Meeting the Enemy (40 page)

By the end of July, Germany was talking of defeat. There was even speculation that the Kaiser would choose to die at the head of his troops rather than return with a beaten army. According to Princess Blücher, others said openly that if ‘he only had the courage to abdicate now, he might save his whole country from the terrible fate impending . . .’

German newspapers could no longer disguise the seriousness of the position. Stories of the Germans shortening their lines were now taken by the public as an admission of loss and retreat, while at home the constant military and political merry-go-round of sackings and hasty appointments gave the impression that an implosion was nigh. The fear of spreading Bolshevism grew daily. Stories abounded of a nascent rebellion in the army and of wounded men refusing operations for fear that successful treatment would hasten their return to action.

‘It is sadly tragical to look on and see the slow fate of Germany overtaking her,’ wrote the Princess. ‘I, who have watched the people struggling, and seen their unheard-of sacrifices and stolid resignation, cannot but pity them from my heart.’

The public were tired in Britain, too: tired of shortages of food and ever-increasing state control over their lives; tired and bitter at the losses incurred at the front. The German offensive, and the national anxiety at the idea of defeat after such sacrifice, chipped away at public resolve. In their exhaustion civilians were too willing to be swayed by any rabble-rousers who once more returned to the threat offered by uninterned Germans at home. Why, they asked, should they be tolerated and not
all
be sent home?

The desire to repatriate uninterned Germans grew throughout 1917 and 1918 and in the press there were constant reappraisals of the numbers interned and at large. For some, the figures were always too high, whatever they were, and were used to berate the government. During the war there had been two peaks of Germanophobia: October 1914 and May 1915. In July 1918 there was a third and final surge.

After The Hague agreement of July 1917, some MPs had asked why all enemy aliens could not be sent back in one great exchange. Yet their wish to exchange ‘All for All’ civilian prisoners hit the intractable problem that the British held far more Germans of combat age. The point was conceded and an agreement was made to allow men aged over forty-five to leave, regardless of numbers, even if it meant ten Germans being exchanged for every Briton. In the Lords, questions were put as to whether the government would reconsider sending back Germans of military age, perhaps to a neutral country for continued internment. If nothing else, Britain would be relieved of the expense of looking after these aliens, while returning these Germans would also release an estimated 2,500 men charged with guarding them.

The repetitive nature of the debate made some weary of the whole question. Speaking in the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, voiced his growing boredom: ‘Anyone who had tried to follow the long-drawn story of talk on this subject [of repatriation] would be surprised by the extraordinary monotony and sameness of every discussion which had taken place.’

The problem was never resolved. No neutral country would take 20,000 internees, and the British government would not countenance the appearance on the Western Front of a new German army division formed from the repatriated. Equally, there was no appetite within the Cabinet to out-Prussian the Prussians as Lord Newton, speaking for the government, pointed out in the Lords in March 1918. ‘It would require a double dose of German brutality to send away some of the Germans who have lived in this country for practically all their lives, have married British women, and have sons fighting in the British Army.’

It was precisely for the reasons given by Newton that, despite the hardships of incarceration, many enemy aliens did not want to leave Britain. Newton stressed in his speech that he had just heard of two interned Germans who had committed suicide after receiving repatriation orders, their deaths highlighting again the desperate mental fragility of men in long-term captivity.

Newton explained that, while hundreds of Germans were being repatriated every few weeks, at least a third of those interned would wish to stay owing to family circumstances. ‘The presence of a number of Germans in this country will have to be tolerated,’ he insisted.

Nevertheless, in July, the Commons listened to a second reading of the government’s British Nationality and Status of Aliens Bill, the main purpose of which was to widen the powers required to revoke certificates of naturalisation. The Home Secretary, Sir George Cave, addressing the House, emphasised that hitherto the state revoked certificates only when they had been obtained by false representation or fraud. ‘We have all come to the conclusion, mainly owing to experiences arising out of the war, that that power ought to be extended.’ ‘Hear, hear,’ cried MPs.

Cave reassured the House that the government was not looking for arbitrary powers to revoke certificates and that it should be remembered that an individual who gained British nationality generally lost his nationality in the country of his birth. Nevertheless, it was the government’s intention to revoke an individual’s right to citizenship where it was proven he or she was disloyal or of bad character. If it was no longer in the public interest for a naturalised British subject to remain a citizen, he or she could be judicially stripped of that nationality. A proposal was made to amend the Bill so that certificates awarded since the outbreak of war would be subject to review, although this would not apply to British-born persons.

This last remark sounded contradictory but Cave was referring to British-born women who married Germans and acquired through marriage their husband’s nationality. When these German men applied for naturalisation so, by default, had their wives, who were issued with their own certificates of naturalisation. In a case where an individual was to be deprived of his naturalisation, his return to ‘alien’ status would not be followed by those of his wife and children; they would be given six months to make a declaration of alienage should they wish to cease being British citizens.

The proposals of the Bill met with cross-party agreement, although one or two MPs wished the Bill to be a wartime measure only. Other MPs foresaw that the only danger to the Bill’s passage into law would be public insistence that the new rights did not go far enough.

Plenty of civilians were swayed by the arguments of parliamentarians, among them Brigadier General Page Croft MP, who mercilessly played to the public gallery. Naturalised Germans, he said, were to be more feared than unnaturalised ones, as they gained privileges with citizenship while paying only lip service to loyalty. ‘They [the government] could tie a peacock’s tail to an elephant but that did not make the elephant a peacock,’ he told a crowded public meeting in Manchester on 23 July, as the government’s Bill reached its last stages. Page Croft told the audience that Germans had been sent to Britain before the war to gain positions of responsibility, becoming naturalised and making themselves indispensible to the country. It was all part and parcel of Germany’s scheme for world domination, he said enlighteningly.

Page Croft was doing what other MPs did with apparent impunity: making wild claims without evidence; insisting that both he and other MPs knew of instances of potentially dangerous enemy aliens running free in Britain without sanction.

As predicted, the main objection to the government’s Bill was that it did not go far enough, although one press demand that naturalised Germans should be deprived of their citizenship by class and not just on an individual basis was dismissed out of hand by MPs.

The Bill received Royal Assent on 9 August. The legal basis for stripping citizenship from alien-born British subjects was passed and almost no one demurred. An Advisory Committee officially known as the Certificates of Naturalisation (Revocation) Committee was set up and began reviewing cases presented before it, notifying the Home Secretary who should have their certificate of naturalisation revoked. The Committee, composed of three judges, did not have to give reasons for its recommendations and, as reported by
The Times
, ‘was not bound by the strict rules of evidence’. The policy of the government, as publicly stated, would be to deport those stripped.

On 7 October, the Committee met for the first time in the Grand Committee Room of Westminster Hall to deliberate in private over an initial tranche of 190 cases. Three weeks later, the press reported that Udo Willmore-Wittner, granted naturalisation in January 1913, had had his certificate revoked for an unspecified crime committed in May 1917, for which he had been imprisoned for one year. The Home Secretary ruled that ‘the continuance of the certificate [in this case] was not conducive to the public good’. This case was followed by half a dozen more: all the individuals whose cases were examined were similarly stripped, one on a nebulous charge of showing himself disloyal to His Majesty.

One case of revocation in particular underlined the unchallenged authority of the Advisory Committee. It concerned Caroline Hanemann, a British citizen since October 1914, a trained nurse and a long-term maidservant to Katherine Graham-Smith, the sister of Margot Asquith, wife of the Prime Minister. Caroline Hanemann had served her mistress faithfully since 1890, for Katherine was in very poor health and an invalid by the outbreak of the Great War.

Horatio Bottomley, the ultra-patriotic and rabble-rousing MP for Hackney South, was one MP who prided himself on finding out through endless parliamentary questions just how many Germans had been ejected from the country and how many had had their certificates of naturalisation revoked. Why, Bottomley asked, when it was the policy of His Majesty’s Government to deport all Germans stripped of British citizenship, was Caroline Hanemann apparently exempt from such a rule?

The Home Secretary, Edward Shortt, replied that he never asked the Advisory Committee for their reasons for revoking the certificate of naturalisation ‘but I do know there was no question of disaffection, disloyalty, or any danger to this country involved’, although, since he never asked the Advisory Committee to account for their decisions, how did he know this? Shortt told the House that he had no intention of deporting a woman who, he said, had been in faithful employment since 1890 and was ‘entirely inoffensive’.

Mr Bottomley: Then the denaturalization was purely a fantastic act on the part of the Committee?

Mr Shortt: The hon. Member will form his own view.

Mr Bottomley: I have.

If Caroline Hanemann was someone not worthy to hold British citizenship, Bottomley asked, why was she allowed to accompany Katherine Graham-Smith to 10 Downing Street on several occasions during the war? Shortt stonewalled. The reasons for revoking Caroline’s citizenship remained obscure, as they no doubt did to Caroline herself. She was not deported and, given the length of her unstinting and faithful service, it is to be hoped she kept her job.

10

All Fall Down

By early autumn, the combined effects of economic mismanagement and the Allied naval blockade had tipped Germany into terminal crisis. British and Empire prisoners in Germany, particularly those sent on working Kommandos, became familiar with the signs. In October 1917, on the seventieth birthday of Chancellor Paul von Hindenburg, Germany had been festooned with flags and portraits of the Field Marshal. His once undeniable popularity was no more. Private George Wash, a prisoner for more than three years, passed through Münster after the celebrations. The flags and pictures had been systematically attacked. ‘Every one of them were torn, the eyes scratched out, or defaced. The war loan placards were treated in the same way.’

Exchanged Allied prisoners reported the decline, too. In interviews, they were adamant that whereas food served to prisoners in 1915 had been intentionally substandard, as the Germans then had plenty, by 1918 meals were inadequate simply because the Germans had no more to give. Private Henry Webb of the Royal Army Medical Corps recalled that, during his exchange in September 1918, the train passed through Aachen. Knowing that better food would shortly be theirs, the prisoners threw away their meagre bread rations and watched as German soldiers scrambled for the scraps. Private James Whiteside reported that troops travelling on the same train conversed openly with prisoners. ‘They said everything was “kaput”, and that they had no bread or meat and no cigarettes worth smoking. They liked the cigarettes we gave them and threw their own away.’

Private Ernest Hart, captured in April 1915, was repatriated in October 1918. On his release, he testified how, on the journey home, he was taken from Heilsburg camp in East Prussia to Berlin.

I was in the charge of a German soldier, a man about 50 years of age or more. He kept a greengrocer’s shop in Berlin. He took me to his home and gave me some dinner, but we only had potatoes. His wife said it was only England that kept the war going. ‘Why did they not give us peace?’ I told her to write and ask Mr Lloyd George. The husband said that if they do not get peace by Christmas the German soldiers would throw it in.

Just as the escaped POW Private George Allen had walked freely around Berlin, chatting without trepidation to civilians, so, it would appear, Private Ernest Hart was at liberty to see the capital without fear of attack or insult. Hart testified that after his meal the guard took him for a tram ride in what amounted to a sightseeing tour. During the trip Hart was confident enough to speak to a number of civilians.