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.
