Guernsey’s forgotten heroes revealed
A previously unseen archive featuring the testimonies of people who were deported to German prison camps during World War II has been uncovered by a team of researchers working in Guernsey.
The unique record, which had lain untouched in an old wardrobe since its compilation, contains the first-hand accounts of Guernseymen and women who were arrested for acts of resistance during the wartime occupation of their island.
Many of the statements, which were made to claim compensation money after the war, describe in graphic detail the appalling experiences they had to endure.
Others reveal what happened to people who were taken from their homes by the Gestapo, leaving neighbours and friends able only to speculate about what had happened to them, or why. Some never returned.
The discovery was made by a team of three academics - Dr. Gilly Carr, Dr. Paul Sanders and Dr. Louise Willmot - who are planning to write the first ever definitive account of protest, defiance and resistance in the Channel Islands during the German occupation of 1940 to 1945. A film about the find and the British Academy-funded project is also being released on the University’s YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/cambridgeuniversity) on Thursday (18 November) as part of the "Cambridge Ideas" series of short films.
Dr. Gilly Carr, from the University of Cambridge, who is leading the project, described it as "the single most important resistance archive ever to emerge from the Channel Islands."
"In a word, the file is incredible," she said. "The contents have never been studied and we are the first people to see it since it was made. When we found out what was in it, we knew we had hit an incredibly rich seam of new historical information."
"Researching the resistance in the Channel Islands is still a very difficult and sensitive issue. Not everybody felt that they could afford to defy the Germans at the time and emotions still run deep. As a result, the story of these people has never been analysed in a complete or definitive way. We are the first to try, so to have this archive at our disposal is quite amazing."
Some testimonies reveal horrific details about what took place in German prisons and prison camps during the war. One islander, who was in the Gestapo-administered prison at Frankfurt in the summer of 1944, recorded how prisoners "were being executed by the Nazis by guillotine at the rate of 25 per week."
Another account, written by the islander Cecil Duquemin, describes how he and 400 other prisoners were moved between prisons in cattle trucks after their original camp was bombed in 1945.
"We had no sanitation and though suffering from starvation and malnutrition, we were forced to bury the many prisoners who died in the trucks," he later recalled. "This was a daily occurrence and we hardly had any strength left in us to dig the men’s graves."
The archive, which stretches to almost 200 pages in all, was compiled years after the war by an islander called Frank Falla, who was himself deported for running an underground newsletter called the "Guernsey Underground News Service" (GUNS).
After the Germans occupied Guernsey in June 1940, Falla and other islanders secretly kept wireless sets to tune into the BBC. The five GUNS men, who didn’t all know of each other’s involvement until after they were caught, then wrote up news from the Allied side and distributed it to their fellow citizens.
All of the GUNS members were eventually caught and taken to prisons on the continent, where two of them died. Falla, however, returned to Guernsey but became deeply embittered when, after the war, his own efforts and those of others like him, went largely unacknowledged. History has since tended, incorrectly, to portray the Channel Islanders either as collaborators, or passive victims of the occupation.
In the 1960s, Germany paid the British government a one-off sum so that people who had suffered from Nazi persecution in German prisons and concentration camps could be compensated. Falla made it his business to help compile statements for people in Guernsey who had been deported and had suffered in this way.
The forms that he sent to the Government have never been released. The original testimonies, however, were stuffed into a briefcase and stored in the wardrobe in his daughter’s house. There they remained, until this summer, when Falla’s daughter answered an advert that Dr. Carr had placed in the local paper asking for information that might aid her research.
"There were so many Germans in the islands that people could not organise armed resistance in the same manner as the French, but many of them tried to resist in other ways," Dr. Carr said. "Falla was always angry that they went through so much, but that their efforts were never properly recognised."
The archive is one of a number of sources still being uncovered by Dr. Carr’s research team. As well as writing an analysis of resistance during the occupation, they hope to compile a definitive list of names so that Guernsey can set up a proper memorial to the resistance, which currently does not exist. They are also planning a possible "Resistance Trail" around the island for visitors.
"In some cases these people were bundled off in the night and nobody outside the family - and even some family members - knew what had happened," Dr. Carr added. "Even when they came back, there was no formal welcome and they were never publicised as heroes. While the story of a small number was published in local newspapers after the war, there was little subsequent interest and no formal recognition of their heroism. Without this archive, the real story of their brave acts and the sufferings after capture of so many would not just have been forgotten - they would never really have been publically known about at all."
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