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

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

Part two of this interview will be published shortly.

BOB LE SUEUR

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

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

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

Bob: Well it had to adapt. People attempted to carry on- there is a kind of deep sense of force of habit and routine when times are very difficult and I’ve seen this in other parts of the world when travelling, when there’s been a crisis of some sort. They pretend that everything is normal, they feel safer trying as far as they can to go along with their usual routine and that happened here (Jersey).

Interviewer: Something we were told in an earlier interview was interesting. The interviewee suggested that this attempt to act normally changed significantly after the deportations of the Islanders began. Was this how you saw it?

Bob: There was a change in attitude after September in 1942. It had been, well one would never say it was a pleasurable Occupation, but it was endurable. Things were getting worse, rations were steadily getting lower, the Russian workers came in and there was great uncertainty as at that time. No-one could predict which way the war was going but certainly after the deportations there was a totally different mindset. From that time on there was an attitude of burning hate and an attitude by everybody to be as awkward as possible from that moment on, which hadn’t existed to such a degree before.

Even on the day the first deportees were leaving on a little boat going out through the harbour mouth, people were grouped up on the hill. The people going out started singing “There’ll always be an England” which was then picked up by the group on the hill. Now that sort of thing hadn’t happened before- this was open defiance. There was a minor riot, young boys were striking German officers no less and were put in prison for it- that sort of thing. That defiance was caused by tremendous anger and afterwards although that anger was perhaps more subdued, it was always there.

Interviewer: The decision to deport people seems to be a very odd one at that point of the war when the islands were so firmly in their control. How did the German administration respond to the acts of defiance?

Bob: They responded in the only way they possibly could. We learned later on that this move had been strongly opposed by the German administration for some time because they knew perfectly well that it was going to make life more difficult for them afterwards. They were not responsible for the decision- the orders had come from Paris and were in fact from the Fuehrer himself. Yes obviously for them it made things much more difficult for them on an individual basis and they didn’t therefore want it.

Interviewer: Please can you now tell us about how you were involved in trying to hide the Russian slave workers who were brought into the island by Organisation Todt?

Bob: Yes, I became involved… it was something that evolved into my life rather than a sudden change or decision.I was working in insurance and used to travel around to houses to collect premiums and doing this I got to know a truly remarkable widow who used to live in the north west of the island. She had a young man living in the house who was introduced as being French. However I knew from the way he spoke French that he did not speak it as a Frenchman would. I said nothing but I suspected.

The next time I called at the house she admitted to me that he was Russian. She had two sons who were both in the armed forces. The elder son who was a graduate of Oxford University… both very bright, both had scholarships to Oxford. The eldest graduated in 1929, enrolled in the Navy and very quickly became an officer. One day she got a Red Cross message- Red Cross messages were 25 words maximum- and this message told her that her eldest son Richard had been lost at sea in the Mediterranean.

Two or three weeks after that a neighbouring farmer came to her door with this Russian… he too was a remarkable man. He was trying to place escaped prisoners with local families. Her words to me that I shall never forget were “I had to do something for another mother’s son”. She, for her pains, finally ended up in a gas chamber at Innsbrook-Reichenau but that’s another story…

Eventually there came a time when he had to be moved and she was arrested a few days later. By that time I knew of other Russians who were being hidden and somehow was part of this small group helping them. You didn’t know anybody else’s names, there was no organisation- you couldn’t talk about these things, that was far too dangerous and all the prisoners would have to be moved after a time. I mean imagine if in this house you had one hidden, the neighbours would see. They would see this strange person going in and out and would say, “well, who can that be?” So the moment the neighbours began to get curious- well they wouldn’t go running to the Germans- they could just talk loosely so the workers had to be constantly moved.

Interviewer: Can you tell us more about the workers themselves?

Bob: Well they had been brought from Russia in appaling conditions, in cattle trucks across Europe, the journey taking perhaps 2 weeks. In many cases they were simply picked up in the street. I knew a boy of 15 who had been going home from school in Kiev, I think many of them came from the Ukraine, which was at that time part of the Soviet Union. He was on his way home from school wearing his school cap, carrying his school books and with his friends. They were suddenly aware that there were German trucks at the top of the street, and German trucks behind them. Able-bodied men were being thrown into the trucks. Quick thinking men sashed into buildings, possibly got out of the back but these boys were simply picked up, taken straight to the railway station, put in a cattle truck- so many of them that there wasn’t even room for them to sit or squat- and came across Europe. I leave you to imagine the sanitary conditions in those cattle trucks in the height of summer.

Interviewer: What was their main task when they arrived in the Islands?

Bob: Building fortifications for the quasi-civilian German organisation under a Doctor Todt, called Organisation Todt. The Russians were regarded by the Nazis as ‘untermenchun’, meaning ‘low people’. They were immensely racist, as racist or worse than the very worst kind of Afrikaan in South Africa during Apartheid, not only against coloured people but against Slavs for some reason, and particularly if they came from Russia.

Interviewer: Can you now tell me something about their living conditions when they reached the Islands?

Bob: Well they were working very long hours. They were not paid of course. They were not allowed out of their camps. Others groups were- there were a lot of Spanish Republicans. They were paid in the rather worthless Reichmarks but these could be used in the islands, but the Russians were not paid at all. They were also very badly fed.

The badly fed was not actually the German government’s policy. I got to know very well a Spaniard, who was a lawyer in his civilian life in Spain, and because he was educated he was working in an office. He told me that on paper the rations that the Russians were supposed to be getting were really quite good. It was all worked out by a specialist dietitian in Berlin who had calculated the requirements to get a good day’s work out of a man. The trouble was Nazi Germany, like I think all dictatorships, was quite incredibly corrupt. This was a surprise to me. I knew that Nazi Germany was brutal, even before the war. We knew how they were treating Jews. They weren’t sending them to death camps at that point but they were denying them certain ordinary civil rights. People at that point thought “Yes but they get things done” and they’re building autobahns and suchlike“ but in fact it was very corrupt. Dictatorships are not efficient! So what was happening was that these rations were getting piched along the transit route and in the islands by guards who were then selling them on the black market. That’s why they were just getting watery soup, resulting in a high death rate for quite a long time until the German Red Cross intervened and their conditions were improved. At that point some of the more infamous camp commandants in Jersey were replaced. It seems even the most inefficient and brutal of regimes doesn’t want to see its labour just dying off like that!

Interviewer: Was it the conditions that led to many of the workers trying to escape?

Bob: Well, they were obviously unhappy being forced to help out with building fortifications anyway in order to help the German war effort, but I think that the appalling conditions was a very strong reason why many of them sought to escape yes.

Interviewer: With conditions being that bad there must have been an awareness of this amongst the islanders.

Bob: Oh yes, I mean we had very small bread rations and so on ourselves but people would share these when possible. They would go to near the work sites and attempt to throw them the odd piece of bread. My God, if you were caught you were imprisoned immediately for it! A couple I knew, my dentist and his wife, they were passing food to the Russians one day on a building site, got seen arrested and were deported. They spent the rest of the war imprisoned. They were not sent to interment camps but were sentenced and imprisoned and sent to prisons on the continent. Both survived the war, miraculously

Interviewer: Were there any instances where German soldiers were sharing their rations with prisoners?

Bob: No I don’t, it must have happened but I didn’t see it myself. Well one thing, there is a photograph that Michael Ginns (head of the Channel Islands Occupation Society) has showing a group of Russian workers, some of them only boys, and a German soldier had written on the back ”A group of Russian workers. Poor fellows.“, which shows that there was an awareness or maybe sympathy to their plight but I don’t think any soldier would have dared stick their neck out by actively helping them.

Part 2 of this interview is now available to read and continues the look at the lives of the Russian workers and those who helped to rescue and hide them.

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