Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Mike was reluctant to be tied down and equally reluctant to return home. Nevertheless, she bore her family’s hardships in mind. They were so short of everything. She made a point of posting parcels of
luxuries – easily available to her through the NAAFI, bazaar or black market – back to Berkshire:
I’m worried to see you had a further cut in fats – I’ll buy some tins in town. I know the beef dripping was acceptable. I won’t send butter, it’s buffalo juice and horrid! If I see any really nice material I’ll buy it for curtains and send it home on duty-free label. Measure up your and Daddy’s room including bedspread.
If you want anything – Yardley, Lizzy Arden or Helena Rubinstein, it’s only two-thirds of the price out here.
But at last the time came when she could remain no longer. ‘My darling dearest,’ she wrote to her mother on 25 May 1946: ‘They say to say goodbye is to die a little … to-day I think I have died quite a lot. I have worked my last day as a WAAF intelligence officer … after nearly seven years it cannot help but hurt a little.’
There were farewell noggins all round before she embarked in June from Port Said on HMT
Corfu
. On the 14th they passed Gibraltar: ‘Dear Mediterranean, I hope I’ll see you again soon. I love your blue seas and skies so very much. Somehow, I feel very depressed. This awful feeling of “
¿donde vamos?
” ’ Two days later the ship docked in Southampton. She had missed the 6 June Victory celebrations by ten days, and disembarked in pouring rain to a country suffering from anti-climax. The euphoria of reunion with her beloved mother soon wore off; downpour was followed by a chill drizzle, ‘very weary & oh, so cold’, and her aloof father welcomed her in like manner, ‘with a snarl’. By 21 June disappointment had set in, and she was utterly depressed:
Between you and me Diary – a Goddamn fool to leave Waaf-ing in Cairo for this.
Soon after, the entries thin out. In her own word, Mike ‘mooched’ – did nothing. Her main preoccupations during the early autumn of 1946 were her restless romance with Max, which she attempted to combine with the newer attentions of Geoffrey, and her application to work with the German Control Commission. At last in November her marching orders came through; by the end of the month she was only too happy to find her feet again in the Intelligence Division of
the GCC at Herford in north-west Germany, followed soon after by a posting to Berlin.
Independence, worth, usefulness and the knowledge that her initiative and expertise in the German language were being recognised set Mike Morris back on course for a fruitful expatriate career in corporate welfare and personnel over the next twelve years. But the love affairs fizzled out. When Mike eventually married a divorced colonial officer in 1958 she gave up work and started to collect antique furniture. In later life she also took up ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) and became proficient enough in that art to offer demonstrations through the National Association of Flower Arrangers.
Vanquished
In November 1945
Anne Popham boarded a Dakota bound for Bünde, Westphalia, in northern Germany. Three long years had passed since Graham Bell’s bomber had fallen out of the sky over Nottinghamshire. Time had eased the sharpest pain, but nobody had replaced Graham in Anne’s heart. She forced herself to resume a normal life, accepting invitations among the cultured milieux in which she had previously moved. And it was at one of these post-war parties that a foppish young man approached her to see whether she would be interested in helping the work of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Branch, which had been delegated to help restore the dispersed art treasures of Germany to their proper places, under the aegis of the Control Commission. As a German-speaker and former Courtauld graduate, Anne was ideally qualified.
Well, I thought I’d love to have this job. I was concerned about all the bombing and the destruction and the horror and the moving about of pictures and so forth. And I knew I had something of use and value to offer. I agreed to do it.
And so, late in 1945 – at a time when most Englishwomen, despite victory, were largely feeling crushed by unprecedented post-war gloom and hardship – Anne Popham found herself on a springboard to authority and future recognition. In post-war Germany she gave the best of herself, working to her strengths and finding in the meticulous
task that now faced her a means of recovery, almost a salvation. Anne was given the rank of major, and based at headquarters in Bünde. The task of the five British zone regions was to reinstate the scattered or stolen contents of museums, churches and collections, to prevent the army’s misuse and abuse of architectural gems and to implement reconstruction. Anne’s job was to coordinate them. Her diary-cum-logbook of this work is a chronicle of frustrations and hindrances in the face of bureaucracy, broken-down phone lines and car engine failure. A few excerpts give a flavour of her busy working life in Bünde:
7th November 1945
Spent a lot of this afternoon trying to get through to Hamburg. Finally despaired & decided to wait till morning.
5th December 1945
Priority 1 call from Berlin. Public Safety have found a collection of pictures & require a monuments officer to inspect them immediately as it is a question of making an arrest.
8th December 1945
Chapter of accidents culminating in abandoning the Mercedes on the autobahn at 9pm … given a lift to Bünde, arriving 12 midnight.
Off-duty, Major Anne relaxed her business-like efficiency. Gone were the days when it was thought unseemly for women to drink alongside men. The mess was immensely sociable, and Steinhäger gin was twopence a glass:
One would go there before dinner and have one – and perhaps two, then a bottle of wine with dinner, followed by coffee and brandy. And sometimes the next day one would be pretty sorry for it … And then we used to go to Officers’ clubs and go dancing.
Sometimes, things got out of hand:
Once when we were on a field trip we caught sight – through a window – of a very nice sofa, which we thought would be just right for our mess. And our charming Dutch padre, who was the ringleader, persuaded us to steal it. We got it into the car and drove it back to Bünde.
Together, work, fun, friendships and distance from England were
healing the wounds. An awareness was growing in Anne, of her own worth: ‘Until then I’d always assumed that everybody else knew best, but in Germany I realised that I was much better at a lot of things than other people, and that in some cases
I
knew best. I knew I was good at my job, and I felt valued and recognised too.’ Anne was thirty now. She felt it unlikely that she would meet anyone to replace Graham, but she was convinced that, despite being a single woman, her work and life had significance.
The heartbreak had receded, the bad days were melting into the past. And if Anne needed any further reminder that life could be a lot worse, she had only to step outside the undamaged military enclave in which her Bünde HQ was situated:
I went to Hamburg. It was destroyed – absolutely flattened, worse than Berlin. Acres of debris. And you sometimes saw somebody sort of creeping out of a hole – appearing like some phantom from the vast wasteland of rubble. It was a terrifying sight – how had these people not been killed? How did they even exist? They’d certainly got it as bad as we had, if not worse. This was far worse than England … I was glad the war was over, but I didn’t feel any sense of glory at all.
Confronted by such evident suffering, the triumphalism of the victor seemed an alien emotion – at least to this particular young woman. Anne couldn’t comprehend her male colleagues’ punitive attitude to the Germans. Her fellow officers seemed filled with anger. One day she invited Graf Metternich, the German Director of Monuments and Fine Arts, ‘not a Nazi, but a very civilised, educated man’, to discuss their mutual concerns. Later, she dined with the Graf in the British officers’ mess and was dismayed to see a contingent rise and leave the room in protest at his presence. On another occasion, she was travelling with one of her colleagues when a German pedestrian accidentally collided with her on a railway platform. Her colleague flew into a rage with the man, abusing him roundly for not treating the Fräulein Major with proper respect. Anne conceded that the men had, perhaps, more reason to feel anger against the enemy: ‘They’d been through the war in a way that I hadn’t – though goodness knows us civilians got it almost as badly.’ But to her it seemed so unnecessary, with the German nation on its knees, for these male officers to keep on kicking their
victims, as if to continue proving that they were top dog. Despite a visit to Belsen, all Anne’s instincts tended towards mercy and reconciliation with their one-time enemies.
When QA Lorna Bradey
was posted to Germany in 1947, she too felt dazed by the level of suffering and humiliation she encountered. Lorna was sent to the British Military Hospital at Wuppertal.
The stench of decay as we drove through the town was unimaginable. With dismay I saw total destruction around … I could read the hate on the people’s white drawn faces. Some spat at us.
As winter approached hunger eclipsed every other need:
The Germans would do anything for food and stealing was rife … The shops were boarded up and empty; only the ruins and dejected people creeping about … One felt helpless – the conquered race.
Later, posted to another military hospital at Spandau outside Berlin, Lorna herself went hungry after the Soviet powers severed communications into the city. British, French and Americans organising the Berlin airlift (‘Operation Victuals’) were drawn together in adversity. Staff and patients alike kept warm by burning scavenged firewood, and food was short. The hospital admitted all patients except Russians. For Lorna, it was ‘a strangely happy time’, when, undeterred by international tensions, the nurses’ off-duty hours were spent dancing at the French club at Lake Wannsee – ‘tightening our belts’.
Humanity is not exclusive to women, nor were they all insensible to the sweet taste of victory.
But the artist Frances Faviell
was another young woman, like Lorna Bradey and Anne Popham, whose time in post-war Germany caused her to ponder the relationship between victor and vanquished, as well as between men and women. Frances had experienced the worst that the London Blitz could throw at her; being lowered into a bomb crater to bring help to a horribly mutilated victim was an experience that remained indelibly engraved on her memory. And she and her husband, Richard, had nearly been buried alive under the ruins of their flat. In 1941 their son John was born. Now, in the autumn of 1946, the Parker family decamped to Berlin.
Eighteen months earlier, in April 1945, Berlin had been pounded by Russian bombs. Civilians who tried to surrender or escape from
inevitable doom were rounded up by the SS and hanged from lamp- posts. The Russian army entered the city. Out of control, its soldiers looted every item of property they could lay hands on, then, like animals, rampaged through the streets looking for women. It is estimated that up to 130,000 women were raped in Berlin in 1945. Frances had last visited Germany’s capital in 1938. Half of it now lay in dust:
The complete and utter devastation of Berlin had shaken me profoundly. Nothing … had prepared one for the dead horror of this city.
In 1946, Richard Parker’s job was to assist in implementing reconstruction and reparations in the British zone; meanwhile, Frances helped out at the improvised school set up for the children of the occupying troops. She employed an attractive but reserved young German woman named Lotte to look after five-year-old John in her absence. One afternoon she returned to find Lotte reading aloud to the little boy, who was miserable with a heavy cold. Touched by the young woman’s intimate heed for him, Frances made an effort to draw her into conversation. What had it been like, she asked Lotte, that April, before the capitulation? ‘For answer she fetched her diary for the months of April and May 1945.’
Frances sat down to read. The pages covered the dreadful final days of the Reich, that time of rumours, broadcasts and aching fear, when the people of Berlin began to realise that the war would be lost. Lotte described how she had hidden in a dark cellar, listening to the awful bombardment, emerging only to forage for food. Horrors piled up. The soldiers – ‘filthy Mongol troops’ – were more like murderers and bandits than military men. Filled with rage and malevolence against the German race, they had found Lotte and raped her, ‘not once … but time after time’. She was one among the thousands of women, from young girls to grandmothers, who were seized and drunkenly forced into sex:
women with their children clinging in terror to their skirts, and young women held by one man while another took his pleasure … Every date and detail was set down in pencil – she had written it by the light of her torch.
It was one of the most horrible documents I had ever read, and I felt icy cold as I put it down.
A barrier broken between them, Frances now persuaded Lotte to talk more about her brutal ordeal. Further horrors emerged; she trembled violently and went white. Time would surely dull the pain, suggested Frances, even if it could never erase the experience. There was a chilling dignity in Lotte’s reply: ‘What does it matter what happened to me – we have lost the war!’
Lotte’s brief story, which first appeared in print in Frances Faviell’s 1954 memoir about her time in Berlin, offers a glimpse of the dreadful sufferings of Germany’s female civilians. The following year the world was presented with a fuller female perspective on the sack of the city, when
A Woman in Berlin
,
the anonymous diary of a woman journalist, covering the same period from April to June 1945, was first published in Britain. The diarist, an educated and liberal thirty-four-year-old, reflected on the collapse of Nazism as Zhukov’s army rolled towards the capital: