Introduction
‘We are in a country where milk and honey are flowing day and night’, claimed Otto Schmidt, a non-commissioned officer (NCO) in the Wehrmacht (German army), to his platoon, early in the German Occupation of the Channel Islands (1940–45).Footnote 1 In invoking the Schlaraffenland, a term connoting the biblical ‘Promised Land’, Schmidt thus constructed the British Channel Islands of Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Alderney as a paradise.Footnote 2 In the early days, shortly after the Islands’ occupation began in summer 1940, many of his comrades agreed. Unhindered by Germany’s rationing, soldiers bought up ‘huge stocks’ of goods, from ‘potatoes and tinned goods’ to long unseen luxury items like ‘silk stockings and footwear’.Footnote 3 Some described the Islands’ beautiful landscape as ‘a little paradise’, finding themselves on what they thought to be ‘the island of one’s dreams’.Footnote 4 With a mild maritime climate, perfect for the cultivation of tomatoes and flowers, and home to herds of cattle famous for their creamy milk, the troops’ joy was unsurprising.
Yet, by the Islands’ liberation in May 1945, German perceptions of the Islands had changed significantly. By then, troops on the Islands were starving under siege conditions imposed by the Allied recapture of mainland European supply lines. When British liberation forces arrived, bringing bread to relieve the hunger of German forces, German war correspondent Fritz Illing wrote in his field notes a broken echo of Schmidt’s words from around five years before: ‘After many months of starving, a life like in the Schlaraffenland’.Footnote 5
This radical shift in perspective – from soldiers viewing the occupied Channel Islands as a paradisical promised land to the very opposite – demonstrates their progressive disillusionment as Germany’s military fortunes deteriorated throughout the war. However, it also highlights the role of space and place in determining wartime experiences and troops’ responses to them. This shaping of responses by physical space has also been documented by historian David Blackbourn, who demonstrated how the Third Reich’s social Darwinist principles influenced displaced Germans, albeit in a different context, to project their emotions onto the landscape.Footnote 6 A space such as the Channel Islands, initially believed to be a Schlaraffenland and that then denied troops, through its geography, access to entertainment, loved ones and basic necessities, was ripe for such projection. As such, what was originally a topophilic attachment to the Islands was short-lived, transforming through a process of disillusionment into a kind of topophobia.Footnote 7
When discussing the forced labourers brought to the Islands by German troops, historians such as Caroline Sturdy Colls and Kevin Colls have suggested that labourers’ experiences there were ‘inherently connected to the nature of the landscape, a site’s materiality and the material objects they would encounter within the space’.Footnote 8 This observation, drawing on Maria Starzmann’s emphasis on the role of location in determining fate during conflict, can be expanded to include the experiences of German soldiers.Footnote 9 Indeed, the gradual disillusionment of German troops on the Channel Islands between 1940 and 1945 is a microcosm of occupation. Yet, it provides macro-level insights into how, regardless of what hardships troops experienced, the specific geographies where these hardships occurred defined individual responses to them. The Channel Islands’ geography created the perfect storm for disillusionment as they were isolated and cut off by treacherous waters, poor wintertime weather and British raids on German shipping. They are also small, with the occupied islands ranging from Jersey, at just forty-five square miles, to Sark, the smallest of the inhabited Islands, at less than three, forcing Germans into close proximity with both one another and the Islanders. The Islands’ geography also largely precluded violent resistance, being mostly flat with little forest that could have sustained guerrilla warfare, thus depriving the troops of a local enemy.
Understanding the influence of this external landscape on the disillusionment and internal landscape of German soldiers on the Islands is a complex task. This article defines disillusionment as a loss of morale and distrust in Wehrmacht leadership. Expressing disillusionment did not necessarily mean that a soldier was anti-Nazi, just as saying ‘Heil Hitler’ did not necessarily indicate pro-Nazi feeling; yet, it did display dissatisfaction with leadership and perhaps the regime more broadly. Although disillusionment seems to have affected almost all the men to differing degrees, regardless of their political position when arriving on the Islands, they were often reticent to express disillusionment. Popular historian George Forty, hitherto the only author to specifically to consider German soldiers’ experiences on the Islands, denies that this disillusionment existed, asserting: ‘the average German soldier, sailor and airman had unshakeable confidence in the Führer and the rest of his leaders, who apparently could do no wrong’.Footnote 10 Yet, Forty draws these conclusions from problematic sources, relying on informally gathered and unreferenced oral testimonies.Footnote 11 While this article uses some of these sources, given the scarcity of German testimonies of this occupation, it does so sparingly, conscious they cannot reliably attest to historic ideological matters, only to how speakers wished to present their views at the moment of creation.
Disillusionment around leadership, both the Islands’ field command and senior command in Berlin, is thus primarily identified here in contemporary literature, diaries and letters, and then corroborated through select memoirs and oral testimonies. Contemporary literature discovered on the Islands, such as poems and pamphlets penned by soldiers, is crucial in demonstrating the extent of disillusionment on the Islands. Given the anonymity provided by these forms, German soldiers were able to express themselves outside the constraints of both Wehrmacht censorship and self-censorship stemming from fears of being judged for expressing their feelings. These are supported by German-authored letters and diaries that, largely unconsidered by previous scholarship, are scattered across the Deutsches Tagebucharchiv (German Diary Archive, Emmendingen), the Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives) and the archives of the Channel Islands (Island Archives, Guernsey; Jersey Archive Service; Sark Archives). While German diaries were often subject to self-censorship, not least due to fears around their discovery by unsympathetic eyes, these can be corroborated by Islanders’ diaries, which were less closely monitored and described the troops’ moods. Similar to German diaries, Feldpostbriefe (German troops’ letters home) were actively censored by the Wehrmacht, and thus expressions of disillusionment within were necessarily vague. Perhaps partially influenced by the subtlety of these expressions, previous scholarship on Feldpostbriefe from deployed forces in other conflict zones has concluded that soldiers were largely loyal to Hitler and failed to engage in uprisings against Third Reich leadership.Footnote 12
This article contests these conclusions by both demonstrating the prevalence of disillusionment and providing evidence of an uprising on the Islands spearheaded by German soldiers. While other, more heavily populated occupation zones bear out previous scholarship’s conclusions, this article spotlights the ego-documents authored by soldiers within the Islands’ peculiar geography to give historians the clearest picture of disillusionment. As such, it provides unique insight into the inner lives of Wehrmacht personnel within the context of occupation by focusing on their role in a largely unconsidered territory.
After initially situating the reader in the geographical, cultural and strategic context of the troops and the environment in which they found themselves, this article uses the aforementioned ego-documents to explore how the Islands’ unique geography negatively impacted almost every aspect of troops’ lives. The geography of the Channel Islands, initially a paradisical foil to soldiers’ fears of the Eastern Front, quickly became a monotonous prison, inducing Inselwahnsinn (island madness). Inselwahnsinn was compounded by geographic isolation, with adverse weather conditions and fractured supply lines delaying mail and leave by months, plaguing the men with loneliness. As a result, many took their own lives in a spate of suicides. Finally, the geographic restrictions of Island life brought soldiers into close contact with both Islanders and their superiors. Able to closely observe their commanding officers, rank-and-file soldiers began to perceive the double standards regarding rations and leave, a particularly stinging blow during the starvation of the final two years of occupation. Unable to rely on their leaders, either on the Islands or those in Berlin who had seemingly abandoned them, soldiers became disillusioned. Through identifying the monotony, loneliness and starvation that exacerbated tensions between officers and men, this article then examines troops’ varying responses to disillusionment. These responses were often verbally expressed to Islanders but also manifested in poems and pamphlets. The unification of these two forms of disillusionment, social and literary, resulted in a climactic, although ultimately failed, uprising against National Socialist leadership, stemming from the geographic context of this occupation.
A study of these geographic impacts on occupying forces encourages historians to consider the experiences of more rural, isolated occupations in conjunction with those of population centres such as Paris and Prague. While German soldiers in Paris, a city close to the Islands geographically but their opposite in experience for occupying forces, could embrace the pleasures of Parisian life, soldiers on the Islands had no such opportunities for ‘carefree’ escape.Footnote 13 Although scholars such as Robert Gildea have focused on more rural occupations, such studies rarely consider occupiers’ perspectives.Footnote 14 Further exploration of these oft-ignored sources allows historians to examine how dissenting and disillusioned voices were less stifled in isolated occupations. While troops in both contexts experienced hardships, the implications of an individual’s geographic surroundings could entirely rewrite their experience of war and occupation.
The Channel Islands as a Military Landscape
While this article has already established something of the Islands’ geographic character, it was the soldiers who inhabited them that shaped them into a military landscape, a geographic space transformed by the presence and activity of armed forces.
These soldiers initially belonged to the Wehrmacht’s 216th Infantry Division (ID), which asserted control over the Channel Islands by July 1940 and made them the only pieces of British soil occupied by the Third Reich. Prior to the troops’ arrival, during May–June 1940, the British government declared the Islands ‘indefensible’ and withdrew military protection.Footnote 15 Some civilians withdrew to mainland Britain in mass evacuations, but around 65,000 Islanders remained.Footnote 16 Other units from the Luftwaffe (German Air Force), Kriegsmarine (German Navy) and Feldkommandantur 515 (German military administration) were also stationed on the Islands; however, most available ego-documents concern the Wehrmacht, determining the army as this article’s focus. In summer 1941, the 216th ID transferred to the Eastern Front and was replaced by the 319th ID, which would remain on the Islands until liberation in 1945.Footnote 17 The troops were thus largely static; however, supporting units (e.g. Flak units) were rotated, and some men also transferred in and out of the 319th ID according to military necessity. Most transfers brought additional troops to the Islands, particularly in 1942 and 1944 when German command, conscious of the imminent Allied advance, sent reinforcements of younger, stronger men to bolster occupation forces in France and the Channel Islands, who they believed had become accustomed to ‘soft living’.Footnote 18
It was much rarer for men to be transferred off the Islands, but despite this, soldiers there were disproportionately terrified of the Eastern Front. Island diarists wrote that soldiers ‘dreaded the thought of being sent to Russia’, with some injuring themselves or committing suicide to avoid going.Footnote 19 Although there are records of some men being sent from the Islands to the Eastern Front, this was relatively uncommon, particularly for those in the 319th ID. Those in supporting divisions could be relocated en masse, yet it was also unlikely for them to be sent specifically to fight Soviet forces rather than into another conflict zone. However, the numerous men transferred in from the Eastern Front did little to dispel these fears; one Islander was told by a German soldier, ‘I have just come back from Russia and find this place paradise after hell’.Footnote 20 Thus, the soldiers on the Islands lived in a liminal space; one that was a Schlaraffenland when compared to the Eastern Front’s conditions, yet one with such levels of monotony, loneliness and starvation that it evolved away from the paradisical. One poem written by soldiers in 1943 acknowledged that the Islands’ difficulties seemed small when they had to leave, although while there they ‘often cursed our stay’ due to boredom, irregular contact with home and lack of food.Footnote 21
Between unpredictable transfers and the official German reports listing only the Gefechtsstärke (fighting strength) of troops, thus excluding soldiers off active duty and logistical staff, the number of troops stationed on the Islands at any particular moment is difficult to discern. Nonetheless, in July 1941, the Gefechtsstärke on the Islands numbered almost 7,000; upon the Islands’ liberation, the Allies found 27,000 people associated with the German armed forces.Footnote 22 These numbers are large considering the Islands’ civilian population of just 65,000; in contrast, occupied France had a million troops for twenty-five million inhabitants.Footnote 23 Troops’ disproportionate deployment on the Islands can be accounted for by German high command’s perception of the Islands as a ‘military landscape’.Footnote 24 Not only were these Islands conceptualised as a base from which to attack Britain, but troops’ presence there was a symbolic desecration of British territory, with Hitler insisting the Islands become an ‘unassailable fortress’.Footnote 25 The presence of thousands of troops in an occupied territory with little to no armed resistance (despite significant cultural and ideological resistance) and to which Britain afforded similarly little strategic significance was therefore a psychological and symbolic assertion of dominance, swathed in the guise of geographic strategy.Footnote 26
Despite this, the Islands’ geography was significant in other ways for the troops stationed there. A military landscape may be one shaped by the presence of occupation forces, but those forces can be shaped just as fundamentally by the landscape. The Islands’ geography was crucial in shaping soldiers’ occupation experiences and their gradual descent into disillusionment.
Monotony
The soldiers were initially enamoured with their surroundings, partaking in sea bathing and ‘walks to explore the island’s scenic beauty’, giving soldiers a sense of being in a ‘cushy billet’.Footnote 27 Yet, as rations dwindled, such physical pursuits were unsustainable. Lack of supplies even began to affect other forms of leisure, with a soldiers’ singing group, once praised for ‘colourful’ performances of folk songs, disintegrating when reduced rations left its members depressed.Footnote 28 Organised dances were poorly attended by Island women, with one soldier mourning: ‘Unfortunately we have no chance with the ladies. . . . If I were a girl, I wouldn’t want a soldier either’, suggesting a ‘dearth of dance partners’ rendered even this pastime joyless.Footnote 29 While some Island women did engage in romantic relationships with German soldiers, these women were in the minority given both the strength of Island patriotic feeling and the social policing of women’s interactions with the occupying forces.Footnote 30 Sedentary leisure activities, such as film showings and musical performances, remained popular; however, the Islands’ limited venues meant that cultural experiences were restricted to occasional evenings.Footnote 31 Unlike soldiers in occupied European cities, the rural, isolated nature of the Islands’ geography barred them from experiencing many leisure activities accessible to troops elsewhere. This was no Paris, where ‘tourism’ for German occupation forces created a vibrant social scene for soldiers.Footnote 32 Nor was it Warsaw, where, between 1941 and 1942, a single theatre company offered 182 performances, attended by 115,000 German soldiers.Footnote 33 The experience of boredom due to geographic constraints was likely shared by German soldiers in other rural territories; however, the sea formed a crucial barrier between these two comparable experiences. Even those stationed in rural areas of mainland Europe likely had access to transportation allowing them to visit nearby cultural centres, cities and landmarks. Soldiers on the mainland, even outside of major cities, thus engaged in forms of leisure, with ‘military tourism’ becoming popular. For example, Wehrmacht authorities in Greece produced a guidebook specifically for German soldiers stationed there.Footnote 34 This guidebook suggests that not only was this usage of leave common practice for soldiers in mainland occupation zones but also that opportunities to experience various European cultures were presented as one of the highlights of service. Thanks to the geography of the English Channel, soldiers on the Islands were often denied even these small pleasures, with weather conditions regularly preventing excursions even to nearby France. While German leadership on the Islands attempted to provide leisure spaces for soldiers, the Islands’ geography, particularly their size and difficulties of supply, staved off the diversions of mainland Europe.
The remainder of soldiers’ days thus descended into tedium. ‘There is nothing to do here and playing cards gets boring. . . . We get up at half past eight in the morning and then we have to find something to do during the day’, wrote one soldier.Footnote 35 Another expressed boredom even with the lack of violence: ‘The Tommy leaves us in peace. This is . . . a bit boring’.Footnote 36 Far from frontlines in Europe and Africa, soldiers on the Islands were not even preoccupied with suppressing partisan groups. Civilian resistance was largely non-violent, including anti-German jokes, ‘button-hole resistance’ (wearing national symbols/colours as protest) and groups such as GUNS (the Guernsey Underground News Service), which illegally transcribed and distributed BBC news broadcasts.Footnote 37 To be clear, these other forms of resistance were important contributions to resistance movements more broadly, as has been highlighted in scholarship, and suppressing these did occupy some of the German soldiers’ time.Footnote 38 However, this naturally involved much less manpower than battles with partisans would have done, and while there were a few instances of armed resistance, these were rare and, when they occurred, often disorganised. This was far from the targeted attacks on the infrastructure crucial to the forces of occupation launched by partisan groups elsewhere in Europe, often with the support of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). On the Islands, there was no equivalent of the Maquis (French and Belgian resistance fighters) nor Związek Odwetu (the partisan Polish Union of Retaliation). Indeed, one Jerseyman stated: ‘You couldn’t take to the mountains in Jersey with arms in hand. First, we’ve got no mountains, and second, we had no arms’.Footnote 39 This evidences the geographic basis for the Islands’ lack of violent resistance. Potential resisters were trapped in a confined geography with no mountains or forests to facilitate guerrilla warfare and lived in tight-knit communities that afforded them none of the anonymity available to residents of cities such as Paris or Amsterdam.Footnote 40
To combat boredom, German leadership filled troops’ days with repetitive tasks: ‘artillery and ammunition training . . . drill practice and close combat training, lessons and instruction’.Footnote 41 Yet, the boredom remained and brought soldiers to mental health crises so regularly that the commonly recognised phenomenon was christened Inselwahnsinn (island madness) by one NCO:
The monotony and stupidity of everyday life lead to . . . ‘island madness’ in the troops . . . one day one of my best NCOs ran out of the bunker to a heavy machine gun, without any reason, without saying anything to anyone, loaded the gun and let off a whole box of five hundred rounds of ammunition out to sea.Footnote 42
Soldiers’ unfulfilled hankering for action underpinned their experiences of occupation. Much previous scholarship has been devoted to the function of violence under the Third Reich, with several scholars suggesting that mutual experiences of violence produced community cohesion, with historian Rolf-Dieter Müller linking Wehrmacht soldiers’ collective processing of battlefield trauma on the Eastern Front to strengthened bonds of comradeship.Footnote 43 Sources from the Islands support such conclusions, suggesting that violent action that provided a sense of participation in the war effort was necessary for the preservation of morale. Indeed, Bastiaan Willems argues that, on the Eastern Front, many German soldiers found their sense of self to be rooted in their identity as a wider unit, an identity that was ‘strengthened and reasserted’ with every collective violent action.Footnote 44 However, within isolated occupations such as this, violent action was unavailable as an outlet for troops’ frustrated boredom. Not only did the lack of combat mark out the experience of troops on the Islands as different from other theatres of war, but it also contributed to the rampant growth of disillusionment.
Such action was made unavailable because the Islands’ civilian population was considered by German leadership to be ‘racially perfect’ and ‘more valuable’ than the French, with Hitler himself insisting on a ‘distinct differentiation’ in treatment between Islanders and the French.Footnote 45 Historian Peter Lieb demonstrates that, on the Western Front, the Wehrmacht did not see the population as an ‘ideologically deadly enemy’ and did not require the exterminatory mindset adopted on the Eastern Front.Footnote 46 If this was the case in France and other areas of the Western Front, as Lieb argues, how much more so for the ‘racially pure’ Channel Islands? This links to Thomas Kühne’s definition of Kameradschaft (comradeship), that is, morale fostered by shared action with other soldiers. Kühne grounds Kameradschaft in soldiers’ perceptions of ‘acting in concert . . . laying their individual I’s on the altar of the We of the army and the fatherland’.Footnote 47 Yet, to act ‘in concert’ with others, there must be some action to be performed, some warfare to enact, some group to demonise. Without this, morale crumbled, with one soldier on the Islands writing that as he was ‘not destined to actively intervene in the fighting’, he could only cling to the futile hope that his ‘endurance’ would somehow strengthen his comrades.Footnote 48
Therefore, the lack of activity, particularly the suppression of resistance activity or extermination of local populations, created a monotonous, purposeless existence for many troops. Although few soldiers expressed an active desire for violence, the lack of meaningful action, of soldierly purpose, created by the Islands’ geography, which constrained both civilian resistance and soldiers’ leisure, caused them to experience negative mental health effects.
Loneliness
The monotony of life on the Islands also provided soldiers with long stretches of time to ponder their isolation from family and friends. ‘Are you also as lonely as me?’, one soldier wrote to his wife; another told his family: ‘I miss you very much. I hope you miss me too. I feel lonely’.Footnote 49 This loneliness, compounded by the boredom, created a breeding ground for depression. While loneliness and isolation are common to troops across temporal and spatial contexts, Island geographies posed specific challenges crucial to the development of Inselwahnsinn and even suicidality among troops.
One way the Islands’ geography promoted loneliness was the challenges it posed regarding post. Due to treacherous weather conditions and tenuous supply lines, it was common for soldiers to go a ‘full month without post’, and postal boats could be so rare that one soldier received a backlog of ‘thirty-six letters’, all out of date.Footnote 50 The necessity of post for maintaining morale is easily observed. A government directive to the German postal service in 1940 demonstrates Berlin authorities’ awareness of the impact of post on morale: ‘The delay of news via Feldpost, especially from family members, can cause soldiers to worry and thus impede their ability to perform their duties’.Footnote 51 Similarly, historian Maksim Fomenko suggests the regular receipt of post was a key determinant of forces’ combat capability during the Second World War, improving commitment to their cause.Footnote 52 Yet, despite the clear influence of post on soldiers’ disillusionment and morale, the Islands’ geography prevented its delivery to a greater extent than any other occupation zone. While in 1942, letters to and from Western occupied territories such as France were delivered in approximately three to five days, troops on the Islands could wait a month or more, twice as long for post than even those fighting on the southern Eastern Front, where troops waited twelve to sixteen days.Footnote 53
The importance of post to the maintenance of morale was articulated by one soldier on the Islands, who stated, ‘To maintain a good mood among the infantrymen’, post was a necessary ‘link with home’.Footnote 54 In one instance, when post failed to arrive on the Islands, soldiers became so distressed that search parties were dispatched to the continent; the return of three sacks of post misdirected to Paris was met with ‘great joy’ and described as how ‘the bridge to home was rebuilt’.Footnote 55 In the times between these ‘bridges to home’, one soldier commented that to ‘endure this dull life’, one should ‘stop thinking about your loved one’ and their letters to prevent becoming depressed by the monotony and isolation.Footnote 56
Similar challenges arose around leave. Scarcity of boats and/or adverse weather conditions regularly delayed or even cancelled rare opportunities for leave.Footnote 57 These difficulties highlighted tensions between rank-and-file soldiers and leadership. Soldier Erich Wolf described how one sergeant, permitted to go on leave despite a leave ban for lower ranks, was serenaded by soldiers who had rewritten a popular song to include the line ‘We have no leave passes/the sergeant goes on leave alone’.Footnote 58 Such sources allow historians to document how emergent tensions between men and their superiors over differing treatment worsened as the occupation continued, with later events bringing these nascent resentments to fruition.
Thus, the majority of rank-and-file soldiers faced immense difficulties in obtaining a ‘bridge to home’, whether through leave or post, due to the isolation of the Channel Islands. Along with little to distract them from their boredom, fears around what news they might receive when they were finally granted leave or obtained letters festered. One soldier wrote, ‘I’m terrified of letters’.Footnote 59 Fears around news ranged from fear of being rejected by a girlfriend via letter, to terror about the fates of wives, parents and/or children who might have perished in bombing raids. The increased mention of German suicides in Islanders’ diaries (as well as the limited statistical evidence) suggests that these stressors, exacerbated by the geographic limitations of the Islands, were key to the proliferation of suicides among troops. While it is unclear exactly how many men took their own lives in this context due to both a lack of official sources and the stigma associated with suicide, Islanders’ diaries record significant numbers of German suicides, particularly after the D-Day landings isolated the troops further and experiences of Inselwahnsinn intensified. Guernsey clergyman Reverend Ord records that many suicides were motivated by news of family members being killed by British bombing raids: ‘Two Germans committed suicide this week, having heard that their wives had been killed in air raids’.Footnote 60 Another report told of a soldier who ‘placed a hand grenade in his mouth and committed suicide’ after he ‘heard that all of his family had perished in the bombing of Berlin and he had nothing to live for’.Footnote 61 Further stories abound, with Island undertakers ordered to build coffins for soldiers who had killed themselves.Footnote 62 The aforementioned Reverend Ord also found himself regularly responsible for interring these coffins, and the bodies within, in the graveyard of his chapel; he performed this office so often that he came to know the relevant officers by name:
Hoffmann came to ask if I would allow the body of a German suicide to be placed in the Foulon Cemetery Chapel. ‘This must be the fifth suicide you’ve buried down there among our people.’ I suggested. His answer was grave: ‘There are many, many suicides.’ Not all are buried in the same place lest the garrison be upset.Footnote 63
This source testifies to not only the leadership’s anxieties around the spread of disillusionment and dissent but also the large numbers of suicides that resulted from these feelings. The extent of suicide among the German troops is attested to in a number of diaries and occupation accounts, as well as by the limited archival information available; although incomplete, a collection of German death certificates surviving in Jersey’s archives emphasises this. Of sixty-five certificates, fifty-two list cause of death; of these, 17 per cent were suicides.Footnote 64 Many others are attributed to ‘accidents’, such as ‘accident with pistol’ or ‘accident with hand grenade’, and it is impossible to tell which of these were described thus to avoid the stigma of suicide.Footnote 65 Similarly, the German Military Cemetery at Fort George, Guernsey, points towards this phenomenon, with 4.5 per cent of burials being explicitly recorded as suicides, and an additional 9 per cent as possible suicides (these causes of death are either unknown, attributed to vague ‘accidents’ or related to traditional methods of suicide such as ‘gas poisoning’).Footnote 66
Some of the suicides recorded by Islanders in their occupation accounts may certainly be exaggeration or rumour; indeed, anti-German rumours served a significant purpose in maintaining cohesion within the Island community.Footnote 67 However, the frequency of discussion by Islanders, combined with what little statistical data exists about German suicide rates, points towards suicide becoming an unusually common occurrence during the occupation.Footnote 68
The suicidality to which these men were driven was thus common, closely related to anxieties around homes/families and geographically based. Although news of a loved one’s death might be the coup de grâce that finally drove a soldier to suicide, it is unlikely such events would have been so common if not for the pervasive loneliness and monotony already felt by troops. Even today, research suggests people experiencing loneliness are significantly more likely to attempt suicide in the aftermath of bereavement.Footnote 69
While there is little information on suicide among German occupation forces elsewhere during the Second World War, chronologically and geographically comparable occupations bore out similar results, such as American forces’ experiences on the Aleutian Islands.Footnote 70 Historian Galen Perras writes of the ‘Aleutian stare’, an expression adopted by men stationed there that betrayed their severe depression and suicidality.Footnote 71 Another comparison can be found in how troops’ disillusionment was also reminiscent of German troops’ experiences of Stacheldrahtkrankheit (barbed wire disease) during the First World War. Stacheldrahtkrankheit, the emergence of depressive, anxious and neurotic feelings among German prisoners of war, was identified by Adolf Lukas Vischer, a Swiss psychiatrist, in 1918.Footnote 72 In his treatise on the subject, Vischer identifies isolation from family and friends, the indefinite length of confinement and the irregularity of post as factors that drove German soldiers in captivity to ‘repine and complain, not only against the camp routine and the authorities, but also against his friends and relations’, much as their counterparts on the Islands did several decades later.Footnote 73 Furthermore, Vischer suggests that these feelings fixed the minds of soldiers on the boundary line that separated them from the rest of the world.Footnote 74 While for Vischer, this was the line of barbed wire, the phenomenon of Inselwahnsinn suggests that the sea surrounding the Islands formed a similar manifestation of soldiers’ fear, anxiety and disillusionment, as it physically and geographically separated them from contact with their families and engagement with leisure pursuits. The similarity between these experiences suggests Island geographies, which exacerbated troops’ fears for loved ones, loneliness and boredom, contributed significantly to their disillusionment.
While loneliness based on separation from loved ones was clearly contributing to disillusionment, there was also a sense for many soldiers of being ‘alone in a crowd’. Due to their reliance on the group for survival, it could be difficult for soldiers to be honest with one another, particularly if they were already feeling disillusioned. The following song, recorded by a German soldier on the Islands, expresses the concerns felt by many German soldiers about sharing their true feelings, even in jest, with their comrades:
Expressing disillusionment, even through casual mimicry of a famous politician, playing music considered ‘Jewish’ or even just being a ‘grumbler’, could be enough that a soldier might be ostracised by his comrades, or even denounced by them. Even unification with those who shared their disillusionment was dangerous, as one might find oneself imprisoned alongside them, as embodied by the ten’s proverbial reunification in Dachau. Thus, many could feel alone even among those with whom they ought to share comradely bonds, particularly when this was compounded by distance from loved ones at home in Germany.
Starvation
The previous song also highlights the quality of the food on the Islands by the middle of the occupation, calling it ‘Pigswill’. Although troops relished the supplies they found in Island shops after the initial occupation of the Channel Islands, these supplies were not to last. The Allied recapture of France and the severance of German supply lines brought starvation conditions to the Islands that led to many German deaths.Footnote 79 Popular histories that consider German perspectives have downplayed this starvation, particularly in 1944 and 1945, with Forty commenting, for example: ‘The soldiers had a hungry Christmas [1944], but made the best of it’.Footnote 80 Although soldiers used what food they had to create a meagre Christmas feast, by late 1944/early 1945, this ‘making the best of it’ constituted ‘eating cats and dogs and scraping . . . rotten potatoes’.Footnote 81 Illing wrote that, in these final years:
Eating had long been the number one topic. Dialogues like this were the order of the day: ‘I saw a cat at ten meters today’. ‘Man, why didn’t you kill it? They’re supposed to taste fabulous, even more tender than rabbit meat . . .’Footnote 82
Islanders’ encounters with ‘emaciated’ soldiers who were ‘almost too weak to stand’ corroborate this.Footnote 83 While Islanders’ diets were supplemented by Red Cross parcels, their diaries are clear that ‘German forces were far worse off’ and ‘starving’.Footnote 84
It is notable that despite their starvation, German soldiers very rarely attempted to steal the Red Cross parcels. Several Islanders noted their restraint in refusing to touch the parcels, and thefts that can be directly attributed to German soldiers were rare.Footnote 85 Although soldiers would commonly steal from Islanders’ fields or milk their cows, there were few instances of violent looting from homes, and those that occurred were quickly met with action by the German authorities.Footnote 86 The difference between the troops’ behaviour on the Islands and that on the Eastern Front, in particular, is striking. When retreating even through German territory, where the civilians were countrymen, violent looting was common for soldiers returning from the Eastern Front, with consequences rarely imposed by the leadership.Footnote 87 Willems attributes much of this to the radicalisation of German troops on the Eastern Front through collective violence. The evidence certainly supports this, yet it is important to note that the instances of looting cited by Willems are often ones in which the troops were transient, passing through settlements and looting as they went.Footnote 88 Meanwhile, when troops were in the same place for a long time among those they considered their racial equals, looting was quelled effectively.Footnote 89 The geography of the Channel Islands continued this paradigm: soldiers were in close proximity to Islanders for extended periods of time, without violent action to radicalise them. The lack of action broke down bonds of Kameradschaft while the proximity allowed them to bond with civilians, facilitated by the notion that the Islanders were racially pure. All this, the proximity and the lack of action, can be traced back to the Islands’ geography, which impacted scavenging behaviours despite the starvation of troops.
The starvation of troops was a real and present danger to their survival as, by early 1945, an Islander recorded between one and seven soldiers dying of starvation each week.Footnote 90 Despite this, German authorities were determined to ‘hold out until final victory’, ordering the three-month food reserves be stretched to feed troops for two years.Footnote 91 The opposition between this decision and the troops’ starvation exacerbated existing inter-rank tensions, increasing their disillusionment. Indeed, one Islander, writing about troops’ starvation and resultant disillusionment, recorded how, even in 1943, ‘the troops here all say they wish it [the war] were over’.Footnote 92 There is thus ample evidence of troops’ starvation and the negative impact of this on morale. Yet, one particularly loyal German soldier attempted, in a post-war interview, to temper the idea that soldiers were disillusioned with their leadership under these starvation conditions, trying to distance the two factors:
In the German armed forces there were no special rations for officers and troops. Everyone ate exactly the same. And that is why there was in fact no unrest among comrades, because on our side we are all equal among equals.Footnote 93
However, not only was there significant unrest among soldiers on the Islands, evident in the following pages, but contemporaneous sources also contradict these claims of shared experience. Sources from early in the occupation such as the diary of Paula Stuck, a German woman who visited the Islands as a guest of some officers, demonstrate that, from the very beginning, there were significant differences between officers’ and troops’ diets. Stuck mentions drinking ‘whiskey of the finest kind’ and attending a ‘wonderful six-course meal’ of ‘Soup, omelette, two meat dishes, salad, vegetable dishes, Madeira cake, coffee, and Munich beer’.Footnote 94 Although not representative of officers’ general diet, given these were special dinner parties, officers’ very access to this kind and amount of luxury food and alcohol is indicative of the significant divide between officers and rank-and-file soldiers. Even at this early stage of occupation, troops’ diets were much poorer. Meat was rare and common meals were tomato soup, potato and leek casserole or porridge.Footnote 95 Stuck even notes being served porridge herself at more subdued meals among rank-and-file soldiers.Footnote 96 Reverend Ord corroborated the ration differences between officers and men, who, unlike their superiors, ‘never see fish unless they can wangle it secretly’.Footnote 97
Although rank-and-file soldiers were generally billeted on local civilians or in hotels converted into barracks, and high-ranking officers could receive mansions for their own exclusive use, such physical separation could only go so far in disguising the differing rations of officers and men.Footnote 98 On such small Islands, the disparity in treatment became evident and sparked significant ill-feeling among the troops towards their better-fed and more luxuriously housed leaders. As food supplies dwindled, such ill-feeling grew. One Islander recorded that:
The Germans here appear to be getting more and more dejected as time goes on. By all accounts, the troubles between officers and men is often very serious; our ambulances have been employed on two or three occasions after these disturbances.Footnote 99
This ill-feeling was observed by one soldier in his comrades’ ‘mutinous’ mutterings against officers.Footnote 100 As the war continued and starvation conditions began to affect officers too, their ‘visible weight loss . . . was noted with great satisfaction in the bunker conversations’.Footnote 101 Although this description of ‘visible weight loss’ demonstrates that, by the final days of the occupation, officers also suffered from starvation and malnutrition, the disparity in exactly when different ranks experienced these conditions is telling. Such sources demonstrate both that soldiers and officers were unequally affected by starvation and how the Islands’ starvation conditions shaped troops’ decreasing faith in their superiors.
It is evident that German leadership was aware of the resultant potential for mutiny and attempted to prevent this. An instruction to the ‘Fortress Commandants’ in the West from 1945 specifies that, for troops:
National Socialist leadership is what counts, not National Socialist education. The object is not to know, but to will. . . . Soldiers are never concerned with theories, but only with immediate problems.Footnote 102
Berlin’s instruction to focus on ‘National Socialist leadership’ indicates an understanding of how the ‘immediate problems’ of boredom, loneliness and starvation were exacerbating existing tensions between officers and men, and causing disillusionment. Indeed, Kühne argued that the maintenance of morale, of ‘will’, was dependent on the men’s unification under a ‘comradely leader’.Footnote 103 When these leaders failed – whether in preventing the boredom, loneliness and starvation causing disillusionment, depression and suicidality, or merely acting as hypocrites – morale was lost.
Responses to Disillusionment
The factors outlined above demonstrate that disillusionment both fundamentally altered troops’ experiences of occupation and was created by the Channel Islands’ geographic conditions; however, this unique geography also created unique responses. These responses could include expressing disillusionment to civilians, creating anti-Nazi material or even, in the unification of these two, mutiny.
Islanders’ diaries record soldiers expressing disillusionment with startling regularity, thus granting historians insight into troops’ responses. For example, one Guernsey woman wrote:
Many of them have not seen their homes and relatives for years, and are hopelessly weary of war. Their appetite for glory – never as voracious as that of their Master – seems to have been satisfied long ago. A few of them already admit it: renouncing allegiance to Hitler’s creeds and practices in no uncertain terms. They show photographs of their homes and families to anyone sufficiently interested to see them; admitting, in so many words, that all they want to do is to go home, and live in peace. They have had their fill of Hitler’s Promised Land.Footnote 104
This Islander was unlikely to have known the language of Schlaraffenland, nor soldiers’ complicated relationship with the promised paradise of the Channel Islands, yet her choice of this biblical image – ‘Hitler’s “Promised Land”’ – is poignant. Her account highlights the distinction between the desires of the rank-and-file men and that of ‘their Master’ and how these disparate desires were prompted by geographic separation from their homes and families. Another woman recorded a similar interaction; when her husband was chopping wood, a passing soldier ‘threw off his belt and said, “Let me do that for you,” and he sawed up a huge amount of wood, talking all the time. He cursed Goering, Hitler, up and down.’Footnote 105
These stories may be so common as disillusioned soldiers perhaps sought out Islanders with whom they felt ideological affinity. This was the case for Heinrich Bodeker, a German minister who befriended Reverend Ord over shared theology and was heard ‘quietly but decisively expressing his views against the Nazi regime’.Footnote 106 Yet, Islanders did not only encounter dissenting Germans when they shared ideological convictions. The sixteen drunk soldiers in a Jersey hotel who ‘stuck their bayonets in a large portrait of Hitler, then threw it out of the window’, suggests criticism was witnessed by Islanders not only in private expressions of shared beliefs.Footnote 107
While historian Gilly Carr accurately asserts that ‘German threats were real and were carried out’, which required some, if not the majority of, soldiers to acquiesce to orders handed down from Berlin, claims by those such as Forty of troops’ unswerving loyalty are exaggerated.Footnote 108 Although Islanders’ diaries do contain rumours of fanatical soldiers, these were often what Cheryl Jorgensen-Earp termed ‘warning narratives’; stories aiming to disparage the occupiers, which were sometimes fictional and often exaggerated.Footnote 109 Knowing the propagandic purpose of such narratives, in addition to the often blurry details of such interactions, it is clear that such stories are outweighed by the proliferate contrasting experiences in Islander accounts.
One such account was written by Guernseyman Wilfred Renouf, who had little reason to approve of any German; his father had been killed in a pre-occupation German bombing raid, and he initially described the occupiers as ‘a vile and relentless enemy’.Footnote 110 Renouf’s many interactions with soldiers, however, led him to conclude that, although some were ‘indoctrinated Nazis’, many expressed dissent and disillusionment:
I made note of what one young German said to me: ‘You English are lucky. . . . If we don’t obey – prison or shot and parents suffer. If English come, I prisoner, I not fight. But you not speak to my kamarade [sic, comrades]!’ Many spoke in the same vein in secret, for they were all very frightened of being overheard or denounced.Footnote 111
By 1945, Renouf had written ‘the decent people of the rank and file understood its [the Nazi regime’s] ulterior motive’, describing them as ‘victims of their leaders’.Footnote 112 Not only does this account highlight soldiers’ fear of, and disillusionment with, leadership, it also points towards how dissent was largely expressed in private conversations, perhaps accounting for how these feelings among soldiers have been overlooked by previous scholarship. Despite historians such as Jörg Echternkamp suggesting that such expressions of dissent belong to a too ‘broadly framed concept of resistance’, consideration of these forms of dissent as expressions of disillusionment can give historians a unique window into troops’ experiences.Footnote 113
This soldier who spoke to Renouf also expressed fear of what his comrades might think, demonstrating that disillusionment was there, merely veiled by self-censorship. Similar veiled expressions of disillusionment can be seen in Feldpost letters despite this medium’s more overt censorship. For example, Bernhard Schulz, a soldier on Alderney in 1941, wrote to his sweetheart:
Last year I was in Duisberg for Easter and we . . . were dancing outdoors. At that time, we had a friend who is now buried at the Lys. And the third, who was seriously wounded, lies still in a hospital in Brussels. When will it happen to me? . . . We are inoculated with the serum of distrust, distrust of God and the world, and of ourselves.Footnote 114
Although Schulz’s writings are constrained by awareness of censorship, his meaning is plain. He mourns his friends who have died and/or been wounded in a war he displays no desire for and asks when – not if – he will face death or severe injury. Schulz not only desires a world free from war’s troubles, idealised in nostalgia for ‘dancing outdoors’, but also describes being ‘inoculated with the serum of distrust’. Although what he means by this metaphorical serum is not entirely clear, his evident disillusionment demonstrates clear weaknesses in any belief he held in National Socialist leaders. This letter, too, was written while supplies were still relatively plentiful on the Islands. When this changed, there was increasing evidence of troops’ disillusionment in more overt forms of anti-Nazi literature.
The German tradition of creating Freundschaftsbücher (friendship books), which collate autographs, poems and illustrations addressed to a particular person or group, led to a wealth of soldiers’ creative works on the Islands.Footnote 115 While these rarely admit to disillusionment directly, many provide insight into soldiers’ daily lives and demonstrate the close friendships between soldiers and Islanders. One telling example is a poem written for a Sark woman who did laundry for the German soldiers, in which two members of an artillery unit express their ‘warmest’ thanks to her. They state they are ‘full of pride in their tradition, just like 100 years ago’, accompanied by an amusing cartoon depicting soldiers in uniforms from the Napoleonic era.Footnote 116 Their choice to harken back to a past in which Britain and Germany (then Prussia and the Austrian Empire) were fighting on the same side within the Sixth Coalition is a pointed rejection of the current conflict and a point of unification with Islanders.
The most interesting poem to be found on the Islands is, however, not within a Freundschaftsbuch, but instead was discovered by the author tucked away in the Sark Archives, unconsidered by scholars. It is typewritten on the reverse of a fifty Reichspfennig note, which was among the occupation Reichsmarks issued as currency for the Islands by the Wehrmacht, and reads:
Long description
A three-column table displaying lines of a German poem with corresponding English translations. The left column is empty, the middle column contains German text in italics, and the right column provides English translations. The content is satirical and references Hitler, a “50 Pfennig” coin, and public attitudes toward value and propaganda. Each row pairs one German verse with its English translation. The final translated line includes a footnote reference marker. The table allows readers to compare the original text and its translated version line by line.
It is almost certain that this poem was written by a German soldier. Not only were they far more likely to have access to a typewriter, but the poem’s language indicates a native speaker, with the informal shortening of words such as ‘heiss’ ich’, use of separable verbs to create a consistent rhyme scheme and casual use of vulgar terms such as ‘Arschwisch’ and ‘bescheißen’. All this suggests that Islanders, who generally only had a functional knowledge of German, would have been incapable of writing the poem, especially when the poem uses puns such as ‘Arschwisch’, playing on the meaning of ‘Wisch’ as not only [toilet] paper but also its colloquial use as ‘bumph’. This poem thus demonstrates one soldier’s significant disillusionment with National Socialist leadership, embodied in a monetary note that could not buy soldiers anything to do, contact with their families or even, by the occupation’s close, a morsel of bread. The poem remains officially anonymous, likely due to the potentially severe consequences that the author would have faced had he been discovered.
Consequences for dissent could indeed be severe. One soldier on the Islands, von Prittwitz, was court-martialled for having ‘spoken disrespectfully of the Leader’ while drunk and only retained his post through familial connections to the Islands’ commander.Footnote 118 Other forms of dissent, such as desertion, carried more severe penalties. Nikolaus Schmitz, a young gunner who deserted from the Wehrmacht on Jersey, was executed after he was discovered hiding in a local woman’s house.Footnote 119 Despite these potential consequences, some soldiers were brought to radical action by their disillusionment. A few successfully dissented through desertion, as in the case uncovered by historian Paul Sanders, who identified Kurt Hälker, a navy telegrapher whose ‘aversion to the regime’ led him and a number of colleagues to desert and aid French Resistance networks.Footnote 120 This was, however, rare, given the lack of places to hide on the Islands. Despite this, one deserter stands out: Paul Mühlbach.Footnote 121
Although it is unclear when Mühlbach arrived on the Islands, uniformed photographs suggest he was an Obergefreiter (Senior Corporal) in the Wehrmacht.Footnote 122 After deserting, he was sheltered by members of the Jersey Communist Party (JCP), including Bob Le Sueur, who aided in his resistance activities.Footnote 123 Mühlbach has been credited with an arson attack on 7 March 1945, which destroyed Jersey’s German headquarters, situated in the Palace Hotel, St. Saviour.Footnote 124 More pertinent to this article, however, is Mühlbach’s creation and distribution of anti-Nazi leaflets encouraging soldiers to mutiny and advising them to ‘take part in removing the Nazis otherwise you will be guilty too; your fate will be the same as that of all war criminals’.Footnote 125 These leaflets formed the basis of Mühlbach’s grandiose, yet somewhat successful, plan to inspire the troops to mutiny. These materials also capitalised on the sources of the soldiers’ disillusionment, summoning those ‘depressed by care and worry for our loved ones’ after years of loneliness, boredom and isolation, and communicating that it would be ‘useless [for them] to die for a lost cause’.Footnote 126 Furthermore, the same pamphlet exploits their starvation, promising that those who participated in the mutiny would be ‘issued with the greatest possible Rations from existing stores in compensation’.Footnote 127 Another leaflet takes advantage of the tensions between officers and men, stating that ‘all officers are to be arrested’, and then sorted according to their politics – those who resisted were to be shot.Footnote 128 Mühlbach thus intentionally manipulated the sources of German disillusionment to stoke support for his mutiny.
Even those officers who had benefited from their extra privileges as regards food supplies experienced disillusionment from other sources and were willing to risk a mutiny in which they might be shot. Indeed, Mühlbach told Le Sueur that ‘he had the backing of several officers of the rank of colonel and above who were ready to turn their backs on Hitler and help to liberate the island’, a claim corroborated by a document from the Jersey Archives that was signed by ‘Oberst [Colonel] Linder’, who was central to the German leadership on Jersey.Footnote 129 Linder’s participation in Mühlbach’s plot evidences that anti-Nazi disillusionment had reached almost all ranks of the German forces on the Islands. The document bearing Linder’s signature, an impassioned message urging soldiers to join Mühlbach in overthrowing their Nazi leaders, states this uprising would begin with a gunshot on 1 May 1945.Footnote 130 Le Sueur wrote of the plan in his post-war memoirs that:
It was credible that Mühlbach would be able to garner support from his erstwhile comrades as we all knew that the average German soldier was demoralised, cold and hungry, worried about the relentless push of the Red Army towards their homes and the overwhelming bombing campaign against their cities. They had followed the progress of the war and few were still convinced of final victory or even of the chances of surviving unhurt. Everything they had been taught since they were in school was hollow and their beliefs had just been swept from under their feet.Footnote 131
This account, highlighting how soldiers’ demoralisation was linked to geographically imposed hunger and fear for their families, demonstrates the clear connection between geography and disillusionment with leadership. Furthermore, Le Sueur remained convinced that, had the gun been fired, ‘there would have been a mutiny’.Footnote 132 However, due to news of Hitler’s death reaching the Islands on the very day of the planned uprising, Linder never fired the gun and the mutiny was called off.Footnote 133 While historians can never be sure of the uprising’s potential consequences, the depth of planning and sheer scale of the proposed overthrow of Nazi rule by men who had served, or were serving, as German soldiers, demonstrates the significant level of disillusionment among the troops.
In addition, Mühlbach’s ability to spread dissent among his comrades was facilitated by local Islanders. Kühne suggests that the common identity key to Kameradschaft was a primary determinant of ideological cohesion even after it became evident that Germany would lose the war.Footnote 134 However, he also suggests comradeship ‘denotes the relationship of people who cooperate, work, and live together not by choice but by coercion, by accident, or by fate’.Footnote 135 Given the isolation of the Channel Islands and the living situations of the soldiers, who spent time among the Islanders at work and in billets, the Islanders could be as much an individual soldier’s comrades, determined by a seemingly random allocation of troops, as their fellow soldiers. This allowed men like Paul Mühlbach to form comradely bonds with those outside the Wehrmacht with whom he could express his dissent and disillusionment, even in the form of mutiny. Mühlbach’s actions nuance the observations of scholars of wider occupied Europe, such as Echternkamp, who have downplayed dissent among the troops because it did not come to practical fruition.Footnote 136 While Echternkamp’s observations are largely borne out in the Channel Islands context, such as ‘deserters were a small minority’, his proposition that dissent, as well as desertion, ‘remained the exception’ emphasises active, violent resistance over the more subtle feelings of disillusionment discussed here, which have thus far been paid little attention.Footnote 137 Yes, Mühlbach was in the small minority of deserters, but his bonds with civilians and anti-Nazi literature inspired mutiny in soldiers who were already worn down and disillusioned through geographically based boredom, loneliness and starvation. Crucial to these expressions of disillusionment, then, was the consistent presence of alternative community.
Conclusions
In other surveys of the internal landscapes of Wehrmacht soldiers, scholars have highlighted that even those confined to prisoner of war camps, such as Fort Hunt, maintained generally positive views of National Socialism, the Wehrmacht and Hitler, with their loyalty broadly remaining strong even in the latter years of the war.Footnote 138 However, as historian Arnold Krammer has observed, much of this ideological loyalty stemmed from the strong stance taken by senior German officers within the camps, where the maintenance of military hierarchies provided soldiers with both comradely leaders and peer pressure to preserve loyalty to the Third Reich. For the Germans in these camps, they were not only constantly exposed to their perceived enemies, their Allied captors, but also surrounded by other German soldiers to whom it could be dangerous for them to express disillusionment.Footnote 139 While there were certainly loyal National Socialists on the Channel Islands, their geography and proximity to largely unthreatening Islanders provided the majority of other soldiers with safe outlets for their disillusionment. Much of this took the form of dialogue with Islanders, who allowed soldiers a means of community outside of their German comrades.
Elsewhere, historian Stephen G. Fritz suggests that the maintenance of loyalty to National Socialist leadership among the soldiers was due to their conviction that the National Socialist state had redeemed Germany from the humiliation of the First World War and thus redeemed ‘a uniquely German sense of identity’.Footnote 140 This uniquely German sense of identity was, however, difficult to maintain within the geography of the Channel Islands. The sea, as mentioned before, formed a physical demarcation between these men and the physical terrain of Germany, which was so crucial to National Socialist understandings of Aryan racial identity. Instead, these men were in close contact with Islanders whom they perceived as racially pure, with whom they could identify and even form comradely bonds.
As such, the example of the Channel Islands does not so much challenge the existing historiography on the Wehrmacht as enhance it, demonstrating how understandings of soldiers’ morale and psychology, while consistent across occupied Europe, were experienced differently depending on the environment soldiers found themselves in. It was the geography of these Islands, which soldiers once considered a Schlaraffenland, then saw as a hell of monotony, loneliness and starvation, that formed the basis of troops’ disillusionment and dissent against their leaders. Certainly, the Islands were stunningly beautiful, and at first appeared nothing short of a holiday from the horrors of the Eastern Front, but their geographic isolation quickly eclipsed their attractions.
While the examples of disillusionment given in this article do not necessarily represent the experiences of the entire garrison stationed on the Islands, they demonstrate that previous historiographical narratives of unswerving loyalty are similarly, if not more so, unrepresentative. The various accounts of soldiers’ dissent, particularly those created by the soldiers themselves in letters, poems and pamphlets laced with disillusionment, serve to complicate the popular image of the German soldiers stationed on the Islands. They reveal how soldiers inhabited a complex ideological landscape that was formed and reformed by the increasingly challenging physical space of the Channel Islands. This was a space that bored them, kept them from their families and could not feed them and, in so doing, undermined their faith in their leadership.
This article in many ways concurs with Douglas Carl Pfiefer’s recent conclusions that ‘war weariness’ and homesickness were crucial motivations for disillusionment and dissent, particularly as pertaining to desertion, but that this did not necessarily correlate with aversion to Hitler or the Third Reich in general.Footnote 141 Thus, it provides an extension of existing scholarship to cover this overlooked location. However, it also demonstrates the insight made available by unconventional sources such as art, poetry and political literature in understanding the inner worlds of Wehrmacht soldiers, a methodology that could be useful to other scholars of occupation. More than this, it demonstrates that the geographic location of troops was able not only to foster disillusionment but also to facilitate specific avenues of dissent by allowing contact with other social milieus, specifically, here, the Islanders. This should encourage other historians to examine the close contacts facilitated by unusually isolated geographies under occupation, whether islands or simply remote rural communities, and understand how these geographies could impact the course of the war more widely. While the timing of Hitler’s suicide prevented such far-reaching implications from resulting in the case of the Channel Islands, the planned mutiny and demonstrable disillusionment shown by soldiers there prove that not only does military presence transform a landscape, but that landscape can transform a military.
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