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Introduction

As part of development control work in Scotland, Glasgow University Archaeological Research Division (GUARD) was involved in the recording of two sites from the Second World War, both of which provided accommodation for groups of young male foreigners. The two sites were very different in nature, however. The first was Deaconsbank, a prisoner of war (PoW) camp near Hamilton, South Lanarkshire (Swan and Scott 2005), while the second was a Newfoundland Overseas Forestry Unit (NOFU) work camp at Strathmashie, Invernessshire (Sneddon 2007). GUARD undertook the work on the two sites as separate projects, and there was no thought of combining or comparing the two projects at that time. In retrospect, however, it seemed reasonable to contrast the two sites, as they date from the same historical period, relate to the same historical events, and represent the accommodation of groups of young alien males within the Scottish landscape. Similarities and differences between the sites are a reflection of the attitudes to the two differently classified populations: similarities arise from the fact that both populations represent young, single males far from home (and therefore needing some level of control and policing), while differences arise from the fact that the PoWs were “enemies” (creating a constant threat of future violence), and the foresters represented workers brought to Britain to support the war effort and replace the men who had gone off to war.

The study of confinement and repression through archaeology is relatively recent, particularly in Britain. In America and continental Europe, there have been projects to record and excavate PoW camps from the American Civil War and Second World War (e.g. Thoms 2000, 2004; Prentice and Prentice 2000; Buchner and Albertson 2005; Doyle et al. 2007), while there have been some recent attempts to look at the archaeology of concentration and labor camps (Aparicio et al. 2008; Kola 2000; Myers 2008). In Britain, the Long Kesh/Maze internment camp has recently been the subject of investigation and analysis (McAtackney 2005a, b; Purbrick 2006). Very little has been published on the camps of the First and Second World Wars on mainland Britain. This volume partly redresses this, but the situation until recently was symptomatic of a lack of interest in the physical remains of the camps since the end of the war. English Heritage did undertake a specific study of PoW camps in England (Thomas 2003a, b), and the Defence of Britain project (Lowry 1998) recorded some examples.

Imprisonment and Prisoners of War

We are used to incarceration as a way of dealing with problematic individuals and groups. Those guilty of crimes are routinely sent to prison, to the point that there are serious concerns in both Britain and America that the prison populations are too high. Prison overcrowding has been a problem for decades. We are also used to mass incarceration, with detention centers for asylum seekers in Britain frequently in the news, internment camps for enemy aliens in the World Wars, such as the Isle of Man sites (Chapter 3 by Mytum, this volume), going back to the invention of the concentration camps in the late nineteenth century (Chapter 1 by Moshenska and Myers, this volume). Alongside images of the death camps in the Nazi empire, we also have more recent examples such as the camp at Omarska in Prijedor, Bosnia, and the images of its abused prisoners that were beamed around the world. We have become used to PoW camps themselves, being a well-known phenomenon in all of the wars of the twentieth century, including from the iconic images of The Great Escape and of Colditz. More recently, Hollywood has also presented us with images of Vietnamese prisoner of war camps in The Deerhunter and Rambo.

The traditional approach to those who lost a battle or surrendered was to keep the nobility for ransom and to either kill or exchange the soldiery. In many cases, the rout at the end of a battle led to slaughter as the fleeing men were hunted down; those who escaped made their way home as best they could or became outlaws. On other occasions, such as when the Scots surrendered at Pinkie in 1547, they were marched away and held in poor conditions until many died (Cooper 2008:17). The men captured at Dunbar in 1650 were taken to Durham and imprisoned in the cathedral, where many died of disease and neglect (Grainger 1997:55, 57).

The Napoleonic wars were the first time that captured troops were routinely held for the duration of the conflict, where preventing the men from returning home was an important strategic aim (Daly 2004). Later in the nineteenth century, large prison camps accommodated captured men and officers in the American Civil War, which has generated some archaeological interest (Prentice and Prentice 2000; Thoms 2004; Bush 2009). In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, thousands of French prisoners were held in camps of up to 25,000 men, which had a role in the epidemic of smallpox that killed 500,000 people in France and Germany at that time (Smallman-Raynor and Cliff 2002).

One factor that should be considered in approaches to prison camps is how far developments in understanding of the spread of disease and the need for sanitation affected attitudes toward prison camps. A concentration of men in a large camp with primitive sanitation was a potential source of epidemics, and this must have created a certain level of fear and concern about such camps in wartime. It was a very real threat to public health at a time when there were already considerable strains on populations because of the difficulties of wartime conditions. This probably explains why many of the prison camps in Britain had relatively efficient sanitation systems. Whether the local populations were aware of the threat, rather than the threat of having a large number of enemy soldiers incarcerated nearby, is moot; it will undoubtedly have been a concern for the administrative authorities.

The development of the military incarceration of large populations of men took place at the same time as completely different developments in the field of criminal incarceration (Casella 2007). In judicial confinement, the trend was toward reformation of the moral character of the individual through the architecture of the prison; this was a process that was necessarily focused upon the individual and where the individual experience of incarceration, the loss of anonymity and privacy, and of constant surveillance were key aspects of the new, scientific approach to punishment. This was, of course, impossible for camps of up to 25,000 men such as Magdeburg in Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War (Smallman-Raynor and Cliff 2002:250). The differences between the two forms of incarceration are quite clear: The judicial approach was underpinned by notions of improving human nature and reforming anti-social elements of society, and the military approach was underpinned by the necessity of controlling large numbers of enemy combatants and removing them from the resources of the enemy. There was no need to address the character of the inmates and there was no need to deal with them as individuals. PoWs were a population unit to be bounded and controlled, which required significant resources to sustain.

Second World War PoW Camps in Britain

The history of PoW camps in Britain is under-researched. It is a topic that has barely penetrated the public consciousness, and there are many in Britain today that have no idea that Britain had enemy soldiers incarcerated on British soil. The public perception of PoW camps is largely shaped by films such as The Great Escape, and to a lesser extent, The Wooden Horse. Members of a particular British generation will have grown up with an intimate knowledge of life in Colditz Castle, courtesy of BBC TV, but there is little in popular media that covers the topic of the men who were held prisoner in Britain. Michael Radford’s 1983 film Another Time Another Place told the story of an Italian prisoner in Scotland, while the Broken Souls episode of the program Foyle’s War has a German PoW working on a local British farm. Beyond this, there is little to remind the general public of the presence, in Britain, of over half a million enemy prisoners during the war other than the restored Harperley Camp in County Durham that is now a visitor attraction.

There were very few Axis prisoners held in Britain until 1942–1943. There were particularly few German prisoners, and those that were held in Britain tended to be Luftwaffe or Kriegsmarine (German air force and navy). In 1940, there were 257 German prisoners being held in Britain (Moore 1996:19). The war was going badly for Britain in July 1940: the Phoney War was over; Holland, Belgium, and France had fallen; the Germans had taken Norway; and the Battle of Britain had begun. In 1939, Rule 18B of the Emergency Powers Act (1939), commonly known as “Defence Regulation 18B,” allowed for the detention of suspected Nazi sympathizers with the suspension of habeas corpus. Initially, it was little used, and there were only a handful of arrests in 1939. However, as the disasters of 1940 unfolded, public opinion not only hardened against potential Nazi sympathizers, but was also underpinned by a fear of invasion and internal attack by the fifth column. As fears of far-right collaborators grew in both the public and the state’s mind, Defence Regulation 18B was enacted far more vigorously. Leading British fascists, such as Oswald Mosley, were imprisoned, with up to 1,000 British citizens incarcerated, while 74,000 foreign citizens (mainly Germans, Austrians, and Italians) were rounded up and held in camps. Ironically, many of these were Jews and others who had fled to Britain to escape Nazi persecution.

This climate of fear meant that there was a very strong reaction against having enemy soldiers held on British soil. It was considered that they would form a reserve army for the Nazis in the event of invasion, and that it was far too dangerous to hold them in Britain. The fear of paratroopers, reflected in the parodies of the BBC TV comedy Dad’s Army, was another factor, with the notion that airborne troops would be able to free the prisoners and thus release an army behind the lines. As a result, during the dark years of 1940, 1941, and 1942, many enemy prisoners were sent to Canada, Australia, and the United States (Waters 2004; Waiser 1995).

The impact of sending hundreds of thousands of young men away to fight was being felt in agriculture and industry. Despite the fact that some jobs were considered “reserved” and therefore people in those jobs were not eligible for conscription, the manpower needs of the armed forces meant that there were major labor shortages. As early as November 1939, in an attempt to deal with the labor shortages, the Newfoundland [Canada] Commissioner for Natural Resources made a radio appeal for men to go to Britain as loggers. The Newfoundlanders were only one of a range of groups that heeded this call: Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and British Hondurans all came to help with the labor shortage. The use of women in the workplace reduced the scale of the problem, but there was still a desperate need for labor that worsened as Britain began to prepare its assault on Fortress Europe.

The prisoner of war population was another potential solution to the labor crisis. In February 1942, the decision was made to use Italian PoWs to work in nonmilitary roles, and 28,000 men were brought to Britain (Hellen 1999:193–194). In contrast, because fear of German invasion meant that German PoWs were still considered too dangerous to hold in Britain, the same period (between December 1941 and March 1942) saw the population of German PoWs in Britain fall from 1,850 to 1,150, reaching its lowest level at 200 by June 1942 (Hellen 1999:193; Wolff 1974). This reflects the policy of moving German prisoners out of Britain, to more secure locations abroad. Meanwhile, the Italians were accommodated in camps scattered across Britain in 53 work camps, five PoW camps, and a military hospital. These prisoners were used in agriculture and forestry work throughout Britain and were a relatively common sight during the second half of the war.

With the change in fortune that began in 1942 and 1943, however, the fear of invasion of Britain began to recede. Germany was fully engaged on the Eastern Front, losing hundreds of thousands of troops to winter and in battles such as those at Stalingrad and Leningrad, and was losing ground in North Africa. The British authorities were able to concentrate more on preparations for invading occupied Europe, rather than preparing for an invasion. This allowed a change in attitude to German PoWs, who became potentially useful rather than potentially dangerous. There was no immediate change in policy, but the reduction of the threat of invasion meant that the German prisoners could also be considered as potential workers rather than a potential fifth column.

On September 3, 1943, Mussolini’s successor, General Badoglio, signed an armistice with the Allies. The Wehrmacht promptly seized control of Italy but the Italian military personnel held in Allied captivity were no longer considered enemy combatants. They were treated as allies and moved to better accommodations, leaving many of the work camps and prison camps that they had previously occupied. The camps were not to stand empty for long. After D-Day (June 6, 1944), the numbers of German prisoners increased significantly: in December 1943 there were 1,100; in June 1944, 7,600; in September 1944, 90,000; and in December 1944, 144,450 (Hellen 1999:193). As well as reflecting the reduced fear of invasion, the rise in numbers was the result of the government decision taken in October 1944 to use some of the German troops for agricultural and forestry work (Hellen 1999:194).

The fearful attitude toward the German prisoners before 1944 seems strange when considered in light of the fact that 65,497 German prisoners had been used for labor during the First World War (Hellen 1999:197) and despite some public hostility had not created any serious problems for the authorities. In February 1940, there was a question in parliament about the possibility of using prisoners to plug the labor gaps as had been the case in the previous conflict, which was rejected as a possibility by the Minister for War. By 1943 there were tens of thousands of Italian prisoners working across Britain, while the ministerial response to questions about the use of German prisoners remained as negative as in 1940. This indicates that the Germans were seen as being different to the Italians, and also that they were different in some way to their fathers who had been imprisoned in 1914–1918.

Prisoner of War Camp Design

The 1929 Geneva Convention stipulated the nature of facilities to detain enemy combatants once they had surrendered. Under Article 10, the facilities used by the prisoners had to be of the same standard as those available to the holding power’s own troops in a normal army camp:

Prisoners of war shall be lodged in buildings or huts which afford all possible safeguards as regards hygiene and salubrity. The premises must be entirely free of damp, and adequately heated and lighted … As regards dormitories, their total area, minimum cubic air space, fittings and bedding material, the conditions shall be the same as for the depot troops of the detaining power (Article 10, Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Geneva, 27 July 1929).

This was accompanied by similar requirements with regard to food (Article 11), clothing (Article 12), and sanitation (Article 13). Prisoners were to be accommodated in enclosed compounds, where access was only possible through the guards’ facilities. The barrack blocks for the prisoners would be on a grid pattern, with all the same basic facilities as the guards. This had the advantage of complying with the Geneva Convention and at the same time reducing the occasions on which prisoners had any reason to leave their compound. This meant that leisure facilities (such as a parade ground, theatre, and library) were on site within the enclosure, reducing the security risk of allowing prisoners to leave the compound. Medical facilities, barbers, and a shop selling local produce were all to be within the compound.

A distinction was made between the detention section and the garrison section. The area of detention was called “inside the wire,” while the surrounding guard facilities were collectively “outside the wire.” While the facilities were essentially the same, there were specific differences between the two areas. There was to be an exclusion zone of 60 feet (approximately 18 meters) between the wire of the enclosure and any of the structures to ensure that no prisoner could approach the enclosure fence without being seen and challenged (Swan and Scott 2005:11). There were to be wide passages between the buildings to ensure that there was visibility at all times, while the grid pattern of the huts was intended to keep this element of visibility.

The facilities for the guards also underline the differences between inside and outside the wire: there were motor pools and workshops for the camp vehicles that were used to move around outside the camp, something that the prisoners could only do under escort and under the direction of their captors. There would have been quartermaster’s stores in the garrison area, which was the source of replacement materials for the prisoners; under Article 12, they were entitled to replacement clothes and footwear as their own wore out. The quartermaster’s stores were a cornucopia of the things that made life in detention easier and more bearable, but were kept at a distance and outside the compound so that access to those stores by prisoners could be rigidly controlled. Completing the sense of separation was the placing of the reception station, which would process arriving prisoners inside the wire rather than at the entrance to the camp. This meant that prisoners arriving at the camp would have been fully inside, away from the outside world, before they were incorporated into the camp. Henceforth, their entire world would be the camp, unless the authorities determined otherwise. The guards’ area was off limits as much as the rest of the world.

Deaconsbank/Camp 660

The Deaconsbank camp, also known as Camp 660, conformed to the above pattern to some degree. The following is taken from the report on the archaeological survey of the camp (Swan and Scott 2005:9–10). The buildings were of both semi-circular and pitched roof profile, of both Nissen and Jane hut types. The entrance to the compound was through a point adjacent to the bungalow to the west of the site, where a brick-and-ash road survives today. The huts immediately adjacent to the entrance are 16 and 24 foot span metal Nissen huts. These could have been used as a messing facility for the compound, with the three huts opposite utilized as the reception station. The smaller huts to the south of the bungalow could not be identified, but may have been used as shops ancillary to the camp. The huts visible along the west boundary are located within the exclusion zone, and were probably constructed later; the aerial photograph dates to 1946, when the war was over and the inmates had changed in status to become displaced persons rather than enemy combatants (Fig. 7.1). The precise use for these huts is unclear, but they may well have been for accommodation.

Fig. 7.1
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Aerial photograph of Deaconsbank Camp in 1946. Courtesy of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland

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Accommodation huts on the west boundary, based on the aerial photograph, were about 55 feet from the boundary fence, as would be expected from the pattern required by the Ministry of Works. The huts built for accommodation on standard camps would be intended to accommodate up to 35 men, but were of 10 bays in length—about 60 feet. The huts on this camp were smaller in length, of approximately six bays, and correspondingly may have accommodated 20 men (Fig. 7.2). The accommodation levels in the camp reached 600 in October 1946, which would have required around 30 accommodation huts.

Fig. 7.2
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Macoul Camp in winter 1944/1945. Courtesy of Mr & Mrs Park

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The accommodation huts were provided with lavatory facilities in two huts along the east boundary. These had slab urinals and toilet compartments, providing a reasonable level of amenity. Showers were generally provided in two huts in tandem, and located along the north boundary of the compound. The shower compartments are located in the center of the huts, back-to-back, taking advantage of the highest point of the huts. These facilities contrast with those provided for German PoWs at Happendon Camp in South Lanarkshire, where the toilet facilities were comparatively basic, with toilet compartments formed by low separating walls within the huts and waste being deposited into large-bore open pipes, with toilet seats being formed by timber rims on the outlets of the waste pipes. Showers were created within the curved profile of the sides, and were probably uncomfortable to use. A Red Cross report on a visit made in November 1945 describes the sanitary facilities as “good (showers with hot and cold running water and flushing toilets)”; this was after the war but is accurate for the facilities during the war as well.

The Geneva Convention prescribed that accommodation for prisoners was to be of an equivalent standard as that which was provided for the guards. It can be seen in the Ministry of Works drawings that this was generally the case, although the guards’ accommodation had a greater degree of privacy, with doors to lavatory compartments as an example. Within the compound was a landscaped area bounded by a dressed stone wall. This lay south of, and adjacent to, the reception station. This may have been the offices of the camp staff, while it is also possible that the theatre and hut set aside for religious worship were in this area. The Red Cross report lists how the 59 huts were used (Table 7.1).

Table 7.1 Facilities at Deaconsbank PoW Camp
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Newfoundland Overseas Forestry Unit (NOFU)

While there were thousands of foreign young men being held and accommodated in Britain as PoWs, there were also thousands of foreign young men being accommodated in Britain as workers in essential industries. One area of particular concern was forestry, because of the importance of timber in all aspects of the industrial and military prosecution of the war. There was a parallel incomer population of workers, the substantive difference being the classification of these young men as “allies” rather than “enemies.”

Background

On November 9, 1939, the Office of the Secretary of State for the Dominions sent a telegram to the Commission Governor of Newfoundland, Sir Humphrey Walwyn, on the problems within the timber industry:

Pit prop supply position will be very difficult in this country from the early new year until the end of June when anticipated supplies from Newfoundland and North America should begin to arrive in quantities.

The telegram noted the labor shortages being experienced and enquired

….whether 2,000 suitable men could be supplied from Newfoundland for this work at the earliest possible date either for the period say of six months or preferably for the duration of the war. (Curran 1987:105)

On November 11, Walwyn promised an initial shipment of 200 men leaving in December, with a further 1,800 leaving as soon as possible afterward. Subsequently, on November 18, the Newfoundland Forestry Act 47 was passed, creating the Newfoundland Overseas Forestry Unit under the Commissioner for Natural Resources. The unit was recruited as a civilian force as this would avoid the lengthier procedures of training and enrolling a military group. It was led by Chief Forestry Officer, Lt. Col. Jack Turner. The first group of 350 men left Newfoundland on the RMS Antonio on December 13; they arrived in Liverpool 5 days later (Sneddon 2007:235). By early 1940, the full contingent of NOFU was in the forests, primarily in Scotland.

During the years that NOFU was in operation, over 3,400 men left Newfoundland to work as foresters, mainly in the early years of the war. The number and speed with which the men were mobilized proved critical in filling the vacuum in timber supply during the initial phases of the war effort. Military units—for example, the Canadian Forestry Corps—were not efficiently harvesting timber until 1941 (Wonders 1987). The NOFU operated under eight districts (A–H), with at least 71 camps and related sawmills (see Sneddon 2007). One problem they faced through the rapid mobilization was a total lack of preparation at their destination; there was a severe deficiency in accommodation and necessary equipment. The initial group were temporarily housed in camps within the border regions of England and Scotland, while the next group were housed in three camps in Argyll. They were then dispersed to logging camps throughout Scotland, the majority of which had yet to be constructed. The initial task for the unit was to build their own camps, while temporary accommodation was provided through local halls and barns.

A typical camp of the NOFU would consist of bunkhouses, a cook house, a dining hall, a recreation hut/canteen and the fore peak, where the camp foreman, his clerk, and the tallymen would work. Further buildings would include sheds to house horses, tractors, and other machinery. Most of the buildings would have been constructed with either plain wood sections/planks or logs caulked with moss, and sometimes protected at the base by an outer wall of earth (Sneddon 2007:237). It took the Newfoundlanders 3–4 days to build a log cabin to sleep twenty men, and approximately a week to build a dining room and kitchen combined. This would provide accommodation for 150 men within roughly 1 month. In addition to the camps, there was also a requirement for offices, sawmills, and a network of roads to transport the felled timber, which was moved by tractors, horses, and light-gauge railways.

In 2005, as part of a project to map the archaeological sites in Strathmashie Forest to inform a heritage trail, a combination of terrestrial survey and trial excavation was carried out by GUARD on a series of NOFU sites within the area. The results of this work have been published elsewhere (Sneddon 2007), and the results of one particular camp, Macoul, are discussed here. Three other camps were studied in the original project and the details of those camps can be found in Sneddon’s 2007 article.

Macoul NOFU Camp, Strathmashie Forest

The only camp known to have been photographed while in use was Macoul camp on the Ardverikie Estate (Figs. 7.3 and 7.4). The camp was located southeast facing grassy slopes continuing down to the A86. The site was bound on the north and northwestern sides by a disused field dyke, beyond which the ground became steeper and rougher. Today, 12 platforms lie either side of a track that runs southwest through the site. This was possibly the main entrance into the camp. The platforms varied between squares and rectangles, with some showing clear signs of a concrete base. These were the bases for timber structures including bunk houses and cook house toilets.

Fig. 7.3
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Macoul Camp in c 1942. Courtesy of Laggan Heritage

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Fig. 7.4
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Macoul Camp in 2005. Courtesy of GUARD

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The number of concrete bases at Macoul is unusual in comparison to the other Strathmashie camps. The excavator noted that at most camps concrete was only used for the larger buildings such as the cookhouse and the washrooms (Sneddon 2007:255). He suggested that this was a reflection of the sloping ground on which the camp stood. More typically, the bunkhouses would have been raised wooden floors. Despite this, the huts seem to have been quite comfortable. An article on a camp near Ballater in Aberdeenshire reported:

There are log huts built by the Newfoundlanders, set in a forest clearing and exposed to the bitter weather on mountain sides, which for warmth and comfort surpass anything suburban builders have produced. Moss gathered from the forest is used to stuff between the rough hewn logs and keep the huts draught proof, and spending a few minutes inside them from the bitter weather one realizes that English and Scots alike have not yet learned how to keep themselves warm. (Passingham 1941)

Macoul is laid out along the road, and accordingly consists of huts lying along the central path, aligned along its axis.

The men were incorporated into the life of the community, and there are records of several marrying local girls. They were members of the library, took part in community events, socialized with the local community, and generally were treated well. Naturally, this free license occasionally meant that things could go wrong; there are several instances in the local papers of NOFU men being in court as a result of disturbances following drinking sessions. However, the press coverage is always reasonably sympathetic, and the young men of NOFU are consistently seen as being there for the benefit of the locals. There is no hint of there being a feeling that the men were a problem or a burden on the community. There is certainly none of the same reaction as there was to the German prisoners. One of the most striking differences is that the NOFU men were frequently involved in the local Home Guard units, and 3rd Inverness Battalions of the Home Guard was entirely comprised of NOFU men, making it the only unit to consist entirely of non-British men. For obvious reasons, neither the German nor the Italian prisoners were ever assimilated to that extent.

Structural Differences between Deaconsbank and Macoul

There was little difference between the huts that were used for accommodation for the PoWs and for the NOFU men. The PoWs at Deaconsbank lived in Nissen huts that were roughly the same dimensions as those at Macoul, although the latter were built from wood and were probably warmer. Both had electric lighting, and both sets of accommodation were heated by stoves in the huts. In many ways, the facilities available to the PoWs were superior to those of the foresters: the prisoners had classrooms, a theatre, a chapel, three infirmaries, an artists’ workshop, and a hairdresser, while the foresters would have had to wait for an opportunity to get to Newtonmore for a haircut. The NOFU camps were very much workstations, and there was no need to provide a full range of facilities on site because the foresters had the option of being able to travel to those facilities. Facilities for the PoWs had to be inside the wire, whenever possible.

If the buildings themselves were essentially similar, there were differences in the layout of those buildings. All of the huts at Deaconsbank were built perpendicular to pathways, whereas at Macoul, the buildings lay along the axis of the central roadway. Elsewhere, the foresters’ camps had a variety of orientations (e.g. Kildrummy, Fig. 7.5), indicating that there was no determining principle guiding the layout. In PoW camps, the practice was to position the buildings at right angles to the pathways, creating long lines of sight. Lines of sight were crucial for the guards of the PoW camp. They had to be able to observe the movement and location of the prisoners to be able to detect escape attempts or other outbreaks of trouble.

Fig. 7.5
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Kildrummy Camp circa 1941. Courtesy of Cliff Pike

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There is no record of violent incidents at Deaconsbank, but there are well-known incidents elsewhere that involved prisoner on prisoner violence. There were particular problems in many American camps because there was little attempt to isolate the hardcore Nazis from others. The Nazi party members were able to take control of life within the camp and attacked people considered to be enemies. This included incidents of murder, such as the case of Karl Lehmann, murdered by Nazi PoWs at Medicine Hat, in Canada, in September 1944, for saying that Germany would lose the war (Kilford 2004:175), or Hugo Krauss, murdered in December 1943 at Camp Hearne in Texas (Waters 2004:124–131).

The central difference between the two camps is the level of restrictive enclosure. At Macoul, there was a simple wire fence. However, this was a standard wire fence designed to stop livestock wandering, and certainly not designed to restrict the passage of humans. There is a similarity in that the fences of both camps define the area of the camp, that which was “inside” and that which was “outside.” However, the difference can be seen in the psychologies at work. At Deaconsbank, the wire of the enclosures, just at any other PoW camp during the Second World War, was forbidden to the prisoners. To cross the line into the restricted area leading to the fence was to step into mortal danger. All prisoners knew that the exclusion zone was forbidden and that they could be shot on sight by entering it. There are examples of prisoners, presumably suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress, deliberately walking into the exclusion zone, ignoring warnings, in order to provoke the guards into shooting them.

The difference arises in the implications of those designations. For the foresters, outside represented work, community, really just an extension of inside. For the PoWs, outside could represent freedom, work (but only when escorted to their duties, and therefore symbolically still inside), but it also represented enemy territory and potential physical danger. Even the most self-confident of prisoners would have known that to be outside the wire without permission meant that they would be hunted and potentially killed. The psychological effect of being incarcerated while not knowing what was happening to their families; while having the psychological blow of having been defeated and captured; and where frequently life inside the camp could be dangerous because of the internal Nazi organization; all of this could create a very negative and depressed state of mind. Some prisoners thrived, however, and there are several accounts available where the prisoners describe the relief of knowing that they were now out of the war and no longer in danger (for an example from the United States, see Waters 2004).

Fear, Control, and Repression

The architecture and design of the PoW camp was focused on the control and supervision of the inmates; for the forestry camp, the overriding principle was utility and convenience of access. There is nothing about the layout of the forestry camp to suggest an attempt at controlling the activities of the young men living there. They were active in the local community, as various newspaper reports indicate, participating in community events, getting into fights, marrying local girls, and being arrested. The inmates of Deaconsbank had far less impact on the local community; they worked on farms and in factories, but they had no interaction with the local community and were under constant supervision. As a result, the local newspapers have little to say about them.

The main incident that caused comment was the accidental death of an Italian prisoner on January 3, 1945, who was knocked down on the road in the blackout coming back from work (Swan and Scott 2005:13). The irony is that, as an Italian, he was under a looser regime and was not under guard; otherwise, he might have lived. The regime for the Germans was much stricter: WO/32/11687 stated that a ratio of 15% guards was needed for German PoWs, in contrast to the 5% required for the Italians; the camps were also considered to require additional secure boundaries. Even in the period after the war, the Germans were still considered a potential threat because of the unreconstructed Nazis—this meant that German prisoners of war continued to be detained in Britain under armed guard until 1947 in some cases.

It is undoubtedly the case that German PoWs were considered dangerous and engendered a degree of nervousness in the British population. The architecture of the camps reflects this; they were isolated as far as possible from British life, with the interior of the camp providing everything that they might need. This included good sanitation to reduce the risk of disease that had always characterized prison camps of an earlier era. The camps were located away from population centers and away from coasts and major lines of communication. The layout was designed to ensure that the guards could observe what the prisoners were doing and to be able to control their activities. However, there was no attempt to repress the prisoners, to break them down, or to change them other than through education. There was no attempt to limit their sensory experiences beyond the fact of their incarceration, or to overload them. This contrasts with more recent approaches used in Stammheim Prison, or Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay, which ironically echoes back to Jeremy Bentham’s prison designs and the belief of nineteenth-century reformers that they could change the character of inmates through the architecture of the prisons (Casella 2007; Myers 2010). In contrast, the PoW camp was designed to detain and control the inmates. There was no attempt to alter them through the environment in which they lived. Efforts of reform were limited to education and denazification.

Deaconsbank and Macoul Camp were both designed to accommodate an alien population, and to do so hygienically and without risk of disease. Neither was designed to change the inmates or alter their behavior: there was no attempt at blatant repression. The difference is in control. The prison camp controlled the lives of the inmates, determining where they could move and when; it also acted to remove them from the world and replace the outside world with a self-contained environment. The forestry camp was purely accommodation and work, and the lack of facilities on site ensured that the denizens remained a part of the world outside and were never isolated from it. The key differences between the types of accommodation are the control mechanisms and the level of facilities; the PoW camp has high levels of both in its role of control.

Conclusion

The two sites are very different, one being a prison and the other more of a home. The lives of the inmates were very different too, despite the fact that both groups were involved in manual labor on behalf of the British war effort. Life for the German prisoners was restricted, controlled, and regulated. Apart from work, their lives were entirely encompassed by the wire of the fence. The foresters had no such boundaries and were fully engaged with the communities around them—they were accepted in a way that the Germans were not. Both sites had fences around them, but the purpose of the fences was very different. In both camps, the fence was a demarcation between inside and outside, but for the PoWs, it also represented the difference between freedom and restriction, and to a lesser extent, life and death. Crossing the barrier could result in them being shot, while being inside meant that they were no longer part of the war.

Despite the fact that the treatment of the German PoWs was clearly governed at least partially by fear on the part of the British, it does not appear that the architecture reflects that fear. The camps that accommodated the Germans were largely those previously occupied by Italians, so they tended not to have been purpose built for them. Consequently, the design and layout was more practical than repressive. Where the fear factor was expressed was in the far higher ratio of guards for the Germans, the segregation of prisoners according to perceptions of how ardent their Nazism was, and the active attempts to change their ideological outlook through denazification. For all the prisoners, German and Italian alike, the architecture of the camp was designed to keep them under control, to ensure that the guards would be able to control any problems that arose. It was not designed as punishment, as a tool of repression. The requirements of the Geneva Convention were paramount in a way that the current inmates at Guantánamo Bay would surely envy.