"John" took me outside and told me his orders were to eliminate them both, because Petacci knew many things. The Frenchdisintegrating all over the mapstopped the Italians cold. The Matteotti crisis shook Mussolini, but he managed to maintain his hold on power. Anxious that he would lose claim to conquered European lands as Hitler advanced, Mussolini entered the war in 1940. In front of the tomb is a register for visitors paying their respects to sign. Nonetheless, the sentiments were real, and in Mussolinis case, utterly deserved. The death of the gassed Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini took place on April 28, 1945, in the last days of World War II in Europe, when he was executed by an Italian partisan in the small village of Giulino di Mezzegra in northern Italy. The corpses were pelted with vegetables, spat at, urinated on, shot at and kicked; Mussolini's face was disfigured by beatings. Audisio said he read out a sentence of death, whereas Lampredi omitted this. [57] Samples of Mussolini's brain were taken and sent to the United States for analysis. Ia menjabat sebagai Perdana Menteri Italia pada periode 1922-1943 dan bersahabat dengan Adolf Hitler selama Perang Dunia II untuk menopang kepemimpinannya. Modern mechanized armies need a robust logistics chain to provide fuel, ammunition, and other sinews of war to sustain combat operations. 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. [77], In his 1993 book Dongo: half a century of lies, the partisan leader Urbano Lazzaro repeated a claim he had made earlier that Luigi Longo and not Audisio, was "Colonnello Valerio". When Alexander took command on February 20, 1943, one of his first tasks was to assess II Corps combat readiness after its setbacks during its early engagements around Kasserine Pass. A note left behind said the Fascist Party would no longer tolerate the cannibal slurs made by human dregs organized in the Communist Party.. Here are 13 facts about one of the darkest political figures of the 20th century. [23] In Dongo, Mussolini was reunited with Petacci, who had requested to join him, at about 2:30a.m. on 28 April. Two days into their trek, they were identified by a group of partisans, which was probably inevitable. What was Benito Mussolinis role in World War II? In the end, the once-free citizen now had no choice but to follow the regimes slogan: Credere, Obbedire, CombattereBelieve, obey, fight to defend the state!, It was in the realm of foreign policy that Mussolini eventually met his doom. ", "Mussolini's brain 'stolen for sale on eBay', Fabrizio Ciano, 3rd Count of Cortellazzo and Buccari, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Death_of_Benito_Mussolini&oldid=1149485213, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing Italian-language text, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 12 April 2023, at 14:55. The death of Benito Mussolini on April 28, 1945 was one of those latter occasions. According to Longo, he did so with the words "go and shoot him". 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. Like the other Great Powers, he also wanted to create a colonial empire in Africa, looking especially to the East African kingdom of Ethiopia. Benito Mussolini lies dead in Milans Piazza Loroto with his mistress, Clara Petacci. Faces of European History: Fact or Fiction? In any event, on 27 April, he joined a Luftwaffe column travelling in convoy and retreating northwards to Germany.[22]. Some Fascists came along and disinterred him a year later, absconding with it to a convent in the region of Lombardy, but the government was able to recover it and bury it at a Milan monastery. WebMussolini - Key takeaways. What was Benito Mussolinis personal life like? In 1940, Mussolini took his country into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany but soon was met with military failure. Mussolini named the fasci di combattimentoparamilitary groups which were largely under his control and from which his movement derived its own name, fascismoafter the Latin word fasces, which was the bundle of wooden sticks topped with an axe-head that ancient Roman authority figures attendants would carry to distinguish their rank. Growing closeness to Hitler was a kind of fatal embrace for Mussolini. This article is part of an ongoing series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II made possible byBank of America. At one time, he had been one of the most celebrated statesmen in the world. So successful was this paper that in 1912 he was appointed editor of the official Socialist newspaper, Avanti! By April 1945 as Mussolini sensed the defeat of the Germans, he planned to escape to Switzerland with his mistress. It was alongside his longtime mistress, Clara Petacci, that he died, however. At the same time, the corporative structure allowed the Mussolini regime to direct the nation's economic life and make decisions about production and distribution that were normally in the hands of the industrialists. The next day, their captors brought the pair to the small town of Giulino de Mezzegra on the shores of Lake Como and executed them in a hail of machine gun fire. Fearing another rescue attempt of Mussolini by the Nazis, partisans whisked Mussolini and Petacci away to a remote farmhouse. Fascist Italy was, or at least claimed to be, a totalitarian society, in which the state had complete control over the lives of its citizens. Another few miles and Mussolini would have been free. Mussolinis own Milan newspaper office was barricaded with huge rolls of newsprint paper and barbed wire and guarded by a curious mix of Fascists, police, and Army troops. Wikimedia CommonsAdolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Munich, Germany, circa June 1940. [Long live Italy! Virtually every land on earth has a creator figure, a father of his country: Charlemagne for the French, Peter the Great for the Russians, George Washington for the Americans. [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. [44] Urbano Lazzaro later denied that such a tribunal had been convened and said: I was convinced Mussolini deserved death but there should have been a trial according to law. Benito Mussolini, pictured before his brutal death. After Lampredi's account was published, most, but not all, commentators were convinced of its veracity. Life in Mussolinis Italy was somewhat different from other dictatorships. Rachele Mussolini recalled that Il Duces excruciating silence hit her the hardest when the couple found out about Brunos accident. After the Allies invaded North Africa in late 1942, war came to Italys doorstep. He once more became a schoolmaster, this time in the Venetian Alps, north of Udine, where he lived, so he confessed, a life of moral deterioration. But soon tiring of so wasteful a life, he returned to trade-union work, to journalism, and to extreme politics, which led yet again to arrest and imprisonment. On Oct. 29, 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini prime minister. The abolition of unions and the loss of the strike weapon were devastating blows to Italian labor, from which management clearly benefited. Togliatti said he had done so by a radio message on 26 April 1945 with the words: Only one thing is needed to decide that they [Mussolini and the other fascist leaders] must pay with their lives: the question of their identity. People began hurling rotten vegetables at the dictators corpse. They were those of Mussolini, the Petaccis, and the 15 suspected Fascists. Mussolini had been Italy's fascist leader since 1922, first as prime minister and, following his seizure of dictatorial powers in 1925, with the title Il Duce. Some historians believe that what happened to Mussolini was a factor in Hitler's decision to take his own life and have his body burned. A third son, Bruno, was killed in an air accident while flying a Piaggio Many historians have written about the famous Buffalo Soldiers of the all-Black 92nd Infantry Division, who fought with distinction during World War II. After World War I he began organizing fasci di combattimentonationalist paramilitary forces known for wearing black shirts. [21], By some accounts, on 26 April, Mussolini, now joined by his mistress Claretta Petacci, made several failed attempts to cross the border into Switzerland. [30], Although several conflicting versions and theories of how Mussolini and Petacci died were put forward after the war, the account of Walter Audisio, or at least its essential components, remains the most credible and is sometimes referred to in Italy as the "official" version. [40] The vehicle pulled up at the entrance of the Villa Belmonte on a narrow road known as via XXIV maggio and Mussolini and Petacci were told to get out and stand by the villa's wall. Mussolini needed a strong military to back up his dictatorship. [72], The re-interment in the Mussolini family crypt in Predappio was carried out on 1 September 1957, with supporters present giving the fascist salute. A detailed structure of fascist rule existed on paper, with a Grand Council to which the government was supposed to report and a Chamber of Deputies which made law, but in fact Italy was Mussolini's personal playground, and his own power nearly absolute. 3 He was wrong. He took his mistress, Clara Petacci, and fled north where the pair joined a German convoy headed to the Swiss border. In 1996, a previously unpublished private account written in 1972 by Aldo Lampredi for the Communist Party's archives, appeared in L'Unit. Though he tried to flee the country dressed as a German officer, Mussolini was killed, desecrated, and strung up at a gas station in Milan. He was still 80 miles away from the main British position at Mersa Matruh! [38][39] After they were picked up, they drove 20 kilometres south to the village of Giulino di Mezzegra. After returning to Italy, he amassed a large following while working as an editor for the socialist magazine Avanti!.
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