On April 28, 1945, Italian partisans executed Benito Mussolini, the former Italian dictator and Adolf Hitler's World War II Axis partner.
Born in 1883, Mussolini had been a schoolteacher and political journalist in the years prior to World War I. A dedicated socialist before the war, Mussolini's early support for intervention in the war (despite its treaty commitments to its German and Austro-Hungarian allies, Italy remained neutral, only to join the British and French in 1915), and his experiences in the trenches changed his outlook. Socialism's internationalist dogma, he believed, proved to be at odds with the Italian nationalism he came to embrace.
Like most Italians after World War I, Mussolini felt that his nation had been short-changed at the 1919 Paris peace conference. After all, Italy had joined the Allies with the understanding that when the war was won, the Dalmatian coast along the eastern Adriatic would become Italian. That claim proved at odds with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's call for self-determination for the peoples of Europe, however. Though on the winning side in the war, many Italians seethed with the feeling that they had been betrayed and with irredentist fervor.
Mussolini soon formed a new party he named Fascio, or Fascist Party, referring to the bundle of sticks that made up the handle for an ax, the symbol of power in the Roman empire. Soon dubbed blackshirts for their uniform clothing, in 1922 Mussolini led his party in the so-called “March on Rome.” Mussolini did not so much take power as he struck a deal with the Italian king and government, who were intimidated by Mussolini's perceived popular support. Holding the office of prime minister, though enjoying wide powers, Mussolini preferred the title “Il Duce,” the duke, or the leader.
Eleven years later, in an echo of Mussolini's “March on Rome,” Hitler would refer to his becoming German chancellor as the “Seizure of Power.” This dramatic term also concealed the fact that he brokered his way into power, rather than through some radical revolution as the phrase implies.
The first years of Mussolini's rule saw little change for Italy. Though Il Duce proved to be incredibly corrupt and often brutal, the Italian military, civil service and foreign office saw no large-scale purge. Most political undesirables were exiled rather than executed or sent to a concentration camp. Initially seeing fascism as an economic model, a third way between communism and capitalism, Mussolini promised that the state, workers and industrialists would work together for mutual benefit. In reality, politicians and businessmen simply worked more closely, and little changed for the better for Italy's working classes.
Though Hitler admired Il Duce greatly, Italian-German relations were initially cool after Hitler came to power. Mussolini resented Hitler's emphasis on racial struggle rather than on the economics of fascism, though gradually the two regimes found they had much in common. In 1938, when Hitler invaded Austria in a bloodless unification, he feared Mussolini's reaction above all. The Austrians had their own irredentist claims on the South Tyrol, awarded to Italy after World War I. When Hitler assured Mussolini that he had no plans to pursue a claim on the South Tyrol, the two dictators began to draw closer together.
In his biography of the German dictator, “Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis,” Sir Ian Kershaw noted Hitler's elation that Mussolini would not oppose the German-Austrian unification: “Hitler heard the news he had been patiently awaiting: Mussolini was prepared to accept German intervention (in Austria.) 'Please tell Mussolini I will never forget him for it, never, never, never, come what may,' a hugely relieved Hitler gushed. … 'If he should ever need any help or be in any danger, he can be sure that do or die, I shall stick by him, come what may, even if the whole world rises against him,' he added, carried away by his elation.”
That proved to be the case. Though Mussolini only allowed Italy to enter World War II after it looked certain that France was about to fall in 1940, Hitler aided Mussolini's flagging military efforts against Greece in early 1941, despite the fact that it pushed Hitler's launch date for the attack on the Soviet Union back five weeks.
After the British and American armies landed in southern Italy in the summer of 1943, the Italian military deposed Mussolini and placed him under house arrest. Hitler again lent a hand by sending SS commandos led by Otto Skorzey to free him and bring him to Germany.
From 1938 until the end of World War II, with Italy drawing closer politically and militarily to Hitler's Germany, Mussolini became more brutal and corrupt. He willingly allowed Italian Jews to be rounded up and sent to German death camps in Poland, and threw more and more Italian soldiers into Hitler's desperate war against the Soviets when victory increasingly looked impossible.
Early 1945 saw Mussolini as a virtual puppet of the Germans, in theory ruling German-occupied northern Italy as the Repubblica Sociale Italiana-Italian Social Republic, or RSI. This new state was only recognized by the Japanese government and the Germans themselves. Most of the Italian people, by that point, longed for an end to the war and as the German military position continued to deteriorate not only in Italy but in Germany itself, bands of Italian resistance fighters began to strike back.
Mussolini and his comic-opera cabinet now considered a desperate last stand against the approaching allied armies and considered where to make it. In his book, “Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945,” historian R.J.B. Bosworth wrote:
“It was decided instead that the last withdrawal should be to the Valtellina, on the Swiss border. A medley of surviving radical fascists … were ostensibly willing to contemplate a final glorious immolation. No military resistance was ever organized, however. Mussolini and the other surviving Fascist bosses were captured by partisans well short of any final redoubt and, should the truth be admitted, were utterly unclear where they were going.”
In addition to his fascist followers, arrested with Mussolini was his longtime mistress, Clara Petacci, nearly 30 years his junior. After being arrested on April 27, Mussolini's party was taken to Giulino di Mezzegra in Lombardy. The next day, the communist partisans shot each member of the group. On April 29, the executed dictator and his followers were taken on board a German truck to Milan, a city always close to Il Duce's heart. There, the bodies were hung upside down in the center of town.
In his biography, “Mussolini,” Bosworth wrote: “In a spring dawn, the people of the neighborhood, their lives having been so disrupted and afflicted by war, spontaneously began to assemble. The moment had come when they could show what they thought about Mussolini's tyranny. … The dead Mussolini at last could be attacked with impunity. Not only did the crowd hurl imprecations at their ex-leader and spit at his remains, they also hit out at the corpse with sticks and their bare hands. Local women, it is claimed, urinated on it.”
Mussolini's corruption, poor war leadership and murderous policies of Nazi appeasement had led to his downfall. Just as Mussolini's rise to power had been a blueprint for Hitler, so too his death provided foreshadowing for what was in store for the German leader. Rather than suffer similar indignities, Hitler ordered that his corpse be burned after he killed himself on April 30.
Even the public display in Milan proved not to be Mussolini's final indignity. One year later, his body was stolen out of a cemetery near Milan by members of a fledgling post-war fascist movement. Authorities soon arrested the ringleaders and the body was returned several months later.
Cody K. Carlson holds an MA in history from the University of Utah and teaches at Salt Lake Community College. An avid player of board games, you can check out his blog at thediscriminatinggamer.com. Email: ckcarlson76@gmail.com