With brain removed –
Duce patched up, buried in box
He and mistress lie in Potters’ Field
MILAN, Italy (UP) – Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were buried secretly in unmarked graves in the Potters’ Field of the Maggiore Cemetery late yesterday, it was revealed today.
Former Fascist Party Secretary Achille Starace, who was executed yesterday, was interred a short distance away.
Ignominious burials
The only witnesses to the ignominious burials were 15 members of the cemetery staff who were sworn to secrecy to prevent mobs from learning the graves’ location and possibly exhuming the remains of the former dictator.
The three bodies were in rough, unpainted pine coffins, the tops of which were screwed on.
A military chaplain offered a brief Catholic benediction for all three as they were lowered into the ground.
An Italian Red Cross truck had transported the three bodies from the morgue to the burial site under some fir trees.
Duce’s brain removed
Vittorio Vertova, cemetery director who supervised the burials, said the brain had been removed from Mussolini’s body and criminologists were examining it.
Undertakers did their best to repair the damage to Mussolini’s corpse, which had been stoned, kicked, spat upon, and shot at by the Milan mob in two days of unparalleled crowd hysteria.
They built up his face so that it had regained some of its old-time arrogance. His mouth was stuffed to hide the loss of his teeth kicked out by the mob.
A routine autopsy was performed yesterday because no doctor had attended the dictator’s death before a firing squad. The body later was sewed together roughly.
Fittingly, the body of the “Sawdust Caesar” rested on sawdust, loosely thrown in the bottom of the coffin. He was nude and his blood-soaked uniform was tossed on top of him.
In Casket 165, still next to him, was the body of Clara Petacci, his mistress.
Achille Starace was executed yesterday in Loretto Square in view of the dangling bodies of Mussolini and his mistress.
The Partisans asked Starace whether he wanted to be shot in the front or the back. He replied in the front. They promptly shot him in the back.
The Milan mob stormed Vittore Prison howling for the life of Marshal Rudolfo Graziani, Fascist minister of war and commander of the Italian Fascist Army still resisting in North Italy. However, Partisans turned Graziani over to Col. Norman Fiske, of Portland, Oregon, of the Allied commission.
Col. Fiske also accepted the surrender of 150 to 200 SS troops, including their general, who had been barricaded in the Hotel Regina since the Partisan uprising began here last week. When the Germans filed from the hotel, a crowd of thousands spat upon them, hissed, and shook their fists.