Ermanno Foschi and the Italian Military Internees

"Italian Military Internees" arrive at a German POW Camp, September 1943 (from www.ns-zwangsarbeit.de)

Ermanno Foschi, from Rovereto (Trentino), was a 19-year-old recruit in the 2nd Alpine Artillery Regiment at the time of the Armistice of Cassibile. The announcement of the Armistice, on 8 September 1943, found him in the barracks in Meran, South Tyrol, where a few hours later they were rounded up by German troops who marched them to Bolzano/Bozen. After spending the night there, in the early morning of 9 September Foschi and his comrades were marched to the railway station, where a freight train was waiting for them:

“We were lined up in groups of fifty-six men in front of each wagons (…) the soldier guarding us asked “Wie viel uhr ist”, pointing to his wrist; some of my comrades, understanding that gesture, raised their arms and looked at their clocks, and at this point the soldier, aiming his submachine gun at them, ordered them to hand over their clocks. (…) We entered the wagons, which were then locked from the outside, and thus we departed for Germany, destination unknown. Being fifty-six in the wagon, we could not sit down; so we took turns. The real problem were the physiological needs. One of my mates took a bayonet from his backpack, and with that we made a hole in a corner of the wagon. (…) In the early morning [of 11 September] the train slowed down (…); shortly thereafter, it stopped.

They immediately opened the wagons and shouting “raus, raus”, they made us come out. I later learned that we had reached Stammlager XI-B near the village of Fallingbostel, and that we were military internees without any assistance and forced to work for the Reich. After leaving the train we were put in a column and we entered the camp. It was huge, littered with wooden buildings and surrounded by barbed wire; around it, in the distance, we could see the woods. Each building consisted of twelve rooms, and in each room there were twelve three-story bunk beds without mattresses (…). Immediately afterwards, we were called, lined up and photographed, each of us holding a sign with a number. My number was 151-909 and from that moment my surname did not exist anymore.

In the afternoon, a Fascist official came, accompanied by two SS soldiers, and in front of the barracks he climbed on a stool and informed us that Mussolini had been freed and that if we wanted to return to Italy all we had to do was to sign the pledge [to the Italian Social Republic], but that if we chose to stay, we would endure a hard life and most of all, famine. Welcomed with whistles and shouts against the Duce, the official left. Very few men signed. (…) That night, we received a ladleful of water and turnips, a kilogram of bread and 100 grams of margarine, to be divided between eight. This was the ration they gave for an entire day.

Two days later, in the morning, they loaded around two hundred of us onto trucks and after a trip that lasted several hours, we arrived in another camp [Arbeitskommando 6008, near Hilkerode], also surrounded by barbed wire: inside it were four wooden buildings, plus another one that was the seat of the German headquarters. The buildings were identical to the ones of the previous camp (…) The German guards were Wehrmacht soldiers, about a dozen. The camp was near a small village. Shortly after our arrival we were gathered in the courtyard and counted one more time; then each of us was asked what was our job in Italy. Nearly all, myself included, answered “farmers” in the hope of being assigned to agricultural work. Our hopes were soon disappointed; at six in the following morning, after receiving a cup of barley coffee we were divived into squads and left the camp; after marching for some kilometres, we reached a large factory under construction [near Rhumspringe].

We entered the construction site; some German civilians took us over, and in groups of fifteen we were assigned to various tasks. I ended up in a group tasked with unloading bricks from railway wagons. We thought that at noon we would receive a meal. Just half an hour of rest, instead, and no lunch at all. At evening, when we returned [to the camp], the dinner consisted of a ladleful of water and turnips, of the usual bread and margarine to be divided between eight. Our hunger was great, and every day that passed I felt weaker, also owing to the work in the construction site. One day my friend Fausto Festini (also from Rovereto, he hailed from the district of Borgo Sacco) told me that, since he was allowed to go to the nearby village (as he worked as a painter in the camp), he had noticed some piles of potatoes near a hospital. (…) We thought that we could try to steal them at night. We spent several days thinking about how do to that. We decided that I was to procure a pair of pincers [to cut the barbed wire], a screwdriver [to unscrew a small window on the roof of the buildings where the prisoners were accommodated] and some rope from the construction site. (…) every night I checked the movements of the guards. Thus I learned that after midnight surveillance greatly slackened, the guards only left their building every fifteen minutes for a round of inspection. (…) One night we decided to act. We left after midnight, and within ten minutes we were out of the camp. In order to reach the piles of potatoes, we had to jump over waterfilled moats and cross some fields (…) we filled our sack with potatoes, tried to close the holes and we returned to the camp. (…) We had been away for about two hours. (…) I and Fausto repeated this once a week, for over a month. One day, Fausto told me that the Germans had noticed that the barbed wire had been cut, and thus our escapes and our feasts came to an end.

Our only day of rest was on Sunday; in the morning that asshole of our camp commander gathered us in the courtyard, asked us if we wanted to sign [the pledge to the RSI] to return to Italy, and when we refused he forced us to march at goose step for about an hour. That was also the day we devoted to personal hygiene and delousing of our clothes. The Germans gave us a special letter with which we could write home once a month, and a food stamp so that our relatives could send us a package with food and clothes.

Christmas and New Year [1944] passed melancholicallly; we talked about how we had passed our previous Christmas festivities with our families, listing the respective menus. (…) Our relationship with the German guards were awful, and that with the civilians wasn’t any better. Both seized any opportunity to lash out at us. I had not revealed that I know German, fearing they would force me to act as an interpreter with my mates. Feigning not knowing German was also useful in slowing down the work; if they told me to bring a shovel, for instance, I brought a pickaxe, etc.; these tricks were answered with kicks and slaps by the German civilians. We did have an interpreter, a South Tyrolean; but he never came with us to the construction site, he always remained at the camp. For sure he did not help us, I never heard him trying to defend us, albeit I realize it wasn’t easy. (…)

On their part, the German soldiers never missed an occasion to show us their contempt and to treat us like scum. “Scheisse Mensch” – shit man – was their usual way of addressing us. We reciprocated with resentment and hatred, cursing everything German. We were still wearing our old uniforms, by then worn-out and ripped, without any blankets for the night, infested with lice. Every day, at dawn, we had to carry out the bin full of excrements and urine, to be emptied into a tank outside the hut (…) for the entire day we felt dirty and stinky, devoid of strength, walking and working like robots. Not to mention the “transgressions”: the slightest delay at the morning roll call, or not being perfectly aligned when marching to the construction site, and so on. At the moment, you’d get a beating. Worse, in the evening (…), before dinner, we had to watch as those who had been sentenced to punishment were punished. The poor guy was stripped to the waist, then forced to lift weights, and in the end, they poured buckets of freezing water on him. (…)

Raids by British and American bombers were more and more frequent at night, and in the distance we could hear the blasts of the bombs. Our camp lay between two great cities: Hannover and Braunschweig.

In January [1944] we received the first letters from home, along with the first packages (…) I received the first package in early March, and that was a day of celebration. Finally, I could eat something different in quantity and quality. The package, besides dry bread, tinned meat and other things, contained a sack of corn flour. I cooked polenta, with great joy of mine and of my friends. (…) At the construction site, in the meantime, an event happened, which deeply saddened me. At noon, when we were given half an hour’s rest, we were unhealtily hungry. In the construction site, there were some huts used as kitchens, where the cooks cooked meals for the German civilians and some Polish collaborators. They usually discarded the potato skins in some bins outside the huts. We were forbidden from coming near. The huts were surrounded by barbed wire, but we often managed to overcome it and filled our pockets and our hats with the potato skins. (…) One day, in March, a friend from Folgaria came with me, his name was Renato Cappelletti. Unfortunately, some German soldiers saw us; I managed to escape, but he got tangled in the barbed wire. I later learned that he died from the beating he had received. (…)

The new job at the construction site consisted of carrying pipes to the upper levels of a large building (…) most likely the pipes were used to manufacture chimical products. We thought we could sabotage this plant, and thus we inserted some cloths into the pipes (…) before they were welded together. This gave us immense satisfaction, even though the risk was great.

During those days, I started to feel ill, to suffer from acute, continuous dysentery, regardless of what I ate, to the point that I was no longer able to stand on my feet, and I was thus admitted to the infirmary. There, by the way, we did not receive any care, but at least we were exempt from work. (…) Suddenly, one morning, (…) they put us on a truck, and we left. During the trip, talking between us, we made dark predictions about our future, as we had heard about the existence of camps for the annihilation of prisoners. Luckily (so to speak) we went back to the “base camp”, Stammlager XI-B.

This time I was billeted to a hut where only people in bad health conditions had been housed, to the point that all of us could barely stand. Each morning, someone did not move anymore. The unfortunate man was taken, placed in a sort of coffin, and carried outside on a cart. At some distance from the huts there was a large ditch (…) the body fell in the ditch and was immdiately covered with lime. (…) This work was performed by us prisoners. (…) The ration always consisted of a ladleful of water and turnips and a loaf of bread to be divided between eight. After two or three days I was summoned to the building where the German command was located. With a tremendous effort, I reached the building. The soldier who had called me informed me that ther were two packages for me. (…) I opened the first package, which had been sent by my uncle Ugo, from Russi di Romagna (…) It contained a salami and a lot of dry bread from Romagna. In that moment I realized that perhaps I could have managed to recover. (…)

Slowly the dysentery started to abate, the swelling in my legs subsided, and I started walking again without problems. At this point I noticed that next to our camp there was a camp for French POWs. (…) The French could enter our camp, but we could not enter theirs. The French soldiers were assisted by the Red Cross, and “radio scarpa” [literally: “radio shoe”; meaning rumors among the soldiers] said they had plenty of food. With my two packs of cigarettes, I thought, I could bribe the guard and enter the camp. I tried with the soldier on watch in the morning: he said “Nein”, but the one on watch in the afternoon accepted the cigarettes, and thus I was able to enter the French camp. I entered the first hut, but I was rejected: they called me “maccaronì”; however in the second one I found some young men I made friends with (…) The problem was that in order to enter and exit the camp without being stopped, I needed to look like a French soldier. They lent me one of their greatcoats and field caps, and this worked perfectly, as I had no difficulties in going in and out [of their camp]. (…)

This [the visits to the French camp] went on for about fifteen days, until one morning, after the usual headcount, a German doctor came. He visited me, and told the soldiers who were taking notes that I was now able to resume working. (…) It was May [1944] (…) After two days, in the morning, I was called along with another six of my companions; we were loaded on a small truck and as usual, without knowing our destination, we left. (…) we reached a very small camp. There was one hut with about thirty Italian soldiers in it. We were guarded by a German corporal, who walked with a limp. The hut was located just outside a village near a railway station, surrounded by the countriside. The village was called Neuhaus. The hut was smaller, with bunk beds with straw mattresses. It seemed to me I had entered another world. The kitchen was managed by Belgian civilians, and we received two meals per day; the meal was less unpleasant, and besides the usual bread and margarine, it also included boiler potatoes.

The factory where we worked was nearby (…) it was a rather run-down factory, which produced black tiles made of tar. (…) I worked at the press, it was not a hard job, just a boring one – I was always doing the same thing for nine hours. We started working at eight in the morning; at noon we had an hour’s break and then we resumed till six in the evening. Meanwhile, I made friends with the soldiers billeted in my hut. There were Venetians, Lombards, and southerners, and the orderly was from Rimini. After some time, they gave me a different task; they assigned me as an assistant to a German civilian (…) He was an old, short, thin man, whom I slowly made friends with. At the beginning, as usual I feigned not knowing German, but one day (after about one month) while we were pouring, as usual, the sand and boiling tar into a big cylinder with a mixer in it, he told me: “It would be good to throw Mussolini and Hitler together (“Zusammen”) in here”. I thus realized that he was an opposer of Nazism. I heartily told him that I agreed with him, and while I was at it I informed him that I understood and spoke German. He smiled in satisfaction. On the following day, he told me that he had a son he could not talk with about politics, as he was a member of the SS. “Nazism” he complained “is the ruin of Germany”. There was a lot of mistrust even among German civilians in the factory, so we made sure that nobody saw us when we were talking. Every morning he brought me two slices of bread with margarine (…) He was really a good person. He always kept me up to date about how the war was going, and this comforted me; for I learned that Germany was now losing on all fronts and was near defeat. At night the air raids on the cities continued, and we were continuously awakened by the alarms.

One night, in July, big bombers came in random order, flying lower than usual, and they kept flying over us for six, seven hours. An impressive sight (…) On the following day, my German friend informed me that Hildesheim, a very industrial town, had been razed to the ground. “This was an American reprisal” he told me. On the previous day, the flak of Hildesheim had shot down an American bomber, and the pilots, after bailing out, had been machine-gunned and killed while they descended in their parachutes. How could have he known of the killing of the pilots was always a mystery to me, as they had only been shot down the previous evening. A few days later he told me of the attempt on Hitler’s life: it had failed, and there had been a ferocious repression.

The prisoner who slept right above me in the bunk bed was named Scognamillo (Neapolitan). A good lad, always smiling and playful (…) On Sundays, we brought our bunk beds out in the courtyard and we disassembled them, as they were infested with bed bugs. We lit a fire, we seared the wooden parts of the beds with it, and you could hear the crackle of the bed bugs that were getting baked. (…) In this camp we enjoyed relative freedom, it was as if the German corporal wasn’t even there (…) He trusted us and knew us all. He was a good man. One day, after work, two Italian Fascists in plain clothes came and asked us if we wanted to go back to Italy and sign up for the Salò Republic; when we refused, they proposed us to sign up as civilian workers, as long as we signed an application form. We all replied that we were internees and we wanted to remain so. They left without arguing, albeit visibly annoyed. It was September [1944]. (…) One morning [the German corporal] came to wave us goodbye. Sadly, he had been called up for the Eastern Front, and he was very depressed. (…)

Sometimes we discussed politics, but we mostly talked of the past, as most of us had been born in the Fascist period and we did not have any political ideal. We felt anti-fascist, yes, we were against the war and we blamed Mussolini’s Fascism for what had happened. With us, at that time, there was a Piedmontese of a certain age (…) he told us he had fled from Italy as he was a Socialist; Germans and Fascists had been looking for him. Often, in the evenings, this Piedmontese explained Socialist ideology to us. We were very interested and we asked many questions, we wanted to know the value of the word “freedom”.

The winter of 1944 was nearing the end. At the factory, work as usual. From my German friend I knew that the Wehrmacht was retreating on all fronts. We couldn’t wait for liberation. In March [1945], one day, we went to the factory and we were told it had been closed due to lack of raw materials. The end was in the air. On the following day, a German civilian came and led us to a wood where there were some huts and prisoners wearing a white and blue striped uniform (we later learned they were Jews) guarded by the SS. Underground, in the wood, they said there was a factory that produced the “V-2” bomb [note: this was the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp]. We were tasked with cleaning up the wood, cutting some trees, etc. Basically we did little or nothing. This sort of work lasted about twenty days. Thus we reached the end of March. One evening, on 2 April, I remember well, while returning from work I saw a poster, and stopped to read it. It contained an order by Goebbels, dated 30 March, urging the Germans to kill all prisoners, political and military. I immediately warned my friends of this danger, and together we decided that we would not go to work anymore, we would hide in the factory in daytime and keeping watch in turns at night.

On the following day, the road we usually walked was full of retreating German soldiers. There were groups of soldiers on foot, trucks full of servicemen, a tank with another two, crowded with soldiers, in tow. Besides them, where was a squad of youngsters in Nazi uniform: 15 or 16 year old boys who marched singing. There was a column of Jews, too. They marched with difficulty, pushed with shouts and beatings. Every now and then you could hear gunshots, probably the killing shots for those who could not continue. We observed all this while hiding in the factory. After seeing this I decided to flee from the camp, without listening to those who said we should stay. I called my friend Scognamillo and I told him to prepare. After dinner, as soon as night came, with our backpacks on our shoulders, I escaped along with the Neapolitan [Scognamillo], a Valtellinese and a Vicentine, and we entered the nearby woods. We walked all night (…) At dawn, we saw a large hut atop a hill (…) the hut was closed, with is door bolted, but we laboriously managed to unnail a plank and to get inside. (…) we prepared a pallet and we fell asleep.

We woke up around noon (…) Now there was the problem of finding food and drink. From the hut we saw some fenced market gardens with huts inside them. (…) We went out in the evening and we noticed that there were many snails near some ditches, so we collected a lot of them. Inside the huts, we found many potatoes. Loaded with them, we went back to our hut. (…) We spent the entire day and the following night in the hut. The following morning, a tank appeared in the distance, which we thought to be American. It was advancing very slowly. The guns placed near the bridge started firing, and the tank backed off and disappeared. At first we did not understand why it had retreated, but after about half an hour two American planes came and repeatedly dropped cluster bombs near the bridge; when they left, nothing remained of the battery. The rest of the day passed without further attacks. (…) During the night many German soldiers passed near the hut, sometimes they tried to enter, but upon finding it locked they left.

The next morning, we were awakened by a deafening noise; we looked out of the window and saw a huge American tank, stopped a short distance from the hut. We immediately got dressed, tied a white rag to a cane, and waving that we went out and approached the tank. As soon as they saw us, the tank slowly moved towards us; it was a moment of great joy but also of worry, as we feared that they might not recognize us. The hatch on the turret opened and an American soldier came out, holding a submachine gun; we shouted “We are Italians!” The American lowered the gun, shouting back: “Paisans!” – it turned out he was an Italian American, the son of southern immigrants, who immediately made friends with Scognamillo, speaking in their dialect. His mates also came out of the tank, they celebrated and gave us cigarettes, canned meat and white bread. It was 7 April 1945, my name-day, and as far as I can remember, the happiest day of my life.

We then asked what should we do, where should we go. They advised us to go beyond the town and wait for the infantry. They also told us that for three days we would have “carte blanche”, that is we would be free to do whatever we wanted, even against German civilians. We bode them goodbye and we thanked them.

Passing through the town, I saw a cart in the courtyard of an apartment block, which I thought could be useful. I entered the courtyard and, counting on what the Americans had told us, I seized the cart. A middle-aged man immediately came out and, with usual German fury and arrogance, started to threaten us, yelling “Raus! Raus!”. My reaction was swift. I had so much repressed anger from the past two years, that I beat him with the cane I had used to wave the white flag a little earlier. (At this point, when I narrated these events to an old friend of mine, he looked surprised: “I did not think you were this aggressive” (…) My reaction, apparently, had seemed disproportionate to him; and perhaps it was. If one did not consider those endless nineteen months of hard and precarious life. I was still angry over the six months I had spent at Camp 6008, the hunger I had suffered there, the illness I had endured, from dysentery to tuberculosis; with only one desperate thought in mind: survive in those sorrowful and humiliating conditions. (…)

So, we loaded our backpacks on the cart, went to the outskirts of the town, and waited for the American infantry, but after a long column of tanks, an endless caravan of Dodge trucks started passing through the town. Towards evening, the truck column stopped. Scognamillo approached some American soldiers, found more of his countrymen. They gave us tinned food, chocolate etc. and they informed us that they were the infantry. As it had now gotten dark, we needed to find a place to sleep. Our Neapolitan friend asked one of his countrymen to accompany us to a nearby farmstead. Indeed, thanks to the presence of this American soldier, the owner offered us a room without saying a word. I acted as an interpreter, and the joy I felt at hearing his submissive “Ja” to my request cannot be described.

Before going to sleep (…) I noticed a nearby roost. I went back to my friends and I asked both the Valtellinese and the Vicentine if they were capable of wringing chicken necks. The answer was negative. These two weren’t of much help. I wanted to catch at least two or three chickens; with Scognamillo we devised a way (…) We left early in the morning. After a couple of hours we stopped in a field near a wood. We plucked the chickens, lit a fire and boiled them. After two years of turnips and potatoes, the taste of that broth and of those chickens felt unforgettable.

In the afternoon, we started our trip back to the camp we had come from. (…) We reached the camp in the evening, and there we found nearly all our old friends. Next to our hut was the local American command. The following day, Scognamillo went there and found yet another countryman (a sergeant). This friendship with the sergeant had its use, as in the nearby station there were some locked train carriages, which we opened with his permission. One of the wagons was full of boxes containing bars of soap. We took four boxes and used our cart to carry them. We opened one of the boxes in the dormitory, and gave the soap to all our comrades. Another box I gave to my anti-Nazi German friend (I knew his address) as a sign of gratitude. The poor man could not thank me enough, as in those times when everything was lacking even a certain amount of soap bars, that could be traded for other goods, was a fortune.

I did not know what to do with the remaining two boxes. One day, Scognamillo had an idea and told me: “Why don’t we go to the nearby villages and trade them for other goods?” “Sure” I agreed, “but we need the Americans’ permission to do this”. Scognamillo went to his friend the sergeant, and we got permission to go to the nearby villages. The next day, in the morning, we loaded a box on the cart and left. Halfway we were stopped by a patrol of American [military] police (white band with a “P” in the center). We showed our written authorization, they said “Ok” and left. The best part came when we reached the square of this village. After putting the soap bars on display on the cart, Scognamillo started to shout in Neapolitan: “soap bars, women!” I laughed a lot, but his call was effective, as shortly thereafter some women came, and we traded nearly all our bars of soap with eggs, margarine, potatoes, salt and other things I can’t remember. (…)

Over a month had passed since the day of our liberation, but there was no word about when we could go home. Railways didn’t work, bridges had been blown up: basically all of Germany was destroyed. There was only one chance: return to Italy on foot. Some of us, the most impulsive, took ths risk, but to me and to most of the others it seemed a folly to cross that way chaos-stricken Germany. I said to myself: they brought us here by train, and by train we will return, even if we will have to wait for months. And things went exactly that way, as we left for Italy in early September.

In the meantime, I had put on weight, as we did nothing but eat and sleep; and play cards every day. We learned that the American air force had dropped the atom bomb on a Japanese island [sic] and that Japan had surrendered. We did not know, however, what the hell was an atom bomb and how much destruction it wreaked. In early September, as I said, we left on a train bound for Italy.

[We travelled] in freight cars, but this time the wagons were open and there was plenty of space to lay dawn. It took us four days to get to Innsbruck in Austria. The train proceeded extremely slowly; especially on the bridges, which had been replaced by American prefabricated ones, we proceeded at a walking pace, and in many stations our stops lasteds for hours and hours. Everywhere we saw destroyed homes and entirely charred towns. The city that impressed me the most was Nuremberg, a pile of rubble. Only in the evening of the fourth day we reached Innsbruck. A large transit camp had been set up next to the station, and we spent the night in those huts. In the morning they gave us a shower, while our clothes and backpacks were deloused.

In the afternoon, we left for Bolzano. The scene when we crossed the Brenner was moving: some were misty-eyed, others shouted “Italy, Italy!”, so happy we were for being finally back. We reached Bolzano, we got out of the wagons and we were led to the nearby transit camp, which had been set up for us returnees from Germany. They welcomed us over the loudspeakers and informed us that after dinner we would leave for Pescantina, another transit camp. Thus, after two years, we ate a plate of macaroni with tomato sauce. The day was 7 September 1945, two years after my departure (…)

We left around midnight, and at five in the morning the train stopped in Rovereto. After saying goodbye to my friends and hugging Scognamillo, I got out of the wagon (…) and headed towards home. Truth be told, as I got nearer to my home, which was close to the station, my legs started trembling as it had been six months since I had last heard of my family. From the distance I saw that my home was intact, and I calmed down a little bit. I rang the doorbell two or three times. My mother opened the door, and she almost couldn’t believe her eyes! And together came my sisters, awakened at that hour, sleepy but happy. My mother made me a coffee, then, as I was dead tired, I undressed and went to bed. After so much time spent sleeping on bare planks, I felt as if I was sinking into the bed. I was home at last." 

(the full account, in Italian, can be found at www.reducelager.blogspot.com)