A new book by a German historian has cast fresh light on one of the most extraordinary episodes of the first world war and revealed that the celebrated 1914 Christmas truce took place only because many of the Germans stationed on the front had worked in England.
The book, Der Kleine Frieden im Grossen Krieg, or The Small Peace in the Big War, shows that the German and British soldiers who famously played football with each other in no man’s land on Christmas Day 1914 didn’t always have a ball. Instead, they improvised. On certain sections of the front, soldiers kicked around a lump of straw tied together with string, or even an empty jam box.
According to previously unseen letters and diaries sent home by Germans from the trenches, many of the passes went wildly astray and shot off the icy pitch. The soldiers used sticks of wood, their caps and steel helmets as goalposts. The games lasted about an hour. The sleep-deprived players then collapsed, exhausted.
The book, by the German author Michael Jürgs, is the first to be written from a German perspective about the impromptu Christmas ceasefire that spread across the western front — in defiance of official orders and to the horror of the British high command — some five months after the outbreak of war.
It includes extracts from an extraordinary diary by a German lieutenant, Kurt Zehmisch, discovered four years ago in an attic near Leipzig. Zehmisch was a schoolteacher who spoke English and French. He describes how, on Christmas Eve, the shooting suddenly stopped. His Saxon regiment then blew a whistle on two fingers. The English immediately whistled back.
”Soldier Möckel from my company, who had lived in England for many years, called to the British in English, and soon a lively conversation developed between us.”
A couple of soldiers from each side then climbed out of their trenches, shook hands in no man’s land, and wished each other a merry Christmas. They agreed not to shoot the following day.
”Afterwards, we placed even more candles than before on our kilometre-long trench, as well as Christmas trees,” Zehmisch wrote. ”It was the purest illumination — the British expressed their joy through whistles and clapping. Like most people, I spent the whole night awake. It was a wonderful, if somewhat cold, night.”
According to Jürgs, the fraternisation involving mostly Catholic Saxon and Bavarian regiments was only possible because many of the German soldiers spoke good English as they had previously been employed in Britain. ”They had worked as cab drivers and barbers in places like Brighton, Blackpool and London,” he said. ”When war broke out in August 1914 they were forced to go home. Some even left families behind in England.”
One German soldier had worked in the Savoy; when the war started British soldiers would apparently shout ”Waiter!” across their newly dug positions. Another German infantryman described how on Christmas Day, when both sides climbed out of their trenches and over the barbed wire, a British Tommy had set up a makeshift barber’s shop in no man’s land. The barber was ”completely indifferent” to whether his customers were German or British, and charged a couple of cigarettes per haircut, Bavarian Josef Sebald observed. ”This was war… but there was no trace of enmity between us,” he added.
The informal ceasefire stretched all across the 800km western front where more than a million men were encamped, from the Belgian coast as far as the Swiss border. The truce was especially warm along a 48km line around the Belgian town of Ypres, Jürgs notes. Not everybody, though, approved. One Austrian soldier billeted near Ypres complained that in wartime such an understanding ”should not be allowed”. His name was Adolf Hitler.
Last night Zehmisch’s son Rudolf, who discovered the diaries in 1999 while clearing out the family loft, told the Guardian he was proud that his father had helped initiate the unprecedented ceasefire. ”My father had studied in France. He also visited England. He went on a day trip to Folkestone in 1913,” Zehmisch (76) said.
At first he was unable to read his father’s 15 diaries sent back from the front in envelopes because they were written in an archaic form of German shorthand. He managed to track down an elderly professor who could decipher the text — who then died. Zehmisch then taught himself Gabelsberger shorthand and began the translation. ”My father was in charge of three or four companies. At one point he wrote: ‘We will not shoot against the British today’.”
Miraculously, Kurt Zehmisch survived the first world war and returned to his old teaching job. He did not survive the second, however. After Hitler’s rise to power he rejoined the army, became a major, and was sent to fight on the eastern front. The Russians captured him and took him to a prison camp. In November 1946 he disappeared.
Last night Jürgs, a biographer of the German novelist Günter Grass and a former magazine editor, said he had found numerous unseen letters in German newspapers and regimental archives. He said his book was the first about the 1914 truce ”to be written from the German point of view”, adding: ”It’s important for British people too because it tells what happened from the other side.”
In some parts of the front, meanwhile, the ceasefire lasted for several weeks after Christmas Day 1914. Inevitably, though, the slaughter resumed. ”The English are extraordinarily grateful for the ceasefire, so they can play football again,” Gustav Riebensahm, of the 2nd Westphalian regiment, wrote in his diary. ”But the whole thing has become slowly ridiculous and must be stopped. I will tell the men that from this evening it’s all over.”
Der Kleine Frieden im Grossen Krieg by Michael Jürgs, published by Bertelsmann – Guardian Unlimited Â