The Foibe Massacres Were Not a Reaction to Fascism

(Written by Marco Vigna, taken from the periodical “Lega Nazionale”, Anno XVIII, Numero 56, May 2019)

The ‘foibe’ are deep underground pits or sinkholes found in the Carso/Karst region around Trieste, Istria & Venezia Giulia (located primarily in modern-day Croatia & Slovenia). This is where the bodies of Italians were dumped or hidden after being massacred by Yugoslav Partisans; sometimes the victims were thrown into the pits while still alive. As many as 20-30,000 Italians were killed in these massacres—most of them civilians—including anti-Fascists, women, children and clergy. It was a genocide.

The idea that the Foibe Massacres were a “reaction” to Fascism or that they were not an ethnic cleansing is a hypothesis that is both erroneous and yet deeply-rooted in certain political circles. The truth is that the Yugoslav invaders raged against anyone who would obstruct their objective of annexing Venezia Giulia, indiscriminately massacring Italians, whether they were Fascists, anti-Fascists (even Communists), politicians, officials, soldiers, etc. It was not an ideological persecution or a revenge for acts of war, but the execution of an ethnic cleansing program against Italian people.

There are many proofs of this, such as the long duration of the Slavic war against the Italians which began in the mid-19th century and continued uninterruptedly until the First World War, the expulsion of many Italians from Dalmatia during the interwar period, and the Slavic terrorism in Venezia Giulia, which finally culminated in the Foibe Massacres. Another proof is the fact that Fascists were only a small minority of those who were murdered by the Yugoslav invaders, whereas many of the victims were in fact openly anti-Fascist.

An anti-Fascist intellectual from Grado, Biagio Marin, representative of the Liberal Party in the C.L.N., stated the following about the behavior of the Slavic invaders:

“The most important Fascists were not harassed and if they were arrested they were soon released, whereas on the other hand all the possible anti-Fascist elements which were of pro-Italian or autonomist sentiments (as in Fiume) were beheaded so rapidly and systematically so as to exclude any possible resistance.”

Professor Elio Apih, in his work “Trieste: Political and Social History”, reports an excerpt from the document FO 371/48953, r. 1085. This is an official English document, which was collected by the British Secret Service immediately after the war, and then transmitted to the Foreign Ministry. This document was classified for over 40 years before being made public. Among other things, it reads as follows:

“It has been established, beyond any doubt, that during the Yugoslav occupation of Trieste and the adjacent territory, many thousands of people were thrown into the local foibe. In Trieste all the members of the Police Headquarters, the Public Security, the Guardia di Finanza, the Carabinieri, the Civic Guard and C.L.N. Partisans who were taken by the Yugoslavs, were arrested and thrown into foibe.”

These massacres – whose victims were members of the C.L.N. of Trieste, as well as Italian military personnel – are also confirmed by other official documents, this time from the State Archives of Slovenia.

In addition to Trieste, killings of numerous Italian soldiers, Carabinieri and Guardie di Finanza, also occurred in other places invaded by the Slavs.

The Titoists sometimes attacked the Italian anti-Fascists with greater determination, rather than their well-known Fascist adversaries, since, for specific political purposes linked to the peace conferences, the Yugolavs intended to peddle the idea that all Italians were “Fascists”: the anti-Fascists of Venezia Giulia were therefore physically destroyed.

The Yugoslav avant-gardes – who arrived in Trieste after the Germans had already been forced to enclose themselves in a few strongholds, where they remained until the arrival of the New Zealanders – were concerned not with “fighting the Nazi-Fascists”, but with disarming the members of the Italian C.L.N. and indeed with arresting a good number of them. Thousands of people were arrested by members of the Yugoslav “People's Defense” or “People's Guard”, through pre-prepared hitlists. Still others were arrested because they had affirmed the Italian character of Trieste and Venezia Giulia, whereas the Titoists proclaimed it Slavic (“Trst je nas”, as Slovenian nationalists still say today).

The arrests and massacres committed by the Yugoslavs in fact affected all those who were believed to be capable of opposing in any way the annexationist goals of the Titoists, and often those affected were anti-Fascists, given that the Fascists by now were – if not dead – completely devoid of power. Already in September 1944 the Triestine Federation of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) had been decimated by an internal purge, with the elimination (or “disappearance”) of, among others, Luigi Frausin and Vincenzo Gigante, both of whom had always expressed their total opposition to the Yugoslav desire of annexing the region. This internal purging of the PCI itself was prompted by the hostility of the Venezia Giulia sections of the PCI towards the idea of incorporating the region into Yugoslavia, which was previously written about, and was ordered – directly or indirectly – by the Yugoslav Communist Party, for the purpose of eliminating all those who opposed the annexationist project.

The arrests and killings of members of the C.L.N. of Trieste and of the PCI of Trieste, which go hand in hand with the Porzus Massacre of the white partisans of the “Brigate Osoppo”, sufficiently demonstrate how the supposed Yugoslav “liberators” acted even against anti-Fascists themselves, even when they were Communists, whenever they were regarded as potential obstacles to the Slavization of Venezia Giulia.

Among those killed in the Foibe Massacres was also Angelo Adam, who was an anti-Fascist Jew. As an Italian from Fiume, but of Jewish religion, he was deported to Dachau on December 2, 1943. His registration number was 59001. At the end of the war he returned to his hometown in Fiume, but found it occupied by Tito's partisans and saw that nearly the entire Jewish community had disappeared. Adam had tried to get in touch with the C.L.N. of northern Italy and with local partisans, without any result. The Titoists kidnapped him together with his wife, Ernesta Stefancich: they disappeared and were never seen again. When her daughter Zulema, a young minor, tried to find out about the fate of her parents, she too was made to disappear.

All this demonstrates the ideological and fraudulent nature of the theory that Venezia Giulia was “liberated” from the “Nazi-Fascists”; the reality instead shows that:

1) the Yugoslavs were disliked by the vast majority of the population, including a part of the Slavic population, and even by some Communists of Venezia Giulia;

2) in addition to the notorious Foibe massacres and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Italians, the Titoists had dedicated themselves with particular ferocity to killing also Italian anti-Fascists of the C.L.N., and even to carrying out purges against the Communists of the PCI.

The hostility of the Titoists towards the local anti-Fascists themselves was part of their program of conquering of the region, aimed at presenting abroad an artificial image of an Italian population made up entirely of “Fascists” and therefore undeserving of consideration in its requests.

Subsequently, the false hypothesis of “anti-fascist retaliation” was advocated and propagated precisely in order to deny the obvious ethnic cleansing and genocidal character of the Foibe Massacres and the Exodus, and at the same time to try to provide it with a degree of justification, albeit of an ideological nature.