Nothing prepares you for your first sight of a prisoner’s uniform from a Nazi concentration camp. This is especially the case when you learn that the uniform was recently found under the floorboards of a house that lies not in Germany or Poland but in the British Isles. Just how did this awful remnant of the Holocaust come to be discovered on a small, foggy island in the English Channel called Alderney?
While the British mainland was never under Hitler’s control during the Second World War, Alderney and its fellow Channel Islands, Jersey and Guernsey, were. They lie within a few dozen miles from the north coast of France and are well known today for being tax havens. Alderney, which measures just three square miles, is a British Crown Dependency—it is protected by Britain but not technically part of the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, the island was recently mooted by the British government as a potential place to intern immigrant asylum seekers.
