The Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre mourns the death of Ugo Brilli. The last survivor of the former forced labour camp in Berlin-Schöneweide, which now houses the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre, died on 17 June 2021 in his native Tuscany at the age of 99.

At the age of 21, the Tuscan farmer and woodcutter Ugo Brilli begins a two-year period of suffering as a young prisoner of war and forced labourer. In September 1943, Italy withdraws from the alliance with Nazi Germany. The Wehrmacht then takes Italian soldiers prisoner, deports them to the German Reich and declares them military internees.

Among the total of 650,000 Italians is Ugo Brilli, who had been drafted into military service by Italy's army only a few months earlier. The radio operator stationed on the border with Slovenia first ends up in a collection camp in Luckenwalde in Brandenburg. From there, like around 30,000 comrades, he arrives in Berlin as a forced labourer. At first he had to clear rubble at Siemens, later he had to work in a carpentry workshop.

Ugo Brilli is released from captivity in 1944. However, he has to remain in Berlin as a civilian forced labourer. He is placed in forced labour camp No. 40 in Berlin-Weißensee. There he bribes the German cook in the camp kitchen with cigarettes, which he exchanges for bread on the black market, for example. In this way he secures a comparatively better job as a kitchen assistant and a little more food for himself and some of his comrades.

He survives a bombing raid on the forced labour camp on 7 May 1944, in contrast to 53 Italians who die in the camp's anti-splinter trenches. Brilli never forgets that day for the rest of his life. "Before I die, I want a memento of those poor comrades who died there," he says in a television interview in 2017.

This memento has existed since May 2021. On the initiative of Ugo Brilli, an information and memorial plaque erected by the Pankow Memorial Plaque Commission and the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre now commemorates Ugo Brilli's killed comrades at the former camp site in Weißensee. He takes great pleasure in this new memorial sign, which is so important to him, on the basis of photos sent to him of it. He is no longer able to travel to Berlin for the inauguration.

There are several reminders of Brilli in Schöneweide. At the end of 1944, Brilli was sent from Weißensee to camp no. 75/76, the present site of the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre. He worked again as a kitchen helper.

Brilli spent the last days of the war in 1945 mainly in one of the air-raid shelters there. After the liberation by the Red Army, he initially had no choice but to search for food supplies in the cellars of the surrounding houses in order to survive.

After the end of the war, the Russians put him to work dismantling a factory outside Berlin.

In September 1945, Ugo Brilli, who weighed only 48 kilograms and was seriously ill with typhus, was finally able to return to his family in Tuscany. Back home, the former military internee builds a new life for himself without any compensation or recognition for his imprisonment in Germany. He works in the forest again, marries and has two children.

Later he visits Germany and returns several times to the historical site of the former forced labour camp in Schöneweide. On 7 May 2013, for example, he speaks about his fate at the opening of the first permanent exhibition, "Forced Labour in the Daily Round 1938-1945". He shares his memories with school classes in both countries. In recognition of his valuable contribution to a common culture of remembrance in Germany and Italy, Brilli will receive the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on 9 December 2019.

Now Ugo Brilli, the last contemporary witness who was able to tell so perceptively and pointedly about his time of suffering as a prisoner and forced labourer in the Second World War, has died at the age of 99 in Campi Bisenzio near Florence.

The Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre commemorate a hitherto little-known chapter of the Holocaust with the short film "Karya 1943". The film highlights the deadly forced labour of Jewish men in the mountains of central Greece on the Athens - Salonika railway line in 1943.

80 years ago, the army of the Kingdom of Greece capitulated to the Wehrmacht, which had invaded the country. Years of plundering, starvation and mass murder followed under German occupation. This included the almost complete annihilation of Jewish life.

Near a village in Karya, a level siding was to be literally hammered into the rock to make it easier for waiting trains to start again in the future. The work was carried out under great time pressure in shifts. The approximately 300 Jewish prisoners received only mouldy food and hardly any water. Working clothes were not provided. Sadistic foremen and supervisors, Germans, Croats and Romanians, beat them.

More than 15 years ago, the Greek collector Andreas Assael - himself the son of a Jewish survivor - acquired a photo album at a Munich flea market that shows numerous photographs of forced labour in Karya. He succeeded in finding contemporary witnesses and researching details of the operation. In cooperation with Andreas Assael, the Foundation Memorial and the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre are now working on the concept of a German-Greek travelling exhibition, which is to open in both countries in 2023. The Federal Foreign Office funded a pilot project in 2020/2021 to further research the crime and locate the mass grave near the site.

The short film by Berlin-based director Stefan Auch introduces this important German-Greek reconciliation project.

Contact:

Dr. Ulrich Baumann, Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Tel: +49 (0)30 26 39 43 - 27, ulrich.baumann(at)stiftung-denkmal.de

Dr Kay Kufeke, Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre, Tel: +49 30 6390 288 13, kufeke(at)topographie.de