3rd March 2008
In my previous two postings I've commented on the autobiography of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Sholto Douglas, who succeeded Field Marshal Montgomery in May 1946, as Military Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the British forces of occupation in Germany (Years of Command, London: Collins, 1966).
As I said earlier, he appeared to see himself as, above all, a professional airman and disliked those aspects of his job which required the skills of a politician or diplomat: "I found myself wondering quite often why I, an Air Force officer, should be trying to solve problems which should have been in the hands of the politicians."
One aspect of the memoirs that interested me was his remarks on the German air force, the Luftwaffe.
Sholto Douglas fought as a fighter pilot in World War One, and continued to take a personal interest in the fate of those who had fought against him on the other side. Early in the book, he wrote about the German fighter pilot Ernst Udet, who later played a significant role in the rebuilding of the Luftwaffe:
"During the years that had passed since the end of the [first world] war I had followed with personal interest the exploits of another of my former adversaries in the air over the Western Front: the famous German ace Ernst Udet. He had probably seen more action than any of us in the air, and he had achieved a great reputation as a pilot who was ready to take on any sort of flying, the more hazardous the better, particularly if it had anything to do with the making of films. The flying that he did in 1929, among the mountains of Switzerland, for the film The White Hell of Pitz Palu is some of the finest that has ever been placed on record."
In 1930 Douglas was based in the Sudan, where he met Udet, who had run out of fuel and been reported missing flying back home, after filming in Kenya and Uganda.
"We flew some of our mechanics to the place where Udet had been found, and they repaired the leak in the tank; and then Udet flew his aeroplane out and came on to Khartoum. For a few days he stayed with me in the house that I had there. During the war we had heard that he was a decent likeable man; and in the contact that I was able to establish with him in Khartoum I came to appreciate his honesty and his sincerity. I also liked his rather swashbuckling attitude towards life, and I felt that he enjoyed being well-liked by everybody ..." The two former adversaries "compared the experiences that we had had during the times when we must have fought each other in the skies over the Western Front."
Many years later, "...halfway through November 1941, the German wireless broadcast an item of news which gave me cause for feelings of a distinct personal sadness. Ernst Udet, it was announced, had been killed in a flying accident." At the time Udet was the general in charge of Luftwaffe supplies. Douglas wrote that there was speculation he had committed suicide, due to disagreements with his colleagues.
Udet was not the only German air force officer for whom Sholto Douglas expressed a personal interest.
I wrote last week about his concerns at signing death warrants of those condemned to death by British Military courts.
Together with the other Military Governors of the US, Soviet and French Zones, in the Allied Control Council, Sholto Douglas was also responsible for hearing appeals for clemency and for confirming the sentences of those condemned to death at the war crime trials at Nuremberg. One of these was Hermann Goering, who previously, among other things, had also been a fighter pilot in World War One, and was subsequently head of the Luftwaffe.
As Sholto Douglas described in a chapter in his memoirs titled 'A Matter of Conscience', the whole issue concerned him greatly. Although, after considering all the arguments, he was convinced that the decision to sentence Goering to death was correct, he still wrote that: "But so far as I was concerned there was much more to the whole issue than just the matter of legality. That can scarcely be wondered at because of the inescapable interest that I had always had in all that Hermann Goering had been doing, and which was almost of personal concern to me."
He described how he received a personal instruction from Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, to consult him before the Control Council reached any decision on the matter of clemency, and objected strongly to this instruction:
"This time I had to take the strongest exception. I regarded myself as being in a judicial position, and I did not think that the Foreign Secretary or anybody else had any right whatsoever to tell me what I should do, and that it was up to me to give my decision according to my conscience and my conscience alone..."
He was then told in a further telegram, that that there should be no alterations in the sentences. At this he felt a sense of outrage. The accused German military leaders were sentenced on the basis that they should have followed their consciences when given orders, and now he was being forbidden to follow his own conscience. Nevertheless, he did his duty, and regardless of his own personal feelings, confirmed the sentences on all those condemned to death:
"Twenty years before Goering and I, as young fighter pilots, had fought each other in the cleaner atmosphere of the air. As I spoke the words that meant for Goering an inevitable death sentence, I could not help feeling, for all my loathing of what he had become, the strongest revulsion that I should have to be one of those so directly concerned with it."
His final words in this chapter were: "I was only too glad to be finished with the whole sordid business."
Is it too much to think that, in the back of the mind of this British Marshal of the Royal Air Force and Military Governor of Germany, could have been the thought that: "There but for the grace of God, go I"?
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