ROME (AP) — A leftist former premier's assertion that Benito Mussolini should have been tried instead of summarily executed in the waning weeks of World War II has sparked an outcry in Italy.
Mussolini and his mistress were shot to death in the northern Italian countryside in April 1945 and their bodies strung up by their heels in a Milan square the next day. Crowds spit at their bodies.
"A trial would have been fairer," Massimo D'Alema said in an interview published Friday in Panorama news weekly.
A trial like those held for war crimes in Nuremberg, Germany, at the end of the war "would have permitted the reconstruction of a piece of Italian history," D'Alema said.
Italian communists, whose ranks fought Mussolini's Fascist forces and German Nazi occupiers, were particularly angered by D'Alema's comments, especially since the ex-premier was himself a former communist leader.
D'Alema played an important role in transforming Italy's powerful Communist Party into a more moderate leftist force after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"I find it incomprehensible to maintain today, as D'Alema is doing, that the firing squad execution of Mussolini was an error," Gianfranco Pagliarula, a communist party official, was quoted as saying by the Italian news agency ANSA.
Armando Cossuta, a longtime communist leader, criticized D'Alema's mention of the Nuremberg trials, insisting the situation in the two countries could not be compared. He noted that Italy, unlike Germany, had a powerful resistance movement during the war.
"The difference between Italy and Germany lies in the fact that here there was a long and great war of liberation. In Germany, no," Cossuta said. "Here there were partisans, taking up arms, to capture the fascist hierarchy."
"Massimo D'Alema is erring deeply," he added. "Mussolini was tried by history and in any case was condemned to the firing squad in the name of the Italian people."
But Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the dictator and leader of a small right-wing party, called D'Alema's words "important, but late." She called her grandfather's execution "a cowardly and unacceptable act."