The Channel Islands At War (31 page)

Meanwhile, Island officials were having their first contacts with each other and the outside world carefully supervised by German guards. Coutanche and his wife were allowed
to go to Guernsey with von Aufse
ss, where they were lodged at the Grange, and were able to meet the Careys. Von Aufsess invited them to have dinner, and they had a pleasant meal of roast lamb washed down with burgundy. Next day the Careys too were invited to the Royal Hotel. Coutanche was able to lunch (with two soldiers outside the house) with John Martel, the attorney-general. Over two days, a meeting was held at Rozel with the Red Cross representatives. The two bailiffs said that flour, fuel, and Red Cross message forms were important priorities. The Red Cross representatives said there was no room for fuel on the ship, but promised to send 500 tons of flour which did not arrive until March 1945.

On 8 January, Churchill minuted the minister of production about relief supplies for Holland, Belgium, Italy, and the Balkans. Those, like Maugham, who were angry because they heard of aid to Greece and Italy before any was sent to the Channel Islands were justifiably annoyed by the neglect, and January 1945 passed without a Red Cross ship.

On 14 February Mrs Tremayne remarked it was six weeks since Red Cross parcels had last come, and they had been told they would come every month. The parcels themselves lasted for about ten days. The
Vega
arrived again on 7-11 February, bringing Red Cross letter forms, cigarettes, and tobacco, medical supplies, clothes and shoe leather, but no flour. For a short time there were good things to eat. Mrs
Tremayne
made herself a pot of tea, and drank off five cupfuls. The ship in March brought flour at last, and bread became available once more. Fuel was carried for the first time. The ship came again in April and May, and earned the deep gratitude of the Islanders in the last three months of occupation. A letter written on behalf of the girls and boys at the Intermediate School in St Peter Port in March 1945 to the President of the Red Cross well summarizes their feelings: 'For three weeks we have been without bread ... But now people look more cheerful because the relief ship, the
Vega
is expected in two or three days time, laden with flour for us. Today, as I went to the grocer's shop to fetch my fourth parcel I met many people wearing smiles on their faces and wheeling small carts carrying their parcels home.'

Part
6

Hitler's New Order in the Channel Islands

The Todt Workers and the Death Camps

During the war the Channel Islands became a small corner of Hitler's empire of camps. At Nuremberg in 1945-6 when the war trials started, the British attorney-general, Sir Hartley Shawcross, estimated that 12 million had perished in Nazi Europe, half of them Jews. The multiplicity of camps, the transfers between them, the exaggerated records of zealous officials, the destroyed records of guilty ones, the confusion and secrecy make it impossible, even in a small area like the Channel Islands, to be sure how many came to the Islands, and how many died. The only concentration camp on the Islands, Sylt on
Alderney
, appears to have been discreetly passed over in SS Records and the Organization Todt records for the Islands have largely vanished.

On the Channel Islands there were subsidiary camps, camp areas like a particular street, work site, or building taken over, and frequent shifts in the population between slave workers, prisoners of war, and other categories. In theory there were a number of different categories of camp. There were concentration camps. There was the hutted world of the slave labourers. There were POW and internment camps. But, in practice, inmates moved between these camps, jurisdictions were blurred, and conditions varied immensely. In some camps the Red Cross was present, and the Geneva Convention was applied; in others there was nothing but brute force, and a violation of every civilized standard. In the Channel Islands, as elsewhere in Europe, slaves, POWs, politicals, Jews, and common criminals were mixed up in the network of camps.

Amidst so much horror and suffering in Europe as a whole it is not surprising the presence of one subsidiary concentration camp on
Alderney
, and about thirty other camps on the Islands was not front page news in the immediate post-war years. The SS occupation of Sylt camp lasted from March 1943 to July 1944 and the maximum number of prisoners was about a thousand. The Todt camps contained perhaps 16,000 slaves at their maximum extent, reduced by half by the end of 1943, and dwindling to a thousand after D-Day. The treatment of prisoners in Islands camps was not raised at Nuremberg and the British held no trials of those involved apart from a kapo, or trustee, and seven Germans, whose names have been kept secret by the German authorities, who were tried for killing prisoners in transit away from Alderney. There

have been frequent denials of atrocities, or any substantial numbers of deaths.

Of course the camps were not an Auschwitz, but they were part of the same system. The numbers involved were smaller, and therefore the number of deaths was comparatively small. But however lenient German occupation as a whole, there is no evidence that the SS or Todt saw the Channel Islands camps as special cases for kid-gloves treatment. The death rate in Sylt in the 15 months it was under SS jurisdiction seems to have been one third of the prisoners: a figure in line with its parent camp in Germany. The treatment of Todt workers witnessed by Islanders was exactly similar to that elsewhere in Europe, and so were camp conditions. The death rate among them might well be expected to run parallel, and there is some evidence that it did. It is not an exaggeration to speak of some of the Island camps as death camps.

With the exception of Sylt for fifteen months, these camps were part of Organization Todt run until his death in a plane crash in 1942 by Fritz Todt. This organization was responsible for the Siegfried Line, the underground V-weapon factories, and the Atlantic Wall of which the Channel Island fortifications accounted for a twelfth of the resources involved. I
n 1942, Albert Spee
r became head of the Todt Organization, and armaments minister as well. He was directly involved in using slave labour for production as well as construction, and to feed his empire, Fritz Sauckel was made plenipotentiary for labour in March 1942 with the job of providing workers. Although there was a conflict of aim between Speer who wanted to keep workers alive to boost production, and others like the SS who wanted to work them to death as quickly as possible, in practice Speer's humanitarian pretensions had no effect.

Among the SS camps was Neuengamme, situated some miles north of Hamburg, and by 1942 having as many as 50 subsidiaries including work sites. It was the parent camp of Sylt on Alderney, and this link with the Channel Islands came about as fol
lows. In October 1942 Baubrigade
1 was formed from a mixture of Russian and other nationalities drawn mainly from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It was sent to work at Duisburg and Dusseldorf, and in February 1943 was transferred to Alderney. It seems the intention was that the thousand or so prisoners should go there to be worked to death, and when their usefulness was at an end they would be transferred to Neuengamme for extermination. The new commandant, Captain Maximilian List, an early member of the SS in 1930 who had seen service at Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen, arrived in
Alderney
on 5 March 1943. Existing Todt workers were dispersed to other camps, and the familiar striped uniform, cropped heads, numbers, and coloured identifications of concentration camp prisoners were seen in the Island. List installed himself in a chalet-bungalow with a fine view down the Val dc L'Emauve and connected to the camp by a tunnel passing under the perimeter fence. He remained there until spring 1944, and was therefore in charge during the period of maximum deaths. His two lieutenants
were Gcorg Braun and Kurt Klebe
ck. Klebeck was the official deputy, but was involved in inadequate guard arrangements which led to prisoner escapes in transit to Neuen
gamme, and was recalled soon
afterwards. George Braun, an incurable syphilitic, therefore became List's successor. Clearly a strong Nazi, it was he who issued an order in May 1944 that prisoners were not to be taken alive by the Allies, and there is some evidence that a tunnel was specially prepared for their extermination. It is
said that neither Braun nor Kle
beck survived the war, but List almost certainly did survive and was never tried.

The camp staff were under the command of Otto Hogelow, later replac
ed by Staff-Sergeant Go
tze. Hogelow certainly survived the war because he was called as a witness in the only trial affecting Alderney camp staff. The German authorities tried to conceal his identity on the trial record, but he was identified by the prisoners present at the trial.

Sylt was a typical small concentration camp. There was a wired inner enclosure with about ten wooden huts for the prisoners. The camp was protected with concrete sentry posts, a concrete guard-room below ground level, lights and corner towers. Six bloodhounds came ashore in March 1943, in the charge of a junior private from Stettin. Prisoners were employed to work outside the camp, and this led to petty clashes over jurisdiction with the Todt organization. The officer in charge of the OT workers complained to the Island commandant about excessive beating of prisoners on his work sites and in return List accused Todt officials of being soft on Jews. The SS were able to get their revenge because there was no punishment lager for Todt workers on Alderney, and they were sent to Sylt. At the end of their stay, the SS refused to give up the prisoners. There was much squabbling as a result of which wretched Todt workers endured eight months in the concentration camp.

Because Sylt was to some extent a transit camp for workers, there were frequent transports off the Island among which was the notorious one in June 1943 during which 12 escaped. Seven Sylt prisoners died on their way to Neuengamme on that occasion, and in assessing the death rate of Alderney SS prisoners such deaths in transit should be included. In bad conditions on the
Gerfried
and the
Schwalbe
inmates were transferred to St Malo between 24 June and 1 July 1944 to travel on from there to their eventual destination of Buchenwald. Desperate camp inmates tried to escape at Kortemark, and near Toul. Over 50 of these were killed. The remaining prisoners did not reach Buchenwald. Instead they were marched to Sollstedt, and Mauthausen where an American advance prevented their liquidation. It was during this march that the kapo, Gustav Fehrenbacher, and seven SS men carried out killings for which the
y were put on trial. Fehrenbache
r was convicted of killing two prisoners at Sollstedt, and given eight years.

When the decision was made in October 1941 to fortify the Islands the intention was to carry out a 14-month crash programme. This was delayed by material and transport difficulties, but by the end of 1943 the work had been more or less completed, and half of the workers involved had left the Islands. It was mainly carried out by Organization Todt and by January 1944 their building programme had constructed 484,000 cubic metres of fortifications and other works. Railways were constructed and roads widened and both old and new Island quarries brought into use. Todt was in theory a civilian organization responsible to Speer in Berlin, but for
practical purposes it was the We
hrmacht inspector of fortifications west who was the ultimate authority, and Todt came to function under his commander in the Channel Islands, Major May. The organization level of the Todt administrative structure was based on the chief construction office in St Malo, and after February 1943, Cherbourg. Each Island was an
abschnitt
.
Alderney became Adolf, Jersey, Jakob, and Guernsey, Gustav.

Many Todt officials were administrators or technical experts, and had little to do with the camps, but Todt was responsible for its own security, although in view of the brutality it is not surprising that prisoners referred to their guards as SS. Each Island had a punishment lager: in Alderney this was achieved by transferring prisoners to the SS in Sylt. On Jersey, Elizabeth Castle was the lager. On Guernsey the
straflager
was housed opposite Le
s Vauxbelets College in a compound with towers, searchlights, and machine-guns surrounding a house called 'Paradise'. Wood said that, 'in charge of "Paradise" was a brutal sadist, a huge man, who delighted in trussing up his victims with a length of rope, beating them about the head and body, and then leaving them dangling in the hall from the banisters of the staircase'.

One prisoner executed on Guernsey is known by name. Two Todt workers Franzeph Losch and Marcel dc Bois, seem to have operated a transmitter to the United Kingdom (another matter on which British secret service histories remain silent) for nearly two years from April 1941. De Bois had fortunately gone on leave when the Feldpolizei arrested Losch in the act of transmitting. He was executed by firing squad at Fort George on 16 June 1943.

At Norderney the
lagerf
ü
hrer
Tietz employed a muscular black Senegalese to beat prisoners and, was not above joining in himself. 'Every day the Camp Commandant made a habit of beating any man he found not properly standing to attention or who had not made his bed properly or did not execute a drill movement properly.'