Heligoland - Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea

On 18 April 1947, British forces set off the largest non-nuclear explosion in history. The target was a small island in the North Sea, fifty miles off the German coast, which for generations had stood as a symbol of Anglo-German conflict: Heligoland. A long tradition of rivalry was to come to an end here, in the ruins of Hitler''s island fortress. Pressed as to why it was not prepared to give Heligoland back, the British government declared that the island represented everything that was wrong with the Germans: ''If any tradition was worth breaking, and if any sentiment was worth changing, then the German sentiment about Heligoland was such a one''. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, Jan R-ger explores how Britain and Germany have collided and collaborated in this North Sea enclave. For much of the nineteenth century, this was Britain''s smallest colony, an inconvenient and notoriously discontented outpost at the edge of Europe. Situated at the fault line between imperial an