What might life in Britain have been like under Nazi occupation? Look to the Channel Islands
What might life in Britain have been like under Nazi occupation? Look to the Channel Islands
‘There is a tiny bit of weather in the air,’ the pilot cheerfully announced to a plane full of grumpy people. Classic English understatement. We were already two hours late for take off due to that ‘tiny bit of weather,’ and once we were off, the frequent air pockets made babies cry and triggered restless leg syndrome in the man next to me. ‘Oh well,’ I thought, ‘people have survived bumpier rides in and out of Jersey.’
I got out a copy of Madeleine Bunting’s ‘The Model Occupation. The Channel Islands Under German Rule, 1940-1945’ and started reading to learn at least a little bit about the place where I was heading and its traumatic relationship with Germany.
I must admit that I didn’t know much about Jersey before I had been invited there to deliver the annual lecture of the local trust company Baccata on the subject of ‘Are Britain and Germany still reliable partners?’. I knew that Jersey was one of the Channel Islands, that it was closer to France than to Britain and that it spoke English but wasn’t part of the UK.
I also knew that it and the other Channel Islands had been occupied by the Nazis. What I did not know was how much the island and its inhabitants continue to be shaped by the legacy of this history. Next year, it will be 80 years since the liberation of the island on 9 May 1945 (the morning after Germany had surrendered), and yet you’d find it difficult to spend a day in Jersey without coming across traces of this history.
I had barely landed and greeted my host before we were off to see the first German tunnels and defensive installations on the island. Between 1940, when the Wehrmacht first arrived, and 1944 when they had other things to worry about, the Germans had dug 244,000m3 of rock out of the Channel Islands, most of it in Jersey. It was quite startling for me to see their functional grey concrete everywhere or guns or German writing.
Even as we explored La Hougue Bie, a Neolithic ritual site that contains two medieval chapels, a passage grave and a museum with the world's largest Celtic coin hoard, there was no getting away from the fact that the Germans had been here too. During the Second World War, the mound served as a lookout point, so a bunker had been dug into it. It now contains a harrowing exhibition about and memorial to the victims of occupation such as the thousands of forced labourers that had been dragged here to build these structures.
The trauma of what happened here runs deep. Some of it is out in the open. Jersey’s national day is its liberation day, 9 May. Its capital St Helier has a Liberation Square right by the harbour with a statue celebrating the occasion.
When I ordered a ‘Waverider’ Pale Ale at dinner in the evening, it turned out that it is brewed by the local ‘Liberation’ brewery, which has been around for much longer than 1945 and used to be called ‘Ann Street Brewery’, but clearly decided for this evocative name change at some later point.
In conversation with the islanders, you also can’t get past the topic even if you wanted to (which I didn’t). Many can trace their identity and family lineage back for generations. All those who can have stories to tell, either of the voluntary but chaotic evacuation that happened in 1940 before the Germans arrived or of living under the jackboot for five long years.
My host’s father had been a teenager when the Germans occupied his native land and up until a few years ago he never spoke about it. As is often the case with people of that generation, the dam began to break as he neared the end of his life and stories began to flood out of him. My host showed me the original identity cards his family members had to carry. They were bilingual in German and English – a chilling reminder of how close Britain itself came to Nazi occupation.
I think this last point is what intrigues so many British people about the Channel Islands in the war. Because the UK itself was never occupied by the Nazis, the British public never had to deal with the long-term social rifts of the moral dilemmas these situations bring with them.
France is a long way from moving on from questions over who collaborated, who resisted and the many grey stories in between. When I was in Norway last week, there were heated discussions about a new film that had just come out: Quisling: The Final Days. How would it depict the Norwegian population?
In Jersey, people told me of a book presentation later that day. The actor John Nettles would read from his ‘Gentle Violence: Hans Max von Aufsess Diaries 1943-45’, the first unabridged English translation of the diary of Baron von Aufsess, commanding officer of the German Civilian Administration. The big debate was around the fact that this diary may be authentic but therefore also full of rampant antisemitism. Someone who attended the presentation sent me a message afterwards to say that she found it fascinating but also deeply uncomfortable, especially as her son-in-law is Jewish.
When Madeleine Bunting set out to write ‘The Model Occupation’ she encountered a lot of hostility from islanders for the fact that she had come as an outsider, passing judgment on how Jerseymen and women had behaved. As an Englishwoman, so people told her, she wouldn’t know what it was like to face the pressures that came with foreign occupation.
The Nazis may have wanted to run the island as a ‘model occupation’, i.e. in apparently friendly coexistence with the locals but this didn’t stop them from treating forced labourers with brutality, deporting Jews to be murdered at Auschwitz, deporting and interning other islanders and inflicting harsh punishment on people who didn’t comply with their ideology.
Louisa Gould is probably the most famous example. She’d run a grocery store on Jersey and became part of the resistance movement on the island. She hid an escaped forced labourer for two years at great risk to herself. Her simple explanation why she did that was: ‘I have to do something for another mother's son.’ She was betrayed by her neighbour, arrested and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp where she was gassed shortly before the camp’s liberation.
Her tragic story is a reminder of how difficult it was for Jersey people to make decisions as to how to behave under occupation. Some went into active resistance, some profiteered from the presence of the Nazis. Most tried to get by somehow. The controversy around Bunting’s book shows that these moral dilemmas still run deep, and it gives an indication why the occupation and the moment of liberation are among the things that set Jersey identity well apart from British identity.
Nonetheless, the German occupation of a part of the British Isles has always intrigued people in the UK. It’s the closest thing that gives an indication of the situation they themselves had been pushed so close to. It chills people to the bone to see images of German soldiers marching in front of Boots or British police uniforms alongside those of Wehrmacht officers. It’s like stepping into a British episode of The Man in the High Castle, only this was real.
All of these things were still running through my head as I incongruously faced Baccata’s invited audience to talk about German-British relations. Here I was, a German who’d come to Jersey on a British passport, speaking to an audience that included finance people, military people and local school kids.
I couldn’t help but imagine what their family stories were. What had their fathers, grandmothers and great-grandparents done in the war? What about my own forebears? I guess the fact that we all sat there together and discussed where the German-British relationship is today and what this might mean for Jersey is a sign that things had moved on.
I had another on moment of surreality when I was driven up to Government House, the official residence of the lieutenant governor of Jersey. He is the representative of the British king in Jersey, which isn’t part of the UK but connected to it by being a dependency of the British Crown.
The office of lieutenant governor is currently occupied by Vice Admiral Jerry Kyd who turned out to be a very nice man. We had tea and discussed all manner of things besides Germany and Britain. The hour with him flew by in animated conversation, but due to the omnipresence of WWII history in Jersey, I again couldn’t quite help marvelling at the fact that a senior Royal Navy officer and a German historian were having tea together in Jersey while discussing geopolitics.
Whenever somebody says people or nations are ‘obsessed’ with the history of the Second World War, they should take a moment and consider the situation. This isn’t usually meant as a compliment and is often followed by the suggestion that one should ‘get over it’. You’ve got to either be undereducated regarding the impact the Second World War and Nazism had on European and World history or willfully ignorant of it to deny the effects these seismic events continue to have. One visit to Jersey would probably be enough to cure anyone of the idea that the Second World War would cease to matter anytime soon.
These accounts from the author’s travels are something that sets Katja Hoyer apart. They add depth, context, and the human element to what would otherwise simply be research.
I am very familiar with this story - though with more emphasis on Guernsey and Sark - have written about it, and will post on my own Substack........when I work out how to use the bloody software.
[If you want a giggle google Sybil Hathaway, Dame of Sark - the Germans nicknamed her the Königen and treated her deferentially.]
You are right, the Germans behaved with great civility, and there was no witch-hunt for Jews. Indeed, local commanders took risks ignoring instructions to do so. However, three Jewish women made the mistake of demanding to know about relatives in Germany, and thus drew attention to themselves.
In calling Channel Islanders 'collaborators' Madeline Bunting was disingenuous, more interested in publicity for her book - which is quite poor.
In September 1941, the Islands received a visit from a renowned German sociologist, Professor Karl-Heinz Pfeffer, who was making an extensive tour and would report back directly to Hitler. His report contained the following; “The Islands are for us an important test case for the confrontation with an English population….At the moment it is of course a matter of complete indifference what the English think of us; but if it was our intention after victory to get parts of the English population onto our side, the present stance of the German occupying troops could be used splendidly in propaganda….”
However, on the island of Alderney there was at least one S.S. camp where atrocities were committed.
The people who really suffered in the Channel Islands were the workers imported to build the Atlantic Wall - under Organisation Todt, they were treated as slaves. Some were ex-criminals in their homelands, and after a few months, the Islanders were more afraid of them than they were of their occupiers.
Ironically though - the better things got for the Allies in France post-D-Day, the worse things became for EVERYONE on the island, as supply lines were cut. The winter of 1944-5 was harsh too, and big problems were eventually relieved by the Red Cross.
Lastly, there is the story of the foolish, ardent and obsequious Nazi who became garrison commander for the final months of the war. Friedrich Huffmeier - formerly captain of the Scharnhorst - informed Berlin of his superior's 'lax' attitude, and so was given Rudolf von Schmettow's job. Luckily, Huffmeier was a bloody idiot, hated by almost all of his officers and men who disobeyed his orders.
Proof of the general humanity of the German occupation lies in the fact that in 1966 von Schmettow was invited back to visit Jersey, and was most cordially received.
p.s.
By all accounts, Lanz - first photo - was a superb officer. A doctor of law and philosophy, he was stern but straight. He was moved on in August 1940 when the troops of the initial invasion were removed and a permanent garrison established as part of the occupation.
Lanz’s talents were needed elsewhere, and he was eventually killed on the Russian front in January 1942.