John Nettles is a household name thanks to his starring role in ITV's Midsomer Murders . The actor played DCI Tom Barnaby from the show's inception until his final episode aired in 2011. While John continued with his acting work after leaving the drama, appearing in shows such as Poldark , he also turned his attention to a very different career.
After announcing his departure in 2009, John had more time to focus on his work as a historian and made a three-part documentary, The Channel Islands at War , about how Jersey and Guernsey, were occupied by the Nazis in the Second World War. Then in 2012, John published a book on the same subject, Jewels and Jackboots , which was followed by an edition of the diaries of Reverend Douglas Ord, who lived in Guernsey during the war. In a recent interview, John revealed that he's currently working on a translated version of the diaries of Baron von Aufsess, the Chief of Administration during the Occupation at the Feldkommandantur in Jersey.
The book will be published in September. "He has this fascinating German mentality that explains why the Germans carried on fighting even when it was clear they were losing the war," John told The Telegraph . "The attitude was very much, 'my country, right or wrong'.
He sympathises with the island inhabitants, forced to cooperate with their occupiers. Their argument was: 'They've got the gun. We haven't.
' "Jersey is a very small place, only about seven miles wide, and there were 30,000 Germans there. Th.