The Bitter Taste of Victory (14 page)

British troops in Hamburg wanting to be entertained by a more highbrow art form could also go to the theatre, where there was no danger of Anglo-German contamination. At the end of May, Sybil Thorndike, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and sixty-two other members of the Old Vic theatre company had arrived from London, under the auspices of ENSA (Entertainments National Services Association). They performed
Peer Gynt
,
Arms and the Man
and
Richard III
in Hamburg and Lubeck and at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to packed and enthusiastic audiences. They were all given the honorary rank of lieutenant and had to wear uniform when offstage.

The actors experienced the usual ambivalence of Anglo-American onlookers confronting the German ruins. On their way into Germany the pilot banked down over Essen to show them the damage and Sybil Thorndike began to cry. She had read about the bombing of Essen and Hamburg in the newspaper during the war but it was shocking to see the realities of the air campaign now. The centre of Hamburg had been flattened in an eight-day bombing raid in 1943 whose codename ‘Operation Gomorrah’ had proved horribly apposite. During the night of 27/28 July alone, twelve square miles were reduced to rubble and 18,474 people killed in a firestorm created by the combined might of 729 heavy bombers. By the end of the war 43,000 had been killed, 900,000 evacuated and 61 per cent of houses and flats destroyed. Much of the city was now a desolate wasteland. Walking around the centre, Thorndike wondered where people lived. ‘I’m just bowled over with it,’ she told her husband; ‘I think English people should see it – and the senselessness and waste of war and the hatred engendered.’ One day they escaped into the German countryside, accompanied by an army officer. Watching as a farmer went by on a cart drawn by two horses and piled with
hay, Thorndike said: ‘It’s so beautiful, this is what we fought the war for, a free and a decent and an open life like this. . . we must preserve it.’ Later she was distressed to receive a visit from a security officer who told her it was improper to be heard speaking about the enemy in such favourable terms.
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Thorndike spoke good German and was frustrated not to be able to talk to any of the people she saw. After a few days she decided to risk being sent back to England for breaking the non-fraternisation rule and started chatting to shopkeepers, room maids and farm workers. ‘I feel this in some way is a sign of friendliness,’ she wrote, ‘or rather a desire for peace.’ But her friendliness was curbed when they visited Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where the head of the Red Cross medical team had asked if they would stage a matinee for the staff. The camp still had 40,000 inmates and there were 10,000 corpses rotting in the sun. Thorndike was taken around the children’s hospital where she was appalled by the skeletal figures. She talked to a woman who had witnessed her husband and daughter being shot and was now watching her remaining daughter dying – ‘a poor little girl like a ghost with a shaven head’. Afterwards the actors were unable to eat their lunch but they managed to perform
Arms and the Man
in the vast cinema where Marlene Dietrich’s sister and her husband had made their living entertaining the camp commandants during the war. ‘I was in a haze, a nasty evil-smelling haze,’ Thorndike wrote. ‘I’ll never forget this all my life. Oh, war turns people into monsters – though some heroism comes sometimes, doesn’t it? I’ll never get over today – never.’
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Back in Hamburg the company was joined by the writer and artist Mervyn Peake, who was in Germany as a war artist accompanied by the journalist Tom Pocock. Like Thorndike, Peake was horrified by the plight of the German civilians and then sickened by a visit to Belsen, where he sketched the skeletal figures dying before his eyes and wrote a poem about a consumptive woman he saw in the hospital. In the poem Peake asks how, watching the woman in the ‘hour before her last’, he could want to paint her, ‘her limbs like pipes, her head a china skull’. If his schooled eyes can see the ghost of a great painting in the body of a
dying woman then where is mercy? The poet is appalled by his own emotional vacancy and vows to remember the moment in all its horror:

Her agony slides through me: I am glass

That grief can find no grip

Save for a moment when the quivering lip

And the coughing weaker than the broken wing

That, fluttering, shakes the life from a small bird

Caught me as in a nightmare? . . .

Those coughs were her last words. They had no weight

Save that through them was made articulate

Earth’s desolation on the alien bed.

Though I be glass, it shall not be betrayed,

That last weak cough of her small trembling head.
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More than most of the writers and artists in Germany that summer, Peake had come with a clear sense of mission; he had felt that he could somehow lessen human antagonism by illustrating the images of war. In his view, this was the role of the writer or artist in a time of crisis. Writing to his wife from Paris on the way to Germany, he told her that he would not forget ‘the reasons which prompted me to try and go to where people suffer. I will miss you desperately, but I will be proud to do something which we both believe in.’ Once there, he found in the sights of ruined Germany a version of his own grotesque style; here were the shapes of his imagination given architectural and human form. However, he was no longer sure that sketching them was going to do much to save humanity and it was a relief to join the Old Vic troupe in Hamburg and relax into the more familiar world of the theatre. Peake drew Olivier in his costume with a false nose as Richard III and joined in the theatrical parties. None the less his wife reflected that he seemed to have changed dramatically when he returned from Germany in July. ‘He was quieter, more inward-looking, as if he had lost, during that month in Germany, his confidence in life itself.’
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These visits to Bergen-Belsen went some way to convincing Thorndike and Peake of the validity of the non-fraternisation policy. If most Germans had been complicit in the concentration camps – if it was culpable simply not to protest – then they could not be treated as friends. But the problem remained that the Germans could not continue as the enemy indefinitely and that re-education was only going to occur through interaction. On 12 June the law was changed so that British and US troops were allowed to speak to and play with children. The Americans were now less committed than the British to the non-fraternisation rule and it seemed likely that it would be overturned within the next few months. But if they were no longer going to behave antagonistically to the Germans, then how were they going to convince them of their guilt? This was the question that confronted the film-maker Billy Wilder when he arrived in Germany in June, sent by the US to be partially responsible for film in the American zone.

An Austrian-Polish Jew, Wilder had been a successful film-maker in Berlin before emigrating to the US after the Nazis came to power in 1933. Arriving in New York aged twenty-eight, Wilder spoke no English but he had always been impertinently resourceful so he managed to persuade friends to give him work in the film industry. As in Berlin, his rise to success was rapid and by 1945 he was an obvious candidate for the government to send to help reconstruct the German film industry and determine how to use film as a vehicle for democratic propaganda. Wilder was furious with both the Austrians and the Germans, whose anti-Semitism he had always recognised, and wanted little to do with any of them, but he was keen to find the whereabouts of his mother and grandmother, whom he suspected may have died in concentration camps. In May he travelled to London as the production chief for the film, theatre and music control section of the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD). His role was initially to advise on the kind of films to be produced in Britain for German consumption during the postwar years.

At this point a documentary of concentration camp footage was being prepared in London, intended to record the German atrocities
and to convince the Germans of their guilt. In February, Sidney Bernstein, chief of PWD’s Film Section, Liberated Areas, had told General McClure that the Soviet authorities were preparing to make a film using concentration camp footage and that he thought the Western Allies should do the same. McClure was reluctant, believing that films exhibited in Germany should demonstrate ‘the way of living in democratic countries’ rather than showing war footage. Bernstein began to watch footage produced by the Americans liberating the first concentration camps and then visited Bergen-Belsen on 22 April to record sound interviews with British officials and the German SS, wanting to produce definitive proof of the German atrocities. He now persuaded McClure to let him make a full-length documentary as a combined Anglo-American production, aiming to convince the Germans to forsake National Socialism and, ‘by reminding the German people of their past acquiescence in the perpetuation of such crimes, to make them aware that they cannot escape responsibility for them, and thus to promote German acceptance of the justice of Allied occupation measures’.
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When Wilder arrived in London the film was already in production. Alfred Hitchcock was advising on the final cuts with editors Stewart McAllister and Peter Tanner. Wilder’s task was to watch hour after hour of concentration camp footage, helping select scenes for the film. As he sat through sickening shots of crematoria, ash piles and lampshades made of human skin, he waited anxiously to see whether he would recognise his mother or grandmother in the piles of skeletal corpses. Asked years later about the footage, Wilder remembered one scene in particular: ‘There was an entire field, a whole landscape of corpses. And next to one of the corpses sat a dying man. He is the only one moving in this totality of death and he glances apathetically into the camera. Then he turns, tries to stand up, and falls over, dead. Hundreds of bodies, and the look of this dying man. Shattering.’
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In the middle of June 1945, Wilder was sent to Germany via Paris. Initially he was based at Bad Homburg, the spa town near Frankfurt where McClure’s PWD had its HQ. Sections of both the British and the US occupation forces were headquartered in spa towns that formed
odd havens of undamaged, self-satisfied German
Gemütlichkeit
amid the ruins. The headquarters at Bad Homburg were more military than the equivalent British HQ at Bad Oeynhausen in Westphalia. The PWD had set themselves up in a barbed-wire enclosed compound that had previously been a training facility for German railway workers. It included twenty-five houses, a large auditorium, a mess with a bar and a kitchen. Wilder was reporting to McClure and working closely with his deputy, an American colonel called William Paley who was in charge of operations. He became friends with both Paley and his assistant, Davidson Taylor, who was responsible for the Film, Theatre and Music Control Section. Wilder and Paley managed to concoct elaborate dinners in Paley’s kitchen, using a broken toaster as a barbecue and eating food that Wilder bartered for cigarettes in the German countryside. Wilder especially enjoyed the straightforwardness of this male companionship because it followed a period of unusually complicated womanising in LA, where his marriage was in jeopardy because he was having simultaneous affairs with two actors, the twenty-one-year-old Doris Dowling and the twenty-two-year-old Audrey Young.

Paley and Taylor now became so frustrated by the slowness of Bernstein’s film in London that they decided to make their own concentration camp documentary in Bad Homburg. The Russian film-maker Sergei Nalbandov had already been trying to assemble some of the footage; now Taylor suggested that Wilder should take over and prepare the script. The film would then be assembled in Germany under Wilder’s supervision. Wilder began some work on this project but in the meantime McClure decided to test screen a two-reel preview of the atrocity documentary from London entitled
KZ
(
Konzentrationslager
). Cinemas were officially closed to German audiences until July, but the army opened a selection of cinemas advertising a series of films including the innocuous-sounding
Welt im Film no 2
, which was the
KZ
documentary masquerading as a newsreel.

Wilder and Taylor attended one of these screenings at the Lichtspiele in Erlangen on 25 June. The other films advertised included
Duke Ellington and Orchestra
and
Cowboy
. They reported that when the title
KZ
appeared on the screen there was a gasp throughout the
audience. Expressions of shock and horror were audible throughout the screening; whether because the audience resented being hoodwinked into watching the footage or because the atrocities came as a revelation is unclear. Their report went on: ‘When the title “Buchenwald” came on the screen, the audience spoke the word almost as one man. The atmosphere was electric throughout the film, and a palpable feeling of incredulity ran through the audience when the narrator said that the wife of the commandant at Buchenwald had made lamp shades from tattooed human skin. We have footage showing this collection of tattoos and why it was not used I cannot say.’
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