Skorpa prisoner of war camp

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.

In addition to the military prisoners there were also civilians from trawlers and merchant vessels sunk or captured off the Northern Norwegian coast.

[8] 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.

The prisoner transport from Finnmark to Skorpa was escorted by the patrol boat Ingrid – a captured German trawler operated by the Royal Norwegian Navy.

One merchant navy sailor was killed by a stray warning shot during a disturbance in the camp, and Oberleutnant Hans Hattenbach (the pilot of Oberleutnant zur See Bärner's He 115) was shot on 6 June by a Finnish volunteer soldier when he approached the camp fence and failed to heed orders from a guard to stop.

Thus, when the order came in the late evening to transfer the 40 airmen to Harstad for interrogation at the British headquarters in Norway there were 59 Luftwaffe personnel at Skorpa.

[18][19] Shortly after the departure of the Luftwaffe prisoners orders came through for the southern Norwegian soldiers guarding the camp to be transferred for front service against the Germans.

The German prisoners were told of the capitulation, released and transported from the camp under the leadership of Schulze-Hinrichs in the late evening of 12 June,[6][21] on the Norwegian steamships Barøy and Tanahorn.

[25] Captain Sandberg was arrested by the Gestapo in Trondheim on 28 June 1940, accused of mistreating the prisoners while in charge of Skorpa,[26][27][28] but was released on 5 August 1940.