by Dugald » Sat Feb 02, 2008 12:31 am
Newsreel News in Wartime Glasgow.
At the start of the war national and world news assumed a new importance in the daily lives of most British people. Newspapers of course continued to provide news, but there also occurred for example, a big increase in the number of people listening to the BBC Radio News. These were the only available sources (aside from Lord Haw Haw) of current news for most people. The BBC broadcast at 9 pm was probably the most popular broadcast and remained, for most people, an almost sacrosanct institution until the end of the war. There were needless-to-say, no pictures accompanying the BBC News.
During the war however, most people also spent a good deal of their free time going to the pictures, that is, the movies. As well as a feature attraction, the theatres all showed a newsreel, usually Pathe News or Gaumont-British News and they lasted oh, maybe ten or so minutes. These very popular newsreels were I'd guess, a useful means for the Ministry of What-have-You to disseminate any item of news, as well as other items of information, which the government felt might further the cause of winning the war. Dr. Göbbels too, made use of the German "Wochenschau", much the same as our newsreel, but it would be a safe bet that the British one was much more closely allied with the truth than the Nazi one.
The news items were a widely appreciated part of the picture show. They provided a means of openly expressing one's feelings about what was happening in the war: with rousing cheers or polite applause for the good stuff, and rousing boos or a silent acceptance for the other kind of stuff. No cheerleaders were required for the cheering or the booing, they were totally spontaneous, and very enjoyable.
I cheered and booed many a wartime newsreel presentation, but two of them had a more significant impact on me than most of them, and I can still recall them with a good measure of clarity.
The first of them, around about 1943, was the exchange of severely wounded British and German prisoners. The British POW's, transported by the Germans to Sweden, arrived home aboard a Swedish hospital ship, and the unusually long movie newsreel, showed the wounded coming ashore at a dockside in a British port. The background music to this heartfelt memorable disembarkation was, "We'll Keep the Home fires Burning". I watched this very sad film unfolding in the Plaza Cinema at Govan Cross. We watched blind soldiers being led down the gangway and into the care of waiting nurses; stretcher bearers carrying mangled bodies; and soldiers with unapparent reasons for repatriation being helped by medical personnel. There was an utter silence in the theatre, interrupted after a very short while by the sound of muffled sniffles among the audience.
An historical aside: These wounded-prisoner exchanges were carried out several times during the war on behalf of the British and the Germans by the Swedish Red Cross using the Swedish ship S/S Drottningholm. The British repatriates landed at Liverpool or Belfast, but there may have been one landing at Leith. There were of course some civilians exchanged in a similar manner.
The most famous, or perhaps infamous, of the wartime repatriated civilians, was Unity Mitford. She, a personal friend of Hitler, swore she would shoot herself if Britain and Germany went to war. True to her word, on Sept 3rd, 1939, Unity went to a park in Münich and shot herself in the head. The .22 bullet didn't kill her; it lodged in her brain and she clung to life. Her unconscious body was found by the police... and so was Hitler's phone number in her address book. Hitler himself arranged for Unity to be sent to the UK via Swirzerland; she never recovered fully, and banished to the island of Mull, died in Oban I think, in 1945.
The other newsreel with the significant impact occurred in the early part of 1945 in the Vogue Cinema on Crossloan Rd. The newsreel this time was one that shook not only Govan, but all the U.K., if not the world. I'm speaking of the pictures taken by British Army photographers of the German concentration camp at Belsen in Schlesweig Holstein. The movie of British soldiers actually bulldozing heaps of decaying emaciated human corpses, are pictures most of us who saw them will never forget...indeed, neither should we. These pictures portrayed another aspect of the terrible evils of which the Third Reich were capable.
This newsreel too, was longer than was the norm, and after its showing there was a stunned silence. Unlike the repatriation pictures, and as far as I recollect, there was no sound of sobbing; and I say again, just a stunned silence. It was as if we didn't know what to do, didn't know how to react to such a debasement of human life. This lasted for a short while or so after the conclusion, and then the theatre was filled with whispered conversations of what had been seen.
The next day these Belsen pictures were the main topic of conversation among the people of my acquaintance in Govan.
An historical aside: The Hereford Light Infantry, was among the first British troops to enter Belsen and it seems that Josef Kramer, the Belsen camp commandant, had sought a truce with the advancing Allied force, for the purpose of saving lives [said Kramer!] among the inmates of Belsen, but the truce was rejected by the Allied force. Yes, I know, sounds like utter rubbish...but the official history of the H.L.I. confirms that this did in fact happen. It seems too, that Belsen was not an 'extermination' camp like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There were no gas chambers nor any other apparent means of execution, and the enormous heaps of corpses were those of prisoners who had died of starvation and of typhus (there was no cure for this disease back then). We didn't know of this back in 1945, and it was assumed these prisoners had been intentionally killed...as they were at Auschwitz for example.
It was difficult to understand why Josef Kramer chose to remain at Belsen in the final days of Nazi Germany, when he could easily have done what countless other SS personnel had done, and make good his getaway. Kramer stayed and, after a trial, was executed by the Allies. Kramer it seems, didn't think he was guilty of any war crime. No matter which way one looks at it, there is no doubt Belsen was an episode in WWII that gave a new meaning to man's inhumanity to man.
I had the occasion about ten years ago to cycle around Belsen and I saw nothing at all to indicate what had happened here during the war. I did see a military cemetery there, but no mention of the concentration camp. There were British troops still stationed in the town of Bergen Bergen, a dusty dump of a town, beside Belsen, but they weren't very communicative.