Sylt Concentration Camp— SS Camp on British Soil

I watched a documentary last night, Adolf Island, and to be honest, it wasn’t great. It only received 5.8 (out of 10) on the IMDB scale and I can see why. However, it was an interesting subject. It was presented by British archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls.

I had known about concentration camps on the British Channel Islands but not so much about how they really operated.

Lager Sylt was a Nazi concentration camp on Alderney in the British Crown Dependency in the Channel Islands. Built-in 1942, along with three other labour camps by the Organisation Todt, the control of Lager Sylt changed from March 1943 to June 1944 when it was run by the Schutzstaffel – SS-Baubrigade 1 and Lager Sylt became a subcamp of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp.

On the 3rd and 5th of March 1943, SS Baubrigade 1 (SS BB1) – a building brigade comprising prisoners sent via the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme in Germany – arrived on Alderney on a boat called Robert Müller 8. It was the aspiration of the Nazi administration that this unit would increase the number of construction outputs, as well as their quality. However, SS BB1 also simultaneously functioned as a penal unit and being a member was a form of punishment. These prisoners were housed at Sylt SS Camp.

The arrival of SS BB1 on Alderney—identifiable by their striped pyjamas—was noted by many inmates from the OT camps who gave their testimonies after liberation. 4 Like concentration camp prisoners elsewhere in Europe, inmates were forced to wear triangles on their uniforms indicating their prisoner classification, something which provided further detail about their supposed misdemeanours; red for political prisoners, green for serious criminal offences, black for work-shy individuals and purple for conscientious objectors (commonly, this included Jehovah Witnesses). Another group of between 1,000-2,000 French Jews also made up a significant number of the slave labourers.

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 in the Channel Islands. Nearly all of the Alderney residents were evacuated. The Germans encountered no resistance when they arrived on the three-square-mile island that July.

SS-Hauptsturmführer Maximilian List moved from the Neuengamme concentration camp to become the commandant of Lager Sylt, arriving on the island on 23 February 1943.

In June 1943, workers were being deported back to Neuengamme, probably to be exterminated, but fled, and a disciplinary enquiry against List took place in September 1943. To avoid a repeat of this—subsequently, sick workers on Alderney were killed. List left the island in March 1944, replaced by SS-Obersturmführer Georg Braun.

Another commandant, Karl Tietz, had a black French colonial as an under officer. Shocked to see a black man beating up white men from the camp, a German naval officer threatened to shoot him if he saw him doing it again. Tietz was brought before a court-martial in April 1943 and sentenced to 18 months penal servitude for the crime of selling cigarettes, watches and other valuables he had bought from Dutch OT workers on the black market.

Prisoners carried out twelve-hour working days of heavy physical labour in the construction of tunnels, roads, and military hospitals, with death through labour being the common factor in the high fatality rate in Alderney. Even if the unfit slave labourers did not succumb to death through labour, they were then immediately transported to an extermination camp on the continent instead.

Sylwester Kukula was one of the men imprisoned in Sylt. On a visit a few years ago, he recalled:
“How strange are the wheels of fortune. As a young Polish boy, before the war, at school, I had lessons about Great Britain, but I never heard of an island called Alderney. Yet I found myself on it in 1943. How did it happen? Having been arrested as a student—for teaching Polish—together with a group of 1475 other students in 1940 I was sent to Dachau near Munich. Then in 1942 to Sachsenhausen where the new work units were created, so-called construction brigades whose original purpose was to clear rubble from bombed sites in Düsseldorf and Duisburg. Most newcomers to Sachsenhasuen were put into those brigades, as the old prisoners already had regular assignments. They moved our Baubrigade to Alderney and on 5 March 1943, I stood in front of this place as I am doing now. The sign SS Lager Sylt was above these gates. What happened behind them for the following 15 and half months has still been only partially described. Suffice it to say that out of 1000 men entering these gates only about 600, still barely alive, left them. I was lucky, I survived, even the whole way back to Austria and on to the liberation day. On 9 May 1945, we were about 350. Another turn of the wheel. Back in 2001, my daughter brought me here to revisit the places with haunting memories. Never did I expect to do that again. Yet today, after 65 years, I am deeply moved to stand again in front of what now are just the gateposts. On one of them we, ex-prisoners (there is another known survivor, in Belgium, unable to come over) and members of our families, are placing this plaque to commemorate them and those who died here. All nationalities were here: Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles, Germans, Dutch, Czechs and Slovaks, French, Yugoslavs, and Lithuanians. Let this marked gatepost stand here forever to remind and warn. Let similar camps never be again anywhere. I bow and salute all Sylt prisoners.”

Francisco Font, a Spanish Republican and forced labourer at one of the other camps on Alderney, recalled that while doing work near Sylt, he saw a man strung up at the main gate.
“On his chest, he had a sign which was written, For stealing bread.” Font said in a recording kept at an archive in Jersey, “His body was left hanging like this for four days.”

One mass grave of 337 prisoners had been discovered after the war, but Professor Caroline Sturdy Coles thinks that number should be at least twice as much. She calculated the figure by comparing recorded deaths with aerial drone surveys of unidentified graves. The graves were located using radar technology to create 3D terrain maps and identify evidence of burial sites.

The Alderney state authorities were very reluctant to provide any help with the investigation. In fact, they did not allow Professor Caroline Sturdy Coles to carry out any excavations.

Sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-guernsey-48663118

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-guernsey-57596077

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/forgotten-nazi-concentration-camp-england-revealed-archaeologists

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-reveal-hidden-horrors-only-nazi-ss-camp-british-soil-180974556/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-most-terrible-camp-after-80-years-cruelty-of-ss-site-on-uk-soil-revealed/

https://occupiedalderney.org/sites/sylt-ss-camp/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2bndf7v

https://www.businessinsider.com/artwork-forensic-evidence-probes-nazi-execution-site-on-british-island-2023-3?r=US&IR=T

Camp Sylt: a secret Nazi concentration camp on the British isle of Alderney

When the Brits helped the Germans deporting Jews.

From 1940 to 1945 the Channel Islands were the only part of Britain to fall under German Occupation. During that period, local courts continued to function and to apply Island law. Lawyers, judges and government officials in Jersey and Guernsey continued to swear oaths of allegiance to the British Crown. But German anti-Semitic laws and other measures were introduced and became part of the legal system.

During the occupation of the Channel Islands by Nazi Germany during World War II, laws were imposed on the authorities that required registration. All non Guernsey and British foreigners (Aliens) had already been required to register with the police, but the records did not mention their faith. An advertisement appeared in the newspaper in October 1941 calling on all Jews to identify themselves.^[3] The Germans issued identity cards to everyone, which listed their nationality and faith.

Jews identified in Guernsey and Sark

• Elda Brouard née Bauer, 27/4/1884, British by marriage, born Italy
• Elisabet Duquemin née Fink, 21/7/1899, British by marriage, born Austria
• Auguste Spitz, 28/8/1901, German, born Austria
• Therese Steiner, 22/4/191625 German, born Austria
• Anny (Annie) Wranowsky, 22/4/1894, Czech but held German passport, living on Sark

Marianne Grunfeld, born in Poland in 1912, had studied horticulture at the University of Reading before going to work on a farm in Guernsey. She was identified in April 1942 as Jewish.

Therese Steiner, an Austrian, non-practicing Jew, who had come to the Islands from England ,and become trapped in the Islands by the invasion as she had been detained as an alien, amongst 30 enemy aliens who were arrested and detained in June 1940.She didn’t have a UK visa to go to the UK as required for immigrants from Germany and Austria (from 1938).

A qualified dental nurse, she was then employed as a nurse by the States of Guernsey, working at the Castel Hospital, She went, after 18 months to the German authorities to ask to contact her parents. This act alerted the Germans to the presence of Jews in the Island, resulting in anti-Jewish laws being forced through and ultimately led to Jews being deported.

 

The registration process, was the beginning of a systemized persecution, first all Jewish businesses had to display a sign stating the shop was “Jewish owned or “Jewish Undertaking”, then the business was subsequently “Aryanised” and turned over to non-Jews.

 

The Channel Island authorities in particular Bailiff Alexander Coutanche cooperated throughout this entire process, and to a great extent he even  administered much of it.

‘The Third Order’, registered in the Royal Courts of Guernsey on 17 June 1941 and of Jersey on 31 May 1941 as Regulation and Order No 307, redefined those persons considered to be Jewish.

Any person having at least three grandparents of pure Jewish blood shall be deemed to be a Jew. A grandparent having belonged to the Jewish religious community shall be  deemed to be of pure Jewish blood. Any person having two grandparents of pure Jewish blood who:

(A) … belongs to the Jewish religious community or who subsequently joins it; or

(B)… is married to a Jew or subsequently marries a Jew; shall be deemed to be a Jew.

There was a determined effort by the Germans to show their best side for propaganda purposes. The harsher treatment of France was not to prevail here. British goods that still remained in the shops were bought up by the Germans, who were unused to seeing so many luxuries. These stocks could not of course be replaced.

Singing “God Save the King” was a serious offence, yet no attempt was made to remove the “royal crest” from the courthouse. Newspapers were strictly controlled, printing the news according to Dr Goebbels. The editors left the curious Germanic English in news stories so that nobody would be deceived.

At first it was possible to listen to the BBC until later, when radio sets were confiscated. From then on many Channel Islanders risked imprisonment, deportation and even death to hear the BBC news on hidden radios.

The first group of three Jews were ordered to leave the Island in April 1942.The three, Marianne Grunfeld, Auguste Spitz, and Therese Steiner, were first sent to Saint-Malo, where they took up local employment, Marianne Grunfeld was reported to be living in Laval, France, until three months later when they were rounded up in a mass deportation of French Jews. They were sent directly to Auschwitz, where they all died.

The night before their deportation Therese Steiner and Auguste Spitz visited their friend Elisabet Duquemin, a fellow registered Jewish refugee from Vienna. Elisabet Duquemin remembered:

“They had a paper with them from the Germans that they had to report the next morning to be taken away to France and were in a terrible state of anxiety. They borrowed a suitcase from me and I never saw the poor girls again”

The remaining Jews on the Channel Islands were deported in February of 1943 sent to internment camps in France and Germany. Of course while the authorities in the Channel Islands helped the Germans deport the Jews, they had no certain idea on what their fate would be.

It was clear however that no matter what their inevitable fate, their persecution under the Germans would most certainly be “unpleasant”, yet they did nothing to prevent the deportations.

The Normandy landings in 1944 heralded the final phase of the of the islands’ German occupation. By August St Malo surrendered and the islands’ supply routes were cut off.

For the next eight months, the local population and the 28,000-strong German garrison went close to starvation. Liberation finally came when an Allied task force headed by HMS Bulldog arrived off St Peter Port, Guernsey on 8 May, 1945.

 

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Sometimes there was Honor

Full military honors were granted by the Luftwaffe at the funerals of RAF sergeants Butlin and Holden who were shot down over Jersey, Channel Islands. It is thought this was to try to pacify the local population. The Luftwaffe behaved much differently than the SS or Wehrmacht. Much more chivalry.

RAF Sergeants Butlin took off on an operation to Frankfurt at 23.15 hrs from RAF Burn in Yorkshire and ditched roughly 3 miles south-west of the Channel Island of Jersey after a call was made by Sgt. Odling for assistance. The body of observer Sgt. Holden was eventually washed up on St. Ouen’s Bay in Jersey on the 3rd June 1943. On the 5th June his and the body of a Sgt. Denis Charles Butlin lay in state in the Hospital Chapel with hundreds of islanders visiting the coffins to pay their last respects, prior to a service on the morning of 6th June. The coffins were then draped with the Union Jack before being taken to the cemetery. Hundreds of people lined the route but the Luftwaffe prevented them entering the gates of the cemetery.

The Channel Islands were occupied by Nazi German forces for most of the Second World War, from 30 June 1940 until their liberation on 9 May 1945. The Bailiwick of Jersey and Bailiwick of Guernsey are two British Crown dependencies in the English Channel, near the coast of Normandy. The Channel Islands were the only part of Britain to be occupied by the German Army during the war.

Anticipating a swift victory over Britain, the occupiers experimented using a very gentle approach which set the theme for the next five years, the island authorities adopted a similar attitude, giving rise to accusations of collaboration, however as time passed the situation got gradually worse ending in near starvation for both occupied and occupiers during the winter of 1944-45, liberation arrived peacefully on 9 May 1945.

Alderney Camps—Nazi Concentration Camps in Great Britain

The Alderney Camps were prison camps built and operated by Nazi Germany during its World War II occupation of the Channel Islands. The Channel Islands was the only part of the British Isles to be occupied.

The Nazis built four camps on Alderney. The Nazi Organisation Todt (OT) operated each subcamp and used forced labour to build fortifications in Alderney including bunkers, gun emplacements, air-raid shelters, tunnels and concrete fortifications.

The camps commenced operating in January 1942. They were named after the Frisian Islands.

Four labour camps were built, which were named after the German islands of Sylt, Borkum, Norderney and Helgoland.

The camps on Alderney were run from the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany. Anton Yezhel was one of the few forced workers who was sent to Alderney to have been photographed. Sadly, if he survived the conditions is unknown.

Lager Sylt, whose gates still stand today, housed the Jewish prisoners, whose treatment shocked the locals who remained on the Islands under the Nazis.

Guernsey priest, The Reverend Douglas Ord, saw the prisoners from Sylt arrive in Guernsey in 1944.

He wrote in his diary, “Coming down from the harbour was a column of men in rows of five. All were in striped pyjama suits of sorts and their footgear varied from wooden sabots…to pieces of cloth bound around the feet. Others were barefoot.

There were more than the 1,000 of them—political prisoners brought away from Alderney. They were shaven-head and in varying degrees of weariness or lameness.

Scattered thorough the column among men of sub-human criminal type were others obviously intellectuals, men of superior calibre who had offended the brutal Nazi regime. It tore the heart to see the effects of this systematic and deliberate degradation of human beings.”

Reverend Ord added, “At the head of the column marched five evil-visaged SS men armed with automatic guns. At the rear of the column and along its flanks on both sides and at a distance of about a dozen feet from each other were more of these brutes, similarly armed, and all on alert for any attempt at a break-away. I have never seen such brutality written on human countenances.

Occasionally a man would make the ‘V’ sign to us as he went by. All the emotions of pity, sympathy, sorrow, anger and horror surged through us as we watched.

All day long the stench of their poor, wretched, unwashed bodies and clothes hung about the route they had followed.”

While there were no gas chambers at Camp Sylt, the way the prisoners were treated led to the deaths of around half of the labourers brought to the island.

Documents compiled by British intelligence services trying to work out what was going on on the Channel Islands at the time laid bare the brutal conditions of life.

One report stated, “Too undernourished and exhausted to work efficiently, these men were mercilessly beaten by the German guard and frequently when they were too weak after a beating to stand up, they were clubbed to death or finished off with a knife.”

A report by British intelligence body MI19 said, “One such was crucified on the camp gates, naked and in midwinter. The German SS guards threw buckets of cold water over him all night until he was finally dead.”

Another was caught by bloodhounds when attempting to stow away to the mainland. He was hanged and then crucified at the same gate. His body was left hanging on the gate for five days as a warning.

More than 700 camp inmates lost their lives before the camps were closed and the remaining inmates were transferred to France in 1944.

After World War II, a court-martial case was prepared against former SS Hauptsturmführer Max List, citing atrocities on Alderney. However, he did not stand trial and is believed to have lived near Hamburg until his death in the 1980s.

sources

https://www.alderneysociety.org/museum_gallery.php

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/forgotten-nazi-concentration-camp-england-revealed-archaeologists

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-guernsey-57596077

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-reveal-hidden-horrors-only-nazi-ss-camp-british-soil-180974556/