A military camp in the middle of nowhere: mobilities, dislocation and the archaeology of a Second World War German military base in Finnish Lapland

Abstract

This article discusses military mobilities and encampment, and associated themes such as dislocation and displacement of people, through the case of a Second World War German military camp in Finnish Lapland. The article describes the camp and its archaeological research and discusses various aspects of the camp and camp life in its particular subarctic 'wilderness' setting, framing the discussion within the themes of mobilities and dislocations, and especially their multiple impacts on the German troops and their multinational prisoners-ofwar based in the camp. A particular emphasis is put on how mobilities and dislocation -in effect 'being stuck' in a northern wilderness -were intertwined and how the inhabitants of the camp coped with the situation, as well as how this is reflected in the different features of the camp itself and the archaeological material that the fieldwork produced.

Invisible women at war in the West: An archaeology of the Australian Women’s Army Service camp, Walliabup (Bibra Lake), Western Australia, c. 1943–1945

“…In addition, scholarship tends to be masculinist (see Garton 1998 for overview). So far, our contribution to understanding how 200 or more women, many of them far from home in an unfamiliar place, experienced the war, is modest (see Seitsonen et al 2017 for work on the dislocation of military personnel). Basic information such as knowing where these women were terra australis 54 stationed requires considerable effort to glean.…”

‘For you, the war is over? Not a chance!’ Captivity and escape at Cultybraggan prisoner of war camp, Comrie, Perthshire

“…Other examples are Bridgend in Wales (Rees-Hughes et al 2016), where a group of German PoWs were able to tunnel out of the camp; Dumfries House in Ayrshire, which remains in grey literature (Arabaolaza 2013;Jones 2018); and Lager Wick (a forced labour camp rather than a PoW camp) on Jersey, the Channel Islands (Carr 2016). There has been more work outside Britain, such as a series of excavations of PoW camps in Arctic Finland (Seitsonen and Herva 2011;Seistsonen et al 2017) and in Norway (Jasinski and Stenvik;Jasinski 2013). In the USA, there have been several studies of PoW camps from the Second World War (e.g.…”

Editorial

“…The middle paper, which I have left to last, is my own work carried out at the Cultybraggan PoW Camp at Comrie in Perthshire. This is another paper about PoW camps, a topic which has been a feature of several papers published by the Journal (Demuth 2009;Cooper 2011;Rees-Hughes et al 2016;Seitsonen et al 2017;McNutt and Jones 2019). This paper is closest in nature to Rees-Hughes et al (2016) in tone, because both relate to the issue of escape.…”