The Channel Islands At War (36 page)

As a result of Carey's and Coutanche's activities the Germans once more had their lists, and it seems that 26 Jews were still on the Islands, 22 on Jersey, and four on Guernsey. There is some evidence that a Jewish woman on Sark, Annie Wranowski, was not registered, and a story given by Norman Longmate describes how another Jewish resident evaded registration by escaping down the fire escape, and hiding in her friend's house.

Although yellow stars ordered by Casper did not come, the effect of the anti-Jewish laws was to isolate the small number of Island Jews. Two of the women concerned on Guernsey were Mrs Elizobet Duquemin, and Mrs Elda Brouard. Elda Bauer as she was before her marriage had come from Italy, and Elizobet Fink from Vienna with some other girls to learn English. She had married Harry Duquemin, and they had a daughter, Janet, who was only 18 months old in February 1943. Details of their incomes were given by the police to the Germans along with those of other Jews showing that Island banks paid no attention to confidentiality. Mrs Duquemin had £80 which she was saving for her daughter's education. Mrs Brouard had more, even though she worked as a housekeeper paid 10s a week with full board. She had £250 invested in war loan and £60 deposited in Barclay's Bank. These two women were told by Carey not to enter restaurants. Mrs Brouard, Mrs Duquemin, and her daughter were deported to Biberach, and Mrs B
rouard subsequently moved to Lie
benau. Henry Duquemin was also deported, and it is interesting that his is the only name to appear in the published lists of deportees.

The other two Jews on Guernsey disappeared before the deportation. It seems they left for France in April 1942 and were not subsequently traced. Both of them were from V
ienna and knew Mrs Duquemin. There
sia Steiner was a 26-year-old nurse at the Castcl Hospital, and Auguste Spitz was a 41-year-old hospital maid. Mrs Duquemin said the two had come to see her to borrow a suitcase, and were terribly frightened.

On Jersey, two French Jews ran foul of the Germans. In October 1944.

Suzanne Malhe
rbe and Lucille Schwab were arrested. Von Aufsess wrote that 'there are very few Jews on the Islands. The two Jewish women who have been arrested today belong to the unpleasant category.' They were sentenced to death for distributing anti-German propaganda, but subsequently reprieved and imprisoned in Jersey.

Although the lists of deportees have been carefully studied, hardly any other Jewish names can be found except in the lists of deaths. It may well be that the rest of the Island Jews were also removed at the same time to vanish in European camps. Among those listed as dying
are
A. Nathan at Bibcrach,
Emanuel Solomon, Alfred Weismann and Nathan Guter in Laufe
n, and Raymond Gould at Wurzach. The only Jewish families which appear to be listed among the deportees are the Goulds, and the Schutzs.

This is not the complete story of the Channel Islands Jews. It sheds a little more light accounting by name for the fate of 12 or so of them. Steckoll claimed he had seen a letter from Casper to the SS in his own handwriting dated 17 June 1942 recommending the removal of the Island Jews to Dachau. But in the absence of the records, no more can be said for the time being. Senator Wilfred Krichevski, who represented the Island Jews at the time and was in Britain during the war, would have known the rest of his fellow religious, and it would have been easy enough to check how many returned. Krichevski played down their loss, and declined to support a request to the Board of Deputies of British Jews for a memorial because he could not 'see why they ought to be specifically remembered quite separately from the other foreign labour". (Stcckoll, p. 110). Eventually, a privately sponsored one was erected and dedicated at a ceremony Krichevski did not attend. Even in this case there seems to be a spirit of forgetfulness abroad in strong contrast to what happened elsewhere in Europe.

18

Belsen, Buchenwald, Frankfurt, Naumburg, Neuengamme, and Ravensbruck

The War Crimes Commission assembled at the Courts of Justice in the Strand in October 1943, and a month later the Big Three Powers issued the declaration that at the end of the war those guilty of war crimes would be brought to justice either in the country where the crime was committed, or elsewhere if they were guilty of initiating more widespread policies. The first trials in the British zone were held at Luneburg in September 1945 and resulted in the first executions of 11 Belsen commanders and guards. The Nuremberg trials themselves began in November 1945, and throughout Europe, trials and executions of Nazi war criminals and their accomplices went on for years.

But there were no such war trials in the Channel Islands. The victims of the Kommandantur were unavenged, and those responsible for breaches of international law and for prison sentences which led to the deaths of Channel Islanders were never brought to trial. The deportation of 2,000 people, acts of individual brutality and illegality all went unpunished. Although Morrison said investigations were to take place, by the time he arrived in the Islands he was able to affirm that 'there appears to be no evidence of anything which could be regarded as a war crime as far as the Germans on Jersey and Guernsey were concerned.'

The Germans on the Islands were arrested and sent to British POW camps from which they were released within three years. Although detailed statements were
taken from escape
rs, deportees and the Islanders in 1945, the result was that the evidence was stated by the next home secretary, Chuter Ede, to be inadequate for prosecuting any Islanders or Germans. The Treachery Act of 1940, and the Trading with the Enemy Acts were not extended to the Islands, and no attempt was made to make actions like fraternizing and informing into criminal offences.

It is often said that no executions of Islanders as a result of German action took place, although a number of death sentences were passed. This is true, but it omits a group whose numbers and fate still remain uncertain: the Islanders sent to pris
ons on the Continent. Somewhere
between 70 and 100 Islanders served sentences in Europe, and at least 20 of them died there in captivity, or shortly afterwards. This penalty was exacted not for murder or sabotage, but for acts like insulting a German or listening to the wireless.

Channel Islanders were scattered in at least 30 places in France and Germany. They found themselves in German gaols with ordinary criminals, or in French ones with captured resistance workers, SOE operatives, and RAF personnel. Stanley Green sentenced for having a wirele
ss set at West's Cinema in St Helie
r which w
as not his, found himself at Fre
snes at the same time as Wing-Commander Frederick Yeo-Thomas when he was being beaten up and taken for daily torture at the Avenue Foch. Green, like Yeo-Thomas, was destined for Buchenwald. Islanders would end in Belsen, Neuengamme, and Ravensbruck among well-known names in Germany and Ro
mainville, Cherche Midi, and Fre
snes of equal infamy in France.

On 17 April 1944, Charles Machon, ill with his ulcer, was the first of those sentenced for his part in producing
GUNS
to leave the Island. He was transferred from Potsdam Prison to Hameln-Weser Hospital where he died on 26 October 1944. The other four men concerned: Falla, Duquemin, Legg and Gillingham were sent to the Continent on 4 June just two days before D-Day. They were destined first for Frankfurt prison and remembered hearing the D-Day news at a wayside station as they travelled there. The prison contained over 800 inmates among whom, according to Falla, were 15 Island prisoners. Some were there as a result of acts of defiance, but others were there for crimes like the policemen involved in the black market affair on Guernsey. Gillingham, Legg, and Falla were confined in one cell, and Duquemin with two French prisoners. The four men were at Frankfurt for two months. Among those they met was Percy Miller, who had been informed on for listening to the radio. He became ill, and died in the infirmary there in August that year, aged 61.

In August, the four
GUNS
prisoners, together with seven other Channel Islanders, were transferred to the much grimmer prison at Naumburg south of Leipzig. Its 300 inmates were a complete cross-section of German prisoners, and a range of Allied nationalities. Falla managed to get a pencil, and wrote on tomato paper hidden in his shaving-stick the names of those who died there. They included Joseph Gillingham, George Cox, William Marsh, Frederick Page, Emile Paisnel, Sidney Ashcroft, and Clifford Querde. Falla, Duquemin, and Legg were subjected to periodic beatings, and Falla saw Legg thrown down steps so that he suffered from a permanent limp. Legg had such bad dropsy, that a bucket and a half of water was drained from him. Medical treatment was minimal because the doctor was hoarding medicines of every conceivable kind, presumably to sell on the black market. When Falla got pneumonia, the doctor refused him aspirin, and he had to cope with it by himself.

Falla admitted English prisoners were treated less harshly than others although he received a beating for climbing on the table to look out of his
cell window. Among those Falla
met at Naumburg were two other Islanders. They were victims of informers being punished for listening to the radio, and had formed part of the group around Canon Clifford Cohu.

John Nicolle
sentenced to two years was to die at Dortmund in 1944. Falla met the Canon himself and Joseph Tierney. They believed they were being moved on to Laufen, but in fact were in transit to other camps. Tierncy died at Celle and was buried at Kaschitz. Cohu was lost sight of in the prison system. His wife heard from him in June 1944, but it was not until December 1945 that she heard from a fellow prisoner at Spergau of his fate. Ill though he was he had been compelled to work, and sleep outdoors in a tent. Dysentery had overtaken him, and he had died. Under his shirt was found a small Bible.

The women sent to the Continent were usually confined in French prisons. Caen Prison received among others Mrs Winifred Green, for her remark about Hitler and the rice pudding, and Mrs Le Norman and Mrs Kinniard convicted of displaying the V-for-Victory signs. Mrs Michael and Mrs Mulholland arrested for helping the British a
gents in 1940 were sent to St-Lo
and placed under house arrest. But others suffered more. One woman placed in solitary confinement by the Germans became mentally disturbed and returned to the Islands after the war a broken woman. The most tragic case was the death of Louisa Gould. Together with her brother Harold Le Druillenec, and her sister, Mrs Ivy Foster, she had been sentenced for harbouring a Russian fugitive, and possession of a wireless. Harold and Louisa travelled to St-Malo together, and were then separated. By an unknown process, possibly connected with her Jewish
name, Mrs Gould was sent to Rave
nsbr
ü
ck, the women's concentration camp 50 miles north of Berlin. This camp killed at least 50,000 women, and among them were sever
al British victims like Violette
Szabo, Lilian Rolfe, and
De
nise Bloch shot in the back of the neck in the yard behind the crematorium. A number of English prisoners including Odette Churchill survived to give testimony when the commandant, Suhren, and the assistant commandant, Schwartzhuber, were brought to trial and hanged. Among the camp guards was a kapo or trustee from Guernsey where she had been trapped by invasion in 1940. Mrs Julie Barry admitted she had treated other prisoners brutally as part of her duties, and was able to describe the usual method of execution by a bullet in the neck although a gas chamber was built to kill 7,000 of the women, and Mrs Gould could have died in either way.

Harold Le Druillenec survived, but only just, a nightmare prison journey through no less than six European prisons after a short stay
in Guernsey prison. L'Espcrance
, St-Malo was followed by Camp Marguerite at Renncs, and Fort Hartry at
Belfort before he arrived at Ne
uengamme, the parent camp of Sylt. From there he moved to Wilhelmshaven, and eventually to Belsen where he became the sole British survivor. Ncuengamme was responsible, like Ravensbruck, for some 50,000 deaths. There Le Druillcncc found Frank le Villio, aged only 18 who was to die shortly after his release, but he did not see James Houillebecq, who died later at Neuengamme. At Wilhelmshaven, Le Druillenec worked as a welder. He was liberated on 16 April and spent nine months in various hospitals before he recovered at a convalescent home at Chelwood Gate in Sussex, and was able to return to the Island in December only to hear Louisa had not survived. The Russians honoured him for his deed in helping the Todt worker. And finally in 1966 the only British survivor of Belscn was given £2,000 compensation by the British government.

A number of Islanders spent periods of time at Buchenwald, six miles from Weimar. Stanley Green, the c
inema projectionist, left Fresne
s for Buchcnwald in one of the SS death transports. At Buchenwald, Green was shaved and put in prison costume. They had to sleep in the open until death provided them with places in the huts. Green found William Symes, Sandeman Bill of 'The Dive'. Both men were extremely lucky because they managed to get letters out of the camp. As a result they were transferred to Laufen. Other Islanders imprisoned at Buchenwald included Paul Gourdan and J.T.W. Quick.

In 1941 Edward Chapman, an English criminal who had been released from Jersey Prison, and his black market associate Anthony Faramus, were arrested, and sent to St D
enis, and then on to Romainville
, an old-fashioned fort used to keep a stock of hostages for shooting in reprisal. The two men were horrified when hostages were taken away and shot after their names were read out when they were working. Chapman's account must be taken with a pinch of salt. He was a convicted criminal, and later became a double agent for Germany and Britain in order to avoid further imprisonment. He described how informers were planted among the prisoners. Chapman referred to an Italian shot dead for waving from a window. The food was sometimes reduced to boiled vegetables with worms floating in the mess. There was no fuel for the stoves, and they removed rafters to make firewood. Chapman was interviewed three times at the prison after he had expressed his wish to be a German agent, and in April 1942 he was taken away. He said goodbye to Faramus who was moved on to Buchcnwald where he managed to survive.