Germany 1939

Pages For this Section

Germany 1937, the Goering stories

Germany 1937

Schramberg 1938

Germany 1938

Germany and Prague 1938

Germany 1939

Germany 1939

Germany 1939

It was over three years that I had been living in the Europe Hotel, Heidelberg, on that Sunday afternoon in May 1939. During the week I had received from a friend in Singapore by registered post a fat envelope, bearing a customs declaration "Current used postage stamps". I was enjoying myself by washing off and sorting this very acceptable gift, when the telephone bell rang. It was the hall porter telling me that I was wanted downstairs. I did not want to be disturbed and told him so. To this he replied that it was the police. That was different and, walking along the corridor, I wondered what it could be - car, passport, work permit or maybe that very minor infringment of the currency regulations?

Looking over the baluster as I went down the stairs, I saw him - a mountain of a man, complete with kepi, green uniform, pistol and bayonet on his belt and jackboots. But it was as I turned on to the half-landing that the real fright came. Sitting at a small table the other side of the hall near the revolving doors were two unprepossessing individuals in belted raincoats and furry felt trilby hats and they were both staring hard at me. Gestapo! The Gestapo do not occupy themselves with motoring offences nor even with minor currency regulations. Of course, I had not been entirely innocent of taking an interest in industrial, economic or even military matters of the Third Reich. Oh no! It could not be!

Three steps from the bottom, where my Schupe was standing, I raised my right forearm and said politely "Heil Hitler" to which he replied "HEIL HITLER" in a voice loud enough to convince the whole state of Baden that he was an ardent Nazi.

Somehow my knees got me down these last steps and standing face to face, he asked me,

"Your name is ..........Yes."

"You were born on ........ Jawohl."

"In London? .......... Yes."

"Your profession is ......... Jawohl."

"You work at the Deutsche Bergin A.G. at Mannheim Rheinaa .......... Yes."

The Gestapo had not moved but were still intently watching us. I preyed that he would get down to business and get it over. He did. He lowered his voice to a gentle whisper and said "Herr Dokter, I apologise for disturbing you on a Sunday afternoon, but I wondered if you have any British Colonial stamps to swap?"

The explanation was that his brother was the regular postman who delivered the hotel letters. A lot of my Singapore packet went to him in exchange for some nice early Wurttemburg issues and he became a very good friend. I asked the hall porter who those horrible raincoated persons were, but he did not know. All the same I told him he should not allow guests like them into his four-star hotel - they can frighten people.

Germany 1939

Every factory in Germany, as in any other police state, had its political kommissars, but in Germany they were called "Zellenobmann". Ours was named Hans Spross. He got his job as a section foreman by political influence, certainly not by industrial ability, because he was the most inefficient technician I had under me among the 350 workers in the factory. He spied on me, went through my desk with great regularity, planted a loaded pistol in my desk, applied for warrants for my arrest for industrial sabotage, industrial espionage and any other dirty trick he could think up. All the same, I somehow liked Hans and played along with him. By phone calls to Berlin to the Ministry of Food, I mysteriously got all the warrants for my arrest squashed before the local office ever issued them, I replaced his sandwiches in his rucksack with the pistol he landed on me and ate the evidence of my theft and when I got tired of his eating the chocolates I always had in my desk, I brought back from leave in England two packets of Ex-Lax, carefully wrapped individual pieces in silver paper and the trap was baited. I listened to a long desciption of the worries the doctors had about him during the fortnight he was in hospital and how he hated all those X-rays he had had to put up with, and how he was certain he was going to develop cancer from them.

One of his tricks, however, was a very near thing. One evening in August of 1939, when Germany was really an armed camp, I was driving back from the factory to the hotel at Heidelberg and just before the last bend on to the long straight stretch leading to the railway bridge at the beginning of Heidelberg, a policeman scrambled down a bank covered with bushes on the side of the road and stopped my car. One policeman - not two, as is usual on these occasions and as he opened the passenger's door, I recognised my stamp friend, with whom my acquaintanceship had grown into real friendship. He neither looked me in the eye nor spoke a word. He opened the glove pocket in the dashboard, took out a piece of paper, glanced at it, slammed the door, picked up his bicycle which had been lying on the grass and pedalled off the way I had come, as if the angels of hell were after him. I found nothing in the glove pocket, so I drove off. As I reached the railway bridge, I was stopped again, this time by quite a reception committee, including plain clothes. They also dived for the glove pocket, obviously did not find what they were looking for and eventually one drove with me to the police station, where I and the car were given a real going over. After about an hour, with a lukewarm apology, I was allowed to go.

Our friend Hans had spent his lunch time copying down the numbers of all the military vehicles that passed down the main Mannheim-Karlsruhe road and spent my lunch time, copying them out again on my typewriter. My friend of the philatelic world happened to be in the charge room when Hans phoned his information through. I greeted Hans the mext morning with a broad wink when I saw him and he had the sauce to grin back. Poor Hans does not grin any more - he met his at Stalingrad. I swapped some stamps with a real friend the following Sunday and neither of us mentioned the incident. It was on a very generous basis of exchange to him that we haggled over those little bits of coloured paper and he realised it.