ABSTRACT
The Risiera di San Sabba National Monument and Museum in Trieste marks the site of the lager remembered as the only Nazi killing camp on Italian soil. This chapter examines how the museum and monument, consecrated as an Italian national memory site, reflect the post-1945 memory of Nazi occupation and the narrative of resistance and victimhood in the context of Adriatic cultural politics and ethnic anti-fascism of the interwar period and World War II. It explores the ways in which emphasis on the period of the lager's functioning in the Adriatic Littoral Operation Zone from September 1943 to April 1945 reinforces perceptions of Nazi culpability and avoids Italian national reckoning with the realities of Fascist ethnic persecution and violence in the region. It examines how the monument and museum cast the partisan struggle as a united multi-ethnic front against the Italian Fascists and then against the soldiers of Hitler's Reich, leaving aside the unique and long-term contributions of autochthonous Croatians and Slovenes, subjected to ethno-nationalist persecution for more than two decades, who fought to defeat fascism and authoritarianism in the region.
