So Diels was moved, promised not to run away, just as his host had promised not to let him, and there he remained, true to his word until I left Nuremberg in November 1947. (He was, in fact, still there two years later when I dropped in on them all. I noticed then, as I had before, how close the rapport between him and Marianne seemed to be, but that was, surely, no concern of mine. During my long stay in Nuremberg I spent many a happy weekend in that house and it is regrettable that, for reasons of tact and discretion, no more than that can be told).
The last time I saw Diels[5] was in June 1949 when I was collecting material for a series of articles that I wrote for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune.[6] We went for a long walk while Marianne was preparing our meal. He told me of the long, uphill struggle he had had, trying to avoid a harsh verdict under the still functioning de-Nazification proceedings. Diels’s farm near Hanover was, he told me, still being held by British Property Control.[7]
26. FAMILY REUNIONS
BACK IN BAD OEYNHAUSEN IN 1945 my days in the compound were coming to a close with BWCE being rapidly brought up to full strength. We now had translators, clerks, drivers, a quartermaster and all the other paraphernalia that seems to be accumulated wherever an army unit is functioning. This included a number of lorries and Mercedes saloons for officers, one of which had been assigned to me. Within the unit we had three officers, six NCOs and some thirty ORs. Leslie Hill was still with us and we had been joined by Captain Emsley, who was also a linguist.
By the time we received our orders to set off for Nuremberg I had long made up my mind not to take the shortest and quickest route. There were two people I wanted to find first – my mother, from whom I had had no news for over two years, and, if at all possible, my ex-wife Maditta.
We had been instructed as to which route the unit was to take, and it was only after we had left the compound that I told my driver about the planned detour. There wasn’t much he could do about it and, in any case, he didn’t care a hoot.
We went from Bad Oeynhausen to the Allgau[1] where my mother had been living when I last had news from her (indirectly, of course) and I soon found the elderly woman who had once, during my childhood years, been our housekeeper. Yes, she knew where my mother was and I found her in less than an hour.
She was feeding chickens when I arrived. She had aged terribly and she looked much older than her sixty-seven years. We had not seen each other for seven years; seven years that had been a nightmare for her. She cried at first of course and then she told me of her ordeal. After our last meeting, in Switzerland in the spring of 1939, she had decided to leave Pasing, where we had lived together, and to move to the Allgau where a former governess of mine had promised to find a flat for her, and this is where she was living when war broke out. For some time, nothing changed. There were blackouts and air-raid drills, and rationing was severe, however people were being decent to her.
Then one day in January 1941 an army officer called at her home, which was close to a tiny airfield. She was told I had joined the British Forces and might try to use her, for instance, to give signals for landings on that airstrip, and she would therefore have to leave at once. The local party organisation was taking over, following orders from the military.
That was when her misery began.
She was given just forty-eight hours to move out. No alternative accommodation was available. No, nobody was going to help her. She had, furthermore, been married to a suspicious man, possibly English, and possibly a Jew, and she was required to supply her ‘Ariernachweis’ (proof of pure German race) immediately if she wanted to stay out of a concentration camp. My former governess provided a roof over her head and she spent endless hours, writing for documents, collecting birth certificates and resurrecting her pedigree. When it was done, she was told that she was under grave suspicion but would remain free. Her ration coupons, however, were withdrawn, she was not allowed to travel and her health insurance was annulled. Theoretically, she was condemned to death through starvation, or exposure, or illness, but our friends from the days long gone didn’t let that happen. So, there she was, feeding their chickens and helping them where she was able, when I suddenly turned up, not as she was quick to say, in the least bit unexpectedly.
There had been one other nasty experience, which she hesitated to relate for fear that it might embarrass me. When the US Army had appeared, they had robbed her of every item of value she had saved and cleaned her out of all she had in the little room in which she was surviving – and they had not been the least bit gentle with her. So the side on which I was serving had stolen, from a helpless old lady, some of my childhood souvenirs. It was one of the injustices of war and it got under my skin.
Months later I was escorting General Curtis LeMay, the top American Commander, through the courthouse in Nuremberg when I interrupted his praise of my performance as an interpreter. ‘General,’ I said, ‘I’m glad you were impressed. Now, could I ask you a favour?’ I told him about his gallant men’s conduct. He froze and handed me over to his adjutant – and that was the end of that, of course.
Mother had, however, succeeded in saving some pieces of antique furniture and a few pictures, by distributing them amongst some of her friends, and she had hidden a valuable china tea service; all of which she wanted me to take away with me. I could not do that of course, nor could I take mother with me. I was a British officer attached to the United States Army – so how could I turn up at Nuremberg with a German mother?
We had much to tell each other. This sort of reunion puts a great deal of emotional strain on two people who were very close and yet unable to be truly relaxed with each other. I had brought much suffering into her life through my flight from Germany and service for England and I couldn’t do anything conclusive to make up for it. (When I was later in a position to offer her a comfortable flat close to me she preferred to remain in a home for the elderly, waiting to get well enough to move into a place of her own; which never happened).
When I had to leave mother with her chickens the following morning she was in excellent spirits. My driver and I headed for Munich and I was wondering whether I would be as successful in locating my former wife Maditta. I need not have worried. As my Mercedes was bouncing over potholes and rubble I spotted her walking along a street – which I had no business taking and where she had no cause to be. She was recognisable to me from 300 yards away by her slightly knock-kneed and very typical walk.
I pulled up alongside her and rolled the window down. She noticed the private, my driver, sitting next to me, and she said in her perfect English – and here I will quote her verbatim: ‘Ah, there you are at last. I had expected you much earlier. Let’s go to the Conti (the Hotel Continental, only half destroyed, and just around the corner from where we were) and have a chat.’
I told my driver to pick me up from there later and we descended the steps to the air-raid shelter of the Conti which was a cafe in the morning and afternoon, a restaurant for lunch and dinner and a nightclub after 23.00 hours. It was amazingly elegant. The owner, Max Billig, had unearthed some of his own antique furniture, someone had done wonders with wrought iron grills and the place had an atmosphere of luxury which was completely unbelievable to one who had just been picking his way through rubble, ruins and bomb craters and over mountains of bricks and lumps of concrete. Munich had been truly bombed to hell, totally destroyed – Rotterdamned, Hamburgered, to quote some of the ghastly expressions that had been used in the British Press during the war. Perhaps the picture had shaken me all the more because I had lived some of the best years of my life in Munich and was still emotionally attached to the city. (Now that Munich has been most effectively reconstructed I find myself happily aglow and sentimentally affected whenever I go back there. Munich is one of very few places where many things are ‘as they used to be’).
5
Rudolf Diels presented an affidavit for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials and was also summoned to testify in Goering’s defence. After 1950 he served in the post-war government of Lower Saxony and then in the Ministry of the Interior. He died on 18 November 1957 when his rifle accidentally discharged while he was hunting.
6
Following the Nuremberg Trials Wolfe Frank risked his life again by going underground in both West and East Germany to write a series of articles for the
7
Many German-owned properties and estates were seized by the Property Control Division and handed over to reliable Germans or were held by the Board until the Control Council decided how to dispose of them in the interests of peace.
1
The Allgau is a region in southern Germany that covers parts of the south of Bavaria and parts of Austria and stretches from the pre-alpine lands up to the Alps.