GR-related: Helgoland

Sat Aug 26 03:50:50 CDT 2017

"For days he floats over the North Sea, till he reaches Helgoland, that red-and-white Napoleon pastry tipped in the sea ..." (p. 652)

> ... In the early morning of 18 April 1945, a fateful day in the history of Heligoland, Gestapo and SS squads arrested five civilian islanders and ten soldiers, members of a brave, hopeless conspiracy to seize control of the fortress and surrender it to the British armies already conquering the North German coast. The islanders were shot for treason. But only a few hours after the arrests, the first RAF pathfinder aircraft arrived over the island and began to drop marker flares. They were leading the six waves of a thousand-bomber raid which – almost completely unopposed – dropped 5000 tons of high explosive on Heligoland and reduced almost every human structure to mangled wreckage.

The attack lasted less than ten minutes. Then the survivors, defenders and inhabitants alike, crept out of their deep tunnel shelters into a smouldering wilderness they no longer recognised and were ferried to the mainland as the Third Reich surrendered. The formal capitulation of Heligoland to the Royal Navy didn’t take place until 11 May. Then, after the remaining garrison was evacuated, Heligoland became for the first time in millennia an uninhabited rock.

Britain had, in effect, regained possession of Heligoland. But, still obsessed with its supposed symbolism, the British were in no mood to repeat their old tolerance. Instead, exactly two years later, they returned to the place to prepare the ‘Big Bang’, an explosion billed as the biggest non-nuclear blast in history, which would remove all traces of the fortifications, tear the island to pieces and render it for all time unfit for human use. ‘Blow the bloody place up’ was not a new idea. It had been one of three options considered by Arthur Balfour in 1919 when deciding how the (imaginary) menace of Heligoland could be struck out of the hands of defeated Germany for ever. The other two were ‘re-annexation’ and ‘neutralisation’ under a League of Nations mandate. Balfour fancied the last idea, as long as Britain could acquire the mandate – in effect, re-annexation without obvious imperial hubris. But in the end he was pushed into a compromise: returning Heligoland to Germany on condition that all of its fortifications were demolished.

As usual, nobody in 1919 had asked the islanders what they wanted. Nobody except – as usual – Fleet Street’s finest, who gave big space to an appeal by Heligolanders to return to British sovereignty, to islanders singing ‘God Save the King’ and to refusals to hoist the German flag. The German government allowed the Berlin press to shout about ‘treason’ and licking English boots, but in fact they were nervous: exposing the ‘disloyal’ feelings of Heligolanders could undermine efforts to rally the patriotism of German or ‘Germanic’ frontier populations in Alsace or Upper Silesia. Back then, demolishing the colossal bunkers and casemates had taken two and half years, filmed by German newsreel to illustrate the nation’s humiliation at Allied hands. But in 1945, the victors had no mind to waste time. This was to be a naval operation, with British film cameras to record it, and on that grim anniversary, 18 April 1947, ‘on the fourth pip of the BBC’s one o’clock time signal’, nearly 7000 tons of assorted explosives were detonated. The shock was easily felt on the mainland: seismographs over in Britain jumped and scribbled.

To the delight of Germany, the scarred island itself survived. ‘Der rote Felsen steht noch’ – ‘the red rock is still standing’ – was one headline. But the British then proceeded to make bad much worse by setting up a long-running PR disaster, denying all access to Heligoland and using the empty island as an RAF bombing range. As Rüger puts it,

The reaction in Germany could not have been worse. The British were continuing the bombing war as if Germany had not capitulated over two years previously. The RAF was out to annihilate the island for ever and with it Germany’s self-respect. Had Germany not suffered enough? A number of initiatives began to document ‘British atrocities’ against ‘the German island’.

Rüger goes on to provide a fascinating and ironic account of how the fate of Heligoland was now woven into the cause of the ‘Expellee League’, the association of Germans driven from their homes in lost provinces or in East and Central Europe. A whole victimology library about Heligoland arose: ‘For once, Germany could claim the moral high ground against the Western Allies.’

In 1950, a pair of German students carrying the flags of Germany and the European Movement landed on the island. Soon they were joined by other campers, some of them returning islanders. In a curious, now forgotten episode, the East German regime also sent ‘young patriots’ to squat and demonstrate for peace, making the most of their arrest and jail sentences. The police, under British orders, kept removing the campers, but they continued to return, accompanied by ever more journalists. This ill-tempered farce continued until the British finally gave up, and handed Heligoland back to the West German state on 1 March 1952.

The British seem not to have turned up for the ceremony. There wasn’t much clear ground to stand on anyway, among the mountains of rubble. But Konrad Adenauer (who didn’t attend either) said that ‘peaceful Heligoland, set in the seas between Germany and Britain, will be in future a symbol of the will to peace and friendship of both nations.’ Few Britons now know where the place is. Still fewer know that it was once a British colony ... <

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/neal-ascherson/a-swap-for-zanzibar

Heligoland 1947 'British bang' (largest non-nuclear explosion):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6hKwjoKa-c

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