Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the contestation, from 1945-2010, between public and private memories of political prisoners and acts of resistance during the German occupation of the Channel Islands.

Paper long abstract:

Since the end of WWII, a plethora of books have been written and sold in the Channel Islands on the subject of the German occupation of 1940-1945. Nearly all of them describe acts of protest, defiance or resistance that took place during the occupation, and they preach to a long-converted local audience. The vast majority of resistance in the Islands was unarmed, as all Islanders know. When compared to armed resistance in other formerly occupied countries such as France, Islanders experience some anxiety that their resistance somehow doesn’t ‘count’ or compare well on the international stage, as it ‘didn’t further the British war effort’.

These feelings of insecurity were turned to anger by the publication, in 1995, of journalist Madeleine Bunting’s book, The Model Occupation, which was heavily biased in favour of an interpretation of collaboration. After this, Islanders turned inwards and were unwilling to share their occupation stories with outsiders who might distort their cherished occupation memory. At the same time, the sensationalism of Bunting’s work ensured that it was widely read in the UK, such that it became common ‘knowledge’ that the Islands collaborated during the occupation.

Have the islands’ authorities done anything to change this perception? What legacy or heritage have political prisoners left behind for islanders, tourists or researchers to see? How are they portrayed in museums? What memorials have been erected, when and where? This paper examines the contestation between the public and private memory of resistance in the Channel Islands, carried out in the heritage sphere, and examines how it affects the perception in the UK of the Channel Islands’ experience of occupation.