Slave Labourers and
  Concentration Camps
menu:
   
Back To Republican
Slave Labourers In Britain

Liberation Day May 2005. Photographs of the Westmount Cremetorium Commemoration
Home Page
concentration camp
e-mail us on:  editor@spanishrefugees-basquechildren.org
A group of Spanish Republican Slave Labourers in Alderney during the 1940s.

Sadly, we do not know the names of any of them at the moment, but hopefully, with help and further research, we may be able to name a few.

All the Spaniard Republicans who were emprisoned on the islands by the Nazi's and forced to work, under great hardship, must be remembered and not forgotten.


'Lest we forget'
One of the four Camps on the island of Alderney.
Sylt was a concentration camp.

The prisoners in Sylt and the Norderney were for enforced slave labourers who were forced to work building the many military fortifications and installations throughout the islands.

.  The prisoners were  slave labourers from Russia and Europe, including, Spanish Republicans.

Helgoland and Borkum camps, were volunteer Labour Camps and the Labourers there, were of course, treated better, although often harshly.
Francisco Font :
A Republican
Hero

   As a Spanish anti-fascist who was brought here (Channel Islands) by the Nazis as a slave-worker, I wish to comment on the death of Franco.

I greet it as I greeted the death of Hitler, of Goering and the rest of the Nazi leaders who had helped to put Franco into power in my country.  Also as I greeted the Israel's execution of Eichmann, one of Hitlers worst gangsters.

In my gratitude at this death, I think back to the 1,000,000 dead of the civil war, to the 2000,000 assassinated by his regime between 1939 and 1941, I think of the 65,000 soldiers and the 500,000 civilians who entered France as refugees in 1939.  Iremember the many thousands who then suffered at the hands of Franco's friends, the German Nazis.  For example the 8,000 who entered Matthausen concentration camp -- of whom only 1,000 survived.  And I remember my friends who were dragged here to the Channel Islands and died here, only because they had fought for their lawful government against Franco...

May I hope that the present anf future generations of Spaniards will never have to experience the suffering and torment that my generation had to live through.

I shall sleep better tonight, I shall not shed tears, for I have no more tears left to shed.

Saddly, Francisco Font is no longer with us.  He died in 1980. In 1975 he wrote the following extract as a letter to the Guernsey newspaper.
A map of Alderney showing the position of the four Labour Camps.
Francisco Font's widow Kate and their son Garry.
a spanish republican
slave labourer
For Juan Taule, the
fighting started in 1936.
He took up arms in the
Spanish Civil War to
fight against Franco's
fascist regime.  In 1939
he fled to exile in France.
There, he was handed
over to the advancing
German army and in
1941 found himself in
St Helier harbour in
Jersey.  He was then
forced to work on building an underground hospital and other forticifaction with a group of 40 other Spanish republican exiles.

"You lived day by day.  You...didn't know what was happening tomorrow.  We used to work together in gangs but people would be moved overnight and we would never see them again".

Juan now is 85 years old and lives with his wife Alice in Bolton.  They have a daughter; Juanita.
a group spanish
republican slave labourers
The remaining gate posts which were the entrance to the Sylt concentration camp.

There was a total of 4 labour camps on the island of Alderney.  Russian OT workers were in Lager Helgoland in the north of the island, whilst in Lager Borkum was used for German technicians and volunteers from different countries of Europe.

However, Lager Norderney and Sylt were totally different.  Norderney Camp housed European and Russian enforced slave labourers, whilst Lager Sylt was totally and simply a Concentration Camp  organised by the SS-Baubrigade I and ran as the Neuengamme camp in northern Germany.

   (click her to see a plan of the Sylt concentration camp)
                   Francisco Font.