Mussolini Hanged: Fascism's Bloody End in Italy

Walter Audisio, a Communist partisan using the code name Colonnello Valerio, executed Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci by firing squad on the afternoon of April 28, 1945, against the wall of a villa at Giulino di Mezzegra on Lake Como. The executions were summary, authorized by the National Liberation Committee but carried out without trial, hearing, or formal charges. The bodies were transported to Milan, where they were hung upside down from the girders of an Esso gas station in Piazzale Loreto, the same square where the Germans had displayed the bodies of fifteen executed partisans the previous August. The scene at Piazzale Loreto was medieval in its savagery. A crowd of thousands gathered to view the corpses, kicking and spitting on them. Women fired pistols into Mussolini's body. Petacci's corpse was subjected to particular abuse. Photographs of the inverted bodies, distributed worldwide within days, became among the most disturbing images of World War II. The display was both a catharsis for a population that had suffered under fascism and foreign occupation, and a deliberate political message: this is what happens to dictators. The decision to execute Mussolini rather than hand him to the Allies was driven by Communist partisan leadership, particularly Luigi Longo, who feared that the British or Americans would protect Mussolini for political purposes. The Allies had already shown leniency toward King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio, both of whom had supported the fascist regime for years before switching sides. The Communists calculated, correctly, that a dead Mussolini could not be rehabilitated, and that the manner of his death would be a lasting deterrent. Mussolini's fall was total in a way few dictators have experienced. He had ruled Italy for twenty-one years, waged aggressive wars in Ethiopia, Spain, Albania, and across North Africa and Europe, allied with Hitler, implemented racial laws against Italian Jews, and reduced Italy from a European power to a devastated, divided country. His body, eventually buried in an unmarked grave by the government, was stolen by neo-fascists in 1946 and hidden for four months before being recovered. He was finally interred in his family tomb in Predappio in 1957, where the grave remains a pilgrimage site for far-right sympathizers.