Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Jews Among 70,000 Slaughtered By Nazis In Channel Island Camps That Britain Covered Up

A shocking new report says up to 70,000 prisoners — including many Jews — may have been murdered by the Nazis in slave labor camps on the Channel Islands — a toll that British intelligence covered up.

Britain’s official history says just 400 prisoners were killed in camps off the French coastline. But a new probe says the true toll was around 150 times that figure, including about 1,000 Jews, according to a report in the Daily Mail.

“Thousands upon thousands of Russian prisoners of war and forced laborers, men and boys [were] dragged from their villages in Russia and Eastern Europe, Jews from France,” the report stated.

Some survivors lived to tell of an isolated horror show of torture and death.

“(One) man was crucified for stealing, hung by his hands. When I got up in the mornings I saw dead bodies in the bunks around me. Sometimes their lips, nose and ears had been eaten by rats.”

The British evacuated the Channel Islands after the Nazis occupied France. After recapturing them at the end of the war, British intelligence was apparently embarrassed at the extent of the carnage on British soil and never fully probed the camps.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.