The Second World War has arguably been the dominant influence on the British national identity of the twentieth century, and the second half of that century has been played out in its shadow. Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and D-Day have been elevated into national myths – not in the sense of being untruths, but because they have come to represent the highest expressions of the resilience and determination against all odds of the British people. The images, the rhetoric and the legends of the war have been recycled, and Britain continues to employ them to interpret the world. The Channel Islands’ culture is British; the islanders watch and listen to British television and radio, and they read British newspapers. Inevitably, the British perception of the Second World War has infiltrated their own. It is a history which sits very uncomfortably with the islands’ own experience of the war.
The first half of the war had seen countries in Continental Europe fall like ninepins to the German advance; Britain had come perilously close to invasion, and had lost thousands of tons of shipping in the Battle of the North Atlantic. It had required a huge mobilisation of national determination to continue fighting rather than seek peace; what was formed in that crucible was a national perception by the British of themselves as the plucky and defiant David to Hitler’s Goliath. They believed that they had shown themselves to be made of sterner stuff than the rest of Europe, which had reached accommodation with the Nazis. At the end of the war, Churchill claimed for Britain ‘an unblemished record’ in standing up to the Nazis. Only Britain had fought Hitler from the start of the war to its bitter end – at the cost of more than four hundred thousand lives, bombed cities, a lost empire and a near-bankrupted economy.
‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,’ Winston Churchill had declared in June 1940. He had his theme ready for the rallying cry should Britain be invaded: ‘You can always take one with you.’ Leonard Woolf and others among his Bloomsbury friends agreed that they would kill themselves if the Germans invaded, and bought poison in order to be able to do so.
But Channel Islanders did not fight on the beaches, in the fields or in the streets. They did not commit suicide, and they did not kill any Germans. Instead, they settled down, with few overt signs of resistance, to a hard, dull but relatively peaceful five years of occupation, in which more than half the population was working for the Germans.
Despite the British politicians’ exoneration of the islands in 1945, the islanders had not lived up to Britain’s wartime ideals. Indeed, they had dismally failed them. The first British soldiers to reach the Channel Islands after Liberation were horrified by what they found, and newspaper headlines of the time are evidence of that. In 1945 the idea of Britons co-operating, let alone collaborating, with the Germans was deeply shocking. Nor was it only the British who were shocked, but all the countries of the Empire, towards whom Britain had maintained such a strong sense of superiority. The curious story of Roland le Folet Hoffman, an Australian journalist who committed suicide on Guernsey shortly after Liberation, illustrates this point. A colleague told the coroner inquiring into Hoffman’s death: ‘He was ashamed and disgusted at the signs of outright collaboration with the Germans that he saw in the Channel Islands.’
The Channel Islands Occupation did not fit into Britain’s interpretation of the Second World War. It did not fit into the British collective memory of the war, the collective memory which, as Enoch Powell put it in 1989, ‘makes a nation: its memory of what its past was, what it has done, what it has suffered and what it has endured’. The islands’ experience flatly contradicted Britain’s dearest and most complacent assumptions about the distinctness of the British from the rest of Europe. Under occupation, the British had behaved exactly like the French, the Dutch or the Danish.
In histories of the war, the Occupation has been relegated to a footnote, a curious anomaly. It was left to newspapers to feed the British public’s appetite for stories about fraternisation and collaboration, stories whose capacity to shock, grab attention and sell papers is testimony to the endurance of the myth that the British ‘do not do that sort of thing’. Rollo Sherwill, son of Ambrose Sherwill, the President of the Guernsey Controlling Committee, says:
Newspapers write about the Channel Islands’ Occupation in the way they do because this was the only bit of the British Isles which was occupied, and we’re supposed to have reacted like the British would. But we didn’t behave as British people should. We had no alternative, we had to stick to the laws of war. Since the war we have felt like a woman must feel in a rape trial. People accuse her of having led the rapist on. But just as a woman might co-operate for fear of not surviving, so did we. If we hadn’t co-operated, we would have been harshly treated.
Sherwill pinpoints the cause of the British people’s fascination with the islands’ Occupation; they see it as an indicator of how they themselves would have behaved if Germany had invaded, and are horrified by anything that does not match up to how they like to believe they would have acted.
This is what underlay the extraordinary degree of media attention generated by the discovery in the Guernsey archives, when they were first opened to the public in January 1993, of letters proving that island officials had tracked down Jews and handed them over to the Germans. Some of the newspaper headlines were: ‘Islanders Aided Nazi Jew Hunters’ (Guardian); ‘Guernsey Leaders Helped Nazis Round up Jews’ (Daily Telegraph); ‘Guernsey Betrayed Jews to the Nazis’ (The Times); ‘Knighthood for Man who Sent the Jews to Die’ (Daily Mirror).
Guernsey accounted for just three of the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust, but as the Guardian’s editorial said, the revelations ‘touched very raw nerves indeed’. They challenged the assumption that British civil servants and police would not have co-operated in sending the British Jewish community to the gas chambers as the French had done. For nearly fifty years the British have believed that there was an element of decency and fairness, integral to being British, that would have prevented a British Holocaust. They believed that, alone in Europe, their consciences were clean. That illusion was shaken by the disclosure that respected servants of the British Crown, some of whom were subsequently knighted (Victor Carey and John Leale), had participated – in however small a measure – in one of the greatest evils of human history.
British interest in the Channel Islands Occupation is largely motivated by the ways in which it reflects on Britain itself, and by the British preoccupation with its own identity. This self-absorption, however, is not apparent to islanders, who feel that Britain has misunderstood, judged and criticised them. As a result, they have reinforced their island mentality to turn inwards and batten down the hatches. They are suspicious of outsiders, and reluctant to give information about their experience of the war to them. Their loyalty to the islands overrides their interest in telling the truth about the Occupation, and they have developed their own version of the war’s history in the shadow – and under the scrutiny – of Britain.
In 1945, the Channel Islands were riven by bitter divisions. Neighbour criticised neighbour; farmers who had sold food to the Germans at high prices were loathed; some families could not accept that their neighbours had chatted with soldiers and invited them in for tea, or that women whose husbands were away fighting for the British had slept with the enemy. These divisions were immeasurably exacerbated by the return home of islanders who had spent the war abroad. A demobilised soldier might find his neighbour had been a black marketeer; a man who had worked in a British munitions factory for five years might come home to find his old job had been taken by a man who had stayed behind and worked for the Germans for good wages; there were British servicemen who came home to bring up German-fathered children.
Some of these divisions lasted until the people involved died. In a number of cases, where an islander died at German hands, descendants have inherited a family grievance against other islanders. But, for the majority, the divisions have been buried beneath layers of island loyalty so that a united front could be presented against the criticisms levelled by outsiders. Time dulls passions, and accusations have been tempered by sympathy for the moral dilemmas every islander faced. Islanders now talk of the women who slept with Germans with pity, not condemnation, and they would never dream of passing on the names of such women to an outsider. The divisions have been buried deeper and deeper in the recesses of the popular memory. Books written in the war’s immediate aftermath were more honest than those which followed.
What has been lost, and what this book has attempted to illustrate, is the islanders’ own experience – of fear, of helplessness, of guilt, of compromise and collaboration. It was an experience they shared with France, Holland, Denmark and the rest of occupied Europe, an experience informed with the moral complexity of war. Unlike the British, those who had been occupied could never view the war in quite the same terms of moral absolutes: of good against evil, the Allies against the Nazis. As American historian and critic Paul Fussell points out in his book Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War. ‘For the war to be prosecuted at all, the enemy of course had to be severely dehumanised and demeaned . . . [Germans were] a perverse type of human being, cold, diagrammatic, pedantic, unimaginative and thoroughly sinister . . . their instinct for discipline made them especially dangerous.’ The English writer Edward Blishen commented, on seeing the newspaper headline ‘Hamburg has been Hamburgered’ after a bombing raid: ‘The tragic evolution of the war was commented on in the language of a gang fight in a school playground . . . such an orgy of brutal over-simplification [would] shape attitudes that would last a lifetime.’
Such simplification was not possible for islanders who had lived as neighbours with the Germans for five years. Michael Ginns, a Jersey schoolboy at Liberation, remembers the difference between the islanders’ perception of the enemy and that of the rest of the British people. He had spent nearly three years in an internment camp in southern Germany, and when he showed photographs of the camp to schoolfriends who had been evacuated to England, they refused to accept that the guards were real Germans:
They had believed British propaganda cartoons literally; they thought all Germans had square heads and brutal faces. When I was in the army after the war, I found it easier to relate to the German and Polish prisoners of war whom I came into contact with than the other British soldiers. For the British, everything on the Continent was alien. In Britain, every German was considered a Nazi, but I never saw one act of cruelty during the five years of the war. Every nation produces its scum, but we saw the man behind the uniform and we saw the human face.
Islanders at the end of the war had a vastly more complex understanding of how good can merge imperceptibly with evil, with every possible muddy, deceptive permutation. This view does not diminish the terrible evils committed by the Nazis, but only reveals how complicity can spread its tentacles into the most unexpected of places. This part of the islanders’ experience has not found its way into books: to a British audience it would smack too much of accommodation, precisely the charge against which islanders are most keen to defend themselves.
A collective memory has developed which eschews all controversy and provides a version of the Occupation around which all islanders – whatever their wartime experience, be it evacuation, deportation or occupation – can rally. The Occupation is too traumatic and recent an event for islanders to be able to ignore it. The dominance of British culture ensured that the islands’ unique ordeal would be overlaid with the conventions and myths of Britain’s wartime experience.
Over the last couple of decades, a large number of islanders who lived through the Occupation have published their memoirs. With one or two notable exceptions, they abide by clearly defined conventions: islanders are cast in the role of plucky and defiant characters who do everything they can to thwart the enemy; most of the Germans appear to be humourless and of subnormal intelligence. Great emphasis is put on the islanders’ resourcefulness and ingenuity in maintaining a semblance of normal life amidst hardship and shortages – this was their heroism. It was analogous to the heroism of Londoners and other city-dwellers under the Blitz; ordinary people surviving with cheerfulness and determination. In this version of history, the writers argue that there was no resistance because they had no choice: large numbers of islanders would have been killed in retaliation. But they did attempt to obstruct the Germans in whatever small ways they could. They add that there was no alternative but to abide by the Hague Convention and hope that the Germans did the same. The vast majority of islanders make few references to slave labourers, Jews, fraternisation or the tiny handful who genuinely did resist. There is little hint of how demoralised islanders were, or of how they informed on their neighbours for rewards, or worked for the Germans for high wages.
This sanitised collective memory is buttressed by the few historians who have turned their attention to the subject. Oxford historian Charles Cruikshank was commissioned by Guernsey and Jersey in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum to write the official history of the Occupation. His book, which was published in 1975, devotes only four and half pages out of 314 to the thousands of slave labourers on the islands during the war. References to the island authorities’ collaboration, Jews and fraternisation have to be decoded; they bear the marks of compromises hammered out in committees. On the island authorities’ injunction to islanders not to offer any resistance, Cruikshank comments: ‘This line, which followed logically on the demilitarisation of the islands and the attitude implied by the government’s few pronouncements on the subject, was plainly commonsense.’ At another point he writes: ‘If the island administrations seem occasionally to have leaned too far in the direction of collaboration, it was their judgement that was at fault and not their loyalty.’ What Cruikshank focused on was concrete and bullets. Every detail of the British military raids, including those which never got beyond the planning stage, is recounted, taking up nearly a third of the book.
Many of the local historians in the Channel Islands Occupation Society have followed Cruikshank’s line. They have researched – in mind-boggling detail – the islands’ fortifications and the German war machinery. The 1988 edition of the Society’s review is typical, boasting articles entitled ‘Alderney’s German Jetty’, ‘German Flamethrowers in Jersey (Part 2)’ and ‘German Ground Radar’.
The history of the Occupation has become the pursuit of facts relating to a few tightly circumscribed subjects. Islanders would exclaim to me, ‘You’re not writing another book? What more is there to say? We know everything about the Occupation already.’ Yet most of the Occupation’s history has remained a mystery, the subject of rumours and whispered allegations.
Anyone who breaks the rules of this selective history earns condemnation, such as that meted out to Solomon Steckoll after he published The Alderney Death Camp in 1982. Steckoll, a South African Jew, was the first person to bother to find out what had happened to the Jewish women on Guernsey; he uncovered documentary evidence of their deportation and the collaboration of island officials. He also traced and interviewed survivors of the Alderney camps, and discovered details of the British government’s failure to prosecute Germans for war crimes committed on Alderney. But Steckoll’s sensationalist style, and the manner in which the book won instant media exposure, was seized upon by islanders as a pretext for completely dismissing his findings.
The islanders have virtually succeeded in controlling their history: co-operation is only extended to those writers who agree to abide by their conventions. Fellow islanders are encouraged to leave the histories to those who actually lived through the Occupation. The islanders succeeded in frightening off the last historian to publish a book on the Occupation; he admitted that he had never set foot on the islands for fear of the controversy he may have found.
It was because the wartime archives might challenge the conventions of the history accepted by the islanders, and reveal embarrassing facts about people who were still living, that there has been considerable procrastination about opening them to the public. The Jersey archives were finally opened to the public in 1994, and those on Guernsey in 1993. In fact, the latter occasion revealed that the authorities need not have worried, as the islanders showed a marked lack of interest. While the national British media made much of evidence that Guernsey officials had tracked down Jews for the Germans, the Guernsey Evening Press ran the headline ‘Archives Reveal that Island Authorities Resisted German Orders’. The story underneath stated: ‘Files reveal that far from complying quietly with German orders, the island authorities protested against many of them and did their best to protect islanders from their worst effects.’ One of the examples given to illustrate this point was a dispute over the requisitioning of footballs!
Islanders rallied to Guernsey’s defence. Frank Stroobant, a Guernseyman who has written a memoir of the Occupation, was quoted in the Daily Telegraph: ‘It all happened fifty years ago. People are trying to make up a story about what should have been dead and buried. They should have waited another ten years before opening the files. What would you have done in the same situation? The Germans were cock-a-hoop. To resist them was absolutely impossible.’
Molly Bihet, a Guernseywoman who has written an account of her Occupation childhood, said in the Daily Express: ‘Maybe there were some things the island could be ashamed of – some of the women fraternised – but you tell me of a war when that never happened. But I do not think we deserve to be blamed for these deaths [of the Jews]. The Committee had to give over those names, but no one knew of the Holocaust then. What were we to do on Guernsey if we had known anyway? There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.’
The Guernsey Bailiff, Graham Dorey, also stepped in to defend the island’s honour, issuing an unprecedented statement in which he criticised the press coverage, which had ‘distorted our war record’. The islanders’ version of history survived unchanged; the glare of publicity in those few days of early January 1993 confirmed their belief that Britain was critical and judgemental of issues of which it had no experience and no understanding.
Tangible evidence of the selectivity of the islanders’ history is that there are no public memorials to the slave labourers who were on Guernsey. On Alderney a private memorial was erected by the Hammond family, and plaques were presented by each of the nations from which the victims had come. The memorial, which replaced a plaque to the French slave labourers erected in 1951 by the Alderney government, is not well maintained, and it leaves survivors like Otto Spehr baffled. In Germany, Spehr points out, the sites of SS camps have become carefully tended gardens of remembrance, often with well funded museums and archives attached. But the site of the SS Sylt camp on Alderney is a wasteland covered with brambles. Spehr enlisted the help of Chancellor Willi Brandt, and the German government agreed to put up half the funding for a memorial on the site of Sylt, but, Spehr claims, Alderney refused to consider the idea. When I asked a senior member of Alderney’s government about the memorial, he said he had never heard of Spehr’s request, and referred to the SS prisoners as ‘men who had played with little boys’.
There is a memorial to the slave labourers on Jersey thanks to the efforts of the small community of former Spanish prisoners, including Francisco Font, who married a Jerseywoman and stayed on after the war. The crew of a Soviet ship which docked at Jersey in the 1960s contributed some of the funds. On the anniversary of the Liberation, the Russian ambassador comes from London to attend a ceremony of remembrance organised by islanders, and wreaths are laid on behalf of many countries.
On Guernsey there is no memorial to the slave workers.
Another illustration of this selective history is how those islanders who were brave enough to resist have been forgotten. Marie Ozanne died on Guernsey after having been tortured for complaining about the conditions of the slave labourers. She was a member of the Salvation Army, and after the war she was posthumously awarded the organisation’s highest honour. But Guernsey forgot her; when a reference to her terrible suffering was discovered in an unpublished diary in 1992, few islanders had heard of her. The island awarded her no recognition for her courage and compassion, and no plaques were erected in her memory. Similarly, Jerseywoman Louisa Gould died in Ravensbrück for sheltering an escaped Russian slave labourer. Charles Machon, a Guernseyman, died in the French prison to which he was sent for setting up the Guernsey Underground News Service, which was so much admired during the war. Yet Machon’s bravery has not been recognised. One of his associates on GUNS, Frank Falla, commented in his memoirs, The Silent War, that it was hard to understand why the bravery of these people had never been officially recognised either by the island governments or the British government. He quoted Sir John Leale, who suggested in the 1950s that ‘It might be difficult for a government which is a signatory to the Hague Convention to recommend honours for those who broke the Convention.’ Falla observed, ‘My comment on that is, simply, “Rubbish”.’
The treatment of Jerseyman John de la Haye is in striking contrast. In January 1945 de la Haye saw an American plane shot down over the sea off St Brelades. He went out on a float through the minefields and got the pilot onto a rock. German soldiers who had followed in a boat helped them both back to shore. For this act of bravery de la Haye received an extraordinary number of honours: the Silver Medal of the Jersey Humane Society; citations on parchment from President Eisenhower, Prime Minister Attlee and the Jersey Bailiff. He also received a gold watch from the parish of St Brelades, was mentioned by the King in the London Gazette, and was asked to lunch with the Duchess of Kent on the fortieth anniversary of the Liberation in 1985.
Ironically, it was the Soviet Union which recognised the bravery of the islanders, awarding twenty gold watches in May 1965 to those who had sheltered or fed escaped Russian slave labourers on Jersey.fn1
Islanders have simplified and moulded their history into one which they can celebrate. The Occupation has become a major tourism asset for the islands, which are dotted with museums commemorating it. Every May, Liberation Day is a bank holiday; there are services of remembrance in the churches, talks by those who lived through the Occupation and local historians, funfairs, knock-out contests and bands.
A few islanders are brave and honest enough to challenge this sanitised history. One of them is Joe Miere, the former curator of the Jersey Underground Hospital Museum. Miere has put together an exhibition in the museum which charts every form of resistance in the Occupation – he was himself imprisoned on Jersey for petty resistance. Stung by post-war allegations that islanders had collaborated, he set about collecting photographs of those who had resisted, or had died in prisons on the Continent. He also has photographs of those who did collaborate. His intention was to set the record straight and document both of the forgotten sides of this history. It is this honest desire to recount the richness of the whole Occupation story which had been all but lost. The last wartime generation is now going to the grave with all the stories which never fitted into the straitjacket of accepted wisdom. For that, the censorious British bear the responsibility as much as the defensive islanders.
It is a source of embarrassment to the islanders, and to the British, that there was no resistance in the islands on the scale of the rest of Europe. There were none of the astonishing feats of bravery which characterised the legends of the French, Belgian, Cretan and Greek resistance. While the British were spurring on the European resistance movements through BBC broadcasts, infiltrating agents and dropping arms and equipment, they did nothing to encourage resistance on the islands. After the war, as the leaders of other countries’ resistance were being feted as national heroes, it was uncomfortably obvious that the one bit of British soil occupied by the Germans had produced no resistance movement to immortalise. As the historian M.R.D. Foot wrote in the Daily Telegraph in January 1993: ‘Twenty-five years ago I had to arrange a set of lectures in Manchester about how resistance had been organised. One of our speakers, Vladimir Dedijer had been a political commissar under Tito. He opened by remarking that every nation had its own resistance heroes, could we tell him who had been the heroes of resistance in the Channel Islands? An awkward silence followed: the question has never had an answer.’
Islanders tell the British that they do not understand what it was like to be occupied; they cannot say the same to the Dutch, Belgians, French and Danish who ask the same question as Vladimir Dedijer: Why did the occupation of the Channel Islands diverge so dramatically from that of the rest of Europe?
In 1940, the string of German victories in western Europe seemed so total and so irreversible that the only option for occupied countries appeared to be to come to some sort of accommodation with the invader. Initially, France, Holland, Denmark, Belgium and Norway saw the best policy as one of peaceful collaboration with the Germans, in the hope of winning favourable treatment. The Germans claimed to respect ‘Germanic’ nations such as Holland and Denmark – in the latter they tolerated a considerable measure of Danish sovereignty, and elections continued to be held there until 1943. Denmark’s ‘model protectorate’ was the closest parallel to the Channel Islands’ ‘Model Occupation’.
Aage Bertelsen, a Danish resistance fighter, admitted that at first, ‘we were all in favour, my wife included, of the so-called collaboration policy’. André Gide wrote in his diary on 9 July 1940: ‘If German rule were to bring us affluence, nine out of ten Frenchmen would accept it, three or four with a smile.’
The workers of western Europe accepted the new jobs available through German occupation just as the Channel Islanders did. In the first sixteen months after the fall of France, fifty-nine thousand French workers voluntarily took jobs for the Third Reich. By the end of the war, 845,000 French were working either directly or indirectly – in companies contracted to the Germans – for the Reich, representing 42 per cent of the country’s economy. By 1944, half of Dutch industry was working for the Germans. In the course of the war, 403,000 Belgians volunteered to work for the Germans. More than 100,000 Danish worked in Germany (a proportion of them were forced to do so). German occupation had dislocated these countries’ economies just as it had done in the Channel Islands. They had lost foreign markets and imports of vital raw materials, and working for the Germans seemed the only alternative to economic collapse and starvation.
Indirectly, public services such as electricity, telephone and railway companies were also benefiting the Reich. The railways transported thousands of German soldiers and officials, as well as Jews to the gas chambers. In the same way as local police assisted the Germans on the islands, they assisted them in Europe; the French and Dutch police rounded up Jews and implemented anti-Jewish laws.
At first, resistance in occupied western Europe was confined to symbolic actions. In September 1940, two million Danes – 150,000 of them in Copenhagen – gathered in their local towns to sing folksongs in a gesture of national solidarity. The Dutch took to wearing badges made of coins bearing their exiled Queen’s head, and put stamps on the left-hand side of their envelopes because the right belonged to the queen. Norwegians wore a tiny national flag or razor blade in their buttonhole. This was the kind of resistance which became common on the Channel Islands throughout the war.
Accommodation and passive resistance were never possible in Eastern Europe. The Germans wanted to wipe Poland as a nation off the map, and they replaced the country’s government with a Nazi administration which ruled with unparalleled brutality. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, captured eastern territories such as the Baltic countries, Belorussia and Ukraine were subjected to the full force of Nazi contempt for ‘Bolsheviks’, as they called all Soviet citizens.
In mid-1941, the uneasy accommodation and co-operation with the Germans in occupied western Europe began to break down. The countries split between ‘quislings’ and violent resistance groups, with every nuance of collaboration and resistance in between. A logic of spiralling violence was set in motion, whereby German repression triggered resistance and vice versa – with terrifying consequences. Whole villages were wiped out in savage reprisals for ambushes and assassinations. Occupation came to mean Gestapo raids in the night, arbitrary arrests and torture, and the transportation of thousands of civilians to concentration camps. But not in the Channel Islands. This is where they diverge from the pattern which emerged in the rest of western Europe; they were never caught up in the cycle of violence. It has been calculated that if a German was killed in Norway, ten Norwegians were killed in retaliation; in Yugoslavia, a hundred would be killed; in Poland, a thousand. When two Germans were killed on Sark by a British agent during a raid on the island in 1942, two hundred islanders were deported to German internment camps where they were well fed on Red Cross parcels and survived the war in good health, and no one was killed in retaliation.
Unlike the rest of occupied Europe, the Channel Islands remained in that early mode of accommodation, in part because the Germans adopted a markedly different approach there than elsewhere in Europe. The islands had a German military government which contained few Nazis and no Gestapo; they allowed the island governments a measure of autonomy, which unlike in Denmark continued until the end of the war. The Germans were more tolerant of the islands’ own sense of identity, of which loyalty to the British monarchy was a very important part. They allowed the islanders to pray for the King in church every Sunday, and island officials insisted that the population be permitted to retain their allegiance to the King; Ambrose Sherwill did so in his German-sponsored broadcast to Britain in August 1940. Such tolerance was not applied in Holland. The Nederlandsche Unie movement was conceived in the early phase of the Occupation as a rallying point for those Dutch who wanted to co-operate with the Germans while retaining their national identity. Its founding document advocated loyalty to the exiled Dutch Queen in London and collaboration with the Germans. The Germans objected to the former. Within a year the movement had become more openly critical of the Germans, and was banned. It was from such small beginnings that the logic of German repression provoking opposition spawned fully-fledged resistance movements throughout Europe.
There were four significant differences between the policies the Germans adopted on the islands and in western Europe, all of which contributed to lulling potential opposition to the Occupation. Firstly, the Germans did not attempt to change the islands’ system of government; they confined themselves to working through the island authorities rather than undermining them. The system worked well from the German point of view, since some of the resentment over food rationing and requisitioning was directed at the island governments, rather than at the occupiers. In Holland, by contrast, the Germans reneged on their promise that their role would only be supervisory of the Dutch government, and in 1941 they abolished local municipal and provincial self-government to restructure the administration in line with the German Reich.
Secondly, in Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway the Germans undermined governments by the patronage and promotion of fledgling National Socialist parties. Senior government officials were dislodged in favour of German-sponsored home-grown Nazis, provoking huge resentment and providing the burgeoning resistance movements with an educated middle-class cadre possessing leadership and organisational skills. The installation in Norway of Vidkun Quisling, a Nazi, in February 1942, and his zealous Nazification programme infuriated Norwegians and increased sabotage attacks on the Germans.
Thirdly, the Germans’ Nazification programmes forced thousands into open resistance. When Dutch students were forced to take an oath of loyalty to Germany, 85 per cent refused. The rounding-up of Jews in Amsterdam in 1941 triggered a strike which was brutally repressed. The Danish churches led the campaign against Nazification in Denmark, winning huge support; when the Germans shot a resister in August 1943, ten thousand people gathered for his burial. The Germans panicked and fired into the crowd; strikes were triggered and martial law imposed. When the Danish government refused to do the Germans’ bidding and round up saboteurs, the Germans finally abandoned their pretence of a ‘model protectorate’ and took over power in the summer of 1943.
Finally, quotas for forced labour were imposed on other occupied countries, stimulating resistance. In Belgium, workers went on strike when quotas were stepped up. To avoid the labour draft thousands of young men, particularly in France, were forced underground where, without ration or identity cards, they had little choice but to join a resistance group.
In the Channel Islands there were no local Nazis to promote, and the Germans’ Nazification programme was a diluted version. On Guernsey German, Polish and Austrian Jews were deported to concentration camps, not those married to British islanders; as a result the measure did not affect islanders, only a few strangers. Otherwise, Nazification consisted of censoring the local newspapers and insisting on German being taught in the island schools. There was no attempt to impose oaths of loyalty to the Reich on professionals such as doctors and teachers, and there were few attempts to force people to work for the Germans.
The Channel Islanders’ own behaviour was a crucial contributing factor to the relatively peaceful Occupation. The majority of the islanders were more quiescent than other Europeans. They did what they were told; the German officer’s description of Guernsey people as ‘obsequious peasants’ provides a glimpse of how the Germans regarded the islanders. For the islanders’ part, they saw the Germans as they had seen the English tourists and property developers before them – as outsiders to be avoided. Islanders wanted to be left alone to get on with their own lives; the Germans were an annoying irritant, to be circumvented. The islanders’ character was to avoid direct confrontation with the Germans if at all possible; they knew they would inevitably lose such confrontations, so they employed other, more wily means to achieve their ends. The result was that the Germans’ authority was rarely challenged, and they did not feel the need to resort to violence and terror in order to enforce their authority. As many Germans stationed on the islands remember, the Channel Islands were the one part of occupied Europe where they did not always need to wear a helmet or carry a weapon.
A telling instance of the confidence of the Germans was when thousands of islanders gathered for the funerals of the British sailors from HMS Charybdis whose bodies had been washed onto Jersey and Guernsey’s shores in November 1943. The islanders were expressing their defiant patriotism, but unlike the funeral in Denmark shortly before, there was no panicky firing of shots to keep control of the crowds. The Germans may have been irritated by the display of passive loyalty to Britain, but they were not frightened; they recognised it as a gesture of defiance, but not the first sign of a mass resistance movement.
One factor which underlay the islanders’ quiescence was their knowledge that Britain was still fighting the war. There was no humiliated national honour which required avenging, as in the defeated countries of Europe. In Britain’s armies, air force and navy were thousands of islanders, and the achievements of the British forces bolstered islanders’ morale and self-respect. It was much easier to put up with irksome German orders when you knew that the previous night the British had shot down a large number of their planes.
In addition, the islands had no tradition of opposing authority. They were rigidly hierarchical, conformist societies. The small elite of inter-connected families who dominated the government of the islands suffered some humiliation at the hands of the Germans, but they quickly recognised that open protest would bring savage repression. Deeply frightened, they focused on the objective of keeping themselves and as many islanders as possible alive. The tentacles of power of this elite stretched into every aspect of island life and economy: getting planning permission, licences, jobs and customers required their patronage. They had the power to stifle those who were disruptive of island–German relations. Any serious resistance movement would have required the participation of some individuals from that elite, with their authority and leadership. It never happened; time has proved that they made an astute appraisal of their best chance of survival. Unlike anywhere else in Europe, the power of the islands’ elite survived unscathed; the same families were in power before, during and after the war. The grandson of the wartime Bailiff of Guernsey, Victor Carey, became the Deputy Bailiff on the island (he makes it a principle never to comment on the Occupation). It is a sign of the strength of this system of power that it could withstand the strains of Occupation – the massive expansion of government into every aspect of the islands’ economies, and the strict rationing – with no real attempt being made to oppose them.
There were no independent institutions to challenge this elite. In Europe, the Communist Party, the trade unions and the churches played a crucial role in mobilising resistance. The islands’ trade unions were banned by the Germans, and only on Jersey did they continue underground, organising resistance activities such as Norman Le Brocq’s leafletting operation in conjunction with the minuscule Communist Party and a group of left-wing sympathisers. The churches were central to island life; Guernsey boasts a large number of Methodist congregations, but there is no evidence that they took any stand on the treatment of slave labourers or Jews. Apart from Canon Cohu on Jersey, who died in Spergau concentration camp after having spread BBC news among islanders, no minister or priest is known to have been involved in resistance. Several vicars and pastors of different denominations crop up in letters to the German Feldkommandantur in 1942, pleading to be exempted from deportation to German internment camps; they make a point of stressing their loyalty to the occupiers. If their example is anything to go by, then the islands’ churches were anxious to follow the lead of their governments.
There were clear geographical circumstances which militated against any resistance in the Channel Islands. The first was that the islands had no strategic significance. As far as the British were concerned, they were never anything other than a complete irrelevance to the rest of the war. Resistance seemed futile to the islanders. The Channel Islands were not like Sicily, the capture of which was a vital stepping stone to the conquest of Italy. The islands’ power to harm the German war effort was strictly limited. Nor were islanders ever called on as the French, Belgian, Dutch, Danish and Norwegian resistances were to assist the Allied liberating armies after D-Day by blowing up bridges and railways, and spying on German troop movements. The British government recognised the pointlessness of resistance on the islands in terms of war strategy, and made no attempt to encourage its development. The raids which the British mounted on the islands never had the objective of contacting resisters. The British dropped no arms or Special Operations Executive agents, and no BBC broadcasts encouraged resistance on the islands. In the view of the British government, all the islanders could do was wait.
Secondly, the islands shared a geographical handicap with Denmark, Holland and Belgium. They were flat, densely populated, and offered no mountainous terrain such as that which sheltered the maquis in southern France or the resistance on another island, Crete, or the fjords which provided such excellent secret harbours in Norway. Only at the end of the war, when German authority was breaking down in Holland, Belgium and Denmark, was armed resistance possible in those countries; but on the islands, German authority remained intact to the end. The islands had a huge concentration of German soldiers; a higher number of armed troops per square mile even than Germany. There was nowhere to run to, no means of escape. The shores were mined and patrolled, and the ownership of boats was strictly regulated. On the Continent a resister could slip over the border with forged papers, whereas on the islands the chances of capture were very high. Open resistance such as sabotage would result in almost certain death, for questionable gain.
The result was that the islanders did not succeed in frustrating or resisting any of the Germans’ war aims on the islands. On the contrary, they actually helped them achieve those aims, the most important of which was to hold onto the islands. The islanders helped feed, clothe and house the huge garrisons, a role which was acknowledged as crucial by the Befehlshaber, Graf von Schmettow, at a meeting in the German Foreign Ministry in October 1944 when the German government was considering whether the islands’ civilians should be evacuated in order to ensure that the garrison had adequate supplies. In addition, the islands supplied thousands of electricians, builders and decorators to help construct defences to make the islands impregnable fortresses. The camouflage they constructed for anti-aircraft guns hid them from British detection; the guns whose concrete emplacements they had helped build were used to fire at British ships.
The Germans’ secondary war aim – at least at the beginning of the Occupation – was to establish good relations with the civilian population, for propaganda purposes. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams; they could never have imagined that within a few weeks German newsreels would be showing soldiers chatting with flirtatious island girls, and that a senior island official would be declaring in a radio broadcast that the conduct of the invading Germans had been exemplary.
It is surprising that islanders did not offer more resistance over some issues. There are three prominent examples. The first occurred within four months of the Occupation on Guernsey, when British secret agents Hubert Nicolle and Jim Symes were handed over to the Germans, along with thirteen of their friends and relatives. By law it was treason to hand over a British agent to the enemy, a point which did not escape the President of the Guernsey Controlling Committee, Ambrose Sherwill, who had urged them to give themselves up. Although the Germans could have shot the agents as spies, and indeed passed the death sentence on them both, they agreed to treat them as prisoners of war, commuting their sentences to imprisonment in a PoW camp. In his private papers, Sherwill anguishes over whether he did the right thing. It was a huge gamble; if more islanders had died than the First World War veteran Louis Symes (the father of Jim), who committed suicide in the Cherche Midi prison in Paris, history’s judgement of Sherwill might have been different. Instead of his pragmatism being praised, he might have been tried for treason.
It is surprising that there were no serious protests at the deportation of 2200 islanders in 1942 and 1943. The Germans said that the islanders would be well treated in internment camps, but why should they have been believed? Yet the islanders obediently boarded the ships, and those who remained behind cheerfully waved them goodbye. The only protest was a scuffle caused by a few teenagers on the Jersey quayside. The island governments even helped the Germans in deporting the British-born islanders by drawing up lists and guiding the German soldiers to the appropriate addresses. There were no strikes or demonstrations, and no growth in resistance.
Similarly, there were few overt complaints when radios were confiscated in June 1942; this did not happen in any other occupied country, and confiscation of civilians’ radios was against the Hague Convention. The loss of their radios was a real hardship and provoked much resentment, but not even that stirred the islanders into open protest.
Readers will have formed their own judgement as to whether the islands’ acceptable pragmatism became cowardly subservience. The Occupation is a very human story, in which there is more evidence of weakness than of bravery. There are only a few incidents in this history to admire or to inspire; for the most part it is made up of the kind of shabby muddling through to which most people are prone.
At the start of the Occupation, the islanders’ aims were peace and survival, and by and large they were successful in achieving them. There was no violence on the scale of every other occupation in Europe. The islands’ governments succeeded in keeping the majority of their civilian populations remarkably healthy and safe: the Channel Islands were probably among the safest places in Europe between 1939 and 1945. Armed resistance would have had little chance of success: it would not have contributed to the defeat of the Nazis, and would have led to the almost certain death of those brave enough to have participated, as well as probably costing the lives of innocent islanders.
The island governments had been told by the British government to rule in the best interests of the islanders, and they defined that duty very narrowly. They did not feel obliged to protect Jews or to speak up for slave labourers, nor to champion the cause of those islanders whom the Germans accused of misdemeanours – including having resisted – and who were sent to Continental prisons, where some of them died. The survival of the large majority of the islanders was at the cost of these unfortunates.
It is in their failure to remember and acknowledge those who were sacrificed to the islands’ welfare that the islanders must be judged. How can they belittle the suffering of the slave labourers by denigrating their characters and dismissing them as criminals and paedophiles? How could Therese Steiner, Marianne Grunfeld and Auguste Spitz be forgotten for forty years? Why were the names of people such as Louisa Gould, Harold Le Druillenec, Marie Ozanne and Charles Machon left to fade, unrecognisable to future generations? Only when there are exhibits in all the islands’ museums to these people, and well cared-for memorials and plaques in their memory, only when islanders talk as freely about the Jews as they do about how they made tea out of bramble leaves, will they have begun to tell the whole story of the Occupation.
And only then will the British people have begun to accept that the memory of the Second World War does not serve merely to reinforce the separation caused by twenty miles of water which has shaped Britain’s destiny. If Britain’s national identity is to adjust to the development of European integration in the late twentieth century, so the stock of British wartime legends will have to be expanded to encompass a common European legacy of 1939–45; the history of sixty thousand British citizens under German occupation offers a vital link to the Continental experience of the Second World War.
fn1 Albert Bedane, Claudia Dimitrieva, François Flamon, Ivy Forster, René Franoux, Royston Garrett, Louisa Gould (posthumously), Leslie Huelin, John Le Breton, Norman Le Brocq, Mike Le Cornu, Harold Le Druillenec, René Le Mottée, Francis Le Sueur, Bob Le Sueur, Dr R. McKinstry (posthumously), Augusta Metcalfe, Oswald Pallot, Leonard Perkins, William Sarre.