Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (14 page)

As they examined the German forces for new understanding, occasionally the diarists were grudgingly positive about the self-styled young “Aryans” in their midst. However, this assessment was mainly about the physical attributes of these men who composed the enemy forces, and thus it was tinged with deep concern. Winifred Harvey described the eight hundred new troops of the 319th Infantry that had arrived recently: “very fine-looking men, tall and strong.”
²⁰⁴
During that same summer of 1941, Jack Sauvary mentioned the Germans going bathing at the public beach pools at seven in the morning, at times with more than a hundred heading off together. Jack found it interesting that they never seemed to take a towel along and that they stayed undressed for most of the day.
²⁰⁵
Jack saw what other Islanders also sensed: the element of display put on by the German soldiers, a reflection of the Nazi cult of the body. Although the young soldiers were polite, mainly ignoring the civilians around them, they also did not cover themselves or retire to less visible parts of the public bathing pools. The message was one of power—a display of the very bodies that the husbands and sons of Guernsey were now fighting in the war—and the right to ownership of the area. It was a clear sign that they were “digging themselves in properly.”
²⁰⁶

One adjustment to the new imposition of Nazi power was an amusing tendency by Guernseymen to avoid speaking or writing of the German soldiers directly. Many of the diarists refer to Germans as an unspecified “They” or “Them” (at times underlined), as if a lack of verbal immediacy could distance the writers from the force that controlled their lives.
²⁰⁷
At times the indirect references drip with irony; the Germans become “our unwelcome tourists,”
²⁰⁸
the “visitors,”
²⁰⁹
“the gang,”
²¹⁰
or “our ‘Friends.”
²¹¹
The Islanders also relied on synecdoche, or using a part of something to stand for the whole. The Germans become the “uniform,” as when Dorothy Higgs declared, “They are stealing so much of our stuff and even our police daren't lay a hand on a uniform, no matter how mean the theft they catch it perpetrating.”
²¹²
For Kitty Bachmann, they were the “field-grey ‘pestilence that walketh in the noonday’ and stalketh by night to trap the unwary.”
²¹³
Thus, the German soldiers become an object, an “it,”
that must be treated with an undeserved deference. Winifred Harvey managed to combine all these forms of indirect reference when she described the Germans as “grey-uniformed uninvited guests.”
²¹⁴
And, of course, the residents of the Channel Islands, like all of the British, used the common nickname of “Jerry” for the Germans, a reference dating from World War I that likened the German helmet to a jeroboam or chamber pot. The combination of humor and contempt in such a nickname hardly needs comment.

The diarists also indulged in a series of metaphors, finding a commonality between the occupiers and the supposed traits of those in the animal world. Some of the references were essentially “dead” metaphors, ones so commonly used that they no longer function metaphorically. Thus, it is expected that Dorothy Higgs would call the Germans “swine,”
²¹⁵
and Gertie Corbin would echo with the equally common “dirty swine.”
²¹⁶
Of more interest is a feline metaphor that occurred with an increased perception of danger as the Occupation continued. Very early on, Rev. Ord anticipated what would happen as the Island could not sustain the number of troops imposed upon it: “While they lapped up our cream they purred. Now that supplies are running short the true ‘kulture’ emerges.”
²¹⁷
Bert Williams described the German way of tightening police “beats,” so that policemen were under almost constant surveillance, as being “watched like a cat watches a mouse.”
²¹⁸
However, the most operative sense of increasing control and danger came as the crises of 1942 and 1943 unfolded, leaving Dorothy Higgs to speak for many when she wrote, “We are just as helpless to defend ourselves as mice in a cat's paw.”
²¹⁹

Rev. Ord maintained this sense of peril, simultaneously making a metaphoric switch when he described their unease: “And all the time a dog that may turn savage at any moment is roaming loose among us.”
²²⁰
One of the major concerns was the increasing lack of food, and the ability of the Germans to confiscate what little there was at will. Thus, Winnie Harvey described the Germans with a mixed metaphor as “prowling” the Market with sacks, with “eyes like hawks” for any food they could claim.
²²¹
And German thefts directly from the fields led Winnie to switch metaphors yet again, describing “what discouragement it is for the Guernsey people to plant their crops and have them all taken by these locusts.”
²²²

One means of domesticating, and thus taming, a threat is to liken it to something familiar and therefore more understandable and controllable. In their faceless numbers, the German troops were like bees, and Guernsey was “swarming with Germans,”
²²³
“swarming with Nazis.”
²²⁴
Like a woman sitting among the bees in her summer garden, Winifred Harvey decided that even when an area was “swarming with troops,” she would not allow their presence to worry her.
²²⁵
Rev. Ord was not so benign and dismissive, seeing in the surveillance of agents in the pay of the Germans “a regime which has bred a swarm of sneaks.”
²²⁶

Despite comparisons to the familiar, and some objective evaluation that was reluctantly positive, the Islanders' overwhelming assessment of the Germans highlighted contempt for their cruelty, pettiness, and immorality. The more that Guernseymen had contact with these “gentry,” as Ord called them,
²²⁷
the more they saw the lack of a moral core in the men who held such power over them. Grae Ord learned that a friend's maid, a young and “very decent girl” who had worked for the family for some time, was overtaken on the street by a German officer billeted near the family. “Wouldn't you like a nice little German baby?” he asked the girl, with, as Rev. Ord recounted, “no trace of any sense of wrong.” The girl hurried home very upset and indignant, but was followed to the house by the officer. He spoke to the girl's mistress and seemed surprised that, in Ord's words, “the girl had not seen fit to embrace so fair a proposition.” The officer's sole consideration was a practical one: “The
girl seems quite healthy and strong, too!”
²²⁸
Such instances, observed and reported widely around the Island, proved the much-vaunted “higher culture” of the German military establishment to be illusory.

Heedless cruelty, too, was on constant display. On a Sunday in early October 1941, Rev. Ord was walking up the hill towards Ville-au-Roi and came upon a girl cycling toward him. She was followed by an army lorry that held an officer seated next to the driver. After looking at the girl and grinning to each other, the two men steered the vehicle ever closer to her, nearly crushing her against the wall of the neighboring field. Leaving the girl pale and shaken behind them, they drove off apparently pleased with their “fine lark.”
²²⁹
Because there were continual deaths of Guernsey cyclists and pedestrians in lorry “accidents,” being toyed with by the Occupation forces had lethal implications.

Accounts of individual cruelty were so blatant and inexplicable that, unknown to the Islanders at the time, they proved to be a brief window into the same mindset that would fuel the Final Solution. During the final year of the war, a close friend of the Ords told them of being in the Rohais Road and seeing a German deliberately shoot a little girl's dog in the leg. The crying child picked up her pet, the dog's blood pouring down her dress. There was no option but to have the animal put down. Ord offered his conclusion to the story: “Is there any wonder the hatred grows? Difficult though it may be, one must fight against this instinctive reaction lest one lose the power of sober judgment altogether.” Yet this assessment, couched as it was in the neutral parlance of academic morality, could not cover Ord's anger and disgust.
²³⁰

The Islanders felt particular contempt for the obsequious nature of the Germans, and those having contact with the forces consistently noted the combination of bullying and fear that was on display. Bert Williams observed that “the average German soldier is terrified of the Officers and Under Officers,”
²³¹
an atmosphere of fear that Ambrose Robin believed compromised the efficiency of the entire “German war machine.” From his vantage point working for the Guernsey States, Robin noted the friction not just between units of the German army but also “between officers and men in the same unit.”
²³²
Efficiency was compromised by the reluctance of German officers to put anything in writing, a tendency noted by Dorothy Higgs that she attributed to “fear of the next one above.”
²³³
Some of this fear was apparently brought with the Germans from their homeland, where the same surveillance that they had imposed on the Island was a way of life.

In December 1941, Robin had a surprisingly frank talk with a German officer in a secluded office at the States. This unnamed officer had just come back from leave. While at home, he could not speak to his wife freely if the children were anywhere close by, because his son, apparently a member of the Hitler youth, would be sure to report him to the Gestapo. Despite his rank and his unsullied record of service, he believed that such a report by a child would spell his “finish”—whether of his life or merely his career was unclear.
²³⁴
As Rev. Ord, who was positioned to learn the inner workings of the German military, put it, “Great fear hangs over this delectable army. Spies and bullies hold complete sway.”
²³⁵
Kitty Bachmann drew the comparison that she felt must be apparent to the Germans: “They find us unburdened by secret police; neither have we to resort to subterfuge and deceit between friends and relatives. We do not live furtively, like rabbits afraid to leave their burrows.”
²³⁶

The average Guernsey resident apparently found great humor in the obsequiousness, fostered by fear, of the German troops. The diarists' accounts are littered with a strong sense of schadenfreude, that useful German loanword that describes our unexpected pleasure at
the misfortunes or suffering of another. One Islander told Rev. Ord of being in the Kommandantur and observing a German talking on the telephone. The German was apparently in a full toadying attitude, and by the time he hung up the receiver, he had actually saluted the person on the other end of the line (who was not, of course, there to see this gesture of deference). Whether this story was apocryphal or true, the pleasure of the mental image remains.
²³⁷

By chance, Winifred Harvey saw the system of intimidation and response firsthand. On her way back from visiting Mrs. Clayton, by that point settled in the Mount Row Nursing Home, she heard “a roaring and a bellowing” from the direction of Queen's Road. When she came around the corner, she saw a thick-necked, crimson-faced old officer screaming in rage into the face of a small soldier. When the officer seemed to be done, the soldier saluted, marched off, and only made it about ten paces when he was pulled back by the officer for a “fresh dose.” As the little soldier finally was released and passed Winnie, he grinned and tipped her a cheeky wink. It was then that Winnie realized that the officer was General Müller.
²³⁸
It was highly satisfying to watch the soldiers who bullied the civilians being bullied themselves.

And the pomp so cherished by the Third Reich gave ample opportunity for silent derision. Troops would tramp along the road accompanied by the spirited singing of martial songs. Yet, trailing in their wake, young boys would follow them, goose-stepping with great vigor and comic effect and also singing the more easily picked-up German verses. The Germans seemed to take no offense in these little mimics, perhaps because they so completely lacked a sense of humor. Quite likely, they read this total mockery as adulation and relished their ability to foster a generation of little British Nazis.
²³⁹

When German high officials visited the Island, the symbolic trappings would be ratcheted up a notch. For example, on Sunday, December 20, 1942, a large German flag was flying at the Royal Hotel, and a continuous guard of two soldiers (their bayonets fixed) flanked the door. Islanders gathered silently to watch as the guard changed to much ceremonial goose-stepping. The observers were rewarded by the sight of one of the guards landing flat on his back mid goose step, a satisfying treat for those in attendance and a story that could be told with great glee around the Island.
²⁴⁰
Thus, the apparently simple act of
sousveillance
, or watching and assessment from “below,” punctured the dignity of the occupiers and fostered a sense of agency that would support resistance.