4 May 2020
Who was the first British soldier or civilian member of the Control Commission to marry a German woman after the end of the Second World War?
Marriage with so-called ‘ex-enemy nationals’ was prohibited, before the government in London announced, on 31 July 1946, that the ban would be relaxed, subject to certain conditions. But it still took a long time for the couple to assemble all the necessary documents and as far as I can tell, no serving British soldier, sailor or airman was allowed to marry a German woman, in Germany, before March 1947, although as described in previous posts on this blog, a few couples married without official permission, such as Ralph Peck and Ursula Ottow, or in secret, such as Andrew Gardiner and Sabine Quast.
Some couples were able to marry earlier than March 1947 in Britain, rather than in Germany. Towards the end of 1946 - I don’t know exactly when - German women first received permission to travel to Britain to marry a British man they had met in Germany, who had now been demobilised from the armed services and had returned home. Travel to Britain ‘to marry’ was also subject to various conditions. Germans were not allowed to leave the British Zone of Germany without permission. There were no scheduled air flights, and travelling by road, rail and sea was not easy. Various documents had to be obtained, including a medical certificate, confirmation that the couple had somewhere to live in Britain, and a permit to leave Germany and enter Britain.
Renate Greenshields has described in her book, Lucky Girl Goodbye, how she was one of the first group of 15 German women who received official permission to travel from Cuxhaven in Germany on the ship, the Empire Halladale, on 18 December 1946, to marry in Britain. She and her husband, Tom, were married in Hawkchurch in Devon on 6 January 1947. And as described in another post on this blog, Ingrid Dixon has told the story in her book, The Bride’s Trunk, of how her parents first met in Germany, how they sent letters to each other after her father was demobbed and returned home, before he returned to Germany in December 1946 to collect her mother and travel with her to Britain. They were married in Liverpool a week after she arrived, on 13 December 1946.
But as far as I know, the first officially permitted marriage, in Britain, took place two months earlier. Kate Sherwood has sent me the following story of how her mother was able to leave Germany in September 1946, after hitching a lift on a cargo ship passing through the Kiel Canal, to marry her father on 19 October 1946, in Chiswick in London.
My mother, Liane Marie Schlüter, born November 1924, was living with her parents and younger siblings in Hassee, a suburb of Kiel, a town in Schleswig Holstein in the north of Germany, when she met my father. Two of her brothers had been killed in the war, Hugo aged 24 in Freiburg im Breisgau in early 1945, and Paul aged 18 in Küstrin/Kostryn around April 1945.
She left school at 14 and completed an apprenticeship at the department store, Karstadt. She then did war service as a land girl and as a conductress on the trams. Shortly after the end of the war she had the opportunity to start learning English.
My father, Anthony George Blight, served as a gunner in the Royal Horse Artillery in North Africa, landed in Normandy and ended up outside Hamburg in May 1945. His unit was then sent to Kiel, where he stayed until he was demobbed in February 1946.
My father loved swimming and it was in an open-air swimming pool about a 20 minute walk from my mother’s home where they first met, maybe in the early summer of 45. Despite the non-fraternisation order (which apparently was disregarded by all and sundry), they went out for walks, spent time with her family, and visited her older sister and her husband in their apartment.
So having fallen in love when marriages were still forbidden, and as my father had been demobbed and returned home to Britain in February 1946, they had to wait until Germans were permitted to travel to Britain to marry. Immediately this was announced, some time later in 1946, my mother went to the British administrators’ office in the Düppelstrasse in Kiel to request a visa. Having assembled all the required documentation, she then enquired as to how she could get to England and was told to buy an airline ticket or ask her fiancé to send her one. So she drafted a letter to my father indicating that she had all the documents necessary to travel, but needed an airline ticket, and asked the officer in charge to put his official stamp on it. My mother felt very uncomfortable about putting her fiancé to such an expense and perhaps realising this, the officer suggested he could instead arrange for her to travel by ship.
So, the letter was never sent, the officer accompanied her in an official car to the Kiel-Holtenau lock, where ships enter the Kiel canal on their way from the Baltic to the North Sea, and the naval officer in charge undertook to get her a safe passage. The only ship passing through that day bound for London was Russian, which was disregarded by the officer as being not suitable, so she returned early the following day. Eventually, a cargo ship carrying timber, presumably from one of the Baltic States, arrived and the Estonian captain agreed to take her. The ship’s crew included a female steward and my mother was given the first mate’s cabin and ate her meals with the captain and the engineer. She cannot remember how long she was on board but recalls wondering on arriving in London why the ship did not proceed to dock, to be told that the tide was against them.
I don’t know how my father knew when she was arriving but he was at the docks with his brother to meet her on (we believe) Friday, 27 September 1946. A rather bemused immigration officer accompanied them on board, where he examined my mother’s entry permit. Presumably he would have stamped it so that we would have had a definite date of arrival but it has not survived. My father and uncle gratefully accepted the invitation to eat breakfast, just then being served. My father enquired as to how much he owed for my mother’s passage to which the answer was “This is not a passenger ship, there is nothing to pay”.
They were married on 19 October 1946 in Chiswick Register Office and until I was born, in September 1947, they lived with my grandparents in Whitton, Middlesex.
Kate Sherwood, May 2020.
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