Word: helgolanders
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...great courage and matchless brutality, a man capable of believing himself when he snarled, as he often did to a wavering follower: "Death is easy." During World War I he helped sabotage some German cement barges. By war's end he was a stoker on the battleship Helgoland and was hard at work stoking up the fires of the German naval mutiny. It was Stoker Wollweber who gave the mutiny signal to the Helgoland's crew. When truckloads of shouting armed mutineers stormed into Bremen, the man in the lead was stocky Ernst Wollweber...
...Germans brooded over this indignity. Last month two Heidelberg students, 21-year-old Georg von Hatzfeld and 22-year-old René Leudesdorff, had an idea. Said Leudesdorff, an ardent United Europe supporter: "We suddenly saw that Helgoland was a symbol of injustice.* We decided to make an issue of Helgoland in order to clear everyone's conscience...
Nothing But the Rats. The students hired a fishing boat in the port of Cuxhaven, sailed off to occupy the island until the British stopped the bombings and returned it to its former inhabitants. Equipped with the flags of West Germany, Helgoland and the United Europe movement, they landed on the rubbled shore. "It looked to us," said one of the invaders later, "like the world on the morning after the next war." The island's vegetation had been wiped out; except for rats, few living things had survived. The two students huddled in a flak tower, the only...
...German political factions, including the Communists, cheered the news of the invasion. Fresh from Helgoland, where a century ago Poet Hoffmann, von Fallers-leben had written Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, Invader Leudesdorff exulted: "This is the first time since the war that all Germans are united...
What, No Handcuffs? The British hastily passed an edict banning any visits to Helgoland, then told German authorities to enforce it. A British revenue cutter ordered to the scene was damaged by ice floes and forced back to base for repairs. A Royal Navy patrol boat met the same fate. The ex-German navy captain of a minesweeper flotilla, now operating under British orders, refused to send his ships...