Robert Jan van Pelt's research on Alderney featured in Waterloo News
An international panel of World War II archeologists and academic historians including School of Architecture Professor, Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt assembed to examine the Nazi occupation of the island of Alderney during World War II presented their findings at the Imperial War Museum in London in May.
Alderney was occupied by Germany from 1940 to 1945 and the death toll on the island during the occupation has been the source of an ongoing debate.
The panel arrived at its conclusions by looking at archival materials and comparing each member’s work. Before that, the closest thing to an official count came from a British military intelligence interrogator, Theodore Pantcheff, shortly after the end of the war. He had found that at least 389 people died in Alderney. Recently, amateur historians, inspired by conspiracy theories, began to speculate that the number of victims might have been as high as 40,000, and that since 1945, the British Government had engaged in a nefarious cover-up, refusing to put the German perpetrators on trial.
The panel did not come to an exact number. It concluded that the likely range of deaths was between 641 and 1,027, with a maximum number of 1,134 people.
Read the full feature on Waterloo News.
