Moral high ground gets murky

When, only days after the July 7th London bombings, the London police announced the arrest of a suspected ringleader, a friend conceded that for one awful moment he feared that history might be repeating itself. A quick arrest and perhaps years regretting the haste.That doubt must have crawled across the hearth of many Irish homes, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

Thankfully, the police action appears strongly supported by evidence, but nonetheless a moment of uncertainty about the British culture of justice became a feature of other people's observations and experience, again.

These thoughts may seem a million miles away from a new film about Germany after 1945. The film airs on BBC2 on August 16th and later I will tell you its title, but not yet.

The connection between Britain in 2005 and Germany in 1945 is that Britain and the US established the sense of profound moral accomplishment that still influences the cultures of both countries, and indeed of the rest of the world (it took them into Iraq), at the end of the second World War with victory over Nazi Germany.

The sense of moral accomplishment is periodically undermined. There are rogue activities such as prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. But worse, potentially, is the capacity of quite legitimate police or Government action to unsettle public confidence - the rapid arrest being a case in point - suggesting that the profound sense of moral accomplishment that guides British and American culture is tarnished. In my view, that possibility needed to be addressed.

The moral high ground staked out by Britain and America stretches from Normandy where British and American troops landed in June 1944 to Berlin, which they occupied from the summer of 1945. The battles won in that year have since assumed enormous moral importance, and rightly so.

The extent to which those victories should still determine our collective futures, though, is something I wanted to question.

To its credit, the BBC, in the middle of its conflicts with the British Government, allowed me and a colleague Roy Ackerman, to make a film about this. To make a 90-minute feature documentary for BBC 2 requires compromises, however. We were allowed to make the film provided we could reflect contemporary concerns in Iraq.

That means our film shows prisoner abuse in the months after the second World War, and it meant we could deal with some aspects of victory's underbelly.

American and British troops in Germany spent the spring and summer of 1945 on what distinguished Life photojournalist, Margaret Bourke-White, called "a looting frenzy". Crimes that we have come to associate with Russian troops in Berlin - rape, pillage, and brutality - became familiar also to the western Allies.

Even before the war's end, American criminal investigators had to orchestrate the simultaneous arrest of 400 enlisted men and commissioned officers for the wholesale theft of supplies heading to the front.

And at the war's end a small group of British army officers sent to guard Nazi industry minister Albert Speer pulled off one of the most impressive heists in the annals of crime, by stealing £6 million worth of crown jewels from the Prince of Holstein, a cousin of the British King.

The film tells the story of a few such incidents. It is perhaps the first time that a film has attempted to ask if the recurrent celebration of second World War victory has introduced a harmful complacency into the national psyche of both countries.

But there are other issues. Contrary to expectations, in 1945 extraordinary warmth developed between many of the German and British men who had fought each other and seen their colleagues killed, in some cases only a few months earlier. There was no jingoism in the flush of victory.

The broadcaster Raymond Baxter, who became a well-known figure in Britain while presenting a BBC science show, Tomorrow's World, for 14 years, talks of his pride at helping Germany back to its feet in the early post-war years.

A soldier who walked through the open gates of the extermination camps at Belsen and saw the consequences of the Nazi extermination policy talks of having to forgive.

On the other side of the various fences that spring up, metaphorically, between former enemies, the Germans we interviewed were, without exception, effusive about the sense of fair play that British soldiers brought to Germany and about the relationships they developed.

In fact, they were so positive that we began to disbelieve them. Gunner Oldag, a 15-year-old in Hamburg who looted bombed-out houses for old postcards of the city to sell to the Tommies, was so effusively pro-British that it was hard not to feel that gratitude is still a compulsory emotion in his generation of Germans. Gratitude allowed them an escape from the shame of Nazism.

The tacit agreement to forgive and to defer, however, hides other events that we have never heard of nor investigated. The idea that victory was won in May 1945, for example, assumes too much about whom Britain's leaders regarded as the real enemy.

Between May and December 1945, insurgents from the Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania killed 35,000 Red Army soldiers, probably with the support of the western Allies. The insurgents in what became the Eastern Bloc depended on British equipment.

The tantalising possibility also exists that stay-behind German troops co-operated with the British against the Soviets before the war ended.

We cannot know the precise truth of these developments because British security files from this era and place are still closed but Soviet archives are more than suggestive.

Raymond Baxter acknowledged in our interview that early in 1945 his superiors asked whether he would be prepared to fight against the Soviet Union at the war's end.

Unfortunately, Baxter's comments do not appear in our film even though they represent the first time that an ex-British officer has acknowledged being officially asked if he would take the war to Russia.

On issues of more common knowledge we also found inconsistencies that need to be aired. The rape of Berlin is a cliché of the summer of 1945. But an interviewee called Inge Deutchschkron, a woman who lived through those days, challenges the extent of rape that took place and says that women were not helpless in the face of Soviet brutality. She twice fought off Red Army soldiers, successfully.

Inge's comments do not appear in our film either.

Doubtless there were many brutal rapes, but the picture of wholesale defilement has its doubters among the Germans. A new generation of German youth share Inge's scepticism. The idea that German women were victims, however, helped re-admit Germany swiftly in the league of free nations.

Why do the counter-intuitive viewpoints, that war did not end, that we may have exaggerated some aspects of German suffering, fail to make the screen? In part because programme makers have lost confidence in the capacity of film to challenge assumptions, beyond a certain point, to believe that too much that is new is off-putting, a factor that led us to limit the use of controversial evidence.

I find most people are hungry for much more than this, in fact are hungry for their understanding of today's society to be radically rewritten and for their history to be challenged.

The second World War and its aftermath are rife with stories that can help us redefine the truly complex moral character of British and American experience and their rightful influence on our daily lives and on global politics.

Who is aware now that in 1943, shortly after the pivotal Soviet success at Stalingrad, when the Red Army inflicted the most decisive defeat of the war on the German armies, the diplomatic wires buzzed with news that Churchill had travelled to Turkey to seek a peace with Hitler?

Such astonishingly counter-intuitive events and possibilities are a window on a new interpretation of the war and sacred beliefs about the moral tapestry that victors inevitably create.

The title of the film you might want to see on August 16th, by the way, began simply as Aftermath. At a certain point it became re-titled: After the War - Conquering Germany. The film makes a small breach in the conventional imagery of the second World War and its aftermath. The change in title probably says as much.

After the War - Conquering Germany is on BBC2, Tues, Aug 16 at 9pm