Deported: The four-year-old sent to a Nazi camp

When Steve Matthews and his family were forced to leave Guernsey in September 1942 for a Nazi prison camp his mother told him they were going on holiday.

Aged four, he embarked on a journey through occupied France to an abandoned prisoner of war camp in Dorsten, ending at an internment camp in Biberach, southern Germany.

The first of more than 2,000 non-native Channel Islanders were deported to camps in southern Germany 75 years ago.

The process was a direct retaliation by Hitler after British forces interned German nationals in Persia (modern-day Iran).

Thirty-five Channel Islanders died in the internment camps, while many more Jewish people and resistance fighters from the islands also perished in Nazi concentration camps and prisons.

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