The fall of Mussolini

On the afternoon of 25 July 1943 King Victor Emmanuel III received Benito Mussolini at Villa Savoia, his residence in Rome, told him that he was no longer head of the government and entrusted power to Marshal Pietro Badoglio. When Mussolini left the villa, a Carabinieri officer put him into an ambulance and drove him off to barracks. The dictatorship that had ruled Italy since October 1922 collapsed in a single afternoon, without a shot being fired and without any attempt at defence by the party, the militia or the Duce himself. A dozen or so hours earlier, on the night of 24/25 July, the regime’s supreme body, the Grand Council of Fascism, had for the first time in its history passed a motion directed against Mussolini. That vote gave the King the pretext he had been waiting for.

In the evening the radio announced that Mussolini had resigned and that the new government would carry on the war at Germany’s side. Italians did not believe the second part and poured into the streets to celebrate the end of Fascism. Hitler did not believe it either, and that same night he began preparing to take control of Italy.

A country that had lost the war

By the summer of 1943 most Italians considered the war lost. In May the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered, in June the Allies captured Pantelleria, and on 10 July they landed in Sicily. The island’s defence was falling apart faster than anyone had expected: heavily fortified Augusta fell almost without a fight, and on 22 July the Americans took Palermo. Allied bombers were wrecking Italian cities, and on 19 July Rome was bombed for the first time. As early as March the factories of the north had seen the first mass strikes in twenty years.

Mussolini, ill and increasingly passive, had no idea how to get out of the crisis. At the Klessheim meeting in April he had failed to persuade Hitler to make peace with the USSR, and on 19 July at Feltre he did not even raise Italy’s situation with him, although he had been urged to do so by the Chief of the General Staff, General Vittorio Ambrosio, and by the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Giuseppe Bastianini. Bastianini was trying on his own initiative to make contact with the Allies through the Vatican and Lisbon. Victor Emmanuel III, who had given Mussolini power in 1922 and tolerated him for twenty years, had been considering his removal since the winter. The Minister of the Royal Household, Duke Pietro d’Acquarone, kept in touch with the generals and with pre-Fascist politicians such as Ivanoe Bonomi. On 15 July the King told Badoglio that he would be the new head of government, stipulating that it was to be a cabinet of experts rather than politicians and that no armistice was to be sought in the first phase.

At the same time Mussolini’s old comrades were turning against him. The most determined was Dino Grandi, a former foreign minister and ambassador in London, and in 1943 President of the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations. His plan was to remove the Duce, return power to the King, form a government without Fascists and leave the alliance with Germany. Others, such as Roberto Farinacci and the new party secretary Carlo Scorza, wanted the opposite: total war, a unified command with the Germans and power for the party. Under pressure from a group of party leaders, Mussolini agreed to convene the Grand Council, which had not met since December 1939.

The Grandi motion

Grandi returned to Rome from Bologna on 20 July with a draft resolution, a so-called order of the day (ordine del giorno). He wrote it to sound innocuous: the document began with a patriotic appeal to the nation and the soldiers, went on to demand that the organs of state provided for by the Albertine Statute be restored to their full functions, and ended by asking the King to assume, under Article 5 of the Statute, “the supreme initiative of decision” and command of the armed forces. Grandi knew that many members of the Council would not dare vote openly against Mussolini, and he hoped that the vague wording would win their votes and that the King would read the resolution as a signal to act. Together with Luigi Federzoni, Giuseppe Bottai and the Duce’s son-in-law, the former foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, he refined the text and collected signatures. Ciano joined despite the hesitation of Grandi, who distrusted his fickleness.

On 22 July Grandi spoke with Mussolini for more than an hour in Palazzo Venezia and, by his own account, urged him to step down of his own accord before it came to a vote. The Duce replied that Germany would soon use a weapon that would decide the war. That same day Mussolini had an audience with the King. According to the accounts of Mussolini himself and of Badoglio, he promised that Italy would leave the war by mid-September, and he came away convinced that he had the monarch’s support. The King, who had tried in vain to persuade him to resign, decided then that he had to act.

The night in Palazzo Venezia

The Grand Council met on 24 July at about 5 p.m. in the Sala del Pappagallo (Parrot Room) in Palazzo Venezia. Twenty-eight members attended. Mussolini refused to allow minutes to be taken, so the proceedings are known only from the later accounts of participants. Grandi, convinced that he might not leave the palace alive, brought two hand grenades with him, having first made his will and gone to confession.

Mussolini opened the meeting with a long account of the course of the war, defended his decisions as commander-in-chief and shifted the blame onto the army. He said he was ready to move the government to the Po Valley and put a “dilemma” to those present: war or peace. Grandi then read out and argued his motion, and others spoke after him. Marshal Emilio De Bono, one of the two surviving quadrumvirs of the March on Rome, supported Grandi. Farinacci presented his own pro-German resolution. Bottai made a political speech in favour of the motion, and Ciano recounted the history of the alliance with Germany, arguing that it was not the Italians who had betrayed but they who had been betrayed.

Before midnight Mussolini proposed adjourning until the following day. Grandi replied that it would be shameful to go to bed while Italian soldiers were dying for their country, and demanded a vote. After a short break Mussolini threatened the meeting. He warned that passing the motion would mean the end of Fascism, that the Allies wanted the destruction of Italy, not only of him, and that he himself held a “key” to victory that he could not reveal. He added that if the King renewed his confidence in him, the consequences for Grandi’s supporters would be serious. Some of the party leaders wavered. The situation was turned round by Scorza, who unexpectedly tabled a third resolution handing power to the party. It was so unpopular that the waverers went back to Grandi.

At about 2.30 a.m., after almost ten hours of debate, Mussolini called the vote. Nineteen members of the Council voted for Grandi’s motion and seven or eight against (the discrepancy in the sources depends on whether Farinacci, who voted only for his own resolution, is counted), with one abstention. Among those in favour were Grandi, Bottai, Federzoni, De Bono, Ciano and De Vecchi. Mussolini declared the motion carried, asked who would take it to the King, and heard Grandi reply: “You.” As he left he said that those present had provoked a crisis of the regime, and he stopped Scorza when the latter wanted to raise the ritual salute to the leader.

Arrest at Villa Savoia

Before dawn Grandi passed the text of the resolution to the Minister of the Royal Household, d’Acquarone, who informed the King at seven. Victor Emmanuel III summoned Badoglio and confirmed his appointment. The coup being prepared by the King’s entourage, Ambrosio and General Giuseppe Castellano was to have taken place a few days later, but the vote in the Grand Council brought it forward. The commander of the Carabinieri, General Angelo Cerica, was ordered to detain Mussolini that very day.

Mussolini behaved as if nothing had happened. In the morning he went to his office, where he found a letter from one of the Council members, Tullio Cianetti, withdrawing his vote. He received the Japanese ambassador, Shinrokurō Hidaka, and asked him to get Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō to persuade Hitler to come to terms with Stalin, as otherwise Italy would have to leave the alliance. In the afternoon he toured the bombed district of San Lorenzo. He requested an audience with the King to report on the Council’s proceedings and convince him that the resolution had no legal force. His wife, Rachele Mussolini, according to her memoirs, warned him not to go, because he would not come back.

At 5 p.m. Mussolini arrived at Villa Savoia. The conversation lasted about twenty minutes. The King, in the uniform of a marshal, told him, according to Mussolini’s later account, that the country was shattered, the army did not want to fight and he himself was at that moment the most hated man in Italy. He announced that Badoglio would be the new head of government and assured him that he would personally see to the safety of Mussolini and his family. On the steps of the villa Captain Paolo Vigneri of the Carabinieri was waiting; he asked the former dictator, for his own safety, to get not into his own car but into an ambulance standing nearby. Mussolini protested, but got in. The ambulance took him to the Podgora barracks in Trastevere and then to the Legnano Carabinieri barracks. That same night Badoglio sent him a courteous letter explaining that he was being held for his own protection. Mussolini replied that he was ready to cooperate with the new government.

Meanwhile the army and police occupied the telephone exchanges, the radio and key buildings. The party secretary, Scorza, was detained but released on parole when he gave assurances of loyalty to the new government. The chief of staff of the Fascist militia, General Enzo Galbiati, whose barracks had been surrounded by the army, forbade his men to start any incidents. Nobody came to Mussolini’s aid. The regime that for twenty years had boasted of its strength fell apart like a stage set.

“The war goes on”

At 10.45 p.m. the radio interrupted its programme. The announcer read a statement that the King had accepted the resignation of “the Head of Government, Prime Minister and Secretary of State, Cavaliere Benito Mussolini”, and had appointed Marshal of Italy Pietro Badoglio in his place. Then came proclamations by the King, who was assuming command of the armed forces, and by Badoglio, ending with the words: “The war goes on. Italy keeps faith with her pledged word.” The formula was meant to reassure the Germans and to gain time.

People understood it in their own way. In Rome, Milan, Turin and dozens of other cities crowds came out into the streets that night. They chanted against Mussolini, cheered the King and Badoglio, tore Fascist symbols off buildings, smashed busts of the Duce and ripped party badges from passers-by’s lapels. There was surprisingly little violence against Fascists. The new government, made up of generals and officials without a political base, nevertheless feared an outbreak of revolution more than a return of the Fascists. A state of emergency was declared, gatherings were banned and the army was ordered to fire on demonstrators. In the days that followed, according to historians’ estimates, several dozen people were killed in clashes with the army, mostly workers and demonstrators.

At the end of July the Badoglio government dissolved the National Fascist Party, and a decree of 2 August abolished the Grand Council and the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations. Political prisoners were released, and the banned parties, which even before the dictatorship fell had been forming the nucleus of a common anti-Fascist front, began to return to public life. At the same time some former dignitaries were arrested, among them the former Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Ugo Cavallero, while Farinacci fled to Germany.

Hitler’s reaction

News of Mussolini’s arrest reached Berlin and Hitler’s headquarters on the evening of 25 July. Adolf Hitler had been expecting Italian treachery for weeks. As soon as he received the news, he wanted to order German troops to occupy Rome, arrest the King, Badoglio and the Crown Prince and restore the Fascists to power. His advisers talked him out of immediate action: the Germans did not yet have enough forces in Italy, and an open break might hasten Italy’s move to the Allied side. Hitler decided to wait, but to prepare.

Plans for the event of an Italian capitulation had existed since May. Now they were turned into a ready scenario, later known as Operation Achse. German divisions began to pour into northern Italy over the Brenner Pass, officially to support the ally, and command over them was to be taken by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s army group, which was being re-formed in Bavaria. General Kurt Student was ordered to prepare an airborne landing in the Rome area, and SS-Hauptsturmführer Otto Skorzeny was given the task of finding and freeing Mussolini. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commanding the German forces in southern Italy, trusted Badoglio’s assurances longer than Hitler did. As early as 26 July Hitler agreed to withdraw troops from the Oryol salient to free divisions for Italy – a further consequence of his earlier decision to call off Operation Citadel.

Badoglio’s prisoner

Badoglio could not leave Mussolini in Rome, where he could easily be rescued. His request to be taken to his summer residence, Rocca delle Caminate in Romagna, was refused. On 27 July he was taken to Gaeta and from there by corvette to the island of Ponza, where he turned 60 on 29 July. At the beginning of August, when the government feared the Germans were on his trail, he was moved to the naval base on the island of La Maddalena off the coast of Sardinia, and at the end of August to the Gran Sasso massif, where he was soon confined in the Campo Imperatore hotel.

Significance for the rest of the war

The fall of Mussolini was the first time the war had swept away the leader of one of the Axis powers. Badoglio’s announcement that the war would go on was a delaying tactic. From August emissaries of the Italian government held secret talks with the Allies in Lisbon and Tangier, but the principle of unconditional surrender adopted at the Casablanca Conference left them little room. On 3 September 1943 an armistice was signed at Cassibile in Sicily and announced on 8 September. The Germans, who had been preparing since the end of July, disarmed the Italian army within a few days and occupied Rome and most of the country, while the King and Badoglio fled south. On 12 September German paratroopers and Skorzeny’s unit freed Mussolini from the Gran Sasso in Operation Eiche. Hitler installed him at the head of the puppet Italian Social Republic in the north of the country.

The party leaders who had voted against the Duce on the night of 24/25 July paid dearly for it. In January 1944, at the Verona trial, a court of the Social Republic sentenced Ciano, De Bono and three other members of the Grand Council to death. Grandi, Bottai and Federzoni were sentenced in absentia, having managed to go into hiding or leave the country. Italy, meanwhile, became a battlefield for a year and a half: the Allied campaign up the peninsula, the German occupation, partisan warfare and a civil war between Fascists and the Resistance went on until the spring of 1945. Mussolini himself was killed by partisans on 28 April 1945.

For the course of the war, the coup of 25 July was of far more than local significance. The invasion of Sicily and the fall of Fascism forced Hitler to transfer divisions from the Eastern Front and from France to garrison Italy and the Balkans, much of which had until then been occupied by the Italians. For the Allies it was the first political fruit of the Mediterranean strategy pressed by Winston Churchill: the Rome–Berlin Axis, with which the rapprochement of the dictatorships had begun in the 1930s, fell apart long before the end of the war.