The Bergerac actor was in Jersey last week to promote a volume of wartime diaries by a Guernsey clergyman, the Rev. Douglas Ord, a Methodist minister born in east Yorkshire who came to the island in 1938.
But he said he had obtained the original text of a diary written by Baron Hans Max von Aufsess, who was based in Jersey where he had an administrative role dealing with the island’s authorities.
These were first published in 1985 but Mr Nettles said that this was a ‘cleaned-up’ version, unlike his book: ‘This is the full Monty,’ he told the Jersey Evening Post.
‘You’ve got everything in here – the badmouthing, the sex, the violence and also the awful nature of some of the Germans who were here.
‘It’s an extraordinary thing and like all the diaries of the Occupation gives a unique insight. It has an immediacy and impact that you’ll get nowhere else in any of the academic histories.
‘There was a plan to stick all the islanders – from both islands and from Sark – into a camp and just leave them to starve, in the same fashion as they had dealt with the Russian prisoners of war in the early months of Barbarossa [the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union],’ he said.
The text also included frank details about the baron’s love live and his attraction to a Jersey woman 20 years his junior.
‘It is extraordinary,’ Mr Nettles said, ‘because it is from the German point of view and its details exist nowhere else.
‘Most of the other accounts produced by the Germans of the time in the island are either short, brief or non-committal – or sheer lies – but thisman tells the truth and he also tells the truth about the island population towards the end of German rule.’
Mr Nettles has been researching the Occupation for the last decade after his interest was kindled by the sight of bunkers and other remnants of the time when he was filming the BBC’s Bergerac series in Jersey in the 1980s and early 90s.
He published his first book on the topic, Jewels and Jackboots: Hitler’s British Isles, the German Occupation of the British Channel Islands, in 2012.
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