The Dutch army hasn’t practiced building a prisoner of war camp in more than 30 years. That’s not because the Netherlands has been at peace – it’s because modern military deployments never produced the need. In Afghanistan, Dutch forces rarely detained more than two or three people at a time. The kind of mass detention that defined 20th-century warfare had effectively become a theoretical concern. Until now.
This week, the Dutch Army began testing a new prisoner-of-war camp design at Marnehuizen, in the northern province of Groningen – the first time in more than 30 years that the Netherlands has conducted training focused on detention at this scale. The exercise is a deliberate, concrete response to a possibility that Europe’s militaries are no longer willing to treat as remote: a large conventional conflict on NATO soil involving tens of thousands of combatants on both sides.
The temporary facility in the Groningen training area is intended to demonstrate how large numbers of detainees could be processed and held far from the front line. What makes this exercise striking isn’t just the scale. It’s the details – the festival contractors, the drones, and the deliberate rejection of everything a traditional prisoner-of-war camp looks like.
Why the Dutch Army Is Building a Prisoner-of-War Camp Now
All 32 NATO member nations have reached a consensus that Russia could possess the military capability to launch an attack against an Alliance country by 2029 or possibly sooner. Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, head of Germany’s army, was unambiguous speaking to Politico at the ILA Berlin Air Show: “All 32 NATO partners agree that Russia might have the capability to invade a NATO partner country in 2029. 2029 is not a German timeline. It’s NATO-agreed intelligence,” adding a warning that an attack may occur sooner.
That broader threat environment explains the urgency behind what might otherwise look like bureaucratic military housekeeping. The Netherlands hasn’t trained for large-scale detention in more than 30 years, and the Marnehuizen exercise is part of a wider military shift in which mass captures of enemy troops are again being treated as operationally plausible. According to Dutch newspaper AD, the exercises are directly linked to preparation for a possible conflict with Russia.
On March 18, 2026, Karel Řehka, Chief of the General Staff of the Czech Armed Forces, said that most NATO military leaders do not rule out the possibility that Russia could attempt to attack Alliance territory by 2029. Inspector General of the Bundeswehr Carsten Breuer stated that NATO should prepare for a possible Russian attack by 2029, describing Russia’s various indicators – rearmament, troop buildup, economic and political developments – as all converging on that date.
What the New Prisoner-of-War Camp Design Actually Looks Like
The Dutch army is testing a camp design at Marnehuizen in Groningen that could accommodate up to 2,000 soldiers in the event of war. The camp could be set up in a single week, and to build such a facility the army plans to involve not just military personnel, but also civilian contractors who typically build infrastructure for major music festivals. That last detail isn’t incidental. Festival-industry contractors specialize in rapidly erecting large, modular structures with utilities, crowd-flow management, and sanitation – exactly the logistical requirements of a short-notice detention facility.
Brigadier General Nicole de Wolf, commander of the Operational Support Command of the Royal Netherlands Army, said the goal is not to recreate older models of detention facilities. The design differs significantly from traditional images of prisoner-of-war camps. The project would not resemble the traditional prisoner-of-war camps of the past, with their many watchtowers and searchlights. Security would instead be ensured by modern surveillance systems – cameras that can react to image and sound, with drones flying over the perimeter and transmitting video in real time.
Inside the camp, prisoners of war would be housed in barracks holding up to 20 people, with shared sanitary areas, a dining facility, and a medical center. The command of the Dutch Ground Forces says conditions of detention should be “no worse than those of their own military personnel.” That standard isn’t arbitrary. It mirrors the requirements of international humanitarian law, which directly govern how captured soldiers must be treated.
De Wolf linked this approach to the expectation that captured Dutch soldiers would also receive humane treatment. “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you,” de Wolf said.
On communication, mobile phones and personal electronic devices would be confiscated from prisoners, but they would be allowed to write letters to relatives. That combination – removing electronic surveillance risks while preserving a basic human contact channel – reflects the same dual-purpose logic that shapes the camp’s entire design.
The Legal Framework: What the Geneva Conventions Require
A prisoner-of-war camp doesn’t just need to function militarily. It needs to comply with a body of international law that has governed the treatment of captured soldiers since 1949. The Third Geneva Convention sets out specific rules for the treatment of prisoners of war. Its 143 articles require that POWs be treated humanely, adequately housed, and given sufficient food, clothing, and medical care, and also establish guidelines on labor, discipline, recreation, and criminal trial.
POWs must be treated humanely in all circumstances. They are protected against any act of violence, as well as intimidation, insults, and public curiosity. International humanitarian law also defines the minimum acceptable conditions of detention, covering accommodation, food, clothing, hygiene, and medical care, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The Convention places strict limits on interrogation. A prisoner is only required to provide basic personal details – name, rank, date of birth, and service number. Any attempt to force prisoners to give additional information through coercion, threats, or torture is strictly prohibited.
Living conditions in detention camps should be comparable to those provided for the armed forces of the detaining power – which is exactly what Brigadier General de Wolf committed to publicly. The Dutch design, with its medical post, walking areas, shared showers, and room-based housing, tracks directly with what the Red Cross summary of the Geneva Conventions describes as the baseline standard.
The Capability Gap That Made This Exercise Necessary
It’s the first time in more than 30 years that the Dutch army has practiced setting up a prisoner-of-war camp. The last such exercises took place during the Cold War. The decades in between weren’t idle – the Netherlands participated in multinational operations across the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan – but those missions produced a different kind of military culture, one organized around small-unit counterinsurgency rather than conventional state-on-state warfare.
De Wolf said the Dutch military has largely lost the experience of holding thousands of prisoners over the past decades. During missions in Afghanistan, Dutch forces usually detained only two or three people at a time, who could be held at military bases. No one was building camps. No one needed to know how.
That gap now matters. A conventional conflict with a peer military adversary produces an entirely different detention arithmetic. Engagements can result in hundreds or thousands of captured soldiers in a short period. The processing, housing, medical care, and security of that many people requires planning, infrastructure, and trained personnel that can’t be improvised in the field. The Marnehuizen exercise is, at its core, an attempt to rebuild that institutional muscle from near zero.
The choice of Marnehuizen is deliberate. Marnehuizen is the largest military training village in Europe, making it the logical location to test infrastructure at a scale that approximates real-world requirements. A simulated camp that could hold 2,000 people requires significant physical footprint – not the kind of exercise that fits on a standard training range.
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What This Means for You
The Dutch exercise at Marnehuizen isn’t a prediction that war is imminent. It’s a recognition that the capability to manage large-scale detention – dormant since the Cold War – needs to exist again before it’s needed, not during a crisis when there’s no time to build it.
Germany’s defense minister and senior military leaders have said Russia could be ready to threaten a NATO member by 2029, a warning that comes as intelligence points to a rapid Russian military buildup and Europe scrambles to rearm. The Dutch POW camp exercise fits into that same framework: NATO members are pressure-testing capabilities that have been allowed to atrophy, from detention infrastructure to rapid deployment logistics, recognizing that the conditions that made those capabilities irrelevant no longer apply.
The camp design itself offers a practical model for what humane, legally compliant, scalable detention infrastructure looks like in 2026. Festival-grade civilian contractors. Drone-based perimeter surveillance instead of watchtower searchlights. Room-based housing capped at 20 people. A medical post. Letters home. The design treats the Geneva Convention not as a bureaucratic checklist but as an operational standard – one that Brigadier General de Wolf framed as a matter of reciprocity: the treatment you’re prepared to give is the treatment you should expect to receive.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.