Article claims Nazis, building V1 rocket site, killed 40,000 on occupied UK island
Co-written by ex-British army commander Richard Kemp, extensive piece in the Daily Mail radically challenges accepted WWII history of Alderney, asserts Nazis came close to firing chemical weapons
An investigative report co-written by a prominent former top British army officer alleges that the Nazis murdered 40,000 people on an English Channel island in the Second World War as they tried to build a secret base there to launch chemical gas-tipped rockets at the British mainland.
The article, published on Saturday in the Daily Mail, radically challenges the known history of the wartime German occupation of Alderney, the northernmost of the inhabited Channel islands. It goes so far as to allege that if the Nazis had managed to get the rocket site operational, they could have so disrupted allied preparations for the liberation of Europe as to have altered the course of World War II.
“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,” the article alleges. “Such a toll makes Alderney nothing less than the biggest crime scene in British history.” The piece does not explain how the authors reached their conclusions about the death, but promises that a second piece, to be published on Monday, will do so.
The article claims to have uncovered a previously unknown site on the island built by the Nazis in order to launch V1 rockets at allied forces that were gathering in Britain in preparation to launch the June 6, 1944, D-Day offensive to liberate Europe.
Hitler's plan to use Sarin nerve agent against British and American troops. My article in today's @DailyMailUK. https://t.co/UYRXQdUkFq
— Rɪᴄʜᴀʀᴅ Kᴇᴍᴘ ⋁ (@COLRICHARDKEMP) May 6, 2017
The authors, including Col. Richard Kemp CBE, a former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, said that by analyzing tunnels, ramps and water tanks on the island that were previously thought to be part of Nazi fortifications, they determined that the infrastructure was actually identical to that at other known V1 launch sites elsewhere. “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,” the authors claim.
Specially constructed and finished rooms inside the tunnel complex are believed to have been built to put chemical warheads on the rockets, the authors further allege, speculating it was the deadly Sarin nerve gas.
“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 article sensationally asserts. “The Allies would have been on the back foot and Hitler in the ascendancy. He might even have fulfilled his ambition to conquer Britain.”
In fact, V1 rockets were first launched against Britain a week after D-Day, mainly fired from a site in The Netherlands.
The history of the Nazi occupation of Alderney is murky because the residents were evacuated before the Germans came in 1940, leaving few witnesses. The Channel Islands were the only part of the British isles occupied by the Germans in the war.
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The article also cites the presence of an SS unit on the island and reports of extensive chemical weapons drills as evidence that the Nazis had an unusual secret program there.
The article notes that “Alderney was six times more densely fortified than either of the two main Channel islands, Jersey and Guernsey.”
The authors allege that 40,000 slave laborers were killed there, with many “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.”
However, they offer no details on how they reached this number, which is massively larger than any previous numbers posed by historians.
Accepted histories of Alderney hold that there were some 6,000 Jewish and Russian slave laborers held in two labor and two concentration camps on the island, brought there to build the massive fortifications.
Fewer than 1,000 were known to have died there, with the rest thought to have been transferred back to France in 1944. There are 397 known prisoner graves on the island.
