Jersey in WW2 - Organisation Todt

by Deborah Swift

Russian Slave Workers of Organisation Todt

My latest research has been into the German Occupation of Jersey during WW2. At first, the surrender by the British and the occupation by the Germans was polite, and the aim by both sides was to make as little disruption as possible, but inevitably as time progressed, relationships between the German occupiers and British citizens began to break down, leading to many reports of trauma and atrocity.

One of the things that caused fear and distress on the island of Jersey was the treatment of the forced labourers of Oganisation Todt. Named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi, Organisation Todt was a civil and military engineering confederation responsible for building infrastructure such as defence works and railways.

Hitler saw The Channel Islands as key to the control of Europe and Great Britain. With this in mind, he became obsessed with the idea that The Channel Islands should not be lost, and became determined to defend them, with the idea that eventually, after Europe was defeated, they would become the ideal base for Nazi families to enjoy holidays in a 'Strength through Joy' (Kraft Durch Freude) Camp. Worryingly, when I searched for more about the KDF, I found it still exists, and has branches in the North of England. Here is a typical Propaganda poster, the only one I could find not emblazoned with swastikas.

In order to defend the islands a massive programme of fortification began, and the Organisation Todt provided the labour. This obsession with Jersey was seen by many Germans as Hitlers inselwahn - island madness. Before Hitler's supposed final victory, the islands were to be a stronghold and submarine base for forays into English waters.

For those living on the island, they had to endure the appearance of nearly 500,000 metres of reinforced concrete to make anti tank walls, gun emplacements, underground barracks and bolt holes. Historic castles were fortified with concrete, and new roads cut through the previously quiet lanes to carry truckloads of building materials, plus the many workers needed for this enormous enterprise. To prevent landing by sea, the beaches were mined by more than 100,000 mines.

The workers for this frenzy of building were imported labourers and prisoners of war from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine. According to Nazi propaganda, the Slav races were untermenschen and treated as slaves to the Nazi building machine.

To house the workers,  camps known as lagers were constructed in several places, all named after famous German poilots such as ‘Richthofen’ and ‘Immelmann’. The treatment of the workers was appalling, and most were on inadequate rations because the food was progressively stolen by German employees and guards - either for their own use, or for sale on the black market. The lorry that brought the inadequate soup to the quarries and construction sites, also took away the corpses of those who had died from malnutrition, cold, exhaustion or disease.

Note the armed guard supervising these construction workers

Jersey people were suddenly reminded through these atrocities, that their occupying force could treat pepople in this barbaric way, and this made the constant fear of the occupation much worse. The Germans shot workers caught stealing potatoes from the fields. Suddenly, their Germman neighbours seemed much less civilized when the treatment of their 'slaves' was exposed. Civilians were warned of the penalties for giving the workers food, but a number of Jersey people did try to rescue them, taking them into their homes at great risk to themselves.

According to 'The IslandWiki' - the Channel Island Website, German records show that by May 1943 there was a total of 16,000 foreign workers in Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney. In November of the same year, numbers had halved to 8,959 and by July 1944 only 817 remained.

Workers from Organisation Todt feature in one of the stories in a new collaboration by writers fron many countries - all proceeds are in aid of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The stories focus on the theme of Resistance, and the collection of ten novellas is available now.

More about the stories here

Sources: The Model Occupation - Madeleine Bunting

The First Casualty - Jersey's Occupation Experience

https://www.theislandwiki.org

Jersey Evening Post

Hide & Seek, by Clare Mulley

This month The Folio Society republished one of the great memoirs of the Second World War; Xan Fielding’s Hide & Seek. Described by Antony Beevor as, ‘one of the great modern books not just of the Cretan resistance; it is one of the great books of the Second World War’, Hide & Seek recounts with powerful immediacy, humour and unsparing honesty the drama, tedium, exhilaration and anguish of organising reconnaissance and resistance behind enemy lines on Crete.

The Folio Society's new edition of
Xan Fielding's Hide & Seek,
courtesy of The Folio Society.

I first read Hide & Seek when I was researching my biography of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, the first woman to work for Britain as a special agent during the war. Christine had saved Xan’s life, at huge personal risk, in the summer 1944 while they were both serving in occupied France. Xan never forgot his debt, and dedicated Hide & Seek to Christine’s memory, so I was thrilled when Folio asked me to write the introduction for their new edition of the book. I now had the chance to look more deeply into the other side of the story, reading around Xan’s life and talking to many people who knew him.

In my experience the people connected with an extraordinary character, such as Christine Granville or Xan Fielding, have been unfailingly generous with their time, papers, photos and stories. Xan had many remarkable friends, from Paddy Leigh Fermor and Bill Stanley Moss, both of whom also served with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Crete, to Laurence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Millar, Dirk Bogarde and Lucien Freud. Friends, children, and children-of-friends, kindly shared stories with me over sandwiches, or over the internet.

Anecdotes covered everything from Freud’s dead monkey, which was apparently usually kept in his fridge but eventually decomposed when left forgotten in his studio, to Daphne Fielding’s budgerigar, the only creature allowed near Xan’s Remington typewriter, as it ‘delighted in the ping of the bell at the end of each line which heralded an exciting struggle to maintain balance as the roller rotated and carriage whizzed back’. I learnt of revealing private dedications hidden penned inside personal copies of Hide & Seek, and discovered the wonderful advert Xan placed in The Times, when he was seeking work in 1950: ‘Tough but sensitive ex-classical scholar, ex-secret agent, ex-guerrilla leader, 31, recently reduced to penury through incompatibility with post-war world… Would do anything unreasonable and unexpected if sufficiently rewarding and legitimate’. There are, of course, many wonderful stories, and you can read more of them in my introduction to the Folio edition of Hide & Seek.

Paddy Leigh Fermor with Xan Fielding
courtesy of The National Library of Scotland

Besides the stories of this remarkable group of friends I also found - and this is a first – the editorial issues fascinating! I wanted to see the manuscript that Folio was using so that I could page reference my quotes, but here was another issue... Hide & Seek was first published in 1954. Xan wrote from his wartime notebooks - a collection only missing the one volume inconsiderately eaten by Cretan pigs in 1942 - and the book is refreshingly immediate. But in the 1980s he had sat down with Paddy to amend the manuscript for a new Greek-language edition. They removed a few offensive phrases that had not dated well, and modified some of the less flattering character portraits, but Xan did not seem happy with the process.

With admirable diligence Folio tracked down Paddy and Xan’s revisions and set to work deciding which version of the manuscript to print. In the end, being, their editor told me, ‘very conscious of… the risk of tearing the fabric of the text’, they made very few editorial interventions to the original manuscript. As a result, in this edition Xan again speaks his mind freely, vividly expressing his not-uncritical love for the place and people of Crete, as well as the fierce anger he felt at much of the conduct of the war.

Reproduction SOE map of Crete, annotated by Paddy Leigh Fermor
and included in the new Folio edition of Hide & Seek,
courtesy of The Folio Society

Hide & Seek is not the only one of Xan’s books to have been republished recently, nor is The Folio Society the only publisher interested in this rich seam of war memoir. Paul Dry Books republished this and his other Cretan book, The Stronghold, last year, as well as, in 2010, Bill Stanley Moss’s Ill Met By Moonlit, the account of his and Paddy’s kidnapping of the German General of the island that was later made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde. (Xan had been otherwise engaged, and also too dark-skinned to pass as the requisite ‘Aryan’ German officer, so did not take part in that exploit, but some years later he did serve as advisor during filming, lending his own clothes to Bogarde to give an air of authenticity. Striding around in chinos and espadrilles, apparently Xan was amused to overhear Bogarde’s dresser describe him as still looking, ‘like a fucking little killer’.) Moss’s other book, A War of Shadows, was also republished, by Bene Factum Publishing, earlier this year, and Paddy Leigh Fermor's previously unpublished account of the kidnapping, 'Abducting a General' will soon be published by John Murray, while Bloomsbury has just signed up a new account of the same incident by Rick Stroud. Both Paddy and Bill Stanley Moss also knew Christine Granville in war-time Egypt, and Bill and his Polish wife, Zofia Tarnowska, later named their daughter Christine in her honour.

When I write a biography I am always sadly aware of all the fabulous stories that I cannot include, and the incidental but remarkable characters that there is no room to develop although they are often fully deserving of biographies of their own. So I am delighted to have been able to contribute to this Folio edition of Hide & Seek, and even more so that Folio has also added lots of new photos, a pull-out reproduction of his and Paddy's SOE map of Crete, along with some of Xan's previously unpublished correspondence, making it a really terrific new edition.

It turns out that manuscripts also have lives of their own, with hidden stories, strategic translations and freshly edited republications and, as with people, it is only a matter of judgment which versions are the most authentic, which voice most true, and which should be remembered or retold.

Getting into the Olympic Spirit? Biographer Clare Mulley is fascinated by the stories behind the Winter Olympics of 1936, and their resonance today.

The twenty-second Winter Olympic Games, and the 2014 Winter Paralympics, will be held in Sochi, in southern Russia, next February. So far thirty-eight nations have qualified to send athletes, including Great Britain. After all the excitement of the Olympics here last year, I will certainly be tuning in, watching the spectacle as much as keeping tally of the medals. By focusing the world’s attention on the host country, the Olympics always seems to provide a fascinating insight into how that nation perceives itself, and how it would like to be perceived. 

I recently inherited a box of beautiful old German books, among them the official commemorative album of the 1936 Winter Olympic Games held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, high in the Bavarian Alps. The cover of this inky-blue cloth bound volume is embossed with a golden bell, inside of which the German eagle perches on the Olympic rings above the legend, ‘ich rufe die jugend der welt!’ – ‘I call upon the youth of the world!’ This was of course an exaggeration. Hitler was the Patron of the games and the Nazis had no wish to embrace young Jewish, Black African, Gypsy, Jehova Witness, gay, communist or disabled people. Nevertheless, just as for the infamous Berlin Olympics held later that year, the winter sports host town was cleared of anti-Semitic signs before the international community arrived, and teams from twenty-eight countries, then a record number, were made welcome.

The glossy photographs in the book, each individually stuck in place, provide a wonderful record of athletes launching into the air on their heavy wooden skis, crashing into ice-hockey goals, and bob-sleighing in matching woolly jumpers. The weather seems glorious and everyone is terribly well-dressed. Canada’s Alpine skier, Diana Gordon Lennox, enjoys a break leaning back on the slopes wearing mittens and a monocle, while the British figure skater Jack Edward Dunn sports a white trilby while competing on the ice.

Canadian Alpine skier Diana Gordon Lennox

British figure skater Jack Edward Dunn

But not everything is quite so jolly. The only picture printed directly into the book is the frontispiece, showing Hitler and Goebbels cheerfully signing cards for the winning athletes. Hitler had announced that he would be pleased to give his autograph to every medalist - sadly it is not recorded how many athletes took up his offer. 

Of the hundreds of faces caught on camera here, only two are black, both in the American Olympic team shot, and there are many more stories hidden behind the pictures. Cecilia Colledge, a Brit who won silver in figure-skating, later drove ambulances during the Blitz, and Czechoslovakia’s beautiful Vera Hruba would escape to America with her mother just two years later when the Wehrmacht entered Prague.

Czechoslovakian figure skater Vera Hruba

Perhaps the most striking photograph in the book, however, shows the three ski-jumping champions on the podium. Norway’s remarkable Birgur Ruud is on the highest step, flanked by two fellow Scandinavians, all smartly dressed in lounge jackets and plus fours, and looking straight ahead as the Norwegian national anthem is played. Ruud had dominated ski-jumping in the 1930s, winning three world championships and the Olympic gold medal in 1932 as well as in 1936. To the three medalists’ left is the rather less-athletic-looking President of the International Olympic Committee, and beyond him the German President of the organizing committee, Karl Ritter von Halt, whose right arm is raised in the Nazi salute. ‘The German people honoured all the winners’, the accompanying text tells us, ‘with the raised arm as a symbol of peace’. Just four years later Germany invaded Norway and, having criticized the Nazi occupation of his homeland, Ruud was incarcerated in Grini concentration camp. In 1944, after his release, he joined the Norwegian resistance. Surprisingly perhaps, he survived the war, and won silver in ski-jumping at the 1948 Olympics in Switzerland.

Gold-medalist Norwegian ski-jumper Birgur Ruud, with fellow Scandinavian medalists and (far right) the German President of the organizing committee, Karl Ritter von Halt

Earlier this month 4,000 people demonstrated in Berlin to protest against Russia’s new anti-gay propaganda law, and call on the German government and all Winter Olympic 2014 sponsors to demand an end to homophobic legislation in Russia. In Britain, Stephen Fry called for a boycott of the games on the same basis and, when this was rejected, he suggested that participants protest silently by crossing their arms over their chests to show solidarity with LGBT campaigners. Three times US national champion figure skater Johnny Weir is against a boycott. In a September interview, while wearing Russian military uniform, the gay American athlete said that he hoped his presence would help empower the Russian LGBT community. However more recently he decided not to register for the US national championships this year, the event at which the US 2014 team are to be chosen, so he will not be competing in Russia. 

Stephen Fry, demonstrating his symbolic protest

US Figure skating champion Johnny Weir, in Russian military uniform

Perhaps, then, rather different arm symbols may be caught on camera during the forthcoming Olympic coverage, gestures of freedom and solidarity. And may be some of the medalists will be able to proudly talk about standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the podium and making their support for human rights clear without fear of reprisals. 

www.claremulley.com