5 days ago
Britain Under the Nazis: The Forgotten Occupation, review: asks the question, ‘What would you have done?'
The title to Channel 4's wartime documentary is Britain Under the Nazis: The Forgotten Occupation but it could just have well have been, Britain Under the Nazis: What Would You Have Done?
When the Nazis occupied the Channel Islands during the Second World War, the 94,000 islanders who remained were left with some stark options: resist, collaborate or plough some middle furrow. In the round, these two, excellent hour-long films showed how the ramifications of those choices echo to this day.
The format was an amalgam relatively new to documentary – actors voicing first-person testimony interspersed with archive footage, with expert historians also on hand to make sense of both. A similar narrative technique worked startlingly well for last year's D-Day: The Unheard Tapes – which went even further, using actors to lip-sync to audio recordings of eyewitnesses. What Britain Under the Nazis did so well was to show in the process why so many of these stories are unheard: there is deep, abiding shame and corrosive recriminations for what happened in Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney when the Germans came in 1940.
The programme confronted the source of that shame head-on, with an astutely curated cast of islanders, all of whom wrote fulsomely and eloquently. Frank Falla was the journalist on the Guernsey Star who documented his attempts to keep the truth alive in the face of overwhelming Nazi propaganda – he was one of five who set up the GUNS (Guernsey Underground News Service) in a bid to keep disseminating the BBC News to the Islanders to counter rife German propaganda. He ended up being deported to a German prison camp.
Claude Cahun was the resistance fighter who secretly published anti-Nazi propaganda flyers (she called them her Paper Bullets) that presented the German campaign as a losing battle. She again showed how the right words in the right places can be weapons in themselves.
What the two films did well was show how a bad situation got steadily worse as the war went on, like a spreading cancer rather than an instantly fatal wound. Instead of just presenting a litany of horrors – and there were plenty of those, from Churchill's (much disputed) 'Let 'em starve' abandonment of the islanders through to Hitler's deportation of non-natives to camps – Britain Under the Nazis charted a steady crescendo of both staggering bravery and casual iniquity.
It was not faultless – short attention spans, snippet-viewing and ad breaks mean that factual programming on commercial channels is now full of repetition, and at times there was a sense that (for obvious reasons) there just isn't that much archive footage of the Channel Islands during the war to show.
But then that was part of the point – this is an episode in our history that has been brushed under the carpet, or seasoned with rumour and scandal, or mostly just ignored. Documentaries like this bring difficult facts and harsh questions to light: questions such as, 'If that had been me, what would I have done?'
