On 28 June 1914, the Austrian Archduke and his wife were murdered by two Serbs at Sarajevo. Herbert Sulzbach, the son of a wealthy banker from Frankfurt-am-Main, had just turned twenty. Recording the event and its likely consequences – ‘dreadful things may be in store for Europe’ – young Sulzbach, in the first of thirteen small notebooks, noted that twenty was ‘a fine age for soldiering’. On 8 August, he signed up to fight. Four weeks later, he was on his way to the Western Front.
Sulzbach began the war as a German patriot. ‘We certainly did not want this war!’ he wrote on 21 October 1914, amid the smoking ruins of a French village and trenches filled with corpses. ‘We are only defending ourselves and our Germany against a world of enemies who have banded against us.’1 Marching home from the Western Front four years later, a lieutenant decorated with the Iron Cross and a Front Line Cross of Merit, Sulzbach remained convinced of the rightness of Germany’s cause. ‘It is really marvellous,’ he wrote on 29 November 1918: ‘this whole march is wonderful and our home country really seems to have understood that we are undefeated and unconquerable.’2
Sulzbach’s family were Jewish, as was his second wife Beate (a member of the celebrated Klemperer family that included the conductor, Otto, and his cousin Victor, the diarist). In 1932, he wrote a letter to a leading Berlin newspaper, Der Tag, in which he criticised the Nazi party. His only response was an anonymous note, warning him that his name had been noted. In 1937, he was identified as of Jewish blood and put on the Black List. Following the confiscation of Herbert’s Berlin paper factory by the Nazis, Sulzbach and his wife emigrated to Britain. Made stateless in their homeland, the outbreak of war classified the couple as ‘enemy aliens’.
In May 1940, Beate and Herbert Sulzbach were arrested by the British authorities and separately interned. They were still imprisoned on the Isle of Man in the autumn of 1940, when their small London house was hit by a Luftwaffe bomb and flattened.
In November 1940, Sulzbach was due for release; he had just obtained permission to fight for Britain as a private in the home-based Pioneer Corps. But it was his subsequent work in two POW camps for captured Germans that enabled Herbert Sulzbach to begin his greater task: the reconciliation of his two beloved countries, England and Germany.
When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, Frank Foley, an engine-fitter’s son from Somerset, was studying philosophy in Hamburg. Disguised as a Prussian officer, the thirty-year-old Englishman made his way west to the mouth of the River Ems, where some sympathetic shrimp-fishers agreed to ferry the small and earnest-faced fugitive across the lagoon to their base in neutral Holland.
Frank Foley’s brief period of service as an acting British captain at the front ended when he was shot in the lung at Ecoust on 21 March 1918 and sent home to England on sick leave. Recruited by British Intelligence after his recovery (he was fluent in German and French), Foley was despatched, first to Cologne (where he met Kay, his future wife), and then to Berlin, where he was officially employed from 1921 as Head of British Passport Control. Unofficially (the Foreign Office provided no diplomatic status for Passport Control officers), Foley was employed by Mansfield Cumming, head of the British Secret Service in the city regarded, during Germany’s chaotic post-war years, as the Service’s leading overseas station.
Foley met Wilfrid Israel, the cultured heir to one of Berlin’s leading department stores, shortly after his arrival in Berlin. Following the rise to power of the Nazis and their campaign to despoil and exile all German citizens designated as non-Aryan, Foley joined forces with Wilfrid Israel and their mutual friend Hubert Pollack, another British Secret Service agent. Pollack identified the families in need of visas; Wilfrid Israel provided the cash and vital contacts; Foley, at considerable risk (he regularly harboured Jews under his roof and also travelled to camps to rescue them), signed the visas. One of his last actions before leaving Berlin in August 1939 was to arrange eighty permits for young people hoping to reach Great Britain.
Foley’s death in 1958 passed without notice in Britain; in the recently formed state of Israel, however, a grove of trees was planted in his honour. The idea had come from Hubert Pollack, who stated that the number of Jews rescued from death in Germany would have been tens of thousands less, ‘yes, tens of thousands less, if an officious bureaucrat had sat in Foley’s place. There is no word of Jewish gratitude towards this man that could be exaggerated.’3 Benno Cohn, a former Jewish leader in Berlin who had worked with Foley and Mossad (an organisation originally dedicated to helping Jews to reach Palestine), added a tribute of his own during the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. Foley, Cohn declared, had stood above all others of his time ‘like a beacon. Captain Foley, Passport Control Officer in the British Consulate in the Tiergarten in Berlin [was] a man who in my opinion was one of the greatest among the nations of the world.’4
In July 2012, a plaque honouring Foley’s achievement was placed at the entrance to the Jewish cemetery at Golders Green where he, like Herbert Sulzbach, lies buried.
In 1948, speaking on the BBC, Herbert Sulzbach stated that the best envoys for future peace and understanding between Britain and Germany would be the German POWs who were finally being allowed to return to their homeland.
Sulzbach knew what he was talking about. In 1944, he had been transferred by the British from the Pioneer Corps to the ‘Interpreters’ Pool’. In January 1945, he was posted as a staff sergeant to Cultybraggan Camp, Comrie.
Built on the site of Agricola’s old marching camp in Scotland, Comrie was already known for the hardened spirit of its Nazi inmates. On 22 December 1944, five young German POWs (the eldest was twenty-one) had beaten up a new arrival and hanged him backwards, over a water pipe.* Wolfgang Rosterg’s unforgivable crime had been to dare to criticise the Reich in a camp where ‘When Jewish Blood Spurts from the Knife’ was still being sung with fervour. What would such brutal men make of a slightly built Jewish interpreter who had fought for Britain in the recent war?
Bernard Braine, a politician paying tribute to Sulzbach at the memorial service held at the German Embassy in July 1985, described the dapper, blue-eyed Herbert as ‘that greatest of all charmers’. Charm alone cannot explain the measure of Sulzbach’s achievement. By 11 November 1945, he had persuaded all but a handful of the Comrie prisoners to acknowledge that Germany had been wrong and that its arrogance had led to misery. To stand beside Sulzbach on Armistice Day required some 4000 German POWs to volunteer their solemn promise to return home as good Europeans, ‘and to take part in the reconciliation of all people and the maintenance of peace’.5
Encouraged by the remarkable response at Comrie, the newly promoted Captain put his project forward at another camp. A large number of high-ranking SS officers were imprisoned at Featherstone Park in Northumberland from 1945–48; Sulzbach’s mission was to send them home with a clear understanding of the principles and values of a liberal democracy. One simple way in which he drove his message home was to abolish any form of censorship, a fact that was approvingly noted by the POWs who edited Die Zeit am Tyne, the camp’s newspaper. Captain Sulzbach’s success was apparent from the fact that some 3000 liberated prisoners (who had little by then to gain from the process) would later write to thank him; many went out of their way to maintain contact with the remarkable man who had striven to cure them of their preconceptions.6
Herbert Sulzbach never stopped working for reconciliation between England and Germany, the two countries that he loved. A European branch of Featherstone was established at Düsseldorf by twenty-five former German POWs in 1960; annual meetings were held there until Sulzbach’s death in 1985. From 1955 until 1973, Sulzbach made use of his position as cultural affairs officer at the German Embassy in London to spread further his belief in the power of tolerance and international friendship. Speaking at the tribute that marked Sulzbach’s eightieth birthday in 1974, Bernard Braine praised his old friend for having led the way forward in restoring Anglo-German relations. Six years later, a group of former German POWs laid a plaque at Featherstone camp. It honoured their former interpreter as the man ‘who dedicated himself to making the camp a seedbed of British-German reconciliation’.
Speaking once again on television in 1984, a year before his death, a white-haired Sulzbach told Channel 4 viewers that he had been working for reconciliation between his two beloved countries for nearly forty years. Recalling the war in which he had fought for the Kaiser (‘It was then our Kaiser’), he described it as ‘nearly a miracle that today, nearly seventy years later, my two countries are allies and friends’. He spoke of his ardent conviction that the restored friendship between Britain and Germany would provide ‘the foundation stone for a once to come United Europe’. ‘But first,’ he added, ‘the old distrust must disappear.’7
Almost thirty years after Sulzbach made his final plea, the old distrust of which he spoke remains in place. The horrors inflicted by the Nazis cannot be forgotten and should never be forgiven. But it is time to remember that Britain’s close-knit relationship with Germany predates the Third Reich by over 200 years. We abhor the idea of making comic stereotypes of any ethnic group; our justified attitude to the Nazis has made it unjustly acceptable to continue to treat Germans as an exception to that code of civilised behaviour. Herbert Sulzbach would be further saddened to note that Britain and Germany have failed to unite in providing today’s Europe with a secure foundation. On the eve of marking the centenary of the opening of the hostilities that devastated the world and changed its history, old wounds gape rawly open.
The time has surely come to listen to Sulzbach’s words. No two countries in Europe possess a stronger history of cultural and familial sympathy, trust and mutual respect than Britain and Germany. This book sets out the diverse stories of some of the people who contributed to the building of a house of shared dreams and aspirations, of mutual enlightenment and fruitful exchange. These are the stories of emperors, kings and queens (opening with the journey from Whitehall to Heidelberg of the future Winter Queen whose grandson became England’s first Hanoverian monarch); of travellers, writers, artists, students and political exiles; of ambassadors, reformers and the families so closely woven into the fabric of both countries that, when war came, divided loyalties ripped them apart. ‘I feel,’ said a member of one such family, ‘as if my mother and father have quarrelled.’
All these people have played their part. All, in their different ways, are remarkable; all deserve to be called noble for what they set out to achieve. All – glimpsed here only at the point where they contribute to the story of England and Germany – have earned their place in a history of the love and mutual admiration that two nations once shared – and that they deserve to share again.
Footnote
* The five guilty youths were hanged at Pentonville on 6 October 1945.