Sir Henry Vaughan Berry (28 March 1891 – 27 February 1979) was a British financier, intelligence officer and military administrator, noted for his close association with senior figures in the Labour Party prior to World War II and for his role afterwards as Regional Commissioner of Hamburg in British-occupied Germany.
[1] Upon his return to Britain he won a further scholarship to read French and German at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating in 1913 with a second class in the medieval and modern languages tripos.
[5] His experiences as a District Officer for the village of Benrath, near Düsseldorf, led him to sympathise with the Germans rather than the French, and foresee that the penury and hunger he witnessed could become a breeding ground for xenophobic, nationalist politics.
He arrived in the city at a time of great crisis: there had already been widespread protest at the continuing military requisitioning of houses in the area, and the oncoming winter was to be the worst in living memory.
[20]The Hamburg newspaper Die Zeit, in an encomium following Berry's departure from the city in 1949, demonstrated this respect when it described him as "an Englishman who embodies all the proverbial but not always encountered characteristics of his compatriots: fairness, humour, simplicity, objectivity and prudence".
[21] A similar assessment was made years later by the future West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who had as a student once been invited by Berry to attend an informal discussion on economics at the latter's home.
[22] Confessing to a youthful "attachment to Britain" in a 1983 article for The Times, Schmidt recalled that it was his ... experience in postwar Hamburg under British occupation that confirmed my childhood impressions.
A distinguished military governor, Sir Henry Vaughan Berry, did much to introduce young Hamburg politicians into the British tradition of democracy, fairness and pragmatism.
[24] Back in England, Berry was the British delegate to the International Authority for the Ruhr, and became a full-time member of the Iron and Steel Corporation of Great Britain for three years.
[16] In retirement, he frequently wrote letters to The Times, where he expressed his long-standing aversion to currency speculation,[26] his objection to criticisms of the Labour Party made by the apostate former MP Ronald Chamberlain,[10] and his solutions to the problems of Northern Ireland in the wake of The Troubles.