HITLER’S BRITISH DEATH ISLAND

It’s an astonishing story uncovered by one of Britain’s top soldiers after months of forensic research. How the Nazis murdered as many as 40,000 in Channel Island concentration camps – and planned to blitz the South Coast with chemical weapons

ON A spring afternoon, the grassy headland is bursting with a joy that lifts the soul. Sunshine, blue sea and sky; splashes of golden gorse catch the light and bluebells sway in the breeze; larks float on air currents while gannets in their thousands swoop and screech on a rocky island below.

This is the southern tip of Alderney, smallest of the three main Channel Islands. Across the water, Guernsey, Sark and Jersey glisten. It has to be one of the most beautiful, tranquil and inspiring sights in the whole of Britain.

But close your eyes, take your mind back 75 years . . . and this idyll is a scene of sheer horror.

We are standing on the remains of a massive World War II gun emplacement — a German gun. To the left, a small valley leads down to the cliff top.

All those years ago it was known as the Valley of Death because down it were herded unknown numbers of slave workers, too exhausted to be of use any longer to their Nazi masters, to be thrown to their death on the rocks and swept away by the sea.

Behind us, lost in the undergrowth, are the chilling remains of a concentration camp, run by the SS as ruthlessly and inhumanely as any of its counterparts in the Third Reich, where men were whipped, bludgeoned, starved, hanged, shot, even crucified.

You have to pinch yourself to remember that this is British soil.

Unspeakable atrocities — which we will spell out in detail later — took place here. Not in distant territories on the other side of Europe, but just 60 miles from the coast of England, on an island that is British through and through and has owed its allegiance to the Crown since 1066.

That tiny Alderney — less than four miles long and a mile-and-ahalf wide — was the site of slave labour camps during the war has been recognised for decades. But the scale of the operation and the number of deaths there have always been played down. After years of research, we are now in a position to reveal the grimmest truths.

THE numbers who died there in helping hitler and his henchmen pursue their evil master-plan were not the few hundreds spoken of in semi- official sources and history books. In fact, tens of thousands lost their lives in the most brutal way — at least 40,000 by our calculations and possibly many, many more.

Such a toll makes Alderney nothing less than the biggest crime scene in British history.

THE project on which they were engaged was not just the massive defensive works — the fortifications, bunkers, block-houses and anti-tank walls built all over the island on hitler’s express orders to forestall an Allied invasion. There was a deadly offensive capability, too, never previously known.

We have uncovered incontrovertible evidence that a top-secret launcher site for V1 missiles — one of hitler’s vengeance weapons — was being constructed on the island.

And the reason for that secrecy was that, shockingly, they were to be armed not with conventional explosives, but with internationally outlawed chemical warheads, capable of causing the same degree of destruction, terror and panic seen recently by President Assad’s chemical strike in Syria.

They are likely to have contained the very same nerve gas: Sarin.

The target of these deadly doodlebugs? The southern coast of England from Weymouth to Plymouth, where in the winter of 1943 and spring of 1944 hundreds of thousands of British and American troops were assembling and preparing for the D-Day invasion.

If the Alderney missiles had been fired — and our conclusion is that they were within a whisker of this happening — their chemical payloads would have thrown Allied invasion plans into such chaos that D-Day could not have taken place on June 6, 1944, and the whole course of World War II would have been drastically altered.

The Allies would have been on the back foot and hitler in the

ascendancy. He might even have fulfilled his ambition to conquer Britain.

These are startling conclusions and they will change for ever perceptions of what really happened during the German occupation of Alderney.

When the Channel Islands were liberated in 1945, there was a mood and a move to minimise the events of the past five years when a slice of British territory had to exist under the Nazi heel.

It was embarrassing for the British government of the day, which had made a conscious decision in 1940 not to fight for the islands, but leave the residents to their fate.

It was embarrassing, too, for islanders and officials on Jersey and Guernsey who came to terms with the invaders in ways that sometimes bordered on collaboration and even treason. Uncomfortable questions were not asked. Veils were pulled over the truth, with the result that the full story of what happened on Alderney has been hidden.

Until now. WE ARE military men, with experience from Northern Ireland to Bosnia, the Middle East and beyond. One of us [Col Richard Kemp] commanded British forces in Afghanistan. We have expertise in warfare and weaponry, strategy, logistics, terrain, intelligence.

We have brought that distinctive military perspective to bear on the troubled and often confusing wartime history of Alderney, which we have both known intimately over many years.

What makes Alderney unique in the occupation of the Channel Islands is that — whereas most of the civilian population remained in Guernsey and Jersey — the island was almost totally evacuated before the all-conquering German army arrived in late June 1940.

In six ships, its 1,500 residents left en masse for the mainland of Britain, where they remained for the rest of the war. Just half-adozen resolute souls stayed behind and quietly got on with their lives.

The result was that, with no prying eyes to monitor the activities of the roughly 3,000- strong German garrison, they had a free hand to do whatever they wanted.

They began by putting in massive guns to protect the island from air and sea. Then — on Hitler’s express order in the summer of 1941 after a number of British commando raids on other Channel Islands — they built fortifications on an unprecedented scale to make Alderney virtually impregnable. Forts and barracks built in the Victorian era were updated and strengthened.

New bunkers, blockhouses and reinforced defences were constructed by slave workers brought in their thousands from the Nazi empire all over Europe under the direction of the notorious Organisation Todt.

This was an immense joint civilian and military engineering group that in peacetime had built Germany’s autobahns, and in wartime was given the task of fortifying the defences of the Third Reich.

Hitler made it plain he intended to hang on to the Channel Islands at all costs. He had turned his attention away from Britain after the RAF thwarted his attempt to bomb the country into submission in 1940. He switched the direction of the war to the Soviet Union and the Eastern Front. But his occupation of these outposts in the Channel symbolised his power. They were his jackboot planted firmly in England’s front garden. They would also cover his back.

As his main armies marauded eastwards, the Channel Islands would be a pivotal point of the Atlantic Wall, the line of defences and strongholds he also ordered to be built along the coast of France.

Fortification of Alderney was a brutal business (as we will explain in more detail in the next part of this series on Monday).

When it was completed, the island bristled with hundreds of bunkers, casements and armoured turrets. It had five coastal artillery batteries and 22 anti- aircraft batteries, giving it more cover per square yard than anywhere else in the Third Reich, including Hitler’s