If Britain Had Fallen (22 page)

If the one man whom his countrymen certainly, and the Germans possibly, had in mind for the post had refused to head a British government, who could von Brauchitsch have found to act as the indispensable link between his military government and the existing Civil Service and local authority machine? Mosley himself, who had known personally almost every politician of any consequence in the inter-war period, and had moved in those fashionable circles where pro-German sentiment was most conspicuous, never, he says, came across anyone who looked remotely like a collaborator. Certainly if potential traitors there were they were to be found among the upper classes rather than lower down the social scale. It was in London society that Hitler’s ambassador, von Ribbentrop, a man detested by most other people who met him and ultimately hanged for his crimes, was dined and lionised, and it was in
comfortable country houses by the Thames and in the Home Counties that pro-German sentiment, masquerading as a desire to do justice to Germany, and the gangrene of appeasement spread fastest. In every country enslaved by the Germans it was the rich who found it easiest to come to terms with occupation, not least because Hitler had destroyed the spectre of Communism and provided a stable order of society where strikes and demonstrations were banned. Somewhere among the noble families which feared a revolution and which had fawned upon von Ribbentrop or been entertained by Göring at his hunting lodge, there may have been someone ready to persuade himself that it was his duty to interpose himself between the invaders and the British people and become head of a ‘caretaker’ government, which would in time have become permanent, but if there were the Germans had not identified him. Their ‘White List’ of thirty-nine ‘English people friendly towards Germany’, compiled in Munich in September 1940, which will be discussed in more detail later, contained not a single well-known name and none of those mentioned had anything approaching the qualifications needed by a Quisling. Sixteen, indeed, were women, which to Hitler, a firm believer in the doctrine that women’s interests should be confined to ‘children, church and kitchen’, would have disqualified them from the start.

Yet in the opinion of Sir Alexander Cadogan, at that time Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, who was himself on the German ‘Black List’, there was an obvious candidate for head of a pro-German government. On 20 May 1940 Cadogan had a chance encounter with Sir Samuel Hoare, a former Foreign Secretary, who had been appointed British Ambassador in Madrid, where it was assumed, rightly, that his reputation as an arch-appeaser would make him highly acceptable to France. Sir Alexander deduced from a remark of Lady Hoare’s that she was already anticipating Britain’s defeat and later that day confided to his diary: ‘The quicker we get them out of the country the better. But I’d sooner send them to a penal settlement. He’ll be the Quisling of England when Germany conquers us and I am dead.’

Cadogan’s opinions, despite his high position, were often erratic, but it seems at least possible that Hoare had been sent to Spain partly to get him out of the way. And it would certainly have been logical for the Germans to look towards him if Britain had been beaten, for he had been, with the then French Foreign Minister, Laval, the architect of the Hoare-Laval pact in 1935, which had proposed to reward Mussolini’s aggression in Abyssinia by giving him a large part of the country, a plan which caused such an outcry in Britain that Hoare had been forced to resign. His old ally, Laval, was now deputy prime minister and the most powerful
member of a collaborationist government in France. That Hoare, if asked to fulfil the same role in England, would have agreed is, of course, uncertain, but that he would have been asked seems far from unlikely. Failing him, the Germans would have had to scrape a long way down the barrel to find a figure even remotely credible – some senile old general, perhaps, or a still-ambitious retired senior Civil Servant – who allowed himself to be persuaded that it was his duty to his fellow countrymen to take over the government as a first step towards enabling life to return to normal. Failing any such figure they might have been driven to ruling direct through a ‘Reichs Kommissar’, a combination of viceroy, ambassador and governor, who would have issued orders to the Civil Service through his own officials, who would, in practice, have been departmental ministers.

Captured documents make clear that the Germans, like the British government, had made the mistake of identifying ‘pro-Fascist’ with ‘anti-British’ and they greatly overestimated the number of likely collaborators. A note drawn up on 26 August referred to ‘the release of Englishmen detained since the beginning of the war on the ground of “friendship with Germany” ‘, and suggested that ‘after checking these political prisoners with the aid of Home Office files’, it would be desirable to ‘attach some of them immediately to certain Search Commissions [Mosley supporters]’. The same writer advised the first arrivals in Britain to investigate the prospects of ‘collaboration with English anti-Churchill groups’. But by September 1940, apart from the Communists and some right-wing Conservative MPs who had struggled to keep Chamberlain in office, there
were
no ‘anti-Churchill groups’. In seeking a civilian ruler for Great Britain the Germans would therefore have been forced back on some senior Nazi or diplomatic official who already knew England. Von Ribbentrop would have been the obvious choice and, though it would have been a form of demotion for the German to become ‘Protector’ of the British Isles, he might have felt it acceptable, since it would have enabled him to live in Buckingham Palace, which he had last entered as a not-over-welcome guest, and lord it over his former British acquaintances. Another name sometimes mentioned is that of Ernst Bohle, a thirty-five-year-old Under Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who had specialised in Nazi activities overseas and had been promised by Hitler the post of German Ambassador in London when the British made peace. The truth is, however, that despite the elaborate preparations for the military side of the occupation, no real plans for its replacement by a civil administration had been made.

What would have been the first signs for a British civilian after the fighting had stopped, or peace had been signed, that he was now living under an entirely new form of government? Visible evidence would have been the arrival of the German infantry in the main streets of his town moving cautiously at first in the middle of the road, rifles ready to respond to any sudden shot from a window or rooftop. Then, gaining confidence, the men would have moved along the pavements, kicking open the doors of shops and houses and venturing inside, occasionally returning loaded with a clock or ornament or some other article too tempting to resist. After the infantry would come the motor-cycle detachments, their sidecars loaded with route signs pointing the way ahead for later units, which would be nailed up at cross-roads and fastened to lamp-posts. Soon there would be military policemen, large, grim figures silently directing the traffic and ignoring the few civilians in the streets and the curious groups of children gathering to watch. Within hours anyone walking through the town would see German sentries posted outside the police station, the Post Office and the telephone exchange and many other buildings, all of them displaying notices in German, some neatly painted beforehand, ready for this occasion, some hastily scrawled in chalk with pasted beside them a standard printed notice, in German and English, forbidding entry to civilians. The Town Hall would by now probably have been taken over as a German headquarters, though before long the fighting formations would move out to make room for the officers of the military government. At least one hotel would have become a divisional head-headquarters or officers’ mess, while schools and church halls would be requisitioned as canteens or barracks for German other ranks. The largest cinema would before long be showing only German films, to German soldiers, while pioneers might be busy in the local park wiring off a large area to serve as a temporary ‘cage’ for captured British prisoners. Everywhere, in car parks, by the side of roads, in the main square, and on the verges of quiet, tree-lined suburban estates would be parked German tanks and lorries, waiting to be redirected into more permanent quarters as the first confusion of military victory was followed by the tidy pattern of long-term occupation. By now, too, the queues would be forming outside the Town Hall, the public library and parish halls, as the public waited to obtain the new identity card required by the Germans, or one of the numerous passes necessary for travel after dark or outside the district. (The buildings, and the clerks already used for distributing ration books, would perhaps have been taken over for the purpose.)

The other unmistakable sign of defeat would have been the German soldiers, swaggering along the streets as if expecting the local population to get out of their way, or behaving with studied, unsmiling politeness, relieved by an occasional attempt to talk to a small child in a shop. This
would probably end with a small voice, hastily ‘shushed’ into silence, asking piercingly, ‘But, mummy,
why
is it naughty to talk to that man?’ The Germans have always been great posters of notices and soon after their arrival in any area walls and hoardings would have carried this
Proclamation to the People of England,
signed by Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, the style of which admirably reflects the German attitude to the British people, at once ‘correct’ and arrogant:

1. English territory occupied by German troops will be placed under military government.

2. Military commanders will issue decrees necessary for the protection of the troops and the maintenance of general law and order.

3. Troops will respect property and persons if the population behaves according to instructions.

4. English authorities may continue to function if they maintain a correct attitude.

5. All thoughtless actions, sabotage of any kind, and any passive or active opposition to the German armed forces will incur the most severe retaliatory measures.

6. I warn all civilians that if they undertake active operations against the German forces, they will be condemned to death inexorably.

7. The decrees of the German military authorities must be observed; any disobedience will be severely punished.

Other posters would have appeared at the same time calling for the surrender of firearms, warning against helping anyone escaping from the Germans into unoccupied territory or taking part in any form of public demonstration without prior permission, and imposing a black-out. This would, of course, have been no new hardship and, if experience in Europe was any guide, would probably have been less rigorous than the one the British had already imposed on themselves, especially as police and wardens would no doubt have shouted ‘Put that light out!’ less zealously now that they did so on German orders. Although ‘assembling in the street, circulation of pamphlets, holding of public meetings and processions without previous authorisation … or any other demonstration hostile to Germany’ became illegal under pain of court-martial, as did any ‘incitement to stop work’ or ‘stopping work maliciously’, the Germans were anxious that so far as possible normal life should continue. ‘All businesses, trade undertakings and banks are to remain open’, ran one order. ‘If they are closed down without justification the persons responsible will be punished. Producers of and dealers in goods required in everyday life are to continue in their occupations and distribute goods to the consumer.’ Nor were the Germans willing to allow any section of the population to exploit the situation to obtain higher pay or charge higher prices. ‘The
raising of wages, prices and remuneration of any kind above the level of the day of the occupation is forbidden unless exceptions have been expressly authorised’, ordered another regulation.

The main immediate change that the shopkeeper was likely to notice was that German money, as well as sterling, now became legal tender, the rate of exchange being fixed at 9.60 Reichsmarks to the pound, i.e. at just over two shillings to the Reichsmark in existing currency, or 10p in today’s money, a fair enough level at that time. Perhaps prompted by bitter experience elsewhere, the Germans warned that there should not be one price for the locals and another for the gentlemen from Deutschland. ‘All merchants, manufacturers and retailers’, laid down Article 7 of Part III of the Occupation
Ordinances,
‘are forbidden to sell any member of the German forces or to any German official any commodity or article of any sort whatsoever at a higher price than that paid by others’; although the troops were, in fact, officially discouraged from doing much private shopping.

Both the Army Commander-in-Chief’s ‘Most Secret’ orders, collected together in German War Office File Number 3000/40 ‘Military Government (England): General’, and the detailed collection of
Ordinances
to be enforced later, refer to the existence in Britain of both an ‘occupied’ and an ‘unoccupied’ zone, as
in
France. Willingness to leave a large part of the country in French hands had proved a powerful bargaining factor in June 1940, though the agreement was torn up in 1942 and the whole country overrun. The Germans had perhaps some such intention in mind in the British Isles, but no map was ever prepared showing the proposed demarcation lines and, with no formal capitulation and no Vichy-type regime, it seems likely that they would have been forced to occupy the whole country, at least in the legal sense. The
Sea Lion
plans, as already mentioned, looked no further ahead than a point in the campaign where German forces occupied the central band of the country from Hampshire to mid-Essex, and made no mention at all of Wales, Scotland or Ireland. The Gestapo’s blueprints for occupation did envisage a Scottish office, and they advised that ‘It is essential that Ireland be also occupied’, though only on the grounds that ‘the shortest distance from England to Ireland is twenty kilometres and therefore many Englishmen would try to escape by motor-boat’. Wales was apparently regarded as part of England; the only reference to its existence on the part of either Army or Gestapo was a regulation that ‘no language other than German, Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch or English may be used in correspondence by post. Dialects are not permitted.’