With Italy’s declaration of war in May 1915, the front inched closer and closer to Sesto/Sexten. Starting at the end of July 1915, the fortresses of Haideck and Mitterberg were subjected to daily bombardment, as was the village itself. On July 31, the house of Mayor Josef Kiniger was hit, killing his adopted daughter and causing his wife to lose a leg. The next day Karl Stemberger’s Hotel “Zur Post” was hit and a dozen soldiers in the dining room were killed. A letter from Stemberger refers to the bombing: “My property in Sexten [Sesto] was completely hit and burned. I managed to save myself along with two of my daughters who had stayed with me, after sending away my wife and my youngest daughter; The house had been bombed repeatedly and a bombhad hit the dining room just after I left it.”1Singer, Das Posthotel in Sexten.
The bombardment of Sesto/Sexten and Moso/Moos in the summer of 1915 was also experienced by the captain of the “Königlich-Preußischen Fußartilleriebatterie Nr. 102” (“Royal Prussian Foot Artillery Battery No. 102”) of the German Alpine Corps, Carl Franz Rose, who had been stationed in Val di Sesto/Sextental since the beginning of August and regularly reported his impressions of the war in letters to his family. On August 3, 1915, for example, he wrote to his seven-year-old son Hans about the first deaths in Sesto/Sexten: “Yesterday the cruel Italians killed a little girl here. Now all the people have to leave this place.”2Feldpostbrief an Hans Rose, 3.8.1915, in: Rose, Detlef A. (Hrsg.): In Schussweite. Grüße aus den Dolomiten. Briefe von der Südtiroler Front 1915–1916, München 2015, 86 f. The evacuation was ordered by the military to take place on the night between 3 and 4 August. People had to abandon their possessions and seek new accommodation as war refugees. On August 12 at 15:00, the village was almost completely reduced to rubble by incendiary bombs. The efforts of the riflemen to extinguish the fire were in vain; only a few valuables of the parish church and some houses were saved. A total of twenty-three buildings and the parish church were destroyed by fire on the same day. Carl Franz Rose once again witnessed the destruction: “Yesterday, around two o’clock in the afternoon, the scoundrels again bombarded Sesto/Sexten with incendiary bombs, and unfortunately the flames soon flared up from the exceptionally large and beautiful church. It was not possible to put out the fire, because those guys kept pelting the village. Sesto/Sexten is a large village with many tall and massive houses, inns, etc. The fire spread rapidly. After a few hours half the village was on fire. Around 4.00 in the morning I went there with Albert – very carefully, always along the wall – and it was a sight that will probably not be seen very easily. One house after another, the village was engulfed in flames and eventually collapsed with a crash. I never thought that such a spectacle of flames was possible! The highlight of the whole show was when the bell tower of the church caught fire and its steeple, with the bells, collapsed into itself.3Feldpostbrief an Claire Rose, 13.8.1915, in: Rose, Detlef A. (Hrsg.), In Schussweite. Grüße aus den Dolomiten. Briefe von der Südtiroler Front 1915–1916, München 2015, p. 97.
The sight of the destroyed and evacuated village was also captured by a war correspondent who visited Sesto/Sexten at the beginning of September 1915: “We stopped at the first house in the village. It is an old Tyrolean farm, with a massive stone structure, the upper part made of wood, crowned by a flat roof of half-destroyed shingles. The southern front was hit directly. It is as if the entire wall has been raised like a backdrop. Stone debris and chipped beams lie all around, the roof hanging half broken on the collapsed wall. And inside, in the clean living room, the beds are still fresh, as if they had just been made.”4Hans, Tiroler Kriegsbilder.
Only after the evacuation of the front and the return of the first inhabitants of Sesto/Sexten in the destroyed village, in 1917, could the difficult work of reconstruction begin.

During the bombing of Sesto/Sexten in August 1915, the parish church was hit and severely destroyed. The roof and bell tower burned up, the spire broke off, and the dome was pierced by bombs. The soldiers of the Standschützen Baon Innsbruck I were sent to the site to extinguish the fire and save the precious ecclesiastical goods stored inside the parish church. Oberjäger Heinrich Hierner gives the following account of this rescue operation: “On 12.8.1915 in the afternoon, while I was on duty at Moos [Moso], the village of Sexten [Sesto] was set on fire. It was in Sexten [Sesto] that I met the military chaplain Hosp, who informed me that there were still several valuables in the church, such as liturgical vestments, banners, statues, paintings, etc. that absolutely had to be brought to safety. I immediately entered the church with several other soldiers following the parish priest Hosp and I was tying a large banner when the rope holding the large central chandelier began to burn, without us noticing. While I was carrying away the banner, the chandelier collapsed right in front of me and only thanks to a lucky coincidence I was not hit and […] killed. After this incident, I took the banner outside, went back inside and, together with the other soldiers, carried all the valuables out and deposited them outdoors. When this work was finished, the explosions of the shrapnel had become so intense that it was no longer possible to leave the church through the main gate, so we had to find the way out through a side gate. Once outside, another bomb exploded in the immediate vicinity and we retreated to the camp. The valuables left outside were then collected with a shopping cart […]”.5Tiroler Landesarchiv, Standschützen Baon Innsbruck I 1914-1918, Faszikel I, k.u.k. Standschützen Bataillon Innsbruck I. 4. Kompagnie, Protokoll vom 23. August 1915.
Although it was not possible to extinguish the fire, at least the valuable inventory of the church, such as altarpieces, statues and paintings, could be rescued, as described by Oberjäger Hierner. In the winter of 1916-1917, the central vault of the parish church collapsed under the intense pressure of the snow and therefore remained unusable following the return of the first inhabitants of Sesto/Sexten to the village. In August 1917, with the help of the parish priest of Sesto/Sexten, Heinrich Schwaighofer, a makeshift chapel was built in the woods in the Holzerschlucht on the Außerberg/Monte di Fiori (the so-called Waldkapelle). Later, the headquarters of the fire brigade served as a makeshift church and, finally, a military barracks next to the cemetery was used for ceremonies and mass celebrations.