The German occupation

A few days after the Cassibile armistice (whose contents were broadcast by radio on 8 September 1943) Trieste was occupied by German troops. Although not formally annexed to the Third Reich, it became part of the Operational Zone of the Adriatic coast, which included the provinces of Trieste, Gorizia, Pola, Fiume, Udine and Ljubljana led by the Austrian gauleiter Friedrich Rainer. Rainer allowed in the city the reconstitution of a PFR headquarters, directed by the federal Bruno Sambo, the presence of a modest contingent of Italian soldiers under the command of GNR general Giovanni Esposito and the establishment of a department of the Guardia di Finanza. He himself appointed Cesare Pagnini podestà of the city, while as prefect of the province of Trieste he chose Bruno Coceani. Both characters were appreciated by the RSI authorities and by Benito Mussolini himself, who had known Coceani personally since the 1920s. On the other hand, there were constant frictions and tensions with the local fascists who saw themselves ousted from the administration of the city and the province. In order not to create a split with the Italian authorities, the Germans authorized the local federation of the PFR to set up its own paramilitary formations and its own secret police to be used in the anti-partisan struggle.

During the German occupation of Trieste, the Risiera di San Sabba, a rice husking plant built in 1913, was used by the Germans as a prison and sorting camp for Jews to be deported to Germany and Poland and as a detention camp for partisans and political prisoners. San Sabba was the only extermination camp in Italy with a crematorium, put into operation on April 4, 1944. At the same time, the activity of the Yugoslav partisan movement intensified in Trieste and on the Trieste Karst, which operated in such a way as to destabilize the regime of occupation. The reaction of the Germans and the Italian collaborators was not long in coming: roundups, searches and even decimations devastated the Julian city and the neighboring towns.
In April 1944 in Trieste, following an attack that had caused the death of 7 German soldiers in a room in Opicina, seventy-two citizens of both Italian and Slavic ethnicity were shot; a few days later, on 23 April 1944, due to another attack, another fifty-two were hanged in the canteen of Palazzo Rittmayer in via Ghega in Trieste.

To the climate of uncertainty and repression were added the American and British bombings which repeatedly, between April 1944 and February 1945, targeted Trieste. Damage and devastation occurred not only in the port facilities, the oil refinery and shipyards but also in the city. Numerous residential buildings were razed to the ground and many others suffered damage of varying degrees. The number of victims on which only rough estimates can be made is heavy (in all probability around a thousand for the entire municipality). Terrifying was the air raid on 10 June 1944 which alone caused nearly four hundred deaths.