Rijeka ( ree-EK-ə, ree-AY-kə, ree-YEK-ə, Croatian:[rijěːka] ; local Chakavian: Reka or Rika; Slovene: Reka, Italian: Fiume, is the principal seaport and the third-largest city in Croatia. It is located in Primorje-Gorski Kotar County on Kvarner Bay, an inlet of the Adriatic Sea and in 2021 had a population of 108,622 inhabitants. Historically, because of its strategic position and its excellent deep-water port, the city was fiercely contested, especially between the Holy Roman Empire, Italy and Croatia, changing rulers and demographics many times over centuries. According to the 2011 census data, the majority of its citizens are Croats, along with small numbers of Serbs, Bosniaks and Italians.
The Julian March, also called Julian Venetia, is an area of southern Central Europe which is currently divided among Croatia, Italy, and Slovenia. The term was coined in 1863 by the Italian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, a native of the area, to demonstrate that the Austrian Littoral, Veneto, Friuli, and Trentino shared a common Italian linguistic identity. Ascoli emphasized the Augustan partition of Roman Italy at the beginning of the Empire, when Venetia et Histria was Regio X.
The Serbian Volunteer Corps, also known as Ljotićevci, was the paramilitary branch of the fascist political organisation Zbor, and collaborated with the forces of Nazi Germany in the German-occupied territory of Serbia during World War II.
The Istrian–Dalmatian exodus was the post-World War II exodus and departure of local ethnic Italians as well as ethnic Slovenes and Croats from Yugoslavia. The emigrants, who had lived in the now Yugoslav territories of the Julian March, Kvarner and Dalmatia, largely went to Italy, but some joined the Italian diaspora in the Americas, Australia and South Africa. These regions were ethnically mixed, with long-established historic Croatian, Italian, and Slovene communities. After World War I, the Kingdom of Italy annexed Istria, Kvarner, the Julian March and parts of Dalmatia including the city of Zadar. At the end of World War II, under the Allies' Treaty of Peace with Italy, the former Italian territories in Istria, Kvarner, the Julian March and Dalmatia were assigned to now Communist-helmed Federal Yugoslavia, except for the Province of Trieste. The former territories absorbed into Yugoslavia are part of present-day Croatia and Slovenia.
The Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral was a Nazi German district on the northern Adriatic coast created during World War II in 1943. It was formed out of territories that were previously under Fascist Italian control until its takeover by Germany. It included parts of present-day Italian, Slovenian, and Croatian territories. The area was administered as territory attached, but not incorporated, to the Reichsgau of Carinthia. The capital of the zone was the city of Trieste.
The Operational Zone of the Alpine Foothills was a Nazi German occupation zone in the sub-Alpine area in Italy during World War II.
The governments of the German Empire and Nazi Germany ordered, organized, and condoned a substantial number of war crimes, first in the Herero and Namaqua genocide and then in the First and Second World Wars. The most notable of these is the Holocaust, in which millions of European Jewish, Polish, and Romani people were systematically abused, deported, and murdered. Millions of civilians and prisoners of war also died as a result of German abuses, mistreatment, and deliberate starvation policies in those two conflicts. Much of the evidence was deliberately destroyed by the perpetrators, such as in Sonderaktion 1005, in an attempt to conceal their crimes.
Klana is a municipality in Primorje-Gorski Kotar County in northwestern Croatia.
The A7 motorway is a 42.4-kilometre-long (26.3 mi) motorway in Croatia. It connects the nation's largest port in Rijeka, to the Croatian motorway network, as well as to the Rupa and Pasjak border crossings to Slovenia. The motorway forms part of a longitudinal transportation corridor in Croatia, and it is a part of European route E61 Villach–Ljubljana–Trieste–Rijeka. The A7 motorway route south of Orehovica interchange, where it also intersects Pan-European corridor Vb, is a part of European route E65.
The foibe massacres, or simply the foibe, refers to mass killings and deportations both during and immediately after World War II, mainly committed by Yugoslav Partisans and OZNA in the then-Italian territories of Julian March, Kvarner and Dalmatia, against local Italians and Slavs, primarily members of fascist and collaborationist forces, and civilians opposed to the new Yugoslav authorities. The term refers to some victims who were thrown alive into the foibe, deep natural sinkholes characteristic of the Karst Region. In a wider or symbolic sense, some authors used the term to apply to all disappearances or killings of Italian and Slavic people in the territories occupied by Yugoslav forces. Others included deaths resulting from the forced deportation of Italians, or those who died while trying to flee from these contested lands.
The Adriatic campaign of World War II was a minor naval campaign fought during World War II between the Greek, Yugoslavian and Italian navies, the Kriegsmarine, and the Mediterranean squadrons of the United Kingdom, France, and the Yugoslav Partisan naval forces. Considered a somewhat insignificant part of the naval warfare in World War II, it nonetheless saw interesting developments, given the specificity of the Dalmatian coastline.
The Porzûs massacre was an intra-partisan massacre of the Italian resistance during late World War II, on 7 February 1945. It saw the killings of 17 partisans belonging to the Brigate Osoppo, a strongly Catholic formation, by communist partisans of the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica. Four members of Brigate Osoppo were killed when a group of them was ambushed, while the survivors were taken prisoner and summarily executed in the following days. The event is still the object of study and controversy in Italy.
The Province of Fiume was a province of the Kingdom of Italy from 1924 to 1943, then under control of the Italian Social Republic and German Wehrmacht from 1943 to 1945. Its capital was the city of Fiume. It took the other name after the Gulf of Carnaro.
The action of 1 November 1944, also known as the Ambush off Pag Island, was a naval engagement in the Kvarner Gulf of the Adriatic Sea, between the islands of Pag and Lussino on 1 November 1944. It was fought between a British Royal Navy destroyer flotilla and a Kriegsmarine force of two corvettes and a destroyer. The German flotilla was deployed to escort a convoy retreating from Šibenik to Fiume. The British managed to destroy all three German ships in return for no loss.
Polizeiregiment "Südtirol", later Bozen, and finally SS-Polizeiregiment "Bozen", was a military unit of the German Ordnungspolizei recruited in the largely ethnic-German Alto Adige region in north-east Italy in late 1943, during the de facto German annexation of the region. The ranks were ethnically German Italian draftees while officers and NCOs were Germans.
The Fiume Autonomists purge, or the purge of the Autonomist elements of the city of Fiume, was a series of well orchestrated killings of the most prominent politicians and intellectuals of the Autonomist Party of Fiume or Rijeka.
The Liburnian Autonomous Movement or the Liburnian Federalist Movement was a political group founded in Rijeka in the summer of 1943, disbanded in the last months of the Second World War. Its most prominent members were killed during the Fiume Autonomists purge.
Mario Toffanin a.k.a. his nom de guerre "Giacca" was an Italian Communist partisan and responsible for the Porzûs massacre.
The Brigate Osoppo-Friuli or Osoppo-Friuli Brigades were autonomous partisan formations founded in the headquarter of the Archbishop Seminary of Udine on 24 December 1943 by partisan volunteers of mixed ideologies, already active in Carnia and Friuli before the Badoglio Proclamation of 8 September. The partisans in this brigade adhered to various and often conflicting ideologies, including both secularism and Catholicism, as well as socialism and liberalism.
