Hitler’s horror island: Inside the only concentration camp on British soil from which ‘everybody heard the screams’ – and the little-known atrocities committed there

The tiny Channel Island of Alderney is a hidden gem, with stunning beaches and abundant wildlife. But it is also the only place on British soil to have housed a Nazi concentration camp.

Earlier this year a review of the atrocities committed there concluded that not only did far more people die than was originally officially claimed, but that there had been a cover-up by the British authorities. Now a new two-part Sky History series, Hitler’s British Island, looks into Alderney’s grisly wartime past.

For Hitler, occupying the Channel Islands was the first step to an invasion of Britain. Alderney, codenamed ‘Adolf’ by the Nazis, was evacuated by the Royal Navy after France fell in 1940. Of a population of about 1,500, only a few remained.

Among those who stayed was seaman George Pope, his wife and four children. His daughter Janet recalls life under occupation in the documentary. ‘My mother refused to speak any German but the children learned to say “Guten tag” and the Germans loved it because we were the only children on the island. Every day was a struggle to find food. Now and then soldiers would turn up on the doorstep in their big boots to see if there was anything that shouldn’t be there.’

Alderney, codenamed ‘Adolf’ by the Nazis, was evacuated by the Royal Navy after France fell in 1940

In 1941 Hitler ordered Alderney to be fortified as part of his ‘Atlantic Wall’ to safeguard his new territory, and suddenly the island was filled with slave labourers – and soldiers overseeing them. By 1943 there were 3,200 Nazis and more than 4,000 prisoners on Alderney, housed in four camps. Three were forced labour camps. The fourth, Lager Sylt, was run by the SS. This was where the Jews were kept and it was the harshest on the island.

‘We knew pretty well what was going on,’ Janet says. ‘People dying of starvation and being beaten to death. There were a couple of incidents where somebody had been caught stealing food, and I think everybody heard the screams.’

When the island was liberated in 1945, British military investigator Captain Theodore Pantcheff was sent to Alderney. He interviewed George Pope, who handed over a list he said he’d been given by a Nazi with the names of 1,000 people who had been killed on the island. But Pantcheff wasn’t sure he could trust Pope – was he a collaborator? Pope had been a supporter of Oswald Mosley – although Janet insists her father had fallen out with Mosley because of his antisemitism, and had even tried to hit the fascist leader when he’d spotted him in the street.

‘There was no option but for my father to have a relationship with the Nazis. He was ushered to the Commandant’s office, who said to him, “You have a family?” And when my father said yes, he said, “And I have a gun.”

Nazi soldiers with a woman on the island in 1942

‘Before liberation he was given a document stolen by a German officer, and when the British arrived my father invited a couple of officers to our house and said, “Here you are. It’s a German document about the deaths. Look at the insignia.”’

Pope’s list has never been seen again, and Pantcheff’s final report led to an official figure of 389 people having been killed on Alderney. But rumours of mass deaths continued.

Earlier this year, a new report on atrocities on Alderney found between 641 and 1,027 people had died under the ‘brutality, sadism and murder’ of the Nazis, and that a ‘succession of cover-ups’ were a ‘stain on the reputations of successive British governments’. British authorities had hidden behind an agreement between the Allies that each would be responsible for trying the war crimes targeted at their own populations. Although the horrors took place on British soil, it was decided that the USSR should try the Nazis because most of the prisoners were Russian.

The Soviet Union ‘decided to do nothing’ with the evidence. Nobody was ever brought to justice. But at least the story is now being told.

• Hitler’s British Island, Tuesday, 9pm, Sky History.