Langwasser internment camp

Nuremberg, Bavaria

“White bread for the guards on Sunday?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Every Sunday. Something of a special issuance for guards.”

“Sunday it is then.”

Several men cross the German-Czechoslovak border. They speak German, Polish, and Czech.

Guards awoke at the Lagnwasser Internment Camp, where former SS soldiers and officers were being held, with the sound of screams. The Americans rose quickly and emerged from their barracks, rifles in hand. Bodies lined the camp ground, blood everywhere, vomit, diarrhea. One American soldier uttered a prayer. Another began vomiting himself, though unlike that of the prisoners, he did not vomit blood.

Amid the corpses, hundreds of men were convulsing as if the Devil himself was wearing their skin. Screams echoed across the Bavarian countryside. The camp commander called for reinforcements and ambulances. Hundreds more were huddled around the camp fires seeking warmth, sickly and nauseous.

After the situation was under control, it was found that 1,499 former SS soldiers and officers were dead. The cause of death was likely arsenic poisoning, and investigators found a mixture of arsenic and glue painted on the bottom of several hundred loaves of bread that had just been distributed to soldiers the previous night. Another 1,019 inmates fell ill from the poisoning, with 118 still in critical condition.

In the course of the investigation, investigators located huge stores of arsenic under the floorboards of the Konsum-Genossenschaftsbäckerei in Nuremberg, the bakery that supplied all of the bread for the internment camp. There was enough arsenic at the bakery to kill 60,000 men. The proprietor was arrested, although it is believed that he was not responsible for the attack given the way in which the arsenic was hidden even from him, and the fact that several of his newly hired Polish employees, Holocaust survivors and Warsaw ghetto uprising veterans, had mysteriously disappeared between Sunday night and Monday morning, not reporting to their shifts on that Monday.

The Americans in Bavaria are on edge.