18 December 2006
Michael Thomas was a German citizen, a British army officer during the war and a member of the British Military Government and Control Commission for Germany after the war.
He was born in 1915 as Ulrich Holländer. Half Jewish, he was the son of Felix Holländer, director of the Deutsche Theater in Berlin, and later a theatre critic. His uncle, Victor Holländer, wrote operettas, and his cousin, Friedrich Holländer, wrote the music for the film, 'The Blue Angel', including the famous song sung by Marlene Dietrich: 'Falling in Love Again' (Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe engestellt.)
He fled to England in 1939 and after being interned as an 'enemy alien', volunteered for the British Army, was promoted to be an officer, fought in Normandy, Belgium and Germany with a Polish Division, and then, after the war, became a liaison officer for General Gerald Templer, who was Director of Civil Affairs for the British army in Germany in the period immediately after the war.
His mother continued to live in Berlin and survived the war. But all of his Jewish relations on his father's side, except for one aunt who escaped to England with her son, and Friedrich Holländer, who emigrated to Hollywood, were killed in the concentration camps.
He was demobilised from the British army in August 1946 and returned to Germany as a civilian member of the Control Commission. He left the Control Commission in January 1952 and stayed in Germany, working for the Hamburg firm of Coutinho, Caro and Co, where he remained for 25 years.
His remarkable background and experience make his memoirs "Deutschland, England über alles", published in 1984, an unusual and fascinating book. It was written in German and as far as I know, has never been translated into English. This is a shame, as the story he tells is not from a British, or a German, or a Jewish, perspective, but a mixture of all three. Here are a few extracts:
1) At the start of the war there were around 70,000 'enemy aliens' in Britain, many of them Jewish. Some were interned immediately, but those who could show they were 'Anti Nazis' or 'refugees from Nazi oppression' remained free. After Dunkirk these too were interned. Thomas relates how he was woken from sleep by two policemen on 27th June 1940 and interned in Huyton, near Liverpool. The camp commander, a colonel, (revealing how ignorant many in Britain were of what was really happening in Germany), remarked as he saw the internees arrive "Ich wusste gar nicht, dass es unter den Nazis so viele Juden gibt." (I didn't know that so many Jews were Nazis).
2) On 19 September 1940 he was enrolled into the British army and escorted to Devon where he "exchanged one barbed wire fence for another." He was later promoted to become an officer.
3) In August 1944 he joined a Polish division fighting in Normandy after the D-day landings. He changed his name, from Ulrich Holländer to Michael Thomas, to protect his mother, in case he was captured by the German army. On 5th April 1945 he crossed the border into Germany. A young boy took off his cap to him. In all the houses where people were still living, white sheets were hanging out of the windows as signs of capitulation.
4) Soon after this, the troops in his company freed a small concentration camp in Aschendorf. "Was später über Bergen-Belsen und andere Lager bekannt werden sollte, hier sah ich es mit eigenen Augen." (Here I saw with my own eyes what was later revealed at Bergen-Belsen and other camps).
5) He says he learnt how to distinguish Nazis from non-Nazis by a simple formula: "ein Nazi jemand, der eingleisig dachte; ein AntiNazi war, wer differenzieren konnte und diskutieren wollte." (A Nazi was someone who had a single track mind; an Anti-Nazi could understand different viewpoints and wanted to discuss these).
6) He wrote a report on attitudes among young people in Germany and gave it to his colonel. He found that his colonel had forwarded his report on German youth to Field Marshall Montgomery and a colonel at Montgomery's HQ wanted to see him. Montgomery later published the report in his memoirs.
7) Following the meeting at Montgomery's HQ, he was transferred to the political intelligence branch of the 21st Army group. He says of these times in Germany: "Viele haben das trostlose Bild, das Deutschland damals bot, und ihre eigenen leiden fast vergessen, waehrend jene, die diese Zeit nicht miterlebt haben, sich das Elend kaum vorzustellen vermogen." (Many people have almost forgotten their own suffering and the tragic picture of Germany at that time, but it is almost impossible for those who did not live through it to imagine what it was like).
8) He worked for General Templer as a liaison officer, and took part, as a British observer, in meetings of leading German officials, appointed by the British after the war, which were later formalised as the 'Zonal Advisory Council' and became the nucleus of the new German administration.
9) Of Templer himself, he says: "Ohne Templer wäre der Winter 1945/6 für die Bevölkerung zur Katastrophe geworden." (If it had not been for Templer, the Winter of 1945-6 would have been a catastrophe for the [German] population). Despite having done many other things since, the happiest times of his life were when he was working for Templer in 1945-6, with the belief that he was serving his split country on both sides of the Channel.
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