Alderney’s inconvenient truth
An inquiry into Nazi atrocities on British soil will be painful
What happened on Alderney during the war? A government ‘Review into the number of prisoners who died on Alderney during the Nazi occupation’ has been greeted with headlines about ‘Britain’s Holocaust Island’ – allegations of cover-up and conspiracy, and counter- arguments that outsiders are making trouble for no good reason. Eric Pickles, the Conservative peer and former government minister who announced the inquiry, has even been accused of ‘wokeism’, which must be a new one for him. His team of 11 experts, led by Paul Sanders, an academic historian based in France, is due to report in March next year. The inquiry will be taking public submissions of ‘evidence, files, or calculations of the number of the dead’ until November. We have long known that, when the Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans in 1940, Alderney was made a special case. Its residents were mostly evacuated. Camps were set...
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