Benito Mussolini: II Duce

His Death, and that of his lover   

Clara Petacci

Mussolini was captured on 27 April 1945, as he tried to flee to Switzerland dressed in a Wehrmacht uniform, by Italian partisans of the Communist 52 (Garibaldi) Brigade, near Lake Como. He was recognised by Political Commisar Urbano Lazzaro, and with his mistress Clara Petacci, and the other fugitives of the Salo regime, taken to the village of Guilino di Mezzagra to await their fate. The order came from the communist high command that they were to be executed the following day. When it came to Mussolini’s turn, Clara begged for his life. When her pleas were ignored she threw herself in front of Mussolini and was shot with him. Whether or not she would have been executed anyway is uncertain. Mussolini’s last words were “shoot me in the chest”, so they did. The coup de grace was given by Colonel Valerio (Walter Audisio) who shot them both in the head. Their bodies were then transported to Milan to be displayed. They were hung upside down by their ankles from meat hooks at a gasoline station in the Piazzale Loreto, to be stoned, spat upon and abused. It was a fittingly undignified end for a man to whom self-esteem and self-worth was everything.

Benito, Clara, and friends

Postscript

Unlike Adolf Hitler, whose evil is served up undiluted in a one-dimensional cocktail of risible hatred and calculated slaughter, Mussolini is a much more complicated figure. Had it not been for his collaboration with Hitler he may have held power for many more years. He had his admirers then and he still has them now, and they are not all from the far right. He once said that all he wanted was “to acquire for Italy, a small place in the sun”.

Perhaps, we should leave the last word to his great adversary Winston Churchill, who wrote in, 1951, “He raised the Italian people from the Bolshevism into which they might have sunk in 1919, to a position in Europe such as Italy had never known before”.