More than seventy years after its end, the Second World War is still an intrinsic part of Britain's national identity. Standing alone, the British people came together to face the great events of 1940–41—Dunkirk, fear of invasion, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz—and emerged stronger, more determined, and more united than before. The war was a leveler. All social divisions were set aside for the duration, and the whole nation united as one to endure all of the dangers and hardships put before it, each member of the national community contributing in his or her own way to ultimate victory in the what was called the People's War. After its victory, the nation's reward would be a fairer postwar society that recognized the sacrifices made by the entire people.Footnote 1 Among the defining events of the People's War was the Blitz. Bombers were no respecters of class, race, or religion, and the fortitude, stoicism, and even humor with which the nation endured the horrors of the bombing became a key element in the larger narrative of the People's War. The “Blitz Spirit” was characterized, according to Angus Calder, by three key qualities: the British “had all been in it together,” “taken it,” and “carried on.”Footnote 2
Yet Calder also questioned this portrayal of British wartime unity. In The People's War (1969), he searched for evidence that the social and political divisions that had existed before the war, supposedly forgotten (or at least dormant) but very much alive and well, had been edited out of the national story.Footnote 3 In his Myth of the Blitz (1991), the angry response of a Marxist to what he saw as the appropriation of the spirit of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz by the political right of his day, he maintained that the “Blitz Spirit” was contradicted by evidence of panic, revulsion, depression, and antisocial behavior, in which divisions of class and race were glaringly apparent and were widened by the impact of the bombing.Footnote 4
Integral to the “finest hour” narrative are the speeches of Churchill, perhaps most famously that of June 1940, delivered to the House of Commons after Dunkirk. With the fall of France imminent, Churchill vowed that Britain would “never surrender”; even were Britain to be occupied and its people “subjugated and starving,” the fight would be continued by the empire.Footnote 5 But one part of the British Isles was in fact occupied by the Nazis, and those who, like Calder, have speculated how a defeated British people might have behaved under German occupation, have looked to the Channel Islands for an answer.Footnote 6
The Channel Islands lie off the west coast of the Cotentin Peninsula, nearer to France than to England. As Crown Dependencies, the islands did not form part of the United Kingdom but enjoyed self-government, and though very much considering themselves to be British, islanders had their own identities distinct from those of the mainland. The Germans occupied the Channel Islands on 1 July 1940, and for administrative purposes incorporated them into the Départment de la Manche, and with that into the military district of northwest France, by which measure all German laws passed in France were applied to the islands.Footnote 7 The islands were viewed as a backwater of the war by all concerned—the British government, the German military, and the islanders themselves. The nature of the occupation of the Channel Islands was less severe than that on the continent, and islanders were surprised in 1940, and not a little relieved, at the discipline and conduct of the Germans and their efforts to behave “correctly.”
The occupation is still a sensitive subject in some quarters. The Channel Islands have sometimes been depicted as exceptional, both in terms of the supposed absence of resistance to the Nazis and in the level of collaboration, an argument made controversially in The Model Occupation by British journalist Madeleine Bunting.Footnote 8 In the chapter “Resistance? What Resistance?,” Bunting indicates not so much an absence of resistance itself as the need for a useful definition of its nature and a full examination of the evidence available for the Channel Islands.Footnote 9 It is now accepted that resistance could take many forms, military and nonmilitary, and the “what resistance?” fallacy has been put to rest by a recent study showing nonmilitary forms to have been widespread in the islands.Footnote 10 Of some sixty-five thousand islanders, a minimum of thirteen hundred were convicted of offenses against the occupying forces; that figure of course excludes those who managed to avoid arrest.Footnote 11 Of the thirteen hundred convicted, approximately one-fifth served their sentences in the very dangerous conditions of continental prisons and camps; twenty-nine did not return.Footnote 12
It is more difficult, if not impossible, to gauge the numbers of those who collaborated. We would need first to decide what we mean by “collaborators”: paid informers, for example, would fall into that category. But what of black marketeers with German contacts? Or those who worked for the Germans in a nonmilitary capacity? In fact, any form of social contact with the occupiers risked the accusation by fellow islanders of being “friendly” to the Germans, which to many minds qualified as an act of collaboration. In France, over ninety thousand collaborators were convicted in the postwar courts of the legal purge,Footnote 13 but no such purge took place in the Channel Islands. MI5 arrived on the islands in May 1945 with a list of 340 persons of interest, compiled in part from the evidence of young islanders who had escaped for Normandy after D-Day with lurid tales of what they had left behind, and sweeping allegations of collaboration against both individual islanders and swathes of the population.Footnote 14 More names were added during investigations over the summer of 1945. However, not all the accused were collaborators in any meaningful way; many were probably entirely innocent. Accusations were made by fellow islanders on the flimsiest of grounds, many maliciously so, and were largely discounted. The British authorities eventually identified only twelve cases they thought would have a reasonable chance of prosecution in the courts. In the event, none were charged or convicted.
The occupation of the Channel Islands, like the Blitz, was a test of the unity and morale of the British people in the face of the enemy. The nature of the test was very different, of course. The Channel Islands were spared the horrors of bombing but bore the mental and physical strains of five years under Nazi rule. Like the Blitz, the ordeal of the occupation put pressures on individuals and communities that brought out the best and the worst in people.
Calder's “Myth of the Blitz” started to form as soon as the first bombs fell in September 1940. It was built on the speeches of Churchill, the broadcasts of J. B. Priestley, the work of the Crown Film Unit, the Ministry of Information, the BBC, the British press, and the reports of sympathetic American journalists. Myth building along these lines could not take place in the Channel Islands. By its nature, much of the resistance, protest, and defiance went unnoticed and unrecorded by a Nazi-controlled press. Those newspapers naturally printed only news and views of the war dictated by German censors, and the only propaganda films shown in cinemas were those of the Germans. The expression of anti-German opinion or sentiment was forbidden and was punishable in German courts. The islands’ leaders had neither the opportunity nor the character to inspire their people as Churchill did. As for the BBC, the rarity of broadcasts aimed at the islanders, none of which was inspirational, left islanders feeling isolated, forgotten, and sometimes bitter.Footnote 15 The “People's War” and the “Myth of the Blitz” have been interpreted as products of “cultural hegemony,” created and to some extent imposed on the whole nation by the powers that be.Footnote 16 In the Channel Islands, the power and the hegemony belonged to the Germans.
What filled this vacuum was gossip and rumor, often malicious, much of it fueled by suspicion and fear. The perception of islanders at the time, in the evidence given to the security services and confirmed in occupation diaries and postwar memoirs, is one of widespread collaboration—by local politicians and civil servants, farmers and builders, employers and workers, friends and neighbors. The difference between their perception and the reality, however, is difficult to establish. In this climate, almost any form of contact with the enemy might be interpreted as collaboration, and to patriotic islanders, any collaboration was too much. Nevertheless, the evidence of islanders was taken at face value by the British secret services in 1945 (though not always uncritically or without reservations), and MI5's condemnation of the people of the Channel Islands, released to the public by The National Archives in the 1990s, has strengthened the case against them.Footnote 17 Much of the history written since then has been influenced by this collaborationist narrative.
Letters of Denunciation
Were the islands exceptional in their level of collaboration? Was denunciation in the Channel Islands, as Peter Davies has remarked, “a veritable industry?”Footnote 18 Studies of denunciation in other parts of the Nazi empire give us the opportunity to put this aspect of the occupation of the Channel Islands into a meaningful context and may help to refine some of the judgments made.
Robert Gellately has defined denunciation as “spontaneous communications from individual citizens to the state (or to another authority such as the Church) containing accusations of wrongdoing by other citizens or officials and implicitly or explicitly calling for punishment.”Footnote 19 Informing, though a related act, is different, and “generally implies a regular, often paid, relationship to the police.”Footnote 20 The study of denunciation in the modern totalitarian state began in earnest with Gellately's analysis of the surviving Gestapo files in German archives, which questioned the depiction of Nazi Germany as a terror state, its passive citizenry kept under the surveillance and control of an all-knowing and all-powerful security apparatus.Footnote 21 Rather, the Gestapo that Gellately found in his study of these files was a more reactive body, dependent to a surprising degree on information volunteered by a public that was “self-policing.”Footnote 22
Subsequently, historians have examined both sides of this relationship—the motive of the letter writer and the response of the state—in places and times as diverse as revolutionary France, Tsarist and Soviet Russia, Nazi-occupied France and Czechoslovakia, postwar Poland, postwar Germany, the German Democratic Republic, and Salazar's Portugal.Footnote 23 Sheila Fitzpatrick described how citizens’ letters were used in the Soviet Union as a source of intelligence on the state of public opinion and to identify problems with bureaucracy; her book showed how, during the purges of 1936–1938, an “epidemic” of denunciations helped spread the terror, claiming many victims.Footnote 24 Fitzpatrick also stressed the complementary nature of denunciation in the Soviet Union: both the state and the denouncer had something to gain. John Connelly used letters sent to district offices of the Nazi Party to make the same point for Germany, showing how denunciation worked at a local level as an interaction between the people and the party, to the benefit of both.Footnote 25 The degree to which the German people were self-policing has been challenged by Bernward Dörner, correcting what he sees as an underestimation of the Gestapo's role (a point also made by Claire Hall with regard to the Gestapo's paid informers).Footnote 26 But it is denunciation in Nazi-occupied countries that is of particular relevance to the Channel Islands. The islands were administered through France and were subject to the same laws. And in terms of denunciation, the islands and France share the extra dimension of collaboration with a foreign occupier, of treason and betrayal of one's countrymen to the same enemy.Footnote 27
These varied studies demonstrate a set of characteristics that appear to be almost universal. Letters of denunciation targeted rivals, enemies, and competitors. Writers might denounce those above them in society, such as officials or their superiors at work, or within their own social class and their own neighborhoods. It was not unknown in Vichy France for Jews to denounce fellow Jews.Footnote 28 Even family members could be victims—spouses and in-laws, parents, children, and siblings.Footnote 29 Denunciation tends to be prevalent at the lower end of the social scale;Footnote 30 individuals who might normally feel themselves to be impotent or downtrodden could invoke the power of the authorities against their work or social superiors by means of the anonymous letter—as Fitzpatrick describes it, a “weapon of the weak.”Footnote 31
The factors that distinguish denunciation in one society from another are variable: the extent to which the state tries to control behavior, and the laws it passes to do so; the severity of the punishments for breaking those laws; the willingness and ability of the security apparatus in a state to act on the information received; and the social and economic conditions under which people live. Every new law creates an opportunity for denunciation, and there is always somebody willing to take it.Footnote 32 These conditions were created in the Channel Islands in 1940. New laws were passed by the German occupiers to restrict the islanders’ behavior, and a responsive security apparatus in the form of the Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Field Police) and Feldgendarmerie (German military police) acted upon information received about those who broke those laws.
Few letters of denunciation have survived from the period of the occupation of the Channel Islands, yet much can be found in their language to tell us something of the character and motives of the people who wrote them. In the Normandy Départment of Calvados, almost 60 percent of denunciations were motivated by personal reasons, against family, in-laws, neighbors, and colleagues.Footnote 33 The dominant theme in those letters is the desire to settle a score. And in the small sample of surviving letters from the islands, we see the same underlying emotions—spite, jealousy, anger, resentment, and vindictiveness.
How widespread was denunciation in the Channel Islands? Were the islands, like Nazi Germany, self-policing? Estimates of the numbers of anonymous letters in France range from hundreds of thousands to an unlikely three to five million.Footnote 34 More reliable are the figures from Calvados, which, like the Channel Islands, faced the English Channel and was heavily militarized. After the liberation 1,302 cases of denunciation were investigated, some 0.32 percent of a population of just over 400,000.Footnote 35
The impression in the Channel Islands, during the occupation and since, was that very large numbers of letters of denunciation were sent to the German authorities. An officer of the Geheime Feldpolizei based in Guernsey claimed that he had no need for surveillance: “All I have got to do is open my mail in the mornings.”Footnote 36 According to Albert Lamy, the acting chief officer of the Guernsey police, hundreds of anonymous denunciations were received during the course of the occupation,Footnote 37 and more were intercepted and destroyed by Guernsey's postal workers.Footnote 38 It is possible that the number of writers was significantly lower than the number of letters—that, like the Soviet Union, the islands had their “super-denouncers” who wrote multiple letters; however, only a little evidence hints at this.Footnote 39 Numbers in the hundreds, rather than thousands, are broadly in line with what Julie Chassin found in Calvados, but that is probably as much as we can say.Footnote 40
The majority of the accused who came before German courts in Jersey were tried on charges of theft and the receiving of stolen goods, usually of food (a crime many were driven to, particularly in the islands’ own “hunger winter” of 1944–45); to that we can add black market and profiteering offenses. And from June 1942, the most common single offense was wireless related, either for possession or for the dissemination of news.Footnote 41 Most of the letters of denunciation that have survived in Jersey and Guernsey were aimed at these groups of people, and I examine those accusations next.
Food and the Black Market
If some denouncers in the Channel Islands were motivated by selfishness or spite, others may have been driven by the stresses of life under the occupation, not least the struggle to find food. As the war progressed, rations fell and thefts of food rose. Yet food still found its way onto the black market, and trade increased as shortages became severe. Thefts of foodstuffs in Guernsey rose by 74 percent between 1942 and 1944, and black market offenses rose by 150 percent.Footnote 42
It appears that in Britain comparatively few letters were sent to the authorities regarding the black market. Like the Nazis, the British authorities were reluctant to make use of letters of denunciation for fear of the negative effects on morale.Footnote 43 The black market in Britain was unsavory and unpatriotic, but an effective system of rationing made its effects far less serious than they were in the islands, where food shortages became critical and threatened malnourishment—and, after D-Day and isolation from France, starvation. For these reasons, whereas the British were able to ignore anonymous letters, Feldkommandantur 515 (the German civil government in the islands) felt obliged to take the black market seriously and to act against it. In a letter to the bailiff of Jersey, prompted by the discovery of grain hoarding by two farmers after an anonymous tip-off, the Feldkommandant demanded action, because “this, quite rightly, causes discontent amongst the population.”Footnote 44 He was correct to identify the issue of public discontent. There was anger at local farmers, who were believed to hold back food illegally to supply the black market, and at members and officials of the States of Jersey (the island government) who failed to act or were thought to be involved themselves. It was widely believed in Jersey that those in office did not play by the rules and that there was “a good deal of nest-feathering.”Footnote 45 What made matters worse was the knowledge that some farmers chose to sell produce to high-paying Germans rather than to fellow islanders, and that black market activity on any large scale often took place in league with German servicemen.
For an islander, the decision to denounce black marketeers might have been difficult to make. A Londoner writing to the Metropolitan police to report black-market activity might have done so in a spirit of civic duty, even patriotism. But in an occupied country, a denunciation presents some difficulties: to whom should the offender be denounced? And when does denunciation become collaboration? In Nazi Germany, denunciations were not only made to the secret police: up to ten different local, state, and police authorities received letters of denunciation, as did professional bodies.Footnote 46 Likewise, in the Soviet Union, letters were sent not just to the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (known as the NKVD) but to all sorts of party and government organizations, including those in academia, the sciences, ballet, theater, or the kolkhoz (collective farm).Footnote 47 In France, even before the German occupation, the denunciation of black marketeers was actively encouraged by the state, an approach taken also by the Vichy government.Footnote 48 Frenchmen denounced to the Gestapo and Feldgendarmerie but also to all levels of local and national government in Vichy France.Footnote 49
In the Channels Islands, the German options included the Feldkommandantur, Feldgendarmerie, the Geheime Feldpolizei (or Gestapo, as the islanders thought), and any German serviceman or acquaintance. But islanders still had the option of reporting crime to their own local police or authorities. Islanders with evidence or suspicions of black-market activity, passing that information to the local police, might well have felt that they were playing a part in clamping down on an immoral trade that deprived fellow islanders of food, at a time when rations were being cut and the threat of malnutrition and starvation became more and more real, particularly after D-Day. The fact that the German authorities were equally determined to see black-market activity stopped need not make of it an act of collaboration; but denouncing other islanders to the Germans authorities was still a step that some people would not take.
A senior States of Jersey employee, for example, was accused of receiving wood from States supplies (fuel also being a scarce commodity). His accuser, having “decided that my duty as a citizen was to request the competent officials to investigate the matter,” reported this to the relevant department of the island's government. When no satisfactory response was received, he went directly to the attorney general, Charles Duret Aubin. Duret Aubin also refused to investigate or prosecute. With his island options exhausted, the accuser wrote an open letter to the Jersey public, apparently circulated among States officials, including his name and address. He seems not to have considered escalating his charge to the Germans, who might have shown more concern than the attorney general.Footnote 50
In Guernsey, a letter concerning milk supplies, one of a number in which the tone is “why can't I?,” was addressed to an official at the island's dairy, rather than the Germans:
Sir
Why is M A MAHY of Windmill Vineries Ville au Roi permitted to receive full cream milk daily from Mr D. Ozanne of Ruette Bray Farm as I understand that this is strictly forbidden and do not see why this is allowed to go on when I and many others have forgotten the taste of good milk.
Trusting that you will see into this immediately, if not I shall, but I thought you the right one to inform.
ANONYMOUSFootnote 51
The letter was passed by the dairy to the police, who investigated and took no action. This writer, too, seems not to have considered the German authorities as an option but threatened to deal with the matter himself.
But if the States of Guernsey did not act on the information provided by concerned citizens, and complainants were not prepared to let the matter rest, they had the option of escalating their claim to the Germans. Or if the writer had no confidence in the States from the outset, local authorities may have been bypassed entirely. The Feldkommandantur received an anonymous letter from a Guernsey shopkeeper identifying two women running black-market businesses from their homes. The writer pointed out the unfairness of legitimate businesses having to follow the law and pay for licenses, taxes, and rents, restricted in what they could sell and for how much, while black-market dealers took custom from them and made large profits at inflated prices. This writer turned to the Germans only after the Guernsey authorities failed to act: “I have told the States about her before but nothing is done.”Footnote 52
The writer in this case could well have been the aggrieved shopkeeper that he or she purported to be. But given that letters were sometimes framed in terms to which the Germans would be more receptive, there is a possibility that the writer also operated in the black market. The British authorities found that black marketeers used denunciation as a weapon against rivals. In France, too, shopkeepers accused each other of black-market activity in order to have businesses closed down so they could take on their clientele.Footnote 53
There is reason to think that customers denounced their own black-market suppliers. Most people had to resort to the black market at one time or other, and must naturally have resented paying inflated prices to dealers who profited at their expense, often with the help and protection of German servicemen. In a letter addressed to “The Gestapo,” this writer seems to be very familiar with his victim's house:
Why is Jack Le Cornu, 4 Boyne Terrace, Great Union Road, allowed to have received 1 ton of anthracite coal when other people have none at all,
Also call and see his stock of food in bedroom cupboards and billiard room and see what you think of it??? [writer's underlining]Footnote 54
A letter in which a local farmer was accused of black-market activity in league with a German sergeant may also have been based on firsthand knowledge. The writer asks the Feldkommandant to have the house searched for contraband, where “finishing up in bath room you will find a wireless set in cupboard.”Footnote 55 The next writer was well informed about the stock-in-trade of his target:
Only a few lines hoping you will do a great favour to a certain person.
It is to see if you can do something about Frank Powers living at Clairvale Road who sells cognac, sugar, butter and many other things at terrible prices. The cognac is German property and he dilutes it.
One more point, he is believed to have a wireless set hidden in one of the house walls.
Anyhow I hope you will do something,
Best of luck,
A StrangerFootnote 56
The information that German goods were being sold was a hook to attract the interest of the Feldgendarmerie, but it seems from the writer's knowledge of the prices and the diluted cognac that he may well have been a dissatisfied customer.
In Guernsey, Julia Brichta, known as the “Black Market Queen,” was the subject of an anonymous postcard asking the Feldgendarmerie to investigate her dealings. They seem to have done so, and a letter was received later to thank them for taking action. But the writer added that Brichta had bribed the Feldgendarms and continued to boast that she was supplied by Organisation Todt and military contacts. As is the case with other letters, the writer was well informed about the variety of goods sold and their prices, and the advice to “Look under her floorboards and in her piano” suggests firsthand knowledge.Footnote 57
In some letters there is more than a hint of bitterness at the opportunism of the black marketeers. But there is also an undercurrent of class tension and anger, mirroring what Angus Calder highlighted in Britain, a sense of burdens unevenly shared. Sources in France “suggest a direct link between economic hardship and the outbreak of wholesale denunciations of the ‘haves’ by the ‘have-nots.’”Footnote 58 For poorer people in the islands whose hardships were not being shared by all sections of society, letters of denunciation were a way of levelling the playing field. An officer of the Geheime Feldpolizei remarked on this animosity in the islands; people with the means could live lives of almost peacetime standard, while the poorer classes went without.Footnote 59 As early as March 1941, long before the most serious food shortages hit, graffiti appeared in St. Helier, demanding, “Workers need more food—search houses of rich hoarders.”Footnote 60 Where States officials were suspected of wrongdoing, there was anger and frustration at the hypocrisy and injustice in small-fry offenders brought to court on relatively petty bartering charges while those with connections escaped justice. MI5 officers assigned to the island after its liberation heard accusations relating to the black market made against many members of Jersey States and departmental heads.Footnote 61
The class issue is stated explicitly by an anonymous letter to the president of the Controlling Committee in Guernsey. The letter accused the manager of the dairy of being in collusion with farmers to keep milk back from the public ration, only for it to later appear on the black market as butter, sold “to the rich people at £2-5-0 a pound yet we never hear of a case before the Court, and when we complain of our milk ration we are told by the Dairy Manager that the reason is that the Germans take all the milk.” The writer signed off, “We hope Sir you will see this through on behalf of the working class.” But in this case too, an investigation did not lead to prosecution.Footnote 62
Wirelesses
If the denunciation of black marketeers was often driven by hardship and anger, the confiscation and prohibition of wireless sets in June 1942 was a gift to anyone holding a grudge. This was already the case in Germany, where Goebbels's ban on foreign wireless reception, as the minister of justice had warned, opened “the floodgates of denunciation.”Footnote 63 As the BBC provided the one surviving link to the outside world and a free Britain, on which the Channel Islands’ future freedom depended, there was despair at the confiscation order, and inevitably widespread flouting of the ban.Footnote 64 Over a fifth of all offenses that came before German courts in Jersey in the final three years of the war were related to wirelesses, typically carrying a sentence of three to six months.Footnote 65 Longer sentences could be passed, however, and until the islands’ isolation from the continent in August 1944, any sentence over three months might entail deportation to a continental prison or camp; such were the conditions in these camps that almost one in in ten of the islanders who found themselves in that system did not survive.Footnote 66 Over a third of those had been convicted of radio offenses.Footnote 67
The confiscation order of 1942 opened the floodgates of denunciation in the Channel Islands too, and in the matter of wireless possession at least, the islands were to some extent self-policing. In Guernsey, the majority of convictions for wireless offenses were based on anonymous letters to the Germans.Footnote 68 After interrogating Geheime Feldpolizei officers in May 1945, MI5 concluded that the Germans “apparently received enough anonymous letters on the subject to keep the GFP pleasantly employed without pushing the matter to embarrassing limits for the Civil population.”Footnote 69
Among the letters concerning illegal wirelesses is another in the “why can't I?” vein:
Sir
Just a line to tell you I don't see why people had to give up Wireless and not others as quite a few people has kept them for one Le Sueur from Clairvale Farm St Saviours he got his and about 20 people goes to listen so I don't find that rightFootnote 70
The house was searched and nothing found, but if the investigation had been successful, up to twenty people could have been imprisoned, and Le Sueur's sentence would have been stiff indeed, since the hosts of these gatherings were liable to receive much longer sentences, which might be served abroad. As was the case with black marketeers, letters of denunciation suggest that the denouncers were familiar with their victims and had been inside their homes, such as this request to the Feldgendarmerie to search a St. Helier boarding house:
PLEASE SEARCH
BRAMPTON VILLA
GT UNION ROAD
FOR AT LEAST
2 WIRELESS.
HIDDEN UNDER
FLOOR BOARDS. LOFT
& CELLARS.
IT IS A LODGING HOUSEFootnote 71
As occupation diarist Arthur Kent noted of house searches, when the Feldgendarms went straight to a particular spot in a house, garden, or shed where a wireless was hidden, such information could only have come from a close acquaintance of the victim.Footnote 72
Concealment
Naturally, few denouncers were likely to sign letters using their own name, even if they expected discretion from the authorities. A letter from a G A Tippett accused a Guernsey farmer of hoarding potatoes, but investigations found nobody of that name on the island.Footnote 73 Rather, where letters were signed at all, they were attributed to “A well-wisher,” “A Stranger,” or “A Friend.”Footnote 74 Writers might make some additional effort to conceal their identity beyond simple anonymity. Jersey's attorney general observed, referring an anonymous note to the Jersey police, “A strange thing about the letter seems to me to be the marked contrast between the construction and the writing of the letter, which are very good, and the spelling which is, deliberately I think, bad.”Footnote 75
Two other letters received by the Feldkommandantur, written by the same person and targeting the same victim, have such poor grammar and spelling that they appear to have been written by a non-English-speaker—but that may very well have been the intention.Footnote 76 Some of the surviving letters were scrawled on scraps of paper, possibly due to a shortage of writing paper, but perhaps, too, as a precaution against identification. Writers might also try to disguise their handwriting, using all capitals or a random mix of upper- and lower-case letters.Footnote 77 These precautions were wise. The Jersey Police would make enquiries to trace the writer where an accusation turned out to be false or unproven, and Guernsey's Inspector Lamy identified one writer by showing the letter to her victim, who recognized her neighbor's handwriting.Footnote 78 The two sisters who betrayed Louisa Gould and Harold Le Druillenec for harboring an escaped Russian Organisation Todt worker in Jersey were identified after liberation by their handwriting.Footnote 79
Not only identities were hidden, but motives, too. Letter writers in the Soviet Union were able to identify with state ideology, signing off as “one of your own,” “partisan,” or “Red Army soldier”; in Germany they appealed to the values of the Volksgemeinschaft (the peoples’ community).Footnote 80 Anonymous denunciations in an occupied country, however, often had a pretext one might think unnecessary, given their anonymity. But the intention was to give the letter more credibility with the recipient and a better chance of being acted upon. Denouncers used language they believed made their letters more plausible.
As they were in France, letters were phrased so as to give an appearance of moral or community-based motives—justice, or the common good—using the language of the authorities themselves.Footnote 81 A letter written to ask for a search of a St. Helier woman's house for a wireless and car began “in interest of many public”; the writer was so concerned about the public interest that he wrote again three weeks later, when the Feldgendarmerie had failed to visit his victim, to denounce her again.Footnote 82 One Jersey citizen claimed to be writing “in bono publico,”Footnote 83 while others signed off with “Fair Play,”Footnote 84 as did a letter aimed at Julia Brichta: “Yours Truly sir, Fair play for all.”Footnote 85 If their thinking was that the appearance of acting for the benefit of the community or in the name of higher ideals gave the letter more credibility, one can also sense the writers trying to justify their actions to themselves.
One further letter, though short, shows a number of the characteristics of the anonymous denunciation. In 1942, a dealer in Jersey by the name of William Bartlett was granted authority to buy confiscated wireless sets from islanders for resale to German servicemen.Footnote 86 A few months later, a disgruntled customer wrote to the Feldkommandantur:
Dear Sir,
I wish to thank you for the new way for the public to sell there [sic] wireless sets, I have just sold my set to Mr Ferdinand and have had a very good price given, and am well satisfied. This is very different to how that man Bartlett at Bel Royal tried to do me down. The ridiculous price he offered me made me think that perhaps he is a Jew as well as a big free Maison. [sic]
Yours Truly
Anti free Maison and anti JewFootnote 87
The writer's personal resentment toward Bartlett is transparent, and no attempt has been made to hide it. There is no actual offense being reported here—just what the writer took to be an insultingly low offer, for which he felt Bartlett deserved to be punished. But this insult, as the writer knew, would have been of no concern to the Germans, and so their interest had to be piqued in another way. As Sheila Fitzpatrick observed of letters written in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, denunciations were often phrased in a way the writer thought the authorities would be most likely to act upon them.Footnote 88 This letter should not be interpreted as evidence for the divisions of race that historians of mainland Britain have found; rather, this writer would have been very aware, through notices published in the local press, of the measures being taken against both Jews and Freemasons, including the confiscation of their property.Footnote 89 Choosing those trigger words to encourage German involvement, and for good measure signing the letter “Anti free Maison and anti Jew,” is no less transparent than the real motive. It is highly unlikely that the writer genuinely thought Bartlett to be a Freemason, and still less a Jew. Perhaps the writer simply felt that bringing Bartlett to the attention of the Germans was revenge enough and that an interrogation or house search by the Geheime Feldpolizei would settle the score.Footnote 90 Or this may have been a speculative denunciation, in the hope that a spurious allegation might uncover a genuine offense, were the Germans to visit Bartlett. The same bait was also used to attract German attention toward Julia Brichta, who was indeed a Jew but had escaped registration.Footnote 91 The Guernsey shopkeeper who denounced Brichta told the Germans that she was in fact a Jew who “just married for a business affair to escape your jurisdiction on Jews.”Footnote 92 Another denunciation with Brichta as its target called her “truly a bad-tongued Jew and an awful cheat.”Footnote 93
The German Response
If the authors of anonymous letters were despised by the islanders, that opinion was shared by the Nazi leadership.Footnote 94 While citizens were encouraged to provide information for the “right” reasons, in keeping with the ideology of the state, a flood of accusations for the “wrong” reasons risked undermining the Volksgemeinschaft, the sense of national unity they were attempting to foster. The huge number of denunciations to Nazi organizations from 1933 prompted Hitler to speak of “a sea of denunciations and human evil,” causing a “monstrous uneasiness.”Footnote 95 The Vichy regime encouraged truthful, signed accusations but branded anonymous denouncers “enemies of the National Revolution.”Footnote 96 Officials in the Limousin made it known publicly that anonymous letters would not be acted upon and that the “cowards” who wrote them would be prosecuted if identified.Footnote 97 Another Vichy official told his colleagues that anonymous denunciations would face investigation and serious sanctions, and suspects would be fingerprinted.Footnote 98
Yet in spite of their misgivings, Nazi authorities still made use of them, acting on denunciations, whether the reasons were “right”—“idealistic” or “proper”—but also when they were “wrong.” Authorities did sometimes invite denunciations in the press.Footnote 99 In fact, when Goebbels announced the outlawing of listening to enemy radio broadcasts, he made it an offense not to denounce known offenders.Footnote 100 However negatively authorities may have felt toward anonymous letters, as long as they were acted upon, they would continue to be written.
The German authorities in occupied Jersey shared this distrust and distaste of the anonymous denunciation. The flow of letters to Feldkommandantur 515 in 1941 prompted the Feldkommandant to publish a notice in the Jersey Evening Post stating that anonymous letters, and those using a nom de plume, would be ignored.Footnote 101 In March 1942, he forwarded to the bailiff of Jersey a letter accusing a local farmer of black-market activity, adding, “Although I do not attach importance to anonymous letters, nevertheless in the interest of the food supplies I pass on the enclosed letter.”Footnote 102 Three months later, the Feldkommandant received an anonymous letter about a woman concealing a wireless and car. Dr. Casper, chief of administration in Feldkommandantur 515, passed the note to the Feldgendarmerie for investigation, but added a note of caution about the validity of accusations in anonymous letters.Footnote 103
Many Germans, some of whom listened to the BBC themselves, found the business of denunciation distasteful. As one German said to the owner of a house he had just searched, “What sort of people are these islanders who betray their own people to the enemy?”Footnote 104 A sympathetic Austrian officer of the Feldgendarmerie warned Inspector Lamy of the Guernsey police whenever anonymous letters had been received and a house search was planned, giving him time to warn those concerned.Footnote 105 Lamy asked one German officer to visit the suspected author of an anonymous letter to frighten and discourage her;Footnote 106 another Austrian Feldgendarm performing house searches only had to put his head around the door to decide that he could find no wireless in the house.Footnote 107 German soldiers who were aware of islanders still in possession of wirelesses might turn a blind eye;Footnote 108 such reluctance by at least some of the German rank and file may be explained in part by their not feeling threatened by the local population, or that they too relied on the BBC for accurate news.
Why were the Germans uncomfortable with anonymous denunciations in an occupied country? The first point to note is that this was not Stalinist Russia or Hitler's Germany but a backwater of the war, of no strategic value, with a population in the tens of thousands. No Gestapo presence was felt necessary, for there was simply no need for the same level of information or surveillance. The occupiers took care to maintain the rule of law and to be seen to do so. Sentencing in German courts was generally consistent and proportionate, acquittals were not uncommon, and there were occasional remissions of sentence for charitable reasons. Few death sentences were passed against islanders, and none were carried out. In the absence of any violent resistance, the occupiers were not pushed to take more drastic measures.
Like the leadership of Nazi Germany, the German government of the Channel Islands felt uncomfortable that their rule might be associated with anonymous and false accusations. They knew very well that they were being used to settle petty scores, which could only undermine their moral authority and the reputation of German justice in the eyes of the occupied. A dim view was taken of false accusations, and letters that prompted house searches in which no evidence was uncovered were investigated.Footnote 109
But, as was the case in Nazi Germany, and in spite of the reservations expressed in March and July 1942, the Feldkommandantur did see to it that anonymous allegations were investigated. A year later, in July 1943, Jersey's attorney general, Charles Duret Aubin, was told by Feldkommandantur 515 to hand over all anonymous letters that he had received in the previous year—that is, since the prohibition on wirelesses was introduced—and was later told to hand over all future letters too.Footnote 110 The Feldkommandantur wanted to see all anonymous letters, whether they had been sent directly to the attorney general or via a States department, even those already forwarded by the Feldkommandantur for investigation. This shift in attitude from the skepticism of 1942 may be related to events later that year.
As Louise Willmot has written, three events in mid-1942 changed islanders’ perceptions of the Germans for the worse. Firstly, in June, came the confiscation and prohibition of wireless sets. Islanders followed their fellow Britons’ progress in the war not only out of concern for Britain but because their own liberation was dependent upon British victory. Until summer 1942, they could do so freely, not through the local press, which was under German control, but through BBC broadcasts. The BBC was the islands’ last link to the outside world, and the loss of wireless sets was hard felt. August saw the arrival of the first Soviet Organisation Todt workers, who were to work on the huge Atlantic Wall construction project, when islanders saw for the first time the brutality of which the Nazis were capable. Then, a month later, the sudden order for the deportation to Germany of two thousand British-born islanders caused enormous distress, heightened by the fear that the deportees would suffer the same cruelties as the Organisation Todt workers.Footnote 111
These events fostered a growing sense of defiance and resistance among the population, which, though not a serious threat to German rule, were significant enough for the Germans to feel obliged to respond and uphold their authority. Any qualms they might have had a year earlier had diminished, and anonymous letters were now too good a source to disregard.
The Island Response
The local police and judicial authorities in the Channel Islands were, as elsewhere in the Nazi empire, part of the German system for administering conquered territories. As such, they, too, received reports of crime, and letters of denunciation from islanders. When people passed information directly to island authorities, it might not have occurred to them that the information could be passed to the Germans. The island authorities had not been installed by the occupiers and were not sympathetic to the Nazis or German rule. They retained their pre-war authority at the direction and with the blessing of the British government in London, and for these reasons had legitimacy in the eyes of the islanders.
Given that islanders who provided information to the States or police forces did so in the knowledge that those were the legitimate British authorities, the question of right or wrong, of collaboration, is less clear than would be the case with collaborationist authorities on the continent. A Guernseyman who informed the local police about a black marketeer may have expected the island courts to deal with the matter, considering his act to be a civic-minded one in the interests of the Guernsey public, not motivated by malice, ideology, or money, nor intended to help the occupiers in any way. But if information given to the island authorities in this spirit was then passed on to the Germans authorities (willingly or unwillingly), does it then become denunciation?
The sharing of information with the occupying authorities was in some cases unavoidable. Sometimes, however, the island authorities had other options. When in August 1943 the Geheime Feldpolizei demanded to see all of the anonymous letters in the possession of Jersey's attorney general, he duly passed them to Feldkommandantur 515, including any that had been sent to the attorney general himself or to other States departments, and that up to this point would have been unknown to the Germans.Footnote 112 It is possible, then, that anybody who had sent information to the island authorities, expecting Jersey's police and courts to deal with the matter, could unwittingly have been made a German informer. Duret Aubin had the opportunity at that point to filter the letters he was to forward to the Feldkommandantur 515, removing any not already seen that might incriminate an islander. We cannot say if he took that opportunity, but given his general willingness to comply with German demands, it seems unlikely.Footnote 113
If Duret Aubin can be accused of a failure to shield islanders from German justice, then the bailiff of Guernsey, Victor Carey, went much further. When in 1941 the BBC began broadcasting the “V for Victory” campaign, islanders took the opportunity to show their defiance and patriotism, and the V sign started to appear in both Jersey and Guernsey in June and July 1941.Footnote 114 The Germans responded with curfews and compulsory watches through the night by islanders. When caught, offenders could expect custodial punishments.Footnote 115 Carey took the matter as seriously as the Germans. Not only did he press the local police to find the guilty parties,Footnote 116 but he also published a notice in the Guernsey Evening Press, offering a reward of £25 for any information leading to the conviction of a fellow islander. By the time this notice was published, it had become apparent that many of the “V” signs were the work of children, and for some time the names of these children, and their parents, were duly handed over to Feldkommandantur 515.Footnote 117
As was often the case in the Channel Islands, individuals were prepared to take action where their leaders were not, and where they were in a position to do so, they made efforts to obstruct denunciations. Before the war, Inspector Sculpher of the Guernsey police had a policy of ignoring anonymous letters—a reminder, incidentally, that anonymous letters did not begin and end with the war. His wartime successor, Inspector Lamy, did dispose of some of the letters received by the police, but he investigated others, perhaps because German suspicions would be aroused if none were seen to be received.Footnote 118
Also well placed to obstruct were postal workers who took it upon themselves, at personal risk, to intercept letters. The head postmaster in Guernsey steamed open letters addressed to the Feldkommandantur, resealing and forwarding any he thought harmless but destroying more than two hundred in the course of the occupation.Footnote 119 Postal workers in Jersey's sorting office steamed open suspicious letters addressed to the Feldkommandantur or the “Gestapo” and either warned the intended victims before forwarding them to their destination or simply put them “straight in the old fire and gone.”Footnote 120 Czech postal workers took similar action, as did their French counterparts in, for example, Montpelier and Calvados.Footnote 121
The Impact of Denunciation
Given the reputation for “correctness” of the Germans and the relative lack of brutality toward islanders during the occupation, denouncers might have believed that their victims could expect, at worst, a few weeks or months in prison. Some might have hesitated at denouncing another islander if the conditions in continental prisons and camps had been known. There were, however, unintended consequences, often out of all proportion to any grievance that might have prompted the denunciation. The nature of the German occupation of the Channel Islands meant that punishments were, relatively speaking, less harsh than those on the continent. But while no death sentences were carried out, over two hundred islanders were required to serve their time in the brutal conditions of continental prisons and camps, which for some proved fatal.Footnote 122 Louisa Gould, a victim of her neighbors’ anonymous letter, was sentenced to two years imprisonment for her offense, and her brother Harold le Druillenec was sentenced to five months. Harold was eventually liberated from Bergen Belsen in April 1945, in appalling physical and medical condition. By that time, Gould had already been murdered in the gas chambers at Ravensbrück.Footnote 123
The impact of denunciation and informing went beyond the individual victims, to islanders’ perceptions of their own communities. It was in the denunciations’ anonymity that their menace lay. Much is made in contemporary diaries and post-occupation memoirs of the feeling of isolation in the islands, particularly after the confiscation of wireless sets in 1942. Islanders felt cut off from the world, from news of the war, from family and friends who were evacuated in 1940, and wondered if they had been forgotten by Britain. Denunciation had the effect of intensifying this sense of isolation by adding an internal dimension. Shannon Fogg quotes Vichy officials, who remarked that “one has a tendency to see in his neighbor a possible denouncer,” and in this atmosphere the “fear of denunciation appeared increasingly to isolate French men and women from each other.”Footnote 124
The same climate of suspicion of both strangers and neighbors pervaded the Channel Islands. Precautions had to be taken when visiting friends who owned a wireless set. When Marion Foley went to a friend's house to listen to the BBC, she had to make sure that she did not arrive just before the news was scheduled to begin—a telltale sign to watching eyes.Footnote 125 Edward Le Quesne, Jersey's minister for labor, noted in his diary, “It is dangerous to speak to anyone concerning the War and even friends are more and more refraining from discussing anything if they are not entirely alone.”Footnote 126 Edwin de Sainte Croix said that people felt they could not talk over the fence to a neighbor in case the person on the other side could not be trusted; Dorothy Blackwell was reluctant to share BBC news with her neighbor.Footnote 127 Mary Deslandes felt that the people of Jersey “might be living in Germany for the furtive way everyone speaks in the street, while looking over one's shoulder for spies.”Footnote 128
In this regard, informers and denouncers had a different influence on their communities. Informers, at least in the Channel Islands, were often well known and universally loathed. While there may have been fear of falling victim to them, they were small in number and, known as they were, could be avoided. Through their pro-German activities, they had made outcasts of themselves and become emboché, as the French would say.Footnote 129 Like other known collaborators, informers had joined “them.” Denouncers, however, were a faceless, nameless enemy who accounted for more victims. They seemed to be everywhere, and were living among “us.”
Denunciation, as one of the forms that collaboration took in the Channel Islands, had other long-term effects that lasted beyond the occupation. With the liberation of the islands on 9 May 1945, the question of punishment came to the fore. In France, the new government put into action the épuration légale, a legal purge that had been planned in London by Charles de Gaulle.Footnote 130 The purge prompted a “new wave of denunciations” in which the tables were turned, victims becoming accusers.Footnote 131 The same motives were evident: the settling of scores, problems with neighbors, and civic duty. Of those found guilty of denunciation in Calvados, seven were executed, ninety-nine sentenced to forced labor, and 262 imprisoned.Footnote 132 And, as was the case during the occupation, false accusations were made. In liberated Czechoslovakia, the People's Court received an “avalanche of denunciations and slander, incriminations and dirty tricks [which] in ninety percent [of cases] had to do with the settling of personal, antipathetic accounts.”Footnote 133 In almost half of the 1,302 cases of denunciation investigated in Calvados, no action was taken.Footnote 134
If the experience of denunciation during the occupation of the Channel Islands was broadly similar to elsewhere in Nazi Europe, one significant difference is what happened after the liberation—or, rather, what did not happen. Not one collaborator was prosecuted in the Channel Islands for offenses committed during the German occupation. The governments of Guernsey and Jersey were unique in Nazi Europe in that their members remained in their positions when the Germans arrived, continued to govern throughout the occupation, and were still in office after the liberation. The British Home Office had instructed them in June 1940 to remain in office, and the Germans had not found it necessary to impose direct rule or their own collaborationist governments. The smooth transition of power on 9 May 1945 enabled the rule of British law to be enforced from the first day of the liberation, and there was the hope and expectation that collaborators would be brought to justice in the islands’ own legal purge.
The phase of denouncing the denouncers began, as it did in France, after D-Day. In Jersey, letters were sent to a number of locals accusing them of collaboration—anonymous letters, naturally.Footnote 135 More accusations were made after the liberation. The Civil Affairs unit attached to the liberating force received hundreds of reports and letters—some anonymous—alleging collaboration; an officer in the Criminal Investigation Department posted to Guernsey reported that “everyone accused the next man of collaboration, only to have the same accusation made against himself.”Footnote 136 The military commander of the liberating force called the information used by MI5 “tittle-tattle prevalent on the islands but which nobody is prepared to come forward and substantiate.”Footnote 137
Within days of the liberation, islanders used the local press, free for the first time in five years, to call for action against collaborators. Typical of the letters received by Jersey's press was that signed by “Loyalist,” who wondered, “When is the cleansing to commence?”Footnote 138 Aware of the purges that had taken place on the continent, “Plain Justice” asked, “Other liberated countries are clamoring that offenders during enemy occupation be brought to book: should we in Jersey keep silent?”Footnote 139 Where “fair play” had been invoked by letter writers denouncing fellow islanders to the Germans, it was now used in the pages of the Jersey Evening Post to call for their punishment.
However, there was a lack of political will in the Channel Islands to bring alleged collaborators to justice. The States governments did not pursue denouncers nor any other alleged collaborator. In the absence of any great enthusiasm from island authorities, it was left to the British government to decide how to proceed.Footnote 140 That decision, taken by the Home Office in August 1945, was to look to the future and to take no legal action against collaborators of any sort, giving the governments of both islands a clean bill of health— leading some to believe (then, and since) that a whitewash had been agreed upon.
Although their own experience of the war was radically different from those elsewhere in the United Kingdom, Channel Islanders, as Britons, could consider themselves to have emerged from the war as victors—and in a very real way, given the endurance and faith in British victory that they had shown throughout the occupation and the service of ten thousand islanders in the armed forces. This sense of sharing in British victory may have eased any sense of collective shame there may have been at the collaboration of the few and lessened the need for the catharsis of a purge. This was not the view of MI5's investigating officers, who, in their indignation at the decision not to prosecute, made withering judgments of all islanders. Collaboration by British citizens with the enemy was clearly an uncomfortable subject for both the Home Office and MI5, so contrary was it to the sense of British national identity forged during the war. The explanation given by MI5 for the un-British behavior of the Channel Islanders, then, was that they were not British at all, but “Norman peasants with all their limitations of character and outlook.”Footnote 141
But the major factor in the decision not to prosecute was the poor quality of the evidence that had been collected before the liberation, much of it from the young escapees to Normandy after D-Day, no doubt excited by their experiences and at being the center of MI19's attention. The allegations made to the British security services after the liberation were no more trustworthy. During the occupation, denunciation to the Germans was used to settle scores; post-liberation authorities were manipulated in the same way, and, as in France or Czechoslovakia, it was difficult, if not impossible, to sift the genuine cases of collaboration from the mass of unfounded and malicious accusations made in a febrile post-liberation atmosphere.
Yet that same evidence, whether expressed through the damning opinions of MI5 or by the islanders themselves in interrogations, and the fear, suspicion, and mistrust recorded in diaries and memoirs, has been accepted uncritically in some judgments of the conduct of the islanders during the occupation. In the absence of any myth of occupation, the islands have been judged against the paradigm of the British People's War, one wholly unsuited to five years of isolation under Nazi rule. If a myth of the occupation has been constructed, it is the collaborationist/what resistance? narrative based largely on the problematic evidence of 1945. Denouncers had a negative impact on individuals and society as a whole that was out of all proportion to their numbers. The same might be said of their impact on the historiography of the occupation.
