“Camp 30” – Exploring the Eerie Bowmanville POW Camp

Located east of Toronto, just outside the forgettable town of Bowmanville, is a dilapidated prisoner of war camp from the Second World War that has long lost its purpose. It’s raison d’être extinguished, it has been pilfered and defaced, despite its heritage status. Yet it is this dilapidation and abandonment that makes it so interesting to explore. The property has been slated for development but yet remains unaltered. Maybe its time to make it a publicly accessibly urban ruin à la Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary so that people may learn about Camp 30 and its now forgotten riot, daring escapes and espionage operations!

Camp 30 Layout

The Camp 30 parcel is located at the east end of Bowmanville, where a suburb now abuts it. The land was at the time of its conception, far outside of town, surrounded by farmers fields. Its most important buildings are located at the north end of the property, just off Lambs Road. They include the Mess Hall, which may be the first structure you come across. The gate to the property is kept locked. I recommend parking off Lambs and hopping over the fence. Alternatively you can park in the neighborhood and walk over to the property via a path on Sprucewood Crescent. There will be plenty of other urban explorers on the parcel, or people walking their dogs.

Once into the property you will find a large loop where the majority of the larger buildings are still standing. Nearly half a dozen of them still stand, and where they have been demolished you will find an asphalt path.

A Brief History

The property began its life as the Bowmanville Boys Training School in 1927, lasting until 1941. Of course, these were the war years and the school was asked to move, and the property commandeered to be quickly converted into a prisoner of war camp (the Second World War having started in 1939). In seven months they prepared the entire property for the arrival of their guests, fortifying it like a prison and building a barracks for the Canadian Army. These works were complete by late 1941, in time for the arrival of the prisoners.

In 1942 the most famous incident at the camp took place, the Battle of Bowmanville. In response to the German “Commando Order”, in which allied commando prisoners were to be shot when capture, prison guards asked for 100 camp prisoners to volunteer to be shackled. This was refused and the order went our to force them to be shackled. 1500-4000 prisoners revolted with makeshift weapons, more on this later. Soldiers had to be called from Kingston to help quell the riot. After order had been restored, 126 prisoners were transferred to other camps for their role in the riot.

After the end of the war, the school moved back to the property and operated until 1979. It was partially used for some academic purposes until 2008. It is after this year that the property fell into utter disrepair.

Exploring Camp 30

Arriving at Camp 30 today, one would be hard pressed to recognize the built environment from the 1940’s. The property was surrounded with barbed wire and nine guard towers were erected to monitor the site. There was once a water tower on site, it is now gone and the masonry buildings, once elegant have lost any semblance of charm after their windows were broken.

The most famous building on site is the Mess Hall, standing at the north end of the property. It almost looks like a strange masonry pyramid.

Like most structures on the property it was boarded up, this has not stopped urban explorers however. There is a large hole in one of the walls, and you can enter the darkened entrails of the structure.

The inside of the hall is voluminous, due to the strange triangular shape of the buildings. Despite the darkened interiors, light still filters in from the boarded up windows. Once you enter it, you will be at the very center of the Battle of Bowmanville, where it started and one of its best known events. This where prisoners first holed up after the order to shackle prisoners took place. It is here that they faced off against those guards and 100 solders from Kingston, the latter who armed only with hockey sticks faced off against the prisoners. Helped by water cannons, the Kingston soldiers quelled the riot and coaxed the prisoners to come out peacefully, this after hours of evenly matched melee fighting inside the hall.

It should be noted that the riot continued for several days with several violent incidents, in which a Canadian solder suffered a fractured skull and a prisoner bayonetted as well as another one shot. After the riot, quite a few prisoners were shipped to other POW facilities.

Some of the prisoners who attempted escape were also transferred to more remote camps including Camp 20, near Huntsville. This camp has a much happier history then Camp 30, with prisoners even intermingling with locals. If you enjoyed learning about Camp 30, I urge you to do a little reading on Camp 20.

The rest of the properties suffer from an equal level of neglect and are not nearly as impressive as the mess hall.

One exception would be the old pool building. Unfortunately, that building is harder to access but as you can imagine it is impressive.

Make sure to bring a flashlight as many of all of the structures are unlight with little natural light filtering in.

A Few Stories From Camp 30

The Bowmanville POW camp is the subject of many remarkable stories in which prisoners tried to dig tunnels or crawl through the barbed wire to escape. Most of these tunnels were intercepted when noise was detected, or a cave in happened. One prisoner did try to escape through a laundry truck but was discovered. One of the most successful attempts was conducted right as the camp opened, by a prisoner by the name of Ulrich Steinhilper, who managed to get under the barbed wire and was on the run for two days. He try again twice after before being moved to Camp 20.

My favorite of these stories is that of Operation Kiebitz. It was a German intelligence operation that sought, but failed, to break out four submarine commanders from Canadian prisoner of war camps (Horst Elfe of U-93, Hans Ey of U-433, Otto Kretschmer of U-99, and Hans Joachim Knebel-Döberitz of U-99). They were to be given coded messages via the Red Cross but those were interrupted by Canadian intelligence officials who planned on letting them carry on with their plan so they could capture a U-Boat. Close to the date they moved in to take the prisoners who had almost completed their escape tunnel. One of them eluded Canadian officials and made it to the rendez-vous point at Pointe de Maisonnette New Brunswick some 14000km away by way of finding his way abord a CN train. He was picked up at his meet up location but the U-Boat itself, U-536, managed to escape. It was sunk one month later however.

Conclusion

If you enjoy unaltered ruins, forgotten history, and graffiti filled decay this is the place for you. Camp 30 is the urban explorer’s wet dream! Hopefully these ruins will be preserved in some way and historical interpretation given, to a forgotten but truly important part of Canada’s history.