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4: CASE STUDY 1: THE ITALIAN/SLOVENIAN BORDER<br />

Between the wars<br />

After the First World War and the fall of the Habsburg Empire the southern<br />

part of the empire declared itself independent: the Kingdom of Serbs,<br />

Croats and Slovenes, later named the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The border<br />

towards Austria was settled through a referendum in 1920 when Austria<br />

gained the northern sections of Carinthia. The border with Italy was settled<br />

in the Rapallo Treaty in 1920 (Medved 1993:136). In this treaty Italy<br />

acquired 8768 km² of territory extending east and south-east, including the<br />

ports of Trieste and Fiume (now Rijeka) which were the two main ports of<br />

the Habsburg Empire in the Adriatic, becoming the new province of<br />

Venezia Giulia (Moodie 1950:84–87). The population in these areas were a<br />

mixture of Italian, Slovene, Croatian and German. As fascism and its<br />

progressively heavy emphasis on nationalism grew stronger in Italy times<br />

became increasingly difficult for non-Italian groups within its territory.<br />

Even if the official line, expressed by Prime Minister Nitti in 1919, was to<br />

treat people of minorities with justice and sympathy, reality showed that<br />

treatment of minorities were highly inconsistent and depended on the<br />

attitudes of the local authorities (Sluga 2001:42). After 1922 the Fascist<br />

government started a more active policy of Italianising Venezia Giulia. As<br />

part of the nation-building process a renaming operation was carried out<br />

where street names, monuments and persons were given a new Italian<br />

identity through new Italian names, this was not an uncommon tactic used<br />

as part of nation building both in Italy and in other parts of Europe (Sluga<br />

2001:47).<br />

WWII and new borders<br />

Yugoslavia was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941 and in 1943 when the<br />

Italians capitulated the Germans also took the area around Trieste and the<br />

study area, which became included in the so called Operational Zone of the<br />

Adriatic Littoral. In Trieste a concentration camp was established, the<br />

Risiera di San Sabba, on the outskirts of town in a previous rice husking<br />

plant. The camp had a purpose-built cremation oven which was blown up<br />

by the Germans late April 1945 to hide the evidence of their crimes when it<br />

became clear that the Yugoslavian partisans were about to take over the<br />

area. It has been reported that as many as 25,000 Jews and Yugoslavian<br />

partisans may have been interrogated and tortured here and 3,000–5,000<br />

people are believed to have been killed at the camp (Aktion Reinhard<br />

Camps 2011).<br />

73

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