When guards shoved Dan Culler through the door of Barrack Nine he nearly passed out from the stench. Every Indiana barn he had ever been in smelled better than this place. The wooden floor was covered with filthy straw, which the prisoners slept on and used for toilet paper after they vacated in the miasmic slit trench just outside the front door. "What happened to me that night, and many more to follow, was the worst hell any person ever had to endure," Culler wrote in his searing prison memoir. A group of Russian prisoners held him down, stuffed straw in his mouth, and sodomized him repeatedly. "Coming from a small faming community, I never heard of men doing to me what they did. I... hadn't even been with a girl, except to hold her hand and give her a light kiss on her cheek or mouth. I was bleeding from all the openings of my body, and I prayed to God to take my life from me."

He was raped again the next morning and forced to have oral sex with several of his assailants, who stuck sticks in his mouth to pry it open. After being knocked unconscious, he awoke to find blood running down his throat. Too weak to move, and with his hands tied behind his back, he was thrown into the waste ditch outside the barracks. "When I finally came to my senses, I crawled from the ditch and tried to wipe myself with straw. I noticed something was hanging from my rectum, and realizing it was skin from the inside, I tried to push it back in."

Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany By Donald L. Miller; Pages 342-343