Camp 165

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IT was a place so secret that not even the people living there knew the full truth of what was happening on their own doorsteps.
But now the internet is poised to make a remote Highlands village one of the world's most viewed scenes.
Daniel Halasz's haunting photos of Watten in Caithness have just won Google's global photography prize.
But the windswept moorland scenery and bleak housing developments he has captured on film masks a dark history of post-war captivity.
Camp 165 in Watten was the Guantanamo Bay of its day.
There were no allegations of torture - quite the opposite - but the Scottish prisoner-of-war camp held some of the most infamous, top-ranking Nazi officers in high-security confinement long after World War Two ended.
Beyond the Nissen huts which housed low-risk captives who were allowed to mingle outside with villagers, was the top secret secure interrogation and re-education unit known to inmates as "Little Belsen".
Locals who had any inkling of the status of some of the prisoners within its barbed wire fences were sworn to keep the information to themselves. Most took the secret to their graves.
Only in the last few years has the full truth about Watten been uncovered by historian and local mother-of-three Valerie Campbell.
Max Wunsche ... Hitler's personal aide
She learned of the existence of the camp only when she moved to Watten and two of her children started attending the local school.
She said: "My interest in it began when my twin daughters came home one day and said they'd been told a prisoner of war camp had been in the village.
"As it turned out, my family's house was actually built on the site. Because I have always been interested in World War Two, I thought I would have to find out about it."
It was when she researched recently declassified documents that she found the camp had been much more than an ordinary holding pen.
She said: "There were not only ordinary soldiers, submariners or members of the Luftwaffe, but also members of the Waffen-SS.
"These men had been indoctrinated by Nazi policies and it was hoped they would be reformed and re-educated before being sent back to Germany." They included Max Wunsche, Hitler's personal aide and SS commander, and Paul Werner Hoppe, commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp who assisted in the murder of 85,000 people there.
Also imprisoned was "Silent" Otto Kretschmer, The Wolf Of The Atlantic, who masterminded the "silent running" of Germany's deadly U-boats. Today, little remains of the former PoW base which began life as a military training camp in 1943.
Then it had an armourer's store, a canteen, mess halls and barracks.
But in the spring of 1945 it was expanded to become a PoW camp for German, Austrian, Belgian and Polish nationals.
Aerial photographs taken in 1946 show the site on the south side of the main road through Watten village, within a double line of fencing which surrounded the main compound.
There were rows of Nissen huts inside for prisoners and huts outside for staff and guards.
Within the camp were a church, barbers, classrooms, workshops and a theatre for use only by the ordinary PoWs.
But operating from the end of the war until 1948, the camp's secret purpose was to provide a place for the imprisonment, questioning and "de-Nazification" of inmates regarded as too risky to be kept in other PoW camps.
Area A of the camp was for the ordinary PoWs who worked on farmland while dressed in uniforms with a highly visible diamond pattern on the back.
Most of the local population of Watten, which then numbered no more than a few hundred, knew of their existence.
Viscountess Thurso, who lived near the camp but did not know of its true nature, said: "When we learned there was to be a PoW camp in our midst, there was apprehension, even fear.
"As the weeks passed into months, though, without the feared incidents of dangerous prisoners roaming the countryside, villagers accepted the presence of the camp.
"Those who met and employed the prisoners found them harmless and acknowledged them as good and willing workers."
The locals were aware of occasional escape attempts by the low risk inmates, but they never got far on the unforgiving moorlands and usually gave themselves up.
Valerie, who wrote a book of Watten's history - Camp 165 Watten: Scotland's Most Secretive PoW Camp - said that since publication of the book she had been told by villagers that many of the prisoners got on so well with their captors that some stayed on after the war.
Colonel "Tishy" Murray, the camp commander, even left his estate to one of the prisoners.
Valerie said she had also been told the story of a Caithness girl who fell pregnant and of how suspicion had fallen on the German prisoners.
Colonel Murray lined up all the prisoners, ordered them to sit then demanded that the "guilty" PoW get to his feet. "Apparently, eight prisoners stood up," said Valerie.
On another occasion, she said, it was thought there had been a mass breakout but several "missing" prisoners were found asleep - they had permission for a lie-in after playing in an orchestra.
Life in Compound O - reserved for the "B-Category" hardline Nazis who were watched over by armed guards - was far less relaxed.
They were repeatedly shown films of the atrocities of the Third Reich and newsreel footage of its defeat by the Allies in a bid to cleanse their Nazi brainwashing.
Valerie said: "The local people had not got a clue that they had some top Germans in their midst and those who did were not allowed to speak about it.
"Even 60 years on, it was like trying to get blood out of a stone getting people to talk."
Prisoners who responded to the de-Nazification were allowed to return home to Germany.
Those who resisted, or who were still considered a threat, were classified as Category C and transferred elsewhere for further interrogation or to stand trial.
Hungarian photographer Halasz, who won the Google award, said: "I did a lot of research before taking the images because I wanted to concentrate on the history of the place.
"I thought it was important to remind everyone of what happened in the war, because there is still so much hatred in the world towards people from other countries."

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/fe ... p-165.html