Page 14 - TORCH Magazine - Issue #19

of conflict archaeology and genocide investigation at Staffordshire University in England, has spent more than ten years studying the Alderney camps. She says the physical traces of the atrocities committed at Sylt have been both “physically and metaphorically buried.”
“As a British citizen and a researcher,
I hadn’t heard about the atrocities perpetrated on Alderney during World War II until I was doing my Ph.D. research,” says Sturdy Colls, “I had a wider awareness of the fact that the Germans occupied the Channel Islands, but not really that they built those camps.”
In a recent study, Sturdy Colls and
her team combined archival records
with modern forensic methods such
as ground-penetrating radar. To avoid digging, the team used Lidar, which uses lasers to map large areas, attaching it to a drone through which they found physical evidence supporting witness accounts
of harsh conditions at Sylt. They mapped the surviving shallow depressions of the barracks at the camp, confirming witness reports of overcrowding. Each prisoner had just 16 square feet (1.5 m2) of space at best. The team made virtual-reality visualisations for a clearer view of features.
The entrance to the former Nazi concentration camp.
Using aerial images, the researchers also tracked how both the size and security measures of Lager Sylt drastically increased when it evolved from a labour camp to a concentration camp in 1943.
“We’re not the first people to discover this camp existed—but despite all those testimonies and despite all those previous efforts, the history of the site was still not known,” Sturdy Colls says.
“The work we did was trying to help the stories of the people who suffered be known more widely.”
Chemical weapons?
Away from the world’s attention, the secrecy afforded by occupied Alderney has raised speculation about a further sinister role. The takeover by the notorious SS
on Alderney – and nowhere else in the Channel Islands – in place of operational German command has only added to the mystery.
In 2017, Colonel Richard Kemp and John Weigold visited Alderney and conducted a survey of the land and remaining evidence, including the miles of complex system
of tunnels stretching deep underground, hewn out of bare rock by the slave labour
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