Did you know the Channel Islands played host to a poison milk plot in World War II?

Some of the most unlikely stories of World War II can be found away from the large battles and famous commanders, in the obscure nooks of history. One such story is the poison milk plot that played out among the leaders of the German occupation forces in the Channel Islands, the only part of the British Isles to be captured by the Third Reich in World War II.
 
For most of the occupation, Army General Rudolf Graf von Schmettow was the overall commander of German forces in the Channel Islands. He was not a very committed Nazi, and one subordinate officer’s diary described him as a likely man always up for a joke or escapade, who was trying to limit the harm done to the civilian population.

The commander of the Island of Guernsey, however, was a very different person. Vice Admiral Friedrich Hüffmeier was a Kriegsmarine man, who greatest claim to fame before his appointment to the island in July 1944 was captaining the battleship Scharnhorst for over a year and a half, including a mission in which the ship accompanied the Tirpitz on an attack on an Allied weather station in the Arctic as part of the “weather war” waged for meteorological forecasts. (The Weather War) Hüffmeier was an incompetent naval commander and despised by all of his crews, but he was an ardent Nazi and the head of the office of the Wehrgeistiger Führungsstab (“Military Spiritual Leadership Staff”), the Nazi equivalent of Soviet political commissars.

Hüffmeier was determined to hold the Channel Islands and fight to the bitter end; he did not care about the suffering of the civilian population or the hopelessness of the fight. He got dangerously close to his suicidal wish in February 1945, when von Schmettow was relieved of command on medical grounds (most likely a fabrication), and Hüffmeier succeeded him.
 
Enter the third person in the plot, Lieutenant Colonel Hans W. von Helldorf, von Schmettow’s former aide-de-camp. Von Helldorf was a Nazi believer and had helped Hüffmeier undermine von Schmettow, but he didn’t quite share the fanaticism of the new commander. Unlike Hüffmeier, he didn’t want to fight to the death, so he turned on his co-conspirator.

Hüffmeier used to walk to Castle Carey on Guernsey every day for a glass of milk – a glass von Helldorf planned to lace with a deadly poison. However, one of Helldorf’s accomplices tattled on him, and he was banished to the small island of Herm pending a court martial and very likely execution.

Herm had a total population of eight at the time, and did not have a German garrison, with German soldiers only visiting to hunt rabbits and cut down trees for fuel. A flak battery was placed on the island for a few weeks in 1942, but was dismantled after it shot down a German plane by accident. Von Helldorf sat out the rest of the war on Herm, surrendering to British forces as the only German on the island May 12, 1945.
 
If you want to learn more about the German occupation and the spectacular fortifications of the archipelago, join us on our Channel Islands tour.
 
This article is based on research by Nick Le Huray.

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