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| The surviving gateposts of SS Lager Sylt. |
How Britain Has Buried the Jewish Dead of Alderney — And Why a Small Bronze Plaque Has Become a Battleground
By Marcus Roberts (Director) of JTrails (Registered Charity No. 1151165), Michael James (Trustee) and Robert McDowall (Trustee),
Alderney is the most westerly of the Channel Islands, a three and a half mile scrap of British territory ten miles off the French coast. Between 1940 and 1945, it was the only piece of British soil occupied by Nazi Germany — and the only place on British territory where the SS built concentration camps. Prisoners were worked to death under the doctrine of Vernichtung durch Arbeit — extermination through labour — building Hitler's Atlantic Wall. The island's fortifications earned it the nickname ‘Adolf Island’.
The terror of their experiences led to French Jewish survivors dubbing it, the ‘Buchenwald of the West’, ‘Little Auschwitz', or ‘Devil's Island’. This is not widely known in Britain. It was not meant to be.
THE COVER-UP: A Decision Made in 1945
This is the most important part of this story, and it begins not with the Nazis but with the British government.
In May 1945, Captain Theodore "Bunny" Pantcheff, a 24-year-old British intelligence officer fluent in French and German, was dispatched to Alderney to investigate war crimes. He interviewed approximately 3,000 witnesses. His report was unambiguous:
"Crimes of a systematically callous and brutal nature were carried out — on British soil — in the past three years."
Prisoners had been beaten, starved, tortured, and worked to death. Witnesses described bodies thrown from cliff-tops, folded into setting concrete, dumped in the sea. Pantcheff identified 15 suspected war criminals who had been in British custody.
Not one was ever prosecuted. Instead, the British government then made a deliberate decision to bury the story. Key steps in that cover-up:
The "Russification" decision: The Foreign Office decreed that "for practical purposes Russians may be considered to be the only occupants of these camps." This erased from the official record the 27 other nationalities present — including hundreds of French Jews, North Africans, Spanish Republicans, Poles, and Ukrainians.
Responsibility handed to the Soviets: Pantcheff's report was sent to Moscow in October 1945 and Russians blamed for not prosecuting and where the report remained classified until 1993. The British copy was claimed to be destroyed.
France deceived: When French War Crimes authorities requested information in 1947, Britain replied that "the majority of internees were Russians" and that it could only say they "were treated with great cruelty." The letter made no mention of the hundreds of French Jews who had been imprisoned alongside them. The British refused to provide evidence that could have assisted French prosecuting SS crimes against French Jews.
The war criminals walked free: The commandant of the Alderney camps, Major Carl Hoffman, was falsely reported to have been "executed in Kyiv in 1945." In truth, he was held in British custody until 1948, then released to return to Germany, where he died peacefully in Hamburg in 1974. A total of 15 suspects in British custody were allowed to walk free. The British government did not admit this until 1983. His two most senior SS subordinates — Hauptsturmführer Maximilian List and Obersturmführer Kurt Klebeck — also lived out their lives in Germany.
MI6 reclaimed the files: It can now be confirmed for the first time, that MI16 came to Alderney in 2005 and collected Pantcheff's personal copy of the full report from his widow as well as remaining papers held at the Alderney Museum. The museum director personally bagged them up and sent them. It is claimed they, ‘only received a summary in return’, but a former Curator says a copy was returned and new information shows a full copy was returned by Military Intelligence. Moreover, the files in the UK were marked as embargoed - ‘Not for TNA’, until after 2010 and reproduction of the files was refused for a film (probably in 2015).
As Madeleine Bunting wrote in her 1995 book The Model Occupation: "Trials on British soil would have been an acutely embarrassing reminder to the British public of several painful facts about the war which the government wanted quickly forgotten."
SS Lager Sylt survivor Otto Spehr stated the British were not interested in his testimony when he escaped to Britain in 1944 and was later reprimanded by the BBC for mentioning the Alderney camps in a live German broadcast. He concluded, 'The British did not want to know that there had been a concentration camp on British soil.'
The cover-up was not an accident. It was policy.
THE NUMBERS: What Happened to the dead and the Jewish Dead?
The official postwar death toll for Alderney was 337, a count derived as part of the investigation to support potential prosecutions against war criminals, rather than to provide a decisive count of the dead. Pantcheff himself acknowledged this could not represent the full picture. Recent scholarly estimates range widely:
Prof. Caroline Sturdy Colls (Staffordshire University, forensic archaeologist): 701–986 confirmed, with the true figure almost certainly higher due to deliberate concealment, with 600 missing graves. She described Alderney as a ‘Killing Site’, in an IHRA report of 2014 and that the fortifications should be seen, ‘as the products of slave labour and Killing Sites in themselves - their location can also often provide clues as to where mass graves may be located’.
Marcus Roberts (JTrails): estimates at least 3-4,000 deaths at ‘near certainty’, and potentially, c. 8,000+, as ‘highly probable’, based on eyewitness estimates and reports of deaths, labour force size and the scale of fortifications built and a detailed analysis of caloric conditions. He concludes that without additional food, Alderney was not survivable beyond weeks, or at best, months.
Two military authors in the Daily Mail (2017): a minimum of 40,000, possibly 70,000 based on the number and scale of construction and necessary labour force required to build it and calorific conditions.
What is in dispute is that the official figure of 8 Jewish deaths — later revised to just 4 by the Lord Pickles Alderney Expert Review (2024) — is wrong, and the methods used to arrive at it are deeply questionable, particularly as the report offers contradictory accounts of the numbers of Jewish deaths. One estimate of Jewish deaths based on Red Cross Records and survivor accounts by Stekol estimated nearly 800 Jewish deaths on and off the island.
THE ALDERNEY EXPERT REVIEW: A Flawed "Definitive" Account
In 2024, Lord Eric Pickles — the UK's Post-Holocaust Envoy — published an ‘Expert’ led Review of deaths on Alderney. The Review declared itself "definitive" and warned that anyone disputing its conclusions by “minimizing” or "exaggerating" Jewish deaths was a "Holocaust distorter" and condemned ‘the distortion of conspiracy theorists’. It announced to the Guernsey Evening Post that only 4 Jews had died on Alderney, as well as by Guy Walters in the ‘Independent’, even though this figure is both statistically implausible and internally contradicted by the Review's own pages.
The review, which was led by archeologists, leant heavily on German records of deaths and discounted reports of deaths by eye-witnesses, whose experiences were derogated, as being mostly useful for reporting ‘conditions’, conveying ‘atmosphere’ and providing ‘subjective responses’.
In reality, many of the eyewitnesses reporting deaths were Jewish doctors in the camps who were professional record keepers and witnessed and reported deaths in the camps to their captors. Also, much of the testimony was high-quality legal evidence, collected within hours, or days, of the liberation of the island by highly skilled British multi-lingual interrogators in highly regulated interview conditions, for the purposes of planned prosecutions against German perpetrators. The review went against the long British legal tradition of the central value of witness testimony.
The report instead followed a ‘reductive’ methodology used by German Holocaust historians, whose work and methodology, informed and directed the review. These historians often reject the idea of ‘extermination by labour’ and one of the report authors, Karola Fings had already dismissed the idea SS Lager Sylt being ‘a liquidation camp’ as far back as 2005. The camp death numbers determined by German scholars are often much lower than those provided by Jewish historians of the Holocaust, which take into account eye-witness testimony and carry out estimations. The Yad Vashem, ‘Killing Sites’ project recommends using both German and Eyewitness reports of deaths and providing ranges of numbers assimilating all the evidence available and does not make the methodological assumption that German statistics are inherently more reliable than any other form of evidence.
Holocaust survivor and scholar, Dr Michael Pinto Duchinsky commented in an article in the Jewish Chronicle about the review and the composition of the panel:
‘Even 80 years later, Jewish / Israeli and German Holocaust scholars still tend to have different approaches. Though not universal, it makes the composition of the panel feel uncomfortable from a Jewish viewpoint.’
Dr Pinto Duchinsky also identified that the review simply did not have enough evidence about prisoners transports, to make definitive conclusions:
‘There was no comprehensive list of all shipping, without which it is impossible to assess if all possible prisoners and transports were identified. However, the panel attempted to maintain that it had somehow exhaustively identified all transports without proving it had done so.’
It was admitted afterwards by the review editor, Prof. Carr, that the testimonies of British witnesses were not examined because, 'this was beyond the remit of this review, but one of the follow-ups I would like to undertake is a fuller account of the testimonies of those who were present at Alderney's Liberation.' The British witnesses speak of many more Jews being present on Alderney in 1943 – around 1,500 Jews - even though the review only claims 591 were present.
Furthermore, it omits the evidence of George Pope “the key witness to the Holocaust on British soil”, according to the Bedford Museum / AJR exhibit for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026. He witnessed 200-400 Jewish deaths and a Jewish mass grave on Longis Common in 1943, which is at the center of the current dispute about the proposed grave plaque. What is more, he, along with several other witnesses, testified that virtually every member, of a group of 2 – 3,000 Ukrainians had died on Alderney due to mass-starvation. His full-account has yet to be released by the UK, though it is crucial in determining the fates of Jews and other prisoners and is a major bone of contention.
Problems with the "4 Jews" headline:
The Review acknowledges only one Jewish transport to Alderney: Transport 641 from Drancy, carrying 591 Jews to SS Camp Norderney in 1943. Even accepting this as the only Jewish transport (which JTrails research disputes), a death rate of 4 from 591 is less than the current annual UK death rate of 9 per 1,000. The SS camp was named in cruel parody of a Jewish health spa. No one should be asked to believe it had a lower death rate than peacetime Britain.
JTrails research has identified evidence of at least 1,500 – 3,000 Jews transported to Alderney, not 591: There are accounts in British intelligence reports that both Newtown and Helgoland Camps were predominately Jewish camps, with up to 1,000 Jewish inmates each, with Helgoland described as, ‘the main Jewish camp’, but not even referenced as such in the review. British intelligence clearly states that 600 remaining Jews were transferred from Helgoland Camp, to Norderney Camp, in February, 1944 where they joined the 591 Jews described in the review, so at least 1,200 Jews were present in 1944.
The Review's own table of deaths (p. 37) references: "Jews and political prisoners' murdered during so-called 'dance' killings and cliff-edge shootings — c.100 (minimum, as multiple actions may have occurred)." This figure was never announced to the press and was not included in the headline tally of 4.
The Review declines to classify the c. 250 deaths in the sinking of the ship Minotaur as Jewish: It only admits that half of the ‘passengers’ may have been killed, despite every other historian consistently identifying them as French Jews, who were not ‘passengers’ but captives held in the holds and when the front hold was blown wide open by a torpedo, it left tangled bodies caught-up in the peeled-back forward section, when it limped into port.
The Review ignores approximately 250 worked-out Jews and North Africans reportedly sent to camps in Germany to be gassed.
Most strikingly, the Review reversed its own previous position: Lord Pickles and his experts had previously vigorously stated that "extermination by labour" took place on Alderney. The 2024 Review retreated from this, just weeks beforehand, concluding instead that the Germans were not trying to kill anyone — offering the euphemism "eliminatory prejudice" instead.
A French review of Organisation Todt camps, published three months before the Alderney Review, reached the opposite conclusion:
"It was mainly the Jewish internees in the camps of northern France and the forced labourers on the Channel Islands who experienced a concentration camp regime that caused many deaths and deportations to the extermination camps. The OT in France is therefore fully part of the murderous history of the Nazi regime during the Second World War."
This French review was ignored by the Alderney Expert Review entirely.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans — one of Britain's foremost historians of the Third Reich — recently stated publicly that the UK government's denial of extermination by labour on Alderney is "absolutely incorrect" and "an antiquated view," and that "there is plenty of recent evidence to show many more died."
The Review is not, in any meaningful academic sense, "definitive." It has not been published by a major academic press, has not undergone genuine external peer review by independent scholars, and has not been subjected to correction by professional academic editors. It had been suggested that leading Jewish academics such a Sir Simon Schama would provide independent oversight, but this did not happen.
Scholars are reluctant to challenge it publicly and a member of the review panel (backed by their university) has sent solicitor’s warning letters to the Jewish organization ‘Jtrails’ which has publicly, strongly criticized the review. The legal letters, threaten severe repercussions for responses that upset the respondent. JTrails affirms that full freedom of speech, academic freedom of research, must not be suppressed and that the right of free expression and the right to put forward an ‘alternative perspective’ – even a Jewish one - on the findings of the review are crucial to determine the truth in a highly contested history. Lawfare-by-threat should never succeed.
THE PLAQUE: A Modest Proposal Refused
Since 2008, JTrails — working with partners including the Committee for the Preservation of European Jewish Cemeteries (CPJCE), Kedoishim, and local Alderney residents — has sought to establish proper memorialisation at Longis Common, where mass graves from the occupation are known to exist.
The proposal now before the States of Alderney is for a single small bronze or stone plaque, to be placed along the path at Longis Common. Its proposed wording:
"This plaque is dedicated to the memory of the unknown souls, who perished on this island between 1941 and 1945 during the Nazi occupation of Alderney, including Jews, whom still rest at this site. The Plaque also stands in remembrance of all victims of Nazism who rest not only here but in other places unknown upon Alderney. We honour your memory."
The proposed plaque does not make a public affirmation that the site is a ‘Jewish mass-grave’ but recognizes all victims in the vicinity. This is due to the rejection of the previous application that was more explicit in the matter and in order that Jewish community members may yet come to an appropriate place to remember and pray. It also requests that a dog-waste bin currently positioned within the known cemetery boundary be moved a short distance east, as a mark of basic respect.
This application was rejected.
The original application was rejected by the States of Alderney's Policy and Finance Committee cited, among other reasons, "no official proof of a mass burial site on island." This claim is false, and is contradicted by the States' own declared authority — the Alderney Expert Review — which states on page 34 that there remain "the 12 bodies still remaining in the mass grave at Longy, and the 5 un-exhumed bodies at St Anne's cemetery," and on page 41 describes "several probable mass graves identified within and outside the boundaries of Longy Common cemetery."
It is further contradicted by Lord Pickles himself, who stated in an ITV Guernsey interview (14 February 2024): "We recognise there are a number of Jewish graves and it is important that they are not disturbed." He was acknowledging in his messaging the request to the States of Alderney, by the Chief Rabbi in 2019, that potential Jewish graves remaining on site should be preserved in perpetuity.
Also, Prof. Gilly Carr (Cambridge), who as IHRA representative at a July 2021 island meeting — with Lord Pickles present — pointed directly to the location where the plaque is proposed in a public meeting with Lord Pickles and all the islanders and said:
"aerial photos and geophysical survey show further pits here. We think that there's a good chance that there may once have been, or may still be, bodies there. What this proposes would be to somehow maybe put a marker in the corners of this area to demarcate where it is."
Prof. Carr recently wrote in the Guernsey Press (28 April 2026) that:
"Yes, there [is] solid archaeological evidence for mass graves on Longis Common. I support Caroline Sturdy Colls' findings on this and always have."
She also stated that the grave site remained sacred to the Jewish community and should be marked regardless of the status of the graves. ‘According to Jewish traditions, even if bodies have been removed, the area of a former cemetery should still be considered permanently sacred.’
The States of Alderney rejected a plaque on grounds that their own experts — and the UK Post-Holocaust Envoy — directly contradict.
THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
The physical evidence for remaining burials on Longis Common is substantial and multi-layered:
Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) surveys by Prof. Sturdy Colls have confirmed deep pits consistent with burials in the area. Her work has passed peer review. One feature, designated L2, has been GPR-confirmed as a grave-pit and corresponds to the area identified as a probable Jewish mass grave.
Wartime aerial photographs from August 1943 show geomorphological changes consistent with excavation in the same locations.
3D photogrammetry surveys (2025) by JTrails using Digital Surface Models and Gaussian Splat imaging reveal faint but visible lines of grave trenches to the north of the official "Russian Cemetery," consistent with 1943 Allied aerial imagery.
Eyewitness testimony from Ray Gaudion, an Alderney resident who as a teenager assisted the island undertaker during postwar exhumations, described in multiple consistent interviews how excavators were restricted to a fenced area and that skeletal remains extended well beyond it — "[the excavator was] doing that in the sand as long as his arm could go but he couldn't touch them, he wasn't allowed to get them out… they were only allowed to dig where it was fenced-off."
British military witnesses at liberation, including Albert Pike, described "about 250 Russian graves bearing crosses and many unmarked graves" as well as ground and graves higher up the slope that had been "ploughed over."
Admissions from British military officials reported by Solomon Steckoll: "They also found two mass graves in one of which they counted 88 corpses of what later were revealed to be the remains of French Jews and some Russians. Shocked by what they saw, the soldiers reburied them." (Observer Review, 31 May 1981)
In 2017, the States of Alderney formally requested the missing burial files from the UK government, expecting them to disprove the claims. The UK refused to supply them. The burden of proof has now shifted: it is not for JTrails to prove the graves are there; it is for the UK government to prove they are not.
THE CONTEXT: Antisemitism and the Rejection
While the campaign for the plaque has not been conducted in a total vacuum of goodwill, there have been some disturbing, hostile, dismissive, and borderline anti-Jewish reactions. In response to a factual Facebook post on "Alderney Chit Chat" about the planning rejection, JTrails encountered what it characterizes as bizarrely oppositional responses including:
Unsupported factual denials: "What happened in Alderney has got nothing to do with the Holocaust."
Delegitimisation: Dismissing stakeholder organisations as merely a "tour company" motivated by profit. This theme was taken-up in the recent Guernsey Press article which described Jtrails as, ‘a Northamptonshire based heritage tour company’ and would not acknowledge that JTrails is a registered UK Jewish heritage charity providing public benefit.
Double standards: Arguing that the Hammond Memorial (which itself contains multiple individual group plaques) is sufficient for all purposes — a standard thus far only applied to Jewish memorialisation.
Issue Conflation: A member of the States told JTrails not to apply "for ten years, because of Gaza" — conflating a planning application for a wartime grave marker with contemporary Middle East politics.
Aggressive Dissonance: One former museum curator wrote "Your sob story adds nothing to the discussion" in responding to a relative of Anthony Pope — the youngest (2 years old) British victim of the Nazis on Alderney who is buried in an unmarked grave.
Ill-considered responses do not create any legitimate ground for refusing planning permission. The States of Alderney should consider whether it has adequate training in place to ensure that planning decisions are not contaminated by a desire to erase Alderney’s history, regardless of the motive.
THE CALL TO ACTION
JTrails, the CPJCE, Kedoishim, and their co-applicants — including Michael James (Alderney resident and researcher), Robert McDowall (Alderney resident and former First Minister of Alderney), and Holocaust educator and author Michael Rosen — are now calling on the States of Alderney to:
Approve the revised plaque application, which has been deliberately moderated to reflect agreed facts and does not make claims beyond what the States' own authorities have already accepted.
Honour the commitments made by the States of Guernsey, States of Alderney, the IHRA, the UK Government and representatives including, President Tate, Lord Pickles, Prof. Carr, and the late Statesman Graham McKinley OBE — to mark and memorialise the graves on Longis Common.
Refer the application to the full States rather than a small committee, given the clear failures of process in the original rejection.
Request the UK government release the missing burial files that it refused to supply in 2017.
WHY THIS MATTERS NOW
Britain is building a £100 million Holocaust Memorial next to the Houses of Parliament, launched by the publication of ‘Britains Promise to Remember’ (2016). Its slogan is: "Confronting Evil, Assuming Responsibility."
As Michael James, an Alderney resident who has spent years researching his island's history, puts it:
"How can Britain, in good conscience, build a £100 million memorial and become head of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, if we can't come clean about one little fingertip of the Holocaust on British soil?"
The IHRA Charter — to which the States of Alderney has signed up — explicitly mandates that "each and every site should be identified in situ," whether through a plaque, information board, or other marker. Longis Common, where victims of Nazi persecution on British soil almost certainly still lie buried, has no such marker.
Our proposal is a small bronze plaque. It will not disturb the dead. It will not harm the island's beauty. It will not cost the States of Alderney anything. It is funded by a US foundation that supplies memorials across Europe.
It will, however, allow Jewish visitors — and visitors of every background — to find the site, to stand at the right place, and to say a prayer for the dead.
That is not too much to ask.
For press enquiries: Michael James, Alderney Robert McDowall, Alderney www.jtrails.org (Address available on request — not for publication)
JTrails is a registered UK Jewish Heritage Charity (No. 1151165). The charity's Alderney work is conducted in partnership with the Committee for the Preservation of European Jewish Cemeteries (CPJCE) and Kedoishim UK.
Background reporting: Isobel Cockerell, Coda Story (Orwell Prize-nominated, 2023); Madeleine Bunting, The Model Occupation (1995); Solomon H. Steckoll, The Alderney Death Camp (1982); Index on Censorship (2023); The Sunday Times (Gabriel Pogrund); The Observer.
[1] Prof. Caroline Sturdy Colls — Alderney Study
Institution: Staffordshire University (Professor of Conflict Archaeology and Forensic Investigation)
Duration: Ongoing since 2010
Methods Used
Sturdy Colls pioneered the use of non-invasive forensic techniques on Alderney, specifically to avoid disturbing potential Jewish graves (in accordance with Jewish Halacha law prohibiting exhumation). Her toolkit included:
Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) — to detect sub-surface burial pits
Wartime aerial photography — to identify geomorphological changes (signs of digging) at known grave locations
Drone surveys and laser technology
3D photogrammetry — including cutting-edge "Gaussian Splat" imaging (2025 surveys), which revealed faint but visible lines of grave trenches at Longis Common
Key Findings
GPR confirmed deep pits consistent with burials near the perimeter of the former cemetery on Longis Common. One feature, designated "L2," has been GPR-confirmed as a grave-pit and corresponds to the suspected location of a Jewish mass grave.
Wartime aerial photographs from August 1943 show excavation activity in the same locations as the GPR anomalies.
Her 2025 photogrammetry surveys revealed traces of grave trenches to the north of the official "Russian Cemetery" — consistent with Allied aerial imagery from 1943.
She concluded it is "highly likely that areas of burials survive" near the former cemetery perimeter.
Her estimate of confirmed deaths: 701–986, while acknowledging the true figure is "undoubtedly higher" due to Nazi efforts to conceal crimes.
On Jewish Victims
Sturdy Colls believes the scale of Jewish atrocities has been systematically downplayed: "It is evident from the wide range of testimonies available and from the surveys we did of the camps in which Jews were housed that they were treated appallingly, and more Jews likely died than we know of."
She stated the camps on Alderney were part of a broader network of sites housing Jews, with conditions mirroring those elsewhere in occupied Europe.
Published Work
2019 Smithsonian Channel documentary: "Adolf Island" — followed her forensic investigation on the island; brought international attention but provoked fierce local hostility, including threats to shoot down her drones.
Book: Adolf Island: The Nazi Occupation of Alderney — published 2024/2025, her full account of the investigation.
Peer Review and Academic Standing
Her work has passed peer review by independent experts in the field.
Prof. Gilly Carr (Cambridge), despite other disagreements with the JTrails campaign, has explicitly stated: "Yes, there is solid archaeological evidence for mass graves on Longis Common. I support Caroline Sturdy Colls' findings on this and always have."
Lord Pickles (UK Post-Holocaust Envoy) cited both archaeological and archival evidence when stating: "We recognise there are a number of Jewish graves and it is important that they are not disturbed."
Controversy
Sturdy Colls encountered unusually severe resistance on Alderney:
Residents threatened to shoot down her drones
A leaked documentary pitch (obtained via a hack of the production company's website) appeared to suggest excavating graves — she denies this was ever her intention and the complaint to her university was not upheld
She has stated she has never in her career experienced comparable professional hostility: "All because they want to forget the memory of people who were brutalized and murdered on this island."
Bottom line: Sturdy Colls' study provides the strongest independent scientific evidence that mass graves — including probable Jewish burials — remain in situ at Longis Common. Her findings are accepted even by critics of the broader JTrails memorialisation campaign, making the States of Alderney's claim of "no official proof of a mass burial site" particularly difficult to sustain.
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