‘The Holocaust happened on British soil’: Inquiry into​ Nazi camps creates bitter divide on Alderney

Michael James at a spot where the bodies of labourers are thought to have been dumped during the war. Photograph: Mark Townsend/The Observer

Their foreboding entrance smothered in ivy, the tunnels gouged out of sheer rock beside Water Lane on the island of Alderney have long terrified generations of the island’s children.

For decades, though, it seemed that was as far as the notoriety of the dank tunnels on the outskirts of St Anne, the capital of the tiny Channel Island, would extend.