Corrections? [81][88] Commenting on the RAI television documentary in 2004, Christopher Woods, researcher for the official history of the SOE, dismissed these claims saying that "it's just love of conspiracy-making". A note left behind said the Fascist Party would no longer tolerate the cannibal slurs made by human dregs organized in the Communist Party.. [46][note 4], During his dictatorship, representations of Mussolini's bodyfor example pictures of him engaged in physical labour either bare-chested or half-nakedformed a central part of fascist propaganda. His father was an ardent socialist who worked part-time as a journalist for leftist publications. Among those who had him ousted and arrested was his own son-in-law Gian Galeazo Ciano. The test was inconclusive. Benito Mussolini took control of Italy thanks to the pen just as much as the sword. The photo of Mussolini's final fate documents a full day of fury acted out on the reviled leader. And that brings us back to where we started: that ill-fated gas station in the Piazzale Loreto. He was expelled and sent to the Giosu Carducci School at Forlimpopoli, from which he was also expelled after assaulting yet another pupil with his penknife. At the age of 19, a short, pale young man with a powerful jaw and enormous, dark, piercing eyes, he left Italy for Switzerland with a nickel medallion of Karl Marx in his otherwise empty pockets. Fifteen partisans had been shot there in August 1944 in retaliation for partisan attacks and Allied bombing raids, and their bodies had then been left on public display. [67] Ian Kershaw notes that while it is uncertain whether Hitler was told the details of Mussolini's death: if he did learn of the full gory tale, it could have done no more than confirm his anxiety to take his own life before it was too late, and to prevent his body from being seized by his enemies. [29], He also claimed that he had given the order as deputy prime minister of the government in Rome and as leader of the Communist Party. [17][18] That evening,[19] with the German army in northern Italy about to surrender and the CLNAI taking control of Milan, Mussolini decided to flee the city. Lonati was interviewed for the documentary and claimed that when he arrived at the farmhouse: Petacci was sitting on the bed and Mussolini was standing. Even in death, his mouth couldnt be shut. Ivanoe Bonomi, the prime minister, later denied that this was said with his government's authority or approval. Consequenses For the Mussolini Regime. Also Known As: Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini. [30], Although several conflicting versions and theories of how Mussolini and Petacci died were put forward after the war, the account of Walter Audisio, or at least its essential components, remains the most credible and is sometimes referred to in Italy as the "official" version. Fighting the Allies during the North African campaign of 1942-1943, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommels Afrika Korps (DAK) was resupplied by a concerted air and sea lift effort. [32], Audisio and Lampredi left Milan for Dongo early on the morning of 28 April 1945 to carry out the orders Audisio had been given by Longo. By 1945, Germany was Duce! He built up an elaborate cult of personality around himself. It was here that he learned Germany had begun negotiations for Mussolinis surrender, which sent him into a fearful rage. At other times, howeverand we have to be honest about thisit can make us feel contented, perhaps even happy. He once more became a schoolmaster, this time in the Venetian Alps, north of Udine, where he lived, so he confessed, a life of moral deterioration. But soon tiring of so wasteful a life, he returned to trade-union work, to journalism, and to extreme politics, which led yet again to arrest and imprisonment. Hed declared war against the rest of the world with only Germany to back him up. In another eight months, the people of Milan would get their revenge on Mussolini in an act that was equally as savage. There were differences in Lampredi's account and that of Audisio. Duce! once upon a time, perhaps not so long ago. [20], In any event, Longo instructed a communist partisan of the General Command, Walter Audisio, to go immediately to Dongo to carry out the order. After writing in a wide variety of socialist papers, he founded a newspaper of his own, La Lotta di Classe (The Class Struggle). In fact, he first set out to be a teacher but soon decided that career wasnt for him. British war plans in the 1930s, in fact, flirted with abandoning the entire Mediterranean to Mussolini in the event of a conflict, so worried were the British that they could not resist his attacks. He needed more than just fiery speeches and violent rhetoric. On Easter Sunday 1946, Mussolini's body was located and dug up by a young fascist, Domenico Leccisi, and two friends. In 1935, Mussolini used a border dispute between Abyssinia and neighboring Somaliland as a public excuse to invade the country. On April 28, 1945, Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, and his mistress, Clara Petacci, are shot by Italian partisans who had captured the couple as they attempted to flee to Switzerland. The country was battered, and it was, many thought, all Il Duces fault. A cadre of 10 men unceremoniously dumped 18 bodies out of the back. As an adult, Benito Mussolini would have two wives and many mistresses. He was a bully at school and moody at home. Benito Mussolini was the fascist leader of Italy, appointed as prime minister after his march on Rome in 1922. [55], At about 2:00p.m. on 29 April, the recently arrived American military authorities ordered that the bodies be taken down and delivered to the city morgue for autopsies to be carried out. [31][32][33], It was largely confirmed by an account provided by Aldo Lampredi[34] and the "classical" narrative of the story was set out in books written in the 1960s by Bellini delle Stelle and Urbano Lazzaro, and the journalist Franco Bandini (it). A fitting end to a wretched life, the New York Times declared, and there were few, either inside or outside of Italy, who disagreed. Word of Benito Mussolinis death spread quickly. Author of. Life in Mussolinis Italy. In the afternoon of the desecration of the corpses, both American troops arrived and a Catholic cardinal arrived. Without Hitlers military intervention, a coup surely would have toppled Mussolini in 1941. By April 1945 as Mussolini sensed the defeat of the Germans, he planned to escape to Switzerland with his mistress. Fascists dug up Il Duces body on Easter Sunday of 1946. All of those propaganda posters and photos had now truly come back to haunt him. In 1994 Bruno Lonati, a former partisan leader, published a book in which he claimed that he had shot Mussolini and he was accompanied on his mission by a British army officer called "John", who shot Petacci. Fearing another rescue attempt of Mussolini by the Nazis, partisans whisked Mussolini and Petacci away to a remote farmhouse. Well, it didnt quite work out that way, as everyone knows. Inside The Mysterious Death Of The 'Godfather Of Soul', How Did Joseph Stalin Die? Togliatti said he had done so by a radio message on 26 April 1945 with the words: Only one thing is needed to decide that they [Mussolini and the other fascist leaders] must pay with their lives: the question of their identity. Mussolini went to fight in the war. German commandos crash-landed gliders into the side of the mountain behind the hotel before freeing Mussolini and airlifting him back to Munich, where he could confer with Hitler. Rachele Mussolini recalled that Il Duces excruciating silence hit her the hardest when the couple found out about Brunos accident. By the spring of 1945, the war in Europe was over and Italy was broken. The corpse turned up four months later in a monastery near Milan. There it stayed for eleven years, until Italian Prime Minister Adone Zoli turned over the bones to Mussolinis widow. The next day, their captors brought the pair to the small town of Giulino de Mezzegra on the shores of Lake Como and executed them in a hail of machine gun fire. The next month, in November 1940, the Italian fleet was caught at anchor at Taranto by British torpedo bombers. Italian partisans took his body to Milan and exposed it before an angry crowd. When the Allies touched down in Sicily in 1943, Mussolinis own government arrested him. American razor blades, it was said, were inadequate to cut his tough beard. Accounts vary as to how he died: Some say he was killed with coma-inducing injections, others say it was from electric shock treatments. WebDuring the Second World War, there was one man who was idolised and best friends with Adolf Hitler. At the same time, the corporative structure allowed the Mussolini regime to direct the nation's economic life and make decisions about production and distribution that were normally in the hands of the industrialists. Known For: Mussolini was a fascist dictator who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943. His father was a blacksmith who wrote part-time as a socialist journalist, and his mother was a staunchly Catholic schoolteacher. Containing both labor and management, their task was to negotiate labor settlements. He had one child with his first wife, Ida Dalser, but would eventually abandon them and seek to hide them from the public eye. WebBenito Mussolini began his political life as a committed socialist. It was alongside his longtime mistress, Clara Petacci, that he died, however. The night after Benito Mussolinis death, a cargo truck roared into Milans Square of the Fifteen Martyrs. No autopsy was carried out on Petacci. It was even forbidden to publish a picture of him smiling or to print the word DUCE in anything but uppercase letters. [82], They took them out of the house and, at the corner of a nearby lane they were stood against a fence and shot. Consider this quick summary. At the time, Mussolini is said to have remarked "for the blood of Piazzale Loreto, we shall pay dearly". [29] According to Leo Valiani, the Action Party representative on the CLNAI, the decision to execute Mussolini was taken on the night of 27/28 April by a group acting on behalf of the CLNAI comprising himself, Sandro Pertini, and the communists Emilio Sereni and Luigi Longo. In February 1929 he signed a Concordat with the Vatican, the Lateran Treaty, which brought to an end the hostility between the Church and the Italian government that dated back to 1870, when the Italian state had seized the Papal States. Forces loyal to the Italian king arrested Mussolini and imprisoned him. In June 1940, with German armies running riot all over Europe, the Duce decided to strike. WebBenito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was born on 29 July 1883 in Predappio in northern central Italy. WebHow Benito Mussolini Died In the meantime, Il Duce and his mistress had risen late. [82], Some, including most persistently the fascist journalist Giorgio Pisan, have claimed that Mussolini and Petacci were shot earlier in the day near the De Maria farmhouse and that the execution at Giulino de Mezzegra was staged with corpses. But arresting Il Duce was no longer a viable course of action. Zoli, who also came from Predappio and knew Mussolini's widow, Rachele, was reliant on the far right to support him in Parliament. The whereabouts of the body was kept a secret, even from Mussolini's family. When Benito Mussolini, the tyrannical ruler of Fascist Italy before and during World War II, was executed on April 28, 1945, it was only the beginning. The Fhrer convinced Il Duce to set up a Fascist state in northern Italy where it all began with Milan as its headquarters. These politics included the themes of racial superiority, xenophobia, and imperialism that defined his actions as a dictator. In the afternoon of 25 April,[16] Cardinal Schuster hosted peace negotiations at his residence between Mussolini and representatives of the CLNAI, which were unsuccessful. The New York Times MUSSOLINI ON ISLE TORE OFF HIS SHIRT; But The Ousted Dictator As A Prisoner On Ponza Soon Wearied Of Tragic Role. WebAnswer (1 of 6): Benito Mussolini was captured along with several of this top ranking officers while he was trying to flee to Switzerland, along with his lover and a certain amount of money and precious items. After the defeat of the Italian Army in Russia, Mussolini was removed as head of state and imprisoned. [69][70], The authorities then arranged for the body to be hidden at a Capuchin monastery in the small town of Cerro Maggiore where it remained for the next eleven years. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. No more posturing now: this was the real thing, when all that hard work and money he had lavished on the Italian military would bear fruit and show the world that he had created a new kind of Italian: a warrior as of old. Sometimes the death of a man has the power to move us, to make us stop what were doing, and to contemplate our common humanity and the cruelty of fate. People began hurling rotten vegetables at the dictators corpse. More than once he was arrested and imprisoned. The corpses were pelted with vegetables, spat at, urinated on, shot at and kicked; Mussolini's face was disfigured by beatings. Spitting on the corpses. ] It was the birth cry of fascism. The economy was based on a system he called corporatism: Italian economic life was organized into 22 corporations, representing all industries in a major area of production, like agriculture or metallurgy, from raw materials through production to distribution. [63] In accordance with Hitler's prior instructions, his body was immediately burned with petrol, leaving virtually no remains.[64]. The man who had once strutted across the world stage now dangling by his heels, next to his mistress. However, fewer accounts exist of Operation Flashpoint, Ninth US Armys assault crossing of the Rhine, which began on March 24. [30] Longo asked another partisan, Aldo Lampredi[it], to go as well because, according to Lampredi, Longo thought Audisio was "impudent, too inflexible and rash". Your leisure time was overseen by a party organization called the Dopolavoro, and your children had no choice but to join the Young Fascists. In 1996, a previously unpublished private account written in 1972 by Aldo Lampredi for the Communist Party's archives, appeared in L'Unit. Stories circulated in Italy to reinforce the image. William DeLong is a freelance wordsmith. In 1940, Mussolini took his country into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany but soon was met with military failure. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Still, he voraciously read the works of great European philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Georges Sorel, Benedict de Spinoza, Peter Kropotkin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. It was never anything more than a German satellite state, and it did German bidding, rounding up and shooting anyone associated with the thriving anti-Axis partisan movement. In it, Lampredi confirmed the key facts of Audisio's story but without the embellishments. The New York Times After Mussolini. Fearing that Mussolini and Petacci might be rescued by fascist supporters, the partisans drove them, in the middle of the night, to a nearby farm of a peasant family named De Maria; they believed this would be a safe place to hold them. Two days into their trek, they were identified by a group of partisans, which was probably inevitable. The death of Benito Mussolini on April 28, 1945 was characterized A fitting end to a wretched life, by The New York Times. Mussolini was killed two days before Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide. According to the latter, when he met Audisio in Dongo, Audisio asked for a list of the fascist prisoners that had been captured the previous day and marked Mussolini's and Petacci's names for execution. He took his mistress, Clara Petacci, and fled north where the pair joined a German convoy headed to the Swiss border. Photographs and videos taken on that day have preserved this historic event forever. [5], On 18 April 1945, Mussolini left Gargnano, a village near Sal where he had been residing, and moved, with his entire government, to Milan and based himself in the city's prefecture. Audisio replied that she had been Mussolini's adviser, had inspired his policies and was "just as responsible as he is". [75] Comparisons have been made with the John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories,[20] and it has been described as the Italian equivalent of that speculation. We want this, even though we think an execution platoon is too much of an honour for this man. A restless child, Mussolini was disobedient, unruly, and aggressive. Whatever you call him, Mussolini cut an incredible public figure in the 1930s: strutting on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in comic opera style in front of 100,000s of people chanting Duce! What were Benito Mussolinis political beliefs? Audisio himself did not speak publicly about it until he published his account in a series of five articles in L'Unit later that month (and repeated in a book that Audisio later wrote which was published in 1975, two years after his death). At least this way, Mussolini believed, he could live out his days in exile. Life in Mussolinis Italy was somewhat different from other dictatorships. Some journalists, politicians and historians, doubting the veracity of Audisio's account, have advanced 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. The tee-totaling, vegetarian Hitler had a quiet last lunch, shook hands with the remaining staff, and that afternoon committed suicide with his wife on a couch in his private sitting room. A strongman who had seized power in Italy in 1922, then in the midst of its post-World War I troubles, he had restored order, ended partisan squabbling, and built Italy up into a respected military power. While earning a reputation as a political journalist and public speaker, he produced propaganda for a trade union, proposing a strike and advocating violence as a means of enforcing demands. by Adnan Nasser L April 3, 2023. [note 5] The tomb is decorated with fascist symbols and contains a large marble head of Mussolini. Joseph Stalins death in March 1953 ended his long and brutal reign as leader of the Soviet Union. At 3:00 am, the corpses were dumped on the ground in the old Piazzale Loreto. After Lampredi's account was published, most, but not all, commentators were convinced of its veracity. Benito Mussolini was the less dominant half of the Rome-Berlin axis, formalized by the 1939 Pact of Steel between Adolf Hitler and himself.