Thousands Were Brought to the Channel Islands - But They Had Not Come There Freely

Thousands Were Brought to the Channel Islands - But They Had Not Come There Freely

In my last post, I looked at how the people of the Channel Islands coped with occupation and some of the ways they resisted.

From the autumn of 1941, another group began arriving in increasing numbers.

As the German authorities turned the islands into heavily fortified positions, thousands of workers were brought across from occupied Europe and elsewhere. Many had not come willingly.

Organisation Todt, the engineering organisation responsible for much of the construction work, oversaw a workforce that included civilians and military prisoners of war. Some had been conscripted or forced into labour, while Soviet workers were subjected to a particularly brutal system of slave labour.

Among them were Soviet forced labourers and prisoners of war from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, Spanish Republicans who had fled Spain after the Civil War, and workers from France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, the Netherlands and North Africa.

Around 6,000 forced and enslaved workers were brought to Jersey alone.

They were put to work digging tunnels, gathering stone and sand, unloading building materials and constructing bunkers, gun positions, sea walls and other defences.

Much of what they were forced to build can still be seen across the islands today.

Conditions could be dreadful.

Many worked long hours on dangerous sites while receiving inadequate food. Soviet workers suffered particularly brutal treatment, and inadequate food, dangerous working conditions and physical abuse contributed to deaths among the labourers.

Islanders sometimes saw groups of exhausted and hungry workers on the roads or near construction sites. Some later remembered men begging for food.

Helping escaped workers carried considerable risks, but some islanders still provided them with food, clothing and somewhere to hide.

In Jersey, 116 workers who died during the occupation were buried at the Strangers’ Cemetery at Westmount.

The same system stretched beyond Jersey.

On Alderney, almost the entire civilian population had already evacuated before the occupation. The island was then used to house thousands of prisoners and labourers in a network of camps while fortifications were built.

Their experience on Alderney was especially severe, and I will come back to that story separately.

Next, I want to look at something much closer to everyday island life - what it was actually like to live under occupation.

Had you heard about the thousands of forced workers brought to the Channel Islands?

Image: “Todt Workers being Embarked - Guernsey, May 1945”, Harold Hailstone / Imperial War Museums. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.