Chronology

1940
15 June	War Cabinet decides to demilitarise the Channel Islands.
16–20 June	All military equipment and personnel evacuated from the islands.
19 June	Island governments informed of the decision to demilitarise. Preparations for evacuation begin.
21–23 June	Thirty thousand islanders evacuated to Britain.
28 June	Germans bomb St Peter Port, Guernsey and St Helier, Jersey, killing forty-four people.
30 June	Germans land at Guernsey airport. The island surrenders.
1 July	Jersey occupied.
2–3 July	Alderney and Sark occupied.
9–28 July	Philip Martel and Desmond Mulholland land on Guernsey, but are forced to give themselves up and are sent as prisoners of war to France.
1 August	Ambrose Sherwill, President of Guernsey’s Controlling Committee, broadcasts on Radio Bremen.
4 September–21 October	Hubert Nicolle and James Symes hide on Guernsey. On their surrender, fourteen islanders who had helped them, including Ambrose Sherwill, are imprisoned in France.
27 September	Anti-Semitic laws are registered in the islands’ parliaments.
December	The islanders imprisoned for helping Nicolle and Symes return from France.
1941
24 May	Bread rationing starts.
15 June	Hitler orders the fortification of the islands.
8 July	Victor Carey, Bailiff of Guernsey, offers a £25 reward for information leading to the arrest of anyone found guilty of painting ‘V for Victory’ signs.
November	Dr Fritz Todt, founder of the Organisation Todt, visits the islands as part of the planning for the fortification programme. The first OT workers arrive.
1942
January	Four camps – Helgoland, Norderney, Sylt and Borkum – are set up on Alderney for the OT workers. RAF bombing raids on St Peter Port harbour kill several islanders.
March	Eighteen Guernsey policemen are arrested for stealing from German and civilian stores and selling the goods on the black market.
21 April	Three Jewish women, Auguste Spitz, Therese Steiner and Marianne Grunfeld, are deported to France. All are to die in Auschwitz.
May	‘Guernsey Underground News Service’ starts publication.
June	All civilian radios banned.
16–27 September	Two thousand islanders deported to German internment camps for the duration of the war.
3–4 October	British raid on Sark. Two Germans killed, one captured.
1943
January	The Xaver Dorsch and the Franka run aground off Braye harbour, Alderney, leading to the loss of hundreds of slave workers’ lives.
18 January	Teaching of German made compulsory in all island schools.
12–25 February	A second deportation of just over two hundred islanders.
March	SS Baubrigade I, commanded by Maximilian List and Kurt Klebeck, arrives on Alderney. Sylt camp passes to the control of the SS.
22 June	Louise Gould and Harold Le Druillenec sentenced for hiding a Russian slave worker. Le Druillenec narrowly survives Belsen; Gould dies in Ravensbrück in February 1945.
23–24 October	HMS Charybdis and HMS Limbourne sink off the islands with the loss of 504 British lives.
17 November	Forty-one bodies washed up on Guernsey and Jersey are buried with full military honours.
1944
6 April	Members of the ‘Guernsey Underground News Service’ put on trial. Five are imprisoned in France, where two of them die.
6 June	D-Day. The Allied invasion of Normandy begins.
June–August	The Allied capture of Cherbourg, Granville and St Malo cuts the islands off from all supplies.
July	The remaining slave workers on Alderney are evacuated to France.
7 July	The Minotaure, carrying slave workers and French prostitutes, is sunk by British torpedoes with the loss of 250 lives.
9 September	Gas supply on Jersey comes to an end.
19 September	The German government informs the Swiss, as intermediary power, that civilian supplies on the islands ‘are exhausted’.
7 November	Britain agrees to allow the Red Cross to provide food parcels for the islanders.
2 December	Suzanne Malherbe and Lucille Schwab are sentenced to death for spreading anti-German propaganda.
21 December	Gas supply on Guernsey comes to an end.
27–30 December	The Vega arrives with 750 tons of food and medical supplies for the islanders from the Red Cross.
1945
13 January	Milkless days introduced.
7–11 February	The Vega brings more supplies.
17 February–12 March	No bread available.
7 March	An unexplained explosion at the Palace Hotel, Jersey, kills nine Germans.
25 March	Admiral Hüffmeier, now Inselkommandant, declares that there will be no surrender of the islands.
8 May	VE Day. The Liberation Force holds talks off the islands with the Germans.
9 May	The Germans surrender the islands. Brigadier Alfred Snow sets up a military government.
14–15 May	Home Secretary Herbert Morrison visits the islands.
18 May	Major Haddock begins his investigation into the treatment of slave workers on Alderney.
7 June	King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visit islands.
25 June	The first evacuees return from Britain.
August	2190 deportees begin to return from Britain after being repatriated from Germany.
25 August	Brigadier Snow’s military government hands over power to the island governments.
October	Captain Theodore Pantcheff completes his report on atrocities against slave workers on the islands. A copy is sent to the Soviet Union with a view to the prosecution of certain German officers. However, no further action is taken.
1946
November	Home Secretary James Chuter-Ede announces to the House of Commons that the Director of Public Prosecutions has decided that there will be no trials of collaborators as ‘there are insufficient grounds to warrant the institution of criminal proceedings’.