German P.O.W. Camps in Canada
The last prisoner of war (P.O.W.) camp in Canada in Monteith, Ontario, northeast of Timmins, closed 60 years ago. The last of 35,046 P.O.W.’s went home. They were interned in 26 maximum-security enclosures and scores of small minimum-security work camps scattered across Canada.
Camp 20, Gravenhurst (“Muskoka Officers’ Camp”) housed 400 officers in a converted sanatorium. Bowmanville (“Lake Ontario Officers’ Camp”) caged 750 officers in a boys’ reformatory. Espanola’s camp was a factory, Lethbridge’s a collection of barracks, Kingston’s a fort, and Hull’s an abandoned jail where Canadian communists were imprisoned.
Camp 43, Ile Ste. Helene, Montreal, was the smallest maximum-security camp. The millions who visited the Expo ’67 island were probably unaware that 300 German prisoners had sat out their war there. The largest camp, 12,500 prisoners, was in Lethbridge.
The first camps opened in Petawawa and Kananaskis, near Calgary, in September 1939. They were not military compounds exclusively. Aliens in Britain when war broke out were interned. Canadian citizens and landed immigrants considered security risks were detained. Aliens on ships docked in Canadian ports wound up behind barbed wire.
Eight hundred civilians were locked up separately from military prisoners. The highest profile civilian was Montreal Mayor Camilien Houde. He exhorted Quebecois to boycott conscription. He was interned in Petawawa for four years (1940–1944), without being charged or tried. The flamboyant politician was a Francophone twin of colourful New York Mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia. After his release, Houde was re-elected mayor and member of the assembly. In 1949, at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium, he kicked off the ceremonial ball when Montreal defeated Calgary 28-15 to win its first Grey Cup. When officials thanked him, the impish chief magistrate told English Canada he would be happy to come back every year and “kick all your balls off.”
Canadian communists, fascists, militant union bosses, and conscription opponents were rounded up; 130 Canadians “believed to be communists” were arbitrarily interned. Prominent Quebec fascist, Adrien Arcand, was jailed. Seaman’s Union president, Pat Sullivan, Nova Scotia fishermen’s union chief, Charles Murray, electrical workers union president, C. S. Jackson, and Windsor United Auto Workers’ organizer, Bill Walsh, were incarcerated.
Walsh was detained from 1940 to 1942 and released. He was forbidden to leave Windsor and was required to report to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). He violated both conditions. The RCMP went looking for him. The trail led to France. A Mountie waited to interview the intelligence officer of a Canadian battalion preparing to assault the Siegfreid Line. He didn’t know the intelligence officer was Bill Walsh. Communist Party leaders Tim Buck, Sam Carr, and Charles Sims fled to the United States to avoid detention.
A little known chapter in Canada’s war was the involvement of Canadian communists. At the request of Britain’s Strategic Operations Executive (SOE) and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the RCMP, the Canadian Communist Party, and the Departments of Defence and External Affairs combined to create a secret commando unit. The Communist Party provided lists of Canadian communists of Yugoslav, Bulgarian, and Hungarian descent. Sixty volunteers were recruited, trained in Canada, Palestine, and Egypt, and parachuted behind enemy lines into Yugoslavia and the Balkans. Their mission was to link up with resistance fighters, sabotage enemy assets, gather intelligence, and harass enemy forces.
Meanwhile, converted liners — the Queen Mary, the Ile de France, and the Duchess of York — transported Allied troops to Britain, deadheading back to Canada with P.O.W.’s for internment. In July 1940, U-boat U-47 torpedoed the British liner, Arandora Star, 161 kilometres west of Ireland. Half the 1,600 German P.O.W.’s on board perished.
Liners docked in Halifax or Quebec, and trains took prisoners to camps. Each coach carried three guards armed only with whistles and small leather blackjacks. The guards belonged to the Department of National Defence’s Veterans Guard. By June 1943, there were 11,000 Veterans Guards. Their maximum age was 50.
Over five years, the Guards lost only one prisoner. Luftwaffe ace, Franz von Werra (“The One That Got Away”), jumped from a train into a snowbank in Smiths Falls and made a “home run” to Germany. He used his hands as paddles to guide a stolen rowboat across the slush covered St. Lawrence River to neutral territory in the United States. Germany’s
consul in New York secretly delivered him home to Germany through Mexico and South America. He was given a tumultuous hero’s welcome in Berlin and decorated personally by Deputy Fuhrer Hermann Goring. The swashbuckling von Werra claimed he was a baron and was photographed alongside his fighter with his pet lion cub. He was killed when the engine of his ME109 seized and he crashed in the North Sea.
Canada’s internment operations bureaucracy operated out of Rooms 283, 285, and 285A of the West Block of Parliament. The director was Brigadier General Edouard de Panet, a World War I veteran of the First Canadian Division. His deputy was Lieutenant Colonel Hubert Stetham, Royal
Military College faculty member and Kingston city councillor.
Prisoners were treated well. Some were contracted out as day labourers on farms. They were paid 50 cents a day. Some, in remote bush locations, were trusted with rifles and allowed to hunt game. Food allotments were comparable to civilian portions — equivalent quantities of rationed items — butter, sugar, tea, coffee, eggs, meat, fish, jam, fresh fruit, and vegetables. When their uniforms wore out, P.O.W.’s were given replacement clothing, dark blue trousers with a red stripe across the right leg and shirts and tunics with red circles painted on the backs.
Every camp had a working still. Copper piping was liberated from camp plumbing, while sugar and raisins were stolen from kitchens. Bowmanville had a large contingent of thirsty Afrika Korps desert troops. A friendly guard became friendlier when he took a shine to their “shine” and provided all the copper tubing they needed.
In Espanola, a mahogany piano vanished. Prisoners shaved the hardwood upright, mixed it with tobacco, and smoked it. Guards routinely inspected pianos for prisoners hiding inside. Before a coffin was carried to a graveyard outside camp, guards opened it to catch any escapee piggybacking out on top of the deceased. Espanola P.O.W.’s pursued a profitable sideline casting fake Iron Crosses and selling them to unsuspecting guards. In Farnham, Quebec, an air show promoter paid three German paratroopers $10 each to jump. They spent the money on liquor and were blind drunk when they jumped. No camp was without a homemade radio. Kingston prisoners concealed theirs in waterproof wrapping in the roots of a potted plant.
Homosexual activity was rare, but not unknown. Punishment for homosexual acts was administered by peers and was swift. At Monteith, a prisoner who propositioned a sailor ended up with a battered face, two black eyes, and 28 days in detention.
Kingston prisoners revolted when black soldiers were assigned to guard them. They informed the camp commandant in a written protest that “coloured people” were not acceptable. Lake Superior P.O.W.’s complained that a camp hospital doctor was Jewish.
Escape attempts were frequent and unsuccessful. Two P.O.W.’s escaped from Kingston and crossed the St. Lawrence to Clayton, New York. The United States sent them back. Nineteen Kingston P.O.W.’s escaped by tunnelling under a stone wall. All were captured. Camp X in Angler, 400 kilometres northwest of Sault Ste. Marie and 150 kilometres from the U.S. border held 560 P.O.W.’s. Twenty-eight broke out in April 1941: two were shot dead and three were wounded. Two got away, but were free only briefly.
One escapee was 2,000 kilometres from Angler when the FBI nabbed him. He crossed the river to Detroit from Windsor and reached Texas. A Detroit Nazi sympathizer who helped him was convicted of treason and sentenced to hang. Twenty-four hours before his scheduled execution, President Roosevelt commuted his sentence. The globetrotting escapee was returned to Angler and given 28 days in detention.
In April 1942, two Luftwaffe officers escaped from Bowmanville and were picked up in Niagara Falls the next day.
Five thousand hard-core Nazis were imprisoned in Camp 132, Medicine Hat. On two separate occasions, SS troops accused a prisoner of being communist and anti-Nazi. Ringleaders presided over kangaroo courts. The accused men were found guilty and lynched. In July 1943, a court found three prisoners guilty of the first murder. One was hanged. In December 1946, four P.O.W.’s were convicted of the second murder and hanged.
The Veterans’ Guard made it abundantly clear that media attention was unwelcome. Toronto Star reporter Doug MacFarlane was arrested when he stepped down from a train near a camp. Toronto Telegram reporter Scott Young had his notes confiscated and burned.
On V-E Day, all hell broke loose in Gravenhurst. There was cheering; horns blew, and ecstatic citizens danced in the streets. A prisoner asked a guard what the uproar was about. The guard responded: “The war is over.” The P.O.W.’s rejoinder: “Who won?”
When hostilities ended, many P.O.W.’s wanted to stay in Canada, but the Geneva Convention stipulated repatriation to Germany. Many came back, married Canadian girls, and established businesses near the camps where they were imprisoned.
On a Danube cruise from Vienna to the Black Sea, Janet and I were assigned a dining table. Our companions for 10 days were a retired oil company executive and his wife. He spent most of his war as a P.O.W. in the Muskokas. He told us he escaped once and avoided detection by hiding under water in eel grass in Pine Lake. He breathed through a hollow reed. The only clothing he wore was a bathing suit. He said the mosquitoes and black flies were so thick he gave himself up, happy to return to the relative cold comfort of barbed wire.