“Teacher, Founder of the Hostel, a Witness to the Unofficial 1914 Christmas Truce… the Man Who Dreamed of Peaceful International Understanding…”
THE TEACHER
Richard Schirrmann was born in the East Prussian town of Grunenfeld (now Gronówko, Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship) on May 15, 1874. His father, August Schirrmann, was a teacher.
In 1895, the young Schirrmann passed his teaching examination in Karalene, near Insterburg. He first became a teacher in the Kirchschule Königshöhe in Lötzen, then later in Schrombehnen in Pr. Eylau. Schirrmann took every opportunity to hold his lessons in the outdoors.
In 1903, Richard Schirrmann was transferred to Nette-Schule in Altena, Province of Westphalia. It was there that he met Wilhelm Münker, who later became his partner.
Six years later, Schirrmann first published his idea of inexpensive accommodation for youth travel after a school camping trip that was derailed by a thunderstorm. He received considerable support and opened a makeshift hostel for hikers in his school. Then in Altena Castle on the first day of June 1912, Schirrmann opened the very first hostel… where the original rooms are now a museum.
But a little over two years later, war came to Europe. Richard Schirrmann would be witness to (1) the continent’s “last 19th century conflict “, and (2) an unofficial truce late in December 1914. The latter led to an idea that he felt would bridge the world.
LIVE AND LET LIVE
In early September 1914, the German attack through Belgium into France had been repelled by the Allies just northeast of Paris at the First Battle of the Marne. The Germans then fell back to the Aisne River, where they dug in and checked the Franco–British advance. Soon, both sides began digging trenches to economize on manpower and utilize surplus to outflank each other. In the “Race to the Sea”, the two sides made such reciprocal outflanking maneuvers. After several weeks, during which the B.E.F. was withdrawn from the Aisne and sent north to Flanders, both sides ran out of room! By the end of November 1914, both sides had built a continuous line of trenches running from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier (a distance measuring 475 miles).
Before Christmas 1914, there were several peace initiatives:
1. The Open Christmas Letter was a public message for peace addressed “to the women of Germany and Austria” and signed by a group of 101 British women suffragettes at the end of 1914.
2. On December 7, 1914, Pope Benedict XV begged for an official truce between the warring governments. He asked “that the guns may fall silent at least upon the night the angels sang”. Sadly, the plea from the Vatican was refused by both sides.
But fraternization—peaceful and sometimes friendly interactions between opposing forces—was a regular feature in quiet sectors of the Western Front. In certain sectors, both sides would refrain from aggressive behavior… while in other areas, it extended into regular conversation or even visits from one trench to another! Even on the Eastern Front, Fritz Kreisler reported incidents of spontaneous truces and fraternization between Austro-Hungarian and Russian troops in the first few weeks of the war.
Truces between British and German units began in early November 1914, around the time that the war of maneuver ended. Rations were brought up to the front line after dusk… and soldiers on both sides noted a period of peace while they collected their food. A British soldier could recall a friendly visit from a German sergeant one morning “to see how we were getting on”.
Relations between French and German units were generally more tense, but the same phenomenon began to emerge. In early December, a German surgeon recorded a regular half-hourly truce each evening to recover dead soldiers for burial, during which French and German soldiers exchanged newspapers. This behavior was often challenged by officers. On December 7th, Charles de Gaulle wrote of the “lamentable” desire of French infantrymen to leave the enemy in peace. However, the commander of the French Tenth Army (Victor d’Urbal) wrote of the “unfortunate consequences” when men “become familiar with their neighbors opposite”. Soon, other truces were forced by both sides in the event of bad weather, especially when trench lines became flooded.
The proximity of the front lines made it easy for soldiers to shout greetings to each other, and this may have been the most common method of arranging informal truces in the last weeks of 1914. Men would frequently exchange news or greetings, helped by a common language. Many German soldiers had lived in England (particularly London), and they were familiar with the language and society. Several British soldiers recorded instances of Germans asking about news from the football leagues… while other conversations could be as banal as discussions of the weather or as plaintive as messages for a sweetheart! One unusual phenomenon that grew in intensity was music. In peaceful sectors, it was not uncommon for units to sing in the evenings, sometimes deliberately with an eye towards entertaining or gently taunting their opposite numbers.
This soon shaded gently into more festive activity. In early December, Sir Edward Hulse of the Scots Guards wrote that he was planning to organize a concert party for Christmas Day, which would “give the enemy every conceivable form of song in harmony” in response to frequent choruses of “Deutschland Über Alles”.
Roughly 100,000 British and German troops were involved in the informal cessations of hostility along the Western Front. The Germans placed candles and Christmas trees on their trenches, then continued the celebration by singing carols. The British responded by singing carols of their own. The two sides continued by shouting Christmas greetings to each other. Soon thereafter, there were excursions across “no man’s land “, where small gifts (such as food, tobacco, alcohol) and souvenirs (such as buttons and hats) were exchanged. The artillery in the region fell silent. The truce also allowed a breathing spell where recently killed soldiers could be brought back behind their lines by burial parties. Joint services were held. In many sectors, the truce lasted through Christmas night, some even continuing until New Year’s Day.
On Christmas Day, Brigadier-General Walter Congreve, commander of the 18th Infantry Brigade, stationed near Neuve Chapelle, wrote a letter recalling the Germans declared a truce for the day. One of his men bravely lifted his head above the parapet and others from both sides walked onto no man’s land. Officers and men shook hands and exchanged cigarettes and cigars, one of his captains “smoked a cigar with the best shot in the German army”, the latter no more than eighteen years old. Congreve admitted he was reluctant to witness the truce for fear of German snipers.
Bruce Bairnsfather, who fought throughout the war, wrote:
“I wouldn’t have missed that unique and weird Christmas Day for anything…. I spotted a German officer, some sort of lieutenant I should think, and being a bit of a collector, I intimated to him that I had taken a fancy to some of his buttons…. I brought out my wire clippers and, with a few deft snips, removed a couple of his buttons and put them in my pocket. I then gave him two of mine in exchange…. The last I saw was one of my machine gunners, who was a bit of an amateur hairdresser in civil life, cutting the unnaturally long hair of a docile Boche, who was patiently kneeling on the ground whilst the automatic clippers crept up the back of his neck.”
Henry Williamson a nineteen-year-old private in the London Rifle Brigade, wrote to his mother on Boxing Day:
“Dear Mother, I am writing from the trenches. It is 11 o’clock in the morning. Beside me is a coke fire, opposite me a ‘dug-out’ (wet) with straw in it. The ground is sloppy in the actual trench, but frozen elsewhere. In my mouth is a pipe presented by the Princess Mary. In the pipe is tobacco. Of course, you say. But wait. In the pipe is German tobacco. Haha, you say, from a prisoner or found in a captured trench. Oh dear, no! From a German soldier. Yes a live German soldier from his own trench. Yesterday the British & Germans met & shook hands in the Ground between the trenches, & exchanged souvenirs, & shook hands. Yes, all day Xmas day, & as I write. Marvellous, isn’t it?”
Captain Sir Edward Hulse reported how the first interpreter he met from the German lines was from Suffolk… and had left his girlfriend and a 3.5 hp motorcycle! Hulse also described a sing-song which:
“…’ended up with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ which we all, English, Scots, Irish, Prussians, Württenbergers, etc., joined in. It was absolutely astounding, and if I had seen it on a cinematograph film I should have sworn that it was faked!”
Captain Robert Miles, King’s Shropshire Light Infantry… who was attached to the Royal Irish Rifles, recalled in an edited letter that was published in the Daily Mail and the Wellington Journal & Shrewsbury News in January 1915:
“Friday (Christmas Day). We are having the most extraordinary Christmas Day imaginable. A sort of unarranged and quite unauthorized but perfectly understood and scrupulously observed truce exists between us and our friends in front. The funny thing is it only seems to exist in this part of the battle line – on our right and left we can all hear them firing away as cheerfully as ever. The thing started last night – a bitter cold night, with white frost – soon after dusk when the Germans started shouting ‘Merry Christmas, Englishmen’ to us. Of course our fellows shouted back and presently large numbers of both sides had left their trenches, unarmed, and met in the debatable, shot-riddled, no man’s land between the lines. Here the agreement – all on their own – came to be made that we should not fire at each other until after midnight tonight. The men were all fraternizing in the middle (we naturally did not allow them too close to our line) and swapped cigarettes and lies in the utmost good fellowship. Not a shot was fired all night.”
Of the Germans, he wrote:
“They are distinctly bored with the war…. In fact, one of them wanted to know what on earth we were doing here fighting them.”
The truce in that sector continued into Boxing Day; he commented about the Germans:
“The beggars simply disregard all our warnings to get down from off their parapet, so things are at a deadlock. We can’t shoot them in cold blood…. I cannot see how we can get them to return to business.”
On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1914, Alfred Anderson’s unit of the 1st/5th Battalion of the Black Watch was billeted in a farmhouse away from the front line. The last known surviving Scottish veteran of the war, Anderson vividly recalled that Christmas Day in a 2003 interview and said:
“I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence. Only the guards were on duty. We all went outside the farm buildings and just stood listening. And, of course, thinking of people back home. All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machinegun fire and distant German voices. But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted ‘Merry Christmas’, even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war.”
A German lieutenant, Johannes Niemann, wrote:
“…grabbed my binoculars and looking cautiously over the parapet saw the incredible sight of our soldiers exchanging cigarettes, schnapps and chocolate with the enemy”.
In the Comines sector of the front, there was an early fraternization between German and French soldiers in December 1914. Gervais Morillon wrote to his parents:
“The Boches waved a white flag and shouted ‘Kamarades, Kamarades, rendez-vous’. When we didn’t move they came towards us unarmed, led by an officer. Although we are not clean they are disgustingly filthy. I am telling you this but don’t speak of it to anyone. We must not mention it even to other soldiers.”
Gustave Berthier wrote:
“On Christmas Day, the Boches made a sign showing they wished to speak to us. They said they didn’t want to shoot. They were tired of making war, they were married like me, they didn’t have any differences with the French but with the English.”
On the Yser Front (where German and Belgian troops faced each other in December 1914), a truce was arranged at the request of Belgian soldiers who wished to send letters back to their families, over the German-occupied parts of Belgium.
Many accounts of the truce involved one or more football matches played in “no man’s land”. This was mentioned in some of the earliest reports, with a letter written by a doctor attached to the Rifle Brigade, published in The Times on New Year’s Day 1915, reporting:
“…a football match… played between them and us in front of the trench”.
AN IDEA IN THE WORKS…
Richard Schirrmann, who was in a German regiment holding a position on the Bernhardstein (one of the Vosges Mountains), wrote an account of events in December 1915:
“When the Christmas bells sounded in the villages of the Vosges behind the lines… something fantastically unmilitary occurred. German and French troops spontaneously made peace and ceased hostilities; they visited each other through disused trench tunnels, and exchanged wine, cognac and cigarettes for Pumpernickel (Westphalian black bread), biscuits and ham. This suited them so well that they remained good friends even after Christmas was over.”
He was separated from enemy French troops by a narrow strip of “no man’s land” and described the landscape:
“…strewn with shattered trees, the ground ploughed up by shellfire, a wilderness of earth, tree-roots and tattered uniforms.”
Military discipline was soon restored, but Schirrmann pondered over the incident and whether “thoughtful young people of all countries could be provided with suitable meeting places where they could get to know each other”. The war made him an even stronger proponent of hostels; hostels would be “bridges of peace” to foster international understanding.
BUILDING BRIDGES
In 1919, Schirrmann founded the German Youth Hostel Association. Three years later, he retired from teaching to focus entirely on hostels.
In 1925, Schirrmann founded the children’s village “Staumühle” on a former military training ground near Paderborn. For the next six years during the summer months, he organized a school camp.
From 1933 to 1936, Schirrmann served as President of the International Youth Hostelling Association (now Hostelling International), before the Nazi government forced him to resign. The hostels were put under control of the Hitler Youth.
After the Second World War, Schirrmann worked on rebuilding the German association. For this, he received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesverdienstkreuz) in 1952.
In 1946, Schirrmann was flown to the International Youth Hostel Conference in Scotland by an American friend on a private plane. He became the first German civilian to enter British territory after World War II.
At the age of eighty seven, Richard Schirrmann died in Grävenwiesbach, Taunus on December 14, 1961.
