The Proximity to Violence: the experiences of Channel Islanders in Alderney during the German occupation, 1940-1945

The Channel Islands were occupied by German forces in the early summer of 1940. Unlike the two largest islands, the population of Alderney had almost wholly evacuated to the UK, leaving this third-largest island largely empty for German forces to act how they wished. This involved building forced labor camps and a concentration camp, bringing thousands of forced and slave laborers from across Europe to build the Atlantic Wall, and treating them with brutality. These acts were carried out without the kind of civilian audience who acted to moderate the hands of the occupiers in Guernsey and Jersey. There was, however, a group of civilians who were watching: the men and women from Guernsey and, later, Jersey who volunteered or were conscripted by the German occupiers to work in Alderney, and who later gave testimonies to war crimes investigators. What did ‘volunteering’ to work in Alderney mean in practice? How much did Islanders witness, and what was their experience over five years of occupation? This paper assesses their perspective of what happened in Alderney.