A long-standing dispute over parts of Britain’s Holocaust history has been settled.
A committee of historians tasked with investigating the deaths on Alderney, a British Crown Dependency and one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel, has revised the island’s historical record, adding hundreds of deaths to official statistics from the 1940s.
Sir Eric Pickles, Britain’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues, announced last July that the expert committee would try to resolve the sometimes heated debate, and on Wednesday he presented its findings with the panel’s members in a packed room at the Imperial War Museum in London.
The panel did not arrive at a precise number. The report concluded that the likely death toll was between 641 and 1,027, with a maximum of 1,134. Previous estimates had put the death toll below 400.
The commission also answered the question of how many forced laborers and prisoners there were on the island during the occupation, 1940-1945, and concluded that the number was between 7,608 and 7,812. Most of them were forced laborers from the Soviet Union. This number also included 594 Jewish prisoners from France.
“We have absolute confidence in these numbers,” Pickles said. “The truth will never harm us.”
Pickles said the committee’s initial mandate was to focus solely on numbers, but that proved insufficient. Over the past nine months, the commission has widened its scope to examine why Britain did not hold any of the Nazi perpetrators accountable for abuses such as beatings, shootings, malnutrition and poor working conditions.
Mr Pickles said the failure of anyone to be prosecuted for violence and crime in Alderney was a “stain on the UK’s reputation”.
Anthony Gries, a historian at the University of Buckingham, said that the government’s failure to bring the perpetrators to justice was a “government cover-up,” but his research shows that the government had no intention of leaving the perpetrators alone. He emphasized that it was clear.
Gries said that after the war, Britain handed the Alderney massacre over to the Soviets in 1945 because most of the victims were Russian. The Soviets never brought any of the perpetrators to justice, but the British government never made this public. Moreover, the Soviets never requested any information, according to the commission’s 93-page report.
Then, in the years after the war, public appetite in Britain to prosecute major war crimes waned, Gries said.
“It’s not that I condoned murder,” Gries said. “I just didn’t have the determination.”
The Channel Islands were the only British territory occupied by German forces during World War II. In June 1940, the British government withdrew from Alderney.
The Nazis established four camps on Alderney. Two of them, Helgoland and Borkum, were labor camps run by the Nazi Civil and Military Engineering Department. The SS, the organization primarily responsible for the Nazi’s brutal extermination campaign, occupied the other two camps, on Norderney and Sylt, in 1943.
The Commission reached its conclusion by examining archival material and comparing the work of each member of the Commission. Previously, the closest thing to an official figure had come from British Military Intelligence interrogator Theodore Panceff shortly after the end of the war, who found that at least 389 people had died on Alderney.
The debate over the numbers has drawn a lot of attention to the island over the years, at times discouraging islanders who want a quiet and secluded life.
“I’ve encountered plenty of arguments over numbers,” Pickles said, “but nothing compares to the toxicity and personal nature of the arguments over numbers in Alderney.”
Hearing the panel’s conclusions, island chairman William Tate said he felt a mixture of relief and sadness: relief that the numbers were not much higher, and sadness for the hundreds of victims who remain virtually unidentified for more than 70 years.
“This is a very significant moment in the history of our island,” he said.
Tate said the island has a responsibility to keep the memory of the victims alive and provide more information in the form of signage to residents and visitors.
The commission’s scholars are pleased with the outcome of their long-awaited report. “We’ve solved the problem. It’s exceeded expectations,” said Dr Gilly Carr, a historian who has written a book about the Nazi occupation of the islands. Other members of the commission also expressed confidence in their findings.
Robert Jan van Pelt, a historian at the University of Waterloo and a member of the committee, said new information may surface and provide future insights, but these results will hold. He said he was deaf.
Alderney plays a relatively small but extraordinary role in Britain’s World War II history, placing Nazi violence and atrocities squarely on British soil.
The tiny island, located about 16 miles off the coast of France and currently home to just over 2,000 people, did not have any gas chambers, but researchers say conditions for workers and prisoners there were harsh.
“In the eyes of the Nazi regime, Jewish forced laborers only had the right to live as long as their labor was exploited,” the report concludes. “The Holocaust is therefore part of Alderney’s history.”