In the Second World War, the U.S. War Department created three clandestine facilities where Army and Navy intelligence officers interrogated enemy prisoners of war. Located in the remote Pennsylvania woods just eighty miles north of Washington, D.C., Pine Grove Furnace Prisoner of War Interrogation Camp was the third and final covert site. Begun specifically to cross-examine captured German submarine sailors, the camp’s mission quickly changed to include questioning Axis soldiers after the Allied victory in its North African campaign.

The camp evolved from an abandoned farm with links to the area’s eighteenth-and nineteenth-century iron industry and a deactivated Civilian Conservation Corps camp into this secret intelligence-gathering site. With the war over, the place transformed into a Christian church camp where hundreds of youth stayed in the former prisoners’ barracks, took meals in the old Staff Mess Hall, and enjoyed prisoner artwork left behind on the walls of the guards’ Recreation Hall. During its thirty-month existence, perhaps 2,500 German and Japanese prisoners passed through this place known in unclassified sources only as the “3300th Service Unit.”
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