by Gerard Gilbert

On the morning of 9 September 1943, my father and 500 other mainly British officers stepped through a hole obligingly cut in the barbed wire fence by their former captors at Fontanellato prisoner-of-war camp, near Parma in northern Italy.

Their hosts, having deposed Mussolini two months earlier, had signed an armistice with the Allies, and the Germans were expected to take over the PoW camps at any moment; in fact they arrived at Fontanellato just five minutes after the mass exit had been completed.

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Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/