Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (60 page)

There were other signs of dissension in the ranks, at least if a combination of inside knowledge and widespread rumor were to be believed. Ambrose Robin heard in November that the troops were becoming difficult to handle as supplies grew smaller, and around three hundred “discontents over food” were now cooling their heels in prison. More solidly in the rumor line, he reported that a general or admiral (the uncertainty evidently marking this as rumor) was shot and wounded by one of the men under him, who then shot himself.
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Jack Sauvary partially confirmed this latter rumor when the gravedigger came to visit him the same week that Robin reported this shooting. According to Jack's visitor, he had been busy digging a grave for a German who shot himself after trying to shoot the chief of naval staff. “Maybe true,” mused Jack.
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More objective proof that discipline was breaking down among the occupiers was provided by the advertisements in the papers seeking deserters from the German forces. Notably, Ernst Lickfeld, condemned to death and imprisoned in the Wehrmacht Prison, escaped during the night of February 25, 1945, and went into hiding. His photograph and description appeared in the newspaper under an “Attention-Wanted” heading—a handsome man in his thirties, described as tall and slender with blue eyes and dark blond hair. Warry included this clipping in his scrapbook with the notation “Since fusilated, and a few others.”
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Lickfeld was not the only German to attempt hiding in the Island, for Rev. Ord estimated at the time that roughly seventeen German deserters were hiding out, “even in so small a place as Guernsey.”
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Islanders were torn between a certain amount of satisfaction in the difficulties of the Germans, and fear over the breakdown of discipline in the armed forces in their midst. There was hope that the Germans would pack it in if they were starved out and perceived their position as untenable. By the winter and spring of 1945, the Germans were “looking ghastly with
hunger,”
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a turn of events celebrated in many quarters. Others were not so sure that there would be such a positive outcome.
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Not only did the Germans seem unlikely to surrender based on the hunger of the troops, it became clear that only German discipline stood between the Islanders and disaster. By international law, the Germans could not touch the parcels that were provided to civilians, but how long could this keep up, and when would hunger overrule the officers' ability to control their men?

Bert Williams, generally upbeat about indications of hunger in the German forces, knew that “a starving man is dangerous.”
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There could be no mistake about the depth of German hunger, for it was confirmed not only by their appearance but even more obviously by their actions. In late November, word went around Guernsey that seven Germans had died from digging up crocus bulbs, cooking and eating them (or, in another version, eleven Georgians—Russians in the German army—died from eating wild garlic).
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A doctor at Vauquiedor heard of Bill Warry's skills as a botanist and sent a messenger down with a plant. When the Germans called on Bill's expertise, several Russians had already died and others were seriously ill. Bill had little difficulty identifying the tap-rooted plant as “hemlock” (
Conium maculatum
), an extremely powerful vegetable poison. This plant looks enough like celery that when the men came upon it, they cooked it and “partook of same with usual results.” Ultimately, eleven Georgians and one German would succumb from their impromptu meal.
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Such desperate hunger led to one of the more psychologically disturbing situations of the Occupation for the Islanders. Pets were disappearing all across Guernsey, and it was no secret that they were ending up as dinner for German soldiers. This was known to go on earlier in the Occupation, but now dogs and cats were being sought by the soldiers not just at night but in broad daylight. Any stray would be scooped up immediately, stuffed in a haversack, and carted away to be prepared for the stewpot.
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Little could be done, even when the perpetrators were known. One woman told Rev. Ord that her cat was killed and eaten by the men billeted next door. In the same neighborhood, there were four dogs missing, and another person reported seeing the severed heads of five cats all lined up in a row.
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There are photographs of smiling Germans posing with the severed head of a cat, but dogs (though also eaten) did not seem to be treated in such a cavalier fashion.
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Yet, dogs too met the same fate, and it was difficult for some Islanders to change ingrained habits and protect their pets. Rev. Ord warned one lady not to let her spaniel run loose, to which advice she replied, “You needn't worry over him. He hates the Huns!!”
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Once a family pet turned up missing, the realization of their probable fate and the pain that it caused are clear in the diarists' accounts. Bert Williams mentioned on January 4, 1945, “Jack our Dog is missing.” By the next day, when there was no news of Jack, he wrote, “I am afraid he has been taken by the Germans for food.” And by January 6th, although there was still no news, his pet was now “poor Jack the dog.” And Bert records each day the lack of news about Jack until the 11th: “No news of the dog, I have given up hopes of ever seeing him again.”
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And Winifred Harvey actually found a measure of peace from all of this pain. Her friend Maude lost her cat, and Marie Randall's dog also seemed to be “among the victims of the stewpot.” Winnie felt the most grief over General de Lisle's “dear little Scotch terrier, so like my Rolf,” who also turned up missing. So finally there came a time when Winnie was not just trying to convince herself that Rolf's death had some saving grace rather than being a horrible mistake made under pressure. She could honestly compare Rolf's end, quick and without suffering, to friends' pets now missing and likely to have suffered a terrible end. “I am thankful,”
wrote Winnie, “that has not been my Rolfie's fate and would not now have a cat or dog for anything.”
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And she seemed finally able to consign Rolf to the past and absolve herself of the burden of guilt and regret that she had carried for nearly five years.

Pets were not the only items stolen, as “robberies organized and unorganized”
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became increasingly widespread. Some were fairly large-scale or at least preplanned operations, as when Symon's Butcher Shop was raided and sides of pork stolen. Other thefts were smaller or less coordinated, such as snatch-and-grab break-ins of shops, or missing rabbits or swedes taken from a garden in the night.
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Kitty and Peter's friend George was treated to the sight of the few hens he had left reduced to a series of heads left behind on the ground.
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Occasionally, these smaller thieves were caught, as when one German soldier was shot and killed, and another wounded, in the act of stealing from a broccoli patch. Robin believed that this would be a warning for certain civilians, some of whom he thought were also “rogues” who “prowl after curfew hours.”
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Germans were going door-to-door begging for food, which was troubling and frightening not only to women living alone, but really to all of the Islanders, who were, of course, unarmed.
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These Germans would ask for potatoes, but when turned down would simply come back in the night and steal them.
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Incidents abounded of soldiers simply walking into civilian homes, grabbing whatever food was on the table, and bolting away. Rev. Ord was told of one woman who was robbed “in grand style,” for she found a German sitting at her kitchen table tucking into her “ersatz pudding” with a will. He looked up at her and, cool as could be, complimented her on her cooking.
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Islanders were aware that they were often being “cased” by the Germans in these final months—to see what food they might have, and to gauge how easy it would be to carry that food away. The Germans started large-scale house searches under the guise of uncovering caches of food held by hoarders.
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What became clear was that such searches were means for the German soldiers to plan a nighttime robbery.
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Most Islanders took simple steps to secure the small amounts of food that they had. Locked doors, barred windows, and casual forms of what would now be called neighborhood watches were the first lines of defense. Many took the contents of their precious parcels upstairs to bed with them at night, and the Ords not merely took theirs upstairs but also stashed them in the piano.
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Others went to more elaborate means of protection. Bill Warry put tripwires in his garden to try to foil thieves, and was pleased to see signs that someone had a “nasty fall” and left marks to that effect on the ground.
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Frank Higgs set up clatter traps to fall and wake the dog if anyone tried to break in. All of these efforts worked well for a while, though on Easter Monday, Dorothy woke to find that her youngest milker, Chloe, had been killed and carried off. At that point, they built stalls actually in the back scullery of the house and went to sleep each night to the sound of goat noises.
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There was always the chance that Islanders would fall into the trap they had set for another. One of the most amusing stories of someone hoist with his own petard was told to me by Alf Williams. Someone had been “pinching” their milk, so Alf said to his father, “I'll have him,” and he set up an elaborate trap using a series of ropes to rig up a bath of cattle liquid over a door. In the old farmhouses there was a second door to go into the barn, and the plan was that anyone opening that door would pull the rope and all of the liquid would come down on him. This type of cattle insecticide has an absolutely vile smell that would last a week or more and would be fitting justice to anyone attempting a break-in and theft. All seemed well until Alf's father was listening to the crystal set at 6:30 in the morning on March 24, hearing the
news that Montgomery had crossed the Rhine. All excited and shouting with glee at the news, he grabbed his milk cans, jerked open the door, and Whoomp! received the full bath all over him. He had simply forgotten that the trap was there. Of course, his clothes were worthless and had to be burned, and this when replacements were hard to come by. Alf said, “I went to work very, very early that morning.” But if Alf anticipated that his father would blame him for the incident, he was in for a surprise, for he “never heard another word” about it.
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Burglary was one thing, but the final year saw mounting fear as thefts took a violent turn. As early as August 1944, the Island was deeply disturbed by the shooting of a St. Saviour's farmer named Jehan and his son. Hearing a soldier in their potato patch in the night, the thirty-nine-year-old farmer ran out with his son to chase the man off their property. But the soldier turned and fired, striking Jehan in the stomach and his son in the heel. The next day, Jehan died. Bert Williams later reported on the inquest, describing the verdict as “the funniest one imaginable.” According to Bert, the magistrate appeared frightened of what the Germans would say to a verdict of murder, so he rendered the odd decision of “murder or manslaughter.”
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Islanders were not at all conflicted about whether or not this was murder.

The other open question was whether the soldier involved was a German or Georgian (Russian). There were Russian units in the Island, composed of a blend of volunteers willing to fight against the Soviets and men who had donned the German uniform rather than starve in concentration camps. The latter were truly men without a country—having turned traitor to Russia, but without the discipline of the German soldiers, or any ideological stake in the war. Their game was personal survival, and they seemed willing to play it in any way necessary. In the Jehan case, Colonel von Heldorff, the German supply chief, met with the Bailiff to assure him that guns had been taken away from the Russian units, and that any Germans who had threatened civilians had been punished.
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A German official attended Jehan's funeral—perhaps as a show of solidarity with the civilians, but a presence that Bert Williams read as an indicator of German guilt.
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As desperation mounted over food in the forces, violence also increased. Then, on February 22, a neighbor of Mr. Sigwart, a watchmaker in Hauteville, became concerned when neither Sigwart nor his wife were up and about their daily errands. She noticed that the blackout was still in place and tried banging on their back door with a hammer to rouse them. Failing to get a reply, she called the police, who found the couple's bodies in their house—she strangled, and he drowned in the bath. Testimony was given by neighbors of heavy footsteps going up the Sigwarts' stairs, and a bicycle inside the gate during the evening before the bodies were found. Also, the police reports described seventy-four-year-old Mrs. Sigwart lying in the dining room, strangled by a piece of material tied tightly around her neck. Mr. Sigwart, seventy-seven years old, was found in the upstairs bath, in a tub that was only a quarter filled. His left foot was dry, although his body was wet and in the tub. Two handkerchiefs were tied around his neck, one tightly and the other loosely. This scenario seems to speak more to someone pushed backward into a tub (with one foot left outside of it) rather than climbing in to commit suicide by drowning. It seems unlikely that a suicide would bother with strangling himself with a handkerchief. The inquest, which lasted a long time and was twice adjourned, brought in a verdict of murder/suicide, a conclusion that was not shared by most Islanders. As Winifred Harvey put it, “Many think they were the first victims.” She did not need to elaborate.
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