Phase 2- Pre-production
With some initial funds secured we hired Michael Amtmann, a German researcher based in Munich, to trace the Kumpel family line. Initial script ideas were juggled and then it was a case of waiting patiently for any news.
Things got off to a slow start and for a month or so we feared that Toni would never be found. Branches of his family were discovered, but none matched Toni himself. A distant cousin of his was found alive but she refused to co-operate with Michael so he had to start from scratch again. Suddenly a breakthrough was discovered, a photo in the list of Missing In Action soldiers published by the Red Cross after the Second World War ended. We suddenly had a picture and ultimately a realisation of Toni’s fate. It had been a mystery why the sketches and notes in the book were all in 1942 and no further. Toni, it emerged, had been transferred to the Russian Front after only 6 months of life serving in the Channel Islands. There he died in battle after only eleven weeks.
Michael’s next step was to trace Toni’s roots. The village of Buisdorf was eventually discovered to have been swallowed up into a suburb of Bonn in west Germany. Here a church was discovered carrying a plaque of missing soldiers bearing Toni’s name. The war memorial in town listed those confirmed dead- Toni was not among them.
A few of Toni’s classmates were discovered who remembered him at school but unfortunately that was it- his close family had married (he had two sisters ) and moved on.
We decided from this that there was enough information to use Toni’s story as a loose framework to create a documentary that would look at the Occupation of the Channel Islands from both sides and from a very human point of view. A further round of background research was conducted: Michael traced a number of German soldiers of various ranks and backgrounds who served as part of the Occupation forces based throughout the Channel Islands as part of 319 Division and arranged for them to be interviewed during the shoot.
David Caldwell-Evans, an experienced television researcher, spent a few weeks in Guernsey going through the German military paper archive and discovered a number of fascinating facts and stories which gave us the information we needed to compile questions for the shoot and also an idea of the locations we would like to film at. We also made contact with the Channel Islands Occupation Society and the local media, the Jersey Post and Guernsey Press as well as BBC Radio Jersey and Guernsey. Interviews and articles helped bring some attention to the project and enabled us to get a list of islanders had lived through the occupation that we could interview to balance out the story on both sides.
