Hitler’s horror island: Inside the only concentration camp on British soil from which ‘everybody heard the screams’ – and the little-known atrocities committed there

The tiny Channel Island of Alderney is a hidden gem, with beautiful beaches and an abundance of wildlife. But it is also the only place on British soil where a Nazi concentration camp stood.

Earlier this year, an investigation into the atrocities committed there concluded that not only did many more people die than originally officially claimed, but there was also a cover-up by British authorities. Now a new two-part Sky History series, Hitler’s British Island, looks at Alderney’s grisly wartime past.

For Hitler, the occupation of the Channel Islands was the first step towards an invasion of Great Britain. Alderney, codenamed ‘Adolf’ by the Nazis, was evacuated by the Royal Navy after the Fall of France in 1940. Of the approximately 1,500 inhabitants, only a few remained.

Among those who stayed were sailor George Pope, his wife and four children. His daughter Janet remembers life under the occupation in the documentary. ‘My mother refused to speak German, but the children learned to say ‘Guten tag’ and the Germans loved it because we were the only children on the island. Every day it was a struggle to find food. Every now and then soldiers would stand on the sidewalk with their big boots to see if there was anything that shouldn’t be there.’

Alderney, codenamed ‘Adolf’ by the Nazis, was evacuated by the Royal Navy after France fell in 1940

In 1941, Hitler ordered Alderney fortified as part of his ‘Atlantic Wall’ to protect his new territory, and suddenly the island was filled with slave laborers – and soldiers overseeing them. In 1943 there were 3,200 Nazis and more than 4,000 prisoners on Alderney, housed in four camps. Three of these were forced labor camps. The fourth, Lager Sylt, was run by the SS. This was the place where the Jews were held and it was the toughest on the island.

“We knew pretty well what was going on,” says Janet. ‘People dying of hunger and being beaten to death. There were a few incidents where someone was caught stealing food, and I think everyone heard the screams.”

When the island was liberated in 1945, British military researcher Captain Theodore Pantcheff was sent to Alderney. He interviewed George Pope, who handed over a list he said he had received from a Nazi of the names of a thousand people murdered on the island. But Pantcheff wasn’t sure he could trust Pope – was he a collaborator? Pope had been a supporter of Oswald Mosley – although Janet insists her father had fallen out with Mosley over his anti-Semitism, and even tried to punch the fascist leader when he saw him in the street.

‘There was no other option than for my father to have a relationship with the Nazis. He was led to the commander’s office, who said to him, “Do you have a family?” And when my dad said yes, he said, “And I have a gun.”

Nazi soldiers with a woman on the island in 1942

‘Before the liberation he was given a document that had been stolen by a German officer, and when the British arrived my father invited some officers to our house and said, ‘Here you are. It is a German document about the dead. Look at the badge.”

Pope’s list was never seen again, and Pantcheff’s final report led to an official figure of 389 people murdered on Alderney. But rumors of mass deaths continued.

Earlier this year, a new report into the atrocities on Alderney found that between 641 and 1,027 people had died under the Nazis’ “brutality, sadism and murder”, and that a “succession of cover-up operations” had left a “stain on the reputation of the Nazis was’. successive British governments’. The British authorities had hidden behind an agreement between the Allies that each would be responsible for bringing war crimes against their own people to justice. Although the horrors took place on British soil, it was decided that the USSR should try the Nazis because most of the prisoners were Russian.

The Soviet Union ‘decided to do nothing’ with the evidence. No one was ever brought to justice. But at least the story is now being told.

• Hitler’s British Isle, Tuesday, 9pm, Sky History.