Pregled posta

Marketing

During the final campaign of the war my father served in the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment. When the war ended, the battalion, by then part of the 7th Armoured Division, was in the suburbs of Hamburg. In the weeks that followed it moved up into Schleswig-Holstein, rounding up German troops who had retreated there and receiving the surrender of others drifting home from Denmark. The Wehrmacht had refused to surrender to the Danes, who had not defeated them, and crossed the border in good order, fully armed and singing.
On 14th June 1945, the Division was ordered to proceed to Berlin to take up occupation duties. The move was twice held up by the obstructiveness of the Russians. The civilian population of the capital welcomed British troops with manifest relief. The 2nd Devons, along with the Grenadier Guards, were allocated the Hermann Goring Barracks, described by their Commanding Officer, Colonel Peter Brind, as "a place of indescribable filth with dead bodies still lying about and barrack rooms used as latrines". It required the labour of 2,000 German women ...there were no men... over 48 hours to make them habitable.
Evidently the well-ordered scene in my father's photograph must have followed the clean-up. The Wehrmacht certainly looked after its own and these impressive amenities seem a far cry from Catterick or Pirbright. To me there is always something slightly off-putting about swimming pools, gymnasia, diving boards, changing rooms, shower cubicles, white tiles, medicine balls and men in trunks. School, and early "Temple of the Body" indoctrination aimed at discouraging self-abuse, is partly to blame, but I have always perceived something slightly suspect in the obsessive cultivation of the physique. At bottom it is bound up with the idea of getting your own way by physically overpowering those who disagree with you. It is hardly surprising that body culture, with its various sub-cults, such as sunbathing and naturism, should have been such a fetish during the interwar years, the age of totalitarianism. The fad lingered on into the 50s, with the Keep Fit Association and Eileen Fowler's television appearances.

Palm trees reflected in a pool.
Shot with a Hasselblad and Phase One back.