- 6/18/2025
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00We're talking about hundreds of bodies that we're disposed of somewhere.
00:25There were concentration camps run by the Nazis in the Channel Islands.
00:34There were Germans who should be prosecuted. We have the witnesses. We have the people.
00:40My father said to them, you must know what happened. I want to tell you. Somehow they just brushed him aside.
00:50This is the greatest mass murder in British history. And yet the perpetrators walk away scot-free.
01:00The British authorities would have been ashamed of the crimes that had taken place.
01:07Today we rule Germany. Tomorrow the world.
01:20Why didn't they do anything?
01:34Stalin may have been more interested in getting Soviet nationals back into Russia than going after lesser Nazi war criminals.
01:47My father certainly did know Oswald Moseley.
01:571940 Germany invades France and very quickly take the country.
02:07Then they have the very juicy prospects of occupying the Channel Islands.
02:22With the occupation of the Channel Islands, the German troops for the first time stepped foot on English soil.
02:41This is very important because it's officially British territory.
02:48The life of the island population proceeds orderly under the protection of German weapons.
02:57It's a fantastic propaganda coup for them. Hitler now can present to the world how fine it would be if the whole of Britain came on side.
03:11The 1400 residents of Alderney decide to abandon their homes, abandon their livelihoods and just leave the island.
03:29People were given two hours' notice to put a bag together, destroy their animals and to get themselves down to the harbour.
03:41So they basically just left their homes.
03:44They realise that a life under the German jackboot is going to be very, very unattractive.
03:54And all bar about eight or ten of them flee.
04:00The first couple of years of the occupation of Alderney is pretty relaxed.
04:06But things change in 1942.
04:11Hitler orders the construction of the Atlantic Wall.
04:15Concrete defences stretching all the way down from Scandinavia right through to Spain.
04:22Hitler becomes obsessed with building gun emplacements, concrete walls, bunkers, huge underground tunnel systems.
04:36This involves vast amounts of concrete, vast amounts of enslaved labour.
04:43Some of them were political prisoners from Germany, Holland, France.
04:48There was a contingent of French Jews and Spanish Republicans.
04:55So it was very, very international.
04:59But the conditions of the camps were terrible for the forced labourers.
05:04The slave labourers had a task, which was to fortify Alderney.
05:10If they all died, then it couldn't be done.
05:14So they were kept alive, sufficient to their work.
05:18But it was an absolutely appalling regime of beatings and killings and utter brutality.
05:28There was almost no food, maybe watery soup, a hunk of dried bread, if that.
05:38They were starving.
05:40They were working for hours and hours and hours.
05:44When they fell or got sick, they were kicked, beaten with rifle butts.
05:48There was utter contempt for human life.
05:53The Polish and the Russians were lower people, savages.
05:59Nazi ideology regarded Jews as repulsive, as well as the Eastern Europeans.
06:05The treatment of those Nazi guards is utterly brutal.
06:14They don't lift a finger themselves to do any work.
06:18But they lift their fingers and their shovels to beat people, to maim people, to crucify people,
06:24to have dogs tear them apart and throw their bodies into the sea.
06:29These are things that people are capable of.
06:32So long.
06:41After very nearly five years of German occupation, the Channel Islands were free.
06:56The German commander-in-chief was soon on his way to an English prison camp.
07:00Thus ended the five-year ordeal of the only British territory in Europe occupied by the enemy.
07:06Very soon what emerged is the stories of ill-treatment of slave labourers.
07:14And then of course there were many, many allegations of people who had collaborated.
07:19The liberating forces decided that this needed more investigation.
07:23And they sent a young captain called Theodore Pancheff to investigate what had happened on Alderney.
07:32A key witness interviewed by Pancheff is this man called George Pope, a British ex-merchant seaman.
07:41George Pope said that he knew of 1,000 people who had been killed.
07:48But when we look at the records of the investigators and Pancheff in particular, we see that they had doubts about George Pope's story.
07:59His relationship with the Germans, about why he was on Alderney in the first place.
08:08Pope, he'd been there throughout the duration of the occupation.
08:13Now, how does he end up on Alderney?
08:15My name is Janet Pope. My father was George Pope.
08:28He was the eldest of six children.
08:32I think he was 11 when he decided to run away from home to get a place on a merchant ship.
08:39My father could be quite a forthright kind of person. He wouldn't hold back.
08:46He said one day, I'm really not staying here any longer. The weather's terrible.
08:51I can't face another English winter. Why don't we get a new life somewhere in a new world?
08:58In 1939, he decides to buy a boat and sail it all the way to New Zealand with his wife, his children.
09:13I don't know what route he planned to take.
09:17He had an oil skin container in which he stowed all his sea charts, which were sort of his Bible of the time.
09:24And maybe they just decided it would be an adventure.
09:31Now, he doesn't really get that far. He manages to make it to France.
09:36When he's in France, the Germans are on the move.
09:41What am I going to do? Am I going to stay in France with my family or am I going to flee?
09:46He looks on the map. He's going to go to the nearest place of safety. And that is Alderney.
09:56When the Germans arrived in Alderney, there were only about 18 people living there, of whom the most significant are the Pope family.
10:21My family really had to fend for themselves.
10:28The place was just empty and the doors were wide open.
10:34They stole everything they could that was of use.
10:38Is that looting or is that taking things that you would rather were used by Islanders than by Germans?
10:48If you knew a neighbour had a larder full of food, do you go and get it?
10:54What do you do? Leave that food to go to waste?
10:56If they've got chickens in the yard, what are you going to do? You have to survive.
11:06It could be very dangerous to be found going into somebody else's empty house.
11:13It was forbidden, but you might even get shot.
11:20Social order began to fragment.
11:22One family, for example, decided to evacuate.
11:27Couldn't get on a boat, came home. By the time they came home, their house had been emptied.
11:32Neighbours had taken everything that they wanted.
11:37One example really sums up the moral complexity.
11:40In May 1941, people from Guernsey sail over to Alderney in order to loot houses to take stuff back to Guernsey.
11:53They're caught by the Germans and put on trial for looting the property of their former friends.
11:59To this day, there is some resentment between the two islands.
12:05Some of auntie's best china is sometimes found in a Guernseyman's home.
12:11But it was a case of take what you need, not what you fancy.
12:16Life under occupation is tough.
12:20Those occupied face really, really devastating moral choices.
12:26Do I collaborate with the Germans? Do I fight them? Do I just keep my head down?
12:32Nobody would dare set sail without some direction from a pilot.
12:39And so every few weeks, my father piloted supply boats.
12:45So yes, he did have that relationship with them, but there really was no option.
12:50Right at the very beginning, my father was ushered to the commandant's office.
12:59The commandant said to him, you have a family?
13:03And he said, yes.
13:05And then he said, and I have a gun.
13:09We had all interacted with the Germans.
13:13I mean, the island, three miles long, one and a half miles wide.
13:18You can't hide on it. You can't escape from it.
13:25My father got on well with some of the Germans because he spoke a bit of German.
13:32But with those in top authority, anything he could do to annoy them,
13:38so long as it didn't actually get him put in prison or shot.
13:41When the British investigators arrived on the island on the 16th of May 1945,
13:54George Pope said that he knew of 1,000 people who'd been killed
13:59or who had died there as a result of being incarcerated in the camps.
14:06Our latest review has identified the death toll probably up to 1,027.
14:12We now know obviously that George Pope's figure of 1,000 is very close to what we have come up with.
14:18And so it does raise the question about how he acquired that information.
14:23He was given a German document, a list of deaths stolen by a German army officer,
14:33who possibly didn't really like Hitler.
14:36He duly dumped this evidence in my father's care.
14:42When the British arrived, my father invited a couple of the officers to our house.
14:48And he said, here you are, it's a German document, look at the insignia on it.
14:53And these are the deaths.
14:54Pancheff, when he comes to the end of his investigation, comes up with a figure of just under 400 deaths.
15:08This document, essentially an interrogation report of a German officer on Alderney,
15:29seems to describe two Englishmen who have been beaten and shot,
15:36and then their graves have been levelled and the crosses removed.
15:42It says here that a statement was given to the Englishman Popo, P-O-P-O.
15:50Popo is the name the Germans gave to George Pope.
15:54Here you've got strong and compelling prima facie evidence
15:57that two Englishmen had been fired upon and murdered.
16:04If true, if this incident is true, then it does represent the only known incident
16:11of British dying at the hands of Nazis on British soil.
16:15Two Englishmen, I'd be fascinated to know who on earth they could have been.
16:20My father certainly never mentioned this.
16:22However, it could be that it was so grim and gruesome
16:25that my father did not repeat it.
16:28Were it true that two Englishmen had been murdered on Alderney,
16:32that would really change the story of the war.
16:34What the documents show is that the British investigators thought the Pope was an unreliable witness.
16:48They strongly suspected that in fact he had collaborated with the Germans and therefore had a motive for him magnifying the extent of German crimes in order to ingratiate himself with his inquisitors.
17:01My name is Andrew Pantreff, the son of Bunny Pantreff, who conducted the investigations on Albany.
17:15I think Mr. Pope tried too hard.
17:29He didn't want to be seen as a collaborator.
17:31But in the course of so doing, he became unwittingly what amounts to an unreliable witness.
17:37In Britain, Sir Oswald Mosley offered himself to the people as a Hitler with a Marxism accent.
17:54I'm told that Hitler is mad.
17:57Well, I've got another view myself.
18:06He certainly did know Oswald Mosley.
18:11Mosley was a brilliant orator, very convincing, and my father was really longing for somebody who would help.
18:18I think he definitely thought this man was the answer.
18:27The question of today is how to overcome the present crisis.
18:31We need a new movement, a modern movement of youth, of energy, of manhood.
18:38My father's job was to point the spotlight at Mosley, which is why they knew how well he could speak to a huge audience and convince everybody that he was right.
18:54The scales fell from his eyes, in that he saw Mosley for what he was.
19:09He heard Mosley speaking in a way that was completely unacceptable about the Jews.
19:15And that did it. My father wasn't having any of it.
19:17He stormed up to London one day, confronted Mosley, there was a bit of a fracas, and my father left.
19:28And tore up any evidence of anything to do with Mosley, and binned it, and that was that.
19:35We know that the Germans tried other scare tactics on George Pope to try and get him to cooperate.
19:57Was this a story to scare people?
20:02If perhaps there were two dead people lying in a ditch, a guard could have said they're British.
20:09Even the British were at risk.
20:15They had doubts about his relationship with the Germans, about his motivations for wanting to speak so freely about the thousand deaths.
20:24And really dismissed his testimony.
20:30We do know that George Pope gave documents over to the British, but the actual list has never been found.
20:37I don't cast doubt on the existence of this list, but we don't know what happened to that list.
20:45We don't really know the nature of that list.
20:48And because we don't know the nature of that list, that means will we necessarily recognise it when we find it?
20:52One can only hope that if that list exists, that one day it will turn up in an archive.
20:57If it does, you know, it would give us invaluable information.
21:00Why was no one prosecuted for the war crimes that took place on Alderney?
21:10There weren't any prosecutions for what happened here.
21:14Why weren't there prosecutions?
21:15Why weren't there prosecutions?
21:16My dad certainly wanted there to be.
21:17They're not safe.
21:18It's now that the story begins to get a little murky, because not all of the testimony remains
21:24for what happened here.
21:25There weren't any prosecutions for what happened here.
21:27There weren't any prosecutions for what happened here.
21:29Why weren't there prosecutions?
21:31There weren't any prosecutions.
21:32There weren't any prosecutions.
21:33There weren't any prosecutions.
21:34It's now that the story begins to get a little murky, because not all of the testimony remains
21:48in the archives.
21:50Pantshev's report on Alderney disappears from the British archives for almost 50 years.
21:59I'd heard that archives were being opened up in Moscow.
22:03So I thought, it's just possible we can find the Pantshev report, the original Pantshev report,
22:09in Moscow.
22:11And sure enough, that's what happened.
22:15Pantshev interviewed everybody.
22:18He interviewed all the German POWs that they had, prisoners of war.
22:25And he interviews hundreds of former slave laborers, prisoners.
22:32Pantshev's report was totally compelling, prima facie evidence of war crimes.
22:41Pantshev knew there were Germans who should be prosecuted, being held in prisoner of war camps
22:47in the islands.
22:48We need to charge these people, put them on trial.
22:51We have the witnesses.
22:52We have the people.
22:54tourism.
22:55He draws up a charge sheet, with 49 names on it.
22:58Near the top of that list are some truly horrendous individuals.
23:05Maximilian list, who'd been in charge at Silt Camp.
23:08Karl Hoffman, the island commander when hundreds had perished
23:13Kurt Klebeck had been number two at Silk Camp
23:18He had given men incentives like extra leave cigarettes
23:23if they murdered prisoners
23:25There is an aspect of this history which is really hard to pin down
23:33Pancheff had said we need war crime trials
23:38We don't fully have an explanation as to why those trials never happened
23:44You've got evidence that might convict dozens of war criminals
23:49Is there some sort of weird sinister motive that's making the British avoid trials
23:54about crimes committed on British soil?
23:57Of the men that Pancheff had identified as potential war criminals
24:04Maximilian List died in Germany in the 1980s
24:08Karl Hoffman died in Germany in 1974
24:11And another of the most brutal SS men also enjoyed a peaceful retirement
24:18I began to try and track down Kurt Klebeck in 1992
24:24It's not that people didn't know where he was
24:28They knew he was living in Hamburg
24:30And sure enough, Kurt Klebeck was still listed in the telephone directory
24:34We knocked on the door of his apartment
24:38And he'd come out onto the balcony to look at us
24:43So the photographer that was with us was able to go right in, get the photo
24:47Could he be extradited?
24:51Could he now finally stand trial?
24:53And it was decided that he was too elderly
24:55He was in his early 80s by then
24:57But judging by that photograph, he looked in good health
25:00There are many reasons why the British might not want to have led on the prosecutions on Alderney
25:09Potentially one of them may be embarrassment
25:13What I've had to do is to think about theories that might explain it
25:21How is this going to play out?
25:27English soil occupied by the Huns
25:31Brutal atrocities in a crown possession
25:36It's something that happened on British soil
25:40That was seen as an atrocity
25:43By the British investigators and by the British government
25:46It just didn't fit with the narrative of us having won the war
25:50There were definitely conscious attempts to brush over that aspect of British history
25:57Britain had decided not to defend Alderney
26:01The British authorities would have been ashamed
26:05Of the crimes that had taken place on British soil
26:08But this is one factor among many
26:13This is where what happened on this tiny little island 80 years ago
26:21Gets caught up in international legislation
26:24Specifically the Moscow Agreement
26:27Signed in 1943 between the major allied powers
26:31Britain, America, and the Soviet Union
26:35What the Moscow Declaration said very clearly was
26:41That Nazi war criminals should be returned
26:44To the places where they had carried out their appalling acts
26:50You'd think it was an entirely watertight case
26:55That there should be trials in Alderney
26:58The only let out was where it talked about war criminals being tried
27:08By the people who had been the victims of the war crimes
27:14What we can see in the record
27:18Is that there was an argument going on in different departments in Whitehall
27:22Are the victims all Russian?
27:24We know for a fact that there were French Jews among the victims
27:30But ultimately they say that all of the victims were Russian
27:34There's clearly differences of opinion between different government departments
27:39That anybody other than Russians were killed there
27:43When in fact Panchev had clearly shown there were more than 30 nationalities
27:47Of people sent to Alderney
27:48It was undoubtedly true that the vast majority of victims of Nazi atrocities in Alderney were Russian
27:58It is seen as largely a Russian issue
28:04The majority of the prisoners who died are Russian
28:07So therefore the position is quite simple
28:10These are crimes against Russians
28:11Russia, it's over to your war crimes teams
28:14The Moscow declaration made excellent sense
28:17Everything was right about it
28:19Except Alderney
28:21Alderney was an exception
28:25The unique exception
28:27Stalag Luft 3 was a German prisoner of war camp
28:52The UK and US airmen who'd been shot down
28:57Were incarcerated there
28:59They staged this escape
29:03Immortalised in the Great Escape
29:06But some 50 of those captured were put to death by the Gestapo
29:15The most heinous single act of savagery
29:21Against British personnel
29:23In the whole of the Second World War
29:25It's a trade
29:42Those responsible were being held in the Soviet zone
29:48But should be tried by the British
29:51In Alderney
29:54It was Germans who'd carried out atrocities on English soil
30:00But should be tried by the Russians
30:03We handed over this case
30:07To the Russians
30:08In good faith
30:11And we expect them to do something with it
30:14For whatever reason
30:17They did not bring
30:19Those Nazi war criminals to trial
30:21The conclusion was that
30:25They're not going to prosecute anybody
30:27And I don't know why
30:33The British did a really thorough investigation
30:45We shouldn't be pointing the finger at the British
30:48The fingers should be pointed at the Russians
30:50Why didn't they do anything?
30:56Was it because they were more interested in repatriating Russian prisoners?
31:05Stalin was terrified of large numbers of Russians living outside the grip
31:12That the KGB could exercise on them
31:15Stalin may have been more interested in getting Soviet nationals back into Russia
31:23Than going after lesser Nazi war criminals
31:28The Soviet mission that were working alongside the British investigators
31:33Were actually from a repatriation commission
31:36And so it was their task to find out really whether they had worked for the Germans
31:43In their eyes they saw slave labourers as collaborators
31:48Traitors to the motherland as they called it
31:52They went there not really to find out what those people had suffered
31:57But rather whether they could be classed as collaborators
32:00The irony is Stalin is more vengeful against Soviet citizens
32:05Who he thinks have let the side down by surrendering to the Germans
32:09Than he is with bringing to justice men like Maximilian List
32:14Who had carried out the most atrocious crimes against Stalin's own citizens
32:19Hitler's Wehrmacht surrendered in droves
32:21The crushing defeat was etched plainly on their faces
32:24To a man they knew that the end could not be far off
32:27There were all sorts of explanations
32:30It's ironic that Theodore Panshev, known always as Bunny Panshev
32:36Whose father presumably had escaped from the Soviet Union in the 1920s
32:43Clearly had a Russian name
32:46Suspicious Stalin might have thought perhaps he's an agent provocateur
32:51Perhaps he's wanting us to prosecute people who aren't criminals at all
32:58In order to embarrass in some way
33:00The records show that various suspects sat in British detention for two years, three years
33:09And by the time they were released
33:12Something very important had happened
33:15From Stepien in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic
33:21An iron curtain has descended across the continent
33:25There was a new war brewing in Europe
33:28And that, of course, is the incipient Cold War
33:32As Winston Churchill said, that iron curtain descends across Europe
33:37And we've entered, some would argue, an even more dangerous war
33:42You couldn't hold people in prison indefinitely
34:05If you do have a war criminal in your possession
34:09And the Soviet Union don't ask you to surrender him
34:14After a time, you have to let him go
34:16Conspiracy theorists who are out there say
34:22That the British were not serious about wanting the Russians to try the Alderney criticism
34:28Not true, they were serious
34:29But you can see why
34:32You wouldn't want people to know
34:33That we've given a stun in something we should have done ourselves
34:36By not having a war crimes trial in Alderney
34:41You appeared to be engaged in a cover-up
34:44The cover-up was not that we didn't want to do anything about these Nazis
34:49We did
34:50The cover-up was that we asked the Russians to do it for us
34:54I do remember what my father was saying to me
34:59When they said, there aren't going to be prosecutions
35:03He said, even if it's only one
35:06To show that you can't just come in here and do this and walk away
35:09Not even that happened
35:11It's very seductive to say, we should have done more
35:20But at the time, people didn't want to do more
35:26You must plead guilty or not guilty
35:30Not guilty
35:37Nuremberg was seen almost as a kind of show trial
35:41To encapsulate the greater criminality carried out by hundreds of thousands
35:47There just wasn't an appetite at the time to do it
35:52When we consider the appalling crimes that took place on Alderney
36:00And the lack of prosecution
36:03Just imagine what it feels like for the relatives of the victims
36:09My father was arrested by the French police
36:14And was taken to the camp of Alderney
36:19So the justice had to be much more active
36:25If the justice had been more rapid
36:29Effectivement, it would have allowed the Jews to feel better
36:33And to live normal
36:37Some of the prisoners escaped death in absolutely remarkable ways
36:52One of those was the French-Jewish prisoner Leon Cartoon
36:57Along with lots of other prisoners in 1944
37:02He'd shipped from Alderney to the French mainland
37:07And he manages to get out of the train
37:10To escape through the floor of a carriage, through a hole
37:15The Germans knew this was going on
37:18They knew people were trying to get away
37:19So periodically, while they were loading the trucks
37:22They would go along with their machine guns
37:24And go ta-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da
37:25Underneath the trains
37:26Just to flush anybody out who was in there
37:29And he somehow, must have had nine lives
37:32Managed to survive that
37:34And then as the train moved off
37:36He was able to get out and crawl away
37:38He manages to make his way to the safety
37:44Of the advancing Allied armies
37:46Five years later
37:50He's able to give evidence in court
37:52Against some of his former tormentors
37:55It's an incredible story
37:57When he heard about this trial going on
38:14He went and gave a very coherent description
38:17Of what went on
38:19A testimony about Ebbers is particularly distressing
38:23One of the things that he would do
38:25Was when the prisoners received letters
38:27From their families
38:27He would hold them up
38:29In front of the prisoners
38:30And then put them in the stove
38:32And burn them
38:33He just set fire to them
38:36In front of them
38:37So, yeah
38:39That's the thing he gave evidence of
38:41They were sentenced
38:43To ten years
38:44And seven years respectively
38:46As well as the two in France
38:50You've got two other officials
38:51From Alderney
38:52Who were brought to justice
38:53In the Eastern Bloc
38:54One in Russia
38:56Sentenced in 1949
38:58To 25 years
39:00The fourth of these men
39:03Is tried in the German Democratic Republic
39:07East Germany
39:07In 1963
39:09And he's executed
39:10Obviously just those four individuals
39:15Are kind of dropping the ocean
39:16We know that there were dozens
39:19Of war criminals on Alderney
39:21When the French wanted to try Germans
39:33For atrocities committed against French Jews
39:36The British said
39:39We don't have any files
39:41We don't have any lists
39:42Of any Germans involved
39:44And the French
39:47After all were our allies
39:48We lied to the French
39:49About this
39:51As a historian
39:52Sometimes it's easy
39:53With hindsight
39:54To look back
39:55And be very judgmental
39:56About decisions
39:57That were made
39:57In fraught conditions
39:59In this case
40:02You can see perhaps
40:03A decision was made
40:05For the right reasons
40:06That had terrible impact
40:09I don't think the decision
40:13Was right
40:13I think the call
40:15That was made
40:16Was the wrong call
40:16I was astonished
40:28First of all
40:29And then rather
40:31Pleased I suppose
40:32Gratified
40:33That figure
40:36Pretty well echoed
40:37The number of deaths
40:38That my father had evidence of
40:40At the end of the occupation
40:42It was astonishing
40:43I've made a master list
40:57Of every single Channel Islander
40:58Who went to Alderney
41:00And came back from Alderney
41:02And I haven't noticed people missing
41:03So I would say
41:05That this particular report
41:07Is not verified
41:08By any subsequent evidence
41:10When they came back
41:28The dwellings
41:31Were just shells
41:32Every piece of wood
41:36That was on the island
41:37Was burnt
41:37All the trees
41:40Were cut down
41:41And burnt
41:41When they came back
41:44They noticed
41:44There was no birdsong
41:45I don't know
41:47Whether I would have had
41:48The strength of character
41:50To rebuild this
41:51We just sort of live
41:56Within that experience
41:59We go out of our houses
42:03And we see the tank wall
42:05Or we see bunkers
42:06And so there are constant reminders
42:09Every day
42:09So how can they then say
42:12That we are in denial
42:13Of what happened here
42:15You know
42:17And it is an emotional
42:18It's an emotional issue
42:20And you know
42:21Remains so
42:22With I think
42:24Everybody that lives here
42:25The matter remains unresolved
42:41That is why
42:43There is this constant
42:44Speculation about
42:45Cover-ups
42:46They should have done something
42:50Otherwise it leaves it open
42:53That's not a good precedent
42:55This was a big decision
42:59And it was a fateful decision
43:02Because it meant
43:03That people
43:04Who were responsible
43:05For appalling atrocities
43:07Were not brought to justice
43:09To be continued
43:39To be continued
44:09To be continued
Recommended
1:47
|
Up next
43:08
44:30
59:40
6:23
44:03
45:12
58:50