The liberation of the Channel Islands

At 7.14 on the morning of 9 May 1945, aboard the British destroyer HMS Bulldog, anchored off St Peter Port on Guernsey, the German Generalmajor Siegfried Heine signed the act of unconditional surrender on behalf of the commander of the forces in the Channel Islands, Vice Admiral Friedrich Hüffmeier. At around ten, aboard the destroyer HMS Beagle, Generalmajor Rudolf Wulf signed the surrender of the garrison of Jersey. A few hours later the first British soldiers landed on the quays of both islands, welcomed by crowds of half-starved islanders. Almost five years of occupation of the only part of the British Crown’s territory in Europe to fall into German hands during the war had come to an end. Little Sark was liberated on 10 May, and fortified Alderney only on 16 May. To this day 9 May is a public holiday on Guernsey and Jersey: Liberation Day.

The German garrison agreed to unconditional surrender only reluctantly: as late as the evening of 8 May, when Europe was already celebrating Victory Day, a German envoy told the British that he could discuss only a ceasefire, not a surrender.

Five years of occupation

The Germans occupied the islands without a fight at the turn of June and July 1940, after the British government had judged them indefensible and withdrawn its troops. Some of the inhabitants, including most of Guernsey’s children, were evacuated to England. More than 60,000 people stayed behind. The local authorities – the Bailiffs, Alexander Coutanche on Jersey and Victor Carey on Guernsey – kept their offices, but every decision they made required the approval of the German commandant. At first the occupation was “correct”, and the Germans presented it in their propaganda as a foretaste of mild rule in Britain.

Over time it became increasingly harsh. In October 1941 Adolf Hitler ordered the islands to be turned into an impregnable fortress. The Organisation Todt, with the help of thousands of forced labourers from Eastern Europe, Spain, France and North Africa, built batteries, bunkers and tunnels there which swallowed a disproportionately large share of the concrete intended for the entire Atlantic Wall. Labour camps were set up on Alderney, including the Sylt camp, which from 1943 was placed under the SS as a subcamp of Neuengamme. A British panel of experts which in 2024 reviewed the surviving documents at the government’s request estimated the number of victims on Alderney at 641–1,027.

In September 1942, on Hitler’s personal orders and in reprisal for the internment of Germans in Iran, the Germans deported more than 2,000 English-born islanders, together with their families, to internment camps at Biberach, Wurzach and Laufen. A month later British commandos carried out the raid on Sark, after which Hitler issued his order for captured commandos to be shot. A second wave of deportations followed in February 1943.

The occupation also played its part in the Holocaust. On Guernsey the island authorities, on German orders, registered several people deemed to be Jews. In April 1942 three women – 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 perished. The part played by local officials in registering them remains one of the most painful subjects in the islands’ history.

The islanders also resisted, mostly passively. When the cruiser HMS Charybdis was sunk off the coast of Brittany in October 1943 and the sea washed the bodies of her sailors ashore on Guernsey, several thousand islanders attended the funeral, which the Germans took as a silent demonstration. People hid radio sets, copied out BBC news, painted “V” signs on walls and helped escaped forced labourers. They paid for this with imprisonment, and more than a dozen people deported to prisons and camps on the Continent never came home. Among them were Louisa Gould of Jersey, who had hidden an escaped Soviet prisoner of war and died at Ravensbrück in 1945, and her brother Harold Le Druillenec, regarded as the only Briton to survive Bergen-Belsen.

Islands under siege

In the spring of 1944 several tens of thousands of German soldiers and sailors were stationed on the islands. When, after the Normandy landings, the Allies took the Cotentin Peninsula and Brittany, they made no attempt to capture the islands. An attack on the most heavily fortified stretch of the Atlantic Wall would have cost many lives, civilians’ among them, and the islands no longer had any military importance. A plan to retake them, drawn up in 1943 under the code name Constellation, was shelved. The garrison was cut off, and the population with it.

Until then food, fuel and medicines had come in from France. In the summer of 1944 the supplies stopped. The Germans proposed through the Red Cross that the civilians be evacuated, but the British government took the view that feeding the population was the occupier’s responsibility and that outside help would allow the garrison to hold out longer. Winston Churchill is said to have written on a memo on the matter at the time: “Let ’em starve. No fighting. They can rot at their leisure” – though he had above all the Germans in mind. In the autumn and winter rations fell below subsistence level. There was a shortage of bread, flour, salt, soap, fuel and electricity. People burned their furniture and cut down the trees in the parks, while emaciated German soldiers stole vegetables from gardens and killed dogs and cats.

Only after lengthy negotiations did London agree to help from the International Committee of the Red Cross. On 27 December 1944 the Swedish ship Vega sailed into St Peter Port with food parcels from Canada and New Zealand, salt, soap and medicines. The parcels were intended exclusively for the civilian population, and the German command had to undertake not to seize them. The Vega made several more voyages. For many islanders her parcels were their salvation from death by starvation.

At the end of February 1945 command of the islands was taken over by Vice Admiral Friedrich Hüffmeier, a former captain of the battleship Scharnhorst and a fervent Nazi, who replaced General Rudolf von Schmettow, considered too accommodating. He announced that he would fight to the end and set out to raise the morale of his hungry garrison. During the night of 8–9 March 1945 his ships carried out a raid on the French port of Granville, which a few months earlier had housed Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters. The Germans damaged the harbour installations, sank or damaged several ships, made off with the British collier Eskwood and took several dozen Allied soldiers and sailors prisoner, freeing German prisoners of war in the process. It was one of the last successful German raids in the west, and of no significance whatsoever for the course of the war. Hüffmeier planned further raids, and after Hitler’s suicide he recognised the authority of his successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz.

The surrender

In London a plan to liberate the islands after Germany’s surrender, called Operation Nestegg, had been in preparation since 1944. It was to be carried out by a specially formed force, Force 135, under Brigadier Alfred Snow, which according to the plans numbered some 6,000 men. Its stores were filled with food, clothing, medicines and household goods for the population.

On the morning of 8 May the German authorities informed the inhabitants that the war was over. At three in the afternoon, through loudspeakers, through radio sets hidden for years and through radios switched on with German permission, the islanders heard Churchill’s speech: “Hostilities will end officially at one minute after midnight tonight … but in the interests of saving lives the ‘Cease fire’ began yesterday to be sounded all along the front, and our dear Channel Islands are also to be freed today.” British flags appeared on buildings.

That same day the destroyers HMS Bulldog and HMS Beagle sailed from Plymouth with British emissaries on board. Off Guernsey a German launch came out to meet them carrying Kapitänleutnant Armin Zimmermann. He declared that he was authorised only to discuss a ceasefire, not a surrender, and intimated that the presence of British warships off the island could be regarded as a provocation. The British replied that Germany’s surrender applied to the islands’ garrison as well, and announced that they would return at midnight. They returned as announced. This time Zimmermann brought Hüffmeier’s deputy, Generalmajor Siegfried Heine, who was authorised to sign the surrender. The formalities lasted until morning, and at 7.14 the document was signed. The German command behaved correctly to the end: not a single shot was fired on the islands.

That same morning a small detachment of British soldiers entered St Peter Port harbour. The crowds on the quay sang “God Save the King”, the soldiers handed out cigarettes and chocolate, and children were given their first sweets in years. Before noon HMS Beagle accepted the surrender of the Jersey garrison. Two naval officers, the first to step ashore at St Helier, raised the British flag over the harbourmaster’s office and on the flagpole of the Pomme d’Or Hotel, the headquarters of the German navy. Thousands of people flocked to the square in front of the hotel, later named Liberation Square.

On 10 May a British detachment reached Sark. The island’s feudal ruler, the Dame of Sark, Sibyl Hathaway, had put up firm though courteous resistance to the Germans throughout the occupation. For several days the British left her as the sole authority over 275 German soldiers, who on her instructions began dismantling barbed-wire entanglements and clearing mines from the beaches. The garrison of heavily fortified Alderney, almost all of whose inhabitants had left in 1940, surrendered on 16 May. The prisoners were shipped out by 20 May, but the islanders began returning to their homes only in December 1945, after German prisoners of war under British supervision had cleared the mines and the ruins.

The main body of Force 135 landed on Guernsey and Jersey on 12 May. On both islands Brigadier Snow read a royal proclamation entrusting him with military authority, but in practice the local authorities continued to govern, and military administration ended at the end of August 1945. According to various estimates, some 26,000–27,000 German soldiers, sailors and civilian employees went into captivity. Most were shipped to prisoner-of-war camps in England, while several thousand were kept on the islands to clear mines and remove fortifications. On 14 and 15 May the British Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, visited the islands and explained to the local parliaments why London had not defended them in 1940 or retaken them by force after the Normandy landings. On 7 June King George VI and Queen Elizabeth arrived.

Reckonings

The joy of liberation had its dark side. Women who had formed relationships with German soldiers were contemptuously called “Jerry-bags”. In the first hours after liberation British soldiers had to protect some of them from mob justice. British investigations into collaboration found that most of the allegations were unfounded. Twelve cases were considered, but none came to trial, because the prosecuting authorities concluded that there was no legal basis for charging even those who had informed on their neighbours. The Bailiffs Coutanche and Carey were knighted by the King. The dispute over whether the island authorities had been right to choose the path of cooperation, including over the Jews, revived in the 1990s, when the British archives were opened, and continues to this day.

The islands emerged from the war ruined and in debt to the tune of more than £10 million. The British government gave them over £3 million, and they had to pay off the rest themselves. Many of the thousands of bunkers and tunnels have survived to this day, and some have been turned into museums.

Place in the history of the war

The liberation of the Channel Islands was of no military significance. The garrison, which had sat in a cut-off fortress for almost a year, surrendered only the day after Germany’s final surrender was signed at Karlshorst. It was one of the last German forces in the west to lay down its arms – like the garrisons of the fortresses on France’s Atlantic coast, at Dunkirk, Lorient and Saint-Nazaire, which surrendered in the same days. On that same day, 9 May, Soviet troops entered Prague, and Moscow celebrated victory.

For the British, however, the islands were a symbol. They were the only part of the British Crown’s territory in Europe to be occupied by the Germans, and the experience of occupation – the local authorities’ cooperation with the occupier, the deportations, the fate of the Jews and the forced labourers, the hunger of the last winter – showed what German rule might have looked like in England itself had an invasion taken place in 1940. The questions raised by this history returned with full force years later, with the opening of the archives and research into the camps on Alderney. For the islanders themselves, 9 May 1945 remains the most important date in their modern history.