Look closely at this idyllic little 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 live on the island do not lock their cars. Where the streets are quiet and the pubs (nine of them) are lively and the roads have no traffic lights. And where memories of World War II lurk behind most corners.
This fiercely independent Channel island, about 10 miles from France, is at the center of a debate about how to remember Nazi atrocities and live mindfully among the sites where wrongdoing took place – and about how to take into account the fact that Britain has never held anyone accountable. for running an SS concentration camp on his soil.
Alderney, a British Crown dependency in the Channel Islands, has an independent president and a 10-member parliament. (King Charles III is its monarch, but Rishi Sunak is not its 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 after, as Germany occupied parts of northwest Europe in June 1940, German troops moved to the island.
The Nazis built four camps in Alderney. Helgoland and Borkum were work camps run by Nazi civil and military engineers. The SS, the organization that was largely responsible for the Nazis’ barbaric extermination campaign, took control of two other organizations, Norderney and Sylt, in 1943.
It has never been clear how many people died in Alderney. While an official estimate dating back decades was around 400, experts believe there could have been thousands. A report expected this spring is supposed to provide answers, but not everyone who studies Alderney’s past believes it.
“We need a clear idea of the number.”
The closest to an official tally reveals that at least 389 people died at Alderney, a figure based on a report by Theodore Pantcheff, a British military intelligence interrogator who investigated the atrocities shortly after the war. Estimates by other historians range from several hundred to several thousand.
Whatever their numbers, the Nazis’ intention for the fate of the island’s prisoners and slave laborers seems clear. Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, ordered a commander in Alderney to kill his prisoners in the event of an Allied invasion. Other stories include exercises in which prisoners had to walk through tunnels they had built themselves to train for their own execution.
Lord Eric Pickles, Britain’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues, announced last summer that a group of experts would attempt to settle a debate that has long troubled the island.
“It seemed to me maybe a way to close the island off,” Mr. Pickles said. “We need a clear idea of how many prisoners and slave laborers were on the island of Alderney,” he said.
But one thing is clear, Mr. Pickles added: “the Nazi labor annihilation operation was being practiced there.”
While many locals want to get to the bottom of the island’s history, the panel was not well received by everyone. Among the team are academics who have already published findings on the topic, raising the question of whether they will produce new findings or simply reformulate old ones.
The panel focuses on the numbers, said Gilly Carr, a historian and member of the team that has published books on the Nazi occupation of the islands, «and not on the why and why.» Just the numbers.
Some residents, whose families have been on the island for generations, have expressed a feeling that the British government is encroaching on their territory by telling them what to do.
“There have been suggestions that we are in denial, that we don’t recognize what happened,” William Tate, the island’s president, said in an interview in his office. But islanders know the story of Alderney because it cannot be missed, he said: “You only have to walk through the door here to see that the occupation was real. »
Although Mr Tate welcomes the review, he acknowledges the difficulties he faces due to incomplete records and lack of access to Russian archives, which could contain more information.
“We don’t know if this investigation can provide a definitive answer,” Mr. Tate said. «I do not think so.»
There is a lack of institutional memory
The type of work the panel does is often done by historians linked to an official institute, said Robert Jan van Pelt, another historian on the team. But Alderney has no such institutional manager of its war history, he said.
Alderney holds two annual remembrance ceremonies, one in May to commemorate the official end of the war and the other on December 15, the anniversary of the islanders’ return after its liberation.
The main memorial to the victims is in the middle of the island and was erected in the 1960s by the family of local resident Sally Bohan, who passes by on foot most days. Aside from the memorial, Ms. Bohan said, “there is no central point on the island.”
The camp locations have few, if any, vestiges of their wartime history. Sylt had 10 barracks capable of holding around 1,000 prisoners from continental 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.
“If you are here on a day like this, you cannot imagine that brutality takes place here,” he said, looking at the entrance to the Sylt camp on a sunny autumn afternoon. last. A tunnel from Sylt, connecting the commander’s villa to the camp, still exists.
Norderney also detained hundreds of Jews from France. Only eight have been officially declared dead on the island, a number that Michael James, who grew up in Alderney and has spent years examining documents, says is unrealistic.
Marcus Roberts, founder and director of JTrails, the national Anglo-Jewish heritage trail, said other documents show the Nazis may have planned gas chambers on the island. Several tunnels were built in Alderney and two canisters of Zyklon B – the poison used by the Germans in the gas chambers – were found there, Mr Roberts said.
The causes of the Alderney prisoners’ deaths included disease and starvation, as well as brutal shootings and beatings by Nazi guards, according to Mr. Roberts and other experts.
And in 2022, a plan to build an electricity link between Britain and France via Alderney was canceled, partly out of fear it would disrupt Jewish remnants.
Mr James said he was outraged by the lack of justice for atrocities on the island and the lack of response from the British government since.
It is unclear how many people lived on the island during the war. Mr Partridge estimates there were around 6,000 prisoners at Alderney in 1943, at the height of the occupation of the four camps. It is also unknown how many people were buried at Alderney. The German War Graves Commission exhumed an unknown number of bodies after the war and, according to Mr James, Alderney still has two mass graves.
Nazi commanders forced prisoners to walk for miles before working 12-hour days of hard physical labor with almost no food. The prisoners were forced to build the ever-present fortifications, part of the Atlantic Wall meant to protect against an Allied invasion of the island. This invasion never happened.
“The islands never needed to be defended,” Mr Partridge said. “All these people died for no reason.”
Living in the middle of history
The Nazis were not the first to understand the need to fortify Alderney. In the 19th century, Britain built structures along the coast to protect the port against France. Eighteen of these forts and batteries survive. The Germans occupied most of it.
The remains of the camps are less visible. The site of one of these is now a street with houses, its entrance pillars blending into the streetscape. Another is a campground for vacationers. A third is crossed by a road, in front of a dairy farm.
Saving sites like these related to the Holocaust and protecting 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, exhibition or book could,” said Kathrin Meyer, IHRA Secretary General. Establishing the facts, including the number of victims, is an important part of combating Holocaust distortion, she said.
She also recognized the difficulties of coming to a place like Alderney and telling locals how to deal with their history. “We have to find an agreement with the people who also have to live there,” she said.
The people of Alderney deeply love the place, longing for a quiet lifestyle and low taxes.
For people like Mr. James, there is no hiding the story behind this idyll.
“Even though we are not responsible for the Holocaust, we are responsible for its diminution and its cover-up,” he said. In Alderney, he said: “Jews were murdered and we allowed the culprits to go free. »