Marriage with ‘ex-enemy nationals’ (continued – part 9) – Who was the first, and how many British soldiers and administrators married German women after the end of the Second World War?

8 May 2020

Today is the seventy-fifth anniversary of VE Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe.

Previous posts on this blog have told the extraordinary stories of some of the first British men and German women who met, fell in love and married after the end of the war, when marriage with so-called ‘ex-enemy nationals’ was officially forbidden. On 31 July 1946 the government in London announced that the ban would be relaxed, but marriages were still strongly discouraged by the British authorities in Germany and numerous conditions had to be fulfilled before permission to marry was granted.

Who was the first British soldier or civilian member of the Control Commission to marry a German woman after the Second World War? I first asked this question in May 2009. As the stories told on this blog show, the answer depends, among other things, on whether the man was a serving soldier or a civilian, and if the couple married in Britain or in Germany, with or without official permission.

As far as I am aware, the first officially permitted marriages did not take place in Germany before March 1947. As described in a previous post, the first marriage between a British soldier serving in the Army and a German woman, was when Harry Furness married his wife, Erna Maria Karhan, in Lüneburg, on 22 March 1947. Two Royal Marines serving in the Navy also married in March 1947. Jim Draper added a comment to another post on this blog, to say that his parents married on 10 March 1947 in Wilhelmshaven, and they believed that their wedding was the first, or maybe the second between a British soldier and German national after the cessation of hostilities. Joseph Lawson and Sonja Sieghammer married in Kiel in March, although the exact date is not known. Their marriage was reported in the British Zone Review on 29 March 1947 as the ‘first Anglo-German wedding since the capitulation’.

Some marriages took place in Britain a few months earlier. Towards the end of 1946, German women were able to obtain permission, subject to various conditions, to travel to Britain to marry British men who had been demobilised from the armed services and had returned home. As they were now civilians, the British men were not subject to the same regulations as serving soldiers, but their German fiancées still had to obtain permission to travel to Britain. In her book, The Bride’s Trunk, Ingrid Dixon has told the story of how her parents first met in Germany, stayed in touch after her father was demobbed, travelled to Britain, and married in Liverpool on 13 December 1946; but as far as I can tell, the first British/German couple to marry in Britain were Anthony Blight and his wife, Liane Schlüter, on 19 October 1946, after she hitched a lift on a cargo ship passing through the Kiel Canal, on its way to London.

A few other couples married earlier, in secret, illegally, or without permission, such as Andrew Gardiner and Sabine Quast, and Ralph Peck and Ursula Ottow.

This post is written as my contribution to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of VE Day, the end of the war, and the subsequent years of reconciliation between former enemies, peace and relative prosperity in Western Europe. It tries to answer the question: not who was the first, but how many British/German couples married in the first few years after the war?

On VE Day, 8 May 1945, there were around 750,000 British troops based in Germany, but the number declined rapidly as soldiers were demobilised and returned home. In June 1947 there were 114,000 British troops in Germany and only around 50,000 by March 1950. There were many more US troops in Germany, around 3 million in May 1945, falling to around 135,000 by June 1947. The number then remained stable until the end of 1950, when more US (and British) troops were posted to Germany, as tensions between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union rose following the start of the Korean War.

Despite many more US troops stationed in Germany in the first five years after the war, according to my estimates, there were roughly the same number of British/German marriages as US/German marriages; around 15,000 ‘war brides’ in both cases.

The number of ‘war brides’ and ‘fiancées’ entering the US was recorded in US immigration statistics, but not in the equivalent British figures. Before the British Nationality Act came into force at the start of 1949, the wife of a British man automatically acquired British citizenship on marriage, regardless of her previous nationality. This meant that if a couple married in Germany and subsequently travelled to Britain, no record was kept by the British immigration authorities. The wife was already a British citizen, with a British passport, and she had the right to enter and live in Britain, with no further questions asked. After the Act was passed, the wife had to apply for British citizenship, but this was very rarely refused. Provided citizenship was granted while the couple were still in Germany, before they travelled to Britain, she was treated as a British citizen, and no further questions were asked when she crossed the border into Britain.

Although there are therefore no immigration statistics on how many German women entered Britain as married wives of British men, we can estimate the number from another source. A government minister from the War Office stated in November 1951, in a written answer to a Parliamentary question asking ‘how many soldiers serving in Germany have married German women?’

‘Since 1947, permission to marry a German woman had been given to 7,342 soldiers.’

This figure of 7,342 serving soldiers granted permission to marry was most probably obtained from army records. I have not found any files in the archives with further information as to how this number was calculated, but as far as I know, the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) was the only organisation that kept a record of serving soldiers granted permission to marry German ‘ex-enemy nationals’.

Some men married without permission. The minister added that since 1948 a further 305 soldiers were known to have married without permission.

Some British men may have been granted permission but never actually married, and some serving soldiers may have married in Britain rather than Germany, but not I think very many. Permission was only granted at the end of a long and complicated process and in all the cases I have researched, if the soldier was serving in Germany, the wedding took place, in Germany, very soon after permission was finally granted.

Statistics is not an exact science, but I think it is reasonable to say, based on the minister’s written answer to the question, that around 7,500 British soldiers serving in Germany either married German women, in Germany, or married without permission, between 1947 (when the first marriages took place) and November 1951, the date the question was asked.

Although married wives of British men entering Britain were not recorded in the immigration statistics, German women granted permission to travel to Britain to marry former soldiers who had now been demobbed, were recorded, as the women had not yet married and were therefore still German nationals when they entered Britain. The statistics recorded a total of 9,115 German nationals, quite a large number, admitted to Britain between 1946 and January 1951, in order ‘to marry British subjects’. 8,890 were women and 225 were men. (The men, by the way, were almost certainly German Prisoners of War who were returning to Britain to marry women they had met while they were held in Britain, but that is another story!)

The 8,890 German women recorded in the immigration statistics, who were admitted ‘to marry’ in Britain, were therefore in addition to the 7,342 serving British soldiers granted permission to marry in Germany. Not all the 8,890 women recorded in the immigration statistics who travelled to Britain may have actually married – some weddings may have been called off at the last minute, after the bride had arrived in Britain – but I would estimate no more than 1,000, at most. Permission to travel to Britain was not easy to obtain. Before being granted an entry permit, a German woman had to provide a signed letter in which her prospective husband promised he would marry her soon after her arrival, and confirmed that he could provide accommodation for the couple in Britain.

Add the figures together: 7,342 serving soldiers granted permission to marry German women in Germany, 305 soldiers who married without permission, and 8,890 German women recorded in the immigration statistics as admitted to Britain ‘to marry British subjects’, (16,547 in total); then take off around 1,000 to allow for the women who may have arrived in Britain, only to find there was no-one at the port to meet them, or their fiancé had called it off at the last minute, and I think it is reasonable to assume that a total of around 15,000 – 16,000 British/German couples married, in Germany and in Britain, in the first five years after the end of the war.

The historians Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth have estimated, in my view incorrectly, that there were fewer, around 10,000 British/German marriages in the first five years after the war. I quoted this number of 10,000 in an earlier post on this subject in August 2016, but based on the immigration statistics and the answer to the Parliamentary question quoted in this post, together with my research into various individual cases, it seems to me that their figure of around 10,000 is almost certainly too low.

The number of British/German marriages may actually have been higher than the estimated figure of 15,000 - 16,000 given in this post, as the Parliamentary Question referred to ‘serving soldiers’ and may not have included sailors in the Navy; airmen in the RAF; or the many civilian British administrators in the Control Commission who married German women in Germany, (such as Ralph Peck and Ursula Ottow, or Jan Thexton and his wife Gunni).  In addition to these, around 8,000 British soldiers were demobilised overseas after the war, the majority in Germany and in India. According to Julius Isaac, writing in his 1954 book British Post-war Migration, they did so because: ‘In the case of Germany the motive was usually that British members of the Occupation Army married German girls or war widows and entered the business of the bride’s family’. How many there were of these, we don’t know. There were also 682 Austrian women admitted to Britain between 1946 and January 1951 ‘to marry British subjects’, and an unknown number of British men who married in Austria.

As is often the case, what the Americans did in Germany after the war has received far more attention from historians than what happened in the British Zone. In her study, GIs and Germans, Petra Goedde argued that more attention should be paid to the role of personal relations ‘hidden from the official documents of the political and diplomatic agencies’. In particular, she claimed that ‘the process of rehabilitation began before the emergence of the Cold War. It thus refutes one of the major assumptions of post-war German-American relations: that American policy toward Germany became conciliatory as a result of the Cold War. In fact … German-American rapprochement was as much a cause as a consequence of the Cold War.’

My own research on ‘marriage with ex-enemy nationals’ – British men who married German women after the war – suggests that Petra Goedde was right. The process of reconciliation between former enemies is not something that happens from the top down, determined by government policies. It starts as ordinary people, such as those discussed in the posts on this blog, meet and get to know each other, as individuals, face to face.

References

Julius Isaac, British Post-War Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954)

Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003)

Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010)

My own research on the subject, with notes and references, has been published (in English) in a collection of papers given at an academic conference held in 2017 in Paderborn, Germany: Briten in Westfalen: Besatzer, Verbündete, Freunde? (Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019)

Comments

[Kayleigh Boyle]

Very interesting read, thanks for covering this.

Im looking into my grandparents currently that married in Germany and came to the UK as my grandfather was in the RAF. But we know nothing more than this, im currently researching this.

Thanks again!

[Caroline Brooke]

My dad was with BAOR he married my mum early 1948 my brother believes she was german but on the marriage certificate it says she was polish we cant get to the bottom of it

[martin pilkington]

My parents were married in the Garrison Church Celle Germany as were two other couples. The date of the marriage certificate is 10th March 1947.He was an RAF Sergeant.

[Chris Knowles]

It seems that airman in the RAF were permitted to marry, in Germany, a few days earlier than soldiers in the army - with the first marriage of an airman in the RAF on 10 March 1947, and the first marriage of a soldier in the army on 22 March 1947.

[Chris Knowles]

Caroline, on not knowing if your mother was German or Polish, many people who lived in the German / Polish borderlands before and after the First World War could speak both languages. She may have been one of the thousands of Polish woman who were forced (or in some cases volunteered) to work in Germany during the war, and did not wish to return to Poland afterwards. Alternatively, she could have been one of the German-speaking minority who were forced to leave the country as refugees after the end of the Second World War. The borders of the country of Poland changed, quite substantially, several times - for example in 1919, 1939 and 1945, when a large part of what had been Germany became part of Poland, and a large part of what had been Poland (between the wars) was annexed by the Soviet Union.

[Michael Anderson]

My parents married in Hannover on 06/12/1947. My father was in the Control Commission, ex Gordon HIghlanders.