If Britain Had Fallen (48 page)

Unless the British Isles had had an exceptionally lenient Occupation, like Denmark, most of those organisations which strengthen a man’s own opinions, or enable him to voice them effectively, would, of course, have disappeared. The political parties would have been dissolved or powerless, the trade unions allowed to exist merely on sufferance so long as they did not thwart the Germans’ wishes. Social gatherings would not have been banned—amateur theatricals and private entertainments round the family piano flourished in the Channel Islands, though one either had to get home before curfew or stay the night—but once ‘polities’, as the Germans understood them, intruded, even the most harmless-sounding
chess club or play-reading group would have been in trouble. Undoubtedly, as in other occupied countries, there would have been pressure from their friends on those who wanted to challenge the Germans, urging them not to do so for fear of endangering the progress back towards normality already achieved. The argument not to ‘rock the boat’ is a powerful one, especially when the waters ahead seem increasingly smooth and the surrounding sea is full of sharks.

One activity which would certainly have been permitted was church-going, though no foolhardy vicar who used his pulpit to denounce the Nazi Party or the Occupation authorities would have lasted very long. Provided, however, that he confined himself to conducting services and counselling Christian acceptance of the inscrutable dispensations of the Almighty he would have been allowed to retain his living. Hitler despised Christianity, whose coming he described as ‘the heaviest blow that ever struck humanity’, and his only recorded religious observance was on the evening that the French armistice was signed when, apparently without irony, Field-Marshal Keitel ‘addressed a few words to the Führer as our victorious lawlord’, and the company joined in singing ‘Now thank we all our God’. Nazism preached, of course, the very reverse of the Christian doctrines, which were frequent subjects for scorn when Hitler had his sycophantic audience gathered round him at the dinner table. ‘Christianity,’ he told them one day in October 1941, ‘is a rebellion against natural law … . Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.’ ‘What nonsense it is,’ he said on another occasion, ‘to aspire to a heaven to which, according to the Church’s own teaching, only those have entry who have made a complete failure of life on earth.’

True to his principles, Hitler had refused, back in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, to attend the usual religious service to mark the assembly of the Reichstag, and clergy were not accepted as party members. But he rejected atheism, which he described as ‘a return to the state of the animal’, arguing that ‘an educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature and bows before the unknowable’. His solution was ‘to let Christianity die a natural death…. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble’—though Hitler proposed to help them do so by making recruitment to the Church’s ministry more difficult. ‘In the long run,’ he considered, ‘National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together … . It’s impossible to escape the problem of God. When I have the time, I’ll work out the formula to be used on great occasions. We must have something perfect both in thought and form.’

Hitler never did get round to inventing his new religion, but he did try out his economic ideas with a fair degree of success. The essence of the New European Order, or the Greater German Economic Sphere as the Germans called it, was that it was based on a united Europe, built round what was now the major Continental power. Germany had developed, she could claim with justice, a new system of production which had raised her from the poverty of 1933 to unheard-of prosperity, and she argued that, given the chance, it could do the same for those countries fortunate enough to enjoy German rule. The important person in the new system was the worker—the Nazi Party had begun as the German Workers’ Party—not the financier, and it offered him real freedom, the freedom of security and employment, in contrast to what German radio described as ‘the abstract and dying idea of English freedom’. Capitalist laissez-faire, said the Germans, was clearly finished and the basis of the economic relationship between countries was trade in goods, not paper transactions based on their possession of gold. Under Germany, claimed Goebbels’s propagandists, Europe could enjoy what she had not enjoyed in the past, unbroken peace, a steady advance towards affluence and even a cultural renaissance. Both economically and politically the New Europe would be strong enough to deal on equal terms with the United States, and the Monroe Doctrine, that European states had no concern with the American continent, could now be practised in reverse, with ‘Europe for the Europeans’.

Great Britain had no place in this tidy scheme, except as an uninvited guest. She had always tried, the newly conquered nations were told, to divide Europe, while Germany’s interests, like theirs, lay in her being united. England was ‘decadent’, and had no real interest in Europe, which could very well get on without her, her interests lying in her empire overseas. Whether a place would have been found for Britain in the New Europe if she had been successfully occupied is not clear. A senior wartime official of the German Ministry of Economic Affairs, which drew up and operated this scheme, confirmed in 1972 that no plans to absorb her permanently into the new economic community, as distinct, of course, from the immediate removal of the booty mentioned in an earlier chapter, had been drawn up. This expert believes that Britain had ‘too big a population, too big an industry’ to have been ‘dominated the same way as the European countries’ and that she might, therefore, have been allowed to go on trading with the Commonwealth countries, obtaining her raw materials from them and selling them her exports, though whether the Commonwealth would have been willing to continue to send goods into a German-occupied British Isles seems highly doubtful.

It seems more likely, however, that Britain’s economic future would have lain with the other German satellites in Europe, and, in strictly economic terms, it might not have been too grim a future. This official, concerned with drawing up the economic blueprint for the New Europe, believes ‘we could have done without the United States’, though there would have been ‘certain bottlenecks in minerals, metals … seeds [and] oils of different kinds’, as well as ‘in textiles, because there wasn’t much cotton or wool in the whole of Europe’. But he also considers that, given time, all these could have been overcome, ‘through new raw materials like plastics or in building up a big industry of producing synthetic fibres’. Natural rubber, he thinks, might have been bought from Indonesia, to supplement the Germans’ own expanding production of artificial rubber, and ‘certain types of metals that were very scarce’, and oil and minerals could have been found in ‘Arab and African countries’.

Nor, this man believes, would imposing central control from Berlin on the allocation of raw materials and the type of output on which each factory was to concentrate have created any insoluble problems, for in imposing this policy between 1940 and 1945 there were no ‘difficulties to amount to anything with industrialists and none with the workers at all’. The former welcomed a guaranteed supply of raw materials and an assured market while what the latter ‘wanted was work and earnings and food’. There were, he admits, ‘irritating and disagreeable’ strikes in Holland, encouraged, he believes, by the Dutch government in exile, but they rarely lasted long because the strikers ‘didn’t get any pay and they had no food cards’. In France, where ‘there was a real government and we could talk over problems as they arose’, cooperation was complete, though ‘in Belgium it was not quite so easy because the government was out of the country and there was not very much cooperation from the civil servants’, although the King was still there. The Ministry of Economic Affairs in Berlin, however, suffered no real anxieties—as the production figures for German industry confirm, for they went on rising throughout the war, despite allied bombing. ‘The necessities and resources of the whole of Europe’, this economist found, ‘had a tendency to balance each other.’ Had the New European Order lasted, ‘there would have been enough agricultural production and there would have been enough industrial capacity and there wouldn’t be too many conflicts of interest’. As for the factory-owners and managers and workmen on whom the whole edifice rested, some of them ‘worried a lot’ about the fact that they were working for the Third Reich, ‘but they couldn’t help it. There was no other way out.’

A good deal of other evidence bears out these conclusions, including
that from a German industrialist who was then working in the same ministry in charge of the allocation of steel, and was sent to Italy to try and develop additional sources of supply of various special types of the metal. Although this was 1943, and the Italian government was suing for peace, the German experts he later despatched there ‘found very good cooperation. We had no sabotage, we had good friends who, after the war all agreed that we helped them a lot in those troublesome days’—indeed the postwar Italian steel industry owes much to the Germans’ wartime efforts. The Germans achieved what they wanted here by setting up a special company to organise the supply of raw materials and to give firm orders for the finished product, and though the Germans who arrived to ‘advise’ the Italian factory managers and industrialists encountered ‘a certain resentment in the beginning’, before long the Italians ‘found out that we had come to help them in using their full capacity by supplying the necessary raw materials’, and became ‘very cooperative’.

This is not hard to believe, for German industrialists too, for similar reasons, had very early on come to terms with Hitler, but more opposition might have been expected from the Italian labour force, who later acquired a reputation for left-wing militancy. But the Germans did not encounter it. ‘I don’t think I ever ran into a problem with a trade union’, says this official. ‘Strike in those days was not a term you thought of. I mean, what would they strike for? They got paid according to their wage agreements, we didn’t care whether their wages were increased, that was none of our business … . The main thing for working people in general is stability. Whoever gives it to them I don’t think they care so much.’ But he admits that the Germans enjoyed two advantages: they could offer a man the security of a well-paid job at a time of uncertainty, and, since they were already working for the Germans, the men in the steel works were exempt from the danger of being sent to work in Germany.

The Italians were, until 1943, at least allies of the Germans, but experience in other countries seems to have been little different. What happened in Denmark, where there was an active resistance movement and most of the population never mentally accepted German occupation, while fitting neatly into the place in the New European Order for which they had been cast, is even more revealing, for the Danes in their general approach to life have often claimed some affinity with the British. The basic fact here, as in every occupied country, was that whatever one’s patriotic sentiments one had to eat, and this meant finding employment, which meant in turn being able to sell the country’s products. The Danish government adjusted itself with remarkable facility to the new situation. Before the Occupation more than half the country’s exports
went to England and only one fifth to Germany, but within a few months, instead of the shiploads of Danish butter and bacon crossing the North Sea, trainload after trainload was pouring into Germany to feed both the civil population and the Wehrmacht, while the Army of occupation also filled its needs of food through local purchase. Eventually, and up to the very end of the war, Denmark was supplying ten per cent of all Germany’s needs in butter, meat and sugar and nearly twenty per cent of its salt-water fish, leading to a saying among the Germans that occupying Denmark was as good as having an extra ration card. One of the leading Germans involved in the occupation of Denmark believes that ‘basically the farmers were glad’, since they now received far better terms from the Germans than they had done from the British. ‘Production increased, income increased and the farmers got out of debt’, claims this official. ‘Naturally they … liked that; they were the ones who were reconciled the quickest’ to the Occupation. Whether they were so pleased at the end of the war when they found the Germans had run up a debt of 7000 million Kroner (about £350 million) through the Clearing Account handled by the National Bank seems more doubtful.

Denmark was, of course, a small country with no hope of liberating itself, but its reactions show clearly the pressures to which a beaten people were subjected, as this German, who was in charge of propaganda and press matters in the newly conquered country, discovered:

I remember on 15 June 1940 there was a great party given by the Danish Publishers Association. The guest of honour was the Danish Minister of State and I was the German guest of honour, the only German present. I was sitting next to the Minister and he was asking me what was the latest news I had. I replied, ‘Well, minister, I can tell you that Paris has fallen.’ Then he said, ‘Well, thank heavens, things will be finished soon.’ At that time the Danes believed that England would give in, i.e., would make peace with Germany and then the whole episode would be over and done with. It was under this impression that the Danes issued a declaration in July:

‘The great German victories, which have caused astonishment and admiration all over the world, have brought about a new era in Europe, which will result in a new order in a political and economic sense, under the leadership of Germany.’

And this declaration was not just handed over to the German government by the Danish ambassador in Berlin, no the second highest man in the Danish Foreign Ministry … went to Berlin and accompanied the ambassador to the German Secretary of State.

A similar spirit was reflected in another conversation the same German had with another member of the Danish government, whom he asked, “ “Minister, really and truly you would not want the Germans to win victory?” He replied, “Oh yes, but only a small victory”, which meant that Denmark wanted to go on [benefiting from] the rivalry and competítion between England and Germany, because by this she would gain most. And he told me further, “You see, there is the heroism of the lion, which you, as the great German nation have, and then there is the heroism of the hare, who has to know when to flatten his ears in danger; and we are a small nation, and for us the heroism of the hare is appropriate.” ‘ So enthusiastically did the Danes carry out this policy that there were even, later in the war, discussions of a possible currency and customs union between the two countries, though they came to nothing, as ‘in the meantime … England had not given up, and eventually it was said, “Well, it is probably better if we decide after the war.” ‘
¹