The Muddled Middle Ground: Capturing the Grey Spaces between Collaboration and Resistance on the German Occupied Channel Islands, 1940-1945

Abstract

The Channel Islands have been dogged with accusations of collaboration while other historians have rushed to their defense and sought to contextualize the Islanders actions in ways that emphasized their resistance. However, these two labels of collaboration and resistance are too rigid and continue to silo Islander actions and their legacy. They fail to capture the totality of the Channel Islanders’ lived experiences under Occupation. In this thesis, I argue that the conceptual structure of this dichotomy misses deep nuances of the events as they unfolded. While some events fit the polar extremes, the vast majority falls in the grey areas in between. This thesis elucidates that muddled middle ground.