War, in retrospect, seems to have loomed bleak as a certainty beyond the cheating brightness of the summer of 1939. Richard Haldane’s great project, the Territorial Army, had been instructed to double its intake that March. On 27 April, six months of military training became compulsory for all males aged twenty or twenty-one. By July, plans were being laid for the swift future evacuation of children from cities in Britain. By August, sandbags had become a familiar eyesore to Londoners, while gasmasks were being distributed, together with instruction handbooks. On 24 August, Neville Chamberlain requested – and received – Parliament’s approval for a new Emergency Powers Act. A hundred measures were set in place, during the next five anxious days, for the improved defence of Britain.
With hindsight, the warning signs were large and glaringly apparent. And yet, in England, the approach of war brought no grave alterations to the pace and form of daily life. A few privileged souls threw their money about with singular ostentation that summer, but it would be unrealistic to suppose that the owners of Blenheim Palace and Osterley Park (to name but two grand houses in which magnificent balls were held on successive weeks) were acting in a spirit of magnificent defiance. To attendants of the parties presided over by Lady Jersey (Osterley) and the Duchess of Marlborough (Blenheim), the most thrilling news of the night might be that light-fingered thieves had pilfered a couple of treasured trinkets from their hostess.
Retrospect robes everything in significance. A couple of weeks before the outbreak of war, Count Clement (‘Cle’) Franckenstein, an admired Munich music director who had lost his job under the Nazis, visited his beloved brother in London. Hitler’s stringent currency laws had made it almost impossible to travel outside Germany by 1939. Did Georg Franckenstein, the Austrian ambassador to the Court of St James’s, suspect what was coming when he arranged for his brother Cle to be paid to conduct a concert in London during that final August of possibility? Did Churchill, too, intuit that this would be a last encounter when he went out of his way to wish Franckenstein a friendly farewell, and to urge him to return to Britain? When, two years later, Cle died of cancer in Germany, a loving friend noted that the gentle Count’s final, unhappy cries of appeal had been only for a last brief glimpse of Georg: ‘the brother in England [whom] he loved most dearly’.1
Churchill, while he had almost no personal experience of Germany, was wise enough, as war became inevitable, to pick the brains of his more knowledgeable friends. On 4 September 1939, the night after Germany’s brutal attack upon Poland’s borders and airfields had led England – at last – to declare war, Churchill invited Hansel Pless, a Polish citizen since 1924, to come and dine. Hansel was not the only guest, but Churchill was keen to gather information about Germany’s Polish borders from a man who was well-equipped to advise him, having struggled for over ten years to run Pless in tandem with administrators from Poland.
Prince Hansel, by 1939, was estranged from Countess Maria (‘Sissy’) Schönborn-Wiesentheid, the beautiful young German wife who, forced to choose between a high life among the Nazis (whom Hansel loathed) and a quiet life in the land that her husband adored, preferred the Reich. Hansel’s recollections, although always courteous, do not suggest that Sissy was much missed.
‘England shall have my bones!’ Hansel had once exultantly confided to his diary. By 1938, settled into a flat on his uncle’s London estate and taking long, happy excursions through the English landscape that he had loved since boyhood, the Prince had taken a formal pledge to serve his mother’s birthland. With touching pride, he even copied the wording into his diary. ‘I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to his Majesty King George, his heirs and successors.’2
Hansel, dining with Churchill and his own uncle, the Duke of Westminster, on that momentous evening, did his best to be reassuring as he expressed, once again, the passionate devotion to their country that he felt. He had already found himself work as a stretcher-bearer at St George’s Hospital. He hoped to do more. Armed with excellent Polish contacts, and with the evident good will of such a powerful man as Churchill, there was every prospect that an able-bodied and well-connected man of just under forty might do as much for England in this war as he had done, with equal commitment, in a previous one, for Germany.3
In April 1939, while staying with Quaker friends in Cornwall, Tisa Schulenburg had experienced a hopeful moment of epiphany that, disappointingly, led to no new sense of resolve about her life. In May, while still awaiting the finalising of an amicable divorce from Fritz Hess and pondering whether she wanted to take up full-time work among the Durham miners, Tisa received news from Germany that her mother was seriously ill and that her father was dying. Naturally, the elderly Schulenburgs wanted their only daughter to come home. Conscious of her family’s commitment to the Nazi regime, Tisa deferred the visit. Her mother’s letters grew more plaintive. When was she coming to Germany? Why did she not come? Still, Tisa hesitated. ‘All my friends were in England . . . yet I longed to see my parents.’4
Family feeling won out. Tisa returned to Germany in time to be reconciled with her father before his death. General Schulenburg had become – despite strenuous attempts to step aside in 1934 – a prominent figure in Nazi Germany. A state funeral held in Potsdam at the end of May was even attended by Hitler. Tisa and her mother stayed away. ‘If one could not kill him’ (Hitler), Tisa fiercely wrote, ‘why go?’5
It seemed that one funeral, for the Nazis, was not enough. When Heinrich Himmler attempted to stage a second ceremony at Tressow, the General’s family home, Fritz Schulenburg quietly indicated that the idea was unwelcome. And, to Tisa’s surprise, Himmler backed off. How had her sharp-witted favourite sibling achieved such influence in the Reich? Dressed in his new uniform as deputy chief of the Berlin police, Fritzi looked formidable; so why had he opposed the second Nazi ceremony with such vehemence?
Fritzi waited until the day before his sister returned to England, just a week after their father’s funeral, to reveal the truth. Back in 1938, he had secretly committed himself to the Abwehr plot for the overthrow of Hitler. That mission had never been abandoned. With Hitler gone, so Fritz Schulenburg and his friends believed, peace could be swiftly restored and the rule of law regained. Fritz had shared his hopes only with Charlotte, his wife. His brothers – Johannes Albrecht, Wolfgang and Heini – knew nothing, and (as ardent Nazis) must know nothing. Their secret, as Fritzi warned his loquacious sister to remember, must never be betrayed, if Tisa valued her brother’s life.
Tisa, while thrilled by Fritz’s revelations, had no desire to linger longer in a marching, militaristic Germany that perpetually reminded her of all the friends who had lost their jobs, their homes, even their lives. Flying thankfully back to England on 2 June, and armed with a talismanic copy of her favourite poet, John Keats, she was called over by the single iron-faced officer who was running the immigration sevices at Croydon Airport. Asked, on that stifling summer afternoon, to produce her papers of identity, Tisa foolishly displayed the cuttings that showed her to be the daughter of a prominent Nazi general whose funeral had recently been attended by Hitler. She even made a weak joke about her shaky qualifications for re-entry. The officer grew more thoughtful.
Later, Tisa persuaded herself that her undoing had begun before she ever left England, when a Secret Service investigator of Hampstead’s alien residents had paid her a visit, and had bafflingly demanded to marry her. Naturally, she turned down the absurd proposal: ‘he drank and he wore creaking stays’.
The story is an odd one: what could have made the inspector imagine that Tisa would welcome such an offer? It seems more likely that the photographs of a Nazi funeral, combined with a flippant manner that bordered on arrogance, had been enough to seal her fate. Still stranded at Croydon, Tisa made some frantic calls. Fritz Hess arrived, followed by representatives from the Quakers, and finally, by members of the Artists’ International Association, led by Misha Black and Julian Trevelyan. The officer’s answer remained the same: as a German national, the Countess was obliged to return home to Germany.
‘And if I refuse to do so?’
His answer was clear: ‘Then we will use force.’
Back again in Germany and disconsolately lodged at the Cologne flat of one of her Nazi brothers, Tisa pulled every string within her vigorous reach. But the British Foreign Office, by July 1939, had larger matters on its mind than the fate of the daughter of a German general. Nothing could or would be done. The door to England was shut, and Tisa, to her utter dismay, had reached ‘the dreaded dead end’.6
Nobody had ever accused Tisa Schulenburg of being unresourceful. Realising that she faced being trapped in Mecklenburg for the duration of the war, she hastily took up with a former lover, Carl Ulrich von Barner. In September, Tisa married him, and while the likeable von Barner (always known as C. U.) went glumly off to fight for Germany, his new wife settled into running Trebbow, the beautiful old Barner estate that lay, like her own former family home, close to the Baltic Sea.
From 1942, Tisa shared Trebbow with Fritzi Schulenburg’s wife, along with Charlotte’s attractive brood of children. Together, the sisters-in-law turned Barner’s pretty old house into a kind of bohemian transit hotel for anybody who was on the run or had lost their home, while trying not to attract the suspicion of the Barner estate’s most dangerous employee.
‘Ha’ was a quiet and violet-eyed woodsman who had been appointed by the Nazis as the area’s Ortsgruppenleiter. He terrified Tisa. (‘During all those years he was the main opponent I had to deal with . . . The forester watched me as the huntsman watches his prey.’) She dreaded that Ha would discover the truth about her brother Fritzi (‘a born leader of men’), whose secret life she could discuss only with Charlotte, his valiant wife. The Schulenburg children, for their own safety, were kept in complete ignorance of the plot; the mother and aunt, bound together in anxious admiration for Fritz’s courage, fastened their hopes upon his ability to win support. Fritzi, so Tisa wrote, was ‘“the drummer” . . . the one employed to win others to the cause’. Her brother was good at it. In 1943, Fritz told her that the net of resistance against Hitler was spreading, and that it had become a great underground organisation, drawn from people of every rank and creed throughout Germany.
‘“And if you don’t succeed in killing Hitler?” I asked my brother.
“We must succeed,” was his answer.’
Easter 1944 marked a high spot at Trebbow in a life of daily dread and increasing privation. Fritz Schulenburg arrived unexpectedly one evening; accompanying him was the charismatic Claus von Stauffenberg, destined to become the most famous of all the July conspirators who plotted to assassinate Hitler.
Stauffenberg, evidently, was a captivating guest. Short of elegant attire, Tisa and Charlotte decked themselves out for their romantic visitor in the finest brocade curtains they could find. When the guest asked for a ‘White Lady’, they rushed to drain the household’s last measure of gin into his glass. Fascinated, they watched the resistance hero, a black ribbon masking his lost eye, as he sipped his cocktail and delicately manoeuvred a matchbox against the stump of his missing arm to light a cigarette. Rapt, they listened as he talked, between gales of merriment and infectious jokes, about nothing and everything: about ‘Shakespeare and England and Catholicism and Stephan George’ (the poet revered almost as a patron saint by the Stauffenberg family). It was the gaiety that Tisa remembered best: ‘Roars of laughter. I have never known anyone with such a capacity for laughter. It was a glorious evening.’7
The July plot failed. Saved by the mere width of a sturdy table leg, Hitler escaped with a few burn marks and a ruined pair of trousers from the briefcase bomb that should have ended his life. The plotters, together with such courageous associates as Wilhelm Canaris, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Carl Langbehn and Helmuth von Moltke, were arrested.
The plotters themselves had been scrupulous about the form of trial that Hitler, if they could only capture him, was to be granted. No such mercy was meted out to them. Arriving in Berlin on 10 August – the day of Fritz’s trial – his wife and sister found the city’s centre in ruins and the so-called People’s Court closed to all those who failed to produce special Nazi permits. They never saw him again. Fritz Dietlof Schulenburg was hanged, together with Stauffenberg’s brother, Berthold, at four o’clock that same afternoon. Official confirmation reached his widow in mid-September, when Charlotte was requested to reimburse the Nazis for the cost of killing her husband, together with the additional expense of preparing, and posting, an invoice.
Sippenhaft, the act of collective punishment for a crime, was not applied to all the families of the plotters. Charlotte, accompanied by her young children, escaped to safety during the last and most terrifying stages of the war, when the penalty for flight was death. Tisa, staying on in Germany, was briefly reunited with her agreeable second husband, following von Barner’s release from an Italian POW camp in the autumn of 1945. Fidelity had never been Tisa’s strongest suit; in 1946, Barner, like Hess, divorced his wife for her faithlessness. Deprived of her home, family and husband, Tisa found herself suddenly alone.
It would be easy to predict that Tisa Schulenburg, after the war, would return to England, where she retained enduring connections with her friends in the mining communities of Jarrow and Durham. Instead, in 1948, she moved to the harsh landscape of the Ruhr, converted to Catholicism, joined an Ursuline convent and settled, as Schwester Paula, at bomb-shattered Dorsten, a former mining town. Here, committing herself with equal fervour to her art and her faith, she produced a remarkable series of drawings and a sculpture (one among many works of arresting beauty and strength) inspired by the horrors of the Holocaust.
Tisa’s decision to become a nun is less surprising than the choice, by such a life-affirming woman, of such a barren environment in which to end her life.
‘I chose the Ruhr’, Schwester Paula explained to her friend Christabel Bielenberg (who had settled with her husband in Ireland, as the couple had planned to do before the war), ‘wanting to live where others had to live. No more roar of the sea, nor the smell of bracken and gorse. I have delighted in it [that] to the full.’8
Mechtilde Lichnowsky, following the death of her husband, and the taking over of Kuchelna by her eldest son, Wilhelm, had chosen to stay away from a country that had become alien to her nature. Letters and notebooks suggest that she remained in close contact with her sister, Helene Harrach, who shared Mechtilde’s hatred of the Nazi dictatorship. But while Helene and her husband retreated into the home of their eldest daughter at Niederarnbach (a moated Bavarian schloss that offered an escape from prying eyes and enforced behaviour), Mechtilde was given a chance introduction that led to a second, and exceptionally happy, marriage.9
Mechtilde had been only twenty-three when she first met the tall, fair-haired and quietly humorous Ralph Peto at the British Legation in Munich. There was a romance. Marriage was discussed, but was not considered suitable by Mechtilde’s ardently Catholic family. Instead, two years later, the young Countess married the eminently eligible Karl Max Lichnowsky.
Major Peto, who had married and divorced during those interim thirty years, shared Mechtilde’s fondness for music. The two friends rediscovered each other in the 1930s, while independently attending a concert at London’s Queen’s Hall. They soon became inseparable. Major Peto, although less bookish and knowledgeable about modern art than Mechtilde, shared her sense of humour, her energy and her intense love of the English landscape. Not a writer himself, Ralph Peto was filled with admiration by the nonchalant cleverness and originality of the Princess’s books and delighted by the adroit and topical drawings with which she punctured many an inflated reputation.
In 1937, Mechtilde Lichnowsky married her dashing major and took British citizenship. Settled in the London of rose-brick terraces and wide green parks about which she wrote with such tenderness in her memoirs, she clung to the memory of her German family. Wilhelm, her son, sent letters from Kuchelna. News of her sister was regularly conveyed by Helene Harrach’s pretty daughter, Irene, who continued to pay visits from England to her parents at Niederarnbach until the eve of war.
By August 1939, the news from home had grown sufficiently alarming for Mechtilde to decide that she must, however briefly, go back to Germany. Over four years had passed since her last visit. Despite the warnings of an anxious husband, she seized what felt like a last opportunity to see her family.
Major Peto’s unease was well founded. When war was declared, Mechtilde, like Tisa, found that her return to England had been blocked. In 1939, she became the prisoner, in her own land, of a political regime that she abhorred. Cut off from her husband (no correspondence was permitted between Britain and Germany during the first three years of the war), Mechtilde was tarnished in Germany by her previous marriage to Lichnowsky, a man still hated by the Nazis for his public acceptance of Germany’s culpable role in 1914. Classified as a ‘feindlichen Ausländer’, Mechtilde was kept under close observation and required to report every week for interrogation by the Gestapo. The discovery that her brother-in-law, Rudolf Marogna-Redwitz, had been closely linked to the 20 July plotters increased suspicions of a woman whose own writings were among the first to be purged by fire from the Nazi canon.
Little survives to indicate how Mechtilde received the news – if it reached her – that Ralph Peto, who had been tirelessly struggling to find a way to bring his wife home to England, had, by 1944, fallen seriously ill. What could she do? Mechtilde did what she had always done in times of despair. She wrote two books. For a woman whose last memoir would declare that ‘Der Schreibtisch ist mein Hafen’ (‘My desk is my harbour’), work was the only conceivable solace.10 Her wartime writings were not, however, intended for publication. One manuscript, an attack on Hitler, Der Werdegang eines Wirrkopf (The Making of a Fool), was so incendiary that she hid it in a casket and buried it deep underground.
In September 1945, following the confiscation of both Kuchelna and Graz, together with their contents, and the news that her eldest son Wilhelm was in flight, hoping to join his younger brothers in Brazil, Mechtilde received, at last, a letter from England. It brought bleak news: her beloved husband, Ralph, was dead.
Mechtilde did not, as might perhaps have been expected, choose either to stay in Germany with her sister’s family or to join her children in South America. Instead, she returned to England. Living in London among a circle of literary exiles who included Elias Canetti and a beautiful Czech baroness (Sidonie Borutin, a patroness of Rilke) whom she had known since childhood, Mechtilde continued to write, to sketch, to go to concerts and to remain joyously unconventional until her death in 1958.
In the spring of 1940, Hansel Pless took a couple of weeks off from his light duties as a stretcher-bearer to pay a visit to his mother’s old friends, the Londonderrys, at a time when their son, Lord Castlereagh, was also present. The principal subject of conversation, in alarming times, was Hansel’s mother, Daisy Pless.
Short of money (the Pless estate had ceased to provide an allowance), and almost immobilised by multiple sclerosis, Daisy was still living in the gatehouse at Fürstenstein, where she continued to be cared for by Dolly Crowther. During the early months of the war, she had managed to get word out to her sister, Shelagh, that all was well. (‘Don’t worry about me, everything is warm and comfy.’11) More recently, Hansel had received ominous news. Photographs of himself taking part in an air-raid exercise in the mandatory gas mask and steel helmet had been published in Germany, offering conclusive proof that the Prince had become an enemy of the people; it followed that the traitor’s immense estates were now open to confiscation. Pless had already been taken; Hansel’s younger brother, Lexel (a former Nazi supporter whose handsome car was used to transport the 1923 ‘blood banner’ to meetings), had fled, together with Daisy’s cousin Ena Fitzpatrick, first to Poland and then to France. Fürstenstein was now under threat of confiscation and Hansel was desperately seeking ways to get funds out of England to enable his mother to be moved to the nearby village of Waldenburg. Such currency exchanges, during wartime restrictions, were not easy to transact. Possibly, Hansel thought that Lady Londonderry, possessed of good banking connections in Germany through her friendship with Dr Melchior, might help him to transfer the necessary sum.
Listening to these conversations, the Londonderrys’ son formed the view that his parents were being asked to implicate themselves in unpatriotic activities. He did not, however, choose to speak out until later.
On 10 May 1940, following the news that Germany had invaded Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg, Neville Chamberlain resigned and was replaced by Winston Churchill. Three days later, the new Prime Minister vowed his absolute commitment to winning the war by whatever means it took for England to prevail and triumph. One of the first steps taken in that direction was to guarantee, by securing the immediate arrest of all German males living in England, that no enemy treachery could be harboured at home.
Hansel, as a Pole who had given his allegiance to England, remained untouched during the early summer. Ben Greene’s good works for the Kindertransport, on the other hand, counted for less by the summer of 1940 than the fact that he had a German mother and a sister, Barbara, who was living with a German in Berlin. Far more seriously, Ben had drifted away from his Quaker friends to become a central figure in Lord Tavistock’s BCCSE. The innocuously named British Council for a Christian Settlement in Europe had been attracting attention from MI5 since January 1940 for its unpatriotic activities. Reports that Ben, the Council’s treasurer, kept a Nazi eagle on his desk (the eagle was a family heirloom) did not sound reassuring. On 23 May, Ben was arrested and taken to Brixton. This particular swoop took a further 700 suspects into custody.
The internment programme, resulting in the arbitrary rounding up of 27,000 men and 4,000 women with German connections, was not well planned and England had not been well prepared for such mass arrests. Chaos ensued. Fritz Schumacher found himself briefly confined at Paignton among a group of starving internees who had not been fed for nine days. Michael Kerr, the teenage son of Germany’s most eminent theatre critic, was carried off in his tennis clothes from Cambridge to be lodged at a disused ice-cream factory and, later, in an underground car park until, still bewildered by his fate, he was deported to join, on the Isle of Man, a German prince, a Cockney stable boy and a certain Pastor Hildebrandt, freshly arrived from his work with Julius Rieger at the Church of St George’s in Aldgate.
Hansel Pless, throughout May and June 1940, remained at liberty and impatient to do more than stretcher-bearing to demonstrate his commitment to the England that he loved with such passion. Thinking, perhaps, that his Uncle George’s twelve-year marriage to Churchill’s mother might work in his favour, he decided, on 15 July, to ask the Prime Minister’s secretary if more active work could be found for ‘a healthy and fit man [able] to serve the national cause’. Hansel hoped for an appointment to the Scots Guards.12 Instead, reported by the Londonderrys’ son to have displayed Nazi sympathies, the forty-year-old Prince was arrested and taken to Brixton jail, where, according to his own unselfpitying recollections, he was provided with the bare minimum of subsistence: a cell, a mattress and a slop pail. Initially, Hansel was baffled as to what his crime could have been; at some point, however, he recollected something about the manner of the Londonderrys’ son that had seemed unfriendly. Could such a man – the son of his trusted friends – have set out to do him harm?
One MP, Victor Cazalet, spoke up in the House of Commons that summer about the injustices that were taking place in Britain due to the new German internment policy. On 22 August 1940, Major Cazalet declared that tragedies ‘unnecessary and undeserved’ were taking place and that he was not prepared to rest ‘until this bespattered page of our history has been cleaned up and rewritten’.13 It was a splendid speech. No changes took place.
A year later, on 25 September 1941, conscious of Cazalet’s humane attitude and of his particular sympathy to Poland’s cause(Cazalet was closely involved, from the summer of 1940, with President Sikorski’s London-based government in exile), Hansel wrote – during a brief spell of imprisonment on the Isle of Man – to ask for his help. Typically, however, the Prince expressed far less concern about the release of his person than the rescue of his reputation. He had, he wanted Cazalet to understand, been the victim of ‘a wicked calumny’ [in] . . . a trumped-up case’. Without quite pointing a finger at Castlereagh, his nemesis, Hansel asked that Lord Londonderry should be informed that ‘beyond doubt there is no reason for my detention’. Characteristically, Hansel went on to congratulate Cazalet on behalf of the 3000 men who had – unlike himself – already been released: ‘Thank God,’ he wrote, with no conscious irony, ‘this still is England.’14 It is not known whether Major Cazalet found time to enter a plea on Hansel’s behalf. If so, it went unheeded.
Michael Kerr, following an appeal by his distinguished father, was released from his internment in November 1940, and – following service as a bomber pilot – was naturalised as English. He later became Britain’s first foreign-born judge. Kerr had, so he wrote in his memoirs half a century later, felt no bitterness about being interned. The greater cause was all that mattered: ‘In fact, throughout my internment, I never met anyone who felt bitter against the British government.’15 Ben Greene, who felt very bitter indeed about the fact that his arrest had been set up by MI5, responded to his release in 1942 by unsuccessfully suing the Home Secretary for libel and false imprisonment. Haunted to the end by his sense of unjust persecution, Greene died in 1978 and was buried in Suffolk, following a Quaker service attended by his German mother, then in her mid-nineties.
Hansel remained in Brixton. Eventually – typed out on one of the small cards through which the Red Cross were permitted to transmit international post after March 1942 – he received the contents of a letter that his mother had written from her new home in Germany. The news was reassuring. Hansel’s funds had come through and Daisy liked her new Waldenburg home (‘such beautiful big sunny rooms and a lovely view’.) The fact that she and the ever-loyal Dolly dwelt in almost total solitude troubled the gallant Princess less than putting her son’s mind at ease: ‘Hansel darling, don’t let anything worry you, everything is in perfect order, just as you would wish it to be . . . I am so proud of you.’16
Daisy Pless died, in Dolly Crowther’s arms, in June 1943. In Germany, Daisy’s status as an enemy alien guaranteed her little more than cursory death notices. In The Times, two weeks later, tributes to Daisy were overshadowed by the obituaries of Victor Cazalet and President Sikorski of Poland, killed in a suspicious plane accident shortly after Sikorski’s request for an inquiry into the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn.* Nevertheless, Hansel (if allowed to read The Times in Brixton) would have been proud to see how warmly his seventy-year-old mother was praised in the newspaper’s densely printed pages for her work as a reformer on the Pless estates, for her courageous help to British POWs and for unceasing attempts ‘to help Anglo-German relations remain on an amiable footing’.17 No mention was made, however, of the fact that Daisy’s son, godson to both Edward VII and the German Emperor, was presently serving time in a London prison.
It’s unlikely that either Daisy’s death or George Cornwallis-West’s well-intended endeavours to bribe the Prime Minister with a freshly caught salmon and an assurance that Hansel was ‘entirely guiltless of subversive activity towards this country’ affected the status of the unfortunate Prince.18 Nevertheless, towards the end of 1943, Hansel was finally released and informed by the Governor also of Brixton that ‘a terrible mistake had been made’. The courteous Prince, having stayed on for lunch in order to wish all his Brixton friends farewell (Hansel was popular with his fellow inmates), soon afterwards achieved his cherished wish to contribute to the war effort.
As a trained lawyer, he was put in charge of investigating the cases of Irish soldiers who were accused of desertion after joining the British Army. To judge from the vivacity with which he discussed his work on the tapes that recorded his memories, the Prince found the task both sad and satisfying.19
After the war, Hansel lost all his estates to Poland (‘they even took my clothes and my boots’) together with his only source of income. Naturalised as an English citizen in 1947, he became a keen cyclist and a less keen businessman, whose venture into lumber-drying failed to prosper. It was characteristic of Hansel that, following the register office ceremony of a happy second marriage, he unselfconsciously carried his Irish bride off on honeymoon in a tiny bubble car into which his tall frame could scarcely bend itself to fit. The delight of skimming past larger and grander cars on narrow alpine passes apparently compensated for cramped space to a man who, modestly renaming himself Mr Henry Pless, would become a much-loved member of that English world to which he had always given his heart.20
Dolly Crowther was less fortunate. Having cared for her beloved princess until the end of Daisy’s life, Dolly was forced to flee when the Soviet troops approached Waldenburg. While making her way, on foot, to the US safety zone, Dolly was murdered and left in a roadside ditch. Daisy’s own grave, although swiftly dug up by the incoming Soviet troops, was almost as swiftly put to rights.
Back in 1914, when Queen Victoria was still a remembered presence, royal connections, or noble birth, still carried a mystique that allowed soldiers, swapping photographs on Christmas Eve, to exclaim over the beauty (‘Schöne Prinzessin!’) of some member ofthe enthroned family that still, confusingly, seemed to belong to both camps. All that, as Hitler faced Churchill across the lines of war, had disappeared. Nothing – or nothing that was linked to great culture or to noble families – remained sacred. Charlie Coburg, the unhappy schoolboy appointed to rule over Prince Albert’s own duchy by a loving grandmother, had grown into a man who wore Nazi uniform, supported the Nazi party and who understandably gained little in the way of post-war clemency. (The by then very frail Duke, following a period of imprisonment in the American zone, died in a German estate cottage in 1954, still sleeping in his cherished bed from Claremont, the English mansion that had been his childhood home.)
A contributing factor to the approval that was granted for the launching of attacks on civilian towns and on Britain and Germany’s most treasured monuments (among them, St Paul’s in London and the great cathedral of Cologne) was the fact that neither Churchill nor Hitler knew much about the other’s country. Churchill had paid one visit to Berlin 1932; Hitler, even though a possible future home had been picked out for his victorious later years, had never once set foot in England.
The use of Darmstadt, home to the part of Victoria’s family that had always remained most faithful to England, as a practice ground for carpet-bombing by the Allies, demonstrates how much the mood had changed in thirty years. Neither the British Princess Margaret (‘Peg’) nor Prince Ludwig, her intensely musical German husband, had ever approved of the Nazis. Expelled from the army in 1943 (as were all the German princes) and briefly imprisoned in his own small city (where the relaxed conditions of imprisonment allowed the Princess to feed daily cigarette rations into her husband’s upheld fingers through a road grating), Prince Lu had born his fate with equanimity. Placed under house arrest for the rest of the war, he and his wife turned their secluded home, Wolfsgarten, into an oasis for refugees (among them, in due course, the motherless children of Lu’s cousin, Prince Philipp of Hessen-Kassel, while their father served time from 1946–8 in the local camp).
Lu, like Peg, was always sympathetic to the British cause. But how can the couple have felt on the night of 11 September 1944 when pretty little Darmstadt was singled out for one of the heaviest air raids of the war? Out of 110,000 citizens, 66,000 lost their homes and 12,300 died in an attack for which the target was the medieval town’s wooden centre, ideal for the creation of a firestorm.
It’s harder to guess how Prince Ludwig, whose grandmother, Princess Alice, had done so much to support the German Hospital in London, felt when he heard about the sad ending of one of the most esteemed connections between the old England and the old Germany, created back in the days when the two countries had shared a vision for social reform.
The hospital’s troubles had begun when Ribbentrop, acting in his role as ambassador to the Court of St James’s, attempted to have its patient list Aryanised. His only supporter, the hospital chaplain, left London for Germany in August 1939. But Pastor Schönberger had failed to convert the nurses, over whom a more powerful influence was exerted by the memory of the hospital’s splendid role in the previous war. A handful returned home to Germany. Confident of the protection that was traditionally extended to a religious nursing order, the majority of the nun-sisters (most of whom came from Darmstadt) remained in London under the inspiring leadership of Sister Anna Jochmann. At Hitchin, the hospital’s convalescent branch, none of the German nurses dreamed of quitting their posts because of the war. There was not one among them, according to the hospital secretary, Herr Loeffler, who concerned themselves with politics: ‘their lives were consecrated to the care of the sick’.21
On 28 May 1940, the hospital was subjected to a surprise visit from Scotland Yard. Crying and carrying bundles of clothes in their arms – Sister Anna had a coat draped over her long nightgown – the sisters were forced down the front steps and into the vans that took them to Holloway Prison. Three months later, on 18 August, the entire group was deported to Port Erin on the Isle of Man.
The arrests had taken place during the first hysterical period of internment, at a time when even old gentlemen in Hampstead’s public libraries were hustled from their seats by zealous officials and ordered to produce their papers. But the decree that had gone out from Whitehall was for the arrest of all German males below the age of sixty. The arrested persons, on this occasion, were middle-aged nurses and elderly nuns.*
Even before their menacing prisoners had reached Port Erin, the authorities had begun to acknowledge the possibility of error. It now embarrassingly emerged that a medical chest in which munitions were alleged to be stored at the hospital held nothing more dangerous than the supplies of plaster used for making leg casts. That revelation did not prevent the hospital’s last remaining German resident, Sister Gertrud, aged sixty-eight, from being immediately gathered up and despatched to Port Erin. Sister Sophie, aged sixty-seven, a widely loved local figure who had run the Hitchin convalescent hospital on the Schröder family’s behalf for over twenty years, was also arrested and deported.
Throughout the rest of the war, the hospital struggled to retain a minimal service with a skeletal staff, but the powerful bridge linking it to Germany was broken beyond repair. Appeals for funding after the war received no response from a ruined country. In 1948, after over a hundred years of charitable service, the hospital renounced its voluntary status. Today, while still fondly referred to by locals as ‘the German’, one of the great monuments to Anglo-German philanthropy has been converted into flats.22
The hospital, had it been allowed to serve the role that it performed so ably during the First War, might have helped to heal more than wounded bodies. Wounds of a different nature were incurred by acts of such splendid, quixotic loyalty as the determination of the middle-aged Prince Charles de Rohan to serve two and a half years of hard labour in Germany rather than renounce his British nationality.23
Rohan’s story is an extraordinary one, of supreme pettiness (he was arrested for having failed to stop a hotel clerk from mentioning a British news item) and of uncommon powers of survival. While one of his many torments had included being forced to balance on a narrow ledge within the dark neck of a chimney, while a fire was lit beneath him, such experiences paled beside the Prince’s stories of the sufferings of his comrades. At Theresienstadt, where he worked as a stone-breaker for the railroad, he saw elderly Jews being pushed off a high wall to be torn to pieces beneath by the ravenous Great Danes owned by the notorious ‘Pindja’, the camp commandant. Together with his fellow prisoner Count Czernin, the deeply religious Rohan was forced to witness the slow boiling alive of a Catholic priest.
Admirably, Rohan continued to reject the bait that was always extended: to be freed, he had only to become a citizen of Nazi Germany. A proud English subject to the end of his days (he died in Croydon in 1965), Rohan not only rejected the offer, but – encased in a subterranean cell below the centre of that very city – actively cheered on the pilots he proudly called ‘our boys’ as they strafed Hamburg.
Rohan’s defiance of the Nazis was admirable, and even heroic, but it did not open the way for more than the salvation of his own fierce integrity. Elsewhere, the scaffolding was being erected (and in a most improbable venue) for a bridge towards the first faint glimmer of post-war reconciliation.
Germany, up until 1933, honoured Shakespeare as a compatriot. Hamlet, melancholy, tortured and profound, was – and still is – identified as the mirror of the country’s darkest self. Shakespeare’s plays, as English travellers were always charmed to discover on their visits to Germany, were performed almost every week in, as it sometimes seemed, every tiny town throughout the nation.
In 1927, Saladin Schmitt lifted the idolatry to a new level by devoting an entire week at Bochum – from 3 p.m. to 2 a.m. each day – to nothing but the performance of all ten of Shakespeare’s histories. Ten years later, the Nazis repeated the Bochum Festival. On 23 April 1940, Shakespeare’s wartime birthday was celebrated in Germany with only a little less enthusiasm than Hitler’s (conveniently occurring during the same week). In Berlin, throughout the 1930s, the Shakespeare plays that were mounted by Gustaf Gründgens and sponsored by Goering at Berlin’s Prussian State Theatre had competed against those being put on with equal splendour at the Deutsches Theater by Goebbels’s man, Heinz Hilpert.
The Nazi interpretation of Shakespeare’s works was, inevitably, tainted by their creed. Richard II lent itself to jeers at the corrupt Anglo-Saxon nobility; Hamlet, however, began to give cause for concern. (Could a true hero be allowed to vacillate?) Troilus and Cressida, with a message that spoke unquestionably against the glory of war, was banned. The Merchant of Venice continued to play, but with a caricatured, posturing Shylock being presented as the improbable foster-father to a Christian girl. (A non-Jewish Jessica could thus marry Lorenzo and enjoy a happy ending without contravening the Reich’s inflexible new laws about inter-racial alliances.)
The texts were perverted to suit the Nazi ethos; the passion for Shakespeare, however, remained unquenched.
It was within this context of a shared – and profound – cultural devotion that some of the strangest and most significant productions of Shakespeare that may ever have been performed in Europe took place, in wartime Germany, with British actors.
Michael Goodliffe was an English vicar’s son who, after graduating from Oxford, had joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. Wounded at Dunkirk in 1940, Goodliffe was reported to have been killed and was duly accorded a brief obituary in The Times. In fact, the 26-year-old actor’s capture had led to his being imprisoned in a Bavarian hilltop castle and then, after a variety of camps, at Eichstätt, a secluded valley famous for the splendour of its Benedictine monastery.
The experience of the prisoners who shared Goodliffe’s captivity was not pleasant (shaven heads in icy conditions and without the provision of caps; a diet of mint tea and old potatoes), but monotony was the principal enemy.* Escape, both at Tittmoning and Eichstätt, remained the prime objective.
Possibly, the Nazi guards took the view that a bit of diversion would keep the prisoners’ minds off digging tunnels. Possibly, they themselves shared their boredom and welcomed the prospect of some culture in the camps. For whatever reason, Michael Goodliffe was encouraged to put his stage experience to use, with his admirable British superior officer, General Victor Fortune, urging him forward: ‘Put on some shows as soon as you can.’24
Slowly, the performances staged by Goodliffe (who fashioned the scenery from Red Cross crates and the reflector lights from dried milk tins) created a new dynamic between the captors and their prisoners. Both sides had discovered an outlet, far removed from the sphere of politics and war, in which some semblance of humanity could be restored.
Simple enjoyment, without doubt, played a dominant role. A repertoire that ranged from Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde to Gilbert and Sullivan was designed to please – and did so. (‘Three Little Maids from School Are We’ received ten encore requests at Hohenfels, another POW camp.) But Goodliffe’s fellow prisoners were also professional soldiers, keen to bring the same high level of competence to their productions as they would to any other mission. The camp commandants, too, became increasingly enthusiastic. They started importing costumes from the Munich Opera House; they asked for boxes of Leichner’s theatrical make-up to be requisitioned from Berlin. Music was composed by the prisoners; instruments, often borrowed from local orchestras in return for free attendance at performances, were fetched in by their play-addicted guards. Clear evidence of the goodwill that began to develop appears in the fact that, after the Nazi audience had left the room, the actors – British captives in a German prison camp – were given permission to belt out, as loudly and often as they pleased, their own national anthem.
One potential difficulty for theatre productions in a single-sex camp lay in an absence of female performers. Greatly to Goodliffe’s surprise, this presented no obstacle to an attentive and eager audience who knew their Shakespeare plays. They accepted the males in girlish attire, he wrote, ‘exactly as the Elizabethans accepted their boy-actors’.25
It’s a startling thought. Here, in a hilltop medieval castle in Bavaria, assembled for a performance – it was a favourite – of The Winter’s Tale, the guards and prisoners were unconsciously reliving the experience of a young English princess and her German groom, celebrating a marriage that was being called ‘the union of Thames and Rhine’ as they watched that same play being performed by male actors, at the Palace of Whitehall, in 1613. Arriving at the hilltop medieval castle of Heidelberg that summer, Elizabeth Stuart (the future Winter Queen of her own Bohemian tale) seemed almost to have pointed the way forward when she initiated the creation of a new Shakespeare theatre – for Germany.
Hamlet – performed at Eichstätt – was looked upon by Michael Goodliffe as his greatest triumph. Attracting an audience of 200 for its opening performance, the production was extended for a further ten days by popular demand. But it was in Stalag 383, at Hohenfels in Bavaria, that the bravest wartime Shakespearean tragedy was mounted: a completely uncensored presentation of The Merchant of Venice. Ian McKibbin, one of the actors, remembered that the Germans were shamelessly enthusiastic about the idea: costumes were even brought in from the Goering-approved State Theatre of Berlin for a play that had become, in Nazi times, a popular farce.
Shylock, in Nazi productions, was always played for laughs: a comic villain of the lowest kind, ridiculed and ridiculous. His greatest speech (‘Hath not a Jew eyes . . .’) was invariably omitted, doubtless from a fear that it might elicit sympathy. That caricature was not how Shylock was presented at Hohenfels. McKibbin, writing after his release, described how the Australian professional actor who took the part had gone to particular trouble to represent a heroic Shylock, a presented of ‘fine dignity’. The performance had, McKibbin added (perhaps a touch complacently), been ‘rather disturbing to the Germans in the stalls’. And yet, after the initial pause, and an anxious moment of uncertainty, the Germans had applauded with whole-hearted approval. ‘A grand production was most enthusiastically received.’26
Michael Goodliffe’s son suggests that his father and his fellow POWs were simply doing what professional soldiers learn to do: they were ‘building bridges’. These bridges, nevertheless, were of a special kind. However tentatively, the extraordinary stagings of works by the most humane of playwrights – presented by British prisoners to complicit Nazi guards – reached towards the faint possibility, following all the bitterness and the horrors that would still arise in the future, for the performance, in a post-war world, of a dramatic experiment.
Footnotes
* Wilfrid Israel, seeking homes in Palestine for emigrating Jews, died in that same month, shot down by German fire in the civilian plane that was carrying the Hungarian-English actor – and sometime British agent – Leslie Howard back to England from Lisbon. Of the responses to these tragic deaths, the newspaper homages to General Sikorski were the most prominent. Churchill read the funeral address for his Polish friend at Newark-on-Trent.
* A group of German Benedictine nuns migrated to Minster, on the Isle of Thanet (with which there was an ancient German connection through Saint Walburga), in March 1937, with help from the dashing and good-hearted Delphine Reynolds. In wartime, the abbey was requisitioned for use as an army mess. But, rather than being deported, these Bavarian-based Benedictines were permitted to take refuge at a sister convent in Devon. The German connection has been upheld at Minster (despite the abbey’s near-destruction through lightning in 1987) to this day.
* Such calculated discomfort is reminiscent of the experiences of Leonard Friedrich, the Quaker who had been removed from the centre at Bad Pyrmont well before the outset of war. Friedrich recalled how, in midwinter, large holes were cut in the centre of the back of the coats of those prisoners who worked outside.