Atterbury POW Camp - Edinburgh, IN
Posted by: 
DnRseekers
N 39° 22.516 W 086° 04.136
16S E 580196 N 4358835
A chapel built by Italian POW's still stands at the site of this POW camp and is in excellent condition today after several renovations
Waymark Code: WMB9PP
Location: Indiana, United States
Date Posted: 04/23/2011
Views: 15
Atterbury POW camp was opened by the US and eventually housed 3,500 Italian POW's and 10,000 German POWS, although original plans for the camp only included enough housing for 3,000 prisoners. At some point during their stay, a group of Italian prisoners who are remembered as "skilled artisans" petitioned camp Commander John Gammell to allow for the building of a chapel. Permission was granted and a plaque commemorating their work indicates the work was done in 1942. This cannot be accurate, as historical records indicate the interment camp was not opened until April of 1943. There are also some discrepancies in the spelling of the Commander's name; in some places his last name ends with one "L" and in others there are two.
A former POW writes of his time in the camp:
From: Peter C. von Seidlein, Professor of Architecture, University of Stuttgart, Germany
When I arrived at camp Atterbury in the middle of September 1944 (I was wounded and taken prisoner on August 20th 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 20th of July 1946.
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