‘The Holocaust Happened on British Soil’: Inquiry into Nazi Camps Creates Bitter Divide on Alderney

THE OBSERVER: An official investigation of claims that many more people than previously thought died during Nazi control of the Channel Island has pleased some, but dismayed others

Michael James at a spot where the bodies of labourers are thought to have been dumped during the war. Photograph: Mark Townsend/The Observer
Their foreboding entrance smothered in ivy, the tunnels gouged out of sheer rock beside Water Lane on the island of Alderney have long terrified generations of the island’s children.

For decades, though, it seemed that was as far as the notoriety of the dank tunnels on the outskirts of St Anne, the capital of the tiny Channel Island, would extend.

That is about to change. An official government inquiry into the full horrors of the Nazi occupation on Alderney, revealed last month by the Observer, has vowed to investigate all new evidence of atrocities, including the grisly Water Lane tunnels where, it is claimed, huge numbers of slave labourers died in their making. » | Mark Townsend | Sunday, August 13, 2023