RIDING MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, MAN.—Even today, getting to the prison camp site is no walk in the park but rather an arduous trek through thick forest under the watchful gaze of wolves, bears and an unending supply of mosquitoes.

During World War II, this remote stretch of bush was home to nearly 500 German soldiers, who ended up prisoners of war in Allied hands following defeats in North Africa.

Under threat of invasion by Germany, Britain shipped the prisoners to Canada, where more than 30,000 of them spent the remaining war years in remote camps in the Prairies, Quebec and Ontario.

This little known chapter of Canadian history is the object of an archeological dig deep in the forests of Riding Mountain National Park, about three hours drive northwest of Winnipeg.

The joint project has brought researchers from Stanford University and the nearby University of Brandon together to study one of the war’s smaller PoW camps — and the only unfenced one in North America.

“We had no barbed wire,” recalled Ewald Wellman, one of the former prisoners interviewed for the project. “You can walk a fair bit but you can’t run away. In the forest, you can’t really run.”

Wellman, who was in his early 20s when he first arrived at the camp near Whitewater Lake, said he and the other prisoners saw always wild animals around them. One even kept a bear cub as a pet.

After the war, they were returned to Germany and the camp was shut down. The site was never forgotten, but its remote location made it hard of access for decades, said Stanford researcher Adrian Myers, who is heading up the dig with help from students from Brandon.

“For decades, this was just a garbage area in the park. There was trash lying around, and until not that long ago this wasn’t considered an archeological site,” said Myers. “Then, in the 1990s, Parks Canada archeologists decided this was important enough to protect and because nothing was built on top of it and it’s in the middle of nowhere, most of this has remained intact with no disturbance.”

The nearest town is about a 10-hour walk away, but Myers said there is evidence that some of the prisoners would leave the camp at night to drink beer in town or dance at a community hall and then return the next morning.

Some local farmers were reportedly sympathetic to the PoWs and it's possible they might have offered them rides out of the forest and helped them return to the camp at dawn, said Myers. But there were also letters to the editor in local papers saying the PoWs were being treated too well considering how harsh the conditions were for Canadian soldiers fighting overseas.

Kathleen Christensen, who’s patiently sifting through tin cans left in a rubbish tip, is volunteering her time on the dig because she sees it as a rare opportunity to experience artifacts before they become museum exhibits.

“You’re going to be able to see these materials in universities and museums one day but this is giving us a glimpse of the whole context,” said Christensen, a curator at the Royal Canadian Artillery Museum in nearby CFB Shiloh. “What we’re seeing here is there were real people living here and their lives are being told in what was left behind.”

The 440 PoWs at the camp had fought in the deserts of Libya and Egypt in Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. After their capture, they were shipped to Halifax and then travelled by train to Manitoba. In the camp they earned 50 cents a day felling trees to supply firewood and lumber for the war effort.

Their earnings went to toiletries ordered from Eaton’s catalogues. These included shaving cream and cologne, remnants of which have been found behind where the barracks used to be. The German Red Cross also shipped supplies to the prisoners. Mugs with swastikas have been dug up, as well as tubes of toothpaste with German labels.

Brandon University anthropologist Suyoko Tsukamoto and more than a dozen students have spent most of the summer living in tents on site.

“My first thought was these prisoners had hot showers, flush toilets and I was hoping the students doing the field studies didn’t realize that these PoWs had better living conditions than they did,” said Tsukamoto.

Tsukamoto, who grew up in Brandon, said her father was one of 20,000 Japanese-Canadians interned during the war in detention camps.

“It was so bad he never talked about it. Ever. Conditions for them were far worse than it was for these prisoners of war,” she said.

Author and historian David Carter, who has written a book about the PoW camps, said there are lessons to be learned.

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“These camps, what’s left of them, serve as warnings that our world can change suddenly, whether it’s because of war or economic upheaval, and governments behind closed doors can all of a sudden take away your freedom.”

After the war many of the German prisoners praised Canada and the treatment they received.

“We treated some people very well,” Carter said, “and others, like the Japanese, we took away everything they had.”

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