Himmler’s role in mass execution at Britain’s only Nazi concentration camp revealed

The direct written order from the head of the SS is the first known instruction indicating that plans had been drawn up to exterminate all inmates of the only Nazi concentration and labor camps to exist on British soil, The Observer writes.

Himmler, a key organizer of the Holocaust, instructed commanders on Alderney to kill all their prisoners and workers “without delay” if they caused trouble.

During the Nazi occupation, the Norman island of Alderney, owned by the British Crown, was home to four labor camps, including a concentration camp whose inhabitants were forced to build the huge defenses of Hitler’s so-called Atlantic Wall.

Other documents obtained from SS headquarters and dating back to 1943 suggest that significantly more prisoners were likely killed on Alderney than the official death toll of almost 400 suggests.

The British government is currently trying to determine the exact extent of the Holocaust in Alderney by counting the number of prisoners who were killed in an ongoing review led by Lord Pickles, Britain’s Holocaust envoy.

Although the public was invited to submit evidence for review, concerns about the “lenient” instructions given to potential authors persuaded renowned wartime historian and writer Ian Sayer to instead hand over the SS documents from his archive to The Observer.

Among these documents is a letter from Himmler to SS-Hauptsturmführer Maximilian List, commander of the SS construction brigade in Alderney.

Himmler’s letter, dated August 19, 1943, and marked “top secret,” states: “If – in the event of an attack – the prisoners show even the slightest indication that they intend to cause trouble, you must act immediately and without ceremony and shoot the culprits. If order is still not restored, you must shoot all the prisoners without delay.”

The letter was delivered to List personally by courier with Himmler’s specific orders to ensure that his order to kill hundreds of unarmed and abused enslaved workers would never be made public.

“He [Лист] must read it three times and then send it back to me through you without making a copy of it,” declares Himmler, the man responsible for many of the worst crimes of the Third Reich.

Professor Richard Evans, emeritus professor of history at the University of Cambridge, has suggested that Himmler’s order may have been prompted by a prisoner uprising at Treblinka, one of the deadliest Nazi extermination camps in occupied Poland, which occurred a few days before the SS chief wrote the letter to List .

“On August 2, 1943, there was a prisoner uprising at Treblinka, and Himmler may have been concerned about this. Possibly also due to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in May. This reaction was quite standard for Himmler,” says Professor Evans.

However, Richard Evans, an internationally recognized expert on German history, said it was not entirely certain that the SS chief was informed of the Treblinka uprising before the end of August.

What is even more certain, according to previously unpublished documents, are attempts to keep secret Himmler’s order to kill prisoners on British soil. A separate letter dated 15 September 1943 reports that another SS officer, Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, informed Himmler’s aide-de-camp Rudolf Brandt that all documents relating to the Alderney assassination order had been destroyed.

“There is no longer any written material on this topic,” says the letter, also marked “top secret.”

However, Himmler’s letter somehow survived and was probably looted from SS headquarters after the war, acquired by Sayer at a New York auction in June 1983.

The 78-year-old was known for tracking down Nazi-stolen gold and war criminals and was a leading expert on wartime documents, but was uncomfortable presenting them to the government.

“As someone who has helped various societies, museums, authors and journalists over the years by providing copies of documents and letters from my World War II archive, I thought I could make a contribution,” said Ian Sayer, who 1988 tracked down the highest-ranking surviving Nazi in the world, SS General Wilhelm Mohnke.

Sayer believes government guidelines for making documents available to the public will deter members of the public wanting to help, particularly the threat from a request that documents not submitted in a specific format “will be ignored.”

Describing the SS documents as having “significant historical significance,” Sayer added: “The investigation itself is a worthy endeavor, but it is wrong to treat the people you are asking for help that way.”

Professor Robert Jan van Pelt from Canada’s University of Waterloo, a leading expert on Auschwitz, confirmed this information. the authenticity of the documents, concluding that they are “undoubtedly genuine.”

Van Pelt, who was an expert witness in the London trial of Holocaust denier David Irving, is also currently part of the expert panel at the Alderney inquiry, led by Pickles.

The same set of documents collected by Sayer reveals information about the SS construction crew tasked with building the Nazi defenses on Alderney, with one passage applauding the work ethic of the enslaved workers, saying that “the productivity of the prisoners equaled that of the German workers.”