If Britain Had Fallen (46 page)
But all your pains were forgotten when you went to the mill with your gleanings for grinding into flour and carried home with you the small bag of flour … . My first grinding to me was more precious than gold—and the cake my mother made, even though without sugar, tasted heavenly compared with the minute husk-filled flour ration.’ It was also preferable, no doubt, to the cakes made of millet, normally fed to cagebirds, which some people on the same island produced at this time. Eventually the supply of bread and flour almost ran out, and the population were only saved by supplies sent in by the Red Cross, which reached the Channel Islands at the very end of 1944 and early in 1945. People were seen laughing hysterically as they went to fetch their loaves from the bakers, and ordinary families smiled inanely at each other as they sat down to a meal of almost forgotten white bread, eaten by itself or spread with Red Cross cheese or marmalade. ‘In the houses which still retained some remnants of their prewar prosperity’, one Jersey man remembers, ‘these loaves would be put out on silver salvers or cake dishes and sliced as if they were some fantastic cake at a banquet.’
The arrival of the food parcels was the last act in the Channel Islands’ struggle to survive. There had been no sudden plunge from sufficiency to near-starvation, but rather what one man remembers as a process of ‘the screw being put on little by little’ with rationing ‘gradually getting worse and worse and worse until you’ve got practically nothing’. The same process, to a far more limited extent, happened as food and goods of every kind became scarce in wartime Britain, but conditions would clearly have been far worse had the Germans arrived, and only a few items—tomatoes from Guernsey, which had a glut of them throughout the Occupation, onions from Brittany, sadly missed in Britain after 1940—would have been more plentiful. And what would the end have been? In the Channel Islands, as the Germans prepared to fight to a finish, and ships from the French mainland ceased to arrive, stocks of almost every item reached danger level and starvation became an imminent possibility, until in November 1944 the Bailiff of Guernsey sent a despairing message to the International Red Cross in Geneva:
Conditions rapidly deteriorating here. Will soon become impossible. All rations drastically reduced…. Bread finishes 15 December, Sugar finishes 6 January, Ration of separated milk will be reduced to one-third pint per head by end of year. Soap and other cleansers … completely exhausted. Vegetables generally inadequate to supply civilian population through Winter … . Clothing and footwear stocks almost exhausted. Gas and electricity finish at the end of year. Coal stocks exhausted. Many essential medical supplies already finished.
To his colleagues on Jersey, who a few days later sent off a similar message of his own, he wrote, ‘Starvation begins to stare us in the face and I can see no way out of it.’
The Germans had already done their best to wash their hands of the Channel Islands’ problems. Supreme Headquarters in Berlin, in the shape of Hitler’s immediate subordinate, Field-Marshal Keitel, had in September issued an order that civilian rations were to be cut to ‘the barest survival level’, and had warned that ‘An Order will follow for the complete stopping of rations to the civilian population and for measures to inform the British government that this has been done’, the intention apparently being to herd the population into one corner of the islands and leave Britain to remove, or feed, them. Hitler himself suggested deporting all the residents, except able-bodied men who would remain to work for the Germans, though where they were to go was not explained, and eventually wiser counsels prevailed and the Germans agreed to a Red Cross ship being sent to the islands, stocked with parcels from the Canadian and New Zealand Red Cross societies, of the kind sent to prisoners of war, and these arrived regularly thereafter.
What would have happened in Britain if there, too, the supply of
imported food had ceased? With greater natural resources conditions would probably not have become quite as desperate, unless the Germans had deliberately starved her people to try and force the United States to support them, which it seems inconceivable that she would have refused to do. Alternatively America might herself have demanded the right to send food ships to the British Isles and to escort them with warships, even at the risk of war. If, however, Europe had been liberated before Great Britain, the Germans on the British Isles might, like those on the Channel Islands, have found themselves cut off from their bases and rapidly becoming worse off even than their captives, until forced to forage for food in the fields and even in the civilians’ dustbins. ‘You haven’t got an Army,’ the Dame of Sark told the German Commandant on the island at this time, ‘you’ve only got a pack of thieves and beggars. They’re either coming round to one door begging for potato peelings to eat, or else breaking in another door trying to steal something.’ In fact the Germans’ discipline remained extraordinarily good, even though by now German officers were eating raw cabbage stalks pulled from the fields, and one soldier was seen to scrape clean and eat ravenously a tiny turnip thrown on a dung heap. One German declined some cigarettes offered by a civilian he had helped with a household job because, having arrived on the Red Cross ship, they were for civilians only, but the shared experience of empty stomachs broke down old resentments to such an extent that at least one kindhearted woman, shocked at the half-starved look of some of the young soldiers, furtively pressed crusts upon them. The final tribute to the Germans’ self-restraint came in an anonymous letter to the authorities on Jersey. The distribution of Red Cross parcels should, the writer suggested, be entrusted exclusively to the Germans, since they were the most trustworthy of all the hungry people on the island.
1941 will be the crucial year of a great New Order in Europe.
Adolf Hitler, 30 January 1941
For the people of Great Britain one visible symbol of defeat would have been the disappearance of Nelson’s Column from London. For the citizens of Germany the tangible proof and reminder of victory would have been the new Berlin which Hitler planned to build as heart and centre of his New Europe. Hitler had always been interested in architecture. To the very end of his life he amused himself studying the models and drawings of grandiose projects of which not a brick would ever be laid, and he had drawn up imposing plans to reconstruct such Nazi shrines as Munich and Nuremberg, as well as Linz in Austria where he had been brought up. Here he proposed to set up an enormous observatory, to which ‘thousands of excursionists will make a pilgrimage every Sunday’ to ‘have access to the greatness of our universe’—and to reflect, perhaps, on the glory of their town’s association with the Führer. But his most dramatic plans were for the capital of the Reich, and he entrusted the preparation of them to a young architect he had discovered, Albert Speer, who later, in 1942, became a spectacularly successful Minister of Armaments and Munitions.
Hitler’s taste was for the massive and the monumental, faithfully reflected in the new Chancellery, the combined 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, or White House, of Berlin, which Speer actually built for him in 1938, and in his plans for the new government quarter of Berlin which were based on sketches Hitler had made as far back as 1925, eight years before he came to power. Speer recalls Hitler’s eagerness to see his plans implemented when the two men discussed them in 1936 and he himself was, he admits, immensely enthusiastic ‘to have such a huge task … . For an architect just thirty years old it was an unheard of order, one couldn’t dream of.’ The centrepiece of the whole scheme was to be ‘a huge avenue … similar to the Champs Elysées’ but far wider and longer, stretching four miles through the heart of the capital. ‘On both sides were the ministries of the greater Germany, as Hitler said, and also cinemas and theatres, operas and shops, everything mixed, so that life would continue also at night in this new centre of Berlin.’
Hitler planned to retain the existing Reichstag, only recently rebuilt after it had been burned down in 1933—an event exploited by the Nazis
to assist their seizure of power—but to create alongside it a new and far larger one, with seats for the representatives of the 140 million people in the new German Empire. At that stage no provision was made for any ‘members for Great Britain’, but the chamber would no doubt have been large enough to accommodate them, too, when this last province was finally incorporated into the Reich. The new Chancellery was also to be kept, but demoted to being the home of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, since Hitler proposed to erect for himself a huge new palace, of long, low, colonnaded buildings surrounding a central square, rivalling in size and magnificence the home of the French kings at Versailles, where Germany had suffered the humiliation which had set Hitler on the road to power. Parisian influence was also reflected in the vast Triumphal Arch, 300 feet high and 400 feet wide, dwarfing the original Arc de Triomphe, which was only half its height, and designed to stand in the middle of the main Avenue. It had been designed by Hitler personally, prompting Speer to tell him, ‘You are the architect, not me’, and the approaches to it were to be lined by ‘guns which Hitler already said should be trophies from wars of the future’.
There were echoes of the Invalides in Paris, too, though again the copy was far vaster than the original, in the Hall of Military Fame—the creation of which was entrusted to another architect. This was to contain other spoils of successful wars, including the railways carriage at Compiègne, where the German surrender of 1918 and the French surrender of 1940 had been signed, and which was destined later in the war to be blown to pieces by a British bomb. Below the Hall was ‘The Memorial Crypt of the Field-Marshals’, Germany’s greatest heroes, which was to contain the bodies of President Hindenburg, ‘stabbed in the back’ in 1918 according to Nazi mythology, Field-Marshal Ludendorff, who had been actively involved in the unsuccessful Munich ‘putsch’ of 1923, and, another Nazi idol, the soldier-king Frederick the Great, who had died in 1786. Another future resident might have been Reichs-Marschal Goring, for the new and imposing building from which he was to control his varied interests, from the Luftwaffe to the economic exploitation of conquered territories, would have overlooked the mausoleum. Whether Goring would have been allowed any say in the design of his headquarters—such as including in it a picture gallery for his splendid collection of old masters—seems doubtful. The Führer, Speer points out, also planned to include in the new government quarter the ‘administration buildings of I. G. Farben, Siemens and other big firms’, but ‘Hitler decided what he wanted to do’ and the companies concerned were ‘not much’ consulted.
Hitler’s plans for his new capital were rounded
off
by a brand-new
central railway station at one end of the Avenue, and, its crowning glory, a huge assembly hall at the other, consisting of a cupola, mounted on free-standing supports, rather like a bridge, 750 feet across, beneath which, Hitler had calculated, 180,000 people could assemble to listen to speeches from himself and his successors. This fantastic construction would have dominated the whole city, for it was to have a height of 800 feet, compared to the eighty-five feet of that other prominent architectural feature of central Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate, and, Albert Speer remembers, ‘the cupola would have been covered with copper and would have been green in a short time, so the whole thing would have looked like a huge mountain, surpassing every building in Berlin’. (It would in fact have risen almost to the height of the television transmission masts which now tower above the city.) Speer’s reaction as the whole fantastic and unbelievably costly scheme was unfolded before him was, he remembers, that ‘everything was out of human scale’, and he was reminded of ‘Cecil B. de Mille’s buildings for his famous
Ben Hur
film, which I saw when I was a young student’. To Speer it seemed that the new Berlin was designed to ‘express in some way the whole authoritarian system, the whole of Hitler’s aims’, and the enormous German eagle which he planned to mount on top of the Assembly Hall dome was to be a concrete symbol of Germany’s supremacy in the world. The scheme was very much a practical blueprint, not a mere layman’s dream. Under Speer’s direction a staff of architects prepared models and detailed construction drawings and preliminary orders were even issued for the huge quantities of granite needed, the whole project being designed to be finished by 1950.
Just as the Berlin which Hitler meant to build seemed at the time no empty vision, so Hitler’s talk of a thousand-year Reich, of which the city would be the centre, was no mere rhetorical flourish but a sober statement of policy. What role Britain would have played in it is uncertain, for Hitler always insisted that he was content to leave her alone to develop her own Empire, but about his plans for the East, to which from July 1940 onwards his thoughts increasingly turned, there was no uncertainty at all. In Russia there could never, he believed, be a reconciliation between rulers and ruled, for Hitler regarded the Slav races as an intrinsically inferior people, destined to remain the vassals of the Germans for all eternity. Russia itself was to lose its identity and become a mere province of Germany. ‘What India is for England’, he declared in August 1941, six weeks after the start of the campaign in the East, ‘the territories of Russia will be for us … . We must no longer allow Germans to emigrate to America. On the contrary, we must attract the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danes and the Dutch into our Eastern territories. They’ll become
members of the German Reich … . The German colonists ought to live on handsome, spacious farms. The German services will be lodged in marvellous buildings, the governors in palaces … . Around the city, to a depth of thirty to forty kilometres, we shall have a belt of handsome villages connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like.’ ‘We shall soon supply the wheat for all Europe, the coal, the steel, the wood’, he predicted two months later. ‘To exploit the Ukraine properly—that new Indian Empire—we need only peace in the West … . When we are masters of Europe, we shall have a dominant position in the world. 130 million people in the Reich, ninety in the Ukraine. Add to these the other states of the New Europe and we’ll be 400 millions as compared with the 130 million Americans.’
