Latest news with #GhostsofAlderney
ITV News
3 days ago
- ITV News
New documentary claims Nazi guards shot slave workers for entertainment in Alderney's prison camps
A new documentary on Alderney 's prison camps claims that Nazi guards lined up prisoners to shoot for sport during wartime occupation. Ghosts of Alderney, created by artist and Piers Secunda, is an upcoming documentary focused on the lives of prisoners on the island during the Second World War. In the film's trailer, Piers says he has been researching this topic for five years, adding: "There was clear evidence of atrocities". The documentary alleges that they have proof German forces used slave labourers for regular target practice in firing squads. One account from the family of a prisoner explains: "If somebody was injured at work, they were often shot [...] people were so badly beaten, they were just tipped into the sea. "This was the biggest mass murder on British soil." The Channel Islands were occupied by Germany in 1940 and remained so until May 1945. In that time, more than 7,000 prisoners were taken to Alderney and put into one of its four forced slave labour camps. They included Lager Sylt: the only Nazi concentration camp on British soil during the wartime conflict. Prisoners mainly came from Eastern Europe and were used to build fortifications for Hitler's Atlantic Wall. Last year, an investigation into Alderney's prison camps revealed that up to 1,134 prisoners died in Alderney - far greater than the previous official figure of 389. The independent film is now hoping to shed light on the treatment of prisoners on the island. Historians say these latest revelations add to the overall picture of what happened on the island. Dr Gilly Carr, an archaeologist and historian who specialises in researching Holocaust heritage, warns that the film shouldn't be used as a basis for any further death toll calculations. She explains: "The methods that we have used for calculating the numbers of deaths use very different sorts of archival records. "What I would do as a historian is to take this testimony and add it to what we know of the kind of brutality that happened in the island and the sort of atrocities. "It is another terrible example of the kind of things that happened. That is how I would use it, but I would not use it for any kind of mathematical calculation." Jersey and Guernsey were liberated on 9th May 1945, but Alderney was considered a fortress with strong defences and was not liberated until 16 May. Alderney residents did not return to the island until December 1945, as it took months for German war material to be cleared and the island's dwellings to be repaired. Despite the suffering inflicted, virtually none of the German soldiers in Alderney were ever brought to justice, as the British government handed the case over to the USSR, which also failed to seek retribution. UK Holocaust Envoy Lord Pickles - who led the new study - said the failure to bring offenders to British justice was "a stain on the reputations of successive British governments".
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Nazi guards shot prisoners for fun at Channel Islands camp, research says
Guards at a prison camp on one of the Channel Islands entertained themselves at weekends by using prisoners for target practice, according to new evidence of Nazi atrocities committed there in the second world war. On Sundays, the SS would regularly pick about a dozen men incarcerated in Sylt, the camp they ran on Alderney, transporting them to a nearby light-gauge railway, where they tied them to tipper trucks and amused themselves by shooting them. Over the course of an hour or two, they would take aim at specific parts of a prisoner's body, wounding them repeatedly until they died. This was regular entertainment for the SS, according to research. It is among accounts of atrocities that will be revealed in Ghosts of Alderney, a forthcoming documentary about victims of the Nazi occupation of the island between 1940 and 1945. Among those interviewed by the documentary's director, Piers Secunda, are two daughters of Giorgi Zbovorski, a Ukrainian imprisoned on Alderney in 1942 for 18 months. Long before his death in 2006, he told them of the horrors he had witnessed as the SS forced prisoners to watch the target practice. Ingrid Zbovorski recalled her father's account: 'Prisoners were made to stand in formation. The guards were acting out of boredom. They would select 12 or 15 of the prisoners. They were put upside down, bound to the train wagons. The guards then started shooting at random, for their amusement. A bullet in your head or your heart and you were dead. A shot in your arm and in your leg, and you would suffer for hours.' Secunda spent five years researching the slave labourers sent to Alderney, where they endured shootings, beatings and starvation. He said: 'Zbovorski personally watched the target practice exercises happening on Sundays for the duration of the time that he was in Sylt camp. That's probably why the Germans sent a delegation from Berlin to Alderney, to find out why the death rate was so high. The head of the SS guards on Alderney, Otto Hogelow, incentivised the SS on the island to shoot prisoners. He offered 10 days' leave, extra food and cigarettes for every five prisoners shot.' Gilly Carr, a professor in conflict archaeology and Holocaust heritage at the University of Cambridge, told the Guardian: 'There are sadly so many stories from Alderney of atrocities and brutal treatment against prisoners. The wealth of evidence, of which this is a part, confirms the horrific nature of the German occupation of the island. 'While a trained historian should note this account, further questions should be asked, which cannot now be answered, before using this account to calculate the number of deaths. For example: for how long did this practice continue? Was it the same number of prisoners every time? Was Giorgi a witness every single time? This is not to dispute the account, but to interrogate it properly and to consider how it can be used.' She was also the coordinator and a member of the Lord Pickles Alderney expert review, which concluded last year that more than 1,000 slave labourers are likely to have died on British soil at the hands of the Nazis, hundreds more than were officially recorded in historical archives. Zbovorski was taken to Alderney after trying to flee forced labour in Austria. In 1944, he was sent to Belgium to work on V1 missile sites, but was among Ukrainians who persuaded a German soldier of Polish nationality not to shoot them if they ran into the forest. Secunda said: 'The Pole duly fired his machine-gun into the air, but a German guard shot three of them in the back, killing them. Giorgi and two other prisoners were able to find a place to hide in the house of a Belgian farmer. When Belgium was liberated by the Allies a few weeks later, Giorgi weighed only 40 kilos.' Zbovorski remained in Belgium, employed by the farmer. Ghosts of Alderney – Hitler's Island Slaves, a production from Wild Dog, a British independent company, will be released in the UK later this year.
