Whilst looking at what happened to him after the war I stumbled across an article from 1971. He pretty much disappeared off the radar after he was released from a prisoner of war camp in 1948. He moved back to Germany and some say he became a preacher, perhaps atoning for his past, although I have not as yet seen anything to evidence this.
Interestingly there is no mention in the article about his time, in the latter stages of the war, as commander of the German forces occupying the Channel Islands. As an ardent Nazi he was quite prepared to let his own men and the civilian population of the Channel Islands starve rather than surrender.
This appearance at watching HMS Belfast demobbed was just three months before his death.
There is even a picture, below, of a smiling Vice-Admiral Friedrich Huffmeier (left), a former captain of the German battlecruiser ‘Scharnhorst’, presents a picture to Rear-Admiral Morgan Morgan-Giles, a former captain of the cruiser ‘HMS Belfast’, which was involved in the sinking of the ‘Scharnhorst’ during World War II, at a ceremony on the River Thames, 21st October 1971. The ‘HMS Belfast’ is being handed over to the Belfast Trust as a floating museum. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Embed from Getty ImagesYou can read about Huffmeier and his dragging out of the occupation of the Channel Islands all the way to the end of the war in my blog posts below.
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© Nick Le Huray
