Behind Barbed Wire 

In the Missisquoi Museum, there is an oil painting signed by an artist named “Berther.” While unremarkable in its composition, it is a noteworthy artefact in the collection because it was painted by a German Prisoner of War (POW) who was incarcerated in Farnham, Quebec.

During the Second World War (1939–1945), the federal government imprisoned 38,000 German refugee civilians and POWs in twenty camps across Canada. Five internment camps were created on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, including Camp A (#40) in Farnham, and Camp N (#42) near Sherbrooke, Qc., for the confinement of thousands of Germans and other “subversives.”

Camp A in Farnham, opened in October 1940 on the grounds of the “Dominion Experimental Farm,” where today, a Tim Horton’s anchors the corner (Routes 104 & 235). In the “civilian internment phase” of Quebec’s imprisonment operations, which lasted until 1943, the inmates were non-combatant German refugees who had been initially imprisoned in the United Kingdom and then transferred to Canada. 

A number of these refugees were elderly and had lived in England most of their lives. Others were highly educated Jewish evacuees who had already escaped Hitler’s Nazi regime. To their dismay, Britain and its allies provided no sanctuary. The “irony and tragedy” is that neither the British nor Canadian governments utilized these refugees to their advantage. Instead of seeing their prisoners as engineers, medical doctors, scientists, and translators motivated to use their skills to fight Nazi oppression, their German ancestry marked them as “enemy aliens” and as threats to national security. 

The government was unprepared for the influx of these civilian detainees and camps were rapidly constructed resulting in crude living conditions. Camp A was considered a primitive and unsanitary environment for its new occupants. Until 1943, the camp repeatedly failed to provide adequate shelter and food, sufficient space, and consistent access to medical care. Resistance to the camp conditions included hunger strikes, attempts at escape, numerous written complaints to the Red Cross, and on one occasion, a riot. 

Within the first year, the majority of these refugees were relocated to Camp N in Sherbrooke. The conditions there were similar and sadly, the pervasiveness of anti-semitism meant that the German Jewish prisoners were told that their treatment was “good enough for Jews.” At the end of phase one, the civilians were released back to England, but many immigrated to the United States and some went to Cuba.  

In the second internment phase, beginning in 1943 and lasting until 1946, military officers of the Third Reich representing various branches of the “Wehrmacht,” were sent to Quebec’s prison camps and held under heavy surveillance. 

Concern that Canadian soldiers would be treated poorly in German prison camps if German prisoners were abused in Canada, authorities abided by the Geneva Convention and attempted to treat their prisoners well. Living conditions were improved, compared to the difficult start for civilians, and sports, art and education programs, aimed at teaching Canadian values, were introduced to alleviate boredom. 

Officials also facilitated the opportunity for prisoners to work on local farms and in orchards to help offset the lack of men who were fighting oversees. Farmers paid for POW labour and guaranteed their curfew, and the prisoners earned wages in credit. 

At times, it was a problematic relationship between the prisoners and their “rural guards” as news of the growing number of Canadian casualties hit home. By war’s end, however, many POWs had generally left a positive impression in the communities where they had been assigned; some connections even resulting in lifelong friendships. 

Surviving paintings made by POWs confined in Canada largely reinforce a nostalgic German identity and may have eased trauma and homesickness as they painted vistas of their homeland. The paintings sometimes benefited prisoners economically, since they earned cash or traded goods for their artwork. In the case of POW Berther, the sailboat painting was a gift to his farm family.

At its height of occupation, Farnham’s Camp A housed 1,098 civilian prisoners and 200 high-ranking military officers. When the war ended, the soldiers were repatriated home; only to be replaced by 200 forcibly relocated Japanese Canadians from British Columbia who were unjustly detained until 1947. There are few vestiges now to remind us of Canada’s role in the incarceration program on the home front during the Second World War. 

Heather Darch

Sources:

Martin F. Auger, Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and “Enemy Aliens” in Southern Quebec 1940–1946. UBC Press, 2005.

Walter W. Igersheimer, Blatant Injustice: The story of a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany imprisoned in Britain and Canada during WWII. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.

Farnham Nikkei Memorial Project: Remembering the Post-War Relocation of Japanese Canadians to Farnham, Qc. https://farnhamnikkeimemorial.ca/