- 22 Dec 2009 21:39
#13275320
Source: http://euroheritage.net/mussolinideathcamp.shtml
(pictures of camp on website)
Mussolini's Italian concentration camp for Slovene, Communist, and Jewish prisoners
by James Mayfield (Chairman, European Heritage Library)
This article is a rare inside look into Italy's sole death camp during World War II that was used to intern social elements deemed threatening or undesirable by the Germans and Italians from 1944 until the fall of Italy and the Third Reich in 1945. It offers historical background and a visual walkthrough from my research trip to this virtually unknown location where over 3,000 were disposed in crematoria.
Historical background: the fall of Italy and the re-establishment of Mussolini's Fascist state
By January of 1941, Mussolini's Italian Empire included Ethiopia, Eritrea, central Somalia, Libya, Albania, Slovenia, western Greece, southeast France, and the Dalmatian coastline of Croatia. The Italians had achieved their greatest extent since the Roman era. But by 1943, Italy had fallen into economic decline, military failures, and had lost many of its military positions in North Africa and all of East Africa almost completely. In 1943, the Americans and British invaded Fascist Italy under Operation Husky, destroying most of the Italian military in less than a year. By September, Italy was completely in shambles. In a desperate attempt to spare the Italians from unnecessary prolonged suffering in the war and to avoid post-war repercussions, Italian king Vittorio Emmanuel III had reversed his longstanding support of the Fascist state (he had selected Mussolini for head of government himself in 1922) and had Benito Mussolini arrested before declaring a national surrender to the Allies. Refusing to allow Mussolini's overthrow, the loss of a significant ally in the war, and the creation of an open gate for further invasion into Germany, Adolf Hitler initiated Operation Panzerfaust. Near-mythic commando Otto Skorzeny infiltrated the prison of Mussolini's internment and successfully kidnapped him into northern Italy. Hungary experienced a similar fate when its hesitant Fascist dictator Miklos Horthy was forcibly replaced by Hungarian Nazis.
Italy was now split into two factions. As the German and Croatian Fascist armies still controlled northern Italy, the Third Reich gravitated Benito Mussolini to the government of a new puppet state in the far north called the Italian Social Republic (or "Salo Republic" after the city of its foundation). Slovenia and Albania, both previously Italian holdings, were incorporated into the Reich, and Kosovo was merged for the first time with Albania. As most of the Italian army was either destroyed or had forfeited in accordance with the surrender of King Emmanuel III, most of the defense and administration of the Salo Republic was the responsibility of the Germans, Italians, and minority volunteers. With the Holocaust now fully in operation and the more radical Germans now under indirect control of half of Italy, the previous Italian Antisemitic laws were bolstered dramatically. The majority of Italy's northern Jews lived in the port city of Trieste to the far northeast. Immediately, the Italian Salo Republic under Mussolini, and with great German and Croatian pressure, began full-scale deportation of the country's ethnic, social, and political "undesirables." Trieste was officially part of the German dominion, but ostensibly in joint administration with the Italians. Most of these were shipped for compulsory labor and imprisonment to the General Government in German-occupied Poland in concentration camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau. Others, especially Slovenes and Communists, were sent to Croatia, where the Fascist regime of Ante Pavelic inflicted some of the war's most brutal genocides. Within the Salo Republic, the Italians, with German pressure and minority volunteers, built Italy's first and only death camp, Risiera di San Sabba. The Italian Social Republic fell with the Third Reich in 1945. Mussolini was executed by anarchists in 1945 only months before the war's end and Hitler's defeat by the Soviet Union.
Inside Risiera di San Sabba, Italians' death camp for Slovenes, Communists, and Jews
Risiera di San Sabba is an obscure, tiny, and ominous concentration camp that was previously a rice husking factory built in 1913. It is incredibly unusual that few have ever heard of this mysterious death camp where thousands were killed before being incinerated in ovens. The post-war Italians have done an excellent job in deflecting blame for these killings on a regime of only partial German occupation, and have done very little to commemorate, subsidize, or acknowledge the events. This may be Italy's desire to escape paying indemnities to their Jewish community as Germany has been relegated to do ever since. In reality, the Italians of the area were highly complicit. It is difficult to even find Italy's only death camp, and those unaware of the title "Risiera di San Sabba" would have no idea that the very few road signs lead to a monument announcing Italy's involvement in the Holocaust and the war. Risiera di San Sabba is right in the middle of the industrial area of the modern provincial capital of Trieste. The local Italian population was certainly aware of hoards of prisoners -- and the entire Jewish population of Trieste --being forced from their homes and shipped to a tiny rice husking plant for either execution or transit to Poland. The entire premise can be traversed in only a few minutes. With more than 700 ethnic Jews and several thousand non-Jews being deported from Trieste to this small factory on the docks where much of the local Italian population found employment, most locals were surely aware that most of these disappeared prisoners were killed.
There is also an ongoing dispute over the ethnic demographics of the death camp. As with the Holocaust as a whole, the Jewish community has appropriately monopolized the concencentration camps of Europe, often to the exclusion of the many other smaller ethnic and racial groups that were slain with equal expedition (Roma Gypsies, Serbs, Poles, Greeks and Jews in Macedonia slaughtered by Axis Bulgaria, and homosexuals). Risiera di San Sabba logically has a plaque commissioned by the Jewish Community of Trieste (shown below) that shows their involvement in the monument. However, there does not seem to be any universal agreement on the ethnic distribution of the victims. Slavs and Slovenes emphasize that they were the supreme victim, not the ethnic Jews. The official website is in Slovene, not Hebrew or Yiddish. There do not seem to be any reliable statistics that show how many Jews versus Slovenes or political dissidents were killed. Both the Slavs and the Jews greatly seem to contest Risiera di San Sabba, and the autonomy-seeking Slovene minority of the region around Trieste cites their suffering in the death camp as an example of their historic role in the region. Some 3-5,000 people were killed here in total [1]. However, according to the official website of the monument, there were only 5,000 Jews in Trieste and all but 700 fled Italy, presciently fearing a similar fate as the Jews of Poland. As a result, it seems that most were not ethnically or religiously Jewish at all, but consisted instead of Slovenes and political dissidents. Slovenes have thus used Risiera di San Sabba as proof of their valiant resistance to the Nazis and their connections to the lionized socialist revolution of Tito's future Yugoslavia [2]. Ironically, the first director of the death camp and a main administrator of the Warsaw ghetto, Odilo Lotario, was an ethnic Slovene himself. The only languages available in the museum are Italian, English, and Slovene, not Yiddish or Hebrew, nor are any signs. The staff is Italian. This is a strange inter-ethnic and historiographic dispute that overshadows this obscure and unknown death camp in Italy.
The concentration camp is incredibly ominous, bizarre, eerie, and quiet. After struggling for over an hour to find this location that the Italians seem to have kept relatively hidden, I found the tiny rice husking plant in the major industrial area (right in public view of the local populations to witness the disappearing Jewish and Slavic prisoners) alongside a supermarket. The only indication that this was a death camp where 25,000 partisans and Jews were interrogated and 3-5,000 were executed [3] was a small sign in Italian on the front wall. Only one employee manages the whole property during the week. A walk through a long and foreboding corridor opens into a massive courtyard. To the left are only a few tightly-cramped rooms with almost no lighting. Multiple prisoners were held in one tiny chamber for weeks at a time with little food and sanitation. Our few insider accounts on the Slovenes' and Jews' suffering here come from etchings on the walls of the prison cells. Several urns containing the ashes from the Auschwitz ovens are placed ceremonially on the ground before the cells. Other large rooms adjacent to the prison cells functioned as torture and interrogation chambers. It is difficult to ascertain the function of the other areas on the tiny, cramped premise, and the only two remaining chambers have been devoted to showing museum and cinematic material.
The large open courtyard in the center is dominated by two monuments. In the far corner, a rather simple, marginal, and symbolic monument of several bound and rising steel shards acknowledges the death of the inmates. The opposite corner of the small property is dominated by a series of metal plates on the floor that connect to a partially-destroyed wall decorated by endless bouquets of ribbons and flowers with Italian national colors. An adjoining sign notes that the floor plates trace the location of the original crematoria that the concentration camp staff destroyed to cover evidence from the Allies. The same was done to the gas chamber in Birkenau (as seen here). This rendition of covered evidence, however, seems fanciful when one considers the large number of inevitable survivors' accounts, the undeniable awareness of the local population of thousands of disappearing non-ethnically Italian prisoners in a small factory by the docks where so many found employment, the fact that the ovens at Auschwitz were not destroyed, and the fact that Heinrich Himmler openly admitted that race-based genocide was occurring even in public speeches at schools [4]. The fact that an oven was used for disposal of executed prisoners is, however, historically verified by all the survivors' accounts, documents, and research on the property.
The methods used to execute prisoners are mysteriously debated. No one is certain how often gas vans, beatings, shootings, or even possibly live cremation were employed. The official video in the museum describes prisoners seeing their fellow inmates being taken away, hearing gunshots or moving vehicles (for reverse-exhaust killing by carbon monoxide), followed by the pungent smell of incinerated hair and flesh. An oven was certainly used for the disposal of executed prisoners, but what percentage of the total killed inmate population is debated. The museum also possesses a bull whip that was believed to be used to smash prisoners in the skull for punishment or execution. The crematory was first tested on the 4th of April, 1944 by burning 70 corpses [3]. It is unknown how many victims were immolated post-mordem here by the end of the war, but it may range as high as 5,000 by some estimates [1].
Risiera di San Sabba is a bizarre and frightening experience that, as I felt when I saw Auschwitz and Birkenau, inevitably draws one to morose silence. It is fascinating due to the fact that almost no one has ever heard of it, because of the unique ethnic and historiographic dispute between Slovenes and Jews over this death camp, and the fact that the Italians have diverted responsibility to the Germans and have gone to almost no expense to commemorate their complicity as the Germans have been forced to do over 70 years later.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
James Mayfield is a historian and the Chairman of the European Heritage Library. I have a Cum Laude BA in History with a Minor in Germanic Studies (language and history), am presently working for my Masters in History, and plan to immediately progress to my PhD Doctorate. I have a special academic interest in Europe's diverse ethnic identities, languages, and cultures, and the political struggles of native European and immigrant minority identities. See my staff entry for more information.
BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES USED:
-personal photos, observations, interviews
-the official video and pamphlets of Risiera di San Sabba
-Images that lack an EHL watermark are not our property. If no link is provided, we were unable to locate the original owner. If you find that your property has been used, feel free to notify us.
[1] http://www.jewishitaly.org/detail.asp?ID=252
[2] Ballinger, Pamela. History in exile: memory and identity at the borders of the Balkans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Page 24.
[3] http://www.deathcamps.org/sabba/
[4] Military History's "Timewatch: Himmler, Hitler, End of the Third Reich."
-The official site of Risiera di San Sabba.
(pictures of camp on website)
Mussolini's Italian concentration camp for Slovene, Communist, and Jewish prisoners
by James Mayfield (Chairman, European Heritage Library)
This article is a rare inside look into Italy's sole death camp during World War II that was used to intern social elements deemed threatening or undesirable by the Germans and Italians from 1944 until the fall of Italy and the Third Reich in 1945. It offers historical background and a visual walkthrough from my research trip to this virtually unknown location where over 3,000 were disposed in crematoria.
Historical background: the fall of Italy and the re-establishment of Mussolini's Fascist state
By January of 1941, Mussolini's Italian Empire included Ethiopia, Eritrea, central Somalia, Libya, Albania, Slovenia, western Greece, southeast France, and the Dalmatian coastline of Croatia. The Italians had achieved their greatest extent since the Roman era. But by 1943, Italy had fallen into economic decline, military failures, and had lost many of its military positions in North Africa and all of East Africa almost completely. In 1943, the Americans and British invaded Fascist Italy under Operation Husky, destroying most of the Italian military in less than a year. By September, Italy was completely in shambles. In a desperate attempt to spare the Italians from unnecessary prolonged suffering in the war and to avoid post-war repercussions, Italian king Vittorio Emmanuel III had reversed his longstanding support of the Fascist state (he had selected Mussolini for head of government himself in 1922) and had Benito Mussolini arrested before declaring a national surrender to the Allies. Refusing to allow Mussolini's overthrow, the loss of a significant ally in the war, and the creation of an open gate for further invasion into Germany, Adolf Hitler initiated Operation Panzerfaust. Near-mythic commando Otto Skorzeny infiltrated the prison of Mussolini's internment and successfully kidnapped him into northern Italy. Hungary experienced a similar fate when its hesitant Fascist dictator Miklos Horthy was forcibly replaced by Hungarian Nazis.
Italy was now split into two factions. As the German and Croatian Fascist armies still controlled northern Italy, the Third Reich gravitated Benito Mussolini to the government of a new puppet state in the far north called the Italian Social Republic (or "Salo Republic" after the city of its foundation). Slovenia and Albania, both previously Italian holdings, were incorporated into the Reich, and Kosovo was merged for the first time with Albania. As most of the Italian army was either destroyed or had forfeited in accordance with the surrender of King Emmanuel III, most of the defense and administration of the Salo Republic was the responsibility of the Germans, Italians, and minority volunteers. With the Holocaust now fully in operation and the more radical Germans now under indirect control of half of Italy, the previous Italian Antisemitic laws were bolstered dramatically. The majority of Italy's northern Jews lived in the port city of Trieste to the far northeast. Immediately, the Italian Salo Republic under Mussolini, and with great German and Croatian pressure, began full-scale deportation of the country's ethnic, social, and political "undesirables." Trieste was officially part of the German dominion, but ostensibly in joint administration with the Italians. Most of these were shipped for compulsory labor and imprisonment to the General Government in German-occupied Poland in concentration camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau. Others, especially Slovenes and Communists, were sent to Croatia, where the Fascist regime of Ante Pavelic inflicted some of the war's most brutal genocides. Within the Salo Republic, the Italians, with German pressure and minority volunteers, built Italy's first and only death camp, Risiera di San Sabba. The Italian Social Republic fell with the Third Reich in 1945. Mussolini was executed by anarchists in 1945 only months before the war's end and Hitler's defeat by the Soviet Union.
Inside Risiera di San Sabba, Italians' death camp for Slovenes, Communists, and Jews
Risiera di San Sabba is an obscure, tiny, and ominous concentration camp that was previously a rice husking factory built in 1913. It is incredibly unusual that few have ever heard of this mysterious death camp where thousands were killed before being incinerated in ovens. The post-war Italians have done an excellent job in deflecting blame for these killings on a regime of only partial German occupation, and have done very little to commemorate, subsidize, or acknowledge the events. This may be Italy's desire to escape paying indemnities to their Jewish community as Germany has been relegated to do ever since. In reality, the Italians of the area were highly complicit. It is difficult to even find Italy's only death camp, and those unaware of the title "Risiera di San Sabba" would have no idea that the very few road signs lead to a monument announcing Italy's involvement in the Holocaust and the war. Risiera di San Sabba is right in the middle of the industrial area of the modern provincial capital of Trieste. The local Italian population was certainly aware of hoards of prisoners -- and the entire Jewish population of Trieste --being forced from their homes and shipped to a tiny rice husking plant for either execution or transit to Poland. The entire premise can be traversed in only a few minutes. With more than 700 ethnic Jews and several thousand non-Jews being deported from Trieste to this small factory on the docks where much of the local Italian population found employment, most locals were surely aware that most of these disappeared prisoners were killed.
There is also an ongoing dispute over the ethnic demographics of the death camp. As with the Holocaust as a whole, the Jewish community has appropriately monopolized the concencentration camps of Europe, often to the exclusion of the many other smaller ethnic and racial groups that were slain with equal expedition (Roma Gypsies, Serbs, Poles, Greeks and Jews in Macedonia slaughtered by Axis Bulgaria, and homosexuals). Risiera di San Sabba logically has a plaque commissioned by the Jewish Community of Trieste (shown below) that shows their involvement in the monument. However, there does not seem to be any universal agreement on the ethnic distribution of the victims. Slavs and Slovenes emphasize that they were the supreme victim, not the ethnic Jews. The official website is in Slovene, not Hebrew or Yiddish. There do not seem to be any reliable statistics that show how many Jews versus Slovenes or political dissidents were killed. Both the Slavs and the Jews greatly seem to contest Risiera di San Sabba, and the autonomy-seeking Slovene minority of the region around Trieste cites their suffering in the death camp as an example of their historic role in the region. Some 3-5,000 people were killed here in total [1]. However, according to the official website of the monument, there were only 5,000 Jews in Trieste and all but 700 fled Italy, presciently fearing a similar fate as the Jews of Poland. As a result, it seems that most were not ethnically or religiously Jewish at all, but consisted instead of Slovenes and political dissidents. Slovenes have thus used Risiera di San Sabba as proof of their valiant resistance to the Nazis and their connections to the lionized socialist revolution of Tito's future Yugoslavia [2]. Ironically, the first director of the death camp and a main administrator of the Warsaw ghetto, Odilo Lotario, was an ethnic Slovene himself. The only languages available in the museum are Italian, English, and Slovene, not Yiddish or Hebrew, nor are any signs. The staff is Italian. This is a strange inter-ethnic and historiographic dispute that overshadows this obscure and unknown death camp in Italy.
The concentration camp is incredibly ominous, bizarre, eerie, and quiet. After struggling for over an hour to find this location that the Italians seem to have kept relatively hidden, I found the tiny rice husking plant in the major industrial area (right in public view of the local populations to witness the disappearing Jewish and Slavic prisoners) alongside a supermarket. The only indication that this was a death camp where 25,000 partisans and Jews were interrogated and 3-5,000 were executed [3] was a small sign in Italian on the front wall. Only one employee manages the whole property during the week. A walk through a long and foreboding corridor opens into a massive courtyard. To the left are only a few tightly-cramped rooms with almost no lighting. Multiple prisoners were held in one tiny chamber for weeks at a time with little food and sanitation. Our few insider accounts on the Slovenes' and Jews' suffering here come from etchings on the walls of the prison cells. Several urns containing the ashes from the Auschwitz ovens are placed ceremonially on the ground before the cells. Other large rooms adjacent to the prison cells functioned as torture and interrogation chambers. It is difficult to ascertain the function of the other areas on the tiny, cramped premise, and the only two remaining chambers have been devoted to showing museum and cinematic material.
The large open courtyard in the center is dominated by two monuments. In the far corner, a rather simple, marginal, and symbolic monument of several bound and rising steel shards acknowledges the death of the inmates. The opposite corner of the small property is dominated by a series of metal plates on the floor that connect to a partially-destroyed wall decorated by endless bouquets of ribbons and flowers with Italian national colors. An adjoining sign notes that the floor plates trace the location of the original crematoria that the concentration camp staff destroyed to cover evidence from the Allies. The same was done to the gas chamber in Birkenau (as seen here). This rendition of covered evidence, however, seems fanciful when one considers the large number of inevitable survivors' accounts, the undeniable awareness of the local population of thousands of disappearing non-ethnically Italian prisoners in a small factory by the docks where so many found employment, the fact that the ovens at Auschwitz were not destroyed, and the fact that Heinrich Himmler openly admitted that race-based genocide was occurring even in public speeches at schools [4]. The fact that an oven was used for disposal of executed prisoners is, however, historically verified by all the survivors' accounts, documents, and research on the property.
The methods used to execute prisoners are mysteriously debated. No one is certain how often gas vans, beatings, shootings, or even possibly live cremation were employed. The official video in the museum describes prisoners seeing their fellow inmates being taken away, hearing gunshots or moving vehicles (for reverse-exhaust killing by carbon monoxide), followed by the pungent smell of incinerated hair and flesh. An oven was certainly used for the disposal of executed prisoners, but what percentage of the total killed inmate population is debated. The museum also possesses a bull whip that was believed to be used to smash prisoners in the skull for punishment or execution. The crematory was first tested on the 4th of April, 1944 by burning 70 corpses [3]. It is unknown how many victims were immolated post-mordem here by the end of the war, but it may range as high as 5,000 by some estimates [1].
Risiera di San Sabba is a bizarre and frightening experience that, as I felt when I saw Auschwitz and Birkenau, inevitably draws one to morose silence. It is fascinating due to the fact that almost no one has ever heard of it, because of the unique ethnic and historiographic dispute between Slovenes and Jews over this death camp, and the fact that the Italians have diverted responsibility to the Germans and have gone to almost no expense to commemorate their complicity as the Germans have been forced to do over 70 years later.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
James Mayfield is a historian and the Chairman of the European Heritage Library. I have a Cum Laude BA in History with a Minor in Germanic Studies (language and history), am presently working for my Masters in History, and plan to immediately progress to my PhD Doctorate. I have a special academic interest in Europe's diverse ethnic identities, languages, and cultures, and the political struggles of native European and immigrant minority identities. See my staff entry for more information.
BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES USED:
-personal photos, observations, interviews
-the official video and pamphlets of Risiera di San Sabba
-Images that lack an EHL watermark are not our property. If no link is provided, we were unable to locate the original owner. If you find that your property has been used, feel free to notify us.
[1] http://www.jewishitaly.org/detail.asp?ID=252
[2] Ballinger, Pamela. History in exile: memory and identity at the borders of the Balkans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Page 24.
[3] http://www.deathcamps.org/sabba/
[4] Military History's "Timewatch: Himmler, Hitler, End of the Third Reich."
-The official site of Risiera di San Sabba.
"Nations ... as an inherent political destiny, are a myth. Nationalism, which sometimes takes preexisting cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting cultures: that is a reality." - E. Gellner
(at your own risk!)
- By KurtFF8
- By Rich
- By litwin
- By JohnRawls