This story is contributed by Sylvia@Intrigue, courtesy of her flickr.com page

“You can not go anywhere in Alderney without constant stark reminders of the German Occupation. Unlike Guernsey, where an uneasy sort-of truce seemed to be in place where the inhabitants and the occupiers lived together, Alderney was virtually abandoned to the Germans.

Over the five years of its occupation, the island was turned into a fortress and housed three labour camps and Lager Sylt, believed to be the first SS Concentration camp. Concrete bunkers, air-raid shelters, gun-emplacements huge sea walls and the four camps were built using forced labour, mainly prisoners from eastern Europe. Mass graves were discovered but the survivors from the camp said that many more had died, mainly owing to malnutrition and exhaustion, and their corpses were thrown into the sea.

Alderney is the only Channel Island that does not celebrate Liberation Day. The Island had been turned into a concrete wasteland. The housing and farms were left to rot or worse destroyed. All usable wood had been stripped for use as fuel. Massive bunkers and concrete roads dominated the landscape. Some 37,000 mines had been laid on the island and an estimated 65,000 yards of barbed wire needed to be cleared.

The residents of Alderney were finally able to return in December, commemorated as a public holiday known as “the Homecoming,” following a clean-up operation by the British troops and the German prisoners of war, including the restoration of 300 houses. But much had been completely destroyed and land markers had been lost. There was no concept of returning to your old home; returning residents were handed a key and an address. Each person was assigned a set of cutlery and two pillows and other basic issue furniture.

Usable furniture was piled up, with people grabbing what they could get as quickly as possible with no reference to the original owners. Merika Clunn remembers the “Battle of the Butes” on the Alderney Government site although she was only four:

“People tried to get stuff to rehouse, so if they saw anything they thought was theirs, they went and sat on it and when the whistle was blown, they took it,” she said.

“My brother shut me in a cupboard and when the whistle went, someone came along and carried it off with me in it. The doors flew open and the person carrying it had a real shock when he saw me. It was like a real battle — you could take things home and if someone recognised furniture in your house that was theirs before the war, they would end up taking it back.”

We were told that the older residents are to this day edgy about having guests as a family heirloom may still be recognised and claimed by the original owner.”