The Germans occupy the Channel Islands

On the evening of 30 June 1940 German Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft carrying a platoon of Luftwaffe troops landed on the deserted airfield of Guernsey. No one resisted, for there was no one to do so: for ten days there had not been a single British soldier on the island. The next day the Germans occupied Jersey, on 2 July the almost uninhabited Alderney, and on 3 July Sark. So began the occupation of the Channel Islands, which was to last almost five years – the only part of the British Crown’s lands in Europe to fall into German hands during the war. The occupation was preceded by an air raid on 28 June in which more than forty civilians were killed. The German airmen bombed islands that no one was defending any longer, because the British government had not announced that it had demilitarised them.

Islands of the Crown

The Channel Islands lie in a bay off the French Cotentin peninsula, a dozen or so kilometres from France and more than a hundred from England. They are the last remnant of the medieval Duchy of Normandy, linked to the English Crown since the 11th century. They have never formed part of the United Kingdom: the two bailiwicks, Jersey and Guernsey (with Alderney and Sark), have their own parliaments (the States), their own laws and their own administration, headed by a bailiff. On each of the two main islands the king was represented by a lieutenant governor, always a senior officer, who also commanded the local garrison. Before the war about 50,000 people lived on Jersey, about 42,000 on Guernsey, some 1,500 on Alderney and a few hundred on Sark. The islands lived on growing tomatoes, early potatoes and flowers, and on tourism.

Until May 1940 the war seemed far away. There was no conscription on the islands, although many young men had left for England to join the forces. In the spring the government in London eased travel restrictions, and newspapers invited the British to holiday on the islands. The German offensive in the West suddenly brought the front much closer. On 11 June, the day after Italy declared war on France and Britain, RAF Whitley bombers took off from the airfields on Jersey and Guernsey to raid Turin and Genoa. In mid-June two squadrons of Hurricane fighters moved from France to Jersey, where they covered the evacuation of troops from Cherbourg and Saint-Malo. Private yachts of the local sailing club also set out from the island to help the soldiers at Saint-Malo. On 17 June the aircraft carrying General Charles de Gaulle from Bordeaux to London landed briefly on Jersey to refuel. The next day he delivered his appeal on the BBC.

Islands given up without a fight

The defeat of France sealed the islands’ fate. On 15 June it was decided in London that the islands could not be defended and had no strategic value. The War Cabinet endorsed this assessment over the following days. Holding them would have required a strong garrison and air cover, and supplying them under the nose of a Luftwaffe operating from airfields in Normandy and Brittany would have been impossible. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was long reluctant to accept that Britain would give up the Crown’s oldest possessions without a shot being fired. In the end he agreed with the military. The troops left in haste on 19 and 20 June, leaving bedding and half-eaten meals in their barracks. The Royal Jersey Militia sailed for England as a formed unit. On 21 June, the day on which negotiations for the Franco-German armistice began in the Forest of Compiègne, both lieutenant governors left the islands. Their civil powers passed to the bailiffs: on Jersey the 48-year-old Alexander Coutanche, on Guernsey the 69-year-old Victor Carey. On Guernsey day-to-day government was taken over by a Controlling Committee chaired by the Attorney General, Ambrose Sherwill. London instructed the local authorities to remain in place and look after the population, under occupation as well.

On 24 June the bailiffs received a message from King George VI: “For strategic reasons it has been found necessary to withdraw the armed forces from the Channel Islands. I deeply regret this necessity and I wish to assure my people in the Islands that, in taking this decision, my Government has not been unmindful of their position.” The king assured them that the islands’ bond with the Crown would remain unbroken and expressed the hope of a day when Allied victory would free them from foreign rule.

In all this the British government made a mistake that cost several dozen lives. It did not announce the demilitarisation publicly or notify the Germans of it, fearing that this would invite them to the islands. The Germans therefore did not know that the islands were defenceless.

Evacuation

The evacuation of the population was decided on at the last moment, without a prepared plan and amid confusion in which each island acted differently. On Guernsey the newspapers announced on 19 June that all the children would be evacuated. Parents had to register them at the schools that same evening, and on the morning of 20 June the first ships took the children away together with teachers and with mothers who had volunteered to help. Guernsey schools often moved to England as a whole and functioned throughout the war in towns in the north of England and in Wales. Some 5,000 pupils left Guernsey, roughly four out of five, together with about 12,000 adults – about 17,000 of the 42,000 inhabitants in all. On 21 June alone 25 ships sailed from St Peter Port.

On Jersey the authorities did not order the evacuation of children. Some 23,000 people registered to leave, but when long queues formed outside the offices, the island authorities, fearing panic, began urging people that it was better to stay. About 6,600 people left, including about 1,000 children. On Alderney the inhabitants, with no contact with London, decided on their own to leave. On 23 June almost everyone left the island; a dozen or so people stayed. On Sark the island’s proprietor, the Dame, Sibyl Hathaway, urged the islanders to stay, and most of them heeded her. Altogether some 25,000 people left the islands, most of them for Weymouth in Dorset. Families were separated for five years. Many children saw their parents again only in 1945. About two-thirds of the inhabitants remained on the islands.

The raid of 28 June

The German command treated the islands cautiously. A landing operation codenamed Grüne Pfeile (“Green Arrows”), involving two infantry battalions, was being prepared, and the air force was carrying out reconnaissance. On the evening of 28 June six Heinkel He 111 bombers appeared over Guernsey. Their target was the harbour at St Peter Port, where a line of lorries loaded with tomatoes stood on the White Rock pier waiting to be shipped to England. From the air they were taken for a column of military vehicles. The bombs hit the lorries, the people sheltering under them and the harbour buildings, and the aircraft machine-gunned the streets. The sirens sounded only several minutes after the first explosions. The mailboat Isle of Sark, lying in the harbour, returned fire with machine guns, to no visible effect. The German airmen also strafed the Guernsey lifeboat, which was heading towards Jersey. One of its crew was killed.

At the same time bombs fell on the harbour at St Helier on Jersey. According to the figures most often given, 33 people were killed and 67 wounded on Guernsey. Some accounts speak of 34 dead, including those who died soon afterwards in hospital, and the number of wounded varies from source to source. Nine people were killed on Jersey. In all, the raids cost the lives of some 44 islanders. That night the Isle of Sark sailed for England with 647 refugees. She was the last ship to leave Guernsey before the occupation.

Only after the raid did the BBC announce that the islands had been demilitarised and were “open”, and soon afterwards it reported the German bombing. For the islanders it was a bitter discovery: the government in London had left them defenceless and had done nothing to protect them from the bombs.

The landing on Guernsey

On 30 June the pilot of a reconnaissance aircraft, Hauptmann Liebe-Pieteritz, landed briefly on Guernsey’s empty airfield to see whether anyone was defending it. No one appeared. The command of General Hugo Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3 concluded that the island was defenceless, and that same evening sent a platoon of airmen to Guernsey aboard Junkers transports. The Luftwaffe thereby forestalled the landing being prepared by the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine.

A Guernsey police inspector drove to the airfield with a letter signed by the bailiff. It stated that His Majesty’s Government had declared the island open, that there were no armed forces on it, and that the bearer did not speak German. The airfield was already in German hands. Their commander, Major Albrecht Lanz, had himself driven to the most important person on the island. At the Royal Hotel in St Peter Port, in the presence of Bailiff Carey, Sherwill and other officials, he announced that Guernsey was under German occupation.

On the morning of 1 July German aircraft dropped an ultimatum over Jersey. It demanded the surrender of the island, white flags on buildings and large white crosses painted on the airfield and in the main square of St Helier as a sign that there would be no resistance. The island authorities accepted the terms, and in the afternoon German troops landed at the airfield, and Bailiff Coutanche handed over authority to them. On 2 July the Germans entered deserted Alderney. On Sark three German officers arrived on 3 July in the lifeboat from Guernsey. Some sources date the surrender of this island to 4 July. The first troops arrived on the islands by sea on 14 July.

A “model” occupation

The Germans treated the islands as a rehearsal for the expected occupation of Britain itself and exploited them for propaganda. Photographs of Wehrmacht soldiers chatting with local policemen in their distinctive British helmets went round the German press. At first the occupiers behaved correctly. They left the local parliaments and courts in place, but every law required the German commandant’s approval, and his orders became binding law. Central European time, driving on the right, a curfew and censorship were introduced. In August 1940 a field command (Feldkommandantur 515) arrived on Jersey and brought the islands under the German military administration of occupied France.

The local authorities chose a path of cooperation, which they themselves called protecting the population and which critics years later called collaboration. The argument over where the line between the two lay continues to this day. British commando raids, such as Operation Ambassador on the night of 14–15 July 1940, achieved nothing, and Sherwill openly asked London to leave the islands alone.

The fate of the Jews

The occupation of the Channel Islands also had its part in the Holocaust. Most of the few dozen Jews living on the islands left in June 1940. Those who stayed were people who did not want to leave and refugees from Central Europe who, as enemy aliens, could not enter Britain without a permit. When the Germans issued their first anti-Jewish order in October 1940, the island authorities carried out a registration: 18 people came forward, most of whom had only Jewish grandparents. Their identity papers were stamped with the letter “J”, their shops were closed or placed under “Aryan” management, and their wireless sets were confiscated. The local officials did not introduce the compulsory wearing of the yellow star, and they obtained false papers for some of those at risk, but they handed Jewish businesses and registers over to the Germans. In April 1942 three women from Guernsey – the Austrians Therese Steiner and Auguste Spitz and the Polish-born Marianne Grünfeld – were deported to France and from there, in July 1942, to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. In February 1943 several people classified as Jews were deported to internment camps in Germany. They survived the war.

The darkest chapter of the occupation was played out on Alderney. From 1942 the Organisation Todt built four camps there for forced labourers who were building fortifications. Two of them, Sylt and Norderney, were taken over by the SS in 1943, and the Sylt camp became a subcamp of Neuengamme, the only German concentration camp on the British Crown’s territory. The prisoners and forced labourers on Alderney also included Jews brought from France. British experts who examined the surviving documents on the government’s behalf in 2024 concluded that between 641 and 1,027 prisoners and labourers died on Alderney.

Significance

The capture of the Channel Islands had no military significance, but it had a symbolic one. For the first time the Germans set foot on the British Crown’s territory, and at a time when the Luftwaffe was preparing for the Battle of Britain and Hitler was planning a landing in the British Isles. The often repeated claim that this was the only British soil occupied during the war needs qualifying: the islands are not part of the United Kingdom, and in August 1940 the Italians occupied British Somaliland, while in 1941–1942 the Japanese took Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Burma. The Channel Islands were, however, the only territory of the British Crown in Europe to come under German occupation.

In October 1941 Adolf Hitler ordered the islands to be turned into an “impregnable fortress”. They became one of the most heavily fortified sections of the Atlantic Wall, absorbing a disproportionately large share of its steel and concrete. In September 1942, on Hitler’s personal orders, more than 2,000 residents born outside the islands were deported to internment camps at Biberach an der Riss, Wurzach and Laufen. After the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944 the Allies bypassed the islands, and the occupiers and islanders, cut off from supplies, were brought to the brink of starvation. From December 1944 they were saved by Red Cross parcels brought by the ship Vega. The German garrison surrendered only after the capitulation of the Reich: on 9 May 1945 on Guernsey and Jersey, on 10 May on Sark and on 16 May on Alderney. To this day 9 May is celebrated on the islands as Liberation Day.