Brave sisters who dared to give two fingers to the Nazis
NAZI FILES made public for the first time reveal the incredible bravery of two British sisters jailed for taunting sunbathing German soldiers during Second World War.
Kathleen and Lilian Norman crept up beside the slumbering troops on a beach in occupied Jersey and pasted V for victory symbols using newspaper and glue. But their gesture of defiance was spotted and they were chased and captured by soldiers who handed them over to officers.
The sisters were charged with “spreading propaganda” and made to appear before a Nazi court in July 1941.
Kathleen, 21, and Lilian, 25, were found guilty and deported by gunboat to a Nazi prison in Caen, France, where they were held for seven months until February 1942.
The brave pair had a lucky escape – after the D-day invasion of June 6, 1944, all 87 allied prisoners in the Normandy jail were executed on Gestapo orders.
Files now made public by the Jersey Archive reveal the sisters were among 506 islanders deemed to have committed crimes against the German authorities. After being released Kathleen and Lilian were returned to the island where they became celebrities.
Kathleen, who became known as Glue Pot Kath, told a historian their spell in prison had been nerve-wracking. She said in 1945: “You never knew whether someone would send you to Germany.
“But the French were good to us and we had more food in prison that we had at home.
“I never regretted putting the sign up. We’d done our little bit. We didn’t do it out of patriotism, but out of defiance.” Kathleen and Lilian lived full lives after the war and both became grandmothers.
Kathleen passed away aged 89 in 2007 and Lilian died of cancer in the 1980s. Kathleen’s son Martin Whitely, 67, a retired civil servant and former Army reservist, said: “It was a horrendous experience for two young women.
“Yet in the end I believe my mother had compassion for the young German soldiers when they finally left the island. She said they were a beaten army and you could see it in their faces.”