Yugoslav partisans near Trieste

According to popular chronicles of the war, on 19 March 1944 Yugoslav partisans attacked Trieste – the great Adriatic port lying where Italian and Slovene lands meet. Put that way, however, the claim is not borne out by either Italian or Slovene histories of the city and of the resistance: in March 1944 there was no major attack on Trieste itself, which remained firmly in German hands until the first days of May 1945. What lies behind the simplification is true, though. On the Karst plateau, which rises just above the city, in the valleys of the Slovenian Littoral and in Istria, units of Slovene partisans under the command of Josip Broz Tito were active at the time. They raided outposts, blew up railway lines and bridges, ambushed military columns on the roads to Trieste, and their men slipped into the city itself. In this war – waged in the suburbs, in the stony villages of the Karst and in the prisons of the German police – the future of Trieste hung in the balance.

On the same day another event caught Europe’s attention: German troops marched into Hungary to prevent an ally from leaving the war. The two threads had one thing in common – after Italy’s collapse the Third Reich had to guard the whole belt of land from the Adriatic to the Carpathians on its own, occupying one country after another with its own forces and dispersing divisions that were needed at the fronts.

Trieste under German rule

Until 1918 Trieste had been the principal port of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, inhabited by Italians, Slovenes, Germans, Greeks and a large Jewish community. After the First World War the city, together with the western part of the Slovene lands and Istria, went to Italy. Fascist rule meant forced Italianisation: Slovene and Croatian schools, associations and newspapers were closed, and surnames and place names were changed. For many Slovenes of the Karst and the Littoral, therefore, the struggle against fascism had begun long before 1941.

After the announcement of Italy’s capitulation in September 1943 the Germans disarmed the Italian army within a few days and occupied the north of the country. By a decision of Adolf Hitler of 10 September 1943 the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral (Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland) was created, with its seat in Trieste. It comprised the provinces of Udine, Gorizia, Trieste, Pola (Pula), Fiume (Rijeka) and Ljubljana. Formally these lands still belonged to Italy, and from the autumn to Benito Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic, but in practice they were governed by a German Supreme Commissioner – the Gauleiter of Carinthia, Friedrich Rainer. The fascist authorities in Salò had little say here, and in Berlin and Klagenfurt plans were being laid for the permanent annexation of the former Austrian Littoral to the Reich.

From the autumn of 1943 the police and SS in the zone were commanded by Odilo Globocnik, a native of Trieste and a friend of Rainer’s, who had earlier directed Operation Reinhard from Lublin. He brought with him men from the staffs of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, experienced in mass murder. The Wehrmacht forces in the Littoral were commanded by General Ludwig Kübler, a mountain warfare specialist who fought the partisans with methods already familiar from the Balkans: hostage-taking, the burning of villages and the shooting of civilians suspected of supporting the “bands”. The German command in the Littoral repeated guidelines of this kind in its orders of the winter of 1943–1944.

Partisans on the Karst and in the Littoral

The Slovene resistance was centred on the Liberation Front of the Slovene People, founded in 1941 on the initiative of the communists but also embracing Christian Socialists and part of the liberal intelligentsia. In the lands incorporated into Italy in 1920 the partisan movement had been growing since 1942, and it expanded rapidly after Italy’s capitulation. In September 1943 an uprising swept through the Littoral and Istria: the partisans seized the weapons of the Italian garrisons as they were disarmed, thousands of volunteers joined their units, and on 16 September 1943 the leadership of the Liberation Front proclaimed the annexation of the Littoral to a united Slovenia. Croatian activists issued a similar declaration concerning Istria. The German offensive of October 1943 smashed the insurgent units and occupied the towns and main roads, and in reprisal many villages were burnt and their inhabitants shot. It did not, however, destroy the partisan movement.

In December 1943 the Slovene brigades operating in the Littoral were combined into the IX Corps of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, whose first commander was Lado Ambrožič. The corps operated in the Trnovo Forest and on the Banjšice plateau, in the Soča and Vipava valleys and on the Karst, reaching the outskirts of Trieste and Gorizia. To the west, in eastern Friuli, there were also the communist-linked Italian Garibaldi Brigades and the Catholic-liberal Osoppo brigades; relations between them and the Slovenes were complicated by the dispute over who should own, after the war, the lands on which they were fighting. In Trieste itself the underground was made up both of Slovene groups linked to the Liberation Front and of Italian communists and the local Committee of National Liberation.

Politically the Slovene movement was part of Tito’s movement. At the second session of AVNOJ at Jajce in November 1943 the annexation of the Littoral and Istria to a future federal Yugoslavia was confirmed. For the Yugoslav communists Trieste was therefore not only a military objective but also the subject of territorial claims – to which they returned in the spring of 1945.

Against the partisans the Germans fielded, besides their own police and army units, collaborationist formations: Italian units of the Social Republic, units of the Slovene Home Guard in the Littoral, and from the summer of 1944 also Cossacks and Caucasians withdrawn from the Eastern Front and settled in Friuli. The fighting thus partly took on the character of a civil war, and the people of the Karst paid the highest price for it – in punitive raids, arrests and deportations.

What happened on 19 March 1944?

The chronicles that mention an “attack on Trieste” give no details – no place, no forces, no losses. The histories of the city and of the Slovene resistance record no attack on Trieste under that date. The mention most probably simplifies, and perhaps also shifts in time, the picture of the fighting of the period: in the spring of 1944 partisans of the IX Corps and urban sabotage groups did indeed attack the Germans in the suburbs of Trieste and in the city itself, but these were small-scale actions carried out by groups of a few men. Faced with the German garrison, the police and the harbour defences, the partisans at that time had neither the heavy weapons nor enough men to threaten the city. The date of 19 March should therefore be treated as nominal – it describes the state of the war around Trieste rather than a specific battle.

The best-known attacks of that spring came a few weeks later and show how the occupiers responded to them. At the beginning of April 1944 a bomb planted by partisans exploded in a cinema for German soldiers at Opicina, a suburb on the edge of the Karst; several soldiers were killed. In reprisal the Germans shot more than seventy hostages, mostly Slovenes and Italians held in Trieste’s jails. In April, after an attack on a soldiers’ hostel in the city centre, several dozen prisoners were hanged in a building on Via Ghega, and their bodies were left on view to passers-by. These reprisals were meant to intimidate the inhabitants; in practice they deepened the gulf between the occupier and the population.

The Risiera di San Sabba

The main instrument of terror in Trieste was a former rice-husking mill in the San Sabba district. After Italy’s capitulation the Germans first set up a transit camp there for disarmed Italian soldiers and then, in the autumn of 1943, a police detention camp (Polizeihaftlager). It was run by Globocnik’s men, veterans of Aktion T4 and of the extermination camps in occupied Poland; the commandant was Josef Oberhauser. Partisans, people suspected of helping them, political activists and Jews were imprisoned, tortured and murdered there. In the spring of 1944 a crematorium oven was put into operation in the camp – the only one in occupied Italy; according to Italian studies, the first bodies burnt in it were those of the hostages shot after the Opicina attack.

The number of people murdered in the Risiera is disputed; the figure most often given is 3,000 to 5,000 victims, most of them Slovene, Croatian and Italian political prisoners and partisans. More than 1,400 Jews from Trieste, Rijeka and the surrounding area also passed through the camp and were sent on, above all to Auschwitz. Thousands of other prisoners were deported from here to concentration camps in the Reich. The testimony of survivors made it possible after the war to reconstruct how the camp worked, even though on the night of 29–30 April 1945 the Germans blew up the crematorium and its chimney to cover their tracks.

Place in the war: the road to the “race for Trieste”

In the spring of 1944 the fighting on the Karst was a secondary front for both sides, but not an insignificant one. The Germans feared an Allied landing in the northern Adriatic and had to keep considerable forces in the Littoral, although those divisions would have been useful in Italy and in the east. The partisans, for their part, were growing stronger: they received more and more weapons by air from the Western Allies, and after the liberation of Dalmatia and Belgrade in the autumn of 1944 their hinterland took in almost the whole of Yugoslavia. Successive German anti-partisan operations, conducted throughout 1944, inflicted losses on the IX Corps but did not destroy it.

The decision came in the last days of the war. In the spring of 1945 the Yugoslav Fourth Army advanced along the coast through Rijeka into Istria, and the IX Corps across the Karst towards Trieste. On 30 April 1945 volunteers of the Italian Committee of National Liberation rose against the Germans in the city, and on 1 May Yugoslav units entered Trieste. A day later General Bernard Freyberg’s 2nd New Zealand Division arrived, and the last German garrisons surrendered to it. For about forty days the Yugoslavs ruled the city; during that time they arrested and deported thousands of people – fascists and officials, but also opponents of the communists and people caught up at random – and many of them died, some in the Karst sinkholes known as foibe. Under British and American pressure Tito’s troops withdrew from Trieste in June 1945 behind the so-called Morgan Line.

The dispute over the city became one of the first conflicts of the Cold War. The peace treaty with Italy of 1947 established the Free Territory of Trieste, divided into an Anglo-American zone containing the city itself and a Yugoslav zone. Only the London Memorandum of 1954 assigned Trieste to Italy and its hinterland to Yugoslavia. For the perpetrators the war ended in different ways: Globocnik committed suicide after being captured by the British in Carinthia in May 1945; Rainer and Kübler were handed over to Yugoslavia and in 1947 sentenced to death in Ljubljana (Kübler was hanged, while the circumstances of Rainer’s death remain unclear to this day); and Oberhauser, sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment at the Risiera trial in Trieste in 1976, was not extradited by West Germany and died a free man in Munich. The Risiera di San Sabba is today an Italian national monument and museum – a witness to a war that was fought at the gates of Trieste long before its liberation.