The notorious Camp ‘SYLT’ in Alderney was an outpost of the concentration camp Hamburg-Neuengamme. The guards of this camp were members of SS Construction Brigade 1 and this unit was stationed in Dusseldorf prior to its transfer to Alderney.
Mail to and from the inmates of this camp was not conveyed direct. The mail from the prisoners had to be written on the standard printed forms, cards and folded letters of the concentration camp Neuengamme and was then taken from Alderney without any postage or postal markings. Firstly the mail went to the Concentration Camp at Neuengamme close to Hamburg. At the Camp the mail was censored and then posted to the addressees from the post office at Hamburg. The families of the prisoners only knew the address of Camp Neuengamme and the actual place where the prisoner was incarcerated was unknown to the families.
Illustrated is a postcard to Germany from the Alderney concentration camp
Sylt sent by a prisoner named Wilhem Becker. The message was written on
a form from the concentration camp Hamburg-Neuengamme and was cancelled by a civilian canceller from the post office of Hamburg-Berge- Dorf dated 24 April 1944. The name of the prisoner, Wilhem Becker, is known to Michael Wieneke and he was one of the post-war witnesses in Jersey and was mentioned in different post-war police interrogations.
Mail into Camp Sylt is unknown and most likely does not exist. Michael Wieneke was told by a former prisoner of Sylt-Camp (named Otto Spehr) that all mail which was received at the camp was collected by the guards and destroyed. Camp Sylt was ‘cleaned up’ just prior to D-Day and the prisoners were transferred via Guernsey to France and later on to Belgium.
Otto Spehr was taken from Alderney to Belgium from where he escaped. He was taken to England where he worked for Soldatensender Calais (Soldier’s Radio Calais), which was a ‘black’ propaganda station broadcasting in German into Germany.
Soldatensender Calais operated from 6pm local time to dawn. Unlike its predecessor, Gustav Siegfried Eins, the programmes were live from the purposely-built broadcast studio at Milton Bryan, Bedfordshire.
The method of propaganda used by the Soldatensender Calais was described by Sefton Delmer, its creator, in his book Black Boomerang, as “cover, cover, dirt, cover, dirt”; that is, using good music and providing coverage of sports and other events of interest to a German serviceman, the station made that listener receptive to propaganda items aimed at decreasing morale. An example was a warning of confidence men swindling German soldiers being transferred from France to the Russian front. This approach could be compared to those used by Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, without the heavy-handiness of the Axis programmes. Soldatensender Calais, as part of its cover, relayed speeches by Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials.
During the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, Soldatensender Calais broadcast information that was intended to impress German intelligence officers that the invasion area was wider than it actually was. After the Pas de Calais area was overrun, the station changed its callsign to Soldatensender West.
Soldatensender’s broadcast was repeated in print the next day in the NACHRICHTEN FȔR DIE TRUPPE air-dropped newspaper for German troops
