Buried under Concrete: Nazi Secrets in Dresden and Alderney

Inner submission to the propaganda: similarities between Nazi Germany and the Occupation of the Channel Islands

I’ve written before about Victor Klemperer’s diaries and my own family connections with WW2. I find it fascinating to explore the parallels between the weaponisation of the behavioural science that Professor Klemperer experienced in Nazi Germany, and what we see forced upon us today. Propaganda and censorship are so powerful, after a sustained campaign many people end up genuinely believing the lies. Here, I reflect on a particular tragic excerpt from Victor’s diary (Vol 2) describing citizens’ trust in authority and the cognitive dissonance of Channel Islanders during and after their Nazi Occupation.

Berlin: Image by Jace & Afsoon on Unsplash

30^th January 1943, Dresden, Germany - from Victor Klemperer’s Diary, Vol 2:

[Jacobi, the Jewish cemetery custodian] told me there will be seven funerals next Wednesday, of which six have to be kept secret. [these were] the bodies of Jews from the Protectorate, who were condemned to death. They were brought to Dredsen for execution. In the county court building on Münchner Platz there is an electronically powered guillotine, a head every two minutes, not just Jewish ones; the main killing time is 6pm, often as many as twenty-five heads fall, one after the other.

Often associated with the French, according to Nazi records, the guillotine was eventually used to execute some 16,500 people between 1933 and 1945, many of them resistance fighters and political dissidents. [Source: History Channel]

The Dresden Guillotine described by Klemperer: From Dark History blog (2012)

Scenes of Dresden over the years: Common Licence

Many executions were carried out in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison. Between 1933 and 1945, approximately 2,891 people were decapitated or hanged in Plötzensee by this machine:

The Plotzensee guillotine after the war: from Dark History (2012)

Those executed were accused of being members of a Communist resistance group, or the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen Organization (aka Red Chapel), the Kreisau Circle or other resistance groups. The attempted assassination on Hitler on the 20th of July 1944, led by a group of officers meant another 90 people were executed in Plötzensee for their role over the following year.

Klemperer goes on to explain how the guillotine story was too horrific to be true but he felt the weight of fear, confusion and anxiety he and his wife Eva lived under during this time (who were they to believe?):

I unhesitatingly assume that ‘often’ and the number are exaggerations, but even if only half of it is true […] A state of siege has been declared and announced on the wireless and sentence of death by shooting has been placed on every act of insubordination and sabotage […] (my emphasis)

Eight months after Klemperer wrote that January entry, on 7th–8th September 1943, an Allied bombing raid on Dresden partly demolished that county court execution building. The guillotine was damaged, so the Nazis hanged the 86 individuals housed there, to prevent their escape. Some of those prisoners were pending clemency proceedings but their deaths were covered-up and the executions continued. At least sixty more individuals were hanged over the next few nights.

Klemperer continues (Jan 1943):

Strange, and to me inexplicable, how the government’s measures combine public intimidating terror with secret brutality. Jew-baiting knows no bounds – but the worst measures against them are concealed from the Aryans. Even people who are close to the Jews are not aware of the petty bullying or the brutal murders. Annemarie [for example] does not know that we are not allowed to sell any furniture, that everything has been confiscated. The mayor in Dölzschen did not know that I am restricted to the city limits and am forbidden to use public transport. Frau Eger said “The most terrible thing for me is that people always say: “but your husband must have done something, they don’t just kill someone for no reason!”.

The cognitive dissonance is strong. Us humans want to see logic where there is none. Many of these Germans simply could not believe their government could be so cruel. The lack of awareness was due to propaganda and censorship, but also due to lack of curiosity. And we saw that during covid when many of us were excluded from hairdressers, gyms and restaurants etc. Those deep in the mass formation, proudly presented their phone’s ‘Vaccine Pass’ and were (still are?) totally unaware of the large percentage of us who did not comply. Just as Klemperer witnessed back in 1943, there was a strange avoidance of the obvious discrimination taking place - look the other way. During the height of the covid era insanity, 2021-22, many New Zealanders were embarrassed that either their fellow Kiwis and/or their Government could ‘let them down’ like this - putting so many people ‘on the spot’.

Sadly, most of these people rejected their ethical, social duty to stand up for what was right. “above my paygrade” as one of my (senior) academic (ex)friends told me, when querying covid vaccine mandates at her institution. They went with the crowd, the ingroup, and desperately hoped that really inconvenient truth would go away. It ain’t! There is a sense of learned helplessness in this behaviour. And there was evidence of this during WW2 outside Germany too. Let’s look at the Nazi occupied Channel Islands, for example.

Picture-postcard images of the Channel Islands before the war [from Islands in Danger by Wood, 1955)

NB The Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by German forces during WW2. The British government considered the islands no strategic importance and were reluctant to waste lives, funds and equipment on their defence. On 19 June 1940, the islands were demilitarised, and it was announced that those who wanted, be evacuated (but these operations were were poorly planned and executed).

Location of the Channel Islands - close to the French coast (Google maps)

Lord Pickles described Alderney during WW2, as a place where “crimes were committed against forced and slave labourers, transported from countries across Europe and brought to Alderney to construct fortifications as part of the German war effort.”

In an old book “Islands in Danger” Alan and Mary Wood (1955) write:

“After the end of the war, accusations of mass shootings and other atrocities on Alderney were made by some of the men of Jersey and Guernsey who had gone there to work for the Germans {…} It is true that a number of foreign workers were buried on Alderney, in a cemetery on Longy Common. {…} George Pope [a shepherd on Alderney] failed, on request, to produce to official investigators his record of the 1,000 deaths [he witnessed]. Disinterments in many different places also failed to give proof of atrocities on the scale reported. There were rumours that some of the bodies were flung into the foundations of defence works, and concrete poured over them. {…}.

One of the concrete fortifications on Alderney (Source: Wikipedia)

This irresponsible atrocity-mongering had its usual effect in tending to bring all such stories into discredit. But there seems little doubt about the evil things happening on Alderney during the Occupation. […] One can only hope that [the prisoners’] sufferings were less than in Europe, because otherwise a handful of British people on Alderney would have come to know more. Beyond that, there is only guesswork. It is certain that there were none of the mass-shootings reported afterwards, they that would have been heard. It may be that, on a small island, a common humanity could even mitigate some of the cruelties of a concentration camp; but otherwise it is likely that no one will ever know what silent horrors may have taken place behind the tall barbed wire fences which, at the time of writing, still have their rusting remains on Alderney. (my emphasis)

Unfortunately, independent researchers argue that is it more likely many thousands of people were tortured, killed and buried at the Alderney concentration camp. If you’re interested, this BBC podcast (28mins) provides some insights into the terrible conditions in Alderney – hidden in plain sight. Indeed, military researchers Col Richard Kemp and John Weigold claimed in 2017 up to 70,000 people could have been killed on the island, which housed four forced labour sites, including the only concentration camp on British soil. They also proposed how the underground site near the main town of St Anne was being prepared to launch a chemical weapons attack on England's south coast:

"We came to the conclusion, with other factors, that this is why they were sited in Alderney, because you could construct and prepare V1's with nerve agent warheads on them, which you could do in total secrecy given the unique circumstances of Alderney, there was no possibility of anyone discovering it,"

And we know all about Germany’s toxic history with their chemical partners like Bayer et al. So maybe the victims weren’t shot, but subjected to the same horrific poison experiments inflicted on the prisoners of Auschwitz? Other researchers suggest that 70,000 is an dramatic overestimate of deaths. The British Government has been urged to release the unpublished records about the Nazi occupation, the contents of which are the source of long-running tension between the authorities. This was partly because a panel of ‘experts’ found a "succession of cover-ups" that meant nobody was brought to justice for the deaths on Alderney. But despite all this controversy, the recent Government Alderney Expert Review Panel concluded “the number of deaths in Alderney was unlikely to have exceeded 1,134 people, with a more likely range of deaths being between 641 and 1,027.” And if you trust your government, that’s Case Closed. Maybe.

Bodies were apparently thrown out to sea, weighted-down with stones. Others were buried, Mafia-style, in concrete foundations, so it’s impossible to assess how many perished in the camps at the small, wind-swept island. One of the most significant reports of the atrocities on Alderney was embargoed by the British government until 2045, but Moscow acquired the report, due to the connection with so many Soviet victims. 

Photo by mahdi rezaei on Unsplash

Today, we often hear people say “but covid is all in the past, we need to move on”. And the Channel Islanders must have thought the same in 1945. Flags flew and champagne corks popped when Operation Nest Egg was finally completed and the Nazis surrendered. Freedom was returned. But the truth about what happened on Alderney remained taboo - after all, the occupation was mainly perceived as good-natured as the communities mainly complied. As Alan and Mary Wood were keen to point out in 1955, most Channel Islanders were keen for the Germans to think well of them, in case they wanted to return on holiday (!) Maybe this passage from Klemperer’s diary provides some better clues about what went on:

Frau Eger said “The most terrible thing for me is that people always say: “but your husband must have done something, they don’t just kill someone for no reason!”. I know something even more terrible, that in such a case even Jews say: “He must surely have done something, covered the star or been on the street after [the curfew at] eight.” The same inner submission. [Jan 1943]

The power of propaganda indicates how, after a while, even the victims of the propaganda themselves, believe the lies. They comply with, and internalise the repeated phrases, adopting them as their own, even when the language is skewed and manipulated. We are five years into this Mindspace psyops and we can see evidence of this now. Klemperer spotted it amongst his own Jewish friends: “the same inner submission”. Did the people of the Channel Islands ignore what was happening on Alderney, even when men who had worked for the Nazis there, returned with horror stories of slave labour, chemical experiments and multiple murders? Or did they dismiss those ‘irresponsible atrocity-mongering’ rumours, just as the German people dismissed the dissidents, shockingly beheaded by those efficient electric guillotines?