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 up for slave workers, imported from the Soviet Union, Poland and, in smaller numbers, from North Africa and Spain, as well as some Jewish prisoners from France.
All were put to work constructing the fortifications for Hitler’s ‘Atlantic Wall’, some of whose brutal concrete edifices can still be seen today.
In time, the SS took over the running of the camps, and the regime became more barbaric. The prisoners had from the beginning been woefully undernourished, housed in filthy conditions and subject to dangerous and back-breaking labour. As in other Nazi camps, the SS are alleged to have killed indiscriminately and to have forced prisoners themselves to participate in brutal treatment of their fellows.
Lord Pickles is far from the first British appointee to be tasked with finding out what happened and, if possible, how many people died.
In May 1945, the day after Alderney’s liberation, led by Brigadier Alfred Snow, Majors Haddock and Cotton arrived to investigate the treatment of slave labourers. Haddock’s report went missing, and notes of his investigations, including letters to his superiors in London, only emerged in 1992. From them came not only accounts of murder and maltreatment, but also direct evidence that, contrary to British government statements long after the war, the alleged perpetrators had been in British hands. At least two of the main culprits survived the war and lived to old age in West Germany.
Haddock’s findings were serious enough that a second investigation was almost immediately ordered. Captain Theodore Pantcheff of MI19 – the section of military intelligence responsible for obtaining information from enemy prisoners of war – arrived with a Russian colleague, Major Gruzdev, at a time when the wartime alliance was already fraying.
They questioned surviving prisoners on Jersey, Guernsey, and Alderney, and a report was sent to London and Moscow.
According to the historian Madeleine Bunting, the British copy was later destroyed to ‘make shelf space’, but there is more shelf room in Russia, apparently, and a copy did survive in Moscow, which she was able to consult.
Pantcheff wrote that ‘wicked and merciless crimes were carried out on British soil in the last three years’. He gave the names of 46 Germans who were alleged to have ordered or participated in these crimes, 15 of whom were already in British hands. Five were still on the Channel Islands, including Major Carl Hoffmann, ‘senior HQ officer on Alderney during the time of mass deaths’, according to Pantcheff.
None of these men was ever tried for his actions on Alderney. Internal discussions among the British show that they decided any perpetrators would best be tried in the Soviet Union, as the majority of victims were Soviet citizens.
But the Germans in British hands were never handed over to the Soviets, probably because relations deteriorated so rapidly between the former allies.
Today, it seems extraordinary that, if the British felt they could no longer hand the men over to the Soviets, they still declined to try them themselves. We can only speculate that the instinct to forget the Channel Islands’ time under Nazi rule was the guiding force.
The new inquiry is being conducted under the auspices of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. The number of Jews who were brought to the islands and how many died have never been established. The initial investigators stated that 'no atrocities were committed against French Jews', which was untrue: Jews were known to have been murdered.
But while this is a crucial aspect of the investigation, it will not change the fact that the majority of victims on Alderney were Russians, Ukrainians and Poles.
Whether public consultation, new documents or archaeology can provide more detailed answers to questions about Alderney remains to be seen. But it is likely that whatever the numbers turn out to be, the conclusions will bear out Pantcheff. Terrible things were done on British soil, and the British let the people who did them get away with it.
