Risiera di San Sabba

The former rice mill of San Sabba became a Nazi police detention camp during the German occupation of Trieste. Today the Risiera di San Sabba is a national monument and civic museum, preserving the cells, courtyard and memorial spaces of the camp.

Why it matters

After the German occupation in September 1943, the mill was converted into a Polizeihaftlager, a police detention camp, where the Einsatzkommando Reinhardt operated a crematorium. A decree of 15 April 1965 declared the site a national monument and protected its courtyard, cells and furnace area. The memorial commemorates deportation, racial persecution and the violence inflicted in Trieste and the surrounding region.

What to notice

The brick chimney visible outside belonged to the rice-drying plant. The crematorium was built inside one of the drying towers in 1944 and destroyed by the retreating occupiers; its remains are sheltered within the memorial. The courtyard and the row of small cells preserve the camp’s physical layout. In the commemoration room stands Marcello Mascherini’s sculpture I martiri (1958). The museum’s 2016 exhibition redesign by Corrado Pagliaro brings together photographs, documents and objects, including an urn of ashes brought from Auschwitz and belongings looted from Trieste’s Jewish homes and returned by the Jewish Community in 2002.

Context and history

The rice mill was built between 1898 and 1913. Milling ceased between 1927 and 1934, and the Italian army used the complex for storage from 1930; it served as a barracks from 1940. After the war, the site housed refugee families until the early 1960s. Architect Romano Boico converted it into a memorial, and the civic museum opened in 1975. In 1976, Trieste’s Court of Assizes sentenced SS officer Josef Oberhauser to life imprisonment in absentia; he was never extradited from Germany.