In 1966, a young Guernsey man named Richard Heaume opened his collection to the public. He had started picking up bits of what other people considered rubbish as a child, and by his teens was leading fellow enthusiasts in searching out and saving wartime artifacts. There were still German helmets in the hedges then, twenty-one years after liberation, and rusting tools, paperwork in the lofts, ration books, scraps of camouflage netting. Heaume kept everything. Sixty years later, what began as one boy's hobby has grown into the German Occupation Museum on Les Houards street in Forest - the largest single collection anywhere in the Channel Islands of artifacts from the five years when this small British territory lived under Nazi rule.
On 30 June 1940, the first Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 52 transport landed at the Guernsey airfield. The British government had quietly demilitarized the Channel Islands a few days earlier and made no announcement to the Germans, who took several days to realize there was nothing here to fight. The occupation began without a shot. It would last 1,775 days. During that time the islanders lived under curfew, surrendered radios, watched neighbors deported to camps in Germany, and saw thousands of foreign laborers - many of them Russian, Polish, Spanish, and Ukrainian, brought as forced or slave workers by the Organisation Todt - die building the bunkers that scar the coast today. The Channel Islands were the only British soil occupied by Germany during the Second World War. The museum exists to make sure no one forgets what that meant.
Heaume was thirteen when he started. The pieces accumulated faster than he could catalog them. Local families donated items they had been afraid to throw away. Detectorists turned up wartime metal in fields. Bunkers gave up their fittings during demolition or restoration. By the early 1970s the collection had outgrown bedrooms and barns and needed its own building. The museum opened in a converted Nissen hut behind Heaume's family home and has been expanded several times since. Today it is one of the most-visited indoor attractions on Guernsey.
The exhibits are arranged not chronologically but as scenes from daily life under occupation. A reconstructed Guernsey kitchen shows the desperate ingenuity of islanders making coffee from acorns and 'sugar' from beet syrup. A bunker corridor reproduces the smell and feel of the concrete underground. A battle post salvaged from elsewhere on the island is fitted with an authentic 4.7 cm PaK 36(t) anti-tank gun - originally Czech weapons, captured during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia and re-issued to the Wehrmacht. Pride of place goes to a working Enigma M4, the four-rotor cipher machine used by the Kriegsmarine. Most museum-grade Enigmas are sealed under glass. The Heaume Enigma can sometimes be demonstrated.
Liberation came on 9 May 1945, one day after VE Day, when British forces of Task Force 135 entered the bay and interned the German garrison. The date is still the island's largest public holiday. The museum's collection covers the full arc - from the airfield landing in June 1940 through the hunger winter of 1944-45, after D-Day cut the islands off from supply, to the Red Cross ship Vega arriving with food parcels in December 1944. A sister museum exists on Jersey, run by the Channel Islands Occupation Society. Between them, the two collections preserve a story that the rest of Britain barely lived through and almost forgot - the story of what it was to be British, in 1940, on the wrong side of an invasion.
The German Occupation Museum is at approximately 49.43°N, 2.59°W, in the parish of Forest on the southern interior of Guernsey, very close to Guernsey Airport (EGJB at 49.43°N, 2.60°W). From the air the museum itself is a small grouping of buildings hard to distinguish from the surrounding rural landscape. The wider parish of Forest is one of the most heavily fortified sections of the German Atlantic Wall - bunkers, observation towers, and casemates pepper the southern cliffs. The museum sits in the geographical center of the very landscape it documents.