Ghosts of Alderney – Hitler’s Island Slaves Plus Q&A

Dir. Andrew Johnstone | 2025 | 60 mins plus Q&A | English

Internationally renowned artist Piers Secunda has spent five years tracing stories of slave labourers sent to the tiny Channel Island of Alderney. When Hitler’s forces invaded, nobody knew just how brutal the occupation of this piece of UK Crown land would become.

Secunda has made work memorialising some of the slaves who endured random shootings, beatings and starvation. People from all over Nazi Europe were shipped to the Channel Islands to build the Fuhrer’s “fortress” against an Allied attack. It was in Alderney however where the treatment was harshest. Intelligence reports after Liberation reveal that bodies dumped in mass graves were compared to victims of Belsen.

Using forensic testing, Secunda has established that German guards in the SS-run concentration camp on Alderney 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 Piers 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.

“Of course there was a cover up,” said Professor Anthony Glees, a security and intelligence expert.

Madeleine Bunting, historian and author, said: “This was the biggest mass murder on British soil. Yet so many questions remain.”

A recent UK Government inquiry found that more than 1,100 people died on Alderney but acknowledged there are many more missing.

Piers goes beyond the numbers to bring the names and faces of those who suffered back to life.

“I’m not an historian, I’m an artist. I looked in places where nobody else has looked,” he tells the film.

Families of survivors – among them French Jews deported by the Vichy Government from Paris – told him that the men who survived were scarred for ever by their time on the island.

In this, the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two, the film is a testament to the bravery of these people.

Piers said: “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.”

Watch the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/951962315

We're excited to welcome Andrew Johnstone, director and producer of Ghosts of Alderney to The Poly for a post screening Q&A hosted by Andy Chatfield from Falmouth Writing & Journalism. 

Ghosts of Alderney – Hitler’s Island Slaves Plus Q&A

Wednesday 12th November, 7.30pm

Tickets: £9.20/£7.70/£7.00

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Please be aware films will start at the advertised time, we rarely show adverts and usually show under 5 minutes of trailers. 

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