Modelling an Occupation: Exploring Points of Contact Between Authorities and Islanders on the Nazi-Occupied Channel Islands

'These are German orders and not mine, so you can sign them and affix the Wehrmacht stamp... I will see that they are obeyed' (Hathaway, 1961, p. 146). These words, spoken by Dame Sibyl Hathaway, the leader of Sark, the smallest Channel Island, during the Second World War, demonstrate what has been read alternately as resistance or passive collaboration by historians in her dealings with the German occupiers. Whilst this PhD project will examine instances of resistance and collaboration during the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands between 1940-1945, it will supersede these reductive categories to examine what Hathaway embodied in this quote: the points of contact between different forces controlling the Islands, considered in the thesis for the first time from both British and German perspectives. During this period, there were three primary forces on the Islands: German authorities, both those stationed there and those sending commands from Berlin; island authorities, which themselves differed across the main islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and Sark; and islanders themselves. Adding to this, one must also consider the British authorities watching from afar, exerting psychological pressure on island authorities and islanders. This project will assess the complex and ambiguous moments and points of contact between different forms of authority and jurisdiction on the Islands to analyse how these conflicts and negotiations affected the nature of occupation and the lives of ordinary islanders. By being concerned with the mundane as well as the exceptional, the thesis goes beyond the existing dichotomies in the historiography through examination of the economic, social, and political points of contact, with particular focus on the somewhat neglected social history, that is, the realities of life under occupation felt by ordinary civilians.
The focus is on two time periods: the period of occupation but also modern-day memorialisations of this period on the Islands, in museums, popular culture and in historiography. This project's emphasis on points of contact will introduce nuance to the reductive representations of agency and victimhood in such memorialisations. This is especially important since traditional historiography on this topic falls into oppositional camps. The first, broadly of mainland Britain and Europe, accuses and condemns the Islands' supposed 'easy' and collaborative occupation. This approach was popularised by historians such as Madeleine Bunting who promoted the idea of a collaborative 'model