A “Not Hundred Percent Anti-Fascist Policy”

The Ethnic Cleansing of Italians in Istria and Trieste and the Allied Investigation Committee, 1943 - 1945

MA Thesis in History Holocaust and Genocide Studies Jorinde van der Meijden 6163726

Supervisor: Dr. Karel Berkhoff Date: 19 August 2016

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 4

ABSTRACT 5

INTRODUCTION 6

I. THE ALLIED INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE 12 Context of the Allied investigation 13 Ideological motives for the investigation 14 Diplomatic motives for the investigation 15 Some of the findings of the investigation 16 Conclusion 18

II. THE INVESTIGATION OF YUGOSLAV CRIMES IN ISTRIA 19 The foibe on the Istrian Peninsula 23 The nature of the violence of the Yugoslav forces 25 Findings by the Investigation Committee 27 The stories of Giovanni Radeticchio, Don Beari and Giuseppe Bari 29 Conclusion 33

III. TRIESTE: FORTY DAYS OF YUGOSLAV OCCUPATION 35 The number of victims 38 The identity of the victims 39 Sites of execution and the foibe 42 The testimonies of two priests 47 The identity of the perpetrators 49 Conclusion 49

CONCLUSION 51

APPENDIX I – Map of the Venezia Giulia area (1946) 53

APPENDIX II – Facsimile of a statement by Giovanni Radeticchio 54

BIBLIOGRAPHY 56

PRIMARY SOURCES 58

3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This thesis would not have been possible without the advice, help and support of the academic staff at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, family and friends. I would especially like to thank Dr. Karel Berkhoff for, very patiently, guiding me through the process of writing an MA thesis. His experience in the academic field and knowledge about structuring and organising a thesis, have helped me a lot during this process. I would also like to thank Dr. Kjell Anderson for agreeing to be the second reader of this thesis. To conclude, I would like to thank the staff at the National Archives in London for their help with and assistance in the research of the primary sources used in this thesis.

4 ABSTRACT

After the armistice signed by Italy on 3 September 1943 the Yugoslav army invaded Istria, a peninsula that was granted to Italy after the First World War, and attempted to annex the area to the new Yugoslav state. During the period in which the Yugoslav authorities attempted to organise their control over the area, ending with the invasion of the German army a few months later, the Yugoslav forces intimidated, arrested, tortured and killed Italian nationals. Many of the victims were thrown, dead or alive, into natural sinkholes, called foibe (singular foiba). When the Allied forces continued their war of liberation from the south of Italy towards the north in 1943, a race for Trieste motivated both the Allied forces and the Yugoslav forces to move quickly to occupy the strategically important port city of Trieste. The Yugoslav army took full control over the city and repeated the massacres of Italians in the same style as in Istria. The Yugoslav forces created countless sites of executions, amongst them were many foibe. When the British army arrived and pushed the Yugoslav army across the so- called Morgan Line, the 13 Corps of Eighth Army of the Allied forces installed an Investigation Committee to excavate the corpses inside the foibe and elsewhere and to collect eyewitness accounts and testimonies from survivors and victims’ family members. The findings of the Investigation Committee show that the Yugoslav troops committed ethnic cleansing in Istria and Trieste in their attempts to gain those territories for Yugoslavia.

5 INTRODUCTION

When I ask my Italian friends and acquaintances whether their history teachers at secondary school taught them about the history of the foibe (plural of foiba), natural pits, in which Italian soldiers and civilians were thrown by the Yugoslav troops, they answer that they vaguely know something about it. They don’t remember much about those history lessons but add that the schools in the region of Venezia Giulia (covering the areas of Gorizia, Trieste, and the whole Istrian peninsula, see Appendix I) do teach their pupils about this gruesome story. It strikes me as odd that these educated, intelligent and generally interested young Italians do not know much about the massacres committed by the Yugoslavs in the Trieste and Istria regions. The secondary sources used in this thesis are predominantly books written by Italian historians such as Raoul Pupo, Roberto Spazzali and Gianni Oliva, but also American historian Pamela Ballinger and others. Despite the factual uncertainties concerning this topic, almost all historians stick to the same context of the history of the Trieste and Istria regions, in the west and south of Venezia Giulia, respectively, during the Second World War. On July 10, 1943 the Allies arrived in Italy.1 The Allied forces consisted mostly of British troops who had an interest in the control over the Mediterranean. Although, according to the historian Paul Ginsborg, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not have a lot of faith in the Italians, he did have some respect for Mussolini. In the early days of fascism, Churchill had even complimented Mussolini for saving Italy from the threat of communism. This meant that there was not a lot of British pressure on the fascist groups in Italy to dissolve. Meanwhile, King Vittorio Emanuele III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio tried to negotiate about war and peace with the Allies but also wanted to retain a military dictatorship.2 The Forty-Five Days, starting with the dismissal of Mussolini on 25 July 1943, ended with the armistice between Italy and the Allied forces on 3 September 1943, which was made public five days later. From then on, Italy was a co-belligerent of the Allies. The Allies considered the Italian partisans, who were fighting Mussolini’s army and the German army and who wanted to install a leftist army, as an obstacle to Allied

1 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, society and politics 1943-1988, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003, p. 11. 2 Ibidem, p. 12.

6 victory. The cases of Greece and Yugoslavia became the examples for the British forces of failed interventions by the Allies: Greece ended up in a civil war between the communists and the monarchists and Yugoslavia became a repressive communist state under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito.3 Therefore, the Allied forces acted carefully when dealing with the partisan groups or Tito and his army. During the Second World War several partisan groups were present in the areas of Trieste and the Istrian peninsula. There were Italian resistance and partisan groups, organised within the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN, the National Liberation Committee). Within this committee existed groups such as the Garibaldi, Mazzini and Friuli battalions, the Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom) and the Brigata Proletaria (Proletarian brigade). These are only a few examples of the many bigger and smaller resistance and liberation groups that were active during the Second World War in Italy. There were also the Yugoslav partisan groups that were attempting to occupy Istria and Trieste. Some were organised by the Croatian, Slovene and Yugoslav Communist Party. The Croatians established the ZAVNOH, or National Anti-Fascist Council of the People's Liberation of Croatia, while the Yugoslavs created AVNOJ, the Anti-Fascist Council of the People's Liberation of Yugoslavia. As the Allied forces went further north within Italy, after the Sicily landing, the border region between Italy and Yugoslavia became more and more important to the Yugoslav troops on the one hand and the Allied forces on the other. While Churchill never trusted the communists, the Yugoslavs wanted the territory back that they lost to Italy during the peace negotiations after the First World War, most importantly the peninsula Istria and the portal city Trieste. These areas had been given to Italy as a reward for joining the fight against Germany in the First World War and Italy subsequently made sure to ‘Italianise’ the area in the twenties and thirties. After the Italian armistice of September 3, 1943, the Yugoslav army started an offensive to take the Istrian peninsula back. When they succeeded in taking most of the area they abolished all Italian bureaucratic institutions, street names and therewith the Italian culture in Istria became marginalised.4 In 1943 a race commenced between the Allies and the Yugoslav army, as they were trying to drive the Germans back over their former northern border, to reach the city first. In the autumn of 1945 the Yugoslav army

3 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 41-42. 4 Gianni Oliva, Foibe: Le stragi negate degli italiani della Venezia Giulia e dell’Istria, Milan: Arnaldo Mondadori Editore 2002, pp. 74-75.

7 occupied Trieste for forty days but had to retreat when the Germans launched a final attack. During these forty days in the Venezia Giulia area, but also in the spring and summer of 1943 on the Istria peninsula, the Yugoslav army committed many atrocities against Italian citizens and army personnel. The violence consisted of executions, kidnappings, looting, violent maltreatment, deportation, forced marches and torture. People were also shot and thrown into the foibe (natural sinkholes), sometimes even alive. The estimates of the number of deaths ranges from a few hundred people to tens of thousands of people.5 Most researchers write about several thousand victims.6 This estimate includes all the Italian victims killed by Yugoslav forces between 1943 and 1945, as well as victims of summary executions and those Italians who died in the Yugoslav concentration camps. It is remarkable that the most prominent scholars on the topic, such as Pupo, Spazzali, Oliva and Ballinger, have not used the materials that the British Allies created by investigating the crimes committed by the Yugoslav troops in the Istria and the Trieste regions. These reports, currently archived at the National Archives in London, will be used in this thesis to provide new information on the victim group and the nature of the violence. Using these sources will give a chance to approach this topic from a different and previously unknown perspective, complementing the extensive research done by the aforementioned scholars on the foibe killings. In the context of war and competing ideologies the Allies and the Yugoslavs were fighting side by side against nazism and fascism but they were also fighting each other over the sphere of influence of the Venezia Giulia region. The conflict only came to an end in 1954 when Trieste was officially given to Italy and Istria became part of Croatia.7 This thesis investigates what happened to the Italian victims of Yugoslav atrocities in Trieste and the Istrian peninsula between 1943 and 1945. The answer will be based, mainly, on extensive research and documentation drawn up by the Allied

5 Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, Milan: Paravia Bruno Mondadori Editori 2003, p. 24. 6 Gianni Oliva, Foibe, p. 4. Also: Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, The Frontiers of Europe, London: Pinter 1998, p. 77. 7 Pamela Ballinger, ‘Who defines and remembers genocide after the Cold War? Contested memories of partisan massacre in Venezia Giulia in 1943-1945’, Journal of Genocide Research, no. 2 (2000), p. 14.

8 forces in Trieste. As said, these materials have not been used at all.8 All of the primary sources were obtained from the National Archives in London. The British started an investigation into the atrocities in Venezia Giulia towards the end of the war. The 13 Corps went to the villages to get information from the civilians about the perpetrators, the victims and the details of the crimes. They found the foibe in which the victims were thrown, dead or alive. They created pages and pages of information about the victims, and to some degree also about the perpetrators. One discovery, as we will see in Chapters II and III, is that many survivors state they ‘were only persecuted because they were Italian’. The first chapter will set out the context of the Investigation Committee of the Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ) and its workings. Not much is known about the motives for starting the investigation and about its practicalities. It is nevertheless important to look at the broader ideological context surrounding the Investigation Committee and the relations between Churchill, Field Marshal Alexander (Commander- in-Chief of the Allied Forces in the Mediterranean), Josip Broz Tito and the Yugoslav army. This context could shed light on the motives behind starting an investigation into the Yugoslav atrocities and could also clarify why it remained unknown. The second chapter describes the massacres on the Istrian peninsula in 1943. It combines the information from secondary sources with findings from the British Investigation Committee. Since I did not have access to the archives in Belgrade or Ljubljana, and did not research Slavic primary sources, I relied on research done by other historians on this topic. One focal point is what other academics write and argue about the identity of the victims and what happened to them. Another is on how the violence was committed and what the perception of the survivors was relating to their victimhood and the perpetrators. The chapter also deals with the statement given to the Allied forces by Giovanni Radeticchio, the only known survivor of the foibe of 1943. The third chapter will discuss what happened in the Trieste and Gorizia regions in 1945. It will discuss what historians have written and there will be a focus, again, on the identity of the victims and the perpetrators and the nature of the violence. Primary sources will supplement the narrative that already exists in the scholarly literature.

8 The materials were merely mentioned in Gorazd Bajc, ‘Aretacije, internacije in deportacije po prvi in drugi svetovni vojni na obmo ju Julijske krajine: oris problematike in poskus primerjave', Acta Histriae, no. 20 (2012) p. 400, and Jo e Pirjevec and others, Fojbe, Ljubljana: Cankarjeva zalo ba 2011, pp. 26, 30, 32. č ž ž 9 Many witnesses gave their testimony to the Allied forces. Two testimonies given by priests from the Trieste region will be discussed in detail, for their position within the community gave them the opportunity to witness and describe what had happened. Because of the absence of survivor narratives, testimonies by family members of the deceased will be reviewed. Now it is important to explain the choice for certain definitions that will be used in this thesis. As mentioned, the foibe are natural sinkholes in which the victims were thrown by the perpetrators. Over the years, the foibe have also come to mean the whole range of atrocities committed against the Italians by the Yugoslav partisans, so also the concentration camps; the death marches and executions. I will only use the word foibe to refer to the sinkholes and not to describe the Yugoslav violence in general. This is important for it enables a distinction between the varying nature of the violence, which, in turn, is important when describing the violence as ethnic cleansing. As we will see in this thesis, Italians in Istria and in Trieste comprised the largest victim group. On various occasions the Yugoslav forces even tried to ban Italian street names, signs, and made Italians even hesitant to speak their own language. I use the terms Yugoslav troops or Yugoslav forces in order to describe the perpetrator group. The Yugoslav forces consisted of military personnel and volunteers who wanted to fight against the Germans and for the Yugoslav occupation of Trieste and Istria.9 Some of the partisans groups were under the control of Tito’s army and therefore it is difficult to distinguish between the Yugoslav army and the Yugoslav partisans. When the term Allied forces is used, it refers to the British who started the research into the foibe, unless indicated otherwise. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ is used according to the definition by Norman Naimark:

“The intention of ethnic cleansing is to remove a people and often all traces of them from a concrete territory. The goal, in other words, is to get rid of the “alien” nationality, ethnic, or religious group and to seize control of the territory they had formerly inhabited.”10

He adds that in Slavic and German language the word cleansing has a double meaning:

9 Gianni Oliva, Foibe, p. 72. 10 Norman Naimark, Fires of hatred: ethnic cleansing in twentieth century Europe, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2001, p. 3.

10 “one purges the native community of foreign bodies and one purges one’s own people of alien elements”11. As we shall see, this addition is of great importance to the topic of the foibe killings and the Yugoslav troops as perpetrators. It is important to mention the difference between ethnic cleaning and genocide. The perpetrators of ethnic cleansing aim to remove a certain group from a certain area to be able to take control over this area. The perpetrators of genocide intent to get rid of a certain group of people by killing them or by letting them die in the process of forced migration and deportation. The violence that occurs during ethnic cleansing usually consists of murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extra‐judicial executions, rape and sexual assaults.

11 Norman Naimark, Fires of hatred, pp. 4-5.

11 I. THE ALLIED INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE

The British Allied Forces started an investigation into the atrocities committed by the Yugoslav army and partisan groups against Italian nationals. The primary sources refer to this research with multiple terms such as the War Crimes Investigation Group, Commission of Enquiry or the Investigation Committee. In this thesis the term Investigation Committee will be used to refer to the broader context of the investigation and the people involved in the research. The investigation took place under the auspices of 13 Corps, which was commanded by Lieutenant General Sir John Harding from May 1944 until November 1946. 13 Corps was part of 8th Army, which consisted of 5 corps.12 The Chief of Command of all Allied Forces at the time was Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander. The primary sources do not mention exactly who was in charge of each part of the investigation. Therefore, this chapter can offer only a general overview. The investigations were directed by the Intelligence and Security (G-2) Section, within 13 Corps, of the Allied Forces Headquarters (AHFQ) and, to cite, “the investigation consisted in ascertaining and proving the validity of official and unofficial reports pertaining to large scale atrocities, wholesale indiscriminate arrests and deportations, and other abuses and excesses committed by the Yugoslav Army and Yugoslav partisans in Venezia Giulia between May 2 – June 12, 1945.”13 The report is based on different types of sources, such as military agencies, the Military Government, the Italian Liberation Committee, the Italian Red Cross, individual civilian sources, personal interrogations and censorship intercepts. The information was sorted in eight categories: 1. Atrocities and torture committed against an individual that can still personally testify; 2. Torture reported by witnesses; 3. Indiscriminate arrests and deportations of civilians and military personnel; 4. General abuse against civilians; 5. Intimidation of civilians by strong-arm squads or emissaries; 6. Testimonies about the Yugoslav concentration camps; 7. The treatment of Allied personnel in Yugoslav concentration camps and 8. Reports by various censorship agencies that confirm the

12 Robert Palmer, A Concise History of: 8 Army (History and Personnel) and A Concise History of: 13 Corps (Western Dessert Force (History and Personnel)), www.britishmilitaryhistory.co.uk, consulted on 30 May 2016. 13 WO 204/12494, ‘Report of investigation (part 1)’, dated 27 September 1945, from the National Archives, London.

12 previously mentioned reports.14 Even though officially the investigation only researched the crimes committed between 2 May and 12 June, it also mentioned crimes committed in 1943 in Istria. The primary sources do not show if and when the Investigation Committee was abolished. However, the sources do show a continuing communication between the British Army, Churchill and Tito focussing on solving the border issues between Italy and the Croatian and Slovene parts of Yugoslavia.

Context of the Allied investigation As the Second World War drew to an end it became clear to Churchill that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were enlarging their sphere of influence in Europe and the same was being done by the Allied forces. Trieste became one of the key places where an ideological battle was to be played out between the British and American forces and the Yugoslav troops. Trieste had already been the centre of a border dispute during and after the First World War, when Venezia Giulia was given to Italy after Italy joined forces against Germany. The Second World War, in which Yugoslavia was formed as a state, gave rise to a renewed belief that Venezia Giulia should be part of Yugoslavia. When Italy signed the armistice on September 8, 1943, the Allied forces saw a chance to incorporate the whole of Italy in the ‘western’ sphere of influence. Historian Kerstin von Lingen explains the British attitude towards Italy as the following. Italy was led into a war by corrupt politicians under Mussolini and was to be regarded as the ‘innocent little brother’ of Germany. In this view, Italy could be saved whereas Germany could not. This meant that Italy was progressively portrayed as a victim of the war instead of an aggressor.15 Besides this, von Lingen argues that the Allied forces in Italy were more threatened by the Yugoslav partisans and Tito than the Soviet army. In the first days of May 1945 the Yugoslav troops had already taken Trieste, even though the New Zealand force was sent to the port city to occupy it before the Yugoslav troops could get there.16 Capturing Trieste was of such importance that Field Marshal Alexander readied his army in order to attack quickly and swiftly if Tito’s forces were not prepared to leave

14 WO 204/12494, ‘Report of investigation (part 1)’, dated 27 September 1945, from the National Archives, London. 15 Kerstin von Lingen, Allen Dulles, the OSS, and Nazi War Criminals: the dynamics of selective prosecution, New York: Cambridge University Press 2013, pp. 108-110. 16 Ibidem, pp. 259-260.

13 the city. The occupation of Trieste by the Yugoslav troops is most commonly called ‘the forty days of Trieste’. During this occupation the Yugoslav troops committed most of the crimes that are discussed in chapter three. The New Zealand forces were in Trieste as well and they witnessed the mass arrests and the deportation of Italian civilians to remote areas. Most of the arrestees have not been seen since.17 On 12 June 1945 the Yugoslav troops left Trieste to be installed east of the Morgan Line. After this, the British Allied forces and the New Zealand forces that were already there could take control of the city and start their investigation into the violence committed against the civilians.

Ideological motives for the investigation The reports about the violence committed by the Yugoslav forces are extensive and 13 Corps collected many eyewitness accounts. When one compares the vastness of the reports, communications and results with the little time (approximately six months in which the British mainly focused on the crimes committed by the Yugoslav forces and not the later border issues) it was conducted in, one could say the British forces saw great importance in doing this investigation. It is therefore striking that the results were never made public; no trials were held to punish the perpetrators even though the British did put war tribunals in place in Italy that could have been used to provide some justice for the victims. Besides this, it is also remarkable that the Yugoslav army gave Trieste up after the forty days of occupation despite the fact that Tito and his government strongly desired the annexation of Venezia Giulia to Yugoslavia. It seems extraordinary for the Yugoslav communists to give up the fulfilment of this ideological dream if it was not for a very lucrative deal with the Allied forces. Unfortunately it is very difficult to prove, but it seems that the Allied forces made a deal with Tito to obtain the Trieste region for the Western sphere of influence. Both parties would have had reasons to keep such a deal secret, especially towards Stalin and the anti-communists in Western Europe, especially Italy. The start of the Cold War had a great influence on the operations of the British Allied forces in Venezia Giulia. Churchill already understood the importance of acting carefully in order to prevent a growth of communist influences in Europe. Therefore, an investigation into the crimes committed under communism (ergo, by the Yugoslav

17 Richard Lamb, War in Italy 1943-1945: a brutal story, London: Penguin Books 1995, pp. 256- 257.

14 forces) could be a useful tool during the post-war negotiations in order to convince the Italian state to reject communism as state organising system. The telegrams sent between Churchill and Field Marshal Alexander show how carefully they approached the situation in order not to deteriorate the relations with Yugoslavia even further. In a telegram from Churchill to Alexander, sent in May 1945 when Yugoslav troops are still in control in Trieste, he underlines the importance to leave negotiations about the border between Italy and Yugoslavia until the war was officially over and peace talks could begin.18

Diplomatic motives for the investigation While trying to establish the facts and details about the investigation, it became clear that this would become a more difficult task than initially thought. The reports of the investigation hardly mention any names of the people involved in the actual research, only the people in the higher echelons of command are sometimes known by name. One example is Lieutenant General Harding, commander of 13 Corps. He has written and signed some of the telegrams used for this thesis. However, it turned out to be very difficult to create a more detailed picture of his role into the investigations. His wartime diary, kept at the Imperial War Museum in London, finishes at the end of 1944 and there is no coverage of the investigation period. In a similar way, the investigation is not mentioned in publications on the Allied forces in Italy during the Second World War. Most of the telegrams sent between London and the AFHQ in Italy deal with the results of the investigation (in numbers and locations of bodies) but one can only hypothesise about the reasoning behind the investigation. As mentioned earlier, the rise of the Iron Curtain and the future peace negotiations are most probably of great influence of the start of the investigation, as to give the Allied forces something to bargain with and to show the Italians in a more positive light, as victims instead of aggressors. The fact that the results have not been made public in Great Britain and nothing has been done with the information discovered by the research to help the victims to seek justice, implies that publishing about the massacres committed by the Yugoslav forces was not the priority for the British army, and possibly even considered detrimental, if there was indeed a British deal with Tito.

18 PREM3/495/6, ‘Telegram from War Cabinet London to Field Marshal Alexander, no 867/5’, dated 11 May 1945, from the National Archives in London.

15 Some findings of the investigation The earliest deport by the Allied forces about the foibe killings refers to the period of May 1 to June 12, 1945. In this report it becomes clear that the Allies have started an investigation into the arrests, deportations and executions in Venezia Giulia, committed by the Yugoslav partisans. The message gives some facts about the Yugoslav atrocities. The CLN (National Liberation Committee) of Venezia Giulia estimated that 18.000 people in the region had been arrested. Another 5.000 people from Gorizia and 50.000 from Istria were still missing. These numbers had been confirmed by other sources as well, according to the Allied report. In Trieste, 8.000 people were released after arrest, about 4.000 were executed and another 6.000 were still interned at the time the report came out. Soon after the Allied forces took Trieste in mid-June 1945 the CLN had contacted 13 Corps with the message that “the Yugoslav troops” had killed hundreds of people in a mineshaft near Basovizza.19 The reason for the Allies to execute this research becomes clear in the communications from the Planning department of the Allied Communications Headquarters in Rome to the Allied Forces Headquarters and 13 Corps in Venezia Giulia. The message shows that former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden considered a full investigation into the atrocities committed by the Yugoslavs in Venezia Giulia. Mr. Eden and Field Marshal Alexander shared the opinion that the investigation must be carried out to avoid accusations towards the British and American governments by the Italians of suppressing evidence of crimes committed by the Yugoslav Army and Yugoslav partisans. The British Embassy also recommended giving the investigation as much publicity as possible.20 According to Colonel Nichols at the Allied Forces Headquarters, the purpose of the investigation was to assemble material for future publicity purposes and to discover the truth about the arrests and executions.21 Unfortunately, the intention to publicise the results never became reality. The first initial report was drafted by 13 Corps on 3 August. The report gives an overview of the information given by civilians or Allied sources about the atrocities.

19 WO 204/12753, ‘Alleged War Crime – Basovizza Mine Shaft’, dated 1 July 1945, from the National Archives in London. 20 WO 204/12753, ‘Message from Headquarters ALCOM (Allied Communication) in Rome to AFHQ G-5 (Special Operations Section) information headquarters for 13th Corps in Venezia Giulia’, dated 1 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 21 WO 204/12753, ‘Outgoing message: Colonel E. Nichols to 8th Army’, dated 2 July 1945, from the National Archives in London.

16 Some of the civilians feared reprisals from the Yugoslavs if they talked to the Allied forces and therefore were reluctant to come forward and share information with the Allies. The report stated that lists were drawn up with numbers of people that were most likely executed. The overview per area was as follows: Trieste: 1.500; Gorizia: 1.000 to 1.500; Pola: 500 to 600 and Monfalcone: 150. These numbers are not completely accurate because of some difficulties the British forces encountered. As mentioned before, civilians feared reprisals and did not cooperate fully. Besides this, there was a lack of police reports, and therewith essential information, and some individuals probably fled with the Germans or were killed otherwise than at Yugoslav hands. In addition, some of the victims were not from Venezia Giulia and did not have relatives in the vicinity to report their disappearance. In the Trieste area about 17.000 were arrested between 1 May and 12 June of which 8.000 were released soon afterwards. About 3.000 persons were executed and 6.000 were still interned at the moment the first report was drafted in August 1945. An unknown, and according to the report, reliable source stated that 3.000 people were interned at the Borovnica concentration camp, situated 30 kilometres south west of Ljubljana. In the Gorizia region, between 1.500 and 2.000 of the 3.000 to 4.000 arrestees were liberated shortly after being interned. Among the arrestees were a vast number of CLN members. Underneath the heading Executions the report stated that between 2 and 14 May 1945, 150 people from Trieste have been shot. This number does not include the hundreds of people who were killed in the Basovizza foiba. The report mentioned personal feelings of victory and hate after being oppressed by the Italians as the motives for the perpetrators to commit violence. The perpetrators applied “indiscriminate arrests”22 as a way to deter the Italians from taking action against the Yugoslavs. However, it is not clear how the term ‘indiscriminate arrests’ has to be interpreted. It could concern the arrestees as being Italian, indiscriminate of their potential Fascist affiliations. It could also mean that not only Italians were arrested, but also non-Italians that happened to be in the area. Unfortunately, the authors of the report did not focus on this detail, while it could have considerate consequences for the interpretation of the violence committed by the Yugoslav troops. Apart from deterrence

22 WO 204/12753, ’General report on Jugoslav arrests and executions in May/June 1945’, p. 3, dated 3 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

17 as a reason for the arrests and deportations, another reason mentioned was to forcefully mobilise men between the age of 17 and 50 to report for duty with the Yugoslav army. Proof of a leaflet was send to the headquarters of 13 Corps on 22 May 1945. There were also reports of house-to-house conscription, enhanced by intimidation and violence.23

Conclusion This chapter identified several reasons for the start of the Investigation Commission. The external reasons were to portray Italy as the ‘innocent little brother’ of Germany in order to make Italy appear as a victim instead of an aggressor. This would help the Allied forces to win Italy for the Western sphere of influence in the starting Cold War. Another external reason possibly has been the fact that the New Zealand Army was in Trieste when the Yugoslav army occupied the city. The New Zealand Army was not allowed to help the Italians and this could be seen as a big mistake by the Allied forces. The decision to investigate what happened to the people in the area might have stemmed from the will to compensate for the Allied mistake. Another ideological reason has been touched upon briefly already: to prevent the communist sphere of influence to spread into Italy. The investigation above all had a diplomatic background: the results could be, and probably were used in the negotiations with Yugoslavia after the war, so as to pressure Tito into submission. This seems all the more reasonable when it is taken into account that the results of the investigation were not made public and the results were not used to do justice to the victims and their families.

23 WO 204/12753, ’General report on Jugoslav arrests and executions in May/June 1945’, p. 3, dated 3 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

18 II. INVESTIGATION OF YUGOSLAV CRIMES IN ISTRIA

In 1940 Italy joined the Second World War by attacking France. A year later, Italy started an offensive in Yugoslavia. This event brought turbulence within the Istrian peninsula. The Communist Party of Croatia and the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia commenced a push for Istria in the summer of 1941. In 1942 the Yugoslav partisans had to deal with a severe blow to their advance when the Italian army stroke back.24 Various armies were present on the Istrian peninsula between 1941 and September 1943; the Italian army, German troops that occupied the coastal cities and the Yugoslav partisans. According to Gianni Oliva, the foibe killings could take place in Istria because of a power vacuum. The Germans had occupied the cities on the Istrian peninsula and in Venezia Giulia, such as Trieste, Pola, Gorizia, Monfalcone and Fiume (nowadays Rijeka), and took control over these areas. They focused their attention on the cities and not on the areas in between. Therefore the military detachments were positioned in and around the cities but not along the main connecting roads. The Germans had not taken over the social and administrative powers, only the military focus points at the coast. The Yugoslav partisans grew more powerful in this vacuum and unlawful killings, such as the foibe killings, sometimes with show trials, started. In this area, a hundreds of people were labelled as ‘enemy of the people’ and as such sentenced to death. At this time, right after the armistice of September 1943, insecurity and uncertainty ruled in the borderlands between Italy and Yugoslavia. The foibe killings had started off but were not organised (yet) and this corresponds in time with the uncertainty of the major military changes, concerning the Allied forces, the attack by the German army and the chaotic situation of the Italian army, in Italy in September 1943.25 On the one hand, says Oliva, there were the Italian partisans in Istria and the Yugoslav partisans with headquarters in Lika and Gorskj Kotar (both are nowadays regions in Croatia) who took over the power in the Istrian interior ‘in the name of the people’, without meeting much resistance from the people. On the other hand there were resistance groups consisting of farmers, who had taken up the military machinery that was left behind by the fleeing Italian soldiers. They targeted Italians and took away

24 Marino Manin, ‘On human losses and the exodus from Istria during the Second World War and the post-war period’, Review of Croatian History, no. 1 (2006), pp. 74-75. 25 Gianni Oliva, Foibe, p. 72.

19 their possession.26 The first group, the organised partisans, were dependent on the 13th Division of the NLA (National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia). They crossed the pre-war border into Italy on September 8, 1943, and were joined by other small partisan groups, including the Slovene partisans. They took refuge in former Italian barracks and used Italian war equipment left behind by the retreating Italian army. A partisan centre was set up in Pisino on September 12. Pinguente became another headquarter for the partisans. In the days that followed, the partisans went to the villages surrounding these two cities to take over civil power as well, next to the military power. They moved into military buildings and offices; replaced the Italian flags with Yugoslav flags and an office on the main square of Pinguente became a military command centre and a police station.27 The partisans had a characteristic manner of ‘converting’ the people to the Slav domination of the area. On the basis of a combination of nationalistic slogans, socialist motives and political demands the partisans made an appeal on the loyalty of the Istrian population that included a ‘redemptive’ promise of a triple liberation; in this sense liberation meant salvation from the former oppressor, the Italians, the class struggle against the elite who claimed property over the land; and a fight against fascism. Gianni Oliva argues that Josip Broz Tito made the following equation: Italian = Master = Fascist.28 In this way, the Italian people became a threefold enemy: national enemy, class enemy, and ideological enemy. The process of equating the Italian nationality with a higher social class and a fascist ideology is of great importance to the establishment of a victim group by the Yugoslav forces (and will reappear in Chapter III about the ethnic cleansing in Trieste in 1945). In other words, the Italians were ‘de-Italianised’ and Istria was supposedly liberated from the Italian yoke. By physically and culturally removing the Italians from the area, the Yugoslav forces were guilty of ethnic cleansing, in accordance with Naimark’s definition. In order to keep the Germans out, the partisans destroyed the connecting roads to important places such as Trieste, further north in Venezia Giulia, and Pola in the south of Istria, where the Germans were still stationed. They also blew up bridges and railways. They isolated themselves from the external enemy, so as to be able to focus on

26 Gianni Oliva, Foibe, p. 72. 27 Ibidem, pp. 72-73. 28 Ibidem, p. 73.

20 the internal enemy such as Fascists and landowners.29 The farmer groups are more difficult to trace and characterise. When the Italian army crumbled, large numbers of citizens saw the opportunity to take actions and avenge the twenty years of fascist rule. Their goal was to defeat every bit of ‘Italianess’ in the region by destroying the Fascist archives that held information about Istrian citizens; change the Italian street names to Slavic street names and, obviously, the Italian government institutions. In this way they tried to take back their refused Slav identity.30 Thus, there were two groups of partisan fighters, each containing several smaller groups: an organised group and a group of farmers that saw their chance fit. Oliva stresses that one should not assume that the latter group was a real populist insurrection, as is often done in Yugoslav/East European historiography. According to Oliva the creation of this partisan group was only possible because of the power vacuum created by the German army that only occupied the militarily strategic cities and not the interior of the Istrian peninsula. Another important factor was the confusion and chaos after the armistice was declared. The Germans occupied some of the cities but in the interiors of Istria the Italians had lost their power because they switched sides by signing the armistice. This meant that the Yugoslav partisans did not encounter any authorities that needed to be overthrown. The only Italian control that was left in the area consisted of small groups of disbanded soldiers. Oliva suggests it is better to interpret the partisan groups as “spontaneous movements” that found fertile ground in the chaos after the armistice and interpret the emergence of the farmer’s ideals as sparked by the appearance of the Croat partisans that arrived in the area soon after the armistice was signed. The “spontaneous movements” saw their control legitimised as a countervailing power against the arrival of the Croat partisans.31 The emergence of the “spontaneous movements” as a countervailing power resulted in police actions against ‘enemies of the people’, organised from the headquarters of Pisino. The popular anger among the citizens was channelled into hate for their ‘enemies’. Public execution places emerged. Within this ‘legitimate’ violent atmosphere personal feuds were settled and petty crime swelled.32 According to Raoul Pupo the Istrian CPL (Comitato Popolare di Liberazione), the

29 Gianni Oliva, Foibe, pp. 74-75. 30 Ibidem, pp. 74-75. 31 Ibidem, p. 75. 32 Ibidem, p. 75.

21 People’s Liberation Committee, declared the annexation of Istria by Croatia on September 13, 1943. This was later verified by the ZAVNOH (State anti-fascist council for the national liberation of Croatia) and AVNOJ (Anti-fascist council for the national liberation of Yugoslavia). This declaration was accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of Istrian Italians in the weeks following the armistice. Pupo argues that the communists used ethnicity to make their claims on territory belonging to Italy since the end of the First World War. Even though there were cities that were predominantly Italian, they were to be considered as ‘islands in a [Slav] see’.33 The communists had already set up bodies of power that were considered the only legitimate centres of power in the Istrian area, Fiume and the Slovene coast. During this consolidation of power, the Yugoslav liberation movements and their Italian counterparts were drawn into a struggle regarding the authority over the people living in these areas. The Croat and Slovene partisans considered the liberated areas to belong to the Yugoslav state. It was expected by the Istrian Italians that the Croat communist party would be replaced by the Italian communist party that would cooperate with the Istrian activists but under the command of the Yugoslav army.34 This shows that even though the Italians had fought alongside the Yugoslav partisans, the Yugoslav army would be the most powerful entity in the area. So alongside the annexation of the former Italian territory and the development of communist centres of power, the Yugoslav army would rule over the area meaning that the consolidation of power was executed on different levels. Alongside Pupo’s argument of using ethnicity as a means to claim territory, Pamela Ballinger argues that the Yugoslav authorities used retribution killings to secure their monopoly of power in Istria. According to Ballinger, the communist authorities did not discuss or decide on how to deal with the ‘losers’ of the war, which created room for interpretation among the various partisan groups. Ballinger mentions historian John Lampe who argues that the killing of ideological opponents was used, firstly, to eliminate the opposition but secondly to create a justification for expanding of the Yugoslav security service OZNA (the Organization for People’s Defence). Ballinger argues that there was third factor to the retribution killings: to consolidate the authority of the command within the partisan divisions:

33 Raoul Pupo, Il lungo esodo: Istria: le persecuzioni, le foibe, l’esilio, Milan: RCS Libri 2005, pp. 69- 70. 34 Ibidem, p. 71.

22 “Indulging the desire for vengeance thus probably consolidated the communist leadership’s position among its own faithful. This use of large-scale retributive violence helped the communist leadership make a more exclusive claim (even a monopoly) on the revolution.” 35

The foibe on the Istrian Peninsula Let us now turn to the actual events of the foibe killings. As stated by Oliva, an oversimplified interpretation of the equation of Italian and Fascist in combination with personal feuds and grievances culminated into ethnic cleansing. In the first stage, this violence was used in the interest of claiming power in the region. The first acts of “cleansing” were detaining, persecutions, confiscation of property, interrogations and arrests of the ‘enemy’. The arrestees from the south of Istria were brought to Pinguente but the majority were taken to Pisino. In both cities Popular Tribunals were put in place to ‘sentence’ the guilty, although the suspects could not defend themselves and the charges usually led to the death sentence. Once arrested, the suspect was already guilty of whatever would be claimed by the judges during the trial. The group of judges in Pisino consisted of educated people of influence, an employee of the secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belgrade and his sister who would become the captain of the Yugoslav Secret Police (OZNA), as well as grass roots individuals who knew more about the person on trial, such as the milk woman from a nearby village and a primary school teacher.36 The victims of these show trials and executions were first of all the squadristi and the local elites who were in power before the armistice.37 The squadristi were fascists who belonged to the armed forces of Mussolini.38 After these two groups, the state representatives, chief magistrates, taxmen and carabinieri (the military police) became suspects. Nowadays in court, a judge looks at personal accountability and guilt but during these show trials personal accountability was not taken into consideration. The purpose was to punish those who had installed a system in which the Croats had to pay tax to a regime they did not agree with and those who exploited the Italian police power

35 Pamela Ballinger, 'At the Borders of Force: Violence, Refugees, and the Reconfiguration of the Yugoslav and Italian States', Past and Present, Vol. 6 (2011), pp. 163-165. 36 Gianni Oliva, p. 76. 37 Ibidem, p. 77, 38 Roberta Sussi Valli, ‘The Myth of Squadrismo in the Fascist Regime’, Journal of Contemporary History, no. 35 (2000), p. 131.

23 over the citizens. But the violence was not only restricted to those who had worked for the previous power to dismantle the political framework. Two aspects that channelled the violence are important to mention. Firstly, the partisan movement in Istria shaped the convictions of the narodnjaci, the Croat local elders, who adhered to a traditional form of Croat nationalism. These beliefs resulted in a tense atmosphere of anti-Italianism that accompanied the destruction of the Italian political powers. Secondly, the communist authority endeavoured to erase everything that indicated ‘Italianness’, with as a final goal the cleansing of Italianism from the region.39 The definition of the target group expanded: first it contained the squadristi, then the people representing the former state and later it also encompassed ‘public people’ such as teachers, doctors, cleaners etc. In some cases the partisans also attacked Italians without any clear reason, only to destroy the victim’s Italian sentiments.40 It is clear that in the process of defining the target group, the partisans made three definitions overlap: Fascist, Italian and landowner. This made it possible to target anyone for a wide range of reasons.41 The killings in Istria climaxed in October 1943 when the Germans pressured the Slovenes and Croats to abandon the area. The show trials were abandoned, the killings now also took place during the day (and not only during the nights as was the case before), and the faces of the victims were no longer covered. The uncovered face of the victims potentially took away the anonymity of the victims and by doing so would function as a stronger deterrence and a bigger threat to the Istrian people. During this period, political motivations for the killings faded into the background, and personal revenge became more important. The combination of violence stemming from the logic of deterrence and the German occupation of Yugoslav territory made the Yugoslav partisans even more ruthless.42 It is likely that the violence escalated out of fear for the Germans but also because of a future-orientated look: the Yugoslavs would come back to claim Istria after the war was over because Istria ‘belonged’ to Yugoslavia. To achieve this, as much ‘work’ as possible had to be done before the Germans arrived. So, the use of violence escalated in October 1943 and the veil of legitimacy (such as show trials) was

39 Gianni Oliva, Foibe, p. 77. 40 Ibidem, pp. 77-78. 41 Ibidem, pp. 77-78. 42 Ibidem, p. 81.

24 dropped.

The nature of the violence of the Yugoslav forces The type of violence that was used by the Yugoslav forces is a very important part when studying these violent events. It is important to know if the victims of the Yugoslav ethnic cleansing were, for example, humiliated or sexually abused before they were killed and in what way the perpetrators addressed the victims because this reveals something about the perpetrators and their motives. Few historians address this aspect. It is mentioned in a sentence or two and then left for what it is. Historian Raoul Pupo and journalist Roberto Spazzali, who are both born in Trieste and are two of the most important scholars focussing on the foibe massacres, write about the research done under the command of Arnaldo Hazarich at the end of 1943 and in early 1945. The primary sources studied for this thesis did not clarify exactly who ordered this research and who was in command. Pupo, Spazzali and Oliva do not elaborate on the context of the research. Nevertheless Hazarich’s research was important because of its early findings and therefore will be addressed here. Hazarich was the head of a team of fire fighters who started excavating the foibe in Istria and bringing up the bodies of the victims of ethnic cleansing. In April 1945 Hazarich had to leave Istria and brought his collection of documents and photographs to the Allied forces in occupied Italy.43 He and his men had found 26 people in the Villa Suriani foiba. Among them were also Norma Cossetto and her sisters who were brutally assaulted and tortured over several days before being killed. Cossetto was found with a piece of wood inside her genitals and her breasts cut off. The other women also showed signs of sexual violence. Two of Norma’s sisters were thrown into the pit alive. The probable pretext for the incarceration, torture and murder of the Cossetto sisters was that their father was an employee of the local fascist secretary. Other victims had been stabbed, stoned and beaten. Some men were found with their genitals in their mouths.44 The types of violence used against Norma Cossetto, her sisters and many others are consistent with the violence used in other ethnically motivated conflicts and can be qualified as ethnic violence leading to ethnic cleansing, according to Naimark’s definition of ethnic cleansing, of the Istrian peninsula. The fear that was spread by

43 Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, p. 52. 44 Gianni Oliva, Foibe, pp. 78-79.

25 publically executing Italian citizens in Pinguente and the torture of unlawfully arrested Italians had a deterring effect of the Italians still living in Istria, resulting in the exodus of thousands of Italians from 1944 onwards.45 According to Oliva it was possible, after the excavation, to establish what had, most probably, happened at the mouth of the pits. The faces of many of the victims had been covered with their hoods or scarves. Others were thrown into the foiba naked to avoid identification by clothing of personal assets. In some occasions, the partisans blew up the opening of the pit after the massacre to make it impossible to excavate the pit. The partisans also used bauxite mines for their executions; the mine would be blown up afterwards so the bodies would be covered with rocks and sand. In the coastal areas, the perpetrators tied stones to the bodies before throwing them into the sea.46 The researchers who led the excavations made a remarkable discovery. In several pits they found one or more dead black dogs together with the victims. These findings show a macabre ritual that Oliva traces back to old Slav rituals. The story goes that killing a black dog takes away the sins of the man that killed a human being. There are also other version of this myth: that the dead dog prevents the spirit of the deceased to go to heaven and take revenge on the killer or that the dog protects the unburied dead. The presence of the black dogs in the foibe suggests that the killings needed to be justified by a popular myth; in other words, the political motivations did not suffice as a justification for ethnic cleansing.47 It could also mean that the perpetrators were not properly trained in brutally killing others and thus needed a ritual to be able to cope with their actions, and perhaps were locals who had not killed before at all. Unfortunately it will be very difficult to get to the bottom of the performance of this myth but the presence of the black dogs is clearly of importance to the understanding of the violence committed by the perpetrators. Oliva suggests that the ethnic cleansing was committed in a rush and with improvisation, and in combination with the use of an old myth, make the massacres even more tragic and dramatic.48 The Yugoslav forces started by targeting member of the Italian Fascist Party (PNF) but soon broadened the scope of culprits by including the carabinieri and other policing organisations, the mayor and his employees, teachers and mail carriers. They

45 Raoul Pupo, Il lungo esodo, p. 13. 46 Gianni Oliva, Foibe, pp. 79-80. 47 Ibidem, p. 81. 48 Ibidem, p. 81.

26 targeted landowners and burned down registers that kept information about the civilians. They also attacked women, as is shown with the case of Norma Cossetto. Pupo mentions that a few workers at a mine were killed for transporting goods from Sardinia to Istria. It is more difficult to establish the number of deaths. Pupo and Spazzali estimate that about 500 Italians were killed between September and October 1943. During excavations in the area 217 bodies were retrieved from the foibe, of which 116 were civilians and the rest soldiers. In Fiume approximately 500 persons disappeared, among which 242 civilians, between March and August 1945. Pupo and Spazzali mention a report written by the American and British Allied forces in 1945 stating that another 500-600 people from Pola were missing, although the source does not state the nationality of the missing people. The Displaced Persons office of the Allied controlled area in the Venezia Giulia region refined the number in 1947 to 827, of which 673 were civilians.49

Findings by the Investigation Committee One of the British army reports summarises what happened in Pinguente in Istria during a call for a plebiscite in August 1945. Several testimonies made clear that the Yugoslav communists called up the heads of the Italian families in the area to sign a plebiscite that proclaimed that Pinguente was under Yugoslav rule and made the Italian families vow to abide by the new communist laws. It was said during a committee meeting that everyone who would not sign would be condemned to being considered a fascist and an enemy of the people’. These allegations were very serious and as soon as the Yugoslavs started their home visits, the Italian families signed the plebiscite. The British report states that threats were made while visiting the Italian families: everyone who would not sign opposed Yugoslav rule and would be treated as a counterrevolutionary. Another threat mentioned the foibe and asked the question who would save the Italians after they are thrown into a foiba.50 The same report also shows that about 200 Italians from Cherso and Lussino (islands that are now part of Croatia) were arrested and deported to Yugoslav concentration camps. Almost all of their cattle were brought to the mainland and their

49 Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, pp. 26-30. 50 FO 137/59396, ‘Jugoslav petition for the annexation of Istria by Jugoslavia’, dated 25 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

27 houses were looted. The report estimates that about 1.800 men from these islands were recruited into the Yugoslav army. Italians, who arrived in Trieste after being released by the Yugoslavs, gave the statements on which the report was based. Other statements mention that about 600 people from Pola were arrested and taken to the mainland on a ship that hit a mine. When the ship started to sink, the Yugoslavs started shooting the prisoners. The people who made it to the beach were arrested again and sent to a Yugoslav concentration camp, possibly Borovnica near Ljubljana. This information was sent from the CLN (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, National Liberation Committee) to the Investigation Committee.51 The Investigation Committee also took witness statements from Italian refugees from Fiume (nowadays Rijeka, Croatia). One person states that it was dangerous to speak Italian on the street after the Yugoslavs took over the power in Fiume. Many Italians were arrested and, according to the witness, many of them were still missing. About 1.000 people were arrested in Fiume by the Yugoslav partisans of whom approximately one third was or had been a fascist. This was estimated by the CLN.52 Estimates like the one just mentioned should be treated with caution because the definition of ‘a fascist’ could be different for a member of the CLN due to the antifascist character of the organisation. It is possible that a smaller part of the 1.000 people mentioned identified themselves as fascists or had other non-ideological motives for working for the Italian government. Although it is not always clear when the testimonies were given and when the events exactly took place, it does show that Italians were targeted again in 1945. The Yugoslav terror resulted in large numbers of Italians fleeing to Trieste, other parts of Italy and even abroad. By doing so, the area would be purged of Italians and the Yugoslavs would thus be able to make a better case for annexing the area based on the nationality of the civilians. Many foibe were discovered in Istria in 1943 and again after 1945, for instance, near Pola, Fianona, Capodistria, Castelnuovo d’Arsia and Pisino. According to an unknown source consulted by the British research team approximately 50.000 people

51 FO 137/59396, ‘Jugoslav oppression on Cherso Island’, dated 25 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 52 FO 371/59396, ‘Section I: Jugoslav oppression of Italians and anti-communist elements’, dated 14 November 1945, from the National Archives in London.

28 from Istria had been arrested and were still missing. The report adds that this number has been confirmed by other sources.53

The testimonies of Giovanni Radeticchio, Don Beari and Giuseppe Bari Three testimonies are discussed here at some length to take a look at the personal experiences of some of the victims or otherwise affected Italians. The story of the only known survivor of the foibe massacres, Giovanni Radeticchio, is very remarkable because it tells the detailed story of how the Yugoslav forces treated the victims.54 Radeticchio (sometimes written as Radechicchio) escaped from the barracks at Marzana, near Verona, where he served with the Territorial Defence Militia (the militia worked for the German SS) on 20 April 1943. He had joined the militia in order to make money for his family. After his escape he went to the nearest Yugoslav headquarters. He was sent away but on May 2, 1943 he was taken away by the armed Yugoslavs while being at the house of a friend. Together with other prisoners he was taken to Lisignano and later on foot to Arsia. The other prisoners were beaten but, for unknown reasons, he was not. He did have to give up his good clothes in exchange for rags. On the way to Arsia the treatment deteriorated. The guards did not give the prisoners any food and the prisoners had to hand over all of their personal belongings. In Pozzo Littorio some of the prisoners (Borosi, Cossi and Ferrarin, first names unknown) were tortured by the Yugoslav guards by being forced to run full speed into a brick wall. After this they were beaten with pieces of wood and this process was repeated. After 30 hours without food they got a bit of pasta. Bound two by two they were taken on foot to Fianona. The wire was so tightly bound that their hands were swollen and started to become very painful. In the evenings they were not beaten because it was dark. At night they were taken one by one to a torture room and were hit repeatedly while their hands were tied behind their backs. The guards consisted of four men and one woman. They used different equipment to hit the prisoners. This is how Radichicchio described the torture:

53 FO 371/59396, ‘Section I: Jugoslav oppression of Italians and anti-communist elements’, dated 14 November 1945, from the National Archives in London. 54 See Appendix II, page 1 and 2, for the statement of Giovanni Radeticchio, WO 204/12494, Various testimonies by Giovanni Radeticchio, Giuseppe Fino, Armando Tosello, Armando Lasagna, Carlo Gitti etc., dated 5 October 1945, from the National Archives, London.

29 “There were five ruffians against me, bound and helpless as I was, one of them was a girl. One of them kicked me, another beat me with a whip made of twisted wire, a third with a piece of wood, the girl with a leather belt. They chased me from one to another and in turn they trampled on me.”55

One day at dawn, the date is unknown, Radeticchio’s hands were bound behind his back again and with five others they were marched to the mouth of the pit. On the way they were beaten again. At arrival the guards tied a stone of 10 kilograms to each of the prisoners and put them in a line. Giovanni was placed after Graziano Udovisi who was ‘invited’ to jump into the foiba. They fired a few shots after every prisoner who jumped. The stone that was tied to Giovanni’s arms came loose due to a hit by one of the bullets and this prevented him from drowning in the water at the bottom of the pit. He tried to swim with his hands still tied while the other prisoners were still jumping into to pit. After everyone was in the water, the guards threw a hand grenade in the pit to kill anyone who was still alive. Radeticchio managed to break the wire around his wrists, severely hurting himself by doing so, and stayed there for a couple of hours. He climbed out of the pit when it was dark and the perpetrators had left. He knew the guards would return the next night because Radeticchio had overheard them say that more people were going to be thrown into another part of the pit. He walked back to Pozzo Littoria and at the fifth night after his escape he arrived at Sissano. A member of the Yugoslav partisans must have heard he was still alive because his sister and brother were interrogated. His sister was arrested but later released. When he considered himself and his family to be safe, he reported to the Allied Headquarters to tell them his story.56 Don Giorgio Beari, who knew Giovanni Radeticchio and who was the director of the Triestine newspaper Vita Nuova, gave a statement that verified the story of Radeticchio. Don Beari also claimed that Radeticchio was investigated by medical personnel at the Allied Headquarters and that their findings were consistent

55 WO 204/12754, ‘Statement by Giovanni Radettichio of Sissano (Subject of Appendix D)’, part of corrections made to an earlier report of 25 August 1945, dated 27 September 1945, from the National Archives in London. 56 WO 204/12754, ‘Statement by Giovanni Radettichio of Sissano (Subject of Appendix D)’, part of corrections made to an earlier report of 25 August 1945, dated 27 September 1945, from the National Archives in London.

30 with Radeticchio’s story. There were marks of the beatings on his back.57 The medical assessment was done under supervision of Doctor Pegorari from Trieste.58 Don Beari, director of the newspaper Vita Nuova, confirmed Radeticchio’s story with the Investigation Committee and subsequently wrote a very striking piece that summarises the tragedy of the massacres:

“The anguished shouts and the fair denunciation by the “Vita Nuova” of the “concentrations camps” opened by the so-called “Bolshevik liberators” found a deep echo in the hearts of the Istrian people who cry without calming their destinies and their victims, already without numbers. The macabre tragedy of the “foibe” of 1943 has been exceeded in cruelty and barbarity. There is no, one could say, corner or point in Istria where one does not almost always talk in soft voices because of the terror working everywhere, of the pits that have swallowed many persons and are not satisfied yet. The grim and agonizing moans of the tortured people, bound and then thrown into devilish caves, moans accompanied not seldom by coarse laughs, with bestial curses of the hangmen, unworthy of the name of humankind, are resounding to deafen many ears. One talks with horror about the revolting stench of the cadavers in dissolution in unwieldy air; like for example at Castelnuovo d’Arsa and Checchi (train station in between Pisino and Canfanaro), where they had to force the farmers to throw soil and stones in the abyss to realise the nauseating stench. In addition, other “foibe” have been specified in Carnizza, S.Domenica di Albona, Antignana, Briono, Monte Maggiore, Basovizza etc. as tombs of soldiers, bourgeois, workers, farmers, almost all innocent or guilty of being Italians and of not sharing the communist ideas, like occurred to more than a few Croats and Slovenes. “Il Lavoratore” could deny them [the foibe] and accuse us of slander, but it would be better to provoke a visit to the foibe on the part of the Allies and C.R. [Red Cross]. […]”

It is interesting to notice that Don Beari uses the term foibe to describe the massacres and not only the phenomenon of natural sinkholes. He also describes the fear and the torture. He mentions a couple locations of the foibe and even describes the victim group as ‘guilty of being Italian’. He continues:

57 WO 204/12753, ‘Statement by Don Beari’, dated 18 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 58 WO 204/12753, ‘Elemento uscito vivo da una foiba presso Fianona’, dated 4 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

31 “The rest of what the partisans of Tito cynically said and wrote has come true– when the pitiful hand of the fire brigade of Pola … [excavated?] the shapeless bodies from certain foibe from September until October 1943: “The fire fighters have done well to make room in the foibe for those of you who we will throw in at our return”. They kept their word barbarically. […]”

Here Don Beari describes a certain level of knowledge and consciousness that he and others had of the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Istria. It also shows there was some communication between the Yugoslav forces and the population about the violence. In another part he writes:

“In a previous article we have denounced the destiny reserved for the Italians who are detained in Slovene and Croat concentration camps. Now we cannot silence the fate reserved for dense groups of arrested people at Trieste and in the rest of Venezia Giulia, which is not occupied by the Allied forces, in the first days of March. According to doubtful testimonies these unfortunates were to be thrown in innumerable foibe in Carso, the foibe in Corgnale, San Servolo, Racizze en Scandaussina, not to mention that some, especially those with wide openings, and vertical shafts were best suited to commit such systematic massacres. In the “Pozzo della Miniera” a small distance from Basovizza, about a thousand persons have been sacrificed with wide action of the inhabitants of the close area. The details are being murmured everywhere with a mix of horror and terror. Of the victims some persons are killed before, but the majority is thrown in [the foiba] alive. They were arrested in the first days of March with or without reason, simply denounced and arrested for mere suspicion; there appear to be numerous female victims and they [the Yugoslavs] demonstrated that their suspicion had fallen down on everyone, even the children of tender age were missing. The Allies got suspicious because of the circulating voices and have started the research into this pit […]. 59

Even though we cannot completely confirm or deny the facts stated in this article, it gives a good image of how the victims perceived themselves and their victimhood: they were innocent and the Yugoslavs were barbarians. A third Istrian citizen, Giuseppe Bari, testified that in the first weeks of May 1943 Yugoslav communists murdered people from the villages alongside the Istrian coast. He mentioned that between Muggia and Capodistria people had been thrown into pits, sometimes only because of personal reasons. He said that the pits were at times too full

59 WO 204/12753, ‘Article written by Don Beari for the catholic journal “Vita Nuova”’, dated 4 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

32 and had to be emptied by the Yugoslavs. The bodies that were taken out were burned to get rid of the smell. According to this witness the perpetrators used false names, which made it very difficult to track them down. The people who fled the area for Trieste also told about various methods of torture. The most striking example was that the Yugoslav forces buried some of the victims alive, leaving their head and one hand clear. This made them die slowly without being able to dig themselves out.60

Conclusion The violence in Istria erupted in a power vacuum created by the Italian armistice and the partial retreat of the German army and was at first aimed at Italians who worked for the fascist regime but became progressively more widespread. Eventually it included children of lower ranking fascist officials, ‘small fish’ such as post carriers and other civil servants. The military chaos on the Istrian peninsula contributed to the power struggle during which the Yugoslav partisans could commit ethnic cleansing against civilians without any repercussions. It has been difficult for the Allied investigators and Italian scholars to identify the perpetrators and the victims. Oliva argues that the target group was threefold guilty in the eyes of the Yugoslav communists: as a nationality, as a class and as an ideology. In this way the target group is easily expandable to include almost everyone as an ‘enemy of the people’. The Yugoslav communists wanted Istria to belong to Yugoslavia again and used a plebiscite to show that the people of Istria wanted to belong to the new Yugoslav state even though the Italian families were forced to sign the plebiscite. The forced ‘conversion’ of Italians to Yugoslav culture showed a semi-organised structure of creating new identities and ethnic cleansing to enhance this process. Ballinger also mentions retribution as a motive for some of the violence, suggesting a lower level of organisation but a higher level of justification for the violence. In Pinguente, the communist centre in Istria, a police station was set up where show trials were held. Some of the victims were found guilty and executed on the main square in the city as a way to deter the population from resisting the new communist rule. The British Investigation Committee showed what kind of violence the Yugoslavs used. Many of the victims were tortured and humiliated before being killed, as has been

60 WO 204/12753, ‘Statement by Giuseppe Bari’, dated 18 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

33 explained with the examples of Norma Cossetto and her sisters. The discovery of black dogs in the pits with the victims shows the urge of the perpetrators to detach themselves from the victims and the violence, possibly signifying the perpetrators were not trained to kill or they knew the victims or their families. The testimony by the only known survivor of a foiba massacre Giovanni Radeticchio clearly stated how he was treated and how the killing was done. The newspaper article also sheds light on how the Italians perceived their own victimhood and how they perceived the perpetrators: the innocent Italians and the barbaric Yugoslavs. In this instance, in Istria, the Italians indeed were the victims and the Yugoslav partisans the perpetrators but the motives behind the Yugoslav massacres are less clear. Ideology, Yugoslav nationalism, political revenge and individual revenge all played their part in leading to the ethnic cleansing committed against Italian civilians in Istria.

34 III. TRIESTE: FORTY DAYS OF YUGOSLAV OCCUPATION

In the first week of March 1945, the Yugoslav 4th Army occupied Venezia Giulia.61 The Slovene Ninth Corps, existing of Yugoslav soldiers but also Italian ex-soldiers, communist and non-communist, occupied Trieste in 2 May 1945. The period that followed is known as ‘the Forty Days of Trieste’, during which the Yugoslav army controlled the city and violence against the inhabitants became widespread. The Germans and the military division of the Republic of Salò, Mussolini’s small state in Northern Italy, had to retreat. The Forty Days lasted until 12 June 1945 when Tito’s troops left the city after negotiations with Field Marshall Alexander concerning the new demarcation line.62 During the occupation, the Yugoslav army captured the German and Italian and a few New Zealand soldiers that where still present in the region. These soldiers suffered much in either concentration camps or other forms of imprisonment. Often, they were executed on the spot. Many of them were sent on long forced marches to a concentration camp, nowadays in Slovenia, south west of Ljubljana near a village called Borovnica.63 According to Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, a hundreds of German and Italian soldiers were not imprisoned but were simply shot without any investigation into the personal responsibility for crimes. In the eyes of the perpetrators, the fact that they belonged to the German or fascist army made them collectively guilty. Much the same happened to the Italian policemen, who were ‘guilty’ because of the close link between the police force and the military within the fascist system. Pupo and Spazzali consider these executions much more as a symbolic and political act than an act to do justice.64 It is important to take note of the fact that among the victims of the Yugoslav 4th Army were indeed Italians who had victimized Slovenes and Croats under Mussolini’s reign. One of the main targets were the members of the Ispettorato speciale di pubblica sicurezza per la Venezia Giulia, a repressive organisation that was created to safeguard the public safety in the area under fascism. The deputy commissioner of this group, Gaetano Collotti, fled Trieste but was stopped at Treviso and shot there by Italian partisans. Not only the Yugoslav partisans wanted to rid Venezia Giulia of anyone linked

61 Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, p. 15. 62 Philip Morgan, The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians and the Second World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007, p. 208. 63 Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, p. 15. 64 Ibidem, Foibe, p. 16.

35 to the repressive bodies of the fascist regime; the Italian partisans were also ready to take action.65 In Trieste, mainly the employees of the repressive state organisations were attacked, such as the Questura di Trieste, the state police who had to answer directly and only to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, although the top of the organisation was left in peace (the Questura obtained a military status in 194366). In Gorizia the police commissioner went missing and was probably killed, together with the carabinieri. The Yugoslav army also attacked the Guardia di Finanza (dealing with financial crimes) and the Guardia civica of Trieste (who had to retrieve abandoned arms in Trieste after the armistice). Both groups were depending on the German control to carry out their work but were not involved in political oppression. Often also members of the CLN, the Italian resistance-coordinating organisation, became the victims of the Yugoslav ethnic cleansing, in line with Naimark’s definition, because the Yugoslav partisans did not accept any other power in the region than the Yugoslav power. This meant that the Italian partisans who would be looking to create an autonomous political and military power “in the eyes of the population and the Anglo- Americans” became potential victims as well. This resulted in the deaths of members of “popular powers”, which together formed the CLN, in Trieste, Gorizia and Fiume.67 The motives of the Yugoslav partisans were, thus, two-sided. In relation to the population, the communist Yugoslav order would be the best ideological option. Regarding the Allies, the Yugoslav partisans would probably not have wanted another force to compete with that might be favoured by the Allied forces. While the Yugoslav 4th Army dealt with the military personnel and the employees of the repressive fascist regime, the political police of the Yugoslav partisans, the OZNA, with involvement of the paramilitary group Difesa popolare (popular defence), dealt with the roundups of civilians. During the arrests, these two groups were assisted by several armed Yugoslav forces, among which a fusion of small divisions such as Garibaldi-Trieste.68 The OZNA, the secret police of the Yugoslav republic that depended on a secure network of Slovene and Italian civilians, was working on (incomplete) lists

65 Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, p. 16-17. 66 Website of the Questura di Trieste, Polizia di Stato, http://www.poliziadistato.it/articolo/1391/, author unknown, accessed 24 November 2015. 67 Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, pp. 17-18. 68 Ibidem, p. 19.

36 of ‘enemies of the people’ for months. The definition of ‘enemy of the people’ was very broad and included a large number of individuals for various reasons. In Trieste, in contrast to Gorizia, the Yugoslavs were mainly searching for the small fish, for example ex-squadristi (the armed forces of Mussolini) and civil servants. Other examples were people who disagreed with the methods and means of the Yugoslavs; people who did not collaborate with the Yugoslavs, individuals that had once chosen for rightist, but not fascist, parties, supporters of the ‘wrong’ side in past international conflicts; these were the people who would become victims of ethnic cleansing by the Yugoslav forces in Venezia Giulia.69 Pupo and Spazzali write that the struggle against everyone who could be an enemy, in whatever way possible, to the new communist state resulted in an equation between “Italian” and “fascist”. This equation was important for the instrumental needs of that time. The authors interestingly add that this equation was easily radicalised because in the twenty years of Mussolini’s regime, the Duce tried to weld those two terms together in order to create his perfect fascist society.70 In response to Pupo and Spazzali, there are two important points to make. The first regards the equation of “Italian” with “fascist” and the second is closely linked to the first. If the Yugoslav partisans used the Italian = fascist equation in order to prepare the area for the annexation by Yugoslavia, this raises the question whether this equation was only instrumental to punish the supporters of fascism, thus emphasising the ‘fascist’ part of the equation, or that the equation was created with a hidden agenda to justify the murders of Italians and Italianness (for different motives such as revenge or ancient hatreds etc.), thus emphasising the ‘Italian’ part. Gianni Oliva uses a different kind of method to establish the target group of the Yugoslav communists, as we have seen in the previous chapter: Italian = Master = Fascist.71 In this way, the Italian people became a threefold enemy: national enemy, class enemy, and ideological enemy. Similarly to what has been described in the previous chapter, the Yugoslav forces created an identifiable target group of Italians (based on their nationality, class and ideology as interpreted by the Yugoslav communists) that would make the process of eliminating them from the Trieste area more achievable. In this way they attempted to cleanse the area of Italians to subsequently claim it for the Yugoslav state. After all, making a territorial claim over Trieste would have benefitted from a more homogeneous

69 Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, p. 20. 70 Ibidem, p. 21. 71 Gianni Oliva, Foibe, p. 73.

37 Slav population that spoke similar Slav languages and had similar traditions and cultures, as opposed to the Italian language and culture. In the same fashion as in Istria, the Yugoslav forces went to the houses of Italians in Trieste to make them sign a plebiscite stating that Trieste should belong to Yugoslavia. Some of the people who did not sign the petition were dismissed from work; others suffered even worse.72

The number of victims In the spring of 1945, approximately 10.000 people from Trieste and Gorizia were arrested by the Yugoslavs. Obviously this created fear among the Triestine and Gorizian people because they had heard of the events that had taken place in Istria in the autumn of 1943. The terror already existing in the Venezia Giulia region had created a schism between the population and the Yugoslavs. The Yugoslavs had to tone down the number of arrests and inform about the destinies of the arrestees in favour of maintaining their power in order to keep the peace in Trieste.73 For different reasons it is impossible to establish the exact number of deaths at the hands of the Yugoslavs in Trieste. The Investigation Committee could only research the foibe within their area of control, meaning that they could not research the Yugoslav occupied territories. In the summer of 1945 the search group found 464 bodies, most of them were German soldiers. In 1948 the Displaced Persons office of the AMG gave an overview of missing people in Zone A. In Trieste 1.492 persons were missing, of which 724 civilians, in Gorizia 1.100, of which 759 civilians and in Pola 827, of which 637 civilians.74 One of the most important places of mass killing near Trieste is the foiba of Basovizza. According to several testimonies, more than 500 Italians were thrown into this pit, dead or alive, all in the first week of May 1945. Another 150 German soldiers were thrown in and about 15 corpses of horses. The horse corpses were probably meant to hinder a later search for bodies, including establishing the number of victims. Identification of the victims has been very difficult because the Yugoslav partisans also threw hand grenades into the pit to make entrance to it almost impossible. The Allied forces conducted a research in this pit and much of their documents are now preserved

72 FO 371/59396, ‘Jugoslav Petitions’, ‘Reprisals against non-Adherents to Federative Democratic Jugoslavia’, not dated, from the National Archives in London. 73 Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, pp. 22-23. 74 Ibidem, p. 30.

38 in the National Archives in London.75

The identity of the victims According to the report and Pupo and Spazzali, the victim group consisted of members the Republican Army (Mussolini’s army), the carabinieri, the Questura (the organisation for the public safety of Venezia Giulia), the Guardia di Finanza, the Guardia Civica, the Difesa Territorale (Territorial Defence) and the Fascist Civil organisations but also the Italian Red Cross and Italian civilians. When the suspected individual was absent at the time of the arrest, the Yugoslavs occasionally arrested relatives instead, increasing the number of civilians amongst the victims. The report describes the target establishment by the Yugoslav troops as ‘a not hundred percent anti-Fascist policy’ and this is emphasised by the fact that the Allied forces arrested members of the former Decima Flottiglia MAS (a fascist army commando) and other prominent fascists or army personnel such as General Giovanni Esposito (the Italian commander of Trieste for the army of the RSI) who had not been arrested by the partisans (even though Esposito is, still, on a UN list of wanted war criminals76).77 The members of the Decima Flottiglia MAS were singled out because they operated independently to defend Trieste and Fiume (now Rijeka) against the Yugoslav army even though they were part of the Marina Nazionale Repubblica (Republican National Marines).78 The report mentions that some SS collaborators had joined the Yugoslav ranks and some of them have been killed as well. Since the area of Venezia Giulia had been under German control, and the Germans planned to keep it this way, most of the key positions in the military and civil administration were held by Germans and not by Italians. This made the Germans a bigger target group in the areas where they were still dominant. Apart form the officials of the former oppressor civilians from the lower and middle classes were arrested as well. This usually happened after hurried denunciations stigmatising the person as an ‘enemy of the people’ by Yugoslav troops or as a part of the

75 Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, p. 30. 76 Website about Italian war criminals: http://www.criminidiguerra.it/Crowcass2.shtml, author unknown, accessed 24 November 2015. 77 WO 204/12753, ’General report on Jugoslav arrests and executions in May/June 1945’, p. 3, dated 3 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 78 Website of Decima Flottiglia MAS, http://www.associazionedecimaflottigliamas.it/il- comandante-borghese.html, author unknown, accessed on 20 November 2015.

39 Yugoslav policy of deterrence. The working class was victimized the least, according to the Allied report.79 The Italian Red Cross drew up lists of missing persons and concluded that in May- June 1945 approximately 1.500 people from Trieste were still missing, based on information from the relatives. Among these people were also persons who had cooperated with the CLN. About 500 members of the CLN had been arrested. Some of them were shot, like Captain Dell’Antonio who was the commander of Corpo Voluntari della Libertà (the Voluntary Freedom Corps). He was shot in Opicina, near Trieste. Many of the arrestees were released; one commander was only released after he signed himself up for the CEAIS (the Italo – Slovene Citizens’ Executive Committee80). He was suspected of collaboration with the Germans but was set free after he became a CEAIS member. The report also drew up a list of Yugoslav concentration camps where most of the arrestees were most probably accommodated: Borovnica (about 2.000 to 3.000 prisoners), Vipava/Vipacco, Otlica/Ottelza, Prestrane/Prestrane nowadays in Slovenia and Crikvenica/Cirquenizza, Sveti Vid, and Sisak in Croatia. According to testimonies and eyewitness accounts the conditions in these camps were unbearable. The report does not elaborate on the situation inside the camps or on the maltreatment of the prisoners. The Slovene Red Cross invited the International Red Cross, on July 12 1945, to observe the conditions within the camp and improvements had been reported in July 1945.81 In August 1945 about a hundred survivors the concentration camps reported to the AFHQ and gave their testimonies about the deportation and incarceration.82 The testimonies do not mention the circumstances of their release, only the date of their arrival in Trieste. Their sudden and undocumented release might have been due to the emerging knowledge about the treatment of the prisoners and the investigation the British forces were conducting in zone A. Not one of the testimonies mentions the reason why they were released or the way in which they could leave the camp. Many

79 WO 204/12753, ’General report on Jugoslav arrests and executions in May/June 1945’, p. 3, dated 3 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 80 Robin Kay, Italy, volume II, from Cassino to Trieste, Government Printer: Wellington (1967), p. 561. 81 WO 204/12753, ’General report on Jugoslav arrests and executions in May/June 1945’, p. 4, dated 3 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 82 WO 204/12494, Report sent by Colonel B. Nichols of G-2 Military Intelligence to the UK Resident Minister Harold Macmillan and US Polad (Policy Advisers), dated 5 October 1945, from the National Archives in London.

40 state they came by foot to the Allied occupied zone, sometimes with the help of the local population who provided them with food and clothes. A study by journalist and author Claudia Cernigoi argues that only 517 persons disappeared between the 1 May and the 12 July 1945. She calculated this by focussing on lists of the Italian Red Cross, testimonies and process scripts from the Istituto Regionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione di Trieste (Regional Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement of Trieste). From a list of 1.458 names she eliminated 942 names because of mistakes made while creating the lists. She gave the following arguments. A first set of 146 names was deleted because the ‘missing’ people were repatriated from prison. Another group totalling 259 names, were people who went missing in other areas than Trieste. Finally, 45 names were twice on the list with two different spellings; people who died in Nazi camps were not counted, as well as fallen partisans; and Cernigoi took out 217 because it could not be established if they were missing. The 516 that remain are ‘a good result’, according to Cernigoi, since “historical research should serve as evidence for the prosecution in a genocide trial”.83 She then adds one name to the list of victims found in the Plutone foiba.84 These people belong to the category ‘deported and disappeared’. But in my view, these terms are not accurate because people were also arrested, prosecuted and sometimes shot for their crimes. Some arrestees died from illnesses. In a footnote Cernigoi mentions that some soldiers were taken to the Borovnica concentration camp where many died from typhoid that spread because of the bad sanitary conditions. For this reason a hospital was set up where the prisoners who got ill were taken care for.85 Both the number of victims she established and her narrative of the treatment of the prisoners at Borovnica are debatable. Firstly, the list of names she published of people that were arrested, deported and often killed by the Yugoslavs, states in most cases that the person was a member of the Guardia di Finanza (GDF), Polizia di Stato (PS), Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), Militia per la Difesa Territoriale (MDT), carabinieri, railway, Italian Red Cross. The problem with this list, and what it implies, is

83 Claudia Cernigoi, Operazione foibe a Trieste: come si crea una mistificazione storica: dalla propaganda nazifascista attraverso la guerra fredda fino al neoirredentismo, Udine: Kappa Vu (1997), p. 30. 84 Ibidem, p. 30. 85 Ibidem, p. 30.

41 that the author does not explain what it meant to the individual to be a member of a fascist organisation or why the victim came to work for a fascist organisation. Cernigoi thus implies that these people were not civilians because of their work for a certain state organisation. She also states that the arrest were not indiscriminate because mainly military personnel and fascist collaborators were targeted.86 Again, by stating this, the arrestees ‘look’ guilty even though there might not have been individual guilt for a known crime. She does not elaborate on the crimes that were committed by the arrestees or about the trials that were held. As we have seen earlier, the Yugoslavs held show trials in Istria after which some of the victims were publicly executed on the main square of Pinguente. This knowledge raises questions concerning the trials that Cernigoi refers to. Secondly, based on almost a hundred testimonies from returnees from Borovnica, the treatment of the prisoners was horrible. Many prisoners were tortured while being questioned or when they had done ‘something wrong’, for example when a prisoner tried to pick up a piece of bread that had fallen from the pile of bread. The witnesses also tell about the hospital. Some state that the death rate inside the hospital was up to 7 a day; outside the hospital it was 3 to 5 a day. They mention the horrific conditions of the hospital and that it was not a place to get better but a place to die.87 Although many of the prisoners got seriously ill inside the camp, it was not the only reason why many prisoners perished. The exhaustion from the work and the physical and emotional damage from the torture and the lack of food and water made the prisoners weak and more susceptible for diseases. The conditions within the Borovnica camp were a lot worse than Claudia Cernigoi describes.

Sites of the executions and the foibe A report about the arrests, deportations and executions by Yugoslav partisans was drawn up on the request of 13 Corps after the AFHQ set up the Investigation Committee. One of the main informants was Professor Taglioferro who gave information mainly

86 Claudia Cernigoi, Operazione foibe a Trieste, p. 65. 87 WO 204/12494, Various testimonies by Giovanni Radeticchio, Giuseppe Fino, Armando Tosello, Armando Lasagna, Carlo Gitti etc., dated 5 October 1945, from the National Archives in London.

42 about the foibe.88 At least twelve other witnesses cooperated but their names are not known. The report, based on Taglioferro’s information, mentions six execution places that were used by the Yugoslavs during the occupation of Trieste: the first is Santa Anna crematorium; here 17 (unidentified) people were shot on May 2. The second place is Santa Sabba (the author most probably meant Risiera San Sabba, an infamous place for the deportation to Germany and Poland of Italian Jews, partisans and others before the armistice) where, also on May 2, 84 people were shot; among them were 15 German soldiers. The victims had to dig their own, superficial, graves before they were shot. Later they were exhumed and reburied in the local cemetery. The third place is Sercola Sewage Farm where a hundred bodies were thrown into the sewers after being shot. The fourth place is the Trieste cemetery where an unknown number of bodies are buried in mass graves. The fifth is a field next to the former Italian army barracks San Giovanni; here too an unknown number of people were shot. The last place is the sea near Servola where people were thrown into the water with bombs or stones attached to weigh them down.89 Besides the execution places, victims were killed in the foibe pits. The Allied forces identified six such pits: the first is at Racia near Lanischie and was called the Bertarelli foiba. According to the report several thousands of people have been killed here. The second is the Gollao pit where an unknown number of people were killed, afterwards petrol was poured over the pit and grenades were thrown in to blow up the pit containing the bodies as evidence of the massacre. The third is the Scadaiscina foiba. In this pit Italian and Yugoslav civilians were killed, along with German military personnel. The fourth, as reported by eyewitnesses, consists of several pits in the Beca area. The fifth is the Basovizza pit, where at least 800 people were killed. This pit will be discussed at length later on in this chapter. The last pits are in the Valle di Rosandra, Baccia, Castelnuovo d’Arsia, Porta Meresego and Corgnale.90 According to two statements given to the Allied forces by Professor Taglioferro and engineer Holzer, who were considered to be reliable and trustworthy, the arrests started on the 1 May 1945 and were carried out on the orders of the National Liberation

88 WO 204/12753, ‘Arrests, Deportation and Executions carried out by the Jugoslavs in Venezia Giulia’, no. 0052, dated 18 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 89 WO 204/12753, ‘Arrests, Deportations and Executions carried out by the Jugoslavs in Venezia Giulia’, p. 1-2, dated 18 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 90 WO 204/12753, ‘Arrests, Deportations and Executions carried out by the Jugoslavs in Venezia Giulia’, p. 2, dated 18 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

43 Front (a leading and prominent group within the Yugoslav partisan movement91). Thousands of people were arrested and sent to concentration camps in Croatia. Many of them had fought for freedom and many considered themselves Italians. They also stated that on June 15 1945, about 14.000 people were interned in the concentration camp of Prestrane. The commander of the camp was called Steffe; he was said to be a common criminal before the war. The interviewees thought that the people who were still missing are probably killed in the foibe. One of these foibe is at Basovizza, and is also called the Pozzo della Miniera. It was used between 3 and 7 May 1945. Several witnesses spoke of groups of 100, 200 and 500 being brought to the mouth of the pit and killed there or forced to jump in. Taglioferro and Holzer stated: “Many women and children were among the victims, whole families were disposed of in this way, as for example ANDREINA PETTAROSI post-woman of S. ANTONIO IN BOSCO, who was thrown into the pit, together with her husband and two year old daughter.”92 The victims had to jump into the pit; if they survived the jump, they were told, their lives would be spared but actually, the survivors were killed anyway. According to the witness Dr. Reich (about whom not much is known) a Yugoslav commissar said that 550 persons were thrown in the pit by May 5 1945. The witness Cosman Slava, at the time living in Trieste, reported that the wife and the son of a carabiniere were killed in the Corgnale foiba.93 This witness did not mention anything about the father but the wife and son, he said, were killed because of the husband’s supposed guilt as a fascist police officer. Many foibe with corpses have been discovered in the region of Gorizia and Trieste, now partly within the Slovene and Croatian borders. Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali mention the following: Quisca, Volci, Cruscevizza, Ternovizza, Aurisina, Prepotto, Prosecco, Sesana, Gropada, Opicina, Padriciano, Plutone (near Basovizza),

91 Sten Berglund, Tomas Hellén and Frank H Aarebrot, The handbook of political change in Eastern Europe, Cheltenham: E. Elgar 1998, p. 345. 92 WO 204/12753, ‘Alleged Jugoslav Atrocities, statement by Prof. Taglioferro and Ing. Holzer’, p. 1, dated 18 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 93 WO 204/12753, ‘Alleged Jugoslav Atrocities, statement by Prof. Taglioferro and Ing. Holzer’, p. 2, dated 18 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

44 Monte Nero, Tarnova, Gargaro (then in Gorizia province) and Trieste.94 The Allied forces committed their research on some of these pits. In Gorizia, several foibe have been identified, including those in the small village of Cobbia, in Gargaro about ten kilometres from Gorizia, in Comino, in Tarnova della Selva and in Aidussina. All of the victims had their hands behind their backs and they were tied to each other as well. They were then lined up at the mouth of the foiba and the first person was shot so the victim would drag the other victims, still alive, with him/her to the bottom of the pit. In one of the pits in the Gorizia area, an estimated 700 bodies were found. Witnesses testify they have heard the victims scream before they were killed. The foiba of Gargaro was found “full of bodies”, according to the report. In Comino the researchers found seven people: two SS men, two members of the Brigate Nere (the military side of the new fascist party of Mussolini, set up after the armistice95) and three Italian ‘workers’ (‘lavoratori’ who were most probably still wearing their work uniforms).96 The Basovizza foibe was investigated most thoroughly of all, and therefore will be discussed at length here. The research into this foiba started on 7 August 1945 but only on 12 September 1945 the first discoveries were made. In the following days they found body parts of civilian men, women and German soldiers. They also found parts of automatic weapons, military objects and horse corpses. The work was done with the help of Allied soldiers and according to a message from Brigadier of General Staff of 13 Corps T.S. Airey to the Headquarters of 13 Corps, the work was not appropriate for soldiers and he asked to pass the work on to civilian organisations.97 The work was too horrific to be done by soldiers who did not have the necessary training and should instead have been carried out by professionals in this area of research. The materials of the Investigation Committee, nevertheless, do not show this wish has been honoured. The Basovizza foiba had a depth of about 300 metres and a diameter of about 40 metres.98 As mentioned before, the investigations into the Basovizza foiba started on 7

94 Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, pp. 236-238. 95 Philip Morgan, The Fall of Mussolini, p. 166. 96 WO 204/12753, Report (in Italian) sent to AFHQ, no. 74/C, dated 4 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 97 WO 204/12754, ‘Investigations Basovizza’, by Brigadier T.S. Airey, sent to 13th Corps, dated 2 October 1945, from the National Archives in London. 98 WO 204/12753, Report (in Italian) sent to AFHQ, no. 74/C, dated 4 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

45 August 1945. On 1 July 1945 a message was send from AFHQ to General Staff Intelligence that stated the rumours about the bodies of fascist policemen, officials, collaborators and German soldiers at the bottom of the mineshaft. The bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition, which made the investigations even more difficult to execute. Because of the stage of decomposition, it was also very difficult to identify the victims of ethnic cleansing. The Lieutenant General who wrote the message (his name is unreadable) calls for ending the research because it was a hazardous and unhealthy task. He recommended closing and hygienically sealing the mineshaft.99 A couple days later, on 10 July 1945, an unidentified brigadier of 13 Corps writes in a letter to the AFHQ: “It is not considered that the British authorities should assume responsibility for investigation of the alleged disposal of Fascist Italians and German soldiers by the Yugoslavs”.100 At this time, the full extent of the mass killings by the Yugoslav army and partisans was not yet fully known to the British forces. It was also not clear yet that the victims were not all fascists or German soldiers, but also civilians, lower ranking fascists, New Zealand soldiers and even children. In a reply to the former message to AFHQ a few children are mentioned as witnesses of over hundred victims that were forced to jump into the foiba. Another witness states he overheard a Yugoslav Commissioner say that 550 have met their death in the Basovizza pit. An Italian informer knows the names of five victims that died in Basovizza: a married couple with their two-year-old son were among the victims. The same message also mentions the existence of other foibe in the area, at Corgnale, west of the Morgan Line and three more east of the Morgan Line. The foibe east of the Morgan Line allegedly also contain the bodies of Allied soldiers that were either fighting with the Yugoslav partisans or were shot down by the Germans.101 A letter from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dated 31 July 1945, stated the identification of a son of Mr. Giannini who had been a member of the Italian partisans and disappeared in May 1945. The letter also notes the exhumation of corpses of two- year-old children from the Basovizza pit.102

99 WO 204/12753, ‘Alleged War Crime – Basovizza Mine Shaft’, dated 1 July 1945, from the National Archives in London. 100 WO 204/12753, ‘Alleged War Crimes Basovizza Mine Shaft’, dated 10 July 1945, from the National Archives in London. 101 WO 204/12753, ‘Alleged War Crimes – Basovizza Mine Shaft’, dated 13 July 1945, from the National Archives in London. 102 WO 204/12753, ‘Atrocities’, report sent to AFHQ G-2, dated 31 July 1945, from the National Archives in London.

46 A very important observation by the authors of the report is that local commanders often exceeded their orders and higher authorities often were not aware of the disorderly actions taken in Venezia Giulia. General Velebit admitted to an American attaché in Belgrade that he did not know that mass arrests had been carried out throughout the whole of Venezia Giulia during staff talks in Duino, Italy.103 This points to a certain degree of chaos within the Yugoslav army and the partisan groups. This chaos might have influenced the lack of knowledge about the perpetrators identities and also whose orders the Yugoslav commanders and the partisans followed during the occupation of Trieste.

The testimonies of two priests A priest, Don Malalan, allegedly witnessed a mass murder at the Basovizza foiba and provided the British investigation with a testimony about what he has seen there. The interview took place on August 7 1945, and was conducted by an anonymous interviewer; the report calls him/her ‘Source’. The identity of ‘Source’ is concealed for security reasons; he/she might be of a Slavic background and could be in danger when the Yugoslavs find out he spoke with the Allied forces. The priest appeared to be anti- Italian and pro-Yugoslav and only admitted the massacre had happened after ‘Source’ explained that the fascists would take revenge on the perpetrators of the Basovizza pit. The priest has probably been offered protection by the British forces in order to extract information from him. Priest Don Malalan explains the massacres were committed on the order of the Military Tribunal of the Fourth Yugoslav Army; the Fourth Army received the orders from General Peter Drapsin who held his headquarters near Basovizza. The victims had to stand trial and all of them had three witness statements against them. Among the victims were Questura agents from Trieste; they were all killed. Most of them were shot before they were thrown into the abyss, but some were also thrown in alive. The reason that Don Malalan was involved in the process of ethnic cleansing was because his brother, a Yugoslav commissar, had asked him on May 2 to come to Basovizza to witness the ‘executions of criminals’. Don Malalan refused to go but knew another priest, Don Virgillo Sceck, who was present at the massacre. Don Virgillo Sceck allegedly told a

103 WO 204/12753, ’General report on Jugoslav arrests and executions in May/June 1945’, p. 3, dated 3 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

47 victim, a member of the Pubblica Sicurezza (a security organisation), that this is what the victims deserved for torturing Yugoslavs during the fascist era. Don Malalan states that the perpetrators used lists of condemned people and these lists are also used to show that the executions were done in a legal way, with a trial, and according to the rules of war. More interestingly, however, is the fact the Don Malalan states that the perpetrators were only soldiers from the Fourth Army, and not local partisans who wanted to take revenge on the fascists. Don Malalan does not know much about the victims, apart from the presence of Questura members. He only mentions Signora Pettarosi who was presumably killed on May 2 but the priest does not know what happened to her husband and daughter. According to him she was suspected of being a spy for the Germans. The reason for the suspicion was her occupation: she was a post woman and had to go from San Antonio di Bosco to Trieste often.104 The afore-mentioned priest Don Virgillo Sceck, from Corgnale, was also interviewed by ‘Source’. He, as well, was very anti-Italian. He confirms that the Fourth Army committed the executions. He also notes that the executions were legal according to the rules of war. He was in the village of Basovizza on May 2 1945 to help with the burials of a couple of partisans. When present in the village, he witnessed a group of 150 people being held by Yugoslav soldiers. According to Don Sceck the victims, “who were recognisable by their faces as members of the Questura”, had a summary trial conducted by the Yugoslavs after they prevented the populace to take revenge themselves. All the victims admitted to the accusations, in the presence of the village inhabitants, of murder, torture and arson. The victims were found guilty, shot with machine guns and thrown into the Basovizza pit. Don Sceck claims he did not see or hear the executions. The next day, Don Sceck went to Basovizza again and witnessed the same procedure with 250 to 300 prisoners. He states that most of them were civilians but there were also about 40 German soldiers. Contradictory, Don Sceck also says they were actually all members of the Questura. The victims were shot after a summary trial and thrown into the foiba. The Yugoslavs also threw the corpses of horses in the pit.105

104 WO 204/12753, ‘Evidence of Priest of San Antonio in Bosco’, dated 18 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 105 WO 204/12753, ‘Evidence of Priest of Corgnale’, dated 18 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

48 The identity of the perpetrators Little is known about the individual identity of the perpetrators of the crimes committed in the area of Trieste, Gorizia and Istria. A few names are mentioned in the reports written by the British forces but the report does not give more information about the persons. The descriptions are often very vague. A possible explanation is that the witnesses who came forward were afraid of repercussions and therefore did not give names. Raoul Pupo and Roberto Spazzali have already mentioned the fear of the Italian civilians and also the Allied reports indicated this. It is also possible that some of the victims knew the perpetrators from their own village or region. Some local socialists or antifascists joined the partisans after the armistice of 8 September 1943. It would be likely that the victims did not always want to indicate the perpetrators because they knew each other and each other’s families. We do know, from Don Malalan, that the perpetrators acted upon the orders of the Military Tribunal of Fourth Army stationed at Basovizza. Fourth Army followed the orders directly from General Peter Drapsin who was stationed in Lipiza, close to Basovizza.106 Two other names that have been mentioned are Ciro Raner and Nerino Gobbo. Unfortunately it is impossible to find any evidence that they have taken part in the ethnic cleansing of Italians in Trieste. A very brief report based on Taglioferro and Holzer’s statements mentions that “many communist elements from Castello di Moco took part in the ethnic cleansing in San Servolo and Val Rosandra”. The perpetrators sometimes made children watch the murder of their parents, without any given reason. One 13-year-old girl testified of having had to witness her parents being killed in San Antonio in Bosco.107

Conclusion During the Forty Days the Yugoslav army and the partisans arrested, tortured and killed many civilians and army personnel in the Trieste and Gorizia regions. The ethnic cleansing was done in two ways, although there are certainly exceptions. Some of the victims were arrested and executed. Other victims were arrested, often taken to a prison and later thrown into the foibe. In all the testimonies and in most of the research one can

106 WO 204/12753, ‘Evidence of Priest of San Antonio in Bosco’, dated 18 August 1945, from the National Archives in London. 107 WO 204/12753, ‘Alleged Jugoslav Atrocities, statement by Prof. Taglioferro and Ing. Holzer’, p. 2, no. 0052, dated 18 August 1945, from the National Archives in London.

49 read that the victims’ hands were tied behind their backs with an iron wire and then they were tied together with the other victims. The victims were lined up at the mouth of a foiba. Then, the first person was shot, dragging the others with him into the pit, alive. How many Triestines were killed in this way is still unclear because the research into the pits has often been difficult. The victim group consisted of former members of Mussolini’s government; civil servants of the Mussolini era; German and Italian soldiers; members of the Italian resistance groups and civilians. The OZNA, the Yugoslav secret police, created lists of ‘enemies of the people’ to identity who had collaborated with the previous regime and therefore, most probably, was guilty of anti-communist sentiments. The target group turned out to be predominantly Italian. Indeed, the victims of arrests and family members of disappeared Italians often note they were victimised just because they were Italian. The Investigation Committee described this policy as ‘a not hundred percent anti-Fascist policy’. One of the informants of the Investigation Committee was Professor Taglioferro who gave 13 Corps a vast amount of information on the various sites of execution and the numbers of people murdered. When the Committee started their investigations into the places Taglioferro testified about, they found the bodies of many victims inside various foibe. There were signs that the Yugoslav troops had intended to blow up the mouth of the pits to avoid further investigation and identification of the bodies. Women and children had been thrown in the foibe, most often because a family member had worked for the previous regime. Taglioferro also testified that many arrestees had been brought to the Borovnica concentration camp. According to survivor testimonies the treatment of the incarcerated people had been inhumane and torture and violence was often used against them.

50 CONCLUSION

This thesis focused on the question of what happened to the Italians in Istria and Trieste that became the victims of Yugoslav ethnic cleansing. The answer is based, mainly, on the investigation done by 13 Corps of the British Allied forces, supplementing the extensive research that has already been done by Raoul Pupo, Roberto Spazzali and Gianni Oliva. This thesis provided a unique insight into the topic of the foibe massacres due to the use of the unexplored reports and testimonies drawn up by 13 Corps. Several reasons made the British start the investigation, in which the start of the Cold War played a large role. One of the motives was to help save Italy as the ‘innocent little brother’ of Germany in order to portray Italy as a victim of Mussolini’s corrupt government. This would help the Allied forces to prevent Italy from choosing the communist sphere of influence in the wake of the Cold War. However, based on the lack of specified information about the decision to start the investigation, diplomatic motives might have been a stronger incentive because the results, portraying the Yugoslavs as the perpetrators and the Italians as the victims (again) probably influenced the post-war negotiations with Tito about the border issues between Italy and Yugoslavia. These negotiations in which Tito did not obtain Trieste, could also show that ‘the West’ was diplomatically and ideologically stronger than ‘the East’, aiding the psychological struggle over the European citizens. This seems even more likely taking into account that the results of the investigation have never been made public and the information has not been used to help the victims and their families to deal with the past. The Investigation Committee did its research in the Istrian and Trieste regions. The second chapter focused on the campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Istria in 1943. While the Yugoslav forces attempted to solidify their power over the peninsula they installed a culture of violence targeting Italians in the region. Arrests, interrogations, show trials, public executions were implemented to spread fear amongst the Italian citizens. The sinkholes in the area were used in order to make the bodies of many of disappear. The victims were tied with their hands behind their backs and pushed into the foiba and often the mouth of the pit was blown up to avoid the exhumation of the bodies and the identification the victims. Norma Cossetto and her sisters have become examples of the torture and humiliation that the Italian victims of ethnic cleansing had to suffer. Another example is Giovanni Radeticchio who clearly described how he was treated and how the

51 killing was done. He managed to survive the foiba and told his story to the Investigation Committee. There have been many parallel motives for the ethnic cleansing, such as the ideological struggle, personal feuds and revenge, however, cleansing the Istrian peninsula from the Italians to concur the area for Yugoslavia, and therewith liberating the Slav population from the Italian oppressor (this refers to the reign of Mussolini before September 1943), seemed to have been the stronger incentive in the background. In a similar way, the Italians in the Trieste region suffered greatly during the Forty Days of occupation by the Yugoslav army and the partisans. Many Italians were arrested, tortured, killed and thrown into the numerous foibe. Again, most of the testimonies show that the victim’s hands were tied behind their backs and were then tied to the other victims. The victims were brought up at the edge of a foiba and the first person was shot, dragging the others with him into the pit, often alive. The OZNA used lists of ‘enemies of the people’ to identity who had been a member of the Mussolini administration or was otherwise guilty. This meant that the target group was predominantly Italian and kept on getting wider to include more people, such as civil servants but also wives and children of civil servants. Tellingly for the time, the Investigation Committee described this policy as ‘a not hundred percent anti-Fascist policy’. The Investigation Committee based many of their reports on witness accounts of Italians and non-Italians. One informant was Professor Taglioferro who informed the Committee about the location of the various sites of execution and the foibe and also gave an estimate of the numbers of people that were murdered. Based on the testimonies of the informants, one can identify similarities with the ethnic cleansing in Istria. In Trieste the Italian people perceived to be in danger just for being and speaking Italian. The Yugoslav army wanted to retake Trieste because of its strategic location and its historic ties to surrounding Slav areas. In order to claim the land, they attempted to cleanse Trieste from a large part of the Italian population, and deterring many others to leave the area. The ethnic cleansing in Istria appears to have been more improvised (with for example public executions) than the violence in Trieste where the OZNA worked with lists of so-called ‘fascists’. The key finding here, however, is that in both cases, the Yugoslav forces attempted to ethnically cleanse Istria and Trieste so as to dominate and annex to Yugoslavia.

52 APPENDIX I

Map of the Venezia Giulia area (1946):

Source: website of the Worcestershire Regiment, http://www.worcestershireregiment.com/bat_1_1946.php, last consulted on 14/07/2016

53 APPENDIX II

Facsimile of a statement by Giovanni Radeticchio, page 1:

54

Statement by Giovanni Radeticchio, page 2:

55 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Publications

Anderson, Malcolm and Eberhard Bort, The Frontiers of Europe, London: Pinter 1998.

Ballinger, Pamela, 'At the Borders of Force: Violence, Refugees, and the Reconfiguration of the Yugoslav and Italian States', Past and Present, Vol. 6 (2011), pp. 158-176.

Ballinger, Pamela, ‘Who defines and remembers genocide after the Cold War? Contested memories of partisan massacre in Venezia Giulia in 1943-1945’, Journal of Genocide Research, no. 2 (2000), pp. 11-30.

Berglund, Sten and Tomas Hellén and Frank H Aarebrot, The handbook of political change in Eastern Europe, Cheltenham: E. Elgar 1998.

Cernigoi, Claudia, Operazione foibe a Trieste: come si crea una mistificazione storica: dalla propaganda nazifascista attraverso la guerra fredda fino al neoirredentismo, Udine: Kappa Vu 1997.

Ginsborg, Paul, A History of Contemporary Italy, society and politics 1943-1988, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003.

Kay, Robin, Italy, volume II, from Cassino to Trieste, Government Printer: Wellington 1967.

Lamb, Richard, War in Italy 1943-1945: a brutal story, London: Penguin Books 1995.

Lingen, von, Kerstin, Allen Dulles, the OSS, and Nazi War Criminals: the dynamics of selective prosecution, New York: Cambridge University Press 2013.

Manin, Marino, ‘On human losses and the exodus from Istria during the Second World War and the post-war period’, Review of Croatian History, no. 1 (2006), pp. 73-88.

Morgan, Philip, The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians and the Second World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007.

Naimark, Norman, Fires of hatred: ethnic cleansing in twentieth century Europe, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2001.

Oliva, Gianni, Foibe: Le stragi negate degli italiani della Venezia Giulia e dell’Istria, Milan: Arnaldo Mondadori Editore 2002.

Palmer, Robert, ‘A Concise History of: 8 Army (History and Personnel)’, pp. 1-13, accessed via website: http://www.britishmilitaryhistory.co.uk/documents.php, consulted on 30/05/2016.

56 Palmer, Robert, ‘A Concise History of: 13 Corps (Western Dessert Force (History and Personnel))’, pp.1-13, accessed via website: http://www.britishmilitaryhistory.co.uk/documents.php, consulted on 30/05/2016.

Pupo, Raoul, Il lungo esodo: Istria: le persecuzioni, le foibe, l’esilio, Milan: RCS Libri 2005.

Pupo, Raoul and Roberto Spazzali, Foibe, Milan: Paravia Bruno Mondadori Editori 2003.

Sussi Valli, Roberta, ‘The Myth of Squadrismo in the Fascist Regime’, Journal of Contemporary History, no. 35 (2000), pp. 131-150.

Websites

Decima Flottiglia MAS, http://www.associazionedecimaflottigliamas.it/il-comandante- borghese.html, author unknown, accessed on 20 November 2015.

Questura di Trieste, Polizia di Stato, http://www.poliziadistato.it/articolo/1391/, author unknown, accessed 24 November 2015.

Crimini di Guerra – United Nations War Crimes Commission, http://www.criminidiguerra.it/Crowcass2.shtml, author unknown, accessed 24 November 2015.

57 PRIMARY SOURCES

National Archives, London

WO 204/12494:

‘Report of investigation (part 1)’, dated 27 September 1945.

Report sent by Colonel B. Nichols of G-2 Military Intelligence to the UK Resident Minister Harold Macmillan and US Polad (Policy Advisers), dated 5 October 1945.

Various testimonies by Giovanni Radeticchio, Giuseppe Fino, Armando Tosello, Armando Lasagna, Carlo Gitti etc., dated 5 October 1945.

WO 204/12753:

‘Alleged War Crime – Basovizza Mine Shaft’, dated 1 July 1945.

‘Outgoing message: Colonel E. Nichols to 8th Army’, dated 2 July 1945.

‘Alleged War Crimes Basovizza Mine Shaft’, dated 10 July 1945.

‘Alleged War Crimes – Basovizza Mine Shaft’, dated 13 July 1945.

‘Atrocities’, report sent to AFHQ G-2, dated 31 July 1945.

‘Message from Headquarters ALCOM (Allied Communication) in Rome to AFHQ G-5 (Special Operations Section) information headquarters for 13th Corps in Venezia Giulia’, dated 1 August 1945.

‘General report on Jugoslav arrests and executions in May/June 1945’, p. 3-4, dated 3 August 1945.

‘Elemento uscito vivo da una foiba presso Fianona’, dated 4 August 1945.

‘Article written by Don Beari for the catholic journal “Vita Nuova”’, dated 4 August 1945.

Report (in Italian) sent to AFHQ, no. 74/C, dated 4 August 1945.

‘Statement by Don Beari’, dated 18 August 1945.

‘Statement by Giuseppe Bari’, dated 18 August 1945.

‘Arrests, Deportations and Executions carried out by the Jugoslavs in Venezia Giulia’, p. 1-2, dated 18 August 1945.

‘Alleged Jugoslav Atrocities, statement by Prof. Taglioferro and Ing. Holzer’, p. 1-2, no. 0052, dated 18 August 1945.

58 ‘Evidence of Priest of San Antonio in Bosco’, dated 18 August 1945.

‘Evidence of Priest of Corgnale’, dated 18 August 1945.

‘Evidence of Priest of San Antonio in Bosco’, dated 18 August 1945.

WO 204/12754:

‘Statement by Giovanni Radettichio of Sissano (Subject of Appendix D)’, part of corrections made to an earlier report of 25 August 1945, dated 27 September 1945.

‘Investigations Basovizza’, by Brigadier T.S. Airey, sent to 13th Corps, dated 2 October 1945.

FO 137/59396:

‘Jugoslav oppression if Italians in Northwest Istria’, not dated.

‘Jugoslav petition for the annexation of Istria by Jugoslavia’, dated 25 August 1945.

‘Jugoslav oppression on Cherso Island’, dated 25 August 1945.

‘Section I: Yugoslav oppression of Italians and anti-communist elements’, written by the Investigation Committee in Venezia Giulia, dated 14 November 1945.

59