5 Discoveries That Archaeologists Wish They Never Found

5A Forgotten Nazi Concentration Camp … Located In Britain

The Nazis occupied a piece of Britain during World War II. That sounds like a fact you’d have heard before now if it’s true, but it’s something everyone in Britain tried to forget ever happened. We’re talking about the island of Alderney, located in the English Channel. Britain evacuated all its 1,500-odd residents in 1940, letting Germany take over this patch of British soil with zero effort.

Antiquity

“We shall surrender the beaches, we shall surrender the landing grounds, we shall surrender the fields and the streets.”

Germany moved thousands of prisoners into concentration camps here. After the war, everyone was curious about what exactly went down in Alderney, so the UK released some info … which, it turned out wasn’t accurate at all and purposely understated all the horrible stuff. So, we can’t trust British records to tell us the truth, and we sure can’t trust Nazi records to tell us the truth. That’s why we need archaeologists, who sometimes piece together stories from millennia ago but other times study stuff from just a few decades back.

In 2020, archaeologists investigated Sylt, the worst of the camps. They used their findings to verify various conflicting accounts, and they concluded that, yeah, the camp was really really bad. We’re not going to get into all the details today, but prisoners were overcrowded, starved, beaten to death, and dumped in mass graves. It’s, uh, kind of what you expect from death camps—especially ones kept secret by British government for ages.

5 Discoveries That Archaeologists Wish They Never Found
Source: Pinoy Daily News