Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

ITT: Piecing Together Untold Stories of POWs

There’s ample history written about the Atlantic Wall, a 2,000-mile coastal defense Adolf Hitler ordered built in 1942. He believed a major allied attack could happen anywhere and wanted to be prepared.

But Texas Tech archaeologist Chris Witmore and his colleagues from Iceland and Norway wanted to tell stories beyond history’s outline of the outpost. The team spent time during the past seven summers at Svaerholt, one of the wall’s northern most outposts at the tip of Norway.

Objects and remnants unearthed at Svaerholt suggest stories about interaction between Russian and Ukrainian POWs who built the outpost and their captors. Historians, Witmore says, want these stories, too.

“Archeology is not dealing with the past that was, it’s dealing with the past that is—what has become of the past,” he says. “What has become of the past is in our engagements. So there’s a story that can be told of these objects, these things. There was an opportunity to go and explore this site because it basically was there sitting, hadn’t had too much interaction because it’s nature, it’s remoteness.”
 

Witmore says that historically speaking, the German’s occupation of Svaerholt ended in November 1944 at Hitler orders. However, he says, archeologically that occupation continues through the enduring remains and what has become of the battery. That, according to Witmore, allows a different type of memory – a persistent and recurrent one.

Beginning in 2011, Witmore and his colleagues lived as the POWs and Germans had. They slept in tents on the ground exposed to sometimes harsh conditions, drank from the same streams and dug into the same earth as did the POWs.

“There’s something to that that make it fundamentally different. Initially it was this almost expectation that we were there as witnesses to try and piece together a story of POWs that never had a history and could not tell their stories when they returned to Russia. At the same time, we were there even without the expectation that we would find even the remains of POWs because these are things that transform even after. They go on to become different things,” he says.

The researchers began by examining turf embankments, walls and exploded bunkers. They used chemical surveys of the soil to parse out what happened inside a particular structure and how the camp was built and changed over time.

Witmore says the research wasn’t like piecing together a puzzle. Remnants lay out of view so it was more akin to a constantly developing picture. Found objects either fit or they didn’t. Some pieces, he says, became irrelevant.

“It’s something that over time begins to appear and make itself apparent. It calls to you. It calls attention to itself and you begin to see it differently because you return every year with a different perspective. You return every year having learned to see things slightly different. You return every year with a deep patience of the place, knowing that things will present themselves when the time is right for them. And every year we learn something different,” he explains.

One of the more surprising things the team uncovered was an apparent “simpatico” toward the POWs from the soldiers. Witmore says the research team found things in its excavations that shouldn’t have been in areas where the POWs lived: smoking materials like pipe cleaners, rubber pieces of shoe soles, sewing materials, and cologne and alcohol bottles.

“This is a very different world, both soldiers and POWs were prisoners of this place,” he says. “Neither side could leave. And you also want to take care of these POWs because if one of them falls sick, the slack falls to you.”

The objects and remnants uncovered hold memories, giving hints and suggestions that pointed the researchers in the right direction. History, he says, even with the hints and suggestions, isn’t definitive.

“It never is and I think that that’s another aspect that we hope people are able to take away from this,” he says.

* Sound of rainfall on tent in audio story courtesy of Stein Farstadvoll.