Bowmanville POW Camp

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The POW camp Bowmanville (as POW camp known 30) was run by Canadians POW camp for German soldiers during the Second World War . It was built in the Clarington district in the state of Ontario , now part of Oshawa , and was occupied with about 880 prisoners ( Bowmanville (Clarington) ). In September 2013, the camp was classified as a National Historic Site of Canada . In 1943 the inmates Otto Kretschmer and Wolfgang Heyda were the subject of an extensive escape attempt called the Kiebitz company .

history

In 1922, John H. H. Jury donated his 300 acre farm to the government for the purpose of building a "school for maladjusted boys who were not inherently delinquent" (Bowmanville Boys Training School). Two of the early buildings were completed in 1927. In 1941, the government decided to use the property as a POW camp, and the Bowmanville Boys Training School was relocated to Rathskamoray (currently the Lion Center) within Bowmanville .

Canadian officials had just under seven months to turn the boys' school into a POW camp. There were 15 meter wide barbed fences, watchtowers (nine), as well as gates and barracks for the Canadian guards built. These tasks were completed in late 1941, just as the first prisoners were arriving. After the war ended, the prisoners of war were sent back to Europe and the site was used as a school again.

POW Camp 30

Prisoner Uprising - "Battle of Bowmanville"

In the summer of 1942, on the orders of the Wehrmacht High Command , British and Canadian soldiers who had been captured after Operation Jubilee were shown in chains in Berlin. In return, the Allies ordered that one hundred inmates of the Canadian prisoner-of-war camp in Bowmanville should also be chained. The commandant of the camp, Lieutenant Colonel James Mason Taylor, asked Major General Georg Friemel, the spokesman for the German prisoners of war, to tie up a group of prisoners on October 10, 1943 at around 12:30 p.m. Friemel's answer was "none of the prisoners would volunteer". Lieutenant General Hans von Ravenstein , Chief Air Force Officer , Lieutenant Colonel Hans Hefele and Chief Navy Officer Corvette Captain Otto Kretschmer were also asked to handcuff volunteers - they refused. The commandant then ordered his own people to be handcuffed. The German officers then holed up in the camp's mess hall until the evening of October 12, 1942 and defended themselves with battens, stones and improvised weapons. About 100 Canadian soldiers, recruited from another base in Kingston, came to the aid of the guards and stormed the mess with baseball bats, keeping the two sides equally well-coordinated. After several hours of fighting, the Canadians brought high pressure water hoses and soaked the rooms thoroughly. After the Germans finally overpowered and captured a British officer, the Canadian guards did open fire. A German was wounded by gunfire and a Canadian soldier suffered a fractured skull from a jam jar that was thrown. After the uprising ended, 126 of the prisoners were transferred to other camps.

The wounded prisoner was Oberfähnrich zur See Volkmar König (born November 6, 1920 in Bremen , † August 22, 2008 in Kiel ), who served on U 99 until he was captured . The extensive estate of King, consisting of documents, photos, film and sound recordings, is located in the International Maritime Museum Hamburg .

Attempts to escape

There have been many escape attempts over the years. The first attempt was made during the first year of the camp on November 25, 1941. One prisoner tried to crawl under the barbed wire but was caught immediately. The Kiebitz company was a failed escape attempt to rescue four German submarine commanders, including Otto Kretschmer . On December 30, 1942, a prisoner tried to escape by hiding in the laundry cart when leaving the camp. The attempt failed and he was held in Oshawa Prison for a few hours before being released to the camp that day.

During a routine inspection of the prisoners' cells on July 29, 1943, a tin can with a map and tools for escape was found. An escape through a tunnel was started in the northeast corner of Victoria Hall (referred to as House IV by inmates). The tunnel was 50 cm square, the lighting was wired and a ventilation system with tin cans installed. Supports were every 1–2 meters and were made from wood from attics in the warehouse. The excavated earth was brought into the attic by means of buckets through a hole in the ceiling. In September 1943, the weight of the accumulated earth collapsed the attic. Alarmed guards discovered the tunnel and buried it.

Todays use

The property was used as a boys' school until 1979 and as a school for foreign Malaysian students, St. Joseph's Catholic Elementary School until 2008 and finally as a private Islamic university. After that, Camp 30 was severely neglected. In 2013, Camp 30 received a place on Heritage Canada's list for "Top 10 Places at Risk of 2013," largely because it was about to be demolished because of the neglect of buildings and the value of the land to a developer. That demolition plan was later discarded in 2013 after it was named a National Historic Site. On July 5, 2016, the Clarington Township announced that it had entered into a purchase agreement with the current owners of the property, Kaitlin Developments and Fandor Homes. This move effectively saved the property from possible destruction from a combination of vandalism, insufficient funding and possible home development. The sale includes a donation of $ 500,000 to the community to help maintain the property in conjunction with an initial cleanup of the site. The cleanup includes the destruction of buildings that have not been given historical status, the removal of graffiti and the installation of surveillance cameras.

and display information about the image
Bowmanville POW camp (2016)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Daniel Hoffman, Bowmanville Museum: Camp 30 "Ehrenwort": a German prisoner-of-war camp in Bowmanville, 1941-1945. Publisher Bowmanville Museum 1990.
  2. ^ Truro Daily News. September 3, 2009 Wrecker’s ball hovers over Ontario compound that housed top Nazi officers.
  3. ↑ Places classified as Historically Significant and Endangered by Canada's Environment Minister on the advice of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMBC)
  4. ^ Nathan M. Greenfield: The battle of the St. Lawrence: the Second World War in Canada. HarperCollins, Toronto 2004, p. 286, ISBN 978-0-002-0066-44 .
  5. ↑ Leeanna McLean: Bowmanville's Camp 30 has a long and colorful history, Including POW camp for German soldiers. In: durhamregion.com. March 6, 2015, accessed December 12, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Helmut Schmoeckel: Humanity in naval warfare? Mittler 1987, p. 200.
  7. ↑ Jean Hood: S ubmarine: An anthology of first hand accounts of the war under the sea, 1939-45. Bloomsbury Publishing 2012, ISBN 1-844-8616-19 : Excerpt
  8. ↑ Andrew Williams: The Battle Of The Atlantic. Random House 2010, ISBN 1-409-0749-27 , p. 291.
  9. ↑ imm-hamburg.de International Maritime Museum Hamburg
  10. ↑ Heroes without a home war returnees after 1945 - Documentation Germany 2010 - Topic: "Trauma War" ARD and arte - Jan N. Lorenzen: Contemporary history on television: Theory and practice of historical documentations Practical knowledge media. P. 53.
  11. ↑ Michael L. Hadley: U-Boats Against Canada: German Submarines in Canadian Waters. McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1990, ISBN 0-773-5080-15 , p. 169.

Coordinates: 43 ° 55 ′ 37 ″  N , 78 ° 40 ′ 0 ″  W.