Resistance in the German-occupied Channel Islands

By the time of the resignation of the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud on 16 June, it was obvious that Germany victory in the Battle of France was inevitable.

[4] The size of the evacuation inevitably reduced the pool of potential active resistors in the Islands once the Germans landed and began their occupation on 30 June 1940.

[9] Willmott estimated that over 200 people in Jersey provided material and moral support to escaped forced workers, including over 100 who were involved in the network of safe houses sheltering escapees.

In other occupied countries, those who sheltered victims of Nazism were generally offering help to local deserters from forced service and Jews – mostly their friends, neighbours, family, or people from the same social milieu.

With so few Jews in the community, and the forced labour situation being different, in the Channel Islands those who helped fugitives were generally harbouring strangers with whom they did not share a language.

With the aid of a German deserter, Paul Mulbach, they apparently had some success in turning the soldiers of the garrison against their masters, including most notably the highest military authority in the Islands, Huffmeier.

Amongst those heading to France were two American officers, Captain Ed Clark and Lieutenant George Haas, who escaped from the prisoner of war camp at St. Helier on 8 January 1945.

As the Allies simply chose to bypass the Islands, and many of the arguably far more militarily-significant French coastal ports such as St Nazaire, Lorient, Brest, and St Malo as well, all of which Hitler had previously ordered to be defended and held at all costs and consequently all of which were all heavily garrisoned, this meant that well over 100,000 German troops which could otherwise have served to help to defend Occupied France (and subsequently Germany itself), at a time when Germans forces on the Western Front were suffering from a massive shortage of manpower, were tied down in positions which were essentially militarily useless.

[2]: 218 Some defiance or passive resistance was very minor and personal to each activist, from crossing a road to avoid meeting a German soldier on a pavement, knocking on a door using the morse code letter V •••-, breaking a used matchstick into a "V" shape, to providing a crust of food to a starving forced worker.

The Guernsey Evening Press and The Star, subject to censorship from the German authorities, continued to publish, eventually on alternate days given the shortage of materials and staff available.

After the Germans temporarily removed the editor of The Star, Bill Taylor, from his position, following an article which they deemed offensive, it was edited by Frank Falla.

As a sign of resistance, he cleverly incorporated into the design for the 3d stamp the script initials GR (for Georgius Rex) on either side of the "3" to display loyalty to King George VI.

The making and concealing of crystal sets expanded when radios were confiscated, taking earphones from public phones and using common objects like metal bedsteads as aerials.

Minor acts of sabotage, such as cutting a telephone wire, which could be repaired in an hour, would result in collective punishment with men in the area required to stand guard duty for several nights,[27]: 105 [28]: 201  a breach of the Hague Convention on military law.

[1]: 195 Two French lesbian artists, one of whom was Jewish, Lucille (also known as Claude) Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe, both having failed to register properly in 1940, produced anti-German leaflets from English-to-German translations of BBC reports, pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh criticism.

Denounced by a neighbour, they were captured by the Germans in late summer of 1944, condemned to death, the intervention of the Jersey Bailiff succeeded in getting the sentence commuted to prison.

[1]: 191 After curfew one night, two Police constables saw a very drunk German soldier staggering through town, and gave him a quick shove which sent him flying down a steep flight of granite steps.

[7] Miriam Milbourne risked her life to save a rare breed, a small herd of Golden Guernsey goats, by hiding them for years.

Nevertheless, many islanders successfully hid their radios (or replaced them with homemade crystal sets) and continued listening to the BBC despite the risk of being discovered by the Germans or being informed on by neighbours.

[1] The deportations of 2,058 men, women, children and babies in September 1942, which triggered suicides in Guernsey, Sark and Jersey,[1] sparked the first mass demonstrations of patriotism of the Occupation.

The illegality and injustice of the measure, which contrasted with the Germans' earlier showy insistence on legality and correctness, outraged those who remained behind and encouraged many to turn a blind eye to the resistance activities of others in passive support.

[1]: 84 Further resentment was caused by a second deportation of 187 that occurred in early 1943, following a commando raid on Sark, Operation Basalt, which resulted in captive German soldiers being killed while trying to escape.

Forced marches between camps and work sites by wretched workers and open public beatings rendered visible the brutality of the régime.

Even Britain changed its attitude, previous requests for Red Cross help being refused with Churchill, on 27 September 1944, writing a note saying: "Let them starve.

[38] On 13 December 1940, sixteen young Frenchmen, soldiers on probation, set out in a boat from occupied Brittany with the intention of joining the Free French forces in England.

[42] This was mild compared to the SS "Nacht und Nebel" directive of December 1941, which denounced even a sentence of hard labour for life as a "sign of weakness", and recommended death or disappearance for any civilian who sought to resist.

[1]: 111 In July 1941 Colonel Knackfuss issued a notice warning that anyone caught undertaking espionage, sabotage or high treason, the penalty would be death.

In addition and more worrying was the notice that in the event of any attacks against communications, such as cutting telephone wires, the Germans would have the right to nominate anyone in the area and give them a death sentence.

[27] The highest profile person to be caught was Ambrose Sherwill, President of the Controlling Committee in Guernsey, sent to Cherche-Midi prison in Paris for helping two British soldiers.

He commented that: All my time here was spent in heaving dead bodies into the mass graves kindly dug for us by 'outside workers' for we no longer had the strength for that type of work which, fortunately, must have been observed by the camp authorities.