| Civilians examine corpses recovered from the “Dei Colombi” Foibe (“deep natural sinkhole”) outside the town of Vinež. Vinež was the scene of several massacres in ongoing ethnic tension in a complicated social and political relationship dating back thousands of years, between ethnic Italians, Croatians, and Slovenes who lived in Dalmatia, Istria, Kvarner, and the Julian March. Italy annexed the region after World War I. The government instituted learning the language for all; during the era of Fascist Prime Minister and Dictator Bentio Mussolini (July 29, 1883 – April 28, 1945), cultural repression was practiced by Italian authorities. After the Italian armistice was announced on September 8, 1943, Communist militia loyal to Josip Broz Tito (May 7, 1892 – May 4, 1980) executed hundreds in revenge killings. The number of victims is unknown. The total is believed to be around a 1,000 people across Dalmatia and Istria during the 1st round of ethnic cleansing. Raffaello Camerinio (1924 – after 2001), an Italian Jew, wrote after the 1st Foibe Massacres, “The cruelty of the Italian fascists against those who spoke Croatian instead of Italian, or those who opposed changing their Croatian or Slovenian surname to another Italian, was such that at night they forcibly took men, young and old, and, with incredible systems, they dragged them as far as Vinež, Chersano and other neighboring localities, where there were sinkholes, and there, after a pistol shot in the neck, they threw them into the abyss. When these cavities were filled, I saw several trucks, during the day and in the evening, with concrete taken from a building materials depot located at the base of Albona, which headed for those sites and after a short time returned empty. At the time I lived in a house located in the square of Santa Domenica d’Labin, adjacent to the church.” After the 1st reports of the presence of bodies in the sinkholes at the beginning of October 1943, the Pola detachment, 41st Fire Brigade, was entrusted with exploring the Vinež Foibe and recovering any bodies. The teams got to work on October 16, directed on the field by Marshal Arnaldo Harzarich (May 3, 1903 – April 22, 1973) and assisted by a representative of the Prosecutor’s Office; all around an adequate armed escort joined by doctors, priests, civil authorities, relatives of the victims and numerous photographers. The 1st work began in Faraguni village, outside Vinež, near Lubin, in the 250 yard (225 meter) “dei Colombi” sinkhole. The recovery operations of the bodies required 7 days of work, during October 18-25; the work was extremely dangerous and the air unbreathable, in fact the operators had to wear breathing apparatus and take turns in the countless descents into the sinkhole. 84 bodies were recovered. Most of the bodies had gunshot wounds to the head or face. The Fire Brigade looked at many other Foibe. The Nazi Germans took film and still photos to use as propaganda to blame the partisans. Giuseppe Comand (June 13, 1920 – after 2018) recalled decades later, “The roads were infested with partisans with the Red Star [Tito’s Communist Yugoslavs], so we had detour between Pisino and Pola and risked our lives several times. In Pola, we camped on the military sports field, without water or food. The first night we were surrounded by Tito’s men, then out of the frying pan into the fire, we fell into the hands of the hands of the Nazi Germans: they took our insignia and swore that if we ran away, our families be was interned in Germany. And that’s when they are assigned us to exhume those poor people from the sinkholes, to help the Pola Fire Brigade led by the legendary Marshal Harzarich…The smell of the decomposing bodies was pestilential, the air unbreathable for kilometers (miles). My brave companions, firefighters stationed in Pola, gulped down cognac before lowering into themselves the sinkhole: they would descend for hundreds of meters with two ropes and a kind of chair, put the body in the coffin and four give pulls of the rope, the signal to say say ‘pull me up.’” 1 of the most well-known victims of the Foibe Massacres was Norma Cossetto (May 17, 1920 – circa October 5, 1943). The Cossetto family began to receive death threats after the Italian Armistice; she was summoned to Communist Yugoslav resistance headquarters on September 25, 1943, and compelled to join. Accounts vary, but she refused; she may have declared she was loyal to Mussolini. Released, she was detained again on September 27, she was bound with wire and raped repeatedly at a school. She was then walked to Villa Surani, raped again and thrown into the Foibe. The 40 days of occupation of Trieste in April – June 1945, when the Western Allies returned the city to Tito, saw 8,000 Fascists and anticommunists arrested and deported by the Odeljenje zaštitu naroda (OZNA – “Yugoslav Secret Police”). Also, anyone who opposed annexing these provinces to Yugoslavia, even if they were Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN – “National Liberation Committee”) resistance fighters who had fought the Nazi Germans with the Communists, Croats, or Slovenes, were subject to arrest. Tito’s militias removed anyone that they deemed opposed to their rule. Anyone deemed insufficiently Communist was arrested; if they were not summarily executed, they languished in prison camps, where they were starved, beaten, whipped, and sometimes forced to fight each other for the guards’ amusement or for food. A survivor of a Foibe Massacre recounted in 2002, “A kilometer (half mile) of walking and we stopped at the foot of a small hill. Here, with the help of an iron wire, a stone of at least twenty kilograms (forty pounds) was hung from our tied hands. We were pushed towards the edge of a sinkhole, whose throat opened fearfully black. One of us, half stupefied by the torture he had suffered, threw himself screaming into the void, on his own initiative. A partisan then, standing with his machine gun pointed at a lateral rock, ordered us to follow his example. Since I did not move, he shot at me. But at this point the miracle happened: the bullet, instead of hitting me, broke the wire that held the stone, so that when I threw myself into the sinkhole, the stone had rolled away from me. The cavity was about ten meters (thirty feet) wide and fifteen meters (fifty feet) deep to the surface of the water. When I fell, I didn’t touch the bottom, and when I resurfaced I was able to hide under a rock. Immediately afterward I saw four more comrades fall, hit by bursts of machine gun fire, and I heard the words: ‘Another time we’ll throw them over here, it’s more comfortable,’ pronounced by one of the assassins. Shortly afterwards a bomb was thrown into the cavity which exploded underwater, crushing me against the rock with the air pressure. Towards evening I managed to climb the steep wall; I reached the countryside, where I remained for four consecutive days and nights, hidden in a hole. Having secretly returned to my village, Sissano, for fear of falling back into the clutches of my persecutors, I fled to Pola. And only then could I say that I was truly safe.” The Istrian-Dalmatian exodus started after the Italian Armistice in September 1943; it wasn’t complete until 1960. Some 300,000 ethnic Italians migrated out of Dalmatia, Istria, Kvarner, and the Julian March. From 1947, ethnic Italians were subject to land appropriation, taxation, and cultural nationalization. In 1989, the Center for Adriatic Studies attempted a meticulous investigation that listed 10,137 infoibata (“Foibe victims”): 994 Italians killed at the Foibe, 326 believed killed at the Foibe but unrecovered, 5,643 presumed killed on the basis of local reports, 3.174 killed in the Yugoslav concentration camps. February 10 is the annual remembrance of the Foibe Massacres in Italy. Italian nationalists still exploit the Foibe massacres, inflating casualties to tens of thousands. The Republic of Slovenia issued a call on February 11, 2025, calling for balanced interpretations of the Foibe Massacre that “The memory of such harrowing events must not be misused as a tool for political or ideological purposes.” This was the 2nd annual call for “the importance of comprehensive and respectful remembrance and dignity for all the victims of the tragic events of the twentieth century.” Photographs of ethic cleansing of Slovenes and Croats are often presented as that of Italian victims, even if the perpetrators are clearly wearing Italian uniforms. In Dalmatia and Istria, the incidents are hardly mentioned. Tito and Soviet Premier and Dictator Josef Stalin broke in 1948, ending the USSR’s influence over Yugoslavia. Tito would never allow prosecutions when Fascists went unpunished for their crimes in Yugoslavia. The deaths became subordinate to the needs of the international Communist movement in the minds of the Eastern Bloc. After the Fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Slovenia and Italy convened a Historical and Cultural Commission in October 1993. The Commmitee’s report dated July 25, 2000, stated that: “During World War II, the Slovene-Italian conflict reached its peak, and at the same time, cooperation against Fascism existed between the nations, based on the decades of unity of the workers’ movement. It culminated in the cooperation of both Communist Parties; of Slovene and Italian partisan units which were also joined by Italian soldiers; in committees of workers’ unity and partly also in the contacts between the National Front and the CLN (National Liberation Committee). On the whole, the cooperation between the Slovene and Italian liberation movements was close and developed successfully.” “The liberation movement spread particularly among the Slovene population; the Italian population was held back by the fear of Slovenes assuming the leading role in the partisan movement, since their national claims were unacceptable to the majority of the Italian population. They were also deterred by the news of the killings of Italians in the autumn of 1943 in Istria where the Croatian liberation movement was active (the so-called “Istrian Foibe”). The killings were motivated not only by national and social factors, but also by a wish to strike at the local ruling class; therefore the majority of the Italians living in this area were concerned whether they would survive as a nation and whether their personal safety was in danger.” “Despite the new forms of cooperation between the two nations, there were considerable differences between their origins, structure, power and influence and their aims and political traditions were not concerted. There were disagreements between the leaderships of the Communist Parties and between the CLN of Venezia Giulia and the National Front leadership, although both sides concluded many important agreements. In Venezia Giulia, resistance proved to be a plurinational rather than an international phenomenon, since, despite the fact that both liberation movements were motivated by the values of internationalism, they were subjected to the need to defend their own national interest. The Slovene liberation movement placed great importance on the annexation to Yugoslavia of the entire territory settled by Slovenes in the past. In view of the nature of the movement, this was justified not only by national motives, but also by revolutionary goals. The control of Trieste was very important, not only for its strategic economic position for Slovenia, but also for the numerical strength of the working class and its role as a stronghold of the communist camp against western influence and the starting-point for the expansion of communism to the West, especially to northern Italy.” “By the end of summer 1944, the Communist Party of Italy at both local and national levels opposed the annexation of nationally mixed or predominantly Italian areas to Yugoslavia and advocated postponement of the settlement of the border issue to the post-war period. Subsequently however, in changed strategic circumstances when the Communist Party of Slovenia gained control over the Garibaldi partisan units and the Trieste federation of the Communist Party of Italy, the Italian communists in Venezia Giulia accepted the National Front positions, while the orientation of the leadership at the state level was vacillating: Yugoslavia’s claims were neither officially accepted nor rejected. Togliatti proposed a tactical differentiation between the annexation of Trieste to Yugoslavia – it had to be kept in confidence – and the Yugoslav occupation of Venezia Giulia, which should have been supported by the Italian communists. In addition to the Soviet support for Yugoslavia’s claims and an internal discussion on direct objectives of the liberation struggle in Italy, the line of the Communist Party of Italy was further influenced by the position of a considerable part of the Italian workers in Trieste and Monfalcone/Tržic, who, in accordance with the internationalistic key, accepted the Yugoslav solution as integration into a socialist state backed by the Soviet Union. This decision had grave consequences in the ranks of the Italian resistance and, inter alia, resulted in the massacre of the Osoppo partisans by a unit of communist partisans on the Porzûs mountain.” “Different were the positions of the CLN of Venezia Giulia (after it was abandoned by the Communists at the end of summer 1944, except for Gorizia); it represented that part of the Italian anti-fascist population who wished to maintain Italian sovereignty over the country. In addition, the CLN strove to be recognized by the Anglo-Americans as a representative of the majority of the Italian population to gain their support when defining the borders. Thus, the CLN and the National Front represented opposing and incompatible border claims; when the border issue came to the fore, strategic cooperation became impossible. In terms of tactics, the last chance of cooperation disappeared during the preparations for the uprising, since it was impossible to reach an agreement on who was to assume political control of Trieste after the expulsion of the Germans. At the end of the war, both sides in Venezia Giulia welcomed their own liberator, the 4th Yugoslav Army with the 9th Corps operating in Slovenia, and the 8th British Army, regarding the army of the other as the conqueror.” “At the end of April 1945 both Workers’ Unity and CLN of Trieste organized two parallel and competing uprisings; anyway the expulsion of Germans from Venezia Giulia was mostly to the credit of the large Yugoslav military units, and partly also of the Allies. Their areas of operation therefore overlapped without being adjusted. The issue of transition from war to peace went beyond the relations between the Italians and Slovenes in this area, and also beyond those between Italy and Yugoslavia, to become one of the issues of the then European policy, although not the most important one.” “Most Slovenes and Italians in favor of the Yugoslav solution welcomed enthusiastically the expansion of Yugoslav military control from the already liberated partisan territories to the entire Venezia Giulia. Slovenes experienced double liberation: from the German occupation and from the Italian state. At the same time, the population of Venezia Giulia in favor of Italy experienced Yugoslav occupation as the darkest moment in their history due to the fact that in the areas of Trieste, Gorizia and Koper, it was accompanied by a wave of violence, manifested in the arrests of several thousands, mostly Italians, and also the Slovenes who opposed the Yugoslav communist political plan. Some of the arrested were released at intervals; the violence was further manifested in hundreds of summary executions – victims were mostly thrown into the Karst chasms (Foibe) – and in the deportation of a great number of soldiers and civilians, who either wasted away or were killed during the deportation; in prisons and in the prisoner-of-war camps in various parts of Yugoslavia (Borovnica should also be mentioned).” “These events were triggered by the atmosphere of settling accounts with the fascist violence; but, as it seems, they mostly proceeded from a preliminary plan which included several tendencies: endeavors to remove persons and structures who were in one way or another (regardless of their personal responsibility) linked with Fascism, with the Nazi supremacy, with collaboration and with the Italian state, and endeavors to carry out preventive cleansing of real, potential or only alleged opponents of the communist regime, and the annexation of Venezia Giulia to the new Yugoslavia. The initial impulse was instigated by the revolutionary movement which was changed into a political regime, and transformed the charge of national and ideological intolerance between the partisans into violence at the national level.” After the 2nd World War, Cossetto’s death has been considered emblematic of Foibe massacres and ethnic cleansings of Italians by Yugoslavs in Istria. In 1949, the University of Padova conferred to her the laurea “honorary” and in 2005 the Italian President Ciampi awarded her the “Medaglia d’oro al merito civile”. In February 2010 she was commemorated during the National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe. In July 2011, the cities of Trieste and Narni (Terni) dedicated streets to her memory, followed by Rome in 2015. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0665.jpg |
| Image Size | 310.53 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 1291 x 875 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | October 16, 1943 |
| Location | Vinež |
| City | Labin |
| State or Province | Istria |
| Country | Yugoslavia |
| Archive | Belgrade Military Museum |
| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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