TELLS OF CAMP
In the Sept. 10 issue of the Christian Science Monitor, an interesting account of the Buchenwald, Germany, prison camp—site of many war atrocities—is given by Lt. Chris G. Petrow, Cambridge, Mass., formerly of Webster City.
Lt. Petrow, son of Mrs. Jennie Petrow, formerly of this city, was attached to an army intelligence office in Germany at the time he wrote the article, included on the Monitor’s editorial page. The lieutenant is now reported to be in France, where he is engaged in further intelligence work.
Article Quoted
Excerpts from the article in the Monitor, furnished the Freeman Journal by Mrs. R. E. Channer, are as follows:
“I was shown around the (Buchenwald) camp by one of the inmates, a French boy who had been there only a few months. He gave me some idea of how the system worked. The inmates were used to make rifles and weapons. They were fed on a starvation diet, and when they were too weak to work any longer, all food was cut off from them. When they died, their clothes and the gold from their teeth were salvaged and they were burned in the crematory. The German government offered the ashes of the victim to his family for a price of 1,000 marks.
“In addition to the normal deaths by starvation and disease, certain of the inmates were selected from time to time for service as human guinea pigs. Some were given injections of typhus bacillus, others had large areas of their bodies burned with phosphorus and then doctors experimented with cures.”
Many Butchered
“Many were butchered at random by SS guards, sometimes because they were communists and sometimes because the beasts just wanted to kill someone. Anyone unfortunate enough to have a tattoo on his body was killed and skinned; the tattooed skin was tanned and used to bind books or make lampshades for the commandant’s wife. These articles can still be seen at the camp.
“Twenty-six nationalities are represented at the camp, very few of whom are Jewish. There are very many Jews left in Europe; the bulk of them have been exterminated.”
Source: Daily Freeman Journal, Webster City, IA - Sept. 28, 1945
Chris George Petrow was born Dec. 14, 1919 to George C. and Jennie W. Breitenkamp Petrow.
Chris was a 1937 graduate of Lincoln High School in Webster City, IA where he was awarded a scholarship to Harvard University. In 1940 he was awarded the Palfrey Prize as the most distinguished member of the senior class at Harvard because he has an unbroken record of straight A’s for three years—the only member of the class to hold such a record. He graduated from Harvard in 1941.
Lt. Petrow served with the U.S. Naval Air Corps in World War II for a short time and was later assigned to the Army and was an instructor in a secret, specialized branch of radio training at Boca Raton Field in FL. In 1945.
Sources: ancestry.com
