Matthew was recently contacted by a Sunday Times journalist about comments he made in the Holocaust Memorial Day debates in 2020 and again this year.
In the debate (full clip above), Matthew called on the U.K. Government to release missing records of the 1961 exhumation of Alderney, the site of the Nazis only concentration camp on British soil.
Having visited the island in 2019, Matthew became aware of the existence of unmarked graves considered to be the resting place of slave workers who died on the island.
In January 1942, the Nazis built four camps in Alderney - two work camps, Lager Helgoland and Lager Borkum, and two concentration camps, Lager Sylt and Lager Norderney. Lager Norderney contained Russian and Polish prisoners of war, and the Lager Sylt camp held Jewish slave labourers.
There are 397 graves in Alderney, out of a total population of about 6,000. On their return to Alderney, the islanders had little or no knowledge of the crimes that had taken place, because when they were finally allowed to return in December 1945, the majority of the senior German officers had left and no one really knew what had happened.
Interestingly, in research being conducted by Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls at Staffordshire University, she has described the estimate of the number of victims as “very conservative”, given the difficulty of identifying prisoners in war records.
However, the Sunday Times has obtained a copy of the Pantcheff report, intelligence collated by a British intelligence officer that was contained in the Russian archives. This outlines details of mass killings and torture of prisoners from the European mainland and Russia.
Matthew said “ I am pleased that my contributions to the Holocaust Memorial Day debate in the last two years has provoked interest in the death camps on Alderney and also what happened to the remains of those who were murdered.
"The Pantcheff report is very useful but I will continue to press the government to release information held in the British archives that has remained hidden since the end of the Second World War."
