New Forest Setley Plain POW Camp 65 Newspaper 01

The New Forest Remembers: untold stories of World War II

The New Forest Remembers project was hosted by the New Forest National Park Authority and funded via Heritage Lottery Fund and ExxonMobil at Fawley between 2012 and 2014. Its aims were to record the archaeology, history and living memories of the New Forest during the Second World War and to make the findings and material freely available via an online digital archive.

The Interactive Portal is a growing online archive including written and audio memories and recollections from those that lived, worked and served here during the war years. The site also holds a wealth of photographs and links to online additional material such as archive film footage, news videos and computer generated reconstructions of historic WWII sites. Thousands of pages of documents have been digitised and some are available for download.

The site is interactive and registered users are able to add comments and information to already posted material as well as adding new articles and images. For more information about the project visit our pages on the New Forest National Park’s website.

Overview of the POW Camp (65) at Setley in the New Forest

Setley Plain POW Camp 65 was built in 1941 to hold Italian Prisoners of War. From 1944 the camp went on to hold German prisoners, and continued to do so until 1947. The camp was then handed over to the New Forest Rural District Council to house young families of returning servicemen, previously housed in Nissen huts at Beaulieu aerodrome. The camp had a shop, run by Harry Munden, and was in existence until the early fifties, when sufficient permanent council housing had been built.

You can get involved!

Kept safe for all these years is a collection of ‘Newsletters’ produced by German Prisoners of War (POW) held in one of the UK POW camps. The newsletters have been scanned and uploaded to Flickr, and it is from there that the current application will retrieve and manipulate the scans. Written in German and including artwork, quizzes and puzzles, as well as the local sports results, these newsletters offer a glimpse into the lives of German POWs in the UK, if only we could read them!

Can you help to translate and transcribe these historic documents? The finished texts will be added to the growing online digital archive as well as downloadable versions of the original documents for you to read and enjoy.

© Digital copy – New Forest National Park Authority 2015 Digitised as part of the New Forest Remembers; untold stories of WWII project

This project is on behalf of

Find the code on Github