More than 1,000 slave labourers may have died in Nazi camps on Alderney, review finds

More than 1,000 slave labourers may have died on British soil at the hands of the Nazis in the second world war, hundreds more deaths than were officially recorded in historical archives, a review has found.

The minimum number of prisoners sent to Alderney labour camps throughout the German occupation was between 7,608 and 7,812 people, the 93-page report said. Almost 100 people died in transit, in addition to the island death toll.

In 1981 the Observer disclosed that senior Nazi officers responsible for the atrocities on Alderney were living freely in Germany.

Alderney, a British crown dependency that lies about 70 miles off the English coast and 10 miles from the French coast, was occupied by German forces along with Jersey, Guernsey and Sark. The British government had demilitarised the islands, in effect leaving them without any defences as German forces advanced.

Soon after the islands were liberated in 1945, Capt Theodore Pantcheff, a British military investigator, arrived in Alderney. Witnesses told him prisoners had been beaten, hanged and shot, and corpses were often dumped in the sea.