70 years ago on this
date, April 28, 1945, Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are
executed by a firing squad consisting of members of the Italian resistance
movement. I will post information about this execution from Wikipedia and other
links.
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The dead body of Benito Mussolini next to his
mistress Claretta Petacci and those of other executed
fascists, on display in Milan on 29 April 1945, in Piazzale
Loreto, the same place that the fascists had displayed the bodies of
fifteen Milanese civilians a year earlier after executing them in retaliation
for resistance activity. The photograph is by Renzo Pistone.
The bodies, from left to right, are:
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The
death of Benito Mussolini, the Italian
fascist dictator, occurred on 28 April 1945, in the final days of World War II in Europe, when he
was summarily executed by anti-fascist partisans in the small
village of Giulino
di Mezzegra in northern Italy. The "official" version of
events is that Mussolini was shot by Walter
Audisio, a communist partisan who used the nom de
guerre of "Colonel Valerio". However, since the end of the
war, the circumstances of Mussolini's death, and the identity of his killer,
have been subjects of continuing confusion, dispute and controversy in Italy.
In
1940, Mussolini took his country into World War
II on the side of Nazi Germany but met with military failure. By 1945,
he was reduced to being the leader of a German puppet state in northern Italy
and was faced with the Allied advance from the south and an
increasingly violent internal conflict with the partisans. In April 1945, with
the Allies breaking through the last German defences in northern Italy and a
general uprising of the partisans taking hold in the cities, Mussolini's
position became untenable. On 25 April he fled Milan, where he had
been based, and tried to escape to the Swiss border. He and his mistress, Claretta
Petacci, were captured on 27 April by local partisans near the village of Dongo
on Lake Como.
Mussolini and Petacci were shot the following afternoon, two days before Adolf Hitler's suicide.
The
bodies of Mussolini and Petacci were taken to Milan and left in a suburban
square, the Piazzale Loreto, for a large angry crowd to insult
and physically abuse. They were then hung upside down from a metal girder above
a service station on the square. Initially, Mussolini was buried in an unmarked
grave but, in 1946, his body was dug up and stolen by fascist supporters. Four
months later it was recovered by the authorities who then kept it hidden for
the next eleven years. Eventually, in 1957, his remains were allowed to be
interred in the Mussolini family crypt in his home town of Predappio.
His tomb has become a place of pilgrimage for neo-fascists
and the anniversary of his death is marked by neo-fascist rallies.
In
the post-war years, the "official" version of Mussolini's death has
been questioned in Italy (but, generally, not internationally) in a way that
has drawn comparison with the John F. Kennedy
assassination conspiracy theories. Journalists, politicians and historians,
doubting the veracity of Audisio's account, have put forward a wide variety of
theories and speculation as to how Mussolini died and who was responsible. At
least twelve different individuals have, at various times, been claimed to be
the killer. These have included Luigi Longo
and Sandro
Pertini who subsequently became Secretary-General of the Italian Communist Party and President of Italy respectively. Several writers
believe that Mussolini's death was part of a British special forces operation.
The aim was supposedly to retrieve compromising "secret agreements"
and correspondence with Winston Churchill that Mussolini had allegedly been
carrying when he was captured. However, the "official" explanation,
with Audisio as Mussolini's executioner, remains the most credible narrative.
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American
wartime comic advertising the government sale of low-return War Bonds by
showing Mussolini, Hitler and Hirohito beaten by superheroes.
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