hannover region had the largest number of institutions. Though adult education was also provided by trades unions, universities, and the churches, most development came through the Volkshochschulen with their evening lectures and courses in liberal studies, together with some vocational training. Courses in foreign languages (especially English), in literature and art, and in religion, were most popular; those in economics and politics were much less attractive. Forty-­ one per cent of the students in Berlin were studying languages; 40 per cent in Hannover were taking courses in art and literature. The mostly part-­time staff was predominantly male (80 per cent in the North Rhine region and in Hamburg). More detail on what was covered in adult education classes can be gleaned from an account of activity in the British sector of Berlin in January 1946. There were classes in all districts, and especially in Wilmersdorf, where information was available on attendance between July and October 1945. In July the average attendance per lecture had been ten; by November it was thirty-­five. Those attending were mainly ‘intellectual workers’ and ‘non-­manual workers’ (30 per cent and 33 per cent respectively). Fifteen per cent were ‘businessmen’, 15 per cent ‘without occupation’, and 7 per cent were manual workers. Attendance by subject revealed a distinct preference for English classes. Among the subjects listed were:

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English (1,850) Literature (1,311) Sciences (712) Philosophy (608) History (297) Russian(227) Law (167) French (116) Economics (31)94

In Hamburg over 50 per cent of the students were men, and in Hannover 58 per cent; in Berlin most (60 per cent) were women. Age distribution figures showed that students aged under twenty-­five constituted 60 per cent of the Volkshochschule population in Hamburg, 50 per cent in Hannover, and 36 per cent in the British sector of Berlin. In Hamburg 26 per cent of the students were ‘commercial and office employees’. Some 9 per cent were manual workers and 5 per cent ‘housewives’. In Berlin 17 per cent were manual workers and 43 per cent ‘blackcoated’ workers. (‘Blackcoated’ workers, in the usage of the time, were those who would now be designated ‘white-­ collar’ workers.) In Bonn 8 per cent of the students were manual workers; in Aachen 45 per cent were ‘manual and blackcoated’ workers. What can be deduced from these sketchy figures is that adult education classes in the Zone seemed to be attracting men and women in roughly equal numbers, that younger adults were surprisingly well represented, and that most students were white-­collar workers.95 The Inspectors explored the perceived aims and methods of adult education in the Zone. They quote Heiner Lotze (1900–1958), responsible for adult education in the education ministry of Niedersachsen, as defining three aims: (1) To provide a new philosophy of life through the study of history, economics and politics in their relation to the problems of the day; (2) to encourage music and the arts; (3) to make good the gaps in popular education caused by the war, e.g. foreign languages.

It should only be concerned with vocational education in places where there is otherwise no provision. Adolf Grimme is quoted as saying that adult education should ‘develop mind and character’, the educationist Wilhelm Flitner as arguing for ‘knowledge for life’ rather than ‘knowledge for power’. Teaching methods, so it was widely reported to the Inspectors, should focus on group learning and group discussion and should eschew ex cathedra lecturing. Charles Knowles described how deeply ingrained the German teaching style was; it tended to consist of a ‘learned person’ ‘laying down the law’ and a body of students sitting at his feet accepting his statements ex cathedra without question. Education through discussion is an idea accepted in theory, but seldom practised, the very word for the adult students, ‘Hörer’ (listener) indicating clearly enough the passive role allotted to him.96

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The Inspectors reported that some of the teaching they observed was ‘almost entirely lecturing – sometimes entirely abstract as well’. A particular problem identified by the Inspectors concerned what they perceived to be a tendency among Germans towards philosophical and emotional escapism. This was seen as dangerous, since it made them potentially susceptible to propaganda. One of the aims of adult education should be to help restore independent-­mindedness: There is no doubt that the German adult educationists have a hard task in front of them. To replace propaganda by objective thinking, the mass man by responsible individuals, passive listening by rational discussion, fanaticism by toleration, grandiloquence by relevant discourse, and escapism by reality, is an undertaking which cannot succeed quickly or spectacularly. It will take time; it will involve hard work, and, above all, it will involve a sense of the right direction in which to go. And it will require the re-­education of many educators themselves, for many of the teachers in the V.H.S. are themselves in need of healing and intellectual invigoration.

A university Rektor who expressed his approval that people did not wish to hear lectures on political and economic matters but rather on philosophy, metaphysics and religion was not to be congratulated: ‘This is to treat philosophy as a narcotic.’. *  *  * Policy on adult education was formally elaborated in a Control Council directive of October 1947, by which time education as a ‘dereserved’ subject had been placed in the hands of German authorities. The text in full reads: 1. Aims of Adult Education The chief aim of adult education should be to prepare active workers for the democratic education of Germany by making widely accessible to the adult population the latest social, practical and scientific knowledge. 2. Organization of Adult Education (a) Education of adults should be achieved through institutions and agencies specially created for the purpose which may be sponsored or promoted by public and private organizations. (b) The radio, cinema, press, libraries, and museums should also be used as media of adult education. (c) German educational authorities and any other interested groups, public or private, should undertake all adequate measures to ensure educational opportunity for adults, taking into consideration local conditions and encouraging local initiative. Special attention should be given to the development of institutions for adults in rural and other neglected areas. (d) The German educational authorities should exercise their control to assure the level (standards) and democratic character of the teaching given in adult educational establishments.

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3. Program and Method (a) Program Educational programs in institutions for the education of adults should comprise indispersable theoretical and practical subjects and should be adapted to local needs. In these institutions any possibility of spreading military or Nazi ideas should be eliminated. (b) Methods (i) Methods of instruction in institutions for the education of adults should ensure the active participation of students, and encourage an objective and rational mode of thinking. (ii) Study in methods of instruction for adults should be organized in each pedagogical institute since these methods differ from the methods used for the instruction of children. 4. Teaching Staff (a) In the instruction given in such institutions, not only professional teachers, but also persons representative of various aspects of public and professional life, of literature, the arts and sciences should be invited. (b) The selection of teaching staffs in institutions for adults should be conducted in accordance with denazification measures AS STATED IN CONTROL COUNCIL DIRECTIVE NO. 24 AND 38. 5. Students In order to make education in institutions for adults available to the broad masses of workers, financial and material assistance, for example free tuition, free textbooks, and scholarships, should be provided where necessary.97

The guiding principles of adult education for the period 1945–47, as signposted by the policy statements, were therefore to motivate German authorities, to establish local initiatives, to interfere only when necessary, to encourage the participation of lecturers with expertise in a broad range of appropriate fields, and to create conditions for imaginative and critical discussion and debate. Adolf Grimme paid tribute to the British support of adult education at the opening of the Volkshochschule in Hannover in January 1946. The attitude of the British had been one of encouragement and support in the most understanding way, and the presence of a British officer at the ceremony was seen as a symbol of comradely co-­ operation between the two countries.98 The 1947 AUT Report had not covered the role of universities in adult education, but this was remedied in the University Commission’s Report of 1948, in which a whole chapter is devoted to the subject. Its recommendations were: 1. All possible encouragement should be given to efforts and experiments in the field of liberal social education.

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2. The organisation of university lectures extra-­murally should be welcomed. 3. There should be refresher courses in all subjects for former graduates. 4. The universities should follow the example of Hamburg University and establish courses for adult education as a part of their social research department. 5. The colleges for social research (Sozialakademien) should be in a position to provide access to the university for some of their particularly gifted students.99

In 1946, the HMI report had argued that the universities should do more in terms of outreach and extension courses: it was dangerous for them to remain aloof from public interests. The University of Münster had organized extension courses; Aachen had a long record of public lectures and was putting on courses on ‘philosophical and artistic themes’; Göttingen had resumed its ‘adult education weeks’ in Celle and Lüneburg. Charles Knowles reported on the slow progress in the winter of 1948: ‘We have still a long way to go [. . .] before we see lecturers and professors appointed and paid by the Universities for the express purpose of conducting classes and lectures outside the walls of the University itself.’100 And in May 1950, Fritz Borinski was lamenting the ivory tower mentality of the universities, it was a fortress protected by bourgeois society. As a result workers mistrusted the university and so close cooperation was now necessary. He proposed the establishment of extra-­mural departments (as in Göttingen), seminars at Heimvolkshochschulen in collaboration with universities, seminars together with teacher training seminars (in Kiel and Hamburg, for example) and the setting up of working groups and committees involving the Volkshochschulen, the universities, and the trades unions or co-­operatives.101 Seeking to involve the universities fully in adult education was therefore still very much work in progress in the young Federal Republic. *  *  * Though not a part of provision in adult education in the Zone, mention must be made of Wilton Park. It started its work in January 1946 under Heinz Koeppler and was first used for prisoners-­of-war. A change of policy in January 1947 – at Robertson’s instigation – also brought some fifty civilians from the British Zone (and later from the American and French Zones) to Wilton Park for six-­week courses alongside the POWs. Robertson’s aim was ’to broaden the outlook of people who would be needed in leadership posts in Germany’.102 Wilton Park served as the exemplar – not only in the realm of education – of efforts to identify potential leaders in Germany and to expose them to democratic ideas and procedures.

Women’s affairs The political recasting of post-­war Germany all but by-­passed women.103 In June 1946, Edith Davies reported on the inaugural meeting held in the Beethovensaal in Hannover of the German women’s club. A ‘most inefficient’ cashier was selling tickets

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and causing much unrest among those trying to attend the meeting, some of whom ‘turned away and went home in disgust’: ‘angry women were to be seen outside waving their umbrellas at the hapless officials who asked for their tickets.’ By the time the meeting was due to start, the hall was only half full. This was clearly not a propitious beginning. But the three speakers were all to play prominent parts in the future progress of women’s groups in Germany. To Edith Davies’s disappointment, two of them, Theanolte Bähnisch and Schulrätin Anna Mosolf, proceeded to read their speeches; the third, Dr Elfriede Paul, began by reading and then abandoned her prepared text, so making a more profound impression on the audience. Women in other countries, said Anna Mosolf, were astonished at the lack of representation of German women in administration (‘applause’); English women especially were surprised (‘very hearty applause’); ‘Let us take our place in politics’ (‘terrific applause’); ‘the worst thing that women could say today was “We don’t want to be bothered with politics”. Two-­thirds of the electorate were women; their choice lay between co-­operating or becoming sacrifices’. Various committees, said Dr Paul, might work on a range of topics: housing (great applause); help for refugees (no applause); food; solutions to queuing problems; help for infants and small children; marriage advice; protection for unmarried mothers; physical education for girls; education; and a publication for women. Frau Bähnisch, who had previously analysed the lack of interest on the part of German women in participating in public life,104 concluded the meeting by saying that its purpose was to lay the club’s programme before the women of Hannover. She wanted them to go home, meditate and discuss. After about a third of those present had left, she called the remainder back in some agitation since she had forgotten to ask that prospective members write down their names and addresses on lists available at the doors. But despite the many mistakes which Davies identified (unpunctuality, failure to collect names; no plans for accommodation for future meetings; promise of a publication when there was no paper available; reliance on Military Government to do much of the ‘hack work’, failure to elect club officers; failure to invite questions after the speeches), she came away ‘feeling distinctly heartened. I had found even more evidence that Germany had women who were fitted and eager to shoulder the tasks which lay ahead, and to take their place side by side with the men in the rebuilding of a new Germany.’ She felt that the meeting provided a valuable lesson for the newly formed Committee on Women’s Education and for the whole Branch.105 Edith Davies had been keeping closely in touch with emerging women’s groups. In April 1946, she had attended the inaugural meeting of the first women’s rural institute (Landfrauenverein) in Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein.106 The purpose of this group was first and foremost practical: ‘learning better methods of agriculture and housewifery to enable them to help to combat the present crisis and [. . .] to come together socially.’ There was no mention of ‘communal cultural work’ – quite rightly, according to Davies, who had seen in advance the group’s proposed constitution (‘perfectly democratic in form and closely akin to our own rural women’s institutions at home’). Since in Davies’s view the value of such an organization was that it operated on a non-­political basis, she had caused a suggestion in the original draft that the chairwoman should be made

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responsible for the political reliability of all the members to be withdrawn. All in all she felt that the meeting in Eutin was a hopeful beginning, even if the group was in need of a lot of guidance on its ways of working. One particular issue raised by Davies was a matter of concern. One of the older women present had asked her whether the association would be only for farmers’ wives and not for the wives of farm labourers as well. Davies thought it ‘illuminating’ that the question was not put to the president and made clear her view that all women in rural areas should be included. A criticism of the women’s movement under Weimar was the ‘intellectual exclusiveness’ which had prevented most women from joining.107 By the end of 1945, women’s groups of various kinds had begun to be formed in the Zone and CCG officers concerned with adult education policy had realized that work with women would be an important focus of its various initiatives.108 In February 1946, the Chief of I&AC Division proposed that the aims and intentions of the work of the Division should be broadcast to German listeners, and two scripts were prepared, one of which – to be read by Edith Davies – concerned women and their roles.109 This text was an unremarkable document, platitudinous and patronizing in tone. Its conclusion gives a flavour of its quality: Military Government urges the German women of the British Zone to equip themselves for the great struggle which lies ahead of them and recommends certain means by which they may do so; by joining or helping to form voluntary organizations of every type – especially Parents’ organizations attached to schools – if none exists in the school which their children attend, then by urging their establishment. If possible women should attend courses at the nearest Volkshochschule: they should equip themselves for the task of educating their young by reading widely and finding out about other countries that they may learn to respect their peoples: they should take an active interest in local government and use their votes with wise discrimination and not be afraid to differ – the great women of the World have all differed – such women as Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, Marie Curie and Germany’s own Helene Lange. Finally they must set before their children the Christian ideal of brotherly love.110

It is not clear whether the script was actually broadcast and what opinion Riddy had of it is not known. But it at least served the purpose of signalling that the role of women in the future of Germany was of critical importance and it made some basic suggestions as to how that role might find expression. The key factor was the realization that the voting power of women was likely to be very influential in elections. In October 1946 there were 12 million registered women in the Zone and 9.9 million men. The ratio of women to men among the twenty to thirty age group was 170:100; among those aged thirty to forty it was 140:100. While under the Nazis women’s role was seen to be principally in the home, along the lines of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church), it was now evident that women would begin to occupy leading positions in politics, in the economy and in society generally.111 It was not until the spring of 1946, however, that formal CCG bodies were established to oversee women’s affairs. In September 1945, Education Branch had

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formed a co-­ordinating Committee on German Women’s Education, chaired by Jeanne Gemmell, which actively sought opinions from leading German women like Theanolte Bähnisch and Christine Teusch. The committee’s early concerns were with the curriculum of girls’ secondary schools, women university entrants and the preparation of an ECI ensuring the same education in Gymnasien for girls as for boys.112 When Gemmell left in mid–1946, the committee’s work was subsumed by the newly formed Civic Development Section which was part of the Administration and Local Government Branch of the Control Commission (A&LG). A&LG Branch then attempted, in a directive of July 1946, to describe the role of the women’s affairs officer at Regional Headquarters. On the Commission side, her duties were: (1) To work as an integral part of the ALG Section at a Regional HQ under the direction of the Controller ALG. (2) To make and keep regular contacts with officers of other functions such as Manpower, Education and Health, who are concerned with matters in which women should take an active part and to secure the cooperation and assistance of these officers in furthering the ALG functions. (3) To travel the Region regularly making contacts with the Kreis Resident officers, and seeking their cooperation in furthering their task and advising them as necessary. (4) To make contact with the appropriate Information Control Unit (I.C.U.) and under the direction of it and Controller, ALG to secure such publicity for women’s activities as is necessary.

While the women’s affairs officer was to encourage women to play a part in local government and in the public services (with the ultimate aim of their being in a position to hold higher office in due course), there is nothing in this description of her duties that says precisely what she should be doing with the various contacts she was enjoined to make. On the German side, she was (1) To make contact with German organisations such as Political Parties, Trades Unions, Churches etc, which have or should have a women’s side and to encourage and forward the participation of women in such organisations. (2) To encourage the formation of women’s organisations which are not the direct concern of other Divisions/Branches. This includes general contacts with women of ability and personality who can be encouraged to develop and foster such organisations. (3) To render all assistance possible to German organisers in the smoothing out of difficulties and obstacles to progress and in the provision of reasonable facilities for their work. It is possible that a certain amount of opposition to this work may

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be found in German official quarters and it is in cases like this that the tactful intervention of the S.O. may be particularly valuable. Above all, to remember that the work must be done by the Germans themselves. We are there to encourage, advise and help but not to run things ourselves. We have of course also to control.

Given the vagueness of such a job description, it is not surprising that Riddy was to feel uncomfortable with the role that A&LG had assumed in women’s affairs. One thing that he was supremely good at was drafting policy statements and briefs and summarizing clearly and concisely. Riddy’s Branch gets a mention in terms of the directive having to be read in conjunction with ECI No.60, ‘Women’s Voluntary Organisations. Adult Education’ and mutual interest in matters of concern to women was conceded. The relationship with Education Branch should be one of close cooperation: ‘The officers of the Education Branch approach the problem from the view-­point of formal education and the officers of A&LG from that of encouraging democratic development. The C.D. [Civic Development] Section would provide the necessary channel of liaison’.113 At a meeting in June 1947 to discuss women’s interests Air Vice-Marshal McNamara, at this point Deputy Director of Education Branch, asserted that work to support the development of women’s organizations and the participation of women in local government was vitally necessary but could not be ‘easily defined’. With the transfer of specialist women’s officers from A&LG Branch to Education Branch, senior ECOs would ensure that the work was continued and that it would become ‘more defined’. This inability to define the ‘vitally necessary’ work with women seems bizarre more than two years into the Occupation and gives credence to the criticism of those who felt that there was no proper policy underpinning the work.114 Eventually the Civic Development Section was moved to Education Branch and later designated ‘Women’s Affairs Section’, with officers based at regional headquarters.115 From this brief outline it may be seen that placing responsibility for women’s affairs was by no means obvious within the structure of the Control Commission. Education Branch had to some extent seized the initiative, with the setting up of its women’s education committee, but A&LG had regarded the oversight of women’s organizations and of matters to do with women’s role in society generally as belonging within its remit. This came to mean that there was an element of turf war in the arrangements, with not a little bickering from time to time. Riddy would get very impatient with colleagues in A&LG, and Birley was not convinced that a women’s affairs section was appropriate. An unfinished handwritten note by Riddy summed up the problem The problem of German women falls into two broad points – (a) their education in the schools and colleges (b) their education in their civic responsibilities. The first is obviously a matter for Education Branch and in the field ECOs. It implies normally close coordination with other Branches/Divisions. The second is the bone of contention.

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Education Branch, Riddy recorded, had been the first to perceive the need for positive action if women were to play an appropriate part in German life for two main reasons: the traditional outlook regarding women; and their numerical preponderance. The Branch had been very active through its women’s committee, attended by other Branches/Divisions since it was set up in September 1945. In March 1946 the Branch issued an ECI 116 – with the full knowledge and cooperation of A&LG – instructing ECOs to encourage the formation of women’s voluntary organizations. This was recognized by A&LG as the responsibility of Education Branch. But in July 1946 and without consultation, the Civic Development Section in A&LG had been set up. The representatives of the British Women’s Group on Public Welfare had recommended ‘since work on women’s organizations is essentially educational and cannot be divided from adult ed. without loss, its direction should be the responsibility of Ed Branch’.117 Riddy was quoting roughly from an original version of the Deneke/Norris Report of 1946 on women’s organi­ zations: the published text omits the recommendation that the direction of women’s organizations should come under Education Branch. What Deneke and Norris originally wrote was: While every effort at co-­operation is being made, between the A&LG and Education Branches, the present position is not satisfactory and it is recommended that the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster should ensure that the direction of work in women’s organisations rests with the Education Branch.

As in other instances, in the case of control over women’s affairs Riddy was clearly annoyed and frustrated at the administrative complexity that bedevilled the kind of hands-­on progress that local Education Branch officers excelled at. A barbed comment in his note indicates where the potential strengths lay in any future arrangements to oversee women’s organizations: People engaged in the work should (i) have sound knowledge of German background (ii) have excellent German (iii) know how to explain a point to a person with a very different outlook.

In the margin he wrote ‘ECO women usually have this’. *  *  * Life for women in the Zone was extremely harsh: they bore burdens of a kind most people would never have imagined possible. Elfriede Paul would speak of the ‘heavy psychological shock’ (‘schwere seelische Erschütterung’) they endured.118 It fell largely to women not only to cater for the needs of their own families often as the sole breadwinners – with so many men missing that the term Halbwitwe (‘half widow’) described their predicament – but also to help care for displaced persons and those returning home from military service far away.119 Recent research has questioned the scale of women’s involvement in rubble clearing and it has been suggested that only

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0.27 per cent of women in the British Zone actually worked in building-­related jobs, less than half of that number as Trümmerfrauen (‘rubble women’).120 Though images of those women who were enlisted to help clear the mountains of rubble in bombed towns and cities often show them smiling and happy as they worked, the labour involved was physically very demanding and unpleasant. (Their reward was payment of about sixty Pfennigs an hour and a higher ration entitlement.) In addition women had to cope with children of school age who had no schools to go to and with disaffected older youth drawn to the attractions of the black market as well as other illegal and dangerous pursuits. Women were relied upon principally to re-­establish an approximation of everyday family life, despite the enormous problems with which they had to contend. But it was clear to the occupiers that women had a more than usually significant role to play generally in the development of a new democratic Germany. They had to be persuaded to become actively involved in movements and organizations that would use their strengths to good effect. It was not forgotten that the women’s vote for the NSDAP steadily increased from 1928.121 All the conditioning women had undergone under the Nazis had paradoxically given them certain strengths on which they could draw in the harsh post-­war circumstances. What Eva Kolinsky has termed a ‘new type of women’ had emerged, ‘resourceful, good at organisation and improvisation’.122 In considering what kind of organizations might further women’s interests and support the policy intention of democratic thinking and civic responsibility, two British institutions were thought to provide models: the Women’s Institute (WI), the first meeting of which took place in 1915; and the Townswomen’s Guild (TG), dating from 1929. Both became involved with women’s affairs in the Zone, the WI hesitantly at first, the TG proactively from late 1945.123 One British woman academic stands out among the many who devoted time and energy to the development of women’s organizations in Germany. Helena Deneke (1878–73) was a well-­known Oxford Germanist – one of the earliest women appointed to a post in the University – and had demonstrated a long-­standing and passionate enthusiasm for the rights and welfare of women. She had been Treasurer during the First World War of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and had played a leading role with Women’s Institutes in Oxfordshire. She took part in the first zonal conference of women teachers from Landfrauenschulen (residential schools for the vocational education of countrywomen), held in Göttingen in 1946. To an audience of some 600 she spoke of the essential features of WIs: the three-­pronged business, instructional and social programmes of their monthly meetings; their non-­party and non-­denominational character; and their democratic local and national decision-­ making procedures. She hoped that the British WI example would inform the future development of the German Landfrauenvereine.124 Deneke’s talk in Göttingen took place during a seven-­week official tour of the Zone and Berlin which she undertook in early August 1946 together with Betty Norris. Deneke represented the WI movement and Norris the Townswomen’s Guilds, and both were selected for the task of reporting on women’s organizations in Germany and the prospects for future development by the Women’s Group on Public Welfare (WGPW),

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Figure 7.4  Helena Deneke, Oxford academic and champion of women’s organizations. following an approach to the WGPW initiated by Major General Erskine in April.125 It was Jeanne Gemmell who suggested that Deneke become involved with women and education for citizenship and that in particular she take an interest in countrywomen. Gemmell drafted a briefing paper, pointing out that Deneke and Norris would be representing women’s organizations in general, and not merely their own; British women’s organizations were prepared to help German women to get their associations going ‘on sound lines’.126 The two delegates would examine the living and working conditions of women, meet and talk to women concerned with existing organizations, give short talks if requested to do so, and ‘meet informally individual women of a variety of social spheres and creeds, who might be expected to be interested’.127 Deneke recorded her sharply observed perceptions of life in the Zone:

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Life in the British Zone brings stark contrasts to the fore and it rouses impressions which contradict each other. Our commitments there are in a measure self-­ contradictory, for we are engaged upon the re-­education of Germany and are handing more and more responsibility to the Germans themselves and yet we must have our army of occupation and maintain military rule. Democracy cannot grow by compulsion, for its success we depend upon truly convincing a sufficient number of responsible Germans; however, the cumbersome governmental machinery which we have set up to carry out and co-­ordinate our conflicting aims checks the Germans at every turn and checks us too. Many fears beset them, their life is grievous, and our experiments at arriving at a policy confuse them. They are losing confidence in us and remain baffled; their mentality anyway and their circumstances are in glowing contrast.128

Here she identifies the paradox at the heart of British policy, the necessary exertion of autocratic control in order to encourage the development of ways of thinking that would reject any attempt at such control. She returned to the question in another text: To [the Germans] a chasm seems to yawn between an ideal of democracy and our performance. [. . .] When we remember the grievance of the very fact of our ‘occupation’ and recall that hungry people are not disposed to be reasonable it is on the whole surprising how reasonable the Germans are. One difficulty inherent in the situation in Germany arises from the fact that our work as administrators and as an army of occupation conflicts with our aim to re-­ educate the Germans. It is not possible to teach democracy as we understand it by authoritarian methods and any attempt to do so stultifies our efforts.129

Deneke and Norris visited – among other places – Bünde, Hannover, the Rhineland, Schleswig-Holstein and Berlin. They were given the rank of lieutenant-­colonel and wore uniform (presumably the hated blue uniforms issued to non-­military CCG staff.) They held many meetings with a variety of women’s groups and with many individuals. At the beginning of their report, they describe conditions in the Zone (rations, clothes, housing, health) and comment on education. Given the severe conditions of overcrowding: there is neither space nor occupation for the children at home. Owing to the shortage of buildings, many are getting far too few hours schooling a week. They then run wild in the streets or are sent out into the country to collect wood or food. Begging from Allied soldiers, barter with one another, and finally all the temptations of the black market activity develop logically from this lack of supervision and control. Approved schools and homes for children on probation are full.130

They then make a general statement about the condition of women in the Zone and reveal some optimism about the future: It must be remembered that the mental and moral collapse of Germany has produced a complex state of mind among German women. The disillusionment

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following the promises made by the Nazis, has left many women suspicious of politics and shy of showing an interest in public affairs; some are embittered, others are bewildered, many are intensely sore. Generally speaking, however, the women whom we saw were the active and intelligent ones who have taken no part in public affairs since 1933 when Hitler dissolved women’s organisations or incorporated them into the Frauenschaft. To them the end of the war came as a deliverance from an intolerable yoke. They are eager to renew contacts with other countries and they welcome the new opportunity for active citizenship. Among younger women we were struck by a few outstanding ones who were determined to take their part in shaping the future.131

Women were understandably sceptical about the nature of organizations, given their experience under the Nazis. The art historian Gertrud Harms (1916–1976), taking part in a six-­week Wilton Park course on political education in January–February 1948, exemplified such scepticism and how it was to be overcome. To avoid any suspicion of prejudice (and I must admit that I myself arrived in a most mistrustful state of mind), the lecturers were not doctrinaire politicians or demagogues, but interested experts from all professions. Whether the lecturers were Englishmen or émigrés they were always chosen as those who could tell us the essentials of the subject we were debating, professors from English universities, M.P.s, prominent industrialists – in a word, personalities with whom the ordinary mortal, let alone the ordinary mortal German, has no chance to come into contact.132

Welfare and relief work formed a principal focus of the work of women’s organizations at the time Deneke and Norris reported. Catholic and Protestant societies were active, as were many other groups in small towns. In Schleswig-Holstein and Hannover, the Landfrauenvereine had started again. Notable developments cited in the report are a willingness among women’s groups to co-­operate and the formation of women’s committees (Frauenausschüsse) in Berlin and throughout the Soviet Zone, and in the Ruhr and Rhineland. These committees had their origin in efforts to bring together all welfare organizations in any town with the municipal authorities involved in similar activities. Deneke described them in a report of July 1947: They were called to deal with distress and met to pool their resources. Representatives of confessional organisations, of the ‘Arbeiterwohlfahrt’ [Worker’s Welfare Organisation], of political parties got into personal touch with one another in this way. Good practical work was done and where goodwill prevailed, the results were good all round.133

There were several criticisms of the report, which does not read well: compared to other reports on developments in the Zone, it is poorly structured and largely superficial. The proportion of women to men in the Zone was of the order of 60:40 (not an outnumbering of women by 70 per cent%); the CDU had been omitted from the list

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of political parties; the amount of space available to each individual in the Zone was 6.5 square metres (not four): the devolution of powers to the Länder negated the delegates’ criticism that Germans had only superficial responsibility for self-­government; ZEI Instruction No.54 on denazification policy removed another of the criticisms made by Deneke and Norris; and only the views of older women had been taken into account in the report.134 On the other hand, Ernest Barker felt that Deneke and Norris had ‘got to the heart of the problem’, namely the position and Stimmung (‘mood’) of German women and the ‘German instinct for thinking in terms of the group, and not as individuals’.135 Helena Deneke continued to take an interest in women’s affairs in Germany. She returned to the Zone in the summer of 1947, visiting women’s organizations and speaking at meetings. Invited by the Klub deutscher Frauen, she attended the conference in Bad Pyrmont at which it was decided to form a union of women’s societies. She recorded that the three main emphases at the conference were on working together with men (‘wir wollen eine männliche Politik in eine menschliche verwandeln’; ‘we want to turn male politics into people politics’), equal rights for women; and belief in women’s potential in public service.136 She concluded from her experience in addressing meetings (with rather careless wording): (i) that the word democracy must be avoided. However, the [democratic] way of life proved interesting if presented with illustrations; (ii) that it is worth while explaining that England is not starving Germany from motives of revenge. It is not easy to get this across; (iii) that the ignorance of conditions outside Germany is colossal. Belief in one’s statements, however, depends on whether one has gained [women’s] confidence.

This visit was followed by several others: to Landfrauenvereine in the autumn of 1948; to Frauenringe in the summer and to Landfrauenvereine in the autumn of 1949, and to the Rhineland and Westphalia in the spring of 1951.137 Helene Deneke counts as one of the most capable and influential British visitors to the Zone. Her German parentage and native fluency in the language meant that she understood Germany and its people as few outsiders could. And her style was that of a passionate no-­nonsense mover and shaker who saw through cant and hypocrisy and was scrupulously fair in all she did. Jeanne Gemmell wrote to her at the time of the Deneke/Norris report:: I can’t tell you how much it meant to have you here. In spite of my profound depression – which I’m afraid I passed on to you – I still believe that something may be achieved by this report. At any rate we shall have tried.138

*  *  * Rita Ostermann, Women’s Affairs Officer in Political Branch, undertook a tour of the Zone in the early summer of 1947. Her report begins with a gloomy assessment:

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As far as the whole field of women’s activities is concerned, we are barely touching the fringe of the subject. Just as there is no economic background but one vast network, in the same way there is no such thing as women’s affairs divorced from the general situation. For this reason any real approach to what would normally be women’s problems is blocked by economic considerations at every turn. This has a direct effect on our two-­fold policy of sponsoring civic development and encouraging a greater interest in political life.139

Problems relating to civic responsibility were hampered by material conditions and insufficient staffing, it was ‘idle to expect any considerable results for some time’. As far as political interest was concerned,‘to ask women in Germany to participate in anything beyond the daily struggle for existence’ involved sacrifice, both of time and of strength and energy. The only realistic way to secure the involvement of women in political affairs was to convince them that practical results might ensue from their efforts. Looking at issues ranging far beyond the need for democratic re-­education, Ostermann argued for much greater representation of women and pushed for a Zonal Committee on which all women’s organizations and all political parties would be represented. She concluded her report with some warnings about the future: Official quarters must show more than a vague if benevolent interest in what is sometimes inadequately described as ‘Women’s Affairs’. The situation demands an imaginative approach and sympathetic handling; anything less is shortsighted if not politically dangerous. Once the desire to co-­ operate with the British authorities is lost, the initiative can more easily pass into other hands, with unpredictable results, both for Germany and ourselves.

Judging from this assessment, there appears to have been a mismatch between the rhetoric of a policy which regarded women as of crucial importance and the reality of having few realizable strategies for its implementation. Mention of ‘other hands’ refers to growing awareness of the potential power of the mass organization of women in the Soviet Zone, where the Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands (DFD), founded on 8 March 1947 and bringing together the zonal Frauenausschüsse (women’s committees) in one body, was gaining ground.140 The political repercussions, Ostermann argued, of plans to establish a Demokratischer Frauenbund in the West could not be ignored: ‘some definite expression of policy, no less than action, on our part is now unavoidable’. In January 1948, and in the particular context of the growing attempts to recruit women to the DFD, Bevin had required the German Department of the Foreign Office to do something about women’s organizations in Germany.141 A brief for Bevin included a reference to the ‘need for our taking the initiative in giving particular help to those organisations which we regard as most satisfactory and most likely to resist Communist infiltration in the Zone’.142 *  *  * Before she left Germany in the autumn of 1948, the Hon. Mrs R.J. Youard, Women’s Affairs Officer at Education Branch Düsseldorf, wrote to Birley to express her criticisms of the nature of policy towards women in the Zone. In doing so she drew attention to a paradox

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which lay at the heart of the British approach. While, for reasons already discussed, Germany was not a tabula rasa, an experimental ground on which radical new ideas might be tried out, there was nevertheless an idealistic strand in policy decisions that visualized outcomes that were far from having been achieved – or even achievable – in the context of the United Kingdom. Attaining equality of opportunity in education would be one such example; another would be forms of university governance; yet another the imperative to make teaching an all-­graduate profession. And so when Youard understood policy towards women to entail raising their status she was expressing the not unreasonable view that something more radical was intended than encouraging their greater participation in politics and employment. She pointed out to Birley that German women had actually achieved far more in some respects (as local politicians and as civil servants) than their British counterparts. The paradox was that the policy ideal imagined changes in attitude in Germany that would not be achieved to any significant extent in Britain for several decades. Youard’s letter is a little muddled in parts, but it is worth quoting as an example of the frustration felt by some CCG staff at what they saw as policy failure. I leave with less regret owing to a growing feeling that our policy with regard to women is bogus. Our only policy pronouncements as regards women enunciate I believe that women should be encouraged to play a larger part in politics and that they should be encouraged to enter industry and employers should accept them. I took it that apart from these practical hints, our re-­education policy as a whole involved raising the whole status of women in the community as without equal respect for women the idea of the value of human personality is meaningless. I must admit that I can find nothing on paper to justify my having thought this. However, I must point out that if we are only concerned with women in politics and employment (a) There are more women in the Landtag in this Land in proportion to total numbers than in the House of Commons. (b) In many Kreistage there are as many women if not more than on local councils at home. (c) There are more German women holding high offices in the Civil Service than at home. In the Control Commission I do not know of any woman over the rank of S.C.O. (d) German women civil servants have achieved a measure of equal pay which British women have not. What evidence have we for thinking that the measures we are advocating are likely to be more successful than they are at home, for instance encouraging women into non-­party activities? On the other hand, in spite of exhorting women to take more interest in public affairs, I do not know of any efforts we have made to introduce registration of customers so as to reduce the amount of time spent queuing and thus have time and energy free.143

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She went on to ask why nothing had been done to register prostitutes and to license brothels, why married women had not been given rights over their property, and why mothers did not have rights over their illegitimate children. ‘Worst of all’ was a scheme to recruit girls for employment in England as nurses and domestics which required them to undergo a V.D. test and a full gynaecological examination to ascertain whether they were pregnant, ‘an admirable administrative provision if women were cattle but utterly in conflict with any policy of restoring in Germany the ideal of human dignity or respect for women’. Birley thought it a tiresome letter while conceding that there was some truth in what Youard said. He wrote to Rita Ostermann: ‘The trouble is, as I have always said, that there ought not to be a Women’s Affairs Section. Each Division ought to be fully aware of the problem and ready to deal with it. But we cannot help that. Our job must be largely that of educating other Divisions.’144 Shortly before he left Germany, Birley reported to Robertson that every election for many years would be determined by women, but that there were ‘no signs that German women as a whole [were] fitted to carry out this responsibility’.145 The Women’s Affairs Section was controversially abolished in September 1951. Plans for its winding-­up produced acerbic comments from the Chief Women’s Affairs Officer of the time, Dr Dorothy Broome.146 In June 1951, having received a copy of the report on their visit to Frauenringe in Nordrhein-Westfalen by Helena Deneke and Margaret Cornell, she wrote to a colleague in the Women’s Affairs Section in Wahnerheide: You invite my comments on the recommendations Miss Deneke and Mrs. Cornell make. I agree with these but in view of the fact that Women’s Affairs Section is to be abolished by the end of September 1951 [. . .] I do not see that any action can be taken in the matter. It is a pity that no one in the F.O. ever reads, still less understands, Reports submitted by visitors or by anyone else, – Women’s Affairs have been abolished by officials who know nothing at all about the problems or the work and care even less.147

The verdict on policy towards women’s affairs has to be mixed. On the one hand those involved in the regions with the practicalities of assisting women in getting themselves organized into viable groups was clearly commendable and for the most part effective; on the other hand the overall policy was dysfunctional, lacking in clarity, coherence and determination. The women’s affairs officers involved were committed to their work, though their direct communication with German women was limited since many had little command of German and had to rely on interpreters.148 Their frustration at lack of interest at higher levels in the Control Commission and in London finds expression in many reports and much correspondence of the time. Birley had identified the underlying question: concern for women should properly have been part of the work of all CCG branches. A women’s affairs section with limited resources could not cover all aspects of issues relating to women. And Education Branch could not separate women from its ambitions for adult education, which were aimed at both men and women.

8

The Achievements of British Occupation Policy in Education

I believe that the foundation which Mr Birley and the officers working under him have laid is probably the most important part of the work of rehabilitation which our countrymen have achieved in Germany since the war.1 The cause of the failure of Education policy in the British Zone lies in the confusion and resultant lack of decision in the minds of members of Education Branch itself.2 Donald Riddy had wanted Education Branch to be upgraded into a division of the Control Commission and was frequently struggling – from an early stage in the Occupation – to bring staffing levels up to a satisfactory complement. But he was constantly frustrated in his efforts to protect the status of the important work he felt that he and his team were doing. Though Riddy, and later Birley and Marshall, received positive encouragement from the three Military Governors and from a succession of supportive Foreign Office staff, the political climate of the day dictated the priorities of those in government. Their plans for the British presence in Germany were determined by thinking on quite a different level. Within a year or so of the Occupation, it was realized that the German economy should not be held back by punitive measures but instead encouraged to develop. This policy, within the context of an understanding of the future balance of power in Europe, was made more vital with the currency reform and during the Berlin Blockade. And thereafter relations with the Russians were a constant preoccupation. In addition, difficult questions were asked in Britain about the cost of the Occupation to the taxpayer during years of great austerity: for the first time bread was rationed in Britain in July 1946. Once the Occupation Statute came into force in 1949 and Britain’s role in West Germany, now as a partner in the Allied High Commission, changed again, the justification for continuing expenditure in areas outside of the controls laid down in the Statute was seriously challenged.3 In November 1951, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister again after the October general election that saw the Attlee government defeated, wrote a personal minute to Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook in response to a paper on British overseas information services which had referred to aspects of educational work in Germany:

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[. . .] What is this ‘general educational work on a considerable scale’ in Germany? Is it teaching the Germans not to be naughty in the future? I do not think this is a hopeful process. Nations are acted on by the spirit in which foreigners trust them, and not by sermons and lectures. A release of German Generals now in prison would bring much more good feeling in Germany, if timed at the right moment – now perhaps too late – than many lectures. Let me know how much is being spent on the lectures.4

Churchill’s scepticism about the value of educational involvement in Germany came after a period when questions were being asked, under the previous Labour administration, about the wisdom of continuing to spend large sums of money on Wilton Park. In August 1950, a Treasury official had voiced his concerns in the following terms: The [Foreign Office German Section] have been spending relatively large sums on the re-­education of Germans. The amounts in the current year’s estimates are:In Germany    £ (a) Cultural Missions 101,000 (b) Educational Adviser and Staff   20,000 (c) Operational expenditure   40,000 In the U.K.   36,000 We have felt considerable doubts about the propriety of this expenditure in general since under the Occupation Statute the education of Germans is now a matter for the German authorities and is not in itself a proper object of expenditure of the British taxpayer’s money. We have taken the line that in so far as it was justified at all it should satisfy the criterion applied to information expenditure, viz. Does it promote a state of mind in the recipient which is advantageous to this country[?] [. . .] In other words, the question is not whether re-­education of Germans is a good thing in the abstract but whether we should spend money on it in our interests.5

Much unproductive exchange of memoranda between the Treasury and the Foreign Office had eventually resulted in Ernest Bevin writing a secret note to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to put the case for the continuance of the educational work in Germany; he argued in part: 5. In the correspondence about Wilton Park and other recent letters on our educational work in Germany, Treasury officials have advanced the view that special arrangements for Germany are no longer justified. They maintain that the Germans are no longer cut off from other European countries, that they have a largely independent Government and that they are increasingly active in European affairs. As there is urgent need for information work in other parts of the world, the

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information work in Germany should, they consider, be brought into line with information activities in other countries. 6. I do not agree with this argument. We maintain a large Occupation Force and a High Commission in Germany which are not present in any other country, and that is sufficient indication that the situation of Germany is different. The fact that Germany is to-­day one of the most vital areas in the world where the cold war is being waged with great fury and determination, and, as we saw over the Berlin blockade, with real danger of being converted into a shooting war. Since Germany is so close to the United Kingdom, conflict there would be more immediately dangerous to us than conflict in more distant parts of the world. We are now engaged in an attempt to prevent war by increasing our strength and that of the Western democracies. The main theatre for which we are preparing is the European one. In any conflict in Europe the German people will play a very important role. If they are integrated with the West, their manpower and their industrial potential will add considerably to our strength. If Germany is overrun, the Germans can either be a source of embarrassment and obstruction within the Russian lines, or if they are not integrated into Western Europe, their population and industry may enter into the services of the Russians and the balance of forces between East and West would be adversely affected by this defection. The Russians appreciate this and are making, through their puppet Socialist Unity Party and other organisations, a determined drive to capture the mind and the allegiance of the Germans. Their latest move is to encourage a campaign of civil disobedience to the Occupying Powers in the West. This initiative, events in Korea, and the comparative state of unpreparedness of the West have seriously affected German morale. A recent report from the High Commissioner envisages the possibility of morale sinking to a point which may endanger our position in Germany. For these reasons, I consider it an essential part of the defence measures that increasing effort should be made in the information and educational work in Germany and cannot subscribe to the view that special arrangements for this work are no longer justified.6

In this late statement of faith in the educational work in Germany is implicit the basis of the Western Allies’ rationale for their involvement in this essential area of democratic reconstruction. In order to preserve the peace in Europe, and a balance of power between East and West, it was essential to ensure that the Germans remained firmly within the ambit of Western democratic thinking. Bevin’s note achieved a reprieve of Wilton Park, which from its beginnings as a prisoner-­of-war camp still continues in existence today – at a new location in West Sussex – as an international conference centre. Churchill turned to the topic again in February 1952, following a spirited defence of the work in Germany by Anthony Eden. Churchill minuted: 1. Nations should speak to nations on a high level. The attempt of the victors to educate the vanquished is not likely to alter the main current of events although it may supply a considerable number of jobs for extremely well-­meaning people. Treating Germany as an equal and as a friend and ally; welcoming her to NATO;

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dropping all the foolery about using Heligoland for bombing practice, and a number of other points I could mention, would be gestures comprehended by all Germans, and would gain far more in a few months than this expensive education would do in years. 2. Indeed there seems to be a much stronger case at the moment for French education, to lift their country back to its former position. I do not gather you have any scheme for this. 3. If our main policy and attitude towards Germany does not convince the German people that we wish them well and welcome them back to the family of Europe and to their place in the world these educational centres may at any time become mere targets for hostility. In any case the proportion of good which they can do in a population of seventy million, actuated by most vehement external and internal pressures, is not worth the money it costs our overtaxed, hard-­pressed island. I will gladly talk the matter over with the Foreign Secretary.7

These later interventions are evidence of on the one hand a scepticism about the value of trying in the immediate post-­war years to re-­educate a defeated nation and on the other a conviction that to provide encouragement in education would produce benefits for the international community of nations. In the early 1950s, then, there was still a continuing if residual effort to support and encourage democratic thinking in educational contexts in Germany. Its endurance way beyond the end of the War is confirmation of the importance the British still attached to it. Some members of Education Branch had felt that their work was still incomplete as the Occupation Statute came into effect. Among those with roles in Germany during the Occupation, the historian A.J. Ryder recalled that it been reckoned by some at the end of the War that the Occupation would last for twenty years, though Hugh Greene believed that that would have seemed ‘ridiculous’; Duncan Wilson remembered that by 1946 it was no longer felt that twenty years would be possible, and that five to ten years was more likely; Michael Balfour’s memory was that ten years was frequently mentioned.8 A joke of the time had a British observer asking a German how long it would take to rebuild his country. Answer: forty-­ two years. Why precisely forty-­two? ‘Well, I suppose that you intend to stay here for forty years, and it will take at least two to reconstruct everything after you’ve gone.’ In the event, ten years was not a bad guess: the Occupation had moved swiftly through its three main phases of development (not predicted during the War) and by the time of Churchill’s questioning of the efficacy of continuing British involvement in the work in education, its results were considerable. Many of the taken-­for-granted institutions and procedures of the Federal Republic had their origins in initiatives during the years of Occupation. *  *  * In April 1949, Bevin asked Birley to provide him with a report on the progress of Education Branch during his time as Educational Adviser. When Robertson passed on the report he commented that a valuable beginning had been made in terms of the role of education in creating a democratic and peace-­loving Germany:

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I believe that the foundation which Mr Birley and the officers working under him have laid is probably the most important part of the work of rehabilitation which our countrymen have achieved in Germany since the war. It is the more important because, by any standard, the British Zone of Occupation is the most important part of Germany as a whole; whether it is judged from the intellectual standpoint, from the point of view of economic power and influence, or by the industry, ability and powers of leadership of its people. If we by our educational policy can leave a lasting imprint upon our Zone, we shall have performed a better service to our country than we could hope to do by years of transitory control and tutelage.9

As one of his last acts in Germany, Birley sent Robertson his thoughts on the future of Education Branch.10 He saw two possibilities: a continuation of the status quo in line with Ordinance No.57, with a decrease in residual powers to influence; or the abandoning of all power to influence education in Germany, except insofar as a nation with close political ties to another nation can be influential. Good cultural and educational relations had been established and future policy should be (a) To do everything possible to foster cultural and educational contacts between Germany and Western Europe as a whole. This would entail exchanges and visits of professors, teachers, etc., and close contacts between German Ministries of Education and those of other countries. (b) To retain as many British officers as possible dispersed throughout Germany, and no longer necessarily in the British Zone. They could no longer be Education Control Officers.11 They should be more like the Directors of British Institutes and it might be advisable for them to come under the aegis of the British Council. But we should not abandon the benefits that ought to accrue to us from the tradition of good relationships built up between British and German educationists and we should establish the fact that these officers were also intended to help German education. In particular, they would be responsible for selecting those Germans who would be invited to Britain.

The Occupation Statute granted a ‘maximum possible degree’ of self-­government to the western parts of Germany: the Federal State and the Länder would have ‘full legislative and judicial powers’ in accordance with the Basic Law (the federal constitution) and the constitutions of the Länder. Various fields were ‘reserved’ (among them disarmament, foreign affairs, foreign trade and exchange) but it was hoped that the Occupation authorities would have no occasion to act in fields other than those specifically reserved.12 With the entry into force of the Occupation Statute, authority on the part of the western Allies was vested in three High Commissioners who constituted the Allied Council. The Council was advised by a number of committees, one of which was the Political Affairs Committee, comprising the political advisers to the High Commissioners. In turn an Information and Cultural Affairs sub-­committee was established to report through the Political Affairs Committee. Education came within the purview of this sub-­committee.13

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These developments, in the context of the founding of the Federal Republic, meant yet another revision of educational policy. Approaches to ‘re-­education’ had had to be revised as the War reached its final stages; further changes had had to be made following Ordinance No.57; and now the advisory role had to be further interpreted. As in the past when any change was in the offing, a flurry of policy statements began to emerge, together with statements of serious misgivings on the part of Education Branch staff and others. Birley’s appointment as Headmaster of Eton was announced in mid-December 1948, and he would leave Germany in August 1949, to be succeeded as Educational Adviser by T.H. (Tom) Marshall. Robertson would be the first High Commissioner.14 Ken Walsh wrote of returning from ‘the funeral’ of the Control Commission and finding some comfort in Birley’s continuing belief in the task of Education Branch: That a nationalist and totalitarian Germany may at any time come to terms with Russia has already been proved once. That our security is the integration of Germany into a democratic Europe is plain. That this aim can best be achieved through the young people of Germany is also plain. But this is a long-­term policy. When CCG in anything like its present form ceases to exist, under what auspices should the educational drive come?15

The British Council would not be an appropriate body to continue the work in education: its aim was not ‘to re-­mould the character of another nation’. Later, L.H. Sutton, the author of the paper ‘Shuffling Feet’, while believing that work in education might now be given a ‘fresh impetus’, with the prospect of success as great as that already achieved, demanded job security for all concerned until the end of 1950 and that each member of the Mission must understand clearly what is required of him or her. Only in this way can the lost morale of the past year, with its insecurity and stagnation, be recovered and the old enthusiasm restored.16

This insistence on clarity echoes an unsigned and highly critical document included in a batch of papers from Niedersachsen in the previous year, entitled ‘Education Branch – Past, Present and Future’ and identifiably from the pen of Brigadier Maude, Principal Control Officer.17 It outlines the policies with which the work in education began: ‘first to denazify, then to support the pre-Nazi Weimar democratic nucleus, and finally to help them train a sound younger generation as quickly as possible.’ Yet ‘We cannot point to success in any one item’. Education Branch officers were ‘bewildered, confused, frustrated’. The task of disarming ‘the spiritual legacy of Nazism’ and replacing it with ‘a positive healthy countergrowth’ had been ‘hamstrung at every turn by lack of money and materials’. The failure of education policy was attributable to confusion and a resultant lack of decision in the minds of members of Education Branch. The example of educational reform in Schleswig-Holstein, which had had a ‘cool reception’ from the Branch, was salutary:

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The passing of the Schleswig Holstein Act, surely to be greeted with enthusiasm by the Branch as the single practical attempt to reform education in a Western democratic sense, was by many deplored as premature, and condemned on the grounds that the requisite money was not available, and that anyway the reform was a ‘political manoeuvre’ on the part of the SPD majority in Schleswig Holstein. [. . .] [The procedure was much better] than that adopted elsewhere, where indecision and financial difficulties have been allowed to halt any progress whatsoever towards reform. As for the charge that the issue of school reform ‘has been made a political issue’, education, like democracy, bristles with political issues, and the free discussion between political parties on every aspect of educational reform is part of the very essence of a democratic system. Only a person with very confused ideas of democracy would deny this. And such confused ideas are to be found in the Branch.18

Birley too is judged guilty of confused thinking: Consider the two following definitions of policy. (i) ‘It is generally agreed that education in Germany in the future is to become a subject under the control of individual states and not of the Central German Government’; (ii) ‘It was very doubtful whether the Land governments would pass any important educational legislation before a Central German Government was set up’. Both these quotations come from Mr Birley’s speech to the Education Section of the British Association on the 13th September 1948. They are separated by only twenty lines from each other.

Several thousand teachers were unemployed since there were insufficient funds and accommodation to train them – but they were a drain on resources while unemployed and surely were already housed somewhere: ‘It is almost as if we accept the financial and housing shortage with gratitude as excuses for doing nothing and avoiding our responsibilities.’ Though education was a central strand of British policy it had never been assigned the priority it deserved: ‘How many times has one heard the remark from Education Branch officers that education is the ‘Cinderella’ of the Control Commission! And how many times have German education officials made the same complaint in their own contexts!’ The effects of the currency reform had been to deplete the funds of public authorities with drastic effects on education. As to the plans for a future role of Education Branch, they would constitute ‘the final step in the renunciation of a responsibility we have been dodging to an ever-­increasing extent in the last 3 years’. The intention to turn Education Branch ‘into a kind of British Council, or series of British Institutes, centres of radiation for the British Way and Purpose’ did not impress as a change of policy. What needed to be done? German educationists should be helped to win financial battles; education must become a priority for the Control Commission; and pressure – through financing – should be put on German ministries ‘to give education the priority it deserves in German society’. All of this was not made easier by ‘the approach of the

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Occupational [sic] Statute’. If the struggle for financial priority does not succeed, ‘the projection of the British Way and Purpose will rapidly become an irrelevance and a sham, and the 3½ years of work Education Branch has put in will have been largely wasted’. There was thus a perception of the failure of Education Branch to achieve its objectives, together with scepticism about future prospects for successful work in education in Germany. And there was criticism of the staff which was at variance with the widespread praise of those working on education. If any Education Branch officers were ‘confused’, it might have had something to do with the large number of policy documents that found their way to them. Those working away from headquarters used their initiative to cope with local conditions, whether their actions conformed to official policy or not. Maude made what he felt was an important point when forwarding to his staff in Niedersachsen a document from the Director of Education Branch (Rex Hume at this stage) on the future role of Education Branch. One paragraph of the document referred to the role of the ECO and youth officer to act as an ‘unofficial agent’ of the Land Ministry. Maude emphasized the importance of giving advice on what he called ‘technical matters’, emerging from visits to educational establishments and organizations of all kinds and he limited himself to one example: As we know, the ‘one-­man-show’ is the easiest, quickest, cheapest and often the most deceptive performance to lay on. Further, its discouragement may appear, on a short-­term view, to be a threat to the lecturer’s living, and a detraction from his personal importance. Sometimes, of course, the lecture is both useful and necessary. Personally, however, I put it, by and large, about bottom of the means of conveying instruction, if only because there is no proof of co-­operation by the taught. Moreover the more co-­operative forms of education (discussions, question and answer etc.) are a stimulus to practice in democracy at the lower levels, which it is important to encourage. [. . .] Whilst it is undoubtedly correct to say that our rôle as unofficial agents of the German Ministry is likely to be a dwindling commitment, the same does not appear to be true of our responsibility for giving constructive advice or suggestions to the Germans on technical matters.19

In this unexceptional statement can be seen a continuation of the fundaments of education policy in the Zone: persuade, proceed by example, present alternatives, discuss, encourage, keep in mind principles of democracy, warn against the dominance of one way of thinking. At the same time as Maude was reporting his misgivings, and after he had been in Germany for two months, Marshall put together a summary of his impressions, having travelled widely in the Zone, had conversations with Education Officers, members of Cultural Relations and Women’s Affairs Branches and Ministers of Education, and visited Wilton Park.20 He found that the reorganization that Birley had started had not been completed, since at the time it was formulated it was assumed that the Occupation Statute would refer specifically to education. The omission of such reference had

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created confusion. He had three main tasks to tackle: establishing cultural missions in the Länder as teams under a single head; the transfer of Information Centres to the control of the Educational Adviser and their use by the cultural missions; and clarification of the role of the British Relations Boards. In addition there needed to be some financial adjustments to facilitate visits to and from the Zone. His analysis of relations between British education officers and the Germans was very positive, though he included a caveat about the universities: Relations are not only friendly but they are the basis of a continuous exercise of very real influence, the extent of which is not, I think, fully realised even by the Germans themselves. There is no sign of any deterioration here. On the contrary, since the transition from control to co-­operation became complete in the spirit as well as in the letter, co-­operation has begun to gain in strength. It is possible that this is not quite true of the Universities, where the position of the University Education Officers is a particularly difficult one. [. . .] I am sure that friendly relations and influence are also present here, but I am not yet certain whether they are having much impact on the established group of professors who are still in full control of the situation.

Figure 8.1  T.H. (Tom) Marshall, Birley’s successor as Educational Adviser.

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This latter observation echoes Marshall’s 1946 report to the AUT and the conclusions of its 1947 report. It was made at a time when he had not had an opportunity to visit universities in the Zone, since they were not in session, but his impression of them seems not to have changed over a three-­year period. In other areas of education he could report positively on German initiatives consonant with British aims. School reform along democratic lines had progressed in Berlin, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, but in some cases the reforms had been ‘over-­drastic in design or too hastily introduced’: hard times ahead were probable. Niedersachsen was not far behind, and in Nordrhein-Westfalen an education bill would probably be conservative, ‘while paying lip-­service to some progressive ideas’. In adult education co-­operation between the trades unions and the Volkshochschulen was encouraging, and in some places universities were showing responsibility through co-­operation with these bodies. In teacher education there were signs of a recognition that teachers should ‘teach children and not only subjects’. Interest in the social sciences was growing; youth affairs were progressing, though much still needed to be done. The 1948 report on university reform was beginning to exert some influence. The Technische Universität in Berlin had experimented with a studium generale and the Rektoren had charged a committee with looking into the state of political science and the role it might play in such courses. There was wide support for the notion of a Hochschulbeirat: Kiel had established such a body before the report was published. A new university law in Nordrhein-Westfalen was expected to include the introduction of a Hochschulrat. And the Rektoren had expressed their collective disapproval of the traditional student clubs and the duelling, insignia and ‘militarist practices’ which they incorporated. He concluded: If none of these signs of German initiative were present then, now that all pretence at control is over, we might well decide to pack up and leave. But these favourable developments, which, I am convinced, are due very largely to the work we have done in the past, provide a real foundation for the work we can do in the future by methods of co-­operation rather than control.

The remainder of his report concerned future operational methods. These included: l

l

l

direct personal influence of Education Officers on Germans (‘the average quality of the officers now here is high enough [. . .] to enable them to influence not only their equals in the German hierarchy, but also those whose opposite numbers would be their superiors in England’); Officers as agents through which influence is exercised by others (through visits and special courses, and especially the recruitment of British teachers to work in German secondary schools); and the Information Centres (‘Education Officers must carry on until the British Council can take over and it is earnestly to be hoped that [. . .] Germany will for some time be treated as a special case where an effort larger in scale than the normal must be maintained’).

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Concerning the Cultural Relations Branch, whose work in art, theatre,and music was of permanent importance and should be safeguarded, Marshall argued that its function in dealing with copyright issues and the scrutiny of German books should cease and its other work should be taken over by the British Council., which should then operate in the whole of western Germany. Robertson agreed in general terms with Marshall’s views on this matter, but was concerned about a potential reduction in effort if the British Council were to take over, with its limitations of personnel, regulations, and financial stringency. The Council would have to cooperate closely with Marshall and respect his general policies: ‘We do not want two agencies in this country, each attempting to influence the German mind in a different way and with a different object.’21 Marshall argued passionately for the ‘clear-­cut bold experiment’ of Wilton Park, whose closure would be ‘similar to the effect that would be produced if we withdrew from Berlin’, and he concluded his report with remarks on the general character of the present phase: The present phase is one of transition to the normal. The Germans, in particular the Ministers of Education, welcome the continued operation of our officers in Germany on this understanding. This transition cannot be sudden. It must proceed by steps and at every step care must be taken not to discard the old method until the new is not merely ready to come into action but is firmly established. This consideration should dominate all our decisions about the reduction of educational staff and of the expenditure of public money on this work.

*  *  * The Foreign Office German Information Department was operating with a broad brief in education in the mid–1950s. Its work was described by William Strang: Advise the Secretary of State on the policy to be pursued in regard to the following matters in relation to Germany; give guidance on these matters on behalf of the Secretary of State to the British authorities in Germany and Austria; Educational and Religious Affairs; Youth Affairs; Juvenile Delinquency; Physical Training and Sports; Women’s Affairs; Adult Education; Teacher Training; Universities Arrange educational courses in the United Kingdom for German educationalists, V.I.Ps., etc. Administer the Wilton Park Training Centre for German students, etc., brought to the United Kingdom. Arrange visits to Germany of British persons from various walks of life, to lecture to German population Arrange for the supply to Germany of educational books, periodicals, films, etc. Give guidance on information matters in Germany. Supply features articles, etc., to that country. Despatch of information visits to and from Germany.22

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Gradually the shift in focus was towards the work of the British Council and co-­ operation with German institutions. Education in the sense of formal provision was now firmly and clearly in the hands of the parliaments of the Länder. In their much-­cited analysis of twenty years of ‘non-­reform’ in education in Germany since the War, Robinsohn and Kuhlmann argued that the prevalent post-­war conservatism in the early decades of the Federal Republic was due to a desire to ensure prosperity and so to distrust any experiments. Adenauer’s election catchphrase was keine Experimente! (No experiments!) and the SPD responded similarly with Schluß mit Experimenten! (An end to experiments!). There was tension between a desire to revert to the pre-Hitler dispensation and the ambition of the Allies and reform-­minded Germans to promote educational change. Given the speed at which the process of creating an independent Germany progressed, and an acceptance of the fact that change could not be imposed from outside, the Allies did not insist on the reforms that formed a part of policy, and the result was in effect a lack of encouragement of reform initiatives23 and after 1949 a dominant conservative approach to educational policy, klassenspezifisch (‘class-­specific’) as Hellmut Becker has put it, but in fact close to the principles in the 1944 Education Act in England.24 ‘Insisting’ on reform in education had not been on the British agenda, at least not since January 1947. A note to Birley from Rita Ostermann of Political Division, written in August 1948, describes a realistic scenario for the future stance towards educational questions, building on a policy which had been consistent for most of the Occupation: Unless you agree that democracy can be imposed rather than learnt the hard way, by trial & error, surely we must agree to limit ourselves to observation, advice & assistance, while leaving to the Germans the real task of finding out what democracy means to them. We can remain aloof & intervene on major issues, always remembering that the interpretation of all legislation, both positive & negative, is in the end in the hands of the Germans; or we can try to work with them, by influence & example, rather than by veto. I cannot believe that any document will convince the Minister Presidenten [sic] of our firm intention to pursue democratisation, and as we cannot define it, we can only hope to impress them, & the German people, by constant observation & by example of our own democratic way of life. Those Germans who share our views will be heartened, but it is their battle for the future of Germany, not ours, if it is to have any permanence. 25

Ostermann goes on to make the point that ‘we cannot afford to suppress Communism & drive it underground’, so agreeing with Birley’s view that fear of Communism ‘cannot be regarded as a force likely to foster democracy in Germany’.26 With Adenauer’s policy of stability, bolstered by the continuance of Marshall Aid (provided from September 1948), the seeds of the post-­war German economic miracle were quickly sown in the years following the founding of the Federal Republic. A former British ambassador to Germany has summed up the qualities that now

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characterize modern Germany in a couple of brief sentences: it is ‘a liberal democracy with high standards of decency, integrity and freedom in public life’ together with efficient public administration and services; and it has ‘a remarkable intellectual and cultural tradition’, which is open to the wider world.27 Several of the organizations central to the present-­day structures of education in Germany had their origins during the Occupation: they evolved from measures initiated by Education Branch and its equivalents in the American and French Zones. The Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder (Standing Conference of Education Ministers of the Länder), for example, is an institution with a role of the kind envisaged for the Zonenerziehungsrat, a body set up in the autumn of 1946 which brought the education ministers together to discuss concerns of common interest and to coordinate policy – necessary especially since what was to be the Kulturhoheit (cultural autonomy) of the Länder might otherwise result in a fragmentation of provision throughout the Republic. (That very autonomy, of course, was also ensured by the policy of the western Allies to eschew centralization and uniformity.) The Westdeutsche Rektorenkonferenz (since 1990 restyled the Hochschulkonferenz) fulfilled a role first assumed by the early rectors’ conferences during the Occupation, when heads of universities came together to discuss common concerns. It was formally founded in April 1949 but had its origins in the conferences established in the British Zone as early as September 1945.28 The Education Minister of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Christine Teusch (1888–1968), along with Grimme and Landahl a leading figure in educational administration in post-­war Germany, chaired at various times three reinvigorated organizations that play a prominent part in Germany today: the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation) in 1948; the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) in 1949; and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD, German Academic Exchange Service) in 1950.29 Marshall’s office described in October 1949 the coordination in the western Länder of efforts in adult education in anticipation of draft laws. This was the latest example of the establishment of organizations on a tri-­zonal basis in the field of education and culture: others were the Westdeutsche Hochschulkonferenz, the ‘Standing Conference of West German Youth Associations’ (the work of which is mirrored in present-­day Jugendverbände in Germany), the Bundesjugendausschuß (still active as a forum for young trades unionists), the Bundesjugendring (founded on 3 October 1949 and bringing youth organizations together), and the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Lehrer (now the Deutscher Lehrerverband).30 Efforts had been made by university officers and others to establish halls of residence for university students. This had not been a strong tradition in Germany, outside of accommodation provided by the student societies. Harry Beckhough felt that provision at Burg Wahn was one of the earliest examples of a new endeavour to create student accommodation along British lines. The lack of housing at the time gave impetus to such developments, and halls of residence gradually became common in German universities. From the early stages of the Occupation, links had been encouraged between British and German institutions. Early in 1949 the Chief Education Control Officer in Hamburg reported that there were hundreds of such links.31 In 1947, partnerships were established

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between Bristol and Hannover, Oxford and Bonn, Reading and Düsseldorf, and Coventry and Kiel, the aims of which were to provide help, to arrange study visits and set up youth exchanges.32 WEA branches adopted German Volkshochschulen: in February 1949 forty-­one pairings were recorded. British schoolchildren corresponded with pen friends in German schools, and Education Branch was arranging for German children to spend time in British schools. Birley was regretting in March 1949 that while places had been found for 100 German secondary school children, a further 100 for whom fares and £1 a week pocket money could be provided for a twenty-­eight-week stay had not been accommodated.33 Latymer Upper School in West London can count almost seventy years of twinning with the Johanneum in Hamburg (a humanistisches Gymnasium founded in 1529), which started with a visit from five German schoolboys in 1948.34 Visits and exchanges, educational and cultural interaction, and general mutual understanding were encouraged at all levels and continued through various AngloGerman organizations, especially the Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft (Anglo-German Association) founded in Düsseldorf in March 1949 by Lilo Milchsack (1905–1992) with Birley’s support and under whose aegis the annual Königswinter conferences began to be held from the spring of 1950. These important meetings were seen in Britain and Germany as a significant non-­governmental link between the two countries, making an impact on both policy and public opinion.35 They were from the start independent of government and political parties and official (state) institutions. Soon after the first meeting branches of the Society were formed in ten German cities.36 *  *  * There were three strands to policy traceable in the discussions in the last years of the War and the early period of the Occupation. The first was denazification. This was a simple enough proposition – remove the Nazis and start afresh with non-Nazis – but one that eventually proved impossible to effect in anything like the full measure intended. The second was re-­education, an ill-­defined and probably undefinable term that had as many detractors as proponents. And the third was democratization, a strategy for change that depended on the many ways in which ‘democracy’ might be defined. Together and individually these three strands informed policy development at all levels, while never proving wholly adequate as guidelines for implementation usable by those charged with the practicalities of control in education. Hellmut Becker has criticized the Allies not only for not solving the problems of denominational education (see Chapter 5) and also for not reforming the administrative structures of educational provision. In his view, the restoration of German bureaucracy was very expedient (praktisch] for the Allies (in order that everything should function quickly), but it was one of the main hindrances to any change in thinking in educational policy.37 This is, however, to ignore the enormity of the problems facing the occupiers after the cessation of hostilities. The recreation of normal German ‘bureaucratic’ structures for the administration of education was not regrettable but inevitable in the circumstances: and in any case to introduce a ‘British’ style of democratic, unbureaucratic administration from day one – even if that had been possible – would have run counter to the policy of proceeding by example, of exercising control in ways that were workable in the vacuum that had been left by the Nazi officials at every level of governance. One

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British officer argued at the time on the lines of Becker’s later criticism: L.H. Sutton wrote to his colleague Handel Edwards on the subject of bureaucracy: Looking back on this picture of a powerful bureaucracy facing weakly organised and inexperienced democratic assemblies, it seems now that we were all somewhat to blame for not having foreseen the inevitable result of the withdrawal of the over-­ riding control of Mil. Gov. We have abdicated, not in favour of democracy, but in favour of old-­type German officialdom. We have in fact deserted German democracy, expecting them to finish the job before we had given them the tools.38

*  *  * The role of the British in restoring and reconstructing education in Germany involved confronting several dilemmas:

1. If the aim of the Occupation was to encourage a democratic outlook in all walks

of life, doing so by means of autocratic control would be counter-­productive. This was a fundamental problem. 2. If, in dealing with the German population, individuals were to be seen as victims of the defeated regime, treating them as its suspicious products would be at odds with the compassion normally shown to victims. 3. If another aim was to encourage freedom of expression, openness, and debate, then exercising censorship, proscribing organisations, and punishing people for their previous political allegiance would cause hostility, however necessary such a policy was. 4. If reform measures were to be encouraged, any evidence that those same measures were not yet in place in Britain would undermine the principles on which they were based and so encourage the charge of hypocrisy. The solution in each case was to keep in mind the principle of enabling the German people to solve problems for themselves, with indirect control when needed, but at every turn with encouragement and advice. And in this the letter of official policy was less important than the work at local levels of the many British officers working alongside German authorities. Among those who contributed most to the reconstruction and regeneration of education in Germany following unconditional surrender, two controversial figures stand out. They were controversial since their appointments were contested, but despite the misgivings – in one case on the part of Foreign Office mandarins; in the other on the part of politicians – they made a success of their time in Germany and contributed substantially to the emergence of an education system that still counts among the most admired and successful in the world. Donald Riddy brought to the task of setting up and managing Education Branch both deep knowledge of how education systems function in democratic societies and a sound grasp of administrative procedure. Working from nothing, he made sure that policy was properly formulated in Military Government instructions, got the schools and universities running again within months, and oversaw the steps that needed to be

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taken to secure the democratic development of all levels of the education system. He had sufficient strength of character to fight for the work that Education Branch was doing, despite many bureaucratic obstacles and some personal antagonism. He was defeated in the end by Birley’s machinations after his arrival on the scene as Educational Adviser to the Military Governor. The unequal duumvirate of Director of Education Branch and Educational Adviser was ill-­conceived and unsustainable as far as Riddy’s position was concerned. Once he had gone, his successors were very much Birley’s nominees, created in his image. And what of Birley? Lord Longford, with the hyperbole of an eccentric, proclaimed that ‘no man contributed more than Robert Birley to the democratic regeneration of Germany’.39 The ODNB article on him asserts, more mutedly but still with exaggeration, that he must be apportioned ‘a generous share of the credit for rebuilding the German educational system’. Birley’s biographer, Arthur Hearnden, concluded that it would be ‘only too easy to exaggerate what he did for Germany. It would be less easy to exaggerate what Germany did for him.’40 He was clearly a charismatic figure who could inspire confidence and enthusiasm in others, and he was probably more significantly a figurehead in education of the kind needed for the second stage of the Occupation rather than a structural reformer. Hearnden calls him ‘fundamentally unsystematic’; it was ‘remarkable’ that he coped at all with the tasks of administration, but his achievements with people had lasting impact. Birley’s was a world of establishment networking, of easy privilege and selective patronage. He contrived to have like-­minded people around him, but he also managed to encourage his troops, to get people on side. He did so through charm and a talent to inspire, using his eclectic scholarship and frequent use of allusion and anecdote to reinforce his many broad-­sweep pronouncements about what needed to be done to secure the future of Germany and of Europe. He had the politician’s skill of seeing the larger picture. He made a profound impact on those who worked with him and they remained very loyal. In so many ways he was the opposite of Riddy, and in retrospect it seems regrettable that the two men could not have worked in tandem up to the end of the second stage of the Occupation. Herbert Walker wrote to Birley in December 1947 of the ‘inspiration, hope and understanding’ he had already at that stage brought to education officers, there was now ‘the right spirit amongst many Germans’.41 Birley’s biographer sums up his strengths: What Birley did supremely well was to give heart and hope to those to whom it did fall to rebuild the schools, the youth organisations and the universities.42

The officers of Education Branch were impressive individuals. They knew and understood Germany; they spoke the language; their instincts and their advice and judgments were usually sound. Geoffrey Bird, Harry Beckhough, Caroline Cunningham, Ray Perraudin, Ruth Harvey, George Murray, Edith Davies and a host of others were effective – directly, or in the case of visitors to the Zone like Helena Deneke indirectly – in interpreting policy with pragmatic understanding of what would work in the prevailing conditions and in the context of a country whose underlying traditions they understood better than most. Harry Beckhough described the common approach

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to official policy: ‘Whatever the directive is, the personal case is always different’: that was why people like him were needed ‘on the spot’.43 Some of them stayed on beyond 1949, adapting their skills to new circumstances but continuing their objective to improve educational thinking in Germany and to further Anglo-German relations. Some stayed perhaps too long for their own career prospects. Most did not go on to positions of authority and influence in Britain; some found a niche as university lecturers, others as schoolteachers. Riddy returned to the Inspectorate and later became President of the Modern Language Association and briefly Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex. People prominent in other parts of the CCG, like Richard Crossman, Noel Annan, Hugh Greene and Duncan Wilson, returned to the UK at a strategic point in their careers and went on to high positions in public life. That so many individuals of talent gave of their time and skills to the task of educational reconstruction and development in Germany was fortunate indeed for the smooth transition from chaotic collapse to stable regeneration.

Notes Preface 1 Robert Birley, Address to the Education Section of the British Association, 13 September 1948. FO1050/1151. 2 Williams, A Passing Fury, 11. 3 See Kaiser-Lahme, ‘Control Commission for Germany (British Element). Bestandsbeschreibung und Forschungsfelder’. 4 Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle, 206–13. 5 Rudzio, Die Neuordnung des Kommunalwesens, 76–77.

Introduction 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Heinz Koeppler, quoted in Keezer, A Unique Contribution to International Relations, 9. The Reichsdozentenschaft. The NS-Volkswohlfahrt (NSV). Van Dijk: ‘Entnazifizierungsklüngel’, 270–71. Adenauer took the view that regard should be had to actual cooperation with and conviction shown to Nazi organizations rather than to mere formal membership. Haupts, Die Universität zu Köln im Übergang vom Nationalsozialismus zur Bundesrepublik, 20; Wighton, Adenauer, 74. Van Dijk, op. cit., 271. (Present author’s translation.) Protocol of the Proceedings of the Berlin Conference, Section II A 7. Reiner Müller, who was a member of the Erbgesundheits-Obergericht. Van Dijk, op. cit., 273. Ibid., 271. FO1050/1121. Miss Ridding’s report is dated 12 December 1947. (Present author’s translation from the German original.) Black Record, 55. ‘Military Government Directive on Administrative, Local and Regional Government and the Public Services’, second edition, revised 1 February 1946, in Rudzio, ‘Export englischer Demokratie?’, 225. Watt, Britain Looks to Germany, 94. Montgomery, ‘Talk to Control Commission’ (undated). FO1050/1376. FO371/46743. Werner Richter, Re-Educating Germany, 28. Balfour & Mair, Four Power Control in Germany and Austria, 230. Anna Mosolf, ‘Die politische Verantwortung der deutschen Frau in der Gegenwart’, 669. (Present author’s translation.) One contemporary photograph shows a young child among a long queue of adults filing past the mass grave of executed prisoners in Remscheid-Lüttringhausen (Kriegsende in Deutschland, 73). Film footage shows young people being required to

310

19

20 21 22 23

Notes carry on open box stretchers the exhumed corpses of people executed by the Nazis in southern Germany. (‘After the War: Conquering Germany’, BBC2, August 2005.) Many people would avert their gaze and shield the eyes of children forced with their parents to observe the evidence of such Nazi atrocities. Birley, ‘Potsdam in Practice’, 76. This assertion is omitted in the earlier version published in The British in Germany (edited by Arthur Hearnden) and it is not exactly true: he certainly used the term at an early stage, in a letter to The Times of 5 May 1945 and much later, for example on 2 July 1947, in a letter to the Chief Administrative Officer of the Control Commission: ‘It will be my duty . . . to set on foot a variety of projects for the reeducation of Germany.’ FO936/324. John Hynd MP, HC Deb 3 April 1947, Vol. 435, Col. 2296. Knowles, Winning the Peace, 11. Watt, Britain Looks to Germany, 71. Sir Ernest Barker, The Times, 10 April 1948.

Chapter 1: War-­time Planning for Education in a Defeated Germany 1 W.Friedmann, The Allied Government of Germany, 1947. 2 Sir Vaughan Berry, interviewed in Charles Wheeler’s Radio 4 programme, Germany: Misery to Miracle, 19 September 2005. 3 Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle, 187. 4 In this and the following section I have used parts of Phillips, The British and University Reform Policy in Germany, 1945–1949. 5 W. Arnold-Foster: Charters of the Peace, 14. 6 Eden, The Reckoning, 505. 7 Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. VI, 644–45. 8 Minute of 14 May, 1945. Ibid., 646. 9 Roosevelt, broadcast of 23 February 1942. Arnold-Foster, op. cit., 11. 10 In Casablanca, the stated policy of ‘unconditional surrender’ seems to have taken observers by surprise. Churchill and Roosevelt had discussed the notion privately, but it emerged publicly in a press conference. Lord Ismay, who was present, recalled that the phrase probably recurred in Roosevelt’s mind and was ‘released fortuitously’. Ismay, Memoirs, 290. 11 Full details of all the war-­time conferences are contained in John W. Wheeler-Bennett and Anthony Nicholls, The Semblance of Peace: The Political Settlement after the Second World War. 12 Protocol of the Proceedings of the Berlin Conference, 4. 13 Ibid., 5. 14 Cox & Phillips, Transcript, 157. 15 See Pakschies, Umerziehung in der Britischen Zone. 16 Sir Robert (later Lord) Vansittart (1881–1957) was elevated to the peerage in 1941. 17 Black Record, 27. 18 DNB. 19 H.J.Laski, The Germans : Are they Human? A Reply to Sir Robert Vansittart (1941); Victor Gollancz, Shall our Children Live or Die? A Reply to Sir Robert Vansittart on the German Problem (1942).

Notes 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48

311

Vansittart, Lessons of my Life, 32. Ibid., 31–32. Black Record, 15. Ibid., 55. Bones of Contention, 65. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 142. Particularly an American film like Frank Capra’s Your Job in Germany, which actively encouraged non-­fraternization and condemned the German people as a whole for the War and its atrocities. It was widely shown to German audiences, prefaced by the screening of footage shot in the concentration camps. Eden, The Reckoning, 476. Cf. Wheeler-Bennett & Nicholls, The Semblance of Peace and Tent, Mission on the Rhine. ‘Works Progress Administration’; ‘Public Works Administration’; ‘Commodity Credit Corporation’. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum: FDR’s Papers as President, President’s Secretary’s File: Subject File: War Department, 1944–1945, 52–60. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum: Morgenthau, Presidential Diary Vol.6, July 1, 1944–April 12 1945, Part 2, 1541. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. VII, Road to Victory, 1941–1945, 965. Cf. Karl-Ernst Bungenstab: Umerziehung zur Demokratie? Re-­education-Politik im Bildungswesen der US-Zone, p.27. For the Plan in detail, see Henry Morgenthau, Germany Is Our Problem. Report, 2. Ibid., 154. The parts of the text relating to education are given in Bungenstab, Umerziehung zur Demokratie, 180. Letter of 6 April 1945. FO371/4687. FO1050/1647. ‘21 Army Gp Mil Gov Ed. Control Instruction No.6: “White Personalities” ’. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Wiss. Nachlaß D.C. Riddy, 622–2/51:14. Kettenacker, ‘The Planning of “Re-Education” During the Second World War’, 62. Henderson’s report dealt with the circumstances leading to the termination of his mission to Berlin, 20 September 1939 (Cmd. 6115). Vansittart wrote of Sargent (an anti-­appeasement voice in the FO) that he was ‘a philosopher strayed into Whitehall. He knew all the answers; when politicians did not want them he went out to lunch’. Sargent had the egregious characteristic for a Foreign Office mandarin of refusing to travel abroad. (Vansittart, The Mist Procession, 399). Quoted in Kettenacker, op. cit., 60. Tetens, Know Your Enemy!, p.98. 100,000 copies of this publication were distributed in May 1944 to influential individuals and groups in the US by the Society for the Prevention of World War III. (Casey, Cautious Crusade, 170.) Hill, Struggle for Germany, 12. Jürgensen, ‘Elemente Britischer Deutschlandpolitik’; ‘British Occupation Policy after 1945 and the Problem of “Re-Educating” Germany’. A.L. Rowse, All Souls in My Time, 98. O’Neill had the distinction of resigning three times from the Foreign Office, the third occasion being in 1968 when the temperamental George Brown as Foreign

312

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61

62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Notes Secretary preferred not to appoint him as British Ambassador in Bonn, a post for which O’Neill was pre-­eminently qualified. He later oversaw with great skill negotiations for Britain’s entry to the European Community and wrote the history of the process. ODNB. FO371/39093. Ibid. The last eight words here replace Troutbeck’s original ‘Music, and the arts generally should therefore be encouraged’. Jürgensen, ‘British Occupation Policy’, 230. Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force. A.C.A. (44) 5: Ministerial Committee on Armistice Terms and Civil Administration. ‘The Re-Education of Germany.’ ‘The Re-­education of Germany.’ FO371/39093. For a full account, see Phillips, ‘War-­time Planning for the ‘Re-­education’ of Germany. Professor E.R. Dodds and the German Universities’ and ‘Dodds and Educational Policy for a Defeated Germany’. Russell, ‘Eric Robertson Dodds 1893–1979’, 364. Grayson Neikirk Kefauver (1900–1946), Dean of Stanford’s School of Education, was later sidelined by the US State Department. He had, it was said, only an amateur’s knowledge of Germany and of re-­education problems: ‘He does not know German and is unacquainted with the complexity of the issues involved.’ Tent, Mission on the Rhine, 71. Troutbeck to Kirkpatrick, 7 June 1944. FO371/39094. Alexander Cadogan (1884–1968), Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the FO, interviewed Kirkpatrick on 12 May 1944 about the PWE and confided to his diary that it was ‘a scandal. 1,250 people in London, and 500 at Woburn, none of whom know what they are supposed to do.’ (Dilks, The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 628.) Gladwyn Jebb described Kirkpatrick as ‘intelligent, combative, sardonic, courageous’; he would have made an excellent general; but in diplomacy he had ‘a tendency to score points and to demonstrate to his foreign interlocutors the extreme weakness of their case’. He was ‘a very brave and forthright man, entirely capable of speaking his mind to his superiors’. The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn, 269. Kirkpatrick’s memoirs, The Inner Circle, provide a full account of his career. Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle, 186–87. Kirkpatrick to Harvey, 16 February 1945. FO371/46693. Kirby to Troutbeck, 23 November 1944. FO371/39098. Minute of 28 November, ibid. Troutbeck to Kirby, 30 November 1944, ibid. Oscar Wood to Ray Monk, 19 June 1987. Wood Papers. Borinski, ‘German Educational Reconstruction: Rückblick und Erinnerung’, 79. ‘A History of the GER’, UCL Institute of Education; Anderson: “GER’: A Voluntary Anglo-German Contribution’, 252. Letter of 29 February 1944. FO371/39093. Minute of 6 March 1944. Ibid. Anderson, 254–55. Pakschies, Umerziehung in der Britischen Zone 1945–1949, 93; 107. Henderson, The G.E.R. Vale Lecture, 36–42.

Notes

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Chapter 2: The Occupation and the Evolution of Control in Education 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

D.C. Watt, Britain Looks to Germany, 69. German woman, 1945, quoted in the documentary film The True Glory, 1945. Montgomery, Memoirs, 345. How Wars End, 103. Barton, The Problem of 12 Million Refugees in Today’s Germany, 16. Interview with Patricia Meehan, 12 February, 1978. Transcript. Tscharntke, Re-­educating German Women, 21. Connor, Refugees and Expellees in Post-War Germany, 19. Patrick Gordon Walker, The Lid Lifts, 8. Ibid., 75. Mehnert & Schulte (eds), Deutschland-Jahrbuch 1949, 291. McClelland, Embers of War, 107. Deneke & Norris, The Women of Germany, 8. Film footage in BBC: ‘Zone of Occupation’ (1981) Programme 1, ‘Year Zero’. Dickens: Lübeck Diary, 18. KLV figures cited in Anweiler, ‘Bildungspolitik’, 706. In 1942 it was 2,078; in 1943, 1,981; in 1944, 1,671. The pre-­war figure was closer to 3,000. Taking 1939 as a base (=100), the average nutritional value of the calorie allocation was 85.3 in 1942, 81,4 in 1943, and 68.6 in 1944; by 1945 it was 67.0. Farquharson, The Western Allies and the Politics of Food, 254. In Darkest Germany, 35. Ibid. Second Report from the Select Committee on Estimates, Session 1945–46, 23 July 1946, v. At this time (July 1946), the basic ration in Great Britain supplied 2,850 calories. Koszyk, ‘ “Umerziehung” der Deutschen aus britischer Sicht’, 11. German Diary, 10. It was reckoned that 100,000 people in Hamburg showed the physical effects of malnutrition in late 1946. (Burleigh: The Third Reich, 794.) Lord Saltoun, HL Deb 6 November 1946, Vol. 143, Col. 1012. The Lid Lifts, 74. Häusser & Maugg, Hungerwinter, 13–16. Dodds, letter to his wife of 6 January 1947, Bodleian uncatalogued Boats additional papers (2017) (2 degrees Fahrenheit is –16.6 degrees Celcius.) Brockway, German Diary, 16. Baxter, Tales of My Time, 93–94. A Bundle of Sensations, 181. Michael Foster to E.R. Dodds, 4 March 1949. Dodds Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Meehan, A Strange Enemy People, 140–45. Montgomery, Memoirs, 345. Ibid., 401–02. Ibid, 401. Montgomery’s first deputy, Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Weeks, had had to resign owing to ill health at the end of July 1945. Second Report from the Select Committee on Estimates, Session 1945–46, 21. Austin Albu, ‘Zone of Occupation’, BBC2, 29 November 1981.

314

Notes

39 FO371/46743. I have corrected O’Neill’s German here – what he actually wrote was Führer, befehl, which should be Führer, befiehl. (‘Führer, command!’); the sense requires the noun Führerbefehl (‘The Führer’s command’). 40 ‘Personal Message from the Commander- in-Chief ’. FO1050/1648. Broadcast on 6 August 1945. 41 The document, which was given to Attlee, is reproduced in Montgomery’s Memoirs, 413–16. 42 Douglas, Years of Command, 362. 43 Robertson, interviewed by Theodore A. Wilson, 11 August 1970, for the Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri. 44 Montgomery, Memoirs, 199. 45 Interview with Patricia Meehan, 12 September 1978. Transcript. 46 He was later (1948–1950) Regional Commissioner for Nordrhein-Westfalen. 47 Interview with Patricia Meehan, 25 May 1978. Transcript. 48 Transcript, interview with Theodore A. Wilson, 11 August 1970, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum. On his ennoblement Robertson was to sit on the crossbenches in the House of Lords. 49 Macready, In the Wake of the Great, 206. 50 HC Deb 22 September 1948, Vol. 456, Col. 96. 51 Interview of 11 November 1981. 52 According to James Mark. Cox & Phillips, Transcript, 68. 53 HC Deb 3 April 1947, Vol. 435, Col. 2297. 54 HC Deb 29 July 1946, Vol. 426, Col. 528. 55 HC Deb 29 July 1946, Vol. 426, Col. 530. 56 Annan, How Dr Adenauer Rose Resilient from the Ruins of Germany, 8. 57 FO371/55690. 58 Draft directive of 15 January 1946. FO371/55688. 59 ‘Political Sanctions to be Applied Against Students and Professors of Higher Education Institutions who carry on Fascist or Anti-Democratic Propaganda.’ FO371/55690. 60 Directive No.32 of the Allied Control Authority Coordinating Committee. FO371/55688. 61 In the Wake of the Great, 212. 62 Interview with Patricia Meehan, 11 September 1978. Transcript. 63 Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary 1945–1951, 373. 64 Pakenham, Lord [Francis (Frank) Aungier, later 7th Earl of Longford] (1953), Born to Believe, 170. 65 Hynd was asked in the House of Commons on 4 December to say on how many occasions he had visited the British Zone during the preceding twelve months. The answer was seven times, twenty-­eight days in all. His interlocutor (Robert Boothby) wondered if that was ‘adequate for the discharge of his duties’. Hansard, HC Deb Vol. 431, Col. 324. 66 Born to Believe, 173–74. 67 Interview with Birley, Somerton, 23 July 1979. 68 Interview with Patricia Meehan, 11 September 1978. Transcript. 69 Ibid. 70 Douglas, Years of Command, 359. Pakenham summed up the dilemma as possibly ‘a case of a steady far-­seeing statesman on the one hand, and a young man in a hurry on the other’. Born to Believe, 184. 71 Interview with Patricia Meehan. 11 September 1978. Transcript.

Notes 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

315

Military Government Gazette: Germany. 21 Army Group Area of Control, No. 1, 1. Restoring Democracy in Germany, 3. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 434. Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy, 8–9. Ibid., 4. Balfour & Mair, Four-Power Control in Germany and Austria, 65. Ruhm von Oppen, Documents on Germany under Occupation, 16. WO193/368. Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government North-West Europe, 207–08. Padover, Psychologist in Germany, 203. Saul K. Padover (1905–81), born in Vienna, was a respected historian and political scientist who held posts in Chicago, at UC Berkeley and in New York. Ibid., 202. Tent, Mission on the Rhine, 41–43. Sutton to Major M. O’Grady of 21 Army Group, June 1945. FO1050/1663. Ruhm von Oppen, Documents on Germany under Occupation 1945–1954, 20–21. Handbook for Kreis Resident Officers, Part I, 50, 51. Four-Power Control in Germany and Austria, 1945–1946, 97. ‘The Control Commission in Germany’, 13. FO936/659. Zentner, Aufstieg aus dem Nichts, Vol. 2, 84. ‘The Control Commission in Germany’, 16. FO936/659. Sir Brian Robertson, evidence before the House of Commons Select Committee on Estimates, given on 30 May 1946. Second Report from the Select Committee on Estimates, Session 1945–46, 13. James Mark, ‘The Art of the Possible’, 40. Charles Wheeler, ‘Germany: Misery to Miracle’, BBC Radio 4, 19 September 2005. Meehan, A Strange Enemy People, 159. HC Deb 19 February 1946, Vol. 419, Cols 959–60. HC Deb 18 March 1946, Vol. 420, Col. 1619. Ibid., Cols 1622–23. HC Deb 5 November 1947, Vol. 443, Cols 1815–16. Interview with Patricia Meehan, 11 September 1978. Transcript. Douglas, Years of Command, 356. Meehan, A Strange Enemy People, 120–26. HL Deb 12 November 1947, Vol. 152, Cols 622–23. Delmer, Black Boomerang, 229. Sahrhage, Bünde Zwischen ‘Machtergreifung’ und Entnazifizierung, 239–40. Teppe, ‘Zwischen Besatzungsregiment und politischer Neuordnung’, 273. FO1050/1291. Grimme to Toni Jensen (Stadtschulrätin in Kiel), 1 June 1946. Briefe, 116. Memorandum of 16 December 1946. FO1050/1063. FO1050/1210. Note to Chief, IA & C Division, 3 December 1946. FO1050/1290. Meehan, A Strange Enemy People, 53. Riddy to Major Besley, 13 September 1945. The answer was ‘voluntary’. (Teachers of German in Scotland wanted to know if they should still teach this traditional form of handwriting.) FO1050/157. Interview with Patricia Meehan, 24 October 1978. Transcript. Fraser became head of German programmes at the BBC in 1948.

316

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115 Dodds, Missing Persons, 163. 116 His formal position was head of the Education and Religious Affairs Division of the G–5 section of SHAEF. 117 Cadogan to Sir Frederick Bovenschen, 23 July 1944. FO371/39095. 118 It appears that he was registered as a research student at Exeter College, Oxford, for two years but did not complete a degree. 119 FO371/39095. 120 Ibid., O’Neill to Troutbeck, 19 July 1944. 121 Minute of 19 July 1944. Ibid. 122 Ibid., note by Dodds of 18 July 1944. 123 Gayre, Teuton and Slav on the Polish Frontier, insert between 32 and 33. 124 ‘A London Diary’, New Statesman and Nation, 5 August 1944. 125 ODNB entry on Sir Frederick Bovenschen. 126 FO371/46693. 127 Ibid. 128 Minutes, Conference on Education, Hotel Trianon, Versailles. FO1050/1647. G–5 was the SHAEF division responsible for civil affairs. 129 The Technical Manual for Education and Religious Affairs appeared under the aegis of Lt-General Sir A.E. Grasett (1888–1971) of G–5 Division of SHAEF. 130 FO1050/1647. The revised version of the Directive was sent on 21 November 1944. 131 ‘Recent Policy for Re-Education in Germany.’ FO1050/1305. 132 Wilkinson, The Terror in Germany, 1933. 133 Davies, ‘British Policy and the Schools’, 98–99. 134 Vernon, Ellen Wilkinson, 211. 135 FO371/46935: ‘Report by Miss Wilkinson, the Minister of Education, of her tour of Berlin and the rest of the Zone.’ 136 Robert Birley, address to the Education Section of the British Association, 13 September 1948. FO1050/1151. 137 Roundtable radio discussion chaired by Robert J. Havighurst, NBC, February 1948. 138 Internal memorandum of 13 November 1946 to Riddy from M.M. Simmons. Wiss. Nachlaß D.C. Riddy, Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 622–2/51:6. 139 Wiss. Nachlaß D.C. Riddy, Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 622–2/51:6 140 Simpson was to resign in May 1947, severely criticizing the Control Commission for failing to root out racketeering: he was ‘disillusioned and frustrated’, ‘fed up to the back teeth’, and was calling for a Royal Commission on the activities of the Control Commission (Canberra Times, 13 May 1947). A written answer in the House of Commons on behalf of the Foreign Secretary said that Simpson had completed his agreed period of service and that his post was to be abolished following his proposals for the splitting of the Division into a number of separate elements, each responsible to the Deputy Military Governor. HC Deb 14 May 1947, Vol. 437, Col.159W. 141 The speech was delivered on 22 October 1946. The relevant passage is: ‘We are decentralising German administration as far as possible. We have set up a new province of North Rhineland-Westphalia, and we intend reorganising the remainder of our zone into two other provinces, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony The Hanseatic towns of Hamburg and Bremen will, for the time being, remain separate from the arrangement. Looking further ahead, we contemplate a German constitution which would avoid the two extremes of a loose confederation of autonomous States and a unitary centralised State. Certain questions would be

Notes

142 143 144 145 146 147

148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165

317

exclusively reserved to the centre; the regional units would be exclusively competent in all the remaining powers.’ HC Deb 22 October 1946, Vol. 427, Col. 1512. Creighton to Dodds, 19 April 1947. Letter in present author’s possession. Translation sent to Herbert Walker, 5 January 1948. FO1050/1163. FO371/64386. FO945/199. HC Deb 12 February 1947, Vol. 433, Cols 358–59. Birley to Bickersteth, 17 August 1945, copied by the Foreign Office in FO371/46744. Kurt Hahn had sought permission to visit Salem in the company of Bickertsteth. Hahn wished to advise the school, ‘with the help of English schoolmasters, to start short courses – one might call them courses in Citizenship – where boys would be disinfected from any Nazi taint they might have acquired through misguided hero worship’. (Letter of 21 July from Hahn to Assistant Under-Secretary of State Nevile Butler at the Foreign Office). Birley to Hirsch, 2 January 1948. FO1050/1193. ‘Memorandum on Education in the British Zone in Germany and in the British Sector of Berlin’, 20 December. Davis, ‘The Problem of Textbooks’, 112–13. By October 1945, 5.25 million books had been printed in the US Zone. (Knappen, And Call it Peace, 84). Birley’s pamphlet Czechoslovakia was published in 1939. O.R.C. (47) 24, 10 April 1947: ‘Germany: Future Policy for Education in the British Zone.’ Copy in FO371/64387. Maud to Birley, 3 February 1947. Birley Papers, City University, London. James Chuter Ede to Birley, 13 February 1947. Birley Papers, City University, London. Creighton to Birley, 19 February 1947. Birley Papers, City University, London. HC Deb 3 April 1947, Vol. 435, Cols 2291–93. Ibid., Col. 2296. FO945/199. Personal communication, 24 September 2014. Interview of 11 November 1981. Birley to his father, 21 May 1947. Birley Papers. ‘Proposed Staff of the Educational Adviser’, 2 July 1947. FO936/324. (Birley had a fondness for the unnecessary initial capitalization of ‘University’, ‘Secondary School’, ‘Youth’, ‘Adult Education’). 19th conference of Senior Education Control Officers, Hannover, 9/10 July. Riddy Nachlaß 622–2/51:17. Birley to his father, 21 May 1947. Birley Papers. Thomas Richmond Mandell Creighton (1915–1987) came from a distinguished family; he met with displeasure from Edgar N. Johnson, the American historian of Germany on Lucius D. Clay’s OMGUS staff, who described him as ‘an utterly frivolous, supposedly brilliant Englishman . . . who looks down on his superiors because they do not come from a good enough family (meaning as good as his family)’. Breunig & Wetzel, eds, Fünf Monate in Berlin, 181. In a letter to Dodds, Creighton wrote of being interviewed for the assistant directorship of Dodds’s old department: he was seen by ‘an unimaginably gloomy collection of dead-­alive old sticks. Perhaps I showed my opinion of them too clearly, for they did not appoint me.’ He went on to say that he felt unable to face much more Berlin life after two years, but had promised to stay over the summer with Birley, though this was ‘too miserable a compromise between education & the shoddy administration of a second rate

318

166

167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174

175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197

Notes service’. He was looking for ‘something more purposefully official than the C.C.G.’. Creighton to Dodds, 19 April 1947. Letter in present author’s possession. Hearnden, Red Robert, 122–23. Reginald (Rex) Vernon Hume (1898–1960) had been with the British military mission in Berlin in 1920–21 and served as acting military attaché in the British Embassy, Berlin from 1921 to 1927. He joined the Military Government in Germany in 1944. As well as being Director of Education Branch, 1948–49, he was Deputy Educational Adviser to Robertson. Later he became Land Commissioner for Schleswig-Holstein and subsequently British Consul in Kiel. Birley to his father, 21 May 1947. Birley Papers. Birley to his father, 7 November 1946. Birley Papers. Birley to his father, 21 December 1947. Birley Papers. Birley, ‘British Policy in Retrospect’, 46. Hearnden, Red Robert, 258. Ibid., 252. Letter of 5 December 1948 to W.W. Woodcock of Education Branch. FO1050/1063. Interview of 11 November 1981 in London. Mark and Pakenham experienced something of a clash of personalities. Though Mark recognized some of Pakenham’s good qualities, he described his life with the Minister as ‘a permanent process of frustration & delay, punctuated by crises during which matters would either be dealt with somehow or else consigned to one’s own discretion’. Pakenham tended to sentimentalize the Germans, and this prevented him from ‘forming a balanced judgment of their virtues and vices and [hampered] him in making an effective & convincing case for them’. ‘Lord Pakenham and my relationship with him’, manuscript, Mark Papers. HC Deb 12 February 1947, Vol. 433, Col. 2297. Meehan, A Strange Enemy People, 54. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 298. ‘Report of a Visit to Göttingen by Capt. R.H. Thomas’. FO1050/1372. Letter from Ian R. Henderson, Head of Section, Informal Education Section, Education Branch, Bad Rothenfelde, to Birley, 14 January 1949. FO1050/1139. Kreis Group Herford to Deputy Chief, IA&C Division, 26 March 1947. FO1050/1312. Malzahn, Germany 1945–1949: A Sourcebook, 88–89. (1918–1980) Letter of 15 December 1947. Harvey Papers. Klewitz, ‘Allied Policy in Berlin’, 199–200; and Berliner Einheitsschule 1945–1951, 34. Birley, ‘Education in Berlin’, lecture to the Royal Empire Society, 1950. Birley Papers, City University, London. Uhlig, Der Beginn der antifaschistisch-­demokratischen Schulreform, 56–57. Blessing, The Antifascist Classroom, 48. Uhlig, op. cit., 57. Birley, ‘Education in Berlin’. Klewitz, ‘Allied Policy in Berlin’, 200. Tent, ‘The Free University and its Americans’, 145. Birley, ‘Education in Berlin’. Letter to Birley, 2 August 1947. FO1050/1193. Letter of 12 September 1947. FO1050/1193. Maude to Birley, 16 December 1947. Ibid. Birley to Hirsch, 2 January 1948. Ibid. Leonard to Walker, 23 October 1948. FO1050/1126.

Notes

319

198 GER/8/4/3. 199 Henderson, The G.E.R. Vale Lecture, 23.

Chapter 3: Policy in Practice: Opening the Schools, Emergency Teacher Training, Re-­educating Youth 1 ‘A Review of German Education (excluding the Universities) from May 1945 to July 1946’, dated 27 July 1946. FO1050/1289. 2 Germany, 5. 3 Pocket Guide to Germany, 7–10. 4 Your Job in Germany, 1945. The text was written by Theodor Seuss Geisel (famous as the author ‘Dr Seuss’). Despite the uncompromisingly tough style of the script, Geisel is said to have considered non-­fraternization to have been ‘impossible and ill-­advised’ (Mark Harris, Five Came Back, 379). 5 12th Army Group, ‘Don’t Be a Sucker in Germany!’. The title alludes to a 1943 US War Department propaganda film on the rise of Nazism and the dangers of Nazi-­style recruitment in the United States, Don’t be a Sucker. 6 Can the Germans be Re-­educated?, 14. The text was published without an author attribution: it was written by Joachim von Halasz. 7 Ibid., 20–21. 8 The case of ‘Vikar B’ illustrates the kind of denunciation of teachers referred to here. He had apparently made remarks critical of the SS and Hitler when dealing with the question of godparents in a religious education lesson. He was alleged to have said: Only pious unblemished people may be accepted. SS men cannot be accepted as godparents and even if the Führer were to take on a role as godparent I would have to consider for some time whether I could accept this godparenthood. In a letter of July 1940 to the Archbishop in Freiburg, the Minister of Education in Karlsruhe wrote: These remarks caused excitement among the pupils and are of a kind to influence them in an unsatisfactory way. Bringing the Führer into such a discussion must be seen as impertinent. In this situation I find myself compelled to withdraw from Priest B the authority to give religious instruction in the schools of the Land.

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Quoted in Engelsing: ‘Wir sind in Deutschland und nicht in Russland’, 81 (present author’s translation). Handbook for Military Government in Germany, para 805. WO241/1. H.V. Dicks, ‘Notes on German Psychology’. FO1032/531. Henry Dicks, ‘Why the Germans Became Nazis’, BZR, 2 (2): 6, 26 July 1947. By this time Dicks was Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Leeds. FO1032/1462. Letter from Kirkpatrick to Lieutentant-General Sir Frederick Morgan of SHAEF, 2 March 1945. FO1032/531. ‘The German Character’, 1 March 1945. FO1032/1462.

320

Notes

16 Mark, ‘The Art of the Possible’, 39–40. 17 ‘Recommended Policy for Re-­education in Germany’, September 1946. FO1050/1305, 2, footnote 1. This document was prepared as a report for the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Riddy appears to have been responsible for it. 18 Interview with Patricia Meehan, 24 October 1978. Transcript. 19 Know Your Enemy, 109. 20 Ibid., 115. 21 Weiß (ed.), Es begann mit einem Kuß, 5. 22 ‘Letter by the Commander-­in-Chief on Non-Fraternisation’, March 1945; Letter No.2, June 1945; Letter No.3, 14 July 1945; Letter No.4, 25 September 1945. 23 Clement Arthur West (1892–1972). 24 Memorandum of 28 May 1945 by C.A. West, Major-General, General Staff. FO1030/289. 25 FO1050/289. The exchange took place on 6 June 1945. A document from Eisenhower dated 8 June referred to the orders requiring avoidance of contact with the German population ‘except on matters of official business and in necessary activities involving procurement of services and supplies’. He added that published orders were ‘obviously not expected to apply to small children’. The Cabinet Secretary’s notes of 11 June record the Prime Minister reporting that the non-­fraternization policy ‘must be modified’ and that Montgomery was putting a plan into effect for gradual change. CAB/195/3. 26 Ian Bevan, ‘The General Gives a Tea Party for 400’, News Chronicle, 22 August 1945. The Headquarters of the 30th Corps was in Eystrup. 27 Horrocks, A Full Life, 271. 28 Bevan, loc. cit. 29 FO371/46984. 30 Graves, The Twenty-Third Quarter, 119. 31 A Strange Enemy People, 150. 32 Cox & Phillips, Transcript, 53. 33 Letter from Major-General Kirby to J.R. Wade, Director of Establishment at the War Office, 6 August 1945. FO1032/1046. 34 ‘How the Control Commission is Staffed’, BZR, 1 (26), 31 August 1946. 35 Murray, ‘The British Contribution’, 76. 36 Interview of 4 November 1981 in Cambridge. 37 Interview with Patricia Meehan, 24 October 1978. Transcript. 38 Ebsworth, Restoring Democracy in Germany, 159. 39 Cox & Phillips, Transcript, 33. 40 Phillips, ‘The University Officers of the British Zone’, 56. 41 Frederick Chesney Horwood (1904–90) had good knowledge of the German language and Germany, and had trained young officers in Military Intelligence during the War. Later he was fellow and tutor in English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. 42 Documents provided to the present author by Geoffrey Carter in May 1982. 43 FO1050/1284. 44 ‘ “Exercise ‘Godesberg.” Exercise on Control of Secondary Schools.’ FO1050/1284. 45 In the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, he is recorded as arguing in favour of forced sterilization. Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting, 117. 46 Thomas’s interview with Stuckart took place on 19 May 1945. FO1050/1271. Richard Hinton Thomas (1912–83) had taught modern languages in schools before the War,

Notes

47 48 49 50

51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66

67 68

321

had worked at Bletchley Park, and later had a distinguished career as a Germanist in two British universities. Together with Richard Samuel, another CCG officer and notable Germanist, he wrote one of the earliest published accounts of education in Germany during the occupation, Education and Society in Modern Germany (1949). Military Government Germany: Technical Manual for Education and Religious Affairs, SHAEF, G-Division, February 1945, 1. Donald Riddy, reporting on a visit to 21 Army Group, 10 May, 1945. Wiss. Nachlaß D.C. Riddy, Staataarchiv Hamburg, 622–2/51:12. Handbook for Kreis Resident Officers, 33–34. ‘K.R.O. Germany 1947.’ Film produced by the Crown Film Unit and directed by Graham Wallace. The town in question was later identified in an article by Wallace as Peine, between Hannover and Braunschweig. (Blog posted by Christopher Knowles, 5 November 2008.) Letter of 24 May 1945 to his wife (UCL Institute of Education (UCL IoE Archives), BOY 2/2). John Stanley Beaumont Boyce (1911–92) read French and German at St John’s College, Oxford, and was a schoolteacher before serving with the Oxford and Bucks Infantry Regiment. After his work in Germany, he had a career in educational administration; he was Chief Education Officer of Lancashire from 1968 to 1973. Letter of 7 July 1945 to the headmaster of Coatham School, Redcar, where Boyce had taught before the War, ibid. ‘S.O.3’ was ranked captain. Letter of 23 April to his wife, ibid. ‘British Policy and the Schools’, 94. Ibid., 96. Edith Siems Davies; ‘Der britische Beitrag zum Wiederaufbau des deutschen Schulwesens von 1945 bis 1950’, 140–141. Ibid., 143–44. Ibid., 145–47. Ibid., 152. Edith Davies was to stay with Education Branch in Germany until 1955. She was then appointed British Vice-Consul for cultural affairs in Kiel and subsequently (1959–69) Education Officer in the British Council headquarters, Cologne. Davies, ‘British Policy and the Schools’, 107. To her irritation, Frau Teusch was habitually called Fräulein Teusch by Adenauer, who had opposed her appointment, telling her that her health was not up to the job; she replied that she wanted to try it and that she would grow healthy as a result. (Landahl, In Memoriam Dr h.c. Christine Teusch, 15, 18.) Burkhardt, Adolf Grimme, 218. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (GStAPK), I.HA, Nachlaß Grimme, A, Nr.3273. GStAPK, ibid., Nr.897. GStAPK, ibid., Nr.315. Arthur James Beattie (1914–96) was a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, 1946–51, and Professor of Greek at Edinburgh University, 1951–81. Letter of 29 August 1946, GStAPK, ibid. Elsewhere he pontificated on European universities: ‘Even in normal times, continental universities are not purely centres of learning and sport as the English ones are. They are centres of lively political and social agitation frequently accompanied by serious disturbances of the peace. An atmosphere of “good, clean fun” is seldom evident.’ (15 October 1945, FO1010/93). GER/5/3/1. ‘Analysis of Educational Survey Land Brauschweig’, 11 June 1945. FO1050/1271.

322

Notes

69 ‘Education Control’, paper by Major M.H. O’Grady, 26 May 1945. FO1050/1647. 70 ‘Education Report for the Regierungsbezirk Aurich, 11 June 1945. FO1050/1660. 71 Riddy to Bickersteth, 18 July 1945. FO371/46743. Bickersteth had been headmaster of Felsted School, where Riddy had taught. Riddy described himself as a ‘civilian soldier’ with the equivalent rank of brigadier. Wearing a uniform in the high temperatures Germany was experiencing at the time was ‘somewhat trying’. 72 ‘Report on the present state of Education (including Youth activities) in the British Zone’, prepared by Riddy for Chief, IA&C Division, 15 July 1945. FO1050/1305. 73 Riddy, ‘Germany: The British Zone of Occupation’, 514. 74 ‘Report on the present State of Education’, FO1050/1305. 75 Presse- und Informationsamt, Sechs Jahre Danach, 102. 76 Letter from Education Branch, 31 July 1945 to OC714 (P) Det, Düsseldorf (for Education Control Officer). FO1050/1305. 77 FO371/46743. 78 Ibid., 26 August 1945. 79 ‘Directif for Teachers regarding Military Government Policy in Education’ and associated statements, 14 August 1945. FO1013/2179. 80 FO1012/74. 81 ‘Reorganisation of Education in all the Zones of Germany, 8 May to 15 September 1945.’ FO371/46744. 82 Donald Riddy to Major-General P.M. Balfour, 21 September 1945. FO1050/1318. 83 FO1050/1305. 84 ECI No.34: ‘Shift Education (Elementary Schools). FO1050/148. 85 Boyce, letter of 31 August 1945 to his wife. UCL IoE Archives, BOY 2/2. 86 Letter of 30 June to his wife, ibid. 87 Letter of 6 August to his wife, ibid. 88 Van Cutsem, ‘The Control Commission in Germany. Its Origin and Development’, 11. FO936/659. 89 Interviewed by Bernard Godding, 2002, UCL IoE Archives, DC/WIL/1/3, typescript, 12. 90 Letter of 26 April from Boyce to his wife, UCL IoE Archives, BOY 2/2. 91 Letter of 16 July to his wife, ibid. 92 Letter of 22 July to his wife, ibid. 93 Spender, ‘Report on Germany’. FO371/17442. Spender (1909–95) offered his services in Germany after the War and was charged with investigating libraries, which he did with singular lack of success. His opinions on Germany became an irritant to those who had to deal with them. Riddy wrote to the Deputy Chief of IA&C Division to express his annoyance when Spender’s report was again requiring a response: ‘A great deal of unnecessary trouble has been given to overworked officers in this Branch and doubtless outside, and really no-­one can expect us to chase with much gusto the hares which Mr Spender started four months ago.’ Riddy to Brigadier Gaffney, 14 November 1945. FO1050/1373. 94 ‘Diary of a Tour Through Westphalia and the North Rhine Province, 15th–17th October 1945’, pp.7–8. FO371/17442. Annan (1916–2000) was to work in the Political Division of the Control Commission and would go on to have a distinguished career as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, Provost of University College, London, Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, and a member of the House of Lords. 95 ‘Report by Miss Wilkinson, the Minister of Education, of her tour of Berlin and the rest of the Zone.’ FO371/46935.

Notes

323

96 BZR, 1 (23), 3 August 1946. 97 This film, directed by Carol Reed and a joint enterprise by the US Office of War Information and the British Ministry of Information, had been released two days earlier, on 4 October 1945. Wilkinson’s citation of the film is close to the original soundtrack: the final words of the film are actually ‘If only you’d given up in 1940, none of this need have happened’. 98 ‘Conditions in Schools.’ FO1013/2179. 99 Brinkmann, ‘ “Nach Jahren der Entbehrung . . .” Kultur und Schule’, 243–44. 100 Ibid., Memorandum of 20 November, 1945. 101 Young Germany, issued 18 October 1945. 102 FO1050/1122. 103 Engelhard, ‘Schulnot von heute’, 305. (Present author’s translation.) 104 Letter from Director, Education Branch, Bünde, 31 December 1945. FO1050/157. 105 FO1050/157. 106 Robertson to Hynd, November 1945. FO1050/157. 107 Riddy to W.R. Richardson, 22 November 1944. FO1050/109. 108 Meeting of 19 October 1944. FO1050/1275. 109 Davis, ‘The Problem of Textbooks’, 108; Pakschies, Umerziehung in der britischen Zone, 173. 110 Ibid., 114. 111 Davies, ‘British Policy and the Schools’, 100. 112 BZR, 1 (3), 27 October 1945. 113 I.M.C.: ‘The Child Debased’, BZR.. 1 (10): 2, 2 February 1946. 114 Katalog der Britischen Quellenbibliotheken, p.ii. The earlier Katalog der Englischen Quellenbibliotheken für das Erziehungsweesen in der Britischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands (1948) lists source libraries in Hannover, Kiel, Düsseldorf, Münster, Hamburg and Berlin. 115 ‘German children enjoy school broadcasts modelled on B.B.C. lines’, BZR, 1 (15): 13, 13 April 1946. 116 Ralph Poston (head of NWDR) to Herbert Walker, 26 September 1945. FO1050/1272. 117 FO1050/1314. 118 Ibid. 119 Monthly Reports of the Control Commission for Germany (British Element), 1 (6). 120 ‘English Broadcasts to “German Schools” ’, BZR, 2 (5): 17, 25 October 1947. 121 ‘School in Cologne.’ Film produced by the Crown Film Unit and directed by Graham Wallace, 1948. 122 See Jarausch, After Hitler, 53. 123 To Hell and Back, 483. 124 Interview with Patricia Meehan, 24 July 1978. Transcript. 125 Sebestyen, 1946. The Making of the Modern World, 37. 126 FO371/46801. 127 Instruction to Corps Districts, 2 July 1945. FO1050/1648. 128 Apel, ‘Re-­education’, 302. 129 To Hell and Back, 483. 130 Plischke: ‘Denazification Law and Procedure’, 817. 131 Letter of 21 April 1947. Harvey Papers. 132 Letter of 9 August 1947. Harvey Papers.

324

Notes

133 The Fragebogen is reproduced in various publications, including Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government North-West Europe 1944–1946, 492–97. 134 ‘Notes on a visit to Braunschweig and Hannover, 17–18 July 1945’ by Lt. Col. W. Forsyth. FO1050/1678. 135 FO1050/1305. 136 HC Deb 17 November 1945, Vol. 416, Col. 1072–73. 137 Walter Bureau Forsyth, 1907–61, had been a contemporary of Riddy’s at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and had taught alongside him at Felsted School. While Riddy achieved a first in modern languages at Cambridge, Forsyth managed only a third-­class degree, despite his bilingual background. 138 W.B. Forsyth: ‘Denazification of Educational Personalities in British Zone’, 29 November 1945. FO1050/1668. 139 Fritz Hagemann, ‘Die Wilhelm-Raabe-Schule in den Nachkriegsjahren’, 101–02. (Present author’s translation.) 140 A ‘Senior Officer’ of Education Branch, ‘The Training of Teachers in Germany’, 179. 141 ‘The Training of Teachers’, 134. 142 FO1051/69. EIGA No.6: ‘Special Emergency Teacher Training Courses.’ 143 Monthly Report of the Control Commission for Germany (British Element), 1 (1): 19, June 1946. 144 Minutes, third meeting of ZEAC, 26 August 1946. FO 1005/1576. 145 Minutes, first meeting of ZEAC, 4 June 1946. Ibid. 146 Monthly Report of the Control Commission, 1 (6): 14, November 1946. 147 Liddell, ‘Education in Occupied Germany’, 99–100. 148 ‘D.W’: ‘Teachers are Being Trained along New and More Progressive Lines’, BZR, 1 (19): 7–10, 8 June 1946. 149 Monthly Report of the Control Commission, 1 (6): Appendix 6, November 1946. Murray gives different figures, recalling that by Easter 1946 twenty-­eight ‘colleges for elementary and technical teacher training’ were operating in the British Zone, catering for about 4,000 students. (‘The Training of Teachers’, 137.) 150 Ibid., 134. 151 Birley to Robertson, 24 July 1948: ‘Prospects of a democratic order in Germany with special reference to Education.’ FO1050/1151. 152 Buddruss, ‘A Generation Twice Betrayed’, 249. 153 A.D. Lindsay, Foreword to E. Amy Buller, Darkness over Germany, v. 154 Smith, ‘Juvenile Delinquency in the British Zone’, 39; Hüttenberger, ‘Deutschland unter britischer Besatzungsherrschaft’, 65. 155 Young Germany Today, 3. 156 Schörken, Die Niederlage als Generationserfahrung, 21. 157 ‘The Future of German Youth’, TES, 6 November 1948. 158 Though a TES correspondent would condemn those over forty for their looking back on ‘ the Weimar ills of factiousness, hobby-­horse riding, and utopianism’. ‘The Future of German Youth’, loc. cit. 159 Young Germany Today, 11. 160 Ulrich de Maizière, quoted in Rees, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, 390. 161 Quoted in Boll, Auf der Suche nach Demokratie, 16. (Present author’s translation.) 162 Buddrus, ‘A Generation Twice Betrayed’, 248. 163 Musicologist Professor Arthur Hutchings of Durham University. ‘Reports of Lecturers to Semester Courses’. FO371/2181.

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164 Written in 1947 by a senior officer of Education Branch. ‘The Training of Teachers in Germany’, 181. 165 BZR, 1 (9), 19 January 1946. Harold Tom Baillie-Grohman (1888–1978) served in Schleswig-Holstein in 1945–1946, dealing with the remains of the German navy; he had previously been in charge of the Royal Navy Boys’ Training Establishment HMS St Vincent. 166 BZR, 1 (11), 16 February 1946. Reginald Vernon Hume (1898–1960) served as military commander in Hannover, 1945–47. He was Director of Education Branch in 1948–49. 167 BZR, 1 (14), 30 March 1946. 168 Meeting of 22 March 1945 between Riddy, Major A.L. Bickford-Smith of Youth Section, and Rev. V.K.C. Logan representing the scout movement. FO1050/1293. 169 FO1050/1293. 170 ‘Revised Draft Message to the German People of the British Zone.’ F01050/1293. 171 ‘Plan for the Resumption of German Youth Activities.’ FO1050/1293. 172 Johannes Wolff (1884–1977) had led the Stephansstift since 1922 and headed the Landesjugendamt from 1946 to 1950. He had been a loyal supporter of the Nazi Party. 173 Otto Haase (1893–1961), dismissed by the Nazis in 1933, led the Pädagogische Akademie in Hannover; from 1946 he served as Ministerialrat responsible for teacher education in the Hannover ministry under Adolf Grimme. 174 ‘Youth Organisers’ Course’ (14–19 January 1946). FO1050/12. 175 Riddy to HQ IA&C Division, 25 January 1946. FO1050/12. 176 BZR, 1 (12), 2 March 1946. 177 ‘C.M.G.’, ‘Cologne – the most devastated of Cities in the Zone’, BZR, 1 (14): 7, 30 March 1946. 178 Walsh, ‘The Revival of Youth Work’, 225–27. 179 Ibid., 227–28. 180 Ibid., 229. 181 Education Control Instruction No.30: ‘Youth Activities III’, November 1945, reprinted in full in Lutzebäck, Die Bildungspolitik der Britischen Militärregierung, Vol.2, 1238–40. Ken Walsh makes the point that the Hitler Youth had borrowed features of scouting. ‘The Revival of Youth Work’, 226. 182 Körber. ‘ “Policy through the Medium of Culture and Education.” Die positive Reeducation-Politik und die verzörgerte Wiederzulassung der bündischen Pfadfinder nach 1945’, 62. 183 Tempel, Vor und Nach 1945, 105–06. 184 Körber, op. cit., 58. 185 ECI No.10 is reprinted in full in Lutzebäck, op. cit., Vol.2, 1232–37. 186 ‘A.A.’: ‘Policy for Youth.’ BZR, 1 (16): 2, 27 April 1946. 187 Füssl, Die Umerziehung der Deutschen, 257. 188 ‘Youth Badges and Emblems.’ FO1050/1293. 189 FO1050/1670. 190 ‘A Club for Young Germans’, BZR, 1 (23): 17, 3 August 1946. 191 J.R. Ridding, ‘Youth Report, Kreis Group Siegen’, 13 December 1947. FO1050/1121. 192 ‘Youth Camps at Duisburg’, BZR, 1 (21): 14–15, 6 July 1946. 193 ‘German Youth in Camp’, BZR, 1 (25): 12, 31 August 1946. 194 ‘Youth Movement Activity. Difficulties of Organisation.’ BZR, 1 (29): 16, 26 October 1946.

326

Notes

Chapter 4: Policy in Practice: Opening and Supervising the Universities 1 Mark, ‘Universities in Germany I’, 2 February 1946. 2 He died in 2001. 3 Cox & Phillips, Transcript, 30–31; Who Was Who, entry for Dr James Mark (1914– 2001). 4 The Army position ‘S.O.II’ was ranked major. 5 Cox & Phillips, Transcript, 31. 6 Mark, ‘The Art of the Possible’, 39. 7 Colledge joined the Control Commission in 1946. For twenty-­seven years he was a member of the English department of Liverpool University, before resigning to become a monk in the Augustinian Order in 1953. There is reference in his obituary in The Times (22 December 1999) to his implicitly problematic ‘temperament and independent mind’. He bluntly refused to take part in or help in any way with the 1982 Oxford Conference of former University Officers. 8 FO1050/1279. 9 ‘Report on Visit to the University of Muenster’, 6–17 July 1945, 1. FO1050/1652. 10 ‘Report on Visit to the University of Hamburg’, 24–31 July 1945, 2. Ibid. 11 ‘Report on a Visit to the University of Kiel’, 1–8 August 1945. Ibid. 12 Cox & Phillips, Transcript, 4. 13 ‘Report on a Visit to the University of Cologne’, 13–19 August 1945, 1–2. Copy provided by Dr Mark. (Missing from FO1050/1652.) 14 BZR, 1 (33): 6, 21 December 1946. 15 Mark, ‘Universities in Germany I’. 16 Raiser, Die Notlage der Universität Göttingen, 5. 17 ‘Memorandum on the Re-Opening of German Hochschulen Within the British Zone’. FO1050/1279. John Brownsdon Clowes Grundy (1902–1987) had been English Lektor at Göttingen University in 1928; he was head of modern languages at Shrewsbury School before the War and was the author inter alia of Brush Up Your German, the 1939 version of which contained much misjudged uncritical material on Nazi Germany, including the principal character placing his son in a Napola and confessing to the head teacher that his maternal great grandmother had an aunt who was Jewish. His post-­war career encompassed a post with the British Council, teaching at Harrow, and the headmastership of Emanuel School, London. 18 Grundy, Life’s Five Windows, 158. 19 ‘Was wird aus Kiels Universität?’ Kieler Kurier, 11 August 1945. 20 ‘Universität Kiel widereröffnet’, Kieler Kurier, 28 November 1945. 21 Reports on the re-­opening of Cologne and Bonn Universities. FO1050/1373. 22 Note signed by James Mark. FO1050/1373. 23 FO945/138. Information as at 22 March 1946. 24 ‘Reopening of Hochschulen in the British Zone.’ FO1050/1305. 25 FO1050/1373. 26 FO1050/1265. 27 Beckhough, Thinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 88. 28 FO945/266. 29 Cologne University Report, January–February 1948. FO945/266. 30 See Haupts, Die Universität zu Köln. 31 F0371/2181.

Notes

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32 FO945/15. 33 Landahl, In Memoriam Dr h.c. Christine Teusch, 23–24. 34 FO1050/1665. Holzlöhner’s statement is annexed to a Detachment weekly report of July 1945. The text reads like a poor translation of a missing German document. 35 Ratschko, ‘Ernst Holzlöhner, Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt und Erno Freerksen’, 137. For full details of Holzlöhner’s part in the low-­temperature experiments, see Mitscherlich and Mielke (eds), Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit. 36 Ratschko, ‘Ernst Holzlöhner, Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt und Erno Feerksen: Drei Kieler Medizinprofessoren im “Dritten Reich” ’, 143. 37 FO1050/1370. 38 Visit to Hamburg and Kiel Universities, 29 April 1946. FO1050/1371. 39 Letter from the Commander of 312 (‘P’) Detachment to the Rektor of Kiel University. FO1050/1371. Behrend Behrens (1895–1969) was Professor of Phamacology. A few days after this rebuke, he began a period as head of the Studentenwerk (student union) in Kiel which lasted until mid February 1946. 40 Ibid. 41 Note of 19 November 1945. FO1050/1370. 42 Preserved at FO1050/1370. 43 FO945/144. 44 Burck had been a member of the SA from 1933 to 1941 and in the NSV since 1936. 45 ‘German Journey, 9 Oct.–9 Nov. 1946.’ FO945/147 46 Das Rasseproblem in der Musik. Entwurf zu einer Methodologie musikwissenschaftlicher Rasseforschung, 1939. In the same year he had contributed to a Festschrift on the occasion of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. These publications disappear from his entry in the first post-­war edition of Kürschners Deutscher Gelehrten-Kalender. 47 ‘German Diary, 1945’, 89. 48 Visit to the British Zone, 16–21 March 1946. FO945/21. 49 Dodds, letter to his wife from the Reichshof Hotel, Hamburg, 10 January 1947. Dodds Papers. 50 ‘Die Idee und die Aufgabe der Universität’, in Reden von Senator Heinrich Landahl und Professor Dr. Emil Wolff, Rektor der Universität, gehalten bei der Feier der Wiedereröffnung am 6. November 1945 in der Musikhalle. Universität Hamburg, 1946, 17. (Present author’s translation.) 51 Letter to his wife of 6 January 1947, Dodds Papers; also reported in Missing Persons, 166. Max Pohlenz (1872–1962), Professor of Hellenistic Philosophy, had been an academic in Göttingen since 1906; he became emeritus professor in 1937. 52 Paul E. Kahle, Bonn University in Pre-Nazi and Nazi Times (1923–1939): Experiences of a German Professor. Privately printed, 1945, 19. (Written in 1942.) 53 Including a contribution on Tacitus to the series Auf dem Wege zum nationalpolitischen Gymnasium. Beiträge zur nationalsozialistischen Ausrichtung des altsprachlichen Unterrichts (‘Towards the National Political Gymnasium [academic secondary school]. Contributions to the National Socialist Alignment of the Teaching of Classical Languages’). 54 From 1946 to 1948, the British had refused Schramm permission to teach. 55 Pickering, Essays on Medieval German Literature and Iconography, 173–74. 56 Schöffler is said to have had a good relationship with the Occupation authorities, but that changed with this lecture, given on 10 November 1945, apparently on the Labour Party and religion, and with his consequent reprimand. Suffering from depression, Schöffler killed himself on 18 April 1946. Entry in Neue Deutsche Biographie, 2007.

328

Notes

57 ‘Visit to Göttingen, 10–11 November’, dated 13 November 1945. FO1050/1372. 58 Reden von Senator Heinrich Landahl und Professor Dr. Emil Wolff, Universität Hamburg, 1945. (Present author’s translation.) 59 Klee, Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. 60 Höpfner, Die Universität Bonn im Dritten Reich, 512. 61 Ibid., 84. 62 George, ‘Neubeginn in Trümmern’, 226. 63 Birley to his father, 21 December 1947. Birley Papers. The ‘finding out’ here had to do with opposition to the setting up of the 1948 University Commission. The University Officer at the time was George A. Kirk. 64 ‘Report on Visit to the TH Aachen and the Universities of Bonn and Cologne, 2–5 Jan [1946].’ FO1050/1374. 65 George, ‘Neubeginn in Trümmern’, 235. 66 Deichmann, Biologists Under Hitler, 74. 67 Bird, ‘The Universities’, 155. The German translation was ‘Angesichts dieses Lehrkörpers werden Sie die Schwierigkeiten gut verstehen, die wir bei der Wiedereröffnung dieser Akademie hatten’. 68 Colledge, ‘The German Universities after the War’, 103–04. 69 James Mark, in Cox & Phillips, Transcript, 53–54. 70 Raiser, ‘Wiedereröffnung der Hochschulen- Ansätze zum Neubeginn’, 177. 71 Bird, ‘The Universities’, 146. 72 Personal communication, February 1982. 73 Birley, letter to The Spectator, 15 October 1977, responding to an article by George Gale (13 August 1977) which was egregiously critical of Bird’s role in Göttingen. 74 FO945/267. 75 Personal communication, 1982. 76 Dundas-Grant, ‘As Assistant University Officer in Göttingen and Bonn’, 106. 77 He changed the spelling of his surname from Beckhoff to Beckhough. 78 Beckhoff, ‘Zur Lage der deutschen Studenten’, 143. 79 Personal communication, February 1982. 80 Beckhough, ‘The Role of the British University Control Officer in Post-War Germany’, 78. 81 Ibid. 82 Cox & Phillips, Transcript, 44–45. 83 Perraudin, ‘Recollections of a British University Officer in Germany 1945–1950’, 128. 84 Personal communication, February 1982. 85 Interview with the present author, 18 November 1981. 86 Personal communication, March 1982. 87 Edwards, ‘Zwei kritische Jahre in der Geschichte der RWTH Aachen’, 85–86. 88 Personal communication, April 1982. 89 Maaß, Die Studentenschaft der Technischen Hochschule Braunschweig in der Nachkriegszeit, 13. 90 Personal communication, April 1982. 91 Maaß, op. cit., 116, 128. 92 Ibid., 285. 93 Ibid., 289. 94 Personal communication, January 1982. For Lord Lindsay’s role in university reform in post-­war Germany, see Chapter 6. 95 Whitley, ‘One UEO’s Duties in Berlin’, 91. Apel served as Rektor in 1948–49.

Notes

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96 Brandt, ‘Wiederaufbau und Reform’, 509. (Present author’s translation.) 97 Mrs Muriel Lambert, as she became. 98 Minutes of 4th Conference of Education Control Officers, Gottingen, 3 July 1946. F0945/137. 99 ‘Report on a Visit to certain German Universities and a Zonal University Conference’, September 1946. AUT Archive. 100 Chorley, ‘Report on a Visit to some German Universities, The Universities Review, 19 (2): 125, February 1947. 101 This section is based on text in Phillips, The British and University Reform Policy in Germany 1945–49, 185–92. 102 The Technische Universität in Berlin was unable to run a course for the same reason. 103 This information is contained in a report by George Murray, ‘University Summer Vacation Courses in the British Zone of Germany’, 1948. FO371/70715. 104 ‘Report on the Vacation Course of the Düsseldorf Medical Academy, August 5th–19th 1949.’ Copy in the possession of the present author. 105 Ruth Harvey claimed that Education Branch officers were generally disliked by others in the Control Commission because they could speak German and ‘frat’. (Interview of 4 July 1980 in Oxford.) Other lecturers complained about their isolation from the Germans and the deliberate remoteness of the messes and barracks in which they stayed. When M.R.D. Foot and Humphry House escaped to make contact with Germans, they were said to have ‘gone native’. ‘And yet’, Foot says, ‘some collaboration with the CCG people is almost essential . . . Their profound lack of interest, not only in university matters, but in all things German, was a considerable shock.’ Foot was referring of course to military officers. 106 Another visiting lecturer reported of a (non-­university) summer school in Westphalia in 1948: ‘[The young Germans] were sick of the word “democracy” . . . so that by the end of the fortnight none of the lecturers could comfortably use it. It was not that they were anti-­democratic, but rather that they were disillusioned, a little cynical, seeking information all the time, but unwilling to accept anything on faith. They seemed to be waiting.’ (K. Gibberd; ‘Young Germans Then and Now, Times Educational Supplement, 18 September 1948.) 107 Phillips, ‘The Re-­opening of Universities in the British Zone’, 17. 108 See Chapter 6 below for a full account of the report. 109 ‘Reservation by Lord Chorley: Denazification’, dated 18 January 1947. 110 ‘Comments of the Control Commission on the Report of the Association of University Teachers on the Universities in the British Zone of Germany’, 20. FO1050/1055. 111 Riddy to Balfour, 21 March 1946. FO1050/1054. 112 BZR, 1 (22): 6, 20 July 1946. 113 Interview of 18 November 1981. 114 Rein, ‘Die Georgia-Augusta nach dem Kriege’, 230] 115 Sutton, ‘Shuffling Feet’. Phillips (ed.), German Universities after the Surrender, 111. 116 Brinkmann, ‘ “Das Vorlesungsverzeichnis ist noch unvollständig” ’, 310. 117 Krönig & Müller, Nachkriegssemester, 181. 118 George, Studieren in Ruinen, 220. 119 Respondek, Besatzung, Entnazifizierung, Wiederaufbau, 100. 120 Becker, ‘Zeiten des Hungers’, 301. (Present author’s translation.) 121 Cited in Leventhal, The Last Dissenter, 290.

330 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

135 136 137

138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155

Notes Schütz, ‘German Universities’. Steffens, ‘ “Innerlich gesund an der Schwelle einer neuen Zeit” ’, 33–34. George, op.cit., 101–02. ‘Schließung der Technischen Hochschule gefordert.’ FO1050/1375. Riddy to Balfour, 21 March 1946. FO1050/1054. ‘Nationalism at Universities in the British Zone of Germany.’ FO945/138 and FO 371/55689. Sutton, ‘Shuffling Feet’, included in Phillips, German Universities after the Surrender, 109–17. FO945/138. Armytage to Education Branch, 2 March 1946. FO945/138. Brockway, German Diary, 6–7. ‘The Universities’, in Hearnden (ed.), The British in Germany, 148. Blind Eye to Murder, 185. Hans Plischke (1890–1972), who had been leader of the scientific (wissenschaftlich) section of the NS-Dozentenschaft in Göttingen and who had signed the Bekenntnis der Professoren in 1933, had been dean of the philosophy faculty, and served as Rektor from 1941 to 1943. After 1945 he became director of the Institut für Völkerkunde. FO1050/337. Murray to Rektor, Göttingen University, 19 January 1946. FO1050/337. The Ministerial Collection Centre, situated in Fürstenhagen, near Kassel, was a facility where captured German files were stored. Among them were 300 tons of German Foreign Office files and fifty tons of Nazi Party membership index cards. ‘MCC Kassel: Organisation & Functions’, FO1032/1486; Eckert, The Struggle for the Files, 45. ‘Report on Göttingen University’ by Captain G[eorge]. Murray, 22 January 1946. FO1050/337. Stephen Spender, ‘Report on Germany’ (undated), FO1050/337. Following his foray into the Zone, Spender published various accounts of his time there. Note from Public Safety Branch, 20 November 1945. FO1050/337. Memorandum of 16 November 1945. FO1050/337. Forsbach, Die Medizinische Fakultät der Universität Bonn im ‘Dritten Reich’, 103. Riddy to Public Safety Branch, 22 December 1945. FO1050/337. Colledge to Public Safety Branch (on behalf of Riddy), 20 February 1946. FO1050/337. Memorandum by F. Foley to Deputy Inspector General, Public Safety Branch, 28 February 1946. FO1050/337. Riddy to Public Safety Branch, 15 March 1946. FO1050/337. FO1050/337. Riddy to Balfour. FO1050/1054. Letter from HQ to the Inspector General of Public Safety Branch, 28 March 1945. FO1050/337. Note attached to a memorandum of 7 May 1947 from E.C. Nottingham, Deputy Inspector General, Public Safety, Land North Rhine-Westphalia. FO1050/339. Hawes, The Shortest History of Germany, 195. Interview with Patricia Meehan, 25 July 1978. Transcript. ‘Anglo-German Discussion Group Plan, BZR, 1 (34), 4 January 1947. ‘Zone of Occupation’, BBC2, 29 November 1981.

Notes

331

156 157 158 159 160 161 162

Birley to his father, 26 July 1947. Birley Papers. Letter of 15 July 1947 to the Master of Clare College, Cambridge. PRO: F0945/269. Whitley, ‘One UEO’s Duties in Berlin’, 92. Barker, ‘Life and Learning in Cologne’. Barker, Age and Youth, 205. Berlin to Oscar Wood, 3 June 1991. Wood Papers. P.W. Kent, ‘Michael Foster; Philosopher, Friend & Enigmatic Don’, typescript in Wood Papers. Birley’s letter to the Dean of Christ Church is dated 3 May 1961. F oster returned to Christ Church, Oxford, and was to die there by his own hand in 1959. 163 Documents in Wood Papers. 164 The University of Oxford has a memorial scholarship named in honour of Michael Foster, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). 165 Colledge, ‘The German Universities after the War’, 106.

Chapter 5: School Reform 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Samuel & Thomas, Education and Society in Modern Germany (1949), 166. Hearnden, ‘Education in the British Zone’, 43. Bösch, ‘ “zum neubau des schulwesens” nach 1945’, 435. Pakschies, Umerziehung und Wiederaufbau, 191. Grimme’s text uses Kleinschreibung (lower case), for which some reformers argued. I have restored the normal capitalization here. See Pakschies, Umerziehung, 313, note 191/3. Grimme, ‘zum neubau des schulwesens’, 15. In the Rahmenplan (‘Framework Plan’), the tripartite division of schools into höhere Schulen, Volksschulen and Mittelschulen is related to the three supposed main types of occupation in modern life, described as geistig führend (intellectually leading), ausführend (carrying out instructions) and praktische Berufe mit erhöhter Verantwortung (practical occupations with increased responsibility). These in turn relate to three skill types: theoretisch, praktisch and theoretisch-­praktisch. Rahmenplan, 9. Führ, Zur Schulpolitik der Weimarer Republik, 331. In 1936 French was replaced by English in the Oberschule. Erziehung und Unterricht in der Höheren Schule, 1938, 1. Grimme’s ideas are also associated with the ‘religious socialism’ to which he subscribed. Pakschies, Umerziehung, 193. Hearnden, Education in the Two Germanies, 23. ‘Directive on Education, Youth Activities and German Church Affairs’, 22 November 1945. FO1050/148. Geißler, Schulgeschichte in Deutschland, 727. ‘The Meaning of the New German Education’, 21. Dodds Papers. Geissler, op. cit., 732. Burkhardt, Adolf Grimme, 243, note 136. Murray, ‘The British Contribution’, 83. Riddy to Sir Martin Roseveare, Senior Chief Inspector, Ministry of Education, London, 2 March 1946. FO1050/1284. FO371/55692.

332

Notes

20 FO1050/1576. Riddy had sought permission from Brigadier Gaffney, then acting chief of IA&C Division, to establish ZEAC. Gaffney’s response was that there could be ‘no objection to using Germans in any manner you wish’. 21 Present at this meeting was the assistant director of Education Branch, the Australian Air Vice-Marshal F.H. (Frank) McNamara (1894–1961), distinguished as a holder of the Victoria Cross for bravery during the First World War. His postnominals stood out among those of even the most senior of CCG officials. 22 Murray, ‘The British Contribution’, 84. 23 Ibid., 83. 24 Control Council Directive No.54: Basic Principles for the Democratization of Education in Germany, in Ruhm von Oppen (ed.), Documents on Germany Under Occupation, 1945–1954, 233–34. 25 Note by the Allied Secretariat, 5 June 1947. FO1050/1163. 26 Report signed by Colonel J. Crosbie, HQ Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf, 22 March 1948. FO1050/1121. 27 Report by W. Cox, ECO HQ Regierungsbezirk Aachen. FO1050/1121. 28 Rahmenplan, 6. 29 FO1050/1164. 30 The Landtag (parliament) in Schleswig-Holstein passed a law extending the ‘primary’ stage by two years in the spring of 1948, involving an additional expenditure of 13 million Reichsmark. ‘G.T.’, ‘School Organisation Reform’, BZR, 2 (11), 24 April 1948. 31 Note by Murray, 14 October 1949. FO1050/1167. 32 Lehberger, ‘Die Hamburger Schulreform von 1949’, 18, 21. 33 Birley to Military Governor, 5 April 1949. FO1050/1184. 34 Becker, ‘Retrospective View from the German Side’, 270–71. 35 Letter circulated on 8 September 1945. FO1050/1306. 36 Education Branch: ‘Note on Denominational Education in Germany’, 4 October 1945. FO1050/1648. 37 Frings to Montgomery, 12 September 1945. FO371/46744. 38 Letter of 29 November 1945 from Anstensen. FO1050/1315. 39 George Murray, ‘Denominational Education in Germany’. FO1050/1022. 40 Quoted from the version in Appendix B of A.S. Duncan-Jones (Dean of Chichester), The Struggle for Religious Freedom in Germany, 283–84. 41 Murray, ‘Denominational Education’. FO1050/1022. 42 G.K.A. Bell, Germany and the Hitlerite State, 31. 43 ‘Annexure A’ to a circular from Education Branch on ‘Denominational Schools’, 3 December 1945. FO1050/1315. 44 Riddy to W.S. Richardson, 26 February 1946. FO1050/1315. 45 He wrote afterwards that it was ‘curious to be using the same studio as William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) had used for his peculiar purposes less than a year before!’. Riddy to Sir Martin Roseveare, 2 March 1946. FO1050/1284. 46 6 March 1946. FO1050.1315. 47 Riddy, ‘A Review of German Education (excluding the Universities) from May 1945 to July 1946’, 27 July 1946. FO1050/1191, 9. 48 Power, Religion in the Reich, 51. 49 ‘Note on Denominational Elementary Schools in Germany’, 28 December 1945. FO1050/1315. 50 Samuel & Thomas, Education and Society in Germany, 105. Bäumler had played a prominent role in the book-­burning in Berlin in May 1933.

Notes 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

333

Grimme, ‘Über Bekenntnis, Simultan- und weltliche Schulen’, 128. Mosler (ed.), Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs vom 11. August 1919, 46–47. Führ, Zur Schulpolitik der Weimarer Republik, 184. Samuel & Tomas, Education in Modern Germany, 104. Draft version in FO1050/1315. Covering letter signed by Handel Edwards for Chief Education Control Officer, Land Nordrhein-Westfalen, 18 September 1948. FO1050/1022. Micklem, National Socialism and Christianity, 18. FO1050/1022. Landahl, In Memoriam Dr. h.c. Christine Teusch, 11. Letter of 15 September 1948 from D.J. Foley. FO1050/1022. Letter of 15 September 1948 from E. Aitken-Davies. Ibid. Letter of 9 September 1948 from R. Duder. Ibid. In the context of the Hamburg Law on Education, Heinrich Landahl later described to Duder the effects of the 1870 Law. It ‘introduced religious instruction into the elementary schools as a proper school subject and provided that the instruction should be in accordance with the principles of the religious denominations. For decades the development, however, has been . . . that . . adherence to the principles of the religious denominations was given up. The instruction was given . . . in the spirit of tolerance and respect towards all denominations. The respective syllabuses and directions had been fully approved by the denominations’. Landahl to Duder, 27 August 1949. FO1050/1166. Letter from CECO L.E. Ditchfield, 16 September 1948. Ibid. Birley to Director, Education Branch (H.J. Walker), and to Director, German Political Branch, Political Division, 20 August 1948. FO1050/1117. ‘Denkschrift zur Schulreform. Katholische Grundsätze und praktische Vorschläge’, 28 May 1948. Copy in FO1050/1117. ‘Summary of Conversation between Mr H.E. Edwards, Land Education Department, North Rhine/Westphalia, and Domprälat Böhler.’ FO1050/1117. Edwards to Director of Education Branch, 10 September 1948. FO1050/1117. Birley to Director, Education Branch, 19 December 1948. FO1050/1022. Howard to Birley, 26 February 1949. FO1050/1022. Minute to Central Secretariat, HQ, CCG, 29 March 1949. FO1050/1169. Minute by Murray, 1 February 1950. FO1050/1169. Public Opinion Research Office, Political Division: ‘The German Attitude to Religious Instruction in Schools’, 21 December 1948. FO1050/1022.

Chapter 6: University Reform 1 2 3 4 5 6

Alfred C. Pundt, Re-Educating the New Germany, 356. Julian Huxley, Argument of Blood, 4–5. Argument of Blood, 5. Snyder, On Tyranny. Hartshorne, The German Universities and National Socialism, 153. The great classicist Wilamowitz was so proud of his action in signing, and his consequent expulsion from the French Academy, that in a show of professorial hauteur he added to the diplomas in which his name appeared: plerarumque in hoc orbe academiarum socius, e Parisina honoris causa eiectus (‘fellow of a great many of the

334

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Notes world’s academies, expelled, honoris causa, from the Paris Academy’). WilamowitzMoellendorff, My Recollections, 383. Bekenntinis der Professoren an den Universtitaten und Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler und dem Nationalsozialistischen Staat, 29. (The text was translated into very poor English, as well as French, Spanish and Italian.) Ibid., 31. For a full account, see Phillips, ‘War-­time Planning for the “Re-­education” of Germany: Professor E.R. Dodds and the German Universities’. Dodds Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. The original motto was in fact Dem lebendigen Geist, ‘to the living spirit’ or ‘to the creative spirit’ as it is now translated by the University of Heidelberg. It was changed to Dem deutschen Geist to mark the University’s 550th anniversary in 1936. Ritterbusch (born in 1900) killed himself on 26 April 1945. Krieck (1882–1947) was the first National Socialist Rektor of a German University, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Kahrstedt (1888–1962) was dismissed by the British in 1946, but reinstated after one month. Hans Friedrich Karl Günther, ‘Rassen-Günther’, racial theorist and eugenicist. Hitler owned six books by him. His surviving lecture notes on Germany are analysed in Phillips, ‘War-­time Planning for the “Re-­education” of Germany: Professor E.R. Dodds and the German Universities’ and ‘Dodds and Educational Policy for a Defeated Germany’. Birley, ‘British Educational Control and Influence in Germany After the 1939–45 War’, typescript, 12. Birley Papers. ‘The German University System’, 45. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 56. AUT archives, Executive Minutes, 24 September 1946. For a detailed account of the AUT commission and its work, together with texts of the original report in English and in German translation, see Phillips, Zur Universitätsreform in der britischen Besatzungszone 1945–1948. A draft of Chorley’s report is contained in the AUT archives; his ‘Report on a Visit to some German Universities’ was published in The Universities Review, 19 (2), February 1947. In Darkest Germany, 111–112. ‘The German Universities after the War’, The Universities Review, 19 (2), February 1947. Dodds, Missing Persons, 167. Letter to his wife, 3 January 1947. Dodds Papers. FO945/265. ‘The Universities in the British Zone of Germany’, The Universities Review, 19 (3): 204, 1947. Ibid., 205. ‘Reservation by Lord Chorley: Denazification’, 18 January 1947. Attached to the original draft report. Dodds Papers. Flexner, 323. Letter of 3 November 1979 to present author. ‘Minutes of Conference with AUT Delegation’, 14 January 1947. FO1050/1055. Creighton to Dodds, 19 April 1947. Original in present author’s possession. ‘CCG Comments on AUT Report’, 30 June 1947. FO1050/1055.

Notes

335

37 Birley, ‘Education in the British Zone of Germany’, 41, citing Hellmut Becker. 38 Birley, ‘British Educational Control in Germany after the 1939–45 War’, 12. 39 Remark attributed by Robert Birley to Hellmut Becker. Birley, ‘British Policy in Retrospect’, 58, and interview with Birley of 23 July 1979 in Somerton. 40 The report was translated into English and published by the Foreign Office in 1949: University Reform in Germany: Report by a German Commission (HMSO). The German text is included in Neuhaus, Dokumente zur Hochschulreform, 289–368, and in Phillips, Pragmatismus und Idealismus. 41 Als Handschrift gedruckt. Nachdruck, auch im Auszug, verboten. 42 FO945/265. 43 TES, 21 February 1948. 44 In 1948 and again in 1965. (Hearnden, Red Robert). 45 Isaiah Berlin, quoted in H.W. Carless Davis, A History of Balliol College (revised ed.), 26. 46 C.M. Bowra, Memories 1898–1939, 345. 47 Scott, A.D. Lindsay, 296. 48 Von Salis, Grenzüberschreitungen, Vol. II, 313–14. 49 Letter of 26 January 1948, translated back from the German. WRK BG-Archiv, File 2. 50 Letter of 29 April 1948, dated eight days after the Commission’s first meeting. 51 No.19, 22 January 1948. 52 31 August–2 September 1948. 53 Wuermeling, Die Weiße Liste, 74–75. 54 Spender, European Witness, 55. 55 Entry of 16 January 1948. Nachlaß Grosche, Historisches Archiv des Erzbistums Köln (AEK). 56 Whitley to Creighton, 15 March 1948. FO1050/1204. 57 The University of Bonn had proposed awarding Stroux an honorary doctorate in 1943, but was forbidden to do so because of his failure actively to support National Socialism. 58 Birley to Everling, 19 June 1948. BG-Archiv. 59 ‘The Law on the Protection of German Blood and German Honour of 15 September 1935 in the Light of National-Scientific Statistics.’ 60 For an appraisal of Drenckhahn’s contribution to National Socialist mathematics teaching, see Elke Nyssen: Schule im Nationalsozialismus, Heidelberg 1979, 93–114. 61 Interview of 14 January 1981 in Cambridge. 62 Lindsay Papers, University of Keele, L221. 63 FO1050/1196. 64 FO1050/1057. 65 Kalkmann, Die Technische Hochscule Aachen im Dritten Reich (1933–1945). 66 Peter Fischer-Appelt, ‘Bruno Snell und das “Blaue Gutachten” zur Hochschulreform’, unpublished manuscript, 13. 67 WRK BG-Archiv (8. E2. Present author’s translation. 68 The generic term Hochschule is used, rather than the specific term Universität. 69 WRK BG-Archiv (17:011–13). 70 Göttinger Universitäts-Zeitung, 3/12, 1948. (Present author’s translation.) 71 WRK BG-Archiv (44.A6). 72 The Kiel returns are in: WRK BG-Archiv (41:D14-E7). 73 ‘Hier liegen die verschiedenartigsten Vorschläge vor.’ 74 ‘Halten Sie eine Reform der Hochschule für notwendig und möglich?’

336 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Notes For a full analysis, see Phillips, Pragmatismus und Idealismus. Interview of 2 June 1979 in Hamburg. Mountford, Keele: An Historical Critique, 110. Phillips, The British and University Reform Policy in Germany, 353. Birley to Robertson, 14 December 1948. FO1050/1057. Lindsay Archive, University of Keele, L221. ‘Niederschrift über die Tagung der Kultusminister mit den Rektoren der Hochschulen in Hamburg am 13.1.1949’. Copy in the Lindsay Archive, L221. The English version of the text has ‘for life’; the (authoritative) German text ‘auf Lebenszeit’, and so the confusion was not the result of mistranslation. ‘Meeting of Ministers of Education and Rektors of Universities of the Three Western Zones to consider the Report of the University Commission, Hamburg, 13th January, 1949’. Report by Birley of 19 January 1949. FO1050/1057. Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, WU20 d4. Monthly Report of the Control Commission, Vol. 5, 7 July 1950, 46. Fischer, ‘Hochschulrevolution oder Hochschulreformen?’, 32. Lindsay, ‘The Commission on German Universities’, 88.

Chapter 7: Culture, Adult Education, Women’s Affairs 1 Strang, Home and Abroad, 237. 2 Michael Balfour (formerly Director of Information Services Control), Four-Power Control, 211. 3 Clemens, ‘Die britische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland’, 201–02. Clemens provides a detailed account of the complex history of the development of planning in cultural affairs from the early stages in the War until late in the Occupation. 4 ‘The Work of an Information Control Unit’, BZR, 1 (27): 6, 28 September 1946. 5 Howard, Crossman: The Pursuit of Power,. 83–107. 6 ‘Literary Revival in Germany’, BZR, 1 (12): 19. 2 March 1946. 7 Malzahn (ed.), Germany 1945–1949, 206–07. This was the beginning of the famous ro-­ro-ro series (Rowohlts-Rotations-Romane). 8 Rowohlt edition of In einem andern Land, 1946, 48. (Present author’s translation.) 9 Neue Auslese 1 and 2, 1946. 10 ‘A.D.W.’: ‘The German Press’, BZR, 1 (14): 2, 30 March 1946. 11 Koszyk, Pressepolitik für Deutsche, 23. 12 ‘P de M.’, ‘Newspapers in Germany’, BZR, 1 (42): 4–5, 26 April 1946. 13 For a full account of the origins and development of Die Welt, see Fischer, Reeducations- und Pressepolitik. The first page of the first issue is reproduced on p.63. 14 Koszyk, ‘The Press in the British Zone’, 120–21; Balfour, Four-Power Control in Germany, 215. 15 Delmer, Black Boomerang, 231. 16 ‘Six Decades of Quality Journalism: The History of Der Spiegel’. Der Spiegel online English site, 5 October 2011. 17 Die Sammlung was a significant outlet for the discussion of current educational issues. Its editor was Herman Nohl (1879–1960), Professor of Education at Göttingen. Nohl had been forcibly retired in 1937, despite some of his writing appearing not unsympathetic to aspects of National Socialist ideology. Special postage rates were

Notes

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

337

agreed for Die Sammlung, so that it could be widely distributed as well as being available in bookshops. For a full account, see Vennebusch-Beaugrand, Die Sammlung. Epstein, ‘The Nazi Seizure of the International Education Review’. ‘The Influence of the Cinema in German National Life’, BZR, 1 (19): 10, 8 June 1946. In Jenen Tagen, directed by Helmut Käutner, was released on 13 June 1947. ‘Throw them out, the Tommy, the Yank, the Russki, the whole Allied pack!’ Smither, Welt im Film 1945–1950. ‘Welt im Film: Anglo-American Newsreel Policy’, 163. Brian Dunn (Deputy Director of Cultural Relations Branch), ‘Cultural Affairs in Germany Today’, BZR, 2 (16): 4–5, 15 October 1948. ‘Hier spricht der Nordwestdeutsche Rundfunk’, BZR, 1 (22): 4, 20 July 1946. Balfour & Mair, Four-Power Control, 220. Talk by Greene at a conference on ‘The Political Re-Education of Germany and her Allies after World War Two’, University of London, 6–7 April 1983. Also recounted in Greene, The Third Floor Front, 45. The Third Floor Front, 52–53. Chief of PR/ISC Group (Major-General Alec Bishop) to Director--General, PID, Foreign Office, 15 December 1945. Reproduced in Welch, ‘Political ‘Re-Education and the Use of Radio in Germany after 1945’, 79. (Original in FO1056/26.) Welch, ibid., 77. Jamie Doward, ‘How the BBC’s Truth Offensive Overcame Nazi Propaganda’, The Observer, 16 April 2017. Tracey, A Variety of Lives, 108–09. Grimme assumed office on 15 November 1948. See Feigel, The Bitter Taste of Victory, for an account of the work in post-­war Germany of many writers and artists from America and the UK. Stieg, ‘The Postwar Purge of German Public Libraries’, 157. FO1050/1316. Riddy to Deputy Director of IA&C Division, 15 May 1946. FO1050/1316. There was another immediate problem for Control Commission staff not evident in the exchanges about libraries, and that had to do with the general absence of key documentation on the Nazi period that was urgently needed. The international lawyer Wolfgang Friedmann (who had worked in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office) mentions in his study of Military Government that essential legal information, for example about the annexation of Austria, was almost unobtainable because so many legal textbooks had been destroyed (Friedmann, The Allied Military Government of Germany, 180). On the other hand, impressive efforts were made to preserve the official records of the Party and of government ministries. (See Astrid M. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives.) FO1050/1366. Letter of 27 October 1945 to his FO colleague Ivor Pink in Berlin. Ibid. (Copyright in Hitler’s Mein Kampf passed to the state of Bavaria at the end of the War and its republication was proscribed.) ISC Group internal correspondence, 23 November 1945. Ibid. Memorandum from Chief, PR/ISC Group, 27 November 1945. Ibid. Robertson to Permanent Secretary, Control Office, December 1945. Ibid. Stieg, ‘The Postwar Purge of German Public Libraries’, 143. Joerden, ‘Die Lage im Volksbüchereiwesen’, 182–97.

338

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44 Lagler, ‘Die Rezeption ausländischer Einflüsse’, 379–80. A US survey conducted in the American Zone in 1946 revealed that 55 per cent of almost 1,000 Germans surveyed never read books; of people who read often, former Nazis predominated. (Malzahn, Germany 1945–1949, 205.) 45 Feigel, The Bitter Taste of Victory, 73. 46 Diary entry of 8 September 1945. Spender, Journals, 70. 47 Sutherland, Stephen Spender, 309. 48 Spender, European Witness, 149–50. 49 Spender, introduction to Stern, The Hidden Damage, viii. 50 Diary entry of 28 September 1945. Spender, Journals, 83. 51 Bird, ‘The Universities’, 156. 52 FO1056/5. 53 OED. 54 Lt. Col. J.D.A. Lamont, ‘Information Centres’, 13 May 1946, FO1056/5. 55 FO1056/5. 56 Bishop to Group Captain G.W. Houghton of the Control Office, 3 April 1946. Ibid. 57 Bishop to Houghton, 8 April 1946. Ibid. 58 HC Deb 28 November 1945, Vol. 416, Col. 1317. Hynd had been asked if the British Zone Review, 15,000 copies of which were printed each fortnight, was made available to the German population. 59 14 May 1946. FO1056/5. 60 ‘Die Brücke’, BZR, 1 (8): 5, 5 January 1946. 61 Hansard, HC Deb 08 October 1946, Vol. 427, Col. 37. 62 Report on the British Information Centres by Andrew Ker of the Central Office of Information, 26 August 1946. FO1056/5. 63 Its full title was Die Brücke – Eine Auslese aus der britischen Presse (A Selection from the British Press). 64 ‘Opening Speech by Brigadier W.R.N. Hinde’, 20 December 1946. FO1056/5. 65 Robertson to Permanent Secretary, Control Office, 14 May 1946. FO1056/6. 66 Houghton to Sprigge, 1 February 1947. FO1056/6. 67 F.N. Soulsby to Chief, PR/ISC Group, 7 February 1947. FO1056/6. 68 Murray, ‘The British Contribution’, 90. 69 Letter from Acting Chief, PR/ISC Group, Berlin, to Control Office, 9 April 1947. FO1056/6. 70 ‘Instructions for the German Directors and Managers of Information Centres’, FO1056/110. 71 ‘Provision of Information Centres for Germans’, 23 April 1946, FO1056/5. 72 Report by Andrew Ker (Central Office of Information) on a visit to British Information Centres, 26 August 1946. FO1056/5. 73 Zeuner, Erwachsenenbildung in Hamburg,1945–1972, 60–61. 74 ‘Hamburg’s Die Brücke’, BZR, 2 (10): 18, 20 March 1948. 75 FO1056/110. 76 ‘Information Centres Monthly Report No.15, August 1947. FO1056/533. 77 Frings to Mil Gov HQ Nordrheinland, 25 June 1946, FO1013/2180. 78 Phieler, ‘Die Brücke’, 98–102. 79 In Freiburg, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Munich and Mainz. 80 Phieler, ‘Die Brücke’, 86. 81 Ibid., 55. 82 Monthly Report of the Control Commission (British Element), 4 (10): 34, 1949.

Notes

339

83 Monthly Report of the Control Commission for Germany (British Element,) 5 (1): 27, January 1950. 84 Marriott, English–German Relations in Adult Education 1875–1955, 193. 85 The Jugendamnestie applied to those born after 1919. For university students, it was in force from the winter semester of 1946–47. 86 Source: Blättner, ‘Die psychologischen Grundlagen der Volksbildungsarbeit’, 13. 87 Führ, Schulen und Hochschulen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 187. 88 Charles Ingram Knowles (1900–2001) joined the Control Commission in 1946, with no previous experience in education. By 1949 he was Head of the Adult Education Section, Bad Rothenfelde. Following his return to England he worked in educational publishing and was briefly editor of the journal Adult Education. 89 ‘The Place of Adult Education in the Future Developments of Education Branch.’ FO1050/1152. Knowles was a rapporteur at a UNESCO conference on adult education held in June 1949 which reiterated these basic principles: ‘What we wish to ensure is that adult education may thrive as a free and independent movement; so long as it remains objective and not a direct instrument of party or sectarian propaganda, it should receive the most liberal financial and moral support from the State.’ (UNESCO: Summary Report of the International Conference on Adult Education, 19–25 June 1949, 29). 90 ‘Adult Education. Need for Outside Contacts’, 10 October 1945. FO1050/1671. 91 FO1050/1671. 92 Marriott, English-German Relations in Adult Education, 149; Hasenpusch, Der Aufbau des Volkshochschulwesens 1945–1947, 21. 93 ‘Report of His Majesty’s Inspectors on Adult Education in the British Zone of Germany and the British Sector of Berlin’, July 1946, 33. FO1050/1287. 94 BZR, 1 (9): 16, 19 January 1946. 95 At a meeting at the Control Office to discuss the HMI report it was confirmed that ‘no more than 8%’ of the VHS students came from ‘working classes’. Meeting of 10 October 1946. FO1050/1287. 96 C.I. Knowles, ‘Education and the Working Class in Germany’, December 1948. FO1050/1058. 97 Control Council Directive No.56: ‘Basic Principles for Adult Education in Germany’, 28 October 1947. 98 Grimme, Selbstbesinnung, 134. 99 University Reform in Germany, 63. 100 Knowles, ‘Adult Education and the Working Class in Germany’. FO1050/1058. 101 ‘Protokoll über die Konferenz betr. Fragen der Erwachsenenbildung’, Hamburg, 24–25 May 1950. Reimers Papers. 102 Keezer, A Unique Contribution to International Relations, 21. 103 Kolinsky, Women in West Germany, 12. 104 ‘German Women’s Place in Public Life’, BZR, 1 (17): 13, 11 May 1946. 105 FO1050/1299. Theanolte Bähnisch (1899–1973) was a lawyer and civil administrator; she became the first female Regierungspräsident of Hannover and went on to play a very prominent role in women’s organizations nationally, especially the Deutscher Frauenring. Anna Mosolf (1895–1974) was an enlightened school reformer who succeeded Katharina Petersen in the Hannover ministry and was joint founder (with Bähnisch) of the union Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft. Elfriede Paul (1900–81) had been the head of an orphanage in Hamburg. She was a KPD member and took part in the resistance organization Rote Kapelle; she was imprisoned from

340

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132

133 134

Notes 1942 to 1945. She was briefly Minister for Reconstruction, Work and Welfare in Hannover and she pursued a successful career in social medicine. ‘Inaugural meeting of the First Women’s Rural Institute, Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein’, memorandum of 15 April 1946. FO1050/1298. Thomas, Women in Nazi Germany, 20. The Handbuch Deutscher Frauenorganisationen, published in 1952, records details of many women’s organizations that had either resumed their work or been refounded since 1945. Letter from Chief, IA&C Division, to Broadcast Control Unit, Hamburg, 13 February 1946. FO1050/1298. ‘Broadcasting the aims and intentions of Mil. Gov. to the Germans.’ FO1050/1298. Ziegler, Lernziel Demokratie, 15. FO1050/1298. ‘Directive to S.O. (women’s Affairs) Regional HQ.’ FO1050/1299. FO1050/1207. Tscharntke, Re-Educating German Women, 20–23. This was IA&C Division’s Military Government Instruction No.78, also known as ECI No.60, dated 10 April 1946: ‘Women’s Voluntary Organizations – Adult Education’. FO1049/568. Undated (1946?). FO1050/1210. Paul, ‘Der Anspruch der Frau an die Volkshochschule’, 169. Von Loeper, ‘Wo steht die Frauenbewegung heute?’, 399. Treber, Mythos Trümmerfrauen, 54. The question of the proportion of women who voted for Hitler has been the subject of contention. Jürgen Falter has shown that in the March and April elections of 1932 the percentages of men and women voting for the NSDAP/Hitler were: men 26.5; women 28.3 (March) and men: 33.6; women 35.9 (April). (Hitlers Wähler, p. 142). Tim Mason challenged the perception that the women’s vote for Hitler was disproportionately high: ‘Women did not rush in overwhelming numbers, as has frequently been asserted, to the support of the movement which promised to envelop them in primordially feminine protective subordination.’ (‘Women in Germany, 1925–1940’, 156). Kolinsky, Women in West Germany, 28. Jones, Women in British Public Life, 1945–50, 232. Phillips, ‘Helena Deneke and the Women of Germany’, 91. Erskine to Permanent Secretary of the Control Office, 18 April 1946. FO1049/568. Paper of 11 July 1946. Deneke 1986 Deposit, Bodleian Library, Oxford, box 20. ‘Suggested Contacts and Itinerary’, ibid. ‘A tour in Germany (August and September 1946)’, Deneke Deposit, box 7. ‘The importance of Women in the Future of Germany’, Deneke Deposit, box 7. Deneke & Norris, The Women of Germany, 8. Ibid., 9. Gertrud Harms, ‘Impressions of Wilton Park’, broadcast on Radio Bremen, 28 November 1948. This English translation was made available by Heinz Koeppler as an introduction to Wilton Park for those taking part in courses there. (I have amended the translation to bring it closer to the original German.) FO1050/1249. ‘Report on Women’s Organisations in Germany, June 20–July 16 1947’, Deneke Papers, box 20. Meeting of 14 February 1947, chaired by Riddy. FO1050/1210. The ‘exact’ figures of the population of men and women in the Zone as at October 1946 were: men:

Notes

135 136 137 138 139 140

141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

341

9,911,079 (a little under 43 per cent); women: 12,007,080 (a little over 57 per cent). Figures contained in a report on women’s affairs by Rita Ostermann, June 1947. FO1050/1207. Barker to Deneke, 6 October 1951. Deneke Deposit, box 9. Deneke, ‘Report on Women’s Organisations in Germany, June 20–July 16 1947’. FO1050/1207. Reports on these visits are preserved in the Deneke Deposit, box 18. Deneke Papers, box 20. Rita Ostermann, ‘Report on Women’s Affairs’, circulated 4 June 1947. FO1050/1207. An account of the founding of the DFD at the Women’s Peace Congress, held in Berlin from 7 to 9 March 1947, appended to Ostermann’s report, describes the ‘utterly undemocratic method of founding a democratic women’s league.  . . evident throughout the proceedings’; ‘opposition speakers were excluded, public discussion was made impossible, and the resolutions so framed as to make assent easy’. FO1050/1593. Tscharntke, Re-­educating German Women, 51. ‘Brief for Secretary of State’, 2 March 1948, signed by Basil Marsden-Smedley and Ivone Kirkpatrick. FO371/70861. Youard to Birley, 20 July 1948. FO1050/1229. Birley to Ostermann, 29 July 1948. Ibid. Birley to Robertson, 24 July 1948: ‘Prospects of a democratic order in Germany with special reference to Education.’ FO371/70716. Dorothy Broome served in Germany from January 1949 to July 1951. Tscharntke, Re-­educating German Women, 237. FO1013/2234. Tscharntke, Re-­educating German Women, 31.

Chapter 8: The Achievements of British Occupation Policy in Education 1 Robertson to Bevin, 30 April 1949. FO1050/1153. 2 ‘Education Branch – Past, Present and Future.’ Unsigned memorandum (1948), attributable to Brigadier Maude, Principal Control Officer, Niedersachsen. FO1050/1151. 3 Some of what follows has appeared in Phillips, ‘Aspects of Education for Democratic Citizenship in Post-War Germany’. 4 T220/1179. 5 Letter of 9.8.50 from A.J.P[latt]. T220/746. 6 Note of 29 August, 1950. T 220/746. 7 Prime Minister’s minute of 4 February 1952, PREM 11/183. 8 Discussion during a conference on ‘The Political Re-Education of Germany and her Allies after World War Two’, University of London, 6–7 April 1983. 9 Robertson to Bevin, 30 April 1949. FO1050/1153. 10 Birley to Robertson, ‘Future Educational Policy’, 24 July 1948. Ibid. 11 This is a curious point, since ‘Control’ had been dropped from the job titles of Education Officers following the implementation of Ordinance No.57. 12 Ruhm von Oppen, Documents on Germany Under Occupation, 375–77.

342

Notes

13 Charter of the High Commission for Germany, 20 June 1949. 14 Marshall’s successor would be George Allen, 1908–99, who served in Germany from 1951 to 1953. He was an Inspector of Schools for some thirty years and became Professor of Education at Sussex University in 1966. His earliest teaching appointment had been as English Lektor at Hamburg University. Like Birley he had been educated at Rugby. 15 Walsh, ‘Brief Notes on Educational Policy’, 13 September 1948. FO1050/1151. 16 Walsh to Land Commissioner, Schleswig-Holstein, 17 November 1949. FO1050/1156. 17 Christian George Maude, 1884–1971, served with the Control Commission from 1946 to 1954, becoming Director of what emerged as the Cultural Relations Division. Affectionately known as ‘The Brig’, he was held in very high esteem by members of Education Branch. 18 FO1050/1151. 19 Maude to Education Branch staff in Niedersachsen, 16 November 1948. FGO1050/1151. 20 Marshall, ‘Interim Report by the Educational Adviser after two months in Germany’, 13 November 1948. FO1050/1119. 21 Robertson to Ivone Kirkpatrick, 21 November 1948. FO1050/1119. 22 Strang, The Foreign Office, 211. 23 Robinsohn &; Kuhlmann, ‘Two Decades of Non-Reform in West German Education’. 24 Becker, in betrifft:erziehung, 12 (10): 24, October 1979. 25 Handwritten note to Birley, signed ‘R.O’ & dated 25 August [1948]. FO1050/1151. 26 Birley to Robertson, 24 July 1948, ‘Prospects of a democratic order in Germany with special reference to Education’. FO1050/1151. 27 Lever, Berlin Rules, 27. 28 The first conference, chaired by Rektor Smend, took place in Göttingen on 26 and 27 September 1945. Grimme was present, and among the British authorities attending were Beattie and Mark. 29 Landahl, In Memoriam Dr h.c. Christine Teusch, 25. 30 ‘Brief for High Commissioner’s Conference: Office of the Educational Adviser’. 28 October 1949. FO1050/1144. 31 FO1050/1171. 32 Grosspietsch, The Changing Geographies of International Municipal Relations in Europe, 109–10. 33 Ibid. 34 Sian Griffiths, ‘Bosom chums for 70 years . . . and counting’, Sunday Times, 8 November 2015. 35 Heywood, ‘London, Bonn, the Königswinter Conferences and the Problem of European Integration’, 135. 36 Lilo Milchsack, ‘A 30-year Perspective on the Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft’, paper of 6 November 1979. Birley Papers, City University. 37 Becker, interviewed in betrifft:erziehung, 12 (10): 28, October 1979. 38 Sutton to Edwards, 3 June 1947. Wiss. Nachlaß D.C. Riddy, Hamburg. 39 Longford, foreword to Williams, A Most Diplomatic General, xi. (This in a biography of Robertson, whose contribution to a regenerated Germany was immense.) 40 Hearnden, Red Robert, 143. 41 Walker to Birley, 29 December 1947. Birley Papers, City University, London. 42 Hearnden, Red Robert, 252. 43 Cox &; Phillips, Transcript, 123.

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Index Italic numbers are used for illustrations. Bold numbers are used for tables. Italic text is used for titles of publications and German terms. Place names are German unless stated otherwise. Aachen administration 45–6, 47 adult education 274, 277 Grundschulen (primary schools) 118 lack of progress 210 schooling of children 47–8, 48, 124 Aachen Technische Hochschule 161, 162, 178, 179, 180, 185, 190 abolition of German language 14 achievements of British Occupation policy 291–307 bureaucracy 304–5 costs 292 criticisms 296–8 dilemmas faced 305 of Donald Riddy 305–6 of Education Branch officers 306–7 influence on Federal Germany 301–2 links with British institutions 303–4 under the Occupation Statute (1949) 295–6 report by T.H. Marshall 298–301 of Robert Birley 306 support for educational work 292–4 Adenauer, Konrad 123–4 Adler, Bruno 254 administrative structure 44–51 admission of students 188–94 adult education 269–77 aims and methods 274–6 British idea of 271–3 in Hamburg 122 need for 269–70 provision in 1946 272–3 Robert Birley on 79–80 student composition 273–4 subjects taught 273–4

Volkshochschulen (adult education) 270–1 advice for dealing with Germans 98–9 Alldridge, James 177 Allied Control Council 36 Anglo-German Association (DeutschEnglische Gesellschaft) 304 Anglo-German discussion groups 85 Annan, Noel 42, 124 Apel, Kurt 182 armed forces recruitment for Education Branch 105 army officers, as students 188–9, 192 Armytage, Brig. 40, 41, 53, 193 Arnsberg 153 Asbury, William 40, 41 Association of University Teachers report 229–36 Atlantic Charter (1941) 8 Augstein, Rudolf 255 Aurich 117 Bad Pyrmont 152 Bähnisch, Theanolte 278 Baillie-Grohman, H.T. 148–9 Balfour, Michael 5, 46, 49, 253, 294 banishment of Nazi professors 197–8 Barker, Sir Ernest 28, 201, 287 bases for administration 49 Bäumler, Alfred 218, 256 Baxter, Raymond 36 BBC German programmes 258 Beamish, Tufton 42 Beattie, A.J. 84, 99, 114–15 Becker, Hellmut 213, 302, 304 Beckhough, Harry 10, 71, 163, 176, 185, 303, 306–7

356

Index

Beckmann, Joachim 240 begging in Germany 89, 285 Behn, Lotte 121 Bell, George, bishop of Chichester 215 Bergakademie (Mining Academy) 161, 172 Bering, Friedrich 162–3 Berlin adult education 273, 274 Allied Command in 36 denominational education 221, 224 Information Centre 263, 264, 265–6 Lord Pakenham’s visit to a school 86–7 organization of education 87–8 schools 125 universities 88, 158, 182, 250, 300 youth movements 154 Berlin, Isaiah 201–2, 238 Berry, Sir Vaughan 40, 41, 200 Bevin, Ernest and Brian Robertson 40 dislike of Germany 43 on educational work 292–3 and Frank Pakenham 44 and John Hynd 41 on policy 53 on women’s affairs 288 Bickersteth, Julian 74, 118 Bickford-Smith, A.L. 151–2 Bielefeld 261 Bird, Geoffrey 105, 161, 173–5, 185, 194, 249 Birley, Robert 72–87 achievements of 83, 146, 237, 295, 306 on AUT report 236 background 73, 73 on Berlin University 88 at Cologne University 164 on Communism 302 criticism of 297 and denominational education 221–2, 223 departure 82, 296 and discussion groups 201 and Donald Riddy 81, 82 on Education Branch 54, 82, 295 Educational Adviser 76–80 and Erich Hirsch 89–91 on exchange visits 304 on Frank Pakenham 44

frustrations 56 on Geoffrey Bird 174–5 on Heinrich Matthias Konen 171 on inadequacy of German education 74 on lack of shoes 89 Memorandum on visit to Germany 74–6 on Michael Foster 202 and ‘re-education’ 6 on Russian policy in Berlin 87–8 on school reform 209, 211–12 train travel by 187 university reform 237–8, 240, 249, 250, 251 on women’s affairs 290 Bishop, Sir Alec 40 Bishop, W.H.A. 263 black list of educational personnel 16 Black Record (1941) 3, 10–11, 12 Blättner, Fritz 270 ‘Blue Report’ (Gutachten zur Hochschulreform) (1948) 236–51, 276–7, 300 Blume, Friedrich 167 Boehm, Franz 250 Böhler, Wilhelm 222–3 Bonn 274 Bonn University buildings 159 denazification 195–6 links with British universities 183 re-opening 161 rectors 171 student health 189 student labour 190 student numbers 161, 188 studium generale 250 University Officers 175 vacation courses 185, 186 books banning of 259–61 burning of 258–9 lack of progress 129 publishing 254 See also textbooks Borinski, Fritz 28, 29, 277 Borken 117 Bovenschen, Sir Frederick 59

Index Bower, Tom 194 Bowra, Maurice 238 Boyce, John (Jack) 111–13, 122, 123 Bradford, Maj. 48 Brailsford, H.N. 190 Brann, Capt. 171 Braunschweig elementary schools 116, 118, 119 Technische Hochschule 161, 162, 180, 181, 185, 187, 250 Brief Encounter 256 Brinkmann, Theodor 171 British Council 201, 263, 295, 296, 301 British universities, links with 183, 201 British Zone administrative structure 44–51 conditions for students 189 conditions in 31–6, 32, 285 conditions in schools 126–7 broadcasting for schools 136–8 Brockway, Fenner 34, 36, 194 Broome, Dorothy 290 Brown, Muriel 182–3 Browning, C.H. 230 Bünde 54 Burck, Erich 166–7 Burg Wahn 303 Butler, R.A. 57–8, 60 Cadogan, Sir Alexander 59 calorie allowance for civilians 34, 124–5, 126, 128 Can the Germans be Re-Educated? (1945) 95 Carlisle, Ian 67, 134–5 Carter, Geoffrey 105–6, 180–2 Casablanca War Council (1943) 9 Celle 153–4 censorship 253, 255, 256–7 centralization of education 207 Champion de Crespigny, Hugh 40, 41, 167–8 character of the Germans 93–100, 123–4 Chichester, George Bell, bishop 215 children British troops and 103–4 descriptions 89, 95, 285 displaced 34 in Hildesheim 128–9

357

numbers 117, 118, 119, 121 warning about 95 Chorley, Robert, 1st Baron 183–4, 188, 230, 231, 234 Christian community schools (Gemeinschaftsschulen) 218–20 Chuboda, Karl Franz 171 Churchill, Winston 8, 13–14, 103, 292, 293–4 Chuter-Ede, James 77 cinema 256 civilian recruitment for Education Branch 105 class sizes 119, 121, 145 classrooms 131–2 See also school buildings Clausthal-Zellerfeld 161, 172 clothing, lack of 89, 128 collective guilt 18 Colledge, Eric on denazification 196–7 at Düsseldorf vacation course 186 on Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt 165–6 on Heinrich Matthias Konen 171 on Herbert Schöffler 169, 170 on Hermann Rein 171 on professors 202 role 174 on Rudolf Smend 170 on universities 172–3, 231 Collins, Harry 138 Cologne 132–3, 152 Cologne University buildings 159 links with British universities 183, 201 nazification of 2 re-opening 161 rectors 162–3 student conditions 189 student labour 191 student numbers 162, 188 University Officers 176, 177 vacation courses 185, 187 commission on university reform (1948) 236–51 adult education 276–7 members 238–40, 242–4 programme 246–7 questionnaire 244–6

358 report 247–51 terms of reference 241–2 concentration camps 5, 6 concerts 256–7 conditions the British Zone 31–6, 32, 285 schools 126–7 universities 189 Control Commission 51–4, 51 Control Council Directive No.54 (1947) 66, 207–9, 211 Control Council Directive No.56 (1947) 275–6 Control Council Order No.4 (1946) 259 Control Office 7, 41–4, 116, 253, 266 Copleston, Fr. 187 Corlett, John 77 Cornell, Margaret 290 courses for Education Branch staff 105 Creighton, Tom 70–1, 77, 81–2, 154, 236 Creutzfeldt, Hans Gerhard 165–6, 178 Cripps, Stafford 28 Crossman, Richard 254 cultural life 253–8 Cunningham, Caroline background 177–8 difficulties at Kiel University 167, 189 on Erich Burck 167 on handover to German authorities 71 on Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt 166, 178 hosted AUT members 232 on Hugh Champion de Crespigny 167–8 on Kiel University 159 untrained for post 105, 178 curriculum 88, 96, 134 See also denominational education; syllabuses Dahrendorf, Ralf 200 The Danger of Fraternisation 101 Davies, Edith 10, 63, 105, 113–14, 277–9 Dean, Sir Maurice 43 Dean, Patrick 26 delinquency of young people 147 Delmer, Sefton 54, 255 democratization definition of democracy 18 Directive for 207

Index failure of 146 German opinions on 97, 285 policies for 2, 5, 10, 22, 302 of universities 178, 234 Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands 288 denazification of books and cultural material 259 policies for 1–2, 10, 15–18, 61–2 of schools 87–8, 138–44 of universities 194–200, 234 Deneke, Helena 283–5, 284, 286–7, 290 denominational education 213–24 Der Spiegel 255 Detachments 112 deterioration of youth 147 Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft (AngloGerman Association) 304 Dicks, Henry 96–7 Die Brücke (Information Centres). See Information Centres Die Brücke (magazine) 264 Die Welt 255 diet of civilians 34, 35, 89, 124–5, 126, 128 Directive for Military Government of Germany Prior to Defeat or Surrender (1944) 15–18, 61–2 Directive for Teachers regarding Military Government Policy in Education 120 Directive No.54 (1947) 207–9 discussion groups 85, 200–1 Dodds, E.R. approach from Foreign Office 58 AUT report 230, 232, 236 background 23, 24 committee on textbooks 134 on Emil Wolff 168 on E.R. Gayre 59 on Max Pohlenz 168–9 school fees 205 university investigations 226–9 winter conditions of 1946–47 35 working party 23–5 Don’t be a Sucker in Germany! (1945) 95 Dortmund 219–20 Douglas, Sir Sholto 39, 41, 44, 53, 131 Dozenten Scheme 201 Drenckhahn, Friedrich 240, 243–4

Index Drexler, Hans 169 Duisburg 155 Dundas-Grant, Valerie 175, 185 Düsseldorf 119–20, 161, 162, 186, 210 Ebsworth, Raymond 45, 46, 105 Edelman, Maurice 52–3 Eden, Anthony 8, 12, 14, 60 Education Act (1944) 205–6 Education Branch of the Control Commission data collection 54–6 and Donald Riddy 57–8, 59–62, 65–70 frustrations 56–7 potential Directors 58–9 staff 52, 104–7, 111, 122–3 Education Control Instruction No.10 (Youth Activities) (1945) 154 Education Control Instruction No.21 (Adult Education) (1945) 272 Education Instructions to German Authorities (EIGA) 216–17, 221 Educational Advisers 66, 68, 72, 78 Edwards, Arthur 178, 180, 185, 186 Edwards, Handel 219, 222, 223 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 15, 45 elementary schools in Aachen 47 in Borken 117 in Braunschweig 116, 118, 119 in Düsseldorf 119–20 Grundschulen (primary schools) 118, 119, 121 priorities for 15 teachers 47, 119 types 205 Eliot, T.S. 258 English language teaching 75, 137–8 Essen 126, 127, 261 Eutin 278–9 Everling, Henry 240 evolution of control in education 31–91 administrative structure 44–51 Berlin 87–8 conditions in the Zone 31–6, 32, 126–7, 285 Control Commission 51–4 Control Office and its ministers 41–4

359 Donald Riddy and Education Branch 54–62 Ellen Wilkinson and the Ministry of Education 63 German Educational Reconstruction (GER) 88–91 Military Governors 36–40 policy and development 63–72 Robert Birley 72–87

fees, school 205, 222 films 256 Final Report (1939) (Nevile Henderson) 18 Fischer, Eugen 226 Fischer, Jürgen 250 Flensburg 121 Flexner, Abraham 234 Flitner, Wilhelm 274 Foley, F. 197 food of civilians 34, 35, 89, 124–5, 126, 128 Foot, M.R.D. 186 forced residence for Nazi professors 197–8 foreign language teaching 137–8 Foreign Office German Information Department 301 Forsyth, Walter 132, 142–3 Foster, Michael 36, 201, 202 Four Freedoms 9 Fragebogen (denazification questionnaire) 138, 139–40, 141, 142, 167, 194–5 Framework Plan (Rahmenplan) (1959) 204, 210–11 Fraser, Lindley 58, 60 fraternization, dangers of 100–4, 101 Frauenausschüsse (women’s committees) 286 Free University, Berlin 88, 158 Freie Deutsche Jugend 154 Frings, Josef 214, 221–2 Fyfe, Christopher 85–6 Gayre, E.R. 58–9 Gemeinschaftsschulen (Christian community schools) 218–20 Gemmell, Jeanne 279–80, 284, 287 general studies 247, 248, 249–50 Gerlach, Walther 250 German character 93–100, 123–4 German collective responsibility 18

360 German education officials 113, 114 German Educational Reconstruction 22, 27–9, 88–91 German Student Harvest Scheme 91 Germany (1944) 95 Golf, Arthur 226 Gollancz, Victor 34, 231 Göttingen 127, 129, 283 Göttingen University adult education 277 budget 160 denazification 194–5, 196 links with British universities 183 living conditions 189 nationalism of students 190, 192–3 rectors 84, 169–71 student numbers 161, 188 University Officers 173–5 vacation courses 185, 186 government of British Zone 37 Graf-Spee-Schule, Kiel 113 Greene, Hugh Carleton 257, 258, 294 grey list of educational personnel 16–17 Grimme, Adolf on adult education 274, 276 and A.J. Beattie 114–15 background 73, 114, 116 commission on university reform (1948) 249, 250 and denominational education 218–19 English approach to 99 lack of sleep 56 and Phyllis Wood 89 roles 114, 212, 258 school reform 203–5, 204 speech to teachers’ conference 113 on teacher training 145 on white list 17 Grimme-Plan 203–4, 204 Grosche, Robert 240, 242 Gruber, Otto 240, 244 Grundschulen (primary schools) 118, 119, 121 Grundtvig, N.F.S. 270 Grundy, J.B.C. 160 Gutachten zur Hochschulreform (Blue Report) (1948) 236–51, 276–7, 300

Index Haase, Otto 151 Hamburg adult education 274 classrooms 131–2 condition of people 34–5 denominational schools 221 elementary schools 118, 119, 121 Information Centre 267, 269 plan for housing British 36 school links with Britain 304 school meals 124 statistics for 121 Hamburg School Law (1949) 211, 212 Hamburg University buildings 159 links with British universities 183 nationalism of students 193 re-opening 160, 161 rectors 168 student numbers 121, 188 vacation courses 185 Hamm 214 Hannover adult education 274 housing 34 number of children in school 121 teacher availability 117, 118 Technische Hochschule 161, 162, 180, 190 Tierärztliche Hochschule 161, 180 Veterinary College 161 women’s club 277–8 Harms, Gertrud 286 Harvey, Oliver 60, 163 Harvey, Ruth 86, 140–1 Hastings, Somerville 187 Hawgood, J.A. 230, 231 health of students 189–90 Hearnden, Arthur 70, 205, 306 Heisenberg, Werner 17 Henderson, Nevile 18 Herford 118 Hildesheim 128–9 Hinde, W.R.N. 265 Hirsch, Emanuel 226 Hirsch, Erich 28, 29, 88–91 history, teaching of 88 Hochberger, Berta 243 Holzlöhner, Ernst 163–5

Index Honecker, Erich 154 Horrocks, Sir Brian 104 Horwood, F.C. 105 Houghton, G.W. 266 housing 33, 128, 189 Howard, Hubert 223 Hughes, Edward 187 Hughes, E.W. 187 Hull, Cordell 14 Humboldt University, Berlin 158 Hume, R.V. 82, 149, 298 Humphrey, Berta 105 Hutchings, Arthur 187 Hynd, John achievements 83 background 41–2, 41 on Control Commission 52 on denazification 142 on Donald Riddy 82 on newspapers 263, 264 on re-education 6, 42–3 on Robert Birley 76, 77 on uniformity in education 130 weaknesses 43, 44 In Jenen Tagen (In Those Days) 256 indoctrination of young people 148 influence of British 83–5 Information Centres 262–9, 265 access charges 267 establishment 262–6 purposes 266–7 types 266 use of 267, 268, 269 Information Control Units 253 Information Services Control Group 253 intelligence gathering 111 International Education Review 256 Jack, T. 272 Johanneum, Hamburg 304 Joint Chief of Staff directive 1067 (1945) 14, 46, 48–9 journals 254 Jürgensen, Kurt 18–19, 21 Kahle, Paul 169 Kahrstedt, Ulrich 227 Keeser, Eduard 168

361

Kefauver, Grayson 23 Kershaw, Ian 138, 140 Kiel 113, 300 Kiel University buildings 159 links with British universities 183 living conditions 189 re-opening 160–1 rectors 163–8 student numbers 162, 188 University Officers 177–8 Kinghorn, Ernest 77 Kirby, General Stanley 23, 25 Kirkpatrick, Ivone 24–5, 26, 59, 60, 97 Klauser, Theodor 172 Klub deutscher Frauen 287 Knight, A.H.J. 230 Know Your Enemy (1944) 100 Knowles, Charles Ingram 271, 274, 277 Kolinsky, Eva 283 Konen, Heinrich Matthias 171–2, 212 Koszyk, Kurt 34 Kreis detachments (K dets) 45, 49, 112 Krieck, Ernst 227 Kroll, Joseph 1, 163, 176, 250 Krüger, Gerhard 161 Kuhlmann, J.C. 302 Kuklinski, Wilhelm 114 Kulturhoheit (Land-based autonomy) 131, 207 labour of students 190, 191 Land autonomy in education 131, 207 Landahl, Heinrich background 115–16, 116 on Joseph Kroll 163 on open discussion 170–1 role 114 school broadcasts 136 school visit 131 on teacher training 145 on white list 17 Landfrauenverein (women’s rural institute) 278–9 Latymer Upper School, London 304 Lehberger, Reiner 211 Lehnartz, Emil 172 Leonard, T.J. 90, 133 librarians 261, 262

362

Index

libraries 258–62 Liddell, Helen 145–6 Lindsay, Alexander Dunlop, 1st Baron Lindsay of Birker background 238–9, 239 commission on university reform (1948) 240 death 246 and Friedrich Drenckhahn 243 on function of a university 251 and general studies 247, 248 links with British universities 183, 201, 303–4 Longford, Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of. See Pakenham, Lord Frank Lord, Guy 53 Lotze, Heiner 274 Lübbecke 50, 118 Lüneburg 143 Lyttelton, Oliver 42 Maaß, Rainer 181 Macready, Sir Gordon 40, 43 magazines 254, 255–6 Mainland, W.F. 186–7 Malkin, Sir William 26 malnourishment of civilians 34, 89, 124–5, 126, 128 of students 189–90 Manchester Guardian 263 Marahrens, August, bishop 84 Mark, James and AUT report 230, 232 background 157, 158 on British approach to Germans 99 on Donald Riddy 78 on John Hynd 42 on Lord Pakenham 83 on recruitment to Education Branch 104 role 41 university survey 157, 158–9 on Werner Schulemann 196 Marshall, T.H. (Tom) 230–1, 296, 298–301, 299 Martin, Kingsley 263 Maud, John 74, 77–8, 132 Maude, Brig. 89, 296–8 McLean, R.C. 230

McNamara, F.H. (Frank) 281 Medical Academy, Düsseldorf 161, 162, 186 Meehan, Patricia 52, 104 Meitmann, Karl 193 Memorandum on the Re-education of Germany (1944) 19, 21 Memorandum on the Regeneration of Germany (1943) 19–21 Mevius, Walter 172 Milch, Werner 28 Milchsack, Lilo 304 Military Government civilian contact with 50 Detachments 112 Directive for (1944) 15–18, 61–2 handbook for 12–13 and secondary schools 108–10 staff 4, 119 and transitional government 52–3 Military Government Law No.8 (Prohibition of Nazi . . .) (1945) 139 Military Governors 4, 36–40 Military Manual of Civil Affairs in the Field 21, 46 Mining Academy (Bergakademie) 161, 172 mining disasters 138 modern languages 204 Möhlmann, Carl 113 Montgomery, Bernard on Brian Robertson 39 on importance of youth 64 as Military Governor 4, 36–9 on non-fraternization 101–2, 103 on youth movements 149–51, 153 Morgenthau, Henry 12, 13–14 Morris, Sir Charles 28 Morse, W.E. 186 Moscow Declarations (1943) 9 Mosolf, Anna 5, 278 Münster 125 Münster University adult education 277 buildings 158–9 links with British universities 183 re-opening 161 rectors 172 student health 189–90 student numbers 161, 188

Index University Officers 176–7 vacation courses 185, 187 Murray, George on denominational education 223–4 on school reform 206, 207, 211 on teacher training 146 teacher:pupil ratios 144 on vacation courses 187 on vetting of staff 194–5 Murray, Gilbert 59 National Socialist education 96 nationalism of students 190, 192–4 Nazism psychology of 96–7 of teachers 116–17 treatment of people 16–17, 197–8 of university staff 225–9, 243–4 See also denazification New Statesman 263 newspapers 254–5, 263, 264, 265 newsreels 256 non-fraternization 100–4, 101 Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) 136, 257–8 Norris, Betty 283–4, 285, 287 Noth, Martin 172 numerus clausus (student numbers) 171–2, 180, 181, 188 obedience to authority, German 97 objectives for education 129–30 Occupation of Germany achievements of British Occupation policy 291–307 administration of 44–51 background xii, xiii Berlin 87–8 conditions in the Zone 31–6, 32, 126–7, 285 Control Commission 51–4 Control Office and its ministers 41–4 Education Branch 54–63, 72–87 experience of 50–1, 50 German Educational Reconstruction 88–91 Military Governors 36–40 plans for 8–9, 11–14 policy 63–72

363

Occupation Statute (1949) 291, 292, 295, 298 O’Grady, M.H. 116 Oldenburng 121 O’Neill, Con background 19, 20 on book purging 260 on Brian Robertson 40 on denazification 139 on educational policy 38 on Ellen Wilkinson’s report 63 on interference in Germany 25–6 Memorandum on Re-education 19, 21 on Montgomery 4 on population problem 32 and school textbooks 135 on teachers’ declaration not to teach Nazi doctrines 120 Oppenhoff, Oberbürgermeister 47 Ordinance No.57 and Education branch 65–72 Ostermann, Rita 287–8, 302 out of school activities 146–56 need for 146–51 summer camps 155–6 training for youth workers 151–2 youth groups 152–5 Padover, Saul 47 Pakenham, Lord Frank on AUT report 236 on Control Commission 53–4 difficulties with Ernest Bevin 44 eccentricity 83 minister for German affairs 43–4 religious beliefs 44 on Robert Birley 306 visit to a Berlin school 86–7 visit to Cologne University 163, 164 paper shortages 255 parental vote on denominational schools 219, 220, 221 Pascal, Roy 230–1, 236 Paul, Elfriede 278, 282 Pender, Robert (Bobby) Herdman 174 periodicals 254, 255–6 Perraudin, Ray 176–7 Petersen, Katharina 240

364

Index

Pickering, E.P. 169–70 Plan for the Resumption of German Youth Activities 154 Planck, Max 17 Pocket Guide to Germany (1944) 93–4 Pohlenz, Max 17, 168–9 Policy Directive No.8 143, 259 Policy Directive No.27 260, 261 policy in practice character of the Germans 93–100 denazification 138–44 non-fraternization 100–4 out of school activities 146–56 policy statements 129–32 recruitment and training of staff 104–7, 111 school broadcasting 136–8 schools, re-opening 111–29 teacher training 144–6 textbooks for schools 133–6 policy statements 129–32 politicization of youth 269–70, 270 population statistics 31–2 post-war administration of Germany 7–10 Poston, Ralph 136 Potsdam Agreement 2, 32, 79 Potsdam Protocol (1945) 2, 7, 9–10 primary schools. See elementary schools private tutors 120–1 professors characteristics 182, 186, 231, 233 and Nazism 2, 168, 169, 195–6, 197–8, 225–6, 243–4 status 2, 249 on white list 17 propaganda 253–4, 256, 262–3, 269 psychology of Nazism 96–7 public broadcasting 217–18, 253, 257–8, 279 public libraries 258–62 public opinion on British forces 50–1, 50 Public Relations/Information Services Control Group 253 publishing 254–6, 257 pupils per teacher 119, 121, 145 Quellenbibliotheken (source libraries) 135 questionnaires 139–40, 141, 142

radio broadcasting 217–18, 253, 257–8, 279 Radio Hamburg 136, 257–8 Rahmenplan (Framework Plan) (1959) 204, 210–11 Raiser, Ludwig 171, 173, 245, 249, 250 Rathbone, Eleanor 27–8 ratio of teachers to pupils 144 ratio of women to men 279, 286–7 Rayne, Mr. 56 reading materials 254 recruitment for Education Branch 104–7, 111 rectors of universities 162–73, 231, 233 re-education definition 3, 6, 18–19 efficacy of 2–3 flaws in 3, 4, 5 Joseph Krolls’ view of 1 policies for 2, 3, 18–25 resistance to 95 Rees, Goronwy 36 Rees-Williams, David 52 refugees 32, 34, 267 Regional Commissioners 37, 40, 41, 66, 67, 70 Reich/Vatican Concordat (1933) 213, 214–15, 222, 223 Reimers, Walter 240, 246 Rein, Adolf 226 Rein, Hermann 17, 171, 189 religious education 213–24 Ridding, J.F. 2–3, 155 Riddy, Donald achievements 82, 83, 305–6 busyness of 118 on character of the Germans 99–100 on denazification 141–2, 259 on denominational education 217–18 on Dozenten Scheme 201 and Education Branch 57–8, 57, 59–62, 65–70 on Erich Burck 167 frustrations 56, 291 later career 307 on nationalism in universities 192 objectives for education 129–30 observation of problems 119 replacement 78, 81

Index school reform 206, 207, 208–9 on school textbooks 133, 135 school visit 132 shortages noted 121 on teacher training 145 on uniformity in education 130 on Werner Schulemann 196, 198, 199 white list of educational personnel 17 on women’s affairs 281–2 on youth movements 149 Ritterbusch, Paul 227 Robertson, Sir Brian on achievements of Education Branch 64, 295 on adult education 277 background 39–40, 41 on Bernard Montgomery 37 on book purging 261 on British Council 301 commission on university reform (1948) 236, 240 on Control Commission 51 on Information Centres 265–6 and John Hynd 43 on Ordinance 57 71 on religious education 217 on Robert Birley 72 role 296 and R.V. Hume 82 and school reform 209–10 on uniformity in education 130–1 Robinsohn, S.B. 302 Rombach, Wilhelm 46 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 9, 12–13, 14 Rowohlt, Ernst 254 rubble films (Trümmerfilme) 256 rubble women (Trümmerfrauen) 282–3 rumour 269 Russian policy 87, 88, 131, 208 Ryder, A.J. 294 Salis, Jean Rudolf von 238, 239–40 Samuel, Richard 167 Sargent, John 58 Sargent, Orme 18 Schaumberg- Lippe Affair 53–4 Schmidt, Helmut 244 Schneider, Friedrich 256 Schöffler, Herbert 169, 170

365

school broadcasting 136–8 school buildings availability 116, 121 classrooms 131–2 destruction 113, 126, 133 plans for 15 used for other purposes 62, 119, 127 school meals 124–5, 126 school reform 203–24 Control Council Directive No.54 (1947) 207–9 denominational education 213–24 Grimme-Plan 203–5 Hamburg School Law (1949) 211, 212 obstacles to 211–12 other proposals 205–7 progress 209–10, 212–13 school textbooks 133–6 schools fees 205, 222 re-opening 108–10, 111–29, 128–9 types 205, 206 See also curriculum; denominational education; syllabuses Schramm, Percy E. 169–70 Schreiber, Georg 172 Schulemann, Werner 196, 198–9 scout groups 153–4 secondary schools 22, 108–10, 121, 205 SHAEF Directive for Military Government of Germany Prior to Defeat or Surrender (1944) 15–18, 61–2 Handbook for Military Government in Germany 12, 61, 96 shoes, lack of 89, 128, 189 Siegen 2–3, 155 Siegmund, Herbert 172 Simmons, Montague 82 Simpson, Julian 69–70, 182 Smend, Rudolf 17, 170 Smith, Sir Norman 53 Smither, Roger 256 Smithers, Sir Waldron 77 Snell, Bruno 17, 240, 242 Snyder, Timothy 225 Soulsby, F.N. 266 source libraries (Quellenbibliotheken) 135

366

Index

Spender, Stephen 123–4, 168, 195–6, 242, 261–2 Stamm, Erna 143–4 statements of policy 129–32 status of Education Branch 122–3 Steel, Christopher (Kit) 223 Stern-Rubarth, Edgar 187 Strang, Sir William 36, 168, 301 Stroux, Johannes 242 Stuckart, Wilhelm 111, 147 students admission 188–94 composition 192, 235 health 189–90 nationalism 190, 192–4 numbers 171–2, 180, 181, 188, 188 work by 190, 191 studium generale 247, 248, 249–50 Stunde Null (Year Zero) 33 summer camps 155–6 survey of Germans on British forces 50–1, 50 Sutton, L.H. 48, 189, 192–3, 194–5, 296, 305 syllabuses 42–3, 113, 134 See also curriculum; denominational education teacher training 144–6 teachers availability 116–17, 118, 119 British, in Germany 85–6 declaration not to teach Nazi doctrines 120 denazification 139, 140–4 teaching assistants 119 teaching styles 75–6, 274–5 Technische Hochschule, Aachen 161, 162, 178, 179, 180, 185, 190 Technische Hochschule, Braunschweig general studies 250 and Geoffrey Carter 180, 181 re-opening 161, 162 vacation courses 185, 187 Technische Hochschule, Hannover 161, 162, 180, 190 Technische Hochschulen 158, 160, 161, 162 Technische Universität, Berlin 158, 182, 250, 300

Teheran Conference (1943) 9, 12, 35 Tetens, T.H. 100 Teusch, Christine 71–2, 114, 221, 250, 303 textbooks 75, 117, 118, 133–6 theatre 256–7 Theunert, Franz 240 Thomas, George 141 Thomas, Richard Hinton 84, 111, 147 Thyssen, Johannes 245–6 Tierärztliche Hochschule, Hannover 161, 180 Tombs, D. Martineau 230 Townswomen’s Guild 283 train travel 186–7 training for Education Branch 105–7, 111 travel by train 186–7 travel to school 129 Troutbeck, John (Jack) 19–21, 19, 23, 24, 26–7, 59–60 The True Glory 126 Trümmerfilme (rubble films) 256 Trümmerfrauen (rubble women) 282–3 tutors, private 120–1 Umerziehung (re-education) 3 uniformity in education 130–1, 208 universities 157–202, 225–52 administration training 105–6 admission of students 188–94 adult education 276–7 AUT report 229–36 in the British Zone 158 commission on reform (1948) 236–51 denazification 194–200 discussion groups 200–2 governance 234 opening and supervision 157–62 rectors 162–73 reform, need for 225–9 University Officers 173–84, 177 vacation courses 184–8 University Officers 173–84, 177 activities 183–4 responsibilities 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180–1 Arthur Edwards 178, 180, 185, 186 Caroline Cunningham. See Cunningham, Caroline

Index Geoffrey Bird 105, 161, 173–5, 185, 194, 249 Geoffrey Carter 105–6, 180–2 Harry Beckhough 10, 71, 163, 176, 185, 303, 306–7 Muriel Brown 182–3 Peter Whitley 71, 182, 185–6, 201, 242 Ray Perraudin 176–7 Valerie Dundas-Grant 175, 185 US Society for the Prevention of World War III 18 vacation courses 184–8 Van Cutsem, Brig. 49, 51, 97–9 Vansittart, Robert, 1st Baron 3, 10–12 Vansittartism 11 veterinary colleges 160, 161, 180 vocational schools, types of 205 Voigt, Elisabeth 143–4 Volkshochschulen (adult education institutions) 122, 270–1, 273 Volksschulen (elementary schools) 119 Wadsworth, A.P. 263 Walker, Herbert 82, 90, 175, 176, 180, 306 Walker, Patrick Gordon 35 Walsh, Ken 152–3, 296 war-time planning for education 7–29 Allied conferences and statements 8–10 Directives on education 14–27 German Educational Reconstruction 27–9 Vansittart and Morgenthau 10–14 Waterhouse, Ellis 157 Watt, D.C. 4 Weimar textbooks 133–4 Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich Freiherr von 240, 242, 249 welfare activities 153, 286 Welt im Film 256 West, C.A. 102–3 Wheeler, Charles 52 white list of educational personnel 17

367

Whitley, Peter 71, 182, 185–6, 201, 242 Wiedererziehing (re-education) 3 Wilcox, A.H. 178, 243 Wilkinson, Ellen 63, 72, 124, 125–6, 125, 127 Wilson, Duncan 74, 294 Wilson, Ronald (Ronnie) Haig 123 Wilton Park, Bucks. 277, 286, 292, 293, 301 winter conditions of 1946–47 35, 189, 232 Winton, F.R. 175 Wolff, Emil 17, 168 Wolff, Johannes 151 women students 161–2, 189–90, 247 women’s affairs 277–90 British policy 285, 288–90 condition of 285–6 groups for women 277–9, 283–4, 287 life of women 282–3 political role of women 279, 288 ratio of women to men 279, 286–7 responsibility for 279–82 scepticism of 286 welfare and relief work 286 women’s committees (Frauenausschüsse) 286 Women’s Institute 283 women’s rural institute (Landfrauenverein) 278–9 Wood, Phyllis 89 Wood, Sydney Herbert 27, 28, 89 Yalta Conference (1945) 9 Year Zero (Stunde Null) 33 Youard, Mrs R.J. 288–90 young people, character of 93–100 youth clubs 155 youth workers 151–2 youths, activities for. See out of school activities youths, politicization of 269–70, 270 Zonal Education Advisory Committee 207 Zonal Education Council (Zonenerziehungsrat) 207