AS hostilities ceased in 1945 the floodgates were opened and a wave of war memoirs, adventure and escape stories came tumbling from the printing presses. At first they all presented the allied case, until Captain Liddell Hart took us to the other side of the hill and into the minds and hearts of the German generals; as war hysteria subsided it was remembered that courage and heroism know no frontiers, and the exploits of German war-heroes now fill as many best-sellers as those of the allies. Little has been written of those who were destined to see both sides of the hill.
A cursory examination of what lay beyond the hill in the 1930s revealed no fundamental clash between British and German interests. German claims to territory taken from her at Versailles appeared reasonable to anyone who stopped to consider how England would have reacted in similar circumstances. Some Englishmen saw in the growth of a "greater Germany" a threat to British Empire; they included the Labour Party, which was pledged to "liquidate" the British Empire and Tories who rivalled the Left in demanding disarmament (in the face of a heavily-armed Germany they professed to regard as a menace) in order to pander to a pacifist electorate. To other Englishmen, whether ex-servicemen of the first World War or youth pledged to fight if ever Britain were attacked, it appeared more logical to re-arm Britain as a precautionary measure while withdrawing from European entanglements within an insulated policy of "Mind Britain's Business". (This was in the pre-atomic era, when the Channel was in fact and not in wishful imagination the moat surrounding an island fortress.) Such a foreign policy was the natural prerequisite to the development of the pre-war British Empire as a self-contained unit capable of providing the British people with the highest standard of living the world had ever seen. When we heard Sir Oswald Mosley advance these twin policies in the 1930s we knew our destinies lay with him in British Union.
On 3rd September, 1939, the British government declared war on Germany. Our position was clear, and had in any case been defined in a statement issued by Sir Oswald Mosley a few days earlier: those of us who were members of the armed forces would loyally obey the rules of the services, while the rest of us would do all we could (within the law) to persuade our British people to call on the government to make a just and honourable peace. We were following in illustrious footsteps—Chatham, Fox, Lloyd George and Ramsay Macdonald; their paths led to high office and public esteem, ours to the concentration camp.
In May, 1940, I was in the Falkland Islands, the British colony off the coast of Argentina, when it was announced that Sir Oswald Mosley and some of his supporters had been arrested. I continued with my job (that of travelling teacher) until 3rd June, when my breakfast in an isolated cottage some fifty miles from the little town of Port Stanley was interrupted by the arrival of three members of the Falkland Islands Defence Force with a warrant for my arrest. (It is a tribute to the efficiency of allied propaganda concerning the dangers of approaching a "fifth columnist" that they had armed themselves with revolvers and handcuffs.) They speedily decided that these were superfluous and we were firm friends before we reached Port Stanley after a three days' ride. We had a race over the last mile and in my efforts to win my horse stumbled in a pothole, throwing me so that I arrived with face smeared in blood, as if to confirm the rumours sweeping the island that I had violently resisted arrest.
I was met by a British army officer in command of the local defence force who informed me that if I felt "aggrieved" I could appeal. I told him I felt considerably aggrieved but experienced some difficulty in appealing in the absence of any charge or explanation for my arrest. He replied that "as far as he knew" members of "certain organisations" could be detained. I was then taken by boat to the hulk of a ship lying out in the harbour and there deposited in the hold, with a couple of guards on deck.
I found I had a companion, and his story gave an interesting glimpse of the other side of the hill. (I will call him by his Christian name of Andreas.) He was a German born in Eger, in Sudetenland. When the first World War ended he was a boy at school and found his German teachers replaced by non-German-speaking Czechs the day after the incorporation of his home town in the new polyglot state of Czechoslovakia. He had run away to sea and after a series of adventures had been shipwrecked on the coast of Chile. He was frequently involved in political arguments and when it was suggested to him that his Czech seaman's papers were not compatible with his pro-German sentiments his reply had always been the same: my passport says I am a Czech but my heart says I am a German. When Sudetenland became German again he brought his papers into line with his heart by taking out a German passport at a South American consulate.
A few years before the second World War Andreas had returned to sea as a cook on a British ship with Port Stanley as its home port. There his ship docked on 3rd September, 1939, and Andreas was arrested as an enemy alien and lodged in the local "lock-up", with an armed sentry outside his cell. As his gaolers had been his drinking companions for several years the situation was not devoid of humour.
In the early weeks of the war the crew of a German ship which had scuttled in the South Atlantic had been brought to the Falkland Islands and interned in a hastily-improvised camp, to which Andreas was now transferred. In December, 1939, the Graf Spee was engaged in the Battle of the River Plate, after which her commander scuttled her. During the battle the British cruiser Exeter was badly damaged and withdrew, to crawl to the Falklands, where she made harbour four days later. There she landed some forty seriously wounded men, to the consternation of the meagre staff of the tiny hospital of Port Stanley. In a desperate search for additional staff the hospital authorities interviewed Andreas in his prison camp and asked him if he would become the hospital cook. He replied that as a German he could do nothing to injure Germany or assist Britain but that he considered cooking for wounded seamen humanitarian work and would therefore agree. He was at once released from internment and worked freely in the hospital, being given the freedom of Port Stanley, without even giving his parole.
Some time later his former prison-camp companions were transferred to South Africa for internment there and Andreas begged to be allowed to accompany them. He was persuaded to stay in the Falklands and continued to work in the hospital. Later still the Exeter's wounded were transferred to South Africa for convalescence and Andreas was deeply touched when her Captain (accompanied by the Governor of the colony) came to the hospital to thank him for his services to his crew. He continued to work at the hospital until the day of my arrest, when he was taken away to our prison ship. It was apparently argued that a German could not be left free while an Englishman was imprisoned, and gratitude for his services was conveniently put out of mind. At times he was inclined to feel embittered, but he too had seen the other side of the hill, where lay the real England, so different from that of officialdom.
All this I was to learn from Andreas in the months which lay ahead, when we exchanged life stories and exhausted our stock of anecdotes, absent-mindedly repeating them until we knew them by heart and could fill in any details the other omitted, like children listening to an oft-told bedtime story. We had so little to do except talk. There were no rules ; we got up when we liked and went to bed when we liked: we had meals whenever we could summon up sufficient enthusiasm to cook some of our meagre and unappetising rations, brought off to us from the shore once a week. We were allowed on deck by day, but frequent rain and high winds soon drove us below again. Once a week we were taken ashore to the public baths, solemnly marched to and from the quay by armed guards.
After a week of this existence I was summoned ashore to appear before a tribunal appointed to hear my appeal against internment. It consisted of the senior army and navy officers stationed in the Falklands, under the chairmanship of the local colonial secretary, from whom I heard for the first time anything in the nature of a charge. I had been detained as a member of "a certain organisation, the policy of which is in sympathy with a government with which His Majesty is at war." Useless to reply that British Union did not fall into this category; "that is for us to decide" was the Chairman's answer.
A few weeks later I received a letter informing me that the Governor had ordered that my detention should continue and adding - somewhat superfluously - that my "engagement with the Government was terminated". A series of letters to the Governor claiming my right of appeal to London and protesting against the conditions under which I was detained produced only evasive replies from the colonial secretary. Stalemate continued for four months, until the Governor at last agreed to transfer us to a cottage ashore, where we remained under house arrest.
Unexpectedly, two weeks later, we were told that we were "going away", but were not informed of our destination, even when about to sail. At sea we discovered that our ship was bound for South Africa, but we had no idea whether that was to be our final destination or only a port of call en route for England. After a detour through seas strewn with ice-bergs to visit South Georgia we proceeded to the South African naval base of Simonstown, where we disembarked. From Simonstown we were taken to an army detention centre at Weinberg, on the coast between the naval base and Cape Town.
The wonderfully kind treatment we received at the hands of the Afrikaaner military police was indicative of their real feelings about the war, concealed beneath a thin veneer of pretended enthusiasm for the Smuts government. After a few days I was separated from Andreas (whom I never saw again) and taken by train to Johannesburg. The tedium of the journey across the Great Karoo and into the flat, uninteresting veldt of the Transvaal was enlivened by the friendliness of the Afrikaaner police who escorted me.
A car took me from Johannesburg to the internment camp of Leuwkop, on the open veldt some ten miles from the city. After "reception" (a formal taking of particulars and a cursory search which spared one the indignities of the English prison system) the inner gates of the camp were opened and I was handed over to an internee for escorting to my hut.
A new arrival from the outside world was always a source of great excitement and I was greeted with a babel of German voices asking at once who I was and where I came from. My reply that I was English caused astonishment, but my explanation that I was interned because of my membership of an English fascist and national socialist organisation evoked more than surprise. I was almost thrown out of the hut by the inmates, who were all anti-Nazis, many of them communists and Jews, who had been interned for such offences as entering South Africa illegally. Back at the gate I was handed over to an internee from "the other side", huts well segregated from those of the communists and housing those who, in some degree, favoured national socialism.
They were not all Germans, but included one or two representatives of almost every country in Europe, interned for a wide variety of reasons, among which the anonymous letter or the secret report of the agent provocateur figured high on the list. My position as the only Englishman was rather delicate. I was opposed to the war and to the British government which had declared it, but I did not wish to see my country defeated by any foreign power. This point of view was respected by the Germans in the camp, who good-humouredly referred to me as "the British consul". We lived together in warm friendship and comradeship, but our discussions on the war and the fate of our countries were regulated by a mutually-imposed formality. This attitude bewildered the camp commandant, an English army officer, who could never believe that I was really British (in spite of my passport) and found my position far too subtle for his simple military mind.
The commandant interfered little with the internal administration of the camp, carried out by the internees under the leadership of an elected lagerfuhrer. We prepared and cooked our own meals, washed our own clothes and kept our quarters clean by rota, each man doing his allotted share of stubedienst and lagerdienst.
Communication with the outside world was officially restricted to censored mail and occasional visits. But the camp had been a Bantu prison and some of the "boys" came into the camp from the prison to which they had been transferred and worked there by day. With their co-operation and by the exercise of considerable ingenuity a newspaper was daily smuggled into the camp, while a cunningly concealed radio not only received news and messages, but transmitted camp information to interested parties outside.
The neglected art of conversation was revived in the camp and our favourite occupation in the cool of the evening was to promenade in twos and threes, putting the post-war world right in long discussions prefaced with the pathetic nach dem Krieg. By day the more energetic read or studied, while the lazier ones sunbathed, and so the days, weeks and months rolled by.
As Christmas 1940 approached a little extra fare was collected, saved from Red Cross food parcels or salvaged from meagre rations, and a brave attempt was made to celebrate in the "traditional" way. On Christmas Eve a German priest among the internees sang Midnight Mass, in a hut packed with almost every man in the camp, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. As Christmas Day dawned his voice rang out : Heute ist Weihnachten, und heute gibt's nur einen Wunsch in jedem Herz . . . die Friede. What a longing for peace welled up in every heart, German, French, English, all Europeans.
Such a highlight served only to accentuate the monotony of camp life, and men began to consider the possibilities of escape. For the Germans, who formed the majority of the camp's population, escape was the prelude to a trek of several hundred miles to Lourenco Marques in Portuguese East Africa. There the German consulate would take the escaped man under its wing and a passage would be arranged on a neutral but friendly ship; many escapees reached Germany by devious routes, after thrilling adventures.
The first step was to get out of the camp. By day armed guards surrounded the camp compound and a large garden at the rear, in which we were allowed to work, growing a few vegetables. At the end of the afternoon a bell summoned us into an inner compound, where the roll was called. When the commandant was satisfied that all were present the guards were withdrawn from around the garden and took up positions around the inner perimeter until morning. A would-be escaper had therefore to hide in the garden until after roll-call (on which his absence had to be concealed) and, when the guards had been withdrawn, had only to slip through the barbed wire to freedom. The occupants of the first hut would line up to be counted, after which they would fall out; one of their number would rapidly crawl through holes in the hut walls, emerging further along the line to be counted again, suitably disguised by a change of clothing. By this method an escape was often unnoticed for weeks, until a change of method in roll calling rendered this particular plan no longer feasible.
Escape by night from the inner compound was more difficult, but in the early months of 1941 I joined a small, carefully selected group in an attempt to dig a tunnel from the camp centre, beneath the barbed wire to the outside world. We commenced our digging beneath the floor of a storeroom, carefully replacing the boards early each morning before creeping back to our beds. The disposal of the excavated earth was the main problem, but we made steady progress, lighting our tunnel with stolen electric light bulbs as we advanced. My activities were brought to an abrupt end in April, 1941, when I was unexpectedly released and returned to England.
On my return home I found England fighting for her existence and political opposition to the war no longer feasible; I therefore volunteered for the forces and served until the end of the war. But I often thought of my friends in South Africa, sitting on the other side of the hill. What were their feelings as they saw all hopes of a German victory fade away ? Were they further depressed when they realised that there would be no victory for England or Germany, but only for Soviet communism? Or, as they looked through the barbed wire and across the South African veldt, did they see a new Europe arising, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old, a continent united at last, developing as our common Empire the Africa which had been our prison and the land of our exile?
Jeffrey Hamm
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