SS troops killed inmates for target practice, according to account given in documentary Ghosts of Alderney
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.
