Fascists dug up Il Duces body on Easter Sunday of 1946. When he returned to Italy in 1904, even the Roman newspapers had started to mention his name. For the next few months, according to his own account, he lived from day to day, jumping from job to job. While these blackshirt squads cropped up all over northern Italy setting fire to government buildings, killing opponents by the hundreds Mussolini himself called for a general workers strike in 1922, as well as a march on Rome. Claras brother, Marcello Petacci, was also shot dead while swimming in Lake Como, trying to escape. Then, in September, an Italian army of 130,000 men under Marshal Rodolfo Graziani invaded Egypt from the Italian colony of Libya. At noon, given a lunch of polenta in their upstairs bedroom, Mussolini told Petacci that he had lost his appetite; suspense over their fate was getting to him. [6] Although each of these accounts vary in detail, they are consistent on the main facts. [29], He also claimed that he had given the order as deputy prime minister of the government in Rome and as leader of the Communist Party. WebAnswer (1 of 6): Benito Mussolini was captured along with several of this top ranking officers while he was trying to flee to Switzerland, along with his lover and a certain amount of money and precious items. Mussolini was killed two days before Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. But while Mussolini died in 1945, the ideas he put a name on did not. [78][79][80], There have been several claims that Britain's wartime covert operations unit, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), was responsible for Mussolini's death, and that it may have even been ordered by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill. Some historians go as far as claiming that this marked the start of World War II. There it stayed for eleven years, until Italian Prime Minister Adone Zoli turned over the bones to Mussolinis widow. Please select which sections you would like to print: Alternate titles: Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, Il Duce, Professor of Modern Italian History, Department of Italian, University College London, London, England. German commandos crash-landed gliders into the side of the mountain behind the hotel before freeing Mussolini and airlifting him back to Munich, where he could confer with Hitler. According to Longo, he did so with the words "go and shoot him". Parents: Alessandro He was wrong. However, to reflect this lack of governmental or judicial authority, sources on the subject have used the term with quotation marks. Zoli, who also came from Predappio and knew Mussolini's widow, Rachele, was reliant on the far right to support him in Parliament. Initially, Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave but, in 1946, his body was dug up and stolen by fascist supporters. He thanks you for reading his content. American razor blades, it was said, were inadequate to cut his tough beard. [91], Other theories have been published, including allegations that not only Luigi Longo, subsequently leader of the Communist Party in post-war Italy, but also Sandro Pertini, a future President of Italy, carried out the shootings. Mussolini may have been wearing German Luftwaffe kit, but there was no more recognizable face in all of Italy. No!. [72], The anniversary of Mussolini's death on 28 April has become one of three dates neo-fascist supporters mark with major rallies. In his initial overtures into politics, Mussolinis beliefs took after his fathers: he spent time organizing with trade unions and writing for socialist publications in both Switzerland and Italy. In his 20s, he ran a series of newspapers that amounted to propaganda sheets for his increasingly extreme political views. This generally accepted version is often termed the "official version", nevertheless. [4], Slowly fighting their way up the Italian Peninsula, the Allies took Rome and then Florence in the summer of 1944 and later that year they began advancing into northern Italy. At least this way, Mussolini believed, he could live out his days in exile. Movie footage of what happened appears to confirm that to be the case. [75] Comparisons have been made with the John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories,[20] and it has been described as the Italian equivalent of that speculation. So successful was this paper that in 1912 he was appointed editor of the official Socialist newspaper, Avanti! And that brings us back to where we started: that ill-fated gas station in the Piazzale Loreto. Stories circulated in Italy to reinforce the image. The death of Benito Mussolini on April 28, 1945 was one of those latter occasions. Facing pressure on the home front due to increasingly stressful wartime conditions and rebelliousness from within his own ranks, Benito Mussolini was removed from office by the king and the Grand Council in July of 1943. But of course, almost all of this was mythologicalunreal! I said I could not shoot Petacci, so John said he would shoot her himself, while making it quite clear that Mussolini however, had to be killed by an Italian. In late 1914, with World War I newly underway, he founded a newspaper called The People of Italy. First it was bombing raids on Italian cities, which possessed only rudimentary antiaircraft defenses. Throughout the 1920s, Mussolini remade Italy in his image. [31][32][33], It was largely confirmed by an account provided by Aldo Lampredi[34] and the "classical" narrative of the story was set out in books written in the 1960s by Bellini delle Stelle and Urbano Lazzaro, and the journalist Franco Bandini (it). Mussolini needed a strong military to back up his dictatorship. [62] The following day, Hitler killed himself in Berlin, shortly before the city fell to the Red Army. He had a party behind him, of course, the Fascists, and he could call on squads of tough guys in blackshirt uniform (Camicie Nere) to beat down his opponents. Finally, in December, a British force under General Richard OConnor attacked Graziani at Sidi Barrani. However, the reason given by those involved in hanging Mussolini and the others in this way was to protect the bodies from the mob. Learn about Benito Mussolini, his rise to power, and role in World War II. [63] In accordance with Hitler's prior instructions, his body was immediately burned with petrol, leaving virtually no remains.[64]. [35][36] Audisio used the nom de guerre of "Colonnello Valerio" during his mission. He resigned from Avanti! Even though Hitler was surrounded by Allied troops in Berlin, Italy didnt want to take any more chances with its own destiny. Growing closeness to Hitler was a kind of fatal embrace for Mussolini. Mussolini led Italy, alright: he led it straight into disaster. The stagnant economy received a great deal of attention, with a number of well-publicized public works projects to create jobs, including a huge effort to drain the Pontine Marshes outside of Rome. And like his mother, he was arrested and locked away in a mental hospital, where he died in July 1942 at the age of 27. [20], In any event, Longo instructed a communist partisan of the General Command, Walter Audisio, to go immediately to Dongo to carry out the order. [69] Over a period of sixteen weeks it was moved from place to place the hiding places included a villa, a monastery and a convent while the authorities searched for it. Life in Mussolinis Italy was somewhat different from other dictatorships. /*-->