The behaviour of the local leaders of the Channel Islands, particularly in Guernsey and Jersey, remains controversial to this day. At the time, they believed themselves to have had no choice, and did the best they could under difficult circumstances. Abandoned by London and told to make do, they genuinely thought that resistance to the Germans was impossible. Their job was to manage the occupation for the Germans and to minimise the suffering of their populations. But by the time the war had ended, they had become the objects of severe criticism and one wrote that he wasn’t sure if he’d be knighted – or hanged.
British military officers sent to the islands after the war were critical of the behaviour of many islanders who co-operated quite closely with the Germans. There were examples of islanders, including political leaders, crossing the line. These included public references to British troops as ‘the enemy’, offering substantial monetary rewards for informers when there was a wave of pro-Allied graffiti on the islands, and most significantly, turning over to the Germans the few remaining Jews on the islands, who would eventually die in Auschwitz.
The behaviour of the local population on Sark, and in particular that of the Dame, Mrs Hathaway, should be seen in that context. Mrs Hathaway was proud of the way she handled her many German visitors, all of whom signed her guest book. They would often add expressions of appreciation for her hospitality, writing such things as ‘always delighted with a nice reception’. She even encouraged the teaching of German to the island’s children. Twenty-two of them took part in German lessons held not at the school but in her home, the Seigneurie. Just before the commando raid in October 1942, those lessons became compulsory.
She was also proud of her small acts of defiance. For example, as she later wrote, she:
Made a point of putting banned anti-Fascist books such as Sawdust Caesar and The House that Hitler Built in a prominent place on my sitting room bookshelf where they were bound to be seen. It was fun to watch the Germans eyeing them, but I was never asked to move them, which was disappointing because I had planned to say, ‘Take them away by all means. Everybody on the island has already read them in any case.’1
She relished the petty acts of defiance of the island’s fishermen, who were forced to take German soldiers on board to ensure they didn’t attempt to flee to England in their boats. The fisherman, she wrote, ‘amused themselves by deliberately steering the boats into large waves, watching the German guards getting well-soaked and often sea-sick’.2 And she also took pleasure in gently teasing the Germans: ‘We never disagreed with the Germans openly, but we could annoy by asking ostensibly silly questions, such as “Haven’t you landed in England yet?” or “I suppose Russia has by now been conquered.”’3
But when she had her first opportunity to actually challenge the Germans and support the Allied war effort, she didn’t rise to the occasion. As she told the story in her memoir, a few days after the Germans arrived, three young men, two French and one Polish, arrived in a small dinghy on Sark. They were brought to the Seigneurie and begged her help to get to England, where they were keen to join the fight against the Germans. She told them she could not help them, and that it was practically impossible to reach England in their small boat. She advised them to give themselves up, which they presumably did.
She later had another opportunity to help British soldiers who had been landed on Guernsey by submarine and wound up hiding in the empty home of her daughter on that island. She went over to Guernsey, met the men, and explained to them, as she had to the French and Polish young men, that she could not aid them in their escape. In the end, they too were advised to surrender to the Germans.
She strongly believed that there was no choice. ‘We could do no good by sabotage,’ she later wrote. ‘There could be no underground movement where there was absolutely no contact with the outside world – we were like prisoners in a gaol with a garden to it.’4 After the war, when challenged on this issue, Mrs Hathaway said she was not in the least ashamed of her behaviour. There was nothing to be gained, she said, by openly opposing the Germans ‘or being rude to them’.5
Initially, the German soldiers made a positive impression on the islanders. As one local Channel Islands historian put it, ‘The German army units in the Channel Islands in 1940 were crack infantry regiments, specially picked by the High Command to make a good impression on the British. Drunkenness, rowdyism, bullying and rape were unknown at this time’.6 One Mrs Alsopp is quoted as saying of the Germans, ‘Towards children and animals they were very kind’.7
‘We found out later,’ wrote the Dame of Sark:
… that the first troops sent to occupy the Island were specially picked to impress on the British people that the Germans were well-behaved, well-disciplined and withal kind-hearted. The behaviour and discipline of these troops was excellent and it was rare to see a drunken soldier in those early days.8
It turns out, however, they were not hand-picked, and their good behaviour did not last long. There were plenty of examples of unsoldierly behaviour later in the war. At the time of the British commando raid in October 1942, one explanation offered for the slow German response to the sound of gunfire was that they may have thought the noise was drunken soldiers celebrating something.
Over time, the islanders grew less and less fond of the Germans. As the occupation continued, the quality of the Germans declined, according to the Dame. She looked down her nose at the petty bureaucrats she now faced who replaced the aristocratic and cultured officers she met on the very first day. She remembered:
Instead of one sergeant and ten men, we were now bedevilled by swarms of officials who arrived and demanded statistics of every conceivable kind. These men had no military bearing. In spite of the uniforms they wore, they were nothing more than jumped-up peace-time clerks and office workers.9
She hated to have to comply with their constant demands regarding the island’s finances, and their meddling in things they knew nothing about, such as which crops to plant. Similar complaints were made about the German bureaucrats on the other Channel Islands who were keen to introduce German ideas about efficiency, especially in farming, to the somewhat laid-back islanders.
Sark resident Julia Tremayne wrote about the Germans in her secret letters, published long after the war. She didn’t see them as Aryan supermen, commenting that ‘the officers here still strut around too fat to move, some of them. It is a wonder their horses don’t give way under their weight.’10 Tremayne was born in England, but came to live in Sark in her forties. Her secret letters were to her daughter, Betty, who spent the war in England, while Julia lived on Sark with her elder daughter, Norah. She hid the letters in her home in Grand Dixcart, not only from the Germans but also from Norah. The Germans would almost certainly have punished her if the letters had been found.
Whatever the locals thought of the German soldiers, they didn’t blame them for the deportations and other problems to come. A typical view was expressed by Channel Islands historian Roy McLoughlin, who wrote that, ‘The Germans who gave their countrymen a bad reputation were those in the S.S. – the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s elite corps … In contrast, the German Army had a tradition and a code of honour. It disliked the methods of the S.S.’11
This attitude was embraced by the Germans themselves in the years after the war and became known as the ‘myth of the unblemished Wehrmacht’. For the Germans, the myth suffered a fatal wounding in the 1990s when an exhibition toured German cities entitled ‘War of Annihilation – Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941–1944’. But even today, the idea of a ‘bad SS’ and ‘good Wehrmacht’ survive in popular culture in Germany, as seen in the 2013 television series Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter (shown in English-speaking countries as Generation War) for example. That series shows Germany Army soldiers shocked at the behaviour of the SS, and even attempting to stop some of the atrocities. Neither the SS nor the Gestapo ever put in an appearance on Sark, and yet the poisonous Nazi ideology of anti-Semitism with its ‘Final Solution of the Jewish question’ soon made itself felt.
It did not take long for the locals on Sark to discover just how unpleasant the German occupiers could be. In October 1940, barely three months into the occupation, the Germans decided to retaliate following the capture of two British soldiers on Guernsey. Fearful that there may be other British military personnel on the islands, everyone was obligated to register their personal details and to indicate if they had any relatives serving in the British forces. Identity cards were issued and all radios were confiscated. Meanwhile Sark’s lighthouse, which had been abandoned by the British in June, was reoccupied by a small detachment from the Kriegsmarine.
Sark’s tourist season was somewhat revived in the summers of 1940 and 1941, as local people from Guernsey came over to the island for a break. While the food situation in Guernsey was already becoming difficult, in Sark there was full-cream milk, locally made butter, fresh fish, crab and lobster in plentiful supply. As a result, the Dixcart Hotel, under the management of Misses Duckett and Page, remained open and some residents of the island took guests into their homes.
1 Hathaway, p.121.
2 Hathaway, p.129.
3 Hathaway, p.130.
4 Hathaway, p.130.
5 McLoughlin, pp.67–68.
6 Marshall, p.16.
7 Marshall, p.15.
8 Cited in Nettles, p.74.
9 Hathaway, p.127.
10 Tremayne, p.117.
11 McLoughlin, p.125.