Not very rice

The San Sabba Rice Husking Mill, just outside the Trieste city limits, has been retained as a monument to atrocities conducted during WWII.

The German Army initially commandeered the place to act as a prison for enemy soldiers: Stalag 339. After it was decided to send all allied troops to German camps, they handed it over to the Nazis for a police base.

The Ukranian SS ran the camp as an interrogation / assassination centre against the Italian / Slovenian / Croatian partisans of whom 2000, ( some say 4-5000,) perished. As well as 25 Jews.

Many more people were channeled through here before catching a train: degenerates, (physical / mental / political / sexual,) inferior races, (Gypsies, Jews, Slavs.) They did not have to wear a colour coded armband though.

The reported methods of execution included hanging, shooting, gassing and bludgeoning. There are several matter-of-fact video descriptions By survivors of events that occurred: one, by a Taylor who was forced to spend a year making officers' clothing on the ground floor of the factory, says that he never found blood or stains on the clothes he had to retrieve from the killing chambers. The metal whip or knout tells another story though.
That the Nazis first tried to use the rice desiccator to terminate lives is probably just propaganda.

The Germans tried to blow the place up when the allies and Yugoslavs arrived. The rooms used to collect people for execution, individual cells holding up to 6 people at a time, & the 3 story transit block survived. An architect sympathetically design a contrasting, concrete framework
to show where the furnaces and outer walls stood: a steel sculpture marks the position of the crematorium chimney.

The most poignant image In my mind is the plaque bearing a metal image and translation of the last letter from a 19 year old partisan to his family. It was found hidden in the prison long after his death.Read more