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

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

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

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. Read Part One here.

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.

Interviewer: We’ll speak about passing your time now. Did you ever visit the local cinema in St Peter Port?

Artur: Sure, it was great, especially the live music from the organist. I mean, I must say, I’m from a small village myself. The nearest town was some eleven km away. That’s where they had cinemas too. Not that I had never been there. I mean, it’s not like today. In those days if you wanted to go into town you had to either get on a bike or to the nearest train station, which was some 3km away, in Celle. You know it?

Well, there is something else I remember now, talking about the cinema. I was seventeen and a half when I was drafted. We youth, we had to be off the streets by 9pm. We were not allowed on the streets after 9pm. I was already a recruit by that time – we are talking August ‘42 – and expected to be drafted by February ‘43.

So, here we were, one night in August ‘42, it was about half past nine or a quarter to ten, getting dark but not yet completely. I was out on the streets with my mates riding bikes, when the police came. Me and a mate, the two of us couldn’t get away quick enough. We had blocked each others way with our bikes. The others got away in time but we got caught by the police.

I had to appear before the magistrate the next day because of it.

Just imagine, I got a weekend in the nick for that but was considered old enough to go out and die for my country only some three months later.

Great, really. Makes a lot of sense. I am not allowed on the streets after 9pm, or to the cinema but I am allowed to go out and die for my country some three months later.

Interviewer: We’ve heard people talk about sports events such as football where islanders and German soldiers would play against each other? Did you see anything like this?

Artur: Well, there were some guys from our unit, they played there and I’m sure they had these local matches, too. You know, one unit against another, nothing special.

Well, the civilians, of course they had their own teams, too. They had two teams, mixed teams, men and women. I had never heard of such a thing before, let alone seen it. Men and women playing together in one team. It was quite fun to watch. It was in St Peter Port on the playing field. Nice field, Cambridge Park I seem to remember.

Interviewer: Was there much in the way of contact between the islanders and the German soldiers at public events such as this?

Artur: Yes, among the players, I am sure. But for us onlookers, well, no. You see, I had arrived there after everyone else and also, I didn’t speak English. Maybe it would have been different if I had spoken English but I didn’t and so I hardly had any contact with the civilians at all. Only when I went shopping, to Woolworth for needles and thread or for socks or stationary.

Interviewer: There is a lot of accusations thrown around about collaboration and whether island girls were liaising with German soldiers. Did you experience this at all?

Artur: I, personally, didn’t have any contact with anyone but you saw it happen all the time.

People told you about it especially later in captivity. They told you about the contact they had made with girls, or families, or a lady to do their laundry. I think, all the sergeants had a lady who would do their laundry. Yes, that’s how it was.

And in St Peter Port on the beach, yes, there I remember seeing some of us flirt with girls.

Interviewer: Let’s now discuss your experiences after the invasion. Did you manage to get through the war on rations or were you affected by the starvation that plagued the islands?

Artur: No. When the hunger period started we looked for anything to eat. Anything. There were stinging nettles everywhere. You wouldn’t help yourself from the fields. It was punished by death penalty, as I mentioned before. One person got sentenced because he nicked cauliflowers.

Cauliflower leaves was a delicacy. We would cook it by itself, boil sea water first, to extract some salt. To boil water was an act in itself. You needed to find wood to make a fire with in the first place and so on. It was all rather complicated.

I mainly had nettles, if I could get my hands on them or mussels, sea mussels, boiled with a bit of salt. No cooking recipes needed there. And tomatoes, of course. There were so many tomatoes on this Island!

When we first arrived we had tomato soup every single day. Tomatoes were big export business on the island before the war. Mainly to France. Invasion put a stop to it. Later they were thrown into the sea, truck loads of them. I saw it myself. How they threw a truck load of tomatoes into the sea, because of the huge surplus.

And this despite the fact the troops ate a lot of tomatoes because we were always hungry. There were a lot of restaurants on the island too before food became scarce.

Interviewer: Many reports from that time indicate that the soldiers became so desperate for food that theft became a big problem. How did this affect the troops? Did you experience this?

Artur: Well, stealing from comrades, stealing anything from anyone, stealing as such was punished by death penalty. If you were caught you got shot or threatened to be shot. There was this guy from the unit next to mine, a father of four. He nicked two cauliflowers and got sentenced to death.

They picked a few from our unit, too when they put the execution command together. You know, you have to exercise that before hand, the different commands like ‘aim’ and ‘fire’ etc.

The guys they picked for this command were all guys who had been a bit rebellious, you know, a bit out of line.

Anyway, they were already exercising the commands but in the end the sentence was never carried out. A day before the sentence was due, the war ended so that was the end of the sentence, too.

Well, that’s all I know about the death penalty for theft. Whether somebody else got shot somewhere else for it, I couldn’t say. I only know of this one incident. The one I just told you.

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