Death of Benito Mussolini

• 1. Introduction

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  Benito Mussolini was shot at the wall of the Villa Belmonte in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra. It was the afternoon of the 28th of April 1945. The partisan who fired, using the nom de guerre Colonnello Valerio, borrowed a MAS-38 submachine gun because his own weapon had jammed. Within hours the body was driven south to Milan and dumped in the Piazzale Loreto. A crowd kicked it, spat on it, and eventually strung it upside down from a girder. Yet the man later identified as Colonnello Valerio, Walter Audisio, has never fully settled the argument over who actually killed Mussolini. At least twelve different people have been named as the real executioner at one time or another. Comparisons have been drawn to the conspiracy theories around John F. Kennedy's assassination. Who gave the order to kill him, who actually carried it out, and why does the argument continue eighty years later?

• 2. The Puppet State

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  By 1922, Mussolini had risen to lead Italy's Fascist movement, entering government as prime minister. Three years later, in 1925, he assumed full dictatorial powers and began using the title Il Duce. By June of 1940 he had committed Italy to World War II, allying with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.

  The Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943. Soon after, Mussolini was deposed and placed under arrest. That September, Italy formally surrendered to the Allies by signing the Armistice of Cassibile.

  German commandos then freed Mussolini from custody in what became known as the Gran Sasso raid. Hitler installed him afterward as head of a new puppet government, the Italian Social Republic, headquartered at Salò on Lake Garda. By 1944 this so-called Salò Republic was fighting a war on two fronts. It faced the Allies advancing from the south and Italian partisans in what came to be called the Italian Civil War.

  Rome fell to the Allies in the summer of 1944, and Florence soon after. By April 1945 the German army's defensive Gothic Line had finally given way under an Allied spring offensive. Total defeat was now only weeks away. The men around Mussolini had already begun weighing whether to make a last stand in the mountains or run for the Swiss border.

• 3. Flight to Lake Como

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  On the 18th of April 1945, Mussolini abandoned his headquarters at the Palazzo Feltrinelli in Gargnano, on Lake Garda's western shore, and moved to Milan. He hoped a change of location might let him negotiate a conditional surrender, or at least put him closer to Cardinal Schuster, the Archbishop of Milan, whom he saw as a possible go-between with the Allies and the partisans. Milan also sat nearer the route to the Swiss border.

  On the 22nd of April, addressing a hundred officers of the Republican Guard in the prefecture courtyard, Mussolini gave his final speech. He closed with the words, "If the Fatherland is lost, there is no point in living." Over the following days he wavered between competing plans: a last stand in the Alpine valley of Valtellina, or a negotiated handover to the partisan leadership known as the CLNAI.

  On the afternoon of the 25th of April, Cardinal Schuster hosted a meeting at his palace. A Fascist delegation that included Mussolini met the National Liberation Committee, led by Raffaele Cadorna. Mid-meeting, Mussolini learned the Germans were already negotiating with the partisans without him, and the only offer for the Fascists was unconditional surrender. Enraged, he stormed out. He told Schuster he intended to confront the German SS commander Karl Wolff over the "betrayal." He promised to return with an answer by 8 p.m.

  At 8 p.m., after Resistance leaders called for a general uprising, Mussolini chose to flee the city instead, heading north toward Lake Como. He reached the prefecture at Como by 9:30 p.m. Local authorities there ruled out any prolonged stay, judging the city indefensible. Rodolfo Graziani argued for returning to Milan. Others, including Guido Buffarini Guidi and Angelo Tarchi, pushed to cross into Switzerland even illegally. On the advice of Como's Federal Secretary, Paolo Porta, the group decided to press on toward Menaggio instead.

  Around four in the morning on the 26th of April, Mussolini wrote a letter to his wife and the convoy left Como. It travelled north along the lake's western shore, reaching Menaggio by about 5:30 a.m. There, as more fleeing Fascists arrived and word spread of their presence, the group argued over what to do next. Graziani again pushed to turn back; ignored, he left alone for Como. Trying to dodge the German gendarmerie, the convoy turned west into the Val Menaggio. It headed for a hamlet called Cardano al Campo, where the Border Militia's 53rd Company held the former Miravalle Hotel.

  In Cardano, Claretta Petacci and her brother joined Mussolini. A German escort, sent on Hitler's orders, arrived to accompany him toward Germany. Word came that a transport plane was waiting at Chiavenna to fly him out. That same evening brought worse news. Ministers Guido Buffarini Guidi and Angelo Tarchi, along with Domenico Saletta, had been captured by partisans in Porlezza while trying to cross the border. Radio broadcasts announced that Milan had been fully liberated, and warned that anyone found armed and responsible for the defeat would face execution. Judging the small garrison at Cardano too vulnerable, the group turned back to Menaggio. That night, Alessandro Pavolini arrived alongside a retreating German convoy of thirty-eight trucks and roughly two hundred anti-aircraft soldiers. Lieutenant Willy Flamminger led them toward Merano via the Stelvio Pass.

  At five in the morning on the 27th of April, the column, about a kilometre long, set off from Menaggio. Just past the town of Musso at seven, a Garibaldi Brigade roadblock near Dongo stopped it. After a brief exchange of fire and lengthy negotiation, the Germans won permission to continue. The condition was that every Italian in the convoy be inspected and handed over. On the advice of his SS escort chief, Second Lieutenant Fritz Birzer, Mussolini put on a Wehrmacht overcoat and helmet. He climbed into truck number 34 and hid near the driver's cabin under a military blanket. During the inspection, the partisan Giuseppe Negri found him hidden under a bench in that truck. The brigade's deputy commissioner, Urbano Lazzaro, recognized him, disarmed him of a Glisenti pistol, and arrested him. Lazzaro later described his face as "like wax," his stare "glassy, but somehow blind," adding, "I read utter exhaustion, but not fear... Mussolini seemed completely lacking in will, spiritually dead."

  More than fifty other people in the convoy were arrested, among them most of the Republican government's members and various political, military, and social figures, along with their families. Some tried to buy their escape with cash and valuables. The occupants of one armored car resisted and traded gunfire with partisans. Pietro Corradori and Alessandro Pavolini escaped by jumping into the lake, but both were recaptured, and Pavolini was wounded.

  At the Dongo town hall, mayor Giulio Rubini greeted and questioned Mussolini. Four other captured members of the convoy joined him there: Francesco Maria Barracu, Idreno Utimpergher, Vito Casalinuovo, and Paolo Porta. Each gave him the Fascist salute on entering the room. The badly wounded Pavolini did the same when he was later brought in. Clara Petacci, meanwhile, was taken to a ground-floor room after being captured in her brother's car. Marcello Petacci had claimed to be a Spanish consul and denied any connection to the convoy.

  Fearing Mussolini might be lynched by a mob or rescued by Germans, commander Pier Luigi Bellini delle Stelle acted that afternoon. He moved him to an abandoned Guardia di Finanza barracks in Germasino. There Mussolini told Bellini delle Stelle and other partisans that Hitler had betrayed him. He called Joseph Stalin "one of the greatest living men" and the war's real victor. He also asked that his regards be sent to the woman travelling with the "Spanish gentleman." Before bed at 11:30 p.m., the partisans asked him to sign a declaration. It stated that the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade had captured him that Friday, the 27th of April, in the square of Dongo. It also noted that his treatment during and after the capture had been correct.

  After Bellini delle Stelle confronted her, Clara Petacci admitted her real identity and asked to rejoin Mussolini, which was granted. She reached him at 2:30 a.m. on the 28th of April. Bellini delle Stelle then moved the pair to a nearby farmhouse in Bonzanigo belonging to a peasant family named De Maria, left them with two young guards, and returned to Dongo to report to the Communist Party in Milan.

  On the evening of the capture, Socialist partisan leader Sandro Pertini announced Mussolini's arrest on Radio Milano Libertà. He called him the head of "this association of delinquents." He added that even an execution platoon would be "too much of an honour for this man." Pertini's words carried a warning of what was coming within hours, though the order to carry it out would come from someone else entirely.

• 4. Order to Kill

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  Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist Party's Secretary-General, later claimed he had ordered Mussolini's execution before his capture even happened. He said he issued the order by radio message on the 26th of April 1945. In it, he stated only one thing was needed to decide the Fascist leaders "must pay with their lives: the question of their identity." Togliatti said he gave the order both as deputy prime minister in Rome's government and as the Communist Party's leader. Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi later denied that Togliatti had acted with his government's authority.

  A different account came from Luigi Longo, a senior communist in Milan. He said the order came from the General Command of the partisan military units. It was acting, he said, on a decision by the CLNAI, the National Liberation Committee for northern Italy. Longo later gave yet another version. On hearing of Mussolini's capture, he and a representative of the Action Party immediately agreed he should be executed, and Longo gave the order himself.

  Leo Valiani, the Action Party's own representative on the CLNAI, offered a third account. He said the decision was made on the night of the 27th to the 28th of April. The group acting for the CLNAI included himself, Sandro Pertini, and the communists Emilio Sereni and Luigi Longo. The day after Mussolini's death, the CLNAI publicly announced that the execution had been carried out on its orders.

  Whatever the true chain of command, Longo instructed a communist partisan named Walter Audisio to travel to Dongo and carry out the sentence. According to Longo, his instruction was simply to "go and shoot him." Longo also sent a second partisan, Aldo Lampredi, along with Audisio, reportedly because he considered Audisio "impudent, too inflexible and rash."

  Within a day, whatever Longo's exact words, Audisio and Lampredi would be the two men standing over Mussolini when the trigger was finally pulled.

• 5. The Shooting at Giulino

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  At dawn on the 28th of April 1945, Audisio and Lampredi arrived in Dongo, where local commander Bellini delle Stelle helped arrange Mussolini's handover. That afternoon, Audisio, Lampredi, and the partisan Michele Moretti drove to the De Maria farmhouse to collect Mussolini and Petacci. From there the group drove twenty kilometres south to the village of Giulino di Mezzegra, stopping on a narrow road called via XXIV maggio at the entrance to Villa Belmonte. Mussolini and Petacci were told to get out and stand against the wall. Audisio shot them at 4:10 p.m.

  Lampredi's account differed from Audisio's on several points. Audisio described Mussolini acting like a coward in his final moments; Lampredi did not. Audisio said he read out a death sentence before firing, a detail Lampredi's version omits entirely. According to Lampredi, Mussolini's last words were "aim at my heart"; in Audisio's telling, Mussolini said nothing at all.

  Bellini delle Stelle gave yet another version of events. He said that when Audisio arrived in Dongo, Audisio asked for a list of captured Fascist prisoners and marked Mussolini's and Petacci's names for execution. When Bellini delle Stelle questioned why Petacci should die too, Audisio reportedly answered that she had advised Mussolini and inspired his policies. She was, he said, "just as responsible as he is." Bellini delle Stelle said no other discussion took place before the decision.

  Audisio himself told a different story still. He claimed that on the 28th of April he convened a "war tribunal" in Dongo. Its members were Lampredi, Bellini delle Stelle, Michele Moretti, and Lazzaro, with Audisio himself presiding. The tribunal, he said, condemned Mussolini and Petacci to death without objection. Urbano Lazzaro later denied any such tribunal had been convened, saying, "I was convinced Mussolini deserved death... but there should have been a trial according to law. It was very barbarous." Audisio later argued, in a book written in the 1970s, that the Dongo meeting satisfied Article 15 of the CLNAI's ordinance. It concerned the Constitution of Courts of War. The absence of a judge or the required Commissario di Guerra, however, casts doubt on that claim.

  The bodies would not stay at Villa Belmonte for long. Within hours they were on their way south, back to the city Mussolini had fled three days earlier.

• 6. Reverberations

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  Late on the 28th of April, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and the other executed Fascists were loaded onto a van and driven south to Milan. They arrived in the early hours of the 29th and were dumped in the Piazzale Loreto, a suburban square near the main railway station. The location was no accident. Fifteen partisans had been shot there in August 1944 in retaliation for partisan attacks and Allied bombing, their bodies left on display afterward. Mussolini himself had once remarked, "for the blood of Piazzale Loreto, we shall pay dearly."

  By 9:00 a.m. a large crowd had gathered around the heap of bodies. People pelted the corpses with vegetables, spat on them, urinated on them, and kicked them; Mussolini's face was beaten past recognition. An American eyewitness, watching Allied forces arrive that morning, described the crowd as "sinister, depraved, out of control." Eventually the bodies were strung upside down by their feet from the girders of a half-built service station. This method of hanging had been used in northern Italy since medieval times to mark the "infamy" of the condemned. Those responsible for hanging Mussolini said afterward it was done to protect the bodies from the mob. Surviving film footage appears to support that account.

  American military authorities ordered the bodies taken down around 2:00 p.m. on the 29th and delivered to the city mortuary for post mortem examination. A US Army cameraman photographed the bodies there, including one image arranging Mussolini and Petacci as though arm in arm. On the 30th of April, doctors at Milan's Institute of Legal Medicine examined Mussolini's body. One version of the report counted nine bullets, another counted seven. Four wounds near the heart were given as the cause of death. Samples of his brain were sent to the United States, in hopes of proving that syphilis had driven him insane. The analysis found no such evidence, and no post mortem was performed on Petacci.

  News of Mussolini's death reached Adolf Hitler in Berlin on the afternoon of the 29th, though it is unclear how much detail he received. Earlier that same day, Hitler had written in his Last Will and Testament that he intended to choose death rather than be captured. He wished to avoid being displayed as "a spectacle arranged by Jews." He killed himself the following day, shortly before the city fell to the Red Army. His body was burned with petrol on his own instructions, leaving almost nothing behind. Historians Alan Bullock and William L. Shirer both suggested that news of Mussolini's fate strengthened Hitler's resolve to avoid capture. Hugh Trevor-Roper doubted the details had even reached him in time to matter. Ian Kershaw noted that if Hitler did learn the full story, it likely only confirmed a decision he had already made.

  Mussolini's corpse, though, was not done making history. Within a year it would vanish from its grave entirely.

• 7. The Body's Long Exile

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  Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave at the Musocco cemetery, north of Milan. On the 21st of April 1946, Easter Sunday, a young Fascist named Domenico Leccisi and two friends located the grave and dug up the body. Over the next sixteen weeks the corpse was moved between hiding places, a villa, a monastery, a convent, while authorities searched for it.

  By August 1946 the body, missing a leg, was traced to the Certosa di Pavia, a monastery near Milan. Two Franciscan friars were charged with helping Leccisi hide it there. Authorities then moved the remains to a Capuchin monastery in the small town of Cerro Maggiore. They stayed hidden there for the next eleven years, their location kept secret even from Mussolini's own family.

  That secrecy held until May 1957, when newly appointed Prime Minister Adone Zoli agreed to let Mussolini be reburied in his birthplace, Predappio, in the region of Romagna. Zoli, who also came from Predappio and knew Mussolini's widow, Rachele, depended on support from the far right in Parliament. That support included Leccisi himself, by then a neo-fascist member of the Chamber of Deputies.

  The reburial in the Mussolini family crypt took place on the 1st of September 1957, with supporters present giving the Fascist salute. Mussolini was laid in a large stone sarcophagus beneath a tomb decorated with Fascist symbols and a large marble bust of his head. A visitors' register in front of the tomb draws dozens to hundreds of signatures a day, and thousands on certain anniversaries, almost all supportive. Each the 28th of April, the anniversary of his death, has become one of three dates marked by major neo-fascist rallies. In Predappio, a march runs between the town center and the cemetery. It draws supporters in the thousands, with speeches, songs, and the Fascist salute.

  Not every account of Mussolini's death, though, ends at that grave. Outside Italy, the story was settled decades ago; inside it, the argument was only getting started.

• 8. A Contested Death

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  Outside Italy, Walter Audisio's account of the execution has been broadly accepted and treated as settled fact. Inside the country, the subject has stayed a matter of dispute since the late 1940s, with numerous competing theories about how Mussolini really died.

  Until 1947, Audisio's own involvement was kept secret. The earliest published accounts, in the Communist newspaper L'Unità in late 1945, referred to the shooter only as "Colonnello Valerio." Audisio was first named publicly in March 1947, in a series of articles in the newspaper Il Tempo. The Communist Party then confirmed his role. Audisio then told his own version in five articles for L'Unità that same month. It was later expanded into a book published in 1975, two years after his death. Other tellings followed, including two 1960s books that set out what became the "classical" account. These were Dongo, la fine di Mussolini, by Lazzaro and Bellini delle Stelle, and Le ultime 95 ore di Mussolini, by Franco Bandini.

  Discrepancies soon emerged between Audisio's original L'Unità story, his later versions, and other participants' accounts. His story was probably built around real events but was also, in places, exaggerated. Given the visible embellishments, and suspicion that the Party had chosen him for its own ends, many in Italy doubted his account entirely.

  In 1996, L'Unità published a previously unseen private account that Aldo Lampredi had written in 1972 for the Communist Party's archives. Lampredi confirmed the key facts of Audisio's version, without the embellishment. As an eyewitness writing only for internal party records, he was seen as having no reason to lie. He was also known both for his reliability and for personally disliking Audisio. Historian Giorgio Bocca wrote that the account "sweeps away all the bad novels constructed over 50 years on the end of the Duce of fascism." He added that "the truth is now unmistakably clear."

  In his 1993 book Dongo: half a century of lies, partisan leader Urbano Lazzaro challenged the accepted story. He said it was Luigi Longo, not Audisio, who had used the nom de guerre Colonnello Valerio. Lazzaro also claimed that Mussolini was wounded earlier that day when Petacci grabbed for a partisan's gun. In his telling, that partisan killed Petacci, and Michele Moretti then shot Mussolini dead.

  A different theory holds that Britain's Special Operations Executive was actually responsible for Mussolini's death, possibly on the order of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The supposed aim was to retrieve compromising letters Mussolini was said to be carrying when he was captured. Those letters, the theory goes, included wartime offers from Churchill of peace and territorial concessions if Mussolini persuaded Hitler to turn against the Soviet Union. Historians Renzo De Felice and Pierre Milza, along with journalists including Peter Tompkins, have argued for this version, though many others have dismissed it. In 1994, former partisan leader Bruno Lonati published a book claiming he had shot Mussolini himself, alongside a British officer known as "John" who shot Petacci. Tompkins later identified "John" as Robert Maccarrone, a British SOE agent of Sicilian descent. In 2004, Italian broadcaster RAI aired a documentary co-produced by Tompkins, built around this theory. In it, Lonati claimed he and "John" killed the couple at the De Maria farmhouse around 11:00 a.m. He claimed the shooting later staged at Villa Belmonte came hours afterward. The documentary also featured Dorina Mazzola, who said her mother had witnessed the shooting. Mazzola recalled hearing the shots herself and looking at a clock that read almost 11. SOE historian Christopher Woods dismissed the claims at the time, calling them "just love of conspiracy-making."

  Fascist journalist Giorgio Pisanò argued persistently that Mussolini and Petacci were actually shot near the De Maria farmhouse. The idea was first raised by Franco Bandini in 1978. Both believed the scene at Giulino di Mezzegra was staged using their corpses. Other writers have proposed different killers entirely, including Sandro Pertini, later President of Italy. Others have argued that Mussolini and Petacci took cyanide capsules and died by their own hand, rather than facing partisans at all.

  No official reinvestigation of the case has followed any of these claims; the wall at Villa Belmonte has never been revisited by a court.