News

Today the BBC announced that the University of Cambridge would be commissioning a follow-on project to the Lord Pickles Alderney Expert Review. Dr Gilly Carr, who coordinated the Alderney Review, has been awarded a grant to lead this research. The same team will be involved in submitting the lists of names that they each found during their research to create a master list of names of prisoners / labourers who were sent to Alderney.

It is estimated that getting half of the total number of names will be a very good result as so many names are lost to us now, most especially those who came from Eastern Europe. There are also GDPR considerations. While Holocaust-related archives have exemption from GDPR, there are still best practice guidelines to follow. As some labourers voluntarily went to Alderney, it would not be good practice to put a list of names in the public domain, especially as these people were not well thought of in some countries. However, it is anticipated that lists of names will be lodged offline in the appropriate archives so that people can consult them for the purpose of tracing their family members.

On 22 May 2024, the Lord Pickles Alderney Expert Review was launched at the Imperial War Museum in London. Members of the  Review team present included Lord Pickles, Chair Dr Paul Sanders, Review Coordinator Dr Gilly Carr, Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, Dr Daria Cherkaska, Kevin Colls, and Professor Anthony Glees. Other team members attending virtually were Colin Partridge, Professor Robert Jan van Pelt, Dr Karola Fings, Dr Fabian Lemnes, Dr Antonio Munoz Sanchez and Benoit Luc. Dr Marc Buggeln gave a pre-recorded presentation.

The aim of the review was to find out how many prisoners / labourers were sent to Alderney and, of these, how many died. The review also aimed to find out why the perpetrators were not tried for war crimes after the war.  The 90-page final report accompanied by a press release revealed that:

• A minimum of 7608-7812 prisoners / labourers were brought to Alderney.
• Of these, the likely range of the dead was 641-1027, with the total number unlikely to have exceeded 1134 people.
• War crimes investigations were wholly serious. The perpetrators were handed over to the Soviets in exchange for the perpetrators of the murder of airmen who escaped from Stalag Luft III in ‘The Great Escape’. The Soviets did not prosecute the Alderney perpetrators but the British convicted the perpetrators of the murders at Stalag Luft III.

The report was endorsed and supported by many, including Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis KBE, who said:

The findings of the Alderney Review are a significant and welcome development. Having an authoritative account of this harrowing element of the island’s history is vital. It enables us to accurately remember the individuals who so tragically suffered and died on British soil. Marking the relevant sites will now be an appropriate step to take, to ensure that this information is widely available.

The States of Alderney welcomed the publication of the Alderney Review. President William Tate said:

On behalf of the States of Alderney and our community, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Lord Pickles and the Review Panel for their dedication in resolving an important issue which has been the subject of much debate for many years.

The States of Guernsey welcomed the publication of the Alderney Review. Chief Minister Lyndon Trott said:

I would like to extend my thanks to Lord Pickles and the Review Panel. This is a thorough and clear report which helps to counter some of the claims we have seen in recent years with solid, well-documented evidence.

Many news agencies and publications reported on the launch and the contents of the report and these can be read here. These included reports from:

• The BBC
• A second BBC article which revealed that the President of Alderney had called for conservation status of the camps in the Island.
• ITV Channel News, who reported with film footage of the launch and its reception in Alderney.
• The New York Times
• CNN.com
• The Guernsey Press’ video coverage, posted on Twitter / X and written news coverage (second article here) (Lucy Rouget).
• Guernsey Press (Andy Brown)
• The Jersey Evening Post (Charley-Kai John)
• The Jersey Evening Post (Rod McLoughlin)
• The Jersey Evening Post (Orlando Crowcroft)
• Island FM
• Bailiwick Express
• The Times newspaper
• The Guardian newspaper
• The Daily Mail newspaper
• The Daily Telegraph newspaper
• The Jewish Chronicle (Felix Pope)
• The Jewish Chronicle (Martin Bright and Anthony Barnett)
• The Jewish News
• The Times of Israel
• Sky News
• i news
• El Mundo (Spain)
• La Razon (Spain)
• ctxt (contexto y accion) (Spain)
• Media Tribu (Chile)
• Morgen Post (Germany)
• ABC radio broadcast (Australia)
• India Education Diary

A podcast by the Bailiwick Express captured extended parts of the launch presentations and interviews with panel members, as well as reflection by Bailiwick Express journalists present at the event.

These links do not include all of the national and international news agencies who have made documentaries or published articles about the Alderney Review before it presented its findings. One of the most recent to air was CBS’s ’60 Minutes‘. Other recent news items before the launch ranged from Le Figaro (France) and the BBC to the Times.

A number of dignitaries present at the launch Tweeted their response on X, including the His Excellency Miguel Berger, German Ambassador to the UK, who welcomed the Review. The Embassy of Spain in the UK also thanked Lord Eric Pickles and his team.

Representatives from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Wiener Holocaust Library and Association of Jewish Refugees were also in attendance and commended the panel and Lord Pickles on their hard work. A representative of The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) attended from Berlin and covered the results on the Report on their website.

Lord Pickles summed up the value of his Review, saying that ‘It was important to tell the truth. The truth can never harm us’.

On 3 January 2024, Lord Eric Pickles announced that University of Buckingham’s Professor Emeritus Anthony Glees would join the Alderney Expert Review in the role of his advisor.

Sitting alongside the other 12 academic experts of the Review (Dr Antonio Munoz Sanchez of the University of Lisbon has recently joined the original team of 11 as the 12th member, taking care of the Spanish Republican prisoner numbers), Anthony Glees has been given different tasks to other members of the team. Rather than working on the question of numbers, Glees is looking into the war crimes records to find out why no trials took place of those guilty of atrocities in Alderney as well as other related and subsidiary issues of interest to the Expert Review.

Professor Glees is recognised as a nationally and internationally published expert on European affairs, the British-German relationship and Security and Intelligence questions.

We are pleased to announce the beginning of a new feature for the website: guest-authored prisoner stories. We invite relatives of those whose family members were in Alderney, whether they survived or not, to submit their stories for showcasing on this website. Today we welcome the stories of four Spanish men, all of them Spanish Republicans (Florencio Cascarosa Pirla and Florencio Cascarosa Perez).

If you have a family story to share, please look at the format of the prisoner story for the kinds of information needed (such as date of birth and death, date of arrival in Alderney, camp / workplace in Alderney, etc). We also encourage scanned photos of the person named. Please get in contact through the website.

Please keep an eye on the website for more prisoner stories coming soon; two Polish stories have been commissioned (Sylwester Kukula and Grzegorz Melnik) and will be among the next to arrive.

On 2 August, the Guernsey Press published an article by Dr Gilly Carr, one of the team members of Lord Pickles’ Expert Review, which explained just some of the methods that the team will use when calculating both those who came to Alderney during the Occupation and those who died.

There are, perhaps, misconceptions about how this work can be done and what counts as a legitimate way of counting and what does not. One of the greatest worries among some Islanders would appear to be that the team would count rumours, myths and stories passed down through families as a way of counting. While these stories are always interesting, historians cannot rely on them or use them for counting. Only archival sources will be used.

Fortunately for the Expert Review team, the methods for this sort of counting were established after the Holocaust as families, communities and countries calculated their losses. Such methods work equally well regardless of religion of the dead. Following the IHRA’s work on making sure Holocaust-related files across Europe are open, the team have free access to the files they will need to do their work. It is important to stress that no human remains will be disturbed. We encourage you to read the article to find out more.

Today Lord Eric Pickles launched the Alderney expert review. Its remit is to identify the number of people who died in Alderney during the Occupation and to identify how many were sent to the island. By calculating how many were sent to the island, this gives a cap or upper limit on those who could have died, although current figures show that the majority who were sent to Alderney survived.

The review calls upon members of the public to submit their theories, numbers and evidence for checking by the expert team. In this way, everyone can contribute to resolving this debate.

As Lord Pickles stated on Twitter, the review is underpinned by the support from Jewish community organisations and Holocaust remembrance ones, including the Association of Jewish Refugees, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Wiener Holocaust Library, the Holocaust Educational Trust, Yad Vashem, and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. He added that ‘there is now no reasonable excuse for anyone with knowledge of the numbers to fail to submit evidence to the Review. The truth cannot hurt us.’

It was announced in the national and international news this week that Lord Eric Pickles, the UK’s Post-Holocaust Issues Envoy and Head of the UK’s Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, is to launch an expert review into the numbers who died in Alderney during the Occupation. When the expert review is launched, the terms will be reported here too.

There have been competing theories in newspapers in recent years about how many died in the island during the Occupation. This is disruptive for the local population. As Lord Pickles has been quoted as saying, both minimising and inflating numbers who died during the Holocaust is Holocaust distortion. For the sake of the dead and their families, it is important to find resolution around the number of those who died so the matter can be laid to rest.

The review has been discussed in, among other places, the Guardian, the Times, the Washington Post, the Jewish Chronicle, the BBC, the Jersey Evening Post, Channel News

In March and April 2023, the artist Piers Secunda presented his art exhibition Alderney: the Holocaust on British Soil at 4 Cromwell Place in London. Secunda works by taking plaster casts of parts of sites of conflict and, through art, discusses their role as evidence of what happened there. Associated with Secunda’s exhibition was a film made of his work in Alderney filmed by Eduardo Jose Lins. Moulding Alderney can be watched here. The film concerns, primarily, an inner wall of the fort at Platte Saline which is covered in bullet marks. A ballistics expert came to view the wall and he identified the pattern of marks, their width and depth, as consistent with what one might expect from execution. Further, traces of rifle bullets of a type used by the Germans during the occupation were found in the wall.

Secunda has also given a public lecture at JW3 titled “Alderney: An Execution Wall And Its Forensic Evidence.” Viewers are encouraged to watch the lecture to understand the evidence and theory provided. Secunda notes that “the film is a presentation of the findings of two professors of Forensic Science from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York: Nicholas Petraco and Peter Diaczuk. Both examined a heavily bullet damaged wall inside the British Victorian fort at Platte Saline, on Alderney in May 2022. Between them, Nicholas and Peter have given over 600 expert forensic testimonies to civil, criminal procedures and trials. With a total between them, of over 70 years of forensic work. Both are specialists in gun crime, laboratory analysis, physical evidence, crime scene investigation and reconstruction, firearms, damage pattern analysis, microscopy, firearms residue, bullet analysis, bullet impact damage, trace element analysis, bullet ricochet and shooting reconstruction.”

Academic research always depends on peer review by other experts before it can be accepted and published. As the evidence provided here, while compelling, has yet to go through this process, we must wait before accepting this theory. Until then, the viewer is encouraged to watch these films in their entirety and then make up their own mind.