The death of Mussolini

On the afternoon of 28 April 1945, in front of the gate of the Villa Belmonte at Giulino di Mezzegra, a small village on Lake Como, Italian partisans shot Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci. The day before, 27 April, the former dictator of Italy and head of the puppet Italian Social Republic had been detained in the small town of Dongo, when, wearing a German greatcoat and helmet and hidden in a lorry of a German column, he tried to get through a partisan roadblock. That same evening, 28 April, fifteen ministers, officials and activists of his republic were shot at Dongo. The next day, 29 April, their bodies, together with those of Mussolini and Petacci, were put on display in Milan in Piazzale Loreto, where the crowd beat them and spat on them; they were then hung upside down from the framework of a petrol station.

War chronologies sum up these days in two sentences: Mussolini, in disguise, is captured in northern Italy while trying to flee to Switzerland, and the next day he is shot together with Clara Petacci and hung by the feet in Milan, as are other members of his government. The account is broadly accurate but needs a few clarifications. Mussolini and Petacci were shot on Lake Como, and only their bodies were taken to Milan. The destination of the flight is uncertain: the column in which he was travelling was heading over the Alps towards Austria, and the Duce himself wavered to the end between Switzerland, the Reich and a last stand in the Alpine valley of the Valtellina. Finally, the circumstances of the execution itself are known mainly from the accounts of those who took part, which differ in detail and have been the subject of dispute for decades.

The last days of the Salò Republic

After his overthrow in July 1943 and his rescue by German paratroopers in September of the same year, Mussolini was placed by Hitler at the head of a fascist state in the Wehrmacht-occupied north of Italy. Because some of its ministries were based on Lake Garda, it was known as the Salò Republic. Real power lay with the Germans: Ambassador Rudolf Rahn and the Highest SS and Police Leader in Italy, General Karl Wolff. The republic was nonetheless capable of taking revenge on its own people – in January 1944, after a trial in Verona, Galeazzo Ciano was shot together with four other members of the Grand Council of Fascism – and, together with the Germans, it waged a ruthless war against the resistance, which had been growing in strength in the cities and the mountains since the strikes of March 1944.

The partisans were directed by the Committee of National Liberation for Northern Italy (CLNAI), the northern branch of the Committee of National Liberation, based in Milan – a coalition of communists, socialists, Christian Democrats, liberals and the Action Party. Its armed wing was the Volunteer Freedom Corps (CVL), in whose command the decisive voices were those of the communist Luigi Longo and Ferruccio Parri of the Action Party. The largest formations, the Garibaldi Brigades, were under communist control.

In April 1945 the German front in Italy collapsed. The Allies broke out into the Po plain, and by 24 April the remnants of the German armies had been pinned against the river. Since February Wolff had been secretly negotiating in Switzerland with the Americans of the Office of Strategic Services on the surrender of the German forces in Italy, without telling Mussolini.

On 18 April Mussolini left his headquarters at Gargnano on Lake Garda and moved to the prefecture in Milan. From there he was closer to the Swiss border and to the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, through whose mediation he hoped to open talks with the Allies and the resistance. He was weighing several options at once: a last stand in the Valtellina, an Alpine valley near the Swiss border, where the secretary of the Republican Fascist Party, Alessandro Pavolini, promised to assemble thousands of men from the Black Brigades; handing power to the socialists in return for guarantees for the fascists; or flight. According to later findings he also sought contact with American intelligence, which in Switzerland was headed by Allen Dulles.

25 April: talks at the archbishop’s palace

On the afternoon of 25 April a meeting took place in the archbishop’s palace between Mussolini – accompanied by, among others, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, Interior Minister Paolo Zerbino and Under-Secretary Francesco Maria Barracu – and representatives of the CLNAI, among them General Raffaele Cadorna, commander of the Volunteer Freedom Corps. The committee demanded unconditional surrender, offering in return to treat the fascists in accordance with the laws of war. During the conversation Mussolini learned that the Germans had long been negotiating behind his back. Indignant, he walked out, saying he would give his answer in the evening. He never came back.

That same day the CLNAI proclaimed a general insurrection in the northern cities and issued a decree on people’s courts. It provided for the death penalty for members of the fascist government and fascist leaders guilty of suppressing civil liberties, creating the regime and leading the country to catastrophe. In practice it was a sentence on Mussolini before he had even been caught. 25 April, the day of the risings in Milan, Turin and Genoa, is today celebrated in Italy as Liberation Day.

At about 8 p.m. Mussolini left Milan with a convoy of cars, heading north to Como. There his entourage split: Graziani advised returning to Milan, while Ministers Guido Buffarini Guidi and Angelo Tarchi wanted to cross the Swiss border, illegally if need be. Early on the morning of 26 April, after sending a farewell letter to his wife Rachele, the Duce set off along the western shore of Lake Como to Menaggio. Graziani broke away and turned back; a few days later he was taken prisoner by the Americans. Mussolini was joined by Clara Petacci, who had been his mistress since 1936, and her brother Marcello. Buffarini Guidi and Tarchi were arrested by partisans the same day as they tried to cross the border. The radio announced that Milan had been liberated.

27 April: detained at Dongo

During the night a retreating German anti-aircraft column – several dozen lorries and about two hundred soldiers – reached Menaggio on its way over the Stelvio Pass to Merano in South Tyrol. On the morning of 27 April Mussolini, his ministers and their families set off northwards with it. A few kilometres further on, beyond the village of Musso, the column was stopped at a roadblock of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade “Luigi Clerici”, commanded by Pier Luigi Bellini delle Stelle, known as “Pedro”. After a brief exchange of fire and hours of negotiation, the Germans obtained permission to continue on two conditions: the column would be searched at Dongo, and all the Italians travelling with it would be handed over to the partisans.

On the advice of the commander of his SS escort, Lieutenant Fritz Birzer, Mussolini put on the greatcoat and helmet of a German NCO and hid in the back of one of the lorries under a blanket. The ruse failed. At about 4 p.m., during the search in the square at Dongo, he was recognised by the partisan Giuseppe Negri, and the brigade’s deputy commissar, Urbano Lazzaro, known as “Bill”, disarmed and arrested him. Lazzaro recalled that the prisoner was utterly exhausted and seemed drained of will, but showed no fear. The Germans drove on without him.

More than fifty people from the Duce’s entourage also fell into partisan hands, including most of the members of the Republic’s government, together with their families. Pavolini tried to escape by throwing himself into the lake, but was wounded and captured. Clara Petacci was detained in the car of her brother, who was passing himself off as the Spanish consul. In the evening Sandro Pertini, the socialist leader in the occupied north, announced Mussolini’s arrest on the radio, describing him as a man who had tried to cross the Swiss border – the origin of the version, fixed in the chronicles, of a flight to Switzerland. Pertini demanded that Mussolini be brought before a people’s court.

Bellini delle Stelle feared that the prisoner would be lynched or rescued by the Germans. He moved him to the abandoned border guard barracks at Germasino, where Mussolini signed a statement that he had been captured by the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade and had been treated correctly. During the night of 27–28 April Petacci, who had revealed her identity, asked to be reunited with Mussolini. The partisans agreed, and at about 2.30 a.m. they took the two of them to the house of a peasant family, the De Marias, in Bonzanigo, a hamlet in the municipality of Mezzegra, guarded by two young partisans.

The order from Milan

Who decided to shoot Mussolini without trial is not entirely clear, because those involved later gave differing accounts. The communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, then deputy prime minister in the government in Rome, claimed that as early as 26 April he had ordered by radio that the fascist leaders be shot as soon as their identity was established. Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi denied that Togliatti had acted on behalf of the government. Luigi Longo spoke at one time of a decision by the general command of the Volunteer Freedom Corps carrying out a resolution of the CLNAI, and at another of his own agreement with Fermo Solari of the Action Party. According to Leo Valiani of the Action Party, the decision was taken on the night of 27–28 April on behalf of the committee by himself, Pertini and the communists Emilio Sereni and Longo. The day after the execution the CLNAI officially announced that Mussolini had been executed on its orders. What is known is that the Allies were demanding that Mussolini be handed over: a clause of the 1943 armistice (the so-called long armistice of 29 September) obliged Italy to apprehend Benito Mussolini, his chief associates and persons suspected of war crimes and hand them over to the Allies. Many historians believe that the haste of the resistance leadership also stemmed from a desire to forestall the Allies.

Longo entrusted the carrying out of the sentence to a communist from the general command, Walter Audisio, who operated under the nom de guerre “Colonel Valerio”. He sent with him another communist, Aldo Lampredi, known as “Guido”, because – as Lampredi later recalled – he considered Audisio too hot-headed. On the morning of 28 April the two left Milan with a small detachment and reached Dongo in the afternoon. There they clashed with Bellini delle Stelle, who was reluctant to hand the prisoner over to the newcomers. According to his account, Audisio took the list of detainees and marked the names of those condemned, including Clara Petacci; when the partisan asked why a woman should die, he was told that she had been Mussolini’s adviser and was “just as responsible as he was”. Audisio later claimed that a court martial under his chairmanship had been convened at Dongo; Lazzaro denied this.

Giulino di Mezzegra

On the afternoon of 28 April Audisio, Lampredi and Michele Moretti, the political commissar of the 52nd Brigade, arrived at the De Marias’ house and ordered Mussolini and Petacci to get into a car, telling them they had come to free them. After a short drive down to Giulino, the car stopped in front of the gate of the Villa Belmonte on the narrow Via XXIV Maggio. The two were stood against the wall. According to Audisio’s account, he read out the sentence, and when his sub-machine gun jammed he took Moretti’s weapon and shot them both at 4.10 p.m. According to the same account, Petacci threw herself on Mussolini, trying to shield him, and was the first to die.

Audisio’s version, first published anonymously in the communist daily l’Unità in the autumn of 1945, agrees on the essential points with Lampredi’s account, written down in 1972 and published only in 1996, and with the books by Bellini delle Stelle and Lazzaro. They differ in the details. Audisio portrayed Mussolini as cowardly and babbling, Lampredi did not; according to Lampredi, the Duce’s last words were “aim at the heart”, and he made no mention of a sentence being read out. In Italy this is known as the “official” version, and since the 1950s many alternative ones have appeared. At least a dozen or so men have been named as the killer, including Longo himself, Pertini and Moretti. The journalist Giorgio Pisanò claimed that Mussolini was killed in the morning at Bonzanigo and that the scene at Giulino was staged; other writers, following suggestions by the historian Renzo De Felice, linked the execution to an alleged operation by British intelligence, supposedly aimed at seizing the Duce’s compromising correspondence with Churchill. None of these hypotheses has been proved, and most historians regard Audisio’s account, at least in its essentials, as the most credible.

The executions at Dongo

From Giulino Audisio returned to Dongo. On the lakeside in front of the town hall he had fifteen prisoners, whom he had chosen from the list, lined up. They included Pavolini, Barracu, Zerbino, the Minister of Popular Culture Ferdinando Mezzasoma, the Minister of Public Works Ruggero Romano, the Minister of Communications Augusto Liverani, Mussolini’s secretary and former prefect of Milan Luigi Gatti, the party’s federal secretary in Como Paolo Porta, the commander of the Black Brigade from Lucca Idreno Utimperghe, as well as Nicola Bombacci – once a co-founder of the Communist Party of Italy, later an adviser to Mussolini – the rector of the University of Bologna Goffredo Coppola, the director of the Stefani news agency Ernesto Daquanno, the pilot Pietro Calistri, the Duce’s aide-de-camp Vito Casalinuovo and the commander of his escort Mario Nudi. At 5.48 p.m. the firing squad shot the condemned men. Marcello Petacci, whom his fellow prisoners did not want in their line, was to be executed separately; he broke free, leapt into the lake and was shot dead in the water.

Piazzale Loreto, 29 April

In the evening the bodies from Dongo were loaded onto a lorry; on the way the bodies of Mussolini and Petacci were collected from Giulino, and in the early hours of 29 April they were all dumped in Piazzale Loreto in Milan. The choice of place was no accident. On 10 August 1944 fascists of the “Ettore Muti” Legion, carrying out a German reprisal order, had shot fifteen political prisoners, partisans and anti-fascists there, and their bodies had been left on public display under guard for the whole day. The number of fifteen executed at Dongo matched that figure, which many scholars read as deliberate retaliation.

In the morning a crowd of many thousands gathered in the square. The bodies were kicked, spat on and shot at, and Mussolini’s face was disfigured. An American witness described the crowd as “sinister, depraved, out of control”. To protect the bodies from the crowd – as the partisans themselves explained, and surviving film footage seems to bear this out – several of them were hung upside down from the steel roof frame of an unfinished petrol station: Mussolini, Petacci, Pavolini, Zerbino, Porta and others. This manner of hanging had been used for traitors in northern Italy since the Middle Ages, to emphasise the disgrace of the executed.

Around midday the partisans brought to the square Achille Starace, the long-serving secretary of the National Fascist Party in the 1930s, who had been removed from power by Mussolini himself. He had been arrested that morning in a Milan street and, after a summary trial at the nearby Polytechnic, was shot by the petrol station and hung beside the others.

The spectacle provoked objections within the resistance as well. Ferruccio Parri and Sandro Pertini protested against the display of the bodies, and in the early afternoon, on the orders of the command and of the American authorities who had arrived in the city, the partisans took the bodies down and removed them to the morgue. On 30 April a post-mortem on Mussolini was carried out at the Institute of Forensic Medicine. To this day the events remain a symbol in Italy both of the end of the regime and of the violence that accompanied it; Parri is said to have called the scene “Mexican butchery”.

The end of the Salò Republic

The Italian Social Republic ceased to exist together with its leader. Its army had been disintegrating since 25 April, and the units still fighting surrendered to the Allies or to the partisans. Graziani, the Republic’s defence minister, gave himself up to the Americans. In those same days the Germans, led by Wolff, were finalising the surrender of all Axis forces in Italy, including the Republic’s units, which came into force on 2 May. By then most of the Wehrmacht’s forces in northern Italy had already been shattered in the course of the Allied spring offensive.

In the last days of April and the first weeks after the war, partisans and crowds dealt with thousands of fascists and real or alleged collaborators in summary executions, and the 52nd Brigade at Dongo alone executed several more prisoners on the following nights. Estimates of the number of victims of these reckonings are the subject of fierce dispute in Italy: historians most often give some 10,000 to 15,000 killed over the whole period, right-wing commentators far more. The fate of the money, gold and documents seized at Dongo – the so-called “Dongo gold” – also remains unexplained to this day, and the post-war trial over the affair, held in Padua in 1957, ended without a verdict.

Mussolini was buried secretly in an unmarked grave in Milan’s Musocco cemetery. On the night of 22–23 April 1946 three young neo-fascists led by Domenico Leccisi stole his body; the police found it a few months later and kept it hidden for eleven years in a Capuchin monastery. Only in 1957 did the government of Adone Zoli, which depended on the votes of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, release the remains to the family. They were buried in the family crypt at Predappio, which became a place of pilgrimage and of annual gatherings of neo-fascists on the anniversary of his death.

Significance

Mussolini died two days before Hitler. News of his death reached the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery on 29 April; it is not known how many details were passed on to Hitler. Early that morning, before the news arrived, Hitler had declared in his testament that he would not fall into the hands of an enemy who needed “a new spectacle organised by the Jews”, and ordered that his body be burned. Some historians, among them Alan Bullock and William Shirer, suggest that Mussolini’s fate may have strengthened him in this decision.

For Italy, the Duce’s death closed twenty years of dictatorship and two years of civil war in which Italians fought on both sides of the front. The resistance, which in April 1945 had itself liberated the great cities of the north before the Allies arrived, gained the legitimacy on which the post-war republic was founded: in June 1945 Ferruccio Parri became prime minister, and a year later Italians abolished the monarchy in a referendum. The summary execution without trial, the scene in Piazzale Loreto and the reckonings of the last weeks of the war nevertheless remained contentious in Italian memory – for some an act of justice by a people that had suffered under fascism for years, for others evidence of violence that the new state was unable to come to terms with. The man whose rise to power in 1922 had opened the era of fascism in Europe died at the hands of his fellow countrymen before he could stand before any court.