Paul Sanders - Earlier Historical Work

Earlier Historical Work

The Channel Islands Occupation, 1940-45

In The British Channel Islands under German Occupation 1940–1945 (2005) Sanders offers an authoritative thematic study covering all aspects of the period, including economics and ethics. The book followed upon a previous publication on the occupation of Jersey, titled The Ultimate Sacrifice (1998). This study had focused on defiance and resistance in the Nazi-occupied Channel Island of Jersey, exploring the cases of 20 wartime residents deported to prisons and concentration camps for various offences. The Ultimate Sacrifice created a paradigm shift, for in the years preceding its publication the Channel Islands had been the object of adverse publicity in the UK media and academia. This had amounted to collective blanket claims against Channel Islanders for their supposedly collaborationist wartime record. The tactic used by authors and journalists (such as Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting) to justify their over-focus on collaboration was to minimise or blank out insular opposition to the Occupation. The Ultimate Sacrifice redressed the balance. Sanders did not rely on oral evidence, but pursued the paper trail left by the Jersey 20 in archives across Europe. The book is dedicated to Joe Mière and Peter Hassall, two occupation survivors who made important contributions to documenting the book. The book's research findings provided the evidence for a ceremony at 10 Downing Street on 9 March 2010, during which Channel Islanders Louisa Gould, Harold Le Druillenec and Ivy Forster received the posthumous 'British Heroes of the Holocaust' award.

The author's implicit aim in The British Channel Islands under German Occupation 1940–1945 is to investigate why the Channel Islands occupation remains a misunderstood, controversial, and, ultimately, repressed episode of British history. The key to unraveling the continuing uneasiness does not lie in the notion of 'islanders trying to dodge their historical responsibility', but in narratives and memory. The genuine nexus of the issue is not 'collaboration', but the subalternity of Channel Islanders, combined with the emotionally charged and identity-constituting memory of the Occupation (plus its associated narrative). In fact, the reception of the Channel Islands occupation is a 'seismic zone' where three 'tectonic plates' of mutually exclusive narratives clash: the Leitkultur of UK war memory (the 'Churchillian paradigm'); European 'Vichy syndrome'; and the 'paradoxical' memory of the Channel Islands ('vanquished victor')

The thematic focus of the work is collaboration, resistance, survival culture, economic life and relations between Germans and islanders. Other chapters feature novel approaches to the much-discussed fate of the forced workers as well as to the circumstances of the islands' small Jewish population (this builds on the groundwork of Freddie Cohen and David Fraser). The book also provides an in-depth account of British post-war policy towards island collaboration - a foreboding of the subsequent clash of Channel Islands occupation memory and British war memory.

Professor Tony Kushner, director of the Parkes Institute at Southampton University, described the book in the following terms:

"This book represents an extraordinary achievement. It addresses a controversial past but, through scholarly sophistication, moves beyond the polemic that has so often been associated with the history of the Channel Islands during the Second World War. In no way apologetic or defensive, it manages to convey the acute dilemmas facing Channel Islanders and shows the range and complexity of their responses. It does justice to their unique situation whilst placing the occupation in a comparative framework within and beyond the Second World War. Based on detailed archive work in many different countries it also utilises written and oral testimony to produce a humane and immensely readable narrative that covers all aspects of this remarkable story."

The current extension of this work has moved to the question why resistance in the islands is still an area of contestation. The Nazi occupation in World War 2 is acknowledged as a defining juncture and an important identity building experience throughout contemporary Europe. Civilian disobedience, defiance and resistance is what ‘saves’ European societies from an otherwise checkered record of collaboration on the part of their economic, political, cultural and religious elites. Opposition took pride of place as a legitimizing device in the postwar order and has become an indelible part of the collective consciousness. Among previously occupied territories the Channel Islands are the odd one out. Collective identity construction in the islands still relies on the notion of ‘orderly and correct relations’ with the Nazis, while talk of ‘resistance’ earns raised eye-brows. Unsurprisingly, the general attitude to the many witnesses of conscience who existed in the islands remains ambiguous. The stance is justified through the supposedly benign character of the occupation: opposition - so goes the argument - was not only unnecessary, but it also exposed the wider population to the risk of reprisals. Accordingly, it could only have been the handiwork of a delusional or irresponsible minority. Recent studies on atrocities against Jews, forced workers or islanders on the wrong side of occupation law have put this argument into perspective. If it is untenable, or even immoral, to maintain that the German occupation was ‘business as usual’, what is it, then, that prevents genuine acts of heroism from receiving the recognition they deserve, almost seven decades after the end of the Second World War? A tentative answer would be that British common law was not equipped to deal with the double quandary of enemy occupation. 'Doing the right thing' under these circumstances required an ability to navigate a median course between the Scylla of compliance with the occupier; and the Charybdis of patriotism calling for 'something to be done'. Law made no provision at all for the latter disposition, effectively 'stranding' resisters in a legal no-man’s land. The islands' unwritten constitutions magnify this effect, as they maintain the nonsensical fiction of a continuity of British law, despite Nazi rule. Finally, failed attempts to rehabilitate resistance in the postwar period casts a pungent light on the constitutional relationship between the islands and the UK. This is apparent in the handling of a Privy Council appeal lodged by several former members of the Guernsey police force in the early 1950s.

The black market in France during the Occupation, 1940-44

In his PhD work on the wartime black market (published under the title Histoire du marché noir 1940-46, 2001) Sanders stressed the importance of the subject to a correct understanding of the social, economic and political stakes of the occupation. It is these wider implications that led French historian Dominique Veillon (CNRS) to credit the book with leaving a "lasting mark". Sanders' thesis allows for a re-examination of German occupation policy, while also highlighting civilian survival strategies, wealth distribution and the changing occupier-occupied relationship. The author's particular (but not sole) focus is on the German occupier: in France, the latter spent at least 15% of all financial resources available through the Vichy occupation levy on the illegal market. This purchasing started from the onset of occupation. Until December 1941 German economic agencies bought 'anything, at any price'. The uncoordinated bidding led to a black market bubble, the effects of which spilled over into the official markets. Spring 1942 brought the centralisation of German black market purchasing and during the ensuing second phase (until spring 1943) the occupier still bought 'anything', but no longer at 'any price'. Although this stabilised prices, it also encouraged illegal production, with raw materials diverted from official industry allocations. During this second period 50-60% of all Vichy occupation payments were spent on the black market, at a strategic juncture of the war when such extravagance was no longer justifiable. This undermined German finances in France and became a liability to exploitation and collaboration. The third phase of black market exploitation, from summer 1943 to the end of the occupation, was the most rational. During this period the Germans restricted purchasing to genuinely indispensable strategic raw materials. This built on the effective implementation of a German black market purchasing ban in spring 1943, the support of the Vichy government and French industrial leaders for economic collaboration, business concentrations and closures, market monitoring and resource management methods. As a result, the illegal market in the industrial economy was largely brought under control. Sanders argues that the same degree of economic mobilisation could have been achieved one or even two years earlier, had the Germans abstained from unilateral black market purchasing and instead heeded Vichy calls for closer cooperation. German failure in this area was due to lack of coordination, institutional chaos, economic dilettantism, endemic corruption and reckless resource competition - all of which have their origin in the structure of the Nazi regime. While the Germans were relatively successful in their exploitation of French and Belgian industrial resources, illegal food markets demonstrated the limits of coercion. As the nutritional value of official civilian rations remained below subsistence level, the French continued to evade all control efforts and depended on the illegal market for their survival: countermanding food restrictions became something of a national pastime. This further punctured Vichy's will-power (and legitimacy) in enforcing thorough economic control over agricultural production.