Alderney’s Occupation story will be played out on the big screen from today with the Mallard showing ‘The Ghosts of Alderney – Hitler’s Island Slaves’.
Artist Piers Secunda’s film, produced by Wild Dog Films, shares the stories of some of those who suffered in the island during the Occupation.
The feature length documentary shares evidence of atrocities committed by Nazis in Alderney during the early 1940s.
Mr Secunda spent five years tracing stories of some of the slave labourers who worked and died in the island.
Using forensic testing, he established that German guards in the labour camps used to compete for prizes of drink and cigarettes by shooting prisoners against a wall.
Such firing squads were used in European camps such as Auschwitz but Mr Secunda believes he has proof that this killing technique was used on Alderney too.
The film also tells how the UK Government hid the real reasons why it failed to prosecute any German officers for war crimes.
“I’m not an historian, I’m an artist. I looked in places where nobody else has looked,” Mr Secunda says in the film.
He added: “The academic research deals with lists of names and adding up numbers to create a total figure of number of people who came to Alderney. But people aren’t numbers. They’re human beings. They have lives, they have histories, backgrounds. And that’s the story that I want to tell.”
The film premieres at the Mallard Cinema today with further showings available for bookings.