The forgotten Nazi camp built on British soil | 60 Minutes

now harley williams on assignment for 60

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the names alitz bergen bson and buenos world are infamous as the scene of atrocities in the concentration

camp

s run by Adolf Hitler's notorious SS, but what you might be surprised to know, as we were, is that Two Nazi concentration

camp

s were established. on British

soil

in the Channel Islands, about 80 miles from the British mainland, the islands were just off the coast of France and became possessions of the English crown about a thousand years ago and were occupied by Germany for almost five years During the Second World War, even in the United Kingdom many people do not know about the camps and as we discovered exactly what happened there, there is heated controversy.

The story will continue in a moment. It's pretty well hidden, isn't it? Yeah, well, if you didn't know how to get here. You wouldn't cross it easily and it was kind of a back entrance. Not much remains of the Third Reich's largest sediment concentration camp on the windswept island of Solony, about 3 miles long and 1.5 km wide. Nature is gradually swallowing its The crumbling concrete walls and the camp here take you directly to the camp. Marcus Roberts is an Oxford-educated amateur historian who runs Heritage Tours. He spent years researching this

forgotten

chapter of British history, so certainly, if you wanted to put a pin on the map, you could say that this is where the Holocaust occurred on sovereign British territory when Germany invaded France in 1940 the British government calculated that The Channel Islands had no strategic value and he abandoned them without a fight almost all of Aliny's residents decided to evacuate before the German troops reached the empty island.

The Germans established two concentration camps and labor camps. They brought in prisoners of war and forced laborers to build giant fortifications that still survive. Today, Hitler part of the Atlantic Wall to protect a minority of them against Allied attacks. They were Jews, others were from Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Spain. I understand that this was called The Tunnel of Death. Yes, it was notorious in the memory of the prisoners. On two occasions they were forced to crowd here in an apparent rehearsal of their own death after the war. In 1945, the British army investigated the camps and estimated the death toll at a few hundred.

Some of those who lost their lives were buried beneath this ground, but Marcus Roberts and others argue that more than 10,000 must have died on the island. Regarding controversial calculations about the size of the workforce needed to build the fortifications, Roberts told us that it is because he is Jewish that he is determined to count all the dead. There is the Jewish instinct to know not to leave anyone behind. You're trying to make sure. Most academics dispute Roberts' estimate of the death toll, but partly as a result of those disagreements last year the British government appointed a Dr Jilly Carr's team, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, is coordinating the review.

Why is it just a document search and not a dick search? It is likely that some of the people in the mass graves were Jewish and, according to halakah or Jewish law, the dead cannot be disturbed, but the second reason is that, according to prisoners' statements, some people were thrown into the sea or thrown from cliffs. What are we going to do? We will excavate the entire island. Well, we can. It's not that the researchers draw on rich material. The Nazis were meticulous record-keepers and British archives contain first-hand accounts from survivors. Look at this. They hit us with everything they could get with sticks.

Spades and spikes. It sounds absolutely awful on certain days. From 5 to 6 and up to 10 men died. Dr. Carr told us that there is no evidence that gas chambers were used at Aliny, but there were summary executions and prisoners

built

Nazi fortifications in starvation camps. seen as expendable the aim was to get every ounce of work out of them and if they died it didn't matter and that perhaps they were expected to be disposable yes how did your father end up in Aly in a pub on the Channel Islands we met Gary font his father Francisco Font fought on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War He was arrested in France handed over to the Germans and sent to a concentration camp in Aliny Francisco survived and later married a British woman Gary's mother witnessed the execution of a young Soviet man who decided to leave work in detail and change his footwear, so he decided to take these paper bags and wrap them around his feet and then tie them with a rope and an SS guard saw him do this and approached him and shot him at point-blank range.

Gary told us that his father's experiences left a mark on him. I saw the emotion on his face. It's difficult, do you think that emotion came from the fact that he had survived the war in Spain and survived the camp here? Yeah. It was the first time I realized, wow, you know, this man has a deep-rooted emotion inside him that he could never get out. The British government's effort to bring the truth to light by counting the dead was commissioned by Lord Pickles, Sir Eric Pickles, a former cabinet minister. and now the UK Post-Holocaust Envoy and the figures vary not by a few hundred or a few thousand but by tens of thousands, so it was controversy that prompted him to commission the review.

Yes, I thought the sensible thing to do was Well, okay, let's do away with this openly, let's make it completely transparent. He also asked investigators to name as many of those killed as they can. If you remember them as individuals, then it's another blow against Itler. Itler wanted to eradicate the memory of This is a kind of continuous fight against Hitler and his ideas. Hitler's evil continues to affect Europe and the world, but it took almost 80 years for the British government to re-examine what happened at Alden and make its decision. public report official British investigations in 1945 were classified for decades and, unlike the trials of Nazi officials at Nurburg, British authorities did not prosecute a single German officer who worked at Aliny even though many of them ended up in camps of British prisoners of war.

To be clear, these are potential war criminals that the British government has evidence against and are in British custody. Yes, at this moment they are. Yeah, kind of a Slam Dunk case. One would have thought LED Marcus Roberts and others claim that. The British government attempted to cover up the extent of the atrocities alone. Dr Carr told us that could be true, but a key document is missing from the British War Office investigation that may explain why there were no prosecutions. It could have been destroyed decades ago. as part of why we need these files, but they could also have been shredded for more nefarious purposes.

I have no idea to say that there was a cover-up. I want to see the decisions made. I want to review them. steps and to make a decision why the British government might have tried to cover up or cover up what happened in Aliny and perhaps more widely in the Channel Islands, there are some things that happened that maybe not, um, that the British government might not necessarily have wanted a wider public to know about those things that were once feared to be too worrying for the general public. They happened on three of the other Channel Islands, where most residents did not evacuate before the occupation, when the Germans arrived, most locals cooperated often with little choice.

Hitler's portrait. It was hanging outside this cinema on Gery Island. Nazi propaganda showed British police working for German troops and British newspapers on the islands printed orders from Berlin. This is a British newspaper and it has the swas sticker at the top which is right in the official archives. the island of Jersey Linda Romeral showed us how British officials implemented Nazi policies by asking Jewish residents to identify themselves and then confiscating their property. There were a large number of searches of people's homes and property during the occupation period, but some were They resisted, risking punishment for painting anti-Nazi graffiti and illegally listening to British news on the radio.

That's my great-aunt Louisa. I suspect she was probably quite Steely. One member of the resistance was Louisa G who hid an escaped Russian prisoner in her house for almost 2 years and this is the house Jenny Lot told us that when her great aunt Louisa was finally captured they sent her to the Ravensbrook concentration camp in Germany she was killed in a Nazi gas chamber she was gassed to death yes, after the occupation, the British government contacted her family to talk about what Louisa had done during the occupation and about her murder by the Nazis, the British government I think they were a little bit embarrassed, they were horrified at what happened and they didn't really want to get too involved in what had happened there, they didn't want to talk about the resistance or didn't want to talk about the occupation at all, it was such a mixed picture that There were people who would resist the Germans as much as possible within a small 9x5 mile island and there were also people who collaborated. some people had betrayed their own country, the only possible legislation was treason, which was still a crime punishable by hanging that they did not want to enter, that was the confusing, disorderly and dirty image of the occupation of the Chanel Islands, We'll learn more about that messy dirty story when the British government's report on the death toll at the Aliny camps is published next month, but some sort of apology is unlikely to satisfy everyone and you know a moral reward would be helpful if Do you want the British government to apologize for not prosecuting alleged war criminals?

Yes, I think it would be appropriate for them to acknowledge what should have been done. It didn't happen. The horrors perpetrated on this small, remote island are hard to imagine. The victims were silenced. and buried, but now, almost eight decades later, they are finally being countered