The day after the survivors’ return, a special railway van that had been adapted to resemble a small chapel and attached to the mail train from Harwich, arrived in London at 8.21am. It contained the bodies of the dead boys, in coffins of Black Forest timber – “from the very woods in which they perished”, as one reporter put it. They were met by relatives and schoolmates as well as officials from the education department, all of whom removed their hats and stood silent on the platform of Liverpool Street station. So many people gathered on the upper walkways overlooking the platform that extra police had to be called in to control the crowds. [...]
The idea of erecting a memorial to the events of 17 April were first raised publicly around a month later in the official Nazi newspaper the Alemannen, as well as in the British press. The people of Hofsgrund had mooted the idea early on, communicating to Freiburg’s tourism director their desire for an inscription carved into the rock, which would have recalled the incident and acknowledged that without the locals’ help, many more would have died. After much vacillating, the Hitler Youth took over management of the project. [...]
The memorial was due to be inaugurated on 12 October, in the presence of a member of the British royal family, the head of the Scout movement, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, and the British ambassador, in a ceremony which once again was supposed to affirm the German-British friendship. The inscription concluded: “The youth of Adolf Hitler honours the memory of these English sporting comrades with this memorial.” [...]
Eaton had wanted the inscription to conclude with the line: “Their teacher failed them in the hour of trial.” But the German authorities forbade the last sentence. A blank space shows where it would have been inserted. In the entrance to the village church, the parents also erected their own memorial, the only one in which the villagers are thanked for coming to the schoolboys’ aid.
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