PG 82 - Laterina

Sheet by: Isabella Insolvibile

General data

Town: Laterina

Province: Arezzo

Region: Toscana

Location/Address: Laterina - Laterina

Type of camp: Prisoner of War camp

Number: 82

Italian military mail service number: 3200

Intended to: NCOs – Troops

Local jurisdiction: Difesa Territoriale Firenze

Railroad station: Laterina

Accommodation: tends, then hutment

Capacity: 6000

Operating: from 08/1942 to 08/09/1943

Commanding Officer: Col. Teodorico Citerni

Brief chronology:
Summer 1942: the camp was opened, and the PoWs were housed in tents.
November 1942: the first huts were built.
Spring 1943: many PoWs were assigned to work detachments.
September 1943: PoWs escaped from the camp and the detachments. Many were recaptured.
After the war: Col. Citerni was symbolically convicted for the war crimes committed in the camp.

Allied prisoners in the Laterina camp

Date Generals Officers NCOs Troops TOT
1.9.1942 1 203 2169 2373
30.9.1942 6 207 2159 2372
31.10.1942 5 248 2511 2764
30.11.1942 5 247 2516 2768
31.12.1942 5 242 2511 2758
31.1.1943 5 240 2472 2717
28.2.1943 5 240 2469 2714
31.3.1943 5 262 2215 2482
30.4.1943 5 332 2616 2953
31.5.1943 5 302 2415 2722
30.6.1943 5 337 2975 3317
31.7.1943 5 3925 3930
31.8.1943 11 515 6416 6942

Camp’s overview

PG 82 Laterina, intended for NCOs and privates, was opened in September 1942 and closed one year later. Initially, the PoWs were housed in tents without lighting or heating. However, already by November, the first huts had been built. Nonetheless, the camp was riddled with issues tied to lighting, heating (which was «expected but not provided»), the lack of a military shop, and insufficient supplies of tobacco, firewood, clothing, medicines, and insecticide. Moreover, the hygienic services were inadequate, including the infirmary, medical and sanitary structures.
In January 1943, the Italians decided to enlarge the camp to add 3,000 beds. In February, however, the Military health directorate of Florence noticed the inadequate outhouses, water systems, sewers, and clothing provided to the PoWs. These issues were not reported by the Protecting Power delegates (or only reported partially), who only mentioned the lack of proper sanitary installations. At the same time, they declared themselves fully satisfied with the treatment of the PoWs hospitalised in Arezzo.
During the following spring, many PoWs were sent to work detachments, while those who remained in the camp were all housed in well-ventilated and well-equipped huts. There were still issues with the water supply and lighting, while the space was sufficient only because half of the camp was functionally empty in this period.
The PoWs were mostly employed on the farms nearby but also in jobs tat they disliked or were even in evident violation of the Geneva conventions, which forbade using PoWs to support the captor’s war effort. For example, one Allied PoW employed in 1943 in a brick factory near Lucca testified that the PoWs were forced to work there although they had agreed to work only on farms. Moreover, some other PoWs were forced to work for a Genoese company that built a torpedo factory in Livorno, an open violation of article 31 of the Geneva conventions. Their case was investigated after the war as a war crime.
The table reports the work detachments of Laterina:

11.1942
Lappato (PI)
Soc. An. Ceramica Lucchese, manifacture
50 South Africans

2.1943
Saonara e Loreggia (PD)
Unknown in Saonara, villa
Wollemberg, farmstead, in Loreggia
250 South Africans (white)

3.1943
S. Quirico d’Orcia (SI)
Unknown
70 South Africans (white)

3.1943
Livorno
Impresa Mantelli Corbella e C., a building company (building a torpedo factory)
50 PoWs of unspecified origin

3.1943
Lastra a Signa (SI)
Unknown
50 South Africans (white)

3.1943
Saletto (MN)
Ditta Stevanin, farmstead
70 South Africans (white)

3.1943
Bagnoli di Sopra (PD)
Ditta Avas, farmstead
80 South Africans (white)

3.1943
Sesto Fiorentino-Campi Bisenzio (FI)
Consorzio bonifiche [reclamation consortium]
200 PoWs of unspecified origin

3.1943
Gambassi (FI)
S.A. Immobiliare Ceres, probably a building company
50 PoWs of unspecified origin

3.1943
Meleto (SI) e Castelfiorentino (FI)
Aziende Volpi e Canevaro, unknown
50 PoWs of unspecified origin

3.1943
Monte Giovi e Poggio Reale Rufina (FI)
Azienda Spalletti Trivelli, probably a farmstead
50 PoWs of unspecified origin

3.1943
Mercatale (FI)
Aziende Buoncompagni, Ludovisi, Fucini e Alessandri
50 PoWs of unspecified origin

3.1943
Carlone, frazione di Vaglia (FI)
Azienda Eredi Corsini
50 PoWs of unspecified origin

3.1943-8.1943
Borgo San Lorenzo (FI)
Cantiera Soterna, building company (building a plant for wood mashing)
200 British and South Africans

4.1943
Carcheri Ginestra, frazione di Lastra a Signa (FI)
Fattoria Marliana del principe Gian Giacomo Borghese, farmstead
50 British and South Africans

Work in the farmsteads allowed the PoWs to enjoy some freedom, organise escape attempts and mingle with civilians, a relationship that, for some, would be useful after the Armistice. For example, a PoW working in the village of Pietraviva (Arezzo) recalled that, on Saturdays and Sundays, the local farmers visited the farm and chatted with them and the guards, comparing their conditions with those of their relatives who were PoWs in Allied territory. A few weeks later, they celebrated together the announcement of the Armistice, all thinking about «going home».
Despite the quite optimistic reports of the Red Cross and Protecting Power delegates, the PoWs’ living conditions in Laterina were often difficult because of the camp’s conditions and the guard’s behaviour. Allied soldiers endured the cold, shortages of supplies, their precarious accommodation, and the general conditions of leaving in an uneasy situation of captivity. In May 1943, a PoW killed himself, and, in his farewell letter, he asked for his family not to be informed about the causes of his death, as he did not blame anyone for it. He claimed he was «a Christian pacifist and socialist» and wrote that he wanted to «deny the right of the State to demand that I take the arms against my fellow men» [TNA, WO 224/135]. The camp leader and the other PoW officers dismissed the event as «a sad case of mental derangement».
Another prisoner described Laterina as such:

When I arrived at this Camp, the accommodation provided for prisoners consisted solely of improvised tents made from Italian ground sheets. There was much suffering amongst the prisoners due to the cold, wet and wintry conditions. In January 1943, we were moved out of these tents into huts which had just been erected. For the first months, we had to sleep on the stone floors of the huts, but later beds were provided. Each man was given one Italian blanket. There were several incidents of prisoners fainting on parade on cold days, for we were paraded for roll-call every day and this parade varied in length from three-quarters of an hour to four or five hours. We were always made to parade longest as a reprisal if we had done anything wrong. [TNA, WO 311/314]


To make things worse, some guards behaved uncooperatively and were sometimes openly hostile to the PoWs. The commander, Col. Teodoro Citerni, was described by a PoW as responsible for many of the camp’s issues: «deficiencies in food and equipment were due mainly to his failure to obtain for the prisoners what they were entitled to, and similarly any active ill-treatment of prisoners was the result either of his direct orders or of the policy he laid down» [TNA, WO 311/314].
PoWs often faced disproportionate punishments, such as the one inflicted on Private Foxcrot, who was arrested by the carabinieri, beaten, chained, and left in solitary for 28 days because he attempted to trade some soap with some guards whom, however, he refused to denounce. Driver Newton was handcuffed to a tree for four days with his back to the trunk, exposed to the scorching sun in the summer of 1943, because he was caught claiming that Italy would lose the war. These punishments, which bordered on torture, were commonplace in Italian PoW camps.
The PoWs, on the other hand, put a lot of effort into organising escape attempts in Laterina and elsewhere. In April 1943, a South African soldier, whose name remained unknown, was killed, probably during an escape attempt, and his British comrade was wounded. Punishments after escapes were constant and violent; often, the PoWs were beaten and then transferred to PG 5 Gavi, a punishment camp.
When the Armistice was announced, the PoWs demanded to be released. The guards opposed some resistance but then accepted and, apparently, even gave them some weapons, perhaps their own. After leaving the camp, many PoWs returned to it as they did not know where to go. In this way, many were recaptured by the Germans. Some, however, managed to disperse and disappear, thanks to the help of the civilian population. Especially those who worked in the detachments managed to escape. One of them recalled that their employer warned them that the Germans were arriving in the village and advised them to run and hide or try to reach their troops. However, the PoWs hesitated, as the «Italian version of a situation» was not always taken seriously [SMTA, Hirst, A Sherwood forester’s story of World War II, sezione 41, digital page 49].
The mistreatment of the PoWs was investigated, immediately after the war, in two separate investigations: case UK-I/B. 102 Vari/Citerni et alii, concerning the bad accommodations and the PoWs who were forced to work to support the Italian war effort; and case UK-I/B. 129 Vari/Citerni et alii (Laterina, 1942-1943), which investigated Col. Citerni (carabinieri), accused of mistreatment, including bad living conditions and excessive punishments, by many witnesses. He was put on trial in August 1946 and found guilty. However, his sentence was merely symbolic: one day in prison.
PG 82, the work detachment of Borgo San Lorenzo, and the mass escape after the Armistice, thanks to the Italian population, were narrated by former PoW Frank Unwin in his memoir, significantly titled: Escaping has ceased to be a sport. A soldier’s memoir of captivity and escape in Italy and Germany.
After 8 September 1943, the Germans used the camp as a transit camp for Italian and Allied PoWs. Many war crimes were committed in this period, especially as the PoWs were forced to march to the train station. The camp was evacuated in June 1944.
Soon afterwards, in the summer of the same year, the Allies reopened the camp to house German and Fascist PoWs. From June 1945 until February 1947, the camp was used by the Allies (Camp n. 374) and then by the ministry for post-war assistance (camp n. 219) to house Fascist PoWs captured in the North after the Liberation. It housed up to 5,000 former soldiers of the Italian Social Republic, including those of the closed Coltano camp (Pisa). Many of them were freed between the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1946. The camp was then closed.
Until 1953, Laterina became a refugee camp, housing Italians from the eastern border with Yugoslavia, the Dodecanese, Libya, and Tunisia.
Today, only some huts survive. In 1998, a memorial stone was placed in the area during the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights




Archival sources

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