Those who lived through the war were also psychologically affected in other ways. Women contributors to this study experienced WW2 as children, adolescents, teenagers or young adults; they almost unanimously described feelings of fear, horror and hatred towards their wartime enemies. Margaret Kertesz has argued that combatants’ hatred for the enemy is tempered by the responsibilities that accompany direct engagement, whereas civilian hatred remains unrestrained, their experience of the enemy as ‘a more shadowy abstract concept’.109
Anecdotal accounts suggest that, for some children, the imagined enemy appeared, at the
107 Cited in Wicks, Welcome, pp. 135 (Joyce Hampson), 143 (Dorothy Lowman), also 160 (Marigold
Hoare).
108 Lorna H., correspondence; Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen Families Association Annual Report, December
1946, cited in Turner and Rennell, pp. 110, 112.
109 Margaret Kertesz, ‘The Enemy: British Images of the German People during the Second World War’
83 outset of WW2, frighteningly real. One online reminiscence describes emerging from Sunday school to hear that war had been declared. The siren then sounded, and they dashed home ‘expecting the Germans to come round the corner at any minute.’110 Barbara Dennis, an
imaginative child, heard the first siren and pictured ‘immediate annihilation… entrails… bloodied corpses’. Another woman, sheltering as an eight-year-old during an air-raid, recalled screaming when the air raid warden banged on the shelter door. ‘We thought Hitler had come to get us.’111
By mid-1940, threat of enemy invasion became very real: eastern and south-eastern coastal areas were cleared of their civilian populations.112 Government leaflets instructed what to do if
German parachutists arrived.113 One woman remembered being ‘taught how to flee into the
woods and hills.’114 Buses showed no destinations, signposts and station names were taken
down. Olive K., aged eight in 1940, recalled ‘You had it on your mind – hope I don’t see a German! … [fearing] they’d land, and… ask you the way.’ Olive was with Pamela, an evacuee, when a stranger did just that, asking the way to London. ‘And Pam said to me “We don’t know… You mustn’t ever tell anybody where London is,”… it could have been a German.’115
Invasion fears disturbed even children in the West Country, where junk was scattered on fields and golf courses to prevent enemy aircraft landing, anti-tank barricades built across main roads. With invasion viewed as inevitable, conversation revolved around how the Nazis would behave. Ann Stalcup heard ‘terrible rumours about their cruelty. Townspeople… were killed if
110 Ruth L. Sharman, online oral history contribution ID A2045288, BBC WW2 People’s War, ‘War Time
Childhood in Surbiton’, 2003:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/88/a2045288.shtml [Accessed 19-7-2017]
111 Dennis, p. 1; Jean Birch, cited in Ben Wicks, No Time, p. 166.
112 In 1940, war artist Eric Ravilious titled depictions of Sussex coastal defences his ‘pre-invasion
drawings’, implying imminent invasion. James Russell, Ravilious in Pictures: The War Paintings, (Norwich: Mainstone Press, 2010), p. 26.
113 Nicholson, p. 63; see also Marion Yass, This is Your War: Home Front propaganda in the Second
World War (London: HMSO, 1983), pp. 21, 34-35.
114 BW27, correspondence.
84 they didn’t obey orders quickly enough.’ Questioning their own capacity for violence, people planned to escape into the countryside. ‘Everyone was trying to be brave, but we were all secretly very frightened.’116 Mothers anticipated their daughters being raped. Kathleen W.
remembered her mother insisting ‘If ever the Germans get here, they’ll never have you. I’ll shoot you first.’117 Other parents also contemplated shooting their children: ‘Far worse than
death would be…to grow up Nazis.’118
In WW2’s early stages, government propaganda emphasized the enemy as the Nazis, and feature films distinguished between cunning Nazis and ‘good’, decent Germans.119 However,
growing complacency about inevitable invasion120 prompted an official propaganda ‘Anger
Campaign’, stressing the loss of democratic freedoms under Nazi occupation.121 The popular
press and cinema newsreels presented the enemy as cruel barbarians.122 In 1941, the Ministry
of Information decided to convince the British public ‘of the increasing brutality of the Germans’.123 One official pamphlet claimed Nazism destroyed family life and turned German
children and young men into heartless, fanatical automatons.124 Another depicted a German
soldier as a ‘snarling gorilla-like creature’.125 Over the 1942-1943 winter, concentration camp
revelations began to emerge. A September 1939 opinion poll had shown that the vast majority
116 Ann Stalcup, On the Home Front: Growing up in Wartime England (USA: Linnet Books, 1998), pp. 45-
6, 48-9.
117 Kathleen W., interview; also Kaitlin Wells and Dorothy Williams, cited in Penny Summerfield &
Corinna Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second
World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 264-65.
118 Cited in Longmate, p. 105.
119 For example, Pastor Hall, Freedom Radio, both released in 1940. 120 Home Intelligence report (TNA ref. INF 1/252), cited in Doherty, p. 106.
121 For example, pamphlet titled ‘What Would Happen if Hitler won’ (TNA ref. INF 1/332).
122 For example, ‘Nazis Torpedo Mercy Ship, Kill Children,’ Daily Sketch, 23-9-1940; ‘In Every Heart There
is No Fear, Only a Most Passionate Hatred of the Enemy’, reporting on Coventry, Daily Herald, 16-11- 1940; ‘This Street was Their Playground’, reporting on Southampton, Daily Mirror, 6-12-1940, p. 7; ‘Bomb These Ten Towns!’, Cassandra column, exhorting retaliatory action on Germany, Daily Mirror, 29- 8-1940, p. 4.
123 INF 1/849, cited in Yass, p. 43.
124 HMSO, Children into Ruffians: The New Nazi Education (Watford: Odhams, [n.d.]).
125 The Battle for Civilization, INF 2/1, reproduced in Yass, pp. 44-45; Robert MacKay, Half the Battle:
Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
85 (91 per cent) regarded the Nazi government as their chief enemy, rather than the German nation. By April 1943, the proportion viewing the Germans as their main enemy had increased to 43 per cent.126 Ministry of Information ‘atrocity literature’ continued being produced until
late 1944.127
As the war progressed, threat of invasion receded but popular desire for retribution accelerated. During the Blitz, Londoners were apparently ‘almost evenly divided on the question of whether to give the German population an equal measure of terror.’128 However,
by June 1943 a Home Intelligence report claimed the majority of the British public felt ‘unqualified approval of relentless bombing of Germany, with little or no thought of enemy civilian casualties.’ For some, it was ‘a good thing to kill Germans, not so much from vindictiveness as from policy’; a large majority regarded the bombing as a ‘horrible but necessary’ means of ending the war.129
Maude P. reflected on a growing ‘blunting of sensitivity towards sufferings on the other side. ‘We felt the horror of carpet-bombing Germany, but less than we had felt the shooting-down of a German plane nearby at the beginning of the war. It became more like a game of taking your opponent’s pieces.’130 The war dehumanised the enemy and desensitised the population,
including children. A 1944 medical journal column warned that ‘destructive impulses let loose in war’ encouraged small children’s natural aggression, given that ‘Bombing, killing, burning are all accepted by adults as meritorious when meted out as retribution to the wicked
enemy.’131 Barbara Dennis described watching an aerial dogfight from the school tennis courts
and seeing a German plane falling in flames ‘just the enemy, not human flesh.’132 Joan Tagg,
126 Chapman, p. 221; Doherty, pp. 165-66. 127 TNF 1/672, cited in Yass, pp. 45-47.
128 Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), pp. 295-96.
129 INF 1/292, ‘Home Intelligence Weekly report’, 3 June 1943, cited in Doherty, pp. 165-66. 130 Maude P., correspondence.
131 ‘War in the Nursery’, Annotations, British Medical Journal, 1944, i (4331), (49-50), p. 50. 132 Dennis, p. 10.
86 aged 15, echoed Lorna H., watching Spitfires attacking German bombers: ‘It was just so exciting – like a cinema show really.’133
Lorna H. contrasted her own callous insensitivity with her parents’ more humane moral outlook. A serviceman home on leave was showing off a wallet he’d taken from a German prisoner containing pictures of his family. Lorna remembered thinking ‘it was great – Look at this! Germans! My parents thought [taking personal mementoes] was awful, even though they hated Germans.’ She later reflected ‘You had been taught all those years to hate Germans.’ Her own antipathy had surfaced when ‘the papers used to publish pages of all the [German] atrocities.’134 By summer 1944, public antipathy towards the enemy was reported as
‘intransigent’. Hatred and bitterness intensified after the V-1 and V-2 raids, and renewed revelations about German barbarities in occupied Europe. Many Britons were reportedly demanding ‘total annihilation’ of the Germans.135
Tom Harrisson, drawing on wartime Mass-Observation reports produced for the Ministry of Information, later claimed that what mattered was ‘events and experiences and people’s own innate feelings’.136 Margaret J.’s attitude suggests some validation for this view. Evacuated to
Kent, she recalled witnessing the Battle of Britain overhead and ‘crying when a [German] plane was shot down and everyone else was cheering. I knew even then that it was someone’s father or husband killed and I think that is how I have always felt.’ Thea Burghart, a land worker, remembered sitting in a mangold field eating her packed lunch during the miserable winter of 1942 and feeling sorry for ‘those poor German troops in Russia.’ This triggered a
133 Cited in Nicholson, p. 82. 134 Lorna H., interview.
135 Home Intelligence report, 27 July 1944, cited in Doherty, pp. 178-79.
136 Tom Harrisson, ‘Films and the Home Front – The Evaluation of Their Effectiveness by “Mass-
Observation”’, in Propaganda, Politics and Film ed. by Nicholas Pronay & D. W. Spring (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 234-45.
87 rebuke from a companion that she should be thoroughly ashamed of herself, and they should all freeze to death. By 1945, however, Thea’s pity had evaporated.137
Looking back, one contributor viewed herself as ‘brainwashed for six years’, regarding Germans ‘with horror and terror’. June K. also recalled feeling ‘terrified’ during an air raid, and thinking Germans ‘were terrible. I can honestly say I saw them as sub-human, not like us.’ Joyce S. described herself as ‘very patriotic, very naïve… All I knew of Germans was what I read in newspapers, saw on films, heard about the 1914-18 war, that they were terrible people… I was as frightened as anyone else in the bombing.’ Others described having absorbed their parents’ attitudes. BW26’s father, who had served in WW1, subscribed to the popular belief that there were ‘no good Germans.’ Joyce W.’s mother, who had ‘a lot of influence’ as she grew up, ‘disliked Germans very much and had the worst remembrances of them, all the propaganda from the First World War. So we certainly didn’t have any good feelings about Germans.’ Joyce was left with the impression ‘that Germans were all blond and fat and lacking a sense of humour.’ Conversely, although Sylvia L. had lost a close friend, her Canadian
boyfriend and boys from her class at school, she ‘had no hatred of Germans’, having been more influenced by her friends’ liberal-minded parents and a mother who loved German music.138
This attitude was unusual. Contributors who were working women during WW2 described a shared feeling of hatred, exacerbated by the threat of hostile enemy action. BW29, in the relocated Woolwich Arsenal, a vast rural site camouflaged to look from the air like ploughed fields, was upset by Lord Haw Haw’s constant’s threats that the Germans would bomb them, which did happen, ‘one dreadful night’. She described most people, herself included, wanting to ruthlessly bomb and kill all Germans, to end the war. Another Donnington worker, whose
137 Burghart, pp. 47, 79.
138 BW26, correspondence; June K., interview; Joyce S., correspondence; BW26, interview; Joyce W.,
88 hometown had been heavily bombed, recalled sending Woodbines to the RAF with notes inside, asking them to put her name on a bomb. Her attitude towards Germans was unequivocal: she ‘loathed’ them, saw them as ‘bestial’, later reflecting that it was just accepted that ‘only us’ spoke the truth.139
Phyllis H., whose father felt no bitterness from WW1, believed her anti-German feelings were influenced more by her peer group and the media than her parents. She described herself as too young to fear invasion, but otherwise very impressionable, going to the cinema, listening to her friends, unthinkingly adopting popular anti-German attitudes, with adolescent bravado: ‘I used to say what I would do to them, what I wouldn’t do to them… But I was only fifteen or sixteen. I would probably have run a mile.’140 Some schoolboys found an outlet for intense
‘anti-German feeling generated by the government and the press,’ by kicking and spitting on parked Opel cars.141 Lorna H. found hers by standing beside ‘a big bomb’ at the town hall
‘persuading people to buy savings stamps’ to stick on the bomb. ‘That was great, we were going to kill Germans.’ She insisted she felt no fear, only aggressive hatred, intensified by depiction of Germans in war films. Lorna went to the cinema three times a week. She loved romantic dramas, musicals and comedies, but also enjoyed patriotic war films – ‘Always the ugly ones were the Germans, with monocles and bald heads…. Made you hate them. You felt you wanted to fight ’em, kill them.’ 142
Of a sample of British civilians questioned in 1943, 32 per cent visited the cinema at least once weekly. For a cinema audience primarily looking for escapist entertainment, feature films (despite formulaic plots, set in occupied countries where heroic resistance characters battled
139 BW29, interview; BW17, interview. 140 Phyllis H., interview.
141 Alan Lake, ‘Anti-German Propaganda’, article ID A1170956, in ‘Childhood and Evacuation’, BBC WW2
People’s War, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/56/a1170956.shtml [accessed 16-
1- 2015].
142 Lorna H., interview. Schoolchildren were encouraged to help raise money for munitions, through a
summer holiday ‘Buy a war weapon through your savings group’ campaign, see Stewart A. Ross, At
89 cruel and brutal German villains) were judged a more effective propaganda tool, more
subliminally portraying the enemy Other as a villain to be feared and hated.143 Five- to
seventeen-year-olds, although only a fifth of the population, represented a third of all civilian cinema-goers.144 Younger cinema-goers may have been more impressionable, more receptive
to negative images of the enemy. A major US research project in the late 1920s, arising from concerns about the new mass medium’s effects on children’s attitudes and behaviour, studied the extent to which films could influence children’s attitudes, including towards other
nationalities. The findings indicated that effects of a single film were insignificant, but several similarly themed films produced significant attitude modification towards views expressed in them; effects of films on the social attitudes of children could not only persist, but increase with the passage of time. It was concluded that children’s attitudes were definitely influenced by some films, and by seeing two or more films with the same bias.145
Of films viewed by one of a 1945 female teenage sample, most reflected Lorna H.’s tastes: romantic dramas, comedies or musicals, but also a war film depicting heroic Allies and evil Nazis.146 The appeal of such films varied. One self-confessed film addict since the age of eight,
admitted at fourteen, in 1943, going ‘absolutely mad on’ war films, which reinforced German brutality and her own hatred of Germans. She fantasized being ‘caught by the Germans, undergoing torture but forever remaining silent.’ Two other sixteen-year-olds liked films showing ‘the type of man against whom we were fighting.’ However, an eighteen-year-old
143 Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939-49 (London: Routledge,
1989), pp. 19-20; James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda 1939-45 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), pp. 221-31; Jo Fox, Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 136-59.
144 J. P. Mayer, British Cinemas and their Audiences: sociological studies (London: Dennis Dobson,
1948), Ministry of Information Wartime Social Survey, pp. 251-72.
145 Ruth C. Peterson & L I Thurstone, Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children (New York:
Macmillan, 1933; Arno Press & New York Times reprint, 1970), pp. 64-66; also referenced in Shearon A. Lowery & Melvin L De Fleur, Milestones in Mass Communication Research: Media Effects, (London: Longman, 1983, 1988 edn), pp. 39-44.
90 suggested ‘everyone is tired of underground war films… you’d seen the invariable chase by Gestapo so often before.’147
Occasionally the actual enemy was glimpsed on newsreels of captured German airmen. Joyce W. wrote of ‘seeing lorryloads of Italian POWs in Cambridge’ early in the war. ‘That was a sensation!’148 Otherwise, in a country bombed but neither invaded nor occupied, the enemy
remained a chimera, a monstrous caricature of evil Otherness, depicted by lurid cartoons, newspaper headlines and cinema villains. However, on the edge of the British population’s postwar difficulties, the enemy human presence loomed, at first in intimidating numbers in large, fenced-off camps, then numerous smaller camps, hostels and farm billets across the UK.
Conclusion
Drawing on official reports, oral sources and secondary studies, this chapter has considered WW2’s influence on British females, subscribing to the view that its impact differed according to age and individual experience. While married women bore the brunt of wartime anxieties, work demands and domestic difficulties, younger women, children and adolescents felt its insecurities, freedoms, excitements, and novelties. Anecdotal oral evidence of married women’s postwar difficulties of readjustment, and official awareness of social problems seen as related to fathers’ absence suggest that a proportion of wartime households functioned without a male head. Paternal absence (through mobilisation into the forces or direction of labour) offered children role models of women accomplishing men’s work and, to rephrase Todd’s words, temporarily establishing the home as a site of matriarchal power. Young women consolidated growing independent agency.
147 Mayer, pp. 35, 38, 170, 175, 186. 148 Joyce W., correspondence.
91 The effect of wartime propaganda on the young, including contributors to this study, is
pertinent to this study’s consideration of openness to transgressive agency in the form of attraction to the enemy, despite former deeply entrenched anti-German sentiments. Chapter Three discusses formative experiences of the young Germans these young women were about to meet. The dynamic of such encounters is explored in Section B.
92
Chapter 3: Young German men – war and personal
transformation
Introduction
This chapter discusses influences on young German males and formative experiences growing up in the interwar period, including Hitler Youth membership, military training and war service. Effects of combat and captivity on personal development and morale are also explored. Many German POWs faced stressful ordeals and testing reversals in their late teens and early twenties, a life stage when, as discussed in the introduction to Section A, young adult
personality is consolidated. Understanding the nature of their experiences crucially contributes to understanding how male contributors to this study reacted to encountering young British women.1
Since most male contributors to this study were not specifically asked for childhood details, comparable published and oral firsthand accounts have also been drawn on in this chapter.2
Titles of published accounts emphasize their subjects’ personal odyssey, either geographically (From Pomerania to Ponteland and From Schöneiche to Alton), or by stressing an outsider identity (A Stranger in Three Continents and Foreign Shores). Others focus on subjective transformation (Trautmann’s Journey: from Hitler Youth to FA Club Legend and From Hitler Youth to Church of England Priest). Having written about their captivity and combat experiences, two former POWs produced a second volume of reminiscences directly
1 Year of birth has been established for fourteen male contributors to this study. Apart from one in
1919, all these births fell between 1920 and 1926.
2 Twelve published biographical and autobiographical accounts of former German POWs (of whom ten
were held in the UK, including six who had relationships with British women) have been drawn on in this chapter. Nine were born between 1920 and 1925, one in 1929, and two pre-1920s. Imperial War