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RUDOLPH RUETER

Interviewer: You mentioned that your friend Deisner was involved with a Guernsey woman. Was this a common occurrence  amongst local women and soldiers stationed there?

Rudolph: Well, I think they were a different type of women, really, but I am not sure. Most of the time it was just friendly contact or, in the case of Manfred and his Jane it was a real love story. Other than that, they hardly got involved with Germans. I mean, Manfred and Jane had been seeing each other for a long time and then they met again. I think theirs was a true love. The others it was all just, you know, fleeting encounters.

My other comrades, Koehler, who had a girlfriend in town, his encounter lasted a lot longer but it was over when the war was. No, most of these encounters were short lived and probably based on “mutual benefits“. Both parties got something out of it. I don’t know. I don’t know of any case where there was serious jealousy involved. It was all just temporary  and not all that serious.

Interviewer: Moving on, we understand that you were involved in a life-threatening incident involving a shipwreck during your time on the island. Please can you tell us the story of what happened?

Rudolph: I had not had any leave for over a year when I was granted fourteen days in January 1943.  It was four of us from our unit, who were to go on holiday. We were driven to the harbour to board the ship ”The Scotland“ or something like that. There was another ship in the harbour, too called France or Normandy, a small steam ship. It was a passenger ship. Ours was a freighter. I got on board and looked round for a place to stay the night. I looked down one loading hatch and saw timber loaded down there on the cement floor and a ladder leading down. I thought to myself, ”better not go down there, if something happens you’ll never make it back up again“. I checked out another loading hatch and there, the same scenario, a timber load and on top of it comrades sitting chatting, playing harmonica, looking forward to going home. But I thought to myself better not go down there either. So I looked on deck for somewhere to stay the night. I decided to take shelter from the wind  behind some planks.

We started moving but were still waiting for the convoy from Guernsey to take us to St Malo. Whilst we were waiting for the convoy, I suddenly noticed these light signals, the ship turned and it became unpleasant up on the deck. So, I decided to go down the iron spiral staircase, down to the first level.  I went into the machine room, the steam room. It was nice and cosy there. I sat on my suitcase resting my back against the isolated  wall of the hot boiler and everything felt great.

We had been going for ten minutes or so, when the ship came suddenly to an abrupt halt. The lights went out and on again. Then, we started moving again. I think, that was the biggest mistake. If the ship would not have moved again but kept sitting on the reef it may not have sank. So, any way, there I am in the machine room and feeling all cosy. Suddenly there was a bang, the light goes out. I get up. The light comes back on again and for a moment everything seemed okay. A moment later however I saw the water gushing forth from underneath the floor. There was such a high pressure, it must have been a meter high or so. And it moved from here to there, because the ship swayed. So, I call this sailor over, he was busy further inside the machine room. He comes, sees the water and tells me to get out of there. He gets a crate and starts to take out the embers, to avoid an explosion because if water gets near the boiler it all explodes. I left him to it. 

Upstairs they were busy firing flares. It was all chaos. I tried to find myself a place in a life boat, I’m not a good swimmer. There was one seat left in one of the boats. But the boat was still tied to the ship by the ropes and none of the sailors were in sight to undo them. They had all disappeared, the sailors. There were only two life boats, anyway. In the second boat, it was already in the water, I saw a female passenger and a few people from the Organisation Todt, old people, you know. I remember thinking, these must be French people, maybe they were being exchanged. Anyway, I had a knife on me and I was about to cut the ropes of the boat when I suddenly realised that by the time I would have untied the boat on both ends somebody else would have taken my place in it. It didn’t make sense to me, so I didn’t do it. The boat later sank together with the ship.

I found myself one of metal-framed inflatable life-rafts. I struggled to pull it from underneath this iron bar. By now the water had risen to knee level. You could hardly see the railing anymore. It looked like the ship would sink any minute now. Some people jumped into the water holding onto their suitcases some undressed before they jumped in. I thought, ”you better keep your clothes on or you’ll freeze“. I had my pistol on me and a sausage. And suddenly there was water everywhere, just gushing forth. The timber was floating past me and I drifted away from the ship. Rescue people started to fish out people at the other end of the ship. I called out for them. One of them heard me, turned the spotlight in my direction and told me that I would have to wait as there were far more people waiting to be saved on the other side of the ship, and that they would come back for me later. Well, I clang on to the railing with one hand and the inflatable life-raft with the other. The raft also contained a net, but the net was broken. Finally, I managed to climb inside the raft. It was old and rusty and leaked, and my legs didn’t fit in. All the while I kept drifting because of the strong current. It was something like eight miles per hour. I kept drifting and drifting because of the strong current. The rescue people had forgotten all about me. I was all by myself.

Some time later I saw a light coming from the land. I tried to reflect it with my aluminium water bottle, so they would see me. But they didn’t. I thought if I get to a bay by myself, there will be mines and I will explode up into the air. All the outer bays were full of mines, weren’t they. So I kept drifting round the Island all night long.

In the morning, drifting past one bay after the other I said to myself “you have to get on land at some point.” I had made myself a paddle from the timber that was floating round everywhere. It looked like a timber road in the sea. So, I took my makeshift paddle and tried to get on land. But I kept drifting because of the strong current. I remember thinking if you don’t reach this bay over there, right now, you’ll drift into the open sea. In the end I took my pistol and fired a few shots in the hope, someone on land would hear me. And then I saw a flare being fired on land and thought, “thank God, somebody saw me”. Two hours later a tug boat came towards me and I thought, “God, I hope, they saw me”, when suddenly the boat turns back. It had come across a mine field and had to turn. But they had seen me. They threw me a rope and got me on board. There was a British pilot on board. He was amazed to learn I had survived. They had not expect any more survivors after all these hours.

I remember asking them to help me get undressed. I also remember the smell of porridge and asking them for a portion. They gave me one and then I fell asleep. That’s all I remember. I had saved one bullet for myself in case I didn’t make it or got rescued because I was scared of drowning. I kept the pistol as a memory. Later, back home my father bedded the pistol into the mortar of the kitchen stove because he didn’t want to hand it over to the Allies.

Interviewer: What happened to the other three soldiers you were with from your unit?

Rudolph: They all drowned. I was fished out at the northern side of the island. The ship sank on the southern end. I always used to think, it was one hundred and seventy people who had drowned. Some statistics say it was one hundred and thirty.

Interviewer: Did such a high number of casualties come as a shock to the troops in the island?

Rudolph: It was nothing unusual. For example, I was reported missing around lunch and found the next day in the afternoon. I had already been pronounced dead.

Interviewer: So death was not something unusual for you to deal with?

Rudolph: No, nothing unusual about that. We had the news coming in from Russia. People were dying every single day, a lot more people. The guys on the ship had just been unlucky. The guys from my unit who’d been on the ship with me had all been excellent swimmers. Only one of them survived.

End of interview.

Read Part 1 of this interview. The boating accident described above is of great interest to the Occupation Archive. If anyone has more information on what this disaster might have been such as boat name and more accurate facts, we would be very interested in hearing about them.

Interview copyright 2001 High Tide Productions Ltd, can be reproduced with permission

RUDOLPH RUETER

Rudolph: My name is Rudolph Reuter. I was born on the same day as Hitler, April 20th. (laughs)

I am a baker by trade but in my spare time always mucked around with radio equipment.
So, when I was drafted they had me repair all the radio gear.

Interviewer: Did you enjoy being in the signals division?

Rudolph: It was great, brought me a lot of advantages. You see, everytime something unpleasant was coming up, like exercises, I invented an excuse, said something needed repairing. The things I got away with, you wouldn’t believe it.

It got even better when I was put in charge of  the whole radio system and the shift rota, too.

I give you an example: when it was announced in the morning we had to exercise, there would suddenly be a short-circuit in the telephone system, and of course,  I had to repair it immediately! Which would take most of the morning, well until they finished exercising anyway. (laughs)

You see, I was my own boss. I could do what I wanted.

Interviewer: Being in the signals meant you had access to all radio broadcasts. Did you ever listen in to the Allied news broadcasts as the war went on?

Rudolph: Yes, I regularily listened to the news and told my comrades what was going on.

Interviewer:  This must have put you in an interesting position. Did you know when your commanders were, for instance, hiding things from you late on in the war?

Rudolph: Well, when I went to this company meeting one Saturday where we’d normally get the latest report from the commander, our commander announced that the wonder weapon, the V2 rocket, was going to win us the war. Would you believe it?

Well, actually most of the soldiers did! The commander gave us such an inflammatory speech, they bought it straight.

I’d gone in there thinking, “that’s it, a few more days and the war is over”. But when I saw my comrades, I realised that they believed the whole story about that mysterious wonder weapon. So, I though I better keep my mouth shut or they’ll say ‘but he (points at himself) told us we’d lost the war already’.

Interviewer: How would you explain this belief from your colleagues? Desperation? Brain-washing?

Rudolph: Well, I guess, you could call it mass hypnosis, the way the commander talked to us that morning. People genuinely believed the war was almost over before they went into the meeting. When they came out they said ‘Wow, at last in ‘45, we got the Wonder Weapon. Now we’ll win the war!’

Interview. During your time in the island, did you have much contact with the locals?

Rudolph: You weren’t really allowed to, but somehow we all tried to make contact with the locals.

Actually, one of my superiors, he was shot because of it, six weeks before the end of the war. He had English girlfriends, one after the other. He wasn’t a very good soldier, though. He had a poor reputation, as a soldier, I mean. They had arrested him and put him in the nick.

Interviewer: Why was he shot?

Rudolph: It was a succession of unfortunate circumstances which let to him being shot, very unfortunate. To start of with, his wife was expecting a baby. The Allies had already marched into Germany, we were starving and we were putting up these fish traps down by the beach. The guy in charge of this was a real hard line Nazi.

So, my superior, Deisner was his name, he is there, too, at the beach, and looks at the fishing boats and says ‘We should try and get away from here in one of these’. What he meant to say was that he ought to try and get home to his wife who was expecting his baby. But this Nazi, he got it all wrong. He reported to his superior that Deisner wanted to flee the Island. Our chief commander had to act on the report  because Deisner was already  known because of his poor record as a soldier and the trouble he always got himself into with girls.

Because of the poor record Deisner had as a soldier and, if you want because our chief commander was a party line Nazi, too, he passed the report on to his superior. And then, Deisner got arrested.

No, hang on, there was something else. He came to us one afternoon and asked us to help him. He had been caught with this Guernsey woman and wanted to intimidate this local guy into not reporting him.

So he asked us to be false witnesses and tell this local guy that we had witnessed him stealing food from the parcel this woman had received from the Red Cross. Deisner only wanted to intimidate the guy, that’s all. But this guy, an English guy, he complained to the chief commander that he had been threatened with a gun, which wasn’t true. Deisner was a harmless soul, he would never have hurt anyone. But now there was this complaint so they had to arrest him.

During trial we were called as witnesses. We acted as if we didn’t know. We said that all we could remember is that Red Cross parcel on the table, all this food in there, so much food! Food we had forgotten existed and so on. The court got annoyed: ‘had we not noticed the civilian being threatened with a gun?’ “No,” we said, “all we saw was the food ( stretches out his arms) so much food, we couldn’t take our eyes off”. In the end, the court dismissed us as useless witnesses.

When they shot him, it was very disturbing for us…

Interviewer: Was there anything you tried to do to help him out?

Rudolph: During the trial me and a friend tried to bail him out. Admittedly, it was a stupid thing to have done, to threaten a civilian with a gun but Deisner didn’t mean any harm. He would never have done anything serious. But now he was in front of a court and on top of it, now the boat story, him wanting to flee by boat, came out too! And that was that. He was sentenced to death. He was returned to prison to await his execution.

I went to visit him there, brought him a clean shirt. Know what he said to me? He said ‘They can’t do much. The war will be over within the next few weeks. I filed a plea for clemency. By the time they’ll have it processed the war will be over.

Well, two days later, I was on duty when I received an urgent  message. This telegram had to be picked up immediately. A motorcyclist was dispatched to pick it up. That’s how I got to know about the execution the next morning.

Manfred Zimmer, he was among the command. They drove Deisner to the forest, in an ambulance. They weren’t really allowed to use an ambulance but did it anyway. They drove him to a gorge, well, a valley,  a beautiful valley, come to think of it. There they tied him to a tree. Read out the sentence and then they shot him. The war was almost over…

If our chief commander wouldn’t have given him such a bad assessment in court, I am sure, things  would not have turned out the way they did and he would not have been shot.

End of part 1

Part 2 of this interview including the final part of the story about Diesner and Rudolph’s dramatic escape from a shipwreck which killed a number of soldiers will be published shortly.

Interview copyright 2001 High Tide Productions Ltd, can be reproduced with permission

The first of these is we’ve set up a Flickr photo group- this is for anyone with any old archive images from the Occupation or pictures of fortifications etc. We are keen for people to add to this group and its been steadily growing since we first set it up with some wonderful images. You can access this at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/occupationarchive

Secondly I have set up a Twitter account to announce new content when its added for the site. I won’t be checking this continually but if oyu have a question please ask and I shall do my best to respond.

www.twitter.com

ID: @CI_occupation

Visitors to the site are slowly growing so hopefully we can continue that through 2009. Really hoping for more user submitted content but some more interviews on the way in the meantime.

All the best

Carl

Interviewer: Did you ever wish you were fighting in any of the other regions- France or the Russian Front for example?

Bernhard: Well, certainly not to the Eastern front. Nobody wanted to go there and I was lucky I didn’t have to. I was even more lucky to have ended up on an island. France? Well, I would have gone there but Guernsey was really the best of all bad choices. We were starving, yes, but at least we were safe. We were sheltering in the air-raid shelter of Europe, so to speak.

Interviewer: You eventually surrendered on 9th May 1944.

Bernhard: The war was over on the 8th of May but we only capitulated on the 9th because there was still an order issued on the 8th that we must continue the fight.

Well, we didn’t exactly fight but we were still under German power and had to follow orders. When the allies arrives the British took over. We had to hand over our weapons. We were driven to a square where we had to put all our weapons down. The munitions was thrown in the sea. We were taken out to the sea guarded by British troops.

Here is a little story for you. We stayed on the first floor of this house. When we heard the British guards do their round downstairs, we made a noise (makes machine gun noise) bam bam bam and did that (indicates gun gesture) at them. When they heard that they came running upstairs, but when they saw the state of us they just laughed. The British always appreciate a good joke.

Interviewer: Did you ever get any communications from your family after D-Day?

Bernhard: For us young ones letters from home  were not so important during the war. I mean, none of us had a family of their own. It was different for the older ones, of course. But we young ones didn’t give it much thought. Youth, you know.

Interviewer: So what happened after the liberation of the islands?

Bernhard: We stayed on the island until 17th of May. Then they came to pick us up. We had already handed over our guns. We were allowed to take us much of our belongings for the prisoner of war camp as we could carry. And boy did we carry! We were weak but carried as much as we could. Mainly clothing. We didn’t know what to expect. We were taken to the ship by boats. The boats were lifted up by the side of the ship and we had to jump on board. There was a huge gap between the ship and the boat, so we had to jump.

Whilst we were still in the boats, the British started to loot us. They went round with a metal detector and whatever they could find like watches, rings, they took from us. It was forbidden. And they knew it. Some of them got caught, too. That’s the only bad thing I have to say about the British.

Interviewer: Was it an Allied ship you were transported in?

Yes, it was an American troop carrier, designed to carry eight thousand people they told us. But it wasn’t true. We were stuck one on top of the other, so to speak. We didn’t leave the bay of Guernsey for another day because of the foggy weather. We were not allowed on deck, though. Shame about the view.

We arrived in England on the 19th. The whole place had been secured by barbed wire fences. A train was waiting  for us to take us to the prisoner of war camp. The interesting thing about that train was that it was a passenger train. In Germany we soldiers had got so used to travel in cattle trucks because of the war. Now as prisoners of war we got to travel on a passenger train!

Interviewer: Where were you taken to?

Bernhard: We were stationed between Bath and Bristol in a small town.

That’s when my weight was down to 88 pounds.  This prisoner of war camp was basically a huge transit camp. But there was no more transit so we stayed there for 4 months. We slept in these tank sheds, 160 soldiers in on shed. We were allowed short walks outside in the concrete square.  We were massively guarded. I have never seen so much barbed wire in my life and never so many soldiers on guard.

Interviewer: How were you feeling about the war in general at that point?

Bernhard: Well, let me put it this way. There was a lot of propaganda around and most of us fell for it, one way or another. We thought fighting a war would be exciting and a lot of fun.

I still remember when, on Christmas eve in 1942 I received my call-up for labour service. I will never forget my father’s reaction when I proudly showed him the letter. He slapped me across the face and  cried ‘you stupid boy!’.

Interviewer: What was the recruitment process like at that stage of the war?

Bernhard: From labour service you would go straight onto the SS. It was supposed to be a voluntary move but really, I remember, that when I entered the recruitment centre of the SS there was a folded piece of paper on the table. You were supposed to sign it without having read it.  We tried to hide behind the others, tried to get past the table but they noticed and picked us out. We had a medical check-up and given a health certificate grade A, a ‘fit for fighting first’. Now they wanted to know why we wouldn’t want to join them. I told them I wanted to join the horses. They said “Why don’t you come to the SS, we have cars?” And they told us we would be on leave before long and I could go help my father on the farm and all that. But I didn’t believe them and stuck to my horses instead until they asked me if my father had forbidden me to join them. I had to deny that, of course, it was really dangerous. If I would have said yes, they would have come for my father.

You see, the SS recruitment took place on a Tuesday by Friday these guys were drafted. I knew that because a friend of mine was among them.  Six weeks later this friend of mine was killed in Russia.

From the labour service I was drafted straight to the artillery. I was sixteen years old.  We first went to France but only stayed there for ten days. It was 1943, the African unit returned and needed their barracks back. We were briefly stationed at Serrant and then shipped over to Guernsey. As for mail, the last letter I received in Guernsey was in October 1944. The next letter I received from my family was Eastern in 1948.

Interviewer: What did you do after you were allowed to go home?

Bernhard: They were looking for twenty thousand German soldiers to stay in England to help on the farms. I applied and got the job. And was glad for it.  You see, I didn’t know where to go back to in Germany. Didn’t want to go to the east. Schlesingen had become Poland after the war and all Germans had had to leave. I stayed with an English farmer for another four months and after that was free to go wherever I wanted. I went back home to Germany for Christmas in 1948. The British government had paid for my return ticket. I came back to England in 1949 and decided to go back to Germany for good. But by now I had started to enjoy my youth so much I was completely broke. So, I had to stay on for a bit longer.

Interviewer: How were you treated by the farmer?

Bernhard: He wasn’t horrible but he wasn’t exactly friendly either.

But then, of course, as a German you couldn’t expect too much friendliness.  The world had judged us. You see, we didn’t know about the Jewish concentration camps.  When we were shown the films in the prisoner of war camp, we first said, “This is not us, it’s you, you British in your Boer War.” You see, we had no idea…

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.

I went stealing a few more times after that.  One time I almost got caught, that’s when I stopped. I had been picking kohlrabi ( German swede) in a greenhouse. It belonged to the infantry next door, when suddenly they were yelling ‘Stop! Who is there! Password!’  I had this little sack with me, almost filled with these swedes by now. I pressed the sack against my face and jumped through the glass wall of the green house, climbed over a wall and was gone by the time they opened fire.

Interviewer: What was the penalty for stealing if you were caught?

Bernhard: Being caught stealing back then meant you were brought before the court in town.  The court would  be in session at around 8.30 or 9.00am in the morning. By the time it was 10.00am you would be shot dead.

The stealing went down eventually, it was too dangerous. People didn’t want to pay with their lives. Life looked pretty grim in any case. I was down to 88 pounds when I became a prisoner of war. I had weight a healthy 140 pounds before. To weigh 88 pounds at the age of nineteen, that’s not a lot.

Interviewer: Did any soldiers report any of this to your officers?

Bernhard: None of us that I know of. But you wouldn’t have known anyway. It was kept secret. And you would be too scared to ask or tell anyone. Maybe we young ones were more afraid of this than the older ones, but I couldn’t say for sure.

Interviewer: What about the officers? Were they also starving?

Bernhard: I take it they had a bit more to eat than we had. Not that we would have seen it. They would dine in their officer’s mess where we were not allowed in.

We were cut off from the mainland in October ‘44 when the allies were on the advance in France. No ships would come in anymore. I couldn’t say for certain, maybe they became slimmer, too. As for my commander, he had alsways been slim anyway.

Interviewer: What about the islanders?

Bernhard: As for the civilians, they were starving, too. I think many cilvilians and German soldiers died of hunger during this time.

Interviewer: Did you steal food from the islanders?

Bernhard: No, you weren’t allowed to steal from the civilians either. That, too, was punished with the death penalty.

Interviewer: How long did this period of starvation last?

Bernhard: We soldiers were starving until the end of the war. For the civilians it started to improve around January 1945. They were being sent parcels via Portugal. I think, 20 pounds per person or was it 20kg, was the allowance, I can’t remember exactly. The civilians were not allowed to share any of the food in the parcels with a  German. I f they got caught giving just one slice of bread to a German their allowance was immediately withdrawn.

Interviewer: Tell us more about these parcels the islanders received.

Bernhard: Yes, they were parcels sent by the Red Cross. The ship came in from Portugal. There was also talk about us soldiers being interned in Portugal. Our commander did not want any more of his soldiers starve to death.  His name was von Schmettow, an aristocrat. He was picked up by an aeroplane one morning and flown back to Germany to be sentenced, I suppose.

The man who informed on our commander was Admiral Hoffmeier, a sea commander. I know that, because all communication was done via the radio. We had a direct line to Berlin.

Interviewer: Did you suspect that Von Schmettow was going to be replaced?

No, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. His successor was General Wolf. He belonged to the SS not the artillery.

Interviewer: After all these events, did you believe that the war had reached a point of no return?

Bernhard: Yes, most of us did. We didn’t really know what was going to happen to us though. We had nothing left to eat.

End of part 2.

Read part 3 of Bernhard’s story

Interview copyright 2001 High Tide Productions Ltd, can be reproduced with permission

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.

Interviewer: Thanks Bernhard- please tell us how you ended up in the Channel Islands.

Bernhard: Well, the reason , I ended up in Guernsey is this. After we had completed our training in France we were told that our year (1925) would not be sent to the front line because of the immense losses among the soldiers from the years before us. That’s how I came to be stationed at Guernsey. The older soldiers we replaced at Guernsey were probably sent to the Eastern front.

I didn’t see it, of course. The movement of a battalion within the army was always a matter of secrecy as it could have been read as a sign of weakness by the enemy.  The older soldiers had already left before we arrived there. Well, that was the explanation we were given.

Interviewer: What was the general mood at the time?

Bernhard: I remember everyone being in good spirits. We had arrived there, a whole bunch of us. All young men. The others were old compared to us. Most of them were in their late thirties or early forties. They could have been our fathers. So, it was much more difficult for as young ones to make contact with them.

Interviewer: So you never really mingled with the older soldiers?

Bernhard: That’s exactly how it was. The old ones kept themselves to themselves and so did we. Well, we came in contact with them on the job during the day but our accommodations were separate. As a young person you tend to bond with your peers and most of us already knew each other from training camp, anyway.

We mostly stayed in our quarters in our spare time. I suppose, we could have gone out more but most of the time we preferred to stay inside. It was safer and a lot less hassle. You always had to go through several controls, show your pass etc.

Occasionally we would go into town, to the cinema or down the beach but I wouldn’t say I fully explored the island.

Interviewer:  What kind of crowd was there at the cinema? Did you get to mix with the locals?

Bernhard: No, only Germans were allowed by this point. The best thing about the cinema was the concert organ. It would play before the actual film accompanied by lights and water. This was often much better than the film itself that was to follow. Mainly because of the newsreels they always showed before every film. These newsreels were Nazi party propaganda, as you well know.

Interviewer: You worked in signals during your time on the island. Did you ever hear any of the radio broadcasts being put out by the Allies?

Bernhard: You had access as a radio operator. All you had to do was switch the channels. Which is, what I did and nearly got caught.

Interviewer: What happened?

Bernhard:  I made a mistake. I forgot to switch back the channel. So, this Lieutenant comes in, switches on the radio and hears it.  I tried to convince him that I hadn’t touched it and that it must have happened by accident but the Lieutenant wasn’t convinced.

In the end it took my commander Lieutenant Wolters to bail me out. He did it because, he himself listened in now and then. It was punishable by the death penalty.

I would also like to mention that it was only in the last 6 months of the war that things like this happened. Before that, nobody would have dared to do such things.

Interviewer: Were there many soldiers who did this?

Bernhard: It’s difficult to say. If people did it they would certainly not have talked about it or let somebody else know. It was far too dangerous.

Interviewer: You said your Lieutenant used to listen in too?

Bernhard: Yes, towards the end. In the last six months or so, he would listen in, too.  That’s mainly why we got on so well.

Interviewer: So there were others prepared ot take the chance of being caught?

Bernhard: Well, not in my unit as far as I was aware. I really only knew the first lieutenant and the major. I don’t know whether the major was a loyal follower or not. All I know is that towards the end he was drinking heavily. Drowning his sorrows, I suppose

Interviewer: Do you remember D-Day?

Bernhard: I remember the night of the invasion very clearly. It was a Monday, the 5th of June. We were in session at the command post when I nipped outside to relieve myself. When I looked up I saw the sky was full of airplanes. I went back inside and said jokingly to my commander ‘Looks like tonight will be the night’ but he didn’t reply. We finished at around 11pm that night and by 12am I was back on duty. At 5.30am I received the message that they had landed.  I forgot to mention that I did receive a message before that one. It said ‘Artillery fire and lighting signals are strictly forbidden for all battalions’.

Interviewer: So you were on high alert at this point?

Bernhard: Yes we were. We were on alert the minute they landed. But as I said we couldn’t leave the command post. I went back down to the bunker to try and pick up information via the radio. There was a lot of air traffic going on,  people tried to get information from the main land. Later on we fell under the command of the Navy, and to operate the marine radio was even more difficult.

Interviewer: What was the islanders’ reaction to the invasion?

Bernhard: They kept pretty quiet as they always did.

Interviewer: But you did have contact with the local populace?

Bernhard: Yes, partly. We talked to them.  They rather liked Germans. I never heard a bad word from them.  We organised ourselves a lady who would do our laundry so we men didn’t have to do it. I would take the laundry round her house once a week. I knew they were short of food and we had plenty, so I would take bread with me one week and butter the next.

Interviewer: Did you ever socialise with them in the evening?

Bernhard: Not in pubs. We were not allowed in there, if I remember rightly.  Well, I never went to a pub there. They were friendly. Would greet you and you would greet them back. Some soldiers had girlfriends.  One of them settled down in Sark after the war. He is German, a former member of the occupying force  at Guernsey.

Today, he is an important dignitary of Sark. He was  received by the queen when she came to visit the island a few years ago.

Interviewer: So going back to the D-Day invasion, what happened after the day of the landings?

Bernhard: We were on alert for the next 6 weeks but nothing really happened. So we gradually slipped back into our old routine. Things went back to the way they were until hunger broke out like an illness among us.

At this point we only slept for a few hours at a time. We were on duty for 3 hours in the morning and another two hours in the afternoon. In-between we had strict resting order.  The food would be mainly porridge by now mixed with lots of water, one hundred grams of it, no more than a thick slice and meshed potatoes mixed with water. That’s when we started to steal.

Interviewer: What sort of things did you steal?

Bernhard: The first thing I stole was a Sunday roast for christmas dinner in 1944.  I caught us a cat.

Interviewer: A cat?

Bernhard:Yes, we called the cats “roof rabbits” *laughs*.

End of part 1.

Part 2 of Bernhard’s story can be found here

Interview copyright 2001 High Tide Productions Ltd, can be reproduced with permission

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.

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BOB LE SUEUR

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.

This was manned by 3 Germans who would be relieved after 2 or 3 days and they would walk back at low tide. Shortly after the D-Day landings in France, the Germans put an absolute stop on any fishing boats being launched as they were worried that the fishermen would simply try and escape to the stretch of coast opposite Jersey which had been liberated by the Americans. his was towards the end of July 1944. These 3 men, either they were relieved late or they set off late and they got stranded. They wet up on a high rock- its a very dangerous area, the tide swirls up and can reach heights of over 13 metres. They were seen on top of this rock wearing their jackboots- jackboots are not ideal for swimming in. Some fishermen saw them. Now the Germans may have been their enemies but these fishermen could not stand to see these men drowned in cold blood and they wanted to launch their boats to go and rescue them. There was a young German officer who would not allow them to do so- he refused to make the decision without first clearing it with a superior officer, whom he could not contact fast enough. In a situation like that you cannot afford to dither and they drowned.

The people of that area although they had been bombed- in fact one of the fishermen who wanted to go and rescue them had had his parents killed in an air raid just before the Germans arrived- despite this he still wanted to go and rescue these men but wasn’t able to.

Interviewer: Was it a common thing that the islanders could differentiate between Germans as enemies and Germans as people?

Bob: By and large no. Well people who had contact with Germans, whose work involved working with Germans, occasionally they would say ”Oh he’s a decent chap really“. I think most of us, well in the line of work I was doing I had very minimal contact with the Germans. I did get to know one very well- his name was Karl Grier because he was a hairdresser, Austrian, who had come to Jersey in the 1920s. He was probably the top ladies’ hairdresser in the island. Well within 2 to 3 weeks of the Occupation, they offered him a choice- join up or serve as an interpreter. Well of course, he chose the latter. Eventually he was drafted regardless even though he was in his early 40s. I remember seeing him in the street. I took both of his hands in mine as he was in tears as he didn’t think he’d ever see his wife and children again. He never did see his wife as she later died of TB.

That man was the island chess champion, he was lead violinist in the symphony orchestra, he was completely integrated. Now I think that many people, even if they had known him before, would have found it very difficult to talk to him after that. I couldn’t bring myself to snub him like that and I didn’t care who was looking. But there were many people who felt even if they had known German people before could not bring themselves to talk to them at that time.

A lady I knew had an incident that in retrospect is quite amusing. She like many young girls of the upper or upper-middle classes had been sent to finishing school in Germany in the 1930s. Her German was fluent. She was taken on by the States of Jersey as an official interpreter. She described how one day walking across the central square of St Helier she met Baron Von Heldorf, who was one of the top German brass. He invited her to dinner. She said to him ”In other circumstances Baron, I would have been delighted but you have to understand that wearing that uniform when I have a brother in the British army, it would be quite impossible.“ He said nothing to this but took her hand to kiss it and she said how she stood there frozen looking to either side thinking ”Who is seeing this?“ as she was worried about her reputation.

There were these little incidents, little crises of how to behave because this man may have not been a Nazi, someone who in better times social climbers would have given their eyeteeth to be invited to dinner by! *laughs*

Interviewer: You were saying earlier there as a German soldier who had been given orders to destroy a very important map.

Bob: Yes this is another incident that I remember hearing about long after the war. In the last few days before the Liberation, when it became obvious that we were about to be liberated, this soldier had plans of all the minefields around the coast. His instruction was, which had come down from the commandant who was a rabid Nazi, a very extreme and unpleasant one, to destroy all plans of these minefields. This man was horrified at this idea. He felt that millions of people had died during the conflict and he thought it was crazy that with the war about to end that there could be more deaths as people walked onto these mines. He also felt, and he was right, that the clearing of these mines was something that would be done by German prisoners of war. So instead of destroying these plans he hid them. In his billet where wallpaper was coming away from the wall he hid them. The Liberation came a few days later and he was then desperate to hand these plans over to someone responsible but the first few Ally soldiers he met- his english wasn’t so good- didn’t understand him and told him to go to hell. He got increasingly desperate, finally in time he was able to make contact and hand them over. Nearly all the mines were cleared without a single casualty. The Germans made meticulous records of this sort of thing, which explains why the Commandant wanted them destroyed.

Interviewer: What about the story of the soldiers who were stranded on a tower after the war ended?

Bob: I told you earlier about the soldiers who were drowned at Seymour Tower- well there is another tower about a mile out from my house called Ichou tower. They were not relieved and were getting very fed up. They were getting very hungry eating shellfish and running short of water. Finally they decided to come back even though they had not been instructed to do so. They met an old lady who was gathering winkles and ended up surrendering to her. Its a nice story but it may not be true. I think there was something similar about some soldiers on the Minquiers Reef about 15 miles south of Jersey, which territorially is part of Jersey, who didn’t know the war had ended but I’m not the man to ask about that.

Interviewer: Have you any final stories or comments that you’d like to add before we leave?

Bob: The island has been much criticised by people who were not here for what they think of as collaboration. How do you define collaboration? Can I give an extreme example.

Within 48hrs of the Germans arrival a whole load of orders were published around the islands by the occupying force. One of these was that as of midnight on that day, one would use the right hand road instad of the left. I suppose some purists not on the island would have insisted that we should have carried on driving on the left. Now I don’t know of the most loyal subject of His Majesty King George VI who would have risked riding on a bicycle down the left hand side of the road when possibly confronted by a tank. Were we collaborating by submitting to that law?

There was no manual issued by the British government on how to deal when living inside an occupied territory. Just do the best you can was all they told the inhabitants.

Now the Jewish position I would like to mention as they were much criticised as a notice appeared in the Jersey Post saying that all Jews should register with the Aliens Office, a precursor to the Immigration Office. It was the poor unhappy man who was in charge of that office who had to sign that order. Now I was horrified, I thought they were going too far. I didn’t know the inside story- it was this woman who was being employed as an interpreter who told me. They had got this instruction from the Field Commandant that they wanted a list of Jews and they were told:

”We don’t have a list of Jews, we don’t go around asking people their religious persuasion“.

They replied ”Oh but you must know of Jews“.

“Well, they would have known a few but the Jersey Jewish population would have known what was happening in Germany before the war and if they had any sense, they were told this, would have got out before the Islands were invaded. As far as we know they all did, we don’t know of any still here“

So the reply from the feldkommandantur was that in that case there was no reason not to print the notice as they had nothing to worry about. They were told that this was an order from Paris, which would have meant straight from Berlin. The local administration knew well that if they were too difficult with the Germans in the local feldkommandantur they would be replaced by ones who would be much more difficult to deal with such as the SS. They really didn’t think that there were any Jews left in the island and if there were they assumed that they would be sensible enough to ignore it.

However, some didn’t. They were told ”What are you doing here? We haven’t seen you, get away“. But their response was that it was an order- most people are law-abiding, they were worried that if it was found out that they would lose their property and so they registered. Nothing happened to the Jersey Jews who registered ultimately. There was one who was Romanian and was deported after Romania entered the war in 1941 but he survived. But there was nothing that the Jersey administration could do to prevent the Germans from being deported if they wanted that to happen.

There were three women who were deported from Guernsey, but again there was nothing they could have done to prevent this. They were held German passports and therefore had no-one who could step in on their behalf.

You can see how seeing a notice like that horrified people, it horrified me, even though none of us knew the whole story. I think that the local authorities did an extraordinary job. Letters have been found to the feldkommandantur saying ”Dear Sir“ and ”Yours faithfully“ which is seen as dreadful collaboration. Well that is how letters are written! Is that collaboration? Would it have been better if they started ”You bastard“, would that have helped anyone?

Interviewer: So you are saying that historical documents should be taken in their context.

Bob: Yes, definitely.

Don’t get me wrong- there was collaboration. There were people who acted as agents for recruiting labour, who used their trucks to help carry building supplies- people who profited from helping the Occupation force. That kind of thing.

There was one German for every three islanders, so you never could have had armed resistance like you did in France and I think one person in 20 actually went to prison, now that was men women and children. I’m sure for every person who went to prison there were probably 10 who didn’t so everyone was crossing the Germans somehow. It was just a case of not being caught.

Interview copyright 2001 High Tide Productions Ltd, can be reproduced with permission

BOB LE SUEUR

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?

Bob: Well there’s no real easy answer to that! It varied from person to person. One particular chap who I got to know very well was being hidden in a flat in St Helier (Jersey’s main town), which was much better cover than being in a detached house in the country. Blocks of flats tend to be very impersonal. You might see a name on a bellpush at the front door but people in flats scarely know each other. I think this happens everywhere. You would get much less contact than say a lane like I live in, where I know all my neighbours and they know me, and they probably know things about me I don’t even know they know! This can be too much. A block of flats is much more private.

Anyway, this fellow had acquired a long rain coat, a hat with a trilby brim and a pair of spectacles with plain glass and he would walk out in this gear in the height of summer. I always thought this was dangerous because everybody would look at him and think ”Who is this fellow dressed like that in summer“- he looked like a failed Chicago gangster- but he was never caught!

Interviewer: How much fear did you have that you would be caught?

Bob: *pauses* Well I’m not sure I really thought about it. You took every precaution you could possibly take and one learned never to tell anybody anything unless that person had to know. You never dropped a name- you never said ”He’s present with some people called Smith and they are living at the top of such and such hill and they think that the milkman suspects that someone is staying there etc“ You would never say anything like that.

Interviewer: Were there any occasions when you came close to being caught?

Bob: No, not as far as I know. There were amusing incidents though. The Russian who was living in this block of flats… we had parties. We had parties for all sorts of reasons. You’d take along your own food, which would generally be miserable little cakes made from oatmeal and the liquor tended to be calvados, which is distilled cider. Calvados on empty stomachs tends to make a party go!

Anyway, it was a warm September evening and the windows were up. Suddenly this Russian got down on his haunches, folded his arms and started thrusting his legs in and out and singing at the top of his voice, doing a Cossack dance to a Russian song. I can still remember the reflex action of people turning round and slamming shut the windows as there was a platoon of Germans marching in the street outside! *laughs*

Interviewer: Were any of the escaped Russians recaptured? Did any of them escape from the islands?

Bob: Some were captured. None escaped to France, which a number of people were doing in the last few months of the Occupation, young men got over with the intention of joining up with the Allies.

I did know of one case where a Russian was desperate to go with one group and they refused him as had they been caught with an escaped POW in their midst they could have been shot. Under international law, he would have been re-imprisoned, they could have been shot.

Those who survived to the Liberation, may of them came to a very sticky fate. They were not welcomed back with open arms by their government. They had been in touch with people in the West and they were therefore very suspect. Many of them ended up in a Gulag and probably died there.

One man I knew was kept under KGB surveillance for 20 years until he was able to convince them that his story was genuine! The Russians had a very simple rule for people in the armed forces: there are no prisoners of war. They did not subscribe to the international Red Cross. You keep one bullet for yourself and if you don’t well God help you, because we won’t! So there was no international neutral supervision of POW camps in which Russian prisoners were kept, unlike other nations, which was one of the reasons they were so appalling badly treated. The thing is most of the people who were here were not even military prisoners but just people who had been picked up in the street.

Interviewer: Can you tell us more about the parties that you had with the Russians?

Bob: There were a few, often they would be all night parties as the curfew was at nine o’clock and your only transport was a bicycle- all of which late in the Occupation had hosepipe tyres- so when the festivities were over you would bed down on mattresses or on the floor for the night.

We had parties for all sorts of reasons: birthdays, gatherings. We had parties on very special occasions such as the last day of gas or the last day of electricity. Of course this made sense as it was the last time you’d be able to warm anything up or the last time you’d have any light unless you were lucky enough to still own a guttering candle.

I know in the last few months in my parents home a light was a medicine bottle filled with diesel oil- where the oil had come from I don’t know, it must have been a German source, which would have been bartered for an egg, which would have been bartered for something else until it reached us- using a boot lace for a wick. If you walked too quickly across the room it went out. My father would get very mad if that happened as we were down to our last box of matches. Its very difficult to imagine a situation these days a time when you cannot replace anything unless you have something spare that could barter.

I digress. Well, two friends of mine were young men who were both conscientious objectors- they would never have picked up a rifle to kill a man but they were both idealistic and willing to save lives. They were hiding this Russian and initially sharing their rations with him, until I managed to get hold of an ID card through a friend of mine who worked at the food station. A photo of the Russian was was very skilfully inserted into this card and with this he was able to get a ration card from that point on. This was the same person who did the Cossack dance at the party that September afternoon.

Interviewer: Did the Germans know that private parties were going on and were they OK with letting this happen?

Bob: Oh yes they would never have interfered with them. There was a great deal of entertainment self-organised. I think there always has been a certain amount of talent within the Islands which found expression in concerts- some were not so good, some excellent- and in plays.

The opera house in Jersey would have one week for German films and one week for local plays. They were always full. As everyone was riding round on these hosepipe tyres the performances had to finish early to give people time to get home before curfew but they were always a sell out. It was an extraordinary lively period of creativity for the local community- we were rarely bored, people always thought of ways to try and entertain themselves. The plays had to be submitted to the censors who sometimes, excellent though their English might have been, failed to spot certain things which could have double meanings.

Read part 3 of this interview where Bob talks about further stories of the Occupation and collaboration.

Interview copyright 2001 High Tide Productions Ltd, can be reproduced with permission