Qualla: German Occupation Museum

German Occupation Museum: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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German Occupation Museum: What the Occupation Actually Was

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 t...

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German Occupation Museum: One Boy's Collection

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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German Occupation Museum: What's Inside

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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German Occupation Museum: Memory and the Sister Museum

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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