PRAGS, Italy — In a little-known chapter in the waning days of World War II, U.S. troops rescued more than 130 political prisoners from an Alpine hotel that members of Hitler’s SS intended to barter for free passage as the Allies converged on Berlin hundreds of miles to the north.

Relatives of the wartime political prisoners-turned-hostages gathered in October at the Pragser Wildsee hotel near Italy’s border with Austria where they had been held to recall the episode that was swiftly overshadowed by the war’s end.

The lessons, they noted, still resonate nearly 80 years later as a warning against resurgent far-right ideology in Europe and beyond, and the use of political prisoners as bargaining chips.

Carl Goerdeler’s parents and grandparents were well-known Hitler opponents in Leipzig, Germany, and were among those taken from concentration camps and held as political hostages in the stately 19th century hotel on the shore of the emerald green Lake Brais, first by the Nazi SS.

“It brings back memories and for me it is a disgrace that it keeps happening,’‘ Goerdeler said, recalling the hostages taken a year ago in Israel by Hamas and ”who are still being held.”

The hostages gathered by the SS included former Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, former French Prime Minister Leon Blum, high-ranking British army officers, German industrialists and the family of German nobleman Claus von Stauffenberg, who was executed after a failed attempt to kill Hitler. Von Stauffenberg’s family were among the so-called “kinship” inmates, family members of Hitler opponents.

Many of the prisoners-turned-hostage had spent years in Buchenwald, Dachau and other concentration camps before the SS put them on buses in the spring of 1945 and drove to the South Tyrol in Italy, a mountainous area where the Nazis planned to make a last stand.

As the buses arrived, however, regular German army soldiers apparently not wanting to end up as criminals of war wrested the hostages from the SS and took them to the hotel, whose owner agreed to put them up at risk to her own life.

The prisoners from 17 countries were ultimately saved by the arrival of U.S. troops on May 5, 1945, just three days before Germany surrendered.

Fifth Army units had received an intelligence report that the Nazis were holding important European hostages at the hotel on the lake and sent combat troops to the site 5,000 feet above sea level. They found a German garrison of four officers and 137 enlisted men and immediately disarmed them, according to an operations report filed at the time.

“Yanks Rescue Famed Enemies of Hitler,” read the headline in Stars and Stripes from the scene on May 8, 1945, the day the Nazis surrendered.

Emma Heiss-Hellenstainer, the owner of the stately hotel, “despised the Hitler regime and the Nazis,” and sought to make the prisoners as comfortable as possible, her grandson Hans Heiss wrote in an account of the rescue.

After the Americans arrived, the hostages suddenly had some “luxury,” said hotel owner Carline Heiss, whose grandmother opened the doors to the prisoners.

“They had food, they had things to wear, they had showers” that the Americans built on the still-frozen lake, she said.

Photos from the time show American soldiers taking the Germans into custody and playing volleyball with the newly liberated hostages.

Next year the hotel is planning an 80th anniversary commemoration of the wartime episode.

American commanders were keenly interested in the identities of the hostages and had them transferred to the island of Capri in southern Italy where they were vetted.

Christiane Godt’s mother, two brothers and sisters were among those taken to the lakeside hotel. Their crime: Godt’s husband, the children’s father, had broadcast from Stalingrad, where he was taken prisoner by the Russians, against the Nazi regime.

Godt’s mother avoided the family’s imprisonment for a period by divorcing her husband, but SS Commander Heinrich Himmler asserted kinship custody in May 1945, and they were rounded up and sent to Buchenwald. Her parents remarried after the war and had two more children, including Christiane.

“My mother, and the father never spoke about it. The children wanted to speak about it, but my father said, ‘I can’t sleep when I talk about Stalingrad,’’‘ said Godt, who eventually wrote a book about the events relying partly on letters from other prisoners to her mother. ”I am here because it is interesting to meet other prisoners’ relatives.”

Marietheres Kreuz-Katzer said her mother, grandmother, aunt and uncle, along with more distant relatives, were hostages of the Hitler regime and that they had feared for their lives as many of their friends had been captured and hanged in public displays.

A sociologist whose grandfather was a minister in one of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s post-war governments, said she is both proud of her family’s history of resistance and troubled by the growing strength of right-wing parties in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

“It seems to me that people have learned nothing from the past,’‘ she said.