Select a region
Nearly 80 years after the end of the Second World War the question of Alderney’s place in history continues to fuel debate.
A much-anticipated report into the number of prisoners who died in Alderney during World War II is expected to be released to the public next month [May] and there are hopes that the true impact of the occupation will be revealed, or at least, better understood.
Some hope it’ll vindicate what they believe is a buried and misunderstood history, others hope it’ll suck oxygen out of an increasingly acrimonious conversation and allow the past to be respectfully remembered and memorialised, and there are others who think it’s a pointless exercise with a predetermined outcome.
I went to Alderney to find out what I could...
On 27 July 2023 it was announced that the UK Special Envoy for post-Holocaust issues Lord Eric Pickles would be leading a review into the number of prisoners who died in Alderney during the occupation.
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 the distortion of conspiracy theorists. Exaggerating the numbers of the dead, or even minimising them, is in itself a form of Holocaust distortion and a critical threat to Holocaust memory and to fostering a world without genocide.
“The review will give historians, journalists, residents, and anyone with a theory an opportunity to explore their thoughts with eleven of the world’s leading experts, in an atmosphere that combines openness with academic rigour. All are welcome.”
Pictured: Lord Pickles (far left) with historian Colin Partridge (middle).
“I hope this review will put to rest conspiracy theories on numbers and provide lasting dignity to the dead and some peace to the residents of Alderney who continue to remember them at the Hammond War Memorial every year in May.”
Lord Pickles pulled together an expert group, which comprises of:
The latest update on the inquiry came courtesy of a dinner at the OGH in Guernsey, where Lord Pickles said he was confident that the Panel would come to a reasonable figure for the number that died.
While the report was set to be published in March 2024, it has since been pushed back to May as the Panel has been occupied with issues falling out of the Israel/Gaza War.
So, what exactly is the Panel trying to establish?
The Panel has four ‘terms of reference’:
Identify the number of prisoners who died in Alderney during the occupation,
Identify the number of prisoners/slave labourers who passed through the island,
To evaluate submissions from the public,
To produce a report on the findings
I met with the only member of the Panel who is based in Alderney, Colin Partridge, to better understand what work is being done and how the Panel hopes to come to its conclusions.
Mr Partridge has lived in Alderney since 1979 and served as Jurat for two decades. An avid historian, he was consulted by the States of Guernsey during the Fortress Guernsey Programme and has written a couple of books on military architecture.
“They obviously knew of my work,” he said of the Pickle’s Inquiry, “and I had in fact been reading substantially over the last four or five years on the subject because I could see that it was becoming of greater interest, particularly to people outside the island.”
He said it felt important to have Alderney representation on the panel.“Some people disagree, but I personally I think that was the right thing to do.”
Each member of the Panel has taken on a specific job, and Mr Partridge explained that he is looking to try and establish the numbers of deaths and the number of workers and labourers brought in by looking at “logistics”.
His work is nearly done, but before I explain further, it might be worth better understanding why we’re here at all.
It’s a question of numbers...
In 1940, Alderney was invaded and occupied by German troops. And In 1945, it was the last place in Western Europe to be liberated, one week after Guernsey
During that time, the Nazis established four camps on the island. Two concentration camps: Lager Norderney and Lager Sylt. And two labour camps: Lager Borjum and Lager Helgoland
Most of the prisoners brought to Alderney were Russian or Ukrainian, but it’s known that some were Jewish, north African and Spanish as well
After the war, an investigative unit was sent to the island to document war crimes and develop a case for prosecuting the individuals responsible. This was led by Theodore Pantcheff.
The Pantcheff Report recorded at least 337 deaths, but there have been a handful of vocal campaigners who believe the number could be in the thousands.
I’ve spent almost too much time writing about Alderney and the occupation and I’ve met several expert and amateur historians along the way.
Two of the most notable detractors of the official narrative are Marcus Roberts and Matthew Diebel, who I’ve spoken to multiple times.
“It has become more and more clear that the number of people who died is different to the official number,” Mr Diebel once told me, a researcher who has been visiting Alderney since the early 1960s.
“They had a policy of death by work. If they died, they just got another load in.”
He linked me up with Mr Roberts, a Holocaust historian and one of the founders of JTrails, a group working to promote and protect Anglo-Jewish history.
He published an investigative piece into the Pantcheff Report, outlining exactly why he thinks the official narrative of 337 deaths is wrong.
Pictured: One of the Nazi camps: Lager Sylt.
In an excerpt from that publication in the Alderney News, Mr Roberts said: “Pantcheff is also explicit about the arithmetic of death on the island. He concludes that there were at least 337 deaths, as repeated in his later book, but with the important explicit admission that 'it cannot definitely be stated that the total figure of 337 graves necessarily represents the total number of foreigners dead on the island'.
“In fact, the report contains numerous witness statements giving much higher death rates and reports of fatalities. If the numbers quoted from individual witnesses in this report - omitting the many other examples in the public files, but not repeated in the report - are counted up, this gives over 3,000 deaths in this report alone.
“Meanwhile, specific examples indicate that some cohorts of prisoners saw a 90% mortality rate, and support my view, and that of others, that the numbers of deaths on Alderney meant that a majority of prisoners did not survive the experience.”
I put the idea of thousands to Colin Partridge, who explained why he disagrees and why he hopes the findings of the report will put to bed the continued discourse.
“From my point of view, it's based on the logistics,” Mr Partridge told me during a tour of what remains of the island’s camps.
“What was the period of construction; and we know that quite clearly to be from early 1942... running through until the evacuations of workers in June 1944.
“So, we're talking of a period between two and two and a half years.Not five years of occupation.
"The only means of transport was by sea and that's really what I'm looking at. I'm looking at shipping arrangements. The volume of materials brought here and comparing that with the actual bunkers that were constructed.
"It was a programme that never kept pace with Hitler's requirements. My estimate is only 39% of the planned works were completed.
“There is a way in which you can relate the labour force required to do a job to the planned works.
“How many actually came here to do that?
“And what did they achieve?”
He said he has done most of the research and it’s now time to assemble it, review it and close in on a final number.
“We will never put a definitive figure on it but we want to be somewhere close to producing a realistic figure that people can accept, and particularly those that think we're talking about thousands.
“Everyone knows that the figure of 389 is by no means the final number, but there's an awfully large gulf in between that and ‘thousands’.
“You would not in wartime circumstances - especially with the difficulty of getting people and materials in and out of Alderney - be shipping in hundreds, let alone thousands of bodies.
"It just doesn't make sense.”
Pictured: Some of Mr Partridges documentation.
It’s a debate that refuses to leave Alderney and continues to be dredged up and while there have been many checkpoints along the way, there is one project that arguably brought the entire issue to international attention.
The France-Alderney-Britain (FAB) project is a proposed 220-kilometre cable between Devon and the Cotentin Peninsula on the north-western coast of France.
Its original path would have taken it through Alderney and specifically through Longis Common, an area understood to contain mass graves from the Nazi occupation.
The proposal drew localised criticism from the Alderney community, including people linked to Mr Diebel and an opposition group was formed to try and derail the multi-million-pound project.
While some argued that the project would tear up the Alderney landscape for very little local gain, the lynchpin of that concern began to crystallise around what allegedly lay underneath Longis Common. Mass graves.
The suggestion of mass graves under Longis Common has continued to resurface, and the lack of clarity around whether this is true continues to raise its head in increasingly strange ways.
Most recently, questions were asked in a States of Alderney meeting about whether it is appropriate to continually graze cows over what could be a mass grave. The answer from the Chair of the General Services Committee, Lin Maurice, being “we don’t know if there are mass graves there”.
This question, given prominence off the back of the FAB debate – which subsequently got canned, with a potential of a resurgence albeit cutting out Alderney - kickstarted renewed national and international interest in what happened in Alderney.
A few more steps down the path and the Pickles Inquiry was launched.
The Report is theoretically a month away from publication, and one local Alderney politician has been vocal in trying to understand how much interaction the Panel has had with the island and the community itself.
“I thought it would be good practice for the panel to present its findings to the community, but I haven’t had clarification whether they will be coming to the island or not,” said Alex Snowdon.
While the Panel does include one Alderney resident, it’s unclear whether or not the entire Panel has visited the island during the development of the report, and it’s an issue Mr Snowdon is quite keen on getting to the bottom of.
“The panel members should come to Alderney and share their findings before going anywhere, and sharing elsewhere. I don’t actually think all the members have come to the island - have they actually visited or is this just a paper exercise?”
He said the States of Alderney have been independently pro-active in protecting, recording and honouring the past, with the installation of informative plaques around the camp sites.
It’s something that has been going in parallel with work by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
In 2019, the IHRA began a project to protect authentic Holocaust sites. Eight recommendations were made for protections in Alderney.
In 2021, the island hosted the UK’s Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues, Lord Pickles, and an IHRA representative, Dr Gilly Carr. They visited various sites and discussed the steps which need to be taken to protect the history of the island.
This led to a wish to create a five-year plan for Alderney – delayed due to covid – which the States of Alderney say would help the island and the IHRA “manage the narrative of the island’s history during the Nazi occupation".
The States of Alderney have since rescinded the resolution appointing Dr Gilly Carr as its Alderney representative for the IHRA.
The decision was made in the wake of comments Dr Carr made during a presentation, where she said people in Alderney are "hostile".
Alderney’s Policy & Finance Committee subsequently announced that Sally Sealy, Deputy Head of the UK delegation to the IHRA, agreed to represent the island instead.
Dr Carr remains on the Inquiry Panel however.
Pictured: Plaques have been placed in areas of historical significance.
Lord Pickles will reveal the findings of the review in May and while one would hope that the soon-to-be-published report will put to bed the ongoing debate, it seems unlikely.
"I think we all have the same objective," said Mr Partridge.
"We would really like to put a name to everybody who was brought here and died here. That's the common target.
"Everything else around it is unnecessary."
Comments
Comments on this story express the views of the commentator only, not Bailiwick Publishing. We are unable to guarantee the accuracy of any of those comments.