Bob's e-mail
A Jerseyman protests
the German occupation
Col. Rybot insults der Fuhrer — in Latin!
© 2001 by Bob Ingraham
Updated August, 2003
 The Channel Islands, anchored as they are in the Gulf of St. Malo in the northwest of France (see circled area on map), are geographically more akin to Europe than to the British Isles. Since the Norman Conquest, however, they have been aligned in all ways with Britain, not that the British could ever say that they were actually in control: Channel Islanders have always been an independent lot, taking advantage of British culture and institutions only as necessary. One British institution that the Channel Islanders had taken advantage of was the British Post Office.
British stamps had long been a staple in Channel Islands post offices. The two stamps shown below, though badly abused at some point in their lives, nevertheless clearly attest to their use on the island of Jersey (note that both stamps were cancelled at 11:45 p.m., though years apart):
Although the British government saw no strategic value in the Channel Islands, Hitler liked the idea of occupying British soil, and included them in his Blitzkrieg, the 1940 invasion of France and the Low Countries. A few islanders died in the initial attack, but following the Occupation, the German garrison lived in comparative peace with the majority of the islanders. Many went hungry, however: much of their agricultural produce went to feed the German army in Europe.
The great majority of islanders experienced relatively few of the Nazi horrors so common in the rest of the Europe, but the same cannot be said of the islands' Jewish residents: although most left the Channel Islands before the Blitzkrieg, those few who remained were "relocated" to concentration camps, where most disappeared into the Holocaust.
Channel Islanders offered little active resistance to the Germans, but one anti-German protest in particular makes an amusing philatelic tale:
Not long after the Germans arrived, supplies of the British stamps normally used by Channel Islanders began to run low.
At first, on Guernsey, stamp supplies were stretched by bisecting stamps to create lower values. Covers franked with those bisects are eagerly sought by today's collectors. Here is an example from February, 1941:
This cover, which illustrates the use of a bisected British stamp on Guernsey, also shows another result of the shortages caused by the German Occupation: In the Circle Date Stamp postcmark, the "1" of "41" is curved. The explanation is that the post office did not receive a new postmark "slug" for the new year, 1941, so a postal clerk improvised by filing off the right-hand two thirds of the "0" of "1940."
In 1941, the Germans arranged to have Channel Islands Occupation stamps issued, first for Guernsey and then for Jersey, but would not allow the new stamps to show the king’s image, or to indicate any connection with Great Britain. Vaudin, however, counting on Teutonic ignorance of British tradition, borrowed the Arms of Jersey for his basic design, thus scoring a small resistance coup: the Jersey Arms, three heraldic lions on a shield against a background of solid color, are also the personal arms of the reigning English sovereign. There is no evidence that the Germans ever twigged to the deception.
Two perforated stamps were issued for Jersey, a half-penny value in green and a one-penny value in vermilion. In 1942, watermarked versions of the two low-value stamps were produced, in green for the half-penny value and red for the one-penny, but these are less common.
Although the Channel Islands occupation issues are colorful, they certainly don't meet the high printing standards that the Germans normally applied to most of their other stamp issues. They must not have examined the designs carefully before turning them over to the printer, for it is only under careful scrutiny that one of the Occupation stamps of Jersey — the one-penny vermilion issue — reveals a tiny philatelic sabotage which would have infuriated Adolf Hitler, had he but known about it.
Although the Guernsey and Jersey occupation stamps look similar, they were designed by different people. The Jersey stamp was designed by a Jerseyman named Col. N.V.L. Rybot; his design was obviously adapted for use on Guernsey.
When the Germans first asked Col. Rybot to design a new stamp, he declined on patriotic grounds. Then he changed his mind, not bothering to tell the Germans that he had decided to insert into the design of each stamp a personal protest against der Fuhrer himself, Adolf Hitler.
Accordingly, the half-penny Jersey stamp, and the one-penny stamp, issued appropriately on April 1, 1941, each contained a tiny but significant addition which would have infuriated der Fuhrer.
After the war, Col. Rybot revealed his subterfuge: the four A's stand for a Latin sentence, "Ad avernum, Adolphé atrox," which loosely translated means, "Go to Hell, Atrocious Adolf." The "A" for Adolf, in the lower left corner of the stamp, can be clearly seen in the image at the right.
The A's are tiny indeed — you need a good magnifier to see them with any clarity — so it's not surprising that Col. Rybot got away with his insulting April Fool's Day challenge to the Nazi dictator. If he hadn't fessed up after the war, none of us might ever have been any the wiser!
The Germans certainly never caught on. The Jersey Occupation stamps were used throughout the war, and in fact weren't demonitized until April 13, 1946, several months after hostilities ended.
Wartime and postwar philatelic covers bearing the Jersey occupation stamps are relatively easy to find, but non-philatelic wartime covers are not. International mail to and from any of the Channel Islands is virtually non-existent; the Germans allowed mail to be sent only within the islands themselves. Curiously, the mail was not generally censored; it appears that the Germans saw no serious threat from the Channel Islanders.
The cover below , franked with a pair of the one-penny "Atrocious Adolf" stamps and a single of the half-penny stamp, appears to be one of the less-common, non-philatelic wartime covers, postmarked at 6:00 p.m. on April 28, 1943. During the occupation of Jersey, about 25 post offices were in use. Jay Carrigan reports that the Jersey cancel, with the two breaks in the wavy lines, was used at St. Helier from 1937.
 Note that the "43" in "1943" of the postmark is in a different typeface than the rest of the text; the post office, unable to obtain a new date slug from Great Britain, probably made their own locally.
The cover is addressed to "Miss Elsie Le Page, Claremont, Ville au Roi, Guernsey," which probably explains why it was not censored: the Germans must have felt very confident in their absolute power over the Channel Islands. There is no return address on the cover.
I wonder whether Col. Rybot got much satisfaction from his nearly microscopic and rather obscure philatelic sabotage. Still, it is unlikely that he would have lived long if the Nazis had taken a truly close look at their new stamps and interrogated their designer. Hitler himself, we can assume, would have become apoplectic had he learned of the Jerseyman's minute protest: "Atrocious Adolf" had no sense of humor.
Col. Rybot's philatelic sabotage was not his only anti-Nazi activity. He wrote a poem commenting acerbically on conditions on the island, and on the ways that islanders were coping with the Occupation — or taking advantage of it. For that story, and the full text of the poem, go to Col. Rybot turns to poetry.
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