GEORGE HORTON, “a bright and genial” Yorkshireman, spent part of the First World War right in the thick of the action, serving as an army chaplain on the Western Front. After two years in wartime France, he took up a much quieter post, as Rector of Frinsted. But, even in rural Kent, the war was close to hand. In May 1918, a stricken German Gotha bomber crashed to the ground near the village, killing two crew members and wounding a third. Horton was quickly on the scene, praying for the enemy airmen, then a few days later burying the deceased with full military honours in the parish churchyard.
Not everyone was quite so forgiving of the enemy. In Handforth, Cheshire, the parish priest apparently refused to allow any decorations or plants over a “Hun’s grave”. Ultimately, though, it was of little consequence whether local clergy welcomed these graves or not; the enemy dead had to be buried somewhere. And, during the First World War, the 2700 or so Germans to die in Britain generally ended up in churchyards and municipal cemeteries.
By the war’s end, in November 1918, enemy graves could be found in hundreds of different sites, from the English Channel coast to northern Scotland. Peace may have finally come, but little changed with the enemy graves. While the British gradually moved all their war dead into new military cemeteries, politicians in the Weimar Republic had neither the funds nor perhaps the inclination to do something similar. The German dead were destined to remain in Britain, quietly resting in churchyards and cemeteries.
With no other arrangements in place, parish priests effectively became the custodians of the enemy war dead. This task was given a more official colour when the newly formed Imperial War Graves Commission agreed to pay parishes an annual fee for maintaining the German graves in their churchyards. The Vicar of St Mary’s, North Mymms, in Hertfordshire, for example, was promised 7s. 6d. for keeping a single German grave tidy.
BEING a custodian, though, often involved a lot more than just trimming the grass or weeding around the graves. Caring for the dead also meant dealing with the living. Understandably, the bereaved back home in Germany, as well as war veterans and German officials, all wanted to know that the graves were in safe hands. Nobody was perhaps better placed than parish priests to offer this reassurance. David Railton, the Vicar of Margate and himself a former army chaplain, was ahead of the curve in this regard, and wrote to Germany about three German airmen buried in his parish, as he thought the relatives “would probably like to know”.
Railton’s tender concern in Margate was a sign of how quickly some communities started to embrace the enemy war dead. A little further north, in the small Essex village of Downham, another three German airmen of the First World War lay at peace. Here, the Rector made direct contact with the families, promising not to make any changes to the graves “without their knowledge”.
Elsewhere, parish priests were often at the centre of visits, welcoming families and veterans who managed to make the long journey to the grave. One visitor, who spent several days travelling to the Isle of Man, was so delighted to see the carefully tended German graves in the churchyard of Patrick parish that she rushed over to the churchwarden and immediately “shook hands with him”.
The Revd R. A. Jones, Vicar of All Saints’, Brocton, in Staffordshire, was one of the busiest. During the First World War, several Germans had died in the Brocton prisoner-of-war camp, leaving Jones to deal with this mortuary legacy, post-war. He was in close contact with the relevant authorities in Berlin as well as with the bereaved. Although it involved a great deal of travel, Jones regularly visited the graves, laying wreaths and obtaining photos for the families. It was a “way of showing sympathy for the dead”, he explained.
Throughout the inter-war years, officials of the German Embassy in London conducted their own regular inspections of the war graves. With hundreds of different sites to visit, this was far from easy. The German consul in Liverpool did some rough calculations and decided, perhaps somewhat pessimistically, that it would take him 82 days just to inspect the different cemeteries within his area of the country.
He and his fellow German diplomats became regular visitors to churchyards. When it proved difficult to travel, they wrote to parish priests directly for information. “The inscriptions are as good and legible as the day they were placed,” the parish clerk in Llanwnog in Powys reassured them. The Rector of Buckland Filleigh, in North Devon, was even more effusive about his single German grave: “We shall not allow it to be neglected,” he replied.
SOME clergy clearly found the glare of the diplomatic spotlight to be a bit too much. Oswald Scott, the Vicar of Seaton Carew on the Durham coast, failed to hide his irritation at the constant stream of German visitors and requests for information which came his way. The situation got so bad that Scott declared that he was “refus[ing] to speak to anyone” about the German war graves “unless they have some credentials in their hands”.
Adolf Hitler’s rise to the German chancellorship only added to these pressures. Places such as Seaton Carew, where Zeppelin crew were buried, became important sites of pilgrimage for supporters of the new Nazi regime. One of the many visitors to turn up in the churchyard, for example, claimed that he had been “commissioned” to inspect the graves by Hitler himself. Scott’s woes in Seaton Carew paled in insignificance, however, to those of the Vicar of Potters Bar, where the crews of two airships lay buried. During the 1930s, the graves became the setting for annual Remembrance services that attracted almost 2000 German visitors.
The ominous presence of Nazi followers and swastika flags in Potters Bar and other British churchyards was a reminder of the rise of the Right in Central Europe. With the onset of hostilities in September 1939, a new set of enemy deaths — mainly as a result of the air war — occurred over Britain. As had been the case some 25 years earlier, the Germans who lost their lives in this second conflict also found their way into cemeteries and churchyards.
Once the war was over, a familiar cycle of care and remembrance started, this time for a new collection of enemy graves. As after the Great War, parish priests again came to play a key part as local custodians of the dead. In the parish of Weldon, for example, five German airmen who had been killed over Northamptonshire in February 1941 lay buried in the churchyard. The Rector, Arthur Higginson, went out of his way to emphasise that he would “help any relatives who wanted to visit”. The whole community, Higginson added, “is proud to have these five graves in their cemetery”.
This pattern of local care for the enemy war dead came to an end only in the early 1960s. At this juncture, the governments of the UK and the Federal Republic of Germany signed an international treaty regulating the future of the war graves. Under the terms of the agreement, the West Germans were granted permission to concentrate the German dead from the two world wars together, in a single military cemetery on Cannock Chase, in Staffordshire.
Before the dead could be moved to their new resting place, however, parish priests had one final task to perform. Under ecclesiastical law, exhuming bodies from consecrated ground required a faculty. Not all local clergy were willing to sign the documents, particularly as the dead had lain undisturbed for decades. The Revd David Strangeways, in Bridport, had a different reason for withholding his consent: after the family of a German airman buried in the churchyard had visited the previous summer, Strangeways was uneasy at the thought of simply allowing the remains to be moved.
In the end, Strangeways and others who were uncomfortable with the exhumations signed the paperwork. This brought local custodianship of the enemy graves to a close, and, at the same time, ended the intricate British-German relationship. Today, visitors to Frinsted, Llanwnog, Weldon, and other parish churchyards will find very few traces of the former enemy graves. Instead, these dead lie quietly, and somewhat alone, in the vast Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery.
The 80th anniversary of VE Day, on 8 May, is certainly a moment to think of all those who unflinchingly fought against the scourge of European fascism. The lives of the German war dead may not feature prominently in the commemorations, but their history is a reminder that there are, of course, always two sides to conflict. The dead, whether friend or foe, were originally buried in communities up and down the country, localising the very human cost of the two world wars.
Tim Grady is the author of Burying the Enemy: The story of those who cared for the dead in two world wars, published by Yale University Press at £25 (Church Times Bookshop £22.50); 978-0-300-27397-7.