Category Archives: Censorship

What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films – The New York Times

Posted: July 13, 2023 at 4:53 am

This particular change to The French Connection came unexplained and unannounced, so we can only guess at the precise reasoning behind it. But we can imagine why the language was there in the first place. The French Connection was adapted from a nonfiction book about two real detectives, both of whom appear in the film, and the scene clearly wants to situate the viewer within a certain gritty milieu: a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor. We see a bit of banter between two policemen working in what was then called the inner city, dialogue underlining their good cop, bad cop dynamic; in certain ways, its not so different from the set pieces you would find in Blaxploitation films of the era. Doyles eagerness to get to the bar hints at the long-running alcoholic cop trope, and his homoerotic jokes are offset by his womanizing another ongoing genre clich. His racist barbs give a sense of his misdirected frustration. Doyle is presented as flawed, reckless, obsessive, vulgar, rough around the edges but, of course, were ultimately meant to find him charming and heroic. He is one in a long line of characters that would stretch forward into shows like The Shield and The Wire: figures built on the idea that good cop, bad cop can describe not just an interrogation style or a buddy-film formula but also a single officer.

Attempting to edit out just one of a characters flaws inevitably produces a sense of inconsistent standards. We get that true heroes shouldnt be using racial epithets. But theyre probably supposed to avoid a lot of the other things Popeye Doyle does too like racing (and crashing) a car through a residential neighborhood or shooting a suspect in the back. This selective editing feels like a project for risk-averse stakeholders, so anxious about a films legacy and lasting economic value that they end up diminishing the work itself. The point of the edit isnt to turn Doyle into a noble guy, just one whose movie modern viewers can watch without any jolts of discomfort or offense. If Gene Hackman is American cinemas great avatar of paranoia a star in three of this countrys most prophetic and indelible surveillance thrillers, The French Connection, The Conversation and Enemy of the State then his turn here might anticipate the intensity with which entities from police departments to megacorporations will try to mitigate risks like that.

Artful jump cuts can illuminate all kinds of interesting associations between images. Bad ones just create bumps in logic; theyre disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play. The one newly smuggled into The French Connection reveals, to use a period term, the hand of the Man, even if its unclear from which direction its reaching. (Is it Disney, treating adult audiences like the children its used to serving? Did Friedkin, who once modified the color of the film, approve the change?) Censors, like overzealous cops, can be too aggressive, or too simplistic, in their attempts to neutralize perceived threats. Whoever made the cut in the precinct scene, sparing the hero from saying unpleasant things, did nothing to remove other ethnic insults, from references to Italian Americans to the cops code names for their French targets: Frog One and Frog Two. It also becomes hilarious, in this sanitized context, to watch the films frequent nonlinguistic violence: A guy is shot in the face; a train conductor is blasted in the chest; a sniper misses Doyle and clips a woman pushing a stroller.

Surveillance, as the movie teaches us, is a game of dogged attention; focus too much on one thing and you miss a world of detail encircling it. Nit-picking old artworks for breaking todays rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture, the full context; we become, instead, obsessed with obscure metrics, legalistic violations of current sensibilities. And actively changing those works continually remolding them into a shape that suits todays market eventually compromises the entire archival record of our culture; were left only with evidence of the present, not a document of the past. This is, in a way, the same spirit that leads obdurate politicians to try and purge reams of uncomfortable American history from textbooks, leaving students learning and living in a state of confusion, with something always out of order, always unexplained.

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What's Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films - The New York Times

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The Legal Fight Over Government and Social-Media Censorship … – The Wall Street Journal

Posted: at 4:53 am

This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Speaker 1: From the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Paul Gigot: A federal judge rules that the Biden administration illegally pressured social media platforms to censor certain views it didn't like, especially on Covid-19, and the judge bars administration officials from meeting with the social media platforms. How significant is this case for the future of free speech and the government use of private actors to do what the First Amendment bars government from doing? Welcome, I'm Paul Gigot with the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, and I'm here with my colleagues Allysia Finley and Kyle Peterson talking about this case, which is Missouri v. Biden, right now in federal district court. Allysia, tell us about the background of this case. Who sued the government and what are they claiming?

Allysia Finley: So Louisiana and Missouri, the states, they sued, actually various government officials. There are over a couple dozen and various government agencies, and these include CDC, Census Bureau, FBI, the HHS, and some of the officials that were named were Anthony Fauci, as well as Rob Flaherty, who we can get to in a little bit, who worked at these agencies and with the states. And also, some scientists or leading plaintiffs were authors of the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which was censored by many of these platforms.

Paul Gigot: Which took an alternative view of how to handle the pandemic.

Allysia Finley: Right. One of the other plaintiffs was the owner of Gateway Pundit whose post, and had been censored by some of these platforms. And they alleged that the platforms, again, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter being the primary ones, were censoring or removing, in some cases, de-platforming individuals at the behest of the government, and that the government and these government agencies and officials were coercing or encouraging the platforms to boot them or suppress their speech.

Paul Gigot: It's fascinating because of course the private companies themselves are not subject to the First Amendment per se. First Amendment constrains government actors. The private companies also have liability protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. So, why are the private actors acting on behalf of government here? Why did Judge Terry Doughty find that there was this pressure on them to do the censoring?

Allysia Finley: So he looked at, actually, this was a very facts and evidence specific case, and he examined the evidence, and a lot of these communications between the government agencies or government officials and the platforms, so the Twitter and Facebook employees, and he found that they were "significantly encouraging or coercing the private platforms to do their bidding." This actually gets to, in 1982, precedent Blum, which related to actually nursing homes and whether the government could be liable for essentially coercing nursing homes to violate law.

Paul Gigot: I see. So this is basically, he went through a lot of discovery. It's the first time these emails and other communications have actually been coughed up in a case like this, and he looked at that evidence. And what did he rule? What did he decide?

Allysia Finley: Well, he ruled that they had violated the free speech rights of the plaintiffs, and actually said that they'd probably violated this speech rights of the millions of Americans across the country. And by the way, they decided to restrict certain content that the government disliked, disfavored, and that this speech was predominantly conservative views.

Paul Gigot: And on Covid, it was dissenting views from the orthodoxy of the government on lockdowns, on vaccines in particular, and other things, right?

Allysia Finley: Masks, right.

Paul Gigot: Masks.

Allysia Finley: And those were the three big ones. I think the strongest evidence in the case actually really concerned the vaccines, and that's where you really saw the Biden White House officials put a lot of pressure on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube to take down content that had flied in the face of their official guidelines.

Paul Gigot: Kyle, what's the coercion that is supposedly exercised here by the government? Obviously, the government has its own right to talk to private actors. It can say, "We don't like this policy." That's not coercion per se. What is the coercive element here?

Kyle Peterson: It's communications between members of the government and staff for these social networks. So, here's a couple of examples.

Paul Gigot: But what makes it coercive? Because if they just say, "Call up Kyle Peterson," and say, "Kyle, I don't like that editorial you wrote." You're going to say, "Well, thank you very much for your comment, but I don't care."

Kyle Peterson: Yeah, I mean, so here's a couple of examples. "Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately." Here's another one. "Internally, we have been considering our options on what to do about it." And there was some talk at that point of revising the Section 230 immunity that social media platforms enjoy in the law.

Paul Gigot: This is the government threat against the companies. We're tugging our chin and saying, "Hmm, we're thinking about revising 230, which protects you from liability."

Kyle Peterson: Right, and so the judge's view is that it's a little bit like, "Nice social network you have there, shame if something would happen to it." Here's what the judge says is the standard, "The state can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power, or has provided such significant encouragement that the choice must be deemed to be that of the state." So basically saying that Facebook, Twitter, these social companies had no choice but to comply with these requests. I would push back a little bit though, because maybe that is true in particular with regard to some of these communications between the social networks and the White House. But if you go through and look at the exhibits, the discovery that was found in this case, a lot of this looks like places where people at the social sites that were concerned about misinformation, and people in the government who were concerned about that, were working together. So there's a White House email, for example, that flags an Instagram user, Anthony Fauci Official, and says, "Any way we can get this pulled down? It's not actually one of ours." The answer from Facebook is, "Yep, on it." So there's a case where Facebook has an incentive, I think, not to have people masquerading as public officials on their platform. The White House obviously doesn't want that either, and so they're kind of working together. And the same is true for some of the Covid stuff, at least, you have emails between the CDC and these social sites where the social sites are saying, "We're seeing all sorts of claims that Covid vaccines might cause ALS or magnetism, or that they can alter blood color. Can you verify whether this is true or not?" And the CDC says, "There's nothing to this," or in the examples of myocarditis, "Yes, there is something to this," and trying to respond. And I have a hard time seeing how there's coercion in some of these emails, at least.

Paul Gigot: Okay, fair enough. I mean, conversations like that are not coercive, but if you start to say, as a government official, "That Section 230 thing, we may want to revise that. Please excise this content." And I gather, Allysia, there's also some antitrust threats here that were part of it, correct?

Allysia Finley: Right. Then the privacy regulation, which the giants have also been trying to ward off, and the antitrust point, Facebook has already been sued. The FTC is already is trying to break up Facebook, and actually it's continued to go after Facebook with a number of lawsuits. And actually for that matter, the Justice Department has also sued Google, a numerous antitrust claims.

Paul Gigot: Which owns YouTube.

Allysia Finley: Right, so this threat was legitimate. And I think going back to the point on Section 230, what's interesting is the Biden administration tries to claim in its defense is, "Well, there was bipartisan support from Congress, and so that threat, it's not legitimate, or it doesn't really mean anything because Republicans support modifying or revising Section 230 too."

Paul Gigot: Did the government actually say that in that case?

Allysia Finley: Yes, they actually made that in their defense.

Paul Gigot: Of course, that if-

Allysia Finley: That makes it even more likely.

Paul Gigot: ... Yeah, it makes it more likely that they'd be able to follow through on the threat. So Kyle, what is your response to that? These are government actors, the White House being a very powerful government actor with control over Justice Department, with heavy influence over the federal agencies. Why would it not be coercive in that case?

Kyle Peterson: Well, it could be, and that's the question. I mean, it will be fascinating to watch this as it works its way up the appeals courts and maybe to the Supreme Court. I'm certainly open to the idea that particularly these White House statements that I quoted, that sounds a little coercive to me. One question in the case would be how far that goes down the chain of government? I mean, if somebody in the White House advisory team is saying coercive sounding things to Twitter, does that affect these good faith interactions between the CDC? Does that coercion go all the way down the government chain of command as it were? But that's part of why I think this case is so interesting, worth watching, is we have a new form of media, social media, and we don't have a great case law, nothing. It really, analogous to these situations to rely on. And so, we're going to answer some of these questions, and I would point to another piece of the judge's ruling. So he says, he barred certain communications, interactions between government officials and these social sites, but he says, "The following actions are not prohibited by this preliminary injunction." One of them is exercising permissible public and government speech promoting government policies, or views on matters of public concerns. So is it the secrecy that was the problem here? If these White House officials said publicly, "We think X is misinformation and we're disappointed that Facebook is not taking greater action." Is that coercive in the same way that private conversations to the same effect are? And then two, the judge also says that, not covered by his injunction, "Is informing social media companies of postings intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures?" And I'm a little bit flummoxed by that because if these interactions are coercive with regard to Covid information, I have a hard time seeing how they're not coercive with regard to what people are saying on voting procedures.

Paul Gigot: All right. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk more about this fascinating case. A federal judge ruling that private censorship under pressure from the government violates the First Amendment, when we come back. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker, "Play the Opinion Potomac Watch Podcast." That is, "Play the Opinion Potomac Watch Podcast."

Speaker 1: From the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Paul Gigot: Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigot with The Wall Street Journal, with Allysia Finley and Kyle Peterson, talking about the ruling by Judge Terry Doughty that found the government had illegally pressured private social media companies to censor speech and violated the First Amendment, particularly on Covid. Allysia, there's no doubt here in the factual case, the discovery that the judge undertook, that these companies did censor speech. They did censor content considerably, correct?

Allysia Finley: Right. In many cases, it was, they suppressed some of the content that they deemed "borderline". By that, it means that they prevented it essentially from going viral. People couldn't share it, so it had a very limited audience.

Paul Gigot: Okay, and this was the Great Barrington Declaration, we know was particularly contentious with Tony Fauci and government public health officials at the time. This is the declaration signed by many, many scientists, but Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff were two of the promoters of this. And their argument was that you should take care of the most vulnerable people first, first and foremost under Covid. Make sure that older people, people who had underlying conditions were protected, but let the rest of the economy stay open. That was not where Tony Fauci was. And they ran a campaign internally, which has been exposed later with emails against the Great Barrington proposal.

Allysia Finley: Right. So in part of the ruling, they actually weren't able to find any instances in which the Tony Fauci and Collins actually pressured the social media companies.

Paul Gigot: Okay.

Allysia Finley: And so, it was a lot of internal communications between the two saying that we need to basically push back against this in the media, like doing articles, Washington Post, providing quotes in those cases.

Paul Gigot: Which is not illegal.

Allysia Finley: This is not illegal. So I think that's actually one weak point in the judge's ruling that just because they publicly denounced and tried to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration in the wider media, and then the social media companies kind of took the hint that, "Well, maybe we should also try to suppress this." I don't think that that passes as or meets the criteria as being coercive or significantly even in encouraging, because there really weren't any direct communications at least that they were able to uncover during legal discovery.

Paul Gigot: Okay. So it seems here, Kyle, that what we're talking about when it comes down to a legal matter is what qualifies as, how should we say, discussion between the government and these companies of the kind that we would have as journalists? Certainly, I would have as an editor and have had with government officials who call and gripe about something, or say, "We sure would like you to write an editorial about this or that." They don't say, "Paul, we're going to pull your license." Well, there's no license to practice journalism, but we're not going to try to take away your job or something like that. They can't do that, or we're going to sue you for something or other. But the social media platforms are vulnerable as we said. But does it come down to, do you think, a fact-based question of just how coercive this pressure was?

Kyle Peterson: How coercive it was, and also what the legal standard, the legal test for that coercion is, and whether it's different in the social media space than it is in other spaces? I mean, the difficulty of the analogies I think you hit, as a journalist, you can get calls from government officials that you maybe would describe as a frank exchange of views. And if you're a reporter doing something on the national security beat, I imagine officials, White House officials may call you and say that, "This is very important national security information. If you publish this, you're going to expose sources."

Paul Gigot: Right, and also say that you may end up being vulnerable yourself to some kind of investigation.

Kyle Peterson: Well, or you may end up killing people because there are sources that are described in this that would be revealed. And to me, I mean that sounds maybe persuasive or maybe not, but the question is whether the decision to publish still rests with the journalists and their editors. And I think that's the question here with social media as well. Whether the decision to moderate that content or not moderate that content was still reasonably in the hands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, what have you, or whether there was so much pressure on them that they basically had no choice but to comply.

Paul Gigot: What do you think about that? Is that the line that you would draw here, whether this is actually a proper ruling or not?

Allysia Finley: Well, I think that the coercion is, and whether it's implicit or explicit, I think that that's the key to the case. Now, I just want to use one other illustration is, we've been seeing what's happened to Twitter since Elon Musk took it over and how Lina Khan has basically been harassing the company.

Paul Gigot: She's the head of the Federal Trade.

Allysia Finley: Federal Trade, and basically, because of his hands-off content moderation policies and has been subject to all kinds of document requests, and FTC is also threatening to rewrite a privacy settlement with the company, and that just shows how vindictive the government can be, and the government really does have a lot of power over these companies. It can't really pull licenses per se, but it could seek to put a company out of business, break it up, so to speak. Maybe the Biden administration would be doing these antitrust cases anyways, but some of it could also be out of sheer vindictiveness.

Paul Gigot: Does the judge cite any precedence for the linkage between government and private censorship?

Allysia Finley: Not actually censorship. He cites a lot of different case precedents to, as I mentioned before, the 1982, the Blum precedent which involved the nursing home, and actually the basis in terms of whether or what qualifies as coercion and significant encouragement, which is the standard to hold the government liable or responsible for violation, whether it be a First Amendment or other civil rights or other individual rights violation. But really, in this realm of First Amendment rights, especially with regards to the media or social media, it really is an untested case.

Paul Gigot: There are not a lot of precedents here that have gone up to the Supreme Court. There is a case from some decades ago where the Supreme Court did rule on a, it was in West Virginia I believe, where the government stood guilty of compelling speech because it amounted to a company town. It was just a small town where everybody more or less worked for the same company, and therefore was deemed to be acting on behest of the government. But there's not a lot of case law on this, so this could set some new ground, Kyle. And I'm just reading between the lines of the Peterson coercion here, or the discussion, and I think you're skeptical.

Kyle Peterson: Well, at least I think that there is possibly a mixed ruling here where maybe some of the White House private statements to these social networks crossed the line, and maybe the CDC apparatchiks coordination with Twitter on them asking, is there any truth to this claim, this health claim about a Covid vaccine, doesn't cross the line. But I think this is certainly one to watch just because it is, I think, setting some new ground, and does raise questions for other areas of life. I mean, we were talking about a comparison to journalists earlier. What if you had a newspaper that ran an op-ed, and the President says, "There is information in here that is libelist about me and my administration, and that's why I'm going to appoint judges that will overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, pass a constitutional amendment to change the libel standard under US law." Is that a First Amendment breach? Is that a retaliation?

Paul Gigot: No, no, not at all.

Kyle Peterson: I think there's a lot of cans of worms that are being opened here, and it's hard for me sitting here right now to see around all the corners about how they're going to be settled. But it is certainly going to be an interesting case. And maybe one, or maybe we have to wait for another one to get up to the Supreme Court. There's another one that could be coming on Ron DeSantis and Disney, his removal of government benefits from Disney after Disney spoke out against the law concerning teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary schools. That is being litigated as a retaliation case, and maybe that will have some bearing on this as well.

Paul Gigot: Well, it strikes me as a very important area to be investigated and litigated because of the power of social media platforms to control speech. I mean, during Covid, we essentially had one part of the debate about Covid, which we carried on in our pages, but that debate could not extend to social media because of the censorship of a lot of those views that the platforms undertook. You saw another illustration with the 2020 campaign with the censoring of the Hunter Biden story that the New York Post have published about his laptop, which turned out to be entirely true. But because of the 51 former spies who said that at the time, that that was possibly Russian misinformation, the platforms used that as an excuse to censor. So, there's a broad concern there for what this says about democratic debate. And it's bad enough if the platforms themselves, from all kicking in the same direction with the same point of view, censor alternative points of view, but it's much worse when the government is able to use them as agents of their official policy to censor dissenting or alternative points of view.

Kyle Peterson: I think that's right. On the point about democratic debate, I would say two things, which is the person who is upset that Facebook keeps taking down their posts about how vaccines cause magnetism or alter their blood color is in the same position as the person whose op-eds on that subject keep getting refused by op-ed editors at newspapers around the country. And I think that it's easy to overestimate the influence of social media on democratic debate. Most Americans are not on Twitter. There is still an awful lot of speech that takes place off Twitter, and way more magnitudes, more speech than there was in the Democratic debate even 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. And so, there's a lot of speech out there, a lot of avenues for speech, and there are many companies that want to be the next Twitter. There is competition out there. One problem is the network effects. I mean, Twitter is powerful because everybody else is on Twitter. But also part of it is, I think, those moderation policies. There are unmoderated social media sites, and they tend not to be very pleasant places to spend a few minutes.

Paul Gigot: Allysia, you're going to get the last word here. What do you think about this issue and where it goes from here?

Allysia Finley: Well, I think as Kyle pointed out, there are a number of free speech cases headed up to the Supreme Court. Texas and Florida have tried to tackle this issue in passing laws that would restrict social media companies from censoring speech and speech of public officials and media companies. And the Supreme Court is now considering whether to grant cert to both of those cases, and has asked for the Solicitor General's opinion. But I think those are probably the two more important cases to watch going up to the Supreme Court, and may decide also the extent of free speech rights for the platforms themselves.

Paul Gigot: Right, because those cases are about the governments of those states saying the tech platforms cannot censor, right?

Allysia Finley: Right, and the platforms in those cases are claiming that this is an abridgement of their First Amendment rights.

Paul Gigot: Right, to be able to decide what they want to say or not publishes content. All right. Kyle Peterson and Allysia Finley, thank you for this fascinating discussion. Thank you all for listening. We're here every day with Potomac Watch, and we will back tomorrow with another edition. So, hope you'll join us then.

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The Pentagon Will No Longer Offer Support to Moviemakers Who … – Military.com

Posted: at 4:53 am

"What does it say to the world when Maverick is scared of the Chinese communists?" U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in a floor speech while discussing the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill.

Cruz was referring to what some eagle-eyed viewer saw in the trailer for the long-awaited "Top Gun" sequel, "Top Gun: Maverick." It turns out the filmmakers had removed the flags of Taiwan and Japan from Maverick's flight jacket. The reason, reported by Politico, was because the studio tried to "appease" Tencent, a China-based backer of the film.

Politico said it obtained a recent Pentagon document that says the U.S. military will no longer offer technical assistance to filmmakers unless they offer a pledge that the final product won't be altered for approval from the Chinese government.

Read: How Hollywood Films Get the US Military as a Co-Star

According to the document, the Department of Defense "will not provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the People's Republic of China... to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the People's Republic of China."

The policy has been a long time coming. In May 2023, Cruz, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, introduced the "The Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity, Protecting Talkies Act" or SCRIPT Act, an amendment to the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill, which would limit or end Defense Department technical assistance to Hollywood productions if those productions censor their films for viewing in China.

"For too long, Hollywood has been complicit in China's censorship and propaganda in the name of bigger profits," Cruz said in a statement. "The SCRIPT Act will serve as a wakeup call by forcing Hollywood studios to choose between the assistance they need from the American government and the dollars they want from China."

This new Pentagon guidance contains most of the provisions of Cruz's intended legislation, without the legislation. It requires the production company working with the DoD to inform its liaison officer of any changes demanded by a Chinese official, and whether or not the company intends to comply with that demand.

The SCRIPT Act would also require an annual report of films that were submitted to Chinese officials and submitted to the Department of Commerce. Films produced in whole or in part in China will also not be allowed to censor their contents for the Chinese government.

Tencent eventually ended its investment in "Top Gun: Maverick" and the flags reappeared in the final version of the film, but this is just one moment in a long line of censorship requests from Beijing, many of which Hollywood is often only too happy to accommodate. China surpassed North America as the world's biggest market for Hollywood movies in 2020, and moviemakers often depend on its market to break even.

Changes are made despite the fact that Chinese censorship isn't limited to content that makes China look bad. It's known that any content involving Uyghurs, Taiwan or Hong Kong demonstrations won't pass, but the Chinese have also been known to censor same-sex kissing ("Bohemian Rhapsody") and even the Statue of Liberty (noticeably absent from "Spider-Man: No Way Home").

Studios have been editing films for China as far back as the late 1990s with "Titanic," where actress Kate Winslet's nude body was edited out of the final version. "Iron Man 3" featured Chinese product placement. Films such as "Fight Club" and "Lord of War" had their endings cut off and replaced with text that told audiences the criminals were apprehended.

"This new guidance -- implementing the legislation I authored in the SCRIPT Act -- will force studios to choose one or the other, and I'm cautiously optimistic that they'll make the right choice and reject China's blackmailing," Cruz told Politico.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, or on LinkedIn.

Whether you're looking for news and entertainment, thinking of joining the military or keeping up with military life and benefits, Military.com has you covered. Subscribe to the Military.com newsletter to have military news, updates and resources delivered straight to your inbox.

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Britains Holocaust island – Index on Censorship

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In a West London art gallery, a pock-marked relief sculpture provides a devastating visual representation of a wartime Nazi atrocity. The piece is both a work of art and evidence from a crime scene: a cast of a wall riddled with bullet holes. The cast could have been taken from any number of sites across Nazi-occupied Europe. But this wall is on Alderney one of the Channel Islands and part of the British Isles which surrendered to the German army in 1940.

The artist Piers Secunda, who created the work, has been told by forensics experts that it was used by a German firing squad. Secunda is part of a growing group of campaigners, journalists, researchers and politicians who believe the full story of the occupation of Alderney has never been told. In particular, he believes the fate of Jewish prisoners on the island has been conveniently minimised to protect the idea of British exceptionalism. If he is right, we will have to reassess our understanding of the history of the geographical boundaries of Hitlers Final Solution. Hence the exhibitions title: The Holocaust on British Soil.

Just eight Jews are officially recorded as dying on Alderney. Secunda, who describes himself as a researcher as well as an artist, is sceptical. Another of his works includes reproductions of lists of deportees compiled by the French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld. Secunda is now writing to the families of 400 French Jews who are known to havebeen transported to the island from the notorious transit camp at Drancy in the suburbs of Paris.

If many hundreds of Jews were sent to Alderney and we know the death rate of prisoners was high-between 30% and 40% how is it possible that only eight people died on the island? There is a disconnect, and my interest is to join the dots, he told Index.

While Alderney is technically a Crown Dependency and not a part of the United Kingdom, the British government was responsible for the surrender of the Channel Islands. The occupation of these islands has always been an inconvenient truth. By the summer of 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchills War Cabinet concluded the islands could not be defended, and at the beginning of July, Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Alderney were all occupied.

However, unlike on the other islands, all but a handful of people on Alderney were evacuated. This paved the way for the island to be turned into a vast prison for slave workers constructing Hitlers sea defences. In January 1942, therefore, four camps Helgoland, Norderney, Sylt and Borkum were set up for workers from so-called Operation Todt. Conventional wisdom is that the majority of those transported to the island were Russian prisoners of war. But the records show a significant proportion of those in the camps were Spanish Republicans, north African Arabs and French Jews.

The conditions on Alderney were appalling and, in common with other Nazi work camps, prisoners were beaten and starved. Many succumbed to disease. Those who could no longer work were sent to camps in mainland Europe where they were murdered. The overall numbers of those who died on the island is also the subject of academic controversy: the minimum estimate is between 700 and 1,000 people, but experts believe the actual figure could be much higher.

Immediately after the liberation of Alderney, two senior British soldiers, Major Cotton and Major Haddock, were sent to investigate war crimes. As a result, the Judge Advocate Generals (JAG) office, the body responsible for bringing Nazis to justice, concluded the conditions were akin to those in other concentration camps in German-occupied territory: The position here is somewhat similar to Belsen, stronger perhaps because the offences were committed on British territory. A young captain, Theodore Pantcheff, was brought in to carry out a full investigation. In September 1945 he wrote: Wicked and merciless crimes were carried out on British soil in the last three years.

And yet Britain did not bring a single German officer to justice for what happened on Alderney. Instead, the authorities chose to focus on the Russian victims of the regime in the islands camps and shift the responsibility for any investigation to the Soviet authorities. In October 1945, Pantcheffs report was sent to Moscow, where it lay in the archives until 1993. The British copy was destroyed.

When the report finally came to light, it revealed that 15 suspected war criminals had been in British custody at the end of the war. In his memoirs, Pantcheff claimed that three of the most notorious of these, Maximilian List, Kurt Klebeck and Carl Hoffman, had not survived the war. This was untrue. Hauptsturmfhrer List was in charge of Sylt, the only SS camp on British territory. After the war, he was traced to a British prisoner-of-war camp and was said to have been handed over to the Russians. In fact, he was living in Germany well into the 1970s. Obersturmfhrer Klebeck, Lists deputy, lived out his days in Hamburg, despite being convicted of other war crimes in 1947 and being the subject of German investigations in the 1960s and the 1990s.

Most shocking is the story of Major Hoffman, the Kommandant of Alderney and its four camps, who Pantcheff said had been handed over to the Russians and executed in Kyiv in 1945. The British government was forced to admit the truth in 1983: that Hoffman was taken from Alderney and held in the London Cage for prisoners of war until 1948, when he was released and allowed to return to Germany. He died peacefully in his bed in Hamelin, West Germany, in March 1974.

The story of Alderney is one of silence, state censorship and missed opportunities. Hoffman and the other war criminals should have faced justice immediately after the end of hostilities. The British government has never explained why it allowed them to go free nor why it pursued a policy of Russification of the atrocities committed on the island. But there is no doubt this was a conscious policy. The details are contained in Madeleine Buntings 1995 book, The Model Occupation. In it she said that Brigadier Shapcott from JAG wrote in 1945 that all the inmates on Alderney were Russian, and Britains Foreign Office concluded that for practical purposes Russians may be considered to be the only occupants of these camps. JAG also told the Foreign Office: No were committed against the French Jews. On balance they were treated better than the others working for the Germans.

There have been a number of attempts to correct the historical record by drawing attention to the camps on Alderney and the presence of Jewish prisoners. Most notable is the work of Jewish South African archaeologist Solomon H Steckoll, whose book The Alderney Death Camp was published in 1982 and serialised in The Observer newspaper. His direct, impassioned approach is captured in the cover blurb: In 1943 the SS built a concentration camp on the British island of Alderney. Prisoners were worked as slaves, beaten, starved, hanged, garrotted, hurled from cliff-tops, even buried alive in setting concrete. Why have these horrific acts been kept from the public for so long?

The Alderney Death Camp is a remarkable piece of investigative journalism driven by the authors own burning sense of injustice. Many on Alderney dismissed it as a tabloid hatchet job. But it is nothing of the kind, not least because Steckoll made it his personal mission to find Hoffman and reveal the full scale of the British governments cover-up. This will be his legacy.

Steckolls revelations prompted a grudging recognition from the British government that it had not told the truth about Hoffman. It did not, though, lead to full disclosure. Those files on the Channel Islands that had not been destroyed remained closed for at least another decade, when Labour MP David Winnick, who is Jewish, began campaigning for their release.

From May 1992, Winnick also pushed for an investigation into the war crimes on Alderney committed by Klebeck, who was by then known to be at large in Hamburg. By the end of the year, he had succeeded on both fronts (although no files released made any reference to Alderney). Winnicks campaign was followed two years later by the publication of Buntings book. Nearly 30 years on it still bears scrutiny as a major piece of journalism; Buntings tone as she grapples with the British governments decision-making is a mixture of shock and justified anger.

Her conclusion is stark: Trials on British soil would have been an acutely embarrassing reminder to the British public of several painful facts about the war which the government wanted quickly forgotten: that British territory had been occupied for five years; that British subjects had collaborated and worked for the Germans on Alderney; and that Nazi atrocities, including the establishment of an SS concentration camp, had occurred on British soil.

One block on transparency has been the attitudes on Alderney itself. Academics and journalists have faced hostility on the island. Caroline Sturdy Colls, professor of conflict archaeology at Staffordshire University, was the first to apply modern forensic techniques to sites on Alderney. Her book, Adolf Island: The Nazi Occupation of Alderney, was published last year. Nearly 80 years after the end of the war, the subject of what really happened on Alderney remains highly sensitive among some residents who dont want their island paradise to become part of what they see as the Holocaust industry.

There are certainly some islanders who want to help memorialise the victims and tell their stories, so not everyone wants to forget, Sturdy Colls told Index. Those that do often provide reasons like not wanting the island to be tarnished by this dark history or not wanting tourism based on Nazi sites.

The archaeologist said there were a host of other reasons why the subject of the camps on Alderney has proved controversial. There are many people who still dont recognise the crimes that were perpetrated as being part of the Nazi programme of persecution and/or the Holocaust. After the war, there was a conscious effort by the government to play down the atrocities that were carried out, and so a sanitised narrative emerged that a good proportion of the British public believed or chose to believe. Some of the islanders who went back to Alderney found it too painful to discuss what had happened there, whilst some residentsafter the war didnt (and still dont) want the island to be known for the occupation-era sites that exist there.

There have been several key moments when a full and accurate narrative should have been told. Immediately after the war, the Pantcheff report could have led to a war crimes trial, but the British government chose to draw a veil over the atrocities.

The extraordinary work of Steckoll in 1982 could have prompted an inquiry, but instead it was dismissed as sensationalist. The combined efforts of Winnick in parliament and Bunting in the press could have opened the door in the mid-1990s, but again the government chose obfuscation rather than openness.

We have another such opportunity now. The mantle of Steckoll has been taken up by another Jewish investigator, Marcus Roberts, who is determined to pursue the truth about the Holocaust on British soil. He believes it is possible that between 15,000 and 30,000 people died on the island, with at least 1,000 being Jewish.

Roberts is the founder of the Jewish heritage charity JTrails. He began researching the Nazi camps of northern France in 2007. Two years later he turned his attention to the Channel Islands. He has been pushing for official recognition of Alderney as a Holocaust site, the establishment of an appropriate memorial and protection of Jewish graves. Roberts has established it was not just French Jews who were sent to Alderney; there were Jews from many from other parts of Europe and north Africa.

His research demonstrates that a considerable number of Jews are likely to have died on the island from dysentery and disease. His view is that the push for a Soviet inquiry was a smokescreen. Roberts told The Observer: The way I read it is that the investigation regarding the Russians was undertaken first as a diversion from war crimes against other nationalities, but also there was definitely discussion in the papers we can read that they wanted to guarantee access to Allied war graves on Russian territory. It was also about plausible deniability.

Although she has challenged the numbers cited by Roberts, Sturdy Colls also believes the scale of the Jewish atrocities has been downplayed. It is evident from the wide range of testimonies available and from the surveys we did of the camps in which Jews were housed that they were treated appallingly, and more Jews likely died than we know of, she said. The conditions in which Jews were housed were an extension of those that they were kept in elsewhere in Europe. The camps on Alderney were part of a network of sites that housed Jews and harsh punishments, terrible working and living conditions, and torture characterised their lives on Alderney.

She added that it was important to recognise the atrocities committed against other groups on Alderney eastern Europeans and Jehovahs Witnesses, for example. Overall, the suffering of most of the people who were sent to Alderney and were under the control of Organisation Todt and the SS has been underplayed.

The momentum towards full disclosure may now be irresistible. In recent years, investigative journalists around the world have turned their attention to Alderney, and the story has been covered by The Sunday Timesand ITV in the UK, Channel 9 in Australia, Der Spiegel in Germany and The Times of India. One of the most comprehensive investigations was carried out last year by Isobel Cockerell for the international online publication Coda Story.

Her article on Alderney has been nominated for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism. In it she asks the key questions: Why did the British government let evidence of German war crimes on its soil remain in obscurity? Why was no one prosecuted? She says the islanders have a range of answers: collective shame at surrendering the islands and subsequent collaboration; the post-war focus on rebuilding the country; a view that the scale of the atrocities didnt merit war crimes trials; and also that no government wanted talk of Jewish murders on its soil.

Events in the next few years may force the governments hand and prompt ministers to correct the historical record. In 2024, the UK will take its turn as chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. The body is responsible for Holocaust education,remembrance and research around the world. Lord Pickles is the UKs special envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues and the head of the UKs IHRA delegation. On visits to Alderney, Pickles has told islanders they need to come to terms with the troubled history of the camps and find a way of marking what happened with a respectful memorial.

Later this year, Pickles will announce an expert review of the numbers who died on Alderney and invite submissions from academics, researchers and members of the public. The IHRA is seeking to adopt a charter to safeguard all sites of the Holocaust in Europe. Gilly Carr, associate professor in archaeology at Cambridge University and chair of the IHRA Safeguarding Sites project, told Index: Such sites play a crucial role in educating current and future generations about the Holocaust and help us reflect on its consequences. In this charter we take a broad approach to what we consider to be a site of the Holocaust. Jews were held in camps in Alderney and we consider these to be Holocaust sites.

Carr, like Sturdy Colls, believes the full story of Nazi atrocities has been downplayed in the past. Certainly, the subject of victims of Nazism in the Channel Islands as a whole, a category within which I would include Jews, political prisoners and forced labourers, has come late to the table, she said. Because there were no war crimes trials resulting from the occupation of the Channel Islands, it became a non-subject for many people.

Carr has helped develop the concept of taboo heritage, where the legacy of war is so sensitive that people become resistant to the idea of full remembrance.

Taboo heritage can become heritage in the end if it receives political support, but this usually takes a lot of time and investment by stakeholders, she said.

Pickles is also co-chair of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, the body responsible for planning a Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, which will be built in sight of the Houses of Parliament. British exceptionalism will be at the heart of the new memorial.

It will celebrate the Kindertransport, the scheme to rescue 10,000 children from Nazi Germany in the nine months before the outbreak of war. It will also celebrate British heroes of the Holocaust, such as Sir Nicholas Winton, who helped rescue 669 children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of war.

There is now a commitment to putting the occupation of the Channel Islands at the heart of the memorial. But what happened here does not sit easily with this narrative of exceptionalism. The horrors of Alderney are a blot on Britains reputation, which is perhaps why the full story has been suppressed for so long. The slogan chosen for the memorial is Confronting Evil, Assuming Responsibility. Will we now confront the evil of the camps on Alderney and assume responsibility for covering up what happened there?

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