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Fort Hunt Park’s peaceful landscape once concealed a top-secret World War II interrogation camp where 4,500 German, Japanese and Italian prisoners of war were questioned between 1942 and 1946.

The National Park Service and Martha Washington Library will explore that hidden history during an online program at 1 p.m. July 26. “Science and Espionage: Fort Hunt and Prince William Forest during the Second World War” will be moderated by National Park Service ranger Daniel Blier.

The featured speakers are historian Ann Todd, author of OSS Operation Black Mail: One Woman’s Covert War Against the Imperial Japanese Army, and Brian Crim, a former intelligence analyst and professor at Keene State University.

The Secret Behind P.O. Box 1142

Fort Hunt’s covert outpost operated under the code name P.O. Box 1142. Many prisoners held there were Nazi naval officers and German scientists. Their interrogators often included German-speaking Jewish immigrants who had escaped the Holocaust.

Among the prisoners questioned at the camp were rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and Reinhard Gehlen, who led Nazi intelligence operations on the Eastern Front. Nearly 800 prisoners had survived the sinking of German U-boats that had terrorized the Atlantic Coast.

Army and Navy officials sought information ranging from officers’ identities to advances in jet engines, rockets and submarines.

Interrogators used an assortment of tactics. Some prisoners were blindfolded and driven repeatedly around Fort Hunt’s circular road in a windowless bus before being taken to an underground interrogation room. Reluctant captives could be threatened with the appearance of a supposedly feared Russian officer in full uniform.

Other approaches relied on games, candy and bubblegum. Listening devices hidden in cell ventilation systems allowed officials to monitor prisoners’ conversations.

The secret compound consisted of two wood-frame-and-concrete enclosures surrounded by barbed wire. Most of its wartime buildings are gone, replaced by lawns, wooded areas and picnic pavilions.

Several traces remain. Four concrete sections once supported guard towers, while the park’s broad central lawn served as the parade field. Two aligned rows of trees planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s still mark the route of the former camp service road.

Officials ordered most of the facility and its records destroyed after the war. More details became public when the government declassified some World War II documents in the 1990s. The Park Service later collected oral histories from people connected to the camp.

A Spy School 25 Miles Away

Prince William Forest Park, about 25 miles south of Fort Hunt, also played a clandestine wartime role. From 1942 to 1945, the wooded site served as a training ground for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Known then as the Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area, it prepared recruits in paramilitary tactics, weapons, demolition, fieldcraft, undercover procedures, security and close combat.

Visitors can still see cabins, an infirmary, storage buildings, a water tower and several gun mounts. Many of those structures were originally built in the mid-1930s by Civilian Conservation Corps workers for camps that allowed inner-city children to experience nature. The park’s museum collection also holds artifacts representing its OSS activities.

Fort Hunt’s Earlier Chapters

Fort Hunt’s history extends far beyond World War II. Native Americans hunted and fished in the area from about 6000 B.C. until the mid-1700s. Captain John Smith encountered the Conoy tribe there in 1608, and George Washington later established a village for enslaved people on the property.

An African American Reserve Officers’ Training Corps unit led by white officers trained at Fort Hunt in 1931. World War I veterans participating in the Bonus Marches camped there in 1933 and 1934 while pressing for pension payments.

In 1939, two years before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the site housed a secret radio station that intercepted and decoded communications from Mexico, Japan, Germany and Italy. A pin oak now commemorates the 1939 visit of Britain’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

Four concrete gun batteries built in the 1890s remain from Fort Hunt’s coastal-defense era. Designed around the time of the Spanish-American War, their semicircular platforms allowed guns to rotate. Shells weighing several hundred pounds were lifted from below using elevators.

The Battery Commander’s Tower, completed in 1902 with concrete walls more than two feet thick, still closely resembles its original form. From its top, a commander could survey the Potomac River and coordinate fire from the batteries.

A white frame house at the park entrance was built in 1905 for noncommissioned officers and was shared by two families.

Fort Hunt Park and Prince William Forest Park are both managed by the National Park Service.