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The Nazi party’s favourite finishing school for the daughters of high-ranking members was not in some remote Bavarian castle, but an ivy-clad detached house in Bexhill-on-Sea.
Augusta Victoria College taught the daughter of Germany's foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s teenage god-daughter, Isa von Bergen, the daughter of Hitler's ambassador to the Vatican, and Countess Haldenberg, a niece of leading Nazi diplomat Herbert von Dirksen.
The school’s badge, which featured both a Swastika and a Union Flag, symbolised the hope that the institution set up by Nazi Party insider Helene Rocholl would help build a bridge between the Hitler’s Germany and British high society.
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Julian Porter, curator at Bexhill Museum, told the Daily Telegraph: "The girls were of marriageable age, they could speak good English and would be in high society finding husbands who were decision makers, so they could later say, ‘Look here, dear, Hitler isn't so bad’.
“Whether the girls actually had any success marrying English men is not clear.”
He added: "Hitler wanted to run Europe, and the British Empire would continue working for him.
"It was an idea that he would strike a deal with the empire then there wouldn't be a war. This is one of the subtexts of the college: it's infiltrating British society."
The forgotten story of East Sussex’s Nazi college has been dramatised in a new film called Six Minutes to Midnight, which stars Bexhill-born Eddie Izzard, and Dame Judi Dench.
Izzard caught sign of the school’s badge in a Bexhill-on-Sea museum, and it sparked the idea for a spy thriller set in the sleepy South Coast town.
As well as daughters of Nazi bosses, the school also taught young women from old aristocratic German families, such as Princess Herzeleide of Prussia. A few English girls from well-to-do local families also attended the school.
Pupils were constantly reminded of their social status. “The laundry tags in the uniform apparently had coronets (next to the pupils’ names)”, Julian Porter says. “The posher you were, the more points on the crown.”
Even as Europe slid towards war, the German girls were welcomed in Bexhill-on-Sea.
The prevailing belief seems to have been that the Nazis would never bomb a town where their own daughters were being educated.
Shortly before war broke out, plans were foot to add a boys’ annexe to the school as well.
Mollie Hickie worked as a chaperone at the school, organising swimming lessons and shopping trips.
Shortly before she died in 2014, at the grand old age of 100, Mollie told local history book Bexhill Voices Two: “I was very happy at the College and made a lot of good friends.”
The school was abandoned in September 1939, within days of the outbreak of the Second World War, as the pupils were rushed back to Germany.
All hopes that the seaside school could help relations between Britain and Germany and prevent a hugely destructive war were dashed when Hitler invaded Poland on Sept 1, 1939.
- World War 2
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