This small island has a dark history

Take a closer look at this small, idyllic island: Victorian-era fortifications dot the windswept coastline. A concrete anti-tank wall disrupts a quiet beach. Overgrown greenery covers bunkers and tunnels.

This is Alderney, where the 2,100 people who call the island home don’t lock their cars. Where the streets are quiet and the pubs (nine) are lively, and the roads have no traffic lights. And where most corners hide memories of the Second World War.

This fiercely independent island in the English Channel, some 10 miles from France, is at the center of a debate about how we can commemorate Nazi atrocities and live consciously in places where atrocities took place – and how we should take into account the fact that Britain has never held anyone accountable. for running an SS concentration camp on its territory.

Alderney, a British Crown Territory and part of the Channel Islands, has an independent president and a ten-member parliament. (King Charles III is the monarch, but Rishi Sunak is not the Prime Minister.) The Channel Islands were the only British territory occupied by the Germans during World War II, and Alderney was the only one evacuated by the British government. Shortly afterwards, when Germany occupied parts of northwestern Europe in June 1940, German troops moved to the island.

The Nazis built four camps on Alderney. Heligoland and Borkum were labor camps run by the Nazi civil and military engineering department. The SS, the organization largely in charge of the Nazis’ barbaric extermination campaign, took control of two others, Norderney and Sylt, in 1943.

It has never become clear how many people died on Alderney. Although an official estimate from decades ago is around 400, experts say there could have been thousands. A report due this spring aims to provide answers, but not everyone studying Alderney’s past believes this will be the case.

“We need a clear picture of the number.”

The closest we came to an official count was that at least 389 people were killed on Alderney, a figure based on a report by Theodore Pantcheff, a British military intelligence interrogator who investigated the atrocities shortly after the war. Other historians’ estimates range from hundreds to thousands.

Regardless of the number, the Nazis’ intent on what to do with the prisoners and slave laborers on the island seems clear. Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, ordered a commander on Alderney to kill his prisoners if the Allies invaded. Other stories included exercises where prisoners had to march into tunnels they built themselves to practice for their own executions.

Lord Eric Pickles, Britain’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues, announced last summer that a panel of experts would try to settle a debate that has long vexed the island.

“It seemed to me that it might be a way to lock down the island,” Mr. Pickles said. “We need a clear picture of the number of prisoners and slave laborers who were on the island of Alderney,” he said.

But one thing is clear, Mr. Pickles added: the Nazis’ “operation of destruction by labor” was employed there.

Although many locals want to get to the bottom of the island’s history, the panel has not been well received by everyone. The team includes academics who have already published conclusions on the subject, raising questions about whether they will come up with new findings or merely repeat old ones.

The panel focuses on numbers, says Gilly Carr, a historian and member of the team that has published books on the Nazi occupation of the islands, “not on the whys and wherefores. Just the numbers.”

Some residents, whose families have lived on the island for generations, have expressed the feeling that the British government is encroaching on their territory and telling them what to do.

“There have been suggestions that we are in denial, that we don’t realize what happened,” William Tate, the island’s president, said in an interview in his office. But islanders are aware of Alderney’s history because it is unmissable, he said: “You only have to step outside the door here to see that the occupation was real.”

While Mr Tate welcomed the review, he acknowledged the difficulties it faces due to incomplete data and a lack of access to Russian archives, which may contain more information.

“We don’t know if this investigation will be able to provide a definitive answer,” Mr Tate said. “I guess not.”

The kind of work the panel does is often done by historians affiliated with an official institute, says Robert Jan van Pelt, another historian on the team. But Alderney has no such institutional steward of its war history, he said.

Alderney holds two annual commemoration ceremonies: one in May to commemorate the official end of the war and one on December 15, the anniversary of the islanders’ return after liberation.

The main memorial to the victims is in the center of the island and was erected in the 1960s by the family of a resident, Sally Bohan, who walks past it most days. Apart from the monument, Ms. Bohan said, “there is no central point on the island.”

The camp locations have little or no remnants of their war history. Sylt had 10 barracks that could house approximately 1,000 prisoners from mainland Europe and Russia. It “wasn’t big enough and people had to sleep outside,” said Colin Partridge, a resident and local expert who is also on the panel.

“Standing here on a day like this, you can’t imagine that atrocities are happening here,” he said, looking at the entrance to the Sylt camp on a sunny afternoon last fall. A tunnel from Sylt still exists, connecting the commander’s villa with the camp.

Norderney also held hundreds of Jews who had come from France. Only eight people have officially died on the island, a number that Michael James, who grew up on Alderney and has studied documents for years, says is unrealistically low.

Marcus Roberts, the founder and director of JTrails, the National Anglo-Jewish Heritage Trail, said other documents show the Nazis could have planned gas chambers on the island. Several tunnels were built on Alderney, and two canisters of Zyklon B – the poison the Germans used in the gas chambers – were found there, Mr Roberts said.

According to Mr Roberts and other experts, the causes of death of prisoners at Alderney included disease and starvation, as well as shootings and brutal beatings by Nazi guards.

And in 2022, a plan to build an electricity link between Britain and France via Alderney was axed, partly over fears this would happen. could disturb Jewish remains.

Mr James said he was outraged by the lack of justice for the atrocities on the island, and the lack of response from the British government since then.

The number of people on the island during the war is unclear. Mr Partridge estimates that there were about 6,000 prisoners on Alderney in 1943, at the height of the occupation of the four camps. It is also unclear how many people are buried on Alderney. The German War Graves Commission exhumed an unknown number of bodies after the war, and Mr James said Alderney still has two mass graves.

Nazi commanders forced prisoners to march for miles before doing 12 hours of hard physical labor a day with almost no food. Prisoners were forced to build fortifications that still remain, part of the Atlantic Wall to protect against an Allied invasion of the island. That invasion never happened.

“The islands never needed to be defended,” Mr Partridge said. “All these people died without a purpose.”

Living in the middle of history

The Nazis were not the first to see the need to fortify Alderney. In the 19th century, Britain built structures along the coast to protect the harbor from France. Eighteen such forts and batteries survive. The Germans occupied most of them.

Remains of the camps are less visible. The site of one is now a street with houses, the entrance pillars of which blend into the streetscape. Another is a campsite for holidaymakers. A third has a road, past a dairy farm.

Protecting sites such as these related to the Holocaust and safeguarding their history are among the goals of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

“Places tell the story in a very different way than any online tool or exhibition or book,” says Kathrin Meyer, Secretary General of the IHRA. Establishing facts, including numbers of victims, is an important part of the fight against distortion of the Holocaust, she said.

She also acknowledged the difficulties of coming to a place like Alderney and telling residents how to deal with their history. “You have to find an agreement with people who also have to live there,” she said.

Residents of Alderney enjoy a deep love for the place, a desire for a peaceful lifestyle and low taxes.

For people like Mr. James, that idyll does not block history.

“Even though we were not to blame for the Holocaust, we are responsible for its diminution and cover-up,” he said. About Alderney he said: “Jews were murdered and we allowed the perpetrators to walk free.”