How the story of a British Army family in post-war occupied Germany inspired first a novel, ‘The Aftermath’, by Rhidian Brook, and now a film exploring reconciliation and forgiveness

On a summer’s day in 1946, a British Army colonel called Walter Brook stood by the river in Hamburg, surveying the grand villa that was to be his family’s new home. He was the recently appointed governor of that area of British-occupied Germany, and the plan was for it to be requisitioned, with its current inhabitants thrown out.

They were the Ladiges, a family with three teenage children. They had been wealthy merchants, but like everyone else in Hamburg they’d seen terrible suffering: their home was one of the few still standing in the city. In one week in 1943 the RAF and US Army Air Force dropped so many bombs they destroyed half its buildings and killed 40,000 of its residents – the same number as died in the whole of the Second World War in London.

Brook was an eminently reasonable man: although the full extent of the horror of the Nazi concentration camps was just being discovered, and there was little appetite for being kind to Germans, he took an impressively humanitarian tack. The Ladiges had not been Nazis. If they were turfed out of their home they’d end up in a camp, living in Nissan huts. Empathising with their plight, Brook decided on an unusual arrangement. The two families would share the house: victors and vanquished, living together under the same roof.