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…

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

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

This story is contributed by Sylvia@Intrigue, courtesy of her flickr.com page

“You can not go anywhere in Alderney without constant stark reminders of the German Occupation. Unlike Guernsey, where an uneasy sort-of truce seemed to be in place where the inhabitants and the occupiers lived together, Alderney was virtually abandoned to the Germans.

Over the five years of its occupation, the island was turned into a fortress and housed three labour camps and Lager Sylt, believed to be the first SS Concentration camp. Concrete bunkers, air-raid shelters, gun-emplacements huge sea walls and the four camps were built using forced labour, mainly prisoners from eastern Europe. Mass graves were discovered but the survivors from the camp said that many more had died, mainly owing to malnutrition and exhaustion, and their corpses were thrown into the sea.

Alderney is the only Channel Island that does not celebrate Liberation Day. The Island had been turned into a concrete wasteland. The housing and farms were left to rot or worse destroyed. All usable wood had been stripped for use as fuel. Massive bunkers and concrete roads dominated the landscape. Some 37,000 mines had been laid on the island and an estimated 65,000 yards of barbed wire needed to be cleared.

The residents of Alderney were finally able to return in December, commemorated as a public holiday known as “the Homecoming,” following a clean-up operation by the British troops and the German prisoners of war, including the restoration of 300 houses. But much had been completely destroyed and land markers had been lost. There was no concept of returning to your old home; returning residents were handed a key and an address. Each person was assigned a set of cutlery and two pillows and other basic issue furniture.

Usable furniture was piled up, with people grabbing what they could get as quickly as possible with no reference to the original owners. Merika Clunn remembers the “Battle of the Butes” on the Alderney Government site although she was only four:

“People tried to get stuff to rehouse, so if they saw anything they thought was theirs, they went and sat on it and when the whistle was blown, they took it,” she said.

“My brother shut me in a cupboard and when the whistle went, someone came along and carried it off with me in it. The doors flew open and the person carrying it had a real shock when he saw me. It was like a real battle — you could take things home and if someone recognised furniture in your house that was theirs before the war, they would end up taking it back.”

We were told that the older residents are to this day edgy about having guests as a family heirloom may still be recognised and claimed by the original owner.”