About this Event
Join us for a special presentation by Dr Gilly Carr highlighting aspects of our newest exhibition
In 2023, Lord Eric Pickles convened the Lord Pickles Alderney Expert Review to calculate the number of forced labourers who came to Alderney and the number who died there during the German occupation. Coordinated by Gilly Carr, a team of thirteen academics calculated that just under 8,000 people passed through Alderney during the course of the war. 400 of them were from the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey.These people were witnesses to much of what was going on in Alderney while it was in the hands of German forces. The German occupiers built forced labour camps and a concentration camp on this tiny island and treated the prisoners with brutality. These acts were carried out without the kind of civilian audience who acted to moderate the hands of the occupiers in Guernsey and Jersey. The men and women from these other islands were, however, watching: these people volunteered or were later conscripted by the occupiers to work in Alderney, and later gave testimonies to war crimes investigators.
What did ‘volunteering’ to work in Alderney mean in practice? Was this collaboration? How much did they witness, and what was their experience over five years of occupation? If war crimes trials had been carried out as planned, how might the post-war history of the Channel Islands have turned out very differently?
In this evening talk, Dr Gilly Carr will answer these questions and explore the story of forced labourers in Alderney.
About the Speaker
Dr Gilly Carr is Professor of Conflict Archaeology and Holocaust Heritage at the University of Cambridge. She is also a Fellow and Director of Studies in Archaeology at St Catharine’s College, and a Partner of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre. Beyond Cambridge, she is a member of the UK delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and of the UK Holocaust Memorial Academic Advisory Board. She is currently working on her ninth monograph (The Futures of Holocaust Heritage) and her ninth co-edited volume (The Holocaust Heritage Handbook). In 2025 she was given an OBE for services to Holocaust research and education.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Wiener Holocaust Library, 29 Russell Square, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
