German boots on British soil

The Channel Islands in WWII

As time passed, the situation gradually got worse. There were very few Jews on the islands, most of them had been already evacuated, and only fewer still were seriously affected by anti-Semitic measures, predominantly because the local authorities tried to sabotage the implementation of the measures against the Jews. In 1942, 2,300 British citizens born elsewhere, however, were deported to internment camps in Germany as retaliation for the British deportation of 800 German civilians from Persia (present-day Iran). This even turned into large-scale demonstrations since it went against the earlier, relatively correct conduct of the Germans.

The defenses of the islands were built in large part by forced laborers housed in work and concentration camps operated by the German paramilitary engineering organization, Organisation Todt and the SS. Four camps, two work camps and two concentration camps on abandoned Alderney, were built to house the more than 6,000 workers, most of whom were Russians, Jews, Eastern Europeans and Spanish. As in other camps, Jews were exposed to extremely inhumane treatment. According to Spanish survivor, John Dalmau “they had reached such a degree of starvation that it was a pastime for the Germans to throw them pieces of carrot and see the pitiful wrecks fighting for it. Cases of cannibalism were reported to me…Some of the octopuses and congers (caught while fishing) we gave to the Jews who ate them raw”. Over 700 of the inmates died of work or on transport ships taking them to or from the island. One of these tragic incidents occurred when the ship Minotaur, carrying 468 workers from Alderney, was hit by Canadian torpedo boats near Saint-Malo on July 5, 1944. Around 250 of the passengers were killed by the explosions or drowned. Some locals sheltered escaped laborers. Louisa Gould, a local who lost her son in the war took in one such escapee in order to do an act of kindness “for another mother’s son.” She was reported by her neighbor and she was sent to a concentration camp along with her husband, where she perished.

The latest motion picture closely related to the occupation of the Channel Islands was the 2018 romantic-drama film The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, distributed internationally by Netflix. It is based on the 2008 novel of the same name, written by American authors Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. The book is a compilation of letters sent from one character to the other about the story of the imaginary society that served as cover for residents breaking the curfew during the occupation.