---

Last revised on June 7, 2023.

Table of Contents:

• Mention of a German POW Camp Piques Our Curiosity
• Some Background Info on WWII POW Camps in Canada
• Where were the Canadian POW Camps?
• NFB Documentary.The Enemy Within. 2003
• Ontario POW Camp Locations
• POW Camps In Northwestern Ontario
• Looking For A POW Camp on Wabinosh Lake
• Kevin Callan’s Confusing Account of a POW Camp
• An Ontario Parks Document Provides A Location
• The Reality of  Most POW Camps In N Ontario

Additional Information:

• Michael O’Hagan’s POWs in Canada Blog
• TV Ontario Article
• Pinetree Line Reminiscences
• Wartime Memories Project
• Outdoor Rob Visits Pishidgi and Wabinosh Lakes

Related Posts On Cliff Lake and Lake Nipigon’s NW Corner

——————–

Mention of a German POW Camp Piques Our Curiosity

At the start of this year’s only canoe trip, before going to the Mattice Lake Outfitters Lodge off Highway 527,  we drove to Armstrong Station to gas up so we’d have a full tank waiting for us at the end of our trip. [See the highlighted post below for a summary of the trip, a map and some pix.]

Canoeing From The Pikitigushi’s Cliff Lake to Echo Rock on Lake Nipigon

While at the gas station, we chatted with a local about our route.  When he heard that we’d be passing through Wabinosh Lake, he mentioned that there was a POW (prisoner of war) camp from WWII we should check out. He said it was on one of the small islands on the lake – “not the big one,” he clarified.   I had visions of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay!  Since I had never heard mention of any POW camps for German soldiers in the Armstrong area, I knew we would have to check it out when we got to Wabinosh Lake.

——————–

Some Background Info on WW2 POW Camps in Canada:

During WWII (1939-1945) an estimated 35,000 German soldiers were kept at various Prisoner of War camps scattered across Canada.  Since the Allies never did establish a foothold in western Europe until June 1944, the majority – 25,000 or so – of those POWs sent to Canada had been captured in North Africa at battles like those at El Alamein.

With Montgomery’s final victory over Rommel’s Afrika Korps in 1943, the Allies had close to a million German and Italian prisoners on their hands.  Some 400,000 were shipped to the U.S.A.; Canada’s share of the POWs was in keeping with the relative size of our population compared to the U.S. at that time.  [There were about twelve million Canadians in 1945; we had about 250,000 soldiers in the field, mostly on the Western Front and in Italy during the last two years of the war.]

——————–

Where were the Canadian POW Camps?

There were twenty-five POW camps in Canada during WWII. [There were an additional fifteen camps holding Japanese Canadians and others whose loyalty was considered suspect – those of German, Italian,  or Jewish background, as well as conscientious objectors.]  Of the camps holding actual prisoners of war,  the two largest in North America were in Alberta –  in Lethbridge and Medicine Hat – and housed a total of 25,000 over the few years they were operational.

A list of those Canadian WWII POW camps can be accessed here.

——————–

NFB Documentary.The Enemy Within. 2003

The National Fim Board of Canada documentary The Enemy Within (2003) gives an excellent introduction to an aspect of Canada’s history that most know little about. Here is the NFB website intro to the film –

This feature-length documentary looks at German POWs from the WWII who were housed in 25 camps across Canada. Filmmaker Eva Colmers follows her father’s story – Theo Melzer – who spent three and a half years in a POW camp in Lethbridge, Alberta. Growing up in Germany, she had always been puzzled by her father’s fond memories of his POW life, so when she moved to Canada, she set out to rediscover this story. What she found surprised her. Watch as Theo Melzer, along with other POWs, recount how their lives were changed by the unexpected respect and dignity they received at the hands of their Canadian captors

As I watched the documentary, I wondered about my father Stanislaw and his experience in German POW camps from 1939 to 1945. He was in what was left of the Polish Army in late September of 1939 when he was captured in the streets of Warsaw and hauled back to a camp in northwestern Germany.  Only once did he open up and speak about those years.

——————–

Ontario POW Camp Locations: 

——————–

POW Camps In Northwestern Ontario:

POW camps in northwest Ontario – along with their years of operation – were the following:

1. Red Rock  (1940-1941)
2. Angler  (1941-1946)
3. Neys (1943-1946)

Nothing in the Armstrong area on the list!  More research would reveal the reason why!

When I heard that there was a POW camp on Wabinosh Lake, I’ll admit that I pictured something like the one at Red Rock in the image above. Of Camp R, a page in the “Community History” section of the Red Rock Township website states this –

In 1940, the campsite abandoned by Lake Sulphite, was bought by the Canadian government and turned into a prisoner of war (POW) camp.  The camp, which encompassed area from Trout Creek in the north, to the railway tracks in the west and the Lake to the east, was surrounded by barbed wire fencing.  The 48 abandoned bunkhouses that had previously housed construction workers at Lake Sulphite Pulp and Paper Company became home to 1145 German prisoners for eighteen months.  Camp “R”, as it was called, came into being in July 1940 when prisoners were escorted from Quebec by the soldiers of the Fort Garry Horse Regiment.  [See here for source of quote]

——————–

Looking For A POW Camp on Wabinosh Lake

Ten days after our fill-up in Armstrong, as we paddled into Wabinsoh Bay, I sent Don Elliot of Mattice Lake Outfitters an email asking where the German POW camp was located.  He replied that it was on the west shore of Wabinosh Lake by the Wabinosh River flowing in from Waweig Lake.  The west shore is where that small island is.  We had some confirmation of the camp’s location! We weren’t sure if he meant to the right or left of the river outlet.

Once we were in Wabinosh Lake, we headed for the west shore and set up camp on the point shown on the map above. Then we looked for evidence of human presence along the shoreline and in the bush behind it.  While the area looked like it could accommodate a few buildings, we only found a 4-meter length of steel cable running down towards the shore.  We figured it may have been left behind from some logging operation.

The next morning as we headed for the Wabinosh River and the five-portage ascent up into Waweig Lake, we headed to the shore on the north side of the river outlet.   At the north end of a long beach area where we landed is an area that could easily have been the site of a camp of some sort – but we did not find any evidence.

As we looked north to the top of Wabinosh Lake, we could see the small – very small! – island.  We considered the possibility of it hosting a POW camp and thought it was totally pointless, given the size of the island and the fact that you could walk from the island to the shore without getting your navel wet.  So much for the Alcatraz of the North!

We would later find out that it was also based on a mistaken idea of how those German POWs were housed.

We left Wabinosh Lake without finding anything except that length of steel cable at our campsite on the westside point.

——————–

Kevin Callan’s Confused Account of a POW Camp

A couple of weeks after our canoe trip,  I reread a bit of Kevin Callan’s Dazed But Not Confused: Tales of A Wilderness Wanderer when this brief passage jumped out at me!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking at the map (see below), I could see a creek that somewhat fit with Callan’s description.  I thought that maybe we hadn’t found anything because we had been looking in the wrong place!  However,  given how remote any place on the west shore of Lake Nipigon was between 1939 and 1945, I did wonder why a location two kilometers up this particular creek was felt to be necessary for a POW camp! The term meandering also did not fit the course of the actual creek, which can hardly be said to “flush into the northeast corner of Wabinosh Bay”.

Since there was no Highway 527 (or its logging road original) until the 1950s, the only way to bring in the POWs to Wabinosh Bay or Wabinosh Lake would be from the CN tracks, which pass through Armstrong Station or by boat from the south end of Lake Nipigon.

——————–

A 2001 Ontario Parks Document Provides A Location

This information from a 2001 Ontario Parks document helped make sense of Callan’s location.

Included in the 2001 MNR document (access here) was this map of the proposed addition to Kopka River Provincial Park –

• The “one known archeological site” mentioned in the above quote from the 2001 MNR document is probably the K.C.A. Dawson site (EaJf-l) near the mouth of the Wabinosh River.  See here for more info.
• The other sites “located just outside the border” are probably the Terminal Woodland sites in Wabinosh Bay where fur trading posts were later constructed. See here for more.
• The Pishidgi Lake site indicated on the MNR map is the one referred to by Brad Mathisen in the Comments section of this post. He wrote –

 I know of the remains of a camp with the fireplace still standing right off of Wabinosh. From Wabinosh, if you take the Kopka river on the SW side of Wabinosh up to where it meets Pishidgi there are the remains of a camp on the right just as you enter Pishidgi. The camp is located at 50.04002533244342, -89.06747517139529. There are also the remains of two old wooden boats with steel skins at this camp.

The “two wooden boats with steel skins” are the Alligator boats mentioned in the MNR document. Given Michael O’Hagan’s comment on 2019-02-06 at 10:34 am they would have belonged to the Nipigon Lake Timber Company back in the 1940s. After ice-out time the boats were used to move the cut lumber down Pishidgi Lake to float down the last section of the Kopka River to Wabinosh Lake. See the end of this post for an Outdoor Rob YouTube video where he and his partner pay the Pishidgi Lake site a visit.

In addition to the remains of the two boats, they come across what is left of the stone fireplace referred to in the comment above. It may be the fireplace that Vince Brown mentions in his 2019-07-04 at 10:29 am comment unless he is referring to a cabin/main lodge building on Wabinosh Lake or Castle Creek.

Tom Vine in his 2023-06-28 at 11:56 pm comment explains that Ontario’s Department of Lands and Forests (its name changed to Ministry of Natural Resources in 1972) burned down a cabin with a fireplace in the early 1970s because it was causing problems. It was perhaps the Pishidgi Lake cabin.

• The document also mentions two sites on Wabinosh Lake itself.  Given their map locations, it looks like we camped near one site and did not quite paddle far enough north to get to the second site (see the red circled area on the map) so we did not see the cabin foundations or the cribbing located underwater at this more northerly site.
• We did note the steel cable near our campsite on the west side of Wabinosh Lake below the inflow of the Wabinosh River.

• Callan’s location agrees with the Ministry document if you change his “northeast corner of Wabinosh Bay” to “northeast corner of Wabinosh Lake“.  It is more likely that Callan and his paddle partner went up Castle Creek to the site mentioned in the Ontario Government Ministry document.  Castle Creek certainly meanders in a way that the creek above Wabinosh Bay does not.

——————–

The Reality of Most POW Camps In Northern Ontario

When you think of a POW camp, the image of a heavily guarded compound with elevated guard towers at each corner comes to mind.  The compound would sit in the middle of a cleared area, and there is barbed wire everywhere.

Callan’s POW camp description paints such a picture. We read –

The area once housed a small city of canvas and wood huts stacked tightly a few meters back from the creek and surrounded by triple-layered barbed wire.

A small city implies not twenty or thirty but hundreds of POWs.  Given that Callan only found bits of metal and the remains of three log cabins at the site,  his imagination has created something quite different than what was actually there.

A collection of reminiscences by American and Canadian servicemen stationed at Armstrong after WWII when it was a part of the Pinetree Line of defence helped answer the question of what was at the Wabinosh Lake location.  (See below for the link.)

So – the German prisoners of war sent to the Armstrong area were essentially used by the logging industry at a time when workers were scarce, thanks to Canada’s war effort. 

Canadian authorities separated their German prisoners into three different categories – black, grey, and white.  The blacks were the hardcore Nazis; the whites were non-Nazis who had joined the Wehrmacht (the German military) for other reasons; the greys were somewhere in between.  The POWs in the Armstrong area would likely not have been in the black category.  And Callan’s “small city of canvas and wood huts stacked tightly a few meters back from the creek and surrounded by triple-layered barbed wire” never existed in the Armstrong Station/Wabinosh area.

Instead, there would be lumber gangs of twenty or thirty German POWs putting in a day’s work in the bush and living a life their brothers in Russian POW camps could only dream about. [About 40% of the one million German POWs in Russia died in captivity. In Canada, it was 137 of almost 35,000, most of natural causes.] The image below captures the reality of the POW experience in the bush of NW Ontario.

What Callan saw at the site – the remains of three cabins –   made up the lumber camp when supplemented by one or two of the buildings on skids hauled in place mentioned in the Pierre Parent comment above.   In the end, what was there was a temporary logging camp where the German POWs had relative freedom to move about.

In a sense, we spent our time looking for something that was never there!  It made for an interesting tangent to what was a multi-faceted canoe trip involving pictographs, logjams, and paddling the big water of Lake Nipigon.  We’ll be back for more!

——————–

Additional Information:

Michael O’Hagan’s Blog

On reading my post, fellow WordPress blogger Michael O’Hagan provided concrete details to clarify matters. He wrote:

To add a bit of context, the POW bush camps you are referring to belonged to the Nipigon Lake Timber Co. Long story short, in May 1943, the Canadian government approved the employment of POWs by civilian employers in agriculture and bush work. By the end of the war, there were almost 300 labour projects, most of which were remote and lacked the traditional security measures of internment camps. Of these, over 100 were bush camps in Northern Ontario employing POWs.

According to my records, Nipigon Lake Timber Co. had three camps in the Wabinosh Lake/Armstrong area employing a total of 200 POWs from 1945 to 1946. The POWs worked 8-hour days, six days a week for $0.50 a day, doing the same work as civilian woodcutters. The camps would have be no different than those employing civilians and often included separate bunkhouses for POWs, guards, and civilian staff, an office/canteen, a kitchen and mess hall, barn, and blacksmith shop.

Click on the header above or the following link to see more of his research on POWs in Canada or get in touch with him.

Michael O’Hagan’s blog:  POWs In Canada

——————–

TV Ontario Article

An article at the TV Ontario website – Daring escapes and Canadian hospitality: Inside Ontario’s WWII prisoner-of-war camps –  provides a readable introduction to the topic.  It is also where I found the map of the 10 Ontario POW camp locations and the photo of the Red Rock Camp.

——————–

Pinetree Line Reminiscences

The reminiscences of those in the Canadian and U.S. militaries who served in Armstrong as a part of the Pinetree Line of defence against Russian bombers after WWII can be found here:

There are references to a number of camps in the Armstrong area.  A careful reading of the material would probably turn up more leads to other site locations.  The first comment by Ren L’Ecuyer has a link to a write-up on a Sioux Narrows lumber camp. It provides excellent detail of what daily life would have been like for the German soldiers who spent time there.  Clcik here for a pdf file of that article or visit the Pinetree Line website to read L’Ecuyer’s entire comment.

——————–

Wartime Memories Project

The Wartime Memories Project website (click on the header to access) lists Axis and Allied POW camps across the globe.

Included in the list is Armstrong POW Camp Ontario, Canada. Unfortunately, there is little there except for this summary –

——————–

Any information or photos that would clarify or correct any points made in this post would certainly be appreciated. Just make use of the comment section below – or send an email to true_north@mac.com

——————–

Outdoor Rob Visits Pishidgi and Wabinosh Lakes

The video begins with a mention of Gull Bay and an examination of a couple of boats. We then see a trailer campsite before they set off on what they say is a shallow lake – so they are not in Gull Bay.  The trailer site is probably at the end of the road into Pishidgi Lake.  They set off to check out the Pishidgi lumber campsite mentioned above.

Along with the remains of two alligator boats, they find the foundation of a fireplace. Back in their motorboat, they then head to the outlet of Pishidgi Lake and down the Kopka River into Wabinosh Lake.  There they check out a site at the north end of the lake. We see the remains of what may have been a bridge or a dock and a fueling station.

The Pinetree Line website includes this image taken in July 1956,  Is it of the same Wabinosh Lake dock?  The roofs of the buildings on the nearby hilltop would suggest that it is not.

——————–

See the following posts for other bits of our canoe trip:

Canoeing FromThe Pikitigushi’s Cliff Lake to Echo Rock on Lake Nipigon

Canoeing From The Pikitigushi’s Cliff Lake to Echo Rock on Lake Nipigon

Down The Pikitigushi From Cliff Lake To Lake Nipigon:  Logistics. Maps, and Day 1 – Cliff Lake

Down The Pikitigushi From Cliff Lake To Lake Nipigon: Logistics. Maps and Day 1 – Cliff Lake

Down The Pikitigushi  From Cliff Lake To Lake Nipigon:  Days 2 & 3 – From Cliff Lake to The Bear Camp

Down The Pikitigushi River From Cliff Lake To Lake Nipigon – Days 2 & 3

Down The Pikitigushi  From  Cliff L  To Lake Nipigon:  Days 3, 4, &5 – From The Bear Camp To Windigo Bay

Down The Pikitigushi River From Cliff Lake To Lake Nipigon: From The Bear Camp To Windigo Bay

Island Hopping Lake Nipigon  By Canoe From Windigo Bay To Echo Rock

Canoeing Lake Nipigon From Windigo Bay To Echo Rock

Canoeing From Lake Nipigon’s Echo Rock To Waweig Lake

From Lake Nipigon’s Echo Rock To Waweig Lake