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for album of an unknown soldier held in an Allied POW camp in Italy
album of an unknown soldier held in an Allied POW camp in Italy
Creator
Unknown
Date1944
Medium99 photographs
Dimensions33cm x 20cm (12.99 x 7.87 inches)
Credit LineAnonymous gift, 2020
Object number2021/262
ProvenanceGerman WW2 album of an unknown soldier held in an Allied POW camp in Italy towards the end of the war. Photographs document his time in camps, fellow German POWs, the ruins of Monte Cassino, an American-occupied airfield, trips to Naples, Capri and Switzerland, and - most unusually - the cast and crew of a camp production of "Die Fledermaus" by Johann Strauss, performed by both German prisoners and American GI soldiers.
Technical photographs include a Sturmgeschütz III (StuG III) assault gun, a wrecked M4 Sherman tank, a C-47 Skytrain and a B-17G Flying Fortress.
Also of note are prints of Benito Mussolini, the deposed Italian fascist dictator, and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, who were executed by Italian partisans and their bodies hung upside down from a metal girder above a service station on Piazzale Loreto in Milan. Also photographs of a "mutige" (courageous) partisan in a coffin and the 1944 eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
POW albums on Italian soil are rare. Italian women with prisoners, also rare.
Ephemera includes postcard prints of Venice, Pisa and Naples. Captions.
LocationNot currently on display
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