The Channel Islands Occupation Archive

This is part 2 of the interview with Bernhard Weiss. He was drafted into the German army at 17yrs of age in 1943 and was immediately posted to the Channel Islands. Here he enjoyed a relatively trouble free life until starvation and low morale forced the soldiers to take drastic actions, including his shocking confession that he would hunt and eat cats to survive. His story continues…

BERNHARD WEISS

Interviewer: Did you steal food from the islanders?

Bernhard: No, we didn’t. But we started to steal other things like sugar. Restaurants which were still stocked were confiscated by our army and we helped ourselves on the side.  By February 1944 an order was issued.  Everyone caught stealing would be sentenced to death. We all had to sign it but we continued to steal all the same.
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This is part 1 of an interview conducted with Bernhard Weiss, a German citizen who was drafted into the German army in 1943 at the age of 18. He was a private stationed in Guernsey until the liberation of the islands by British forces in 1945. He was sent as a POW to England for a few years after the war ended. He was part of the 319 Division signals unit and as he arrived late in the war years, has a unique story to tell about the last days of the Occupation when starvation and fear destroyed the remaining morale of the occupying force.

BERNHARD WEISS

Bernhard: I am from originally from the area of Schlesigen which became Poland after the war. Before the war I worked on a farm just like my father did. I worked there until I was drafted in 1943.

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Apologies to readers for the lack of new content on here for the last few weeks, as I took a summer break for various weddings and my honeymoon. Now that this busy period is ended, I am looking forward to increasing the content on the site much more regularly and also re-vamping the site visually to give it a bit more of an identity (rather than the standard template we are currently using).

Content coming up includes more interview transcripts including a Captain and Major from 319 Division and the memories of two Islanders who were young children during the Occupation.

Thanks for your patience and we hope that you continue to check out the site to see what’s been added.

This is part 3 of the interview conducted with Bob Le Souer, a lifelong Jersey resident who was a young man during the Occupation. Bob was involved closely in the hiding of escaped Russian workers from Organisation Todt, the German company contracted with building all the fortifications that covered throughout the islands.

BOB LE SOUER

Interviewer: Moving on, you mentioned before this interview a story of some Germans who got stranded off the shore and were unable to be rescued. Please can you tell us more?

Bob: This was a sadly ironic case that happened off the south east coast of Jersey about a little less than a mile off shore called Seymour Tower.

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This is part 2 of the interview conducted with Bob Le Souer, a lifelong Jersey resident who was a young man during the Occupation. Bob was involved closely in the hiding of escaped Russian workers from Organisation Todt, the German company contracted with building all the fortifications that covered throughout the islands.

BOB LE SOUER

Interviewer: What were the risks involved in helping the workers escape?

Bob: Well quite considerable, I told you earlier about the old lady who ended up in a gas chamber, although that was I think extreme. Normally that would not have happened. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison initially, but if you had a sentence of more than a certain length of time, you didn’t do it in the islands but were sent to France. But after the Allies landed Normandy, the whole system collapsed and prisoners were moved around from one place to another and many got lost in the system.

Interviewer: How would you make sure that these forced labourers were kept hidden?

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In this post is part 1 of the interview conducted in August 2001 as part of the filming of In Toni’s Footsteps. The interviewee is Bob Le Souer, a Jersey resident who lived through the German Occupation. At the time of the invasion he was a young man starting a career in insurance sales. He was heavily involved in the housing and moving of escaped Russian labourers who were brought into the island by Organisation Todt to build the vast network of defensive fortifications that covered the islands.

Part two of this interview will be published shortly.

BOB LE SOUER

Bob: My name is Bob Le Souer, a very Jersey name!

During the Occupation I was very young, I was 19 when the Occupation began and I was working in the local office of an insurance company.

Interviewer: Can you expain a little bit about how business was affected by the Occupation

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Artur Boch was a dispatch rider serving with 319 Division in Guernsey. He turned 17 in the second half of the Second World War and was immediately drafted into a bicycle cavalry unit. He served in Guernsey until the Liberation of the Channel Islands in May 1945. Following this he served as a prisoner of war in England until 1948 before being allowed to return home.

This interview was conducted in August 2001 as part of the filming for In Toni’s Footsteps: The Channel Islands Occupation Remembered.

This is part two of the interview. Part one was published on May 6th 2008.

ARTUR BOCH

Interviewer: After the invasion had happened you would have had no contact with your family. Were you worried about them?

Artur: Well, yes, because I was born in a little village with about five hundred souls and the front came closer every day. They were already in Germany at this point and we were worried about the future. Our house, I found out much later, was right beside an important cross road for the army. They moved their troops through there. So it was a target. And our house was hit by a granade one day. Luckily, my father had just gone out when, literally a few seconds later, this granade dropped on our house and went straight into my parent’s bed room.

My father was so lucky he was missed. They later did up the bed room again.
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The following is an extract from the novel War on the Margins, generously provided by author Libby Cone. The meticulously researched Jersey-set novel tells the story of a young Jewish woman, Marlene Zimmer, throughout the war years of occupation. We struggle with her as this heretofore timid and nervous young woman gathers strength and maturity to aid two famous French women in their Resistance efforts against the occupiers. The book has been added to the stock of our Occupation shop

This passage concerns Marlene Zimmer, a clerk for the Aliens Office who goes into hiding when Clifford Orange, the Chief Aliens Officer for Jersey, asks her to register as a Jew because of her deceased Jewish father. She flees St. Helier, winding up hiding in St. Brelade with Claude Cahun (Lucille Schwob) and Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe), the Surrealist-artists-turned-Resistance propagandists (They signed their propaganda leaflets “The Nameless Soldier”).

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Artur Boch was a dispatch rider serving with 319 Division in Guernsey. He turned 17 in the second half of the Second World War and was immediately drafted into a bicycle cavalry unit. He served in Guernsey until the Liberation of the Channel Islands in May 1945. Following this he served as a prisoner of war in England until 1948 before being allowed to return home.

This interview was conducted in August 2001 as part of the filming for In Toni’s Footsteps: The Channel Islands Occupation Remembered.

This is part one of the interview. Part two will be published separately.

ARTUR BOCH

Artur: My name is Boch. I was seventeen and a half when I was drafted. We first came to Holland where we were trained. We came to Guernsey in October. We went by train to the coast. I can’t remember how long exactly the journey was. We first went to St Malo and at night got on a ship to Guernsey. We arrived in Guernsey during the night and marched all the way to Fort George where we were stationed. We were a bicycle squadron. The squadron had been cavalry but was changed to bikes.

Well, the next day we looked down, it was a wonderful view. I hadn’t seen much of the island until then, that came later. St Peter Port was not so far away from Fort George, maybe 2 km. We arrived there as young recruits, were trained for another 4 weeks and then brought together with the older soldiers

Interviewer: There were a lot of soldiers already posted in the Islands when you arrived. How did you find they were towards you, being so young when you arrived?
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Launching this week is the first of a series of new content additions to the site that are part of a bigger project called the Occupation Archive. This new site will be an online record of personal accounts, photos, diaries, letters and official information detailing the history of the Occupation of the Channel Islands.

The idea behind the archive is that it will be an organic site that can be added to by members of the public. Its expected that this blog format will be used initially. This allows tagging of stories, with the most popular tagged items or words appearing in the searchable tag cloud to the right. This allows easy searching of related articles.

The addition of information will be a bit sporadic in the early phases as the site is soon to be overhauled visually (we know its not the prettiest girl on the block at present!) and so for now the archive will be supported under the In Toni’s Footsteps: The Channel Islands Occupation Remembered name but will eventually be moved into its more suitable location on new domain www.occupationarchive.co.uk. The first addition to the site is a story not actually about the Occupation as such but events following the Liberation of Alderney. Tonight there will also be added a transcript of the first of 24 interviews that were conducted with both islanders and serving German soldiers as part of the making of In Toni’s Footsteps: The Channel Islands Occupation Remembered

We are keen for people to start submitting new content and are planning on targeting local media and websites for contributions towards making this site the largest and most concise gathering of Occupation related information on the web, one that can serve as an archive of the time and a resource for generations of scholars to come. Site visitors can also comment on any of the stories that are featured, disagree, discuss or add an alternative viewpoint. The site is designed to be a community one where all visitors have a voice.

If you are interested in knowing when new content is added to the site, please sign up to our RSS feed which will notify you of any changes made to the site so you can always be the first to read and comment.

If you have a story, piece of information, picture or anything else to offer please contact us. All contributions will be credited to the author and sources referenced as required. We want this to be an accurate museum to that turbulent time and so thank you in advance for any support you can offer.

Thanks

Carl
Project Leader- Occupation Archive