The Norwegian 6th Division faced a logistical problem unique to the northern front. Unlike in southern Norway, where advancing German forces quickly liberated their captured comrades, the prisoners taken during the Battles of Narvik were trapped behind Allied lines with no prospect of rescue. After housing them at scattered locations around the region, the division command chose the island of Skorpa in Kvaenangen Municipality as the site for a central camp. When the first prisoners arrived, they lived in tents designed for 16 occupants each. By May, construction of wooden barracks had begun, with around 100 prisoners at any time providing the labor under civilian Norwegian craftsmen. The barracks were intended to last through the coming winter -- a winter that, as it turned out, the camp would never see.

Schulze-Hinrichs arrived with 154 fellow prisoners, shipped first to Vardoehus Fortress in Finnmark aboard the 1,382-ton Norwegian steamship Nova, then transferred to Skorpa on the same vessel with 25 additional prisoners collected at Hammerfest along the way. The escort was the patrol boat Ingrid -- itself a captured German trawler now operated by the Royal Norwegian Navy. Prisoners kept arriving through early June 1940: soldiers from the Narvik front, shot-down Luftwaffe pilots, and resistance fighters' captures from as far south as Helgeland, smuggled past German lines. Eight airmen had been taken when two Heinkel He 115 floatplanes ran out of fuel returning from an aborted mission on 13 April, landing at Oernes and Broennoeysund respectively. Local militia captured the crews and transferred the intact aircraft to the Royal Norwegian Navy Air Service.

The camp's guard force was as improvised as everything else. Eighty Norwegian soldiers held the island: 45 from the Varanger Battalion of eastern Finnmark, and 35 who had escaped the fighting's collapse in southern Norway, making their way north through neutral Sweden. Command fell to Captain Rei Sandberg after disturbances broke out among the inmates. During the camp's brief existence, two prisoners died. A merchant navy sailor was killed by a stray warning shot during a disturbance. Oberleutnant Hans Hattenbach, the pilot of one of the captured He 115s, was shot on 6 June by a Finnish volunteer guard when he approached the camp fence and did not heed orders to stop. Hattenbach was buried with full military honors -- 30 prisoners and a 14-strong Norwegian honor guard stood in attendance, a brief ceremony of shared humanity on a barren island in the Arctic.

On 5 June, district command called Skorpa asking how many airmen the camp held. The answer was 40, but 51 more prisoners arrived that same day, 19 of them Luftwaffe personnel. An order came that evening to transfer 40 airmen to Harstad for interrogation at the British headquarters. The 40 highest-ranking were selected, including all the pilots. None of them ever reached Harstad. Instead, as the Allies evacuated Northern Norway days later during Operation Alphabet, the prisoners were embarked on Allied ships and taken to the United Kingdom. At 0130 hours on 8 June, word reached Skorpa that the Norwegian mainland would capitulate. The guards began leaving on 10 June, dispatched to Altagaard army camp on fishing boats. On 12 June, Schulze-Hinrichs led the released German prisoners off the island aboard the steamships Baroey and Tanahorn, bound for Tromsoe -- a city that would not be occupied by German forces for another two days.

After the camp dissolved, many of the Norwegian guards made their way over the mountains to Sweden rather than submit to German occupation. Captain Sandberg was less fortunate. The Gestapo arrested him in Trondheim on 28 June 1940, accusing him of mistreating prisoners during his command of Skorpa. He was released on 5 August. Today the island of Skorpa sits quietly in Kvaenangenfjord, unmarked by any monument to the brief, strange chapter when it served as the northernmost significant POW camp of the Norwegian Campaign -- a place where the chaos of war concentrated 500 men on a windswept rock at the edge of the Arctic, guarded by soldiers who had already lost their country.