Bolzano Camp Memory Passage

Bolzano’s strategic location along the Brenner railway line made it an ideal site for this purpose. The camp ceased to exist on May 3, 1945, with the liberation of approximately 3,500 prisoners.

Although defined as a “Durchgangslager” (transit camp), Bolzano was more than just a collection point for the sorting of prisoners to extermination camps. It was also a place of suffering and death, as evidenced by its history and confirmed by the trial of one of its tormentors. During its brief existence, about 11,000 people were imprisoned in its barracks, including members of the resistance, Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and political opponents. From Bolzano, 13 train convoys transported 3,405 people to Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and other camps, with only about a third surviving. Of a transport comprising 136 Jewish women and children, none survived.

The Bolzano Camp was a fully-fledged concentration camp, participating in Nazi barbarity and instrumental in achieving its criminal objectives. Prisoners were reduced to mere numbers, stripped of all rights, and subjected to the criminal activities of the camp guards. Among these guards was SS Corporal Michael Seifert, born on March 16, 1924, in Landau. He had full freedom to kill and torture prisoners.

Thanks to the efforts of Military Prosecutor Bartolomeo Costantini of Verona, Seifert was brought to trial and found responsible for 11 brutal murders committed within the camp. On November 24, 2000, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Court of Verona, a verdict confirmed by the Military Court of Appeal of Verona on October 18, 2001, and finally validated by the Court of Cassation on October 8, 2002.

Seifert, who had moved to Germany after the war and then to Canada in 1951, was extradited to Italy and imprisoned in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, where he died in 2010 at the age of 86. The Seifert trial was one of the few against Nazi criminals where justice was fully served, from the trial to the sentence’s execution.

Today, there is little to see of the former camp. However of Memory Passage with historical information has been installed nearby the former location of the camp.