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When Hudson’s distant cousin Lord Mackenzie died he left Hudson a considerable sum of money and his house in Edinburgh, as did Lord Mackenzie’s brother. For the first time in his life Hudson found himself well off, if not rich. His wife bought a house in Devon and he returned home, at first devoting his considerable energies to cutting down trees and generally tidying the small wood on a hill behind the house and planting an acre or so of Christmas trees he intended to sell later.
Out of the blue there appeared a letter from the War Office, asking if Hudson would like to join the British Control Commission in Germany. Feeling he still had something to offer, Hudson agreed to do the job for a year and, having attended a course in England on the organisation and objects of the British Mission, which controlled the Civil Administration of the British Sector in Germany, he left for the Ruhr Valley in November 1946.
The school in England, the journey and my first arrival in Germany were eye-openers of the trend of feeling in post-war Britain. I was plunged into an atmosphere of revolt against war and all its horrors and a determination to forget it. In doing so, its values, including its ideals of brotherhood in the face of danger, were being ruthlessly scrubbed.
I soon found there was a deep and bitter feeling in the Control Commission between the ex-civilian and the ex-soldier. This was still further exacerbated by the political rift between Labour and Conservative, Socialist and Capitalist. Class hatred was alarmingly strong. At first it never occurred to me that the fact that I used the designation of my rank, Brigadier, would cause so strong a prejudice against me from the great majority of those with whom I was to have dealings. Again and again at the school and on the journey, when I gave my name as Brigadier, the clerk or Commission officer would repeat emphatically and pointedly ‘Mr Hudson’. I noted too that any chance that presented itself of ‘putting me in my place’, by giving me the poorest accommodation, or keeping me waiting, and so on, was taken. I comforted myself with an amused realisation that a little humbling would certainly do me no harm.
A further possible difficulty lay in the fact that, not surprisingly, many of the ex-soldiers who were his superiors in Germany had served under him in the Army. This latter situation, however, caused no problems and indeed the ex-soldiers fell over backwards to help in every possible way they could, including arranging decent accommodation and other necessities of life in the general chaos existing at the time in Germany.
Hudson found a vast difference between the executive branch on the one hand, who were most upright and respectable people doing their best to exercise their function of government through the existing German civil administration, and the British Control Officers whose duties entailed the control of German industry on the other. These latter people were of very doubtful quality. It was most unlikely that a trained engineer or mining expert would take on a job in the Commission which gave him no security of tenure or future prospect. As a result only the failures or potential failures joined the Commission, or the very young who were attracted by the high initial pay. Most unfortunately, many of these people became corrupted by the large rewards which the German firms over whom they had considerable power were able to offer.
After some further training Hudson was sent as Kreis Resident Officer to Iserlohn in the Ruhr, where the British Army Corps Headquarters was situated. In theory he was in charge of the whole administration of his area, the equivalent in Britain of a district or borough council. In practice he had to work with and through the existing Burgomeister, the official who, under the German system, had almost complete powers – vastly more than his equivalent in Britain. The particular Burgomeister with whom Hudson had to deal had been incarcerated in German concentration camps for six years owing to his anti-Hitler views. He had a strong character and political ambitions and owned some local German newspapers. He resented the British occupation of his country and his main objective was to regain national freedom. He took every chance to show up any mistake or weakness in the action or activities of the Control Commission, which he did mainly by publishing allegedly private letters to his newspapers and occasionally by editorials. When questioned on these activities he pointed out that one of the main freedoms which the British were trying to inculcate into his country was the freedom of the press. He also, occasionally, made bitterly anti-British speeches.
Although they came to respect each other’s point of view their relationship was never easy. The town of Iserlohn had been largely destroyed by aerial bombardment. There were large numbers of refugees flooding the area and one of Hudson’s main tasks was, in conjunction with the Burgomeister, the allocation of housing. During the final phases of the war the Ruhr had been very heavily bombed, during the night by the RAF and by day by the Americans. Practically speaking, only the cellars of houses remained, with here and there a ‘bunker’ above ground intact. A bunker was an air-raid shelter constructed like the inside of a honeycomb. Any houses that had been reconstructed, mostly on the outskirts of the towns or near barracks which the Allies had carefully avoided bombing so their troops could use them, were at once taken over by the occupation troops. The Germans lived in the cellars, which were almost universally dripping wet and very cold owing to the drastic cuts in coal, gas and electricity. Extremely difficult choices had to be made.
Hudson had a Dutch intelligence officer working for him, who turned out to be most efficient and pleasant. He had been doing his conscription service in the Dutch Navy in Indonesia when the war broke out. On return to Holland, when the country was overrun, he had been snapped up by the Germans. On the march to a labour camp he threw himself into a ditch and escaped. Posing as under-age he was left as a student in a university, while living at home with his mother and sister. After some months he at last managed to get in touch with an underground resistance movement but, much to his chagrin, he was left as a train watcher for months on end. At last he was promoted to an active cell and, sooner than he had anticipated, he was selected by lot to execute a Dutch collaborator, the interpreter to the town’s German commandant. The German commandant, accompanied by his interpreter, left his office almost every day at precisely 12.45 p.m. to walk down the street towards the German officers’ mess. At the mess entrance the commandant always paused at least momentarily to receive the interpreter’s salute and return it. The plan was that at this moment the executioner would swoop by on his bicycle and fire a shot with his revolver. He had been warned by his chief that he must shoot to kill and must on no account wound. He must therefore fire at the victim’s head and not at his body. This rule was apparently strictly observed in all ‘executions’. It was a nerve-wracking task, but after two dress rehearsals, the plan worked to perfection. The interpreter was killed and the young Dutchman escaped to his house where he found, to his astonishment, that his mother was already a fully paid-up member of the Resistance and had been passing information to the British by radio for months. Eventually the young man escaped to the British lines where he joined the British Army and, after the war, returned to Holland in British uniform as an intelligence officer, and thence to Iserlohn.
One of Hudson’s more unpleasant responsibilities lay in the de-Nazification process. He had to deal with appeals from decisions by the officials directly responsible. Every adult German had to complete a long questionnaire on his activities during the entire Hitler regime. Penalties for false answers were very severe indeed. Certain checks were made, but, in addition, the reports of informers were accepted and encouraged and their allegations sifted. Personal vendettas, business advantage and all the lowest and crudest weaknesses of human nature were at some time reflected in these reports. Charges and counter charges overlaid each other, and the only question often seemed to be who was the greater liar? All ex-officers had their accounts frozen. As they were not allowed to employ labour, or to have a bank account, they were reduced to earning their living as manual labourers or in very lowly clerical or other work.
De-Nazification acted as a physical and moral wet blanket which lay heavily on the undernourished, under-housed people in the cold winter of 1946/7. The argument that the Germans deserved all they got, and that they had brought it all on themselves, seemed just futile. If we meant to punish them we should declare our intention and get on with it, but on the contrary our policy was to rehabilitate the German economy in order to enable them to pay for some of the damage they had wrought and to reestablish trade for the benefit of Europe as a whole. Our methods did little to assist this.
Hudson was a personal friend of the Chief British Commissioner in Germany, General Sir Brian Robertson. On one occasion he went to stay with him in Berlin.
The Robertsons were a happy family and an energetic one. Besides riding before breakfast, tours of the town and dinner parties, he allowed me to accompany him to a four-power International Meeting. The four Chiefs sat with their staffs on the four sides of a square table within which sat the stenographers typing the speeches in slow motion, in shorthand, easily keeping up with the speakers. Only the Chiefs spoke and it was Robertson’s turn to act as chairman.
The agenda included consideration of the treatment to be accorded to Germans condemned at the Nuremberg trials. There was much argument as to what exactly was meant by ‘solitary confinement’. The French understood it to mean that the prisoner should be in a cell by himself, but that he should be allowed to speak to other prisoners during exercise or during other special periods. The Americans and British agreed that life imprisonment in strictly solitary confinement would be inhuman. The Russian was asked his opinion. He stated briefly that his country would have shot the lot if they had had their way; since this had not been done, as they had wished, they could take no further interest in what happened.
The meeting was a cheerful one and at one point the whole room burst into loud and delighted laughter. The question of the censorship of inter-zone mail was being discussed. During the discussion it became obvious to everyone the Frenchman had dozed off. Robertson asked him point blank if he thought postcards should be included in the regulations as drafted for the approval of the meeting.
The Frenchman woke up with a start and blinked.
‘Postcards, General,’ Robertson said again. ‘What about them?’
The General still looked rather dazed and puzzled but he quickly brightened.
‘Picture postcards,’ he said, ‘should not be censored.’
The cheers of approval at first perturbed him but he quickly recovered and joined in.
After a few months, Hudson was promoted to Kreis Group Commander. Then he was offered further promotion but, ‘I firmly refused to stay on for the reason that the whole atmosphere was too depressing and I hated living amongst people whom I could not like, for the Germans seemed to me a very unlovable people. Being parted from my wife, too, seemed senseless and unnecessary.’ He went out to Germany in November 1946 and returned to England for good in May 1947.