70 Years Ago: Mussolini is killed by Italian partisans

DavidRamsay99

After he was overthrown by a coup in 1943, rescued from captivity by German paratroopers and re installed as the puppet leader of the Italian Social Republic, the strutting Mussolini who once imagined himself as a new Julius Caesar who would turn the Mediterranean into an Italian controlled lake was a shell of his former self. He remained in power due to the presence of the Wehrmacht occupation troops who continued to hold back the American and British in the mountains to the south and the brutal repression of the Nazi SS and the remnant of his fascist forces who were opposed by Italian partisans in northern Italy.



Mussolini photographed with the German paratroopers who rescued him in 1943.

Though Rome was captured by the Allies in June 1944 the war in the Italian peninsula was a sideshow as the Western Allies invaded France and advanced on the Reich from the West while the Soviets steadily drove the Nazis out of their territory and cleared them from the Baltic, Poland, central Europe and the Balkans. In March-April 1945 the Nazi Reich was being overrun and Berlin was surrounded by the Red Army. The Italian Social Republic was crumbling and Allied troops were moving into northern Italy while the Germans were retreating.

Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were stopped and identified by Political Commissar of the partisans' 52nd Garibaldi Brigade, Urbano Lazzaro as they were fleeing by car to Switzerland where they planned to fly to Spain where they would have the protection of the Franco dictatorship. The couple were brought to Mezzegra where they spent the night. The next day Mussolini, Petacci and their entourage were put against a wall and shot by a Communist partisan using the nom de-guerre "Colonnello Valerio."



The bullet riddled corpses of Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci

The following day the corpses were dumped in a square in Milan where they were kicked and spat on before being hung upside down from meat hooks from the roof of an Esso petrol station. Achille Starace, a fascist follower, saluted the corpse of the Duce before being shot himself and hung up next to him.

The spectacle of Mussolini's body hanging public convinced Hitler cowering in his bunker beneath Berlin to shoot himself and have his body burned rather than fall into the hands of the Red Army.



Mussolini, his mistress and other fascists hanging upside down in the center of Milan.