GR-related: Helgoland

[Robert Mahnke]

Ironically, air power both destroyed Heligoland and also was the reason it
was no longer strategically important.

On Sat, Aug 26, 2017 at 1:50 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> "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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