Writing the History of Education in the British Zone of Germany,1945–1949: A Note on Sources and Challenges

Abstract

This paper describes the challenges involved in work in progress on the history of British policy in education in occupied Germany, 1945–1949. The problems centre on the range of archival sources, the structural balance of themes and chronology, and the use of appropriate illustrations. It argues that conclusions about the nature of educational policy in the British Zone depended largely on the role of individuals and their interpretation of policy guidelines rather than strict adherence to directives from on high.

Visitors to the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta, Georgia, are told something surprising. Mitchell apparently wrote the final chapter of Gone with the Wind first. She did so because she wanted to know in advance how what she was intending to write in her 825-page novel would end. There is something counter-intuitive here. A conventional view would be that you can’t write a conclusion until you know what you have actually said – and yet, provided that you have some idea of the way your argument might progress, starting with the end result might not after all be a bad idea. It could help to create a structure to the preceding parts of any study.

This thought has been in my mind as I complete an account of the role of the British in re-establishing educational provision at all levels in the British Zone of occupied Germany after World War II. In this note, I shall outline some of the challenges a historical study of this kind has posed.

The concluding part of the study in question covers the legacy of the Occupation and draws conclusions about the nature of British policy as it emerged during and after the War. To have started with the conclusions might have made clearer the structure of what would eventually constitute the preceding chapters. The first challenge was to organise that structure around a chronology and themes. The chronology is relatively straightforward: wartime planning; the ‘reconstruction’ phase of the Occupation (up to 1947); consolidation from 1947 to 1949; the young Federal Republic under the Occupation Statute (1949 onwards). This is the kind of chronology suggested by Rudzio (1968: 76–77):

1. Preparation for the Occupation

2. Purely military administration up until September 1945

3. Administration by the Control Commission

4. From the beginning of 1947: A period in which the British had a negative right of veto but handed civil administration to German authorities

5. From 1949: The function of the High Commission under the Occupation Statute

Marrying a chronology with themes was the major problem, especially since the themes fall into two discrete groups: (1) education policy on the basis of its three principal strands: denazification, re-education and democratisation; (2) the structures of educational provision: essentially primary, secondary, higher and adult education. A purely chronological structure would have involved considerable repetition of each group of themes within discrete periods. A purely thematic structure, based on either the three policy strands or the components of educational provision, would have meant repetition in terms of timescale. What I finally decided upon was a synthesis of chronology and themes:

1. Wartime planning for education in a defeated Germany

2. The Occupation and the evolution of control in education

3. Policy in practice: Opening the schools; emergency teacher training; re-educating youth

4. Policy in practice: Opening and supervising the universities

5. School Reform

6. University Reform

7. Culture, Adult Education, Women’s Affairs

8. The Legacy of Occupation

The chronology here falls into four main parts: (1) the wartime policy-making processes; (2)–(4) the ‘reconstruction’ phase; (5)–(7) the supervisory phase; (8) the early developments under the young Federal Republic. Within each of the second and third parts in particular, the major policy themes of denazification, re-education and democratisation are developed within the chronological narrative and within accounts of developments in – principally – schools and higher education.

The working title of the study has been ‘Educating the Germans: People and Policy in the British Zone of Germany, 1945–1949’. This reflects another theme that permeates the whole account: the role of individuals as interpreters of policy, as agents for change and development. I decided on ‘Educating the Germans’, rather than ‘Re-educating the Germans’, since ‘re-education’ was a greatly contested term in the context of the Occupation of Germany. It caused much resentment among the German population and was disliked by many members of Education Branch of the Control Commission.

When I began to research education in occupied Germany some 40 years ago, there was only one dedicated publication in English that attempted to look in detail at the role of British members of the Control Commission for Germany in ‘reconstructing’ education in Germany after the surrender. That was Arthur Hearnden’s invaluable edited volume The British in Germany (1978), a collection based largely on accounts by British members of Education Branch of the Control Commission working in Germany after 1945. I built on Hearnden’s seminal work, focusing on the German Universities and using the evidence of eyewitnesses: at the time it was possible still to contact many people who had played a significant part in education in the British Zone, and so, with funding from the Volkswagen Foundation, I brought together surviving university control officers for a conference in Oxford. The recordings of discussions over three days are still a rich source of information about policy in practice in connection with the control and reform of higher education in the Zone. The papers of the conference were published in German Universities after the Surrender (Phillips, 1983).

The emerging archival material in England and Germany also provided a rich source, although the papers of the Control Commission itself had yet not been released. In the time that has elapsed since that initial research, the Control Commission files have become available, and although there has been much published work of a general nature on occupied Germany since then, there has so far been no monograph in English on the role of the British in all aspects of the reconstruction of education in Germany after the War.

The new study seeks to address a number of questions, most of which informed my work on the universities but which are now posed in relation to all areas of educational provision. The focus is on the nature of pre-planning, the emergence of coherent policy, and the practical measures taken to implement policy once the Occupation began. The role of individuals in the whole process of policy making and implementation is highlighted throughout.

At the beginning of the research, some guiding questions were formulated. On wartime planning for education in a defeated Germany, these were: How did British policy on education in a post-war Germany emerge during the War? What practical planning was there? How were education staff recruited and what training was given? How did those recruited perceive their role? On the early work in education in Germany, the questions were: What were the political and economic imperatives underpinning policy on post-war Germany? How was the educational work controlled and managed? What were the roles of the Foreign Office and the Board/Ministry of Education? How was denazification managed? What were the practical difficulties in revising textbooks and curricula, providing equipment, restoring buildings? To what extent were retired and émigré teachers employed/retrained? What degree of cooperation was there with German educationists? How was the work of the British perceived by Germans in the immediate post-war period?

In describing the developing work in education as the Occupation progressed, the issues to be addressed were: What was understood by the declaration in the Potsdam Agreement that control over education in Germany should ‘make possible the successful development of democratic ideas’? How was such ‘control’ compatible with the encouragement of democracy? How did the British envisage potential reform of education, given a general policy to support the German authorities in the development of education? What was the role of British individuals and organisations not based in Germany in aiding the educational effort?

And on the legacy of British policy, the questions I began with were: How successful was British policy? How was it perceived by the Germans? What elements of that policy had any effect on educational development in the Federal Republic? What lessons are there from the example of British policy in occupied Germany for other post-crisis situations involving intervention from a foreign power?

Most of the research has been archive-based. I was previously familiar with the holdings in the National Archives in Kew on the work of the Control Office for Germany and its responsibilities for education in general and for the German Universities in particular. However, I had not explored school policy in any detail.

The aim was to provide a full account of the educational work in Germany from the beginning of the Occupation until the winding-down of British activity, telling the story of the work of the British Occupation officers against the background of established policy and what was pragmatically possible.

Archival Sources

In a recent account of war crimes investigations and trials, Andrew Williams describes the bewildering complexity of the documentation facing a researcher working on the British Occupation of Germany. He describes becoming besieged, of information piling up around him ‘like slag heaps of books and boxes of notes and dust-coated piles of printed statements’, of mundane records and of those that ‘came alive in the reading’ with some records being ‘capable of revealing character and tension and high emotion’. (Williams, 2016: 11)

When the files of the Control Commission in Germany were released, a valuable project was undertaken by German researchers to create a detailed inventory listing their contents, the 11-volume Control Commission for Germany, British Element: Inventory 1945–1955 (Akten der Britischen Militärregierung in Deutschland: Sachinventar 1945–1955). This is now an indispensable source for researchers working on all aspects of policy in the British Zone. Edited by Adolf M. Birke, Hans Booms and Otto Merker, with the collaboration of the German Historical Institute in London and the Hauptstaatsarchiv of Lower Saxony in Hannover, the inventory covers some 27,000 files, most of which are in the condition they were in when they left Germany. They have not been weeded to any obvious degree, and many of them are in poor condition: pages are torn or decaying or missing entirely; there is a lot of duplication and overlap; documents referred to have sometimes been removed; correspondence is out of sequence; carbon copies of the most insignificant office routine are unnecessarily preserved and bulk out the contents.

But as working documents, the files provide the fullest insight into day-to-day policy formation and implementation in the Control Commission. Volume 4 of the Inventory lists the files relating to the work of Education Branch. Some 222 files come under this heading, but many more files on education and education-related topics can also be found; for example, under ‘Religious Affairs’, ‘Youth Matters’, ‘Women’s Affairs’, etc. These documents in the National Archives in Kew have provided my principal source, although I have used material in other archives in Britain and Germany.

Researchers in the heavily used National Archives have a generous allowance of up to 21 files at any one time, although returned files can be replaced, permitting access to many more on any given day if needed. Documents may be photographed at individual readers’ desks. This is in stark contrast to the less heavily used Hauptstaatsarchiv in Hamburg where, in order to look at 26 files, I had to spend three expensive days in the city, since researchers are not allowed access to more than ten files per day and where the photographing of documents is not permitted. Other archives have rules of all kinds, some of them sensible, some creating obstacles to researchers.

Illustrations present huge problems. Picture archives contain much material that is potentially useful, but researchers have both to pay for high resolution images and to negotiate permission fees. The British Film Institute was unable to provide stills from a 1948 film of school life in Cologne, but could make a DVD available from which stills could be taken and published. Often it is not possible to identify copyright holders. Even in the case of photographs provided by family members of officers who worked in Germany after the War, it is not always the case that they own the copyright. The National Portrait Gallery is egregiously generous in its granting of permission to use images in its collection in academic publications with small print runs.

The British involved with policy and planning for education in post-War Germany fall into several groups, interacting in various, often complex, ways. There were the politicians: John Hynd and Frank Pakenham, responsible in turn (as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) for German affairs. And there were the military men, principally Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, and General Sir Brian Robertson, who served as Military Governors in the British Zone. A succession of highly competent Foreign Office staff was also involved: John Troutbeck, Con O’Neill, Ivone Kirkpatrick and others temporarily attached to the Foreign Office, such as Professor E.R. Dodds, Regius Professor of Greek in Oxford, working during the War on planning for education in post-surrender Germany. And perhaps most importantly in terms of implementation of policy, there were the administrators and advisers: Donald Riddy, then Robert Birley and T.H. Marshall, and a large number of British Control Commission staff members working in Germany with Education Branch at both headquarters and local levels. The part played by these individuals was of huge importance, and they figure prominently in the story of what the British tried to achieve in Germany during the Occupation. In particular, it has been possible to reassess the role played by Donald Riddy, a schools inspector who, in 1944, suddenly found himself taking responsibility for the planning of educational reconstruction in the British Zone and who was charged with the implementation of policy once the Occupation had begun. He emerges as one of the unsung heroes of the British presence in Germany.

That story is in fact one of people and their interpretation of policy. Those concerned with education in occupied Germany were engaged in an unprecedented undertaking. Robert Birley, Educational Adviser to the Military Governor, described their task in an address of September 1948 as ‘an educational experiment which is probably unique in history’, the ‘avowed intention of an occupying power to try to alter the characteristics of a defeated nation by influencing its educational system’. ¹ Policy for the ‘re-education’ of Germany emerged with increasing urgency during the final stages of the War and had formed clear parameters by the beginning of the Occupation. It was left to the many committed men and women of the Education Branch of the Control Commission to develop strategies for its implementation and appropriate tactics for the solution of the high volume of practical problems they faced on a day-to-day basis. It is their story that I have been attempting to describe in this work in progress.