April 27, 1945: While fleeing the country, Benito Mussolini and his mistress are captured by partisans in north Italy. Both are executed the next day.
On a morning in late April 1945, a column of trucks, carrying German troops in retreat, made its way to the Swiss-Italian border. Allied armies had launched an offensive on Lombardy weeks earlier, and the German occupation of northern Italy, like Axis efforts across Europe, was still extant in name only. Soviet Army forces had begun to shell Berlin while Hitler wrung his hands in his Führerbunker, weighing the pros and cons of different methods of suicide; within two weeks the Soviets would wrest the capital from the tatters of the German military and militia.
The trucks passed outside Dongo, a township on the western shore of the glacial lake Lago di Como, nestled at the crook of the southern Alps. It was outside this peacetime vacation village that Italian partisans (‘patriots’ as described by The New York Daily News, with many communists among them) stopped this fleeing German entourage. The partisans looked only to check that there were no Italians hidden among the troops in retreat - the unit had been notified that Il Duce was somewhere in flight out of the country. One volunteer, Urbano Lazzaro, spotted an awkward figure wrapped in an overcoat and hiding his face behind sunglasses. Lazzaro grew suspicious, and he approached:
Urbano Lazzaro recalled, “I called out ‘excellency.’ But he didn’t reply. I also shouted ‘comrade.’ Still nothing. So I got into the lorry. I went up to him and I said: ‘Cavaliere Benito Mussolini.’ It was as if I had given him an electric shock.”
Lazzaro’s instincts were right: here was his ‘excellency,’ father of Italian fascism, sitting in a vacation district in a truck surrounded by Italian antifascists. Mussolini was shocked, but so were they: “They had no idea what to do with him.” The partisans seized the disgraced dictator. The details of what happened next remain, to this day, and complicated by Lazzaro’s later investigations and revised accounts, fuzzy. Conspiracy theories, as with the death of Hitler, abound. But whatever happened over the next twenty-four hours, it ended in the execution of Mussolini and his mistress, and if their deaths were a private, understated affair - according to the traditional narrative, a simple death by firing squad against the wall of a secluded lakeside villa - then their fate after death was a wholly public event, in which every person in Milan had occasion to participate.
The partisans loaded Mussolini, Petacci, and their companions, high-ranking party officials, in a van, which arrived in Milan on the morning of April 29. In the Piazzale Loreto, a mob of thousands, far too many for the partisans to hold back, began to trample and spit on the bodies. It was the same piazzale where, in 1944, Italian fascist police and the German army had executed fifteen members of the Italian resistance.
One woman, reportedThe New York Times, “fired five shots into Mussolini’s body, according to Milan Radio, and shouted: ‘Five shots for my five assassinated sons!’” When the blood and dust cleared, the bodies were strung up, upside down, from the roof of a gas station. Reports of the morbid display reached Berlin the next day, hardening Hitler’s resolve to die quietly, and to die without ever having to face and to answer, dead or alive, the rage of the people.
My men shot them all together… Among them was the brother of Mistress Petacci. When they were led out to be shot, Petacci tried to escape but he was shot down… These men died well. Mussolini died badly.
An Italian partisan describes the execution of Mussolini and co.