BRITAIN : Files Reveal a Dark Chapter of War Years : Nazis occupied the Channel Islands until mid-1945, and many residents collaborated.

In a little-remembered military action in World War II, the Channel Islands were conquered by German troops and became the only part of Britain to suffer occupation.

For years after the war, rumors circulated that many British residents of the Channel Islands had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. But an embarrassed postwar government, like that in France, was reluctant to make the issue public by pressing charges. Most of the relevant documents were ordered kept secret for up to 100 years.

But this week the government, under pressure from opposition Labor Party members of Parliament, decided to release 27 folders of partly censored papers. The documents show the extent to which officials on the two largest Channel Islands, Jersey and Guernsey, collaborated with the Germans.

Among other things, the records show that at least 435 women on Jersey and Guernsey had illegitimate children by German soldiers--a revelation that led one British newspaper to headline the story “Sleeping With the Enemy.”

“Numbers of women, including a surprising number of married women . . . have carried on and lived with Germans,” said a wartime intelligence report. “Informants think tidbits of food, an extra log, a bit of butter, etc., have been the initial bait in many cases.”

The documents also tell of reprisals: A group called the Guernsey Underground Barbers shaved the heads of women collaborators, a practice also followed by the Resistance in France.

More damaging was the revelation that some islanders helped the Germans set up four notorious labor camps on the northernmost island of Alderney. There, hundreds of captured Russian and Polish soldiers, French Jews and other prisoners died of the harsh working conditions.

According to the documents, Channel Islanders also cooperated with the Nazi authorities in exposing some 2,000 Jews and British Resistance members, who were sent to concentration camps on the Continent in 1942.

The Channel Islands were occupied in June, 1940, and were not freed from German rule until the overall Nazi surrender in May, 1945. When the Allies invaded France in the summer of 1944, many islanders escaped to nearby French territory.

Beyond the hard facts of collaboration, the papers document the fear that gripped the islands, and the frustration felt among locals that they were not freed before the end of hostilities--even after France was liberated. The British high command never stated conclusively why their forces did not liberate the islands earlier.

While the degree of collaboration varied, a postwar investigation absolved most islanders of serious misconduct during the occupation.

A report by the director of public prosecutions stated at the time, “The worst that can be said of the islanders in Guernsey is that they may have merited the description of one German officer that they were ‘obsequious peasants.’ ”

One Jersey Islander, Maurice Green, 65, recalled this week that his father, Stanley, had worked for the island’s underground, sending out intelligence messages by radio. He was betrayed by a neighbor, arrested by the Germans and later died at the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald.

The informer still lives on Jersey, Green says, and when they pass on the street, the man averts his gaze. But Green adds that he no longer feels any bitterness.

“I don’t think it does any good to harbor feelings of hatred,” he said. “It makes you miserable, and in the end it can destroy you.”