Suddenly an Englishman E-Book

Louis Hagen

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 445

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'England is my home, and if someone asks me what I am – German, Norwegian, Jewish or British – I answer, "I'm an Englishman."' In 1934, aged just 16, Louis Hagen was sent to Lichtenberg concentration camp after being betrayed for an off-hand joke by a Nazi-sympathising family maid. Mercifully, his time there was cut short thanks to the intervention of a school friend's father, and he escaped to the UK soon after. 'The Life of Louis Hagen' follows his adventures across the globe and the characters he met along the way, from the founder of the NHS to a Nobel Prize winner to one of the earliest animated-film directors, all told in lively and unflinching detail. Of the 10,000 men who landed at Arnhem, 1,400 were killed and more than 6,000 were captured – a bloody disaster in more ways than one. 'Arnhem Lift' is Hagen's breathtaking and frank account of what it was like in the air and on the ground, including his daring escape from the German Army by swimming the Rhine. Indeed, it was so honest that Hagen found himself banished to India by his shocked commanding officer soon after its initial publication in 1945. Suddenly an Englishman is the complete story of the remarkable Louis Hagen, a German Jew who survived a concentration camp to become a decorated glider pilot in the British Army Air Corps. His first book, Arnhem Lift, was the earliest published account of the Battle of Arnhem while his accompanying autobiography remained unpublished – until now.

Leseprobe

First published in this combined edition, 2024

Arnhem Lift first published 1945

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Louis Hagen, 1945, 2012, 2024

The right of Louis Hagen to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 720 9

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

The Life of Louis Hagen

Foreword

1    London, January 1936

2    My Family

3    My Early Life

4    Schloss Lichtenberg

5    Making Friends

6    On and Off the Factory Floor

7    A Salesman in London

8    The Phoney War

9    The Pioneer Corps

10  Volunteering

11  Learning to Fly

12  Arnhem

13  The Military Medal

14  India

15  Becoming a Journalist

16  Returning to Germany

17  A New Beginning

Epilogue

Arnhem Lift

Acknowledgements

Prefatory Note to the First Edition

Foreword to the Second Edition

1    About the Author

2    The Background

3    Arnhem Lift

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

4    Winrich Behr’s Story

5    The German View of the Battle

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

6    Summing Up

7    Life After Arnhem

Foreword

I must admit that I am ashamed it has taken me so long to get this autobiography published. I have no excuse other than that while my father, Louis (known familiarly as Büdi), was still alive, we sent this manuscript to many publishers who turned it down on the grounds that the market was flooded with Holocaust survivor stories. It was only when I realised Arnhem Lift was out of print that I contacted The History Press to see if they were going to reprint it, and happened to ask them if they would be interested in publishing my father’s autobiography alongside it. I also mentioned that it was the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of Arnhem, and they came up with the idea of publishing this autobiography alongside Arnhem Lift. All I have done is add photographs and corrected some text – otherwise it is exactly as Büdi wrote it.

An awful lot has happened to my family since. I am now an orphan (although I do have a wonderful family of my own) as both my mother and sister Siri have since died, which could be the subject of another book in and of itself.

But this is Büdi’s story. I think the reader will sense from reading this that he was a very lucky and very brave man in so many ways, but I don’t think it was just luck so much that he survived – I think it’s because he was always such a ‘mensch’. He held no grudges towards what he called ‘The German Disease’, despite being imprisoned in a concentration camp at the age of 16.

As soon as the war was over, Büdi felt the need to return to Germany to try to understand why swathes of his country chose to follow Hitler. As a result he wrote Follow My Leader (also published as Mark of the Swastika), which was then later republished by The History Press as Ein Volk Ein Reich: Nine Lives Under the Nazis. It has achieved critical acclaim as one of the best books written explaining how and why Hitler rose to power.

My father’s luck continues to this day: after the fall of the Berlin Wall my cousin, Dr Louis Hagen (a lawyer living in Germany), spent many years working on, and still is, the restitution of the Hagen family estate, which has transformed the lives of all the surviving family members scattered around the world in London, Munich and New York.

I am eternally grateful to have had Büdi in my life. While he was not perfect, I could not really have wanted for a kinder, wiser or more generous father.

Caroline Hagen Hall.England, February 2024

1

London, January 1936

Even today, after so many years, I can still remember exactly how I felt as the train rattled over the rails on the last stage of my journey from Potsdam to London. I was 19 and leaving home because it was no longer possible for Jews to live safely in Germany. I had already learnt what persecution meant – I had spent six weeks in a concentration camp. As the train drew into Victoria Station, I felt a mixture of joy and relief. Here in England, I was to be an ordinary human being, not different from other people, not a second-class citizen or an outsider because I was a Jew.

Since I had left Germany, I had seen no black or brown uniforms, and no stiff-armed Hitler salutes. When I climbed out of the carriage with my bags and looked around, it gave me real pleasure to not see swastika flags, armbands or badges. Instead, waiting to meet me and smiling, was Dr Lothar Mohrenwitz, an old family friend. We children had always called him Mumpitz, meaning nonsense in German, because of his bubbling good humour and fund of silly stories. He was grey haired now and seemed to have shrunk in the two years since we had last seen each other. He hugged me and said, ‘My, how you’ve grown!’

Mumpitz took me back to the flat in Fitzroy Square that he shared with the drama critic Hubert Griffith and his girlfriend, Kay. I was content just to sit and listen to them, and didn’t feel I needed to talk. This was just as well, as it soon became clear that my English wasn’t as good as I had been led to believe.

Mumpitz saw me up the stairs to a little room containing a bed, a bookcase, a wardrobe and not much else. I soon fell into an exhausted sleep.

But not for long. It seemed only a few moments later that the door opened and someone started undressing by the dim light from the landing. At first I was scared, then I reasoned that a burglar was unlikely to undress.

I cleared my throat to make my presence known. A burly figure peered threateningly at me and growled, ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you know this is my room when the House is sitting? Everybody knows that!’

His words made no sense to me. I pretended to go back to sleep and, grumbling to himself, the intruder gathered up his clothes and lumbered out of the room.

Early next morning, when I crossed the hall to the lavatory, I saw a large bundle uncomfortably curled up on a small sofa. The bundle turned out to be Nye Bevan, an up-and-coming young Labour MP. At breakfast, he brushed aside my apologies and bombarded me with questions about my experiences in the concentration camp, my background, and about the country I had left behind.

The Loewy children. Louis’s mother, Victoria Gertud, is second from right. She emigrated to America via Japan on 11 November 1940. The boy on the far right is Curt Edgar, who died in Gurs concentration camp.

2

My Family

My family, originally called Levy, had been bankers in Germany for five generations. At an early age, Abraham Levy, born at the end of the eighteenth century, became a messenger for the well-known merchant bank of Salomon Oppenheim in Cologne. At the time, it was almost impossible for a lowly employee to rise through the ranks, but young Abraham was discreet and friendly. He was soon noticed by many rich and influential customers who helped set him up in business, first as a registered stockbroker, then as a banker. His son, Herman Levy, born in 1825, expanded the business, and in 1858 turned it into the family bank, A.E. Levy, with the help of the dowry from his wife, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish steel manufacturer.

Their oldest son, Louis, was to build on the bank’s success, becoming a leader of Rhineland industry and president of the Cologne Chamber of Commerce for seventeen years. A well-known bon vivant, he was immensely rich, had an elegant house in the most fashionable part of Cologne, a great country mansion, and a number of beautiful mistresses, each in her own luxurious apartments. After the end of the First World War, he and an ambitious young politician, Konrad Adenauer, led a movement to create an independent Rhineland state that would be closely linked to France. Louis was to be the finance minister and the currency unit, so it was rumoured, was to be the Louis D’Or.

This ambitious scheme failed to get off the ground. Nevertheless, the bank continued to prosper, even when many others were failing. In 1923, A.E. Levy merged with Salomon Oppenheim, and Louis became its head; so the grandson of the bank messenger became its chairman. Salomon Oppenheim remains one of Europe’s leading private banks, and Louis’s descendants, now married into the German aristocracy, are still part of it.

In 1896, when Louis Levy married Emma Hagen, the daughter of a wealthy Catholic industrialist, he changed his surname to hers. His younger brother, Karl, my grandfather, had also changed his name to Hagen and was by now doing very well with his own bank in Berlin, Hagen & Co. He was on the board of thirty-four companies and had built a mansion in Berlin and a large country house on the outskirts of the city, in the fashionable small town of Potsdam.

I never met my grandmother, Katherina, but I still have a lovely portrait of her aged 17, painted in 1880 by the well-known Berlin artist Karl Gussow. My grandfather had seen the picture in the Berlin annual art exhibition and was fascinated by the young girl with the soft dark hair and long plait. He fell in love with the picture, traced her parents’ address, and found that her father was a colleague of his on the Berlin Stock Exchange. Katherina, just as beautiful in real life, was by no means overwhelmed by the idea of marrying before she’d had a chance to enjoy life. Her parents, however, were impressed by the suitability of my grandfather as a son-in-law, and finally it was agreed that the pair should be married when Katherina reached her 18th birthday. It was by all accounts not a happy marriage, but she bore him two daughters and two sons – one of them my father – before her death from breast cancer when my father was still in his teens.

Soon after, Karl fell in love with Julia Wettstein, a striking young woman who was in charge of the lingerie department in one of Berlin’s most exclusive stores – which he later bought for her, and to which I remember being taken as a boy by my mother. One Sunday in 1925, about fifteen years after Katherina’s death, there was a big family gathering at my grandfather’s Potsdam mansion. To my astonishment, everybody stood up and drank champagne (we children had raspberry juice), toasting the health and happiness of Frau Wettstein and my grandfather, who had just got married. Many years later, I asked my father why Opapa (German for grandfather) had not married Julia earlier. Opapa, he explained, had felt it was not proper to bring into the family unit a young wife from an ‘inferior’ social background, until all the children, especially the girls, had left home. Social standards were very strict before the First World War, especially for the likes of a private banker.

Julia made my grandfather very happy. She called him Charles, and he called her Oiseau, his little bird. I can still remember them holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes like a young couple in love. Though petite and apparently fragile, Julia was the most efficient and energetic housekeeper he could have found for the large establishments he kept in Berlin and Potsdam. The domestic routines ran as smoothly and unobtrusively as those in a five-star hotel. Most of the servants stayed for life, and I can still remember most of their names.

Herr Kotter was just about Opapa’s age and had been his coachman before the First World War. By the time I knew him, he had been promoted to chauffeur and was in charge of the enormous supercharged Mercedes, which he endlessly polished with great love and pride. My grandparents took long trips in it to different spas in Germany, and once drove to Nice, at the time quite an undertaking. On these journeys, Kotter, who was getting on, was assisted by the second butler, Arthur, who read the map or took over the wheel when the old man got tired.

Our house flag was light and dark blue. My grandfather was an Anglophile and an enthusiastic follower of the Oxford–Cambridge boat race. To avoid taking sides, he adopted the colours of both universities. The chauffeurs wore light blue dust coats with dark blue lapels and cuffs, and matching peaked caps. Opapa also had a specially built town car, high enough for him to get in without taking off his hat.

On Wilhelm Kotter’s fiftieth anniversary in Opapa’s service, in the late 1920s, my grandfather gave him his own little car. It was an Austin Seven built under licence in Germany by BMW, which he had set up in 1923 in partnership with the Deutsche Bank. Articles about Wilhelm appeared in all the Berlin newspapers – a chauffeur with his own car was unheard of at the time. At least once a week, my bulky grandfather squeezed into the baby car to give Wilhelm the pleasure of driving him to the bank or the stock exchange in his own car.

Each summer, our whole family, with any friends who happened to be staying, often spent the day at Opapa’s house in Potsdam. Some of us went by motorboat, crossing the town through an intricate system of canals; some went by car, but most of the children went on bicycles. Opapa received the children sitting at the electric pianola in the entrance hall, where he pretended to play some wild Tchaikovsky piece that invariably ended with his falling off the piano stool. Every time, we shrieked with laughter and pleaded with him to play some more. We could not get enough of the outrageous stories he used to invent about our mythical ancestors: Pinechens von Bonn, Pulm von Birchen and Gedale–Dalje–Leibje. At the time, we believed everything he said.

These characters also appeared in a review we put on for his 70th birthday, written in verse by a well-known playwright and accompanied by popular songs. Opapa was a generous and public-spirited man. Many of his gifts of paintings, by Renoir, Monet, Manet and others, still hang in the Berlin National Gallery, and he often took his grandchildren to admire them. He also thought it good for our education to go to the opera, where he had his own box. Unfortunately for his theories, I found the visits to the gallery and opera a bore, and they put me off the arts for years.

My other grandfather died quite young, long before I was born, at the turn of the century. Photographs show a tall, slim, elegant man with dark, wavy hair and an uncanny likeness to Lord Byron. A successful entrepreneur, he had taken advantage of the explosive development of Berlin after it became the capital of the newly created German Reich and the seat of the Kaiser. Besides other properties, he owned the smart Hotel Eden and a six-floor apartment house near the Kurfürstendamm, one of the two main shopping boulevards of Berlin. There my grandmother had a spacious, twelve-roomed maisonette in which to bring up their three boys and four girls, of whom my mother, Vicky, was the youngest and prettiest.

My father had known Vicky for many years because she went to the same school as his sisters. Then they had worked together in Die Zentrale, a charity founded by his Uncle Albert to look after the widows and orphans of bank employees. My father had been in love with her for as long as he could remember, but she wanted to learn about life and have a good time before getting married and bearing the inevitable succession of children. So, my father left for America to gain business experience in a New York bank.

Villa Carlshagen, Louis’ grandfather’s house, Potsdam.

Dining room, Carlshagen.

All the grandchildren, Carlshagen, c.1927. Louis is standing on the left, back row.

Carl Hagen, c.1930.

The wedding day of Louis’ parents, Louis Georg and Vicky Hagen, 1912.

Louis’ parents at Bertinistrasse, Potsdam, 1935.

3

My Early Life

On my father’s return from America in 1911, he took advantage of Vicky’s obvious pleasure in seeing him again to seduce her – an almost unbelievable feat at the time. He was also years ahead of his time in arranging for her to be fitted with a vaginal cap, so they could avoid the danger of pregnancy and discovery of their relationship outside of wedlock. If their guilty secret had got out, both families would have become social outcasts. They were married in 1912 and, like her sisters, Vicky was given a dowry of half a million gold marks, a substantial sum at the time.

During the First World War, my father served as a naval officer in the Baltic. His was probably one of the fastest promotions in the German Navy, from civilian to captain of a ship in a single week. My grandfather had used his connections with the German Admiralty in Berlin to propose that, as the navy was short of patrol vessels, he would loan his 30m yacht, Matz, for the duration of the war, on the condition that my father commanded it. The Admiralty agreed, and that was how my father got safely and unheroically through the First World War.

His most notable exploit during this time involved ramming his own admiral’s barge. The naval base was at Kiel, but whenever the Matz returned from patrol, my father disembarked earlier, at the little seaside resort of Travemünde where his family were staying. One evening, my father’s ship scraped the admiral’s barge on its way into dock. My father was not on board because he was already safely in bed with my mother in the Grand Hotel Travemünde. This was a crime for which he should have been court-martialled but, again through my grandfather’s influence, he was given an alternative: if he volunteered for service on the Western Front, the whole matter would be forgotten. He took the alternative.

At the front, the military commander had no idea what to do with a totally inexperienced naval officer whose only asset was his heroism in volunteering for service on the front line. However, my father’s knowledge of horses and boats landed him in charge of a string of horse-drawn barges on the Belgian canals for a few months, until his father managed to get him returned to the Matz.

After the war, my grandfather, tired of the day-to-day running of the bank, asked my father to take over its management. He accepted, with reluctance, and remained an unenthusiastic banker all his life. He was always much more interested in technology, the arts, philosophy and history, than in power or making money. But make money he did; it was very difficult to own a private bank at the time and not do so.

Though not personally interested in luxury – he was spartan in his personal life, hated waste and always tried to save money on even small expenses – my father regularly overspent his income on expensive hobbies. He built a huge super-modern house and a private school for his children and their friends; he made films that never earned a fraction of their production costs, and financed all sorts of avant-garde artistic ventures. He was most generous when large sums and projects were involved, and because of this, he was nearly always in debt and, it seemed to us children, worried about money.

We were five children: Katheriena Herta (Nina), born in 1912; Karl-Viktor (always called KV), born in 1914; me, Louis Edmund, born in 1916; Hans Peter, born in 1918; and Karoline (Carla), the youngest, born in 1922. I was always called Büdi, a mispronunciation by KV and Nina of Bruderlein, meaning little brother. We should have been six, but my mother had a miscarriage in 1920.

In 1925, my father commissioned the architect Otto Block to build one of the first modern Bauhaus-style houses on the Jungfernsee, a lake just outside Potsdam where Prussian royalty had established their summer palaces. The neighbouring house was the summer residence of the Crown Prince; it was later used for the Potsdam Conference between Churchill, Stalin and Truman.

It was a marvellous place to grow up. The large main hall was decorated with Dutch landscapes and an elegant fireplace. At the far end, mirrored sliding doors led on to a wide terrace, with lovely views across the lake to where distant barges and steamers made their way towards the River Elbe, the port of Hamburg and the North Sea. We had twelve roof terraces, our own cinema and a gymnasium that included a boxing ring and shower room. The walls of my mother’s sitting room were covered in ivory silk, hung with a collection of miniatures. The music room had a Bechstein grand piano and space for a large audience. From here, a low step led through heavy damask curtains into a low-ceilinged room with Persian carpets, sofas all around the walls and eastern-style furnishings. We called it The Harem and it was the perfect place for our juvenile attempts at seduction. The English Regency dining table could seat up to eighteen people, as could the huge square oak table in our children’s dining room, which was just as well, as the house was often filled with guests and relations – Mumpitz among them – especially during the summer holidays.

These guests happily joined my parents in a lifestyle that was, for those days, very progressive. Our diet was almost wholly vegetarian, with all the vegetables home grown, and on one day each week we ate only raw food. We children longed for meat and sometimes managed to persuade one of the guests to take us out secretly for a proper meal.

Early every morning, Fräulein Ulrich would turn up with her tambourine to conduct naked gymnastics on the lawn, which stretched down to the lake in front of the house. This nudism once got my father into trouble. He and Nina were having an early morning swim, of course without bathing suits, when, to his astonishment, abusive shouting came from the owner of a yacht anchored close to our landing place. ‘Disgusting! Perverted! Irresponsible!’

My father mildly pointed out that, if the yacht owner objected to nudism on private property, he was at liberty to sail away and moor elsewhere. The abuse continued, loud enough to wake the sleeping household. Soon, young naked figures appeared on most of the balconies and terraces of the house and began jeering at the owner of the yacht, making fun of his protests. Unfortunately, he turned out to be the chief of the Potsdam Police, and charged my father with indecent exposure and corrupting young people’s morals. The press got hold of the story and my poor father was teased mercilessly on his daily visit to the stock exchange. When his case was heard, he was found guilty only of indecent exposure, and was fined one mark.

Louis next to the family painting by Joseph Oppenheimer. The Hagen children and parents are in front of the Villa Hagen. Louis is the child leaning on his elbow.

Villa Hagen, where Louis grew up. Bertinistrasse, Potsdam, was commissioned by his father.

View into the sports room/gymnasium at Villa Hagen.

View of the landing, looking out the garden window.

4

Schloss Lichtenberg

As the Nazis came to power, our happy, close-knit family life came under threat. I had always known about my family’s Jewish background but had never thought much about it. We were like all the other families in Potsdam: German. Our family had lived in the country for hundreds of years and my father had been awarded the Iron Cross (Second Class) for his service as a German naval officer. We never knew this until after his death, when I found it tucked away among his less important bits and pieces.

Gradually, I was made more aware of my Jewishness, at first through antisemitic propaganda in the newspapers and on the radio. Our friends remained our friends and our acquaintances assumed we were fellow members of the master race – we did not look particularly Jewish, and certainly nothing like the crude cartoons in Der Stürmer and other Nazi publications – but it was not long before I began to feel like an outsider. I was expelled from the rowing club, excluded from dances and public functions and was made to feel like a criminal if I tried to take out an Aryan girl. I was constantly reminded that, in the opinion of the new German political system, I was a second-class citizen; but even then I felt, as my father did, that this squalid madness could not possibly last.

It did last, and in May 1934 I was arrested by the Brownshirts (SA) and sent to the concentration camp of Schloss Lichtenberg near Torgau.

The year before, I had written a postcard to my sister Carla: ‘Toilet paper is now forbidden, so there are even more Brownshirts.’ This pathetic schoolboy joke had been intercepted by a maid. When my mother later caught her stealing jewellery and sacked her, she triumphantly showed my mother the postcard, which she had kept for just such an occasion. She told my parents she would denounce me to her boyfriend in the SS if they did not reinstate her.

It was an agonising decision for them. They talked it over at length, and in the end, decided they must not allow themselves to be blackmailed. Of course, they could not have imagined what the consequences would be for me. Who would believe a teenage boy could be arrested and taken to a concentration camp for a childish joke?

But one beautiful summer morning, two policemen came to the BMW factory at Eisenach, where I was working as an apprentice, and arrested me. At the police station, they emptied my pockets, took down my personal details, and locked me up for the night. They were vague about the reason for my arrest; a uniformed Nazi storm trooper who came to interrogate me next day told me only that it was ‘political’.

For the next few days, I was shunted around by train to different small-town police stations, where I was endlessly interrogated by obviously amateur, pompous Nazi Party members who took copious notes. The interrogations were unpleasant, with verbal abuse, threats, and spotlights glaring down at me, but I was never physically hurt. I feel sure the reason for this was that the sessions took place in police stations, and the police at the time still believed in protecting the rights of the individual – until found guilty in a court of law. Neither I nor any of my family had ever belonged to a political party or attended a political rally; my only crime was that I was 100 per cent ‘non-Aryan’.

As my journey continued, I was joined by more prisoners until there were about twenty of us: Jews, dissidents, Catholics, communists, and pacifists. We talked very little among ourselves because we were all afraid of informers.

Eventually, we arrived at our final destination, Schloss Lichtenberg, less than an hour’s drive from my home in Potsdam. The Schloss was not so much a castle as a fortified, rather dilapidated farm, newly painted bright yellow. Fifty of us were housed in the large grain and haylofts, sleeping on rough palliasses on the floor. There was one water tap and a basin, which the older men used to pee in when they could not wait.

In the middle of the night, the younger prisoners were often woken by drunken guards and taken to their mess. There, to howls of laughter, we were ordered to pull down our trousers and pants and get on all fours. Then they took turns to slap our naked bottoms, either by hand or with little riding whips, which they kept tucked away in their jackboots. I had the impression I was often singled out for special attention because of my youth and class. As they beat and abused me, they called me a spoilt Yiddish brat crying for his fat Yiddish mama. They would teach me a lesson; they would show me who was master in Germany today.

They made fun of my uncircumcised penis. ‘How typical of your race,’ they jeered, ‘to go to such lengths to deceive us.’

More often than not, these sessions happened over the weekend. It was their idea of a bit of fun to round off a good night out.

Some of them obviously felt sorry for us and tried, without much success, to restrain the others when they began to get frenzied and draw blood. There was one very blond and good-looking youth, not much older than myself, who tried to make his mates go easy on me by pretending to join in the spirit of the occasion. ‘That’s enough. Let the poor bastard go. Can’t you see his Jewish arsehole is already bleeding? We don’t want it to get infected.’

Sometimes he managed to slip me out and lead me back to my quarters, putting an arm around my shoulders and mumbling drunkenly, ‘Don’t mind them. They’re good chaps at heart, just a little drunk.’ I had a hard time not leaning on his shoulder and pouring out my misery and frustration. But I always blinked back the tears; I dared not show weakness or gratitude. He was a degree or so better than the others, but he wore the same brown uniform and jackboots. When he left, I fell back on my sack of straw and cried uncontrollably. I was comforted by a fat, middle-aged communist called Wolfgang, who became my friend.

One day, while I was playing chess with Wolfgang, I noticed a group of men crowding around the window facing the courtyard. We got up to see what they were looking at, but before I could get there, Wolfgang pulled me back. ‘There’s nothing there, Büdi,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with the game.’ But I insisted on seeing what was happening. If ever I got out, I wanted to be able to tell people what was going on. It turned out to be the cruellest, most shocking thing I have ever seen.

It was a very hot sunny day. A group of SA men in their shirtsleeves were standing round the farmyard pond, where there were usually a few ducks swimming and a couple of pigs cooling themselves in the mud. That day there were neither ducks nor pigs in the pond, but instead, four prisoners splashing around, entirely covered in mud, moving as if in slow motion because of its dragging weight. They were trying to crawl out of the pond, but whenever they reached the edge, the SA men kicked them back in, laughing and shouting. I could not go on watching and turned away. Later, I learnt that none of them survived.

When the guards could think of nothing better to do, they gave each of us a bucket of water, then chased us around the courtyard. If we spilt any, they beat us. I was young and very fit, and I managed well enough, but some of the older men were soon exhausted in the blistering heat and collapsed. They were then kicked and beaten until they got up and started running again. The weakest were chased into the muddy pond to ‘cool down’ before, covered in mud, they had to start running again.

Perhaps because I was the youngest and the son of a well-known banker, I was chosen for the duty of emptying the latrines. They were made from thick wooden planks, about 4m long and 1m wide, and very heavy, so that four people could only just lift one when it was full. We had no spades or tools, so had to empty them with our bare hands. The iron handles of the boxes cut into our palms, which soon became infected; the pain increased each time we were made to do it.

One day, as we were standing miserably to attention in the castle’s courtyard, the gates opened to let in a big black Mercedes flying the Nazi flag. I knew the smartly uniformed man who stepped out; he was Judge Engelman, the father of one of my school friends and a senior civil servant in Potsdam. I heard him say he had come for me, but I did not dare move. I was taken to the commandant in the guard-house, who told me that if I ever revealed to anyone what went on inside the camp, they would ‘get me’, wherever I was, and then I would never ‘get out’. He handed me a statement to sign, acknowledging that I had been well treated and that all my possessions had been returned to me. I signed it.

Once in the Mercedes, the judge turned to me. ‘Now, what happened?’ he asked. I wanted to tell him everything, but I hesitated. I was afraid the two SA men in the front of the car could hear through the glass partition, and I hardly knew my rescuer. I had met him only once at a school function, and he was a prominent member of the Nazi Party, having joined when it still seemed to many conservatives that it represented new hope for Germany. But I remembered those still in prison and knew that I had to take the risk, so I showed him my hands. I don’t think I would have dared to do that today, now we know the full extent of the horrors that were committed by the Nazis.

It was time for me to leave Germany. My older brother and sister had already left, KV for New York and Nina for Paris, and Herr Popp (Generaldirektor (managing director)) had been obliged to sack me from the BMW factory on the grounds that I was ‘non-Aryan’. It was becoming difficult to find countries willing to accept German refugees, but an English banker friend, Sir Andrew McFadyean, managed to get me a British permit and a job with the Pressed Steel Company in Oxford.

My mother fitted me out with a wardrobe of clothes she thought suitable for England, and my father gave me a list of names and addresses of old friends who could be helpful to me. I left my family with sadness, but my country with great relief. I knew Mumpitz would be waiting to meet me in London.

Schloss Lichtenburg in Prettin, Südseite. (Global Fish via WikimediaCommons, CCA-SA 4.0)

Louis as a young man.

5

Making Friends

After several weeks in Mumpitz’s flat, I looked at the list my father had given me. I rang the first name on it and found myself invited for the weekend to a country house, a large, pillared mansion that was certainly impressive, but no more so than many of our friends’ houses in Germany. What did surprise me was the formality of the daily routine. Every evening the party changed into dinner jackets and was served by a butler and two parlour maids. The elaborate courtesy and quiet conversation was pure P.G. Wodehouse (our English tutor had been fond of the author and used to read us his books) and impressed me no end.

After dinner on the first evening, the men gathered around the log fire while the women ‘retired’. I became a little tipsy, unaccustomed to the quantity of port and brandy drunk, and, having been asked, held forth about the evils of the Nazis and how the only way to stop them overrunning Europe was with military force. ‘Diplomacy, rational argument, negotiations and compromises,’ I said, ‘would only be ridiculed as signs of weakness.’

When I finished, there was silence, and embarrassed eyes looked everywhere but at me. At last, my host spoke. He realised, he said quietly, that I felt bitter at having been thrown unjustly into a German prison, and at having some of my activities restricted, but Germany had considerable problems and should be given the opportunity to deal with them without outside interference. There was such a thing as loyalty, and it wasn’t playing the game for a young man to turn against his own country – to come over here and make anti-German propaganda. England had given me refuge and it wasn’t right for someone in my position to tell the English how to run their foreign policy, especially when my views could be understood as warmongering.

The other guests seemed to agree but were ready to forgive me on account of my youth and unfortunate position. They went out of their way to be kind to me for the rest of the weekend.

A month later, I was invited with Mumpitz and Kay to stay with the Bevans. They lived near Reading in a small cottage with low ceilings and wooden beams. Nye was a big man in every way, bubbling over with ideas and a vitality, confidence and friendliness that were immensely attractive. He loved the good things in life, but never forgot his mining background in Wales or those he had shared it with. Jennie Lee, his Scottish wife, was also a Labour MP, and a beautiful, intelligent, idealistic and passionate woman. Her father had been a miner, too, and her parents lived with the couple, looking after the cottage and garden while Jennie and Nye were busy with their political life in London.

After dinner, and several bottles of good wine, we settled down to talk. They asked me all about Germany and how I liked being in England. I had learnt my lesson at the country house party and avoided any criticism of the British Government for its failure to oppose German expansionism. Instead, I praised, sincerely, the British sense of fair play, the success of their democratic institutions, their tolerance and sense of humour.

Jennie rudely interrupted me. ‘You don’t know anything about it. That’s the trouble with you bloody foreigners. You tell us how wonderful everything is here when you haven’t seen anything except a few overfed Londoners. You should go with Nye down to the Rhondda Valley and see the inhuman conditions the miners live and work in, or come with me to Scotland and see the endless queues of unemployed waiting for a bowl of soup from the local welfare organisations. You’d soon stop telling the British how wonderful they are.’

I sat in numbed silence. Then Nye banged me on the shoulder. ‘There, there, boyo, you weren’t to know. You’ve only been here five minutes, isn’t it?’

Jennie was immediately smiling and apologetic, but it was a long time before I dared either praise or criticise my new country again.

It was now early March 1936, time for me to leave Fitzroy Square and present myself at the Pressed Steel Company in Cowley. I was told Cowley was part of Oxford and an easy bus ride from the train station, but I could see no sign of a bus stop and none of the passersby I asked seemed to understand this foreigner with his limited command of English. Finally, a tall young man noticed my difficulty and offered to help, warmly inviting me to come with him to his ‘digs’, a shared flat in Wellington Square.

My new friend was tall and good looking, with curly black hair and dark eyebrows that met in the middle. He was obviously intelligent, seemed to find life amusing and didn’t pay much attention to how he dressed. He was a postgraduate student in biology called Peter Medawar. When we reached the flat, Peter sat me down on a worn-out sofa and assured me we could sort everything out over a cup of tea – the standard British response to any problem. Presently, other students arrived, and again I found myself answering questions about Germany, until a very attractive, slim, dark-haired girl came in, and immediately all that was forgotten.

I watched, fascinated, as the others crowded around her, all talking at the same time. Jean Taylor was a science student in her first year at Somerville College; she and Peter were the best-looking couple I had seen in England and would later marry.

When Jean heard my story, she insisted they drive me to Cowley, but by the time we got there the factory had closed, and besides the guard at the gate had no idea who I was.

Peter drove me back to Wellington Square and I spent the night there. I reported to the factory the next morning and was started on my first job, on a conveyor belt.

6

On and Off the Factory Floor

The Pressed Steel Company’s principal business was the manufacture of motor car bodies, mainly for Austin and Morris. My work on the conveyor belt was to smooth off welding ridges with a large electric sander. It was hard, monotonous work but I didn’t care – anything was better than life under the Nazis in Germany.

I earned £3 a week, the standard wage for young workers. Half of it went on board and lodging in a bedsitter where my breakfast and dinner were served to me in my room by the landlady. I spent the rest in the factory canteen, on beer, going to the cinema and, much too rarely, on taking a girl out for the evening. It wasn’t an affluent life – I was always broke two days before payday – but I managed somehow.

Although it was forbidden to send money out of Germany, I still got help from home. Every week, I sent a parcel of dirty laundry to my parents in Potsdam, which was returned ten days later with everything meticulously washed, ironed and mended. In the pockets, sleeves or trouser legs, I usually found hidden a 10 mark note, and occasionally one for 50 marks, along with a box of chocolates or a sausage. It was great getting practical help, and the almost physical contact with my mother was enormously comforting.

I boarded with a nice working-class family near the factory. They were good people and tried to make me feel at home, but the trouble they took in helping me with my English caused problems: I soon realised they spoke very differently from my university friends. At times it was almost as though they were speaking another language, and this class difference disturbed me.

My upbringing had been based on the idea of equality between people. Although at home we’d had maids, a cook, a janitor and gardeners, we were always taught that we were all equal. We children addressed the servants as Herr, Frau or Fräulein, and they didn’t speak any differently from us. However, in England, I found that matching my pronunciation to that of the university people with whom I socialised, distanced me from my landlady, her family and my workmates at the factory. This made me feel uncomfortable. My friendship with the Medawars lifted me a step or two up the British class ladder and widened my horizons, but at the same time it showed me what a gulf there was in England between those who had a higher education and those who left school at 14. I seemed to be the only person in the whole factory who had any social contact with university people.

I was also the only foreigner out of five thousand or so workers, and was deluged with questions and comments. They laughed a lot over my broken English and teased me good-naturedly. They once assured me that the polite form of greeting was, ‘Good morning. Had it in lately?’ When the foreman came on to the shop floor and I proudly repeated what I had learnt, they nearly made themselves ill laughing.

Among the students, too, my background was of interest. I was amazed at how curious – and how ignorant – they were about what was happening in Germany, particularly how much of the Nazi propaganda they believed. Some really thought Hitler had built the autobahns to create work for the millions of unemployed, rather than as part of his grandiose plans for the creation of a greater German Reich. They accepted the official German line that the expansion of the army and navy, and the general rearmament programme, were necessary for the maintenance of law and order, and to restore the nation’s self-confidence and pride. Worst of all, some had swallowed Goebbels’s myth about the ‘Aryan Race’. I was told more than once that the Germans and English were of the same ‘Nordic stock’, that we were like brothers and had more in common than any other two nations. Having observed both from very close quarters, I found this idea ridiculous.

One evening after leaving the factory, I went into one of the nearby pubs for my now usual pint of bitter. Above the hubbub, roars of laughter were erupting from a very noisy group in the corner. One of them was from the factory, and he called me over to join them. He was a large guy of about 30 with a protuberant beer belly he referred to proudly as his ‘brewer’s goitre’. He was always ready with a joke and a laugh and had a roving eye for any passing and passable female. His name was Bill Brandon; he had studied maths at Oxford, was a brilliant engineer and had become head of the research laboratory at Prestcold Refrigerators, a subsidiary of Pressed Steel. That evening we got on well, and a week or so later I was delighted to learn that he had applied for me to be transferred to his department.

Making refrigerators was a new venture for Pressed Steel, and the machines were of poor quality. Bill Brandon, now with my help, was supposed to improve the existing models while developing a new model at the same time. I knew nothing about refrigerators, nor, in spite of my almost three years’ apprenticeship with BMW, was I a trained engineer. Bill, however, was skilful in covering up for me.

One of the most obvious faults of the Prestcold fridges was vibration. They shook like a clapped-out Baby Austin climbing a steep hill in second gear. Anything set on top would crash to the ground within minutes of the machine being switched on. I thought the problem might lie in the rubber washers on which the motor was mounted, so I experimented with those. When I tried thinner ones, the vibration remained the same but the noise was deafening. When I put in thicker ones, there was a breakthrough: movement was transmitted to the legs of the cabinet, which began a slow, crabwise movement across the floor. This attracted the attention (and jealousy) of the other engineers and they began to try out my modification to see who could make their fridge move the fastest. Soon we were running fridge races down the length of the lab.

Bill Brandon, showing his real talent as a team leader, opened a book on the races, selling bets in other parts of the factory and laying down handicap rules based on horsepower and weight. Still mindful of the purpose of the lab, he limited the racing to half an hour after lunch, two days a week, and insisted we work harder at our real tasks to make up for lost time. He himself worked steadily away on the new model and a few months later produced a prototype that was almost silent and, rather disappointingly, remained in the same place.

I had, at this time, all a young man in a foreign country could want, except for one thing: sex. It was the old problem of never the time or place or loved one all together. Well, I had the time and a number of potential loved ones, but I had no place. Back home in Potsdam there were so many bedrooms, outhouses, nooks and crannies that this had never been a problem. But here in Oxford, my landlady would have been horrified if I had tried to take a girl to my room. The female undergraduates were, in those days, strictly chaperoned, and the girls from the factory lived either at home or in bedsits like mine with similarly sharp-eyed landladies.

One weekend, I was invited to a lovely Queen Anne country house belonging to the lord lieutenant of the county. It was terribly civilised and English. Not a large party, just my friend Charles from New College, his 15-year-old little sister Grace, plus a few interesting neighbours. The talk was animated and well informed, mostly about international affairs and especially about Germany. The guests left at around half-past nine and, punctually at ten o’clock, my hosts announced that they were retiring.

I did not feel like going to bed yet; I was too stimulated by the talk and the company. I would have liked to stay up talking with Charles and his sister, but Charles yawned widely as he rose to wish his parents goodnight, and soon I was shown to my room in a distant wing of the rambling old house. There was nothing to do but climb into bed, think over the evening’s events and reach out for one of the books that were piled on the bedside table.

Half an hour later, I was just beginning to feel drowsy when I heard a creaking noise on the stairs. The sound came along the passage, then stopped. The door groaned open and a small figure appeared. It was Grace, dressed in a white flannel nightgown. She tiptoed into the room, carefully closed the door behind her and came to sit on the bed. She had seen the light under my door, she said, and since she wasn’t tired, thought she would come in and talk. I was very concerned that someone might discover her in my room, but she was quite unconcerned and chatted away about the guests that evening and the conversation.

After a while, she said she was cold. When I suggested it was time for her to return to her room, she shook her head and crawled under the covers.

Now I was terrified, and my instinctive response to an attractive female began to feel very uncomfortable. I gave Grace a reassuring, avuncular smile and made great play of moving over to one side of the bed.

‘What are you doing, Büdi?’ Grace asked with a smile.

‘Just making room for you and getting comfortable,’ I answered truthfully.

‘You’re not comfortable, Büdi? Is this better?’ she asked in a way I could not misunderstand.

Later, I asked if she had ever had sex before, and she answered, ‘Oh yes, whenever my brother brings a friend home. You’ve seen for yourself how boring it is here. And one has to be nice to one’s guests.’

A year or two later, when I had a flat of my own in London, I found no difficulty in being nice to her when our positions were reversed.

Louis when he was working at the BMW factory, Eisenach, 1933.

7

A Salesman in London

One day, my easy life in the engineering lab was disturbed by a message summoning me to a meeting with the general manager, Hank Müller. I felt as a devout Catholic might on being called to an interview with the Pope. I wondered what he could want from one of his lowest-paid and youngest underlings. I wasn’t exactly scared; I knew I had done nothing seriously wrong, but I also knew I had hardly overexerted myself on behalf of the Pressed Steel Company.

When I entered the manager’s office, I was greeted by a stocky, grey-haired American with sharp blue eyes who seemed curiously ill at ease. He asked me to sit down and offered me a cigarette. I had a feeling of déjà vu, remembering my meeting with BMW’s Herr Popp.

Mr Müller cleared his throat and stared down at the desk. ‘This is one of the most awkward things I have ever had to do, Mr Hagen.’ He looked up at me. ‘I feel really bad about this, but I have to tell you that, with immediate effect, you are dismissed.’