The Channel Islands At War

by Peter King

  October was therefore a month of desperate waiting on the Islands. The first escaper with information about conditions had reached London on 23 September. Yet, when the cabinet discussed the matter on 16 October they were still unwilling to accept Morrison's request that the Red Cross be approached. Churchill said the Germans should be warned they would be charged as war criminals if the population starved. All the Islanders knew was that nothing was happening, and on 21 October Carey at last plucked up courage and sent a sharp message to the Commandant accusing him of requisitioning a disproportionate amount of local produce for the troops and failing to maintain the civilian population. Von Schmettow replied two days later refusing the request, denying the accusations, and repeating that 'the besieger alone bears the responsibility for his compatriots'.

  In Jersey, Coutanche asked Norman Rumball, a former member of the Granville Purchasing Mission, and an employee of the National Provincial Bank, to take copies of his memorandum to the Red Cross with him when he escaped early in November. In Guernsey, a group of officials twice urged Carey to take action, and, when he would not. Sir Abraham Laind, C.H. Cross, and Doctor A.W. Rose decided to act on their own initiative, and Frederick Noyon and William Enticott escaped with details of Island shortages. By then the Germans had won, and the British government been forced to climb down. Complaints from MPs, and action by the Channel Islands Committee in Britain reached the cabinet, and strengthened Morrison's hand. Yet when the matter was raised on 6 November Churchill still dug his heels in, but in the discussion he was overruled and it was agreed to approach the Red Cross providing the German commander was warned of his responsibility, and told not to reduce existing rations. This decision was sent via the Swiss Minister on 7 November, and the Germans replied on 23 November agreeing not to reduce rations, and to give safe conduct to Red Cross vessels. The Islanders reacted with delight to the news. 'Hurrah. A ship is really coming with relief, wrote Mrs Tremayne at the end of November, but sadly there was to be yet another 'month of delay before the Vega, a Swedish vessel, sailed from Lisbon on 20 December carrying 100,000 food parcels from New Zealand and Canada, 4,200 invalid parcels, and consignments of medical supplies. On 27th of December hundreds of hungry, badly clothed, chilled to the bone people gathered on White Rock to watch the arrival of the Vega at St Peter Port. The food was given out in Guernsey on Sunday December 31st. Goods for Sark were loaded on the White Heather, and were distributed on 3 January 1945. The Vega then left Guernsey for Jersey on Saturday 30 December, and supplies for Jersey were handed out before it left St Helier on 4 January.

  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 Aufsess, 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. In 1942, Albert Speer 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 follows. 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 Klebeck. Klebeck was the official deputy, but was involved in inadequate guard arrangements which led to prisoner escapes in transit to Neuengamme, 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 Klebeck survived the war, but List almost certainly did survive and was never tried.

  The camp staff were under the command of Otto Hogelow, later replaced by Staff-Sergeant Gotze. 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 they were put on trial. Fehrenbacher 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 Wehrmacht 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 Les 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 lagerführer 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.'

  Tietz was removed from office for black market activities in April 1943, but Adam Adler and Heinrich Evers were quite as evil. Francisco Font who was in Norderney, later recalled beatings by Evers as well as dousing with cold water. At Christmas 1943 he deliberately destroyed prisoners' mail in front of their eyes. According to Steckoll it was Evers who killed the only Chinese Todt prisoner who was then discreetly buried in the military cemetery at Le Foulon in grave number 104. Ki-Lieng Tien was lashed by the familiar stick which broke three of his ribs, and took 20 days to die.

  It is usually stated that there were four camps on Alderney: Helgoland, Norderney, Borkum, and Sylt. Each camp was designed to take about a thousand prisoners and all were full in May 1943. Then numbers declined, and one by one the camps were destroyed, and the huts broken up for firewood. But there was a fifth camp at Hauteville in St Anne known as Citadella containing African POWs. />
  In Guernsey there were purpose built camps like that at Rue Sauvage, and areas of existing housing in St Peter Port which were taken over as camps. Richard Mayne has listed ten Jersey camps. Some of these like lagers Udet and Molders were camps in their own right; others like Prien or Ehrenbreitstein were sub-camps, and some like Schepke or Wick were set up on specific work sites. The list is not exhaustive because in August 1943 a camp for African POWs was opened at Pier Road, and they were involved in work on defences. Prisoners were to be found in places "not strictly camps' including Melbourne House, St John, West Park Pavilion, and Elizabeth Castle.

  The majority of workers were housed in conditions which made their hungry, ill-clothed, and back-breaking existence even more wretched. There was some hospital provision at Avenue Vivier in Guernsey, and Rosemount in Jersey, but the buildings were poorly staffed to cope with the victims' construction accidents, typhus and other contagious diseases, and air raid victims from port areas. Medical affairs on Alderney were handled by the Kriegsmarine medical officer, and there was a single ward in Norderney staffed by Russians. Francisco Font said lice, diarrhoea and dysentery were widespread, and the only medicine ever doled out was aspirin. At Sylt List and Klebeck had one remedy, to send 'the sick prisoners away from extermination".

  Sixteen thousand or more foreigners pouring into small Islands in the mono-cultural days of the 1940s created an immediate impression among the inhabitants who tended to confuse races and the status of those they saw behind barbed-wire, marching in rags, sitting numbed on lorries or back to back on open cars on the railways, or toiling in all weathers at fortifications. The German forces themselves brought Austrians, Russians, and Italians. Among the Todt workers there were 27 different nationalities at one time or another. Mrs Tremayne's daughter Norah, visiting Guernsey, reported back to her mother rather confusedly to say the Island was full of what she called, 'Russians, Jews, Niggers, Americans, Italians, Poles and Swedes'.