ENEMY SOLDIERS MADE ALBERTA HOME
‘Home-front story’ told in museum pieces
The Royal Alberta Museum’s Sean Moir displays a wooden model battleship made by a prisoner of war at a camp near Lethbridge during the Second World War. More than 35,000 PoWs, mostly Germans, were held in Canada during the war. The museum recently acquired a collection of documents and artifacts that preserve a little-known part of Alberta history.
The lives of 35,000 German prisoners of war who were shipped to Canada during the Second World War have been documented in a collection amassed over 40 years and now owned by the Royal Alberta Museum.
The museum on Thursday unveiled parts of the Robert Henderson PoW Collection, named for the Saskatchewan resident and former RCMP officer who spent decades collecting artifacts from the people who lived and worked in the camps. Henderson sold his collection to the museum this winter.
“I think the home-front story (of the war) is something that’s much less known,” said Sean Moir, the museum’s curator of military and political history.
“This happens to be one of those other stories of our history in Alberta.”
The German soldiers were sent to Canada following a British government request in 1940. There were thousands of PoWs already in Britain — and with the Germans planning an invasion of the United Kingdom, there were fears the PoWs were actually an army of occupation in waiting.
The PoW camps also housed German sailors captured at ports around the world when the war started, and Canadian citizens of German and Italian descent.
Two thirds of the PoWs were housed in Alberta, with the country’s biggest camps in Lethbridge and Medicine Hat.
Intricate wooden model battleships made by PoWs were on display Thursday.
Moir explained that PoWs were encouraged to do craft work, sports or play musical instruments. Guards believed that keeping PoWs busy would prevent fights, or plans for escape.
Also on display were “Wanted” posters for PoWs who did escape. Some PoWs were given work assignments outside the camps — cutting lumber used to heat Canadian homes or
“I think the homefront story (of the war) is something that’s much less known.” Sean Moir, Royal Alberta Museum
working sugar beet farms in southern Alberta — that offered opportunities to slip away.
Curiously, several “Wanted” posters show PoWs who escaped after the war ended.
“My guess is that maybe they wanted to stay here and they didn’t want to go back to Germany,” Moir said.
Some PoWs remained in Canada until 1947. It took time to organize transportation for thousands of men back to Europe, at the same time Canadian soldiers overseas were trying to return home.
The Germans arrived back to find a devastated country. Many PoWs applied from Germany to move to Canada and were eventually successful in their bid to return to the country that had interned them.
Museum staff credited Henderson for the research that went into explaining the hundreds of objects and documents.
“It was almost serendipitous how some of this collection was saved,” said Anthony Worman, the museum’s assistant curator of military and political history. After 40 years, Henderson gained contacts in Canada and abroad who knew he was collecting items from the camps.
The museum’s staff is currently cataloguing the entire exhibit. It wants to open the display to the public in its new downtown building. Parts of the collection will be available online sooner.
The museum says Canada housed about 35,000 German PoWs during the war. To hold them, the federal government set up 26 major camps, located in Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick, the museum says.