Aiding and Abetting the Third Reich: Der Mitläufer, Passive and Not-so-Passive Followers and Sympathisers of the Nazis

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Biographical, Inter-ethnic relations, Regional History, Society & Culture

As part of the Denazification process (German: Entnazifizierung) after the Second World War and to facilitate the Nuremberg war crimes trial proceedings, the German people were classified into five discrete groups:

• Major offenders (Germ: Hauptschuldige)

• Offenders: activists, militants, or profiteers (Germ: Belastete)

• Lesser offenders (Germ: Minderbelastete)

• Followers (Germ: Mitläufer)

• Exonerated persons (Germ: Entlastete)

Of the five categories, Mitläufer is the most contentious…it absolves the person concerned from having committed any formal Nazi criminal activity but acknowledges that he or she participated in some form of loosely defined, indirect support of Nazi crimes, which might be as minimalist as passively sympathising with Nazi aims and goals [‘Mitläufer’, Wikipedia, en.m.wikipedia.org]. The extent of the offence actually perpetrated however didn’t always equate with the category description – as will clear from the examples below.

Nazi defendants at the International Military Tribunal (Nov. 1945) (source: National Archives and Records Administration)

The German term Mitläufer (fem: Mitläuferin)—literally meaning “with-walker” or “one walking with”—can be defined as “follower” or possibly a “passive follower”. Mitläufereffekt is derived from it, also called the Bandwagon-Effekt (effect), which refers to the effect a perceived success exerts on the willingness of individuals to join the expected success. A characteristic of the Mitläufer is he is not convinced by the ideology of the group followed but merely offers no resistance, such as for lack of courage or for opportunism (ie, giving in to peer pressure) (‘Mitläufer’).

Some observers make a further (slight) distinction from the Mitläufer typology, to allow for the Nazi Mitläufer, a fellow-traveller” (Mitreisende) who sympathised with the Nazis but only indirectly participated in Nazi atrocities such as genocide.

Famous Deutsch Mitläufer and Mitläuferin

Martin Heidegger: one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers for his pioneering work on existentialism and phenomenology, all of which has been overshadowed by his controversial association with the German Nazi Party. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 – prior to this the philosopher was fundamentally apolitical. As rector of Freiburg University he delivered a number of speeches extolling the Nazi cause and publicly expressed antisemitic opinions. At the end of the world war the knives came out for Heidegger, he was forbidden to teach and lost his West German chair of philosophy (the ban was overturned just three years later). Heidegger, perhaps because of the lofty esteem he was held in as a leading intellectual, was never submitted to any harsher retribution (such as a term of incarceration). Critics have noted Heidegger’s complete failure after 1945 to “honestly reckon with the realities of Nazi Germany’s crimes, including the Holocaust, and his own role in lending support to the regime” [Jürgen Habermas in ‘Heidegger’s Downfall’, Jeffrey Herf, Quillette, 22-Feb-2023, quillette.com]. A very full account of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism makes it abundantly clear that he was neither a reluctant fellow-traveller nor (…) a nonpolitical scholar, a ‘child’ who got caught by the juggernaut of hideous political events [‘Heil Heidegger’, J.P. Stern, London Review of Books, Vol. 11 No.8, 20-April-1989 (Review of Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, by  Hugo Ott), lrb.co.uk].

Heidegger, intellectual backing for the Nationalist Socialists (image: simplycharly.com)

Leni Riefenstahl: a Berlin-born actress-turned-filmmaker, one of the few German women to direct a motion picture during the Weimar period. A favourite of Hitler, Riefenstahl was an important instrument of the Nazi propaganda machine, producing highly successful propaganda documentary films like Triumph of the Will and Olympia for the Third Reich. After the war Riefenstahl was arrested and found to be a Nazi fellow-traveller, sympathetic to the Nazi movement but not a party member[ᗩ] She however avoided being charged with any crime. Riefenstahl claimed she was an “apolitical naïf” and denied any knowledge of Nazi racial policies or the Holocaust, describing a concentration camp she had visited where the Roma and Sinti were detained as “a relief and welfare camp”[ᗷ] [‘Burying Leni Riefenstahl: one woman’s lifelong crusade against Hitler’s favourite film-maker’, Kate Connolly, The Guardian, 09-Dec-2021, amp.the guardian.com].

Leni: “My favourite dictator”

Wilhelm Stuckart: to the casual observer Wilhelm Stuckart’s steady progress up the Nazi hierarchy corresponds with that of the classic career Nazi. The Nazi lawyer and senior Interior Ministry official’s fingerprints were on some of the most nefarious Nazi concoctions against humanity (eg, co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, involved in the planning of the Final Solution). For someone involved fundamentally in the framing of genocidal policies Stuckart was absurdly classified as category IV (follower), copping a sentence of just three years from the tribunal. The leniency shown to Stuckart and other accomplices, Gruner attributes to the sophisticated defence strategies employed by former Nazis and their lawyers. Only a short time after Stuckart regained his freedom he was back drafting provincial German laws, one of which ended Denazification in Lower Saxony [Gruner, Wolf. The Journal of Modern History, vol. 86, no. 3, 2014, pp. 727–29. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/676745. Accessed 10 July 2024].


Wilhelm Stuckart on his SS uniform. (source: Yad Vershem)

Footnote: As illustrated above, classifying someone as Mitlaüer was a good way of allowing them to avoid the more serious categories and their consequences. Some high-profile unofficial servants of the Nazi regime managed to avoid being categorised as a Mitlaüer altogther. One was famous Austrian conductor Karl Böhm. Böhm was never a member of the NSDAP and never brought before the Denazification tribunal. However, as the historian Oliver Rathkolb has remarked, he was the artist who “had presumably been the most active (non-party) member to provide propaganda for the (Nazis)” and was lavishly rewarded with plumb conducting positions, culminating in his appointment as director of the Vienna State Opera [‘Karl Böhm – Salzburg Festival’,salzburgerfestspiele.at].

[ᗩ] Nazi party membership of itself didn’t necessarily result in a more serious classification than Mitläufer…in the case of the celebrated Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan joined the NSDAP twice (membership nos. 1607525 and 3430914), he was exonerated of illegal activity during the Nazi period at his Denazification tribunal hearing and classified as a Mitläufer

[ᗷ] trenchant critics in the West take an unflinching and unforgiving view of her role, labelling her an “unindicted co-conspirator” (Simon Wiesenthal Center), “a Nazi by association” (Sandra Smith) and “the glib voice of ‘how could we have known?’ defence” (Bach, Steven. “The Puzzle of Leni Riefenstahl.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976—), vol. 26, no. 4, 2002, pp. 43–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40260668. Accessed 11 July 2024)

Hitler and the Nazis, the West’s Continuing Collective Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
International Relations, Military history, Popular Culture, World history,

Your own private Adolph Hitler

SUCH is the fixation in the West with everything Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, the story of the Third Reich’s dramatic rise and fall is just so familiar to everyone that it seems like we all have our own little piece of the megalomaniacal German dictator. Hitler is the most talked about/written about public figure of the 20th century. The obsession with Hitler and the Nazis since the end of the Second World War, now into its eighth decade—in cinema, in television dramas and documentaries, in popular literature, in scholarly dissertations and books from academe, in popular culture, in social media—is not only not abating but on the upsurge if anything🄰.

Hitler the demagogue in full flight (Source: Correo.com)

It seems as if every aspect, every scintilla, of the Nazi regime and every chapter of Hitler’s life, before and after attaining power, has been turned over, sifted through and scrutinised diagnostically to the nth degree. One explanation for the blanket coverage is the sheer volume of available material on the subject. We might not have the personal letters exchanged between the Führer and his mistress Eva Braun and we know that the existence of the Hitler Diaries was an outrageous sham fiction, but the Nazis, unlike other mass misery-inflicting, totalitarian regimes, left behind a plethora of filmic, photographic and written documentary evidence, to enable a compelling picture of the nature of the Third Reich to be pieced together [‘Why are we still fascinated by Hitler?’, John Jewell, Journalism, Media and Culture, 11-Sep-2013, www.jomec.co.uk].

Pages from the fake Hitler Diaries (Source: Times of Israel): though palpably bogus it’s “discovery” only fuelled the Nazi mania

Why does Hitler and Nazism continue to exercise this central role in the thinking of so many people? This question has continued to exercise the minds of international scholars, historians, political scientists, not to mention the average punter, ever since the 1940s.

The fact that the Third Reich remains relevant to our contemporary society—illustrated in a number of ways and forms—is a factor that keeps Hitler and his extreme right cronies in the forefront of peoples’ consciousness. There is the moral objectionableness of the Nazi regime per se. The nature of the regime was horrifically egregious to a degree that is sui generis, and the catastrophic consequence of its rise as a world power, total global war and mass destruction, stands as a lesson and a reminder for all nations of what happens when a hitherto cultured and advanced, democratic nation loses its moral compass and goes madly off the rails .

Source: Times of Israel

Hitler and the Nazis were not your ordinary garden variety mass murderers…when you weigh up the mega-scale and severity of the Nazis’ atrocities its hard to escape the conclusion that Hitler personified absolute evil. He and his vilified movement represent a moral abyss. Moreover, Hitler and by association German Nazism is the yardstick by which we measure the very essence of evil! Whenever someone or some institution acts in a brutal manner which we find anathema we tend to reach by reflex for the Nazi card (it might be prompted by something as everyday basic as an encounter with overbearing officialdom or a neighbourhood bully). As Roger Moorhouse put it, these “simple stereotypes (have made the term ‘Nazi’) part of the cultural furniture” [‘Why is the Public so Obsessed with the Nazis?’, Roger Moorhouse, History Today, Vol. 1, Issue 3 (Mar 2020), www.historytoday.com].

Der Führer launching the VW, 1938 (Photo: AP)

We are reminded of the magnitude of the Nazis’ criminality whenever the media outs some elderly individual who is accused of having been a Nazi functionary or collaborator and is (sometimes) brought to trial – the most recent, nonagenarian Oskar Groening, “the bookkeeper of Auschwitz” in 2015. At such times Nazism is thrust back into the spotlight once again (assuming it has ever left it)🄱. Then there’s the raft of large corporations who were associated with and in many instances benefitted from the dominance of the Nazi Party in the Thirties and Forties—household names from the business world such as Hugo Boss, Volkswagen, Porsche, Bayer and Siemens—all still operating profitably today.

Although the German state capitulated in May 1945 and the Nazi empire was completely dismantled, the spirit of Nazism didn’t end with WWII. The postwar era has seen a rebirth of the movement in the form of neo-Nazi groups which sprang up across Europe and beyond🄲. Many of these far-right organisations still operate, espousing racist, antisemitic and anti-immigrant views, including in democratic Germany itself (Alternative for Germany – AfG), their continued existence a reminder that the ashes of an abhorrent past are not entirely extinguished.

Neo-Nazi protest march, US (Photo: The Guardian)

Endnote: “The Nazi cinematic universe” Hollywood and European cinema in the postwar era has been awash with Nazi war movies, by far the biggest contributor to the war genre movie. Moviegoers have been assailed with a constant bombardment of films with various Nazi themes and stories…victims of the Holocaust; Allied POWs escaping from Nazi prisons; the Nazis invading Britain, France, Norway, etc; and so – a veritable avalanche of wartime action capers, many borrowing freely from popular fiction to embellish the history with fanciful tales of supposed Nazi plots.

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🄰 a good example pertaining to social media of the Nazi fixation is Godwin’s Law (AKA Godwin’s Rule of Analogies) – it states that the longer an internet discussion goes on, the more likely it is that someone will bring up the subject of Hitler or the Nazis

🄱 this aspect of the Nazi memory does of course have a tangible end-date, given every active participant in WWII war crimes still alive would today need to be nearly 100-years-old or older

🄲 including in Allied countries who had fought against the Third Reich such as US, UK, Australia and France

Returning Serve to the Nazis: Britain’s WWII Radio Propaganda Machine

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
International Relations, Media & Communications, Military history, Regional History
❝History stopped in 1936 – after that, there was only propaganda❞
~ George Orwell

❝We want to spread disruptive and disturbing news among the Germans which will induce them to distrust their government and disobey it❞
~ Sefton Delmer

⨳⨳ ⨳ ⨳ ⨳ ⨳

Previous blogs on this site talked about how the Nazis used expat Britons and Americans to launch a blast of psychological warfare against the Allies with the objective of undermining their forces’ morale in WWII, the means utilised, the ‘weapon’ of powerful radio transmission (voiced by role-playing figureheads, in particular the so-called “Lord Haw-Haw” and “Axis Sally”). It wasn’t long into the World War before Britain decided it too would infiltrate the enemy airwaves in a counter-attempt to try to mess with German military minds.

𝔓𝔯𝔬𝔭𝔞𝔤𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔞 𝔴𝔞𝔯–𝔣𝔦𝔢𝔩𝔡, 𝔚𝔚ℑℑ (ℭ𝔯𝔢𝔡𝔦𝔱: 𝔉𝔩𝔦𝔠𝔨𝔯)

∘

Es spricht der Chef
To undertake the task the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) was formed with the brief of disseminating ”black propaganda”⦑a⦒ against the enemy.The idea involved setting up a number of fake German radio stations—the first called Gustav Siegfried Eins (shortened to GS1) using shortwave frequency, harder for the Nazis to jam—as the propaganda vehicle for deceiving the Fatherland. From May 1941⦑b⦒ every day at 1648 hours a broadcaster purporting to be an old school Prussian officer known as der Chef would come on the air on German radio and, predictably, denounce the enemy, the ‘Brits’, the ‘Ruskies’ and the Jews, but then launch into a full-blown rant castigating Nazi officialdom too…in “profanity-laced tirades” the Chief would lambast Nazi officials’ “buffoonery, sexual perversity and malfeasance…condemning their incompetence and their indifference to the deprivations” suffered by the German volk⦑c⦒. Because he sounded ‘legit’ the impression many listeners got from the disillusioned Chief’s on-air ‘sprays’ was that there must be a rift within the German high command (‘The Fake British Radio Show That Helped Defeat the Nazis’, Marc Wortman, Smithsonian Magazine,28-Feb-2017, www.smithsonianmag.com).

𝔓𝔥𝔬𝔱𝔬: 𝔞𝔪𝔞𝔷𝔬𝔫.𝔠𝔬𝔪

∘

Other little parcels of poison delivered by “the Chief” via the radio waves included insinuations that the supposedly ‘Ayran’ army of the Third Reich was being contaminated by the influx of foreign troops in its ranks. He also alleged that injured German soldiers were receiving infusions of “syphilis-tainted blood” of captured Slavs. Another unsubtle avenue pursued by the Chief was to play on German officers’ fears of spouse infidelity at home.

𝔊𝔖1 ℜ𝔞𝔡𝔦𝔬 𝔖𝔱𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔞𝔱 𝔐𝔦𝔩𝔱𝔬𝔫 𝔅𝔯𝔶𝔞𝔫 (𝔖𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔠𝔢: 𝔅𝔢𝔡𝔣𝔬𝔯𝔡 𝔅𝔬𝔯𝔬𝔲𝔤𝔥 ℭ𝔬𝔲𝔫𝔠𝔦𝔩)

∘

In truth, the voice they heard belonged not to a disaffected Prussian army veteran but to Peter Seckelmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany acting out the role of der Chef. The panicked Nazi commanders combed the Reich to try to locate what they thought must be a maverick German general on the loose, all the time Seckelmann was secretly housed in England, in a small radio studio tucked away in quiet Bedfordshire.

𝔖𝔢𝔣𝔱𝔬𝔫 𝔇𝔢𝔩𝔪𝔢𝔯 (𝔓𝔥𝔬𝔱𝔬: 𝔎𝔲𝔯𝔱 ℌ𝔲𝔱𝔱𝔬𝔫/𝔓𝔦𝔠𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔢 𝔓𝔬𝔰𝔱/ℌ𝔲𝔩𝔱𝔬𝔫 𝔄𝔯𝔠𝔥𝔦𝔳𝔢𝔰/𝔊𝔢𝔱𝔱𝔶 ℑ𝔪𝔞𝔤𝔢𝔰)

∘

Sefton Delmer at the helm
 The mastermind behind Britain’s black propaganda campaign was Denis Sefton Delmer, born in Berlin of Australian parents. Recruited by PWE in 1940 because of his fluency in German and familiarity with the Nazi leaders⦑d⦒, Delmer had a thing for colourful descriptions of what his black propaganda unit did…”psychological judo” and “propaganda by pornography”⦑e⦒. The former German-based Daily Express journalist moulded PWE “special operations” into a “veritable fake news mill”, assembling an efficient team of artists, writers and printers who worked tirelessly to create thousands of phoney German newspapers and leaflets (not to neglect the role of American bombers who dropped two million units of the bogus literature every day over enemy territory)⦑f⦒. Gathering information from various sources (British intelligence, German POW interrogations, resistance operatives, bomber debriefings), PWE deceived and bewildered the Axis enemy through a carefully measured mix of lies and fact (Wortman). The tactics of ‘black’ radio were “short-term, rumour-filled⦑g⦒ and deceptive” (Nicholas Rankin, Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception 1914-1945 (2008)).

ℭ𝔩𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔢 𝔄𝔰𝔭𝔦𝔡𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔯𝔞 𝔱𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔰𝔪𝔦𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯 𝔞𝔱 𝔚𝔞𝔳𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔫 𝔗𝔬𝔴𝔢𝔯 (𝔖𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔠𝔢: 𝔩𝔦𝔳𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔞𝔯𝔠𝔥𝔦𝔳𝔢.𝔬𝔯𝔤.𝔲𝔨)

∘

The fake news network
Soddatensender Calais (G9) was another, British-run, faux Nazi radio station. ‘Aspidistra’, a medium wave radio transmitter located in Crowborough, East Sussex, conveyed the Sefton Delmer blend of music, innocuous information (appealing to German servicemen) together with the manipulated, ‘black’ kind of information (‘Fake News is Nothing New: 5 ‘Black Propaganda’ Operations From the 1930s and 1940s’, Jeanette Lamb, History Collection, 24-Mar-2017, www.historycollection.com).

𝔅𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔞𝔦𝔫’𝔰 𝔭𝔰𝔢𝔲𝔡𝔬–𝔊𝔢𝔯𝔪𝔞𝔫 𝔫𝔢𝔴𝔰𝔭𝔞𝔭𝔢𝔯
∘

Getting back to “the Chief”, Seckelmann under the direction of Sefton Delmer made in all 700 broadcasts to the German population. The Nazis tried to jam the broadcasts coming through the GS1 station but to no avail. Delmer, having decided to close down GS1, orchestrated a dramatic denouement for der Chef charade, having him ‘assassinated’ on-air in the final episode in 1943 (transforming “the Chief” into a kind of martyred loyalist to the Führer⦑h⦒).

Backlash to Delmer’s black propaganda approach
 Not everyone in Britain including those within government were on board with Delmer’s black radio activities. There were critics inside Churchill’s war cabinet, like Richard Stafford Cripps, who condemned PWE for taking the moral low ground … serving up a cocktail of outrageous lies and dirty tricks – from inventing military sex orgies to discredit the SS⦑i⦒ to fake news of American ‘miracle’ weapons like the new, non-existent ”phosphorus shells” to abrade the morale of German listeners [‘Black Propaganda in WW2’, The History Room, YouTube video, 2014). Delmer himself was a forthright, controversial and sometimes polarising figure, he had no compunction about exploiting sex in its most extreme manifestations including ”beastly pornography” and even pederasty, fabricating atrocities including the rape of German soldiers’ wives and sisters. Delmer was eyed with suspicion by both sides, some Germans thought he was a British spy and some Britons thought he was a Nazi spy (Rankin).


How effective were PWE’s black propaganda broadcasts?
PWE’s sheer weight of rumours, lies, half-truths and disinformation from PWE certainly no doubt took some toll on a already sagging German morale in the latter stages of the conflict, but did Delmer’s ”psychological judo” “disrupt the enemy’s will and power to fight on”? (‘Propaganda – A Weapon of War’, NLS, www.digital.nls.uk). It is not possible to definitely answer this question in the affirmative or negative. At the end of the war PWE was disbanded and all its records and documents were shredded. The deficit of data precludes any firm idea of how big and widespread the Germany wartime audience for the phoney radio transmissions was. Praise for PWE’s work however came from on high in the enemy camp, Minister of Propaganda Goebbels no less who conceded that Britain’s black Soldatensender had accomplished a “very clever job of propaganda” (Goebbels’ 1943 diary entry).

𝖁𝖔𝖑𝖐𝖘𝖊𝖒𝖕𝖋ä𝖓𝖌𝖊𝖗 (𝖑𝖎𝖙. “𝕻𝖊𝖔𝖕𝖑𝖊’𝖘 𝕽𝖊𝖈𝖊𝖎𝖛𝖊𝖗”) (𝕾𝖔𝖚𝖗𝖈𝖊: 𝕮𝖔𝖔𝖕𝖊𝖗 𝕳𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖙 𝕮𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖊𝖈𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓)

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Footnote: ‘Black’ v ‘white’ propaganda
Black propaganda is distinguished from the more common type ‘white’ propaganda. The ’White’ kind is propaganda that does not hide its origins or nature, that emanates from bodies from government international information services (eg, BBC, The Voice of America). A third variant, ‘grey’ propaganda, straddles the other two – the origin of the information and messages is concealed so it can’t be discerned, eg, during the Cold War the CIA beamed grey propaganda into the Eastern Bloc through the intermediary of radio stations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (’Grey Propaganda’, www.powerbase.info).

______________________________

⦑a⦒ a form of propaganda (used by both sides in the war) which “is presented by the propagandizer as coming from a source inside the propagandised” (Becker, H. (1949). ‘The Nature and Consequences of Black Propaganda.’ American Sociological Review, 14(2), 221–235. https://doi.org/10.2307/2086855) , ie, by those it is supposed to discredit (Wikipedia)


⦑b⦒ the onset of Der Chef’s broadcasts coincided with the defection of the Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess to Britain


⦑c⦒ the Chief’s main target for ”character assassination” were ”lower-level Nazi functionaries” and their presumed corruption, ‘His Majesty’s Director of Pornography’, Stephen Budiansky, HistoryNet, www.historynet.com)


⦑d⦒ Delmer met Hitler himself while inspecting the Reichstag fire in Berlin


⦑e⦒ he even referred to himself irreverently as “HMG’s Director of Pornography”


⦑f⦒ producing “agitprop masquerading as inside dirt” (‘Fighting the Nazis With Fake News’, Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com)


⦑g ⦒ one baseless rumour spread by the bogus German stations that led the Gestapo on a wild goose chase concerned a resistance group of anti-Nazis supposedly inside the Reich called “Red Circle” ‘Undermining Hitler (Part One of Three)’, Providentia, 07-Feb-2016, http://drvitelli.typepad.com)

⦑h⦒ Seckelmann‘s dissident officer in his radio diatribes had been careful to exclude Hitler himself from any blame, suggesting that it was the subordinates who had betrayed the Führer


⦑i⦒ the PWE artists’ role in the Brits’ deception was to skilfully forge documents which falsely incriminated Nazi personnel in the SS and other arms of the forces


ƿՐ૦ƿค૭คՈძค ८૦Ն૦υՐs

English Channel Islands under the Swastika, 1940–1945

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
International Relations, Military history, Regional History

In the wake of the catastrophic Allied defeat in the Battle of France in 1940, Britain made the decision not to defend the strategically-unadvantageous but sovereign Channel Islands lying just eight miles from the French coastline, giving up the oldest possession of the Crown “without firing a single shot” (Hazel R. Knowles Smith, The changing face of the Channel Islands Occupation, 2007)⚀. The islands were demilitarised, giving the German Wehrmacht a saloon passage into them in June 1940. There was no resistance to the German invasion…in addition to the British government withdrawing all troops, the locals were instructed not to resist the German invaders. Unfortunately no one told Berlin about the demilitarisation and German bombers raided Guernsey and Jersey, resulting in the death of 44 civilians✦.

Resistance by the islanders was pretty much out of the question due to geography as well as the numerical strength of the German military commitment (some 21,000 troops and a ratio of two Germans to one civilian in some areas). The islands’ terrain, being very small, flat and easy to search, made it “very difficult for a potential resistance to hide and organise” [‘Life under Nazi rule: the occupation of the Channel Islands’, (Rachel Dinning), History Extra, 25-Nov-2020, www.historyextra.com].

🔺 (Photo: World Travel Guide)

A so-called “Model occupation?”
Compared to the harshness of the Nazis’ subjection of Eastern European peoples, the occupying German military exerted a softer, lighter touch in its handling of the residents of the Channel Islands. The occupation has been described as “a gentler and kinder one with a correspondingly civil ladies and gentlemen’s resistance” MCGETCHIN, D. (2017). Journal of World History, 28(1), 154-161. Retrieved July 3, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/44631517]. Even the attorney general of Guernsey depicted it as a “model occupation”. Hitler clearly saw an opportunity for an exercise in public relations (Dinning). The greater lenience given to the islands’ Britons also can probably be attributed to the Nazis’ perception of the occupied people as “racially elevated”, similar to how the Germans treated the Danes and Dutch, in contrast to the much harsher treatment meted out during the war to Russians and Poles for example (McGetchin).

While relations for the most part were cordial with the majority of islanders accordingly willing to peacefully co-exist with the German presence, the “softer approach” of the Germans shouldn’t be overstated—islanders were not free to speak their minds, they were subjected to curfews, 2% of the population were convicted and some imprisoned, two persons were executed, over 2,000 were deported including some Jews—certainly not a Sunday school picnic and things got tougher over time as the inhabitants faced critical food shortages which progressed into the very real reality of starvation.

🔺 Seigneur of Sark (Dame Sibyl Hathaway) visited by Wehrmacht officers at her fiefdom (Source: Twitter)

Pockets of non-militarised resistance
A lack of overt resistance didn’t mean there was no resistance at all. Among the islanders there was episodes of defiance of a non-violent kind – Britain’s BBC encouraged people to chalk the ‘V’ (for Victory) sign on buildings, ‘V’ jewellery was made, some civilians and local policemen as well raided German stores and supplies, others engaged in intelligence gathering, arson and graffiti-writing (Dinning). Act of sabotage on a small scale occurred and many islanders fed and even hid especially Russian POWs in their properties. On the other side of the coin there were varying forms of collaboration with the invaders, including paid informants who turned in their own people to the Nazis. The most vilified collaborators were women—derisively labelled ‘Jerrybags’ by townsfolk—who had sexual liaisons with the soldiers stationed on the islands (‘Defending Jerrybags’, (Colin Smith), Prospect, 20-Apr-1997, www.prospectmagazine.co.uk).

🔺 ‘V’ sign on Robin Hood pub, St Helier  (www.jerseyeveningpost.com)

A Nazi island fortress
With the British civilian inhabitants largely under wraps, the Nazi Führer embarked on his plans to “battle-proof” the Channel Islands. The Nazis transported massive amounts of steel and concrete for the grandiose-scale building scheme, tower forts, 45m-high gun stations, casements, anti-tank walls, air-raid shelters, bunkers and tunnels§. Beaches were mined and barbed wire laid around the coastlines. Hitler has plans for the heavily fortified islands in the post-war Third Reich as well, to serve as a haven for Axis soldiers [‘Did you know about Hitler’s insane “war-proof” islands?’, (Jeremy Caspar), SBS, 17-Mar-2017, www.sbs.com.au]. The value of the Channels’ coastal defence network to Hitler as propaganda against enemy Britain accounts for Berlin’s out of proportion material commitment to the Channels, constituting 10% of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall resources⋔ (‘Occupation of the Channel Islands by Nazi Germany’, New World Encyclopedia).

Forced labourers building island fortifications 🔻

(Photo: Priaulx Library & Occupation Archives)

The fortresses were built by Organisation Todt (OT – the Nazi civil and military engineering group) employing forced labour mainly from Eastern Europe (French and Spanish prisoners were also forced into service on the mega-building project). The effectively enslaved workers (Ostarbeiter) were treated appallingly badly (with a resulting large loss of life) by the Wehrmacht soldiers who looked on them as Untermenschen (“sub-human”) (Dinning)✪. The Nazis built four labour camps on Alderney Island, two for ‘volunteer’ labourers (Hilfswillige) and the other two were concentration camps.

(Source: tvtime.com)

Hitler’s fortresses, or the remnants of them, remain highly visible to this day – especially on Alderney the most northern of the Channel Islands. Alderney was the most heavily fortified of the islands (nicknamed “Adolf Island”), after virtually all of its inhabitants were evacuated [‘The Nazi Occupation of the Islands of Guernsey‘, (Stephanie Gordon), Historic UK (nd), www.historic-uk.com].

Footnote: How did the Channel Islands first become English?
Traditionally belonging to the Duchy of Normandy, the collection of small islands became English when Norman noble William the Conqueror was victorious at Hastings and succeeded to the English throne in 1066.

Postscript: the return of evacuees to the Channel Islands from mainland Britain after liberation in 1945 led to a difficult period of reintegration for all. A schism within the communities developed and sustained for a long time, some of those who stayed thought the evacuees cowardly for leaving, whereas the latter retorted that it was they who had gone through the real war facing the Blitz while the “safe-at-home” ‘stayers’ cosied up to the Germans (Barrett).

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⚀ Britain prime minister, Churchill, in his ‘bulldogged’ forthright fashion still wanted to defend the Channel Islands on a matter of principle, however the stark realities disclosed by the naval high command—the islands were situated too far from mainland Britain, too close to enemy bases in France, the martial materials required to do so would have left Britain vulnerable to defending itself—made the decision a “no-brainer” [Duncan Barrett, Hitler’s British Isles, 2018]

✦ there was token resistance to the raids from a solitary ground gun on the Isle of Sark

§ in both Guernsey and Jersey 200-250 strongpoints were constructed by OT

⋔ the Atlantikwall was an extensive Nazi coastal defence system built along western continental Europe and Scandinavia

✪ around 16,000 forced/slave workers were sent to Jersey alone [‘World War Two: Forced labourer who made Jersey his home, BBC, 10-May-2020, www.bbc.com]