Museo della Risiera di San Sabba

The Museo della Risiera di San Sabba (San Sabba Rice Mill Museum) is a national monument and museum: a former rice mill and factory in Trieste, which German occupation authorities employed as a detention and concentration camp from 1943-45. Following the Italian-Allied Armistice and subsequent German occupation of Northern Italy in 1943, Trieste was absorbed into the Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland (Adriatic Coastal Operation Zone); San Sabba was repurposed as a police detention camp and saw the imprisonment of captured or suspected partisans, political suspects, and Jewish individuals. While accurate figures are uncertain, thousands were imprisoned or deported through San Sabba to concentration and death camps including Auschwitz, while at least three hundred were killed and cremated at San Sabba itself, among them Italian, Slovenia, and Croatian partisans and approximately 25 Jews. SS Officers Odilo Globočnik, Karl Frenzel, and Ivan Marchenko are known to have been stationed at the camp, while the cremation facilities at San Sabba were the only ones installed in any Italian camp and were constructed under the supervision of SS Officer and mason Erwin Lambert; Lambert was also involved in the construction of gas chambers and cremators at German hospitals and psychiatric facilities as part of the T4 Program, and at the Sobibór and Treblinka death camps. The site was used as a refugee camp in the immediate aftermath of the war, before being declared a National Monument in 1965.  

The current museum was established in 1975 to present visitors with the history and significance of the site, while a multimedia exhibit featuring documents, letters, and photographs of internees was created in 2016.