The paper aims to investigate suicides and suicide attempts in the city of Trieste during three distinct phases: the Nazi occupation (September 1943-April 1945), the liberation by the Yugoslav People's Army (May-June 1945) and the first months under Anglo-American occupation (June-December 1945). In the months between September 1943 and December 1945 some of the lowest suicide rates in the history of Trieste were recorded, but at the same time we can see that among the causes reported by the authorities the words 'for fear of punishment' appear in several cases, often associated with people who were in places of detention. Such cases are of particular interest to historians because they reveal, on the one hand, the systematic violence used during the Nazi occupation, especially by local collaborators (e.g. the infamous „Collotti Gang“), and on the other hand, fears of possible punishment for the perpetrators in the early post-war period. The research is based on the aggregated data in the Bulletin of the Statistics Office of the Trieste Municipality and on the files kept in the Trieste Municipality archive where the cases of suicide and attempted suicide for the years 1944-1945 are collected, where the medical and police authorities punctually reported the suicide data.