Time Team

Les Gellettes, Jersey - Hitler's Island Fortress (18x4)

Air date: Feb 27, 2011

Tony Robinson doesn't usually get to decide where the Team should dig, but in this episode he chooses his first ever site for investigation: a German anti-aircraft battery built during the Nazis' five-year occupation of Jersey. The archaeologists have never investigated anything like this before and must apply all their skills to make sense of a site now reclaimed by a forest. It's soon clear that the gun emplacements are part of a much bigger, complex fortified settlement that was home to hundreds of German soldiers equipped with a vast array of weapons. And, unlike with older sites, the Team can talk to people who witnessed life under the occupation at first hand. What emerges is the shocking story of a fortress island where German installations were built by slave labour and the local population began to starve as the war continued. Of terrible conditions that seem more fitting to the eras the Team usually investigate, rather than just 70 years ago. Over three days Time Team uncover a fascinating and frequently horrifying glimpse of life during war.