If Britain Had Fallen (30 page)

The Nazis had been pioneers in the use of the film for propaganda purposes and some of their early works are still regarded, on technical grounds, as classics. In all the occupied countries cinemas were allowed to remain open, both for indoctrinating the population and to provide harmless amusement, though cinema-going was, of course, curtailed by the curfew which made it illegal to be on the streets after a fixed hour, usually in Jersey 9 or 10 pm, by rationing of electricity and, most of all, by the shortage of new films. In the Channel Islands the population had to make do with the few titles already there, until everyone was heartily sick of the sight of
The
Barratts of Wimpole Street,
George Formby in
Keep Fit,
and Fred Astaire in
Top Hat.
The British Isles, with its own film industry, and a far wider range of releases already going round the circuits, would have been better off, though films about the British forces, or (like many productions of the period) pouring scorn on the Germans would obviously have been impounded at once.

The machinery for controlling the cinema and live theatrical performances was very similar to that affecting the press. Not merely the producers and distributors of offending items were liable to be punished, but the premises where they were shown could be closed down for three months, the manager or proprietor of the cinema being personally liable to imprisonment. There was one other pitfall for the cinema manager. In Article VII of the
Ordinance
governing public performances, with a hypocrisy surely unique in history, the Germans proclaimed themselves as guardians of the public morals. ‘Whenever the authorities shall consider that a film shall be such as to be injurious to morals, they shall inform the delegate of the Military Commander’, in other words, the propaganda chief for the district. ‘The delegate may, if agreeing with the opinion, forbid immediately either the exhibition of the film wholly or in part or the admission of young persons under eighteen years of age. The Military
Commander may maintain or cancel the decision of the delegate or may-order that the same measures be applied to such film throughout the occupied country.’ This rule was never in fact applied on British soil, perhaps because a chaste lack of realism was still the order of the day in British pictures, while the Hays Office in the United States was busy rooting out even the mildest of bedroom scenes or bad language, but a few years later the German censors would surely have had their hands full.

If the British Isles had been occupied in September 1940 imports of films from the United States, which was still officially neutral, would presumably have continued, though with war films conspicuous by their absence. Westerns, musicals and gangster films—encouraged by the Germans as demonstrating the decadence of the United States—might still have flowed in, and there would have been no shortage of British films which the Germans were likely to find harmless—among them
The Gang’s All Here, Jamaica Inn, The Lambeth Walk, Goodbye Mr Chips
and
Where’s that Fire?
The proportion of war films being produced in the autumn of 1940 was relatively small, and the British film industry could, if required to do so, have stepped up its output of light-weight films to replace all productions of a more serious kind, so that one of the minor horrors of the Occupation might have been more cinemas offering films featuring ‘Old Mother Riley’ and the ‘Crazy Gang’. True to the policy of impugning prewar British governments (not a very difficult task) the Germans would also surely have raised no objections to
The Stars Look Down,
showing exploitation of the miners, or
Love on the Dole,
about the Depression in Lancashire.

For the cinema-owner the main worry would have concerned not what was appearing on the screen but what was happening in the audience. During the first year of the war the British cinema-going public had become accustomed to responding to programmes with unaccustomed animation. Hitler was always good for a hiss, a British pilot for a round of applause, and a unit of goose-stepping German soldiers for a raucous laugh or loudly-voiced comments such as ‘You forgot to take your coat-hanger out, mate!’ Although a German victory would have removed from the screen feature-films and newsreels in which the British were the heroes, the Germans would certainly have included in programmes news-reels and propaganda ‘shorts’ of their own, sometimes, if experience in the Channel Islands is a guide, with English subtitles, written in what was meant to be a colloquial style, by a German who had learned his English in America. The results were often hilarious and a determined humorist could easily ruin, too, the dramatic climaxes of the most solemn film. A
classic example occurred in Guernsey, where the bread was barely eatable, prompting one man to shout out as a German war film showed two soldiers standing sadly by the grave of their fallen comrade: ‘The poor b——probably died of indigestion!’ Such pleasantries were well received by the audience, but not by the Germans who, in the Channel Islands, often had a block of seats reserved for them and who at any ‘anti-German demonstration’, such as untimely applause or laughter, ordered the lights to be turned up and the audience to leave. After a few such occasions, even if no further penalties followed, the entertainment-starved population would no doubt have preferred to keep their reactions to themselves, anyone who did try to interrupt being ‘shushed’ into silence by his neighbours.

But one type of programme if shown in Britain (it does not seem to have been seen in the Channel Islands) would surely have proved too much for even the most long-suffering audience. The Germans had produced a series of anti-Semitic ‘shorts’, the one most commonly shown in occupied Europe having only a one-line commentary and thus being easily dubbed for use in any country. It consisted of only two scenes. The first was a long shot of a bare, ugly corridor, down which came tumbling some forty rats, the ugliest, dirtiest, most vicious-looking specimens imaginable. The film then ‘mixed’ through to a precisely matching shot of a similar road, down which a band of ragged, half-starved, bedraggled Jews were shuffling under the orders of some unseen figure, glancing furtively towards the camera out of the corner of their eyes, the visual comparison being underlined by a guttural German voice remarking ‘The Jews are the rats of Europe’. Whatever success this example of the German film-makers’ art may have had in other countries, it is not hard to imagine its reception in Britain. The pictures of the maltreated Jews would undoubtedly have provoked sympathy, not disgust, while the sequence showing the rats would assuredly have been greeted with cries of ‘Here come the Germans’, ‘Look out for Adolf and the like until even the most obstinate local propaganda chief withdrew the film from circulation.

One excellent change which the Germans would certainly have imposed in British cinemas would have been to apply their own ‘No smoking’ rule in cinemas. It might briefly have become patriotic (though disagreeable to one’s neighbours) to defy the new law, but, with tobacco scarce, it seems likely that it would have needed only two or three occasions when a German policeman hauled out the culprits and ground their precious cigarettes under his heel—as happened in Guernsey—to force even the most besotted addicts to toe the new line. The public would, too, surely have rapidly accepted, as they did in the Channel Islands, the mysterious
transformation of the ‘Exit’ signs into notices reading ‘Ausgang’, and of the familiar ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gents’ into ‘Damen’ and ‘Herren’.

Conforming to the regulations for the theatre, which were similar to those for the cinema, is unlikely to have presented the acting profession with much problem, for already the emphasis on the London stage was on undemanding comedy and revue, and these, with topical references deleted, could have continued. Of plays which had recently opened, only
Thunder Rock,
with its message of a better world after the war, seems likely to have incurred the Germans’ displeasure. In the provinces most productions were revivals of old favourites, safely remote from contemporary events, and once the actors became accustomed to seeing Germans in uniform in the audience, and to dispensing with ‘God Save the King’, there was no reason why the theatre should not have continued to exist, Occupation being less discouraging to audiences than a blitz.

The Germans did, however, take very seriously the control of even the amateur theatre, which, as there was no resident professional company, flourished in the Channel Islands during the war. One keen local actor was astonished when the German propaganda chief in Jersey refused permission for his company to perform the three Noël Coward one-act plays known jointly as
Tonight at 8.30
because one of them,
Red Peppers,
included as a ‘play within a play’ two sailors singing a nautical song. This might, it was suggested, incite the audience to burst into ‘Rule Britannia’. The same German’s reaction when this actor appeared in
The Merchant of Venice
was even more unreasonable. ‘He was very angry and literally foamed at the mouth’, the former Shylock remembers, declaring that he was ‘sympathetic to the Jews’ and that the play was an attack on German policy. It was in vain that the actor explained that the play had been put on because a local school were studying it as a ‘special subject’ for a coming examination and that ‘it never entered our heads that
The Merchant
was any different to any other Shakespeare play’. He was eventually ordered by the Germans to write an article for the Jersey
Evening Post
on ‘Shylock as I see him’, to which he agreed on condition it appeared unaltered, but it was never published.

One of the first warnings to the world of the barbarian nature of the Nazi regime had been the famous public ‘burning of the books’ which they had organised, a sizeable blaze since they objected to most of the world’s great literature which was neither pro-German nor anti-Semitic. Although each local commander was free to indulge his own prejudices, the basic black list used on Guernsey covered fifty authors, among them such non-political names as Dennis Wheatley, E. Phillips Oppenheim and Peter Cheyney, as well as more predictable offenders such as Winston
Churchill, Duff Cooper (a particular target of German hostility) and H. G. Wells. No raids on private libraries seem to have occurred, but public lending libraries and bookshops were all ordered to surrender copies of the forbidden books, and of others referring critically to Hitler and the Nazis. One employee of Boots the Chemists in St Helier, which, as in many towns, also operated a branch of Boots Booklovers Library, still remembers the occasion:

The job was loaded on to me and with the help of the staff I sorted out something like 400 volumes – the number amazed me. In due course I packed these in wooden cases and got a horse and cart [the Germans had appropriated virtually all motor transport] and took them up to Sonder-Führer Hohl [the German propaganda-chief on Jersey] … deposited them on his doorstep and then knocked on the door and asked for a receipt. He seemed a bit bewildered … it’s quite a lot, 400 volumes dumped on your doorstep, and he asked me what it was all about. I told him that they … all had references to Hitler in them. I placed one on top and I showed him. I said ‘Look, it says here “Hitler is a cow”.’ He blew up at once and I said, ‘I haven’t said it, it’s in the book. This is what it says in the book, not me. Please sign the receipt’, which he did. I never knew what happened to the books … . I don’t know whether they were sent out of the island or whether they were burnt or what.

Similar scenes would have been enacted all over the British Isles had the culture-loving Germans arrived, and the thought of some large, humourless German standing in a small Chain Library branch earnestly thumbing through piles of romances in search of some slighting reference
to
his countrymen is not unamusing, as well as providing for the subscribers an object-lesson in what Occupation really meant.

¹
‘Colonel Bogey’ seems a strong candidate on two grounds. As anyone who had been in the Army, and many civilians, knew, a distinctly coarse expression (‘B——! And the same to you’) was commonly sung to its opening bars, like a more elaborate bawdy rhyme, composed during the war, which ingeniously insulted the four leading Nazis with, so far as is known, no justification in fact:

‘Hitler has only got one ball,
Goring’s, it’s said, are rather small,
Himmler’s are somewhat similar,
and Goballs has no balls,
At all.’

Chapter 12:
How long is a Crayfish?

All members of the armies of occupation and their families are forbidden to fish by any means whatever unless in possession of an authorisation or a fishing permit.

Occupation
Ordinances,
1940

While in the summer of 1940 scores of his countrymen at Army headquarters were engaged in the congenial task of planning how to enslave yet another country, one dedicated lawyer or bureaucrat somewhere in the Reich was busy on a task hardly less agreeable to any true German, devising pettifogging regulations. Of all the ninety pages of the draft Occupation
Ordinances,
none reveals more vividly the obsession of the Germans with the most trivial details affecting the lives of their conquered subjects than the four devoted to
Fishery Rights.
A ‘fishery officer’ was, the anonymous draftsman laid down, to be ‘appointed by the commander’ of each Corps area, ‘to negotiate with the authorities of the occupied country’ and ‘members of the armies of occupation shall have the right to fish on condition that they shall have obtained from the Military Commander the authorisation to apply for a fishing permit’. This authorisation was to be presented to the ‘owner or tenant of the fishery rights’, who was ‘bound in all cases to issue a fishing permit, either by amicable agreement, or failing such, by way of requisition, except in the case of closed waters, that is to say, artificial breeding grounds, fish-breeding establishments, portions of water-courses of which the communication with other water-courses, lakes or ponds is barred by grating, nets or weirs to keep the fish which have reached the size demanded by law’. All very sensible, no doubt, to prevent overfishing, but perhaps a little over-elaborate considering that not a single German angler had yet had the chance to cast greedy eyes over a single British trout-stream.