‘Forgotten’ Nazi camp on British soil revealed by archaeologists

March 31, 2020

Today, the site of the former concentration camp Sylt is an overgrown patch of land hard against the rugged cliffs of Alderney, part of a British Crown Dependency in the Channel Islands. But just 75 years ago, it was a feared and heavily guarded German prison where hundreds of men suffered and died at the hands of their Nazi captors on its soil.

With the end of the war, Lager (camp) Sylt and other smaller German camps on Alderney were dismantled and slowly faded into the landscape. Now, a British team of archaeologists has reconstructed Lager Sylt and tracked how it grew over its short but brutal history. Their research is published today in the journal Antiquity.

Caroline Sturdy Colls, an archaeologist with expertise in Holocaust sites and lead author on the study, says the evidence for the crimes committed at Lager Sylt has been “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, who is now a professor of conflict archaeology and genocide investigation at Staffordshire University in England. “I had a wider awareness of the fact that the Germans occupied the Channel Islands, but not really that they built those camps.”

Sturdy Colls and her colleagues wanted to explore how forensic archaeological methods could bring to light this history. They began studying Lager Sylt in 2010, combining evidence from archival records, historic aerial photographs, and new non-invasive survey techniques like LiDAR and ground-penetrating radar.

One important aspect of the research was simply proving that much of the camp indeed survives today. The wartime history of the site remains a taboo subject on the island. Sturdy Colls says some residents of Alderney had been supportive. But the team has faced resistance to their work from local authorities, especially after a 2019 documentary titled “Adolf Island” featured her study of the camp and claims that there might be as-yet unaccounted for mass graves at the World War II-era cemetery.