The “Risiera di San Sabba” Trial of 1976

Theatrical Staging for an Extermination -  by Ugo Fabbri (Italy)

            The “Risiera di San Sabba” in Trieste originally was a rice-processing plant. In the wartime years of 1943-1945 the buildings, having been abandoned, were used by the German army as a police post for the clearance of prisoners of war and a base for anti-guerrilla troops.

In 1965 the “Risiera” was declared an Italian national monument by virtue of its being “the sole example of Nazi lager in Italy”. The word “camp” is misleading for the place consisted of a main five-storey building used as barracks for the German troops. Around it were subsidiary buildings, that is, storehouses, garages, a cookhouse, a large room for prisoners in transit.

On 16^th February 1976 in the Trieste Assizes there opened the trial of six German officers, amongst whom colonel Dietrich Allers, a “Risiera” commander, charged, thirty years after the purported facts, with crimes that German troops were said to have committed against the Communist partisans and the Jewish community.

According to the literary and official version, thousands of “innocent” prisoners belonging to the local Jewish community, along with partisans of Tito, were killed at the “Risiera” and burnt in a crematorium. A historical fraud so obvious that it is easily exposed.

The myth of the “Risiera” as the sole extermination camp in Italy originated as a diversion created by the partisans to draw public opinion away from the crimes they themselves had committed at the “foibe”, deep crevasses in the rocky land outside Trieste. During the war they were the partisans’ killing grounds for Italians and political opponents.

Wherever a civilised juridical system exists the facts are ascertained first and a judgement is made later. In Italy, cradle of law but grave of justice, the trend has been towards a reversal of tradition.

The first non-official investigative act concerning the “Risiera” dates from May 28^th, 1964. It is a letter that Dr Dettmer, member of the Hamburg criminal court and investigating magistrate, sent to Trieste to get information about SS General Odilo Globocnik. The Communist Party immediately got wind of the affair and took control of it. One of its examiners was Albin Bubnic, a wartime inmate in the German lager and then Tito’s official representative in the Venezia Giulia region. Dr Mario Stock of the Jewish community actively assisted.

A comparison of the various trial witnesses’ statements gives a significant picture: on some points there is a doubtful, repetitive matching with the partisan fabrication, even in the mistakes. Anything going the accusers’ way always found favourable ground, with no attention being paid to testimonies favourable to the defendants.

Four of the six defendants were dead. According to the code, the court should have removed their names from the indictment. However, at the partisans’ request the Court reserved the right to take its decision later; it was clear that it served somebody’s interests to keep ghosts on trial so as to throw mud at their memory without fear of cross-examination. The only one who was eventually to sit in the dock was lieutenant Joseph Oberhauser, a junior officer.

In all Western lawcourts stands the maxim nemo iudex in causa sua (no-one is judge in his own case), that is, that the judge must guarantee that he is above the parties. In the “Risiera” trial this was flouted.

There is a strict procedure to guarantee the impartiality of a jury, the members being drawn from among the citizenry and supposed to meet particular requirements. One of the “Risiera” trial jurors, Adolfo Rot, belonged to a partisan Yugoslav Communist family who had paid with their blood in the fight against the Germans. Owing to the losses his family suffered during the war, Rot appeared the man most suitable to take personal revenge on the Germans, rather than guarantee them a fair trial. In any European country this circumstance alone would be enough to declare the nullity of the whole trial due to presumed bias. The above also applied to juror Adriana Nicolini who as a young girl had seen her maternal aunt (belonging to the Jewish community) arrested by the Germans, and said she had been in shock after it.

All the partisans in charge of supervision of references to alleged facts were connected either with the “Resistance” or with the Jewish community. The Court should rather have appointed as its consultants historians who could guarantee impartiality.

As to how the witnesses were treated, the case of Mr Luciano Hesse, interpreter at the German command, is emblematic. In spite of his being put under pressure in an environment which poured on him all its ethnic hatred, he always refused to acknowledge the existence of a crematory oven at the “Risiera”, and was thus convicted for perjury.

When a criminal investigatory body does its work, the scene of a crime is inspected immediately, or at least as soon as possible. However, the investigation into the mass-killings at the “Risiera” and the on-the-spot inspection were ordered only after duly-guided workmen had planed the floors, thus doing away with traces that might lead to the truth.

The case for the existence of the crematory oven and its use to burn corpses is groundless. A simple technical consideration makes this fact appear forthright and conclusive. Despite whatever may be believed in Italy or elsewhere, the device had been a rice-drying apparatus, not equipped with firebricks (unavoidable component for an oven), but with an innocuous thermo-hydraulic mechanism, a boiler similar to a common household heating plant. It produced an air jet of 30°C, that is, a temperature lower than that of a hair drier and at which one cannot even cremate an ant. The idea that such a boiler could be turned into an ad hoc crematory oven is a simple triumph of ignorance and bad faith. The Court must be rebuked for its total carelessness concerning the subject, which called for a forensic inspection.

Since there was no objective matching confirmation, other than the interested party’s statements, to prove the existence of a crematory oven, as a cover-up it was said that, before abandoning Trieste, the Germans had dynamited it.

Under Italian law ‘criminal liability is personal’ and this to the extent that the Court of Assizes should have fulfilled the duty of identifying the person whom the defendant had allegedly killed, how, when, in what circumstances and why the defendant would have sullied himself with the crime of which he was charged. Nothing of all that was known at the “Risiera” trial: we do not even know the identity of the victims and we are not sure whether they actually existed.

The partisan fabrication supplied the Court with a list of 317 “victims”, drawn up by A. Bubnic and produced without any verification. Since it was difficult — for good reason — to make a long list of the names of persons actually deceased at the “Risiera”, the forgers included the names of missing soldiers, criminals, spies, saboteurs, partisans already sentenced to death for various crimes by the German military courts. Such “non-innocent” victims, according to the public prosecutor’s own statement, should have been excluded. In addition, Bubnic’s list contains names stated twice, that is, in two languages or else mentioned twice by mistake, the names of several persons deceased elsewhere, of persons of whom nothing is unspecified, of persons killed by the Yugoslavs and the Communists and not by the Germans, of Jews registered as having been deported to the lagers, of partisans who died after the war’s end.

Moreover, it is highly significant that many relatives of persons in the list of victims were not admitted as plaintiffs in the case, for the State auditing authority ascertained that those victims were not “innocent”. Whereas the Trieste court had painted a thoroughly black picture, with thousands of innocent “Risiera” victims, the State auditors, having taken due care in verifying the documents produced, threw out all “Risiera”-related claims, finding them manifestly groundless.

            Liliana Picciotto Fargion, who works at the Centro di documentazione ebraica (Centre for contemporary Jewish documentation) in Milan and collaborates with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, writes: “The following list is the outcome of a ten-year job. It includes only the ascertained deportees, either dead or surviving”. The Centro, aided by other scholars, has classified each of the Jewish inmates at the “Risiera” as having been deported to the lagers. The trial judge, however, listed them amongst the victims burnt in the alleged crematorium at the “Risiera”.

Recently the vaults containing the bones, not ashes, of 70 partisans shot at the rifle range near the village of Opicina 1944 were discovered at Sant’Anna Cemetery in Trieste. The find belies the Assize Court’s verdict stating that the bodies were incinerated in the crematory oven at the Risiera di San Sabba. These remains – miraculously resuscitated from the chimney – lay bare the fraud of those who intrigued to put a hoax in the place of historical truth.

On 2^nd April 1944 a partisan bomb exploded near Opicina, killing several men of the German 188^th division. In reprisal, the German military court ordered 70 captured partisans to be shot. They were executed at the rifle range near Opicina, where a plaque recalls the tragic event.

In 1976 the Court of Assizes in Trieste re-examined the case and ruled that the bodies of the shot partisans had been burnt in the “crematory oven” at the Risiera di San Sabba, adding that lieutenant Oberhauser – tried and sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment – had “confessed” as much.  

The vaults, not cinerary urns, can be still seen at Sant’Anna cemetery, section XX, in the “sacred” area reserved for the partisans. Readily available photos show a plaque with the 70 names, and the city authorities gather there to commemorate the 70 partisans.

            That is the triumph of historical truth.

            In recognizing as “innocent” victims persons who were in reality terrorists acting against the civilian population, the court criminalized the anti-guerrilla struggle by the Italian and German troops against Yugoslav and Communist partisan bands.

            The “Risiera” trial reproduced the Nuremberg trial thirty years later.