Seajet
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Yes they do as examples of Nazi construction. The Victorians had their pro's and con's but I wouldn't accuse them of that many nazi traits.
Alderney Breakwater. Wish you were here?
- Thread starter harry potter
- Start date
lpdsn
Well-Known Member
But getting back to your claim ...
which was that the breakwater is disintegrating because slave labour built it of concrete in the early 1940s and the Nazis disposed of dead workers within the concrete. You've since claimed it was only a concrete extension of the breakwater.
Anything else is irrelevant to this particular discussion.
I've a truck of salt arriving tomorrow to take with your claims as a pinch was not enough. But I'd be happy to view any photographic or video evidence you can produce of the concrete construction of the breakwater (nothing else) and the claimed body-shaped holes.
prv
Well-Known Member
In which case you'd expect the makeup of it to change part-way along? From Victorian granite to German concrete?
No such change last time I walked out to the end of it a couple of years ago. Stone blocks all the way along, except for a little concrete hut at the end holding the power supply for the navigation light. The walls of that hut might have been thick enough to entomb a cat or two, perhaps?
The Nazis might have mixed some bodies into the tons of concrete being poured for all the fortifications elsewhere on the island, maybe even for works at the harbour itself like the quay where the Huelin Dispatch unloads (though the current one is perforated concrete with no space for corpses). But there simply is no Nazi extension to the main breakwater at Braye.
Pete
Seajet
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I'm not exactly going to fly out and survey the breakwater just to satisfy you; just ask yourselves how the Nazi's behaved and how likely, and the person who told me about it had nothing to gain, not selling the story.
lpdsn
Well-Known Member
Whatever else they did no one has shown that they built a Victorian stone breakwater out of concrete and dead slaves. I suspect you're the only one who has tried.
Anyway, no need to fly out. I'm sure an Anderson 22 could be there and back by lunch.
dom
Well-Known Member
As I understand it, most of Alderney's inhabitants were evacuated during WW II, and the local population replaced by two Nazi Work Camps and two Concentration Camps. The total inmate population varied, peaking at well over 6,000. Around 750 inmate deaths were recorded in Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney, but War Crimes investigators believe the numbers to have been much higher. Precise details are, however, almost impossible to determine as most of the records were either burnt, or otherwise destroyed.
As for the accounts/stories Seajet has relayed: the breakwater is predominantly stone, no question about that, but vast concrete structures exist in the inner harbour area. One of the Alderney Concentration Camps was called Norderney, named after the East Frisian island of Norderney. It was located just behind Fort Albert on the East-side of Braye Harbour and nobody knows for sure what crimes were committed there. The guards were essentially Russian criminals, almost no records were kept, and here is an extract from a war crimes report:
For the source of this and other related information, may I commend this link:
https://web.archive.org/web/2003121...eritagetrust.org/edu/resources/pdf/cijews.pdf
For those wishing to investigate further the Alderney Society and German Occupation Museum (Guernsey) are well worth a call.
http://www.alderneysociety.org/museum.php
http://www.germanoccupationmuseum.co.uk/
As for the accounts/stories Seajet has relayed: the breakwater is predominantly stone, no question about that, but vast concrete structures exist in the inner harbour area. One of the Alderney Concentration Camps was called Norderney, named after the East Frisian island of Norderney. It was located just behind Fort Albert on the East-side of Braye Harbour and nobody knows for sure what crimes were committed there. The guards were essentially Russian criminals, almost no records were kept, and here is an extract from a war crimes report:
‘Several Russians were employed as guards.These hand picked villains were sent to Paris for a special warder’s course before being postedto a camp. They were armed with lengths of sand-filled rubber hosing with which they beattheir wards unmercifully’: Reuven Freidman stated that Adler would boast about being number33 in the Nazi party. Freidman remembered well the commandant’s brutality: Adam Adler(‘General Allgemeine SS’ not ‘Deathshead SS’; Nazi Party number 330237) also held the rankof OT Hauptruppenführer: PRO WO 208/3629 confirms that Adler sometimes wore an SSuniform and at other times an OT uniform; Adler and Evers were tried at the Tribunal MilitairePermanent de Paris at Caserne de Reuilly in Sept. 1949 for subjecting Jews to ‘superhumanwork’ and ‘systematic ill-treatment’.
For the source of this and other related information, may I commend this link:
https://web.archive.org/web/2003121...eritagetrust.org/edu/resources/pdf/cijews.pdf
For those wishing to investigate further the Alderney Society and German Occupation Museum (Guernsey) are well worth a call.
http://www.alderneysociety.org/museum.php
http://www.germanoccupationmuseum.co.uk/
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dom
Well-Known Member
Here is another extract from the first linked source; speaks for itself:
"Gordon Prigent, an 18 year old non-Jewish prisoner sent from Jersey to Alderney at the end of 1943, described daily life in Norderney:
"Prigent detailed the barrack arrangements where workers slept on threetier bunks with only straw on wooden boards. Burials occurred on‘several days each week’. He witnessed prisoners being whipped whilst marching to and from work. Prigent’s own teeth were knocked out when he was hit in the face with a rifle butt by a Norderney camp guard.
"The Basilov/Pantcheff report confirmed that ‘workers were treated atrociously’. The report detailed the regime at Norderney andHelgoland:
'breakfast was half a litre of [ersatz] coffee without milk orsugar, lunch was half a litre of watery cabbage soup plus 1 kgof bread between 5-6 people. Two or three times a week 25gr ofbutter was distributed, very rarely, if at all, sausage, cheese orfresh vegetables, meat and sugar never … foreign workers werenot given any additional clothing in winter. Foreign workersworked 12 hours a day hard construction work. At midday therewas a short break of 10-30 minutes. This regime continued 7days a week ... only 1 Sunday a month they had a half day.'
"Whilst food rations were poor for all workers, Jewish forced labourers received less food than other groups of workers. Reuven Freidman testified that on occasional Sundays there was no work and on these days no food was issued. Like many other prisoners he contracted what became know amongst the prisoners as ‘flea fever’. Freidman was treated by a Jewish doctor named Rosenfeld and recovered.
"John Dalmau witnessed Jews working unloading boats: ‘[the Jews] had reached such a degree of starvation that it was a pastime for the Germans to throw them pieces of carrot and see the pitiful wrecks fighting for it. The human part of the body appeared to be dead but the instinct for survival remained … Cases of cannibalism were mentioned to me by an elderly Rumanian Jew … Some of the octopuses and congers[caught whilst fishing] we gave to the Jews who ate them raw.’ "
https://web.archive.org/web/2003121...eritagetrust.org/edu/resources/pdf/cijews.pdf
"Gordon Prigent, an 18 year old non-Jewish prisoner sent from Jersey to Alderney at the end of 1943, described daily life in Norderney:
‘Roll call 06.00; marched to work on stone quarry, dock workor agricultural work; 12.00 - cabbage leaf soup and 1 slice ofbread; 12.30 - back to work; 18.00 - march up to 3 miles backto Norderney; ladle of cabbage soup and 1 slice of bread;19.15 - roll call; 20.00-23.00 - more work’
"Prigent detailed the barrack arrangements where workers slept on threetier bunks with only straw on wooden boards. Burials occurred on‘several days each week’. He witnessed prisoners being whipped whilst marching to and from work. Prigent’s own teeth were knocked out when he was hit in the face with a rifle butt by a Norderney camp guard.
"The Basilov/Pantcheff report confirmed that ‘workers were treated atrociously’. The report detailed the regime at Norderney andHelgoland:
'breakfast was half a litre of [ersatz] coffee without milk orsugar, lunch was half a litre of watery cabbage soup plus 1 kgof bread between 5-6 people. Two or three times a week 25gr ofbutter was distributed, very rarely, if at all, sausage, cheese orfresh vegetables, meat and sugar never … foreign workers werenot given any additional clothing in winter. Foreign workersworked 12 hours a day hard construction work. At midday therewas a short break of 10-30 minutes. This regime continued 7days a week ... only 1 Sunday a month they had a half day.'
"Whilst food rations were poor for all workers, Jewish forced labourers received less food than other groups of workers. Reuven Freidman testified that on occasional Sundays there was no work and on these days no food was issued. Like many other prisoners he contracted what became know amongst the prisoners as ‘flea fever’. Freidman was treated by a Jewish doctor named Rosenfeld and recovered.
"John Dalmau witnessed Jews working unloading boats: ‘[the Jews] had reached such a degree of starvation that it was a pastime for the Germans to throw them pieces of carrot and see the pitiful wrecks fighting for it. The human part of the body appeared to be dead but the instinct for survival remained … Cases of cannibalism were mentioned to me by an elderly Rumanian Jew … Some of the octopuses and congers[caught whilst fishing] we gave to the Jews who ate them raw.’ "
https://web.archive.org/web/2003121...eritagetrust.org/edu/resources/pdf/cijews.pdf
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prv
Well-Known Member
You don't need to, I've already sailed there and walked all along the granite with my own two feet.
It doesn't matter how nasty they were, they can't have mixed bodies into concrete that isn't there.
Nobody's disputing the idea that there might have been bodies in the concrete that they did pour, God knows there's enough of it around the island. But those bodies are not part of the Braye breakwater - I say again, the Braye breakwater - because there simply isn't any significant quantity of German concrete in the thing.
The story's gone through three retellings - the sapper to his daughter, the daughter to you, you to us - and three people's memories - the sapper, his daughter, you - over seven decades or so. Surely you can see how easy it would be at some point for it to transfer from one large piece of civil engineering - one of the gun emplacements, or the spotting tower, or my guess the big wall at Longis Bay - to another, particularly the feature most prominent to visiting yachtsmen like you and the daughter. No deliberate intent to mislead needed, just normal human fallibility of memory or understanding.
I don't know why you're always so dogmatic about it.
Pete
johnalison
Well-Known Member
I believe that the smaller breakwater within the harbour is known as the German Breakwater. It is years since I was there but I think that it is faced with stone, though it may be mainly concrete internally. Perhaps some confusion occurred in some of the tale-telling.
dom
Well-Known Member
For sure, and perhaps inevitably so given that the Nazis destroyed as many documents as they could.
That said, the distinction between the original stone breakwater and the concrete inner-harbour structures to which it is attached at the shoreline, seems more to do with a quirk of this forum than any substantive historical interest.
Popeye & Olive
New Member
This book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Island-Madness-Tim-Binding/dp/0330350463 gives a bit of insight to the war time activities on Alderney and Guernsey, bit too graphic how they were placed in the walls (not the Victorian breakwater).
Further to our Omelette we did get ashore early on the third day in a break in the wind. After buying some eggs bread and pasties and it being St Patrick's day popped in for a Guinness which was complimentary as was a couple more at the other pubs on the route back to the harbour where the Equinoctial storm had resumed.
We had to spend most of our weeks budget on a night in a hotel, couldn't afford the menu but the pasties were nice as were the numerous hot showers.
Further to our Omelette we did get ashore early on the third day in a break in the wind. After buying some eggs bread and pasties and it being St Patrick's day popped in for a Guinness which was complimentary as was a couple more at the other pubs on the route back to the harbour where the Equinoctial storm had resumed.
We had to spend most of our weeks budget on a night in a hotel, couldn't afford the menu but the pasties were nice as were the numerous hot showers.
Seajet
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If I was wrong about the main breakwater I hold my hand up, it's a while since I've been to Braye, but I was recounting the story as I remember being told it - for other reasons that lady was very memorable ( I was with my girlfriend so nothing like that ! ) - so maybe she or her dad meant the smaller breakwater - the gist of it is the same, never forget what the nazi's did.
