The Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral (German: Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland, OZAK; or colloquially: Operationszone Adria; Italian: Zona d'operazioni del Litorale adriatico; Croatian: Operativna zona Jadransko primorje; Slovene: Operacijska cona Jadransko primorje) was a Nazi German district on the northern Adriatic coast created during World War II in 1943.

Both operational zones were separate from the Italian Social Republic (RSI), based in Salò on Lake Garda, which governed the remainder of Italy that had not yet been occupied by the Allies.

After serving briefly as Gauleiter of Vienna he had been posted to Trieste, where to the very end he ran the Risiera di San Sabba prison, the only SS camp ever set-up on Italian soil.

[9] Globocnik, returning to his native city in triumph in mid-September 1943, established his office at Via Nizza 21 in Trieste and began to carry out Einsatz R, the systematic persecution of Jews, partisans and anti-Nazi politicians in Friuli, Istria and other areas of the Croatian Adriatic coastline.

His staff of 92, mostly members of the German and Ukrainian SS with killing experience gained in Operation Reinhard, was quickly expanded to combat the unrelenting partisan activity throughout the region.

[14] On 28 April 1945, the San Sabba camp ceased operating, and Waffen-SS troops set free the remaining inmates and demolished the gas chamber and incinerator building the next day, to destroy evidence of war crimes.

In a telegram sent on 9 September 1943 to foreign minister Ribbentrop, Gauleiter Rainer suggests the future establishment of Reich protectorates in Gorizia, Istria and Carniola, based on the subdivisions of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

This strategy was based on an understanding of history of medieval Germany and the Habsburg monarchy, where the German lords and nobles were seen to have made the economic and administrative development of the region possible.

[4] Germans believed that by referencing the prosperous past, they could evoke feelings of nostalgia that would ultimately forge cultural links between Vienna and Trieste to Germany.

With the RSI in control, Germany was able to enact extremely repressive laws which targeted specific ethnic and national groups, thereby spreading Nazi ideology throughout the zone.

In the previously mentioned telegram, Rainer emphasizes that the Friuli region is not ethnically Italian, but is composed of speakers of Friulian and, to a small extent German and Slovene.

These supposedly scholarly findings were echoed in German newspapers, although the Italian-language propaganda spread in the province of Udine emphasized the local population's ethnic distinction and regional autonomy, not pan-Germanism.

The Italians by their infidelity and treachery have lost any claim to a national state of the modern type.He eventually managed to convince Hitler that this course of action should be undertaken, who agreed that Venice should be bound to the Reich in "some sort of loose confederation.