Tito in Trieste

On 1 May 1945 units of the Yugoslav 4th Army and the Slovene IX Partisan Corps entered Trieste, the largest port on the northern Adriatic, which had belonged to Italy since 1920. The day before, an uprising against the Germans had broken out in the city, organised by the Italian National Liberation Committee. On the afternoon of 2 May the New Zealand 2nd Division of General Bernard Freyberg arrived, and the last German garrisons holding out in the city surrendered to it. Two allied armies now faced each other in a single city, each representing a different vision of the post-war order.

To say that “Josip Broz Tito and his forces captured Trieste” calls for some explanation. Tito was not in the city at the time – he was directing the state and the army from Belgrade. Trieste was taken by units of the Yugoslav Army under his command, not by him in person. Nor was the city’s capture the work of the Yugoslavs alone: the Italian uprising of 30 April played its part, and the German surrender was accepted by the New Zealanders. From Belgrade’s point of view, however, it was above all a triumph for Tito, who had been declaring for years that Trieste and the whole of the Julian March would become part of the new Yugoslavia.

A disputed city

For more than five hundred years Trieste belonged to the Habsburgs and was the chief port of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The city’s population was predominantly Italian, but Slovenes lived in its suburbs and in the surrounding villages of the Karst, and in Istria there were Croats as well. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary in November 1918 the Italians occupied the city, and the Italo-Yugoslav Treaty of Rapallo of November 1920 confirmed an Italian border far to the east of it. At the same time a dispute was going on over Fiume, which finally went to Italy in 1924.

For the roughly half a million Slovenes and Croats who found themselves within Italy’s borders, the interwar period meant forced Italianisation. In July 1920 Fascists burned down the Slovene National Hall in Trieste, and after Benito Mussolini came to power Slovene and Croatian schools, associations and newspapers were closed, and surnames and place names were changed to Italian ones. The Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State sentenced Slovene activists to death. The memory of those years later became one of the sources of the violence that erupted in 1943 and 1945.

After Italy’s attack on Yugoslavia in April 1941, Italy occupied part of Slovenia and of the Dalmatian coast, pursuing a brutal occupation policy there. After the Italian surrender in September 1943 the Germans took control of the region in Operation Achse and created the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral under Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer. Formally Trieste remained within the Italian Social Republic; in reality it was ruled by the Germans. The Higher SS and Police Leader in the zone was Odilo Globocnik, previously one of the chief organisers of the extermination of the Jews in the General Government. In a former rice-husking mill, the Risiera di San Sabba, on the outskirts of Trieste, a police camp with a crematorium was set up; historians estimate that between 3,000 and 5,000 people died there – mainly Slovene and Croatian partisans, political prisoners and Jews – and several thousand others were deported from it to camps in the Reich.

In the autumn of 1943, in the short interval between the Italian surrender and the German offensive, the first wave of killings of Italians took place in the interior of Istria; their bodies were thrown into karst sinkholes, known in Italian as foibe. The victims were Fascist officials, landowners, carabinieri and their relatives; historians put their number at several hundred.

The race for Trieste

In the spring of 1944 Slovene partisans were operating on the Karst at the gates of the city, but Trieste itself remained in German hands until the end of the war. In March 1945 the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia – from that month called the Yugoslav Army – launched its final offensive. The newly formed 4th Army of General Petar Drapšin advanced along the Adriatic coast through Lika, Rijeka and Istria, while the Slovene IX Corps operated on the Karst and in the valley of the Soča (Italian: Isonzo). Tito’s aim was to reach the Soča before the Western Allies and present them with a fait accompli.

The Western Allies knew of these plans. In February 1945 Field Marshal Harold Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, agreed with Tito in Belgrade that Trieste and the lines of communication leading to Austria would come under the control of an Allied military government, although the details of that agreement remained unclear. After the collapse of the German front in Italy in the second half of April, the British Eighth Army sent the New Zealand 2nd Division eastwards. The New Zealanders covered more than 200 kilometres in under a week, took Padua on 28 April and crossed the Soča on 1 May.

The uprising and the Yugoslav entry

In Trieste itself the situation was tangled. In April the prefect, Bruno Coceani, and the mayor, Cesare Pagnini, tried to unite all Italian forces – Fascist ones included – against the approaching Yugoslavs. The local National Liberation Committee, from which the Communists, who favoured co-operation with Tito’s partisans, had withdrawn in the summer of 1944, rejected the proposal. On the night of 29–30 April Globocnik ordered some of the German units to withdraw from the city, and on the morning of 30 April the committee proclaimed an uprising. The carabinieri, the Finance Guard and part of the municipal guard went over to it. According to Italian accounts the insurgents took control of much of the city centre, although the Germans still held out in several fortified positions.

At the same time the Yugoslavs were entering Trieste, and in the working-class districts Italian and Slovene Communists linked to them rose up. As early as 30 April the first partisan units reached the suburbs and occupied several buildings. On the morning of 1 May the main forces of the 4th Army broke through the German defences on the eastern approaches and entered the city. By evening the Yugoslavs controlled most of Trieste; in the industrial district fighting was still going on against a strong German and Chetnik force, which surrendered on the morning of 2 May. The Yugoslav military authorities refused to recognise the authority of the Italian committee, disarmed its units and took over the administration of the city.

The German garrisons shut up in the castle of San Giusto, the law courts and the port refused to surrender to the partisans for fear of reprisals. When New Zealand tanks reached the city on the afternoon of 2 May, the Germans surrendered to Freyberg. At 2 p.m. that same day the surrender of the German forces in Italy, signed at Caserta on 29 April, came into force; the German soldiers in Trieste nonetheless preferred to lay down their arms before the Western Allies rather than the partisans. The last German strongpoints on the plateau above the city, at Opicina, surrendered on 3 May. In those same days thousands of Chetniks under Momčilo Đujić crossed the Soča westwards and gave themselves up to the British to avoid Yugoslav captivity.

Freyberg found a Yugoslav administration in the city and Yugoslav troops far more numerous than his own. Both sides, formally allies, behaved cautiously. The New Zealanders occupied the port and several installations, and the Yugoslavs demanded that the Allies recognise their authority in the city. Freyberg refused, but was ordered to avoid a clash.

Forty days

The period from 1 May to 12 June 1945 has entered Italian memory as the “forty days” of the Yugoslav occupation of Trieste. Power was assumed by the Yugoslav military command of the city, which imposed a curfew, took over the press and radio and introduced Yugoslav regulations, while the new authorities announced that Trieste would become part of federal Yugoslavia as an autonomous city. The streets filled with red flags bearing a star, and the demonstrations organised by the Communists drew both Slovenes and some Italian workers. For many Slovenes this meant liberation after a quarter of a century of oppression. For the Italian majority of the inhabitants it was a foreign occupation. According to Italian sources, on 5 May Yugoslav soldiers opened fire on a pro-Italian demonstration, killing several people.

The Yugoslav security service OZNA and army units carried out mass arrests. Those detained included members of Fascist organisations, police officers, soldiers of the Italian Social Republic and the municipal guard, and officials, but also members of the non-Communist resistance who opposed annexation, and people named in denunciations. Some of those arrested were released, some were deported to camps in the interior of Yugoslavia, and many were killed. The victims were often killed at the edge of karst sinkholes and abandoned mine shafts, into which the bodies were thrown – hence the name of the foibe massacres.

The number of victims remains disputed. The historians Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali estimated the total number of victims of both waves of violence, in 1943 and 1945, across the whole of the Julian March and Istria at about 5,000; Pupo later lowered this estimate to 3,000–4,000. Other Italian authors give figures of 6,000 to 11,000, and the highest estimates, by journalists, reach 20,000. Between 1945 and 1948 more than 460 bodies were recovered from foibe and mass graves in the vicinity of Trieste alone, including those of German soldiers killed in the last battles. A joint Italian–Slovene commission established in 2006 that in May 1945, in the province of Gorizia, 1,048 people were arrested and killed, mostly soldiers and police officers of the Fascist republic, but also around 320 Italian and 110 Slovene civilians. The motives are disputed too: some Slovene and Croatian historians see the killings above all as revenge on Fascists and collaborators, while many Italian historians see a deliberate policy of intimidating and eliminating opponents of annexation, among whom were anti-Fascists as well.

The first crisis with the West

The dispute over Trieste quickly turned into the first serious conflict between the Western Allies and a Communist state in Europe. The Yugoslavs occupied not only Trieste but also Gorizia, Monfalcone and Pula, and moved into southern Carinthia in Austria. On 7 May Alexander sent his chief of staff, General William Morgan, to Belgrade to remind Tito of the February arrangements. Tito replied that his troops had liberated the area and had the right to remain there.

Winston Churchill saw the Yugoslavs’ conduct as part of wider Soviet pressure on Europe. On 12 May, in a telegram to President Harry Truman, he wrote of an “iron curtain” that had come down upon the Soviet front – the first time he used the expression he would popularise in his Fulton speech in 1946. Truman, though reluctant to become entangled in Balkan disputes, agreed to a firm line: the Allies reinforced their troops in the Julian March, and American and British divisions prepared for the possibility of a clash. According to accounts, Alexander, in an order to his troops of 19 May, compared Tito’s methods with those of Hitler, Mussolini and Japan, which caused outrage in Belgrade.

Moscow’s stance proved decisive. Joseph Stalin had no intention of risking a conflict with his recent allies over an Italian port and advised Tito to give way. A bitter Tito declared in a speech in Ljubljana on 27 May that Yugoslavia did not wish to be “small change” in the bargaining of the great powers – words that irritated the Soviet leaders and are sometimes cited as one of the first sources of the later split between Belgrade and Moscow. Already on 23 May, however, Tito had agreed in principle to a division of the region.

On 9 June 1945 an agreement between Yugoslavia on the one hand and Britain and the United States on the other was signed in Belgrade. The Julian March was divided by a demarcation line, named the Morgan Line after General Morgan, whose exact course was settled in June at Duino. Zone A – Trieste, Gorizia, a strip of land along the Soča and the port of Pula as an enclave – came under Allied military government, while Zone B, covering the rest of Istria, remained under Yugoslav administration. On 12 June the Yugoslav troops left Trieste. Many of those deported from the city never returned, and for decades their families searched in vain for information about their fate.

Aftermath

The occupation of Trieste was one of the last episodes of the war in Europe and at the same time one of the first disputes of the Cold War – the only place on the continent where, in May 1945, Western and Communist forces faced each other without a previously agreed demarcation line. The crisis showed that the wartime coalition was cracking even before the fighting had ended, and strengthened the conviction in London and Washington that firmness was needed in the face of Communist expansion.

The Peace Treaty with Italy, signed in Paris on 10 February 1947, gave Yugoslavia most of Istria, Rijeka and Zadar, and turned Trieste and its surroundings into the Free Territory of Trieste under the supervision of the UN Security Council. The Territory formally came into being on 15 September 1947, but the powers never agreed on a candidate for its governor, and in practice it remained divided into Zone A under Anglo-American administration and Zone B under Yugoslav administration. After Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948 the West began to treat Yugoslavia as a potential partner, which made a compromise easier. The London Memorandum of 5 October 1954 handed Zone A, with Trieste, to Italy and Zone B to Yugoslavia; on 26 October 1954 Italian troops entered the city. The border was finally confirmed by the Treaty of Osimo in 1975.

The change of borders led to an exodus of the Italian population from Istria, Rijeka and Dalmatia. Between 1945 and 1956, according to various estimates, between 230,000 and 350,000 people left the region, most of them Italians, but also Slovenes and Croats hostile to the new regime. The memory of the foibe and the exodus, pushed to the margins for decades, returned to Italian public debate after the fall of Communism; since 2005 Italy has marked 10 February as the Day of Remembrance for its victims. On the Slovene and Croatian side, by contrast, people remember the Fascist repression and the partisans’ contribution to the liberation of the region. A joint Italian–Slovene commission of historians, which in 2000 completed a report on relations between the two nations in 1880–1956, tried to bring the divergent narratives closer together.