Foreign News: Arsenic & SS

No one knew who he was. He might be the Polish D.P. who was mysteriously missing from Frankfurt and who, police said, had done this sort of thing before. He might be a Nazi victim, a believer in swift and personal justice. One day last week, he struck at Stalag 13, near Nürnberg. A prisoner was suddenly racked by violent pains; during the next two days, over 2,000 others writhed in the same unexplained illness.

Then U.S. officers discovered that the epidemic had been caused by arsenic which had been smeared on the prisoners’ bread rations with a brush. Six arsenic bottles (two of them empty) were found under the floor of the local bakery. First theory was that the poison was being used to exterminate cockroaches. But further investigation showed that the unknown poisoner was not after ordinary vermin. His aim, announced U.S. counterintelligence, was to kill the camp’s inmates—some 15,000 SS men.