The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands Under German Rule 1940-1945 - Hardcover

Bunting, Madeleine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002552426 ISBN 13: 9780002552424

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1996

Synopsis

When the Germans arrived on the Channel Islands after the defeat of France in the summer of 1940, they and the islanders agreed that it would be a 'Model Occupation'. But as the war dragged on and Britain appeared to abandon the islands to their fate, so features of Nazi occupation already widespread throughout Europe emerged.
Making use of recently released archives in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London, Guernsey and Jersey, as well as unpublished private papers and over a hundred interviews with people - islanders, forced labourers and German soldiers - who lived through the five-year Occupation, Madeleine Bunting tells the riveting human story of the only part of Britain to fall under Nazi rule in the Second World War.
Madeleine Bunting has travelled to Russia, Ukraine, Germany, France and Belgium to collect the harrowing stories of the former slave workers, survivors of the biggest mass murder ever to take place on British soil - two thousand died of starvation and disease. Drawing on newly declassified documents in Moscow, she has penetrated the web of lies and apathy which allowed the German officers responsible - some of them still alive today - to escape justice.
On the Channel Islands, British officials acquiesced - in some cases actively assisted - in the implementation of Nazi policies. The Model Occupation challenges Britain's most cherished beliefs about its wartime record. It is a remarkable addition to the history of Britain in the Second World War, and will make readers confront the question of how they would have behaved under Nazi rule.

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Reviews

Within the vast body of WW II literature, only a few volumes examine the five-year German occupation of Britain's Channel Islands. The seemingly peaceful takeover has long been viewed as a historical curio; it was the only incidence in which British territory fell under Nazi rule. Bunting, a reporter for Britain's Guardian newspaper, takes a sociologist's view of the episode, examining the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands as an indicator of how a small, closed community coped with the trauma of a forced takeover. Relying on previously untapped archives in the Channel Islands and Moscow, plus other sources, she has produced a captivating study of life during the "model occupation." On the surface, the islanders' behavior toward the Nazis was shocking. Unlike most citizens in other occupied lands, residents of the Channel Islands acquiesced to German rule, to the point of helping to round up local Jews. But Bunting shows that there were strong pockets of defiance and allows the islanders to make the case that in their isolated location, they cooperated for the sake of survival. The author, who took as her research motto, "There but for the grace of God go I," clearly has taken pains to present truth. She has produced a model study. Photographs; maps.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0002552426
• ISBN 13: 9780002552424
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 354