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I’ve already written several posts about Risiera di San Sabba and they’re visible at https://www.julianwhite.uk/tag/risiera-di-san-sabba/.

Risiera di San Sabba began as a rice-processing plant on the outskirts of Trieste but was seized by the Nazis in 1943 and turned into a detention, transit and killing centre under the authority of Odilo Globocnik, already notorious for overseeing mass murder in occupied Poland. Thousands of people were imprisoned there, including partisans, political opponents, civilians caught in reprisals and Jews who were held before deportation to Auschwitz.

In a building that really wasn’t ideal in terms of its design, the SS created tiny, airless cells, torture rooms and an on-site crematorium, making it the only Nazi camp with such a facility on Italian soil. Executions were carried out in a former boiler room which were adapted to be used as killing space, with bodies burned to hide the evidence. The camp operated until the final weeks of the war, when the retreating Nazis attempted to destroy parts of it, but it was finally recognised as a national memorial in the 1960s.

This is the main courtyard of the site, the former crematorium is in the centre of the photo where the exposed brickwork is, the museum is on the ground floor behind that and the prison cells are to the centre right of the photo.

There’s a model in the museum which shows how it was going to be converted into a national memorial. It took twenty years for the Government to decide that they needed to create a memorial here, they had taken some time to really confront the atrocities that had taken place in the country. The design of the building was overseen by Romano Boico (1910-1985), a local architect.

It’s not used for this purpose at the moment, although it was when I visited before, but these are the imposing walls that visitors enter the site through.

These big tall walls are deliberately designed to be stark, threatening and to feel imposing, the architects of the memorial didn’t want the whole site softened as they wanted visitors to feel some of the oppression that the prisoners would have felt.

There’s a fairly large museum to visit at the site, which is all free of admission and without charges. This gives the background to the site, what happened here and how the buildings were used.

Some of the Jewish property which was seized.

The location of the German concentration camps around Europe.

This large space, which has been deliberately cleared of everything other than what is needed to stop the building falling down (and the fire extinguishers) was used as a transit and holding area. This is effectively where people were held before being deported, assuming that they weren’t being killed on the site, and large numbers went through here.

Another view of the tall and imposing walls which now surround the rear of the site.

This is the temporary entrance of the site and there was a helpful staff member who gave an introduction to the museum. It might not have been the most obvious place to visit on my birthday, but it’s a powerful site and what went here shouldn’t be forgotten.

I’ve mentioned the general prison cells at this Italian concentration camp, but there is also one room known as the ‘cella della morte‘ or the death cell. This room is where anyone expected to be executed within days would be put, often Jews but sometimes partisans or anyone else who had annoyed the Nazi regime.

Sometimes those placed in the cell here, which was in the area where I was standing to take the photo, found themselves sharing their space with dead bodies that were awaiting cremation. The crematorium ovens that had been installed here by the Nazis were just a few metres away.

This memorial is located near to the entrance of Risiera di San Sabba, commemorating the lives of all those Jehovah’s Witnesses who died during the Nazi regime.

This is a moment to mention August Dickmann (1910-1939) who was the first person shot by the Germans for refusing to fight for religious reasons. This story wasn’t a secret, it was reported in the UK that Dickmann, a committed Jehovah’s Witness, had said that he could not sign the Declaration of Commitment that the Nazis demanded.

Dickmann did this whilst at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but his bravery had been evident for some time. He continued his faith even though it was banned by the Nazis in 1933 and he was sent to Esterwegen concentration camp in 1935, before being sent to Sachsenhausen in October 1937. His brother joined him there in March 1939, both still refusing to give up their faith.

On 15 September 1939, a firing squad led by Rudolf Höss, later perhaps best known for being the camp commander at Auschwitz, executed him in front of 8,500 people. At the front of that group were all of the other Jehovah’s Witnesses, around 380, and this was an act that was meant to shock them into joining the German military.

Hermann Baranowski, the camp commander, was no doubt pleased with his work and he went back out after Dickmann’s body was being removed to ask the other conscientious objectors to step forwards to indicate that they would now sign the Declaration of Commitment.

Two people stepped forwards. And those two had already signed it, but they wanted to say that they wanted to remove their signatures after what they had just seen. That takes some incredible bravery and it seems that Baranowski found this response completely sub-optimal and promptly stormed off. Dickmann had said that those who sought to use violence would regret their actions and Baranowski was dead within months and Höss was executed after the end of the war.

Jehovah’s Witnesses were the first Christian denomination to have been banned by the Nazis and around 10,000 were sent to concentration camps. Around 250 were executed and around 3,500 died whilst being imprisoned, whilst children had been taken away from their parents since the mid 1930s. Others in the Nazi movement saw the followers as white and committed Christians, so many found themselves saved, but the opposition from the religion meant that Hitler wanted them gone from Germany.

These are the prison cells at Risiera di San Sabba and the building was a warehouse for the rice-husking business that operated here, so these were hastily constructed by the Nazis in around 1943.

I think that it’s fair to say that they weren’t built for comfort or to cover the sanitary needs of the prisoners.

That’s it, a wooden bed shoved inside and not giving a great deal of space for anything else. They also weren’t single cells, despite looking like that, they were each designed for up to six people.

The rest of the room and it now has something of a haunting feel to it. There are seventeen cells in this room and they were reserved for Slovenes, Croats, partisans, political prisoners and Jews, all of whom were expected to be killed or deported soon after arriving.

When the site was turned into a museum in the 1960s, these cells were kept, although I’m not sure if they had been altered in the period between 1945 and 1965 when the building was used as a refugee camp. I’m not entirely sure what the authorities would have done with them during that time, it hardly seems like suitable accommodation for refugees.

Some of the cells at Risiera di San Sabba, but more on those in another post. One of the political prisoners who found himself here was Giordano Dudine and he had previously spent time at Buchenwald and Gross-Rosen.

This exhibit is of Dudine’s diary and the camp was taken by the Allies a couple of weeks after this, although the Germans tried to destroy the crematorium and any evidence of what had taken place here. The diary was donated by his son, also Giordano Dudine, in 2009. Unfortunately, I can’t find any online content from this diary, so it’s not entirely clear what he was writing about and that would have perhaps given visitors a greater insight into the period.

There are numerous powerful exhibits at Risiera di San Sabba in Italy, where Jews and political prisoners, amongst others, found themselves.

These are ashes from Auschwitz concentration camp, placed here in 2005 by the National Association of Former Nazi Camp Deportees organisation (ANED). I don’t know the back story to this of when they were collected, but I imagine that this was shortly after the end of the Second World War. Their symbolic meaning is what is powerful though, there were around 6,000 Jews in Trieste in 1938, with around 1,500 left after the Second World War whilst today, there are around 600 members of the Jewish community in the city.

There will now follow a series of posts about Risiera di San Sabba, the only concentration camp in Italy with a crematorium and a location that I’ve visited before. Firstly, there’s one individual whose name I’ve come across a few times over recent years and I hadn’t realised that he was born in Trieste.

Odilo Globocnik has a reputation for being one of the most evil men of the Nazi regime, which is hardly known for its tolerance and understanding anyway. You could make a claim that some individuals almost got caught up in the Nazi regime as part of their military career, maybe Karl Dönitz who was ultimately found not guilty of crimes against humanity.

But there are others who saw the Second World War as an opportunity to murder people and destroy settlements. Reinhard Heydrich, a pretty pathetic figure who had been dismissed from military service due to his behaviour, but he happened on the right career move for him by attaching himself to the Nazis at just the appropriate moment.

Then there is Odilo Globocnik, who helped to create and then ran Operation Reinhard, the plan named after Heydrich to murder all Polish Jews. He was not an accidental bureaucrat reluctantly following orders but an eager organiser who pushed for ever more brutal “efficiency” as he might call it, massively enriching himself through theft while treating mass killing as administrative routine. His actions weren’t the product of confusion or wartime chaos but of deliberate, committed cruelty, carried out with zeal and without remorse, leaving a legacy of human suffering on an appalling scale. He deliberately sought out people to murder and took huge joy in what he did.

Odilo Globocnik was given the huge job of being appointed as the Gauleiter of Vienna in 1938, a role he was incapable of doing. He managed to cause all manner of political turbulence of the sort even the Nazis didn’t want and he was fired after it was realised that he was a conman who was stealing huge sums of money. Despite this, Himmler allowed him to transfer to Lublin, where he restarted his career with some zeal.

Globocnik was responsible from that point for the Lublin Ghetto and he then liquidated the Warsaw and Białystok ghettoes. He was also involved with the creation of the Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec extermination camps where millions of people died. He got involved with the killings as often as he could, he was a brutal figure.

After being sent to Trieste, he wrote to Himmler on 4 November 1943 to tell him that Operation Reinhard had been concluded and the concentration camps could be dissolved. His work then focused on Trieste and the establishment of Risiera di San Sabba, ensuring that any Jews would be liquidated but also ensuring that any political dissidents, as he might call them, would be arrested. Mussolini by this time had been overthrown, so there was a power vacuum where the Germans wanted control to prevent the partisans from seizing it. However, when the Allied troops started to retake territory, he fled into the mountains.

The British found Globocnik on 31 May 1945, but he bit down onto a cyanide capsule and killed himself to avoid trial. It might be a myth, but it’s said that the local priest refused to bury him in his church, he was too evil for consecrated ground, so he was shoved into a hole near the church.

That is the background for Risiera di San Sabba, a former factory preserved now as a reminder of the war crimes that took place here.