Last year, for the anniversary of their arrest, I wrote a blog about the entire police force of Guernsey being arrested. Their crime was stealing food from German stores and giving it to civilians. You can read about it here.
Yesterday I became aware of an animated short film that explains what happened in a fairly concise way. The images used are quite clever; as some of them are using well known photographs of people and places as inspiration for the animation. Some of these places wouldn’t have existed at the time of the occupation but would be familiar now.
The film was made six months ago at the time of writing (March 2023) and is an unusual format to tell the story but gets the message across quite well. It even covers the underhand methods that the Germans used to try and get the officers to confess and the suggestion that they might be pardoned after the war by the local authorities.
If you look at it with the benefit of hindsight you might think of it as naive of anyone, be it the local authorities or the policemen themselves, to believe that the Germans would behave in a fair way and not use underhand tactics. However, you have to remember that at this time there was little access to information from the outside world and hadn’t been since June 1940.
Occasionally articles appeared in the British media in the post war years. Eventually they petered out with the odd exception in recent times referenced in my previous blog. Out of the post war articles the one below, from the Sunday Mirror, is probably the most comprehensive.
Image © Reach PLC. Image created courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.
As you will discover when you watch the short video at the end of this blog there were many implications for those officers after the war. Inspector Schulpher, who had been in charge of the force, was investigated in 1946 and had to fall on his sword and resign shortly after resuming his position.
Image © Reach PLC. Image created courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.
Moving to the present day another year has passed with the 81st Anniversary earlier this month on 5 March. You may be wondering if there have been any developments in that year. An article in the 30 January 2023 edition of the Guernsey Press indicated that they might, finally, get a pardon this year. I won’t be holding my breath, but if they do get around to it, the families would have closure.
Thanks to all those that have kept the pressure up to get the pardon. I truly hope it will be granted. Enough of my waffle and time for the short film.
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© Nick Le Huray
