Mukden, Hoten, Shenyang: A Camp in a Global War

Wartime records may call the city Mukden and the camp Hoten. The museum now stands in Shenyang. Recognizing those names makes it possible to connect a local surviving site with documents scattered through overseas archives.

The protected remains include a prisoners’ barracks, Japanese administrative buildings, a hospital building and service structures such as a water tower and chimney. They give captivity a physical setting, but they do not amount to a complete camp preserved unchanged. Surviving fabric and reconstructed exhibition interiors preserve and interpret different parts of its wartime life.

The camp connected prisoners captured elsewhere in Asia to Shenyang’s wartime industrial economy. Australian War Memorial research records the transfer of British and Australian prisoners from Korea toward Mukden in November 1942, joining Americans sent from the Philippines. Factory labour was part of the purpose of these movements.

This was forced labour within a military prison system. Transfers continually changed the camp population, and arrival dates, ranks and assignments shaped prisoners’ conditions and daily work.

Reading the site with those movements in mind enlarges its geography. The barracks belonged to Shenyang, but the routes that brought people there connected battlefields, ports, railways and other camps across Asia.

Flight Lieutenant Oscar Nathan Diamond offers one documented route. The Australian War Memorial records his capture in the aftermath of the fighting in Java, subsequent imprisonment in Taiwan and transfer to Mukden via Japan in March 1945. He reached this camp only in the final months of the war, was liberated in August and returned to Australia in September.

His personal archive, held at the Australian War Memorial, also contains letters and an illustrated Christmas menu from earlier captivity at Shirakawa in Taiwan. Those documents belong to another stage of his journey, before his arrival at Mukden.

American officer William Thompson developed his secretly kept notes into the History of the Mukden Group after liberation. The United States National Archives’ research guide describes the account’s value for understanding camp organization and everyday conditions. It also identifies a limitation: as a commissioned officer, Thompson was separated from enlisted men and received somewhat better treatment.

His account documents one position within the camp’s hierarchy, alongside other testimony and camp records. The recovery and evacuation records add another chapter: the ending of captivity involved locating people, providing care and arranging journeys home.

The surviving site connects these individual journeys to a fixed place. Barracks and service buildings give the records a physical setting; archives trace the transfers, forced work and eventual journeys home that extended far beyond Shenyang.