Re: The Secret POW Photographer

Date: March 21, 2004

"WWII photographer dies

By BILL HUGHES
THE JOURNAL NEWS

YONKERS — A funeral is scheduled today for Angelo Spinelli, a former Yonkers resident whose secret photographs taken while a prisoner in a German stalag during World War II have been hailed as the largest single collection of its kind in existence.

An Army Signal Corps photographer who was captured in 1943, Spinelli was held prisoner for more than two years, during which he bartered with German guards to supply him with camera equipment and film. When he was liberated by Russian troops in April 1945, Spinelli had amassed a collection of more than 1,000 images of daily life in Stalag III-B in Furstenburg, about 50 miles southeast of Berlin.

Spinelli died of natural causes Friday at his home in Florida, two days before his 87th birthday. He will be buried today next to his wife at the Gate of Heaven cemetery in Valhalla, said their son, James.

Spinelli died just weeks after a book of his photographs, "Life Behind the Barbed Wire: The Secret World War II Photographs of Prisoner of War Angelo M. Spinelli," was published by Fordham University Press.

"I think he figured he could finally relax now," James Spinelli said. "He had been working toward this for years and I know he was very happy and satisfied that it finally all came together."

Spinelli was born March 14, 1917, in the Bronx, to Domenica and Giacomo Spinelli, immigrants from Casamassima, Italy. His love of photography began in high school, where he took pictures for the school newspaper.

Unable to find work as a photographer during the Depression, Spinelli took a job in the jewelry trade before he was drafted. He landed in Algiers with Gen. George Patton's 1st Armored Division in November 1942 and was captured three months later by German troops under the command of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at the Battle of Fiad Pass in Tunisia.

In an interview with The Journal News in 2000 marking a traveling exhibition of his photographs, Spinelli said he ran out of both film and luck on the day he was captured. "I was out of film, so I was just sitting around when this lieutenant asked me to escort some German prisoners to the rear for interrogation," Spinelli said. "We got all turned around, and the next thing you know, we walked right into a German patrol, and they turned the tables on us."

Spinelli said that many of the guards at his prison camp were happy to be sitting out the war, far from combat, and many were willing to exchange favors for scarce items the prisoners received from home and in Red Cross packages: cigarettes, chocolate and coffee.

Shortly after arriving at Stalag III-B, Spinelli bribed a German guard with eight packs of cigarettes for a 120mm Bessa-Voightlander folding camera. He and the guard set up a system whereby Spinelli would pay one pack of cigarettes to get a roll of film, and another pack to get it developed. "They told us we weren't going to get out of there alive anyway, so I figured what did I have to lose?" Spinelli said.

To conceal the prints and negatives, Spinelli dug out a hiding place underneath his bunk bed.

"The barracks had bricks on top of a sand floor, so I lifted one of the bricks under the leg of the bed and dug a hole in the sand as deep as my arm could reach," Spinelli said. "I traded cigarettes for some cement and made a cover for the hole, and whenever I heard there was going to be a search, I'd put all my stuff down there."

After the war, Spinelli settled in Yonkers for 38 years and operated a jewelry business with his brother in New York City. The photographs sat in a box for decades until Spinelli was contacted in the mid-1980s by a publisher that wanted to reprint some pictures that had been published in the 1940s.

In June of 2000 Spinelli donated most of his photographs to the National Park Service, which keeps them at the Andersonville (Ga.) Historic Site, a park dedicated to all U.S. prisoners of war.

In addition to his son, he is survived by three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. A funeral Mass is scheduled at 10 a.m. today at St. Eugene's Church in Yonkers.

Reach Bill Hughes at 914-694-3511
©THE JOURNAL NEWS"