Page 11 - TORCH Magazine - Issue #19

direct orders of Adolf Hitler, Alderney became a strategic part of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall coastal defence system that stretched along the western edge of Europe.
The Germans brought around 6,000 slave labourers with them to the island to build the massive fortifications that were completed in
an astonishingly short amount of time and on
an unprecedented scale. Most of those sent to the camps were prisoners of war and civilians from Poland, Ukraine, Russia and other Soviet territories along with German and Spanish political prisoners. There were also hundreds of French Jews, incarcerated in huts separate from the rest of the prisoners and encircled by barbed wire.
In 1943, two of the labour camps, Lager
Sylt and Lager Norderney, were converted to concentration camps run by the “Death’s Head Unit” of the SS paramilitary.
Yet information about the scale of the SS operation and what happened to the victims on the island has remained largely unknown.
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