Take a close look at this tiny, idyllic island: Victorian-era fortifications dot the windswept coastline. A concrete anti-tank wall disrupts a quiet beach. Lush greenery covers warehouses 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 of them) are lively and the streets have no traffic lights. And where reminders of World War II lurk behind most corners.
This fiercely independent island in the English Channel, about 10 miles from France, is at the center of a debate about how to remember Nazi atrocities and live mindfully among sites where wrongdoing happened — and how to account for fact that Britain never held anyone responsible for running an SS concentration camp on its soil.
Alderney, a British Crown dependency and part of the Channel Islands, has an independent president and a 10-member parliament. (King Charles III is its monarch, but Rishi Sunak 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 to be evacuated by the British Government. Shortly thereafter, as Germany occupied parts of Northwestern Europe in June 1940, German troops moved onto the island.
The Nazis built four camps in Alderney. Heligoland and Borkum were labor camps run by the Nazi civil and military engineering department. The SS, the organization largely responsible for the Nazis’ brutal extermination campaign, took control of two others, Norderney and Sylt, in 1943.
How many people died in Alderney was never clear. While an official estimate from decades ago is about 400, experts say it could have been thousands. An exhibition this spring aims to provide answers, but not everyone who studies Alderney’s past is convinced.
“We need a clear idea of the number.”
The closest to an official count found that at least 389 people died in Alderney, a figure based on a report by Theodore Pantcheff, a British military investigator who investigated the atrocities shortly after the war. Estimates by other historians 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 commandant at Alderney to kill his prisoners if the Allies invaded. Other stories involve drills in which prisoners had to go through self-made tunnels 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 attempt to settle a debate that has long plagued the island.
“It seemed to me perhaps a way of closing the island,” said Mr. Pickles. “We need a clear idea of the number of prisoners and slave laborers that were on Alderney Island,” he said.
But one thing is clear, Mr Pickles added: the Nazis’ “operation of manual extermination was carried out there”.
While many locals want to get to the bottom of the island’s history, the panel was not well received by all. Among the group are academics who have already published conclusions on the topic, raising questions about whether they are producing new findings or simply restating old ones.
The panel focuses on the numbers, said Gilly Carr, a historian and member of the group that has published books on the Nazi occupation of the islands, “not the whys and wherefores. Just the numbers.”
Some residents, whose families have been on the island for generations, expressed the feeling that the British government was invading their territory, telling them what to do.
“There have been suggestions that we’re in denial, that we’re not acknowledging what happened,” William Tate, the island’s president, said in an interview at his office. But islanders know Alderney’s history because you can’t miss it, he said: “You only have to step outside the door here to see that the occupation was real.”
While Mr Tate welcomes the review, he acknowledged the difficulties it faces due to incomplete records and a lack of access to Russian archives, which may contain more information.
“We don’t know if this investigation will be able to give a definitive answer,” Mr Tate said. “I suspect not.”
An institutional memory is missing
The kind of work the commission does is often done by historians affiliated with an official institute, said Robert Jan van Pelt, another historian on the group. But Alderney has no such institutional steward of its wartime history, he said.
Alderney holds two annual commemorations, one in May to mark the official end of the war and one on December 15, the anniversary of the return of the island’s residents 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 a resident, Sally Bohan, who walks most days. Apart from the memorial, Ms Bohan said, “there is no focal point on the island”.
The camp sites have little, if any, remnants of their wartime history. Sylt had 10 barracks to accommodate 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 stand here on a day like this, you can’t imagine the brutality that goes on here,” he said, looking out at the entrance to the Sylt camp on a sunny afternoon last fall. A tunnel from Sylt, connecting the commandant’s villa with the camp, still exists.
Norderney also held hundreds of Jews who had come from France. Only eight were officially recorded as dead on the island, which Michael James, who grew up in Alderney and has spent years studying documents, says is unrealistically low.
Marcus Roberts, founder and director of JTrails, the National Anglo-Jewish Heritage Trail, said other documents showed the Nazis could be planning 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 death of prisoners at Alderney included disease and starvation, as well as being shot and brutally beaten by Nazi guards, according to Mr Roberts and other experts.
And in 2022, a plan to build an electrical link between Britain and France through Alderney was scrapped, partly over fears it could disturb Jewish remains.
Mr James said he was outraged at 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 there were around 6,000 prisoners in Alderney in 1943, at the height of the occupation of the four camps. It is also unclear how many people were buried in 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 march for miles before working 12 hours of hard physical labor with almost no food. The prisoners were forced to build fortifications that still exist, part of the Atlantic Wall that was supposed to protect against an Allied invasion of the island. This invasion never happened.
“The islands have never had to defend themselves,” Mr Partridge said. “All these people died for no purpose.”
Living in 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 captured most of them.
The remains of the camps are less visible. The site of one is now a street of houses, its entrance pillars blending into the landscape. Another is a campsite for vacationers. A third has a road running through it, next to a dairy farm.
Protecting places like those related to the Holocaust and protecting their history is among the goals of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
“Parties tell the story in a very different way than any online tool or any report or book,” said Kathryn Meyer, IHRA’s general secretary. Establishing facts, including victim numbers, is an important part of combating the distortion of the Holocaust, he said.
He also recognized the difficulties of coming to a place like Alderney and telling the residents how to deal with their history. “You have to find an agreement with people who also have to live there,” he said.
Alderney residents enjoy a deep love of place, a yearning for a quiet lifestyle and low taxes.
To people like Mr. James, this romance doesn’t block the story.
“Although we are not to blame for the Holocaust, we are to blame for minimizing and covering it up,” he said. Of Alderney, he said, “Jews were murdered and we let the guilty go free.”
