HIDDEN away behind the walls of an unsuspecting mill lies a history of horror, brutality and injustice.

Sitting between Bury and Radcliffe on banks of the Irwell, and now an office space, during the Second Word War Warth Mills became home to a notorious internment camp housing thousands of falsely imprisoned Italians and German Jews in deplorable conditions.

The previously untold story, one of Bury and the UK's darkest chapters, is now being brought to life as part of project, with an exhibition which opened on Monday.

As the Nazi strangle hold on Europe tightened and Britain became consumed by the war effort, a paranoid xenophobia permeated the nation.

In the uneasy atmosphere Winston Churchill ordered the internment of all Germans, Italians and Austrians in Britain, telling officials to "Collar the lot".

Identified as "Enemy Aliens" thousands of men including artists, ice cream sellers and factory staff, many of whom had lived across Britain for decades or escaped the Nazi deathcamps, were arbitrarily rounded up and put to tribunals before being sent to camps like Warth Mills.

Richard Shaw, director of Unity House, part of the team behind the Warth Mills Project, said: "These were people who came over to Britain after the First World War.

"Because Europe had fallen so quickly under Nazi control they were seen as the enemy within and spies, and so the government decided that they would gather everyone of them up and lock them away.

"It was a period of time when there was a lot of panic and a lot of things that were done in haste."

Built as cotton mill by Mellor Ltd in 1891, Warth Mills is recorded as having 46,000 spindles and employing 500 staff from Radcliffe and Bury by 1911.

The mill declined in the 1930s and later became a paint factory in the 1970s, but by the outbreak of war it had become near derelict before being repurposed by the government.

However little is known about how or why Warth Mills was chosen for its grim purpose.

Transported to Warth Mills, internees were strip searched and had any valuables confiscated before they were tossed a blanket and some hay and told to find somewhere to sleep.

Once in the camp they faced a dangerous, squalid and rat-infested environment with few water taps, sparse food, and no sanitation but latrines.

Some of those detained reported that the conditions they experienced in the notorious Nazi prison camp at Dachau were better than those in Bury.

Others had survived Hitler's concentration camps only to have their spirits broken at Warth Mills — being driven to suicide.

The horrors faced at Warth Mills prompted some men to stage protests, such as a hunger strike led by German Artist Hermann Fechenbach — which earned him an arrest and deportation to the Isle of Man.

The misery and immorality inflicted at Warth Mills only came to an end following the sinking of SS Arandora Star on July 2, 1940, when hundreds of men transported from Bury drowned on their way to Canada, after the ship was torpedoed.

After the internment camp was dissolved in the wake of the incident, the mill shifted purpose to become a Prisoner of War camp until the Allies took victory in 1945.

Perhaps surprisingly these POWs fared better, being afforded certain living standards, unlike internees.

The Warth Mills Project, funded by a £64,000 grant, has been painstakingly researched from a variety of sources including collections and oral histories complied at the Imperial War Museum, artefacts and documents at Bury Archives as well as personal collections from those who survived.

The official exhibition opened on Monday at the Fusilier Museum in Moss Street, and is free with entry to the museum.

Mr Shaw said: "If you look at that period of our history, the context for internment there was something significant happening every day at that point in the war.

"Context is really important because you can see people would panic in that situation. It seems like a desperate measure but it was a desperate time.

"I think this history has taken a long time to come to light. But now is the right time to look at it because there are difficult lessons that we can learn from it, with the way we treat refugees and other people.

"The project is also about experiences of internment more generally and telling peoples stories.

"To have a connection with your city or town's heritage is really important, and I think it can bring people together even, if it is not a nice positive story. It can unite people around that shared history."