Talk:Lager Norderney

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Bericht von 2006[edit]

In 1941, Organisation Todt (OT) workers arrived on Alderney and to start with were accommodated in unoccupied houses in the Newtown area. They were initially engaged in the construction of a camp near Saye Bay, to be known as Nordeney and with a capacity to hold up to 1,000 prisoners.

Work on Nordeney was largely complete by late February, 1942 and comprised a number of buildings used as sleeping/living quarters, ablutions/toilet blocks, kitchen/store and eating area. The camp was surrounded by a barbed wire fence so that inmates could be (and were) confined to the camp area, rather than being permitted to move freely on the island where they might steal food or possibly make good an escape, requiring German personnel to be diverted to security duties to prevent this.

The initial inmates of Nordeney were its builders, supplemented by later arrivals who were shipped by boat from Cherbourg in January and March 1942. They were largely engaged in the construction of additional camps, Sylt, Borkum and Helgoland able to hold 1,000 and 500 and 800 inmates respectively.

Several boatloads of slave labourers arrived on Alderney in June and July, 1942 and by August of that year, all of the camps were full to overflowing and held over 4,000 labourers. Helgoland was largely occupied by people from the low countries, Borkum mostly by German prisoners and some Dutch, Sylt mostly by slavic workers (mostly Poles and Russian POW’s) and Nordeney Poles, Spaniards, North Africans and French, among them many classified as Jews.

As work on these camps neared completion by mid 1942, inmates were increasingly engaged on their primary purpose, the construction of gun emplacements, ammunitions stores, anti-tank defences, bunkers and other fortified positions, observation posts, air-raid shelters, and other Atlantic Wall defences on Alderney.

In June 1942, OT prisoners held at Sylt were moved to Nordeney to make room for over 1,100 prisoner under the control of the SS. In September, 1942 Nordeney was partitioned so that half the accommodation available in the camp was isolated from the rest, placed under the control of the SS and used to house additional Jewish prisoners, mostly French but some from Germany, as well as to reduce overcrowding at Sylt.

Subsequently, all of Nordeney was placed under the control of SS Hauptsturmführer List which continued to hold Jews, Slav POW’s, Spanish republicans, some French and a few Channel Islanders sent there for exemplary punishment having infringed German military regulations. The SS continued to control and administer Sylt and Nordeney until they withdrew from Alderney in May/June, 1944.

By late 1942 the camps, including Helgoland were full and remained that way, holding between 3,500 and 4,500 OT and SS prisoners until late 1943 by which time most of the work on fortifying Alderney had been completed.

Prisoners under the control of the SS in Sylt and Nordeney were subjected to a very harsh regime. They were often given the heaviest work and frequently subjected to physical abuse. Their guards did not care who saw them hitting a prisoner, sometimes for no apparent reason. SS Prisoners were provided with little food – only sufficient in the view of the Germans to enable them to do their work adequately.

Within months of arriving, SS prisoners were hollow cheeked and clearly starving. They gradually became weaker so that they became easy victims to sickness from which took a long time to recover. Hundreds did not recover. There were no regular medical staff provided for camp inmates, though an orderly from the hospital was on occasion sent to examine prisoners.

From February, 1944 until June of that year, the number of inmates at Nordeney and the other camps decreased to a total of about 300. This reduced further to less than 100 by the end of that year.

On the orders of the Kommandant, Oberst Schwalm all camp records were burned a few days before the arrival of British troops (16 May,1945) on Alderney. In consequence it is impossible to know with accuracy how many forced labourers and prisoners of war were brought to the island and how many left it.

George Pope handed over a record to British military intelligence officers which he had maintained since 1941. This record estimated that over 1,000 prisoners had been killed or died on the island between January 1942 and May 1944 and where possible gave what information was known about the circumstances of the deaths. The record conservatively estimated that over 700 of the inmates of Sylt and Nordeney camps had died before their closure in 1944.

The estimate was conservative because many of the bodies from Nordeney had been buried in trenches dug in the sands of Saye beach mear the low water mark. George Pope recorded that on several occasions in 1943, he had personally seen bodies thrown into a horse drawn cart in Nordeney. The cart had waited until low water and then been driven to the waters edge where a trench had been dug. The bodies were thrown into the tench which was then backfilled with wet sand.

His report had noted that it was impossible to know how many bodies had been disposed of in this way, nor was it possible to locate any of these graves since they would have been scoured clean by tidal movement over the many months since they were buried. The bodies would have decayed or been eaten by fish.

Colonel Schwalm told the British that 386 workers were the total casualties and that their graves on Longy Common were marked with crosses. He denied that there had been any mistreatment of prisoners or other deaths and, apart from George Popes record, there was no evidence to the contrary.

It is not known what action, if any British Military Intelligence took – or could take – on the information provided to them by George Pope. When asked why all camp records had been destroyed, Col. Schwalm declared he had followed instructions issued by the C-in-C, Channel Islands and had not questioned those orders.

There can be no doubt that Schwalm and List knew precisely what had occurred and why there was a discrepancy between the number of prisoners landing on Alderney from 1941-43 and the number departing between 1942-44. Neither seems to have been pursued by the British who had little material evidence of their activities.

Besuch aus der WP:de[edit]

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