As for the British anticipated that they could defend their the channel Islands against the German Wehrmacht would have evacuated most of the inhabitants and left them largely without a fight the German occupiers. From the 2. July 1940, was also Alderney, the most northerly of the channel Islands under German rule. “The occupation of the island was a tactical Coup for the Nazis, because Alderney was regarded as the last stepping stone before the conquest of Britain,” explained Caroline Sturdy Colls and her colleagues from Staffordshire University. “Alderney has quickly become one of the most fortified areas in Western Europe and was part of the Atlantic wall, the System of defenses along the coast.”
the First labor camp, then concentration camp, the SS
For the construction of the fortifications on Alderney, the Germans put several thousands of forced workers brought with them from Eastern Europe and Russia on the island, and there, in several of the Camps held. In August 1942, was built under the supervision of the Organisation Todt, another camp in the South of the island. This “Sylt” in keeping with the camp served for the accommodation of 100 to 200 political prisoners, which were also used for forced labor. “The few testimonials that describe life in the labour camps of Sylt, under the atrocities underline spheres, even in this early period,” reports Colls and her Team. Accordingly, the workers were malnourished, were hardly suitable clothing, and “were struck with all the security guards got in the hands”, as in the former prisoner later reported.
But there was worse to come: “In March 1943, the island of Sylt from the Organisation Todt was handed over to the SS death’s-head Association, and a labor camp transformed into a concentration camp. The previous occupants were transferred to other labor camps, to make room for more than a thousand prisoners who were brought from the concentration camp Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme to Alderney. Most of these concentration camp inmates were political prisoners from Eastern Europe, who now had to build in even tougher conditions as their predecessors on the Atlantic wall, as the researchers report.
reconstruction of the camp and the island of Sylt in the years 1942, 1943 and 1944. (Image: J. Kerti/ Colls et al., Antiquity, CC-by-nc 4.0
Closely crowded and without protection
however, As the stock “Sylt” before and after this Transfer looked like, what buildings there were, and the conditions under which the prisoners lived, is so far only available from studies directly after the end of the war – and these are only partially reliable and complete, as Colls and her Team stress. Because a large part of the camp was destroyed by the Germans before the arrival of the allies, and a lot of information about its structure is derived from interviews with the German SS men and soldiers. “Even if historical sources can be valuable resources, it may be the Nazi documentation is misleading, both by deception and by single-sided perspectives, or missing documents,” explain the researchers. to get
in order To more objective information about the camp and its development, Colls and her Team conducted in the last few years, extensive archaeological investigations on the island of Alderney. Among other things, by geophysical analysis of the subsoil, the methods of the remote sensing and vegetation analysis, they were able to reconstruct despite the lack of ruins the build-up of the camp in different time periods. The new maps reveal that the stock “Sylt” was in August of 1942, only five barracks, surrounded by a fence of rolled barbed wire. In January 1943, shortly before the Takeover by the SS, had the size of the bearing is tripled. In August 1943, further buildings were added in the course of the conversion into a concentration camp, also a new fence with guard towers in the corners was erected, as Colls and her Team report. The SS also expanded for a area with a stable, spacious stone houses, a Bunker, a canteen and a house for the camp commander.
The archaeological finds, combined with the historical sources of deeper insight about the conditions at the camp. The researchers from the size and number of barracks that the prisoners lived in extremely cramped and hardly before the harsh weather of the island were protected. Even the stables for the horses of the SS had better conditions, as Colls and her Team write. Historical sources also report that the SS even stole a few for the prisoners of imaginary food for themselves. “Our results underscore that the island of Sylt, many of the external and functional features of other SS camp had in Europe,” said the researchers. This is the assumption that the camp on Alderney camps was part of the Nazi network of concentration support. At the same time, the current results reveal that, contrary to previous assumption, relics of the former camp buildings are well received in the underground.
source: Antiquity, doi: 10.15184/aqy.2019.238
*The post “insight into an SS labour camp on the channel island of Alderney” is published by Wissenschaft.de. Contact with the executives here.
Wissenschaft.de
