Eyewitness Testimony Peppino Camelliti

Article published in “La Provincia” on Wednesday, May 7, 2003 The story: A survivor from Como travels to Kahla on the occasion of the reopening of the tunnels where the Nazis built secret weapons in 1945 “I, Slave in Hitler’s Last Camp” A story saved from oblivion thanks to the research of the “Perretta” Institute by Pietro Berra When he left for military service, he weighed 59 kilos; when the Americans freed him, he had wasted away to 36 kilos. These numbers describe the tragedy of Peppino Camelliti, 78 years old, of Calabrian origin, living in Como since ’62. But other numbers give him reason to consider himself lucky: he is not among the 5-6,000 of approximately 10,000 prisoners who died in “his” camp; in the Kahla camp, which Hitler had established as one of the last in spring ’44 to build secret weapons, especially the jet-powered fighter Messerschmitt Me 262, with which he hoped to decisively change the balance of power in the Second World War. Tomorrow, the survivor will return to Germany for the memorial ceremony organized by the state of Thuringia, also representing his many dead comrades. But the celebration planned for Saturday is not just a simple ceremony, but the climax of the processing of a small piece of forgotten history. “Kahla belonged to the military area of former East Germany. So the tunnels, in which thousands of internees worked under inhuman conditions, were forgotten for half a century,” explains Valter Merazzi, head of the “Perretta” Institute in Como, who deserves credit for establishing contact between Camelliti and a young German researcher, Ulriche Kaiser1, who reconstructed the history of the notorious camp on a CD-ROM. Camelliti arrived in Kahla on January 7, 1945. He had more or less followed the same path as the other 640,000 Italian soldiers who were captured by the Germans after September 8, ’43. After his deportation to Germany, he received a visit in December at the Küstrin2 concentration camp from 1 Presumably her real name is Ulrike 2 In the original text Custrin = Küstrin on the border with Poland? Mussolini, who asked everyone who wanted to join the Republic of Salò. He refused, but not for ideological reasons, since he had no political education and had left school after three years of elementary school to support the family after his father returned as an invalid from the African campaign. “I tried to follow the crowd,” he says; “I wanted to be where most others were.” Besides, he believed forced labor would be less bad than war. “At first I worked in agriculture,” Camelliti recalls, “then in a tank factory in Nordhausen. On October 20, ’43, a part of a motor fell on my foot and I was admitted to a cinema converted into a hospital for Italian prisoners. While I was in the hospital, my comrades were asked who wanted to return to their civilian profession. Those who agreed were no longer guarded and received an ID that allowed them to pass everywhere, but no one asked me and I was sent to Kahla together with those who had refused.” Everyone understood where the wind blew on the first evening, “when we were pushed into a dark, windowless shed where there was no straw on the ground.” Camelliti uses an idyllic image to describe the location of the factory in Kahla: “It was a bit like Brunate3,” he says; “at the same level as the lake were the 35-kilometer-long tunnels where the parts of the jet planes were made, outside there were sheds where they were assembled, and then there was a kind of cable car used to transport the parts to the summit, where there was a launch ramp.” All this – the tunnels, the cog railway, and the ramp – was built under inhuman conditions by the prisoners: they wore the same summer uniform with which they had left Italy, wooden clogs from Holland on their feet, and around them was ice; the temperature dropped to 27 degrees below zero. The shifts lasted 12 hours; at the end of a shift they received a ration card for the only meal of the day, consisting of a ladle of broth and 100 grams of bread. “One day,” Camelliti recalls, “there was a second roll call while I was digging4 up on the hill. They recorded me as missing and I did not get a ration card. I was lucky because one of the men from here, a man from Lombardy named Santo Colombo, who received mail via the International Red Cross, gave me some of his rice. But on the following two evenings I had nothing to eat. On the third 3 Place on Lake Como 4 minare has two meanings: “to dig (under)” and “to mine”In the evening, I asked the interpreter to take me to the SS guards: "I don't care if they kill me," I thought, "I can't go on like this anymore." After a severe beating and the accusation of being lazy, he got his card back. Violence begets counter-violence, even in memory... Camelliti recalls other exemplary incidents: "An Italian who had joined the SS killed another who was searching through the trash for something to eat." Once, all the residents of his barrack were punished because two had run away from work to steal potatoes: "For five evenings, they made us carry sandbags senselessly from a river to the camp and from the camp back to the river." Camelliti saw many people die, on the ramp, in the tunnels, in the barracks. "They wrapped them in blankets and made them disappear." One day, the interpreter called together those who were still alive to tell them that the Germans would either win the war or kill them all. A Luftwaffe major had indeed received the order to bring them into the tunnels and then blow up the tunnels before the Americans arrived. But he did not carry out the order out of fear of the Allied tribunals. All this earned Hitler more than 40 airplanes. After Kahla, Camelliti will return with his children and also with an eight-year-old grandson. "From time to time," explains the child's mother, "he asks me why his grandpa came back home. Young people today see the war like a video game." About the person Peppino Carmelliti was born on July 23, 1924, in Giffone (Province of Reggio Calabria). He was drafted into military service in August 1943 and assigned to the 7th Artillery in the Livorno military district. After his capture by the Germans on September 12, he was deported to Germany, where he performed forced labor. The Americans liberated him on April 3, 1945, and sent him home on July 24. "We happened to come to Como," he explains; "because they wouldn't let us pass through France, so we decided on Switzerland." After reporting to the military district, he was transferred to Milan, then used a leave to go to Calabria, where he married the girl he had been engaged to before the war. He returned to Como in '62 to work there as a mason. He has lived with his family in Albate for 38 years. "I chose this place," he says, "because people from my area lived here. In '45 I was here so briefly that I didn't even know there was a lake here." Mockery instead of compensation No compensation: Former prisoner files appeal "We regret to inform you that we cannot grant your claim for compensation under the above-mentioned law. By communicating this decision, however, the OIM wishes to express its recognition and respect for every victim of the Nazi regime." With these words, the International Organization for Migration rejected the application that Peppino Camelliti submitted on November 30, 2001, to receive a share of the 10 million marks that German companies and the government had set aside to pay compensation to forced laborers of the Third Reich. But the applicable law of the foundation charged with distributing the money excluded the interned Italian soldiers and equated them with prisoners of war, even though Hitler did not recognize them as such in order to exploit them and thus circumvent the Geneva Convention. Only those held in concentration camps, extermination camps like Auschwitz and Dachau, are made an exception. Thus, of the 130,959 who applied, only 1,698 of our Italian compatriots received compensation. The deadline for filing an appeal expires on Friday. The "Perretta" Institute has printed hundreds of appeals to protest a decision that is "immoral and against history." "They told us we could decide whether we worked or not," notes the aforementioned Carmelliti. "But if you didn't work, you were killed." The most brutal incidents One night I was beaten until I lost consciousness.