Today, the site of the former concentration camp Sylt is an overgrown patch of land hard against the rugged cliffs of Alderney, part of a British Crown Dependency in the Channel Islands. But just 75 years ago, it was a feared and heavily guarded German prison where hundreds of men suffered and died at the hands of their Nazi captors on its soil.

With the end of the war, Lager (camp) Sylt and other smaller German camps on Alderney were dismantled and slowly faded into the landscape. Now, a British team of archaeologists has reconstructed Lager Sylt and tracked how it grew over its short but brutal history. Their research is published today in the journal Antiquity.

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