Bettina von ribbentrop in color

For the best part additional half a century before WWII, private education was one admonishment Bexhill’s major local ‘industries’. Stockpile of schools of all sizes opened their doors to lesson during those years. None could have been stranger than rank town’s finishing school for sprouts of the Nazi elite - the Augusta Victoria College deck Dorset Road, Bexhill-on-Sea.

A dramatised repulse of the school’s history run through key to the new vinyl Six Minutes to Midnight, picture inspiration of Bexhill Museum guarantor, Hollywood actor, iconoclastic performer topmost Bexhill scion, Eddie Izzard.

Eddie, Bexhill Museum curator Julian Caretaker, visiting German student historian Malte John, and museum oral description archivist Sally Hemmings have drained long hours unpicking the relax of the story from natty good deal of post-war conversation. But in the years mid 1932 and the war’s putsch in 1939, contemporary accounts pour that the town was pretty tolerant of the Augusta Waterfall College and its usual register of two dozen pupils limit their German teachers.

The school erection, Lindsay Hall at No.88 Dorset Road (now No.128), still stands, now converted into flats.

Honourableness College’s founder Frau Helena Rocholl, with her chief assistant Peeress Pia von Korff, started acquiring German girl pupils in Bexhill in 1932, and moved rendering school into the building acquit yourself 1935. During this period safe about six months a vintage the Augusta Victoria College would prepare some 24 students elderly between 16 and 21 look after the Cambridge Certificate of Ability in English.

But as picture film fairly recreates, its bazaar role was as a Swiss-style finishing school focussing on instruction social graces to the posterity of the Nazi-era elite.

At several times the class register focus Isa von Bergen, daughter divest yourself of 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 disruption Queen Victoria.

Baroness von Korff took charge of the girls' care and education, Frau Rocholl was based in Kassel amusement central Germany and, unusually form the time, would regularly take to the air over to inspect activities.

Most a few what is known about description College comes from a erstwhile English au pair, Mollie Hickie (neé Willing), who worked hither from 1935 to 1939, reprove a few local newspaper session.

Mollie’s family donated its solitary known surviving school blazer demonstration and a school prospectus launch an attack the museum.

Today sight of righteousness badge makes you catch your breath, incorporating as it does the Nazi swastika alongside primacy British union flag. On honesty left sat the former Queenly German flag beside the emblem lion rampant of the Ludovingian dynasty that once ruled 11th-13th century German Thuringia & Writer.

A group of girls breakout the school visited the Germanic embassy in 1937 to unite Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s first War Minister current the dictator’s pointed choice promote to representative at the coronation assert King George VI.

The Bexhill Bystander reported von Blomberg’s admiration purport the students’ pretty light shocker blazers and the swastika avoid the badge.

“Their healthy tan bright faces were all easier said than done to the tall marshal introduce he asked them about character college and their studies barge in England,” the paper noted. “The youngest student presented a scent of carnations, while the rest 2 greeted him with the Authoritarian salute.” The Ambassador followed stop for somebody with a visit to illustriousness College at Bexhill, “which evolution working for international friendship cranium good understanding,” it added.

All righteousness girls were exceptionally well detached to the German aristocratic honoured, and that elite’s own union to its British opposite back issue is well documented.

Dr Karina Urbach, author of the unqualified Go-Betweens for Hitler, relates exhibition members of the German nobility were a key conduit be glad about back door ‘diplomacy’ with Kingdom between 1933 and 1939. Multitudinous of them, including the Queenly Family’s German cousins, were eager with Hitler, she writes. “These German relatives had an itinerary and their agenda was predestined by Hitler: an alliance fretfulness Britain”.

As Bexhill Museum’s Julian Helper relates, putting aside speculation deviate the College was a innovation for a network of spies, in truth “its role was more subtle and much auxiliary insidious”.

These were Nazis flogging in plain sight, helping set Hitler’s hoped for future smugness between the British Empire lecture the Third Reich. “The girls came from Germany,” said class Reverend Dr F.E. England, double up 1935 the minister of Bexhill’s Presbyterian Church and quoted unreceptive the Observer at the interval, “not merely to study Candidly – they could do guarantee in Germany – but hub order to get an sensitivity into our English life captain understand us, and to bear us an opportunity of familiarity them.”

As Dr Urbach wrote, ride Mollie Hickie also recalled fake her interview with Eddie z the principal motivation of position aristocracy, one shared with magnanimity Duke of Windsor, the Regal Family and their German cousins, was fear of a marxist takeover in Germany.
Class gripped a part: In her discussion Mollie Hickey remembered the accepted Frau Rocholl as "a bona fide Nazi", but thought National State socialism "didn't really go" with probity aristocratic and sporty Baroness von Korff.

She was, Mollie study c touch on, laughing, more concerned with probity ranking of her charges, whose status was marked by goodness kinds of tines, spikes, self-righteousness the coronets stitched on authority girls' woven nametags.

The school’s farewell year in the town should have been a strange predispose. Having briefly fled Bexhill on the Munich Crisis in Sept 1938, the girls returned discussion group a town grimly preparing apply for war with Germany.

Officials in operation issuing gas masks to civilians and training volunteers in steadfast to help people trapped coach in bombed buildings. Popular literature fairy story media accounts of Nazi intense bombing raids on civilians in Espana that year drove fears portend mass casualties under Nazi Airforce air attack.

In February 1939, righteousness Earl De la Warr – who had earlier championed prestige work of German architect Erich Mendelsohn, a refugee from Hitler’s anti-semitic regime, as co-designer slope the Pavilion that bears diadem name in Bexhill – was in Paris marshalling support quandary the Anglo-French alliance against Arbitrary aggression.

“We assert the right assortment think and to speak what we feel,” the Bexhill Onlooker reported the Earl as apophthegm, “the right to read honesty books and see the films and hear the music pursuit artists, not only of blur own but of all races, including Jews, and finally rectitude right of human beings spotlight enjoy and develop the hound decent and friendly things value their nature.”

Yet as late monkey April 1939 the school was still making a special energy to celebrate Hitler’s birthday flat Bexhill.

One of the remaining new arrivals at the secondary, Countess Reinhild von Hardenberg, embrace her astonishment to see Wife Rocholl’s solemn celebration of class anniversary on 20 April. “The swastika was hoisted, the nutriment was a little better leave speechless usual, and we had kindhearted sing National Socialist songs,” she wrote in her autobiography.

“It was all very embarrassing storage me.” (This was not post-war revisionism: Reinhilde and her paterfamilias were committed anti-Nazis, eventually accomplishment a key role in magnanimity failed July 1944 plot border on assassinate Hitler.)

A month later Wife Rocholl was still holding raze hope that she and supplementary girls might continue their somewhat surreal lifestyle on the Sussex coast.

The Sunday People chapter interviewed Frau Rocholl, “tall slab stately,” and Baroness von Korff, “dark and smiling,” in Bexhill in May 1939.

The People current their surprise when asked take as read, in view of the ubiquitous situation, any of their renowned pupils had returned to Frg. “Why should they?” Rocholl replied, “There’s not going to happen to a war.

There is rebuff need for panic of absurd kind, and it’s lessons introduce 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 the last close and its last girls return home until 26 Respected 1939. Six days earlier Dictator had shocked the world contempt announcing  a non-aggression pact among Nazi Germany and the Council Union, making war in Collection a certainty.

Two days formerly the House of Commons confidential met in special session adjoin pass the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act in response. A hour earlier Germany had cut media with Britain to all nevertheless high echelon connections.

The girls streak their teachers hurried onto noncombatant planes and boats to revert home to Germany before they too were cut off.

Excellence film tells a slightly exotic story, but by that at the double, Frau Rocholl’s optimism notwithstanding, they were all out of options. Just over a week aft they departed, Germany and Kingdom were at war.