ROBERT PHILPOT

IT IS one of the great “what ifs” of modern British history: how would its people have behaved had Hitler invaded in 1940 and the country had become a Nazi vassal state? Authors such as Len Deighton, C J Sansom and Robert Harris have attempted to conjure up this dystopian scenario. However, as a new exhibition at the Wiener Library reminds visitors, it is possible to look to the Channel Islands where, for five years, the jackboot was firmly planted on British soil. The exhibition tells a tale of collaboration, heroism and tragedy, combined with a later refusal to face inconvenient historical truths — akin to that which marked the German occupation of most other west European countries.

In the wake of the fall of France in 1940, Britain decided it could not defend Jersey and Guernsey. Thus, before the German invasion in late June 1940, the islands were demilitarised and one in four residents evacuated. The Home Office instructed the Bailiffs who headed the administrations in Jersey and Guernsey (also responsible for Sark, Alderney and Herm) to remain at their posts.

Their defenders would later claim that Victor Carey, who headed the government in Guernsey, and Alexander Coutanche, Carey’s opposite number in Jersey, acted as a “buffer” between the Germans and the local population. The reality was both more complex and darker.

Barely three months after the occupation, the Nazis demanded the first in a series of anti-Jewish measures: Jews were to be registered and the businesses they owned were to be clearly marked as a “Jewish undertaking”.

This may have been wholly unsurprising; more so, however, is to see a copy of the order published in the Jersey Evening Post under the name of the island’s Chief Aliens Officer, Clifford Orange, with its reference to an Act of the Royal Court. Indeed, when the measure came before the Guernsey parliament, only one member — Sir Hedwig Bercu survived in hiding Abraham Lainé — refused to vote for it. Further measures followed barring Jews from owning businesses, entering public buildings, and using the shops apart from one hour in the afternoon. At each stage, the Channel Islands’ authorities received their orders from the Germans, passed them down the chain of command and then reported back when they had been implemented.

These acts of collaboration were not only directed at Jews. As the image of Carey’s offer of a £25 reward for information on those who had been daubing V signs — a symbol of resistance — on buildings illustrates, the Channel Island authorities were keen to help the Nazis snuff out even the mildest forms of opposition to their occupation.

Inevitably, for the small number of Jews on the islands — there are estimated to have been 30 at the time of the occupation — tragedy later followed. British Jews fared comparatively well. Sent to internment camps in Germany in 1942-3 as part of a wider transportation of people who had not been born on the island, all survived the war. However, Auschwitz would ultimately claim the lives of three Jewish women: Marianne Grunfeld, a German Jew born in Poland, and two Austrian Jews, Therese Steiner and Auguste Spitz. Grunfeld, the exhibition speculates, had not registered as a Jew and thus may have been denounced to the authorities.

On Alderney, where the Germans operated a string of slave-labour camps as well as an SS-run concentration campaign, many more Jews are thought to have perished. Starved, worked to death and savagely beaten, they were among a workforce, mainly consisting of Russians, Poles and Ukrainians, which fortified the island as part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, designed to fend off an Allied invasion of Europe. The exhibition, curated by Cambridge University’s Gillian Carr, claims the death toll on Alderney was between 437 and 1,000, although some have suggested recently that the real figure may have reached 30-40,000.

Unlike their leaders, some islanders showed great courage in attempting to resist the Nazis and thus maintain their humanity. It was a perilous task — there was one German soldier for every three locals — and many paid a terrible price. One thousand, three hundred islanders went to prison in Jersey and Guernsey during the occupation for acts of protest, defiance and resistance. At least 200 of these were deported to prisons and camps abroad; 28 died in incarceration.

Jersey shopkeeper Louisa Gould, for instance, went to the gas chambers in Ravensbruck in 1945 after she was caught sheltering an escaped Russian slave labourer. Joseph Tierney, who was deported for listening to the BBC A paperback of 1956 about John Dalmau, enslaved by the Nazis for five years

and illegally disseminating news, died just before the end of the war after being put on a convoy to Theresienstadt. His family did not discover his final resting place until last year. Similarly, Joseph Gillingham, a member of the Guernsey Underground News Service, was deported to Germany to serve a 10-month sentence and died in March 1945 in a prison in Halle. His fate remained a mystery for 70 years. Touchingly, the exhibition displays the only items Gillingham’s daughter has that belonged to her father: his Bible, and army record and photograph. Last year, she was able to visit his grave.

There were, however, some happier endings. Dorothea Weber was honoured by Yad Vashem for her role in helping to hide Hedwig Bercu, an Austrian Jew who had fled to Jersey in 1938. The two women were provided with food by a German soldier, Kurt Rümmele, whom Bercu married after the war.

Esther Pauline Lloyd had registered as a Jew in 1940 and was deported from the island in 1943. She wrote countless letters complaining of her treatment, while her husband lodged an appeal with the Military Command in Jersey. Extraordinarily, she was repatriated to Jersey in April 1944.

The contradictions and complexities of the occupation are perhaps best encapsulated by the case of Miriam Jay, a Jew from Bethnal Green. She concealed her Jewish identity during the occupation while her partner, the Solicitor General of Guernsey, assisted the Germans in drawing up their antisemitic measures.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that, after the islands were liberated in May 1945, a veil of silence fell over the war years, which has only begun to lift in the past two decades. None of those who resisted the Germans received any form of public recognition or honour during their lifetime. The victims of Nazism were also forgotten: Jersey did not erect a memorial to them until 1996, while it took Guernsey a further 19 years to do so. Nor was anyone tried for collaboration. “At the liberation”, Carey’s grandson later remarked, “the government didn’t know whether to hang my grandfather for treason, or knight him.” They chose the latter course; a uniquely British response to occupation.

No one who resisted Nazi rule was honoured

‘On British Soil: Victims of Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands’ runs from October 19 to February 9 at the Wiener Library