Laura Noller | Lancaster University
One of the great joys of many historians’ lives is the discovery of amusing material whilst sifting through the many serious and important artefacts to be found in archives. One such example presented itself to me during my recent trip to the Channel Islands, where amidst the vast and valuable shelves of papers held in the Sark Archives, I discovered the following poem typed on the reverse of a Reichsmark note.
In English, the poem roughly translates to:
I am Hitler’s toilet paper.
Nobody accepts me,
Because nobody
Can buy anything with me.
50 Pfennig is my name –
But at about 4.50 I swindle
Anybody who thinks,
That Hitler is giving him something.
Despite its humorous tone, this poem raises many serious questions about the author, their intentions, and the context of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands. Who wrote the poem? Why were they so angry about this currency? And what can it tell historians about the realities of life on occupied Sark? Emerging from these questions is the figure of a disillusioned Wehrmacht soldier embittered by consistent economic hardship to the point of penning a poem against the very regime he was supposed to be fighting for.
Though a little-known element of occupation history, the Channel Islands were under Nazi control for the majority of the Second World War, from 1940-1945. These islands of Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, and Sark, along with a number of additional islets, were the only British territory claimed by the Nazis during this period. In the summer of 1940, the British government publicly withdrew all military protection from the islands, and only a few weeks later, Luftwaffe planes dominated the runways of the islands’ airports. Whilst under occupation, these islands used currency issued by the Wehrmacht, the German military, known as ‘occupation marks’ or ‘Reichsmarks’, of which this banknote is one.
Though a number of islanders spoke fluent German, none of them seem the likely author of the note. A letter of the 15th July, 1942, states that only one civilian on Sark was a native German speaker. This woman, Annie Wranowsky, was a Czech-born naturalised German citizen who had emigrated prior to the war. However, as critical as she may have been of the German authorities, she was suspected to have Jewish ancestry, and so it is unlikely that she would have taken the risk to write such a poem knowing that drawing any attention to herself might result in her deportation to a concentration camp in mainland Europe.
Another German speaker was the island’s own leader, the Dame of Sark. The Dame, however, took great pains to keep all interactions with the occupying forces positive, writing in her autobiography:
The relationship between the Occupier and the Occupied was of the utmost importance, and to me it was a great strain to keep a balance… we could do no good by sabotage. There could be no underground movement where there was absolutely no contact with the outside world… Our only weapon was propaganda, and our only propaganda was a cheerful confidence in victory for the Allies.
The hospitality she showed toward the German forces with the aim of protecting the islanders from the worst aspects of the occupation and the perspective stated above in her own words seems incongruent with the biting tone of the poem.
Other German speakers on the island included one Phyllis Rang, a young woman who learned German during the war to act as a translator and later married a soldier stationed on the island. Rang makes for an unlikely author, being a relatively new German speaker and therefore unlikely to write with the fluency and poetic license demonstrated in the poem. A similarly unlikely candidate for authorship is Norah Pickthall, the only other prominent German speaker on the island. An undated letter from Pickthall to the German commander on Guernsey contains the following line: ‘as a Fascist, I have nothing to say except to thank you, for the protection you are giving to these islands’, indicating admiration rather than resentment toward Hitler and the occupation.
As such, the remaining potential authors seem to be among the ranks of the German army. It would have been unlikely that the vulgar slang terms such as ‘Arschwisch’ and ‘bescheiss’, in congruence with such fluent German, could have been penned by anybody other than a member of the occupying forces. German soldiers would also be likely to have had greater access to the typewriters needed to type the poem, having taken over the general administration of island life.
If the poem was penned by a German soldier, however, another question ensues: what would cause a soldier to risk his life to pen such a poem? Distributing anti-German literature carried heavy penalties even for civilians; in the neighbouring island of Jersey, the German court sentenced the famous artist Lucie Schwob, better known by her pseudonym Claude Cahun, to death for such a charge. How much worse would such a sentence have been for a German soldier discovered to be distributing similar literature, especially literature that directly insulted the Führer? The most common punishment for soldiers exhibiting rebellion and defiance was a posting to the Eastern Front, which was effectively a death sentence in itself. Accounts from elsewhere in the Channel Islands, such as the diary of Dr. John Lewis, evoke the fear of a posting to Soviet territory. Lewis wrote that:
the young German soldiers we used to see dreaded the thought of being sent to Russia especially if they had to go in the depths of winter with the weather so bitterly cold. Guernsey must have seemed like Paradise to them.
Lewis added that he saw a number of incidents in which German soldiers would intentionally injure themselves in order to avoid being reassigned. The fact that a soldier wrote this poem, fully aware of the potential consequences if he were discovered as its author, suggests a great level of disillusionment with the occupation.
The exact date at which this banknote was issued is unclear, but it was likely created after late 1943. By this point, disillusionment bordering on despair had begun to spread throughout the troops stationed on the Channel Islands. Though the islanders themselves had relinquished their radio sets in 1942, the troops were often still permitted to listen to the wireless and, as such, were well aware of the defeats washing over the Axis armies just a few miles away in mainland Europe. Particularly after the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944, the soldiers began to feel the true hardships of occupation, utterly cut off from the supporting army, which until recently had controlled France, along with their supply lines. Though Red Cross parcels began to arrive for civilians in 1945, first-hand accounts described the plight of the soldiers stationed there. Guernsey woman Molly Bihet described later in life how ‘Those Germans… were getting thinner and thinner by the day it seemed, their uniforms were just hanging off them… the Germans were very despondent and low in spirit as the war was now swinging against them’. Another woman, Gwen Drawmer, from Sark itself, reports a soldier saying to an islander, ‘When Tommy come, I put up my hands’, suggesting that he was almost looking forward to the moment of surrender to the British soldiers, known as ‘Tommies’, as it would remove him from these conditions of starvation.
However, in order for a soldier to risk his life to write a poem, something more than starvation must have been at play. Here, the true significance of where the poem was printed comes to light. The Reichsmark banknote on which the poem was written was part of a wider economic culture that stretched beyond the occupied Channel Islands. The exchange rate of Reichsmarks fluctuated wildly for the first year and a half of occupation until, as Cruickshank’s official history of the Channel Islands observed, it was fixed until the liberation at 9.36 Reichsmarks to the pound sterling. However, towards the end of the occupation, Sark resident Julia Tremayne wrote that ‘Haricot beans that in peace-time were 2d a pound are now 6s 6d, think of it!’. This indicates food price inflation of up to 3800 per cent over the course of the occupation period. Scarcity, particularly as Axis supply lines through France began to collapse, drove prices sky-high. Whilst a banknote such as this ought to have had the buying power of approximately thirteen English pennies, in reality, it would have had much less. Sark, along with the other occupied Channel Islands, had, partially through wartime conditions and partially through the imposition of the German monetary system in place of the pound sterling traditionally used there, entered a state akin to hyperinflation.
Hyperinflation would have tapped into a primal fear of almost every German-born man at this period of history. After the First World War ended, the Treaty of Versailles imposed heavy military and economic sanctions on Germany. Externally produced goods were too expensive to import for an economy crippled by reparation fees imposed by Allied countries, whilst the loss of German colonies in Africa prevented industry from thriving. The value of the mark in interwar Germany plummeted until, by 1923, it took billions of marks to equate to just one U.S. dollar. Photographs from the time show starving Germans with stacks of banknotes rendered essentially worthless.
Though the German economy did recover throughout the 1930s, the conditions of hyperinflation had brought millions of working-class Germans to starvation, or the brink of it, and had wiped out any savings possessed by the middle classes, plunging them into poverty. For many German men serving in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War, who were likely born in the 1910s and 1920s, inflation would have caused the resurfacing of their memories of hungry childhoods and adolescent years struggling to find enough fuel to stay warm through the winter. These traumas may have been strong enough to foster such great disregard for his own life to cause him to write a poem such as this, a poem made all the more powerful by the medium on which it was written.
From the figure of this soldier, it is possible to understand that many of these men were not believers in Nazi ideology but were, in fact, victims of German governance that had ranged from inadequate to crippled, to evil during the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the Channel Islanders forced to live in close proximity with the foot soldiers of the Wehrmacht for the five years of occupation even noted this. Major J. Clement of the British liberating forces concluded that the islanders drew a distinction between the vast majority of ‘rank and file’ soldiers, whom they generally reported positive interactions with, and the ‘out and out Nazis’ of the higher ranks. Such comments indicate the lack of Nazi fervour amongst the disillusioned lower ranks. Whilst it is impossible to ignore the victims of the Wehrmacht even on the Channel Islands during this period, particularly the forced labourers and the three Jewish women deported to be murdered at Auschwitz, it is important to acknowledge that the foot soldiers of the German army were not, as individuals, monsters, but men who had been shaped by their circumstance, and who experienced the same fears, pressures, and frustrations that you or I would have in their position.
Further Reading:
Cruickshank, Charles, The German Occupation of the Channel Islands (London: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Noller, Laura, ‘Frau Annie’, EPOCH (March 2023) https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/frau-annie
Carr, Gilly, ‘Coins, Crests and Kings: Symbols of identity and resistance in the Occupied Channel Islands’, Journal of Material Culture, 17.4 (2012), 327–344
Laura Noller is an ESRC-funded postgraduate historical researcher at Lancaster University whose research focuses on points of contact between German soldiers and islanders during the Nazi Occupation of the Channel Islands, 1940-1945. She welcomes all conversation about her research, or social history in general, on LinkedIn.