The execution of Ciano

On the morning of 11 January 1944, at the firing range by Fort San Procolo in Verona, a firing squad of Fascist militiamen shot five former members of the Grand Council of Fascism. Among the condemned were Count Galeazzo Ciano, for almost seven years Italy’s foreign minister and the son-in-law of Benito Mussolini, and the 77-year-old Marshal Emilio De Bono, one of the four leaders of the March on Rome in 1922. Giovanni Marinelli, Carlo Pareschi and Luciano Gottardi died with them. The condemned men were tied to chairs with their backs to the riflemen, as traitors were treated.

The sentence had been passed at the end of the three-day Verona trial before the Special Tribunal of the Italian Social Republic, the Fascist state that existed in northern Italy under German tutelage. Ciano was therefore not killed by self-appointed “sympathisers” of a revived Fascism, as it is sometimes put, but under the sentence of a court of a state headed by his father-in-law. Mussolini did not exercise his right of pardon. The trial was a political one: it was meant to punish those who on 25 July 1943 had voted to strip the Duce of power, and to show the Germans and the regime’s own followers that the new Fascism would stop at nothing.

Son-in-law and minister

Ciano owed his career to his father, Admiral Costanzo Ciano, one of the pillars of the regime, and to his marriage to Edda, Mussolini’s eldest daughter. In 1936, at the age of 33, he became foreign minister, and for years he was regarded as the Duce’s likely successor. It was he who signed the acts that bound Italy to Germany, above all the Pact of Steel of 22 May 1939. Yet in August 1939, after talks with Joachim von Ribbentrop and Adolf Hitler at Salzburg and on the Obersalzberg, he urged his father-in-law not to drag Italy into a war over Poland, and his diary recorded a growing dislike of the German ally.

After the defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, Ciano argued for Italy’s withdrawal from the war. On 5 February 1943 Mussolini dismissed him, together with almost the entire government, and sent him as ambassador to the Holy See. On the night of 24–25 July 1943, when the Grand Council of Fascism met after the Allied invasion of Sicily, Ciano voted for the motion of Dino Grandi, which handed command of the armed forces to the King. The motion was carried with 19 votes, and the next day the King had Mussolini arrested. The dictator’s fall sealed the fate of all who had raised their hands against him that night, although none of them then imagined that Fascism would ever return to power.

The trap in Germany

The government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio cut Ciano off from all influence, and the press began writing about the fortune he had amassed during his years in power. Fearing arrest, Ciano turned for help to the Germans, whom he had criticised for years. On 27 August 1943, with Edda and their three children, he slipped out of his villa in Rome and flew to Munich in a German aircraft. He hoped to travel on from there to Spain or South America. The Germans, however, had no intention of letting him go, and they placed the family in a villa on Lake Starnberg under discreet but constant surveillance.

After Mussolini’s rescue from the Gran Sasso on 12 September 1943, Ciano’s position deteriorated sharply. Mussolini met his daughter and son-in-law in Germany, but neither Hitler nor Ribbentrop nor Joseph Goebbels concealed that they wanted the “traitors of 25 July” punished. Goebbels noted in his diary that when Mussolini reminded Hitler that Ciano was, after all, his daughter’s husband, he was told that this only made matters worse. At the same time the radicals in the reviving Fascist movement, led by the new party secretary Alessandro Pavolini, regarded Ciano as the symbol of the old regime’s treachery and corruption. On 18 September Mussolini announced the “elimination of the traitors” in a speech broadcast from Munich.

At the first congress of the Republican Fascist Party in Verona on 14 November 1943, amid mounting partisan attacks and bloody Fascist reprisals in Ferrara, delegates loudly demanded that the signatories of the Grandi motion be put on trial, and some accused Mussolini of playing for time to save his son-in-law. On 24 November the government of the Republic formally established the Special Tribunal, whose judges were chosen from trusted party activists and militiamen.

Ciano, meanwhile, had been handed over. On 17 October 1943 the Germans flew him from Munich to Verona and turned him over to the Republic’s police, who imprisoned him in a former monastery of the Discalced Carmelites known as the Scalzi. SS sentries stood outside his cell. In November four other arrested members of the Grand Council were brought to Verona from Padua: Giovanni Marinelli, the party’s long-serving treasurer, implicated in 1924 in the murder of the socialist Giacomo Matteotti; Carlo Pareschi, a former minister of agriculture; Luciano Gottardi, leader of the Fascist industrial trade unions; and Tullio Cianetti, a former minister of corporations. On Mussolini’s orders De Bono remained at his home in Cassano d’Adda until the trial. The other thirteen signatories, among them Grandi, Giuseppe Bottai and Luigi Federzoni, could not be caught.

The trial at Castelvecchio

The investigation was conducted by Judge Vincenzo Cersosimo. He could not find any minutes of the Grand Council meeting, so he reconstructed the events of the night of 25 July from the defendants’ statements and from press cuttings. The new justice minister, Piero Pisenti, who had studied the files, argued to Mussolini that the charge of treason had no legal basis: there was no evidence of a conspiracy with the royal court, and the Duce himself had known the text of Grandi’s motion before the meeting. Mussolini is said to have replied that he saw the matter as a politician, not as a lawyer, and that reasons of state required him to “go to the end”.

The trial opened on 8 January 1944 in a hall of the Castelvecchio castle. The tribunal was presided over by Aldo Vecchini, a lawyer and officer of the Fascist militia, and the prosecutor was a professor of law, Andrea Fortunato. The judges included militia generals and veterans of the Fascist movement, chosen so that – as Pavolini assured – they would guarantee a severe verdict. Defence counsel, some of them court-appointed, tried to have the case transferred to a military court, but the tribunal rejected the motion. The defendants argued that in voting for Grandi’s motion they had not sought to overthrow Mussolini or Fascism, but only to hand command to the King in a hopeless military situation. Cianetti pointed out that on the morning of 25 July he had already withdrawn his vote in a letter to the Duce. On the second day a note by Marshal Ugo Cavallero, who had died in September, was read out, referring to other plans to remove Mussolini, but the tribunal ruled it irrelevant. Fortunato demanded six death sentences, with no mitigating circumstances for anyone.

On 10 January the tribunal found all the defendants guilty of treason. It sentenced five to death; Cianetti, because he had withdrawn his vote, was granted mitigating circumstances and given 30 years’ imprisonment. The thirteen absent signatories were sentenced to death in absentia. None of them fell into Fascist hands, and all survived the war.

The diaries as a bargaining chip

Throughout this time Edda Ciano fought for her husband’s life. Her most valuable card was the diary that Ciano had kept from 1937 until his dismissal in February 1943. In it he had recorded conversations with Mussolini, Hitler, Ribbentrop and diplomats, as well as the Germans’ sneers at their Italian ally and their cynical remarks about the war in the east. For Ribbentrop it was a compromising document; for SS intelligence, a valuable prize.

The go-between was Hildegard Beetz, a young agent of the German Security Service (SD), who had been assigned to Ciano as an interpreter to extract his notes from him and who in time came to sympathise with him. At the turn of 1943 and 1944 the head of SD intelligence in Italy, Wilhelm Höttl, and the head of the Reich Security Main Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, prepared a plan called Operation Conte (“Count”): a German detachment was to free Ciano from prison, and in return Edda was to hand over the diaries. The undertaking was to go ahead without Hitler’s knowledge. When Hitler learned of it, he forbade it.

Edda then resolved to save at least the notebooks. According to her biographers she wrote letters to her father and to Hitler threatening to publish them if her husband was not freed. On 9 January 1944, with the help of a friend, the air force lieutenant Emilio Pucci, later a famous fashion designer, she crossed the Swiss border with several volumes of the diary hidden under her clothes. The threat changed nothing.

The night of the petitions for clemency

After the verdict was announced, the condemned men signed petitions for clemency. On the night of 10–11 January a dispute over jurisdiction played out around them. Pavolini had opposed passing them to Mussolini from the start, and the justice minister, Pisenti, avoided taking a decision. In the end the petitions were rejected by the most senior militia officer on the spot, under pressure from and on the written instructions of the prefect of Verona and the chief of police. By about 8 a.m. the matter was closed, and an hour later the condemned were being driven to the firing range.

Mussolini’s role remains disputed. According to those around him, he spent the night in tension at his residence at Gargnano on Lake Garda, and he later claimed that the petitions had never reached him. SS General Karl Wolff, the Supreme SS and Police Leader in Italy, related after the war that Mussolini had asked him whether Hitler would take a pardon for his son-in-law badly, and was told that he certainly would. Some historians see the Duce as a prisoner of circumstance, hemmed in on one side by the Germans and on the other by the radicals of his own party, for whom Ciano’s death was the condition of the new Fascism’s credibility. Others point out that as head of state he could have pardoned the condemned men, knew what was coming and deliberately allowed the sentence to be carried out. On one point there is agreement: without German pressure and without Mussolini’s consent the execution would not have taken place.

The range at Fort San Procolo

On the morning of 11 January the five condemned men were driven to the firing range by Fort San Procolo on the outskirts of Verona. The firing squad consisted of about 30 militiamen under the command of Nicola Furlotti. The condemned were seated on chairs with their backs to the rifles and tied down. According to witnesses De Bono cried “Long live Italy!”, and Ciano turned at the last moment to face the riflemen. The volley did not kill all of them at once, and several of the condemned, Ciano among them, were finished off with pistol shots. German officers who were overseeing the execution photographed and filmed it; the footage survives to this day. Ciano was 40 years old. His body was later buried in Livorno, his home town.

At the same time Edda, interned by the Swiss, was staying in a convent at Neggio in the canton of Ticino. She never saw her father again.

Place in the war

The Verona execution was the most notorious act of the Fascists’ reckoning with the “men of 25 July”. It showed how little independence the Salò Republic had: the trial was largely forced by pressure from Hitler and the radicals, and Mussolini’s state, whose army and administration depended on the Germans, could not – or perhaps would not – save even its leader’s son-in-law. The warning was plain to everyone in northern Italy who was considering changing sides. The German philologist Victor Klemperer, who survived the war in Dresden, noted in his diary a few days later that the trial had been a farce, the execution the work of the Germans, and that Mussolini had become no more than “the shadow of a puppet”. In his view the exemplary punishment was meant above all to deter opponents in Germany itself.

Ciano’s death did not strengthen the Salò Republic. Its forces were increasingly bogged down in a civil war with the Resistance, while the Allied front moved northwards. On 28 April 1945 Mussolini himself was shot by partisans on Lake Como. Tullio Cianetti served only a few months of his 30-year sentence, and those sentenced in absentia, including Grandi and Bottai, survived the war. After returning to Italy, Edda Ciano was sent to the island of Lipari, and in December 1945 she was sentenced to two years for supporting Fascism.

The most lasting trace of the whole story proved to be the diary that Edda had smuggled into Switzerland. With the help of the Chicago Daily News correspondent Paul Ghali it was published in 1946, and its English edition was prepared by Malcolm Muggeridge. The notes were used by the prosecution against Ribbentrop at the Nuremberg trial, and they remain one of the basic sources for the history of Axis diplomacy in 1939–1943. In 1963 the director Carlo Lizzani brought the trial and execution to the screen in the film Il processo di Verona.