Wauwilermoos internment camp
Together with Hünenberg and Les Diablerets, Wauwilermoos was one of three Swiss penal camps for internees that were established in Switzerland during World War II.
[citation needed] Unlike civilians,[2] for instance Jewish refugees,[3] who were usually sent back to the territories occupied by the Nazi regime, the Swiss government was required by the Geneva Convention of 1929 to keep these soldiers interned until the end of hostilities.
The soldiers were held in barracks, and they were used as workers for agriculture and industry, except for officers who were not compelled to work and stayed in unoccupied mountain hotels, mainly in Davos.
[4] Wauwilermoos housed military internees of various nations, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and the USA.
[5][6][7] Regardless of the intent of the Federal Council, for most of 1944 the Swiss authorities did not follow the custodia honesta model, but rather "grouped American internees with common criminals in Wauwilermoos".
[1][2] For instance, the American airman Sergeant Daniel L. Culler, B-24 top turret gunner,[9] was one of the first USAAF airmen sent to Wauwilermoos, in June 1944.
In September the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was commissioned by the US Supreme Command to organise the escapes of 1,000 American internees, but this did not happen until late in the winter of 1944–45.
In response to the Americans "who [threatened to cut] up tables and benches to keep warm", Béguin claimed surprise, and resolved that "if they behaved churlishly we could no longer treat them like officers".
Prior to the escape attempts of summer 1944, only a few American internees were condemned to Wauwilermoos, usually for "drunkenness and disorderly conduct" and with the tacit approval of the US legation.
[5] The majority of Americans held in Wauwilermoos in autumn 1944 were in "pre-trial confinement, awaiting a military tribunal by the Swiss Army for the crime of attempting escape".
Internees on trial for escaping normally faced charges of "disregard of regulations", an MPC article that allowed punishment of up to six months of imprisonment in times of war.
"This subjectivity gave military tribunals wide latitude to treat escape attempts as minor infractions, or instead to classify them as criminal felonies".
Dressed in civilian clothes, the group travelled unaccosted to a city near the French border where they were arrested by an observant Swiss soldier.
They were first confined in the Basel city jail for three days and then transferred to Wauwilermoos where Ellington recalled "barbed wire, straw bunks, and guard dogs".
During the interrogation, a Swiss captain asked why they had travelled so far from their camp at Adelboden, and in response, "one of the airmen defiantly informed the juror that 'we were chasing butterflies'".
This "demonstrates that internees had difficulty comprehending their experience with Swiss military justice due to both language and cultural differences, and the fact that they were effectively serving their sentences in advance of the tribunal verdicts".
[5][20] Under the title "Das ist ein Skandal, Mit Hunden gehetzt" ("This is a scandal, rushed with dogs") the Swiss newspaper Berner Tagwacht reported on 7 January 1944 the fate of the Soviet internee Dobrolyubov in late November 1943.
They were accompanied by several guards with dogs who ordered the soldiers to collect significantly more wood than normal and take it to the prison camp, 1.5 kilometres (0.9 mi) from the forest.
On 30 April 1944 Gamperl asked the Swiss Commissariat for Internment by letter to "review the real reasons, a hearing by the legal officer and reprieve to the clarification of the matter".
[12] On the occasion of a lecture in front of Swiss officers Béguin explained his "art of bulk handling" (German: Kunst der Massenbehandlung) on 26 June 1944: 115 internees refused to work.
I'm trying to forget the whole thing.James Misuraca spoke about the compound of single-storey buildings surrounded by barbed wire, the armed Swiss guards with dogs, and the commandant, "a hater of Americans, a martinet who seemed quite pleased with our predicament".
After his arrival at the punishment camp, Northfelt quickly tired of the "meager rations of coffee, bread, and thin soup" which he blamed in part for his weight loss of forty pounds during his time in Switzerland.
"Switzerland's wartime general, Henri Guisan, demanded that all Red Cross reports about the internment camps be submitted to army censors first if delegates wanted access" notes historian Dwight S. Mears.
The American military attaché in Bern warned Marcel Pilet-Golaz, Swiss foreign minister in 1944, that "the mistreatment inflicted on US aviators could lead to 'navigation errors' during bombing raids over Germany".
Wauwilermoos was the subject of official protests by the United States, Great Britain, Poland, and Italy, as well as a barrier to the normalisation of diplomatic relations with the USSR.
Major Humbert also noted the despotic punishment catalogue and psychological deficits of the commandant of the prison camp, Captain André Béguin.
As his correspondence revealed he found "American internees to be undisciplined and ungrateful", claiming that they were "too spoiled by their stay in hotels in the mountains and do not understand purely military treatment".
[11] Then President of the Swiss Confederation Kaspar Villiger expressed his "deepest regrets", and said that the camp commander had lacked "subtle leadership qualities", while offering his apologies on the occasion of an official visit by Dan Culler in 1995.
[13] On 27 October 2015 the Swiss television channel Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen SRF broadcast Wauwilermoos: Kriegsgefangene im Luzerner Mittelland.
Daniel Wyss, the documentary director, contacted Major Dwight Mears, participated in the ceremony in April 2014 in Washington D.C., and met the eight survivors of the camp.
