After France fell to the Nazis in June 1940, the British government decided that it would be too difficult to defend their self-governing territories in the Channel Islands, the archipelago between France and England. While many civilians remained on Jersey and Guernsey, the largest of the Channel islands, nearly all of Alderney’s residents were evacuated. The Germans encountered no resistance when they arrived on the three-square-mile island that July.
Under occupation, the Channel Islands became part of the Nazis’ “Atlantic Wall” coastal defense system stretching along the western edge of Europe. To build Alderney’s fortifications, the Nazi engineering group Organisation Todt established several forced- and slave-labor camps on the island. Most prisoners in the camps were from Ukraine, Poland, Russia and other Soviet territories, but there was also a significant contingent of French Jews. In March 1943, Lager Sylt—already Alderney’s most feared labor camp—became a concentration camp run by the “Death’s Head Unit” of the SS paramilitary. (Read more.)
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2 comments:
There is a film from that era about this little known history from WWII.
Yes, that's right! The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Society. Or something like that....
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