12,000 Hidden German Helmets! Secret WWII Treasure Tunnel

And today, the islands are littered with towers, bunkers, artillery positions, and tunnels from the German occupation. Hitler, in fact, ordered an entire infantry division to garrison the islands. And following the battles of Normandy and Brittany and the Allied breakout across France, the Channel Islands, along with some heavily defended ports on the French coast, became isolated far behind the front line, but they continued to hold out.

Finally, in May 1945, following the official German surrender, the Channel Islands also capitulated. Jersey and Guernsey gave up on the 9th of May, Sark on the 10th, and Alderney on the 16th of May. In a previous video, I covered the last German surrender in the Channel Islands when an overlooked German outpost on a collection of barren rocks called the Minkies finally capitulated on the 23rd of May 1945, 2 weeks after VE Day.

Check out the link to this fascinating video in the end screen. The British moved very quickly to deal with all the German prisoners and the mountains of military equipment and weapons left on the Channel Islands. The German garrison, now prisoners of war, were either shipped on to France to be processed into camps or held on the islands for some months as working parties to help clean the islands up.

The British, of course, had no use for the German equipment, so decided to store most of it in a series of vast underground tunnels the Germans had dug, which they called “Hohlganganlage” or cave passage installations. On Jersey, German weapons, including flak guns, were moved into HO1, the first of these tunnels, which the Germans had dug in 1941 as a munitions storage facility.

 The German weapons were then, incredibly, sealed up in the tunnels and left to rot. German personal kit, such as steel helmets, gas masks, bayonets, lots of other kit, and entire field kitchens were dumped in HO2, a former German ration storage facility. These tunnels were sealed as well. Even tanks used by the Germans in the islands, in this case captured French Char B1 bis tanks, were driven into a tunnel and stored.

Regarding the huge numbers of German artillery pieces that had been removed from casemates and positions across Jersey, most were simply pitched over the cliffs and remain today semi-submerged in the sea. I made a video about this, link in the end screen. And special thanks to Jersey War Tours for some really fascinating photographs of these tunnels.

 Please visit their website, link in the description box. If you visit Jersey today, the only German tunnel system that is safe to visit is HO8, the underground hospital, now a museum with a kilometer of tunnels. It gives a very good idea of the extent of these underground tunnel networks built by the Germans. It reveals also just how much German equipment could be crammed into these tunnels and then sealed up.

In 1948, the local government had a change of heart regarding the sealed German tunnels. Some were reopened and scrap metal merchants began to remove the German equipment. At the time, the equipment was virtually valueless, its only real value being the metal it was made from. And this is where things became interesting.

Island children were among the first people on Jersey to start trading German equipment with each other from the day of the German surrender and began scouring the island to add to their collections. German helmets and bayonets did a roaring trade on the swapsies market in school playgrounds. Some adults, too, saw the utility of not collecting but reusing German material.

German military motorcycles and bicycles were auctioned off along with German military mess kits, knives, bowls, lamps, and all manner of useful things that the population needed and were still short of in the months after the war. Orders were also published that children had to hand weapons in along with German vehicles and other German kit that they had managed to acquire and hide, including a huge number of loaded weapons.

 But, inevitably a lot was hidden away. The enemies bunkers, tunnels, and gun emplacements became the play areas for these children who stripped them of whatever they could find. Overlooked equipment such as telephone systems, German uniform pieces. After a couple of kids got lost overnight exploring one of the German tunnel complexes, the authorities tried to keep people out of them.

 But, still in some cases cram full of helmets, equipment, and sundry objects. The number of German steel helmets hidden in tunnels on Jersey was truly astounding. Probably about 12,000 were dumped in 1945, thousands of which were taken out in the late 1940s and early 1950s for scrap. But, even in the 1960s, huge stockpiles of moldering and rusting German helmets remained, particularly in the HO2 tunnel complex.

There were so many helmets that they formed a gigantic wall the children had pulled down as they continued their explorations. On the 27th of May, 1962, tragedy struck when two teenage boys died of carbon monoxide poisoning whilst exploring tunnel system HO2 looking for German souvenirs. The authorities reacted by concreting up the entrance, but older kids soon found another way in along with adults now seeking the famous piles of untouched German helmets.

In 1972, about seven lorry loads of German helmets were pulled out of HO2 by the men sent to clear it. At least 2,200 of the best quality ones were kept by the salvors and sold off later to collectors, antique shops, and so on. By the 1970s, collecting German militaria was big business, and finding troves of forgotten German helmets was very desirable.

 A good condition one out of HO2 might be worth £25 at resale. By the 1980s, the tunnels seemed to be played out, only full now of really valueless junk. But things kept appearing, as well as from the tunnels, but also from barns and lofts across Jersey, where the inhabitants had stored things after the surrender in 1945. The likelihood of any German helmets still being found in these tunnels in 2026 is remote, and any that remain in those dank, dark tunnels must just be fragile lumps of rust after 81 years.

But images like this give some flavor of the treasures that lay in the tunnels beneath Jersey for over 40 years. A king’s ransom in that most iconic of World War II relics, the German Stahlhelm. Many thanks for watching. Please subscribe and share. Also, visit my audiobook channel, War Stories with Mark Felton.

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