About
Jersey War Tunnels occupies Höhlgangsanlage 8, a complex of tunnels driven into a hillside at St Lawrence by the occupying German forces between 1941 and 1945. It was begun as a bomb-proof artillery barracks and store, and converted late in the war into a casualty receiving station — an underground hospital that was never meaningfully used, because the invasion it anticipated came at Normandy rather than the Channel Islands. Roughly a kilometre of tunnel was excavated; about a third of the planned complex was ever finished.
The museum inside is not primarily about military hardware. It is an account of what happened to a small British community when it was occupied, and it is unusually willing to sit with the parts of that story islanders found hard to discuss for decades afterwards. The exhibition, Captive Island, follows the demilitarisation of the islands in June 1940 and the agonising evacuation decision that split families, then the arrival of German troops, the registration of the population, the confiscation of radios, the slow strangulation of food supply, and the near-starvation of the winter of 1944 to 1945 after the Allied advance cut the islands off from France.
It does not avoid the difficult ground. The tunnels themselves were dug largely by imported forced and slave labour — Spanish Republicans, Soviet prisoners, French, Polish and North African workers of the Organisation Todt — living in conditions that killed an unknown number of them. The displays also address collaboration, denunciation, the black market, resistance, and the deportation of islanders and of Jersey's Jewish residents, on which the island administration's record remains contested.
The visit is a walk of about an hour through cold, damp, rough-hewn rock passages, and the setting does a great deal of the work: the tunnels are unheated, dimly lit and acoustically dead. Outside are memorial gardens, a war trail and the Garden of Reflection, which offer somewhere to sit afterwards.
Categories:
Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- The tunnels are genuinely cold and damp all year — take a jacket even in August. This is the single most common complaint from unprepared visitors.
- The operator says 10:00am to 12:30pm is the busiest slot and 2:00pm to 5:00pm much quieter; go in the afternoon if you can.
- Book online in advance; the operator recommends it and it avoids a queue at the entrance.
- Allow a full hour underground plus time in the memorial gardens afterwards — this is heavy material and most people want to sit down at the end.
- The site is open from 21 January to 21 December, so it is closed over the turn of the year.
- Parking is free and there is coach space, which makes this one of the easier Jersey sites to drive to.
- Some content — forced labour, deportation, starvation — is genuinely distressing, and parents of younger children should look ahead rather than be surprised by it.
- Visit here before touring the coastal bunkers at St Ouen's Bay or Noirmont; the exhibition explains who built them and under what conditions.
Highlights
Höhlgangsanlage 8 itself
The tunnel complex was begun in 1941 as a bomb-proof artillery barracks and munitions store, one of a series of underground works the occupying forces drove into Jersey's hillsides. Roughly a kilometre of tunnel was excavated into the rock, though only around a third of the intended complex was ever completed.
Walking it, the scale of the undertaking is the first thing that registers: the passages are wide, high, cold and utterly silent, cut by hand and by drill through solid diorite.
The structure is the largest single artefact in the museum and the reason everything else here carries the weight it does.
The forced and slave labour that dug it
The tunnels were excavated largely by imported labour under the Organisation Todt: Spanish Republicans who had fled Franco, Soviet prisoners of war, French, Polish, Belgian and North African workers, many of them held in conditions that amounted to slavery. Rations were minimal, the work was dangerous and an unknown number died.
Displays give this proper prominence rather than treating it as a footnote to a story about islanders, and it is the section that most changes how visitors read the rest of the site — every metre of passage they walk was cut by someone who had no choice.
The unused underground hospital
Late in the war the complex was hurriedly converted into a casualty receiving station, with wards, an operating theatre, a ventilation plant and staff quarters, in anticipation of an Allied assault on the islands. That assault never came: the Normandy landings of June 1944 bypassed the Channel Islands entirely and left the German garrison isolated until the Liberation eleven months later.
The hospital treated almost no one.
Reconstructed wards and equipment convey both the seriousness of the preparation and the strangeness of a facility built at enormous human cost for an event that did not happen.
Captive Island: the evacuation decision
In June 1940, with France collapsing, the British government decided the Channel Islands could not be defended and demilitarised them. Islanders were given days to decide whether to evacuate to England or remain, with no reliable information and shipping in short supply. Around a fifth of Jersey's population left; families were split, children sent away from parents, and those who stayed watched the boats go.
The exhibition's treatment of this compressed, agonising choice — using personal accounts from people on both sides of it — is among the most affecting parts of the visit.
Collections
The principal exhibit is the tunnel complex Höhlgangsanlage 8 itself, roughly a kilometre of passages cut into the hillside at St Lawrence between 1941 and 1945 and partially converted into an underground casualty receiving station. Within it, the Captive Island exhibition holds documents, photographs, personal effects, ration and registration papers, German administrative records, weapons and equipment, and a substantial body of recorded testimony from islanders and from former forced labourers.
Reconstructed spaces include hospital wards and an operating theatre.
Material covers the demilitarisation and evacuation of June 1940, five years of military government, forced labour under the Organisation Todt, food shortage and the Red Cross relief of 1944, deportations, resistance and collaboration, and the Liberation of 9 May 1945.
Captive Island
The main exhibition following Jersey through demilitarisation, evacuation, five years of occupation, near-starvation and Liberation.
The underground hospital
Reconstructed wards, operating theatre and plant from the late-war conversion of the tunnels into a casualty receiving station.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.
Nearby Museums (5 within 6 miles)
Jersey Museum, Art Gallery & Victorian House
History & Archaeology
St Helier — ~44 min walk (2.3 mi)
Maritime Museum and Occupation Tapestry Gallery
Transport & Industry
St Helier — ~45 min walk (2.4 mi)