MP asks UK to release files on Alderney’s mass graves
A UK MP has urged the government to release files on mass graves that were created on Alderney’s Longis Common during the Second World War.
Lager Sylt and Lager Norderney were Nazi concentration camps housing Russian and Polish prisoners of war as well as Jewish slave workers.
Matthew Offord is a Conservative Party politician who has been the MP for Hendon since 2010.
He is calling on the government to reveal ‘embargoed files which detail what they found at the cemeteries after the war and their own excavations’.
Speaking in a Commons debate following Holocaust Memorial Day, he said: ‘I’ve been advised that a considerable amount is already known of what lies beneath the ground. The British Government is still sitting on embargoed files which detail what they found at the cemeteries after the war and their own excavations of the cemetery.
‘So today I am calling on the government to find the missing records of the 1961 exhumation and the detailed records that the UK made of each set of remains by the British excavation at Alderney.
‘We have a duty to ensure that no one is left behind and I ask the government to play its part and do the right thing by releasing all information and documents in its possession.’
Last year, in a debate to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, Mr Offord advocated excavating the graves to identify the bodies, though he said he had since changed his mind because Jewish law forbids the transfer of remains from one grave to another, even if it is to a more respected site.
He told the Commons that he had expressed his personal view that unmarked graves, mass graves and locations of bodies hidden by their murderers were not proper graves in themselves and thought it appropriate for the identification of bodies to be undertaken.
‘Some people took my words as advocating the full exhumation of the Channel Islands but that is not necessary or even desirable,’ he said.
‘Putting aside the religious issues, it has been stressed upon me that opening mass graves is not as revealing as one might imagine and the gains in knowledge are slight compared to the moral and spiritual costs of disturbance.
‘Knowledge already exists about the sites and the combination of non-intrusive means of investigation,
Second World War aerial imagery combined with research into records should be sufficient to tell us
with some certitude what lies beneath Longis Common.’
