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Swastika badges and swastika bookmarks. Key rings made of wartime German bullets. Pencil sharpeners in the shape of Nazi fighter planes and warships. Audio-tapes of ‘Hitler’s Radio Addresses to the Third Reich’ (a set of two) and ‘Music of the Third Reich’ (a set of two). Facsimile copies of the wartime German newspapers, occupation maps and orders of the German military commandants. Occupation postcards (sets of eight) featuring German troops marching in the streets of a typical small English town and relaxed German soldiers fraternising with the locals and chatting up high-helmeted “British bobbies”…

This is a random sample of souvenirs an inquisitive tourist can now obtain on Channels Islands, the only part of British territory, which was occupied during World War II.

And the books of course… The book section of De Gruchy supermarket in St Helier alone offers over 25 “occupation titles”:

‘A Child’s War’ by Molly Bihet - occupation as seen by a child;
‘A Doctor’s Occupation’ by Dr. John Lewis;
‘Recollections of Two Blind Boys in Wartime Guernsey’ By Neville Tostevin;
‘I Beg to Report’. Policing in Guernsey during the German Occupation” by William Peel,
chief of German Police in Guernsey;
‘Channel Islands Occupied’ Picture Books;
‘An Occupational Hazard’ by Sheila Parker - a romantic novel about a love-affair of a local girl and a German soldier (in actual fact, on Guernsey alone more than 100 babies were born as a result of such moving war-time romances);
‘Grandpa Versus Germans. A comedy Novel of the Occupation of Jersey’ by John Manning, “ a local entertainer”;
‘A Collection of Occupation Recipes’ by Lillie Aubin Morris - a cook book, and so on…

Significantly, it is impossible to buy these books outside Channel Islands: produced by small local publishers, they are simply not available in the rest of Britain. Likewise, on Channel Islands themselves it is not easy to get a copy of Madeleine Bunting’s ‘Model Occupation’ telling some not very entertaining truths about the locals’ massive collaboration with the Germans: informing on their neighbours, tracking down the Jews, etc.

Nor can one purchase there ‘Island of Dread’ - a heart-turning memoir by Georgi Kondakov, one of the hundreds of Russian prisoners-of-war who ended up as German “slave labourers” on the island of Alderney. After the Liberation, Kondakov returned to Russia where he had to spend 4 or 5 years in one of Stalin’s labour camps, where, in his own words “the conditions were as severe as on Alderney.” Not for everyone, it appears, was the occupation of Channel Islands a mixture of comedy and romance. Certainly not for the 5,000 foreign “slave-workers” in three labour camps and one SS concentration camp Sylt on Alderney, among whom were Russians and Ukrainians, Frenchmen and Poles, Germans and Jews, Moroccans and even one Chinese. 460 of them perished in the camps, which had about 100 Channel Islanders on their staff, by the way.

It is well known that the island of Jersey boasts Europe’s highest per capita rate of privately owned cars. It is less known, however, that the island also operates the world’s highest number of “occupation museums”. In St Helier, the island’s capital - a small town with the population of under 50,000 - there are at least five “occupation sites”. Many more are scattered around Jersey, whose total area is just 45 square miles. Most of them are simply vast collections of German wartime memorabilia and the militaria. The Berlitz Pocket Guide to the Channel Islands proves the point with uncharacteristic irony, while describing two (among dozens) German underground bunkers on Jersey now made into museums:

“The underground [St. Peter’s] bunker, built by forced labour in 1942, consists of six rooms crammed with exhibits as various as an original Enigma decoding machine, a blanket beater used on Russian prisoners and a pin-up picture of the Fuhrer himself. The sound effects are provided by the Horst Wessel song and a sample of Hitler’s ranting from Nuremberg. Propaganda newspapers and occupation money, letters sent from informers to the Gestapo, and homemade shoes reveal how life was on the home front. The Channel Islands’ Military Museum, in a bunker on St. Ouen’s Bay, offers more of the same: look out for the jackboot marks set into the concrete floor.”

Apart from countless Nazi banners, arm-bands and army belts with “God Is With Us” brass buckles, each “site” prominently displays “studies” and portraits of Hitler, lovingly drawn by the soldiers; innocuous water-colours, doll-houses, carved bowls, inscribed “It is better to fight for something than to beg for it”, and other “works of art”. The impression one gets is that of a bunch of harmless and misunderstood artists in Nazi uniforms who were not quite sure what they were doing on Channel Islands.

It was not all leisure, of course. Each museum features battalions of wax figures of blonde, handsome and smartly dressed German soldiers “working” in a radio room, buying foodstuffs from a shop, or manning gun emplacements. It was only in a couple of places that one can see wax figures of the “liberators” - Tommies and GIs (most of the museums totally ignore their existence) - all smaller and scruffier compared to the larger-than-life Germans. Nowhere is this discrepancy more obvious than in the Occupation Tapestry Gallery in St Helier. The semi-dark circular gallery with 12 hand-knitted panels, depicting life on Jersey under the occupation, is dominated by a huge screen, onto which photos of marching, relaxing and ice-cream-eating German soldiers are projected, one by one. The figures of the locals on the panels appear subdued, minuscule and almost caricature-like compared to the enormous, more than twice life-size, portraits of the contented soldiers of the Third Reich.

One thing is certain: the frenetic energy invested into marketing of the occupation leads to the trivialisation of human suffering during World War II, as well as to a certain glamourisation of the Nazis.

“Not all the Germans were Nazis,” says Michael Ginns, Secretary of the Channel Islands Occupation Society, an allegedly non-partisan organisation, created in 1960s with the aim of collecting and preserving German wartime relics.

Indeed, not all German soldiers were members of the Nazi party (just like not all Soviet Army soldiers who invaded Afghanistan and Czechoslovakia were communists), but the German army under Hitler was a Nazi army, which used Nazism as its guiding ideology and military doctrine.

According to Mr Ginns, the members of the Channel Islands Occupation Society promote “reconciliation between former enemies”. But whereas there is nothing wrong with reconciliation between Britain and Germany, there can never be any “reconciliation” with the cannibalistic ideology of Nazism, the elements of which most of the “occupation sites” on Channel Islands unwillingly (or so I hope) promote. In modern Germany, by the way, any public display of Nazi symbols is deemed illegal.

Apart from collecting Nazi relics, the Occupation Society publishes a glossy annual “Channel Islands Occupation Review”, which invariably spells the word “Occupation” with capital “O” and often puts the word “Liberation” in quotes. A good deal of space in its recent issues was devoted to attacking Madeleine Bunting for exaggerating the German atrocities during the occupation - sorry, “Occupation” - and the degree of the locals’ collaboration with the enemy. “Such journalism is merely following a tradition of propagandistic reporting about the horrors of Nazi occupation which established itself in the British press after the Second World War,” fumes the journal’s 1997 issue. So, there were no horrors… Reading this makes one wonder whether the Occupation Society should organise a compulsory excursion to Auschwitz, or at least to Alderney, for all its 500 odd members.

Mr Ginns insists that “Bunting wrote her book to the agenda” and that she “co-operated with David Cesarani”, a respected British professor of Jewish history, in trying to blame the locals for the fate of the Channel Islands Jews. “There was no SS or Gestapo on Channel Islands, but too many British journalists came here looking for muck after the war,” says he.

“Of course, the Gestapo blokes were here,” objects Marguerite Syvret, who lived on Jersey throughout the occupation working for St John’s Ambulance and was herself denounced to the Gestapo for helping foreign “slave labourers” by one of her neighbours (the names of local informers are still classified). “It is weird to have all these occupation museums on the islands,” she adds.

So, did the collaboration take place, or didn’t it? Here’s a sample of the Channel Islands wartime journalism - a quote from an article by a certain William Joyce, a local “columnist”, published by Guernsey Evening Press on 15 November 1944. The issue was on sale at a souvenir kiosk in one of the “occupation museums”:

“Behind the enemies of Germany there always stood the Jews - those creatures who were the masters of Bolshevism. As I listened to these words of the Fuhrer, I was reminded of a speech delivered on the BBC Home Service quoting an article by a Jew. I would not demean myself by repeating the phrases used by this reptilian Hebrew… This man was described by the BBC as a Russian, but he was patently no more a Russian than Churchill is a mulatto. A Jew in Brighton is just as much a Jew as a Jew in Jerusalem.”

“Collaboration” is not a word strong enough to describe this piece of Nazi “journalism”.

At the souvenir kiosk at the entrance to La Valette Underground Military Museum in Guernsey, in addition to audio tapes of the Third Reich military music and Hitler’s speeches - in modern Germany, one could go to prison for selling them - you can acquire a real Nazi military cross for £24, and a faded Soviet medal “For the Victory Over Fascist Germany” (my father had one) for £8! Relative values… It is a good illustration to what can be called obsession with the occupation among a number of Channel Islanders. How else can one explain the purpose of the Occupation Society meeting on 12 November 1998, which was fully devoted to the memories of a man, who was a toddler during the occupation? His two-hour-long slide-illustrated talk was respondent with statements of the type:

“We were playing on the lawn and met three to four very smartly dressed Germans who generally took a very real interest in young children…”

How else can one characterise numerous other stories, still circulating on the Channel Islands, about how honest and kind the Germans were - “they were punished for stealing by their commanders”, “they disliked the informers”, and so on? On Sark, I was told how the German commandant of the island, on hearing an informer’s report of the islanders who had failed to hand over their transistor radios, ordered to punish ... the informer. The underlying meaning of all these legends is obvious: how can anyone accuse us of being “friendly” with such nice, civilised and invariably “smartly dressed” invaders?

There is another reason behind the overzealous marketing of the occupation. The beleaguered tourist boards of both Jersey and Guernsey, are falling over themselves to stop the decline of tourist industry on Channel Islands. The number of visitors to the islands in August 1998 was eight per cent lower than in August 1997.

“Our attitude is hands-on tourism,” explained a Jersey tourism official. Indeed, what can be more “hands-on” than wandering around a real German bunker, following the “jackboot marks” on the concrete floor, to the sounds of Horst Wessel?

Alderney is the only place on Channel Islands that has not been turned into an occupation theme park. Three crumbling stone pillars are the only visible remains of the horrific Sylt concentration camp. In a sad irony, the territory of the Alderney labour camp is now occupied by … the island’s official campsite. There is no trace of the cemetery where foreign “slave workers” were buried. And gateposts of another labour camp adorn the driveway of a plush modern villa.

“The States [Alderney’s governing body] decline to commemorate the sites,” says Colin Partridge, a local historian. In his opinion, this may be due to the locals’ desire to dissociate themselves from the accusations of collaboration. Indeed, one can hardly speak of “kindly and honest” German soldiers on Alderney. Psychologists might say that they are “in denial”. A faded memorial plate, tucked away behind the island’s parish church, vaguely mentions “45 Soviet citizens who died on Alderney in 1940-45”, without saying how they “died” and why.

Colin Partridge is convinced that a decent memorial must be built on Alderney. He and a group of enthusiasts have managed to establish the names of all 460 people who perished in the island’s four camps. To begin with, they are now planning to unveil a memorial plate with 460 names on it. If they succeed, this is going to be the first real “occupation site” on Channel Islands - the site, commemorating the victims of Nazism’s heinous crimes - not their perpetrators.

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