INDEPTH: CANADIAN PRISONERS OF WAR
Behind barbed wire
CBC News Online | Updated September 29, 2003
From the German army archive
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Canadians have ended up behind enemy barbed wire as prisoners of war in all three of the 20th century's major conflicts - the First and Second World Wars and in Korea.
During the Second World War approximately 9,000 Canadians became prisoners of war.
Many forget that a large number of Canadians were held as prisoners of war in the Pacific. The biggest blow to Canadian troops in that region came on Christmas Day, 1941, when Hong Kong fell. On that one day 1,689 Canadians were captured by the Japanese. It's thought that 1,405 survived the camps in Hong Kong and Japan.
| Canadian Prisoners of War - World War II |
| Army |
| Pacific | 1689 |
| Europe | 5399 |
| Total | 7088 |
| Air Force |
| Pacific | 42 |
| Europe | 2482 |
| Total | 2542 |
| Navy |
| Pacific | 2 |
| Europe | 92 |
| Total | 94 |
| POW Casualties |
| Pacific | 290 |
| Europe | 380 |
| Total | 670 |
| Prisoners of War - World War I - Canadian Expeditionary Force |
| Officers | 132 |
| Other Ranks | 3715 |
| Total | 3847 |
| Canadian Prisoners of War - Korea |
| Army | 32 |
| Air Force | 1 |
| Total | 33 |
| Courtesy : Jonathan Vance |
The disastrous raid on Dieppe in August 1942 led to the capture of 1,948 Canadians by the Germans.
Many prisoners were held in camps in German-occupied Poland.
Jonathan Vance, an assistant professor of history at the University of Western Ontario, says Canadians from Dieppe as well as officers and crew from the Royal Canadian Air Force shot down over Europe were held at a camp called Lamsdorf in southern Poland.
After 1941, the German POW camps were "relatively good," says Vance, who wrote a history of Canadian prisoners called "Objects of Concern".
"By the time Dieppe POWs arrived the system was up and running," Vance says, which meant the prisoners were relatively well treated, but that didn't continue.
In 1944 and 1945 the German war machine was beginning to crumble, which meant the treatment of prisoners grew worse.
Vance says "there was a lack of food and forced labour."
The Germans also held about 100 naval POWs, mostly from HMCS Athabaskan, in a camp in the northern part of Germany.
The Canadian destroyer was sunk by a torpedo from a German destroyer in the English Channel in April, 1944.
A few hundred Canadian POWs were also held in Italy.
One group that has fallen through the cracks consists of about 100 Canadian merchant navy POWs, Vance says.
"The situation wasn't much different than it is today [where the merchant navy vets had to lobby for benefits], the Germans weren't sure if they were civilians or military," he says.
In the Pacific, outside of Hong Kong some members of the RCAF (and Canadians serving with the RAF) were held in Java, Burma and Thailand.
Canadian POWs
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POW statistics
Jonathan Vance says it is often hard to pin down the exact number of Canadians who were taken prisoner or who died in captivity.
That's because the armed forces did not officially list someone as a prisoner of war until 48 hours after capture. And someone captured and then killed may be listed as a battle casualty, not a prisoner.
Vance also says figures from different agencies such as the military or the Red Cross can differ somewhat. Figures used on this page are based on Vance's book Objects of Concern and were taken from several official sources.
POWs at Buchenwald
- 68 allied air men, 25 of them Canadian, spent four months at Buchenwald in 1944. Others were from Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
- Buchenwald was built near Weimar, Germany and began operating in July 1937.
- It was designated for political opponents of the Nazi regime, recidivists, "social misfits," Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals.
- Beginning in the Second World War, the Nazis used it to imprison people from other countries. At the moment of the camp's liberation, 95 per cent of the inmates were not Germans.
- More than 250,000 people were held captive in the camp between 1937 and 1945, and more than 50,000 of them died.
- From 1945 to 1950, the Soviet Union used Buchenwald as in internment camp holding both former Nazis and others "arrested in an arbitrary way." Among the total of approximately 28,000 internees, 7,000 died.
Source: Buchenwald Memorial Site, CBC News
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