Nazi death toll ‘cover-ups’ on Channel Island
More prisoners were murdered in the only concentration camps on British soil than academic studies have suggested, an official inquiry is to find this week.
During World War II, the tiny Channel Island of Alderney was the site of several Nazi labour camps operating under the principle of “extermination through labour”.
Jews, German and Spanish dissidents, and Russian prisoners of war, were among thousands of slaves forced to build fortifications ahead of Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain. Many of them were starved, tortured or shot. Survivors spoke of inmates being shot for eating rubbish and being beaten for pleasure, and there is even the suggestion that some resorted to cannibalism.
Lord Pickles, Britain’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues, began an investigation last year to determine the true death toll and the reason why the British state suppressed evidence and declined to bring war crimes prosecutions.
At the time he said: “Numbers matter because the truth matters. The dead deserve the dignity of the truth; the residents of Alderney deserve accurate numbers to free them from [those seeking to exaggerate or minimise the truth].”
He now says a panel of experts supported by the civil service has found that the toll was “larger than a number of academic studies have suggested”.
In June 1945 Captain Theodore Pantcheff, a British intelligence officer, submitted a report which posited that 372 people had been killed.
But Pantcheff, who became a decorated MI6 officer, later said the number was a “minimum conclusion”. His son subsequently explained that his father only wished to include deaths where he could identify a grave on the island.
Paul Sanders, a former Cambridge historian, and Gillian Carr, an archaeologist at Cambridge and representative of the Internationl Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, have previously put the number at about 700. Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist at Staffordshire University, citing the existence of mass graves, has given a conservative estimate of 950.
Pickles said his panel of experts would produce a “definitive figure” within an appropriate margin of error. The number will be disclosed at an event at the Imperial War Museum on Wednesday.
He said it would also reveal the “spectacular” true reason why Britain joined the Soviet Union in declining to bring war crimes prosecutions against the SS officers responsible. “It will make headlines around the world,” he said.
Pickles would not go further than saying there had been an elaborate conspiracy within the British state to avoid reckoning with what happened on the island between 1941 and 1945 - not just one cover-up but a “series of cover-ups”.
The inquiry is a consequence of an EU project to build an electric interconnector between Britain and France.
The dispute at first centred on an EU project to build a multibillion-dollar electric interconnector between Britain and France in 2018. It threatened to dig up land on Longis Common, the site of mass graves created by the Nazis, prompting an intervention by the chief rabbi. That, in turn, reignited questions about what had happened at Lager Sylt, the nearby SS-run concentration camp, and three other forced labour facilities. At this point, Pickles assembled his academics.
“It will make headlines around the world.”
Lord Pickles, on revelations to be made public this week about World War II atrocities on British soil