Alan Turing and German Gays

Alan Turing was a national hero.  He is widely regarded as the father of computer science and was behind the breaking of the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park. His genius allowed critical knowledge of German military movements.  It is no exaggeration to say that he was behind one of Britain's most critical contributions to the Allied and Soviet victories over the Nazis.

Turing happened to be gay.  He was 40 and was in a relationship with a 19 year old when he was arrested in 1952 and charged with the same Victorian offence that Oscar Wilde and an estimated 75,000 other gay men were, before consenting sex between male adults (at the time over 21 years old) was finally allowed in England and Wales in 1967.  Turing was chemically castrated and died in unclear circumstances aged 41.

Alan Turing as a young man

 Problems with a Pardon

This post was prompted by David Allen Green's piece at New Statesman on Turing and the issues around his suggested pardon.  I found it both powerful and actually extremely moving.  I really recommend you give it a read.

As the piece points out, Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology on behalf of our country for the way that Turing was treated, back in 2009.  Pressure has been increased recently, however, for a pardon.  There are problems with this.  A pardon stems from the ancient Royal Prerogative of Mercy.  It is in effect the Monarch using their power to forgive a person who has committed and been convicted of a crime.  The person has still technically breached the law and is guilty; only morally are they are considered innocent.  The law has been correctly applied (as opposed to a misapplication of justice, where it has not).  The conviction still stands on their criminal record.

As David Allen Green points out, such an act is legally and practically useless.  Turing is long since dead, it cannot affect his serving of any sentence, and this is therefore only of symbolic value.  Gordon Brown's apology was enough if all we wanted was a symbolic act.  The chief executive of Stonewall has described the exercise as "pointless".  Others would say the symbolism is in fact worse than useless, but wrong, given the State is reasserting that a crime was committed.

Turing's German Contemporaries

Now let's consider for a moment the fate of gay contemporaries of Turing in Nazi Germany.  Gay sex had been permitted in some German States (such as Bavaria) prior to German Unification in 1871.  Paragraph 175 of the unified German Criminal Code made it an offence throughout the country.  The Social Democrats attempted to repeal "this disgraceful paragraph" as early as the 1890s.  It looked likely to be abolished in the early 1930s and was actual put on a "reform package" before the Reichstag, but in 1933 the Nazis took power.

The Nazis extended the law to cover homosexual thoughts (i.e. orientation) rather than just acts.  After discharge from criminal prisons, many gay men were moved directly to the concentration (as opposed to death) camps.  Here they formed one of the lowest tiers in the prisoner hierarchy, marked out by pink triangles on their uniforms.  Up to 15,000 died of maltreatment, starvation, illness or simple murder.  Unlike Jews or Gypsies they were not subjected to factory type genocide, and the numbers involved were much smaller than the other groups (estimated at 6,000,000 and 1,000,000 respectively).

Nonetheless the individual suffering, based on sexual orientation, was horrendous.  Death rates ran at around 60%.  Those who did survive left to find scant pity or understanding for them.  They were considered sexual criminals rather than victims and some (released by the Allies) were sent back to ordinary prisons to fulfill their prison sentences.  German courts continued to prosecute gay men under paragraph 175 until 1969 (two years later than England/Wales legalised gay sex).  Around 140,000 men in total were convicted under paragraph 175 over the period 1871-1969.

Dachau Monument to Gay Victims of the Nazis

German Rehabilitation 

In 2002 Social Democrat, Green and Far Left members of the German Bundestag succeeded in extending a law called the NS-Aufhebungsgesetz to men convicted under paragraph 175.  This was in the face of votes to the contrary from the conservative CDU/CSU parties and the liberal FDP.   There was a mixed reaction from the LGBT community: whilst the measure was welcomed as far as it went, it did not affect those convicted between 1945 and 1969 under paragraph 175: the very same provision the Nazis had used against gay men.  Their convictions remain unaffected to this day.

The interesting thing here is that most articles on the 2002 law refer to a "pardon" of the victims. A quick look at the German statute reveals that this is legally incorrect. The Act extends to gay criminal offences another Statute of 1998 (apologies that the links are in German).  That Act abolishes the decisions of Nazi courts of "justice" between 1933 and 1945 which were based on political, military, race, religious or philosophical reasons.  This is not a pardon: it is saying the offence never happened and the conviction had no legal basis.  The slate is wiped clean and no criminal record remains.

Back to the Turing Pardon

So, we return to Alan Turing.  David Allen Green's suggestion is a mechanism based on the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, introduced under the Coalition.  Under this men who engaged in consensual gay sex which would no longer constitute an offence, can apply to have their criminal records removed.   The suggestion is that this could be applied to deceased victims of the law that convicted Turing. 

It goes much further than a pardon one, both legally and morally.  It acknowledges that the law was wrong before 1967 and grave wrongs were done.  In effect it would place Turing (and not just him, but all of the other 75,000 victims of this law) in the same position as German gay men convicted under the Nazis.  There is a beautiful and befitting symmetry in this.  The gay German victims of the Nazis who benefited from the law of 2002 would not have done so without Turing's work and Allied victory.  It is right, and it is just for our government to take this step now.

The Bombing of Germany

Pforzheim in the Black Forest

Pforzheim was an extremely pretty little town in the Black Forest.  It dated back to Roman times and was known as the "Gold Town" because of its precision jewellery and watch making industries.  Cuckoo clocks, after all, hail from this part of Germany (not Switzerland as many think).  It was awarded market rights some time before 1080.  Its centre was made up of typically German "ginger bread" half-timbered houses.

 The town had about 50,000 inhabitants: that makes it the size of Havant in Hampshire (ever heard of it?) or less than half the size of Bath.  In 1938 the Pforzheimers had watched on as the Nazis burned down the handsome Moorish style synagogue that had been built in 1890. In 1940 a large proportion of the town's Jewish population was deported to a concentration camp in France.  55 of the 195 Jews deported survived the holocaust.

By the end of February 1945 Nazi Germany was on its knees.  The Soviets were advancing rapidly towards Berlin.  Millions of German civilians, my Mother and her family amongst them, were fleeing the troops.  Auschwitz had been liberated a month before.  The Germans' Ardennes offensive in the West had entirely failed.  France and Belgium had long since been freed.  US forces would shortly be crossing the Rhine.  Many German cities were entirely unprotected by this stage from aerial attack.  German historian Jörg Friedrich, who made his reputation by reporting on the Majdanek trial, described the situation in  Germany simply as follows: "By March 1945 there was no longer any morale, oil or transportation".  The bombing raids which the Allies were conducting with ever greater ferocity were "almost totally devoid of military purpose and free from all tactical risk."

Pforzheim was small.  It was regarded as irrelevant by the Allies as regards armament production.  It was also highly flammable because of its historic buildings and narrow, winding streets. On the evening of 23 February 1945 the Royal Air Force flew over.  They dropped 330 high explosive and thousands of phosphorus incendiary bombs.  1551 tonnes of them.  The incendiaries were designed to rain through the old tiled roofs of people's homes, destroying everything you owned.  Your bed, your clothes, your furniture would catch ablaze.  Flying wood, splinters, debris and glass would be hurled through the air.  The noise would be deafening.

Hundreds of small fires would merge into a major blaze.  The superheated air would shoot upward like a giant chimney.  The heat would climb to 800C and suck in wind like a typhoon at speeds of up to 170mph.  It would suck everything into its centre, uprooting people and trees and drawing away the oxygen.  There would be precious little chance of escape for you, your children, or your dog or cat.  If you sought refuge from the inferno in a fountain you would be boiled to death.  If you were in a cellar seeking protection with your family you would either be suffocated, or it would quite literally serve as a crematorium.  Metal with a melting point of 1700C would become molten as the fire storm progressed. 

Survivor Hermine Lautenschlager:

"On the floor of the cellar, there were piles of ashes here and there.  Part of a human torso that looked like a charred tree stump was in the middle.  Near a pile of ashes in the corner lay a key chain.  They were the keys of my sister.  That's where she always sat during the air-raids, that's what my brother-in-law told me.  Later they even found a small piece of fabric from her dress."

The smoke rose over Pforzheim to a height of 3 kilometres.  The glare of the fire could be seen 160 kilometres away.   The carpet bombing of the town lasted from 7.50pm to 8.12pm: precisely 22 minutes.  There were 20,277 deaths in the hellish inferno.  More than one in three people in the town died.  In Nagasaki, one in seven died.  Over 85% of the city was destroyed.  Not even the pattern of the streets was visible the following morning.  Lead bomber Major Edwin Swales, whose plane crashed in Belgium on the way home, was posthumously awarded a VC for this work that night.

Pforzheim after the Firestorm

Not The Only One
 
You quite possibly hadn't heard of Pforzheim.  That's one of the points of this blog post.  Dresden is remembered every 14 February, the night that the RAF delivered its Valentine's Day gift to the city.  Between 25,000 and 35,000 died.  We are nearing the 70th anniversary of "Operation Gomorrah" in July 1943 when 1 million people were made homeless in Hamburg and 42,600 were killed.  I'm sure that will be the subject of a couple of articles and then it will be soon forgotten. 

Every time I visit Germany I'm aware of the effect on the Allied aerial bombing on the country.  Literally a handful of towns survived untouched: centuries of culture, architecture, beauty and history was wiped out with the repeated destruction of 160 towns, most of them with medieval hearts.  That's not even to mention the human cost: a staggering five hundred and fifty thousand Germans were killed by the British and Americans.  550,000.  76,000 were children or babies.

Whenever Dresden is mentioned, Coventry is thrown in, as if the scale of destruction and loss of life were equivalent.  Goebbels fully exploited the horror of the bombing of Dresden and totally overstated the losses.  Here are some simple comparisons of actual statistics:

• Deaths in Coventry: 568
• Deaths in Dresden: 25,000-35,000
• Total deaths in German raids on the UK: 60,000
• Total deaths in Allied raids on Germany: 550,000
• German bombs dropped on the UK: 75,000 tonnes
• Allied bombs dropped on Germany: 2,800,000 tonnes

Charred bodies in the ruins of Dresden, one of Europe's finest cities

Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of Allied area (carpet) bombing (which I shall come on to), please do not take the simplistic position that there was equal killing and destruction on both sides.  The British and Americans dropped almost 40 times the amount of bombs on Germany than the Luftwaffe did here, and killed almost 10 times more civilians.

From a human perspective, to me, every death is a tragedy.  In that respect this is far from a "competition".  It doesn't matter to the individual who was killed (or to their family) how many others died at the same time, but it does matter when assessing the historical record and behaviour of a country.  Germany was responsible for the deaths of many, many more people in the war than Britain, but I am concerned in this piece with Britain's behaviour, not Germany's.  I'm at pains to stress that below.

For the avoidance of doubt the above figures say little about intention.  I've seen nothing to suggest that Germany would not have wreaked the same level of destruction on British cities had they had the ability to do so.  The fact is that they did not, thank god.  Intent is one important aspect of moral (and legal) culpability; execution is the second.  The Allies had both.

"We shall.... kill 900,000"

A widespread bombing of civilian targets in carpet bombing raids (as opposed to tactical bombing of strategic targets) was feared when war broke out.  The Germans had demonstrated their lack of concern for civilian human life in Guernica (400 dead), Warsaw, and Rotterdam (900 dead, rather than 30,000 as claimed in the Western press).  The first bomb of the London Blitz fell on the City on 24 August 1940 - and is now believed to have been a mistake.  The RAF retaliated with an attack on Berlin and the tit for tat began.

For the first part of the war, the aim was still predominantly to destroy German means of production, despite the revenge attacks.  The accuracy of these raids was sketchy at best.  The RAF even managed to hit the wrong country when it bombed Geneva, Basel and Zurich in neutral Switzerland in 1940.  Later in the war, the USAF killed 40 in Schaffhausen in Switzerland.  Their target was Ludwigshafen, 235km north in Germany.  The US ambassador held a reception in Zurich to apologise and was forced to take cover when yet another USAF bomb raid hit the city, killing five.  The target this time was Aschaffenburg, 280km north.

By October 1942 the policy of aiming mainly for strategic targets changed.  Air Marshall Sir Charles Portal framed Bomber Command's new policy: "I suppose it is clear that the new aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories."  Air Vice Marshall Harris explained his superior's policy:

"We shall destroy Germany's will to fight.  Now that we have the planes and crews, in 1943 and 1944 we shall drop one and a quarter million tons of bombs, render 25 million Germans homeless, kill 900,000 and seriously injure one million."

Think about these words.  This was a deliberately framed, express British policy to render tens of million homeless, to kill almost a million civilians, and to maim a million more.  The strong belief of Bomber Command was that the war could be shortened in this way and British lives saved.  Targets of cultural value were deliberately included, as their destruction would allegedly damage German morale and break the will to fight, as were "flammable" cities, which would burn better.  Centuries of human heritage, art and achievement (what today would be called "World Heritage" assets) were irrelevant in this fight against the then German government.

Britain issued a warning to German citizens.  They dropped leaflets to say that all German cities were now considered valid military targets.  Quite how 30 million people were supposed to leave their work and homes as a result of this, during wartime, is a good question.  The USA was at first quite reticent to join in the British plans to carpet bomb German cities.  By 1944 attitudes had hardened and the US too joined in the revenge attacks - which were labelled "terror raids" by the Germans. 

Two Points to Remember: a Just War and Morale

A couple of things need to be remembered here.  This was a just, brave war.  The Nazi machine was one of the murderous the world has ever known.  We hardly need reminding of the grisly images of the most barbaric treatment of human beings that is possible in the form of the German death camps.  Seen in retrospect, there is an argument that anything that would harm Nazi Germany was a good thing.  Britain held out alone with dogged determination through the years of 1940 and 1941.  Our country has an enormous amount to be proud of in this respect, and more generally for seeing the fight against the Nazis through until the bitter end.

However, caution also needs to be exercised.  It is too easy to simplify matters and to see things with the benefit (or hindrance!) of hindsight.  Britain did not go to war in 1939 to save the Jews.  The world was not aware of what would happen to the Jews in 1939, or even in 1942 when Bomber Command decided to fire-bomb German cities.  The "Final Solution" to murder Europe's Jewry was decided upon in January 1942.  90% of the holocaust's eventual victims were still alive at this point and the policy of mass-murdering them was to be kept a closely guarded secret.  The reality of the death camps only became fully clear in 1945 with their eventual liberation.  Britain went to war because of alarming, threatening German territorial expansion.  When the enemy was finally crushed, Britain and the USA handed Poland on a plate to Stalin's Soviet Union.  A war started for the protection of a country ended with over 40 years of communist rule being inflicted on it. 

Morale: a key part of WW2. But at what cost?

The second is that the area bombing of German cities was considered important to British morale.  After the defeat and flight from Dunkirk, followed by the significant victory of the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, there was for years very little opportunity to actually fight the war.  Other than the fight in North Africa, and a failed attempt to invade France in 1943, Britain had little chance to engage properly until June 1944 and D-Day.  By highlighting the fact German cities were being destroyed, morale could be kept up.  Revenge is a powerful motivator in war time.  Whether that justified deliberately killing hundreds of thousands of people and wiping out centuries of culture for every future generation is another matter.

The Cost to British Lives

An aspect in this ghastly story that absolutely must not be forgotten is the cost to British life that the policy of bombing Germany involved.  Bomber Command crews suffered horrendously high casualty rates.  55,573 mainly young men were killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew.  That is a death rate of 44.4% and is a testament to the extraordinary courage of these men.  Only one in six was expected to survive their first tour of duty (30 sorties) and they knew this.  The death rate was far higher than infantry officer rates in the trenches of WW1.  Bomber Command losses represent a staggering one in five of all British losses in the six years of world war.  Considerably more Britons died flying raids over Germany than the Luftwaffe managed to kill here during the long months of the Blitz (40,000).

Bravery doesn't even do it justice: the stats are terrifying

Those who survived (I knew one) were sometimes scarred for life with their experiences and conflicted about what they had done and the effect it had had.  I too am deeply conflicted when I see the memorials to Bomber Crews which dot my part of the country, Suffolk.  It is, I believe, possible to honour and respect the bravery and sacrifice of individuals, whilst disagreeing with the policy that was initiated by those far higher up the chain of command.

Opposition in Britain

Not all Britons of the time welcomed the reports of German cities turned in giant infernos and "1000 bomber raids".  George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, was perhaps the most outspoken.  He was an active supporter of the German resistance, and a great humanitarian.

He wrote to the Times in 1941 and described the bombing of unarmed women and children as "barbarian".  He said it would destroy the just cause of the war, thereby openly criticising Churchill's support of a bombing strategy.  Two years (to the day) ahead of the destruction of Dresden he urged the House of Lords to resist the War Cabinet's decision to engage in area bombing.  He said it called into question all the humane and democratic values for which Britain had gone to war.  In 1944 he called the bombing of cities such as Hamburg and Berlin an illegal "policy of annihilation" and a "crime against humanity".  Other senior Church figures did not support him.

A (very) few spoke out

Major Sir Richard Stokes, MP for Ipswich (Labour) also openly and repeatedly criticised the policy of area bombing in Parliament and helped force a partial change of policy following Dresden.  He was joined by Alfred Salter, MP for Bermondsey West (Labour) whose own constituency had been heavily bombed, but who held heavily pacifist, Quaker inspired beliefs.  Theirs views were not supported (at least in public) by other Labour MPs.

The existence of these three men, all strong opponents of the Nazis, who in war time could rise above the general clamour for undirected revenge gives me tremendous comfort.  I believe it is to their eternal credit that they did so.

The Rights and Wrongs of the Bombing

It is beyond my abilities to weigh up in a shortish article like this all aspects of the bombing and their rights and wrongs.  I do have a few points though, before passing over to someone (Professor Grayling) who has assessed this far better than I could.

The first is the lack of natural justice that is involved in area bombing.  Germany was the perpetrator nation in WW2.  It doesn't however follow that all Germans should be punished, by death, for the actions of their government.  If an individual commits a crime, s/he should be held responsible.  "Justice from the skies" does not fulfill this.  50 of the surviving 150 surviving Jews of Dresden were killed in the firestorm.  Socialists, opponents of the Nazis, resistance members, babies and children (remember, 76,000 were killed by the British and US) were as likely to be killed in the infernos as committed Nazis or perpetrators of war crimes.  The very top of the pile were entirely safe in their bunkers: the evil judge Freisler is the only prominent Nazi I can think of who was killed in this way.

The next is the question of destroying morale.  Time and again it has been shown that by bombing, people are united in terror and hatred of the people doing the bombing.  That is exactly what happened when the Luftwaffe bombed London during the Blitz.  The Allied destruction of German cities in no way led to a shortening of the war because the people turned against the government.  This simply did not happen as a matter of fact.

We also have the issue of reciprocity.  The basic idea here is that they did it, so it was okay for us to do it back.  Leaving aside the fact that the Allied bombing of Germany was SO much more extreme than the German bombing of Britain, let's just think about this for a moment.  There is zero question that the Nazi regime was evil.  It was so evil, it still almost makes me physically vomit when I discover new aspects of it.  We are not concerned with Nazi actions, however.  What we are concerned with is a democratic nation that takes a premeditated decision "to kill 900,000", which is then accepted in the Mother of Parliaments with the smallest of opposition.

It is perfectly possible to have fought a just war, but in this (actually quite important) aspect to have fallen far short of how we should have behaved.  Area bombing was not, in my view, justified on a tit-for-tat basis: it lowered us to a level where we aimed to murder civilians.  It is a tragic stain on the brave conduct of a nation at war.

The question of whether area bombing was a war crime is one which will never be tested in the courts.  Perhaps surprisingly, a raft of academics from across the political spectrum seem to be  agreed on this point.  They usually focus on Dresden, but the logic presumably applies to other cities.  Dr Stanton, the president of Genocide Watch said: "The Nazi Holocaust was among the most evil genocides in history.  But the Allies’ firebombing of Dresden and nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also war crimes... We are all capable of evil and must be restrained by law from committing it."  Historian Professor Bloxham, editor of the Journal of Holocaust Education is unequivocal that Dresden was "a war crime".  Frederick Taylor in his outstanding work Dresden is however less clear: he finds the city was in many ways a typical wartime target and bounces back any moral judgement to the reader.

Finally we have the issue of whether area bombing shortened the war by damaging German war production.  Historians take different stances on this, but the consensus seems to be "somewhat".   The major problem was that German production was spread out across the country, not centered in a single place.  Despite the 2.8 million tonnes of bombs dropped, production continued to rise right through until 1945.  Questions include: whether simply targeting specific factory targets or purely industrial towns would have been yet more effective; and whether the massive cost of 550,000 civilian lives justified the benefit received. 

Professor Grayling's Conclusion

Professor AC Grayling wrote a 350 page book in 2006 that considered in great depth the moral, international law and strategic (did it help end the war sooner, were these valid military targets etc) aspects of Allied area bombing.  Here is his conclusion:

On the basis of the foregoing chapters the answer I give to the following questions are these:  Was area bombing necessary? No.  Was it proportionate? No.  Was it against the humanitarian principles that people have been striving to enunciate as a way of controlling and limiting war? Yes. Was it against the general moral standards of the kind recognised and agreed in Western civilisation in the last five centuries, or even 2,000 years? Yes.  Was it against what mature national laws provide in the way of outlawing murder, bodily harm, and destruction of property?  Yes.

In short and in sum: was area bombing wrong?  Yes.  Very wrong?  Yes.

What can I add to that?  It is as clear as it could possibly be, and having read the whole of his work very carefully I cannot fault his logic or analysis.  I really recommend the book if you are interested in finding out more on the subject.

Some Final Thoughts

This subject evokes very strong emotions.  In some ways this is good.  Killing 550,000 civilians and wiping out the historic fabric of 160 towns and cities should be discussed.  These were acts implemented and carried out by the British government.  Consider the shock and contemplation in peacetime when there is an accident or an act of terrorism and 20 or 50 people die.  How little is actually spoken about this subject in this country?

Each and every loss of life was horrendous and tragic.  The aim of this piece is not belittle British deaths or claim German ones are more important: far, far from it.  It is to remember from a simple human perspective the astonishing suffering that happened on all sides.  How wrong it would be to claim that the life of a German child who died in Pforzheim, a British child killed in the Blitz, and a Jewish child murdered in Auschwitz are somehow of different values.  To see them as members of groups to be accorded different rights to life is to go down the path of the philosophy of evil.  My aim is also not to somehow claim that by remembering and critically assessing the sufferings of Germans under area bombing, the culpability of Nazism is diminished.  That is what neo-Nazis try to do and it is illegitimate, offensive and wrong.

My father was bombed out of his childhood home in Portsmouth by the Luftwaffe.  He remembered the raids and hiding in the shelter in the garden.  We, as one of the nations on the winning side, are able to remember this type of suffering.  Most Germans do not feel able to highlight what happened to their suffering for obvious reasons.  A member of a perpetrator nation cannot ever be a victim, so the narrative goes.  I disagree, but understand why a different perspective should ideally come from our side of the fence, rather than theirs.

My favourite writer, WG Sebald wrote an incredibly elegant essay on this - On The Natural History of Destruction - in which he considered why there is an almost absolute absence of post-War German literature on this massive series of events.  Almost every German city is scarred by ugly 50s and 60s centres, yet no one speaks or writes about it.

Almost 70 years after the end of the war, I would hope this topic can be spoken about with some objective distance and without people taking simplistic, entrenched views as if we are supporting soccer teams.  It is not, I believe, an insult to the people who lived through or fought during the war in Britain, for me to come to the conclusion that in the course of a just and courageous struggle, our government made mistakes.  Area bombing was a huge and deadly one. 

Weihnachten! Christmas in Germany

Germany invented Christmas. Well, it's a bold assertion and of course by no means entirely accurate - but that said, many of the things we associate with the celebration of Christmas do have their roots in the country. The Germans "do" Christmas wonderfully and a visit to the country in December is a splendid experience.

The most obvious "German import" that both the US and Britain have is the Christmas Tree. This goes back an awfully long way. It is best explained with a comparison. The average Briton can't explain our revulsion at eating horse-meat, when cow, sheep or pig are perfectly acceptable to non-vegetarians. The cultural source for this revulsion is ancient (horses were once worshipped in Britain) and passed on from generation to generation over the centuries. So it is too with the German love of trees: forests and trees have a place in the German psyche that is quite unique. Ancient Germans worshipped the tree. Bringing a tree into the home at the time of the shortest day and lighting it with candles is a barely concealed pagan custom.

The first documented appearance of the Christmas tree in Germany is the 15th century, but as with all documentation this does not mean it is older in actual fact. There are even stories that connect the Christmas tree with the 8th century Christian martyr, St Boniface (he happens to be the patron saint of Germany). One says that he tried to demonstrate the Trinity to the heathen Germans by showing the three points of the tree and showing they were part of the same body. It didn't really help him as he was massacred by a group of heathens in modern day northern Netherlands. The stories of his connection with the Christmas tree are, however, unconfirmed.

What might surprise people is the fact that the Christmas tree seemed to be a North German, Protestant phenomenon. Catholics generally had a crib with a Nativity Scene instead. The tree only made it to Austria, for example, in 1816. A popular myth is that Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, introduced the Christmas tree to Britain after their marriage in 1841. In fact, it had already been brought over with the wife of King George III (America's last king!), Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in the late 1700s. With Prince Albert the fashion of the tree spread from the Royal Family to the Upper and then Middle Classes. It also spread to the United States, where it had become common by the 1870s.

Christmas in Germany starts early. It begins with the time of Advent: many families have an advent ring at home made out of fir branches which is lit with real candles from the end of November onwards. The pre-Christian connection is again so barely concealed. Christmas markets spring up in virtually every German town where people can buy gifts and enjoy Glühwein (similar to mulled wine) in a wonderfully cosy environment that brings light to the dark evenings. Certain cities are famous for their markets: people travel from all over Europe to medieval Nuremburg to see and buy the carved wooden toys, for example. Munich has over 30 such markets. Germans are even getting in on the act in Britain nowadays: Birmingham has a long-established German Christmas market with actual Germans who come over for weeks with their little wooden houses to man them and sell their goods. The Christmas markets last until 24 December and are then all closed up and dismantled rapidly afterwards.

Erfurt Christmas Market

The next marker of the coming of Christmas is St Nicholas' Day on 5-6 December. This is traditionally the main celebration in the Netherlands too (Christmas there used to be a purely religious festival with no presents). On this night children put out their shoes (wooden or otherwise) and if they have been good they will be filled with sweets. If they have been bad they will find sticks or coal. If they have been *really* bad, Black Peter or Knecht Ruprecht (depending where you are) will put them in his bag and take them away. St Nicholas is more of a North German celebration and the Dutch version, Sinter Klaas, is of course where Americans derive the name "Santa Claus". In the US he comes on the morning of the 25th: in Germany and the Netherlands he visits a few weeks earlier.
The big celebration of Christmas is on the evening of the 24th of December. Despite its central importance, it is only then that the Christmas Tree actually makes its appearance. The children of a house will be made to wait outside while the tree is decorated. Its look is generally less gaudy than in the UK or US. Pure white lights are usually used, along with glass or wooden decorations. My own German grandmother used real candles on her tree until the 90s. Houses are incidentally not lit up outside as they are in the US (and increasingly in Britain). The most you will see is fir trees that grow in gardens covered in white lights.

Traditionally a bell is rung after dark when everything is ready. The children come into the room to find both the tree, in all its splendour, with the presents below. Depending on which part of the country you are in, they have been delivered either by the "Christ Child" (Christkind), who is a Christ like child figure of indeterminate age dressed in white with a crown, or by the "Weihnachtsmann" (more of an English Father Christmas/ US Santa Claus type figure). The presents are opened on the night of the 24th: this is the height of German Christmas. The British Royal family, with its very close links to Germany, does the same, whilst the rest of the country waits until the morning of the 25th. There are no stockings to fill overnight on the 24th: the job has already been done and Christmas stockings pretty much don't exist as a custom here.

Food is of course central to the whole experience. Decorated gingerbread houses (Hänsel and Gretel style) are often baked or bought. Stollen is the traditional cake eaten over the period, with English mince pies hardly known. Carp (few Americans would touch it!) is often eaten on Christmas Eve, together with potato salad. Children receive paper plates full of chocolates and sweets on the night of the 24th. Goose or duck is a common meal on the 25th.

There's a huge practical advantage to putting up the Christmas Tree on the 24th: it lasts through to the 6th of January without losing as many of its needles as it would if it were put up earlier. There is also a great advantage to opening presents on the 24th: parents aren't woken at the crack of dawn by eager children wanting to open their gifts! Ah, these practical Germans.

The last rather odd custom that should be mentioned of this whole period is New Year's Eve ("Sylvester", after Pope Silvester, whose day the 31 of December is). Families sit round to watch a short film called "Dinner for One". It is a black and white production from 1963 and was produced in Germany (although it was a sketch originally written in Britain in the '20s). The entire film is in English and Germans therefore assume it is English, when in fact no one has heard of it in the UK. It holds the record for the most repeated TV programme ever. Having watched it, fallen about laughing (the old jokes are the best) people go out to let fireworks off across the country to welcome the New Year in.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber (Bavaria) town square

A piece like this cannot do justice to the sheer feeling of cosiness (Gemütlichkeit) that German Christmases involve. It is a magical time which still manages to be overwhelmingly classy and traditional. I have heard Germans who look at brightly coloured English decorations and say they are more akin to Carnival time. No German would be found in a pub on the evening of the 24th as the British tend to: it is a time to be with the family beholding the wonder of the Christmas Tree and sharing presents. I may be biased but I can think of no other country where I would rather be at this time.


[The original of this blog by me was written for and published on the ACIS Travel blog]

Munich

I've done a "travel guide" before, but hey here goes. I'd like to tell you about my favourite city perhaps anywhere: Munich.  I'm off there again on 1 January and it's the single city I probably visit most outside the UK.

First Experiences: Munich is Shite!

The first time I visited Munich I thought it was absolutely shit.  I'd been inter-railing with my friend Nick in the summer of 1990: we were 19. After a full four weeks travelling around, three days in post-revolution Bucharest with nothing to buy except watermelons, bread and clothes pegs (the latter aren't that edible) had left us in quite a state.  We caught the Istanbul Express from Belgrade to Munich overnight and slept in the corridor. I remember people stepping over my head, smoking all night long, and had the delights of waking up with the side of my face stuck to the floor as I'd rolled off my camping mat.

We got off at Munich Hauptbahnhof, put our least stinking clothes on, washed up a bit, and bought as much food as we could afford from a department store supermarket.  I remember what then happened so clearly: I even know the place we were sitting devouring our rolls with processed sliced cheese, when an old man came up.  He asked in German where we were from.  I assumed he was begging and trying to get some food from us.  I wasn't concentrating (there's a distinction between "kommen von" and "kommen aus" in German) and answered that we came from "Romania".

The lovely old Bavarian clearly thought we were starving Eastern Europeans and offered us the groceries he'd just bought.  I was mortified and swiftly explained we'd *come* from Romania, but were English and had plenty of Deutsche Mark to buy ourselves some more processed cheese if we wanted it!  Bless him, I felt awful for the way I'd dismissed this kindly generous guy out of hand.

The rest of the day was spent wandering round the main shopping street, missing all the sights, and catching a night train on to Paris.  We probably bought some more rolls and cheese to fortify us through the night.  That was Munich.

Munich: Let's Try Again

I then returned with a group of young Americans whom I was leading around Europe.  We had a coach tour of the city with a local guide.  I couldn't believe what I was seeing: we literally had missed everything.  The city was beautiful: full of stunning architecture, beautiful green spaces, art galleries, history, markets and restaurants.  It is classy as anything.  The Munich people love to say it is an Italian city north of the Alps.  Frankly, that's crap.  I know Italy, and love Italy, and whilst elements of the Ludwigstrasse definitely have echos of Florence (quite deliberately) this is very much a German city in terms of architecture, cleanliness and "Ordnung".

The Italianate "Ludwigstrasse" with Alps behind

The people of the city may also be referring to the "laid back" attitude in the city.  Again *ahem*.  It is a little more chilled than say Hamburg, but far less so than scrappy-anything-goes Berlin.  It is an efficient, clean, polished city of 1.4 million people with an incredibly high local GDP.  Yes, people guzzle Bier and will happily sit round being sociable after work, but a city this wealthy did not come from a lot of hard work.  Get on the U-Bahn at 7am and you'll see everyone on their way to work at Siemens, BMW, the publishing houses (it's second only to New York in terms of numbers), or the many insurance and reinsurance companies.

Schickie Mickies

The city is not just wealthy, it is by any standards a very egalitarian city.  The unemployment level is around 4% and everyone seems well off.  You see yuppies in their BMW cabrios (the so called "Schickie Mickies") everywhere and well dressed students (over 100,000 young Germans study here for €500 a semester fees) but remarkably few homeless.   The city has been ruled by a Social Democrat/ Green Coalition for years.  Massive amounts are invested in excellent, reliable public transport: fab retro teak lined subway trains from the late 60s and their gleaming brand new air-conditioned designer counterparts.  You can ride 8km from one side of the city to the other, without touching a road once, on the network of cycle paths. And yes, both young and old people DO wear Lederhosen and Dirndls not for fancy dress (more later).

Oh, ze Lederhosen. Mein Gott.

You just get the sense of a very cohesive, comfortable, well off group of inhabitants.  There are stacks of art galleries (the Alte Pinakothek is magnificent), 4 symphony orchestras, loads of museums - it is an extremely cultural city.  Munich is supremely bourgeois, but in a sharp, trendy, "right on" way.  The city is hugely gay-friendly, has almost 25% non-German population and its Jewish population is apparently back up to 1933 levels.  The newly opened main synagogue in the centre of town is a testament to this: the six smaller ones were packed to overflowing, so a magnificent new one was opened on 9 November 2006. 

The New Munich Synagogue

You also feel you're in a young city: there are so many youthful faces everywhere.  The city is very liberal: in the summer people go to the city park (the "English Garden") and strip off over lunchtime and nude sunbathe.  It's not pervy or weird: you'll see a mother having her picnic with her kids and a young couple nude sunbathing right next door.  You'll also see the SURFERS all year round just close by.  These dudes (and dudesses) can be seen all year round (wet suits in winter) surfing on some serious waves close to the US Consulate.  The story goes that a GI from Hawaii stationed here after WW2 discovered the spot, but that is of course probably utter rubbish.  In any case, I highly recommend stopping here, at the entrance to the English Garden and watching them do their stuff.

Bavarian Surfer Boys (*Skreeeem*)

The English Garden of course also houses Bier Gardens: they are all over the city and provide a "sitting room" for people with apartments to go and meet and be sociable.  Apparently the average Bavarian drinks 46.5 gallons of beer per year.  It is called "liquid bread" and covered by the oldest food purity law in the world.  It is fooking lovely.  Just watch the Wheat Beer: it packs a headache and hangover like none other.  I'll only ever have one and then move to the regular Light or Dark Beer.

There are six big Munich breweries, all located within the city limits, as they have to be to take part in the Oktoberfest.  In 1810 the Crown Prince got married and they had a huge party to celebrate.  The people of Munich liked it so much they did it again in 1811 and have been doing so (with a couple of war related/ hyper inflation related interruptions) ever since.  It begins in late September (one year it snowed in October, so they moved it forward), lasts 16 days and is the world's biggest beer drinking festival.  The atmosphere is amazing: the whole city stops for 16 days as over 6 million visitors come to join in, visit the massive beer tents, drink several million pints of beer, and have fun.

An outstanding Bavarian Balcony

People are merry, but not obnoxiously drunk.  There are crazily fast fairground rides too - just what you want after drinking a few litre glasses of beer.  I've been once: the gay tent was *incredible* - drunken Bavarian boys in Lederhosen up on the tables at 10am, with their shirts open, wearing cute little neckerchiefs, singing and locking arms.  Wow. Just, erm, wow.  If you want to go to Oktoberfest, be aware hotel prices are literally doubled and rooms sell out 6 months in advance.  Ideally you should book no later than now (December 2011) for October 2012.  The Oktoberfest brings a staggering €830 million into the local economy.

Munich of course has not always been the cosmopolitan fun place it now is.  I read a description of the city in the winter of 1933 by that outstanding and sadly recently deceased travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor that sent shudders down my spine.  It was the City of the Nazis: the "Brown City" (as opposed to the socialist stronghold of Berlin, the "Red City").  When Hitler arrived from Vienna he declared "Finally, a German City!".  Vienna was much too international for his tastes.  The old main synagogue in Munich was destroyed in June 1938, 5 months before the other German cities "did their bit".  There are traces of the Nazi past all over the place: amazing fascist buildings that mysteriously all missed the Allied carpet bombing raids (6600 civilians died here, as opposed to 568 in Coventry).  Around 75% of the city was destroyed, but the main buildings were later beautifully reconstructed, unlike in other German cities.

"Führerbau": where Chamberlain signed Munich Agreement

I could write on and on about the history of the place, before, during and after the Nazi period (the 1972 Olympics are fascinating: private sponsorship was *banned* and the city and state paid for everything) but I think I'd probably send you to sleep :(  If you're into this stuff though, the city is a treasure trove of places to look up and is steeped in history.

Some Top Tips

Okay now it's time for some top tips of places to go if this has whetted your appetite to visit.  My favourite hotel is a gorgeous little designer boutique place close to the historic area around the Hofbräuhaus.  It is called Hotel Cortiina and is just loooooovely (click for link).  It runs in at about €250 a night, so is not exactly cheap... if you want somewhere stylish, cheaper, and a little further out but in a beautiful quiet street, try Motel One (Deutsches Museum).  It's around €85 for a double room, has an über-trendy bar and is still a design hotel despite the name.

My top meal recommendations are Sunday brunch at the Park Café (a former SS hangout and now mega trendy contemporary beer hall and jazz venue close to the Hauptbahnhof - the type of place the girls from Sex and the City would come to)... and a high end pizza restaurant called Riva Tal.  The staff are just erm... well very decorative... and the food is literally better than any pizza I've ever had in Italy.  If you really want to eat hearty Bavarian crap, there's plenty of it, and I guess I should recommend Weisswurst (apparently delicious white veal sausage, eaten only ever before 12 noon) - but as a veggie I'm just not going to. So suck it up.

In terms of sightseeing, the thing about Munich is it's quite small: 1.4 million inhabitants is not a lot and there aren't hundreds of big "sights" to see as in Paris or London.  I love it precisely because the centre is so walkable.   I can just stroll about, eat, drink, soak up the atmosphere and enjoy the place. I do enjoy the Residenz (the former Royal Bavarian Winter Palace in the centre of town), the Olympic Park is well worth a visit out to on the U-Bahn, and while you're there most definitely go to BMW World.  It is free and even if you're not into cars, the architecture will blow you mind.  It apparently cost half a billion Euro to build and they have old and new BMW cars and motorbikes to play about with.

BMW World with Olympic Tower/ Park behind

Make sure you also visit the Viktualienmarkt (the main food and flower market) and Dallmayr, a grocery store that is smaller, but I think a lot classier than the Harrod's Food Hall.  Maximilianstrasse has the best shopping in town, along with the department store Oberpollinger which can give Harvey Nicks, a run for its money, dahling.  Check out the Veuve Cliquot bar there.  A totally zany recommendation is Wiesn Tracht which is run by a mad old Bavarian queen, his cohort of gorgeous girls, and sells Lederhosen and Dirndls.  They will serve you champagne free of charge if you hang round long enough admiring the checked shirts.  I go here *every* time I'm in Munich and buy something :)

The *actual* staff of Wiesn Tracht

Rounding Up

Okay, so I hope I've given you a litte taste of Munich?  I've done a lot of travel. I adore it. I've been to a total of 63 countries around the world on 5 continents on my own travels.  I've taken my groups of Americans to 178 towns & cities in 18 countries across Europe (yup, I keep an OCD style list).

I'm often asked what my favourite place is.  It's really hard to answer: doesn't it depend what for?  Of course I have places I love for nature, for beauty, for excitement, for relaxation...  But of cities where I would chose to spend a weekend or even a week - or where I would consider having an apartment - three stand out for me: Amsterdam, Zurich and Munich.  Of these three (I've lived in the first two) Munich is my all-time favourite.

If you haven't been, Oscar says you don't know what you're missing out on.  Even *he* has been to Munich with me.

@LassieOscar on tour in Bavaria

Historischer Keller Restaurant

On Day 1, I had my first lunch in Trier Germany in a restaurant serving German food. Im letting the pics do the talking this time.

A moose

Plenty of wildboar heads hanging around the restaurant given that their specialty was wildboar meat

The specials which I cant read but I think I order the first special on the list

The name of the restaurant

The drink I was recommended to try - apple soda

meet my aunt and uncle - the cheerful duo

My meal - wildboar meat with white asparagus and fried mashed potatoes covered with white sauce. it was delicious.

My aunt had salad

Fish and chips

Rice with bolognaise chicken

The interior of the restaurant

My cousin

its customary for European ppl to have a cup of coffee after their meal. 

Their theory for drinking cofee was so that the caffeine kicks in and they dont feel so sleepy after lunch.

McD

McDonalds is still called McDonalds regardless of which part of the world we are in :)

McRibs found in Trier, Germany. A favourite of many people here.

Mouth-watering pork ribs from McDonalds in Trier, Germany and they eat their french fries with  Mayonaise

Trier, Germany - The area

I was brought to Trier in Germany after arriving at Luxembourg. Trier is an older part of Germany. It was a 30minute drive from Luxembourg Airport. It has a University located so high up in the mountains that the people up there hardly needed to travel to other areas as it was like their own little town up there.

I was told that Trier was a shopping haven for most from Luxembourg and surrounding areas as there were plenty to buy and most importantly, reasonably priced. I visited this historic building called Porta Nigra.

Porta Nigra behind me

We also went on a train ride tour around Trier. I fell asleep while sitting in the train as it was really hot. Also, the tour guide was repating everything in three languages - German, Dutch and English. The English explanation was last, so yea.. I had a good nap. Took some pictures which were n ot very good given that the train had really horrible glass windows...

More to come in the next post....