London: It is a lesser-known fact that the Nazi’s most western concentration camp during World War II was located on a remote, small island that is part of Britain. However, on Wednesday, 80 years after the island of Alderney was liberated from Adolf Hitler’s forces, Britain’s Post-Holocaust Issues Envoy disclosed that as many as 1,134 individuals likely perished there. Additionally, the Envoy stated that “a succession of cover-ups” by post-war British governments attempted to obscure the failure to prosecute Nazi officers responsible for war crimes in the United Kingdom. soil.
Alderney, situated off the coast of northern France, is one of the Channel Islands that is less well-known. Germany seized all of the island during World War II. Hitler regarded it as a strategic location for the construction of fortifications for the “Atlantic Wall,” which was designed to safeguard his dominion from the Allies. Today, the area is cherished for its white beaches, wild landscape, and tranquil lifestyle.
The Germans brought in prisoners from Europe and North Africa to construct large concrete bunkers and other structures on Alderney, which had been nearly entirely evacuated by the island’s inhabitants prior to the Nazi occupation in 1940. As CBS News’ Holly Williams reported for 60 Minutes in April, many of these structures are still visible today, slowly being consumed by nature.
Lord Pickles, who commissioned a panel of experts to review the previous official estimated death toll of 389, stated that Alderney was “hell on Earth” for the majority of those sent to the island. The number of fatalities at Alderney has been the subject of a long-standing and bitter controversy. Many contend that the actual number of fatalities may be thousands higher than the Pantcheff Report, the military investigation that promptly followed the war.
“The British Isles must convey the unvarnished truth at a time when parts of Europe are attempting to rinse their history through the Holocaust,” Pickles writes in the preface of the review. “Numerical values are significant.” Exaggerating the number of fatalities is just as much a Holocaust distortion as underplaying them. The six million deceased are undermined, and Holocaust deniers are aided by exaggeration. It is impossible for the truth to cause us injury.
A significant number of the Nazi officers who were responsible for the atrocities on Alderney were subsequently interned in British POW camps; however, they were never prosecuted by Britain.
Given that the majority of the Alderney victims were Soviet (many of whom were from modern-day Ukraine), the British government provided the Pantcheff Report to the Soviet Union as evidence and urged it to prosecute the Nazi officers in order to foster cooperation with Moscow. Nevertheless, the Soviets were unable to do so.
Pickles wrote, “They should have been subjected to British justice.” “The failure to do so is a disgrace to the reputations of subsequent British governments.”
The document-based review, by a panel of historians and other experts across Europe who were commissioned by Pickles, found no evidence of the island’s four camps operating as a “mini Auschwitz” or smaller version of any of the notorious death camps on the European continent.
Although there was no mission of extermination, panelist Dr. Gilly Carr informed 60 Minutes last month that the prisoners in Alderney “were certainly seen as expendable. The aim was to get every ounce of work out of them, and if they died, it did not matter, and that was kind of, perhaps, expected.”
The review commission determined that the Germans sent between 7,608 and 7,812 individuals to Alderney, with 594 of them being Jews from France, after analyzing thousands of records. The panel estimated that the number of deaths at the Alderney sites was likely between 641 and 1,027, with the possibility of as many as 1,134.
Sir Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, expressed his approval of the discoveries.
“It is imperative to have an authoritative account of this traumatic aspect of the island’s history,” he stated. “It allows us to commemorate the individuals who tragically suffered and died on British soil with precision.” In order to guarantee that this information is broadly accessible, it will be prudent to designate the pertinent websites.
