They did their best in an impossible situation

The Bailiff and States members had remained in office for the benefit of the population but were forced to carry out German demands and orders, otherwise deportation to a French prison or death, and reprisals on the population would have followed.

People do not realise that Occupation means complete control of everything by the occupiers. If the Bailiff and States Authority had left their positions, German Nazis would have taken over and all would have been far worse. In Nantes in France when their Commandant had been shot he was replaced by a cruel Nazi and, as a reprisal, more than 50 people walking in the town were shot on the spot. There is a memorial to them all in Nantes.

Therese Steiner was an Austrian Jewess trapped in Guernsey after the invasion, the States employed her as a nurse at the Island Hospital

where my mother was assistant matron. After 18 months she became worried about her family and requested the Matron to allow her to visit the German High Command for help. Both the Matron and the doctors told her not to contact any Germans as her life would be in danger but she did not take their advice and on a day off she went there. She believed that the Germans had been very kind and she would hear about her family.

The next day the Germans ordered all Jews to register immediately with the Guernsey States Authority for their passports to be stamped. It was Therese herself who alerted the Germans that there were Jews in Guernsey. Her brother Karl, from Canada, who escaped and had spent the war years in China, was the only member of his family to survive and avoid the death chambers. When he came in 1993 to find out about Therese he told us that the moment Therese spoke to the Germans about the family she indeed signed her own death warrant. The States were in no way to blame and there was absolutely nothing anyone in Guernsey could have done to save her. Even his younger brother, who was serving as a soldier in the German Army, once he did the same and enquired about his family was arrested and died in an extermination camp.

In historian Max Hastings' book, The Finest Years about war lord Churchill 1940/1945, not a single mention is made about the invasion and occupation of the Channel Islands.

After the war we found out the truth of what happened to the girls when taken to France and met their landlady in Avranches where they were staying for three weeks before the SS appeared and took them to the Dancy concentration camp in Paris, finally to end in Auschwitz.

LILY MAUGER,

Le Douit, Torteval.