The savage treatment of slave laborers at the Nazi concentration camps Norderney and Sylt was standard, historians say. What made them exceptional was that they were on British soil. A panel of historians has released its findings on the German occupation of Alderney, one of four Channel Islands seized by the Nazis in World War II. The panel determined that up to 1,134 prisoners died during the occupation from 1940 to 1945, but rumors that tens of thousands were killed in a "mini-Auschwitz" were unfounded, the Guardian reports. The island is around 10 miles off the coast of France.
- Atrocious conditions. The forced laborers, including French Jews and Russian prisoners of war, were "subject to atrocious living and working conditions, which included starvation, long working hours, completing dangerous construction works, beatings, maiming, torture, being housed in inadequate accommodation and, in some cases, executions," the panel's report stated. There were a total of four camps on the island run by the Nazi civil and military engineering Organization Todt; the SS took control of Norderney and Sylt in 1943.
- Revised death toll. The panel said the death toll is "unlikely to have exceeded 1,134 people, with a more likely range of deaths being between 641 to 1,027." That's up from a previous estimate of 389, based on marked graves found on the island.