Prisoner of the Swiss: A World War II Airman's Story

By Daniel Culler and Rob Morris

A harrowing memoir revealing the horrors that occurred within a little-known prison camp in Switzerland, by a POW who survived it.
 
During WWII, 1,517 members of US aircrews were forced to seek asylum in Switzerland. Most neutral countries found reason to release US airmen from internment, but Switzerland took its obligations under the Hague Convention more seriously than most. The airmen were often incarcerated in local jails, then transferred to prison camps. The worst of these camps was Wauwilermoos, where at least 161 US airmen were sent for the honorable offense of escaping.
 
To this hellhole came Dan Culler, the author of this incredible account of suffering and survival. Prisoners slept on lice-infested straw, were malnourished, and had virtually no hygiene facilities or access to medical care. But worse, the commandant of Wauwilermoos was a diehard Swiss Nazi. He allowed the mainly criminal occupants of the camp to torture and rape Dan Culler with impunity. After many months of such treatment, starving and ravaged by disease, he was finally aided by a British officer.
 
Betrayal dominated his cruel fate—by the American authorities, by the Swiss, and, in a last twist, in a second planned escape that turned out to be a trap. But Dan Culler’s courage and determination kept him alive. Finally making it back home, he found he had been abandoned again. Political expediency meant there was no such place as Wauwilermoos. He had never been there, so he had never been a POW and didn‘t qualify for any POW benefits or medical or mental treatment for his many physical and emotional wounds. His struggle to make his peace with his past forms the final part of the story.
 
An introduction and notes from military historian Rob Morris provide historical background and context, including recent efforts to recognize the suffering of those incarcerated in Switzerland and afford them full POW status.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Casemate Publishers
• Release date: Aug 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781612005553

Book preview

Part I

The Black Hole of Wauwilermoos

Dan Culler

I wish to dedicate this book to my wife Betty, who has always stood beside me when I needed someone. I am also grateful for the support of my daughters, Sandra, Diana, and Deborah. I also want to thank my deceased mother who, with her strong Quaker beliefs, was against war but never questioned my going and who, after I returned, tried to heal the pain with loving care and understanding.

Dan Culler

Tucson, Arizona, 1990

CHAPTER 1

Beginnings

I was born March 22, 1924, in Syracuse, Indiana, the tenth child of Maude and Clement Culler. We actually had 12 children, but two died in their first years of life by what was commonly called in those days the one-year death sickness. My mother was the daughter of Irish immigrants, and like most mothers in those days, she was the silent rock who held our family together. My father was descended from German Pennsylvania Dutch Dunkards [a sect similar to the Mennonites]. He was a brilliant man, gifted in many things, much to his detriment, for it led to a lifetime of dissatisfaction—a longing to see what was over the next hill or around the next corner. He was deeply spiritual, endlessly searching to fill what he perceived as a void deep within his soul. Before I was born, he abandoned the family to go to California and follow the prophet Billy Sunday. He just up and left, trusting in the Lord to watch over his wife and six young children; he believed that if he was doing God’s work, God would care for them in return.

Thankfully, he also left behind a 4-acre truck farm, and through sheer force of will, hard work, and with the help of the children, Mother was able to keep the family afloat, all the while praying that Father would come to his senses and discover what she already knew—Billy Sunday was a fraud.

About the time she’d decided Father was never coming back, she got a letter from California begging forgiveness and enough money for a train ticket home. She gave in on one condition: the next time he took off to follow some religious nut, he needn’t bother asking for either forgiveness or a ticket home.

Father moved on from Billy Sunday, but remained deeply religious. He was known in the area for walking behind his plow in the fields, one hand on the plow, the other gripping an open Bible. Most considered him a religious fanatic. To his credit, he worked hard, 12 hours a day, six days a week, splitting his time between the farm and his job as a millwright in a Syracuse factory.

Farm children in those days worked like slaves, and we were no exception. We worked and had little time for recreation. Mother also worked hard, supervising the truck farm through its seasonal cycles of planting, cultivating, picking, and then selling the produce or canning 1,000 two-quart jars of fruits and vegetables a year.

We referred to the farm, idealistically, as our house on the hill. The house sat back from the road, atop a rise, above Milford Road. In my boyhood, it became a magical place where I could gaze for miles across the verdant green pastures and dream about the places I’d go someday.

Father, like many honest but poor Americans, dreamed big dreams that were never fulfilled. He worked dawn to dusk and tried to make all the right decisions, but it seemed that every time he was on the cusp of success, such as getting a better piece of machinery or building an addition, another baby was born, or someone would get sick with an illness requiring a big doctor’s bill. His harshness, his anger, was a direct result of his disappointment. Instead of blaming himself for his failure, he blamed his family for holding him back.

One March morning in 1926, when I was nearly two years old, Mother was about to lift the hinged double-doors into the basement when she heard something thump into our house’s front window. She rushed to look and found a dove lying on the ground. Thinking it was dead, she reached down to touch it, and it burst back to life with beating wings and flew north, toward the road and the railroad tracks. Amazed by its quick recovery, she watched the dove as it circled over the tracks, turned and then flew back toward our house, dashing itself a second time against the front window. It fell to earth, roused itself, and flew to the railroad tracks a second time, where it circled before winging away to the north.

Mother watched till the dove was a distant speck in the steel gray sky, then started her descent into the basement, her skin crawling. She told Father when he got home from work. Father was taking the following day off from work to do farm business, and she begged him to be careful as he drove the dirt country roads, especially where the roads crossed the railroad tracks. Father assured her that he would, and told her she was letting her imagination get the best of her.

The next afternoon, my sister and brother, 10 and eight, were riding home from school in the school bus when they came to the railroad crossing near our house. The bus driver stopped, as was the law, and one of the kids got off and looked up and down the tracks for a train, climbing back in and saying one was coming. While they waited, my brother and sister saw our father’s touring car approaching from the west on the Milford Road, and they proudly told the other kids. They watched him approach, noticing he was not slowing down or looking down the tracks. He drove his car onto the tracks just as the fast-moving B&O Capital Limited passenger train passed by. There was a deafening, metal-tearing impact as the two collided, followed by sparks and screeching as the engine dragged what was left of the car half a mile down the tracks before stopping. Bystanders pulled Father’s battered body from the mangled wreckage, surprised to find he still had a spark of life; he died hours later at the hospital in Elkhart, leaving his family alone to deal with the future.

Before Father’s shattered corpse was even buried in the ground, the railroad presented Mother with a bill for damage to the train engine’s cow catcher and for lost revenue from the delay caused by the accident in the amount of $500. This was an amount of money that would be ruinous to pay, and the railroad bullied Mother for a long time after, even threatening to take away her farm, but they never collected. The railroad was heartless. In a separate incident, it sent an unemployed man to jail for six months for stealing coal that had fallen from the coal car onto the sides of the tracks so that he could feed his family. He was arrested with five pieces of coal in his gunnysack.

I did many different jobs growing up. One of my earliest was helping Mother clean the cottages of the rich at Lake Wawasee before they showed up for the summer season. I was fascinated that kids had so many beautiful toys that they only played with a few months a year. Though Mother never let me play with the toys, I was allowed to push the wheeled ones across the floor on their journey to the toy