Holiday behind the wire

Press, 28 November 1980, Page 20

Holiday behind the wire

NZPA Weyhill, England Forty Britons who like vacations with a difference spent the week-end shivering, acutely short of food, and being, shouted at as prisoners of war in a Nazi-style camp reconstructed near the English village of Weyhill in Wiltshire. The camp, a brooding collection of buildings that used to be an isolation hospital, opened its heavily guarded gates to its first customers — fantasists who paid thirty pounds ($74) each for two days in the life of a prisoner during World War 11. The camp was run by a gaunt former British paratroop sergeant, Bob Acraman, aged 41. who wore a German officer’s uniform. and had a line-up of guards, dressed in SS uniforms. The guest-prisoners were an assortment of executives, blue-collar workers and professional men. “I do this just because I enjoy it,” said an executive, locked up in the camp, dubbed Butiitz, near Salisbury Plain. The name is derived from Butlins, one of Britain’s best known holidaycamp businesses, and Coiditz, the famed Nazi priso-ner-or-war camp from which few of its Allied inmates ever escaped. "Commandant” Acraman forced the week-end prisoners to shift rubble, and undergo punishing army drill routines and interrogation sessions. He declared the experiment a great success, and predicted it could become a regular event. "There are- no jolly times here. We are giving them a horrible time,” Mr Acraman barked at reporters.

The camp site in partly wooded country outside the village was ringed with 2m chain link fences topped with barbed wire, as well as watchtowers and arc lights mounted on 12m gantries,