Historians look back at World War II history
HOULTON, Maine — Houlton’s historic prisoner of war camps continue to gain visitors from around the world. Some have been former prisoners, politicians and historians. Among them is Dr. Anthony Hellen of England. He has spent a great deal of time exploring and documenting camp life of German and Japanese POWs. He and his wife Ingeborg have visited hundreds of sites, but Houlton was the one that excited them the most.
“I knew from reading a lot about camps that Maine had five and this was the biggest of the lot,” he said. “I’ve been working on the camps since 1995. I’m a retired academic university professor. Spent most of my life in Africa.
“It’s very nice to be at the first camp outside of Europe,” he remarked.
Hellen comes from the old British Empire. He intended to be a career administrator, however, that all changed when he met his wife. Inga grew up in Germany during the war and she experienced first-hand some of the things that took place during those critical years.
Hellen soon began studying up on the numerous German POW camps and what life was like for those who lived there.
“I wasn’t interested in them immediately and I hardly knew about prisoners of war to tell the truth until later on in my life,” he said. “There were slightly over 1,500 camps in Great Britain. It was a great number.
“Today, only five have survived completely intact,” he remarked. “I think it’s a living history to think that we had these and we’re now all brothers in the European community. We need to preserve recent history as well as ancient history.”
Houlton’s POW camps weren’t able to be preserved, however, their history has been documented and saved. Local historian, Kay Bell, gave Hellen and his wife a tour of the town’s Historical Museum and its POW records and articles. Bell told Hellen that most of the POWs living in camp worked well with their keepers. Hellen said a good relationship was not uncommon for German POWs. In fact, he said most POWs received excellent care and there were very few deaths in camp.
“What some people don’t realize is that we had very few prisoners in Britain until D-Day,” said Hellen. “We never had more than 200,000 prisoners.”
Prisoners were not allowed to fraternize with the local women because they were “bad boys,” they also were not permitted to take part in any type of military work as per the Geneva Convention. They could assist farmers and towns people in other ways.
Hellen said because of the conduct of the prisoners and their keepers, good relationships were established that lasted well beyond the war years.
“These people got to know that they were very similar humans to the locals and they were appreciated if they were hard workers, skilled workers and they’ve kept in touch over generations and there’s very little hatred that came from these camps,” he said.
In fact, in the wake of Germany’s defeat and the release of POWs, locals sympathized with the POWs and the hardships that they were faced with back home.
“Some of the ex-POWs that were here … the farmers would send them care packages of soap and dried milk and things like that,” said Bell. “We had four of them back, but of course, most of them were in their 80s. Some of the ones we had asked to come, died in the meantime.”
Following the war, Europe began to rebuild and the legacy of the camps was buried.
It was so easy to forget,” he said. “When the buildings decayed or are sold off — it’s the end of a difficult war and many farmers and people bought the huts privately. In most countries, people were not interested in these camps.”
That interest intensified however, during the last decade.
“I have given 157 lectures to date on the camps,” he said. “The simple message is that we ought to preserve the legacy of these camps because both sides got to know each other and it was often the case of the rural camps.”
