Escape Artist by Peter Monteath

Author:Peter Monteath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

12

PARTISANS

EVEN WITH THE BEST OF INTENTIONS, IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO arrange a passage to Switzerland for everyone. The occupying German forces collaborated with their fascist Italian acolytes to block the exits from Italy as best they could. At every opportunity they pounced on men on the run and despatched them to Germany and a lengthy stint in a Stalag. There was little that the Allies and the new Italian government in the south could do to stop the procession of captures and deportations. When winter set in, the crossings into Switzerland became hazardous; it was not for want of courage or effort that many failed in their bids for freedom.

Over half the British servicemen who left their camps at the time of the Armistice were able to remain safely hidden for months on end; only a third reached Allied lines or the Swiss frontier.1 The luckiest found brave and accommodating hosts who sheltered them through to the end of hostilities. It was no mean feat, though, to remain in hiding for that length of time, and the strenuous efforts to round up all those on the loose forced the evaders to remain on the move, hoping to keep one step ahead of their pursuers.

The rules that maximised the chances of avoiding capture were neatly summarised by a British soldier. The main points were never to be static and to trust no-one. As for the crucial task of locating a sympathetic host, a range of counsel was offered. As a general rule, the code suggested, the poorer the house, the safer it was likely to be – ‘rich houses are invariably fascist’. Women working in the fields were usually reliable. Once a prisoner had stayed and eaten in a house, that house was very likely to be safe. The reasoning here was that such hosts would never betray a guest to the Germans, ‘as their house would be burnt down for having kept you the one night’.2

The challenges were exacerbated by intense competition for places of refuge, and not just from other POWs on the run. Much more numerous were their erstwhile enemies, Italian soldiers. The armistice had filled Hitler with rage. The Italian betrayal, as he saw it, would not go unpunished, and in the forefront of those to feel the Nazi wrath were the Italian soldiers who had caved in to the pressure of the Allies and thrown in their lot with the former enemy. If these men were seized by German forces, they, like the Allied POWs, were rounded up and packed off to Germany, where they died in their thousands. Classified as ‘military internees’ rather than prisoners of war, they were denied the protections that the Geneva Convention might otherwise have given them.

If they managed to avoid the German net, typically these Italian soldiers abandoned their uniforms, returned to the regions from which they came, and looked to family and friends to shelter them. The best strategy was to head for the countryside, the more remote and sparsely populated the better.

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