Old POW Camp Just A Memory
by Kevin P. Kilbane

40 Years Later, Ex-POW Remembers Atterbury
January 11, 1987

It had been 40 years since Peter von Seildein of Stuttgart, Germany, had been in central Indiana but last month he returned to an area where he lived for almost two years,... as a prisoner of war. Now a professor of architecture at Stuttgart University, von Seidlein was in Columbus last month as part of a university tour group studying the city's architecture. Forth years earlier, he was at Camp Atterbury as a prisoner of war. While in Columbus he met Graziella Bush, director of the Visitor's Center. On arriving back in Germany, he wrote her detailing the experiences of a German soldier serving as a prisoner of war at Atterbury. Some of those memories are reprinted here.

From: Peter C. von Seidlein, Professor of Architecture, University of Stuttgart, Germany

To Graziella Bush, Visitors Center, Columbus

Thank you so much for sending me "The Atterbury File." When it arrived last week I was rather busy, but at 6p.m. I started to read the book and by 10 p.m. I had finished it.

Naturally it was the chapter on the POW camp which interested me most. But there were also some other parts I found most interesting, especially the one on life in the area before it became a military camp in 1942. When I was working with a detail cutting trees in the winter of 1944-45, we once spent much time in a deserted 19^th century farmhouse. I always wondered what became of the farmers.

When I arrived at Camp Atterbury in the middle of September 1944 (I was wounded and taken prisoner on August 20^th in Normandy) life in the POW camp was heaven. We received a new U.S. Army outfit, got as much to eat as we could eat and slept in a bed with a mattress.

There were no German officers and no non-commissioned officers in Camp Atterbury, except for a short period of time when a few hundred officers passed through, which was probably late in 1945. The first few months I was working in one of the 12 kitchens within the POW camp, but I found this rather tiresome and volunteered for work outside the camp.

There is hardly a menial job I didn't do during the next year; picking tomatoes and apples, working in a slaughterhouse, driving a tractor, pressing shits and trousers, washing dishes and so on. Some of this work was done as far south a the Kentucky border and some as far north as Indianapolis.

During the winter I was orderly in an officers' club in Camp Atterbury, cleaning up the club and serving on the bar. My last POW job was interpreting for an "ash and trash" detail, which had to clean up barracks after they were left by discharged soldiers - one of the most sought after jobs as the GIs left all and everything they couldn't carry with them in the barracks.

I left Camp Atterbury after almost 22 months with the last transport late in June 1946, got on board a Liberty freighter in New York, arrived in Le Havre early in July 1946 and stayed at another POW camp, at Bolbec, afraid of being handed over to the French to work in a coal mine for another two years. Eventually we were put on a train to be discharged in Nuremberg on the 20^th of July 1946.

Altogether there were 400,000 German POWs in the USA from 1942 to 1946. The military used the troop ships going back to the US for this purpose. I think that this was an excellent idea. The German POWs who were in America became friends of the United States, saw what democracy is like and told what they had seen to their friends and families when they came back.