Harperley POW Camp 93

Harperley POW Camp 93 stands on a hillside above Weardale in County Durham, built in 1943 to hold up to 1,400 low-risk prisoners. It overlooks Hamsterley Forest across the valley and was one of about a hundred purpose-built camps in wartime Britain. Italian prisoners first constructed the camp using standard Ministry of War designs before being largely replaced by German PoWs after Italy’s surrender. The land had been requisitioned from local landowner Charles Johnson and run by successive commandants, Major Tetlow and later Lieutenant Colonel George Kinnear Stobart. After the war it became a Displaced Persons camp known as Fir Tree, housing men from Eastern Europe who feared return to Soviet-controlled territories. The camp is worth visiting as one of only five British PoW camps still standing virtually intact. It was a working camp where prisoners laboured on local farms, in forests and on dam projects under Durham County War Agricultural Committee supervision. Each day they marched out to work and back, counted in and out through a single entrance guarded by British military personnel. The prisoners’ routine included meals in interconnecting dining huts and time in a converted chapel or theatre. Their daily reward was three cigarettes from King George VI, recalled in a documentary by former prisoner Johannes Heerdegen. A visitor finds 49 original brick and concrete buildings arranged in two compounds separated by barbed wire fences. The prisoners’ area contains accommodation huts, kitchens, ablution blocks and a medical reception station. The guards’ compound holds offices, a guard room and an unused alarm bell beside manicured gardens. The camp road leads from the A689 through a single-track approach, and the surrounding landscape of Weardale and Hamsterley Forest remains much as it was during the war.