Wilton Park

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From January 1946 to June 1948, Wilton Park was an English re-education camp for German prisoners of war and later also selected Germans from the British occupation zone. It was founded on the initiative of Winston Churchill near Beaconsfield (Buckinghamshire) . In 1944 Churchill called for democracy to be established in Germany after the end of World War II .

Wilton Park was set up on January 12, 1946, initially as a so-called white camp for German prisoners of war who had been classified as reliable in the sense of anti-Nazi and had the necessary intellectual abilities. By June 1948, 4,500 German prisoners of war had taken part in the demanding academic courses. As convinced democrats, the graduates should act as multipliers after their return home.

In addition to prisoners of war, selected Germans from the British zone, such as Ralf Dahrendorf or Wolfgang Abendroth , have also taken part in the courses since 1947 , mainly men, but also women from public life, i.e. journalists, party and trade union officials or educators. The invitation could be seen as an award and was therefore a reference for the further career. Participants also included Willi Brundert , later Lord Mayor of Frankfurt am Main , and Hilmar Hoffmann , who later became Frankfurt's head of culture for many years .

There were other camps besides Wilton Park, e. B. Norton Camp , which began training elementary school teachers and theologians in mid-1945. The educational work of this camp was directed by the YMCA . In this camp, from 1946 onwards, all Abitur exams were held in the English camps under the instructed director Willi Lassen .

Wilton Park today

In 1948 Wilton Park became a German-British conference center. Wilton Park has been a not-for-profit independent higher education institution since then. Farhan Nizami currently chairs the Advisory Committee of Wilton Park. The Wilton Park facility was relocated to Wiston House in Sussex after 1951 . In 1957 the association for the promotion of Wilton Park was founded in Munich ; Karl Weishäupl was the founding chairman .

The facility was named after Wilton Park Estate, near Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire , where an interrogation center was set up during the war. The Wilton Park site was an authority of the British Foreign Office from 1948 . Today the Wilton Park Estate is used as the language school for the Defense School of Languages ​​of the UK Department of Defense.

literature

  • Renate Held: Captivity in Great Britain: German soldiers of the Second World War in British custody. (= Publications of the German Historical Institute London. Volume 63). Edited by the German Historical Institute London. Oldenburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58328-1 .
  • Gudrun Hentges: State and political education: From the "Central Office for Homeland Service" to the "Federal Central Office for Political Education". Wiesbaden 2013, ISBN 978-3-531-18670-2 .
  • Helmut Wolff: The German prisoners of war in British hands. An overview. In: Erich Maschke (Hrsg.): On the history of the German prisoners of war of the Second World War. (= On the history of the German prisoners of war of the Second World War. Volume XI / 1). Munich 1974, ISBN 3-7694-0391-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilton Park Conferences: History of Wilton Park 1946–1951. ( Memento from December 12, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Arthur Lee Smith: The war for the German mind: re-educating Hitler's soldiers. Berghahn Books, 1996, ISBN 1-57181-892-8 , p. 50.
  3. ^ Renate Feyerbacher: Hilmar Hoffmann on the 90th birthday. www.feuilletonfrankfurt.de, The Magazine for Art, Culture & Lifestyle, August 25, 2015.
  4. ^ Nicolaus Schmidt: Willi Lassen - a biographical sketch. In: Democratic History. Volume 26, Schleswig-Holsteinischer Geschichtsverlag, 2015, pp. 199 ff.
  5. ↑ Wilton Park and the Association for the Promotion of Wilton Park e. V. ( Memento from July 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ^ Subterranea Britannica: Wilton Park.

Coordinates: 50 ° 53 '59 "  N , 0 ° 21' 32"  W.