When the Americans arrived in the village, "I was identified as a soldier, had to put back on the uniform I had already abandoned, had to raise my hands and join the steadily growing throng of war prisoners whom they were lining up on our meadow. It especially cut my good mother's heart to see her boy and the rest of the defeated army standing there, exposed to an uncertain fate..." Ratzinger was briefly interned in a POW camp near Ulm and was released on 19 June 1945. He and another young man began to walk the home but got a lift to Traunstein in a milk truck. The family was reunited when his brother, Georg, returned after being released from a POW camp in Italy.