Republican Slave
  Labourers in Britain
   
Germany Occupies
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Todt Organisation

Atlantic Wall

Slave Labourers and
Slave Labour Camps

Westmount - Slave Workers Memorial

Westmount - Slave Workers Memorial Picture Gallery 2005

Westmount - Slave Workers
Memorial Pictue Gallery 2006
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At the Nuremburg Tribunal
forced labour was referred to as
slave labour.  It included PoWs,
voluntary workers from allied
countries, conscripted workers
from northern and western
occupied areas and brutally
gathered up workers from
eastern Europe.  In Jersey the
popular description of these
people has been "slave-workers"
and this is how they described
themselves.
A Better Life for Luis
The Memorial built at the cementary in memory of all the Slave Labourers enforced to work on in Channel Islands under orders of Hitler during WWII.  (Photo 2003)

On 9 May 2002, the Channel Island Liberation Day,  Rob Smith laid a wreath on behalf of the International Brigade Memorial Trust at the Memorial Ceremony  in Jersey and Manuel Moreno laid a wreath in memory of the Spanish Republicans who perished fighting fascism and Fernando de la Torre laid a wreath to the memory of his Republican family.

(click here to see plaque)
A German gun emplacement built by slave labourers during World War III.  Such defences are numerous and appear on all the Channel Islands
Let us honour those Republican Slave Labourers who are no longer with us
A German fortification tower in Guernsey.
Under a direct order from Hitler the islands were to be turned into an impregnable fortress to be completed in eight years...

The greater part of this work, that is the actual manual labour, was delegated after 1940 to what could only be described as 'slave labour' in these islands, consisting mainly of Russians, Frenchmen and Spanish Republicans.  Some workers were treated extremely cruelly and as sub-human by all branches of the German forces, especially Russians and Ukranians...
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A rare photograph of a group of Spanish Slave-Labourers being led to enforced work on building fortifications on Guernsey and Jersey
Spanish Slave Labourers
  Juan Taule was a Spanish Republican
Slave Labourer.  He was a German prisoner
of war and one of his tasks was to help
build the underground military hospital on
the island of Jersey.
    "We started excavating in the middle of
1942 and thought it was a quarry at first
but then we started the first tunnel and
realised it wass something else.  About 75
to 100 metres in it started going wrong.
Everything started collapsing and there was
rubble and water everywhere," he recalled.
The Spanish labourers were worked to
exhaustion, 12 hours a day, every day, in
dangerous conditions.
    "I don't know if people were left in there.
There were a lot of accidents from the start
and people disappeared, but every time
there was an accident, the Germans and
everybody did their best to help and tried
to save them.  Some just didn't have a
chance."
    Mr Taule spent even longer than most people facing upheaval and uncertainty.
    For him the fighting started in 1936, when he took up arms in the Spanish Civil War to fight against Franco's fascist regime.  In 1939 he fled to exile in France and did not return home for 20 years.  He was handed over to the advancing German army and in the middle of 1941, he was put aboard a ship in St Malo.  Two hours later, he found himself in St Helier harbour where he became a tool of FaKehlo Co., a subsidiary of the Organisation Todt, which was the civil engineering branch of the Occupying forces...
    While in Jersey, he remained under the command of one German foreman, Herman Schlicker, an Organisation Todt officer....
    Mr Taule was billeted in Camp Lidet Lidet on Route Orange, St Brelade, with his work gang of about 40 other Spanish exiles and prisoners of 16 differnet nationalities, including Ukranians and Poles.  It was later in the War that large gorups of Russian prisoners began arriving in the island, having been force-marched across Europe to get here.  Mr Taule remembers them vividly.
    "When they landed here the Russian boys were just like skeletons.  Some were just 16 or 17 years old.  I was in a bad way myself but nothing
compared to them.  Looking back I realise the Germans
were losing the war then and took it out on the
Russians."...
    He remembers a ward in the camp of ill and emaciated
Russian prisoners near to death, and he recalls the sudden
disappearance of many fellow prisoners.
    "You lived day by day.  You lost your confidence
because you didn't know what was happening tomorrow.  We used
to work together in gangs but people would be moved
overnight and we would never see them again.  You had
to live for yourself...
    Despite the defeat of the Germans, Mr Taule's
problems were not over immediately at the end of the
war.  He was then treated as a prisoner of war by the
British and was taken to a camp in the north of England
as a temporary measure. (Adlington Camp, near Chorley.
The camp heldabout 250 Spanish Republicans - Editor)
Locals used to bring supplies for the exiled Spanis men
and this was how he met Alice, who was then just 16.
They married and settled in Lancashire...He spent his life
working for the same building firm until he retired.  They
have a daughter, Juanita...
Index
Spanish Republican Dies
It is with deep regret to announce that Juan Taule has passed away.

We send our deepest condolences to his wife Alice and Juanita their daughter.
The above picture shows Juan on the front of a special interview booklet which coincided with his return  to Jersey, to commemorate the Republicans  slave labourers.
(The article was edited and taken from the above booklet Jersey Now Issue 2001 and written by Tracy Mourant)
   Luis Aller was a Spanish Todt Organ-sation worker, who earlier in the Occupa-tion had endured appalling conditions in the Alderney Slave camps, and also in Guernsey.  He managed to escape after being taken to France, but was recaptured and returned to Guernsey...  He has the distinction of being the only Todt worker who was allowed to marry a Guernsey girl and he and his wife Margery remember the wonderful day when Luis saw the Union Jack being raised and being told "You are free, you can go where you like"....he re-members walking along the White Rock with his wife pushing their baby son in a pram.  A British sailor threw a little parcel into the pram and Luis's instinctive re-action was that it might be a bomb...In fact the parcel contained sweets and chocolate and was a most welcome gift after the long years of deprivation and misery.