How do you fill your time as a prisoner in an elegant English country house with a tastefully restrained Sassoon era décor set in park like grounds? One way for the high ranking Germans incarcerated at Trent Park was reading.
Some of the reading material in German was ‘borrowed’ from the German embassy, however, a C.S.D.I.C. Top Secret report in the summer of 1945 lists some recent English language publications that had been supplied to the German prisoners, some of whom could comfortably read English. Subjects included Christianity, art, music and European politics. In the report one book that was in ‘great demand’ was Lord Elton’s Imperial Commonwealth that had been published earlier that year. It was an upbeat jingoistic patriotic history of the British empire, dealing with the evolution and progress from domination to self governing Dominions. Elton argued that these institutional changes not only benefited its subjects but was also the main reason why Britain was successful twice in nullifying the threat to its world status from Germany that century and serve as an pattern for future enlightenment and world peace.
At the time though, among the British intelligentsia Elton was a controversial figure. George Orwell in his essay published in May1945 ‘Notes on Nationalism’ called Elton a ‘Neo-tory’, one who Orwell defined as a deluded individual who refused to accept the terminal decline of Britain and its empire and the rise of the Soviet Union and the United States. Elton’s book was unrealistic but apparently popular amongst the Germans.
Perhaps the most sobering book being circulated among the Germans at Trent Park was ‘War Crimes:An Attempt to Define the Issues’ by Manfred Lachs, who was a Polish diplomat advising the Polish government in exile in London. Lachs was later to become one of the greatest lawyers of the 20th century eventually becoming the longest serving judge in the International Court of Justice.
No doubt Lachs' book tackling this controversial subject would make for some at Trent Park uncomfortable reading.
Media - whether books, newspapers or radio - were used at Trent Park not only to fill the occupants time in those comfortable surroundings but also to act as a catalyst for deeply revealing conversations conducted by the Germans that would of course been recorded by the secret listeners and analysed by the intelligence staff.
(The list of English language books as well as German language newspapers recorded by C.S.D.I.C. in 1945 is in the National Archives document WO 208/4178).
