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The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands Under German Rule 1940-1945
During the German occupation of Britain's Channel Islands, there were love affairs between island women and German soldiers, betrayals and black marketeering, individual acts of resistance, and feats of courage and endurance. Every islander was faced with uncomfortable choices: where did patriotism end and self-preservation begin? What moral obligation did they have to the thousands of emaciated and ill-treated slave laborers the Nazis brought among them to build an impregnable ring of defences around the islands?
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
22 people are currently reading
206 people want to read
About the author
Madeleine Bunting
14 books29 followersMadeleine was born in North Yorkshire, one of five children of artist parents. She studied history at Corpus Christi, Cambridge and Harvard, US. She held a number positions at the Guardian including reporter, leader writer, religious affairs editor, and for twelve years, she was a columnist. She wrote about a wide range of subjects including Islam, faith, global development, politics and social change.
She directed the Guardian’s first ever festival, Open Weekend, in 2012.
From 2012-14, she led a team as Editorial Director of Strategy, working on a project around reimagining the institution of a newspaper and its relationship with readers.
She has a longstanding interest in contemplative practices and in 2013 she co-founded The Mindfulness Initiative to explore the potential of mindfulness in public policy particularly health and education. The Initiative supported the All Party Parliamentary Group in their 10 month inquiry which led to a report Mindful Nation UK, published in October 2015.
She lives in East London with her family.
She has received a number of awards and prizes including an honorary fellowship from Cardiff University in 2013, the Portico Prize for The Plot in 2010, a Lambeth MA degree in 2006, The Race in the Media award in 2005 and the Imam wa Amal Special Award in 2002. She has won several One World Media awards for her journalism on global justice.
She directed the Guardian’s first ever festival, Open Weekend, in 2012.
From 2012-14, she led a team as Editorial Director of Strategy, working on a project around reimagining the institution of a newspaper and its relationship with readers.
She has a longstanding interest in contemplative practices and in 2013 she co-founded The Mindfulness Initiative to explore the potential of mindfulness in public policy particularly health and education. The Initiative supported the All Party Parliamentary Group in their 10 month inquiry which led to a report Mindful Nation UK, published in October 2015.
She lives in East London with her family.
She has received a number of awards and prizes including an honorary fellowship from Cardiff University in 2013, the Portico Prize for The Plot in 2010, a Lambeth MA degree in 2006, The Race in the Media award in 2005 and the Imam wa Amal Special Award in 2002. She has won several One World Media awards for her journalism on global justice.
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May 18, 2025
The modern mind recoils at the very idea – what if Nazi Germany had invaded and occupied Great Britain? This (fortunately) counterfactual scenario has intrigued many people for decades, as when British thriller author Len Deighton made it the subject of his 1978 novel SS-GB. And Deighton, who owns a residence on the island of Guernsey, may have drawn part of his inspiration for SS-GB from knowing that Guernsey, Jersey, Salk, Alderney, and the rest of the United Kingdom’s Channel Islands suffered five years of German occupation during the Second World War. The all-too-real story of what happened when 198 square kilometres of British territory, and 60,000 British subjects, fell under Nazi rule is told in a painful and powerful manner by Madeleine Bunting in her 1995 book The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands Under German Rule, 1940-1945.
Bunting, who has written for decades for The Guardian as both reporter and columnist, brings to the writing of The Model Occupation her journalistic training in seeking out stories that have not previously been told – indeed, stories that some might not want to hear being told. Her book occasioned considerable controversy when it was published 50 years after Liberation; I carried the book with me on a visit to the Isle of Jersey, and found it to be an informative and troubling companion throughout my time there.
It may be helpful, for some readers who may not know the U.K.’s Channel Islands (or who might tend to confuse them with a comparably beautiful set of Channel Islands off the California coast), to talk a bit about what makes these British possessions so unique. Located just off the coast of northwestern France, the Channel Islands were part of the Duchy of Normandy from the 10th century on. Through all of the wars that England and France fought over the centuries, the Channel Islands remained an English or British possession, whilst never actually being incorporated into the Kingdom of England or any of its successor kingdoms, including the U.K.
To this day, the British monarch officially rules the Channel Islands as Duke of Normandy, just as William the Conqueror once did. Jersey and Guernsey are both “bailiwicks,” administered by bailiffs; each has its own pound currency. In short, these lovely little islands hold a unique and curious place within British democracy.
Before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Channel Islands were a pleasant and isolated place where British holiday-makers could seek out some seaside relaxation amidst mild weather (milder than London or Glasgow, anyway). But when war began, and France fell to the Nazis with unexpected speed, the position of the Channel Islands as British possessions rapidly became untenable. Some evacuation efforts were undertaken, and a number of islanders were taken to the British mainland; but the messaging about evacuation was muddled and inconsistent, and tens of thousands of British subjects were still on the islands when a Luftwaffe warplane landed at Jersey’s airport on 1 July 1940, and the German occupation of the Channel Islands began.
It was meant to be a “model occupation” (hence the title of Bunting’s book). The islands had not been fortified, and they had been surrendered peacefully; the British administrators retained their governmental authority, with their decisions subject to approval by the occupying German military command. Moreover, Hitler thought that a “mild” occupation of this bit of British territory might have considerable propaganda value. Accordingly, Channel Islanders did not face the kind of brutal day-to-day oppression that was the norm across the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe. And for the occupying Germans, the warm weather, the seaside ambience, the lack of military conflict, and the presence of attractive young women (some of whom entered into love affairs with the German soldiers) made this occupation duty seem almost pleasant – at first.
And yet, as Bunting makes clear, the “model occupation” was an occupation nonetheless, and an occupation under Nazi tyranny at that. The bailiffs of the islands had instructions from London to take over civil administration, coordinating whenever possible with German military authorities, whilst ensuring that their actions remained within the limits set forth by the Hague Conventions. Unfortunately, the bailiffs’ coordination began to seem, to a number of islanders, more like “cooperation,” and it included some measures at which the modern reader feels dismay or even horror.
More specifically, when islanders on Guernsey painted “V”-for-British-victory graffiti on road signs across the island, the bailiff of Guernsey offered a £25 reward for information leading to the graffitists’ capture. When two German soldiers were killed in a British raid on the islands, and the Germans demanded in retaliation that island authorities furnish a list of 200 British-born islanders who could be deported to internment camps in Germany, the bailiffs did so, and those deportations were duly carried out.
And, worst of all, in 1941 the Germans’ nazification efforts went beyond Nazi propaganda films in island cinemas, and mandatory German lessons in island schools, to include forced registration of all Jewish residents of the Channel Islands, followed by a series of increasingly severe anti-Jewish laws. Island authorities cooperated here, too, although they could have refused to do so on the basis of the Hague Conventions. As Bunting aptly puts it, “This aspect of the Channel Islands’ Nazification programme was to have tragic consequences, and is one of the most haunting stories of the Occupation” (p. 105).
Therese Steiner, Auguste Spitz, and Marianne Grunfeld were all deported from Guernsey in January of 1942. All three of these women died at Auschwitz.
Another horrifying aspect of the history of the occupation is the fate of the enslaved labourers brought from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other parts of Eastern Europe to construct fortifications for the defence of the islands. Hitler was determined to hold on to the islands, in spite of their lack of strategic and tactical value, and therefore millions of deutschmarks were spent on fortifications, and hundreds of workers died from overwork, starvation, and mistreatment. As part of Bunting’s herculean labours in putting this book together, she travelled all the way to Russia to interview some of those workers who were fortunate enough to survive.
Bunting’s impressions of the old German fortifications as a part of modern Channel Islands life match with my own impressions from when I was on Jersey:
The concrete bunkers are now overgrown with brambles, and the anti-tank barriers serve as seawalls. It is hard to imagine the suffering their construction entailed now, especially on a sunny summer’s day, when families picnic on their concrete bulk and the beaches are dotted with the brightly coloured towels of holidaymakers. Even the dank, dark tunnels of Guernsey, Jersey, and Alderney, used for fuel and ammunition depots and underground hospitals, have almost lost their power to disturb. Having survived the depredations of generations of inquisitive children and memorabilia hunters, several have been converted into highly successful museums, bustling with coachloads of tourists snapping up souvenirs and scones. A few scraps of graffiti, such as a star of David, or initials scraped into the setting concrete, hint at the hundreds of men who lost their lives building these vast monuments to Hitler’s grandiose ambitions. (p. 154)
Resistance efforts against the occupation were limited at best, and often seem to have been the province of teenagers expressing youthful defiance. Visit the Jersey War Tunnels museum, and you will see a quote from an islander to the effect of, “What were we supposed to do – go up into the hills, and carry on a resistance from there, like in France? There were no hills to go up into.”
The difficulties of occupation in the Channel Islands got worse after the D-Day invasion of 6 June 1944 began the liberation of Western Europe. As strategically and tactically irrelevant to the Allies as they had been to the Axis, the islands were simply bypassed by the Allied forces as they hit the beaches of Normandy and moved inland across France. The food rationing that had always been an odious feature of occupation life became worse as supplies from France were cut off, and starvation began to seem like a very real prospect for occupied islanders and occupying Germans alike.
Of the Germans still holding the islands, Winston Churchill had famously said, “Let ’em starve!” Channel Islanders might have wondered if Churchill’s words applied to them as well.
When liberation finally occurred on 9 May 1945, it was a joyous occasion across the islands. As time passed, however, questions of accountability for what had been done during the occupation mounted. Would Nazi officials who had tortured and murdered the enslaved labourers from Eastern Europe face justice, as leading Nazis did at Nuremberg? Would those who had collaborated with the German occupiers – from black marketeers to farmers who had reaped rich profits from voluntarily selling their produce to the Germans – face consequences for their actions?
A haunting chapter titled “Justice Done?” suggests that, in many cases, the answer was no. A variety of factors – ambiguity over jurisdiction; questions of whether trials should be run by, and should occur in, Great Britain or the Soviet Union; deepening distrust between the U.K. and the U.S.S.R. as the Cold War grew chillier – meant that a number of Nazi officials, against whom there existed a very strong case for war-crimes trials, escaped justice.
On the Channel Islands, meanwhile, there was embarrassment among many, including both island officials and ordinary islanders, regarding the behaviour of some islanders during the occupation. And British subjects on the British mainland didn’t want to think too hard about British territory being occupied for five years, and being permitted to remain occupied, with an SS camp operating on British soil. Great Britain’s Home Secretary visited the islands six days after liberation and spoke to the islanders. “Forgive and forget, he offered; it was an arrangement which suited both sides” (p. 303).
Visit the Jersey War Tunnels today, and you will find it to be a well-appointed and well-arranged museum. A visitor is given a replica of a real-life Jersey identity card of the kind that the Germans forced all islanders to carry, and is invited to follow the life and learn the fate of that Jersey resident. Exhibits call the visitor’s attention to the suffering of the enslaved labourers who constructed the tunnels (Bunting, who is quite critical of the historical amnesia she sees at work in many parts of the islands, praises this feature of the Jersey museum). There is a strong focus on the moral ambiguities of the occupation; for instance, if a smiling German soldier offers your child an ice cream cone, what do you do?
The docents at the museum are friendly and courteous – and are delighted to meet an American visitor with ties to the U.S. state of New Jersey that is named for their Jersey, the original Jersey. Yet if you mention that you have been reading Bunting’s book, the response is a guarded “Oh. Alright.” And The Model Occupation is noticeably absent from the museum’s well-stocked book and souvenir shop – another reminder of how painful and difficult this history is.
I do take issue with Bunting’s belief that the situation of the Channel Islands reflects what likely would have happened if the Germans had invaded and conquered the British mainland. The Channel Islands, as any resident of or visitor to the islands can tell you, are very small, and the ratio of German occupiers to island residents was sometimes as high as 1:2. The United Kingdom, in 1940, had a population of about 47 million people. Would the Germans have been able to deploy 23.5 million soldiers to occupy and garrison the entire U.K.? Does anyone really think that Scotland, or Northern Ireland, wouldn’t have been apt to give Jerry more than a bit of trouble?
Nonetheless, I appreciate Madeleine Bunting’s courage in writing The Model Occupation – a book that spares nothing in setting forth the reasons why the psychological wounds from the German occupation of the Channel Islands remain at least partially unhealed.
Bunting, who has written for decades for The Guardian as both reporter and columnist, brings to the writing of The Model Occupation her journalistic training in seeking out stories that have not previously been told – indeed, stories that some might not want to hear being told. Her book occasioned considerable controversy when it was published 50 years after Liberation; I carried the book with me on a visit to the Isle of Jersey, and found it to be an informative and troubling companion throughout my time there.
It may be helpful, for some readers who may not know the U.K.’s Channel Islands (or who might tend to confuse them with a comparably beautiful set of Channel Islands off the California coast), to talk a bit about what makes these British possessions so unique. Located just off the coast of northwestern France, the Channel Islands were part of the Duchy of Normandy from the 10th century on. Through all of the wars that England and France fought over the centuries, the Channel Islands remained an English or British possession, whilst never actually being incorporated into the Kingdom of England or any of its successor kingdoms, including the U.K.
To this day, the British monarch officially rules the Channel Islands as Duke of Normandy, just as William the Conqueror once did. Jersey and Guernsey are both “bailiwicks,” administered by bailiffs; each has its own pound currency. In short, these lovely little islands hold a unique and curious place within British democracy.
Before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Channel Islands were a pleasant and isolated place where British holiday-makers could seek out some seaside relaxation amidst mild weather (milder than London or Glasgow, anyway). But when war began, and France fell to the Nazis with unexpected speed, the position of the Channel Islands as British possessions rapidly became untenable. Some evacuation efforts were undertaken, and a number of islanders were taken to the British mainland; but the messaging about evacuation was muddled and inconsistent, and tens of thousands of British subjects were still on the islands when a Luftwaffe warplane landed at Jersey’s airport on 1 July 1940, and the German occupation of the Channel Islands began.
It was meant to be a “model occupation” (hence the title of Bunting’s book). The islands had not been fortified, and they had been surrendered peacefully; the British administrators retained their governmental authority, with their decisions subject to approval by the occupying German military command. Moreover, Hitler thought that a “mild” occupation of this bit of British territory might have considerable propaganda value. Accordingly, Channel Islanders did not face the kind of brutal day-to-day oppression that was the norm across the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe. And for the occupying Germans, the warm weather, the seaside ambience, the lack of military conflict, and the presence of attractive young women (some of whom entered into love affairs with the German soldiers) made this occupation duty seem almost pleasant – at first.
And yet, as Bunting makes clear, the “model occupation” was an occupation nonetheless, and an occupation under Nazi tyranny at that. The bailiffs of the islands had instructions from London to take over civil administration, coordinating whenever possible with German military authorities, whilst ensuring that their actions remained within the limits set forth by the Hague Conventions. Unfortunately, the bailiffs’ coordination began to seem, to a number of islanders, more like “cooperation,” and it included some measures at which the modern reader feels dismay or even horror.
More specifically, when islanders on Guernsey painted “V”-for-British-victory graffiti on road signs across the island, the bailiff of Guernsey offered a £25 reward for information leading to the graffitists’ capture. When two German soldiers were killed in a British raid on the islands, and the Germans demanded in retaliation that island authorities furnish a list of 200 British-born islanders who could be deported to internment camps in Germany, the bailiffs did so, and those deportations were duly carried out.
And, worst of all, in 1941 the Germans’ nazification efforts went beyond Nazi propaganda films in island cinemas, and mandatory German lessons in island schools, to include forced registration of all Jewish residents of the Channel Islands, followed by a series of increasingly severe anti-Jewish laws. Island authorities cooperated here, too, although they could have refused to do so on the basis of the Hague Conventions. As Bunting aptly puts it, “This aspect of the Channel Islands’ Nazification programme was to have tragic consequences, and is one of the most haunting stories of the Occupation” (p. 105).
Therese Steiner, Auguste Spitz, and Marianne Grunfeld were all deported from Guernsey in January of 1942. All three of these women died at Auschwitz.
Another horrifying aspect of the history of the occupation is the fate of the enslaved labourers brought from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other parts of Eastern Europe to construct fortifications for the defence of the islands. Hitler was determined to hold on to the islands, in spite of their lack of strategic and tactical value, and therefore millions of deutschmarks were spent on fortifications, and hundreds of workers died from overwork, starvation, and mistreatment. As part of Bunting’s herculean labours in putting this book together, she travelled all the way to Russia to interview some of those workers who were fortunate enough to survive.
Bunting’s impressions of the old German fortifications as a part of modern Channel Islands life match with my own impressions from when I was on Jersey:
The concrete bunkers are now overgrown with brambles, and the anti-tank barriers serve as seawalls. It is hard to imagine the suffering their construction entailed now, especially on a sunny summer’s day, when families picnic on their concrete bulk and the beaches are dotted with the brightly coloured towels of holidaymakers. Even the dank, dark tunnels of Guernsey, Jersey, and Alderney, used for fuel and ammunition depots and underground hospitals, have almost lost their power to disturb. Having survived the depredations of generations of inquisitive children and memorabilia hunters, several have been converted into highly successful museums, bustling with coachloads of tourists snapping up souvenirs and scones. A few scraps of graffiti, such as a star of David, or initials scraped into the setting concrete, hint at the hundreds of men who lost their lives building these vast monuments to Hitler’s grandiose ambitions. (p. 154)
Resistance efforts against the occupation were limited at best, and often seem to have been the province of teenagers expressing youthful defiance. Visit the Jersey War Tunnels museum, and you will see a quote from an islander to the effect of, “What were we supposed to do – go up into the hills, and carry on a resistance from there, like in France? There were no hills to go up into.”
The difficulties of occupation in the Channel Islands got worse after the D-Day invasion of 6 June 1944 began the liberation of Western Europe. As strategically and tactically irrelevant to the Allies as they had been to the Axis, the islands were simply bypassed by the Allied forces as they hit the beaches of Normandy and moved inland across France. The food rationing that had always been an odious feature of occupation life became worse as supplies from France were cut off, and starvation began to seem like a very real prospect for occupied islanders and occupying Germans alike.
Of the Germans still holding the islands, Winston Churchill had famously said, “Let ’em starve!” Channel Islanders might have wondered if Churchill’s words applied to them as well.
When liberation finally occurred on 9 May 1945, it was a joyous occasion across the islands. As time passed, however, questions of accountability for what had been done during the occupation mounted. Would Nazi officials who had tortured and murdered the enslaved labourers from Eastern Europe face justice, as leading Nazis did at Nuremberg? Would those who had collaborated with the German occupiers – from black marketeers to farmers who had reaped rich profits from voluntarily selling their produce to the Germans – face consequences for their actions?
A haunting chapter titled “Justice Done?” suggests that, in many cases, the answer was no. A variety of factors – ambiguity over jurisdiction; questions of whether trials should be run by, and should occur in, Great Britain or the Soviet Union; deepening distrust between the U.K. and the U.S.S.R. as the Cold War grew chillier – meant that a number of Nazi officials, against whom there existed a very strong case for war-crimes trials, escaped justice.
On the Channel Islands, meanwhile, there was embarrassment among many, including both island officials and ordinary islanders, regarding the behaviour of some islanders during the occupation. And British subjects on the British mainland didn’t want to think too hard about British territory being occupied for five years, and being permitted to remain occupied, with an SS camp operating on British soil. Great Britain’s Home Secretary visited the islands six days after liberation and spoke to the islanders. “Forgive and forget, he offered; it was an arrangement which suited both sides” (p. 303).
Visit the Jersey War Tunnels today, and you will find it to be a well-appointed and well-arranged museum. A visitor is given a replica of a real-life Jersey identity card of the kind that the Germans forced all islanders to carry, and is invited to follow the life and learn the fate of that Jersey resident. Exhibits call the visitor’s attention to the suffering of the enslaved labourers who constructed the tunnels (Bunting, who is quite critical of the historical amnesia she sees at work in many parts of the islands, praises this feature of the Jersey museum). There is a strong focus on the moral ambiguities of the occupation; for instance, if a smiling German soldier offers your child an ice cream cone, what do you do?
The docents at the museum are friendly and courteous – and are delighted to meet an American visitor with ties to the U.S. state of New Jersey that is named for their Jersey, the original Jersey. Yet if you mention that you have been reading Bunting’s book, the response is a guarded “Oh. Alright.” And The Model Occupation is noticeably absent from the museum’s well-stocked book and souvenir shop – another reminder of how painful and difficult this history is.
I do take issue with Bunting’s belief that the situation of the Channel Islands reflects what likely would have happened if the Germans had invaded and conquered the British mainland. The Channel Islands, as any resident of or visitor to the islands can tell you, are very small, and the ratio of German occupiers to island residents was sometimes as high as 1:2. The United Kingdom, in 1940, had a population of about 47 million people. Would the Germans have been able to deploy 23.5 million soldiers to occupy and garrison the entire U.K.? Does anyone really think that Scotland, or Northern Ireland, wouldn’t have been apt to give Jerry more than a bit of trouble?
Nonetheless, I appreciate Madeleine Bunting’s courage in writing The Model Occupation – a book that spares nothing in setting forth the reasons why the psychological wounds from the German occupation of the Channel Islands remain at least partially unhealed.
February 11, 2021
Trigger warning: reading Madeleine Bunting’s The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands Under German Rule, 1940-1945 may cause severe reactions including moral confusion, disillusionment, or disgust.
In her excellent review, Caroline has hit the high and low points of Bunting’s impressive history: I’ll try to avoid reiterating her points. My overall reaction to The Model Occupation is that the moral calculus of the Islanders and the British, both societally and governmentally, to the German occupation of Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, and Sark is confusing. As outsiders to the Channel Islands of 1940-1945 and also three quarters of a century later, should we judge what constituted conciliation to preserve the most lives, whether conciliation led to complaisance, whether complaisance led to compliance and cooperation, and finally to complicity and cooperation? Should we judge whether peaceful coexistence signaled tacit acceptance of an abhorrent German regime, and whether willful ignorance and peaceful coexistence, both contemporaneously and later, served as tacit acceptance of the occupying regime and all it represented? Should we judge whether the foot soldiers of the occupying regime, regardless of their rank, bore a moral burden? Could their good looks, charm, fine manners, and education excuse their service to their regime? But if judgement is spared, what have we learned and how can we be better equip ourselves for future similar events? And who should render judgment?: the slave laborers who were imprisoned and died anonymously on Alderney?; the Islanders who remained; the few Islanders who fled?; or the Islanders, whether new to the Channel Islands or born and bred, who were exiled, imprisoned, and killed? What’s the ultimate societal price of maintaining national self-image of a mythic heroic past?
Madeleine Bunting’s The Model Occupation: The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands Under German Rule, 1940-1945 is excellent, compelling, and remarkably readable. It’s to her credit that she raises, both implicitly and explicitly, many basic moral questions that needed to be addressed during and after the Occupation as well as now.
4.5 star
In her excellent review, Caroline has hit the high and low points of Bunting’s impressive history: I’ll try to avoid reiterating her points. My overall reaction to The Model Occupation is that the moral calculus of the Islanders and the British, both societally and governmentally, to the German occupation of Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, and Sark is confusing. As outsiders to the Channel Islands of 1940-1945 and also three quarters of a century later, should we judge what constituted conciliation to preserve the most lives, whether conciliation led to complaisance, whether complaisance led to compliance and cooperation, and finally to complicity and cooperation? Should we judge whether peaceful coexistence signaled tacit acceptance of an abhorrent German regime, and whether willful ignorance and peaceful coexistence, both contemporaneously and later, served as tacit acceptance of the occupying regime and all it represented? Should we judge whether the foot soldiers of the occupying regime, regardless of their rank, bore a moral burden? Could their good looks, charm, fine manners, and education excuse their service to their regime? But if judgement is spared, what have we learned and how can we be better equip ourselves for future similar events? And who should render judgment?: the slave laborers who were imprisoned and died anonymously on Alderney?; the Islanders who remained; the few Islanders who fled?; or the Islanders, whether new to the Channel Islands or born and bred, who were exiled, imprisoned, and killed? What’s the ultimate societal price of maintaining national self-image of a mythic heroic past?
Madeleine Bunting’s The Model Occupation: The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands Under German Rule, 1940-1945 is excellent, compelling, and remarkably readable. It’s to her credit that she raises, both implicitly and explicitly, many basic moral questions that needed to be addressed during and after the Occupation as well as now.
4.5 star
December 24, 2015
The Occupation of the Channel Islands has become something of a footnote in Britain's history of World War II, a fact that might seem somewhat surprising. You would think the invasion and occupation of sovereign British soil by the forces of Nazi Germany for the duration of the war would merit rather more attention. And yet it seems as though all parties, the islanders, the British government and the German occupying forces, would rather forget it ever happened. Right from the moment of Liberation the process of forgetting began - there were no trials of Germans after the Liberation, and no memorials for the dead, no recognition of heroic acts. And there's a reason for that.
The Occupation of the Channel Islands upsets the mythic history of Britain's war, the belief that the British were different from the rest of the Continent, that when Churchill said we would fight on the beaches and in the streets, he and the rest of the population meant every word. The problem with the Channel Islands is that they didn't fight, not on the beaches, not in the streets, not in the fields or the landing grounds.
The islanders settled down to a peaceful occupation remarkably quickly, and the island governments reached an accommodation with the Germans that saw the occupiers working through the governmental structure already in place, with the pre-war official remaining in office and passing laws, regulations, announcements and orders on behalf of the Germans. Many then and after considered it dangerously close to, if not outright, collaboration. And the process of forgetting began very quickly - whilst the government issued many calls for resistance across Europe, whilst the King and Churchill mentioned other occupied areas of the Empire in messages and speeches, the BBC broadcast messages and programmes devoted to exiles and occupied areas, a tacit conspiracy of silence settled over any mention of the Channel Islands. No-one wanted to acknowledge that Hitler had already penetrated Britain's Island Fortress.
As a result of this desire to forget, histories of the Channel Islands occupation have been few and far between. Many islanders have been reluctant to talk, and tracking down the predominantly Russian slave labourers from the SS camp on Alderney was well-nigh impossible until the break-up of the Soviet Union. So this is one of the rare books on the Occupation that focuses on the men, women and children who actually lived through the war under German rule (I use the term German, not Nazi, as Madeline Bunting points out that very few of the Germans were actually Nazi party members and there was no Gestapo on the islands), as opposed to a primarily military account of bunkers, fortifications, mine fields and attempted raids. It's an excellent read, ranging from legal accommodations and personal fraternisations to small acts of rebellion and sabotage, those islanders deported to concentration camps, the slave labour camps, the experiences of the small number of resident Jews, the hardships and deprivations and, still, the pleasures and opportunities of wartime. Whilst it may be damning with faint praise, given the aforementioned scarcity of books on this topic, if I had to recommend one book on the Occupation, it would be this one.
The Occupation of the Channel Islands upsets the mythic history of Britain's war, the belief that the British were different from the rest of the Continent, that when Churchill said we would fight on the beaches and in the streets, he and the rest of the population meant every word. The problem with the Channel Islands is that they didn't fight, not on the beaches, not in the streets, not in the fields or the landing grounds.
The islanders settled down to a peaceful occupation remarkably quickly, and the island governments reached an accommodation with the Germans that saw the occupiers working through the governmental structure already in place, with the pre-war official remaining in office and passing laws, regulations, announcements and orders on behalf of the Germans. Many then and after considered it dangerously close to, if not outright, collaboration. And the process of forgetting began very quickly - whilst the government issued many calls for resistance across Europe, whilst the King and Churchill mentioned other occupied areas of the Empire in messages and speeches, the BBC broadcast messages and programmes devoted to exiles and occupied areas, a tacit conspiracy of silence settled over any mention of the Channel Islands. No-one wanted to acknowledge that Hitler had already penetrated Britain's Island Fortress.
As a result of this desire to forget, histories of the Channel Islands occupation have been few and far between. Many islanders have been reluctant to talk, and tracking down the predominantly Russian slave labourers from the SS camp on Alderney was well-nigh impossible until the break-up of the Soviet Union. So this is one of the rare books on the Occupation that focuses on the men, women and children who actually lived through the war under German rule (I use the term German, not Nazi, as Madeline Bunting points out that very few of the Germans were actually Nazi party members and there was no Gestapo on the islands), as opposed to a primarily military account of bunkers, fortifications, mine fields and attempted raids. It's an excellent read, ranging from legal accommodations and personal fraternisations to small acts of rebellion and sabotage, those islanders deported to concentration camps, the slave labour camps, the experiences of the small number of resident Jews, the hardships and deprivations and, still, the pleasures and opportunities of wartime. Whilst it may be damning with faint praise, given the aforementioned scarcity of books on this topic, if I had to recommend one book on the Occupation, it would be this one.
July 17, 2016
Paperback, 360 pp, 2004
Part of the book deals with the relationship between Jersey and Gurnsey which didn't seem to get along all that well. There is also some notice of incest in the area. A good portion of the book from that point deals with fraternization between the German soldiers and the women on the islands. The lack of overt resistance is covered along with the attitude of England towards the islands (which wasn't all that good.)
There are a number of pages of photographs and a discussion of the liberation of the islands and what happened after the end of the war.
Part of the book deals with the relationship between Jersey and Gurnsey which didn't seem to get along all that well. There is also some notice of incest in the area. A good portion of the book from that point deals with fraternization between the German soldiers and the women on the islands. The lack of overt resistance is covered along with the attitude of England towards the islands (which wasn't all that good.)
There are a number of pages of photographs and a discussion of the liberation of the islands and what happened after the end of the war.
January 31, 2018
Mostly based on interviews with those who experienced the German occupation of the Channel Islands, this book paints an interesting picture – being more critical of the Island authorities, and especially of the “sweep it under the carpet” attitude of the British Government after the liberation, than those from other histories and the latter day commemorations of the individual islands themselves might lead you to expect. It seems that the Guernsey authorities were less likely to protest or be uncooperative with the Germans than Jersey, and that on the whole these deeply conservative authorities were overly concerned with maintaining the status quo with as little disruption and provocation as possible. Not much likelihood of Heydrich-style assassination attempts here, though infrequent small-scale incursions from the mainland kept the occupiers on their toes. The book tries to recount the unhappy fate of the few Jews (many of them refugees from mainland Europe and caught in a limbo when the Phoney War of 1939/40 came to an abrupt end), and the horrors of the forced labour camps on the otherwise deserted Island of Alderney. There is a good description of the hardships and what must have been a strange sensation as the Islands were bypassed by D-day and its aftermath, suffering from supplies being cut off from the continent, and having to wait until May 1945 for the long-awaited Liberation Day. It is also heartening to read of the many individual acts of courage and resistance that did take place, and last but not least some of the humanity shown by a few of the ordinary soldiers of the occupation. Human stories make for a riveting read.
September 4, 2017
Fascinating read about an episode that I knew nothing about: the German occupation of the Channel islands (Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, etc.). The Germans were substantially laxer there than in other parts of occupied Europe, though they did have at least one SS camp there too.
Worthwhile read for texture about the period.
Worthwhile read for texture about the period.
April 5, 2012
I had no idea the Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans in WWII. After reading this book, I can understand why. Everyone wants to forget about it, but no one does. Bunting does extensive interviews with islanders and survivors creating a personal account from those who experienced it. Bunting is very British and I had a little trouble with her dialect, hence the 4 star rating. Otherwise, an excellent account of the occupation. The British miniseries "Island at War" (available on Netflix) is a fictional account of the occupation, but I recognized a lot of the situations described by book.
January 11, 2010
How would we deal with an occupation? During WW2, the Channel Islands were the sole British territory occupied by Nazi Germany for the duration of hostilities. They did not rebel, did not resist, and in some cases, actively collaborated. How would anyone deal with that exact situation? Would we passively resist the massive occupying force, like some did, or would we simply go about our lives in the new norm like the majority of the islanders did?
March 8, 2023
As a Jerseywoman I grew up on stories about the Occupation. By that point it had crystallised into twee tales about parsnip coffee, hidden wireless sets and secret pigs, subtle subterfuge and community spirit. The picture painted in this book, impressively researched by an English writer in the 90s, is much less flattering and infinitely more interesting.
Those tales of comradery and deprivation weren't exaggerated, but what stands out in this book is what was never talked about. A lack of resistance, with the CI governments (lacking any military support) co-operating with the Germans up to the point of tipping over into active collusion and turning over their tiny Jewish population, heartbreakingly, to perish in concentration camps. 18,000 POW were enslaved into forced labour on the islands; many local people witnessed their suffering cooly, labelling them "mountain savages" (they still weren't great with outsiders by the time I came on the scene, btw).
Neighbours informed on each other while an exhorbitent black market flourished, making fortunes for formerly impoverished local farmers (lending weight to my working class English mum's pet theory about how her in laws made their money!). Meanwhile, formerly wealthy people without agricultural nous lost everything, shifting the balance of power in these small communities forever.
One small but fascinating detail concerned the Jerrybags: women that had relations with German soldiers. This slur lasted well into my own lifetime, even though the men were conscripted soldiers and rarely Nazis. Of course it was always *someone else*, no one admitted to it after the war. This book paints a picture of a whole population of young women, raised for a life of hardship and servitude to island men, enchanted by the tall, blonde, fit soldiers that were showing them chivalry for the first time in their lives. Is it any wonder that Jerrybagging was almost the norm? One woman, who married a German soldier and moved with him to Germany, tells a story of how she grew up being repeatedly SA'd by her cousin--and that she doesn't know what might have happened to her if she hadn't met her husband.
Bunting frames this moral discomfort and ambiguity really well, using this "model occupation" to question British exceptionalism around WWII--the sort of complacency that has since contributed to Brexit. But she does analyse the specificities of the Channel Islands too--Jersey has some of the oldest legislation in the world, something it takes pride in instead of being prompted to modernise--and she does so with an objectivity that was NOT welcomed by the locals, LOL. While this is fascinating to me as a local, it's the wider implications that will be more resonant for most.
Those tales of comradery and deprivation weren't exaggerated, but what stands out in this book is what was never talked about. A lack of resistance, with the CI governments (lacking any military support) co-operating with the Germans up to the point of tipping over into active collusion and turning over their tiny Jewish population, heartbreakingly, to perish in concentration camps. 18,000 POW were enslaved into forced labour on the islands; many local people witnessed their suffering cooly, labelling them "mountain savages" (they still weren't great with outsiders by the time I came on the scene, btw).
Neighbours informed on each other while an exhorbitent black market flourished, making fortunes for formerly impoverished local farmers (lending weight to my working class English mum's pet theory about how her in laws made their money!). Meanwhile, formerly wealthy people without agricultural nous lost everything, shifting the balance of power in these small communities forever.
One small but fascinating detail concerned the Jerrybags: women that had relations with German soldiers. This slur lasted well into my own lifetime, even though the men were conscripted soldiers and rarely Nazis. Of course it was always *someone else*, no one admitted to it after the war. This book paints a picture of a whole population of young women, raised for a life of hardship and servitude to island men, enchanted by the tall, blonde, fit soldiers that were showing them chivalry for the first time in their lives. Is it any wonder that Jerrybagging was almost the norm? One woman, who married a German soldier and moved with him to Germany, tells a story of how she grew up being repeatedly SA'd by her cousin--and that she doesn't know what might have happened to her if she hadn't met her husband.
Bunting frames this moral discomfort and ambiguity really well, using this "model occupation" to question British exceptionalism around WWII--the sort of complacency that has since contributed to Brexit. But she does analyse the specificities of the Channel Islands too--Jersey has some of the oldest legislation in the world, something it takes pride in instead of being prompted to modernise--and she does so with an objectivity that was NOT welcomed by the locals, LOL. While this is fascinating to me as a local, it's the wider implications that will be more resonant for most.
March 12, 2025
Fantastic book. I’m from guernsey and I can totally recognise the way the author describes how the islanders tell their own story (and the parts they avoid). Bunting tells a very different and more complete version. She is not afraid to present an inconclusive and honest depiction of the range of local responses to an unprecedented set of events. The parts about Alderney were the most shocking and affecting, without sensationalism; to think that the biggest atrocity to ever take place in the British isles happened just across the water is chilling, and no one was really held to account and people do not talk about it. Loved it.
October 30, 2021
Well this was a real eye opener! Before reading this the only understanding that I had of the German Occupation of the Channel Islands was from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Compared with other Occupied European countries, I was under the impression that the Channel Islands had it relatively easy. I was very wrong! Absolutely appalling. But I am glad I read this to become more educated.
June 23, 2019
This is an excellent book; very well written and researched that tells the story of the Channel Islands' occupation by the Germans during World War II. I learnt so much from reading it - it's well worth a read and I can't recommend it enough.
December 1, 2020
A comprehensive, balanced, unbiased investigation into the history of the occupation of the Channel Islands based on first-hand accounts and meticulous research. This should be required reading for every resident or visitor of the Channel Islands.
November 18, 2022
There were a lot of firsthand experiences in this book which were really fascinating. We also see more information on the slave workers given then we usually do, with some of their stories as well.
Being written in the 90s, there is some outdated information, however.
Being written in the 90s, there is some outdated information, however.
May 25, 2018
Just pure enlightening history. Though I’ve read a bit about the islands during the was, this was mostly new information for me. Very good read.
February 7, 2019
A real life view of humanity on both sides of the war. A rare look into the flaws of a community that made choices for the good of the order. Branded collaborators by many, the Islanders felt they did what they had to do to survive. It also shows German soldiers as human beings with families who they missed, emotions they shared and the mutual feeling of a maniacal tyrant they knew would destroy their home.
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