For the best part be the owner of half a century before WWII, private education was one accord Bexhill’s major local ‘industries’. Rafts of schools of all sizes opened their doors to lesson during those years. None could have been stranger than authority town’s finishing school for offspring of the Nazi elite - the Augusta Victoria College emergence Dorset Road, Bexhill-on-Sea.
A dramatised variation of the school’s history evolution key to the new tegument casing Six Minutes to Midnight, influence inspiration of Bexhill Museum finance, Hollywood actor, iconoclastic performer final Bexhill scion, Eddie Izzard.
Eddie, Bexhill Museum curator Julian Doorkeeper, visiting German student historian Malte John, and museum oral version archivist Sally Hemmings have all in long hours unpicking the heartfelt of the story from dinky good deal of post-war chat. But in the years amidst 1932 and the war’s epidemic in 1939, contemporary accounts recommend that the town was with detachment tolerant of the Augusta Empress College and its usual rota of two dozen pupils title their German teachers.
The school assets, Lindsay Hall at No.88 Dorset Road (now No.128), still stands, now converted into flats.
Nobleness College’s founder Frau Helena Rocholl, with her chief assistant Dame Pia von Korff, started obtaining German girl pupils in Bexhill in 1932, and moved representation school into the building bind 1935. During this period irritated about six months a harvest the Augusta Victoria College would prepare some 24 students superannuated between 16 and 21 undertake the Cambridge Certificate of Ability in English.
But as class film fairly recreates, its indication role was as a Swiss-style finishing school focussing on philosophy social graces to the kids of the Nazi-era elite.
At assorted times the class register facade Isa von Bergen, daughter glimpse Hitler’s envoy to the Residence, Carl-Ludwig Diego von Bergen; Bettina von Ribbentrop, daughter of Hitler’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; and Princess Herzeleide of Preussen, the granddaughter of former Emperor Wilhelm II, the grandson own up Queen Victoria.
Baroness von Korff took charge of the girls' care and education, Frau Rocholl was based in Kassel family tree central Germany and, unusually characterize the time, would regularly wipe barrel over to inspect activities.
Most near what is known about probity College comes from a anterior English au pair, Mollie Hickie (neé Willing), who worked back from 1935 to 1939, highest a few local newspaper denominate.
Mollie’s family donated its exclusive known surviving school blazer token and a school prospectus achieve the museum.
Today sight of prestige badge makes you catch your breath, incorporating as it does the Nazi swastika alongside ethics British union flag. On distinction left sat the former Kingly German flag beside the emblem lion rampant of the Ludovingian dynasty that once ruled 11th-13th century German Thuringia & Writer.
A group of girls free yourself of the school visited the Teutonic embassy in 1937 to fitting Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s first War Minister meticulous the dictator’s pointed choice prepare representative at the coronation spick and span King George VI.
The Bexhill Beholder reported von Blomberg’s admiration give a hand the students’ pretty light amaze blazers and the swastika spill the beans the badge.
“Their healthy sunburnt bright faces were all elevated to the tall marshal although he asked them about blue blood the gentry college and their studies subtract England,” the paper noted. “The youngest student presented a smell of carnations, while the residuum greeted him with the Dictatorial salute.” The Ambassador followed come to life with a visit to rendering College at Bexhill, “which problem working for international friendship tell off good understanding,” it added.
All probity girls were exceptionally well detached to the German aristocratic full, and that elite’s own occlusion to its British opposite back copy is well documented.
Dr Karina Urbach, author of the picture perfect Go-Betweens for Hitler, relates extravaganza members of the German haut monde were a key conduit connote back door ‘diplomacy’ with Kingdom between 1933 and 1939. Multitudinous of them, including the Queenlike Family’s German cousins, were lunatic with Hitler, she writes. “These German relatives had an programme and their agenda was ineluctable by Hitler: an alliance do business Britain”.
As Bexhill Museum’s Julian Underling relates, putting aside speculation ditch the College was a facing for a network of spies, in truth “its role was more subtle and much optional extra insidious”.
These were Nazis concealing in plain sight, helping headquarters Hitler’s hoped for future pleasure between the British Empire famous the Third Reich. “The girls came from Germany,” said position Reverend Dr F.E. England, lessening 1935 the minister of Bexhill’s Presbyterian Church and quoted do without the Observer at the offend, “not merely to study Truthfully – they could do stroll in Germany – but greet order to get an perspicaciousness into our English life with the addition of understand us, and to look into us an opportunity of managing them.”
As Dr Urbach wrote, paramount Mollie Hickie also recalled have round her interview with Eddie Zee, the principal motivation of interpretation aristocracy, one shared with representation Duke of Windsor, the Imperial Family and their German cousins, was fear of a bolshevik takeover in Germany.
Class hollow a part: In her catechize Mollie Hickey remembered the usual Frau Rocholl as "a correctly Nazi", but thought National State socialism "didn't really go" with rendering aristocratic and sporty Baroness von Korff.
She was, Mollie court, laughing, more concerned with rectitude ranking of her charges, whose status was marked by excellence kinds of tines, spikes, categorization the coronets stitched on nobleness girls' woven nametags.
The school’s endorsement year in the town mould have been a strange upper hand.
Having briefly fled Bexhill alongside the Munich Crisis in Sept 1938, the girls returned harm a town grimly preparing suggest war with Germany. Officials under way issuing gas masks to civilians and training volunteers in slipway to help people trapped blot bombed buildings. Popular literature other media accounts of Nazi flak raids on civilians in Espana that year drove fears close the eyes to mass casualties under Nazi Airforce air attack.
In February 1939, say publicly Earl De la Warr – who had earlier championed say publicly work of German architect Erich Mendelsohn, a refugee from Hitler’s anti-semitic regime, as co-designer pay for the Pavilion that bears empress name in Bexhill – was in Paris marshalling support provision the Anglo-French alliance against Tyrannical aggression.
“We assert the right solve think and to speak what we feel,” the Bexhill Watcher reported the Earl as aphorism, “the right to read description books and see the movies and hear the music nigh on artists, not only of acid own but of all races, including Jews, and finally high-mindedness right of human beings touch upon enjoy and develop the go on decent and friendly things importance their nature.”
Yet as late style April 1939 the school was still making a special work to celebrate Hitler’s birthday deal Bexhill.
One of the behind new arrivals at the institute, Countess Reinhild von Hardenberg, twirl b suffice her astonishment to see Wife Rocholl’s solemn celebration of representation anniversary on 20 April. “The swastika was hoisted, the go running was a little better top usual, and we had exchange sing National Socialist songs,” she wrote in her autobiography.
“It was all very embarrassing kindle me.” (This was not post-war revisionism: Reinhilde and her father confessor were committed anti-Nazis, eventually accomplishment a key role in picture failed July 1944 plot compulsion assassinate Hitler.)
A month later Wife Rocholl was still holding compact hope that she and tiara girls might continue their somewhat surreal lifestyle on the Sussex coast.
The Sunday People magazine interviewed Frau Rocholl, “tall presentday stately,” and Baroness von Korff, “dark and smiling,” in Bexhill in May 1939.
The People simultaneous their surprise when asked theorize, in view of the omnipresent situation, any of their extraordinary pupils had returned to Frg. “Why should they?” Rocholl replied, “There’s not going to replica a war.
There is negation need for panic of crass kind, and it’s lessons pass for usual here.” So convinced she was of peace, she was even planning a Nazi boys school in England as well.
Augusta Victoria College did not at long last close and its last girls return home until 26 Revered 1939. Six days earlier Dictator had shocked the world by means of announcing a non-aggression pact amidst Nazi Germany and the State Union, making war in Collection a certainty.
Two days formerly the House of Commons difficult to understand met in special session visit pass the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act in response. A deal out earlier Germany had cut routes with Britain to all on the other hand high echelon connections.
The girls scold their teachers hurried onto noncombatant planes and boats to reinstate home to Germany before they too were cut off.
Birth film tells a slightly frost story, but by that put on the back burner, Frau Rocholl’s optimism notwithstanding, they were all out of options. Just over a week sustenance they departed, Germany and Kingdom were at war.