Risiera di San Sabba

View from the inner courtyard of the Risiera towards the distinctive tower of the goods lift. This part of the building housed offices and dormitories for the SS personnel. © Aiko Hillen

1 October 1943 – 3 May 1945

Author: René Möhrle

Following the German occupation of Italy in September 1943, the SS established a police detention camp in the former rice milling plant of the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste. Initially used as a transit camp for prisoners of war, the site soon developed into a central location of imprisonment, torture, and killing. Those detained there were primarily Jews, partisans, and political opponents. The Risiera was the only camp in Italy equipped with its own crematorium. Between 1943 and 1945, at least two thousand people were murdered there, although some estimates put the number as high as five thousand. In addition, up to twenty-five thousand detainees were deported. Of the approximately one thousand four hundred and fifty Jews who were deported, seven hundred and fifty-four came from Trieste, and only about forty survived. The camp was under the authority of the Higher SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik, who had previously directed Operation Reinhardt, the extermination programme targeting Poland’s Jews. After the war, the Risiera di San Sabba was designated a national memorial, while the judicial prosecution of the crimes committed there remained very limited. Today, the Risiera is one of the principal places of remembrance of Nazi crimes in Italy.

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Involved Unit: Abteilung R (Einsatz R)
Commander: Higher SS- and Police Leader in the Adriatic Littoral Operational Zone
Culprits: Odilo Globocnik, Christian Wirth, Joseph Oberhauser, Dietrich August Allers
Victims: Between 2,000 and 5,000 persons
Investigations and processes: Italy: sentencing of Josef Oberhauser in absentia, 1976.
Germany: investigations began in 1961; no trial; case terminated in 1976.
Armed forces: SS

The image shows an American aerial photograph of Trieste dated 7 December 1944. The numbered markings indicate: (1) the seat of the Supreme Commissioner and the Higher SS and Police Leader in the Adriatic Littoral, located in the Palace of Justice; (2) the headquarters of the Security Police and SD on Piazza Oberdan; and (3) the camp at the Risiera di San Sabba. © US NARA - Record Group 373 - Aerial Photography

The Camp

From rice factory to barracks: the early history of the Risiera di San Sabba

Trieste, today the capital of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, was part of the Habsburg Empire for more than five hundred years until the end of the First World War. In September 1919, the city and its surrounding region were incorporated into Italy. Although Trieste had a strongly multiethnic character, from 1920 onwards it developed into one of the first strongholds of Italian Fascism. The Fascists pursued radical measures against the city’s Slavic population. In 1938, they welcomed Mussolini, who, in a public speech, outlined the introduction of the Italian Racial Laws, which subsequently came into force. With the German occupation of Italy that began in September 1943, Trieste became the governmental seat of the High Commissioner, Friedrich Rainer, and the capital of the Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland, the Adriatic Littoral Operational Zone.

Built between 1898 and 1912, the Risiera di San Sabba rice milling plant stood in the San Sabba district of Trieste, in a semi-peripheral area between industrial and residential zones, a few hundred metres from the shoreline. The industrial complex consisted of several buildings and storehouses, two internal courtyards, and high walls surrounding the entire site. After the plant closed in 1934, the Italian army began using the storehouses, and in 1940, the entire complex was converted into barracks. From September 1943 onwards, the site was first used as a prisoner of war camp, then as a police detention camp, and finally as a place of extermination.
From barracks to concentration camp: the Risiera di San Sabba under German occupation

The German occupiers initially used the Risiera as a main prisoner-of-war camp for ordinary soldiers and non-commissioned officers, a Stalag 339, then as a prisoner-of-war transit camp, Kriegsgefangenen Dulag 339, and from October 1943 as a police detention camp (Polizei-Haftlager). At first, Italian soldiers were imprisoned there and deported to German camps. Later, Jews and, in ever greater numbers, political prisoners were detained in the Risiera, and from 1944, especially partisans.

The layout of the Risiera consisted, in addition to the buildings and halls on the outer sides of the site, of three six-storey transverse buildings that housed the accommodation of the SS personnel, their canteen, offices, and a vehicle hall. Prisoners were held in the large inner courtyard. A three-storey building on the long side of the compound contained an arrival and holding cell that was used for torture and also served as a storage place for the dead, who were subsequently burnt in the Risiera crematorium. Behind this, on the ground floor, were 17 tiny cells, each for up to six persons, where they were tortured and often executed. The upper floors contained collection rooms for groups of about 300 internees of all ages and both sexes who were to be deported.

The large hall on the other long side served as a workshop and as a store for plundered property, in particular, valuables, clothing, and furniture taken from Jews who had been arrested or killed. The rear section also functioned as a depot for firewood.

In January 1944, the master mason and construction specialist Erwin Lambert, known as the “flying master builder” (fliegender Baumeister), had the factory chimney in the Risiera fitted with cremation ovens. During the National Socialist period Lambert was employed as a specialist in the construction of gas chambers and other killing facilities and was sent, both within Operation T4, the murder programme targeting ill and disabled people, and within Operation Reinhardt, the systematic murder of Polish Jews in the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, to whichever sites required such specialised construction work.

Exterior view of the multi-storey Risiera building in which the prisoners were held. © Aiko Hillen
The interior of the building, whose upper floor was used to detain Jews. The ceilings were later removed for structural reasons; most of the wooden beams remain intact. © Aiko Hillen
For many, the cells were the antechamber to death; for others, a brief halt before deportation. © Aiko Hillen
In these rooms, measuring only 1.20 × 2 metres, up to six prisoners were confined – sometimes for a few days, sometimes for months. © Aiko Hillen

From Lublin to Trieste: structures of “Operation Reinhardt“ in the Adriatic Littoral Operational Zone

Himmler instructed Globocnik to continue what was known as “Konto R”, through which assets from National Socialist plunder had been administered, after his transfer to the Adriatic Littoral. He brought the structures and personnel of “Operation Reinhardt” from the Lublin district in occupied Poland with him into the operational zone. His initial task was the persecution and exploitation of the Jews, since Jewish communities existed in Fiume, Abbazia, and Trieste, the last of which was considered the third largest in Italy. In addition, two of Europe’s largest insurance companies, Assicurazioni Generali and Riunione Adriatica Sicurità, as well as several banks and financial houses run by Jewish families, had their headquarters in Trieste. The first arrest of Jews in the operational zone by Globocnik’s personnel took place on 30 December 1943. Very soon, however, the struggle against Tito’s partisans became the principal task of the SS. At the same time, unofficially, even among the population of the operational zone, the question of a permanent annexation of the former Austrian territory to the German Reich remained present.

At the head of Globocnik’s staff stood, first, his adjutant and chief of personnel, SS Sturmbannführer Ernst Lerch, and second, SS Sturmbannführer and Kriminalrat Christian Wirth, who had coordinated “Operation Reinhardt” and the extermination camps of Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor, and who continued this task in Trieste with the three special units known as Einsatz R. After partisans shot Wirth dead in May 1944, his deputy, SS Hauptsturmführer Gottlieb Hering, took over the command of the special units. From July 1944, these were then led by SS Obersturmbannführer Dietrich August Allers, the former head of the T4 central office.

The Einsatz R special units were coordinated from Trieste and were led by the former commanders of the camps of Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor. Unit R1, consisting of about fifty SS men from “Operation T4” and “Operation Reinhardt”, was stationed in Trieste, about half of them in the Risiera di San Sabba. From September 1943 to August 1944, it was led by SS Hauptsturmführer Hering, and thereafter until the end of the war by his deputy, SS Obersturmführer Josef Oberhauser.

Unit R2, stationed in Fiume, consisted of about thirty men, about half of whom had already been involved in “Operation T4” and “Operation Reinhardt”. The unit was initially under the command of SS Hauptsturmführer Franz Reichleitner (Sobibor/Treblinka). After his death in January 1944, SS Hauptsturmführer and Polizeioberleutnant Franz Stangl (also Sobibor/Treblinka) took over. Stangl had previously led Unit R3 in Udine, which consisted of about sixteen SS personnel. This unit was led until July 1944 by Fritz Küttner, and thereafter by Arthur Walther.

Christian Wirth (on the right) during an anti-partisan operation in Istria in 1944, together with Josef Oberhauser (centre) and a police officer in front of an inn along the Karst road. The former organiser of Aktion T4 and Aktion Reinhardt headed Abteilung R in Trieste and remained responsible for the Risiera di San Sabba until his death during an anti-partisan operation in late May 1944. © Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-005-0008-39 / phot. unknown
Franz Reichleitner (third from left) at the Sobibór extermination camp. After his involvement in Aktion T4 and his tenure as commandant of Sobibór, he was transferred to Italy in 1943, where he headed the section of Abteilung R in Fiume/Rijeka. In early January 1944, he was killed by Yugoslav partisans. © USHMM, 2020.8.1_001_011_0005
Burial of the German guards killed during the Sobibór uprising on 18 October 1943 in Chełm; on the far right stands Gottlieb Hering, behind him from left to right Dietrich August Allers, Werner Blankenburg, and Ernst Lerch. They belonged to the circle of perpetrators behind the Nazi “euthanasia” programme and Aktion Reinhardt – the functional elite of these killing operations. Hering, Allers, and Lerch also played central roles in the measures carried out in Trieste. © USHMM, 2020.8.1_001_007_0012
Members of the SS personnel deployed at the Risiera di San Sabba on the occasion of the award of the Iron Cross, Second Class, to Lorenz Hackenholt on 19 April 1944, in the courtyard of the Locanda Venezia Giulia opposite the entrance to the Risiera. From left to right: Erwin Lambert, Alfred Löffler, Karl Schiffner, Karl-Heinz Plikat, Hans Girtzig, Hackenholt, Werner Dubois, Paul Bredow and Gerhard Schneider. Several of those pictured had previously served in the Aktion T4 “euthanasia” programme as well as in Aktion Reinhardt. © Bundesarchiv, B 162 Bild-00694 / phot. unknown
Josef Oberhauser and Kurt Franz (on the right), both central perpetrators of Aktion Reinhardt, were involved in the activities of the Abteilung R, taking part in the imprisonment, deportation, and murder of the inmates in the Risiera di San Sabba. © Bundesarchiv, B 162 Bild-00575 / phot. unknown

Between 1943 and 1945, thousands of people were interned, deported, and murdered in the Risiera di San Sabba. Most of the victims were Italian soldiers, political prisoners, partisans, and Jews from Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Istria, and Dalmatia. From the 1,450 deported Jews, 40 persons survived; at least 28 Jewish persons were directly murdered in the Risiera.

Torture, murder, and deportation: the Risiera di San Sabba as a locus of Nazi crime

Between 1943 and 1945, thousands of people were interned and deported in the Risiera di San Sabba, many of them to the Auschwitz extermination camp. The exact number of victims murdered in the Risiera itself is disputed; estimates range from 2,000 to 5,000. The total number of those interned likewise remains uncertain, estimated at up to 25,000. Of around 1,450 Jews who were interned and, for the most part, deported to Auschwitz, only about 40 survived. Most of them came from Friuli Venezia Giulia and Istria, some from Dalmatia and the Veneto; 754 came from Trieste. At least 28 Jews were murdered directly in the Risiera.

The crimes committed in the Risiera di San Sabba were marked by systematic violence. Under the responsibility of Christian Wirth and Dietrich August Allers, there were regular acts of torture and murder; Otto Stadie is held responsible for numerous killings. Groups of prisoners were murdered several times a week, often by so-called Trawniki men, auxiliaries from Eastern Europe who the SS had specially trained for guard duties and killing operations. Possibly on the initiative of Lorenz Hackenholt, as in the Belzec extermination camp, a bus without windows was converted into a gas van in which prisoners were killed with engine exhaust.

Trieste and the Risiera di San Sabba are regarded as particularly significant sites of German crimes in Italy: on the one hand because of the concentration of high-ranking SS personnel under Friedrich Rainer and Odilo Globocnik, and on the other because the killing and torture methods professionalised in Eastern Europe were continued there within the context of the Adriatic Littoral Operational Zone. The Risiera served as a point of departure for killings and deportations, for terror, exploitation, and for both military and so-called “cleansing” operations.
Caprice, deportation, and murder: daily life in the San Sabba camp

The main office of R1 was located inside the camp. Alongside German SS personnel, it consisted of around two hundred Trawniki men under the command of Johannes Schwarzenbacher, himself previously deployed in Operation Reinhardt. In addition, there were Ukrainian women and, in part, Italian collaborationist units. The Trawniki men in particular appear to have been responsible for the torture and executions that formed part of the daily routine of the camp.

The prisoners were divided into various groups that were also separated from one another spatially. The SS arrested people according to racial and political criteria, often arbitrarily, sometimes during checks or for alleged violations in the urban area, and sometimes systematically when targeting presumed partisans from the surrounding hinterland of the operational zone. Raids and major actions against partisans, their relatives, and entire villages led to large numbers of prisoners and to numerous executions and massacres in the region.

Jews arrested by the R units, some of whom had been betrayed or handed over by Italian collaborators, were brought to the Risiera and, for the most part, deported. Some were also murdered on the spot, for example, during interrogations intended to extract information about the whereabouts of relatives, or because they were regarded as unfit for transport. Jews, moreover, constituted the only group of prisoners that, without distinction, included children, women, and elderly people. Both the provisions they received and their accommodation in the large group rooms of the Risiera were regarded as extremely poor.

In post-war interviews and legal proceedings, various witnesses, including survivors, local residents, workers in neighbouring factories, and even perpetrators such as Josef Oberhauser, reported that executions in the Risiera took the form of killing by engine exhaust, strangulation, shootings, and beatings to death. These acts took place both at night and during the day, often accompanied by loud music or the noise of engines.

From April 1944 onwards, the bodies of the victims were incinerated in the crematorium. Witnesses spoke of large deliveries of coal and wood, of yellow smoke that rose continually from the Risiera’s forty metre high industrial chimney, and of camp personnel in German uniform who almost daily carried sacks filled with ashes to be dumped into the sea.

An aerial photograph of Trieste dated 23 May 1945, a few weeks after the city’s liberation. The remains of the blown-up crematorium can be seen in the centre of the Risiera di San Sabba courtyard. © US NARA - Record Group 373 - Aerial Photography
A guardhouse, B offices and accommodations, C garage, D offices and dormitories for German, Ukrainian and Italian SS personnel, on the ground floor kitchens and dining hall, E offices, armory, cobbler’s workshop and storage, on the ground floor death cells, F drying oven converted into a cremation oven, G chimney, H dormitories, tailoring and cobbler’s workshop, on the ground floor 17 prison cells, J Locanda Venezia Giulia inn, L laundry and storage rooms for confiscated goods, upstairs dormitories, tailoring and household-goods storage, M storage rooms, N infirmary and dormitory, P freight elevator © US NARA - Record Group 373 - Aerial Photography

Between February and April 1976, the Court of Assizes in Trieste conducted proceedings in absentia against 16 SS members guilty of crimes perpetrated in the Risiera di San Sabba. The verdicts had no practical effect since Germany did not allow the extradition of its citizens.

Investigations and trials

Delayed justice: legal processing of the crimes of San Sabba

Between February and April 1976, the Court of Assizes in Trieste conducted proceedings in absentia against 16 SS members guilty of crimes perpetrated in the Risiera di San Sabba. The verdicts had no practical effect since Germany did not allow the extradition of its citizens. A total of 174 witnesses were summoned, among them survivors of the Risiera and their relatives. The judgment delivered in Trieste on 29 April 1976, and confirmed in 1978 by the Higher Regional Court, imposed a life sentence in absentia on Josef Oberhauser. He never had to serve this sentence, however, since Germany did not extradite its own citizens.

Oberhauser had already been sentenced in 1948 by the Soviet occupation authorities to fifteen years in prison, among other things, for his SS membership and his involvement in the euthanasia murders, of which he served eight years. In 1965, the Munich Regional Court sentenced him to four and a half years in prison for aiding and abetting collective murder in at least 300,000 cases, a punishment that appears extremely light in view of the number of victims. By the end of 1966, he was released, with pre-trial detention taken into account. He subsequently worked as a waiter in a Munich brewery and died in 1979 at the age of 61.

The charge against Dietrich August Allers, who had died in March 1975, was dropped. In December 1968, Allers had been sentenced by the Frankfurt Regional Court to eight years in prison for aiding and abetting murder in at least 34,549 cases in connection with the T4 programme, again a punishment wholly disproportionate to the scale of the crime. Since earlier periods of imprisonment were credited to him, the sentence was deemed served.

Memory

Remembrance between remembering and forgetting: the Risiera di San Sabba

After the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, the Risiera functioned for a time as a refugee camp for people fleeing from Eastern Europe to the West. Trieste stood at the intersection between Western Europe and socialist Yugoslavia, a politically sensitive frontier throughout the Cold War.

On 15 April 1965, the President of the Italian Republic, Giuseppe Saragat, declared the Risiera di San Sabba a national memorial site. The presidential decree stipulated that the memory of the site should be preserved in accordance with its status as the “sole example of a Nazi camp in Italy”, while excluding the Nazi camps at Bozen, Fossoli and Borgo San Dalmazzo, as well as the approximately forty Fascist camps established in Italy under Mussolini.

On 24 April 1975, after several years of renovation work, the Risiera di San Sabba Museum, designed by Romano Boico, was opened. Exhibited are items such as letters and drawings by prisoners, as well as torture instruments used by the perpetrators. Information panels in four languages, maps, and photographs provide context. The detention cells and torture rooms can be visited. In the large inner courtyard, there is a marker indicating the place where the cremation oven and chimney stood before the Germans blew them up during their withdrawal to erase all traces.

The concept of the permanent exhibition, which initially focused on the perpetrators and imprisoned resistance fighters, has been revised several times up to the present day. Increasingly, critical attention is given – also within the framework of the Giorno della Memoria established in the year 2000 – to Italian Fascism (1922–1943) and the antisemitic Racial Laws of 1938. The role of Italian collaborators, however, continues to receive insufficient treatment.

On average, the Risiera di San Sabba national memorial is visited annually by around 100.000 people, more than half of them school groups.

The architect Romano Boico enclosed the site with high concrete walls and created a narrow passageway at the former entrance. The constriction and coldness of the walls are intended to evoke a sense of oppression upon entering. © Aiko Hillen
Steel plates in the courtyard mark the footprint of the crematorium and the course of the flue. The slender, vertical steel sculpture recalls the chimney of the furnace. © Aiko Hillen
The sculpture I Martiri by Marcello Mascherini in the memorial hall of the Risiera. The artwork commemorates the victims of the camp. © Aiko Hillen

Sources

Files on the proceedings opened against perpetrators active in the Risiera and SS members who worked in the R-units are distributed in various German and Italian archives. In Germany, relevant holdings are held at the Ludwigsburg branch of the German Federal Archives (e.g., B 162/2210–2213). In Italy, the Istituto Regionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Trieste possesses relevant documents (e. g. IRSML, Busta 20). The Risiera is referred to in the quartermaster’s files of the I. SS-Panzer Corps, kept in the German Federal Military Archives in Freiburg (RS 2-2/26), in its function as a barracks and military depot. Files on Odilo Globocnik, in his function as Higher SS- and Police Officer in the Adriatic Littoral Operational Zone, are located in the German Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde (e.g., the collection of personnel-related documents up to 1945, SSO 016A) and the Trieste State Archive (e.g., ASTS, Prefettura, Atti Generali 1923–1945, Busta 3041/19171). The few extant files available in Germany on the Operational Zone’s high commissioner, Friedrich Rainer, are located in the Berlin-Lichterfelde archives (e.g., R 83) and in the political archive of the German Foreign Office (e.g., PA AA, R 99420).

Literature

Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung: Das T4-Reinhardt-Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka, Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2013.

Stefano Di Giusto, Tommaso Chiussi, Globocnik’s Men in Italy, 1943–45: Abteilung R and the SS-Wachmannschaften of the Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland, Schiffer, Atglen, 2017.

Ferruccio Fölkel, La Risiera di San Sabba. L'Olocausto dimenticato. Trieste e il Litorale Adriatico durante l'occupazione nazista, Milan 2000.

Tristano Matta, Il lager di San Sabba. Dall'occupazione nazista al processo di Trieste, Trieste 2012.

Adolfo Scalpelli, San Sabba. Istruttoria e processo per il Lager della Risiera, 2 vols., Edizioni Lint, Trieste, 1988.

Translation

Translated from German by: Joel Golb

2025

Text: CC BY NC SA 4.0