On 2 July 1940, the German military occupied the island of Alderney, located in the English Channel. What followed was an intensive programme of slave and forced labour, resulting in the construction of monumental fortifications that forever altered the landscape of this small island.
Drawing on more than a decade's worth of historical, forensic and archaeological research, this book represents the first detailed investigation of the lives of the thousands of labourers sent to Alderney and the landscape they inhabited. Approaching sites connected to labourers as crime scenes and piecing together new evidence from archives across the world, it demonstrates that Alderney was closely linked to the wider system of forced and slave labour in Europe. It also argues that the island was the perfect 'laboratory' for the implementation of many aspects of Nazi ideology, including universal brutality, oppression of Soviet citizens and Jews, the rewarding of behaviours which limited the threat of so-called enemies of Germany and the exploitation of people as tools for economic gain. Most importantly, the book restores the victims' humanity by providing information about their experiences, their backgrounds and their fates. For the first time, the names of many of the victims have been identified, as well as the possible locations of mass and individual graves that contain their remains.