I was looking at this site
http://home.arcor.de/kriegsgefangene/usa/index.html
about Axis POWs in America when I read this:
Escape:
The prisoners knew that they hardly could reach their native country after a successful escape out of the camp. The Provost Marshal General noticed: "1369 escape attempts were made until March 1st, 1945 but only 12 prisoners of war (6 Germans and 6 Italians) were in liberty to this day. The punishment after the recapture consisted in detention and water and bread for 30 days.
Are they saying that these 12 men did make it home or were just never found and presumed dead?
They had escaped but had not been recaptured. Maybe a few made it home, a few died, and a few were in hiding somewhere.
It would be useful to know what date the Provost Marshall General made the statement; they 12 may have been accounted for after then.
I read a book many years ago (probably Nazi Prisoners of War in America by Arnold Krammer, but don’t quote me on that) about German POWs held in America. It said that at the end of the war there were 6 escaped prisoners who had not been found. The search never stopped and eventually 4 were found still living in the US. Each of these men were required to leave the country for a set period of time and then were allowed to legally immigrate here. A fifth man was found in Germany. The sixth was never found.
Sorry, can’t help you at all with the Italians.
Some of those who escaped from POW camps in the U.S. had done precious little study of North American geography beforehand. There’s one famous story (I’m too lazy to Google a cite) about a couple of German prisoners who escaped from a camp in the midwest – Oklahoma or Nebraska, I believe. They had been told that Mexico was only a couple of states away, and assumed that American states were comparable in size to those in Germany. After walking for days they learned that they’d barely even covered a fraction of the distance and gave themselves up.