Wreckers ball hovers over Ontario compound that housed top Nazi officers

BOWMANVILLE, Ont. - In the attic of Building 4 at 2020 Lambs Rd. in Bowmanville, Ont., there's a pile of dirt. Stashed there by inmates of Camp 30 in 1943 and somehow left untouched for 65 years, it's evidence of how Nazi prisoners of war, at Adolf Hitler's bidding, once tried to dig their way out.
Historian Lynn Philip Hodgson dreads the day, likely this spring, that a developer's bulldozer razes Building 4, along with the rest of the only intact camp for German prisoners of war that we know of still left in the world.
Camp 30, a collection of 18 buildings on 40 hectares of rural land about 45 minutes east of Toronto, was the only one used to house high-ranking Nazi officers captured during the Second World War.
Among them was a top U-boat commander Hitler hoped to rescue by sending a submarine down the St. Lawrence River. Over eight months, prisoners used tin cans to dig a 90-metre passage 4.5 metres underground into a cornfield, depositing the earth in the attic of "Haus IV." But the ceiling collapsed from the weight, revealing the tunnel's existence before anyone could escape.
While the property's uniqueness is not lost on its owner, The Kaitlin Group, it is still slated for demolition to make way for new homes - though they're not planning to build the houses right away.
"There's nothing we can do with the buildings to use them for anything," says Kelvin Whalen, vice-president of land development. "They're in great disrepair, there's been a lot of trespassing and vandalism, and because of the damage and danger, we really don't think there's merit in preserving them."
The boarded-up buildings have been vacant since an Islamic school moved out last fall. Unless someone steps up with a viable preservation plan, Whalen says, they'll be torn down in two or three months.
Hodgson, who has the support of Clarington's mayor and councillors, the Ontario Heritage Trust, a local heritage group, and dozens of individuals, has been working to preserve the site for 10 years. He says the developer, which bought the property two years ago, hasn't returned his calls.
"It's like the song says: they're paving paradise and putting up a parking lot. This is historical paradise," Hodgson says.
"Durham Region has an unbelievable amount of history, relative to World War II. This put us on the world stage with Canada's effort in the war. Without it, the outcome would have been totally different."
Hodgson, a Scugog councillor and lifelong Durham resident, also tried, but failed, to save Camp X in Whitby. The secret spy school, set up to train agents to work behind enemy lines in Europe, is long gone.
In 1941, Camp 30 was the only camp in the world to house the Third Reich's highest-ranking German officers captured by Allied forces "because Britain wanted to get them as far away from the war as possible," he says. In total, 880 stayed there.
Run like a five-star hotel with luxuries that included an indoor swimming pool, theatre and concert stage, the camp's true purpose was given away only by the barbed wire around it. The occupants had one complaint, which they made to the Red Cross, relates Hodgson: the urinals were too low.
A Luftwaffe pilot who spent time there later wrote: "I am convinced that nowhere in the world did prisoners of war have better housing, better food, better recreation facilities, better educational opportunities, and above all, fairer treatment, than in Canada."