Heligoland (23 page)

The Versailles Treaty was finally ratified on 10 January 1920 and the task of defortifying Heligoland could formally begin. Cunningham’s Heligoland Sub-Commission, consisting of seventeen Royal Engineers, travelled to the island on HMS
Coventry
in February 1920, to superintend the business of demolition. Perhaps appropriately, they were to make their headquarters in the Empress of India hotel by the foreshore, which had been named by Governor O’Brien in the 1880s. It was a peculiar experience for them to be in effective military control of this German-owned island, some thirty years after it had ceased to be a British colony. In anticipation of their arrival someone had scribbled on a wall an old Heligoland proverb:
Liewar duad es Skloaw
(‘Better dead than a slave’). But the crews of the German minesweeping vessels which used the harbour as a base had quite different views and blatantly showed their disapproval of the British presence by assembling outside the Empress of India singing
Deutschland über Alles
and throwing stones at the building. However, that soon stopped and an apology was tendered by the officer commanding the minesweepers. Interestingly, although the singing took place round the statue of Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, it took some time for Cunningham’s party to realise the song’s famous lyrics had been written on the island.

A meeting was arranged with the German Commission to agree a procedure for the dismantling of the fortifications. Bizarrely, the Commission included both the former chief engineer, who had spent some time on the island during the war, and also the man who had constructed the war harbour – and now had to assist in its destruction, surely a unique record. They were dignified, hurt, and not inclined to forgive or forget. They had lived there year by year, had built all those fortifications and designed the intricate machinery – and now had to watch as it was all smashed up and scrapped! They claimed that it was unfair to enforce the dismantlement of Heligoland. Germany, they felt, had not been truly vanquished and now was being miserably treated. The German technicians originally stated that the dismantling would take seven years to complete, but pressure was brought to bear and a few plans altered until that estimate was whittled down to two years. The work of demolition then began, carried out by some 500– 600 German labourers under the supervision of the Sub-Commission. They worked well and gave little trouble. The operation seemed set to be a reverse of the building process.
¹

In fact, in the preceding months some minor dismantling had already taken place. Instruments, gun-sights and fittings of all kinds had been taken as souvenirs by the departing naval garrison. Hitherto working at a rather leisurely pace, they had removed light guns, anti-aircraft batteries and searchlights, leaving stores of timber and metal littered about the Oberland. Now the Allied dismantlers were in charge and they concentrated their attention on the main armament. At the north and south groups of twin 12in gun turrets, the workers began their task, laboriously slicing the huge gun barrels of Anna, Bertha, Caesar and Dora into sections with oxy-hydrogen cutters. Similarly cut up were the eight coastal defence 11in howitzers and four single-turret 21cm guns in the centre of the island. Next they turned their attention to the secondary armament: batteries of 15cm and 8.8cm quick-firing guns mounted on the cliff edge overlooking the harbour, and numerous 3.7cm antiaircraft guns. On the main island an ingenious wooden extractor mechanism was devised for pulling out sections of gun mountings, and various impromptu branch lines were added to the existing light railway in order to move the dismembered pieces of weaponry to the diagonal funicular railway tunnel and down to the harbour. With the remains of the guns went trolley-loads of live ammunition. All the cut-up metal was taken to Wilhelmshaven and sold, and the proceeds divided among the Allies. Where concrete emplacements proved resistant to pneumatic drills they were shattered with dynamite demolition charges. A highly significant discovery – which certainly ought to have been known many years later – was that only 11⁄2lb of explosive was needed to break up a ton of chilled cast-iron around the turret beds. Some of the main tunnels connecting the north group to the howitzer batteries and south group, and the cable and pipe tunnels at a lower level, could not be destroyed even by this means and instead were bricked up.

While the dismantling was in progress a considerable friendship developed between the islanders and the British officers. To the British, the islanders seemed Scandinavian in appearance, pleasant and courteous in manner, and devoted to their island home. Cunningham’s superior, Admiral Sir Edward Charlton, visited Heligoland and asked the local people he met what they did in winter. The reply was: count the money they had made in the summer! The islanders were particularly impressed that when off duty the officers mingled informally with the local people, even donning traditional fishermen’s attire. The Heligolanders, it seems, were appreciative that although extensive dynamiting work needed to be done the British engineers were always careful to minimise the inconvenience caused. They even put steel netting around the sites being blown up to protect the islanders’ property from flying shards of metal and concrete.

Spreading their activities down to the water’s edge the dismantlers then flattened the seaplane base, including its hangars and stranded aircraft. By July 1920 they were hard at work preparing to demolish the dry dock and the west mole. The sides of the dry dock were blown up and the foundations of the moles were destroyed by explosives, and the winter gales, always heavy, soon made them little more than a mass of ruins. The main harbour entrance was sealed by huge 2-ton blocks dropped from a floating crane. The retaining walls around the reclaimed ground created by Tirpitz, on which stood the dockyard building, were pierced to allow the sea to suck out the millions of tons of sand brought from the Elbe for its formation. Thus the whole place appeared to have been wrecked in such a manner that no new harbour could be constructed on the site. Over at Dune a battery of antiaircraft guns, a signal station and searchlight were similarly destroyed. Eventually, on 1 June 1922, the entire work of orderly destruction was completed, the last act being the immobilisation of the diagonal tunnel from the Unterland to the Oberland. All the while, conscious that they would need to be able to prove to the Inter-Allied Commission and the outside world that the fortifications had been razed, the Royal Engineers had been accumulating an impressive photographic record of their demolition activities. This was gathered into a vast leather-bound album which they took with them when the Commission departed in 1922.
²
It seemed that British interest in the island could henceforth surely be only sentimental and historical.

No sooner had the British departed than it became apparent that the destruction of the sea walls could already be having a potentially devastating effect on the island. The moles and port installations had been razed below the level of low water. The sole exception was part of the long west mole. Some 300 metres of this, nearest the Sudhorn – the southernmost rocky tip of the island – was spared to protect the weather side of the fishing-boat harbour. However, the rest of the unprotected areas of Tirpitz’s reclaimed dockyard land were visibly being gnawed away by the sea. If the sea walls were not restored, in just a few years as much as a quarter of the island could be washed away. Even the lifeboat station was at risk. Somehow the islanders managed to patch up enough of the vulnerable deconstructed remains to stem the depletion.

The islanders did what they could to attract visitors back to Heligoland, building a football pitch for soccer enthusiasts, a public swimming pool and, for more discerning visitors, a tennis court on the Strand promenade. Ugly stumps of steel and concrete – the scars left by the Allies’ systematized demilitarisation – remained, but even so the tourists started to return. The reintroduction of the Dover– Heligoland yacht races also helped to put a shine on the island’s tarnished kudos. Gradually the numbers of trippers grew and by the early 1930s Heligoland was welcoming some 30,000 visitors a year – more than before the First World War. Fewer than ever were British, but such was the lingering affection for England in the island that visitors could still stay in the Hotel Victoria or the Hotel Queen Victoria, and enjoy an evening’s entertainment at the Queen Victoria-Bierhalle.

Map 7
In contravention of the Versailles treaty, during the 1930s Germany commenced Project ‘Hummerschere’ (lobster claws): an ambitious scheme to create a German Scapa Flow by building on Heligoland’s 1729 shallows. In 1938 Hitler himself visited Heligoland to see how work was progressing – and even walked down the High Street – but the project was never completed. (
Helgoland Regierung
)

In the midst of all this, there was also a revival of the nineteenth-century tradition of intellectuals gaining exceptional flashes of inspiration on Heligoland; this happened when the German scientist Werner Heisenberg visited the island in June 1925 to do some research and recover from flu. One night he had an idea and he went for a stroll along the Oberland cliff-tops overlooking the Lower Town to consider it further. Not far from the grounds of Government House, where Arthur Barkly had handed over the island thirty-five years earlier, he developed the brilliant mathematical theory that became known as the uncertainty principle. It explained the structure of the hydrogen atom and although he was only twenty-four at the time of the discovery it eventually won him the Nobel Prize for Physics.

The initial impact on Heligoland of the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party was economic. In Hamburg alone there had been 173,000 unemployed as recently as 1932. But in 1933 Hitler’s efforts to ease the economic crisis meant increased affluence on the German mainland and tourism on the island flourished. This time the visitors were more affluent than ever, eager to spend their new-found wealth in the island’s numerous drinking places and in the expensive gift shops that lined the Lung Wai, the main street leading up from the landing stage. In the Kaiserstrade trippers could purchase collectable pictures by the Heligolander Franz Schensky, an internationally renowned underwater photographer who specialised in beautifully dramatic pictures of the island in rough weather. Other scenes he depicted were of traditional fishing boats, such as the elegantly functional shallow schooners and ketches favoured by the islanders, irrespective of the sophistication of the tourists.

During a celebrated speech on 21 May 1935 Hitler unilaterally repudiated the clauses demanding the disarmament of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. It was he who alleged that agents of the German Navy at Versailles had tricked the Allies into sparing the fishing-boat harbour at Heligoland – and thus the demilitarisation had never really been carried out! The commencement of the refortification of the island meant the islanders’ peaceful existence was shattered. Soon the German Navy uncovered the funicular railway tunnel leading from the harbour to the Oberland, and set about rebuilding the fortifications that had been there in 1918. To establish beyond doubt Germany’s command of the seas around the island, and thus of the outer estuaries of the Weser and Elbe, huge 12in and 6in guns were mounted in turrets on the cliff-tops. Those large naval weapons, situated some 200ft above sea-level, were capable of firing shells some 40,000 yards. Impressive though they were, in fact the island was actually
less
well armed now than it had been in the First World War. Instead of eight 12in guns, it had only three, mounted in single turrets in what was called Batterie Schröder at the northern end of the island.

Hitler’s next step was to implement an epic plan to use the newly fortified Heligoland not just as an anti-aircraft fortress, but as a centre for the creation of a gigantic new naval base to rival Scapa Flow, the Royal Navy’s strategic anchorage in the Orkneys. Codenamed ‘Project Hummerschere’, the scheme was the brainchild of Admiral ‘Dr’ Erich Raeder, the commander of the German Navy (1928–43), who was already achieving some renown as the strategic rebuilder of Germany’s naval might. In effect Raeder was trying to recreate Heligoland as it had been in 1629, according to the famous map. In the seventeenth century the two halves of the island, called Rock Island and White Cliff, were linked by a natural causeway which had been swept away in a ferocious storm in 1721. Instead of building another causeway, Raeder intended to create a giant lagoon, some 4 miles long and 2 wide, with huge claw-shaped areas of land on either side – hence the name of the project, as Hummerschere means ‘lobster claws’. The eastern arm, to be developed by extending Sandy Island northwards, would also serve as a Luftwaffe air base.

By 1937 Raeder’s plan had been approved and construction work was in progress. The building of tunnels and underground chambers, by dynamiting and drilling, at the southern tip of Heligoland’s Oberland produced many thousands of tons of excavated rock spoil. This appears to have been carted to the north-west corner of the main island and used for land reclamation. Dumped behind a sea wall it began to enlarge the area of the island by several hectares. Extending north from the ‘Lange Anna’, the northernmost tip of the main island, was built a kilometre-long mole which would, Raeder planned, serve as the west sea wall of the north dockyard. Over at Sandy Island a parallel mole, the Dünendamm West, was also extended northwards. Into the segments behind the breakwater were brought thousands of tons of sand dredged from the Loreley Bank several miles offshore. According to one legend of Atlantis, many centuries earlier this had formed part of the once huge island of greater Heligoland. Bizarrely, history was now being reversed. Enchanted by this scheme, Hitler visited Heligoland to inspect the huge construction works. He landed at the edge of the Unterland, just as the Kaiser had done, and walked along the main street. The date of this visit was 23 August 1938 – just a month before the Munich Crisis.

Under the Treaty of Versailles Germany was forbidden to rearm Heligoland. Article 115 clearly stated: ‘These fortifications . . . shall not be reconstructed, nor shall any similar works be constructed in future.’ Hitler, however, had no intention of abiding by the Treaty. In 1936 MPs at Westminster started asking parliamentary questions about the rumoured refortification. The first shot in what was to become an increasingly intense assault on the Conservative government’s policy of appeasement with regard to Heligoland was fired on 13 July by the relatively unknown Commander Locker-Lampson MP. He sought to discover from the Foreign Secretary whether Britain had any right to inspect the island or whether that had been waived. He received a vague response from a junior Foreign Minister, Viscount Cranbourne. Astonishingly, Cranbourne, like Arthur Balfour, was also a relative of the late Premier, Lord Salisbury.
³
Far from reassured by the reply, just two weeks later other MPs pressed further, wanting to know details of Germany’s apparent contravention of the terms of the Treaty: ‘What representation has been made to Germany on the matter and what reply has been received?’ Determined not to be lured into a position of picking a diplomatic fight with Germany on the question of the island, this time Anthony Eden himself answered. He acknowledged that the action of the German government was unilateral, but said that he did not propose to deal with this question separately since to do so might prejudice the negotiations which had just been set in train for a western pact.