>>213738380 >Fifteen other American bombers landed safely or crash-landed in Switzerland that day. Some of them had been fired on by Swiss pilots and flak gunners. This was not unusual. By the end of the summer of 1944, over a thousand Americans would be in Swiss hands, held under military guard and forbidden from leaving the country for the duration of the war.
>In the last two years of the war, the “benevolent hosts” of the American airmen threw 187 of them into one of the most abhorrent prison compounds in Europe, a punishment camp run by a sadistic Nazi. One of these unfortunates was Daniel Culler. Culler was never told why he was sent to Straflager Wauwilermoos, or for how long. As he passed through the gates of the prison, his military guard whispered to him. “I’m sorry to bring you to this hellhole. Watch your every step. There are some awful men in here, and you are so young.”>Culler's good clothes were confiscated by Béguin in return to "old dirty rags." Sent to barracks 9, Culler was repeatedly raped by internees from Eastern Europe. He reported to the camp commandant André Béguin and some of the guards, who laughed and sent him back.>“What happened to me that night, and many more to follow, was the worst hell any person ever had to endure,” Culler wrote in his searing prison memoir. A group of Russian prisoners held him down, stuffed straw in his mouth, and sodomized him repeatedly. “Coming from a small farming community, I never heard of men doing to me what they did. I... hadn’t even been with a girl, except to hold her hand and give her a light kiss on her cheek or mouth. I was bleeding from all the openings of my body, and I prayed to God to take my life from me.”
