St Helier, Jersey - (Third Reich Mess): The Ministry of Defence has sent in a crack team of excavation specialists to the Haut de la Garenne children's home.
This follows the discovery that the grim house of horror cellars are linked to a subterranean network of tunnels connected to the World War II Hohlgangsanlage 8 German Underground Hospital.
Dubbed Jersey's War Tunnels the underground complex was built by Hitler in 1941 using some indigenous forced labour as well as POW slaves.
The site was never fully utilised and was opened to the public in July 1946 by the States of Jersey following the liberation of the Channel Islands. It eventually became a wartime museum.
However between the mid-1960s to 1970s the disused site is believed to have shielded a renegade ragbag of disaffected ex-British army squaddies who squatted there, planning revenge for their court martials after a hushed-up massacre fiasco at a British base on Cyprus.
A number of these disgraced former soldiers had close links to UK mobster cartels whose flag of convenience for many years was the Provisional IRA.
Some among them also had close connections to dubious employees in the children's home now being probed in a huge paedophile investigation.
"In a matter of days we should be able to announce a breakthrough in the subterranean probe," Insp Jim Bergerac of the Jersey police service said today.
