Foreign News: Gott Strafe England (1946)

A long-expected warning signal came out of Germany last week. It came from Germany’s roughest, toughest and second largest city, half-ruined Hamburg.

Hamburg’s citizens have been normally in the vanguard of trouble. They had rioted during the 1918 Spartacus Putsch and spearheaded the abortive 1923 Communist insurrection. Hamburg once had Germany’s largest percentage of Communists, later it went enthusiastically Nazi. Last week Hamburg went to extremes once more.

The British had issued a housing eviction order to make room for a new Military Government Headquarters. Hamburgers dispatched a delegation of six women to see Hamburg’s dignified Oberbürgermeister Rudolf Hieronymus Petersen, and plead with him to intervene with British authorities.

As they talked, a well-organized demonstration gathered. Singly, in pairs and in small groups, at first mostly women & children, Hamburgers streamed into the Rathausmarkt outside Petersen’s office. Within an hour 4,000 embittered Ausgebombte (bombed outs) were singing the outlawed national anthem Deutschland über Alles, knocking hats off Mitbürger who kept their heads covered during the singing. The crowd yelled: “We’re not Indians, not coolies, we must be treated like Germans.” Other slogans repeated the contents of numerous anti-Semitic chain letters which have been making the rounds of the city recently. Shouts of “Gott Strafe England!” finally aroused British military police to arrest ten youths, one woman.

The first big post-V-E day demonstration anywhere in Germany was a hint of what might be in store as the conquered came out of the stupor of defeat.