From “wildcat” miners to corporate giants
The first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp dates back to 1779. The facility, built in England, marked the establishment of facilities specifically designed to hold prisoners of war during periods of conflict. The majority of these camps were run according to the Geneva Convention. A good many more, however, became infamous for their dreadful treatment of detainees and the poor conditions they had to endure. Indeed, these were places no soldier wanted to end up in. But what were the worst of these brutal, dangerous, and unhygienic stockades?
Click through and take a look at history's most notorious prisoner-of-war camps.
Norman Cross Prison in England was the world's first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp. Completed in 1797, it was built to hold prisoners of war from France and its allies during the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. A memorial to the 1,770 prisoners who died at Norman Cross marks the site of the now demolished facility.
French combatants captured during the Napoleonic Wars were also incarcerated at Dartmoor. In 1813, the prison started to receive American naval personnel taken prisoner during the War of 1812. In 1814, despite the end of hostilities, the British government refused to release the POWs. A riot ensued, resulting in the deaths of 271 detainees. They are buried in the grounds of the prison, which still functions today.
The American Civil War saw thousands of troops captured and imprisoned from both sides of the conflict. One of the most notorious POW camps was the Confederate-run Andersonville Prison in Georgia. Known also as Camp Sumpter, it's here that approximately 13,000 Union prisoners died from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, overcrowding, or exposure to the elements. The site is listed on the US National Registry of Historic Places.
Another infamous Civil War-era stockade was Camp Douglas in Chicago. A Union Army facility for captured Confederate soldiers, Camp Douglas was noted for its dreadful conditions and high death rate. By the end of the war, some 4,275 prisoners had perished while in captivity.
A Union Army barracks converted into a prisoner-of-war camp for Confederate soldiers, Elmira in New York eventually housed the largest number of rebels captured during the conflict. It was soon dubbed "Hellmira" by its inmates, with nearly 3,000 succumbing from a combination of malnutrition, hypothermia, and disease from the poor sanitary conditions.
The Boer War broke out in 1899 between the British Empire and the Boer republics. During the conflict, the British established six prisoner-of-war camps in South Africa and several in overseas British colonies. The facility at Capetown (pictured) comprised two prisons—Green Point Camp No. 1 and Camp No. 2. The camps served as a transit hub to accommodate POWs before they were sent overseas. Conditions were basic and the regime harsh, especially if a prisoner refused to take an oath of allegiance to the British crown.
The year the Boer War broke out is the same year the first international convention on prisoners of war was signed at the Hague Peace Conference of 1899. But by the beginning of the First World War, permanent POW camps did not exist. This posed an immediate problem for German forces, which by 1914 had captured over 200,000 enemy combatants. Pictured are 2,000 Russian prisoners of war captured by the Germans in East Prussia and held in a makeshift camp.
Allied forces were faced with a similar dilemma: where to muster and process Axis prisoners. Here, stony-faced German soldiers stare back at the camera from behind the barbed wire of a French prisoner-of-war camp.
An exception was Holzminden in Germany, which opened in 1917 and housed captured British officers. The camp occupied the premises of a cavalry barracks. The German garrison was housed in Kaserne B (pictured). Holzminden is remembered as the location of the largest POW escape of the Great War.
On July 23, 1918, 29 officers escaped through a tunnel, which had been under excavation for some nine months. Ten succeeded in making their way back to Britain, including from left to right: Lt. Cecil Blain, Captain David Gray, and Lt. Caspar Kennard.
Tuchola prisoner-of-war camp in northern Poland was constructed using labor from captured Russian soldiers. Operated by the German Empire, Tuchola recorded nearly 4,000 prisoner deaths from disease between 1914 and 1918, most of these Romanian prisoners, but many Russians too. Disease was to blame. From 1920 to 1921, Polish authorities ran the camp, during which time a further 2,000 Russian prisoners died due to hunger, bad living conditions, and infectious diseases.
Finnish civil war prison camps were operated by the 'White' side (Civil Guard) of the conflict. Pictured in 1915 is a camp holding imprisoned members known as the 'Red Guards' (paramilitary units of the Finnish labor movement). A total of 12,000 to 14,000 Red Guard prisoners died in captivity.
The Spanish civil war saw several camps established in Spain by General Franco to hold Republican combatants. The Nationalists did not recognize Republican soldiers as prisoners of war, so the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, signed and ratified a decade earlier by King Alfonso XIII on behalf of Spain, did not apply to them.
In theory, the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Prisoners of War was meant to safeguard the rights of POWs, with camps remaining open to inspection by authorized representatives of a neutral power. But in practice, this wasn't always so. Germany ratified the Convention. Japan, though a signatory, declined to do so. Pictured is Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler visiting a camp for Russian prisoners.
Werner Drechsler (pictured on the left injured while disembarking USS Osmond Ingram in June 1943) was a German U-boat crewman who was recruited as a spy by US authorities and placed in Camp Papago Park, located outside Phoenix, Arizona. Drechsler was eventually exposed as an enemy agent by other prisoners and later found hung. Seven inmates were tried by a general court-martial and executed for the beating and hanging of their compatriot.
A daring escape by German POWs took place in December 1944 from Camp Papago Park. Twenty-five inmates tunneled their way under the perimeter and into the desert. All were eventually rounded up however.
Arguably the most famous of the Second World War prisoner-of-war camps, Stalag Luft III was the scene of the daring "Great Escape" of March 1944, when 76 Allied airmen tunneled their way out of the compound near the town of Sagan. Only three escapees made it to safety; 50 were executed on Hitler's orders. Seventeen captured escapees were returned to Stalag Luft III, while two others were sent to another POW camp and another four to a concentration camp.
Located near the town of Bad Orb in Germany, Stalag IX-B operated from 1939 to 1945 and housed prisoners from at least eight countries. Those from the Soviet Union suffered terribly. By spring of 1942, an estimated 1,430 Red Army combatants had perished. A mass grave marks their final resting place, as does a memorial.
More than 140,000 Allied combatants ended up as prisoners of the Japanese during the Second World War. Of these, one in three died from starvation, work, punishment, or from infectious diseases. Pictured is Ohashi prisoner-of-war camp.
The terms of the Geneva Convention were regularly ignored by the Japanese, who made up their own rules and inflicted punishment on a whim.
In April 1942, thousands of American and Filipino prisoners of war were force-marched 88 km (55 mi) by their Japanese captors from Bataan to a train that would take them to internment camps. Some 70,000 men were marched along this route, but cruel treatment and starvation killed anywhere between 7,000 and 10,000 before the grueling trek reached its destination.
Cowra prisoner-of-war camp in New South Wales, Australia, was the scene of the largest prison breakout of the Second World War. On August 5, 1944, more than 1,000 Japanese detainees attempted to escape the compound. During the getaway and ensuing manhunt, 231 Japanese soldiers were killed.
The most notorious prison camp in recorded history, Auschwitz is recognized globally as a Nazi concentration camp. But as with other camps of this nature, Auschwitz also housed POWs, namely Red Army soldiers. The Germans began sending Soviet POWs to Auschwitz shortly after the beginning of their war against the Soviet Union in 1941. The exact number who perished is unknown.
Five years after the end of the Second World War, the Korean War erupted. Pictured in 1951 are Chinese and North Koreans at the United Nations Pusan prisoner-of-war camp. Internees were struck by how humanely they were treated by their captors.
A group of American soldiers is photographed after being captured by Chinese communist forces fighting in Korea.
By the early 1950s, war was also raging in Vietnam. This 1954 photograph shows captured French combatants, escorted by Vietnamese troops, walking to a prisoner-of-war camp in Dien Bien Phu. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the epic confrontation between the colonial French and communist revolutionaries, took place between March 13 and May 7, 1954 and precipitated the collapse of French colonial rule in Indochina.
About 65 US prisoners of war were held at Son Toy prison camp. Located outside of Hanoi, the camp hit the headlines in 1970 when a US military force raided the camp to rescue captured Americans. Instead they found it empty, the inmates having been transferred several months previously.
Perhaps the most infamous prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam was Hoa Loa Prison. Located in the heart of Hanoi, it housed numerous American POWs who endured miserable conditions, including poor food and unsanitary conditions. It soon became sarcastically known as the "Hanoi Hilton." Among the US servicemen detained within its walls was John McCain, later to become a senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee.
Another Vietnam prisoner-of-war facility equally notorious for the maltreatment of its detainees was Phu Quoc. Used for detention of captured Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers, prisoners showed signs of inadequate food supplies, poor medical care, and brutal beatings—cases identified by Red Cross officials after visiting the installation in 1969 and 1972.
While only a temporary detention center, Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was the source of considerable controversary after allegations of maltreatment by the US authorities of Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees. The camp closed in 2002 with all prisoners transferred to Camp Delta.
Manjaca Camp in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina housed Croatian and Bosnian Muslim prisoners during the Bosnian War. The camp was the site of a litany of human rights abuses, namely the regular and systematic beatings and killings of detainees, resulting in indictments and convictions by the ICTY United Nations tribunal for former Yugoslavia.
Sources: (The History Press) (American Battlefield Trust) (History on the Net) (U.S. News & World Report) (History)
See also: Ruins and rubble: Germany post-WWII
History's most notorious prisoner-of-war camps
The worst of war's infamous stockades
LIFESTYLE History
The first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp dates back to 1779. The facility, built in England, marked the establishment of facilities specifically designed to hold prisoners of war during periods of conflict. The majority of these camps were run according to the Geneva Convention. A good many more, however, became infamous for their dreadful treatment of detainees and the poor conditions they had to endure. Indeed, these were places no soldier wanted to end up in. But what were the worst of these brutal, dangerous, and unhygienic stockades?
Click through and take a look at history's most notorious prisoner-of-war camps.