BRINGING CIVILISATION TO GERMANY
LIFE IN THE BRITISH OCCUPIED ZONE OF GERMANY

• A young boy was executed on his thirteenth birthday when a picture of the German  leader was discovered in his bedroom.
• A starvation diet was forced on the conquered people to reduce their numbers  through starvation
• Theft was an offence punishable by death
• Possession of any kind of firearm was punishable by death
• Firing squads were judged expensive, hanging was considered to waste time; The  British Penal Branch asked permission to use the guillotine which can carry out six single executions in 14 minutes.
• Almost 40,000 German civilians between the ages of 16 and 70 were rounded up and  placed in concentration camps. These are held without charge or expectation of a trial.
• These include anyone who 'ridicules, damages or destroys' anything relating to their  conquerors, their culture or their methods of occupation.
• Typically a mother of four was gaoled for a year. She had hidden in a ditch to snatch  a word with her husband who was in a slave labour working party.
• Conditions in the camps were brutal to the extreme, Inmates slept in their clothes,  packed in groups of five in 'beds' made from flotsam wood. Almost all were kept in extreme hunger.
• Family visits were restricted to 30-minutes every three months.
• Inmates were frequently kept in complete darkness to 'prepare them' for  interrogation – a euphemism for torture. According to a courageous British bishop, they are 'terribly beaten, kicked, and so mishandled that traces can be seen for weeks afterwards.'
• The notorious Third Degree methods of using searchlights on victims, and exposing  them to extreme temperatures were also applied.
• Secret camps were set up throughout the British occupied zone which were known  as DIC centres (Direct Interrogation Centres).
• One such was at DIC No. 74 based at Bad Nenndorf. From there two inmates were  dumped. One was skeletal, suffering from frostbite, and unable to communicate. The other was unconscious with no discernible pulse – cold, skeletal, and covered in 'thick cakes of dirt'; frostbite to arms and legs. Both died within hours; a third committed suicide whilst undergoing interrogation.
• A resulting investigation revealed horror stories of deprivation amounting to  deliberate torture. Men were treated for injuries without anaesthetic.
• One prisoner, after eight days of solitary confinement, was placed in an unheated  punishment cell in mid-winter. Buckets of cold water were thrown into the cell which the prisoner was forced to mop up with a rag. His depraved tormentors removed his jackets and boots, and he had to stand with bleeding feet for about ten hours on a frozen concrete floor. Finally he was forced to crawl on his hands and knees to his interrogation. Those responsible, the camp commandant, unbelievably a medical officer, and three interrogators were suspended but not charged.
• Former great German cities were reduced to rubble; the survivors became 'cave dwellers'.
• Water was supplied by a solitary standpipe for a few hours a day. There were no  essentials of day-to-day life. People scavenged like rodents.
• The London government enforced a strict policy of non-fraternisation. As during the  worst inhuman excesses of colonial Africa, British servicemen and women, were instructed 'to keep clear of Germans – man, woman and child – unless in the course of duty. 'You must not walk with them, shake their hand or visit their homes.'
• There was no smiling, no playing with children, no offering food or sweets. Service  personnel were put on a charge for doing so.
• British and Germans travelled in separate carriages and compartments when  travelling.
• British and Germans were not allowed to worship in the same church
• Enjoying a film together was forbidden. Nor were Germans and British allowed to  enjoy music together.
• Newspaper correspondents were under tacit instructions not to send back any reports  that were complimentary or sympathetic to Germany or her people. This policy didn't change until 1965 and is still followed by many British newspapers.
• A catch 22 situation. Work in the public sector essential to the infrastructure of any  society was denied to those who had been members of the NSDAP or any of the former government's armed services, institutions and civil service. Yet formerly these positions had been open only to NSDAP members.
• Before work permits were granted applicants had to fill out forms offering their  record of employment, income and party, group, club, union or institute membership since 1933. One million were issued which resulted in chaos as few British service personnel could speak German, and they were not allowed to employ those who could.
• Anything that could be removed from German industrial plants was systematically  removed and shipped to Britain and the industrial shells then dynamited.
• All German songs were analysed in case they should be pro-nationalist.
• British administrations (24,785) outnumbered their equally ruthless American  counterparts by 5/1 (5,008).
• German food rations were reduced to 1,500 calories a day. Barely enough to survive  on.
• All girls – even schoolgirls had a simple choice of survival. Either clear rubble and  pull half-decomposed bodies from the ruins, or sell their bodies. Nearly two years after the war's end an estimated 500,000 German women were selling their bodies for survival.
• 80% of females suffered from venereal disease and the reluctant British authorities  shipped in penicillin. No doubt to protect their own army of rapists and looters.
• British rapists and those who otherwise sired children by German females were  exonerated from any requirement to pay maintenance.
• Only in July 1951 – six years after the war's end, were these iniquitous and sadistic  measures lifted.

Source: A Strange Enemy People: Germans Under The British 1945 – 1950. Patricia Meehan. Peter Owens publishers. September, 2001. The author is a historian and former BBC TV producer who worked in Germany from 1945.