Nazi horrors chillingly close to home

Alderney: The Holocaust on British Soil

Exhibition

Cromwell Place, London SW7 ★★★★★

Alexander Larman

It is too little known today that, during the Second World War, the British Isles housed two German concentration camps. It is also one of the lesser-detailed facts of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands that Alderney, the northernmost island, was not only home to Russian prisonersof-war and Jewish forced labourers, but that the inhabitants of the camps were treated appallingly, whether executed by firing squad, tortured to death or slowly starved.

That episode, lasting from 1940 to 1945, has been little discussed in histories of the war – certainly in comparison with the occupations of nearby Jersey and Guernsey, which were comparatively benign – and it’s salutary that it forms the basis of Piers Secunda’s new exhibition Alderney: The Holocaust on British Soil, at Cromwell Place in west London. Secunda’s work has previously explored the conflict between creativity and war, as in his ongoing series Cultural Destruction, for which he has made moulds of objects and artefacts damaged by Isis. This show, however, compels as historical documentary as much as it offers aesthetic interest.

Secunda has been working on the project since 2019, using a variety of international archives, and Alderney’s careful focus on detail could put many a historian to shame. The cumulative effect – even in the regrettably small space of Cromwell Place’s Arc Gallery – is both revelatory and shocking: proof that, less than 80 years on, wartime atrocities still have the power to unnerve.

Practically the first thing that greets the visitor is a carefully moulded replica of a wall from Fort Platte Saline on Alderney’s northern shore, which Secunda discovered had been extensively marked by bullet damage. The structure, known as “Shot Wall 1”, contains the necessary physical evidence to be designated a firing-squad execution site. It’s powerful and disquieting, and sets the scene for Secunda’s large-scale silkscreen prints, coloured with “German gunpowder” – ink sourced from burned cordite from abandoned ammunition.

Perhaps the most chilling image of all is from the work 573 Jews in Two Transports. We see a photograph of two Nazi officers strolling down Alderney’s main street. It’s a sobering reminder that the darkest crimes of the Holocaust nearly happened here, too.

Until April 15; cromwellplace.com

Revelatory: a tinted picture of a Russian pilot who was tortured to death