I Spy by Geoffrey Elliott

Author:Geoffrey Elliott [Geoffrey Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571299737
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

15

His Bonnet in Germany

Whatever Elliott found, didn’t find, thought he had found, or thought he had lost when he came back from ‘Spangers’ in 1945, he didn’t enjoy the experience. Nor is it a surprise, then, that when Antony Terry suggested a way of returning to the despised ‘Goonland’ as a minor form of conquering hero, he jumped at the chance as rapidly, and with as little forethought, as when he had jumped out of the Whitley in 1942. Terry was already back in Germany, helping root out for the Nuremberg Trials the evidence to be used against those Nazis already in custody, and the clues to the whereabouts of the nervous majority of middle-ranking thugs and villains who, apprehensive but unrepentant, had slipped furtively back into an equally unrepentant and uncommunicative community.

Whatever job he offered to Elliott would have come as a marked improvement on the snivelling children and the voluble tea-swilling, chain-smoking Slav in-laws carrying on with the voluble verve of a Ukrainian town meeting. So it was an easy choice: back to state secrets and duty-free State Express, back with the lads and, as always, a clutch of adoring, compliant lasses. Psychologically reinvigorated by reinstatement in his wartime rank as a major in the Intelligence Corps, Elliott was part of the British element of the Allied Control Commission in Germany. In the lunar landscape of defeat, the Commission had a huge task. Britain alone sent 25,000 civil servants, lawyers, administrators, businessmen, engineers and intelligence agents, and the US 7,000, into a shattered Germany to do it. The country had to be pulled back together from the ruins from which weeds, bones and broken pipes sprouted in surreal profusion. Food. Fuel. Clothing. Schools. Hospitals. Transport. Each was a strident priority. The whole fabric of society had to be re-woven. At the human level, one-quarter of the homes were completely uninhabitable and most of the rest were rubble-strewn, windowless, waterless wrecks. Dispossessed and still disbelieving Germans, hundreds of thousands of refugees, former prisoners and deserters, scavenged the land in medieval misery. Every adult had to be screened for the stains of Nazi involvement – not for nothing was the coveted de-nazification certificate known as a Tersil ticket’ – sorted for interrogation and, if necessary, hauled before a court (or, in more cases than anyone now cares to admit, carefully safeguarded for later use on the side of the West in the already looming struggle of the Cold War). Out of the woodwork swarmed, as in France, untold numbers who proclaimed themselves long-time resisters in pectore, if not in deed. Black marketeers, many of them members of the Allied forces, minted minor fortunes out of misery.

The myth was one of a hard-fought victory by the yeomen and bowmen of little England for freedom, warm beer, pork pies and the little Princesses over the goose-stepping battalions of evil cruelty, pickled cabbage, beer bellies bulging over leather trousers and all that regimented rallying. The reality was that, once past the euphoria, the

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