Italo Tibaldi

Italo Tibaldi (born May 16, 1927 in Pinerolo , Province of Turin , † October 13, 2010 ) was an Italian survivor of the Mauthausen and Ebensee concentration camps . After his liberation of the research, he is committed and a book about the deportation of Italians in the NS - concentration camp published.

In resistance

Tibaldi's father was a cavalry officer in the Pinerolo riding school . As a result of the collapse of the army after the fall of Mussolini , the father joined a resistance group and Tibaldi became “automatically” a messenger.

Arrest and deportation

On January 9, 1944, on the way to Turin , he was arrested by Italian and probably also German civil servants. The arrest took place after a denunciation, which he only found out after returning home. Tibaldi was summoned to the SD office , where he was interrogated. The day after, he was taken to the Turin Penitentiary.

On the afternoon of 13 January Tibaldi and the remaining prisoners were taken to the station "Porta Nuova" locked in sealed freight cars and sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen deported , which they reached on the following day.

Mauthausen and transfer to Ebensee

After arriving at the camp, which was located on a hill, the deportees had to undress, after which they were pushed into the showers, disinfected and quarantined . This was followed by the issuing of the prisoner's clothing and the registration. Tibaldi was assigned the prisoner number 42307 and the red triangle for political deportees. The inmates were not allowed to leave the barracks, nor did they have any tasks outside of the building.

After a two-week quarantine, Tibaldi and around 500 other deportees were transferred to the Ebensee concentration camp on January 28, 1944, which was still under construction at that time.

Life in the Ebensee concentration camp

Tibaldi also contributed to the construction of the camp, but the purpose of the inmates' labor was different: the construction of a huge tunnel system to enable the development and production of V2 rockets .

At first he was assigned to a job that consisted of cutting plants, and later to work in the tunnels. In general, the Italians were not respected in the camp because “the figure of the Italian is a belligerent”. Due to his young age and his activity as a partisan , he was able to gain respect for the Russian prisoners in particular.

Together with other Italians, Tibaldi was also part of the camp's resistance committee, which existed in secret.

On May 4, 1945 - two days before the camp was liberated by American troops - the camp commandant asked the deportees to go into the tunnels to protect them. In reality, however, the SS men wanted to blow up the facility and kill all prisoners in the process. But they refused the order and the camp personnel fled.

The return to Italy

Tibaldi still weighed 36 kilograms and was admitted to the American hospital in Salzburg , which had been set up in a barracks. As a result, he was transferred to the Bolzano military hospital . There he found someone who took him to Milan . The first bad encounter with relatives of other prisoners, who asked about the fate of their sons, brothers, etc., began in Milan.

About this painful experience, Tibaldi said: "... or the matter of explaining to a mother that you saw her son go into the crematorium furnace or the gas chamber, how should you do that?"

He finally reached Turin by transport, where he was accepted by the Italian Red Cross . Tibaldi - suffering from scabies - managed to inform his mother, who then took him home in a small carriage - it was already the end of June or mid-July.

Tibaldi later took on a job as a surveyor for the municipality of Turin. In addition, he devoted himself to research and published a valuable work on the transports from Italy to the National Socialist concentration camps.

See also

• Roberto Castellani , Tibaldi's Italian fellow inmate in Ebensee
• Mario Piccioli , Tibaldi's Italian fellow inmate in Ebensee
• Deportation and Resistance Museum in Prato

bibliography

• Compagni di viaggio: dall'Italia ai camp nazisti. I trasporti dei deportati (1943–1945) , Milan: FrancoAngeli 1994, ISBN 978-88-204-8270-1 . (Italian)

Web links

• Italo Tibaldi's testimony on "Lager e deportazione" (Italian)
• Italo Tibaldi's speech in Ebensee on the ANED website (Italian)
• Website of the Deportation and Resistance Museum in Prato
• Morto Italo Tibaldi, testimone dei lager (Italian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, all information is taken from Tibaldi's certificate on "Lager e deportazione" (see "Weblinks")