Skorpa prisoner of war camp () was a facility built by the Norwegian 6th Division to hold German prisoners of war during the 1940 Norwegian Campaign of the Second World War. Skorpa was the main PoW camp in Northern Norway and held around 500 civilian and military prisoners when it was shut down at the end of the Norwegian Campaign.
Background
With the outbreak of war between Norway and Nazi Germany following the German invasion of Norway increasing numbers of German prisoners fell into Norwegian hands in the fighting that followed. While many of these were soon liberated by the advancing German forces, the situation for those captured in Northern Norway was different. The Germans fighting at Narvik were on the defensive against superior Norwegian and Allied forces. Prisoners taken during the fighting were sent behind Allied lines, outside the reach of the Wehrmacht. After having first interned the German prisoners at various locations around the region the decision was made by the Norwegian 6th Division command to establish a central prisoner of war camp at the small and isolated island of Skorpa in Kvænangen in Troms county. Access to the island was by boat. The nearest Norwegian armed forces other than the guard force were 10 to 12 hours away from the camp.
Construction
When the first prisoners were sent to the camp they had to live in tents designed for 16 occupants each. By May the construction of wooden barracks had begun, with the prisoners providing the labour force under the guidance of civilian Norwegian craftsmen. Around 100 prisoners were at any time taking part in construction work, much of this outside the barbed wire. The construction was overseen by a second lieutenant of the Norwegian Army engineers. The barracks were meant to provide proper accommodation for the prisoners in the next winter.
Camp population
All Germans captured in Northern Norway were supposed to be gathered at Skorpa, the main Norwegian PoW camp in the region. Amongst the inmates at the camp were military personnel belonging to all three services of the German Wehrmacht; the Heer, the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe. In addition to the military prisoners there were also civilians from trawlers and merchant vessels sunk or captured off the Northern Norwegian coast. In all some 500 Germans were imprisoned at Skorpa. Because of the lack of an internment camp for civilian Germans the sailors were placed as an interim measure in the same camp as the military captives.
The senior German prisoner held at the camp was Fregattenkapitän Alfred Schulze-Hinrichs, who had been captured after his destroyer, the Erich Koellner, was sunk on 13 April during the naval battles off Narvik. Along with 154 other prisoners he had first been sent to an internment camp at Vardøhus Fortress in Finnmark on the 1,382 ton Norwegian steamship Nova. After having been held at Vardøhus from 24 April to 13 May, the 155 Germans were shipped to Skorpa, again on the Nova. On the way to Skorpa another 25 prisoners were picked up at the western Finnmark port of Hammerfest. The prisoner transport from Finnmark to Skorpa was escorted by the patrol boat Ingrid – a captured German trawler operated by the Royal Norwegian Navy. Prisoners kept arriving at the camp until early June 1940; Germans that had been captured at the front-line near Narvik, shot-down pilots, and prisoners taken by the remaining pockets of Norwegian resistance on the coast of southern Helgeland and smuggled past German lines to Skorpa. Eight of the German airmen at the camp had been captured when two German Heinkel He 115s ran out of fuel on the return from an aborted mission to Narvik on 13 April 1940, landing at Ørnes and Brønnøysund respectively. The crews, led by Leutnant zur See Joachim Vogler and Oberleutnant zur See Bärner, were captured by local Norwegian militia forces and the aircraft transferred intact to the Royal Norwegian Navy Air Service.
