During the Second World War, the Nazis also set up several labor camps in the English Channel on the island of Alderney – primarily to build the fortifications for the “Atlantic Wall”. Researchers have now reconstructed how the worst of these camps developed and what the conditions were there for the prisoners on the basis of archaeological studies. Your data will also help verify historical reports.
When it was foreseeable for the British that they would not be able to defend their Channel Islands against the German Wehrmacht, they evacuated a large part of the population and left it largely without a fight to the German occupiers. From July 2, 1940, Alderney, the northernmost of the Channel Islands, came under German rule. “The occupation of the island was a tactical coup for the Nazis because Alderney was the last stepping stone before the British conquest,” explains Caroline Sturdy Colls and her colleagues at Staffordshire University. “Alderney quickly became one of the most fortified areas in Western Europe and became part of the Atlantic Wall, a system of defenses along the coast.”
First labor camps, then SS concentration camps
For the construction of the fortifications on Alderney, the Germans used several thousand forced laborers who brought them to the island from Eastern Europe and Russia and held them there in several camps. In August 1942, another camp was set up in the south of the island under the supervision of the Todt organization. This camp, called “Sylt”, was used to house 100 to 200 political prisoners, who were also used for forced labor. “The few testimonials that describe life in the Sylt labor camp underscore the atrocities committed there, even in this early period,” Colls and her team report. According to this, the workers were malnourished, had hardly suitable clothing and “were beaten with everything that the guards got their hands on,” as the former prisoner later reported.
But things were to get worse: “In March 1943, the Todt organization handed over Sylt to the SS Totenkopfverband and converted it from a labor camp into a concentration camp. The previous inmates were distributed to other labor camps to make room for more than a thousand prisoners who were brought to Alderney from Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme concentration camps. Most of these concentration camp prisoners were political prisoners from Eastern Europe, who now had to build under even tougher conditions than their predecessors on the Atlantic Wall, as the researchers report.
Crowded and without protection
However, what the “Sylt” camp looked like before and after this handover, what buildings were there and under what conditions the prisoners lived is only known from examinations directly after the end of the war – and these are only partially reliable and complete, like Colls and her team emphasize. Because a large part of the camp was destroyed by the Germans before the arrival of the Allies and much information about its structure comes from surveys of the German SS men and soldiers. “Even if historical sources can be valuable resources, the Nazi documentation can be misleading, both through deception and through one-sided perspectives or missing documents,” the researchers explain.
To get more objective information about the camp and its development, Colls and her team have conducted extensive archaeological research on Alderney in recent years. Using geophysical analyzes of the subsoil, remote sensing methods and vegetation analysis, among other things, they succeeded in reconstructing the camp structure at different time periods despite the lack of ruins. The new cards reveal that the “Sylt” camp in August 1942 consisted of only five barracks, surrounded by a fence made of rolled barbed wire. In January 1943, shortly before the SS took over, the size of the camp had tripled. In August 1943, additional buildings were added as part of the conversion to a concentration camp, and a new fence with watchtowers in the corners was built, as Colls and her team report. The SS also built its own area with stable, spacious stone houses, a bunker, a canteen and a separate house for the camp commandant.
The archaeological finds, combined with historical sources, also give a deeper insight into the conditions in the camp. The researchers conclude from the size and number of the barracks that the prisoners lived extremely cramped and were hardly protected from the harsh weather on the island. Even the stables for the horses of the SS offered better conditions at the time, as Colls and her team write. Historical sources also report that the SS stole even the few foods intended for the prisoners. “Our results underline that Sylt had many of the external and functional features of other SS camps in Europe,” said the researchers. This supports the assumption that the Alderney camp was part of the National Socialist network of concentration camps. At the same time, the current results reveal that, contrary to previous assumptions, relics of the former warehouse are still preserved underground.
Source: Antiquity, doi: 10.15184 / aqy.2019.238