The bodies of Mussolini and Petacci in the Milan city mortuary (U.S. Army)
L’Unità (April 30, 1945)
L’esecuzione di Mussolini
Abbiamo avuto la ventura di parlare con l’esecutore della condanna a morte di Mussolini. Egli ci ha narrato seccamente, con poche parole, la fine ingloriosa di un uomo che ha lasciato alla storia ancora le sue parole vili, la sua paura e il suo povero attaccamento alla vita, a costo di qualsiasi vergogna.
Il Comando della 52a Brigata «Luigi Clerici», conscio dell’importanze dei prigionieri catturati, aveva diviso questi ultimi in tre gruppi. Mussolini era stato sistemato con la Petacci in località Giulino di Mezzegre (Tremezzina), provincia di Como, in una casetta di contadini a mezza costa, in una camera senza finestra, guardata da due partigiani.
Entrai con il mitra spianato. Mussolini era in piedi vicino al letto: indossava un soprabito nocciola, il berretto della GNR senza fregio, gli stivaloni rotti di dietro. Lo sguardo era sperduto, gli occhi fuori dell’orbita, il labbro inferiore tremolante: un uomo terrificati. Le prime paro le che pronunciò furono:
– Che casa c’è?
Avevo progettato di eseguire la sentenza in un luogo poco distante dalla casa. Per portarlo fin là dovetti ricorrere a uno stratagemma. Risposi: – Sono venuto a «liberarti».
– Davvero?
– Presto, presto, bisogna fare presto! … C’è poco tempo da perdere…
– Dove sì va?
– Sei armato? – con il tono di offrirgli un’arma.
Rispose: – No, io non ho armi – con il tono di avere compreso la domanda.
Mussolini fece l’atto di uscire. Io lo fermai:
– Prima lei. – La Petacci non riusciva a rendersi conto di che cosa avvenisse, si affrettò affannosamente a cercare i suoi oggetti personali.
– Fa presto, sbrigati…
A questo punto Mussolini fece l’atto di uscire perché non stava più nella pelle. E in realtà uscì prima della Petacci. Uscito all’aperto, Mussolini si trasfigurò, e, voltandosi verso di me, mi disse:
– To offrirò un imperio. – Eravamo ancora sulla soglia della camera. Invece di rispondere a lui dissi alla Petacci.
– Avanti, avanti – e la tirai fuori per un bracciò. La Petacci si affiancò a Mussolini seguiti da me e fecero la mulattiera che scende dalla mezza costa sino al punto in cui era ferma la macchina. Durante il tragitto Mussolini si voltò una volta sola con lo sguardo riconoscente. A questo punto gli sussurrai:
– Ho «liberato» anche tuo figlio Vittorio – (volevo comprendere dalla risposta che avrebbe dato dove poteva trovarsi Vittorio).
– Grazie di cuore, E Zerbino e Mezzasoma dove sono? – domandò.
Risposi: – Stiamo «liberando» anche loro. – Ah! … – e non si voltò più!
Giunti alla è macchina, Mussolini sembrava convinto di essere un uomo libero. Fece il gesto di dare la precedenza alla Petacci, ma io gli dissi:
– Vai tu là. Sei più coperto. Ma con quel berretto di fascista è un po’ una grana…
Mussolini se lo tolse e, battendosi la mano sulla «pelata», disse: – E questa qui? …
– Calcati malto la visiera sugli occhi, allora…
Sì partì. Giunti al posto precedentemente da me scelto (curva della strada la destra e rientro del muricciolo a sinistra, una specie di piazzetta) feci fermare la macchina, facendo segno a Mussolini con la mano di non parlare. E sottovoce, accostandomi allo sportello, gli sussurrai:
– Ho sentito del rumore… Vado a vedere…
Scesi dal, parafango e mi portai fino alla curva. Poi tornai e dissi ancora pianamente:
– Svelti, mettetevi in quell’angolo.
Mussolini, pur obbedendo celermente, non apparve più sicuro, ma tuttavia obbediente, si mise con la schiena al muro al posto indicato, con la Petacci al fianco destro. Silenzio.
Improvviso, pronuncio la sentenza di condanna contro il criminale di guerra:
Per ordine del Comando generale del Corpo volontari della libertà sono incaricato di rendere giustizia al popolo italiano.
Mussolini appare annientato. La Petacci gli butta le braccia sulle spalle e dice:
– Non deve morire.
– Mettiti al tuo posto se non vuoi morire anche tu.
La donna torna con un salto al suo posto. Da una distanza di tre passi, feci partire cinque colpi contro Mussolini, che si accasciò sulle ginocchia con la testa leggermente reclinata sul netto. Poi fu la volta della Petacci.
Giustizia era fatta.
Domani pubblicheremo: «Come sono stati giustiziati i complici di Mussolini».
Dichiarazione del CLNAI sulla fucilazione di Mussolini e dei suoi complici
Il CLNAI dichiara che la fucilazione di Mussolini e dei suoi complici, da esso ordinata, è la conclusione necessaria di una fase storica che lascia il nostro Paese ancora coperto di macerie materiali e morali; è la conclusione di una lotta. insurrezionale, che segna per la Patria la premessa della rinascita e della ricostruzione, Il popolo italiano non potrebbe iniziare una vita libera e normale – che il fascismo per vent’anni gli ha negata – se il CLNAI non avesse tempestivamente dimostrata la sua ferma decisione di far suo un giudizio già pronunciato dalla storia.
Solo a prezzo di questo taglio netto con un passato di vergogna e di delitti, il popolo italiano poteva avere l-assicurazione che il CLNAI è deciso a perseguire con fermezza il rinnovamento democratico del Paese. Solo a questo prezzo la necessaria epurazione dei residui fascisti può e deve avvenire, con la conclusione della fase insurrezionale, nelle forme della più stretta legalità.
Dell’esplosione di odio popolare – che è trascesa in quest’unica occasione ad eccessi, comprensibili soltanto nel clima voluto e creato da Mussolini – unico responsabile è il fascismo.
Il CLNAI come ha saputo condurre un’insurrezione mirabile per, disciplina, democratica, trasfondendo in tutti gli insorti il senso della responsabilità di questa grande ora storica e come ha saputo fare, senza esitazioni, giustizia dei responsabili della rovina della Patria, intende che nella nuova epoca ché si apre al libero popolo italiano non debbono più ripetersi tali eccessi. Nulla potrebbe giustificarli nel nuovo clima di libertà e di stretta legalità democratica che il CLNAI è deciso a ristabilire, conclusa ormai la lotta insurrezionale.
The Pittsburgh Press (April 30, 1945)
Mussolini’s body strung up in Milan, kicked, spat upon by hysterical Italians
Duce, mistress, 16 aides slain
By James E. Roper, United Press staff writer
The last of Mussolini is displayed in a Milan square after execution of the Italian dictator. Armed Partisans try to restrain the crowds. Mussolini’s body lies in a center foreground, with that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, who was also shot, just to the left. The Duce was later hung up feet first at a gas station.
MILAN, Italy – The broken body of Benito Mussolini lay unclaimed beside his slain mistress in the Milan morgue today, dishonored in death by the people he led to empire and ruin.
The fallen Duce died badly in the sight of the Partisan executioners who killed him and his mistress, Clara Petacci, in their hideout on Lake Como last Saturday.
And the people he ruled for two decades paid him their last tribute by hanging his remains head down from the rafters of a gasoline station in Milan’s Loreto Square.
Shot in back
There, for a night and day, they spat upon their fallen leader, shot his body in the back, and kicked his face into a toothless, pulpy mass.
For hours after the body of the executed dictator was brought to Milan with that of his mistress and 16 other slain Fascist leaders. Mussolini lay in a filthy pile of dirt in the center of the square. Then the mob tied wire about the ankles of Il Duce and Clara Petacci and suspended them upside down from the roof of the gasoline station.
Hysterical men and women closed in screaming about the dangling corpses and beat and kicked the dictator’s face into an unrecognizable pulp. His teeth were knocked out and the famed jutting jaw fell over his upper lip.
Dumped into trunk
His mistress skirt was torn off and people spat upon both bodies.
When the mob tired of its ghastly sport, the bodies were taken down and dumped into an open truck. They were carted to the city morgue and the pair were placed on a metal slab in the morgue courtyard.
Someone tilted the death slab upward so the bodies were visible to hundreds of persons still milling about the morgue, peering over the stone and plaster wall.
In contrast to Mussolini’s disfigured features, his mistress’ face remained youthful and beautiful even in death. Her even, white teeth, now splotched with blood, were visible through her parted lips and her dark-brown, curly hair still hung in tidy ringlets.
16 others executed
Her slim torso was covered with an old pair of men’s trousers tossed carelessly over her body. A pink silk garter belt and frilly blue underclothes were exposed.
By the time Mussolini’s body reached the morgue, his jacket had been torn away, revealing his barrel chest encased in a short-sleeved undershirt.
Sharing the morgue with Il Duce and Clara were the bodies of 16 of his henchmen, executed like them by Italian patriots after a “people’s trial.”
Ironically, it was revealed by the Partisan prefect of Milan Province that an order staying Mussolini’s execution pending a more formal trial and forbidding the execution of his mistress was en route to Como at the moment they faced the firing squad.
The prefect said he believed Clara Petacci’s shooting was illegal unless it could be proved she was carrying arms.
Died badly
“Mussolini died badly,” said Edouardo, leader of the 10-man firing squad which sent the dictator to his death.
When he was sentenced to death, the man who had ruined his career through illusions of empire ironically cried, “let me save my life, and I will give you an empire.”
“No, no,” were the last words from Il Duce, who had said “yes, yes” so many times to his Axis partner, Adolf Hitler, He cried his “no’s” as the men of the firing squad raised their rifles to their shoulders.
The execution took place at 4:20 p.m. Saturday near the town of Dongo, on Lake Como. Mussolini was killed at the villa where he had been living since his arrest last Friday with Clara, the Rome doctor’s daughter who wanted to be a movie star.
Tried to escape
Mussolini, the “jackal” to the last, was caught as he attempted to flee to Switzerland in a 30-car convoy, his bulky frame cloaked in a German military overcoat to escape detection.
Edouardo, who commands all the Partisan forces south of the Po, said:
I heard Mussolini was arrested and taken to a villa near Dongo.
None of us wanted Mussolini to be freed or escape to Switzerland so I sent 10 men with an officer to Dongo.
Mussolini was in the cottage on the hill with Signorina Petacci. When he saw Italian officers coming to him, he thought they had come to free him and he embraced his sweetheart.
When he understood he was going to be tried he was shocked. But our men gave them both a trial and condemned them to death.
Offers empire
Then it was that Mussolini, who had dealt death to so many others, offered the empire he didn’t have in exchange for his life. But the firing squad – men from the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade – went ahead with the execution, there at the villa on the hill.
Mussolini did not wear a blindfold. As the squad raised their rifles, he cried “No, no.” A second later he fell from a bullet that entered his left forehead and passed entirely through his head, tearing out part of the skull behind his right ear.
Bodies piled
Edouardo said the 16 others were examined later and shot in the town square at Dongo. They included the brother of Signorina Petacci, who tried to escape. He was shot down as he ran.
“These men died well,” said Edouardo. “Mussolini died badly.”
The others, whose bodies were piled here with Mussolini’s, included:
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Alessandro Pavolini, former propaganda minister and secretary of state in Mussolini’s Fascist puppet government.
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Francesco Maria Barracu, undersecretary to the premier.
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Dr. Paolo Zerbino, minister of the interior.
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Fernando Messazoma, minister of popular culture.
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Ruggero Romano, minister of public works.
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Augusto Liverani, undersecretary of state for communications.
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Goffredo Coppola, rector of the University of Bologna.
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Paolo Porta, a Fascist Party inspector.
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Luigi Gatti, a prefect.
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Ernesto Daquanno, editor of Stefani News Agency.
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Mario Nudi, president of the Fascist Agricultural Association.
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Nicola Bombacci, former Communist.
Rome dispatches said the following were also killed: former Fascist Party secretary Roberto Farinacci, Achile Starace (another former party secretary), movie stars Osvaldo Valenti and Louisa Feriza, former Minister of Interior Guido Buffarini Guidi.
Vito Casalnuova, a colonel in the National Republican Guard, and Pietro Salustri, Mussolini’s personal pilot.
‘Do not hit the medal’
Barracu wore Italy’s highest decoration, the gold medal, and asked the firing squad, “Do not hit the medal.”
Pavolini’s last words were “Viva Italia.”
Edouardo said all the bodies were thrown into a big, closed truck like a moving van and brought to Milan late Saturday. On the way Partisan guards repeatedly stopped the truck and demanded identification papers from the drivers. At one point, overcautious Partisans made the men from Milan get out and stand against a wall. They were going to shoot them before an hour’s argument convinced the suspicious sentries that all was in order.
Duce’s family under guard
By Paul Ghali
COMO, Italy (April 29, delayed) – Mussolini’s wife, Donna Rachele, and his two daughters are under police guard, but have been allowed by Partisans to stay with friends here.
Donna Rachele was carrying $200,000 worth of jewels when the family was captured.
Mussolini’s son, Vittorio, is believed to have fled with the Germans.
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Editorial: The bum of bums
In times of war or peace, when it comes to who is history’s No. 1 scoundrel, gangster or phony, as you may choose to call him, you can always start an argument and get a lot of nominations.
To avoid too much debate about this one, and to allow a little latitude, we employ racetrack parlance and assert that Benito Mussolini will always be in the money for win, place or show.
Anyway, in our book, he will at least tie in a photo finish for first in pusillanimity, past, present or future.
His outstanding qualification for that rating is the way he played safe until convinced that Germany had won the war. He believed he was on a cinch when, right after Dunkirk, he stuck the knife into the back of his neighbor. He considered that he was taking no chance, not risking even what Hitler had risked.
Winston Churchill perhaps described him best as the “tattered lackey.”
He was the world’s greatest exhibitionist. He is now being exhibited, but not on a balcony.
So endeth that chapter.
Did cinch mean something else back in the day? It doesn’t make sense. He believed he was on “an extremely easy task”? That sounds off.
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Informally, it also means “make certain of.”
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An adventurer’s career ends –
‘About time,’ Romans say of Mussolini
Duce first of modern dictators
By J. Edward Murray, United Press staff writer
ROME, Italy – Il Duce was dead, disgraced, and defiled today, and the Italian people from premier to peasant took the news with satisfaction.
The Vatican reportedly received with coolness the news of Mussolini’s summary trial and execution, but throughout the rest of Rome there was only rejoicing.
Unimpeachable Vatican sources told the United Press the Holy See felt Mussolini should have had a more formal trial. The revilement of his body also displeased church circles. American Monsignor Walter Carroll was due to leave for Milan today to bring back a report on the entire episode.
No regret
No such niceties bothered the Italians who had lived so long under the Dictator’s yoke. The news was first flashed to a huge crowd gathered in the Piazzo Santi Apostoli to celebrate the liberation of North Italy. That is only a block from the Piazza Venezia, where the balcony was now bare of the blackshirt for good.
The excited crowd almost mobbed two news vendors who shouted “Mussolini executed.” A United Press correspondent who circulated through the crowd reported the only regret expressed was because Rome did not have the privilege of trying and executing Mussolini.
Premier Ivanoe Bonomi said:
The career of an adventurer who has been gambling with his life and with the destiny of his country has tragically ended. Fortunately, the country is not dying and will revive.
‘About time’
Mario Luzzi, bank clerk, wanted no grief on his former dictator.
“About time. He already was a stinking corpse,” said Luzzi.
“He deserved execution. It was overdue,” agreed shopkeeper Giuseppe Marni.
It was considered poetic justice that the mortal remains of Mussolini were taken for all to see to Milan, where his Fascism was born 26 years ago.
By that time Mussolini, son of a country village blacksmith, had already had a varied career as a soldier, Socialist, editor and teacher. From his birth on July 29, 1883, at Dovia di Predappio in Romagna, Mussolini pursued a relatively peaceful career until 1904. In that year he was expelled from Switzerland for political activity.
Jailed once
Mussolini returned to Italy and divided his time between school teaching and Socialism. He was jailed once for his part in a farmers’ strike. In 1909, he founded a newspaper called The Class Struggle. Three years later, he became editor of the Socialist daily, Avanti.
When the First World War began, Mussolini abandoned his Socialist and pacifist ideas. He gave up his post on Avanti and founded his own paper, Il Popolo Romano. In 1915, he was arrested for making a speech urging Italy to enter the war on the side of the Allies.
Mussolini joined the army and his war record was a good one. He was wounded several times, mentioned in dispatches frequently, and ended as a sergeant.
Started in 1919
Fascism was born in March of 1919, when Mussolini founded the first “Fasci” and was first called “Il Duce.” By 1922, he had a million followers and was able to declare that the Italian government would “either be given to us or we shall take it.”
That was October 24. Four days later from Milan, where his battered corpse had returned today, began the blackshirt march on Rome, a march in which Mussolini himself did not take part. A frightened King the next day invited Mussolini to form a new cabinet.
Mussolini bullied and beat his way to power. Where his balcony speeches sometimes failed, castor oil or rubber hoses rarely did. the murder of the socialist leader, Giacomo Matteotti, showed the world. But Mussolini went on his colorful swaggering way.
Signed Vatican pact
His first big diplomatic victory was when he healed the historic rift between Italy and the Vatican with the Lateran Treaty in 1929. His next was when he went to war with Ethiopia and got away with it. The League of Nations delayed in applying sanctions until it was too late. Mussolini’s dream of empire was being realized.
He supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and his troops took a terrible whipping at Guadalajara.
Invaded Albania
Mussolini, as the first of the modern dictators, at one time treated Adolf Hitler as something of a pupil. But the master was soon outstripped, and when the Axis partnership was formed, Mussolini was the junior member.
Il Duce’s first suggestion in World War II was against Albania in 1939. Then came his “stab in the back” against fallen France in 1940. Those were his last victories. The invasion of Greece was a failure. The Italian armies were beaten in Africa.
When the Allies invaded Sicily, Mussolini was through. His government collapsed on July 25, 1943, and he was imprisoned. On September 12, 1943, he was rescued by German parachutists and taken to Germany, a beaten, broken man. His attempt to form a “new Fascist republic” in Northern Italy was pathetic.
Around him he gathered the old cronies of his Rome days and his mistress, young, pretty, slender Clara Petacci – the same people whose bodies were tossed in the pile with his own yesterday.
Bluster gone
But the old blustering Mussolini was gone. He was a hollow-eyed, tired-looking man. at the height of his career, Mussolini had been built up as a great sportsman. Once for the edification of American newsmen, he played half a set of tennis against opponents who wanted to let him win but couldn’t, and it was announced he had trimmed them.
One wide-eyed chronicler once reported that Mussolini liked Rome, his daughter Edda, children, horses, folk dances, and fortune telling. He disliked cats, rich men, beards, mummies, and old women.
He didn’t dislike young women, and his notorious love affairs did as much as anything to discredit him with his predominantly Catholic countrymen. His last mistress, the one who died with him, he met on a beach and kept in a villa near Rome.
Son-in-law slain
His wife, Rachele, was kept in the background throughout his life. they had five children, Edda, Vittorio, Romano, Anna Maria and Bruno. The latter was killed in a plane crash.
For marrying Edda, Count Galeazzo Ciano was made Italian Foreign Minister. For denying Il Duce after his downfall, he was executed.
Vittorio was reported with his father after his flight from Milan last week, but the dispatches today did not mention his whereabouts. Signora Mussolini tried to cross into Switzerland with Romano and Anna Maria, both in their teens. Edda is already in Switzerland with her longtime lover and newly-taken husband, Count Pucci.
Oberdonau-Zeitung (May 1, 1945)
Mussolini das Opfer von Aufständischen
Mit seinem Mitarbeiterstab ermordet
Genf, 30. April – Nach Meldung eines italienischen Senders ist Mussolini mit 17 Angehörigen seiner engsten Mitarbeiterschaft in die Hände von Aufständischen gefallen. Mussolini und seine Mitarbeiter, darunter Farinaci, wurden ermordet, während Marschall Graziani den alliierten Militärbehörden unterstellt wurde. Die Leichen wurden auf dem Minettiplatz in Mailand zur Schau gestellt.
The Pittsburgh Press (May 1, 1945)
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.
Pose as a drunk fails –
Last hours of Mussolini described by witnesses
‘We have come to liberate you,’ Patriots tell Duce – and execution follows
By James E. Roper, United Press staff writer
GIULINO DI MEZZEGRA, Italy – Mussolini and his young mistress spent the last 14 hours of their lives together locked in a room of a mountainside villa here, overlooking Lake Como.
The details of how Mussolini and Clara Petacci died side by side were told to me by Partisan eyewitnesses of their execution.
After their “People’s Tribunal” trial, the couple was brought to this tiny hamlet of 150 and put in a room in the mountainside house. That was at 2 a.m. Saturday.
Mussolini depressed
There they remained until 4 p.m., disturbed only by the serving of meals.
When a guard entered the room Saturday afternoon, Mussolini was fully dressed and wearing hat. Clara was in bed, wearing a silk slip.
“You must go away now,” the guard told them.
Clara began to dress slowly. The guards told her to hurry. Mussolini seemed very depressed.
The guards drove the couple 500 yards in an auto, then made them walk another 500 yards.
‘Come to liberate you’
“We have come to liberate you,” one guard told Mussolini.
Il Duce seemed to believe it, and for the first time he smiled.
The small group walked down the narrow “24th of May” Street, which has a stone wall on either side. They stopped in front of No. 14, from where Mussolini could see the snow-tipped Swiss Alps to which he had tried to flee. The couple stood with their backs to a stone wall.
Then a Partisan proclaimed: “By order of the General Command of Comrades of Volunteers, I am charged with rendering justice for the Italian people.”
Clara grows hysterical
Clara threw herself across Mussolini’s chest as a shield and cried hysterically, “You shouldn’t kill him.”
“Then we’ll kill you first,” the Partisan said.
The couple was pulled apart and one Partisan – according to villagers, he was a Milan man – fired several pistol shots into Mussolini’s chest and several more into Clara’s chest.
Mussolini squirmed on the ground, so they fired a shot through his head.
“Mussolini didn’t die immediately probably because he twisted just as the shots were fired, making the bullets miss his vital organs,” said a witness.
Rain falls on bodies
The bodies were left there for several hours until it began to rain.
The rain washed away the bloodspots and now the historic spot is marked only by a silvery splotch on the black, iron grill which runs along the stone fence. That splotch is where a bullet, which passed through Mussolini’s or Clara’s body, smacked into the grill.
The Partisans told me that Mussolini was first spotted at a roadblock at the town of Musso, just south of Dongo on Lake Como. He was lying under a blanket in the back of a truck in a German convoy of 32 vehicles. He wore the overcoat of a non-commissioned Luftwaffe officer and a pair of dark glasses.
Posed as drunk
Partisan Negri Giuseppe lifted the blanket and looked down at Mussolini. A German soldier said, “That’s just a drunk.” But the ruse failed.
Mussolini was taken from the truck, and after some negotiations, the Germans were permitted to continue toward Switzerland, minus an armored car which was part of the convoy.
When the convoy was first stopped, the Germans had moved the armored car to the rear of the column, under pretext of towing a truck. The Partisans thought Mussolini first was in the armored car and that he used that opportunity to slip into the truck and hide under the blanket.
He was taken at 6:50 a.m. last Friday.
Duce’s nemesis says –
‘One jackal gone to pitiful end’
Violinist Spalding reveals spy work
WASHINGTON (UP) – Violinist Albert Spalding, revealed today as the Allies’ contact man with the Italian Partisans, said he was glad the Partisans killed Mussolini.
“There’s one jackal that is gone,” the Chicago-born musician commented. “A pitiful end to a miserable career.”
Mr. Spalding returned here several months ago after directing Partisan activities in Italy as spokesman for the Allied High Command.
Until now, however, he refrained from revealing his work which the Office of War Information hails as a propaganda job “unbeaten by any individual in any theater.”
Mr. Spalding missed the incident in which the Partisans shot Mussolini and symbolized an end to Italian tyranny, but he was not surprised it happened.
“I’ve heard them say they’d like that opportunity many, many times,” he said.
Bases hope on Partisans
Mr. Spalding bases his hope for a democratic Italy on the Partisans, whom he considers “the true emblem of a nationalist movement and the real symbol of unity for the Italian people.”
“They come from the homes of the humble instead of the seats of the mighty,” Mr. Spalding said.
He predicted that they would seek political expression in an effort not to return to the rule that suffocated them.
“I look to them for the rejuvenation of Italy,” he said.
Garibaldi recalled
If some wear red shirts, he added, they are not flaunting an allegiance to Communism, but are harking back to the era of Italy’s own short-lived republic of 1849 – and Garibaldi.
They’ve worked heroically at breaking enemy communications, removing and replanting enemy mines and piloting Allied forces through mined territory, Mr. Spalding said.
Mr. Spalding left his violin at home while he was on his eight-month mission in Italy.
“You know, music is a pretty absorbing job,” he explained.
Huh… where was his wife?
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Yeah… but where was she while Pasta man was with his Mistress? Did pasta man shoo her away?
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Pasta man did what pasta man did.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 2, 1945)
Brain of Duce ‘very ordinary’
Remains examined by Milan professor
By Aldo Forte, United Press staff writer
MILAN, Italy – Doctors said today that Benito Mussolini, the extraordinary dictator, had a very ordinary brain.
“His brain showed no special traits,” said Prof. Mario Cattabeni, director of the University of Milan Medical Institute.
Cattabeni said only one third of the brain was left after the Milan mob had finished kicking in Mussolini’s head.
Cattabeni said:
What remains in our hands, namely the top section, shows no particular anatomic or pathologic difference which might classify him as either genius or maniac. However, the brain will be preserved for possible future examination.
Cattabeni, who made the first autopsy on Mussolini’s body, said the dictator was an exceptionally healthy man for his age. He showed no symptoms of either cancer or ulcers, despite frequent rumors that he suffered one or the other. Nor were there any signs of paresis, another affliction often attributed to him.
Cattabeni said:
For a man of his age and considering the amount of work he did his health was perfect. His lungs, heart, and liver all were in excellent shape. If he hadn’t met the fate he did, he would have lived to 100 years.
Good news. What about his pp though?
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 3, 1945)
Duce’s widow in U.S. custody
Caught while trying to flee Italy – 2 children also taken by partisans
By Aldo Forte, United Press staff writer
COMO, Italy – Rachele Mussolini, widow of the executed dictator, and two of her children were under protective custody of American authorities today after their arrest by Italian Partisans as they attempted to flee to Switzerland.
The Partisans turned her over to officers of the U.S. 1st Armored Division, saying she always had led a family life and they did not consider her a Fascist criminal.
She was placed in her sumptuous villa, Crespi, overlooking Lake Como and the Swiss Alps.
Officers told me she was arrested Sunday night with her 18-year-old son, Romano, and her daughter, Anna Maria, 16, youngest of the Mussolinis’ five children.
The three originally were placed in the Como jail, where she first learned of her husband’s execution.
Officers said that in the car in which she was trying to escape they found 12 million lire ($120,000), 1,600 grams of gold and numerous jewels.
I saw her and the children leave the villa in American custody this afternoon for an undisclosed destination.
First three zippered pigskin bags, were carried to a German-camouflaged car waiting in the villa gardens.
Then Rachele descended. She was dressed in a simple black coat, black dress and black turban and, despite the cold sunless day, was stockingless. She looked pale and depressed.
She looked much older than when I saw her in 1940 at the funeral of her son, Bruno, killed in an air crash. Her hair was completely white, she had lost weight and her face was wrinkled.
The Pittsburgh Press (May 4, 1945)
Editorial: Men go, evils survive
Mussolini is gone, spat upon, kicked in the mud like a scrap of refuse, his worn-out old body treated to obscenities that would not be inflicted upon a dead dog.
Hitler is reported dead, although the report is still unverified and the matter of his going is a subject of wide speculation and rumor.
So go the modern Caesars, just like the old ones, mangled by the mobs they once led, betrayed by the Brutuses they once embraced, and now none so poor to do them reverence.
It was not always so. In the past, many prominent people from Winston Churchill to Rep. Sol Bloom have praised Il Duce.
As the two dictators reversed their policies to suit opportunity, men changed their opinions.
Il Duce, once so noble to so many, and now so evil to us all, was the creature of events, caused by stresses and strains in the Italian economy. Hitler was made in Germany the same way. Both were interpreters and sympathizers of political trends and economic drives. It is significant that both succumbed to power as left-wingers.
There is no word but loathing for the dark chapter through which the world is moving, but it is not enough to damn these men as villains. For as these men die, the hated things for which they stood will not also conveniently die and be interred with their bones. Their evil will live after them because the evil is not theirs alone.
The evil is not only war and tyranny itself; it is in the seeds of these things; in the pride and greed and blindness to suffering; the stupidity; the complacency; the inhumanity that lets part of mankind turn away its face until itself is threatened. Certainly, that evil, in some measure, belongs to all of us.
Economists explain that Italy and Germany were societies forced to function at top capacity with purchasing power created by government debt. The economy planned and controlled by organization of both employers and workers (corporatives). They tell us that as militarism became the only course which could keep in political and economic balance the forces that had elevated the dictators, an enemy was invented, imperialism blossomed, and once more the world was bathed in blood.
Certainly, all that could happen again, but that is not the only way war could happen. The key lies in aggression and the fact that successful aggression wins popular support. It could happen whenever a people is powerful enough, and greedy enough, to gamble with war.
There is only one hope, and it is slim. That is, that the first stones of a structure of world responsibility be well laid at San Francisco. The great hope is that the peoples of the world, particularly the powerful peoples, will see to it that their governments help build on the structure so that there will finally be a world discipline strong enough to inhibit even the greatest nations.