"In the Midst of the Canadian Bush": German Prisoners of War in Manitoba's Riding Mountain National Park

• In Event: War and Environmental History

Abstract

October 31, 1943 – nineteen German prisoners of war (PoWs) were found missing from a prisoner of war labour project in Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park. Quickly labeled Canada’s second-largest escape attempt, once local media broke the story, many Canadians were shocked to learn that the camp had no barbed wire fences but instead relied on the park’s natural features, namely dense forest, as the primary means of security.

My presentation will examine the role of the natural environment in Canadian internment practices during the Second World War, taking the focus off the large, heavily guarded internment camps and instead examining smaller, minimal-security labour projects. Scattered across the country, over 230 of these projects employed 14,000 PoWs in an attempt to boost the country’s struggling agricultural and lumber industries. Like the camp at Riding Mountain, these were often located in secluded regions and relied on miles of Canadian wilderness, rather than barbed wire fences or guard towers, to contain the most curious of PoWs.

Using the Riding Mountain Park Labour Project as a case study, I will examine how officials from Parks Bureau, Department of Defence, and Department of Labour employed the natural environment, both intentionally and unintentionally, in internment operations. Like many of the other woodcutting camps in the country, the forest was employed both as a method of containment and as a way to provide PoWs with relative freedom, allowing them to conduct activities like hiking and canoeing, in the hope of encouraging them to work harder and be less likely to cause trouble.

As I hope to demonstrate, applying an environmental history perspective to a study of internment practices can provide valuable insight into how interactions with Canada’s natural environment affected a prisoner’s wartime and internment experience as well as their understandings of Canada and its peoples.

Author

• Michael O'Hagan, Western University