ACCLAIMED German Occupation diaries were rewrittten in their English version to remove anti-Semitic references and disguise the extent of their author’s sexual liaison with a Jerseywoman, according to actor and author John Nettles.
The Bergerac star – who has written the introduction to a new translation of Hans Max Von Aufsess’s diaries – said the version published almost 40 years ago glossed over aspects of the Baron’s beliefs and behaviour that emerge in sharp focus in the new text.
“The new version was a fantastic piece of work but it differed substantially in tone and content from the original diaries published in 1985. It became clear that it was a very much a revised, carefully curated, version of the Occupation experience to make the writer appear much more as the ‘good German’. There were lots of references to touchy subjects in the original diaries, a lot of Jewish references, for example,” Mr Nettles said.
Jersey’s wartime Bailiff, Alexander Coutanche, and Louis Guillement, secretary to the president of Guernsey’s controlling committee, were both referred to as looking “crafty in a Jewish way”, while the Baron expressed his particular distaste of the Surrealist step-sisters Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, who were sentenced to death for disseminating anti-German propaganda.
“This is a difficult passage in the original diaries because it’s an awful expression of anti-semitism. Of course, come 1985 when he was publishing the diary in English, it was changed, and the ladies became not ‘depraved Jews’ but women who were depraved who happened to be Jews. It wasn’t a racial characteristic, in other words; it was a clever bit of rewriting,” Mr Nettles explained.
Meanwhile, the first version of the diaries – whose publication was supervised by the Baron eight years before his death in 1993 – edits out explicit references to a physical relationship which Aufsess enjoyed with local woman Elaine Fielding “whom I call… the Goddess of Victory, or, more prettily, Nike”, he wrote.
Mr Nettles explained that the new translation of the diaries was prompted by his own book, Jewels and Jackboots, which was being prepared for a German edition.
“We reproduced parts of the [first version of the] diary in the original German but they were looking for the original diaries, and they found them in museums in Bavaria, and I had a transcription made of them. They were handed over in the original German, of course, to Tobias Arand, the German historian who edited and annotated them, and provided them with a critical apparatus and so forth,” he said.
However, although they present their author in a more nuanced light – emphasising the extent to which he embraced some aspects of Nazi doctrine even if he disagreed with extremist means of achieving it – Mr Nettles ultimately shares the view of Alexander Coutanche who “gave a clean bill of health to Aufsess” at the conclusion of hostilities.
Mr Nettles said: “He remarked that he was a good administrator who had done his best in difficult circumstances to lessen the effect of the more brutal Nazi edicts put in place in the Occupation period. All the stories I can find of Aufsess’s encounters with the locals show him in a good light from top to bottom. He intervened, for example, in the second deportations in 1943 and managed to save, for example, [Guernsey’s Attorney General] Ambrose Sherwill’s wife and daughter from being transported and so on. He did his best to stand between the heat from Berlin and Paris, and the Islanders. He was part of the buffer, if you like, between Nazism and the civil population.”
Gentle Violence – Dairies 1943 to 1945 by Hans Max Von Aufsess is published by Blue Ormer, priced £25.
John Nettles will be speaking about the new version of the diaries at the Jersey Festival of Words at 7pm on 27 September at the Freedom Centre. More information and tickets for the talk are available at jerseyfestivalofwords.org.
