`LEAVE ME ALONE. I DON'T WANT TO REMEMBER THE WAR'

Andrew Davidson travels to the heart of England to find

people who will not be celebrating VE-Day.

They are former members of the SS

The old soldier — let us call him Ernst — has lived here since 1946, one of the thousands of German prisoners-of- war brought over to help with the reconstruction of Britain after the sec- ond world war. He, like other German veterans, decided to put down roots and stay. Theirs is one of the oddest tales of the war and its after- math. It is also, by neces- sity, one of the least documented, simply because most of the German servicemen now living here have been careful not to attract attention. Those that stayed now have thoroughly Anglicised children and grandchildren. For many of them the anniversary celebrations are a reminder of an awkward truth they would rather forget. I had always taken the stories of old Nazis nestling in the garden of England as a rural myth more suited to a Tom Sharpe novel than reality. That was before a friend who lives outside Sissinghurst casually mentioned that his neighbour was the daughter of a Luftwaffe officer. 'Who lives in Germany?' I asked. 'No,' he replied, `he's a lovely man who lives outside Ton- bridge, and spent most of his life working for the Electricity Board in Kent. There are lots of German veterans about, a result of the string of POW camps that the army established in the south-east to supply local farms with labour.' It seemed to be too strange to be true.

So I started asking around. Another friend introduced me CO Ernst, who gar- dens occasionally for her father. He said, yes, he knew of lots more Germans who lived nearby, but he didn't keep in touch with them. There was the U-boat man near Frittenden, another SS-man, an infantry- man and another U-boat man near Robertsbridge, others in Tenterden: age has winnowed them out but there are at least eight in that small area of the Weald alone, and more outside. There was even a German ex-servicemen's social club, now closed, based in Hastings.

I could scarcely believe that after six years of war the British could be so wel- coming to their former enemies. For peo- ple even of my generation, brought up in the Sixties with the old enmities still visible in every schoolboy magazine, it was incon- ceivable. Other locals who lived through the war just and mutter about bygones and water under the bridge. Coun- try folk are nothing if not pragmatic.

What is curious is that no one seems to know how many Ger- man POWs opted to remain in Britain. As many as 20,000 Ger- mans, Italians, Ukraini- ans and others may have settled here (most needed to have married British women by the end of 1948 to avoid repatriation) but, short of trawling all the mar- riage records for the relevant period, it is hard to find out. The Ministry of Defence says it is unsure how many went via British POW camps; the Home Office says it didn't keep count. The Impe- rial War Museum and the Army's own histori- ans have little data. The German Embassy says it has no idea either.

Such was the chaos at the time, and so large the number of prisoners being handled (Montgomery and Alexander alone are estimated to have captured around 5 mil- lion German servicemen at the end of the war) that accurate records are at a premi- um. Certainly, a few German POWs went on to achieve prominence here — the best- known, Bert Trautmann, played in goal for Manchester City — but most of those who stayed merged quietly into rural communi- ties. And there you can still find them, mainly in the belt of villages below Ashford in Kent and East Sussex, and around the old farmlands of the West Country. Ernst, a tough, wiry 70-year-old with a shock of white hair, blue eyes and a SS dagger tattoo on his arm, was one of the few Germans I approached who was willing to speak about the war and its aftermath: most thought that talking to me would only stir up trouble, even after all these years. He says he stayed in Britain simply because his parents were in East Germany at the end of the war and his mother told him not to come back. So he has worked in Kent ever since, first farm labouring, then build- ing and factory jobs.

Now, since his wife died, he lives on his own in a small two-up, two-down cottage, part of a string of houses on the edge of Romney Marsh. His back garden is a jum- ble of little outhouses and forsythia, at the front old cherry trees and magnolia are in flower. He has no regrets about staying, he says, except that the pensions are much bigger in Germany. Like nearly all the old Germans here, he speaks with a strange, inflected accent: part-German, part-Ken- tish burr. He picked it up from other work- ers on the Romney farms where many of the prisoners-of-war were put to work.

He was captured in France in January 1945, driving a half-track back towards the German border in the retreat that followed the Ardennes offensive. 'If they hadn't put a shell in one of my tracks I would still be running now,' he laughs, reaching for another cigarette. He had stopped in a barn to bandage one of his friends who had been shot in the stomach. As he was bend- ing over, he felt a rifle in his back, and an American paratrooper told him in perfect German, 'Your war is over.'

He remembers another American viciously smashing the pipe out of his mouth with a rifle butt. The Waffen SS may have been conscripted front-line troops — as opposed to the black-uni- formed volunteers who ran Hitler's death- camps — but they were still loathed by their enemies. They were, as one British Army historian delicately described it for me, 'a tough bunch of coconuts who cut a few corners on the way'. That didn't stop many of them settling here. Indeed, the British Army apparently brought back a whole division of Ukrainian SS from Italy simply because there was nowhere else for them to go.

Ernst says he had no choice about whether to join the SS. He was simply selected from a land-army digging party in Hagen, where he was born, and told he was being put in the elite corps as a tank-driver. He served on the Russian front, briefly, and in France. After capture, like other Waffen SS men, he was investigated for war crimes, cleared and put in a POW camp in Germany. Then, in 1946, some- what to his consternation, he was shipped with thousands of others — sailors, airmen, infantrymen — to Britain. 'They gave us injections, shoved us in lorries, drove us to Ostend and brought us over here. What could we do? There were guards with guns. We couldn't run away.' He was put in a large camp in Woodchurch, below Ashford. He remembers being shown the first films of the concentration camps in a big hall in Ashford as part of the POWs"deNazifica- tion'. It didn't work.

`Of course most of us didn't believe it, we thought it was just British propaganda. Afterwards they came round and asked us lots of questions and the majority said, "No, we don't believe it!" It didn't help, Ernst says, that the films were followed by a talk given by a Jewish man, who later offered to sell them socks and underwear. I look at him closely as he tells the anecdote. His point is that the deNazification pro- gramme was cackhandedly put together, given the prejudices of the audience. He seems unaware that what he said also appears offensively anti-Semitic. Does he believe it all now? 'Oh, yeah, of course I do. When I started mingling with British people and they tried to explain things to us which . .. well, it took a heck of a long time to get used to it that the Germans had done all that.' The Germans, he says now. Not 'we'.

Some of the Germans who stayed appear to have rationalised their role in the war either by simply forgetting about it all or adopting an oddly confused outlook. They see themselves as British, even though most of them still cling to German nation- ality. 'I speak English, I think in English, I live the English way rather than the Ger- man,' says Ernst. Yet when I ask him about his passport, he smiles and rummages through a drawer in his sideboard, eventu- ally producing an immaculate new German one. 'I was born a German and will stay a German till I die,' he says proudly. He did cheer for England in the World Cup, though, he adds.

Even so, forgiving and forgetting is not easy for everyone. Ernst, who by nature prides himself on his toughness — he is well-known as a local handyman — shrugs and says he has never met any hostility from British people. After choosing to stay "Woman lion" i fyou don't mind - not lioness.' in Britain in 1948 (German POWs in America were repatriated earlier; those in Britain were kept on longer, probably because the country needed the labour force), he easily found a wife and work and lodgings. 'You could leave one farm and go straight to the next one and they would have you,' he says. Even through the aus- terity years, there was plenty of farmwork simply because many demobbed British servicemen, promised a new deal by Clement Attlee's Labour government, were reluctant to go back to the land. Local farmers thought that the Germans, many of them brought up as farm-boys, were a god- send.

British women who chose to marry the POWs, and their children who took Ger- man names, probably had a harder time of it, according to those I have talked to. They tell stories of cold-shouldering from family and friends, abuse in the playgrounds. 'I got stick from some of the local lads and my mother,' one widow of a German infantryman in Robertsbridge tells me. 'My father, who fought in the first world war, didn't mind me marrying him at all, though.' She has lived in the same village all her life, a factor which she thinks helped in her husband's integration. When he died, the parish church was packed, she tells me. 'He was that popular.'

She adds that it is significant that all the Germans she knew in Kent and East Sus- sex settled into small villages and farming communities, not towns. In villages people quickly get to know you, and judge you by what they find. The POWs would not have had such an easy time in the bigger towns. A U-boat veteran who lived in a village outside Sissinghurst agreed. 'I'm one of the oldest in the village now,' he says proudly. He has been there since 1948, after sailing his U-boat into Belfast as part of the post- war dismantling of the German navy. He too had gone through Ashford's Wood- church camp, but didn't really want to talk about it all. He had experienced some bad feeling. 'One or two round here weren't happy, and they are still at it today,' he says darkly. But generally he has found people `very welcoming'.

None will tell me what they will be doing on Monday, when the VE-Day anniversary fires are lit — probably just staying at home, with their memories, and some con- flicting emotions. 'I don't think about it,' says Ernst. 'I don't get upset about it. I don't let myself get in a state about it. Other people, especially the young ones, say we should forget about it all, the war was finished fifty years ago. But I know the British people sent their husbands and fathers and brothers over to fight the Ger- mans. It's only a natural thing they want to remember them. It's entirely up to them so long as they leave me alone. I don't want to remember the war.'

Others in a similar position have found it more difficult to cope. One German bomber pilot I arranged to speak to post- poned our meeting twice, before his wife finally rang up and apologised, saying he wasn't up to it. He stayed in Kent, she explained, because he lost his family when the Russians overran what is now Poland: his mother and sisters were raped and mur- dered. The current batch of stories about the war and the anniversary of the libera- tion of the concentration camps had brought back the horror of it all. He couldn't sleep. He is wracked by guilt, even though he had no involvement in the death-camps. Another wife of a former German POW put it thus: 'When my hus- band found out about the camps he was just so, so ashamed. But you cannot change who you are and what's happened.'

Perhaps, as the U-boat veteran tells me, I am missing the point. The fact that they have all stayed is not such an odd thing, more a testament to what is good about the British, that we are a remarkably tolerant people, quite happy to live side by side with those who spent six years trying to overrun us. Maybe. Or as another veteran has it, perhaps we are very similar peoples. 'When you think about it, there is not much differ- ence,' he says. 'It is more or less the same way of thinking and living.'

`Of course you must quote me by name. I have nothing to hide!' says Ernst firmly as I leave. He shows me his magnolia and chats amiably over the fence with his neighbour, a young man halfway up a ladder fixing an aerial. But as I drive home I decide it is better to leave real names out of it. There are those who could .no doubt make the former POWs' lives a misery if they want- ed, just because of whom they fought for all those years ago. It is not worth the risk. As an old Kent forestry worker, who used to supervise POWs after the war, put it to me later with a quizzical look, 'Perhaps there are some things which should never be forgiven. I don't know.'