The Rise and Ruin of Heligoland

On 18 April 1947, British forces set off the largest non-nuclear explosion in history. The target was a cliff-bound islet in the North Sea, 50 miles from the German coast: Heligoland. For generations this outpost, half the size of Gibraltar, had stood as a symbol of Anglo-German conflict. As far as the British government was concerned, a long tradition of German militarism was about to come to a conclusive end. ‘No more Heligolands’, Admiral ‘Jackie’ Fisher had vowed before the First World War. A generation later, his vow was to be realised. 

Blowing the island up would solve a number of technical problems: a vast amount of ammunition and shells was stored in the labyrinthine tunnels and bunkers hidden under debris. But symbolic considerations were just as important. The island’s demilitarisation was not to be a cumbersome process involving international commissions and protracted negotiations with the Germans. That had been the approach after the First World War, when the prime minister, Arthur Balfour, had dismissed plans to blow up Heligoland. After another war in which the Germans had shown even greater military potential and expansionist ambition, their threat to Britain came to an end, once and for all. The command given to T.F. Woosnam, the naval engineer in charge of preparing Heligoland for Operation ‘Big Bang’, carried the weight of generations of Anglo-German conflict to be settled now in one symbolic act: ‘Blow the bloody place up!’ 

From the turn of the century until the end of the Second World War, Heligoland had stood as a symbol of Germany’s threat to Britain: the stronghold from where the kaiser and his admirals envisaged entering into battle with the Royal Navy; the fortress which Hitler had built up as a bulwark against Britain. Yet hidden behind the enmity lay a longer history of cooperation and friendship. For much of the 19th century, Heligoland had been Britain’s smallest colony, a picturesque outpost which embodied Anglo-German entanglement. Its location at the fringes of Europe, where the British Empire ended and the German-speaking world began, intrigued officials and academics alike. In 1888 Charles Prestwood Lucas, head of the Dominion department at the Colonial Office, described Heligoland as ‘the point at which Great Britain and Germany come most nearly into contact with each other’. It was impossible to draw a clear boundary on the island between the British Empire and the different Germanies that existed in the long 19th century. After the Royal Navy had taken the outpost from Denmark in 1807, Heligoland served as the linchpin for a series of Anglo-German collaborations, which continued until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Agents infiltrated French-dominated northern Europe from here, troops embarked to fight against Napoleon, weapons and secret payments were channelled to allies and insurgents.

Smugglers against Napoleon

Just as important was the vast smuggling activity centred on Heligoland. Circumventing the Continental System, Napoleon’s blockade of British commerce, was pivotal for Britain’s finances as well as its influence on the Continent. A network of Anglo-German merchants, with links to London, Hamburg, Edinburgh, Bremen, Liverpool, Frankfurt and Manchester, organised this lucrative but risky trade. Between 1809 and 1811 goods valued at roughly £86 million passed through Heligoland, more than Britain’s annual public budget for 1811. Coffee was top of the list of smuggled goods, followed by sugar, tobacco, cocoa, rum and tea. These products broke the Continental System: Marx and Engels declared that Napoleon had lost the war because of the Continent’s love of sugar and coffee. 

The Anglo-German symbiosis encapsulated by Heligoland continued in the following decades. For the Germans, flocking to the colony after it opened its spa resort in 1826, Heligoland was just outside the Fatherland, but very much part of it. A generation of poets and professors used the island as an outpost from which to propagate a liberal, united Germany. The most important was August Heinrich Hoffmann, who published under the pen name Hoffmann von Fallersleben. In the summer of 1841 he sought refuge in Heligoland to escape police surveillance. It was here, in a British colony, that he wrote what was to become Germany’s national anthem. The Prussian government censored the publication of his Lied der Deutschen, but it could do little to prevent its growing prominence. The song became a rallying cry for opposition in the German lands, demanding national unity, freedom and the rule of law. Hand in hand with this liberal vision went a claim for ‘German’ territory. This tension mirrored the irredentism that was inherent in most national liberal writing of the time. Fallersleben told the British governor that he had no doubt Heligoland would be German one day.

Dreaming the German nation in this North Sea enclave was rarely divorced from thinking about Britain and the sea. After unification in 1871, Germany became interested in the island as a strategic outpost. Bismarck was keen to acquire the colony, but not prepared to pay the price the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, demanded. Wilhelm II, who became kaiser in 1888, was less reserved. In 1890 he instructed Bismarck’s successor, Leo von Caprivi, to give Salisbury the colonial concessions he was asking for. Germany allowed Britain to establish a protectorate over Zanzibar, it ceded its protectorate over Witu (in Kenya) and gave London a free hand in Uganda. In return, the kaiser got Heligoland. Its governor, Terence O’Brien, knew why the Germans coveted his colony. ‘The value of this island as a strategic position’, he explained to the Colonial Office, lay in ‘the great advantage it offers as the site for a naval fort to cover the entrance to their four main rivers including the Baltic Canal.’ 

The kaiser and his government lost no time in turning Heligoland into a fortress. Berlin started to plan the island’s fortification before Britain had ceded it. As soon as the Anglo-German treaty was signed, the plans were put into action. But it was only when the German naval programme came into effect after the turn of the century that the island acquired a new meaning in the British imagination. The forlorn colonial enclave, that ‘gem of the North Sea’, became a dark rock symbolising the German menace. Writers such as H.G. Wells and Erskine Childers used the outpost as a symbol of the threat: the island fortress was now a metaphor of the naval arms race that was meant to force Britain into acknowledging Germany as a world power. 

The kaiser’s battle fleet, built up over two decades, did little to compel the British to give way, neither before, nor during, the First World War. Heligoland, demilitarised after 1918, became a symbol of this failure. For the Nazis it was a metaphor for the Fatherland’s humiliation by the Allies, ‘a silent warning’, as Goebbels saw it, demanding revenge. After he took power, Hitler had the fortress rebuilt and vastly expanded. The Nazis cultivated Heligoland as a racial monument, building on the claims of antisemitic scholars who had propagated the island as the birthplace of the Germanic race, an Aryan Atlantis. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and a devotee of Germanic mysticism, was keen to establish ‘scientifically’ that the island was evidence of the prehistoric greatness of the Aryan race. Specialists were to demonstrate that a larger, prehistoric Heligoland had been a centre of Germanic worship. Disappointed by the academics’ vague and inconclusive evidence, Himmler ordered deep-sea divers to establish the prehistoric size of the island and provide evidence for the Atlantis thesis. The war put an end to such research, but not to the Nazis’ ideological embrace of the island. In wartime propaganda it stood as a symbol of Nazi Germany’s iron will to endure the fight against Britain until the ‘final victory’.

Nothing underlined this determination more than the series of rearmament and fortification works which turned Heligoland into a German Scapa Flow, a naval base big enough to house almost the entire High Seas Fleet. A new harbour was built and a labyrinth of tunnels and shelters dug into the rocks to house both the civilian population and military personnel during air raids. Provisions and ammunition were stored to enable the troops to hold the island if cut off from the mainland.

The RAF struggled to make an impact against the systems of fortifications, bunkers and U-boat pens. After a few minor but costly raids, it flew two larger missions in May 1943, together with the USAF. Encountering stiff resistance, the bombers inflicted some damage, but none of significance. ‘Operation Aphrodite’, which took place in September 1944, was designed to guide planes loaded with explosives to crash into the fortress, their pilots having first bailed out. This, too, proved ineffective, as did subsequent targeted raids. In the spring of 1945 Bomber Command selected the island – one of the ‘final citadels of Nazi resistance’, as Eisenhower declared – as a target for strategic bombing. 

Smouldering wasteland

On the morning of 18 April more than 1,000 aircraft, mainly Lancasters and Halifaxes, left their bases in the east of England, carrying 5,000 tons of high explosives. They were manned by crews who had been involved in the blanket bombing of German cities. The attack, according to one of the pilots who took part, was ‘designed to cripple the island for all times’. The first planes were spotted from Heligoland at 12:25. ‘The sky was cloudless and the waves of planes could clearly be seen many miles ahead and behind’, noted R.E. Wannop, a 26-year-old pilot of one of the Lancasters: ‘The island was soon hidden under a pall of smoke as tons of high explosives did their deadly work.’ At 12:38 Bomber Command received the message that the target was ‘saturated’. The pilots noted ‘an intense concentration of craters, bursts, fires and smoke, blotting out the greater part of the island’. Heligoland was a smouldering wasteland of craters and ruins. 

The civilian population had fled into the shelters. When they re-emerged, the island was changed beyond recognition. German High Command recorded 95 per cent of housing destroyed. There was no electricity and hardly any water. Only the U-boat pens and some of the gun emplacements had withstood the bombing. Later that afternoon Hitler attended a military conference in Berlin, which downplayed the extent of the raid. The next day, while the RAF returned to drop massive ‘Tallboy’ bombs on what was left of the fortifications, the evacuation of the island began. The Heligolanders wound their way through the ruins to get onto the waiting ships. They were told to bring only light luggage and leave behind pets. There was no space on board for the bodies of the soldiers who had died in the attack, so they were buried at sea, wrapped in blankets and weighed down with bricks. By the early hours of 22 April 1945 the last islanders had embarked. They left behind an island so devastated that it was difficult to imagine that anyone could ever live there again. ‘You could not recognise anything’, one remembered later: ‘Bomb craters and smoke, ruins and a few solitary chimneys. A completely different, terrifying world.’

The remaining troops and scores of forced labourers were ordered to repair the defences. A week later Alfred Roegglen, the naval commandant, congratulated his men on having ‘largely restored’ the fighting capability of the fortress. ‘We stand as a strong rock in the sea again, in an advance position, facing the most fateful hour of our Fatherland’, he told them. There was nothing left to defend. Much of Germany was occupied and the British had advanced as far north as Hamburg. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. Three days later Admiral Karl Dönitz, his successor, sent Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, the commander-in-chief of the German navy, to the British headquarters at Lüneburg Heath. On 4 May Friedeburg signed a partial capitulation on the terms dictated by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. At 8am the next day all German forces in north-west Germany, including Heligoland, were told to lay down their arms. A week later, British forces arrived at the island. Rear Admiral Gerard Muirhead-Gould, the Royal Navy’s commander in north-west Germany, insisted on a formal capitulation: Heligoland had been a symbol of the German menace for generations, fought over in two world wars. There had to be a ceremony and a document by which it formally surrendered to the British. A Times correspondent and a military photographer recorded how Roegglen signed the surrender. After 55 years of German rule Britain had reoccupied its former colony. 

Heligoland lay between Britain and Germany as a deserted battlefield, a moon-like landscape of craters and ruins. It was in this situation that the Admiralty came up with the plan for ‘Operation Big Bang’, an explosion designed to be of such magnitude that the military installations on the island would be destroyed for ever. Admiral Sir Harold Walker, commander of Britain’s naval forces in Germany, was sure that it would be ‘by far the biggest demolition ever carried out by the Royal Navy’.

Preparations began in August 1946. A team of 120 technicians and labourers, led by T.F. Woosnam, wired up more than 6,700 tons of explosives. After eight months of work, they were ready. On 18 April 1947, on the fourth pip of the BBC’s 1pm time signal, E.C. Jellis, Woosnam’s depute, pushed the button on board HMS Lasso, at safe distance from the island. After a bright flash, pillars of debris and dust rose up ‘in almost frightening splendour’, as one reporter had it. The British press was jubilant. Headlines included ‘Biggest Bang since Bikini’, ‘A very reasonable way of celebrating Hitler’s birthday’ and ‘Hitler’s pride and joy, heavily fortified Heligoland, enveloped in mass of flames’. 

German reactions were less enthusiastic. The narrative, adopted in countless articles and pamphlets, was that the British had tried to eliminate the island, yet it had defied them. The same would be true of Germany in general. The response to the demolition showed a marked willingness among Germans to portray themselves as victims. No doubt this expressed a psychological need: huge numbers of German civilians had become victims of Allied violence. Still, the deafening public silence on the question of causation was striking. In most of the press, present suffering remained disassociated from past responsibility. Heligoland was part of this wider discourse, which spoke eloquently about the ordeal of Germans and remained silent about the suffering of others. 

Bombing practice

The island’s currency as a metaphor of victimhood rose dramatically when the British announced that they would continue to use the island as a bombing range. Throughout the war, MPs and civil servants in Britain had raised questions about the island’s future. The government’s standard answer had been that it would be dealt with in a peace treaty. But with the beginning of the Cold War, such a treaty seemed a distant possibility: too fundamental was the disagreement between West and East about the future of Germany. Using the island as a bombing practice target seemed an interim solution. It would keep the Germans away from their former naval fortress and reserve it for British use until the day of a general treaty. In December 1947 the RAF started its practice sorties with live ammunition. 

The response in Germany could not have been worse. The British were continuing the bombing war as if Germany had not capitulated two years previously. The RAF was out to annihilate the island forever and with it Germany’s self-respect. Had Germany not suffered enough? A number of initiatives began to document ‘British atrocities’ against ‘the German island’. Pressed in Parliament on why it was not prepared to give the outpost back, the Attlee government declared that the island represented everything that was wrong with the Germans: ‘If any tradition was worth breaking, and if any sentiment was worth changing, then the German sentiment about Heligoland was such a one.’ It looked as if this would be the Attlee government’s position for the foreseeable future. The Tory opposition showed no inclination to question it. Churchill never tired of evoking Heligoland as an icon of the German menace: in his postwar writing it features as a monumental error made by his predecessors. In November 1950 Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, reiterated the position in the Commons: Britain had no intention of making Heligoland available. 

A combination of local and global events changed all that. On 20 December 1950 two students, Georg von Hatzfeld and René Leudesdorff, sailed to Heligoland in a fishing boat. It was a rough crossing but, when they landed, they felt elated. Encouraged by reporters, they raised a German flag in the ruins of the fortress. The German press celebrated them as ‘liberators’, who had reclaimed the island from the British and were inspiring more ‘occupiers’ to join them. ‘All German political factions, including the Communists’, wrote Time, cheered the news. 

The peaceful ‘invasion’ put London in an awkward position. Ivone Kirkpatrick, the British member of the Allied High Commission for occupied western Germany, issued an ordinance according to which ‘no person shall land or remain upon the island’. West Germany’s police were reluctant, but obliged, to keep the ‘squatters’ off the windswept rock. There were bizarre scenes when the occupiers were removed with German officers first congratulating and then arresting them. 

The ‘battle over Heligoland’, as German newspapers dubbed it, put a spotlight on the Anglo-German relationship. London and Bonn had begun to move tentatively towards a new partnership, but postwar occupation remained a reality. Kirkpatrick was at once Adenauer’s opponent and partner: together with his US and French counterparts he continued to exercise important aspects of sovereignty over West Germany, especially with regard to foreign policy and military matters. At the same time he was instrumental in negotiating the road to Bonn regaining autonomy in return for its commitment to a defence structure dominated by the western powers. In Heligoland, Kirkpatrick thought, the British seemed stuck in the wartime past, more interested in retribution than conciliation. In early January 1951 he recommended to Bevin that ‘we should now review the whole position’. The foreign secretary was not so easily swayed. It was undesirable, Bevin told Kirkpatrick, to yield ‘to popular German clamour’. 

This underestimated the potency of the issue. There was a danger that the issue would mobilise German public opinion not only against Britain, but also against Adenauer, whose pro-western policy was far from uncontested within Germany. This broader point was lent urgency when it became clear that East Germany was covertly organising a series of Heligoland ‘invasions’. Here was a symbolic issue that united Germans across the East-West divide in a patriotic stance against the western Allies, at a time when the geopolitical future of Germany was still in flux: the two German states, established in 1949, were yet to be formally integrated into the western and eastern military alliances. Sensing a propaganda opportunity, the East German leadership orchestrated a broader ‘Heligoland movement’, styling the island as the site of an anti-imperialist struggle that united Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

The involvement of East Germany raised the stakes. Attlee leant on his chiefs of staff. ‘The political risks inherent in continuing to bomb the island’, conceded the secretary of state for air on 20 February, ‘are considered wholly unacceptable.’ Britain would hand the island back within a year, but not before an alternative German bombing target had been found. It took the governments in London and Bonn until early 1952 to work out the details, during which time more Heligoland ‘invasions’ took place, organised by East German agents, pitching peaceful German ‘liberators’ against British ‘militarists’. On 28 February Kirkpatrick confirmed to Adenauer that London would hand over control. ‘Heligoland will be free again’, declared the chancellor in a radio broadcast. What mattered was not only that ‘our people has finally been given back a piece of soil to which we Germans are attached with so much love’, but that it should be reconstructed as a beacon of reconciliation: ‘Peaceful Heligoland, set in the seas between Germany and Britain, will be in future a symbol of the will to peace and friendship of both nations.’

West Germany’s moral rehabilitation, facilitated by the unfolding of the Cold War, required Bonn to demonstrate that it had overcome the Nazi past. The reconstruction of Heligoland was to create a showcase of a peaceful and prosperous West Germany. British commentators were convinced that rebuilding the island was neither affordable nor desirable, but they underestimated how important the project was for the Germans. This was ‘a national task’, declared Adenauer. Germany would ‘turn Heligoland into a monument of peace, a symbol of European understanding and reconciliation’.

Break with the past

The Heligoland created out of the ruins of war reflected Germany’s relationship with the past. The reconstructed island signalled a clear break. Hardly anywhere in the new town was there a reference to the 19th century. The island was rebuilt as something which resembled an antidote to the past. British commentators saw in the ‘Scandinavian’ character of the new town an attempt to disguise the history of Anglo-German conflict, just as the constant talk about ‘Europe’ seemed to hide ‘Germany’. It felt like a big lie to some, but it was to serve Bonn well. With annual visitor numbers reaching a million in the 1960s, Heligoland had become a showcase of West Germany: economically powerful and internationally uncontroversial. Visitors to the island can now follow a ‘historical path’ along the craters left behind by the RAF. They can even go on a guided tour through the remnants of Nazi Germany’s naval fortress, a subterranean maze of air raid shelters, shafts and tunnels. Like so many other German sites once dedicated to national glory and then destroyed by war, Heligoland has turned into a memorial.

Jan Rüger is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London and the author of Heligoland: Britain, Germany and the Struggle for the North Sea (OUP, 2017).