Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (61 page)

On March 31, at the De Garis farm, men going in to milk the cows came upon some Germans who were “there for the same purpose.” The German police were called in, and one
German policeman, going in to arrest the Germans, was shot and killed. De Garis's throat was cut and he was rushed to the hospital.
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This was the increasing danger: that civilians might surprise armed thieves in the night in their own homes and yards. At this same time came news of the most shocking murder of the Occupation, when an elderly couple, the Robins of St. Martin, were savagely butchered in their own home, their poultry taken, and the contents of their Red Cross parcel stolen.
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The violence of the attack (their heads bashed in and their throats cut—Mr. Robins with twelve bayonet wounds to the head) led most to suspect the Russians. It seems that the Robins traded with both the Germans and the Russians, and whoever killed them was known to the couple, as there was no indication of forced entry.
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Islanders could hear on their hidden wireless sets that the war was coming to a close and liberation was close at hand. Murders like that of the Robins raised one question in their minds: Would liberation come in time?

AND BRITISH AGAIN

Despite the positive information coming through their crystal sets signaling that the war with Germany was moving toward its close, particularly the welcome news of Hitler's death, worries still existed over how the end would play out. Part of the concern was that the Channel Islands were now under the charge of Vice Admiral Hüffmeier, described by Jurat Leale as a “red-hot Nazi.”
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Stories abounded that the new admiral was a “perfect terror” and that more than one attempt had been made on his life, necessitating a double guard of soldiers around him at all times.
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Rumors started as early as February that it was only the vice admiral who was holding up a raising of the white flag, and that the troops under his command were eager for the end.
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Right down to the bitter end, it was believed that Hüffmeier might hold out and was laying down mines in the harbor in preparation to defend against a final siege.
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It was the women of the Island in particular who predicted a “gory ending” to the Occupation and believed that open conflict would ultimately come to their shores.
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It was often the women who kept their eyes open in the Market and on the streets, and they were able to read some disturbing differences among the Germans in their midst. One concern was the obvious dichotomy between officers and average soldiers, the officers appearing well-fed while the troops were so noticeably starving. Only some of the officers retained their accustomed swagger, still peering down their noses at the Islanders and treating them as the vanquished spoils of war for the superior German forces. Such arrogance, seemingly oblivious to the true state of the war, was amusing to many Islanders, who had to suppress smiles as some officers, determined to maintain their image of superiority, pranced and strutted by. What was not amusing was the widespread belief that the officers might hold out longer against surrender because they did not feel the compelling force of hunger as experienced by the common soldier.
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Rev. Ord, who from his Christian perspective retained hope that Islanders could differentiate the good individual from the detested Nazi culture, knew that the final year was challenging in that regard. His hope was always for the souls of his parishioners and that they would not be “warped and embittered” in the day of liberation. It was the coming victory that would provide the “supreme spiritual test.”
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The pressure of Christian obligations became important as parcels relieved some of the civilian hunger and the common soldiers increasingly took on the appearance of gray-green ghosts. In January, Mülle, the Germans' clerk at
Newlands, came up to Moullin, Winifred Harvey's gardener, and tearfully begged for food. He was an Austrian, he said, and he did not want to fight—and look at his clothes, they were paper-thin and in this cold…Moullin conveyed this message to Winnie, who at first said she could not help him. And then she thought, “if thine enemy hunger, feed him,” and after all, she reasoned, Mülle was not an enemy but a “decent fellow,” whom they all liked. So, she told Moullin to give him some artichokes that she could ill afford to give away. Mülle knew this to be a personal sacrifice, and greeted this gift with tears and an assurance that he prayed “every night for this beastly war to be over.”
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But fellow feeling and Christian impulses were not applied simply to those known personally to the Islanders. Winnie was obviously touched by a German soldier who came up behind her while she waited in line at the Market hoping for two small pieces of broccoli. The soldier asked, “Bitte, madam, wollen Die für mich Bluhmenkohl kaufen?” (Please, madam, would you buy some broccoli for me?). That she was torn can be seen in Winnie's description: “He was young, ghastly white, tears in his eyes.” He pleaded, stroking her arm, but in this case, she had to harden her heart and replied, “No. I shall only get two small ones myself. It is against the law. I cannot do it.” She watched him move to the next stall, knowing he would have no better luck there.
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Despite maintaining their unalloyed hatred for the German system and for most of the officers who represented that system, some Islanders could not help but feel sorry for the common soldier. Kitty Bachmann believed that these starving men saw themselves as allied now with the Islanders as “co-exiles and ‘brothers’ in adversity.” Kitty, for one, could “derive no satisfaction from their pathetic state.”
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Dorothy Higgs could not feel sympathy for these men “dragging about with hunched shoulders and arms hanging loose” as long as civilians were hungry as well. But, she wondered, what if in the future the Red Cross could feed civilians to the point where they were not hungry at all? Could they watch the soldiers die when it already “tears one's heart” to see them suffer? It was an interesting hypothetical that pitted the need for the British to starve the Germans out—an outcome that Dorothy supported—against the fact that the Islanders would be compelled to watch these young men of the enemy forces slowly starve to death before their eyes. Already by the spring of 1945 there were many cases of death by malnutrition and hospital cases of collapse in the occupying forces, but as the civilians continued to be driven to stinging nettles and moss for food, this hypothetical was never tested.
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Then, into these small stirrings of sympathy for the weakest among the enemy troops came the news of the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany, and Islanders recoiled with horror. They knew of German cruelty firsthand and could see it in the treatment of the Organization Todt workers. But the extent, the organized cruelty, and the horror of the Holocaust now being uncovered staggered them. Their response was even stronger than most, because they realized that they could have all shared a similar fate had the Germans wished to rid themselves of the local population and keep the Channel Islands as a physical asset. And what could have been the fate of their family and friends, the deportees to Germany, had the Germans made different choices? Perhaps at this point, too, the likely end of the Jewish deportees became apparent to those who had known them. It was terrible and disturbing news on multiple levels, and changed utterly any inklings of fellow feeling Islanders had begun to have toward the starving troops.

These revelations made Kitty question whether the Russians really were the perpetrators of much of the recent violence in Guernsey, or simply convenient scapegoats for the Germans to blame for their own actions. “Many generations must pass,” she wrote, “before the soul
of Germany can feel purged of the guilt and degradation of this real-life version of Dante's Inferno.” And learning of the “dreadful martyrdom of those pitiful, innocent victims” put the five years of Occupation into an entirely new frame: “They make our little Calvaries look very mean indeed.”
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Elizabeth Doig was relieved that pictures were being taken of the atrocities, so that the “German nation” and the entire world could see “what they (these criminals) have done to their fellow creatures.” With this, Elizabeth seemed to separate the German nation from the actions of the Nazi leadership. But then she went on to write, “One can not believe it of a whole people. They can never be trusted or forgiven”—a foretaste of the same questions of collective German guilt that have been explored in recent decades.
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The liberation of the German death camps caused Rev. Ord to think deeply again about his theory of differentiation, his “formula” that each man should be allowed to reveal his true nature and then be treated accordingly. He concluded that, while Christ hated the evil done by men, he could not “find that Christ hated
PERSONS
.” It meant that the innocent would need to share with the guilty in history's “terrific judgment of a nation” that had allowed its liberties to be drained away, and that had put in place men capable of such evil as the concentration camps now revealed. Still, he believed, thinking obviously of those anti-Nazi Germans that he had come to know during the Occupation, that “such things are not the work of those whom we know to be decent-minded.”
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Ord also knew through Reinhold in mid-April that revolt in some parts of the German forces was a distinct possibility. Reinhold was speaking quietly to his closest friends and had come to agree that with the fall of Berlin, they would no longer feel honor-bound to any oath of allegiance and would refuse at that point to serve as soldiers.
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Some others of the common soldiers were more definitely self-serving and tried to escape retaliation they believed would come at the end, saying, “Me nix German; me Polony!”
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And stories went around that the Germans were offering to give their revolvers to the locals and showing them the white flags they had all ready for “when the British land.”
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The true end of the Occupation had a stutter-start feel to it. First came the announcement through the BBC that news of total German surrender could come at any time, and that Churchill would make a speech as to the freeing of the Channel Islands. This news was galvanizing, and Winifred Harvey went first to tell Mrs. Clayton, and then to her friend Maude to share the wonderful news. Winnie and Maude felt there was only one way to react to news of their coming freedom, and they knelt to thank God and seek strength for the days to come.
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What both women sensed was that the war for Guernsey would not be over until Admiral Hüffmeier surrendered. Rumor was increasingly strong that he planned to hold out, and that the airport was being reinforced and mines being laid to withstand a British siege.
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During this uncertain period, Islanders could not be restrained from symbolic displays. After Roosevelt's death, a red, white, and blue wreath appeared on the War Memorial and had remained there untouched. Now someone put a rosette collar of red, white, and blue around the neck of the statue of Prince Albert down at the St. Peter Port harbor.
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Small shops were selling these red, white, and blue rosettes, and children were wearing them openly. One woman was seen walking happily about St. Peter Port with a Union Jack folded over her arm, with all of these patriotic displays ignored by the Germans walking about the same streets.
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As May 7th came with no definitive word, red, white, and blue began to appear everywhere, a display that Ord comically likened to “cutting the cake before the bride had signed the register.”
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Whatever the hardship and challenging decisions of the Occupation, whatever the doubts and difficulties of the postwar period, Guernsey had its moment of untarnished joy at Liberation. Worry that the Germans would hold out changed to wild excitement when the
Star
issued a broadsheet at 10:00
A.M.
on May 8th stating that “The War Is Over for Guernsey: German Officers Inform the Bailiff of Surrender.” A proclamation was to be read at the Royal Court House at noon that day, Churchill would make a speech at 3:00
P.M.
, and flags could be flown after that time.
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And the people took full advantage of the opportunity for display: flags came out of hiding and were flaunted everywhere, houses were bedecked in colors and patriotic symbols.
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At the Court House at noon, Winifred Harvey found the proclamation to be touching; “our worn, strained Jurats and the old Bailiff who had such a weary anxious term of office” were nonetheless impressive and the scene was pronounced “historic.”
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While joy and thankfulness were on every hand, there were no angry demonstrations and no attacks on the Germans still in their midst. Ord was pleased at these signs of restraint as the Islanders awaited the arrival of the British troops that would signal the transfer of military authority. Germans walked “gravely” through the streets, unmolested by the swarms of excited civilians; one German even wore a red, white, and blue rosette, perhaps a sign of his own happiness that the war was over.
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Both Bert Williams and Bill Warry mentioned that it was a good thing that pubs were not open and no liquor was available, for one thing because an unaccustomed drink would “knock most people over” due to their frail condition. Also there was the possibility that the young people might “go mad & start trouble with the Germans.”
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