If Britain Had Fallen (38 page)
Though boatloads of young Englishmen of military age might, of course, have had a very different reception, the actual conditions of the removal, and subsequent detention of the Channel Islanders were probably as good as the authorities could provide in the circumstances, though far inferior to those which Germans and Italians detained by the British were currently enjoying (not without many a complaint) in the hotels and boarding houses of the Isle of Man. Conditions at the first camp to which they were sent were primitive but after six weeks the whole party were moved again to a modern German barracks at Biberach in southern Germany not far from the Swiss frontier, which proved to be a model of its kind, efficiently and humanely run. The atmosphere was not unlike a prisoner-of-war camp, with daily counts of the inmates, presided over by a German nicknamed ‘Donald Duck’, and, with the help of Red Cross food parcels, the occupants were much better off for food than the fellow countrymen they had left behind, the worst feature of life being, as one woman recalls, that ‘you were stuck in the blooming compound’. But those who volunteered to go out to work were allowed outside the camp and found many of the local people friendly, and everyone was struck by the beauty of the countryside. As the wife of a British army sergeant who had retired to Guernsey, and now found herself unexpectedly in Bavaria instead, remarked, ‘If the Germans have got such a lovely country as this to live in, why do they want to come bothering other people?’: a fair question, still unanswered.
Chapter 15:
See Germany and die
They told me I was going to a special camp which was much better than any other.
A Jewish woman, 1942
The first Gestapo Commandos to arrive in Britain would have had the benefit of the ‘Special Search List’, a 350-page document listing the offices of nearly 400 suspect organisations, including political parties and trade unions, such as the Amalgamated Society of Journeyman Felt Hatters which hardly seem likely to have provided the nucleus of a resistance movement. The same report also included the names of 2300 individuals, indicating which section of the Security Service was interested in them. Although many of those named later boasted of being on the Germans’ ‘Black List’, the document seems to have been basically a directory of everyone whose name had at some time or another, not necessarily as a potential opponent, come to the notice of the Gestapo. By far the largest single category consisted of foreign refugees, many of them Jews, and this was followed by politicians, drawn impartially from all three parties, journalists and academics, to whom the Germans were always inclined to ascribe more influence than they actually possessed, the best-known being Professor C. E. M. Joad, the future star of the BBC
Brains Trust
programme. By no means all those on the list had been noticeably anti-German. Lord Halifax, for example, had been a notorious appeaser, while one woman author mentioned was an active pacifist, whom it would have paid the Germans to leave at liberty. There were some unexpected omissions. The first world war Prime Minister, for example, David Lloyd George, who might conceivably have become Prime Minister in 1940 in place of Churchill, was not included, though his daughter Lady Megan Lloyd George, a future Labour MP, was. But the ‘Black List’ is in any case a document of interest rather than importance, for no evidence exists that those on it were marked down for permanent detention, much less liquidation. The Jews and anti-Nazi refugees might indeed have been lucky to emerge again from the wine-cellars of the Reform Club, or wherever it was the Gestapo kept its prisoners, but most of those mentioned would either have gone underground before the Occupation began or have been released once the Gestapo had satisfied itself they were not a potential threat. In the Channel Islands, although the population tended
to describe every particularly obnoxious German as belonging to the Gestapo, it never really operated; no one was arrested without some reason being given, and the only person executed on the Islands was a young foreigner who landed there after escaping from France.
One organisation suppressed in the Channel Islands which would assuredly have suffered the same fate in Great Britain was the freemasons, who numbered about 450,000. Many British people have expressed distrust of this supposedly powerful secret society, but Hitler’s hatred of it reached the dimensions of a phobia and he believed it formed a conspiracy second only to his old adversary international Jewry’. Freemasonry, despite the links between the Grand Lodges in different countries, made no known contribution to rescuing the victims of Nazi oppression or to any resistance movement, but Hitler described it to his cronies in 1942 as ‘an immense enterprise of corruption’ and (without irony) as ‘a handful of men who are responsible for the war’. A month later he returned to the subject, boasting that he had known ‘little towns that were entirely under the dominion of masonry’, and had himself once refused an invitation to a ‘full-dress gathering’ of a local lodge with the courteous response ‘Save your saliva. For me, freemasonry’s poison.’ Its rituals, he considered, ‘transformed men who were quite sane and sober in their ordinary lives into informed apes’. The movement had been suppressed in Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, and former freemasons could only become Nazis if he gave his personal approval, but, he told his listeners, ‘I grant absolution only to men whose entire lives bear witness to their indisputably nationalist feelings’.
Shortly after their arrival on Jersey the Germans closed the Masonic Temple and forbade the Provincial Grand Master, the local head of the order, from holding any further meetings, and in 1941 a task-force of no fewer than thirty Germans—another of those ‘column-dodging’ groups with a soft job which flourished within the Security Service—arrived to make a detailed photographic record of the temple and strip it of all its elaborate decorations, which, with the ceremonial regalia, were shipped off for exhibition in Berlin, apparently to prove that British freemasonry was under the control of the Jews. Thereafter one or two small masonic meetings were held in private offices but officially ‘the craft’, as its members called it, had ceased to exist on the islands. ‘Most of us felt a great loss’, recalls one Jersey freemason. ‘It was like losing something that you had owned from boyhood. But I think there were other things that worried us more at the time.’ The sequence of events would have been the same in England, for Section III at Gestapo headquarters had already laid down, on 26 August 1940, that ‘a separate Commando Group’ was
needed ‘to deal with English freemasonry, with special attention paid to the relations between England and France and the Balkan countries, which to a large extent involve freemasons’—further evidence of Hitler’s belief in an international conspiracy of which Germany was the victim.
Although Hitler seems to have had no personal vendetta against them, the Germans distrusted on principle any international organisation and often assumed, as with the Boy Scouts, that its activities were a cover for the British Secret Service. Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the movement, appeared on the Gestapo ‘Black List’ and both Scouts and Guides would no doubt have been shut down, as they were in the Channel Islands, though owing to evacuation there were few children left. More suffering, at least among the worst off, would have been caused by the closing down of the Salvation Army, also objected to on internationalist rather than ideological grounds. The Germans also suppressed on Jersey and Guernsey, and planned to close down in Britain, such totally harmless friendly societies as the Royal Antedeluvian Order of Buffaloes and the Ancient Order of Rechabites, which combined sickness and similar benefits with a little harmless ritual. The objection here, too, seems to have been to any allegedly ‘secret society’ which might help people to unite against the occupying forces, particularly if it had links with other countries, and this was no doubt the reason why Rotary International was also to be closed down, although its major activity was nothing more sinister than holding regular meetings of the younger businessmen in any community. Even more revealing of the limitations of the Germans’ knowledge of British institutions was their decision to exempt from closure the Ancient Order of Foresters, a friendly society like the others, but assumed by the Security Service to be dedicated to raising timber for the long-term benefit of the Fatherland. The same misunderstanding, one supposes, might also have led the Woodland Folk, a left-wing youth organisation, to be spared.
But the first target in England as everywhere else would have been the Jews. In every country the Germans occupied there was the same sequence of events, beginning with the arrest of leading Jews and the closure of synagogues and Jewish organisations, continuing with the public labelling of Jewish businesses and individual Jews and their segregation into ghettoes, and ending with their removal to a destination unknown then but only too well known now. Even the ‘model protectorate’ of Denmark, with its freely-elected Parliament, was forced to pass anti-Jewish laws, though the Danes helped almost all the Jewish population to escape to Sweden. There was, to use one of Hitler’s own phrases, no ‘Jewish problem’ on the Channel Islands, for the tiny handful of Jews—about ten
each on Guernsey and Jersey—had no synagogues, owned no banks or large businesses and played an inconspicuous part in public life. The authorities on both islands took the view that it was not worth risking a major confrontation with the Germans to protect a group consisting of only about one resident in every 500, and they accepted, with only one protesting vote, the publication of anti-Jewish edicts and the compilation of a register of the names of Jews, not knowing, of course, that this might one day form part of a file in the camp office at Belsen or Dachau. On both islands the order that the words ‘Jüdisches Geschäft’—’Jewish Business’—should be painted across the windows of Jewish-owned shops was obeyed, thought it affected only three establishments in Jersey, and when, later, the Germans ordered that they must be sold to Gentiles, one, a drapers was taken over by the manager in trust for the real owner, who had escaped to England, and to whom he returned it after the war. Lord Coutanche and his colleagues did, however, draw the line at publishing a German order that all Jews should wear a bright yellow star on their backs, and the Germans did not make an issue of the point. ‘The Jews were, I think’, recalls Lord Coutanche, ‘called upon to declare themselves. Some did, some didn’t … . Those that didn’t weren’t discovered. I’ve never heard that they suffered in any way.’ Looking back he believes that there is no more he and his Council could have done to help them. The orders about the Jews were ‘one of many, many hundreds of things that happened’, and no one then realised their terrible significance.
What in fact did become of the tiny number of Jews on Jersey and Guernsey? Rather ominously, no one has so far succeeded in finding out; some seem to have been murdered in German camps, and at least one returned to the islands after the war. One, the wife of a British officer and thus doubly in danger, was hidden by the St Helier physiotherapist previously mentioned. The scene he describes could equally well have occurred, if the invasion had succeeded, in St Austell or St Helens.
The bell rang on the door of my clinic one day and I thought it was a patient. I went to the door and … it was Mrs R, and she was agitated and shaking. I said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Well, can I come in?’
I said, ‘Yes, come in’, and she said, ‘The Germans are after me.’
I said, ‘Where are they?’ and she said,
‘I don’t know. I left them in my flat. They made me pack up all my jewellery and good stuff and told me as I was married to an English officer … I was going to a special camp which was much better than any other camp in Germany, so I was to bring all my best things … trunks, never mind how much, and I’d be well treated. Well,’ she said, ‘during this time my father, who was an invalid downstairs, he called out to ask if we’d like some tea and I said, “Yes”. A German soldier came to me … I was at the passage by then. I said, “You go down and tell my husband to make the tea and we’ll come down and fetch it. He did, but I went into the next room, which gave on to the fire escape, and escaped down it and ran here.’
The family with whom this Jewish woman had taken refuge hid her for three years, for part of which she slept in the cellars of an adjoining house, then, when the troops who knew her by sight had been posted away, in a folding bed in a room in the front of the house, until later on in her stay she was even able to sit out in the garden wearing dark glasses. Her host managed to feed her from food which he received from farmer-patients in payment for his professional services.
If the Germans had landed in Britain, few Jews are likely to have escaped detection. The mere size of the Jewish community, estimated at 450,000, of whom 340,000 were, nominally at least, of Jewish religion and thus on the books of at least one Jewish organisation, would have made it impossible to hide more than a few of its members. The Germans, of course, branded as Jewish anyone with Jewish blood—even a Jewish grandmother made one a ‘non-Aryan—’and the first victims, because the most easily identified, would probably have been those strictly ‘orthodox’ families which kept every Jewish festival, ate Jewish food, spoke Yiddish among themselves, and conducted most of their business and all of their social life with members of their own race. Later it would have been the turn of all those with Jewish forbears, Jewish names and Jewish appearance, and finally of those who had anglicised their names, become Christians, lived and worked among Gentiles, and perhaps thought of themselves, and were accepted by their acquaintances, as being one hundred per cent British.
How would the non-Jewish population have reacted to these events? A striking feature of German occupation in every country (with the sole exception of the bitter battle in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943) was the virtual lack of opposition to the persecution, followed by the internment and removal, of the Jewish population, and the larger it was the more easily it seems to have succumbed. In Germany and Poland especially, which had contained a large number of Jews, little seems to have been done to help them, far greater efforts being made in Holland and Denmark, especially the latter, where the Jews numbered only about 2000 in a population of four million, relatively fewer than in the Channel Islands.
