OpenTube

The True Story of Occupied Sark — Where One Woman Defied the German Occupiers

WW2 Ruins

263,421 views

👉 Hey guys! We're now live on Spotify. 🎧
Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2wie10j...

In May 1945, on a tiny island in the English Channel, a sixty-one-year-old woman took the surrender of an entire German garrison. She had no army. Only ten British soldiers had come ashore, and more than two hundred and seventy armed Germans were still on the island. So the British did the only thing that made sense — they put her in charge of them. Her name was Sibyl Hathaway, and for five years she had governed the only British soil Hitler's armies ever occupied.

Sources

https://www.sark.co.uk/
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-ge...
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
https://hmd.org.uk/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwa...

20 Comments

@jamesgale2147 2 weeks ago

Wonderful old lady. I am glad her grandson was able to take her place in the ordering of things.

@janwhite6038 2 weeks ago

Did you forget that Jersey & Guersey were occupied during WW2? Not just Sark.

@stevenr2463 3 weeks ago

Well told. The story as I know it. Apparently the Germans (Graf von Schmettow) were asked to sign in the guestbook.

@UntoldWarStories-2026 3 weeks ago

One woman standing up to the German occupiers on Sark sounds like an incredible story of courage. Definitely a part of WWII history more people should know about.

@fnln9 2 weeks ago (edited)

The Dame and later Queen Elizabeth II truly shared traits of caring for their charges with compassion, intelligence and strength. The Sarkese were indeed fortunate to have the Dame as a true wartime leader. And the story of Phyllis Baker (a resident of Sark during the occupation) who later married Werner Rang (a German medical orderly who had been assigned to Sark also during the occupation) is very interesting. Overall, a nice presentation. To the Dame!

@DavidAnderson-u2z 3 weeks ago

Sounds like a great assignment for a German soldier.

@jmc8847 3 days ago

Thank you for providing this extraordinary part of British history about the island of Sark during World War II.

@iignorerepliesfrombores4010 2 weeks ago (edited)

A remarkable story. BTW,
24:00 Lobster (cockroach of the sea) was once considered a "trash fish."

@PeterCoates-m4g 2 weeks ago

Seems from the narration that D-Day/Normandy was an exclusively American affair - ie. the British, Canadian and other allied servicemen fighting and dying has been written out of the narrative.

@SM-fe1dh 3 weeks ago (edited)

I had the immense pleasure of visiting Guernsey and Sark in 2019. I would move there if I were a British citizen, but I am only a Canadian.

On another note, the red-orange flashes and the snow on the screen are annoying and useless. Why have them at all? As well, many of the old photos shown cannot be from Sark. This is misleading.

@powerofloveism 13 days ago

There is a movie called Island at War it's pretty good about the German's occupying Guernsey

@anthonywarren3298 2 weeks ago

The Germans also occupied Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney. Herm and Lihou were also under German control.

@DawnIsFabFour 3 weeks ago

"Patrolled the cliffs on a donkey". There is almost nothing more quaintly, eccentrically English than that.

@stephenrandall3551 2 weeks ago

My father inherited a house on Sark and because it couldn’t be sold to anyone on the mainland, it was sold to an insurance company in Jersey.

@sarabenjamin9075 3 weeks ago

Guernsey was also occupied

@stevenr2463 3 weeks ago

The German medical doctor of Sark returned after being pow in England after the war and marrying local. That was missed in this documentary. But otherwise fine!

@johnorchard4 3 weeks ago

I note that the parcels wrer all American Red Cross, that the invasion on the opposite coast was by American soldiers, and...it's amazing. The British and Commonwealth troops and Red Cross were nowehere to be seen.