Death of Benito Mussolini

• 1. Background And Collapse

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  Benito Mussolini, the deposed Italian fascist dictator, was summarily executed by an Italian partisan in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra in northern Italy on the 28th of April 1945. This event marked the final days of World War II in Europe for the region. In June 1940, he took his country into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Following the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943, Mussolini was deposed and put under arrest. Italy then signed the Armistice of Cassibile with the Allies in September 1943.

  Shortly after the Armistice, Mussolini was rescued from prison in the Gran Sasso raid by German special forces. Hitler installed him as leader of the Italian Social Republic, a German puppet state set up in northern Italy and based at the town of Salò near Lake Garda. By 1944, the "Salò Republic" faced threats not only from the Allies advancing from the south but also internally from Italian anti-fascist partisans. The conflict became known as the Italian Civil War.

  Slowly fighting their way up the Italian Peninsula, the Allies took Rome and then Florence in the summer of 1944. Later that year they began advancing into northern Italy. With the Spring 1945 offensive bringing a final collapse of the German army's Gothic Line in April, total defeat for the Salò Republic and its German protectors was imminent.

• 2. Capture And Execution

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  On the 27th of April 1945, a group of local communist partisans attacked the convoy in which Mussolini and Petacci were travelling, near the village of Dongo on the north western shore of Lake Como. They forced it to halt. The convoy included a number of other Italian fascist leaders. The partisans, led by Pier Luigi Bellini delle Stelle and Urbano Lazzaro, recognised one of the fascists, but not Mussolini at this stage. They made the Germans hand over all the Italians in exchange for allowing the Germans to proceed. Eventually Mussolini was discovered slumped in one of the convoy vehicles.

  Following his capture, the partisans took Mussolini to Dongo, where he spent part of the night in the local barracks. In Dongo, he was reunited with Petacci, who had requested to join him, at about 2:30a.m. on the 28th of April. Over fifty fascist leaders and their families were found in the convoy and arrested by the partisans. Aside from Mussolini and Petacci, sixteen of the most prominent would be summarily shot in Dongo the following day.

  Fearing that Mussolini and Petacci might be rescued by fascist supporters, the partisans drove them to a nearby farm of a peasant family named De Maria. They believed this would be a safe place to hold them. On the evening of the 28th of April, Walter Audisio and Aldo Lampredi left Milan for Dongo to carry out orders given by Longo. They met Bellini delle Stelle to arrange for Mussolini to be handed over. After being picked up, they drove south to the village of Giulino di Mezzegra. The vehicle pulled up at the entrance of the Villa Belmonte on a narrow road known as via XXIV maggio. Audisio then shot them at 4:10p.m. with a submachine gun borrowed from Moretti.

• 3. Public Display In Milan

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  In the evening of the 28th of April, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and other executed fascists were loaded onto a van and transported south to Milan. Arriving in the city in the early hours of the 29th of April, they were dumped on the ground in the Piazzale Loreto, a suburban square near the main railway station. The choice of location was deliberate. Fifteen partisans had been shot there in August 1944 in retaliation for partisan attacks and Allied bombing raids.

  Their bodies were left in a heap, and by 9:00a.m. a considerable crowd had gathered. The corpses were pelted with vegetables, spat at, urinated on, shot at and kicked; Mussolini's face was disfigured by beatings. An American eyewitness described the crowd as "sinister, depraved, out of control". After a while, the bodies were hung by their feet from the metal girder framework of a half-built service station. This mode of hanging had been used in northern Italy since medieval times to stress the "infamy" of the hanged. Movie footage appears to confirm that this protected the bodies from the mob.

• 4. Mortuary Analysis And Impact On Hitler

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  At about 2:00p.m. on the 29th of April, the recently arrived American military authorities ordered that the bodies be taken down and delivered to the city mortuary for post mortems to be carried out. A US army cameraman went to the mortuary and took photographs of the bodies for publication. One photo showed Mussolini and Petacci positioned in a macabre pose as though they were arm-in-arm.

  On the 30th of April, a post mortem was carried out on Mussolini at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Milan. One version of the subsequent report indicated he had been shot with nine bullets, while another specified seven bullets. Four bullets near the heart were given as the cause of death. Samples of Mussolini's brain were sent to the United States for analysis. The intention was to prove the hypothesis that syphilis had caused insanity in him, but nothing resulted from the analysis. No evidence of syphilis was found on Mussolini's body and no post mortem was carried out on Petacci.

  On the afternoon of the 29th of April, Adolf Hitler learned of Mussolini's death. Earlier that day, Hitler had recorded in his Last Will and Testament that he intended to choose death rather than be captured by the enemy or fall into the hands of "the masses" to become "a spectacle arranged by Jews". The following day, Hitler killed himself in Berlin, shortly before the city fell to the Red Army.

• 5. Theft And Hidden Interment

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  Two Franciscan friars were charged with assisting Leccisi to hide the body. 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. The whereabouts of the body was kept a secret, even from Mussolini's family. This remained the position until May 1957, when the newly appointed Prime Minister, Adone Zoli, agreed to Mussolini's re-interment at his place of birth in Predappio.

  Outside of Italy, Walter Audisio's version of how Mussolini was executed has largely been accepted and is uncontroversial. However, within Italy, the subject has been a matter of extensive debate and dispute since the late 1940s to the present. At least twelve different individuals have been identified at various times as being responsible for carrying out the shooting. Comparisons have been made with the John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.

  There have been several claims that Britain's wartime covert operations unit, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), was responsible for Mussolini's death. Allegedly, it may have even been ordered by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It was part of

• 6. Conspiracy Theories And Disputes

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  a "cover up" to retrieve "secret agreements" and compromising correspondence between the two men. Proponents of this theory include historians such as Renzo De Felice and Pierre Milza and journalists including Peter Tompkins. In 1994 Bruno Lonati published a book claiming he had shot Mussolini accompanied on his mission by a British officer called "John" who shot Petacci. The theory has been dismissed by many due to lack of serious evidence regarding the existence of the correspondence with Churchill.