At 2.15am on a bleak September morning in 1938, the Ostend-to-Cologne express pulled into the frontier station at Aachen. The door of the third-class, board-seated compartment slammed open, instantly awakening the dozen dozing occupants. Framed in the entrance was a Customs officer and a German policeman. Passports were demanded, and My Friend Harry passed his over to the policeman.
"Books? Papers? Magazines?" he asked, so Harry showed him his Daily Telegraph and that week's Lilliput and said that he had a copy of a Denis Wheatley novel in his case.
The Telegraph and Lilliput were confiscated, but Harry was told that he could keep the book and his passport was returned. The middle-aged man next to Harry was less fortunate. The policeman glared at him after looking at his passport. "Outside," he shouted and the man, clutching his case and mackintosh was jostled on to the platform. One policeman held him while another upended the shirts, underwear, slippers and odds and ends from his case to the platform as the rain cascaded down.
As the train glided away to Cologne, Harry glimpsed the man being propelled to the exit, his sodden clothes abandoned in a folorn heap in the puddles. "Welcome to the Third Reich," thought Harry.
Two months earlier, Harry had reserved a room in the Hotel zum Hunsrucken in Ober- wesel am Rhein in anticipation of a care-free carousal during the wine festival. A cheap carousal, too, for advance booking had ensured a supply of special travellers' Marks worth five times as much as the home-issued variety. Germany needed foreign currency. Since that advance booking, however, circumstances had dramatically changed. Hitler's 'last territorial claim' – Sudetenland - showed all the signs of being the first step toward the forcible acquisition of all Czechoslovakia. All Europe was holding its breath and the air was full of menace and foreboding. A great time to start a holiday in Germany!
A watery sun greeted Harry at Oberwesel at 7 a.m. and he waited for a full 15 minutes outside the station before, at risk of life and limb, dashing across the road to the little hotel. Thundering north through the bunting-decked town was an endless procession of huge trucks jammed with soldiers. Transporters made the ground shake as they passed through carrying sheeted tanks; half-tracks towed guns; armoured cars and ammunition lorries swept past in numbers too numerous to count. And on the parallel road across the Rhine a similar procession was also blasting north to the frontier. As Harry soon found out, those processions went on day after day, night after night.
There were three other English people in the hotel. Were they worried? Fearful? Curiously enough, they weren't. Amazed they certainly were; bewildered, too. But not worried. Were they ostracised by the townspeople? On the contrary, they were positively lionised for they were the living proof that England wanted nothing but friendship with Germany.
So, doing their best to ignore the hurtling might of the Wehrmacht shaking the ground under their feet, they set about living it up - and if there's one thing above all others that Germans do splendidly, it is to enjoy themselves at their festivals. In the wee small hours every morning, the English quartet tottered back to their beds having consumed uncounted litres of beer and wine, having consumed vast quantities of grub, having smoked ferocious cigars and having danced and slapped their thighs and linked arms and sung loud and long. They were having a whale of a time.
On the day that a Strength Through Joy party disembarked from a Rhine steamer, the party leader courteously invited Harry and his friends to join in. So they did. They marched all round the town behind an oompah band and then struggled up the precipitous track leading to the Schonburg Castle - at that time a focal point for the Hitler Youth movement. Inside, in the vast hall, were long tables groaning with cold meat, salads, gateaux, bread, fruit, beer and wine.
At one end of the hall, a life-size painting of Der Fuhrer frowned down at them. At the other was a life-size painting of the rather less intimidating Baldur von Schirach, Youth Leader of the German Reich. Hitler Youth youngsters waited on all the guests and the oompah band kept everyone in a joyous mood. Then the Strength Through Joy leader got up to give all a pep talk. My Friend Harry understood little of what he said but as he, in effect, was standing Harry a free lunch, Harry cheered and applauded mightily when everyone else did. Then it was back to the town festival - and the thundering army.
How did the townspeople react to all the military might dominating the roads? Reasonably enough, they made no comments when within earshot of the English party, but one morning, when Harry was gazing down on the Rhine from the Lorelei promontory, half-a- dozen Heinkels roared low overhead. Three nearby Germans, middle-aged and evidently prosperous, watched the planes disappear towards Cologne and one said aloud: "Der Krieg!" He said it with a head-shake and they looked at each other with apprehension in their eyes. Three Germans, at least, were not lusting after military glory.
Then came the night when Harry hired a motor boat to cross the Rhine to the lovely little town of Kaub for the start of its own wine festival. A huge marquee had been fitted out with tables and benches and a mobile kitchen was sizzling away most agreeably. Buxom ladies were striding hither and yon with four or five beer steins in each hand and the band was belting out 'Einmal am Rhein’.
As soon as Harry ordered a beer, the waitress's eyebrows shot up. "Englander?" she exclaimed - and ran off. The music stopped, the hotel proprietor dashed up to Harry's table, placed a miniature Union Jack before him, signalled to the band and at once the strains of ’Tipperary filled the air amid thunderous applause. For the rest of that night, Harry was not allowed to pay for anything.
What occasioned that extravagant demonstration of cordiality? Well, Neville Chamberlain had just concluded his third crisis meeting with Hitler and had arrived triumphantly in England waving his famous piece of paper, signed by the Fuhrer, which Chamberlain, his eyes brimming with tears, said meant 'peace in our time'.
Chamberlain's 'peace', interpreted by Winston Churchill as 'a total, unmitigated defeat' was to last just ten months ...
Comments