Channel Island concentration camp

[Sheilbh]

Fascinating piece - largely covered up by Britain after the war - the link has images of some of the documents from the investigation:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/exposed-the-nazi-horror-camp-on-british-soil-qq0qw70wx

Exposed: the Nazi horror camp on British soil
Jewish and Russian prisoners were starved, beaten and shot on Alderney after Churchill abandoned the island to the Germans. Britain investigated the crimes after the war — and then covered them up


Four camps were built on the Channel island. The neatly written letters of Robert Perelstein, inset, led to his death
Gabriel Pogrund
Sunday May 30 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

On June 30, 1942, Robert Perelstein wrote to a government official in Sarthe, northwest France, with an innocent question. The carpenter and cabinetmaker, 60, had been wounded twice serving France in the First World War, had married a Catholic woman, and saw himself as "French above all".

Yet Perelstein was of Jewish descent, meaning that under the Nazi occupiers' racial laws, he was required to wear a yellow star with the word Juif (Jew). His employer had sacked him, and he was running out of savings. His wife and their daughter, 3, were suffering.

Could somebody not write to Germans to explain his predicament? In elegant handwriting, he wrote: "Perhaps it would be possible for you, Mr Prefect, to help me obtain a dispensation from wearing the star just to get to my place of work?"


German troops outside their HQ, set up in Lloyds Bank

Soon he would have his answer: he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a slave labour camp the next year. On December 22, 1943, he died. The official cause of death was listed as exhaustion.

In purely statistical terms, Perelstein's story is not unusual: 75,000 French Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, out of a total of six million. However, in other respects, it is unusual: because he died on British soil.

Perelstein's name is one of several hundred contained in a British intelligence report into Nazi crimes committed on Alderney, one of the Channel Islands, during the Second World War.

On this speck of land, between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis built the only labour and concentration camps in the British Isles and imported thousands of prisoners to build fortifications.

After its liberation, survivors and Nazi soldiers provided testimony of appalling horrors, including Jews and Russians beaten for pleasure, prisoners shot for eating rubbish, and even the suggestion, in one instance, of cannibalism.

Such details are not widely known: the British government decided not to prosecute those responsible for war crimes, fearing an international embarrassment, and the evidence remained classified in military archives.

But today, the story can be told in extraordinary new detail. The Sunday Times has obtained a rare copy of the Pantcheff report, named after the intelligence officer who wrote it, which was held in the Russian archives. Many of the details have not been published before.

In addition, we have conducted the first interview with the author's family, and spoken to the descendants of numerous survivors.

Together, the evidence poses sobering questions. How did a campaign of persecution and murder against Jews, prisoners of war and civilians take place on our soil? Why was nobody punished for these acts? And who is responsible for remembering those who died? As Lord Pickles, the United Kingdom special envoy for post-Holocaust issues, says today, it is time for the full truth to come out.

Systematic murder

"It has been established, I think, that crimes of a systematically brutal and callous nature were committed — on British soil — in the last three years." These were the words of Captain Theodore Pantcheff, a British intelligence officer, who submitted his investigation, Report on Atrocities Committed in Alderney, 1942-1945, on June 27, 1945.

The story of Alderney's occupation begins on June 15, 1940, shortly after the Nazis had defeated the Allies in France. It was then that Winston Churchill decided that the Channel Islands were of no strategic importance. The government gave up the crown's oldest possessions "without firing a single shot". Troops left in such a hurry that half-eaten meals were left on tables. Islanders were left with the shallow reassurance of George VI, who said "I deeply regret this necessity" — and claimed the link between them and Britain would "remain unbroken".

In fact, the opposite was true. Churchill avoided mentioning them in his radio broadcasts. The image of Nazis walking down cobbled streets and passing red postboxes and English road signs, it was feared, could dent morale.

In turn, the Nazis were free to do as they pleased. On October 10, 1941, Hitler announced his intention to convert the islands into an "impregnable fortress" at the centre of his Atlantic Wall, a system of concrete fortifications to prevent an Allied invasion of Europe.

Guernsey and Jersey still had large civilian populations, but Alderney was different: its 1,400 or so residents had been moved out, meaning it was in effect empty. That meant the island, at three miles long and 1½ miles wide, would be one of the most heavily fortified sections of the wall.

It was in this context that the OT — Organisation Todt, the Nazi's military engineers — arrived on the island and oversaw the construction of four labour camps, starting in 1941, as well as other satellite prisons for holding slaves. In 1943, the SS arrived, turning two of them into concentration camps, one of them a subdivision of Neuengamme, a notorious camp outside Hamburg. These operated under a form of systematic murder typically described as "Vernichtung durch Arbeit" — extermination through labour.

Those sent to the camps included hundreds of French Jews, many of them spared immediate death at Auschwitz on account of being married to non-Jews or coming from mixed marriages. The largest group was composed of Russian, Polish and Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilians. They were joined by German and Spanish political prisoners. It is thought that more than 6,000 people of 27 nationalities were taken to the island.

By the time of his arrival on the newly liberated island in 1945, "Bunny" Pantcheff's mission was to illustrate what had happened over the previous five years, and the "long-term policy of maintaining inhuman conditions, undernourishment, ill-treatment and overwork".

He was 24, but fluent in German and French, and had impressed his superiors with his interrogation of Nazis at the London Cage, where prisoners of war were held in Kensington. Having also visited his uncle on the island as a child for holidays, he was selected as the man for the job. According to his son, Andrew, 65, a former bookseller who lives on Alderney, his father confiscated a gun from a Nazi soldier shortly after arriving, telling him, wryly: "You won't be needing that until the next war."

But any levity is unlikely to have lasted long. The island had been transformed, the beach replaced by a fortification, and Lloyds Bank turned into a Nazi HQ. Longis Common, on the southeast shore, became a cemetery. Pantcheff "screened" more than 3,000 witnesses, including former prisoners of war, German soldiers and civilians.

Starvation diet

According to Pantcheff, labourers shipped to the island "were kept below deck in extremely cramped conditions, in one case with less than one square metre deck space per man ... there were no sanitary arrangements on board".

Some died during transit to or from the island, or while docked in the harbour for days waiting to get out. Josef Kaiser, a German naval officer interviewed by Pantcheff, recalled a ship remaining in the harbour for five days, at the end of which he "took off about 14 corpses ... [and] thinks one of the bodies removed from ships was eaten by rats or Russians".

Those who survived experienced hell on earth. Prisoners lived in wooden barracks encircled by barbed wire. Many of them were damp, flooded and structurally unsound, surrendering to wind or storms. Inmates spent most of their time outside for a single purpose: labour. Pantcheff wrote that "foreign workers did 12 hours of heavy construction work a day, sometimes more, with a break at midday, varying from 10 minutes to half an hour ... this for seven days a week".

Tasks included laying cables, constructing bunkers, tunnels and walls. Prisoners were not given special equipment or clothing: "Winter or summer they wore what they had on ... with the exception of shoes, which were replaced by wooden sabots [clogs] when worn out."

Amid these conditions, inmates were put on starvation diets. This included "half a litre of coffee, without milk or sugar" for breakfast, "half a litre of thin cabbage soup" for lunch, and "a similar portion of soup and a 1 kilo loaf among 5-6 men" for dinner. "Some 25 grams of butter appear to have been available twice or three times a week, but only on extremely rare occasions — if ever — were sausage, cheese or any fresh vegetable available to foreign workers."

In response to such undernourishment, many prisoners became emaciated, ebbing for months between life and death, and resorting to eating anything they could find. Ernest Vincent Clark, a British farmer who remained on the island, told Pantcheff about how prisoners ate food "the dogs had left", "a calf ... buried under manure and also bad cows' feet", adding: "Obviously they were being systematically starved."

Yet doing so violated Nazi rules, which stated that prisoners could eat only their formal rations, and so carried potentially lethal consequences.

Pantcheff wrote: "Workers were beaten for the most trivial offences, against the harsh regulations, such as failure to execute a drill movement properly, or endeavouring to acquire extra food from the garbage pail."

Wilfred Henry Dupont, a prisoner, described an incident in which he saw a German "shoot a Russian who was picking up potatoes on the farm, but does not know whether he died".

Nazi officers would at times tempt prisoners into breaking other rules so that they could respond with violence. Pantcheff describes how the SS "competed in getting leave by shooting prisoners for the smallest offences, e.g. they threw away cigarette ends and as soon as an inmate bent down to pick them up they shot them".

As members of what the Nazis believed to be inferior races, or untermenschen, eastern European prisoners of war and French Jews appear to have suffered from the most extreme and arbitrary violence.

Jacques Pierre Chansaulme, a French prisoner, described an incident in which a "French Jew hit over the head by an OT man with a pick handle. He fell down and could not get up. Has seen men hit with sticks until they become unconscious." This incident is corroborated in the report by Edgar Quinet, another Frenchman, who also remarked that it was a "common sight to see Jews and Russians beaten with sticks".

On February 21, 1942, Julio Conin, a Spanish prisoner, arrived on Alderney, and was quickly sent to Norderney, the camp where most of the French Jews were held. He quickly became familiar with the way things worked: "Soon after he arrived," Pantcheff wrote, he saw a man "beaten by a German heavyweight boxer". On another occasion, he saw a Nazi soldier "beat until nearly blind a Spaniard ... for giving food to a Russian". He also describes a regular parade of sick prisoners that took place, during which a Nazi assaulted them in "brutal fashion", kicking them in the kidneys.

Yet what is most striking about Conin's interview is that it details crimes carried out not only by camp guards — but the most senior officials as well.

Karl Theiss was the commander of Norderney. According to Conin, the walls of his office were "painted four times to remove bloodstains ... Hitler portrait there washed clean every day". Theiss also forcibly used a "French colonial" black man "as [an] official torturer, as he could flog harder than any German".

Bonuses for killing

In the annexe of the report, witnesses detail a series of accidental deaths, disappearances and murders. A man "blown up by [a] mine while collecting snails to eat"; a prisoner shot on a farm after illicitly picking up a "few potatoes"; two young men killed, their corpses discovered behind a hedge, after it was decided they were too "weak to work".

One of the worst testimonies, euphemistically referred to as the "Russian boy incident", concerns a 17-year-old boy accused of "breaking into a church and stealing food". Despite protesting his innocence, the Nazis are said to have beaten his face, leaving it swollen. The next day, a witness said, "they gave him a cigarette to mock him, but he could not put it in his mouth. They made him sit on a stove which they stoked. Heat unbearable ... kept there for half an hour — he was crying." The testimony concludes: "The Russian boy disappeared after that."

Much of the murder appears to have been more systematic. Scharführer Hoeglow, the head of the SS troops, is listed as giving a "bonus of 14 days' leave, extra food and drink to SS guards for every five dead prisoners". Scharführer Krellmann is listed as a medical orderly whose job was allegedly to give "prisoners injections which killed within 5 minutes. Prisoners old and incapacitated from starvation and exhaustion ... it was Krellman's job to give them the coup de grâce."

On other occasions, it was apparently random, with individual prisoners said to have been thrown into the sea for poor work.

Pantcheff did not corroborate, or throw his own weight behind, every one of these testimonies. Indeed, not all of his witnesses profess to have seen certain individuals actually die, merely assuming they did so — such as the story of civilians "laying a cable ... were beaten to the ground and left by the roadside, apparently to die."

As a result of this, and the apparent random way in which certain bodies were discarded or left to rot, Pantcheff had one main resource in calculating the number to have died on the island: the burial grounds.

Jewish mass graves

After arriving on the island, he visited the southeast shore. It was at Longis Common that he first saw a cemetery with hundreds of wooden crucifixes. In one corner, away from the main site, he found eight Jewish graves, including Perelstein's. He also found several others, which were "opened in my presence and found to contain one skeleton each".

The burials were chaotic. "Although the graves are methodically set out, in perfect order, row by row, the dates of deaths given on the crosses are not in chronological sequences, which suggests that crosses were erected in a binary order, possibly some time after the death." Pantcheff adds: "The same name appears in 11 cases of two crosses."

Such uncertainty is reflected in the phrasing of Pantcheff's conclusion as to the death toll, in which he merely refers to the number of people buried, rather than the number who died. He wrote: "The probable number of foreign workers buried is 372". Similarly, the list of the dead in Pantcheff's report is in fact a list of those who had graves that could be identified.

In merely referring to graves, rather than deaths, Pantcheff may also have been conscious of evidence of mass burials. British officials who arrived before him even appear to have witnessed at least one communal pit on Longis Common, putting up a large cross and a sign with the words: "Here lie the bodies of 43 unknown Russians."

Other burial pits are alluded to by a number of witnesses, such as Lorenzo Cobo, who described "as many as six were buried in one grave, mostly dead through beating though some were shot".

George Pope, a British boatman who did odd jobs for the Nazis, made similar claims, describing Jewish mass graves "containing more than one body ... each grave contained 5-10 bodies and was left open until full". He claimed that 300 to 400 Jews were buried in this way.

Pope's testimony is complicated and controversial. He is described in the report as being suspected of "collaborationist activities" and delivering his testimony in an "unreliable manner" although it was later featured in the press. There are also suggestions he might have provided intelligence to the British during the war.

Today, academics remain agnostic about the total number to have died, and the means by which they did so. Dr Paul Sanders, a former Cambridge historian, and Dr Gillian Carr, an historian at Cambridge and representative of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, put the number at about 700. Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist at Staffordshire University, says mass graves existed, and that British documents about them appear to have mysteriously disappeared after the war. She, too, says the death toll of 372 is lower than the true figure, and has produced a more recent, conservative estimate of up to 950. Marcus Roberts, the founder of JTrails, a Jewish historical organisation, argues the number is likely to run into the thousands.

Perhaps the final word will be from Pantcheff himself, who, in 1981, after a decorated career in MI6, and a few years before his death from cancer, wrote a book detailing his experiences. In it, he acknowledged that his original tally was a "minimum conclusion".

His son, Andrew, says: "My father knew the death toll could be higher, he knew very well he wasn't going to come up with an absolute definitive number. The number was a conservative number because he's got to be able to link the deaths he knows about for people responsible for it. It's not enough to say they might be here, they might be there. I think he erred on the side of conservatism."

To Andrew, such conservatism was the best way of commemorating what happened on the island, rather than a callous underestimate. As a child, he recalls being taken by his father to a bunker where a Jew had engraved a Star of David in the wet concrete. Yet his father rarely spoke openly about what he saw. "I think he kept a lot of it inside, and with a notion of trying to work through it. I don't think he was a great one for publicity. He tried to do God's work, which was not always man's," he said.

Deliberate evasion

In the spring of 1947, military lawyers in the French army wrote to their British counterparts with a series of questions. Had Britain conducted an investigation into the concentration camp on Alderney? Was there a list of men responsible for war crimes? Did Britain intend to try these criminals for crimes committed?

The internal response, dated March 24, 1947 and sent by G Barratt, a lieutenant colonel in the office of the Judge Advocate General, was, at the least, strikingly evasive. He admitted his office "did conduct an investigation into the concentration camp", before claiming that they had no list of the accused. "As no British nationals were involved and the majority of the internees were Russian, the completed reports were handed over to [them] for such action as they might think fit.

"Consequently, I regret that the only information we can give you on this matter is the general statement that the Russians were treated with great cruelty and that not only were many tortures inflicted on them, but they were also allowed to die as a result of starvation."

In fact, Pantcheff's report did contain a long list of named Nazi officials, crimes they were accused of, and details of underlying evidence. It also provided evidence of the camp's leadership structure and its role within the wider German war machine, explaining individuals who were "directly responsible" to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.

Despite such evidence, Britain did not bring prosecutions and prevented others from doing by failing to disclose evidence. Instead, the government exploited an ambiguity over which country should prosecute: the UK, on whose soil the crimes took place, or the Soviet Union, whose citizens accounted for most deaths.

One Foreign Office memo sent shortly after the war read: "For practical purposes, Russians may be considered to have been the only occupants of these camps." As a result, only a handful of Germans were ever punished for their crimes on Alderney, mostly by a French military tribunal.

The only reason the story can now be told is because of the declassification of military records, decades after the events in question. In the early 1990s, the journalist Madeleine Bunting read the Pantcheff report for the first time in the Russian archives. Roberts, of JTrails, has since obtained photographs of the Russian copy of the report and provided analysis.

It is unclear if Britain has a copy of the Pantcheff report in full: Sturdy Colls says its contents are mostly available, but as disparate individual documents in the National Archives. For years, it has been rumoured that the government threw away a complete copy to create storage space.

Traumatic legacy

Séverine Landeau, 38, is the granddaughter of Perelstein, the carpenter who died on the island. She lives in La Roche-sur-Yon, 150 miles southwest of Le Mans, where he had lived. She said her grandfather's fate had cast a shadow over the family that has endured for decades. Even today, her mother, 81, is reluctant to talk about it.

"She always tried to hide that her father was deported as a Jew. It is a part of her life that she always wanted to hide," said Landeau, the youngest of eight.

"Being born in 1939 she lived through the war and really suffered," Landeau added. "She did not have to wear a yellow star, but the other children often insulted her and called her a 'dirty Jew'. Whenever she saw German soldiers come to the school she was really afraid, given that her father had been deported."

Her mother continued to be wary about mentioning what had happened, even well after the end of the war. After her mother married in 1961, Landeau said, she did everything to hide her Jewish maiden name. "She was always worried it all could start again, against her and us. She was always afraid of antisemitism," she said.

Many of these stories could be lost to the time, as the last generation of survivors dies out and no one nation takes responsibility for what happened on Alderney. Yet there are efforts to keep the flame of what happened there alive and explore why it has not punctured Britain's consciousness.

Pickles, for instance, says Alderney's story will form a central part of a new Holocaust memorial, to be built near Westminster. He said: "What happened does not reflect well on the British government on the time, and we are eager to ensure the full facts are understood by the nation ... the fact that the perpetrators faced no prosecution is something that we will feature very heavily. We must explore the reasons for that."

@Gabriel_Pogrund