Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Il Duce
Il Duce
BY
Christopher Hibbert
W ITH PHOTOGRAPHS
L I B R A R Y OF C O N G R E S S C A T A L O G CARD NO. 6 2 - 8 0 6 9
FIRST EDITION
viii
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
Preface vii
PART I
PART II
E M P IR E A ND AXIS
PART III
T H E F A L L OF T H E COLOSSUS
Chapter Fuge
3 The Grand Council Meeting 24-25 July 1945 173
Bibliography 346
Index 356
ILLUSTRATIONS
Facing page
Mussolini as a boy 80
Radio Times/Hulton Picture Library
PAOLO
died at Calboli tj jg
GIACOMO ^ANTONIO
died at Montemaggiore 1810
ALESSANDRO ITALICO VITO ROSA ROSETTA MARIA TERESA GIUSEPPINA PAOLO GIUSEPPE
EDDA = GALEAZZO CIANO VITTORIO = ORSOLA BUVOLI BRUNO - GINA RUBERTI ROMANO ANNA MARIA
b. tgto I b. tgi6 I b. tgi8 d. tg4t I b. 1937 b. 1929
MARINA
FABRIZIO RAIMONDA MARZIO GUIDO ADRIA b. tg^o
b. tgzt b. 1933 b. 1937 b. 1937 b. tg4o
NOTE: Luigi Mussolini (Benito's grandfather)came from an old Bolognese family who for several generations were traders
in muslin (mussolina). Luigi did not prosper on his farm and many of his descendants still live in and around Predappio
as poor peasants and farmers having profited nothing from their kinship with the Duce.
PART I
A t about half past ten on the night of 9 May 1936 a sudden roar,
which a journalist described as being like the noise of a volcanic
eruption, broke out from a crowd of some four hundred thousand
people standing shoulder to shoulder around Palazzo Venezia in
Rome. Benito Mussolini, il Duce del Fascismo, had stepped out
on to the palace balcony above their heads and gazed silently down
at them. His hands were on his hips, his immense jaw thrust out,
his legs splayed apart in a pose which was familiar to them all. He
was wearing the black shirt, grey uniform and round black cap of
the Fascist Militia, and for a few moments he stood in front of
the floodlit latticed windows as motionless as the symbol of his
régime—the axe and the lictor’s rods—carved in stone on the wall
beside him.
He lifted his hand. The crowd fell into silence. Not only in Rome
but all over Italy millions of people were listening and waiting for
the sound of the Duce’s voice. In the warm spring evening, already
given a strangely augural air by a moon of unusual clarity, crowds
of excited listeners, summoned out of doors by church bells and
sirens, looked up at the loudspeakers in the squares.
‘Officers, non-commissioned officers and m en/ Mussolini an
nounced at last in a deep, sonorous voice which Lady Oxford had
described as one of the most beautiful she had ever heard, ‘ Black
shirts of the Revolution, Italian men and women at home and
throughout the world, hearken: a great event has been accom
plished. The destiny of Abyssinia has been sealed today in the
fourteenth year of the Fascist era. Every knot has been cut by our
shining sword, and the Abyssinian victory will remain in the history
of our country, complete and pure like the legionari who have
fallen. Italy has her Empire. . . /
2
THE YOUNG REBEL
His final words were lost in a wild torrent of cheers, in the swell
ing, repetitive, ululating chant, *Duce! Duce! Duce! in the screams
of hysterical women, in the shouts of adoration and protestations
of loyalty to death. And the Duce stood looking down calmly, not
acknowledging the cheers, his hands gripping the stone balustrade,
his massive face expressionless in the brilliant light of the flood-
lamps.
‘He is like a god/ one of his gerarchi said as he watched him
standing there with such Olympian impassivity. ‘No, not like a
god/ his companion replied, ‘ he is one/
arousing and of feeling deep affection. His brother and his sister
both adored him, and even the village children with whom he was
so often quarrelling and fighting remembered years later the
warmth of his rare smiles and the unshakable loyalty of his friend
ship once obtained. They remembered too that he was a dreamer
as well as a fighter and that he would sit for hours on end watching
the birds and gazing across the beautiful valley of his birth, with
his chin in his hands, his enormous dark eyes beneath the bulging
forehead wondering yet watchful. ‘ One day/ he said to his mother,
*I shall astonish the world/
Each year he became more arrogant, less controllable. At school
he crawled under the desks to pinch the bare legs of the other
children, and on Sundays when Rosa took her children to Mass
down the rough track which led to the church, with their shoes
tied round their necks to keep them clean, Benito would lag behind
the others, kicking at the stones with his bare feet. He would never
stay long in church. The smell of the incense made him feel sick,
he said, while the colours of the vestments, the light of the candles,
the singing and the noise of the organ, all upset him profoundly.
He waited for the others to come out, sitting at the top of a tree
and throwing stones at the children on their way to Sunday school.
When he was nine he was sent away to school at Faenza, where
it was hoped that the rigid discipline of the Salesian Fathers would
achieve what his parents could not. Alessandro, his atheistic and
anti-Catholic spirit revolting at the idea of handing his wayward
son over to the care of the Church, but admitting that he could not
control him himself, took him there in a donkey-cart.
11 don't remember being much upset about leaving my brother
and sister/ Benito wrote later. ‘Edvige was only three years old,
Arnaldo was seven. But I was miserable at having to leave behind
me a little bird which I kept in a cage beneath my window. On
the day before we started, I had quarrelled with a companion and
had tried to hit him but missed and my fist went smash against a
wall and I hurt my knuckles so badly that I had to leave with my
hand bandaged up. At the moment of parting I cried/
He remembered how the donkey stumbled and fell just outside
Dovia and how his father grumbled and cursed and muttered that
it was an ill omen. It was October and the leaves were falling from
the trees and the streams were fast and full and the vines were
turning from red to yellow. They arrived at Faenza in the early
afternoon, and Alessandro knocked on the heavy door of the school
and handed his son over to the headmaster and then bent over
J
MUSSOLINI
him to kiss him good-bye with rough tenderness. As the door closed
Benito burst into tears again. The master took him into the yard
where the other pupils were playing, and he watched them silently,
standing alone in a corner, aloof and hostile.
He hated the school. He hated the Fathers, particularly his form-
master, who had a piercing laugh which frightened him, and he
hated the other boys, and most of all he hated the rich boys, who
sat at a different table and ate better food. He did not even try to
work. One day a Father beat him and he hit back and threw an
inkwell at him. He had only one friend, a boy with a skull so thick
that he let Benito amuse himself by hitting him hard with a brick.
In a fight with an older boy he pulled out his penknife and stabbed
him, and the headmaster decided that in the interest of his other
pupils he must expel the uncontrollable child; but on reflection he
decided to keep him until the end of the school year. Frustrated
by the strict rules, the interminable sermons, the lectures on sin
and corruption, he confessed before his first Communion to a long
catalogue of sins both real and imagined. The Fathers were over
come with relief when he left, and one of them afterwards said
that he had never had so difficult a pupil. At his next school, the
Giosuè Carducci school at Forlimpopoli run by the poet’s brother,
Valfredo, he was as deeply unhappy and as obstinately intractable.
In a fight with a boy who had pushed his arm when he was writing,
he lost control of himself and once more pulled out his penknife
to stab the boy in the bottom. And again he was expelled.
In spite of his passionate rebelliousness, however, and his refusal
to do work that seemed boring or unnecessary, he was recognized
as an unusually intelligent boy. He was readmitted to the Forlim
popoli school as a day pupil and three years later, at the age of
eighteen, he passed his final examinations and obtained a teaching
diploma. He had not lost his ferocious temper or his sulky inde
pendence, but he had discovered a hunger for knowledge and an
ability to learn. He had developed too a passion for declamation.
He loved to stand on the hills above Predappio reciting in his
already powerful voice the lyrical and patriotic poems of Carducci,
and one of his earliest oratorical triumphs was in the civic theatre
at Forlimpopoli, where, chosen by the masters at his school, he
made a dramatic and emotional speech to commemorate the death
of Giuseppe Verdi.
On 13 February 1902 he applied for an appointment in a school
at Pieve di Saliceto in the commune of Gualtieri, and the town’s
Socialist councillors, preferring his politics to those of older and
6
THE YOUNG REBEL
Italian lessons and being paid for articles in which he gave vent to
his peculiar form of anarchistic Socialism, his anti-Clericalism, his
erratic sense of social injustice, his angry hostility towards types
and classes of people for whom he felt a personal antagonism. He
began to read a great deal, impatiently and haphazardly, as though
he wished to absorb the whole history of political philosophy within
a few months. He rushed through various works of Lassalle,
Kautsky, Kropotkin, Marx and Schopenhauer, Sterner and
Nietzsche, Blanqui and Bertoni, picking up ideas, misinterpreting
them, extending them. Later he fell upon Baboeuf, Proudhon,
Kant and Spinoza, Hegel, Fichte, Sorel and Guyau, and everything
he read affected him deeply so that, as a woman he had met in
Geneva said afterwards, ‘his philosophical views were always the
reflection of the book he had happened to read last \ He found the
most inspiration not in the turgid pages of Marx, with which he
never got very far, but in the angry writings and dramatic lives
of Louis Auguste Blanqui, the violent French revolutionary, and
Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist. And it
is significant that the only book mentioned in his autobiography is
The Psychology of the Crowd by Gustave Lebon.
Fired by visions of violence he wandered through the streets of
Lausanne and Berne arguing, quarrelling and making inflamma
tory speeches to his trade union. He spent most of his evenings with
Russian students, strange, wild, dissolute Bohemians and nihilists,
and he drank with them and made love with them and argued with
them so intently that he seemed to believe, as one of them said,
‘ that each day might be his last ’. Benitouchka they called him,
but he found the endearment objectionable and preferred to refer
to himself, in the style of Sorel, as ‘un apostolato di violenza9
‘ When will the day of vengeance come? ’ he asked repeatedly
When would the people free themselves from tyranny and from
religion, that ‘immoral disease of the m ind'? Who was Christ, he
asked outrageously, but a ‘ small mean man who in two years con
verted a few villages and whose disciples were a dozen ignorant
vagabonds, the scum of Palestine'? W hat was Switzerland but a
‘ sausage-maker’s democracy which had never known how to find
the road of protest and pretended to be unaware of its immense
shame, believing, perhaps, that William Tell's apple was enough
to perpetuate the tradition of liberty’? In the summer of 1903 he
went too far for the peaceable Swiss, who had him arrested for
making a speech to his union in Berne in which he proposed a
general strike and advocated violence as a means of enforcing the
9
MUSSOLINI
Within a few weeks he was arrested again and spent Easter Day
1904 in Lucerne prison. It was, he said afterwards, ‘one of the
saddest days of my youth ’, and as he listened to the church bells
ringing he wondered whether the Swiss would send him back to
Italy on his release from prison to serve the year's imprisonment
to which he had been sentenced as a deserter. But he was, to his
profound relief, put off the train before it reached Chiasso, and
although expelled from the canton of Geneva he was allowed to
return to Lausanne, where thousands of other Italian emigrants
lived and tried to find work. Mussolini, however, was more for
tunate than most. His French was good by now, his German
passable; he had also learned a little English and some Spanish. He
managed to support himself and even to attend the lectures of
Vilfredo Pareto at the University of Lausanne and summer courses
at the University of Geneva by giving Italian lessons, by translating
philosophical and political works with the help of his Russian and
Polish friends, by writing articles, by borrowing money from his
mother and from anyone else who would lend it to him, until in
November 1904 the King of Italy, in order to celebrate the birth
of his son Prince Umberto, granted an amnesty to deserters.
Mussolini had thought of emigrating to America, but he changed
his mind and decided to go back to help his mother teach in her
school at Dovia. On his way home he met Angelica Balabanoff in
Lugano and left for Italy, so she says, having delivered himself of
a characteristic outburst against the rich. ‘ Look! ’ he said, waving
his arm towards the restaurants and hotels along the pier. ‘ People
eating, drinking and enjoying themselves. And I will travel third
class, eat miserable cheap food. Porca Madonna, how I hate the
rich! W hy must I suffer this injustice? How long must we wait? ’
Two days later Mussolini arrived back in the Romagna with a
reputation for political extremism which was now of more than
local interest. On 18 April 1904 the Rome paper La Tribuna had
published an item from its Geneva correspondent in which Musso
lini was referred to as €il grande duce9 of the local Italian Socialist
club. Already the pattern of his life had begun to form.
3
On 19 February 1905 Rosa Mussolini died of meningitis at the
age of forty-six, and Benito, so II Pensiero Romagnolo said, was
overcome with grief. At her funeral he ‘wanted to utter a last
ii
MUSSOLINI
dramatic phrase, for the enigmatic allusion, the improbable but apt
and striking metaphor. He had developed a skilful ability for arous
ing emotion by building up a series of apparently disconnected
sentences, delivered in staccato bursts but in varying tones of voice
and emphasized by a calculated contrast of gestures into a climactic
whole. He had developed, too, that ability which was later to
become a genius for imposing a mood upon an audience and then
abandoning himself to it until his speech became not a speech at
all, but a dialogue, a kind of unrehearsed litany in which the con
gregation chanted their responses to the preacher’s urgent questions
and he would re-phrase them and throw them back to receive a
louder answer, a more passionate encouragement, a stronger affirma
tion of their unity. He had already learned as well the advantages
of having a reliable claque whose infectious applause and shouts
of agreement could be evoked by a nod of the head or an agreed
gesture. And he had realized, above all, the necessity for a band
of faithful admirers around whom could be built a powerful follow
ing of men ready to regard him as their leader.
For he had by now recognized himself as the leader in chrysalis.
Prompted by ideas, still largely uncorrelated and not always under
stood, picked out of Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, Blanqui, Hegel
and Sorel and borrowed from the Russian Bolsheviks, he was com
ing to the belief which was soon to dominate his life—that the
existing order must be overthrown by an élite of revolutionaries
acting in the name of the people, and that this élite must be led by
himself.
But only the most violent of his fellow-Socialists were prepared
to follow him by endorsing his extreme and violent views, by sup
porting him in his indiscriminate attacks on Turati, Bissolati and
Treves, the moderates within the Party, and indeed on any group,
inside or outside the Party, which disagreed with him. He was an
outstanding man all right, the most conventional Socialists had to
agree, but a dangerous one, already as dangerous as Lazzari. They
heard with alarm his speeches advocating the efficacy of violence—
‘the iron necessity of violence’, as he later termed it—the com
pelling need to ‘use force surgically’. They read with nervous
disapproval accounts of his methods in Forlì and in particular of
one occasion when he marched to the town hall, followed by a large
crowd, and threatened to throw the Mayor out of the window if he
did not obtain a reduction in the price of milk.
When in the summer of 1911 the Government of Giovanni
Giolitti sent troops to Tripolitania and Cyrenaica with the declared
16
THE YOUNG REBEL
* Another delegate, the Russian nihilist Anna Kulishov, who had been im
prisoned at the same time as Filippo Turati in 1898 for her part in the revolu
tionary meetings held that year in Milan, gave a different and more perceptive
opinion of the fiery young man. 4He is nothing of a Marxist,* she said. *In fact he
is not really a Socialist at all. . . . Nor is he really a politician. He is a senti
mental poetaster who has read Nietzsche.* Another less enthusiastic opinion of his
performance at the Congress was given in II Resto del Carlino, which described
his *abundant gestures and expressions that make him resemble a Chinaman *.
The Corriere della Sera, however, endorsed the view of Margherita Sarfatti*s hus
band : 4Mussolini spoke with candour and sincere agitation . . . lean, bitter,
speaking with explosive sincerity, he is liked by the Congress which feels it has in
Jüm an interpreter of its feelings.*
18
2
THE INTERVENTIONIST
O C T O B E R 1913- 24 M A Y 1915
the others were less resolute and seemed relieved when the
nationalists called off their assault.
A few weeks later, Austria declared war on Serbia and the Great
War had begun. ‘Down with the war! ' Mussolini thundered from
the offices of Avanti/, repeating the slogans he had used when
attacking the nationalists of Trent. ‘ Down with arms, and up with
humanity! ' If the Government intervened in favour of Austria
and Germany, its partners in the virtually defunct Triple Alliance,
the workers' revolution would surely begin. Intervention on behalf
of France would be equally disastrous. It was the duty of the
Socialists, in fact, to fight to ensure that Italy maintained a policy
of ‘ rigid neutrality \ He sent a referendum to his fellow-Socialists
asking them to confirm their agreement with this uncompromising
stand, and his admiring followers immediately replied with their
support. When the Government declared that Italy would, in fact,
remain neutral and the Syndicalists declared that the decision was
wrong and that the country should enter the war, Mussolini
attacked them furiously as subversive traitors to the working-class.
Behind the outspoken condemnation of the interventionists, how
ever, different ideas were taking shape in Mussolini’s mind. On the
day of the Sarajevo murder, he was on holiday at Cattolica with a
fellow-journalist, Michele Campana; and as they travelled back to
Milan together, Mussolini confessed his growing disillusion with
his Socialist colleagues. ‘ I want to guide the Party intelligently,' he
told Campana, ‘ steering it as it should be steered through the great
events that lie ahead,' but he doubted that it would follow him
intelligently.
‘ Let’s understand this clearly,' he went on. ‘ The Central Powers
are attacking England and France through Serbia. A general con
flict is inevitable, and France will be its first victim if the civilized
countries do not unite to save her^TJie defeat of France would be
a death-blow to liberty in Europe. The Socialist Party should not
turn its back on the possibility of intervention in favour of France
if she is dragged into the war. But will the Party leaders understand
these truths? '
Michele Campana reminded him of his speech at the last Socialist
Congress at Reggio Emilia, when he had spoken with such force
against nationalism and against those Syndicalists who were sup
porting the war against Turkey in Libya.
‘ That was different,' Mussolini said quickly. That was a war of
aggression. This war could be Italy’s salvation. It could settle the
problem of Trentino and Trieste and deliver them from the grasp
20
THE INTERVENTIONIST
sion from the Party was proposed. Pale and visibly trembling, he
approached the platform to answer his critics. He was wearing the
shabby black suit which he always wore, and a delegate noticed
that his trousers were so short that they scarcely reached to his
ankle-bones. He had not shaved that day nor, so it seemed, the day
before. He stepped on to the platform, and the shouting and jeer
ing grew louder. He began to speak, but no one could hear what he
said. Coins and balls of paper, even chairs, were thrown on to the
stage as he shouted back at the angry delegates, not excusing him
self but accusing them of harbouring a petit bourgeois spirit, which
was always for him the final insult. 4I tell you you are wasting your
breath,' he yelled at them. 4You will all be forced into the war. . . .
You cannot get rid of me, because I am, and will always be, a
Socialist. . . . Your votes against me mean nothing at all.' The
words were shouted at the delegates in a voice which sounded close
to hysteria, and some of those present afterwards said that his eyes
were full of tears. ‘You hate me,* he told them desperately, throw
ing out one of those apparently paradoxical but at least partly
justifiable assertions which he was later never to tire of making.
4You hate me because you still love me I '
But it was no good. As he said himself, his fate was already
decided, and there was no point in trying to make himself heard
by people who were determined to reject everything he said. W ith
a small group of his supporters he left the People's Theatre and
returned to the offices of II Popolo d’Italia.
The resentment of the Socialists was bitter afid implacable.
Former friends and admirers felt a disillusion which went as deep
as hatred. W ith one of them, Ciccotti, who had previously referred
to him as having 4the brains of a direct descendant of Socrates ',
he fought a duel; by many others, including Angelica Balabanoff,
he was considered to be Socialism’s most dangerous traitor. They
accused him not only of betraying Socialism but of accepting
money through the French Institute in Milan for having done so.1
By the beginning of 1915, however, he had gained more supporters
by his volte-face than he had lost. He had swung to his side most
of those who agreed with his declarations that, in the last analysis,
one's country must come first, that the German Socialists having
supported the Kaiser had secured the collapse of the International,
1 Although the money supplied by Filippo Naldi for starting II Popolo d’Italia
does not seem to have come from French sources, there is good evidence to sug
gest that when the paper ran into financial difficulties in 1915 Mussolini received
contributions from *French comrades to help the interventionist campaign
22
THE INTERVENTIONIST
and that freedom was in danger. He had gained the support also
of Corridoni’s Syndicalists, of Libero Tancredi's anarchists, of the
irredentist Cesare Battisti, even of the right-wing Socialist Bissolati
whose expulsion from the Party he had helped to secure after the
attack on Tripoli. His opinions were endorsed by patriotic workers,
by nationalists, by thousands of young people for whom war was
sdii a dramatic adventure, by many intellectuals and by writers
such as Gabriele D’Annunzio who believed that participation in
the war would help Italy on her way towards complete unity,
towards the realization of her rightful sovereignty in the Adriatic
and her place of influence in Europe.
Encouraged by this growing success, by the resignation of
Giolitti and the appointment to the premiership of the opportunist
Antonio Salandra, which made intervention more likely, Mussolini
became more and more clamorous for war, increasingly intemper
ate. He fought a duel with the reformist Socialist Claudio Treves,
a former editor of Avanti!) he was arrested after a wild meeting of
interventionists in Rome; he fought with police officers who broke
up one of his meetings in Milan. And then at last, on 24 May
1915, to the satisfaction of the King, the irredentists, the futurists
and the Freemasons as well as of Mussolini, Italy declared war. The
interventionists who greeted the declaration with such noisy en
thusiasm were not, however, representative of the country as a
whole; and Mussolini was later to record with pleasure that they
had demonstrated unmistakably how a forceful minority could
always impose its views on the masses. It was a lesson which he
did not forget.
‘From today onwards,’ he wrote triumphantly in II Popolo
d’Italia, ‘we are all Italians and nothing but Italians. Now that
steel has to meet steel, one single cry comes from our hearts— Viva
l’Italia!9
Already the seed of Fascism was sown.
23
3
THE FASCIST IN THE MAKING
A U G U S T 1915- 28 O C T O B E R 1922
standing near him were killed as pieces of jagged metal from the
bomb and the burst barrel flew into the air. He was thrown violently
to the ground himself and carried back to the dressing-station
scarcely conscious and with more than forty pieces of the mortar
embedded in his flesh. The hospital to which he was taken at
Ronchi was so badly damaged in a bombardment that most of the
wounded had to be evacuated, but he was too ill to be moved.
Some weeks later, when he was well enough to return to Milan,
Margherita Sarfatti went to visit him. ‘ I shall never forget going
to see him / she wrote. ‘He was so exhausted he could scarcely
speak. He smiled out at us from his pale face, his eyes sunken in
great hollows. His lips scarcely moved; one could see how horribly
he had suffered. Someone asked if he would like a book to read.
He refused. “ I read only this, because it is familiar. I cannot read
anything new ” and he indicated a volume of Carduccio poems/
Mussolini, of course, was not a man to let the advantages of being
a wounded soldier pass by without using them. ‘ I am proud \ he
wrote with characteristic self-dramatization as soon as he was suffi
ciently recovered to hold a pen, ‘to have reddened the road to
Trieste with my own blood in the fulfilment of my dangerous duty/
‘ I faced atrocious pain/ he wrote in his autobiography in no less
dramatic a strain. ‘My suffering was indescribable. I underwent
practically all my operations without the aid of an anaesthetic. I
had twenty-seven operations in one month; all except two were
without anaesthetics/
Recognizing the value of a wound at such a time, he went back
to the offices of II Popolo d’Italia leaning on crutches, which he
continued to use long after the need for them had gone. As a
veteran of the war he felt able to attack the Socialists, the clerical
pacifists and the neutralists, whom he took to be responsible for the
disaster at Caporetto, with more licence than he could have allowed
himself as a civilian journalist; and as one of those to whom he
repeatedly referred as ‘ the survivors \ he began to urge the participa
tion of the returned soldier in the Government of the new Italy, a
Government which must be strong and uncompromising. As early
as February 1918 he was advocating the emergence of a dictator,
‘a man who is ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean
sweep \ Three months later, in a widely reported speech at Bologna,
he hinted that he himself might prove such a man.
It was to those who had fought in the war that these aspirations
were principally addressed, and it was amongst them that they
found their most enthusiastic support. Mussolini’s urgent claims
*5
MUSSOLINI
saving the country from chaos. There was, too, running through
the hooliganism, the degrading savagery, the bombast and rather
absurd devotion to the less admirable military virtues, an unmistak
able thread of patriotic zeal and idealism. There were those, of
course, who supported the Fascists for selfish reasons—industrialists
and war profiteers who saw their factories and capital threatened
and who hoped, as Giolitti himself did, that they could use Fascism
to crush Socialism, landlords who looked to the squadristi to pro
tect their property, peasants who hoped to wrest land from Socialist
farmers, angry soldiers impatient to satisfy grievances against those
who had stayed at home and anxious to enjoy the fruits of the
social revolution which the war had brought about, opportunists
who saw in a possible Fascist State careers and money and power
which would otherwise have been denied them. But there were also
many idealists in the movement. Puccini, for instance, supported it
and Toscanini was actually a Fascist candidate in 1919. Benedetto
Croce thought Fascism in power would be better than the existing
anarchy and believed, like Giolitti, that the Party might be con
verted to constitutionalism. Many Catholics supported the move
ment too, as they saw in it the only firm defence against the atheism
of the Communists. And so by the end of 1920, from bad sources
and from good, Fascism had built for itself a large body of political
support. In the elections of May 1921 in an anti-Socialist alliance
with Giolitti, for which the liberals never forgave the ageing
Premier, thirty-five Fascists were elected to the Chamber of
Deputies, and one of these was Mussolini. He fully realized now
the opportunities which were being presented to him. In the un
certainty and chaos of Italian life he was beginning to gather
round him, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks had done, a group of
dedicated revolutionaries prepared to seize power in the name of
the workers whether or not the workers supported them. And it
was he who would lead them. He had seen the Socialists losing
influence before Italy’s entry into the war and he had abandoned
a Party which he saw that he could no longer lead to power; but
Fascism he could lead to power, and power excited him and never
failed to excite him. 'I am obsessed by this wild desire,’ he con
fessed without shame years later. *It consumes my whole being. I
want to make a mark on my era with my will, like a lion with its
claw! A mark like this! ’ And savagely he scratched the covering
of a chair-back from end to end. He would do anything to fulfil
his ambitions, he admitted. The end was always the justification
of the means. The Fascist policy of squadrismo, for instance, had
30
THE FASCIST IN THE MAKING
ment and the liberal State was necessary and imminent, he was as
constantly restraining his more impatient colleagues Italo Balbo,
Dino Grandi and Roberto Farinacci from putting any plans for a
coup into effect. He was, indeed, not as confident as they were that
Fascism was sufficiently powerful yet to be sure of success, and he
was also more anxious than they that the Fascists should assume
power with an approval which was at least general if not universal.
Many Fascist Deputies had been helped on their way to the
Chamber by the bludgeons of their supporters, and the number
of deaths on polling day had disturbed him. ‘The trouble with
Mussolini/ one of his more arrogantly ruthless henchmen said, 1is
that he wants everybody’s blessing and changes his coat ten times
a day to get it/
In August 1922, after months of vacillation and uncertainty,
Mussolini saw his chance clearly. In that month, to the fury of an
exasperated public, a general strike was called. Mussolini declared
that unless the Government prevented the strike, the Fascists
would. The opportunity of violence in the name of law and order
was again presented to him. At Ancona, Leghorn and Genoa, the
squadristi attacked Socialist buildings and burned them to the
ground; and in Milan they broke up the printing presses of Avanti!
Two months later, at a Party congress held in Naples, Mussolini
was so impressed by the obvious determination of 40,000 Fascists
that he said more and threatened more than he had ever done
before. ‘ What we have in view/ he declared, ‘ is the introduction
into the liberal State, which has fulfilled its functions . . . of all
the forces of the new generation which has emerged from the war
and the victory. . . . Either the Government will be given to us
or we shall seize it by marching on Rome/
*Roma! Rom a!2*9 repeated the claque. ‘ Roma! Roma!9 thousands
of other voices shouted, taking up the cry.
trousers and cut-away black coat appealed to him, but he did not
look well in it and was constantly wriggling his neck in the butterfly
collar and shaking back the cuffs of his starched shirt. When
Rachele came to Rome he looked a little better dressed than he had
done before; but at the beginning she stayed behind in Milan with
Edda and their two boys—Vittorio, bom in 1916 soon after they
were married, and Bruno, bom in 1918. Rachele did not want to
come to Rome. She was conscious of the fact that she looked and
talked like a Romagnol peasant and would feel out of place and
unhappy. She did not want to share Benito's public life but just to
remain a wife and a mother to his children, and she knew that was
all he expected or wanted from her. When friends had called to see
him in Via Merenda before the war, they had often found Rachele
doing the family's washing in the courtyard.
1Is he in? ' one of them called to her one day.
He was out, Rachele said, referring to him as ‘the m aster' as
wives do in the Romagna.
‘Where's he gone? '
‘ I don't know. He never tells me what he's doing.’
He never did. There was no resentment. Men were like this. It
was a happy marriage. She realized her husband was a donnaiuolo
and she was later to admit that she knewhe had about twenty mis
tresses—‘and what of it? ' she wanted t^ffnow; he loved his family
as well. Donnaiuoli usually do. She did not blame him. She was a
hard-working, capable housewife, loyal, humourless, sometimes ill-
tempered, often sulky. She was simple, but she had a peasant's
shrewdness. She understood little about her husband and less about
his work and always irritated him when she attempted to advise or
warn him, and so rarely did. Later when she moved to Rome she
was constantly receiving anonymous letters and telephone calls and
messages from her friends, but when she spoke to her husband he
would say sharply, ‘You know nothing about it.' And it was true,
and she did not mind him telling her so. ‘ He was always the best of
fathers and a good husband,' she said when he was dead, and that
was true as well.
‘W hat a character! ’ she is reported to have exclaimed, amused
and proud and puzzled, when told that Benito had been made Head
of the Government.
The men who had to work for him expressed their opinion of
him in similar terms. To some he was a genius, to others merely
louche, but to all remarkable. He was, of course, a brilliant propa
gandist and he did not hesitate to use this genius for publicity not
38
THE HEAD OF THE GOVERNMENT
to them or when they might be, as they often were, replaced with
out warning for no reason which they could understand, but which,
often enough, was because the Duce had felt their influence a threat
to his position on the pinnacle of power, where he was frankly
determined to remain. In the morning he would telephone a
Minister and without any greeting shout at him a string of peremp
tory instructions and then, a few hours later, he would telephone
again and speak to him perhaps as if he were his closest friend.
Unpredictable, excitable and glowing with vitality and the proud
knowledge of his power, he was as capable of arousing craven fear
by his anger as devotion by the benedictory peace of his forgiveness.
W ithin a few months of his rise to power, his success seemed
assured. The tumult of Italy had subsided into a mood of guarded
but admiring watchfulness. The workers went back to the factories,
production increased, the streets were quiet, the students took up
their books again. On assuming office he had no political programme
and contented himself with undertaking to balance the budget,
ensure a fair deal for the workers and conduct the country’s foreign
policy with determination and dignity. *We shall succeed/ he said,
*because we shall work/ And with the skill of the great propagan
dist that he was, he succeeded in impressing upon the people how
hard he worked himself, not only at his desk but in the factories
and fields encouraging the workers. Pictures of him laying bricks,
hammering with fierce concentration in smithies, cutting corn with
his great chest photographed as he liked to have it photographed,
naked and glistening in the sun, appeared daily in the Press.
The Italians followed his lead. He was the youngest Prime
Minister they had ever had, and most of them were proud of him.
They accepted with pleasure the restoration of the eight-hour day,
enormous cuts in Government expenditure (which had grown so
large under previous administrations that the estimated deficit for
1922-3 was 6,500 million lire), the transference to the retired list or
to other work of thousands of officials. Within two years a deficit in
the postal services of 500 million lire was converted, according to
Fascist calculations which have not been shown to be false, to a
surplus of 43 million lire and a deficit on the railways of 1,400
million lire was converted to a surplus of 176 million lire. And what
was more, Italians were proud to tell you, the trains ran on time.
The Italians, indeed, began to feel pride in many things. Fascism
seemed to work. Mussolini had the backing of the people and he
was careful to nourish the impression that he had saved them from
chaos and Bolshevism. The disillusion of the workers with their
40
THE HEAD OF THE GOVERNMENT
impatiently. *And you can give him my decorations too if you like/
Ciano also described another occasion when the Ministry of Fine
Arts were having difficulty in finding a work of art which would be
suitable as a present for Reichsmarshal Goering on his fiftieth birth
day. ‘At home the Duce only owns one good piece/ the Minister
wrote, ‘a self-portrait by Mancini. . . . Well, when he heard that
a gift had to be made to Goering . . . he immediately thought of
giving his Mancini. I had to argue a great deal to make him change
his mind. . . . The Duce's indifference to personal possessions is
moving/
Soon after coming to Rome he decided not to accept any salary
as either Premier or Minister or Deputy, living on the money he
received for the articles he still wrote, mainly for American papers
and from II Popolo d’Italia* He had a profound contempt for those
whose overriding ambition was to be rich. It was a mania, he
thought, ‘ a kind of disease ’, and he comforted himself with the
reflection that the rich were rarely happy, and he would refer with
satisfaction to Rockefeller, who had lived ‘ on milk and oranges for
the last sixteen years of his life \ But although he had no private
wealth, nor ever wanted it, Mussolini did not live austerely. He was
not a gourmet, his mistresses rarely received as presents so much as
a pair of stockings or a bottle of scent, his children went to State
schools, his wife lived simply, he wore the same suit day in and day
out for weeks on end, but he never, on the grounds of economy,
refrained from indulging a whim. He had taken flying lessons in
Milan, and now that he was qualified as a pilot he had his own
aeroplane and took it up whenever he felt inclined; he enjoyed
driving, and so ordered an expensive red sports car; he enjoyed
riding, and soon had a string of horses in his stables; he liked
reviewing the Fleet and the Army and later on he took immense
pleasure in air displays, and his opponents frequently accused him
of ordering these expensive demonstrations because of the personal
satisfaction they gave him; he was fond of animals, so when he had
grounds in which to keep them he had what amounted almost to
a zoo—not only horses and dogs, but gazelles, a monkey, an eagle,
a deer, a tiger cub, several cats which were his favourite animals,
even a puma which he kept on a leash in his room until it broke
loose one night and roamed through the house to the terror of the
* He remained uninterested in money to the end. It was with the greatest diffi
culty he was persuaded to accept a salary as President of the Social Republic in
1943. 1What do I want with all that money? * he asked when a secretary brought
him a decree prepared by one of his Ministers which allowed him 125,000 lire a
month; and he refused to sign it.
43
MUSSOLINI
46
5
THE DICTATOR
13 J U L Y 1924- 10 J U N E 1940
more impetuous followers. But now the time for action had come.
‘ I declare here in front of this assembly,’ he said, ‘ and in front of
the Italian people that I and I alone assume the political, moral
and historic responsibility for everything that has happened. If
misquoted words are enough to hang a man, then out with the
noose and the gallows 1 If Fascism has been castor oil and club and
not a proud passion of the best Italian youth, the blame is on me.
If Fascism has been a criminal plot, if violence has resulted from
a certain historic, political and moral atmosphere, the responsi
bility is mine, because I have deliberately created this atmos
phere. . . . Italy wants peace and quiet, work and calm. I will
give these things with love if possible and with force if necessary.’
The date was 3 January 1925. It was one of the fundamental
dates in the history of Fascism.
Thereafter there was no further thought of compromise, no turn
ing back. Although the Matteotti murder had provoked a wide
spread reaction against Fascism in a suddenly disillusioned country,
it had also shown how weak and disorganized were its opponents
and how few of them were prepared actively to resist it. Within
five years Mussolini was able, with the help of Roberto Farinacci,
the newly appointed Secretary of the Party, to achieve his declared
object—the ‘ complete Fascistization ’ of Italy. Most of the remain
ing free newspapers were either suppressed or came under Fascist
control. A few self-styled independent papers remained, but were
so colourless as to be treated with contempt by the State and with
indifference by its opponents. Opposition parties were dissolved,
and free elections came to an end. The Chamber of Deputies
became little more than a means of clothing Fascist decrees with
an aura of national approval; the Senate was filled with senatori
prepared to wear black shirts when required and to chant Fascist
slogans; the Grand Council of Fascism, formed by Mussolini who
became its president with full powers to decide its agenda and its
membership, was grafted on to the Constitution as a check on any
independence which might be displayed by individual members of
the Cabinet. Nominated podestà took the place of elected mayors
in an increasingly centralized autarchy. The Fascist Party song,
Giovinezza, was sung at all the flamboyant, choreographic displays
which the Duce loved, and often instead of the Marcia Reale, for
the Party was now taken to be synonymous with the State. Strikes
and lock-outs were declared to be incompatible with the new,
elaborately involved and characteristically corrupt Corporative
System, which, Mussolini said, was ‘ destined to become the civiliza-
50
THE DICTATOR
del grano, farmers were given medals and subsidies for helping to
cut wheat imports; but the farming industry was seriously affected
by this concentration on cereals, which were not, and never had
been, an economical agricultural product for Italy. Thousands of
small farmers and discontented peasants left the land, while noth
ing was done to break up the vast landed estates which were one of
the main causes of their discontent. As year followed year wages and
conditions of work in the towns as well as in the country failed to im
prove at the rate they did in most other countries in Western Europe.
And yet few blamed the Duce. Fascism was seen to be imperfect;
but its founder was still the man of destiny. There might be anti-
Fascists, but there were few anti-Mussolinians. Hardly anyone
questioned him. He was not only a dictator. He was an idol. Photo
graphs of him were cut out of newspapers and stuck on the walls of
thousands of homes, slogans in praise of him were splashed in
white paint everywhere, glasses that he had drunk from and pick-
axes that he had used during his extensive tours were prized as
holy relics. In 1929 when he settled a problem which had been
dividing Italy since 1870 and signed with the Vatican the agree
ment known as the Lateran Pacts, his popularity reached new
heights. Every former anti-clerical statement and blasphemous
attack on ‘ the small and insignificant Christ ’ was forgiven or for
gotten by his former Catholic critics, who recognized in the Lateran
Pacts the beginning of a new and satisfactory relationship between
Church and State. His equivocal attitude to Catholicism and
Christianity, which led him at one moment to speak of himself as
*profoundly religious. . . . A Catholic and therefore a Christian '
and at another moment to profess himself an unbeliever, was over
shadowed by the new official Fascist presentation of the Duce as
a practising Catholic.
He was, in fact, never more than an intermittent Catholic. He
was, on the contrary, and always had been, extremely superstitious
and was quite unashamed of being so. He was seen frequently in
public to put his hand in his pocket to touch his testicles to guard
himself from the gaze of someone whom he suspected of having
the evil eye. He had strange beliefs also, Margherita Sarfatti says,
‘about the moon, the influence of its cold light upon men and
affairs and the danger of letting its rays shine on your face when
you are sleeping'.1 He was proud of his skill in interpreting dreams
1 The belief in the malign influence of moonlight was perhaps inherited from
his father, who blamed its rays for an attack of scurvy he once suffered when he
was in prison in 1902.
53
MUSSOLINI
After reading those which describe the author’s family and the
lovely countryside in which he was born, Giovanni Gentile said
that no man who was a tyrant could have written them. It was an
extravagant claim, but an understandable one. And it was prob
ably true that they were written from the heart, for Mussolini did
not have the ability to recognize beauty in a work of art.
Margherita Sarfatti describes an occasion when they were look
ing at the tapestries in the Vatican museum together. He could
not find much beauty in th em .4W hat are they when all’s said and
done? ’ he said. ‘Just bits of material.’ Even the Vatican itself did
not greatly impress him—only its size. ‘ W hat a lot of rooms,' he
said like a little boy in a palace,4and how big they are. They knew
how to build then.’
Hitler also noticed Mussolini’s lack of appreciation of any of the
visual arts, and on a visit to the Pitti and Uffizi galleries in Florence
in 1938 he was shocked by the Duce’s obvious boredom. Later, at
Naples, Mussolini’s indifference to the pictures he had taken Hitler
to see shocked the Führer again. When he 4had looked at three
pictures ’, Hitler said, 4he could not bear any more. Consequently
I saw nothing of them myself.’ Mussolini was never able to sympa
thize with the Italians’ pride in their great artistic heritage and
could not understand the dismay caused by the Fascist Govern
ment’s gift of Myron’s Discobolus to Hitler, who had expressed
admiration for it on his visit to Rome. He also refused to sympa
thize with their fear that their works of art might be destroyed by
British or American bombs during the war.
But although painting and sculpture and all objects of art and
of virtu left him puzzled and unmoved, and although a visit to
the opera drove him to boredom and, so his son Vittorio says, even
tually to sleep, literature continued throughout his life to exercise
upon him a compelling fascination which was none the less sincere
because while flaunting his literary taste he had a secret passion
for cheap and erotic novels.5 It was one of his great sorrows, so he
5 Ignazio Silone, of course, disagrees with this view. In his brilliant anti-
Fascist book The School for Dictators he makes one of his characters say when
commenting on Mussolini’s account of his father reading Machiavelli^ The
Prince to him every Saturday night : 1Our knowledge of Mussolini’s father makes
it certain that the last thing he was capable of on Saturday nights was reading
anything to anybody. Mussolini’s only object in encouraging such legends is to
create an impression. He uses medieval uniforms and rides on horseback for the
same purpose. It is Mussolini’s great good fortune that throughout his life he has
read and still reads nothing but newspapers. However, as a talented journalist, he
is able to talk and write arrogantly about all the things that he knows nothing
whatever about.'
60
THE DICTATOR
the early and irresponsible Fascist motto ‘Me ne frego’ (‘I don’t
care a damn ’). It was now, as the Duce himself never tired of saying,
‘ the classic and historical responsibility ’ of Fascism to insist on the
‘ severa osservanza dello stile fascista just as it was the duty of the
Fascist to set an example of efficiency, decisiveness, dinamismo, in
contrast to the laxness of pre-Fascist Italian life and to the way of
life in the Western Democracies, which was characterized as seden
tary, traditionalist, bourgeois and pantofolaie—as decadent as
carpet-slippers. ‘ Live dangerously ’, ‘ Life must not be taken easily ’,
were not merely slogans; they were fundamental tenets of Fascist
faith. ‘In other countries/ Mussolini was fond of pointing out,
‘ revolutionists have by degrees become more complaisant; but here
in Italy, year by year, we have grown more radical, more stubborn/
The Fascist must be ever on guard against a relapse into the lazy
habits, both mental and moral, of the past. He must be ‘ Vuomo
nuovo del tempo di Mussolini\ ardent, determined, dedicated,
ready to renounce pleasure and even personality in the service of
the strict ideals of Fascist morality. ‘ We are advocates/ Mussolini
said, ‘ of the collective significance of life, and we wish to develop
this at the cost of individualism/ In pursuit of this aim, the regis
tered Party members, who in March 1937 numbered more than two
million, were to set a rigid standard of behaviour to which the
whole race would eventually conform.
The five years preceding the outbreak of war became known as
Vera Starace, because of the repeated efforts made by the Secretary
of the Party, Achille Starace, to mould the Italians into the obedient
conformists and Spartan disciples of Mussolini’s ideal. Starace was
a blindly devoted follower of the Duce, unimaginative and unin
telligent, hated particularly in the north because he was an ignorant
and vulgar southerner, the kind of official, indeed, that Mussolini
liked to place in positions of responsibility in the Fascist hierarchy.
By the later nineteen-thirties there was, Ciano noted in his diary,
‘ a veritable popular uprising against the pettifogging restrictions of
the Party Secretary. He had made/ the Foreign Minister went on
perceptively, ‘ the two most serious mistakes which you can make
when you have to deal with the Italian people. He has created an
atmosphere of persecution and he has caused annoyance by a
thousand little things of a personal nature. Now the Italians like
their rulers to rule with heart. They may forgive you if you do them
harm, but not if you pester them.’
Starace’s passion for uniforms and medals, his insistence that the
Roman salute should take the place of the handshake, his devotion
62
THE DICTATOR
to slogans, and his eager and sycophantic adoption of all the Duce’s
ideas, earned him not only the dislike but also the contempt of
his fellow-countrymen. When in 1938 Mussolini endorsed the views
of Bruno Cicognani, who had written an article in the Corriere della
Sera attacking the *ridiculous ' use of lei in polite conversation as
being a form of address not in keeping with the best Italian literary
tradition or with personal dignity, Starace took up the campaign
against lei with zealous fury and issued circulars demanding the
immediate and compulsory use of voi in its place. His extravagant
attacks on lei deepened the derision with which the Italian people
regarded him and provoked the opponents of the régime to use
this form of address as often as possible. Benedetto Croce, now
a strong and outspoken anti-Fascist who had always used voi with
his family and friends, abandoned the custom and in defiance of
Starace addressed them all with lei. On occasions Starace went
beyond even the wide limits of Mussolini's approval, as, for in
stance, when he attempted to make it a rule that all official letters
should end with the words ‘ Viva il Duce \ Mussolini first heard of
this new rule when he saw it announced in the newspapers and
called the Secretary to his angry presence. ‘ Dear Madam,' he dic
tated furiously as soon as Starace entered the room. ‘This is to
inform you that your son, a corporal in this regiment, has fallen off
his horse and cut his head open. Viva il Duce. . . . Dear Sir, This is
to inform you that reduction of personnel next month will mean
your dismissal from this office. Viva il Duce.' Mussolini dictated
several more imaginary letters before turning on Starace and send
ing him away with the enraged charge that he had succeeded in
making him ‘ look ridiculous to the whole of Italy '.
As Party Secretary, Starace was also responsible for the increased
intrusion of Fascist ideals into sport, which ultimately became a
virtual State monopoly over which the propaganda departments of
the State exercised a typically absurd control, decreeing, for in
stance, that the national tennis team should wear black shirts and
refuse to shake hands, and that photographs showing Primo Camera
knocked out in the ring should never be published. While the
organization known as Dopolavoro did much good in providing
cheap games and even cheap holidays for workers, the insistence on
the stile fascista in sport and recreation was resented as both meddle
some and pretentious. The institution of what became known as
the ‘Fascist Saturday', a weekly holiday which was, as a replace
ment o f cil weekend *and all that that term implied, to be ‘ imbued
with the spirit of the Revolution’ was a typical example of this.
63
MUSSOLINI
64
PART II
THE DIPLOMAT
28 O C T O B E R 1922- 10 J U N E 1940
his war, and young men said they would gladly die in it by suicidal
air-raids on the British Fleet. Many former liberals supported the
war, and the Church did not oppose it. Several former anti-Fascists
living in voluntary exile returned to support their country in her
hour of need. ‘ The Italian people ’, Mussolini announced in one of
those speeches which delighted Italians whether Fascists or not,
‘are worthy of their great destiny.’ The shocked reaction of the
British people when they were told about the Hoare-Laval Pact of
1935, which planned the partition of Abyssinia between Italy and
the Emperor, had been interpreted as anti-Italian; and when, in
the uproar after its publication, Sir Samuel Hoare was obliged to
give up the Foreign Office to the detestable Anthony Eden, who
could be relied upon to pursue a more rigid and unsympathetic
policy towards Italy, Mussolini’s popularity rose to new heights.
There was yet another and more fateful consequence of Musso
lini’s victory. Watching the success of his Italian friend in his
quarrel with the League of Nations, from which he himself had
flamboyantly withdrawn in October 1933, Adolf Hitler drew his
own conclusions. It was not merely a vindication of the philosophy
of force, it was not only another demonstration of the decadence of
democracy; the League’s débâcle marked the end of the so-called
Stresa Front and the beginning of the Italo-German alliance.
There had been a time when such an alliance had seemed im
possible. Only two years before, relations between the two countries
had been not merely strained but on the point of disruption. Musso
lini, anxious to protect Italian interests in Central and South
eastern Europe, was determined to prevent Hitler realizing his
known ambitions in Austria. On 17 February 1934 he made a
declaration, in which the British and French Governments joined,
upon the necessity for the maintenance of Austrianjndependence;
a month later he emphasized Italy’s resolve to prevent German
expansion across her northern and eastern borders by signing with
Austria and Hungary the Rome Protocols, which provided for
mutual consultation in the event of a threat to any one of the
three countries; and when in July the Nazis sò far overplayed their
hand as to attempt a coup d'état by murdering the Austrian Chan
cellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, while his wife and children were guests
of Mussolini in Italy, the Duce’s reaction was immediate and force-
71
MUSSOLINI
tives realized at once what was in his mind and conferred together
that night to decide whether or not to warn him against an attack
on Abyssinia. They decided his support in their stand against Ger
many was too important to risk, and did not do so. Mussolini had
left Stresa believing that he had gained his point. And when in
June the Anglo-German naval treaty was signed, his belief that
Britain did not really care what happened in the world so long as
her own interests were not threatened was again understandably
reinforced.
Four months later the invasion of Abyssinia had begun. And
that autumn, as Western Europe turned so ineffectually against
him, the idea of an alliance with the one powerful country which
had not openly done so came to the forefront of Mussolini’s mind.
The first overtures had come from Hitler, who had admired the
Duce for the whole of his political life and had been deeply in
fluenced by many of Fascism’s ideological conceptions and choreo
graphic techniques. In 1926 he had written to Rome asking for a
signed photograph. ‘Please thank the above-named Gentleman’,
the Italian Foreign Office had coldly replied to the Embassy in
Berlin, 4for his sentiment and tell him in whatever form you con
sider best that the Duce does not think fit to accede to the request.’
Although there is some evidence to suggest that the Nazis were
being subsidized from Italy as early as 1932, the Duce himself had
no wish to sully his remarkable reputation by open contact with
the ‘unsavoury adventurer’ who was their leader. Even after
Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, which took him by surprise, Musso
lini’s suspicion and wary disdain did not relax. He had made
Fascism, he believed, both respected and admired and had no wish
to taint it by association with National Socialism, which he des
cribed at this time as being the ‘ revolt of the old German tribes of
the primeval forests ’. There was certainly no doubt that Mussolini
was held in a higher regard both in Europe and in America than
Hitler ever was or could be. The accolades which had been so
enthusiastically and gratuitously cast upon him by conservative
writers and public figures in the nineteen-twenties and early
thirties had been so frequent and so unequivocally phrased that he
had no trouble in believing that he was indeed the greatest states
man of his time.
73
MUSSOLINI
Piazza del Duomo at Milan in which for the first time he used a
term which was for ever afterwards to hold a special connotation of
ruin for his country. Referring to the better understanding between
Italy and Germany, he borrowed a dramatic metaphor used two
years before by the Hungarian Premier Combos in describing this
understanding. There had been created, the Duce said, ‘a Rome-
Berlin axis around which all European states that desire peace
can revolve ’. Delighted by this public announcement of friendship,
the Germans read much more into the speech than had been in
tended and were given the impression by their Press that a common
policy had already been established.
Meanwhile in Germany, Mussolini’s new Foreign Minister, Count
Galeazzo Ciano, was paving the way for the State visit to Germany
which the Duce was shortly to make. The son of Admiral Count
Constanzo Ciano, a hero of the First World War, Galeazzo had
entered the Diplomatic Service at the age of twenty-two after work
ing as a journalist in Rome. Three years later, on 24 April 1930, he
had married Edda Mussolini, the Duce’s eldest daughter and, so it
was believed, his favourite child. Thereafter Ciano’s rise to power
was meteoric. Within two months he was Consul-General in Shang
hai and soon became Minister Plenipotentiary in China. By 1933
he was back in Rome as head of the Press Office, and after service
as a pilot during the Abyssinian war he was appointed Foreign
Minister. He behaved in those early years as a devoted disciple of
the man who had made him and who now treated him not only
as a well-liked son-in-law but as an intimate confidant. Vain, self-
indulgent and indulged, ambitious, pretentious and evasive, Ciano
attempted to conceal by a superficial cynicism what was undoubted
ly a deep admiration for the Duce. Even in the diary which he began
to keep with assiduity after he became Foreign Minister he often
made transparent efforts to disguise the idolatry which in conversa
tion with his friends he took pains to hide altogether. Only occa
sionally did he allow himself to lapse into emotional eulogy. ‘ The
Duce praised me several times today,’ he wrote in one such moment
of frank avowal. ‘This so overwhelmed me that I am incapable
even of thanking him. The truth is that one works for only one
reason—to please him. To be successful in this is my greatest satis
faction.’ After an illness in 1938 he confessed that when he heard
the Duce’s voice on the wireless he ‘ started to cry like a small child
His infrequently admitted but heartfelt admiration was apparent
in other ways which made him appear almost ridiculous. He was
unconsciously imitative. He copied the Duce’s attitudes and
80
THE D I P L O M A T
mannerisms both in public and in private; he copied his rapid,
jerky, emphatic way of talking; he even copied his pose of stone-like
impassivity when on the point of hearing some anxiously awaited
news. But he was not a ridiculous man. He had a quick eye for an
opportunity, an undoubted gift for assimilation and a sincere
patriotism. He was often indiscreet and sometimes ruthless, and on
more than one occasion he was to push his country into adventures
which were both immoral and inept. He was so lazy that he refused
to read a memorandum if it were more than a page long, and he
spent as much time on the golf course and at parties given by his
rich acquaintances in Roman society as he did in his office at
Palazzo Chigi. He was so irresponsible that, according to Raffaele
Cuariglia, who was Ambassador in Paris from 1938 to 1940, the
only instructions the Embassy ever received from him were to find
a French governess for his children. But he was nevertheless a man
of many qualities rarely found in Fascism’s gerarchi. He was intelli
gent, alert, brave, not insensitive and, in spite of his postures and
pretensions, charming. He was a devoted son and brother; he loved
his children; and, although he had his own friends, both men and
women, he did not lose the affection of his wife. 4He was a bounder ’,
wrote Lord Vansittart, who met him for the first time in 1934.4But
bounding is no sin in the sun. He liked women and advancement;
others have had the same tastes with less fulfilment. He enjoyed
good looks with some good nature and an occasional sense of
humour. . . . He was having too good a time to want trouble; and
a jouisseurs repugnance to war is more reliable than a pacifist’s
because it is more practical.’
Dino Alfieri, who as Italian Ambassador to Germany was later to
know Ciano well, painted a similar, if more flattering portrait of his
itMovì-jouisseur.
4 In spite of his fickleness and his inconsistency, which sometimes
left one with a feeling of genuine perplexity, Ciano was a good-
natured, generous man. He was always glad to be of service to his
friends, and it gave him a particular pleasure to be able to pass
on a welcome piece of news. . . . He had a slighdy Tuscan turn of
phrase, and his conversation was animated, his language graphic
and concise. By turns serious, paradoxically witty, mocking, some
times even a little cynical . . . he was by nature extremely viva
cious, whimsical, inquisitive, ironical and sentimental. He always
had a ready retort and his wit was facile and spontaneous/
Not everyone found him so quick-witted and attractive as Alfieri,
but few people disliked him and none found him insignificant. With
81
MUSSOLINI
structure \ When told that the King also objected to the introduc
tion of the Roman salute into the Army, Mussolini exploded with
indignation. ‘ It has needed all my patience/ he said, ‘ to tow this
tiresome monarchy along. It has never done anything which would
commit it to the régime. I am still biding my time, because the
King is seventy and I hope that nature will come to my help/
A more alarming result of Mussolini's friendship with Germany,
and one infinitely more despised than the introduction of the goose-
step and the Roman salute into the Army, was the introduction of
anti-Semitism into national life. The evil never went very deep. A
declaration by some well-known university professors printed in the
Fascist Press in July 1938 that the Italians were Nordic Aryans
whose blood had not been mixed since the Lombard invasions was
greeted with the ridicule which it deserved. But three months later
the Fascist Grand Council decided upon a programme of racial
legislation. Marriages with those of non-Aryan race—a term never
precisely defined—were to be forbidden unless permission was ob
tained from the Ministry of the Interior; foreign Jews and those
who had come to Italy after 1 January 1919 were to be expelled; no
Jew was to be allowed to be a teacher, lawyer, journalist, banker or
a member of the Fascist Party; special elementary schools were to
be established for Jewish children; marriage, or even fornication,
with African natives was to be punished by imprisonment. ‘All
this/ the Duce said, would ‘ increase the hatred of foreigners for
Italy. Good ! ’
It also increased the opposition to Fascism, and this drove Musso
lini to frequent and extravagant outbursts against ‘ spineless people
in Italy who were moved by the fate of the Jews \ The King was
one of them, and his expression of ‘ infinite pity for the Jews ’ made
Mussolini remark that the little milksop ought to be treated as one
of them himself. Even before his visit to Germany, Mussolini had,
in Ciano’s phrase, let fly at America as ‘ the country of niggers and
Jews—the forces which disintegrate civilization \ In the year 2000,
he prophesied, the races playing an important role in Europe would
be the Italians, the Germans, the Russians and the Japanese.
‘ Other countries will be destroyed by the acid of Jewish corrosion.
The Jews even refuse to breed because it costs pain. They don't
realize that pain is the only creative factor in the life of a nation/
He approved unconditionally, he said later, the reprisals carried out
by the Nazis when they used the murder of the Third Secretary of
the German Embassy in Paris by a Polish Jew as the pretext for an
increase in their anti-Semitic activities.
86
THE DIPLOMAT
And yet the Duce himself viewed with apparent unconcern the
haphazard and uncertain way in which his own racial legislation,
as indeed so much other Fascist legislation, was enforced. ‘It’s
typical of him / a German Embassy official said to a friend. ‘He
barks like mad, but he doesn’t bite.’ He changed his dentist and
told a leading Fascist to change his secretary, but these gestures did
not impress the Germans with the seriousness of his attitude to the
Jewish question. The OVRA was never instructed to ensure that the
racial legislation was enforced, and Bocchini himself was known not
to take it seriously. As an anti-Semite Mussolini was, and remained,
a disappointment to Hitler. When a Fascist scholar went to him
to protest against the treatment of some Jewish friends, he was
reported as replying, ‘ I agree with you entirely. I don’t believe a
bit in the stupid anti-Semitic theory. I am carrying out my policy
entirely for political reasons.’ But the impression that he was carry
ing it out in deference to German wishes was nevertheless inescap
able.
By the beginning of 1938 Mussolini’s enthusiasm for Germany
had somewhat cooled. Throughout the winter he had been aware
of the imminence of a new German assault on Austrian indepen
dence, but Hitler had not troubled to inform him of his plans. On
12 February Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, who ever since
the signing of the Austro-German Agreement of July 1936 had
been playing for time and making concessions in order to avoid a
Nazi Putsch, paid a visit to Berchtesgaden for a conversation with
Hitler. The Führer was abusive and threatening, and Schuschnigg
was presented with far-reaching demands of which the Italians had
been given no previous notice. Ciano was instructed to make it
known that the Duce was annoyed, but that was as far as the pro
test went. He knew he would have to succumb if Hitler’s threats
provoked war, and the following month, when Schuschnigg had
taken the dangerous but courageous step of announcing that he
would hold a plebiscite in Austria in which the people would be
asked to declare their views on the Anschluss, Mussolini said that
the decision was a mistake. For Hitler it was a great deal more
serious than a mistake. It was, as A. J. P. Taylor has written in
an apt phrase, ‘ as though someone had trodden on a painful corn ’.
He fixed Saturday 12 March as the day for marching across the
frontier, and on the previous Thursday sent a letter which was to
be delivered personally in Rome to the Duce by Prince Philip of
Hesse, whose exceptional ugliness and supposed homosexual pro
clivities were disregarded in a royal messenger who was not only a
87
MUSSOLINI
self. Hitler, for his own part, behaved admirably. He was far from
being the ‘silly little clown* he had seemed at Venice; and the
only fault that the Duce could now find in him was that he appeared
to wear rouge on his cheeks to hide his pallor. He was acclaimed in
Rome, cheered enthusiastically in Florence and Naples; and he
spoke to the crowds well and with dignity. Disclaiming any inten
tion of demanding the return of the South Tyrol, he said, ‘ It is my
unalterable will and my bequest to the German people that it shall
regard the frontier of the Alps, raised by nature between us, as
for ever inviolable.* ‘The Führer has had a great personal success,*
Ciano thought. ‘ He has succeeded quite successfully in melting the
ice around him. . . . His personal contacts too have won sympathy,
particularly among women.* Not even the photographs of him leav
ing the San Carlo Opera House, looking absurd in evening dress
and a top-hat, destroyed the favourable impression that he had
created.
But if the gerarchi were satisfied, King Victor Emmanuel was
not. He disliked and distrusted him on sight, and accepted him as
his guest at the Quirinale with obvious reluctance. He told Musso
lini that on his first night there Hitler had asked for a woman. This
request caused a convulsive tumult in the Royal Household until
it was explained that the Führer could not get to sleep until he had
seen a woman remake his bed. Was the story really true, Ciano
wondered? Or was it rather malice on the part of the King, who
also insinuated that ‘Hitler injects himself with stimulants and
narcotics*? The whole atmosphere of the Palace, Ciano decided,
was ‘ moth-eaten—a dynasty a thousand years old does not like the
manner of self-expression of a revolutionary régime. To a Hitler,
who is nothing but a parvenu, they prefer any paltry little King.*
Hitler disliked King Victor Emmanuel as much as the King dis
liked him, and for the rest of his life he nursed a resentment against
the House of Savoy. In their last public appearance together their
mutual antipathy was apparent. But no less apparent was the cor
diality that existed between the Duce and the Führer. At the
station when they said good-bye, both of them were moved and
Hitler was seen to stare at Mussolini with an almost dog-like
devotion. ‘ From now on,* the Duce told him, ‘ no force on earth
will be able to separate us.* The Führers eyes filled with tears.
He returned from Italy satisfied that the Duce would not inter
fere with his designs on Czechoslovakia. Only the vaguest refer
ence to the problem had been made during the visit, but
Mussolini was known to dislike the Czechs and had already referred
92
THE DIPLOMAT
lini’s own draft and one which the Germans would consider a
satisfactory basis for discussion, the other delegates were prepared
to examine it carefully. Other drafts were written and discussed,
but it was this one which formed the basis of the Agreement which
was signed at two o’clock in the morning of 30 September. Hours
before, Mussolini had decided that Hitler had already gained every
material point, and the continued discussions clearly seemed point
less to him. He did not enter into them and succeeded in giving
Chamberlain the impression of being 4extremely quiet and
reserved \ even 4cowed by Hitler ’. Ivone Kirkpatrick, too, thought
that Mussolini, despite his apparent self-confidence, was afraid of
Hitler and that he now seemed to be 4a man who was deeply
relieved at the outcome ’.
Ciano, deeply relieved as well, watched the Duce standing aloof
from the others and could not conceal his admiration. 4His great
spirit,* he wrote afterwards, 4always ahead of events and men, has
already absorbed the idea of agreement and while the others are
still wasting their breath over more or less formal problems he has
almost ceased to take an interest. He has already passed on and is
meditating on other things.’
Although he was later constantly to express his dissatisfaction
with the Munich agreement, Hitler himself appeared to share
Ciano’s admiration for the Duce. He watched him constantly,
François-Poncet said. 4He seemed fascinated. If the Duce laughed,
he laughed; if the Duce frowned, he frowned.’
The Duce’s performance was greeted in Italy as a triumph. The
King came to Florence from his country estate at San Rossore to
congratulate him, and when his train reached Rome enormous
crowds came to cheer him with an enthusiasm which, according
to himself, they had not shown since the proclamation of the
Empire. But the excitement did not please him, for the title
4Angel of Peace’ which he heard shouted through the more
familiar chant of ‘Duce! Duce!9 was not one which in the least
appealed to him. At the sight of an arch of laurel leaves which had
been built across Via Nazionale he exploded with anger. 4Who’s
responsible,’ he asked furiously, 4for this carnival?’ The Italian
people must not be allowed to hope for peace, their ‘character
must be moulded by fighting ’. Determined not to let them suppose
that he should be compared with Chamberlain as a peace-maker—
a term which for him could be nothing but pejorative—Mussolini
celebrated his return to Italy by making a series of speeches in
tended to dragoon them—and in particular the bourgeoisie, who
96
I n s p e c tin g B la c k sh ir ts a t th e F a sc is t r a lly in N a p le s in 1922
Goering was in Rome that day. He had been sent by Hitler to give
an account to Mussolini of the state of German preparations for
war and of the confidence with which the German Government faced
*the solution of the Polish problem ’; for the solution of this prob
lem, which was to lead inevitably to war, was now imminent, and
the Führer was anxious to be able to declare to the world that
Germany and Italy stood joined together by a military alliance
before taking any irrevocable step. He knew that Italy was still not
a strong military power—although if General von Rintelen, Military
Attaché at the Embassy in Rome, is to be credited the Duce’s boasts
had deceived him into believing she was much stronger than she
was—but he needed her support politically, and, hoping that the
announcement of an alliance would deter the democracies from ful
filling their obligations to Poland, he instructed Ribbentrop to
renew his effort to get the Italians to sign. Ciano was reluctant to
do so. He was afraid that the Germans would ‘overdo things’ in
Poland and would make some move which would have disastrous
repercussions. Five days after Goering’s conversation with Mussolini,
a report came in from Attolico in Berlin warning that Germany’s
action against Poland was ‘now close at h an d ’. Ciano, who had
himself noticed that Goering had spoken of Poland ‘in the same
tone used at other times for Austria and Czechoslovakia *, was deep
ly concerned and took the report to show to the Duce at Palazzo
Venezia. But Mussolini was not in a receptive mood. Victory in
Spain and in Albania had renewed his taste for conquest. He was
delighted when Ciano told him of a visit the Netherlands Ambas
sador had made to Palazzo Chigi to express Dutch concern at
reports that Germany and Italy were to divide up Europe between
them. ‘I a m ’, he said, as if in confirmation of the Ambassador’s
fears, ‘ training Italy for war.’ And yet despite his belligerent atti
tude he realized in his more reflective moments that Italy was not
yet ready for war. He asked Ciano to arrange a meeting with
Ribbentrop to find out how far the Germans intended to go and
how soon they intended to act; at the same time Ciano was to
impress on Ribbentrop the necessity of peace for Italy for at least
three years.
‘ Germany too ’, Ribbentrop reassured Ciano when they met in
Milan on 6 May, ‘ is convinced of the necessity for a period of peace
which should not be less than four or five years,’
I05
MUSSOLINI
immediately to its side as ally and support it with all its military
forces on land, sea and in the air/ There was no suggestion in the
Article, or anywhere else in the Pact, that the military support
should not apply to aggressive hostilities. Clearly for Hitler the Pact
of Steel was the prelude to war.
The very day after it was signed, he called a secret meeting of his
senior military commanders to tell them this in his study at the
Reich Chancellery.
1Danzig is not the object of our activities/ he said bluntly. *It is
a question of expanding our living space in the East. . . . There is
no question of sparing Poland, and we are left with the decision :
To attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. We cannot accept
a repetition of the Czech affair. There will be war. . . . We must
bum our boats. It is no longer a question of right or wrong/
But Mussolini, becoming increasingly alarmed by what he could
deduce rather than by what he was told, continued to advocate a
less reckless approach. Before General Cavaliere left for Germany
to represent Italy on the Military Commission established by the
Pact of Steel, he handed him a secret memorandum which repeated
the warnings that Ciano had given in Milan. Hitler was recom
mended to spend the next two or three years wearing down the
Democracies by fear and not by force, and he was again informed
that in any case Italy needed peace at least until the end of 1942.
A war of nerves, Mussolini suggested, should be the immediate
policy of the Axis.
Mussolini, himself, was already prosecuting such a war. He en
couraged the belief that the Pact of Steel was anti-French and anti-
British; he spoke threateningly of Yugoslavia and of Greece; he
excluded foreign diplomats from Tirana; he increased the numbers
of alarming anonymous letters which he delighted in sending to
unfriendly embassies in Rome; and he referred repeatedly to the
‘Fascist conception of loyalty’. When Sir Percy Loraine, Lord
Perth’s successor as British Ambassador in Rome, was formally
presented to him on 27 May he was, according to Ciano, aggressive
ly rude to him. In view of the manifest British policy of encircle
ment, he said, it was necessary to ask whether the Anglo-Italian
Agreement had any tangible value left. Loraine, shocked by this
sudden attack, blushed deeply and hesitated before he could find
words to reply.4The Duce, who is usually courteous and engaging,’
Ciano said, ‘was very stern. His face became absolutely impene
trable. It looked like the face of an oriental god sculptured in
stone.’ On his next visit Loraine was peremptorily told to ‘ inform
107
MUSSOLINI
1*4
THE D I P L O M A T
At the end of May 1940 Hitler had suggested that Italy should
launch her attack ‘after the liquidation of the Anglo-French-
Belgian strongholds’, when the Germans could throw the whole
weight of their power on Paris. Mussolini had agreed and at that
time was considering intervention at the end of June. When the
Belgian Army appeared to be about to surrender, however, he
decided he could not wait so long. He was greatly encouraged by
123
MUSSOLINI
what he took to be a sudden enthusiasm in the people who 1like
whores ’ always wanted to be on the side of the winner. Even Ciano
felt that the mood of the country had changed, and he was sur
prised to be heartily welcomed at every railway station when
making a journey in May up the east coast, where he heard ‘ many
voices calling for war \ In the same month Edda came to see her
father at Palazzo Venezia and told him that the country wanted
war now and that to pursue a policy of neutrality would be 4dis
honourable for Italy ’. Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, the influential
and pro-German subjugator of Italy’s African territories, also
supported this view.
After receiving news of the surrender of the Belgian Army on
28 May, Mussolini called for the Air Force Marshal, Italo Balbo,
and for the Army Chief-of-Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, to tell
them that he would declare war on 5 June. Badoglio, according to
his own account, protested that it was suicide. ‘You, Marshal,’
Mussolini replied imperiously, ‘ are not calm enough to judge the
situation. I can tell you that everything will be over by September
and that I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the
peace conference as a man who has fought.*
He was standing up behind his desk with his hands on his hips,
staring fixedly at the two worried Marshals, and it was in moments
like these that men were prepared to suppose that all his sudden
changes of opinion and contradictory decisions were cunningly
calculated, even inspired; that they were, as he himself had always
insisted, clever strokes of intuitive deceit, a demonstration of his
instinctive mastery of the techniques of Machiavelli. Certainly the
following day Badoglio, so Ciano said, was preparing for war with
a good grace.
At the request of Hitler the date of Italy’s intervention was post
poned for a few days. And then at last on 10 June Mussolini, hav
ing already arranged—to the King’s sulky annoyance, but without
recorded protest from anyone else—for himself to be appointed
Supreme Commander of the Forces in the Field, strode onto the
balcony overlooking Piazza Venezia to the loud but mechanical
sounding cheers of an enormous crowd.
4Fighting men of the land, the sea and the air,’ he called out in
a strangely high-pitched voice, ‘ Blackshirts of the Revolution and
of the Legions, men and women of Italy, of the Empire and of the
Kingdom of Albania, hearken! An hour marked by destiny is
striking in the sky of our country; the hour of irrevocable decisions.
We are entering the lists against the plutocratic and reactionary
Ï24
THE D I P L O M A T
democracies of the West, who have always hindered the advance
and often plotted against the very existence of the Italian people.
. . . At a memorable meeting in Berlin I said that, according to
the laws of Fascist morality, when one has a friend one goes with
him to the very end. We have done this and will do this with Ger
many, with her people, with her victorious armed forces.
*Proletarian and Fascist Italy is for the third time on her feet,
strong, proud and united as never before. The single and categoric
watchword is binding on us all. Already it is flying through the
air and kindling hearts from the Alps to the Indian Ocean—to
conquer. And we will conquer. And we will give finally a long
period of peace with justice to Italy, to Europe and to the world.
People of Italy, to arms! Show your courage, your tenacity and
your worth/
A few hours previously Mussolini’s intentions had been conveyed
to the British and French Ambassadors in a less dramatic manner.
Sir Percy Loraine received them, so Ciano said, *without batting
an eyelid or changing colour. He confined himself to writing down
the exact formula used by me and asked me if he was to consider
it as advance information or as a general declaration of war. Learn
ing that it was the latter, he withdrew with dignity and courtesy.
At the door we exchanged a long and cordial handshake.’
The interview with François-Poncet was no less friendly.
*I expect you understood the reason for your being called,’ Ciano
told him almost apologetically.
‘I am not too bright,’ François-Poncet replied with the hint of
a smile, ‘but this time I have not misunderstood the situation.’
Like Sir Percy Loraine he had been aware for some time that war
was coming and that Mussolini had already decided his country’s
fate.
Ciano read out the declaration of war.
‘ It is a dagger blow at a man who has already fallen,’ François-
Poncet commented sadly. ‘Thank you all the same for using a
velvet glove.’
Before leaving he added a warning which Ciano had good cause to
remember : ‘The Germans are hard masters. You too will learn this.’
F r o m the first the war went badly for Italy. It was painfully and
immediately apparent that the country—although for eighty years
more than half the State expenditure had been applied to military
purposes—was shamefully ill-equipped to conduct a major war. The
long-continued fighting in Spain had reduced absurdly inadequate
military reserves, already weakened by the Abyssinian campaign,
to dangerously low levels; and yet the unco-ordinated and often con
tradictory policies of the various departments of the Government
allowed valuable stocks to be exported to England as late as the
beginning of 1940 and to Finland (whose supplies included aircraft)
later even than that.1 Most of the Army’s equipment was obsolete
or obsolescent. The artillery was using guns that had been in service
in 1918; the so-called armoured divisions were so short of vehicles
that, according to Carmine Senise, the Chief of Police, they were
obliged to borrow some from him for military parades; the Air Force
was also pitiably equipped; the Navy had neither aircraft carriers
nor a fleet air arm. At the time of the Albanian invasion in April
1939 mobilization revealed that many units listed as divisions on
paper were, in fact, no more than a few battalions strong, and by
the end of the summer of that year Mussolini, himself, had to admit
that, of the seventy divisions he had claimed the Army possessed,
only ten were fit for action. At the beginning of 1938 the Army
Chief-of-Staff had said that by the end of the following spring stocks
and production of munitions and equipment would be adequate
for a full-scale war; in fact, six months before war was declared
General Carlo Favagrossa, Under-Secretary for War Production,
reported that if he could have all the material already asked for
But all his hopes were illusory. He did not have to make peace
with the Greeks, but he was forced to rely on German help to ex
tricate himself from his predicament, and that was almost as
unpalatable an indignity. While Soddu’s telegrams maintained their3
3 According to the Hitler-Bormann documents published in 1961, Hitler con
sidered Mussolini’s mistake to be the greatest contribution to his failure. In fact
the whole Italian alliance was seen by Hitler at the end of his life as the main
obstruction to his success. It even prevented him from making an anti-colonial
appeal to the Arabs and Africans, for Italy was committed to colonialism.
>33
MUSSOLINI
gloomy note, prompting Mussolini to observe that he would in
future form an army from the inhabitants of the Po valley and
central Italy, leaving the rest of the nation to make arms for the
*warrior aristocracy ’, Hitler wrote with a calm and unreproachful
reassurance, which Mussolini took as patronizing, to say that
arrangements were being made for German intervention. Before
these arrangements were complete, a group of Yugoslav officers
carried out a coup d'état against their Government, which had
recently signed a pact binding the country to the Axis. Hitler’s
reaction was violent. He insisted that Yugoslavia should be crushed
with 4merciless harshness ’ at the same time that Operation Marita
was launched against the Greeks. On 5 April, only ten days after
the coup d'état in Belgrade, having already asked Mussolini to stop
operations in Albania for a few days so that the Yugoslav-Albanian
frontier could be covered by Italian troops, he wrote to him again
to tell him that the German attack on Yugoslavia and the invasion
of Greece would begin the following day. All Italian forces, he
suggested, should be subject to the strategic orders of the German
command. Without consulting his generals, Mussolini agreed.
The German attacks, begun on 6 April, were ruthless and com
pletely successful. By 17 April the Yugoslavs had surrendered; ten
days later Athens was occupied. The surrender of Greece was
accepted and the new frontiers of Yugoslavia were drawn, both
without reference to the Italians. Although in his speech to the
Reichstag Hitler tried to soften the blow to Mussolini’s pride by
describing the German intervention as a ‘precautionary measure
against the British attempt to entrench themselves in the Balkans ’
and denying that it ‘was made for the purpose of assisting the
Italians against Greece’, no one, and least of all Mussolini, could
have any more illusions about the position to which Italy had fallen
in the eyes of Germany and of the world. In Berlin, Alfieri was
forced to listen to Hitler’s criticisms of the Italian action and of
the behaviour of the Italian troops. The Führer spoke in ‘ vehement
and aggressive tones ’, Alfieri said, and ‘ contrary to his custom he
did not ask me for news of Mussolini ’.
The subordinate position of Italy was demonstrated not only by
events in Greece and Yugoslavia. On 10 December news had been
received in Rome of the assault on the Italian position at Sidi
Barrani. Mussolini surprised Ciano by maintaining an appearance
of utter calm and impersonal objectivity, hoping that Marshal
Graziani would be able to hold the enemy attack. But this hope,
like all others that winter, was soon dispelled. By nightfall on the
*34
THE C O M M A N D E R - I N - C H I E F
ioth the British had taken so many prisoners it was impossible to
count them. There were 4about five acres of officers ’, the battalion
headquarters of the Coldstream Guards reported, ‘ and two hundred
acres of other ranks \
'F our divisions’, Ciano wrote in his diary, 'can be considered
destroyed.’ The following day Mussolini admitted that Italy had
suffered an unmistakable defeat. By the beginning of January,
Bardia had fallen, and the tattered Italian Army, many units of
which had fought with pitiable bravery against a far better led
and infinitely better equipped enemy, was driven back to Tobruk.
Mussolini remained calm—‘ superhumanly calm ’, Ciano described
his behaviour at a meeting of the Council of Ministers on 7 January
—as he maintained that every army had its day of defeat. But it
was not so easy for him to disguise the feelings of dismay that
Hitler’s prescription for the Italians caused him. Rommel he
recognized, except in his more bitter moments, to be a brilliant
general, but it was hard for him to accept the fact that this single
German officer and a relatively small number of German troops
had altered the whole aspect of the war in North Africa within a
few weeks of their arrival there. Gloomily comparing Rommel, who
was always in his tank at the head of the attacking columns, with
Graziani, who had remained ‘ seventy feet underground in a Roman
tom b’, he could not view the victories in the desert without
grumbling that they looked like German victories, not Italian ones.
He ordered Graziani to face a court of inquiry, which censured
the conduct of the man for whom he felt now nothing but con
tempt. The court’s findings gave profound satisfaction to Badoglio,
who heartily disliked his formerly more popular colleague; but
both he and Mussolini knew that Graziani was not, in fact, alone
to blame. Military intelligence, one of the few really successful
organizations in the Italian Army, had intercepted American
messages which showed how much weaker—both in numbers and
in armour—the British were in North Africa. A less adequate
general than Graziani could have stopped them with men who
were properly trained to fight and wanted to fight and who had
proper equipment with which to fight. But what could you do,
Graziani asked his wife in an exasperated letter; ‘you cannot
break armour with finger-nails alone! ’ Badoglio, who as Chief-of-
Staff since 1926 had been in charge of staff planning and armaments
research for fifteen years, and Mussolini, who shut his eyes to
Badoglio’s evident incapacity, must both share in the responsibility
for the Army’s failure. But while Badoglio and Graziani blamed
135
MUSSOLINI
each other, Mussolini blamed them both and exacerbated his dis
content by angry reflections on the Germans’ success. When Rom
mel was promoted field-marshal he complained that it was a device
of Hitler’s to ‘ accentuate the German character of the battle ’ and
retaliated by promoting General Count Ugo Cavallero, Badoglio’s
successor as Chief-of-Staff, a marshal, although his opinion of him
was not much higher than that of his other generals. ‘ Cavallero is
optimistic,’ De Bono said. ‘ That’s the only reason the Duce prefers
him.’ He was also, according to Ciano, grotesquely servile and
*would bow to the public lavatories if that would advance him \ 3
Despite Mussolini’s resentment and pique, however, Hitler
remained understanding and friendly towards him personally. For
whatever he thought of the Italians, his respect for their Duce was
as yet but little dimmed. Even in November, when the situation
in Greece was at its most chaotic, he had embarrassed Ciano by
declaring with tears in his eyes : ' From this city of Vienna, on the
day of the Anschluss, I sent Mussolini a telegram to assure him that
I would never forget his help. I confirm it today. I am at his side
with all my strength.’ And after the North African disaster, at a
conference at the Berghof in January, Hitler was as friendly as
ever. Mussolini was so ashamed of his army’s failure that he left
for Germany in a state of high nervousness and dreaded the meet
ing. He had postponed it twice in the hope that better news would
come from the Italian war fronts, and had made a half-hearted
attempt to cancel it altogether. But it was so cordial that Ciano
described Mussolini’s subsequent mood of relief as one of elation—
'th e normal reaction after a meeting with H itler’. The Italian
delegation arrived at Pusch station to find the Führer standing on
the platform in the snow in his long leather greatcoat with his cap
pulled down over his ears. Mussolini’s Pullman coach stopped
immediately opposite him, and the Duce got out slowly and walked
towards his host, and for a moment as they shook hands they
looked each other sternly in the eye. ' I haven’t enough blood in
my veins,’ Mussolini had said a minute or two before in the cold
train, ‘ to blush when I see him.’ His features were set in a hard
expression, the Italian Ambassador noticed, and then as Hitler
spoke they relaxed into an artificial smile.
The Ambassador saw Mussolini alone for a moment before the
*Ciano*s opinion in this case—as in many others—was biased. He was on
intimate terms with (supposedly the lover of) Cavallero’s daughter who was married
to Francesco Jacomoni, the Governor of Albania. Indeed it was widely supposed
in Rome at the time that Ciano had advocated the attack on Greece because he
was personally interested in Albanian expansion there.
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THE C O M M A N D E R - I N - C H I E F
conference began and told him that Hitler would be prepared to
listen favourably to any request for help that he felt inclined to
make to him. Mussolini interrupted him sharply. ‘ I have nothing
to ask/ he said.
Nor did he ask. He allowed Hitler to do most of the talking, sit
ting quietly in one of the deep arm-chairs with which the German
conference rooms were always filled, making only an occasional
comment while the Führer demonstrated his knowledge of the
military problems and outlined his schemes for their solution with
a skill which deeply impressed Alfieri and Ciano and the fat little
General Alfredo Guzzoni, acting in Cavallero's absence in North
Africa as Chief-of-Staff. Hitler was in a contented mood, his mind
already occupied with pleasant anticipatory thoughts about his
forthcoming attack on Russia, which with his usual care he con
cealed from the Italians. But Mussolini's amour-propre had been
so much upset by what he thought of as his country's disgrace, by
the Germans' insistence that his attempts to improve relations with
Moscow should be discontinued and by their obvious hints that as
Italy could not supply reliable soldiers she should supply more
workers for German industry instead, that he could not bring him
self to respond to Hitler’s charm and reassuring confidence. The
Führer was ‘polite, friendly and understanding', he admitted to
the Italian Ambassador, but felt compelled to add ‘ too much so.
The man is hysterical. When he told me that no one had lived
through and shared my anguish more intensely than he had, there
were tears in his eyes. It's all so exaggerated. He was too eager to
make me feel and appreciate his kindness and generosity, his
strength and superiority.'
At meal-times Mussolini seemed to concentrate on his food,
bending over his plate with his napkin tucked into the top of his
tunic, eating very little and very quickly. He listened to Hitler with
that earnest display of concentration which so often conceals a
deep embarrassment. On the rare occasions when he intervened in
the discussion he did so in a mumble as though German were a
language that he had forgotten how to speak. During tea on the
first day he was a pathetic figure as he tried without success to
push his chair back from the oppressive heat of the fire, sipping
a cup of camomile tea while Hitler ate a large number of biscuits
and jam tarts and Goering, splendid in a new dove-grey uniform,
talked and talked.
The whole pattern of the conference was repeated six months
later, in August 1941, when Mussolini visited the Führer's head-
137
MUSSOLINI
quarters on the Eastern Front to make a tour of the Russian battle
fields. ‘ The Duce judged it opportune \ the Italian official record
of the meeting explained, *to allow the Führer to develop his pro
positions quite freely/ Hitler made the most of his opportunity and
on one day spoke for two and a half hours without stopping. Musso
lini’s relief when they left for the front was obviously overwhelming.
Notice of the attack on Russia had been given to the Italians
at half-past four in the morning of 22 June. Alfieri was
summoned from bed to the Auswärtige A m t, where Ribben-
trop told him that at three o’clock that morning German troops
had crossed the Russian frontier. Mussolini was still in bed
when the telephone rang at his villa in Riccione. Rachele answered
it and gave her husband the message. He took the news
badly, Rachele afterwards told the journalist Bruno d’Agostini, and
he said to her forlornly, ‘My dear Rachele I This means the war
is lost.’ A few hours later, however, Ciano telephoned Alfieri with a
personal message from the Duce to the Führer. Italy considered
herself at war with Russia as from three o’clock that morning,
Ciano informed the Ambassador, and then asked him to do his
‘ utmost to get the Germans to agree to the Duce’s suggestion ’ that
an Italian expeditionary force should be sent to Russia.4
Although the offer of Italian troops was not welcomed in Berlin,
Mussolini was determined to send them, insisting in private that
it was not only his own pride which was involved. Italy must con
tribute all she could to ensure ‘a blitz victory. If Russia is not
defeated in the first six months,’ he thought, ‘she will never be
defeated at all.’ Eventually a force of 200,000 Italian soldiers, which
might have altered the whole aspect of the war in North Africa,
was despatched—against the advice of every responsible Italian
general—to fight alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front.
And here their horror at the Nazis’ treatment of Russian civilians
and their own ill-treatment after the collapse at Stalingrad, where
the Germans commandeered most of the available transport, as
they did in North Africa in 1942, were to be yet further strains on
the weakening military alliance.
Mussolini followed the movements of his troops in Russia with
an interest which for days on end completely absorbed him. Their
activities were reported in the most minute detail in the Press, and
found a man looking 'fifteen years older than his actual age of
fifty-six. He was ponderous and static rather than vital. He moved
with an elephantine motion; every step appeared an effort. He was
heavy for his weight and his face in repose fell in rolls of flesh.
His close-cropped hair was snow-white.' A month after Welles' visit
the new Secretary of the Party, Ettore Muti, was also shocked to
find the Duce looking aged and haggard. Ciano was worried, too,
but comforted himself with the reflection that it was ‘ a temporary
condition
Ciano was wrong. By the summer of 1942 two years of war had
so aggravated Mussolini’s health that one of his doctors began to
doubt that he had long to live. ‘ Somehow,’ said a woman who saw
him at Villa Torlonia towards the end of that summer, ‘ he didn’t
look real any more. It was like looking at a caricature—or even at
a corpse.’
*43
PART III
T H E F A L L OF T H E C O L O S S U S
1
‘T H E W A R IS G O I N G B A D L Y ’
23 O C T O B E R 1942- 23 J A N U A R Y 1943
By the autumn of 1942, after more than two years of a hated war,
the opposition to the Germans and to the Fascist régime was
already widespread all over Italy. Intellectuals in Rome and Milan,
working-men in Naples and Sicily, were being arrested daily.
Strikes were common, and frequently the police fired over the heads
of angry crowds as the only way of dispersing them. Socialists in
Genoa and Communists in Turin printed clandestine news-sheets
and scratched Fascist slogans from walls and pasted in their place
posters demanding liberty and peace. Non-Fascist newspapers
cautiously supported the opposition and fanned the sparks of dis
content by referring, although forbidden to do so, to queues and
shortages, until several of them—including Oggi—were suppressed.
Almost all foodstuffs including bread, vegetables, meat, rice and
eggs were rationed, and the police did not any longer even attempt
to interfere with the extensive and intricate black market which
had become uncontrollable since the Government in a charac
teristically inept decree had decided to cut all prices by 20 per
cent.
In the south thousands of peasants were close to starvation, and
all over the country the poor were hungry and pulling in their
belts to the last hole, the one they called the ‘foro Mussolini9—
Mussolini’s hole.1 For it was his war and he had led them to it,
and these Germans who marched about everywhere, like the
soldiers of an occupying force, were his friends not theirs. They
would do anything to end the war, the Italians told each other,
repeating with sardonic humour a favourite joke : as a last resort
they would even try to win it. But most of them had already
stopped thinking about victory and waited with a kind of hopeful
1It is a pun. Foro means forum as well as hole; and Mussolini’s forum on the
outskirts of Rome was part of a grandiose scheme of his not yet completed when
war had been declared.
146
‘t h e w a r is going badly ’
non and treated with that adulatory respect which he had by now
accepted as his right; but the spontaneity of devotion and the over
whelming acclamations which, with rare exceptions, had swayed an
entire nation were gone. The cheering seemed mechanical; the
respect prescriptive.
There were other reasons, apart from the detested war and the
hated German alliance, which were the cause of this.
Mussolini was now seriously ill. His presence was never dynamic
and glowing as once it had constantly been. He had lost most of his
former tireless energy, and his always mercurial temperament was
no longer merely unpredictable but wildly erratic. Syphilis was
responsible, his enemies said; inadequately treated in his youth, it
was now entering its final stages, inducing feverish excitation and
hallucinations. ‘I remember,’ Giuseppe Bottai, the Minister of
National Education said at this time, that Marshal Balbo ‘called
Mussolini a product of syphilis, and that I used to object to his
words. I wonder now if this judgment on Mussolini wasn’t correct,
or at least very close to the truth. The Duce has decayed intellectu
ally and physically. He doesn’t attract me any more. He is not a
man of action. He is presumptuous and ambitious and expects only
to be admired, flattered and betrayed.’
By October 1942 Mussolini was not merely decaying but often
in violent pain, and his physician, D r Pozzi, was constantly in
attendance either at Villa Torlonia or Rocca delle Caminate. The
wounds he had received in 1917 had opened up again. In addition,
the ulcer which had intermittently been troubling him for years
gave him so much pain that frequently during an interview he
found it impossible to sit still and turned and twisted in his chair,
fidgeting convulsively; and sometimes the pains were so bad that
he had to press his hands against his mouth to prevent himself
from crying out. According to Quinto Navarra, his personal atten
dant who acted as Chief Usher at Palazzo Venezia, he would on
occasions abandon himself to his pain and throw himself on the
floor to roll about, groaning in agony. No one could doubt his
physical courage, but he was never a man to bear pain without com
plaint and he began increasingly to rely on the analgesic drugs and
injections which Dr Pozzi gave him.
At the end of September Edda Ciano had written to her husband
at the Foreign Ministry; ‘ My mother has no sense of humour. She
says and does the most fantastic things. Anyway this is not why I
am writing to you. My father is very ill. Stomach pains, irritability,
depression, etc. My mother draws a dark picture. In my opinion
150
‘t h e war is going badly *
it’s the old ulcer again—his private life of the last few years gives
one much to worry about, its effects, etc. Well, let’s not talk about
that. They made X-ray pictures of all kinds—all negative—but a
specialist was never called. . . . Please will you do something . . .
anything so that my father is seen and examined properly. Get in
touch with my mother and help her. So far the only measures taken
have been blasphemy and curses.’
Professor Cesare Frugoni, one of Italy’s leading doctors, was even
tually asked to examine the Duce and confirmed Edda Ciano’s
opinion by diagnosing severe duodenal ulcers. Mussolini was put
on a mainly liquid diet, and this made him anaemic. In May 1943
he was found writhing on the floor at Rocca delle Caminate by a
servant, who rushed up to Rachele’s room shouting, ‘Il Duce
muore! Il Duce muore! The Duce’s dying I’ Dr Pozzi came immedi
ately and told Rachele that her husband must stay in bed and rest.
He advised also that another specialist should be consulted in addi
tion to Professor Frugoni and the three other doctors who had
already been called. But Rachele wrote in her diary, ‘ the idea of
too many doctors frightens me ’. They all contradicted each other
anyway. Frugoni, who at first diagnosed ulcers saying that one of
his colleagues had ‘a bee in his bonnet about dysentery’, later
agreed that acute dysentery was a complicating factor. Then he
gave it as his opinion that the Duce was suffering from advanced
cancer, only to be immediately contradicted by Professor Cesare
Bianchi.
The real trouble, as both Ciano and Mussolini’s eldest son Vit
torio knew, was psychosomatic.2 Although the Duce slept heavily,
his days were spent in an almost continual state of excitement and
anxiety. He would never recover so long as the war went so badly
for Italy. As the news of each new disaster in North Africa and in
the Mediterranean reached him, he wrought himself into a
paroxysm of emotion as he inveighed against the Army, which was
fighting with the ‘ calm and indifference of the professional instead
of the fury of the fanatic ’; against the Navy, to which he longed
to send some signal ‘ like the one Churchill sent his admirals ’ but in
eighteen months had given him no opportunity to do so; against
the Italian people, who were not made for war like the Germans
and Japanese and who were ‘ not mature or consistent enough for
3 In May 1945 Avanti! published an article, ‘ Parla il dottore che misurò il
cadavere di Mussolini* by A. Astuni, which showed that the doctor who per
formed the autopsy on Mussolini's body could find no more than a slight scar as
evidence of his ulcer. His heart and arteries were still sound. A knowledge of his
glandular condition would doubtless be revealing.
151
MUSSOLINI
make to his mistress were at least partly responsible for the Duce’s
declining health. His visits, though, were in reality both shorter and
rarer than before; and for hours on end Claret ta lay on the divan
bed in the sitting-room looking up at the signs of the Zodiac painted
in gold on the blue vaulted ceiling and listening to gramophone
records playing sentimental songs or dance tunes over and over
again. Sometimes she would pass the time drawing designs for new
clothes or painting romantic pictures of birds and flowers, or she
would lie on the pillows reading love-stories, painting her nails,
gazing at herself in the looking-glass or out of the window at the
fountain in the courtyard. She filled a little book with descriptions
of their happy days in the past—ski-ing at Terminillo, swimming at
Rimini, picnics on the royal estate of Castelporziano—and with
painful doubts about the future. For when her lover came to her
now, he was often depressed, sometimes angry and glowering,
nearly always irritable. On some evenings she waited until ten
o’clock and he never came at all; and in her loneliness the resent-,
ments she harboured against those who blamed and despised her
grew and festered. ‘They are all his enemies/ she shouted to a
servant one evening when she had waited five hours for him in vain.
‘They betray him fifteen times a day/ The Fascists were ‘ traitors ’;
the generals ‘ silly old fools ’—particularly that doddering idiot De
Bono. ‘ Why does he pretend to be so scandalized/ she asked indig
nantly, ‘ when he makes love himself to an old countess on a black
velvet sofa? ’
Of course, the Duce himself, she felt convinced, was not only
betrayed, but he in his turn was betraying her. She was haunted by
the fear that he had found another mistress or had begun to make
love again to one of his former ones. Margherita Sarfatti or Angela
Curri, perhaps, were trying to take him from her, and there was a
new woman now called Irma who was ‘making a rag of h im ’.
‘ People say it’s m e/ she complained, ‘ but it’s her, it’s her/ When
she dared to do so, she taxed Mussolini about his other mistresses,
but he would then insult her or deride her so sarcastically that she
began to cry, and that would make him angrier than ever. So she
took to writing him letters in which appeals and accusations
tumbled over each other in her fear that she was losing him. How
could she make sure that she did not do so? she asked her brother’s
mistress, Zita Ritossa. By not making herself so readily available
whenever the Duce wanted her, Zita Ritossa advised her. ‘ But if I
tried that/ she said pathetically, ‘ he wouldn’t bother about me at
all.’ It was probably true. Indeed, at this rime he made a positive
154
‘t h e war is going badly ’
effort to end the affair which had now lasted for seven years—the
longest liaison of his life. According to the Sicilian Princess di
Gangi he confessed that he now found the woman ‘ revolting \ One
afternoon in the spring of 1943 Claretta was told by an embarrassed
policeman at the Via Astalli entrance to Palazzo Venezia that he
had orders not to let her in. She lost her temper and pushed her
way past him, only to be met by the Duce’s cold, dispassionate
stare.41 consider/ he announced aloofly, using an expression which,
she afterwards confessed, terrified her, for he had told her how
often he had used it in dismissing other women in the past, ‘I
consider the cycle closed/ But he gave in. There were to be several
more attempts to dismiss her, and he was always to give in. The
tears poured down her face, streaking her white cheeks with the
thick mascara she always wore as she begged him to forgive her
and to take her back; and he did. Afterwards he would regret that
he had done so and telephone to say she must not go to Palazzo
Venezia again. 4Please leave me alone. The war is going badly/ he
told h e r.4The people might criticize me for my weakness/ 4There's
already been one woman who made me do stupid things/ he said
on another occasion, 4and I don't intend to put up with it again.’
But he did. He insulted her, quarrelled with her, behaved towards
her with studied indifference, ‘just as if', so she said herself, ‘he
had another woman who was taking everything out of h im ’. He
quarrelled with her about her family, about her brother's disreput
able financial speculations and the absurd memoranda he sent him
on how to win the war, about her tall, hook-nosed, calculating
mother, whose dangerous boasts and promises of patronage were
earning her the contempt of Rome. Once when they were quarelling
about her brother he hit her so hard that she fell back against the
wall and was only restored to consciousness by a strong injection of
a stimulant given to her by her father. But there were days when,
for a moment, their quarrels seemed unimportant and they found
comfort in love and in the memory of happiness; and afterwards
she would fill her diary with the trivialities of their conversation.
‘I won't come in the day any more/ she whispered once. ‘Just
after dark. For a few minutes, just to see you and to kiss you. I
don't want to cause a scandal.'
It was a scandal, though—a scandal which, in the words of an
important police officer, was ‘ doing the Duce more harm than the
loss of fifteen battles '. 4There is really much too much talk about
the affair/ Ciano agreed, and he told his friend Serrano Suner, the
Spanish Foreign Minister, that there would be no objection to lots
l S5
MUSSOLINI
While it was untrue that the Duce helped Marcello to make money
—he never directly helped anyone to make money, least of all him
self—he was nevertheless ingenuous and careless enough to let the
suspicion grow up that he had done. The truth was that he was not
in the least interested in money and hardly ever thought about it.
He was, indeed, according to Claretta, so innocent about it that he
once inquired how she managed to live so well. ‘ Does your father
earn a lot? ’ he asked her with an apparently genuine wish for
enlightenment about something that had never before occurred to
him. It was, of course, absurdly ingenuous of him not to realize that
when Claretta, heavily made-up, over-dressed and over-scented, dis
tributed money to the poor, her careless patronage would be
resented. Ciano noted in his diary that the Director of Public
Health had told him that Guido Buffarini-Guidi was allowing her
two hundred thousand lire a month; but, as was natural, the poor
to whom she distributed most of this largesse grumbled that it was
the conscience-money of a spoiled tart.
It was, above all, absurd of Mussolini to suppose that his selection
of friends and protégés of the Petaccis to fill the vacant posts at his
disposal would not cause deep resentment. That he was surprised
when his choices were resented seems certain, and that he remained
as often as not unaware of the resentment seems equally so. No one
greatly objected to his asking the newspaper II Messaggero to
appoint Claretta’s father its medical correspondent : Dr Petacci was,
after all, a competent physician. No one objected to his trying to
ensure that Claretta’s sister Miriam should have a successful film
career; she was not a bad actress. But other displays of his hap
hazard patronage could not so easily be forgiven; and in particular
his choice of Aldo Vidussoni, a young man of twenty-six and a
friend of the Petaccis, for the important Secretaryship of the Fascist
Party was universally regretted; and the semi-official explanation
that Vidussoni had been appointed to exercise some sort of bene
ficial influence on the recalcitrant youth of the country convinced
no one. Ciano was aghast at this particular choice of a man whom
Vittorio Mussolini described as full of ‘idiocy, ignorance and
malice ’ for so important an appointment, and said so—but not to
the Duce.
Several leading Fascists approached Ciano and told him that as
Mussolini’s closest adviser and as his son-in-law it was his duty to
inform him how strong feelings in the Party were against the
appointment and how fast resentment in the country generally was
rising against the Petaccis. But Ciano dared not. Nor did anyone
157
MUSSOLINI
each other, ‘ If only the Duce knew 1 ’ For the Duce was still a god
then and not to be held responsible for the wrongs of his mortal
followers; but this was an attitude which was rare now. By the end
of 1942 mo5t Italians had begun to suppose that the Duce must be
a part of every rankling injustice, every defeat, every hardship, every
fresh disaster that showed the Fascist system which he had created
was not capable of dealing with the emergency into which he had
plunged it. The war had gone on too long.
l S9
2
THE CONSPIRATORS
N O V E M B E R 1942- 24 J U L Y 1943
because I like Mussolini, like him very much, and what I shall miss
most will be my contact with him /
It seemed, indeed, that the reshuffle had taken place with the
principal object of showing the Germans that their Axis partners
were determined to prosecute the war with increased energy. On
31 January, six days before the Government changes were an
nounced, Count Ugo Cavallero had been dimissed as Chief-of-Staff
in consequence of the military defeats in North Africa. A new
Cabinet was a logical corollary.
Mussolini’s choice as successor to General Cavallero, a blind
supporter of the German alliance, was, however, as ingenuous as
his refusal to take seriously the defection of his Ministers. He chose
as the new Chief-of-Staff General Ambrosio, one of the men most
deeply implicated in the plots to overthrow him and, as it hap
pened, a man both disliked and distrusted by Field-Marshal
Kesselring, the German Commander-in-Chief in Italy, and by
Hitler, who thought he would ‘ be happy if Italy could become a
British Colony today \
As the winter turned to spring, the plots developed and ramified.
There were anti-Royalist plots, anti-Fascist plots, anti-German plots.
Filippo Anfuso, on a visit to Rome from the Embassy in Buda
pest, found that Count Ciano, now working in his new office, was
‘up to his neck’ in them; and there were many others besides
Ciano as deeply involved. It was difficult to discover, in fact, as
Anfuso says, ‘ who was in what conspiracy ’; but it was certain that
each one, for a variety of conflicting reasons, was aimed at the
displacement of the Duce.
Mussolini, however, continued to ignore the reports he was given
about them. Rachele passed on the warnings she had received, but
he told her not to fuss; his sister Edvige did the same, and he said
that she was dramatizing the situation; in April the anxious Angela
Curri went to tell him that the King was frequently receiving not
only the dissident generals but anti-Fascist politicians as well, and
Mussolini, confident that the Court was completely out of touch
with liberal opinion, replied that he had complete faith in the
King’s loyalty to him; the Secretary of the Party gave Mussolini a
similar warning a few weeks later, telling him that Badoglio’s son
had announced in Morocco that his father would soon succeed
Mussolini and that there were reports from all over Italy that the
Fascists were planning to destroy him, but again he did not take
the warning seriously; even the Pope, so it seems, offered through
an intermediary to receive him secretly and to provide him with
163
MUSSOLINI
was compelled to live on a diet of rice and milk. This time he was
sick several times on the journey and arrived looking, so Goebbels
thought, like ‘ a broken old man \ His resolutions about insisting
on the necessity for peace with Russia, about demanding the return
of Italian troops from other fronts to defend the homeland, and
about telling the Germans that Italy must have more military and
economic help, were all forgotten. He never once mentioned the
need for a new sort of European charter with a view to peace in
the West, which he had discussed at length in Rome. He spoke
half-heartedly and soon abandoned all attempts at talking himself
to sit listening in morose silence to the Führer’s endless expositions
and diagnoses. He was thinking, Alfieri believed, of what Hitler's
determination to launch a new offensive in Russia would mean to
the Italian Army in Tunisia. On the second day he had to leave
the conference room because of a sudden attack of stomach cramps,
and in another room while he drank the medicine his doctor had
given him to ease the pain he said sadly, ‘ The Führer wanted me
to be examined by his own doctor. I refused. I've already diagnosed
my illness myself. It's called “ convoys He seemed so depressed
and listless that for the first time Hitler expressed concern as to
whether *the Duce was determined ', as he said to Doenitz when
the visit was over, *to carry on to the end '.
On the return journey to Italy, however, he began to feel
better, and as always when he had come home from Germany he
spent the first few days behaving as a dictator is expected to behave.
He threatened various arrests and gave instructions for a new
confino to be prepared for anti-Fascists; he dismissed Carmine Senise
as Chief of Police, because he had not dealt sufficiently harshly
either with the strikes in Milan and Turin or with the clandestine
Press or the growing black market, and he appointed the more
severe Renzo Chierici in his place. He also dismissed Aldo Vidus-
soni from the Secretaryship of the Party and replaced him by Carlo
Scorza, a myrmidon of the Party's youth who had been implicated
in the murder by Fascist thugs of the liberal leader Giovanni
Amendola in 1925. He went over the plans for a series of regional
rallies at which leading Fascists were to harangue the people and
encourage them to fight to the death. ‘ They spread it about that
I'm finished,' he said grimly to Bottai, indulging his passion for
enigmatic menaces, ‘ fading away, done for. Well, they'll see----- '
On the anniversary of the capture of Addis Abbaba he went out
onto the balcony of Palazzo Venezia to speak to the crowds in the
square below. 11 feel your voices are vibrating with an incorrupt-
165
MUSSOLINI
ible faith,’ he shouted with the tire of his youth. 4Have no fear for
ultimate victory. It is certain that your sacrifices will be rewarded.
That is as true as it is true that God is just and that Italy is
immortal.’
He came in from the balcony encouraged by the cheers of the
people, and the windows closed behind him; although at the time
it seemed impossible to believe that he had spoken publicly in
Rome for the last time, they never opened for him again.
Two days later his momentary enthusiasm had collapsed. Within
a fortnight all the Axis forces in Africa had been taken prisoner,
and a landing on the other side of the Mediterranean was believed
to be imminent. Hitler believed the attack would be made in Sar
dinia; Mussolini thought it would come in Sicily, and he told a
meeting of his generals at Villa Torlonia that it would have to be
fiercely resisted, for there was no question of a political settlement
or a separate peace. On io July the attack was made after a violent
bombardment of the coast-line. W ithin a few days the Allied armies
were streaming across the plain of Catania, and for a week Musso
lini alternated between periods of studied calm and unconcealed
anger with the retreating Italian troops.
The King, after so many changes of mind and of mood that the
conspirators had begun to doubt that he would ever take a deter
mined stand, at last decided that he could delay no longer. Inde
pendently of the Fascists, with whom he had been in contact, he
decided on the advice of General Castellano and the Duke
d’Acquarone to arrest Mussolini on a Monday or a Thursday when
he went to the Quirinale or the Villa Savoia for the usual audience.
He asked Marshal Badoglio if he were prepared to succeed the
Duce as Head of the Government and Badoglio agreed, suggesting
a non-Fascist administration led by such men as the Socialist
Ivanoe Bonomi and another former Prime Minister, Vittorio
Emanuele Orlando. Castellano and d’Acquarone then met to discuss
the details of the arrest and the action to be taken to ensure that
no unmanageable opposition came from Mussolini’s supporters and,
in particular, from General Galbiati, who, largely on the recom
mendation of the Petaccis, now commanded the Fascist Militia.
Meanwhile the Fascist plotters also decided that they could wait
no longer. Although separated by mutual suspicions and jealousies
and by conflicting ambitions, they were at least agreed that in the
extreme emergency which had been forced upon them by the
invasion of Sicily it was essential that the Fascist Grand Council—
the supreme constitutional authority of the State, created by the
166
THE CONSPIRATORS
Duce but not convened since the war began—must meet again. On
16 July various important Party officials, who were to have spoken
at the several regional rallies planned before the invasion of Sicily,
met in Rome and insisted on the necessity of a meeting of the
Council to obtain from Mussolini a report on the general situation,
which was daily growing more alarming. At first Mussolini refused,
but later consented and set the date of its meeting for the following
week, Saturday, 24 July.
On the Monday of that week Hitler asked Mussolini to meet him
again for an urgent conference in Italy. More worried than ever by
reports of anti-German feeling in Italy, of Italian Army units sur
rendering en masse in Sicily and of their refusing to co-operate
with the German Army, he hoped to stiffen Italian resistance by
persuading the Duce to agree that all Italian armies should be
placed under the German High Command. Piloting his own aero
plane, Mussolini flew from Rimini to Treviso, where he met Hitler
on the airfield and accompanied him to Senator Achille Gaggia’s
villa at Feltre on the southern slopes of the Dolomites. The villa, as
Mussolini described it, was 'a labyrinthine building which some
people found almost uncanny. It was like a crossword puzzle frozen
into a house/ The atmosphere was formal and strained.
This was their thirteenth meeting, and it followed the by now
familiar pattern. For almost three hours, from eleven o’clock until
nearly two, Hitler talked. W hat he had to say was simple and
direct enough. There was only one thing to be done—to fight and
to go on fighting, in Italy as well as in Russia, until the Axis was
triumphant. It was no good thinking that this could be done with
out sacrifices. In Germany boys of fifteen were fighting in anti
aircraft batteries. In Italy there appeared to be a very different
attitude. The troops had not fought as they should have done; the
civil administration commanded insufficient respect; the people had
abandoned themselves to defeatism; it would be necessary to adopt
much more vigorous measures; cowards, traitors and incompetents
would have to be shot; the Italian armies must put themselves
under German command. Mussolini sat listening silently, cross-
legged on the edge of his big arm-chair, his hands clasped round his
knees. He was obviously in pain and frequently he stretched his
back and pressed his hands against it with a sigh. Often he rubbed
his lips with the back of his fingers, and occasionally he was
obliged to wipe the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. But
only twice did he speak—once to correct a misapprehension as to
the population of Corsica and once when his secretary came in to
167
MUSSOLINI
fighting any longer. He knew that the letter which the Duce had
once said he would write to Hitler, telling him that Italy must
make peace, had not been sent and never would be sent. He returned
to Rome fully convinced that the other generals were right, that
the Duce would never be induced to break with Germany and that
his removal from power was the only hope for Italy.
It was about his being4bundled up ' one day when he left the King,
Scorza insisted on telling him. 4I do not like cowards/ was Musso
lini's only comment.
That evening he went to see the damage that had been caused
by the air-raid on 19 July. The ruins were still smouldering, and
the Duce looked at them, his chauffeur noticed, with a kind of
piteous despair.
Filippo Anfuso used a similar phrase in describing his own feel
ings as he looked out of Ciano's drawing-room window in the Via
Angelo Secchi and saw the clouds of dust drifting slowly away to
the east. Those bombs, he afterwards decided, were the mainspring
of the Roman conspiracies.
No one thought of anything but the conspiracies now. Even the
troops of countesses and princesses who paraded in and out of
Ciano’s room, gossiping about their experiences in the raid, laugh
ing at Anfuso, the emotional Sicilian, for suggesting that his native
island should be defended at all costs, even they who usually talked
of little but themselves like the 4inmates of a high-class harem '
avidly picked on every detail which would help them solve what
one of them called 4the mystery of the imminent fall of the Duce \
For nobody knew what would happen, just as nobody agreed about
what ought to happen. Bastianini said that Mussolini had ruined
Italy. Gaetano Polverelli, the new Minister for Popular Culture,
thought that he was the only man who could save it. Vittorio Cini,
the Minister of Communications, said that Mussolini had ‘gone
mad and must be put away \ Ermanno Amicucci thought that it
was they who considered putting him away who were the imbeciles.
4I've no idea what they are all up to/ he said, 4but it's easy to see
that they'll lead us to ruin.' Ciano, whom most of them believed
had always considered himself to be the Duce's rightful successor,
remained secretive and enigmatic. There was no doubt that even
before his dismissal from the Foreign Office—since the beginning of
the war in fact—he and Mussolini had not been as close as once they
had been. In January 1941, when, like many other Ministers sent to
fight by the Duce as an example to the nation, he had come to say
good-bye at Palazzo Venezia before leaving to take command of an
Air Force squadron at Bari, he had found the Duce distant and cold.
All foreign policy matters were taken out of his hands, and he was
not informed of what was happening in his absence. He lived at the
Hotel d'Europa in Bari between missions, and the life he led there,
while no wilder than that led by any extrovert Air Force officer, was
maliciously criticized. Mussolini's refusal to support him in one
171
MUSSOLINI
Duce was standing behind his enormous desk and watched Grandi
with a cold impassivity as he approached him. He did not ask him
to sit down. Grandi read out his resolution and then made the Duce
a brief speech in support of it. Mussolini did not interrupt him,
continuing to watch him with an expression of haughty contempt,
and when the speech was over he merely said ,4Leave me now. We
shall see one another at the Grand Council/1
On his way out Grandi passed through the assembly hall where
the palace servants were already arranging chairs for the meeting.
On one of them, waiting for the Duce to receive him, sat Field-
Marshal Kesselring. It was, as Grandi said afterwards, *not a good
sign'. He had, he admitted, become nervous. The Duce’s impas
sivity and disdainful confidence were not merely enigmatic but
alarming. He decided to ask Albini to arrange for two hundred
police to be hidden in different parts of the building. He also
decided to give way to Bottai, who suggested that Count Ciano
should be brought into the conspiracy. Although Grandi did not
altogether trust Ciano he had to agree with Bottai that if he were
persuaded to support the revolt many wavering votes might be
given to the resolution.
On the afternoon of the day before the meeting Bottai invited
Grandi and Ciano to come to his house. His guests were not at ease
with each other and could not agree on a common policy. Ciano
seemed to suspect that Grandi wished to displace Mussolini only
to gain more power and influence for himself and Federzoni;
Grandi felt that Ciano, despite any undertakings given beforehand,
might at the last moment throw the weight of his influence on to
the side of his father-in-law; Bottai believed that the political power
which was to be wrested from Mussolini should be placed in the
hands of the King together with the supreme command of the
armed forces, but the others did not think that this was practicable.
The conversation between the three men was long and inconclusive,
and when Ciano left. Grandi and Bottai were not at all sure
whether or not he intended to support them.
But by the following morning, he had apparently made up his
mind. A t noon Dino Alfieri, recalled from the Italian Embassy in
Berlin to attend the meeting later on that day, paid a visit to the
1 Count Grandi’s account of this meeting does not differ materially from
Mussolini’s. Field-Marshal Kesselring, however (giving the date as 24 July and
not 22 July), says that Mussolini was quite cheerful when he went into the Sala
del Mappamondo after Grandi had gone.4Grandi has just left me Mussolini said.
‘ We had a heart-to-heart talk. Our views are identical. He is loyally devoted to
me.’
176
Giving the Fascist salute at a parade in Rome
tanding beside his writing-table in the Sala
del Mappamondo at Palazzo Venezia
Giving instructions to a Fascist journalist
THE GRAND COUNCIL MEETING
so too. Indeed, he had begun to think that he would not get out
alive.
Mussolini was already in his office. He had had lunch at Villa
Torlonia, where ‘everything’, as Rachele noted in her diary that
evening, ‘was as usual’. He seemed completely unmoved by the
reports of the plots against him. Four days previously, while a maid
was fastening his collar before dinner, Rachele told him that she
had been given a list of names of men whom Bastianini had sup
plied with passports and that it was ‘ high time he did something
about Ciano, Grandi, Badoglio and company’. But he would not
be warned. He was worrying about the Americans’ tanks, he said,
not about the intrigues of a few Italians. Now, as he left for the
Grand Council meeting, Rachele offered him her advice again.
‘Have them all arrested before the opening,’ she urged him. He
kissed her at the door of the villa without replying and walked to
the waiting car with a bulging brief-case under his arm. ‘He
honestly believes that everything will work out for the best,’
Rachele wrote in her diary after he had gone.
He strode into the meeting with his customary self-confidence,
not looking at any of the members of the Council, who jumped to
their feet when he came in to answer Scorza’s shouted order ‘ Salute
the Duce ! ’ with a loud chorus of ‘ We salute him.’ He showed no
pleasure at being so readily accorded the ritual salute to the Duce
of Fascism, and sat down at his table glowering. He flinched with
pain as he settled himself in his chair. His ulcer had been troubling
him in the night, and when Claretta Petacci had telephoned him
he had mentioned it.
‘W hat will happen if you are feeling ill on this day of all days? ’
she had asked him.
He had replied with that characteristically self-glorifying resolu
tion which was never softened by irony, ‘I shall be strong and
dominate the situation in my usual way.’
As he sat in his chair, listening to Scorza calling the roll, pulling
papers out of the brief-case which Navarra, the Chief Usher, had
put on the table in front of him, frowning sternly with his chin
thrust out so that he looked, as one of his mistresses once said, as if
his whole face was pushed forward by his ears, he seemed capable
indeed of domination. Unlike the others in their black Saharan
shirts, he was wearing the greyish-green uniform of the Fascist
Militia, and this alone accentuated his aloofness, the acknowledged
supremacy of 11 Duce. The table at which he sat was on a dais
higher than theirs, and this too created an illusion of spiritual
178
THE GRAND COUNCIL MEETING
superiority. And above all there were the habits, the attitudes, the
memories and fears of two decades of Fascism. The man looking
down at them so fiercely, Bottai could not help thinking, was
Fascism incarnate.
For many of them—for most of them perhaps—he was, despite
himself, still Italy’s greatest son. And there were few of them there
who had not once professed it; and fewer still, no doubt, unwilling,
had they been given the cause, to profess it even now. Grandi him
self had done so recently with a fervour which the Duce’s most
fanatical adherents would have found it difficult to match. 4My life,
my faith, my soul are yours,’ he had declared less than two months
before.
But Mussolini, like his own faithful followers, had also become
conditioned by the habits of the past. Obedience, adulation, un
questioning trust, had been for years accepted not as the pleasing
reactions of a responsive people, but as the homage due to his
genius. 4Mussolini is always right ’—the slogan splashed on count
less walls—was not so much a tribute to a great leader for whom
his people should feel constant admiration and gratitude, but a
statement of undeniable fact. This confidence in his own self-
sufficient greatness and inviolability and in his incontestable
superiority to all other Italians had made it difficult for him to
recognize the merits of those who might have helped him and the
danger of those growing numbers of dissatisfied men who believed
him beyond the reach of reason. And it was this blind confidence
that had induced him not merely to dismiss the idea of a success
ful plot as illusory, but to reject any suggestion that care should be
taken in the management of a meeting which he expected to be no
more than 4a lively debate ’. He had not even taken any trouble
with the preparation of his speech, which traditionally opened the
proceedings; for he did not doubt that he would silence the opposi
tion by the very sound of his voice.
4The war,* he began in the prosaically didactic manner of a peda
gogue reciting a familiar lecture, 4has entered an extremely critical
stage. W hat seemed impossible (and indeed was thought by some
to be an absurd hypothesis), even after the entry of the United
States into the Mediterranean, has come to pass. One may say that
the real war began with the loss of Pantelleria. The peripheral war
on the African coast was intended to avert or frustrate such an
eventuality. In a situation like this, all official or unofficial trends
of opinion, openly or clandestinely hostile to the régime, make
common cause against us.’
79
MUSSOLINI
pay for this help. Nor did he mention the further help that Italy
might now expect in her truly desperate need. He carefully avoided
all reference to the meeting at Feltre from which he had just
returned.
‘The great dilemma now/ he said at length, ‘is war or peace.
Surrender or resistance to the end/ Instead of answering this vital
question by one of those fervent tirades, epigrammatic, theatrical
and moving, which even then might have brought the Council
once more to heel, he slipped away into weary polemics. ‘ Anyway/
he concluded with a final non sequitur, ‘England is looking a
century ahead to secure its five meals a day. It wants to occupy
Italy and to keep it occupied/
It was a disastrous performance. The members of the Council
looked at the Duce in a kind of shocked silence. Alfieri wrote after
wards of the feeling of appalled disillusionment that swept over
them all. It was the most inept speech that they had ever heard
him make, and in a sense the most decisive. When he had finished
speaking, the Duce had already fallen.
For a few moments no one spoke. Then the sounds of shuffling
feet, whispering, the clicking of brief-case catches, disturbed the
embarrassed silence. At length Marshal De Bono stood up. His
short speech was no more than a veiled attack on politicians who
blamed the Army chiefs when they themselves should accept the
blame for having chosen them. This was a view which his old
fellow-monarchist, De Vecchi, now rose to support; but in support
ing it he made some remark about Italy’s allies which the violently
Germanophil Roberto Farinacci found objectionable. Contradicting
De Vecchi, Farinacci launched into a fanatical panegyric upon
German strength and invincibility. Stung by his remarks, De
Vecchi accused Farinacci of shirking military service in the First
World War and of posing as having been a hero of the Abyssinian
war after having been injured in a fishing accident.
Bottai, realizing that the meeting was in danger of breaking up
in a petty squabble, interrupted De Vecchi to make the first
authentic speech of the evening. The other members of the Council
listened to his words and understood that for the first time Musso
lini was being criticized in public and in his presence. Gathering
courage from the spark that Bottai’s words had struck, other mem
bers showed that they wished to speak; but it was Grandi who rose,
and the others sat back to listen.
‘ I am going to repeat here before the Grand Council/ Grandi
said in a low, grave voice which immediately commanded respect,
181
MUSSOLINI
4what I told the Duce the day before yesterday, and I propose the
following Order of the Day/
He read out his resolution calmly and clearly, but when he had
finished it his tone changed and he made a speech of passionate
eloquence and savage indictment. He spoke bitterly of 4the restric
tive and idiotic formula of the Fascist war \ of the 4needlessly rigid
insistence on the observation of petty formalities ’; of the 4constant
introduction of new regulations and the gradual suppression of
personal freedom*. 4You have imposed a dictatorship on Italy/ he
said in a voice breaking with emotion, ‘ which is historically
immoral. For years you have kept in your own hands the three
Service Ministries. And what have you done? You have destroyed
the spirit of our Armed Forces. For years you’ve suffocated our
personalities in these funereal clothes. For years when selecting
someone from among several candidates for an important post, you
have invariably selected the worst/
For over an hour Grandi spoke. Mussolini sat listening in silence
to the speech which he afterwards referred to as a 4violent philippic
—the speech of a man who was at last giving vent to a long-
cherished rancour \ He leaned over the table in a cramped posture
as though he were still in pain, occasionally drawing doodles on
a large sheet of paper, covering his eyes with his hand to shade
them from the brilliant light of the chandelier in the middle of
the ceiling.4Those fearfully strong white lights/ he confessed later
to Marinetti, 4made me terribly tired. I had to keep my hand in
front of my face to shield them from my eyes. . . . Two hours
before the meeting I had had a violent attack of my old complaint.
I was still in pain then, but my brain was very clear. I heard the
speech of Grandi, the public prosecutor, distinctly, but all my
energy was drained away. This is one of the effects of the disease :
complete extinction of energy but a great clarity—one might almost
call it transparency—of thought/
He looked defeated, Bottai thought, and in despair. 4He didn’t
seem like a man any more, but the ghost of a man already on the
other side of life.’ Buffarini-Guidi described him as being like a
man so far lost in tho u g h t4that he was in another world. It seemed
that he was covering his head as Caesar had done with his toga
under the blows of Brutus and the conspirators.’
When Grandi stopped speaking he changed his position to slump
back in his chair as he undid the collar of his shirt. His white face
was seen to be running with sweat.
It was now that Ciano decided to speak. Under his father-in-
182
THE GRAND COUNCIL MEETING
biati made a flamboyant speech in his favour and cried out that all
Italians were united round the Duce, he decided to make another
speech himself.
‘Among the accusations that are made against the régime/ he
said with a sudden flash of anger, *the one most current on the lips
of the people is forgotten. I mean the fabulous riches which several
of you have amassed. I have enough here/ he added, tapping his
brief-case, ‘ to send you all to the gallows. You/ pointing to Ciano,
‘ more than anyone/2
Encouraged by Mussolini’s revival, Scorza now rose to say in a
long and incoherent speech that the only thing wrong with the
Duce was that he had not been dictator enough and that to give
him more time for the discharge of his other duties he should give
up the command of the Armed Forces to Graziani. Constantly
interrupted by Bastianini, he tried to put forward his own motion,
which seemed to suggest that the dictatorship of the Fascist Party
should be more strictly enforced.
By this time the meeting had lost all semblance of order. ‘ Every
one was talking at once/ Bottai said. ‘Everyone hurled insults/
Mussolini said that he had in his hand the key to the military
situation, but he would not tell them what it was. ‘ If you get rid
of m e/ he called out, ‘ I shall have to renounce the secret weapon
that can end this war. You’ll lose at the same time the war, me
and your own heads.’ While Farinacci looked at him in amaze
ment, Grandi murmured, ‘Blackmail! ’
Then Count Giacomo Suardo, President of the Senate, who had
helped himself to a large glass of brandy during the few minutes'
recess, astonished everyone by saying that he had decided to with
draw his support of Grandi’s resolution and hoped that others
would join him in voting for Scorza’s. Tullio Cianetti, Minister of
Corporations, said that that might well prove the better course.
Ciano also began to waver. He proposed that a commission should
be appointed to consider the resolutions of both Grandi and Scorza
and devise a third to combine the two. Bottai opposed this sug
gestion and spoke again of the necessity for immediate action, but
his words were less confident than before and he was heard with
obvious impatience. Before he had finished Polverelli stood up to
•During his years of power, however, he never seems to have paid any more
attention to the dishonest financial speculations of the gerarchi than to those of
anyone else. When Achille Starace became involved in a scandal of this sort, he
was not much concerned, implying that the man’s real sin was his wearing a
Distinguished Service medal without authoritv.
i8 S '
MUSSOLINI
out me/ he added with a sudden flash of vanity, 4it would not be
a peace but a Diktat/
At five o’clock he decided to go hom e,4Come home with m e/ he
said to Scorza. 41 am very tired/
4The streets were deserted/ he wrote later,4but in the air, already
almost light, for dawn was breaking, there seemed to be a feeling
of inevitability/ As he went down Via Nomentana with Scorza at
his side he m urm ured,4Albini and Bastianini too. And Ciano even
—the lovely forty-year-old! ’
At Villa Torlonia his haggard face told Rachele that her fears
were justified. She had waited up for him, and when someone rang
from Palazzo Venezia to say that he was on his way home she went
into the garden to meet him.
4W ell/ she said to him with a kind of piteous anger.4You’ve had
them all arrested, I suppose.’
4N o/ he replied, weary and unconvincing. 4But I will.’
It was no more than a conventional protest. It was as if already
his will to resist was broken. He went into the house and looked at
his wife in silence. 4There’s nothing more I can do/ he said.
4They’re set on our ruin. My orders don’t count any more.’
He undressed and went to bed, but he could not sleep. At eight
o’clock, when Dr Pozzi called to give him the analgesic injection
which he had now every morning, he refused it. 41 don’t want one
today/ he protested. 4My blood’s running too fast.’
89
MUSSOLINI
While Mussolini was getting ready for his interview with the
King at Villa Savoia, the King was making preparations to
receive him there.
Early that morning Grandi had reported the results of the Grand
Council meeting to Acquarone and had suggested that Marshal
Caviglia, a distinguished soldier and a well-known anti-Fascist,
should be nominated Head of the Government by the King and
that diplomatic representatives should immediately be sent to
Madrid to open negotiations for peace with the Allies. When
Acquarone said that the King had decided to appoint Marshal
Badoglio as Head of the Government, Grandi was dismayed. With
scarcely another word he left the room and disappeared for ever
from public life.3 At six o'clock Acquarone woke up the King to
pass on Grandi's report on the Grand Council voting. An hour later
he called on General Ambrosio, and together they went to Badoglio
to tell him what the King had decided to do. Although Badoglio
was later to lose much of his self-confidence, for the moment he
was overcome with excitement. He put on his Marshal's uniform
and sent a servant down to the cellar for a bottle of champagne.
Then he cheerfully told his family that he had decided, in exercise
of the powers shortly to be conferred upon him, to have them all
put under arrest.
Ambrosio, charged with the duty of arranging a less light-hearted
arrest, did not share Badoglio's high spirits. General Castellano had
been to see him that morning and had told him that the King
had given no definite orders for Mussolini's arrest. ‘If Mussolini
accepts his dismissal without protest,' Ambrosio said, ‘ we'll let him
go. But if he resists we'll have to arrest him.'
‘ But that's not possible,' Castellano objected. ‘ The King doesn’t
3 Grandi had spent part of that morning in his office at Montecitorio, where
Ciano called on him with Filippo Anfuso. Anfuso's account of the events of that
morning provides evidence of how little any of the conspirators knew about the
plans of the Court and how little they trusted each other. At Montecitorio, Anfuso
says, Grandi and Ciano *went off and talked together in a corner '. Then they
began arguing. 1It was clear that Grandi hid a lot from Ciano.* A little later, when
Ciano and Anfuso had left Grandi and were going back together to Anfuso*s
house, Ciano showed that his knowledge of the Court's intentions was as uncertain
as Grandi's. ‘ All is arranged, you'll see,' he said confidingly. 1The Ministry is
already made. Pirelli will be Foreign Minister. I believe Vitetti is Under-Secretary.
General Carboni is Minister of Propaganda. For the time being I shall stand aside,
but we shall see. As for you, I don’t want to say too much. You are known as a
Germanophil. However, I'll speak to my friends.'
190
THE GRAND COUNCIL MEETING
191
4
THE ARREST AT VILLA SAVOIA
25 J U L Y 1943
attention and had asked for no details. Even now as he came out
onto the portico steps of Villa Savoia he had no sense of danger. He
saw his car parked not in its usual place at the corner of the steps,
but farther away on the other side of the drive. He made a slight
gesture of irritation and walked down the steps towards it. Captain
Vigneti of the carabinieri went up to him, saluted smartly and said,
‘Duce, we have heard you are in danger. I have orders to protect
you/
‘ There’s no need for that,’ Mussolini said with no more than a
hint of either surprise or anger. ‘ I have my own escort.’
‘My orders are’, Captain Vigneti insisted, ‘that I must escort
you.’
Mussolini had reached the bottom of the steps now and was
walking across the drive towards his car. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If
those are your orders. You had better come with me in my car.’
‘No, Duce,’ the captain told him. ‘You must come with me.’
‘ But it is ridiculous. I never heard of such a thing.’
‘ It is an order, Duce.’
Vigneti pointed to an ambulance. Mussolini made no further
protest and went towards it. The back doors were open, and as he
came up to them he hesitated for a moment, for there was an
armed guard inside. The captain took him gently by the elbow,
and Mussolini, accepting the gesture as one of help rather than
compulsion, climbed aboard. He sat down, pulling his hat over his
eyes as De Cesare climbed in after him. Another officer and three
carabinieri climbed in as well and two police officers in plain clothes
carrying machine-pistols. The doors were loudly slammed shut. It
never occurred to him that he had been arrested.
195
5
THE PRISONER
25 J U L Y 1 9 4 3 - 2 8 A U G U S T 1943
For many listeners this was enough. They waited to hear no more.
They ran down into the streets to shout and dance and sing. Musso
lini had fallen; the war was as good as over. They kissed each other,
held hands to run up and down the pavements calling up to the
faces at open windows that Fascism was dead. They yelled curses at
Mussolini like excited children who have been told after an en
forced silence that they are allowed to scream. They ran to the
Quirinale to cheer the King and to Via XX Settembre to cheer
Badoglio. They broke into the offices of II Messaggero and threw
furniture, files, telephones and enormous portraits of Mussolini out
of the windows. They hacked Fascist emblems off buildings and
tore Fascist badges out of the lapels of anyone foolhardy enough to
wear them. Few badges, however, were still worn. Rowdies and
toughs, looking for victims, could find none. Everyone, it seemed,
had become anti-Fascist. Scorza, who had been waiting in vain for
a message from Mussolini, had gone in desperation to Party Head
quarters in Piazza Colonna, where he had ordered a mobilization
of all Fascists in Rome. 4Something is happening/ he said to the
Federal Secretary. ‘ I don’t just know what, but I ’ve got a feeling
it’s serious.’ He had no more success, however, than Calbiati had
had with the Militia. Less than fifty Fascists answered his call
to duty; and even they could find little to do.
The houses of a few known Fascists were broken into, but their
owners could not be found. The offices of a few Fascist organiza
tions were set alight, but the fires were soon put out. A gang of
demonstrators burst into Palazzo Venezia, shouting that they
wanted the man who had oppressed them for twenty years, but they
did not attempt to break down the locked door of the Mappa
mondo room and contented themselves by waving a red flag.
There was little violence and no one was killed. The mood was
one of gaiety rather than of revenge. In Via del Tritone, Piazza
Colonna, Via Nazionale and Piazza del Popolo crowds of people
sang and danced as at a festa. ‘ Fascism is dead,’ they called happily
to each other. And it was true. Not a single man died in Rome that
night in an effort to defend it.
Most of the population, however, sat at home in sad disillusion
ment. After the announcement that Mussolini had resigned came
Badoglio’s proclamation that the war would go on and that Italy
would remain true to her allies. They had expected as much. The
Germans were still in Rome. It might have been Mussolini’s war,
but it could not be ended yet. The German Army was still in control
of most of Italy, and already orders had been issued by the German
198
THE PRISONER
At Villa Savoia the King was pacing up and down the paths of
the garden talking cheerfully about the Grand Council meeting and
Mussolini’s arrest with an officer of his staff. The Queen was not so
content. ‘They could have arrested him where and when they
wanted/ she complained later. ‘But they should not have done it
here. Here he was our guest. The laws of hospitality have been
violated. It is a disgrace/1 She had thought Mussolini gross and
vulgar when she had first met him, but she had grown to admire
him and could find it in her heart to regret the suddenness and
violence of his fall.
towards him. General Polito got out of the following car and then
Mussolini also stepped out onto the quay. Maugeri saluted and, as
he did so, he met Mussolini's 4enormous eyes ' as they came nearer
to him 4shining in the surrounding darkness \
Admiral Maugeri led the way on board and, followed by Polito,
Colonel Pelaghi and another carabinieri officer, took him as far as
the door to Captain Tazzari's quarters. While Mussolini stopped
to look at the barograph, Maugeri went back on deck where he
found the Lieutenant of the corvette giving instructions to Musso
lini's guards—six carabinieri armed with machine-guns.
The Persefone weighed anchor and left Gaeta astern. There was
some trouble with the starboard engine which, however, eventually
started up, throwing out a cloud of smoke that lasted throughout
the voyage.
Visibility was poor and there was a slight sirocco. It was hot and
humid and the clouds were low. Maugeri was happy to be at sea
again but he remembered thinking that if there were to be an
attack by bombers or submarines it wouldn't be 4much fun ’.
Before reaching Ventotene, Captain Tazzari reduced speed and
reversed course to wait for dawn; and at a quarter past five he
dropped anchor a few hundred yards from the shore.
The crew remained at action stations while General Polito went
ashore to discover if the island was suitable for Mussolini's exile.
Admiral Maugeri watched him as he climbed into the Persefone*s
motor-launch, and then went below again to make sure th a t4every
thing was all right ’.
4Also,' he admitted, 41 am compelled by a feeling of curiosity.
I enter the cabin. Mussolini raised his great eyes to mine, as I say
“ Excellency" (what else could one call him?). 44Do you want any
thing—a hot drink or a cup of coffee? " '
Mussolini refused the coffee. All he wanted, he said, was some
information. How big was Ventotene? he asked.
Admiral Maugeri told him all that he could from memory and
then sent for the chart-book.
4Ah, a small island,' Mussolini said, smiling.
He was thinking of Elba and St Helena, Maugeri realized, and
the Admiral's thoughts too turned to Napoleon. He looked down
at Mussolini with a kind of pity. He 4looks like a corpse ’, he noticed,
as if seeing him for the first time. 4He is emaciated.'
‘This is a corvette, isn't it? ’ Mussolini asked him, interrupting
his thoughts, and they began to talk of the war at sea, the technical
superiority of the British Navy, the battles that Maugeri had seen.
204
THE PRISONER
Maugeri, who had been smoking on deck, went below and found
Mussolini, ‘very agitated*, although he was making an obvious
effort not to appear so.
*I don't want to land by daylight,* he said. ÄI don’t want people
to see me. . . . Admiral, why all these pointless annoyances? *
Since the previous Sunday, he complained, he had been cut off
completely. He had had no news of his family. He had only the
clothes he stood up in. He referred to the letter in which Badoglio
had spoken of a serious plot against him.
Maugeri told him that he had been ordered on the mission
because the Navy had considered an officer of high rank should
accompany Mussolini on his journey. But he had no authority to
answer his complaints.
It was, nevertheless, Mussolini insisted but in a calmer, even
petulant voice, most ungenerous treatment. It might have serious
repercussions. It might even be dangerous, for Hitler had a strong
sense of friendship.
He continued in this manner for some time, and the longer he
spoke the less agitated and concerned he became. Soon Maugeri
and he were talking again about the war and about the reper
cussions which his fall had had in Germany and England.
Was Churchill very harsh about him, Mussolini wanted to know,
and suggested that the feeling against him personally in England
was very strong.
Maugeri did not answer the question directly, but spoke in a
general way of the *colourless German comments * and the *trend
of English propaganda ’, which was advising the Italians to drive
the Germans out if they wanted an honourable peace. Then he
suggested that Mussolini should go up on deck as it would soon
be time for him to land. Polito had returned to the Persefone
from his reconnaissance of the island where orders had been given
for a house in the village of Santa Maria to be prepared for the
reception of ‘ an exalted personage *.
Mussolini walked up to the ship's rail with his hat—as he was
usually to wear it now—pulled well down over his eyes. He looked
across to the island and asked which was to be his house. He was
shown an isolated, greyish, sad-looking, three-storeyed house with
green shutters on the shore of a little bay between two high rocks.
In front of it was a row of sailing-boats laid up on the beach. When
someone began to describe the house to him, he said irritably, *I
understand. It is that little house above the sailing-boats with green
windows.*
206
THE PRISONER
He was not told that it had also been the prison of Ras Imeru,
the Abyssinian patriot.
He was overcome with depression and made sure his face was
well concealed by his hat before climbing down the ladder into the
launch.41 don’t want to go/ he protested, with the sudden desperate
anger of a child, turning round, holding on to the rail. ‘I don’t
want everyone to know what’s happened.' But the anger subsided
as quickly as it had risen, and he said good-bye to Admiral Maugeri
with composure. 4Please pass on what I have told you,’ he said in
a voice so unnecessarily loud that a sailor standing nearby won
dered if the words had been meant for him.
He smiled sadly, Maugeri noticed, and saluted in the Roman
manner. He took his place in the motor-launch with his escort of
carabinieri. The motor-launch drew away from the ship and the
sailors remained silently at their stations.
It was ten o’clock when Mussolini landed on the beach of Santa
Maria in Ponza. Before walking up to the house, he turned round
and stood for a few moments looking back towards the sea.
41 am tired,’ he said suddenly. 41 should like a bed to rest on.'
The bedroom had been freshly white-washed, and with its
clinically austere walls and cheap wash-basin it gave the inescap
able impression of a prison cell. The only furniture was a bare iron
bedstead, a dirty wooden table from a wine-shop heavily scratched
by knives and a chair with the stuffing bursting out of its seat. At
sight of this lonely, comfortless room Mussolini was overcome
again by that sudden anger of despair that he had felt on the
Persefone. 41 have had enough of this,’ he said, clenching his fists
as he turned towards the window to pick up the chair, which he
placed in the middle of the floor. He sat down on the chair and
buried his face in his hands.
Sergeant-Major Marini of the Ponza carabinieri, who was stand
ing in the doorway and had watched the scene with embarrassment,
came into the room, gave a Roman salute and remained standing
at attention. He tried to say something, but the words caught in
his throat. So nervous and unsure of himself did he look that
Mussolini’s mood immediately changed. He stood up and took the
Sergeant-Major by the shoulders and said to him dramatically,
4Courage I I know what you must be feeling.’
4We didn’t know you were coming to Ponza, Excellency. I was
told barely half an hour ago.’
‘Don't worry.’
41 so often wanted to meet you in the past to tell you things.’
207
MUSSOLINI
found.3 Most of the time he spent looking gloomily out to sea from
the shade of the terrace.
One day General Polito came to the island, and Mussolini asked
him what had become of Badoglio’s promise to let him go to Rocca
delle Caminate. It had been decided that it was too dangerous,
Polito said; the Prefect of Forlì did not think he could guarantee
his safety there.
*Nonsense/ Mussolini said crossly.
1It isn’t nonsense/ Polito said. ‘ The Fascists seemed to have dis
appeared. There are signs of the reaction against them and against
you everywhere. The offices of 11 Popolo d’Italia have been attacked
in Milan. I myself saw a bust of you on the floor of a public lavatory
in Ancona/
‘ W hat about the war? ’
‘ Everyone is longing for it to be over. It's just as much a burden
now for the civilian population as it is for those who are fighting—
particularly for the old people, the women and the children. This is
why there is so strong a feeling against you/
But although the Italians were indeed longing for the war to be
over, Badoglio felt obliged to move towards an armistice with ex
treme caution. His policy was not a successful one. He had said,
and continued to insist, that the new Government would remain
faithful to Italy’s allies. The Germans, however, openly doubting his
word, were still pouring troops across the Brenner, while the Allies,
antagonized by his declared object of continuing the fight, hardened
their determination to batter Italy into defeat. On 6 August at the
frontier station of Tarvisio, Ambrosio and the new Foreign Minister
Raffaele Guariglia met Ribbentrop and Keitel and registered a for
mal protest against what was now in effect a military occupation of
their country. ‘ We have a right/ Ambrosio told Keitel, *to be given
advance information about German troop movements/ It was no
more than a formal objection. The delegates on both sides knew
that the Axis had already collapsed. Kesselring was one of those
few Germans—perhaps indeed the only one—who still believed that
3Pensieri di Maddalena e di Ponza published in translation in the Salzburger
Nachrichten may perhaps have been this diary. A notebook containing the Pen
sieri was given to the Salzburger Nachrichten, so this paper says, by an SS officer
a few days before the surrender. Colonel Skorzeny tells me that when Mussolini
invited him to visit him in the summer of 1944, he asked him to bring back with
him from Germany a diary which had been impounded by the Germans after the
rescue from the Gran Sasso. Skorzeny persuaded the Auswärtige A m t to let him
take back the diary after photostat copies had been made. He believes that one
of these copies may have been extracted from the files and sold to the Salzburger
Nachrichten.
214
THE PRISONER
Fifteen miles beyond Aquila the winding road up the Gran Sasso
ends at the terminus of a funicular, which goes up a further 3,000
feet to the plateau known as the Campo Imperatore. This plateau,
6,500 feet above the sea, stretches for ten miles beneath the tower
ing Monte Corno, the highest peak in the Apennines. It was to an
isolated hotel on this high plateau that Mussolini was being
taken.
For several days it had been known that ‘ an important person
age’ was soon to visit this hotel, the Albergo-Rifugio, and the
arrival there on 28 August of Private Francesco Grevetto, who was
known to have been in the service of the Duce before his arrest,
left little room for doubt who that visitor was to be. As the hotel
217
MUSSOLINI
was still full, the Villetta inn at the bottom of the funicular was pre
pared for Mussolini’s reception until the Albergo-Rifugio had been
cleared of its guests.
Flavia Iurato, the manageress of the hotel, who had come down
the funicular to supervise the preparations for Mussolini’s reception
at La Villetta was in the village square when the Red Cross ambu
lance drew up. ‘From it emerged a heavily built man,* she said
afterwards. ‘ He was wearing a dark suit, overcoat and black hat—
Mussolini. There was no longer anything of the well-fed, self-
assured dictator about him. Indeed he looked anxiously about him
as if he feared some trap, rolling his eyes which stood out from his
emaciated face.’
There had been an air-raid warning on the drive up from Citta
ducale. ‘Groups of soldiers in their shirt sleeves fled shouting in
all directions,’ Mussolini himself wrote later with undisguised con
tempt. ‘And the civilians followed their example. So did the
officers.’ But some of the officers noticed that Mussolini himself was
as anxious to reach the safety of the ditch as any of them.
His lonely days on Ponza and Maddalena and his declining
health had sapped the vigour of his spirit as well as of his body.
To those who saw him now he seemed not only a sick man but a
defeated one. His physical courage had never been doubted before,
and was not to be doubted again, but for the moment he seemed
almost timid.
In his second-floor room at La Villetta Mussolini sat listlessly gaz
ing upwards at the mountains. He was allowed for the first time
to listen to the wireless, but the privilege seemed a not particularly
welcome one. So depressed, indeed, did he appear to his warders,
Faiola and Gueli, that after each meal they quickly removed the
knives and even the forks from the table as they feared he might
try to use them on himself.
At the beginning of September he was taken to the funicular
station for the last stage of his journey. He did not want to go, but
his protest was no more than mild.
‘ Is this funicular safe? ’ he asked the station-master nervously.
And then added quickly, correcting himself with a touch of his
former pride, ‘Not for my sake, you understand, because my life
is over. But for those who accompany me.’
He comforted himself with the thought that it was built, like the
Albergo-Rifugio itself, ‘ during the twenty years of Fascism ’.
How high up was the hotel? he asked: 2,112 metres, someone
told him.
218
ON THE GRAN SASSO
In the few days that you have been with me [Faiola read], I have
realized that you are a true friend. You are a soldier, and know better
than I what it means to fall into the hands of the enemy. I learned
from the Berlin radio that one of the armistice terms speaks of hand
ing me over alive to the English. I shall never submit to such a
humiliation, and I ask you to let me have your revolver.
221
MUSSOLINI
222
7
THE RESCUE FROM GRAN SASSO
i2 S E P T E M B E R 1943
22g
MUSSOLINI
Hearing the roar of the aircraft Mussolini, sitting with his arms
folded by the open window of his sitting-room, looked up into the
cloud-filled sky and saw the gliders swooping down on to the rock
immediately in front of the hotel. As the nearest glider came to
ground with a crash of tearing canvas and splintering wood, he saw
several men fall out of the wrecked fusilage, pick themselves up and
run towards him. At first, although they were less than thirty yards
from the hotel door, he could not see who they were; but then he
saw that one of them was an Italian officer, who was shouting at the
top of his voice to the stupefied carabinieri, 1Don’t shoot ! Don’t
shoot! ’
‘ Don’t fire ! ’ Mussolini himself shouted through the open win
dow. ‘There’s an Italian general there. Everything’s all right! ’
‘Excellency! Excellency! ’ Lieutenant Faiola called out breath
lessly as he ran up the stairs to Mussolini’s room. ‘ Excellency ! The
Germans ! ’
He burst into the room, and at the sight of his prisoner leaning
out of the open window he screamed, close to hysteria, ‘ Shut the
window and don’t move.’
Below them Skorzeny had dashed across the rough ground in
front of the hotel and through the first open door he had seen.
Kicking the chair from beneath a wireless operator, he smashed the
set and looked around for a way out of the room into the hotel.
But there was none. He ran outside again and raced along the side
of the building until he came to a terrace about nine feet above the
ground. Jumping on to the back of one of his men he leapt to the
top of the terrace and looked anxiously upwards at the curved wall
of the building with its rows of small square windows. At one of
these on the first floor he saw the face of Mussolini gazing down
towards him.
‘Get away from the window,’ he shouted and ran on into the
entrance hall of the hotel. ‘ Here,’ one of the staff said later, ‘ all was
confusion. No one thought of giving orders.’ The place was filled
with carabinieri, who had left their machine-gun posts at the first
sight of the German commandos and rushed for shelter, many of
them dropping their rifles and grenades on the way. With unneces
sary shouts of ‘ Mani in alto!9Skorzeny’s men pushed their way into
the building while Skorzeny himself beat a path through the cara
binieri with the butt end of his machine-pistol to reach the staircase,
230
THE RESCUE FROM GRAN SASSO
got into the air it would never stay there. But Skorzeny was in
sistent. ‘ If there was a disaster/ he wrote afterwards, admitting his
concern for his own interest, ‘ all that would be left for me would
be a bullet from my own revolver. Adolf Hitler would never forgive
such an end to our venture. As there was no other way of getting
the Duce safely to Rome it was better to share the danger with him,
even though my presence added to it. If we failed, the same fate
would overtake us all/
Mussolini confessed later that he shared Gerlach’s apprehension,
but he did not mention it. A carabiniere watched him as he stooped
to enter the small aircraft. He looked old and frail in a winter over
coat which was too big for him and a black, wide-brimmed felt hat
pulled down low over his eyes; and the carabiniere felt a sudden pity
for him and an admiration for his courage. Skorzeny noticed that
he hesitated slightly before climbing into the rear seat and respected
him for making no protest.
The Fieseler-Storch’s engine roared to full power as twelve men
tugged hard against its pull and then, as Gerlach dropped his hand,
let go to send it hurtling over the rocky plateau. The aircraft
gathered speed as it approached the end of the cleared strip, but
the wheels did not leave the ground. The edge of the plateau drew
closer and it seemed that the Storch would surely dive down the
declivities of an approaching gully when suddenly it rose from the
ground. A moment later it fell again and one of its wheels hit a
rock, sending the machine toppling to the left and over the edge
and down towards the valley. It fell dizzily through the thin air,
and the wind roared in Mussolini’s ears, as Gerlach tried to pull
the Storch out of its dive and into level flight. ‘ It was a moment of
real terror for m e/ Mussolini admitted to a Swiss journalist the
following year.
The carabinieri and SS men ran forward towards the shelf of the
plateau and watched the machine falling helplessly towards the
dark rocks of the valley. And then, as if from the beginning the
pilot had intended this spectacular take-off, his machine came out
of its dive and flew away to the south-west towards the Avezzano
valley less than a hundred feet above the ground.
For some time no one in the aircraft spoke. Crouched close to
Skorzeny, Mussolini looked not so much afraid as sad and troubled.
As though to reassure him Skorzeny placed his hand on his
shoulder, and when the Duce turned round his face was paler even
than before. But after a few moments he began to speak, pointing
out features of the countryside below, telling Skorzeny what had
*33
MUSSOLINI
happened to him in the towns and villages over which they passed.
On the Pratica di Mare airfield Gerlach’s passengers were trans
ferred to a Heinkel, the engines of which were so loud that Musso
lini could no longer make himself heard. He sat back with his eyes
closed and then appeared to sleep.
It was already dark when the Heinkel came down at Aspern air
field in Vienna, and Mussolini came out of it looking exhausted.
On his arrival at the Hotel Continental, where a suite had been
prepared for him, Hitler telephoned to congratulate him on his
escape; but he was in no mood for conversation. He thanked the
Führer briefly. ‘I am tired/ he said. ‘Very tired. And I need to
rest/
Hitler’s obvious concern for his welfare, however, and his ex
pressions of delighted pleasure had a restorative effect and when
later on Skorzeny took him a pair of pyjamas which had been pro
vided for him by Gruppenführer Quermer, the SS chief in Vienna,
he refused them quite gaily. ‘It’s unhealthy to sleep in night
clothes/ he said with a suggestively prurient smile which Skorzeny
took as indicative of the ‘ Duce’s wide experience of life \ ‘ I never
wear anything at night and I should advise you to do the same/
In the morning Mussolini was obviously refreshed. He had his
beard and scalp shaved, and he received numerous callers. The ex
cited congratulations, the adulatory respect, the infectious enthusi
asm, affected him deeply. He spoke no longer of retirement to Rocca
delle Caminate, but of the future of Fascism and of the necessity
for making it a republican party.
‘ I made one great mistake/ he said, ‘ and have had to pay the
price. I never understood that the Italian Royal House was my
enemy and would remain so. I should have made Italy a republic
after the end of the Abyssinian campaign/ Once again he seemed
to Skorzeny a man of hope and of resolution.
At midday on 13 September he left Vienna for Munich, where
Rachele and the children met him at Reem airport. Rachele was
1shaken by his deathly pallor \ But he walked up to her 1in his
usual sprightly fashion ’ and when she asked him what he intended
to do now he began immediately to talk of his future plans. ‘ I am
determined not to abandon my course of action and to do what may
still be possible to save the Italian people/ he said. He spoke very
fast as if afraid, Rachele thought, that she would interrupt or argue
with him. They left the airfield together and drove to the Karl
Platz, where a suite had been prepared for him. But it was so
luxurious that he refused to sleep in the bedroom and spent the
234
THE RESCUE FROM GRAN SASSO
night instead in the more modest room which had been given to
Rachele. He agreed, however, to have a bath. He badly needed it,
Rachele said. 4His socks were sticking to his feet/
The next morning Edda came to see him. The meeting was a
difficult one, for Galeazzo too was in Munich. Helped by the Ger
mans and against the orders of Marshal Badoglio, he had left Rome
with Edda and the children on 23 August. He had tried to obtain
from the Germans a visa to go to Spain or South America, and after
long delays was given one on condition he travelled via Munich.
But the Germans, and in particular Ribbentrop, whose dislike had
turned to hate, did not want him to escape them. Ciano, himself,
seems not to have been aware of the extent of the feeling against
him and he left for Germany without undue apprehension. Filippo
Anfuso, his former Principal Private Secretary, has described how
he warned Ciano not to go to Germany. Ciano broke down and
wept. 4Mussolini is a great m an/ he said. 4A real genius/ The son-
in-law did not doubt that he would be forgiven. But on his arrival
in Munich difficulties were put in the way of his continuing his
journey. Both he and Edda were diligently watched and reported on
by the Gestapo, whose men waited in the corridor outside Musso
lini's room while the interview between the Duce and Countess
Ciano was taking place.
Edda begged her father to see Galeazzo. He had a full explana
tion of his conduct, she said. But, persuaded by Rachele, Musso
lini refused to meet his son-in-law. Later, however, he relented and
said that he would grant Galeazzo a short interview in a few days'
time. Nothing, though, would make his wife change her mind. 41
hate him,' she said with Romagnol passion and implacability. 41
would like to kill him.’
Before the interview between the two men took place, Mussolini
was flown from Munich for a meeting with Hitler at the Fiihrer's
headquarters in East Prussia. The conversation he had with him
there decided Ciano's fate for ever.
235
8
T H E M E E T I N G A T T H E F Ü H R E R ’S
HEADQUARTERS
15 S E P T E M B E R 1943
ship. The Duce, himself, must go back, place the traitors of 25 July
on trial and have them executed. He must allow Germany to occupy
the north-eastern provinces of Italy, Alto Adige, Venezia Giulia
and the Trentino as a safeguard against an attack through Yugo
slavia. The world must be given reaffirmation of the solidarity of
the Axis. Hitler went on talking for about an hour, and Mussolini
felt too tired and weak to resist him. At the end of his speech Hitler
turned to the newly appointed German Ambassador, Rudolf Rahn,
who was present at the interview, and ordered him peremptorily to
assist in the drafting of the new Republic’s Constitution. Musso
lini left the Führer’s room in a daze. Countess Ciano, who saw him
a few days afterwards, described him as a man deprived of his will.
Hitler, in telling Goebbels of his interview, did not disguise his
disappointment in the Mussolini that Skorzeny had brought back
from Italy, saying that he seemed a much smaller man than before.
The main cause of Hitler’s disillusionment, Goebbels thought,
was Mussolini’s apparent lack of determination to hound the
traitors of 25 July to their deaths. ‘Punishment of the Fascist
traitors ’, Goebbels wrote, ‘ is indispensable to any resurgence of Fas
cism ’. But the Duce, ‘ too much bound to his family ’, seemed un
willing to punish anybody. He seemed to blame the King for his
catastrophe more than anyone else, certainly more than Ciano, a
particularly hated figure at the German headquarters. When Musso
lini had made reference to the fact that Ciano was after all his
daughter’s husband, Hitler had snapped, ‘ That makes his
treachery all the graver. I must be very clear. The apparent con-
donement of treachery in Italy would have profound effects else
where.’ This, Germany would not allow. An example of condign
punishment must be given to the world.
Ciano, it was known, had been promised an interview with Musso
lini on his return to Munich. ‘That means this poisonous mush
room is again planted in the midst of the new Fascist Republican
Party,’ Goebbels commented in disgust. ‘ Ciano intends to write his
memoirs. The Führer rightly suspects that such memoirs can only
be written in a manner derogatory to us, for otherwise he could not
dispose of them in the international market. There is, therefore,
no thought of authorizing Ciano to leave the Reich. He will remain
in our custody.’
‘ The Duce,’ Goebbels added in another passage of his diary, ' has
not drawn the conclusions from Italy’s catastrophe which the
Führer expected. He was naturally overjoyed to see the Führer
and to be at liberty again. But the Führer expected the first thing
237
MUSSOLINI
usual he did not discuss his dilemma with her, saying merely that
he had spent 4three days of intensive work with Hitler \ Late on
the afternoon of the next day he shut himself up in his room to
prepare the speech to the Italian people which he was to broadcast
over the Munich radio that evening.
‘I went with him / Rachele said, ‘into the little transmission
room fixed up in the Karl Platz. It may seem strange, but this was
only the second time he had broadcast. In the past his speeches
were always made in public, though they were relayed by radio.
He was not at his best, and before he began his eyes held mine.
After a pause, which it seemed would never end, he began to
speak/
His voice sounded feverish and his words were slurred, often
mispronounced and sometimes unintelligible. He told his listeners
about his imprisonment and dramatic escape in a way which even
a neo-Fascist admirer has felt compelled to call 'journalistic'.
Then, in an attempt to recapture the powerful accents of the past,
he recalled his people to their duty and enjoined them to follow
him in the march to victory.
But neither Goebbels nor Hitler expected them to follow him.
Italy had abdicated 1as a people and as a nation and although
Goebbels, in contrast with other listeners, thought that the Duce
had spoken ‘quite coolly, realistically, and without exaggerated
pathos ', he had shown himself ‘ incapable of staging a great come
back In any event ‘ old Hindenburg was undoubtedly right when
he said that even Mussolini would never be able to make anything
but Italians out of Italians ’.
240
9
THE PRESIDENT AT GARGNANO
27 S E P T E M B E R 1943- 27 S E P T E M B E R 1944
Hitler and I have surrendered ourselves to our illusions like
a couple of lunatics. We have only one hope left—to create
a myth.
ferring to talk to men who were political outsiders. Two such men
were Carlo Silvestri, a Socialist journalist, and Nicola Bombacci, a
former Communist and Vice-Secretary of the Italian Socialist
Party, whom he had known since 1902 when they had been school
masters together at Gualtieri. Although Bombacci, the friend of
his youth, had become his political enemy, Mussolini had gone out
of his way to help him and his family when he was out of work in
1937. It was a gesture which the impressionable Bombacci never
forgot. *I shall share his fate/ he said when asked what he intended
to do if the German armies collapsed. 41 shall never forget what he
did for my family when they were starving/
Mussolini, he decided, was himself in need of help and sympathy
now, and he went to stay with him at Rocca delle Caminate and
listened with patience and understanding to his long complaints
and diatribes against the Germans, whose influence was as pervasive
here as it had been in Germany.
SS troops patrolled the grounds continually and even stood watch
ing him balefully when he tried to recover his lost strength and fit
ness by chopping up wood in the garden. When, on German advice,
it was decided that the headquarters of the new Government should
be at Salò on Lake Garda rather than at Rome, which might have
to be abandoned to the Allies, and Mussolini moved to Villa Fel
trinelli in the little lakeside town of Gargnano a few miles north of
Salò, German guards patrolled the grounds there too.2 Specially
chosen from the Volksdeutsche and with little knowledge of Ger
man, let alone Italian, these foreign guards depressed Mussolini
beyond measure. 41 don't want everyone to think I am a prisoner/
he complained angrily. But his status was almost that. 4He is fan
tastically guarded/ a young German officer, Fürst Urach, wrote
home . 41 always sing or whistle when I cross the garden as there is
an SS man with a pistol behind every tree. There are a few Italian
Blackshirts there as well in order to keep up appearances.'
German soldiers followed him in lorries when he went out in his
car and German agents listened in to his telephone calls, which had
to be made through a German Army exchange. General Wolff, the
Ambassador Rahn, the doctor Zachariae and Colonel Dollmann,
who had received personally from Himmler orders never to go far
9It was one of the principal weaknesses of the Salò Republic that for reasons of
military exigence it was established so far north. By abandoning Rome, the his
torical capital of the country, the Fascist Government lost what little prestige it
could hope to have in the particular circumstances of its creation and accentuated
the impression of its precariousness.
244
THE PRESIDENT AT GARGNANO
from Mussolini’s side, were all regular visitors. ‘Wolff and Doll-
mann are my jailers/ he grumbled, and whenever he looked from
his window he saw a German helmet. ‘ They are always there/ he
said, ‘ like the spots of the leopard.’
To his Italian visitors he was always grumbling like this; but he
did not do so to Hitler. Once he wrote to him to complain of the
high-handed conduct of German troops, of their arrogant occupa
tion of north-eastern Italy, which amounted almost to annexation,
and of the attitude of the German Government, which seemed to
regard his own as completely servile. But he received no satisfaction
and never repeated his protests so unequivocally, deriving some
sort of comfort from the knowledge that he had at least once made
them and frequently re-reading, with a pleasure that one of his
secretaries thought pitiable, the carbon copy of the letter which he
kept in a drawer of his desk.
Against the trial of the traitors of 25 July, which Hitler had
imposed upon him, he made no such protest. He accepted Hitler’s
terms and issued orders that these men must be found and brought
to trial. The world must be shown, he said, that there had been an
underhand plot against him in which the King had been involved;
and the world must also know that he still had the power and the
relentless implacability of the Duce of Fascism. His secretaries have
described how, when the names of the traitors were mentioned, his
face would assume the marble-like expression of the Emperor
Caracalla, at once merciless and passionless. They could only guess
what he was thinking. Was he hiding behind that façade of cold
impassivity a shame for his weakness in not resisting Hitler’s
demands? Was he hiding a human concern for Edda’s children,
whom, until the beginning of December, the Germans still held in
Munich, by implication as hostages? Was he hoping to regain his
reputation for stern justice and impartiality? Did he really believe,
as he told Serafino Mazzolini, that the trials were necessary for
‘ pure reasons of State ’? Was it true, as he later told the journalist
Ivanoe Fossani, that he had not wanted the trial himself, but the
Party had insisted and the Germans had been determined to have
it as ‘ it was necessary to restore faith in the alliance.’
Whatever his reasons might have been, there was no doubt that
having on 24 November 1943 issued a decree establishing the special
tribunal, he never wavered in his determination to abide by his
promises to Hitler. The decisions of the Tribunal were ‘to be
guided by justice ’ but ‘ also by the highest interests of the country
now at war Its President was to proceed ‘ without regard to any-
*45
MUSSOLINI
made. That afternoon and the following day were spent in listening
to the cautious pleas made on behalf of the prisoners by their
counsel; but the result was not now—nor perhaps ever had been—
in doubt. At half past one on Monday the President of the Tribunal
returned to pronounce that, with the exception of Cianetti, who
was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment, all the accused were
condemned to death.
Cianetti murmured, €Grazie, g r a z i e Marinelli fainted. De Bono
gave a shout of ‘ Long live Italy ’, in which Pareschi, Gottardi, and
Ciano joined.
At ten o’clock that night the priest who heard confessions at the
Degli Scalzi prison came to see the condemned men. The German
guards would not at first let him into Ciano’s cell, but after tele
phoning the Gestapo command he eventually obtained permission
to administer the Last Sacraments to him.
Some nights before, Ciano had had a very different companion in
his cell. She was a good-looking girl with blonde hair who, the
Gestapo hoped, would be able to persuade the susceptible Ciano (in
a moment of passion or desire) to reveal where he had hidden his
diaries. This improbable and outmoded device had an unexpected
result. Donna Felicita was not only unable to persuade Ciano to tell
her anything but, according to Colonel Dollmann, she fell in love
with him, wept bitterly when he was condemned to death and
eventually became an agent for the Allies.
For Ciano there was some comfort in his last hours. A message
was smuggled through to him that his wife, helped by her lover,
Marquis Emilio Pucci, had managed to escape across the border
into Switzerland with some notebooks containing his later diaries
concealed in a belt round her waist, leaving the earlier diaries,
together with some important documents dealing with Italo-Ger-
man relations, which Ciano had extracted from the files at Palazzo
Chigi, in the care of one of the doctors at the Ramiola nursing-
home. Edda had collected these notebooks and papers from their
hiding-place in Rome and had at one time hoped that she might
exchange them with the Germans for her husband’s life. Negotia
tions were, in fact, begun with the Gestapo in Italy, but when
Himmler heard about them he persuaded Hitler to put an end to
them. Ciano, himself, seems never to have believed in the possi
bility of their success and told the priest who visited him on the
night before his execution that he was convinced that the Ger
mans would arrange in some way for him to be killed.
Having given Ciano his Last Sacraments the priest obtained per-
*Ji
MUSSOLINI
mission for him to join the other condemned men in De Bono’s cell.
Marinelli had had a heart attack and lay on the bed while the
others sat talking to the priest. ‘ We did not talk about the life that
was past/ the priest said afterwards, ‘but about the life to come,
about God and the immortality of the soul. . . . It was a pleasant
night, almost Socratic/ Pareschi read extracts from Plato, which the
others discussed with him. Once someone mentioned Mussolini and
for a moment the conversation returned to their trial. As traitors,
Gottardi supposed, they would be shot in the back. ‘ It’s too much/
De Bono suddenly exclaimed with an anger that was close to tears.
‘For sixty-two years I’ve worn a soldier’s uniform without ever
bringing a stain on it/
At dawn news came that the execution had been delayed. They
had all signed an appeal for mercy the night before, which Pavolini
had undertaken to hand to Mussolini, and it was expected that De
Bono, at least, would be reprieved. The prisoners began to have
hope again until De Bono shook his head and said, ‘ It’s an empty
hope. We have Galeazzo with us.’ Pavolini, in fact, had taken
care to withhold the appeal so that Mussolini, in Pavolini’s own
phrase, would be spared the ‘necessity of confirming the death-
sentence ’.
At eight o’clock a German officer came to the prison to say that
the ‘technical difficulties’ had been overcome and the executions
were to take place within the hour a few miles outside Verona at
Fort Procolo. The five prisoners were taken there by car under a
German escort. In an uncontrollable access of rage Ciano began to
curse Mussolini to damnation, until De Bono put a hand on his
shoulder and told him he should try to die in a state of forgive
ness.
It was a cold morning, and De Bono rubbed his hands vigorously
as he walked from the car to the row of school chairs to which he
and the others were to be tied with their backs to the firing squad.
Ciano, perfectly composed again now, pointed to the right-hand
chair and said to him, ‘ That is your seat by right, Marshal.’
‘On the journey we are about to take/ De Bono answered, ‘I
cannot believe that precedence is of any importance.'
They both asked the police officer who commanded the firing
squad if they might face the rifles; but their request was refused.
Marinelli had fainted again and had to be carried to his chair;
Pareschi took off his fur-lined coat and offered it to the soldier who
was tying him up; Gottardi murmured to himself, perhaps in
prayer. The sky was dull and overcast, and Muller the UFA camera-
252
THE PRESIDENT AT GARGNANO
man doubted that his pictures would come out very well. While he
was adjusting his lens, De Bono shouted,4Long live Italy ! *
'Long live Italy I ' Ciano answered him.
And then the order to fire was given, and the five men were
shot. At the last moment Ciano managed to struggle free of his
ropes and turned to face his executioners. Their aim was bad, and
Ciano was not dead when the commander of the firing squad walked
up to him to put a bullet through his head. Muller's photograph
was clear enough to show a face completely calm, almost serene.
‘ We were all swept away by the same storm,' Ciano had said to
the priest. ‘Let my children know I died without bitterness to
anyone/
him every day. Soon after this Buffarini-Guidi arranged for her
family to move to Villa Fiordaliso in the grounds of D’Annunzio’s
villa, the Vittoriale, a big, mournful house which had been turned
into a museum. She herself was given a sitting-room high up in a
tower of the Vittoriale itself and, as an additional security against
an attack by partisans, a German officer for a bodyguard. Although
she wrote in gratitude of the Germans’ thoughtfulness in providing
her with so young and charming a guard and told her sister how
much she liked him, Major Franz Spögler was not so much an
escort as a spy. One of his principal duties was to send a weekly
report on Claretta Petacci to the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna,
where it was supposed that her influence on the Duce might not
be a beneficial one.
In fact, Mussolini saw little of his mistress. Rachele’s outbursts
of jealous rage were becoming insufferable, and in consequence he
visited Claretta less and less. Only occasionally in the evenings,
when it was getting dark, did he go to the Vittoriale, but he never
stayed long. He drove there in a small Fiat, leaving his official
Alfa Romeo in front of the main door of his office in Villa delle
Orsoline. The meetings were sad and unsatisfactory, Claretta said.
The Vittoriale was damp and cold, the woods outside it full of
German soldiers. There was no happiness anywhere and no
seclusion. Twice he told her that he did not want to come to
see her any more; but she began to cry and begged him not to
abandon her, and he gave in and said that he would come again
soon.
One day Rachele, unable to control her jealousy any longer,
exacerbated Claretta’s misery by insisting that Buffarini-Guidi
should take her to see her husband’s mistress. Rachele arrived at
the Vittoriale trembling with anger. Claretta kept her waiting and
eventually came down in a dressing-gown accompanied by Major
Spögler. She looked pale and ill and sat in an arm-chair twisting
a scarf between her fingers and did not answer when Rachele told
her to leave her husband alone. Her silence irritated Rachele, who
came towards her and grabbed hold of the sleeve of her dressing-
gown. At this Claretta burst out, ‘ The Duce loves you, signora. I
have never been allowed to say a word against you.’
For a moment Rachele seemed placated, but when Claretta
offered her typed copies of the letters Mussolini had written to her
she flew into another rage.
‘ I don’t want typed copies,’ she shouted. ‘ That’s not why I came.’
'W hy did you come, signora? ’ Claretta asked her.
*59
MUSSOLINI
She did not reply for the moment. ‘ She stood looking at m e/
G aretta said afterwards, ‘ her hands on her hips. Then she started
to insult me. Her face got redder and redder/
G aretta decided to ring up Mussolini.
‘ Ben/ she said, ‘ your wife is here. W hat shall I do? ’
Rachele snatched the telephone from her and made her husband
admit that he knew she was coming. She was angrier than ever by
now. She told G aretta that she was hated by the Fascists even more
than by the partisans, and twice G aretta fainted and Buffarini-
Guidi had to run away to fetch some smelling-salts. When she was
revived she sat in her chair crying helplessly. Rachele too, Spögler
thought, was crying when she left.
W ith his mistress and his wife squabbling over him, his
daughters-in-law irritating him, his Ministers bothering him with
details which no longer interested him, Mussolini was more and
more anxious to be left alone. During the first few weeks at Gar-
gnano he had stayed in bed until ten o’clock in the morning and
had not left for his office in Villa delle Orsoline until half-past
eleven or twelve. But by the spring of 1944 he was getting up
earlier and earlier every day and was often in his office by eight
o’clock. He stayed there until two o’clock, when he returned to
Villa Feltrinelli for a light lunch, which, like all his meals, was
eaten so quickly that he had often finished and left the room before
the others had begun. By three he was back again in his office, or
in the ill-furnished and tastelessly decorated sitting-room wrhere
he saw his visitors, and he did not go home again until eight or
nine o’clock.
Although he spent so many hours at his desk, the questions which
really concerned him were of a philosophical or personal nature
rather than a practical one. Only occasionally did a problem of
government occupy and absorb his mind, and even then it was
usually one which did not appear to deserve the sudden interest
which he took in it.
He was, for instance, passionate in his determination to obtain
the formal recognition of the Vatican for his régime. He could not
carry on, he once exclaimed in exasperation, without this recogni
tion, although his Government’s functioning was not likely to be
any the more successful with it. It was a matter of personal pride,
and he began to feel himself insulted by the Pope’s reluctance,
which became so much an obsession with him that he declared that
his patience was exhausted and he would denounce the Lateran
Pacts and set up a schismatic Church. He went so far as to consider
260
THE PRESIDENT AT GARGNANO
desk had sometimes been completely bare to show how his mind
contained all that he needed to know and sometimes littered with
documents to show how busy he was. At Villa delle Orsoline it
was merely untidy. Newspaper cuttings, papers and books, jars of
coloured pencils and photographs, were piled higgledy-piggledy
upon it without regard to order or, more unusually, effect. A journa
list once looked at the spines of the books to see what the Duce was
reading. They were a characteristically disparate selection—Dostoev
sky, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Plato, Sappho, Kant, Sholokov’s Quiet
Flows the Don, Nietzsche, Emil Ludwig’s Napoleon, Sorel’s Ré-
flexions sur la Violence, Goethe, Schopenhauer, books about Christ,
about Frederick the Great, about Beethoven—and they all had bits
of paper stuck between the pages to mark a significant passage or
pencilled notes scribbled in the margins. So engrossed did he become
on occasions that visitors and officials, particularly German ones,
were dismissed with an impatient order to go and see Graziani or
the Minister of Popular Culture or his Principal Private Secretary.
‘ Mussolini tends to withdraw from all questions of Government/
the young German officer Fürst Urach wrote home. ‘ If a German
General comes to him with some request he says, “ Oh, do talk to
Graziani.” If Leyers or some economic expert comes he says, " Oh,
do see my Economics Minister, won’t you? ” ’ When one visitor,
more importunate than the rest, insisted that the Duce’s decision
was vital, Mussolini replied that if the decision really were a vital
one he could not possibly make it. The Germans must : he himself
was merely Mayor of Gargnano.
But however vindictively he spoke against the Germans, those
*criminals by birth ’, as he referred to them on one occasion, those
‘ barbaric vandals, cruel, unjust, violent and rapacious ’, as he called
them on another, he could not escape from the spell of their leader.
On 2i April 1944 he went to Germany to see him. Hitler received
him warmly at Salzburg, and Mussolini assured him more than
once of his unshadowed belief in an ultimate German victory. The
atmosphere was friendly and comforting, and encouraged by that
and by the support of Graziani and Mazzolini, who had come to
Germany with him, and of Filippo Anfuso, his new Ambassador in
Berlin, Mussolini went so far as to protest against the German occu
pation of Alto Adige and Trieste, which he had mentioned in his
letters, and to call Hitler’s attention to the ill-treatment of Italian
workers in Germany. Hitler seemed sympathetic and said that he
would see what could be done. Little was done, however, and three
months later, when Mussolini went to see Hitler again, the atmo-
263
MUSSOLINI
you are the finest, indeed perhaps the only, friend I have in the
world/ As soon as the Duce had gone, Hitler gave orders that an
air-raid shelter should be built in the grounds of Villa Feltrinelli,
but Mussolini only visited it once and then merely to congratulate
the workmen who had built it.
The meeting between the two men had been valueless. Mussolini
had repeated none of the protests he had found the courage to men
tion in April and he returned to Italy gloomy and silent. People
had become used to him coming back from Germany infused by
Hitler’s confidence and spirit, but this time if there was a change in
him it was for the worse. He had been given some statistics by an
Embassy official concerning the Italians in Germany and they had
appalled him.4
He returned to the inconsequential routine of his work with even
less energy and enthusiasm than before. Earlier in that summer he
had played an occasional game of tennis, but his opponents always
let him win and he became bored with the game and confined his
exercise to riding a bicycle round the shores of the lake, and to
walking in the woods either alone or with Romano, but followed
always by his German guards. He also gave up the German lessons
which he had previously been having three times a week; he could
always make himself understood, and the expert fluency which he
had hoped to achieve seemed no longer necessary. He left for the
office earlier than ever now, sometimes before eight o’clock, in order
to escape from the squabbling household, and returned home late
to spend the evening, whenever he could, reading alone in his room
or sitting outside in a garden chair with his hands clasped behind
his head staring out over the lake until the sun went down.
He hated the twilight. As soon as it grew dark, he went indoors
and switched on the light in his room. One evening the current had
failed and Quinto Navarra, who had returned to Mussolini’s service,
brought in a candle. 4But he couldn’t stand its low light,’ Navarra
said, ‘ so he went out into the garden until the electric light came
on again, and stood by the lake throwing stones into the water.’
Either his Italian physician or Professor Zachariae called on him
every morning to satisfy themselves that the diet they had recom
mended him to follow was having the required effect. He was exces
sively pale, Zachariae noticed, and his dark eyes were on occasions
almost feverish as they gazed out of a head that seemed curiously
4 Salvatorelli and Mira say that in all 700,000 Italian soldiers were sent to Ger
many during the war for various non-combatant duties and that 30,000 of them
died.
265
MUSSOLINI
gaunt. He had no more than a cup of tea for breakfast, a very light
lunch and dinner. He never drank milk although in the past he
had had as many as six pints a day. The plain uniform of the
Fascist Militia, which he wore habitually, though usually well
pressed seemed to hang about him, and the black collars of his
shirts were much too big, revealing his formerly massive neck as
lined and wrinkled like the neck of a tortoise. He took care to see
that his skull was always well shaved and twice a month a girl came
from Gardone to manicure his nails, but these were his only con
cessions to a personal vanity which had once been compulsive.
' Only rarely,' Navarra said, 1was he in a good humour, and these
rare moments were always followed by long, black hours of sad
ness.'
The month after his visit to Hitler in Prussia he decided to make
a tour of inspection of the front. Encouraged by the regimented
cheers that greeted him he spent five days touring the lines, giving
advice to the generals which they did not take and suggesting
counter-offensives which were obviously impractical. Kesselring
listened politely, but to Mussolini's annoyance made it clear that
his suggestions were not considered of undue importance. 'T h at
Kesselring,' Mussolini had already decided crossly, ‘is not worth
a fig.’
The cheers which had greeted him, however, from both Italian
and German troops, had an invigoratingly restorative effect. He
returned to Gargnano with new confidence and hope and told
Rachele over and over again how the soldiers had displayed their
spontaneous affection. The Germans in particular, he said, had
‘ gone wild with excitement and '—a seemingly incompatible reac
tion—‘ stiffened to attention in the cramped space of their dug-outs '.
But the mood did not last. Within a week he had relapsed into his
former despondency.
In June Otto Skorzenv went to visit him and found him lethargic
and pessimistic. ‘ Mussolini was really quiet,' Colonel Skorzeny says,
‘ and he seemed to me to have resigned completely. He was not any
more the strong chief directing his Ministers, but he let them go
their own way. . . . He seemed to be a philosopher and no longer
the chief of a Government. He talked to me about German history,
with which he was very familiar, and about the philosophical basis
of Fascism and how it would have to be changed in the future. He
tried not to show his pessimism to his family.' But he did not
succeed.
'A s the days passed he became more thoughtful than ever,’
266
THE PRESIDENT AT GARGNANO
Rachele said. ‘ I could tell by the way he talked from time to time
that the deadly struggle between Italians behind the lines was a
constant torment to him. Even at meals he sat gloomy and dis
traught. He would sometimes listen to me in silence and then ask
suddenly, “ W hat did you say? ” '
There was no doubt that this struggle, to which Rachele referred
‘as a constant torm ent’, had by the end of 1944 begun to assume
the proportions of a civil war.
10
THE CIVIL WAR
N O V E M B E R 1 9 4 3 - D E C E M B E R 1944
L ong before the Social Republic came into existence the plans for
organized resistance to the Germans were being made. By the end
of 1943 clandestine Committees of National Liberation had been
established in most of the larger towns in northern Italy, and bands
of partisans had been formed. Composed of deserters from the
Italian Army, which had virtually disintegrated after the armistice,
of professional criminals and adventurers, of self-styled anti-
Fascists more interested in settling personal grudges than in help
ing to drive out the Germans, these bands were at first little
better than the 1groups of ruffians ’ which Mussolini was later to
call them. Soon, however, their character changed. They were
joined by sincere enemies of Fascism, by genuine patriots who saw
that in the defeat of Germany lay the only hope for their country's
future, and by regular officers who considered that the army of the
Social Republic which Graziani was trying hard to create would
never be more than a German satellite or even a police force for
the coercive imposition of anti-Royalist and Fascist measures.1
These officers gave to the partisans a sense of responsibility and an
aura of respectability, and one of them, General Raffaele Cadorna,
the son of Marshal Count Luigi Cadorna, a former Commander-
in-Chief of the Italian Army, ultimately became their leader. They
were, however, in no sense the real leaders of the movement, which
from the first was in the control of less disinterested hands.
1 Graziani’s difficulties were increased by the Germans* attempts to hamper the
creation of an independent Italian army which they could never bring themselves
to trust, and by their encouragement of the formation of several almost autono
mous units such as the Decima Mas which did not come directly under his control
and of various independent armed police forces which served the same purpose
of *divide and rule *. When it was decided that four divisions of Italian troops
should be formed, arrangements were made for them to be equipped and trained
in Germany. Hitler never made ftiy secret of the fact that he thought that Italy’s
contribution to the manpower of the Axis should be in labourers rather than in
soldiers.
268
THE CIVIL WAR
D E C E M B E R 1 9 4 4 - A P R I L 1945
barking and lay down at his feet and went to sleep, and Mussolini
began talking to Fossani. He spoke so fast and at such length that
when he had finished and went back to Gargnano in his motor-boat,
Fossani wrote furiously for three hours without stopping, in an
effort to record everything that Mussolini had said. Fossani him
self during the whole interview only spoke one word—‘T ell’—the
name of the police dog. 4I suspected from the beginning/ he said,
4that the sound of my voice would have damned the flow of talk
of a man who had decided to confess to the stars/
Away from the guards, and the Germans and the arguments of
his Ministers, the tantrums of his wife and the tears of his mistress,
Mussolini felt a sudden liberation which was close to delirium. 4If it
were a summer’s day/ he said, 41 would take off my coat and roll
in the grass like a wildly happy child/ He spoke of the stars, and
the mysterious power of the soil, of his dead son and his brother
Arnaldo, of the inconsequence of human life and of the life of the
soul. He spoke like a feverish prophet, spinning a web of argument
and fantasy and unrelated fact, catching a thread in one train of
thought to leap away to another, suddenly breaking through the
muddle of contradiction, extravagant metaphor and half-formed
ideas to make an observation of striking truth and clarity, or a
prophecy of deep prescience. He tried to analyse the reasons for his
successes and failures. He was not infallible, he said. He had made
mistakes. He could see them now and recognize them. It had not
been easy for he had been surrounded for years by idolators. ‘I
heard the word genius/ he said with a kind of bitter disgust, ‘a
hundred times a day/ But others had made greater mistakes, and
all his own would have been forgotten if the war, forced upon him
by the diabolical foreign policy of the English, had been conducted
by the Germans with restraint. The attack on Russia had been made
against his strong advice, and now Germany was almost destroyed
and the Russians would soon be in a position in Central Europe
from which it would be impossible to dislodge them. If the same
mistakes were committed in the East, China too would help to
strangle the world. 4How can England and America fail to see so
enormous a danger? '
This reference to the English aroused in him a fresh burst of
invective. He attacked them and the French for failing to support
him in his demands for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, for
the cancellation of war debts and reparations and in his stand
against Germany in the early 1930s. He attacked the King and the
reactionary Court which surrounded him, he attacked the hour-
278
THE PRESIDENT AT GARGNANO
geoisie who had infused a false spirit into the faith of Fascism, he
attacked the General Staff for betraying the soldiers, he attacked
the sordid industrial and financial groups who had outrageously ill-
treated the workers whom he himself had 4always loved and love
still. They are good and indestructible/ he said, 'an d infinitely
superior to all the false prophets who pretend to represent them /
And the thought of them brought a new mood of sadness. 41 have
been a prisoner ever since I was arrested in the King’s villa/ he said,
in a quieter voice. 'There is no longer any escape. To our enemies
we are those who must surrender unconditionally, to the others we
are traitors. . . . I have no illusions about my fate. Life is only a
short span in eternity. After the struggle is over they will spit on
me, but later perhaps they will come to wipe me clean. And then
I shall smile because I shall be at peace with my people/
He stood up at last and shook Fossani silently by the hand. And
as he walked back to his boat, the journalist, deeply impressed by
the calm dignity of this ‘great, unfortunate man in his hour of
tragedy ’, says that the police dog 4leapt on to a rock where it let
out a long, shrill howl ’.
But if it were possible to recognize the greatness of this tragic
figure in a moment of ecstatic pity beneath the purity of the stars,
it was more difficult to do so in the stuffy little room in Villa delle
Orsoline where most journalists saw him. One of these, Madeleine
Mollier, found a man she scarcely recognized, a man who looked
like a convict with his white face and shaven head and black, lack
lustre eyes. He was not so much resigned as humble. His resignation
and calm acceptance of his fate had an almost apologetic, self-
pitying air.
‘W hat do you want to know? * he asked her. ‘Seven years ago I
remember you came to Rome. I was an interesting person then. Now
I am defunct. But I am not afraid any more. Death is a thank-you
to God who has suffered so much. This morning in my room a little
swallow was trapped. It flew around desperately in the room until it
fell exhausted on my bed. I picked it up with care so as not to
frighten it, opened my window, then opened my hand. It did not
understand at first and looked around, before opening its wings and
flying, with a little cry of joy, out to freedom. I shall never forget
that cry of joy. But for me, the window will never open except to
let me out to death. And it is right. I have made mistakes and I
shall pay for them, if my poor life is worth the payment. I have
never made mistakes when I have followed my instincts, but often
when I have obeyed my reason. . . .
279
MUSSOLINI
to Plato and ended the interview by saying that for his part he
was convinced that to live was to suffer.
He would even interrupt an important conference with his Minis
ters or the Germans to talk of philosophy or history or religion. On
6 April when the last offensive of the Allies had already begun,
when Massa had been occupied and the German armies were re
treating fast through Tuscany, he shocked Colonel Dollmann, who
was only concerned with the problems of withdrawal and surrender,
by suddenly saying to him in the middle of an urgent discussion,
‘Tell me, Colonel, do you believe in God? General Wolff does.'
12
THE GERMANS SURRENDER
F E B R U A R Y - A P R I L 1945
the SS had for some time now been negotiating with the Allies for
the surrender of the German armies in Italy. Their mediator was
Cardinal Idelfonso Schuster, the worldly-wise Archbishop of Milan,
who had been in contact with them since the beginning of Febru
ary, when he had suggested that to save Italy and to prevent the
useless sacrifice of thousands of men they should allow him to come
to terms on their behalf with the partisans. The partisans, the Car
dinal said, were growing more numerous and better organized every
day, and every day the Allies were sending them arms and supplies.
Colonel Dollmann discussed the Cardinal's suggestion with General
Wolff, and the two German officers agreed that Schuster should
send a representative to the partisan headquarters to see General
Cadorna. Schuster chose a tough, intelligent priest, Don Giuseppe
Bicchierai, who had been a military chaplain.
Meanwhile Colonel Dollmann arranged for Baron Luigi Parelli,
a former representative of an American business concern in Italy,
to be provided with a visa for Switzerland, where he was ostensibly
going for reasons of health. In Zürich Parelli stayed in the house
of a friend of his, Professor Hussman, Director of the Zugerberg
Institute.
One evening, soon after Parelli's arrival in Zürich, a man whom
the Professor did not know called at the house and said that he
had come to read the gas meter. To Professor Hussman's surprise,
Parelli introduced this man to him as Colonel Dollmann of the
German SS and suggested that he should get through to the Ameri
can Embassy and ask Mr Allen Dulles to come and meet him.
Dulles did not himself want to enter into the negotiations at this
stage, so he sent his assistant, Dr Gaevernitz, instead. Gaevernitz
met Dollmann at the Café Bianchi, where the German frankly ad
mitted that his name was sure to be on the Allied list of war
282
THE GERMANS SURRENDER
285
13
T H E MO VE TO M I L A N
19-25 A P R I L 1945
1 ‘ Poör Mazzolini/ he had said to his sister when talking of the Under-Secre-
tary’s death. *But he died in his bed, as he wanted to. Who knows where we shall
die and where our bones will be thrown? '
2Previously he had wanted to move the seat of the Government south to a more
central position at Monza, but the Germans had refused permission. They now
advised against leaving for Milan on the grounds that Lake Garda would be on
the main line of the Army’s withdrawal, whereas in Milan they would not be able
to provide the Fascists with adequate protection against the partisans.
287
MAP OF THE LAKE COMO AREA
THE MOVE TO MILAN
Only when the Cardinal begged him to spare Italy useless havoc
and to accept an honourable surrender did Mussolini momentarily
recover his strength of will. His problem was twofold, he said, and
would be carried out in two moves. The Army and the Republi
can Militia would be dissolved, and he himself would retire into
the Valtellina with three thousand Blackshirts to continue the war
in the mountains.
‘Duce, do not have any illusions/ Cardinal Schuster told him.
‘I know the Blackshirts who are going to follow you are rather
three hundred than three thousand as some would have you
believe/
‘ Perhaps a few more/ Mussolini admitted with grim resignation.
‘Not many, though. I have no illusions/
Even with three hundred, however, Schuster believed that Musso
lini would still go to his last ditch in the mountains. He was ‘ reso
lute in his determination ’, the Cardinal thought, and he did not
venture to reply. They spoke of other things, but the brief fire
in Mussolini had died, and it was the Cardinal who did most of
the talking. He spoke of expiation and atonement, of imprisonment
and exile; but Mussolini might not have been listening, although
once when Schuster mentioned Napoleon there was a glint of
pleasure in the tired eyes, and once when he spoke of God's forgive
ness they filled with tears. The Cardinal gave him a copy of the
Storia di San Benedetto and he accepted it gravely, carefully put
ting it into a brown envelope.
At six o’clock General Cadorna arrived with another delegate
of the National Liberation Committee, Achille Marazza, a lawyer
who was a Christian Democrat, and Riccardo Lombardi, an
engineer who belonged to the Partito d*Azione, was already there. A
few minutes later they were shown into Cardinal Schuster’s room
by Don Giuseppe Bicchierai. The Cardinal offered them his hand
so that they could kiss his ring. When they had done so he intro
duced them to Mussolini, who walked quickly towards them, smil
ing with what Marazza thought was a vague sort of condescension.
He held out his hand to each of them in turn, and uncertainly
they shook it. Then he sat down next to Schuster on a sofa while
the others remained standing.
There was an atmosphere of restraint and embarrassment which
increased when the Social Republic delegates, Graziani, Barracu
and Paolo Zerbino, the Minister of the Interior, joined them.
Mussolini was taking a part he had never learned to play and stared
intently at the heavy crimson damask on the walls, avoiding the
292
THE MOVE TO MILAN
eyes of the others. It was very quiet in the street below the partly
open window.
*Shall we sit down over there? ’
Cardinal Schuster pointed to a large oval table in the middle of
the room on which were several glasses, a decanter of marsala, and
a plate of biscuits. He sat himself at one end of the table next to
Mussolini. Cadorna and Marazza and Lombardi sat on their left;
Graziarli, Zerbino and Barracu on the right. Graziani, Cadorna
says, was looking very angry.
‘ Well, then/ Mussolini began in a sharp, impatient voice as if
the initiative were unquestionably his. 4Well, then. W hat are your
25-27 A P R I L 1945
M u s s o l i n i a r r iv e d i n Como a t a b o u t t e n o'clock.
1Get out of the way/ Graziani repeated. ‘ The Duce can go where
he likes/
*Not without an escort, Marshal. Those are my orders/
A group of Italians forced themselves between the Duce and the
insistent German officer, but when some of Birzer’s men came up
behind Birzer, their fingers on the triggers of their rifles, the
Italians gave way. Again Birzer clicked his heels, saluted and said,
‘ You must not depart without an escort, Duce/
And at last Mussolini gave a tired gesture of resigned acceptance.
He arrived at Menaggio in a dreary drizzle of rain at about half
past five in the morning. With his machine-gun still slung across
his back and his head bent low between his shoulders he walked
up and down for a few minutes in front of a school which had been
turned into a barracks for the Blackshirts and then went to the villa
of Emilio Castelli, secretary of the local Fascist Party, where he lay
down and tried to sleep. While he was resting the other cars and
lorries that had followed him from Como drove into Menaggio
escorted by several companies of Republican soldiers and two
armoured cars equipped with 20mm. machine-guns. The long con
voy came to a halt behind Birzer’s lorry. Claretta Petacci was in one
of the cars, and Colonel Casalinuovo took her to Mussolini at the
Villa Castelli.
Luigi Gatti, afraid that the concentration of so large a number of
vehicles would soon be reported to the partisans, ordered most of
them to go back a little way down the road to Cadenabbia. The
order was obeyed reluctantly. ‘ We have come to die with the Duce/
someone shouted. Another man was heard to grumble loudly, as he
turned his truck round in the narrow road, that the Duce had aban
doned them and wanted to escape alone across the frontier into
Switzerland. It was a growing apprehension. Birzer felt certain that
this was what the Duce intended to do when, after three hours’ rest,
he came out of the Villa Castelli and gave the orders for the remain
ing vehicles to move off the lakeside road to the village of Grandola,
where they would not be so conspicuous while they waited for Pavo-
lini’s force of loyal Fascists to join them. Grandola is only fourteen
kilometres from the Swiss frontier, and as soon as Mussolini had
given the order for the convoy to go there Birzer went up to him
and asked, stiffly courteous as ever but with evident suspicion,
‘Duce, where are we going now? *
‘Follow me/ Mussolini said, ‘and you’ll find out.’
The Italian cars drove very fast up the steep and winding road
into the mountains, and Birzer had difficulty in keeping them in
302
THE FLIGHT FROM MILAN
Claretta F
Walking out of the Albergo-
Rifugio after his rescue in
September 1943
noon began to fail he called to Lieutenant Birzer and told him that
he had decided to wait no longer for Pavolini, but to go back to
Menaggio and then north along the lakeside road towards the
Valtellina. They would leave a message for Pavolini’s men to meet
them in Merano. Birzer did not agree. He said with cold respect
that his men were worn out and that they should not be asked to
break through the blockades which the partisans would surely have
erected north of Menaggio until they had had some sleep. W ith a
shrug of resignation Mussolini gave way and ordered them all to
stay the night at Grandola and to move off to Menaggio at five
o'clock in the morning. Pavolini’s three thousand men would have
got there by then, he said. He spoke without conviction, and no
one believed him.
In the early hours of the morning of 27 April Pavolini arrived
in an armoured car from Como. It was still raining, and as he came
into the hotel Elena Cucciati remembers how the water dripped
down his white face. The Blackshirts in Como had signed a sur
render with the partisans. He had only been able to bring a few
men with him.
‘ How many? * Mussolini asked him anxiously.
Pavolini hesitated.
1Well, tell me. How many? ’
1Twelve/
It was the end of hope.
Soon afterwards Mussolini allowed Lieutenant Birzer to arrange
for him and his few remaining followers to join a German convoy,
of about forty trucks commanded by Lieutenant Fallmeyer, retreat
ing north along the lakeside road towards Innsbruck.
Mussolini, driving himself in his Alfa-Romeo, followed Birzer;
Pavolini, threatening to shoot his way through any road blocks the
partisans might have erected on the road, drove in the armoured
car with Barracu, Bombacci, Casalinuovo, Pietro Salustri, a young
officer in the Air Force, Idreno Utimperghe, a Blackshirt, Elena
Curti Cucciati and Carradori, who was still clutching the two
leather bags of documents and money which Mussolini had given
him in Milan. Marcello Petacci and Claretta were farther
behind in the car which ostensibly belonged to the Spanish
Ambassador.
For a few miles the convoy drove north without being challenged.
Mussolini had recovered his confidence. ‘With two hundred Ger
mans/ he said, ‘ we can go to the top of the world/ On the far side
of Menaggio his car slowed down, and he leaned out of the window
305
MUSSOLINI
and called to a man walking along by the side of the road, 4Are
there any partisans round here? *
There were partisans everywhere, the man said.
The convoy moved on again, but after about a few hundred yards
Mussolini stopped his car and walked back to Pavolini, who sug
gested that the Duce would be safer in the armoured car. Mussolini,
after consulting Birzer, agreed and climbed in. Once more the con
voy moved on. The lakeside road was unnervingly quiet. The men
in the armoured car sat hunched up in silence. And then suddenly
at seven o’clock in the morning about six miles north of Menaggio
three shots rang out, and a moment later the convoy was halted by
an enormous tree trunk and several boulders which had been
dragged across the road. To the right was the lake, to the left an
immense and thickly wooded wall of rock which was known by
the name, aptly ironic, of the Rocca di Musso.
Fire opened again on the armoured car both from the mountains,
where the partisans had placed two 12mm. machine-guns, and from
a bend in the road in front. The guns of the armoured car returned
the fire, killing one of the partisans, a builder’s foreman, and then
a white flag was waved violently above the tree trunk and three
men advanced towards the convoy. Two of them were partisans,
the third was a German-Swiss, Luigi Hoffmann, who lived on the
shores of the lake in a villa which belonged to his wife, the daughter
of a rich silk-manufacturer from Como.
As the three men approached Barracu got out of the armoured
car and went up to talk to them with Fallmeyer and Birzer. Using
Hoffmann as his interpreter, one of the partisans, Davide Barbieri,
a captain in the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade, told the German officers
that to save unnecessary bloodshed he would allow their soldiers
through the road block, but that his men had orders to let no Fascists
through. Fallmeyer protested and asked to speak to the local parti
san commander. Barbieri said that he would merely get the same
answer, but if he wanted to speak to him he could go to the Com
mand Headquarters at Morbegno to do so.
The partisan captain was playing for time. His men were no
match, he realized, for the well-armed Germans if it came to a
serious fight, for most of them only had shot-guns. An hour or two’s
respite would give an opportunity for other partisan units to come
to their help. The Germans did not want to fight either. For them
the war in Italy was over, and they were anxious to return home.
One of them, a Protestant pastor in civilian life, went up to
Don Mainetti, the parish priest, who had come down from his
306
THE FLIGHT FROM MILAN
church at the sound of firing, and asked him in Latin to see what
he could do to arrange a safe transit, ‘in the name of Christian
charity ’.
Were there any Italians in the lorries? the priest asked him.
The soldier did not reply, but one of the German officers gave
Don Mainetti his word of honour as a soldier that there were not;
and the priest said that he would do what he could. As he was
leaving, however, another soldier came up to him, an Austrian
Catholic who had been educated at Padua, and whispered in Italian,
‘There are Italians. Don’t believe the officer. Have the lorries
searched.’
The priest went up the path into the mountains to the local
partisan headquarters. But when he arrived there he was told that
the matter was now in the hands of the Command Headquarters at
Morbegno and there was nothing to be done until further orders
were received.
It was eight o’clock when Fallmeyer left for Morbegno, and it was
not until after two that he returned to Musso. In those six hours of
waiting the Italians in the convoy became more and more anxious
and distraught. Pavolini proposed that they should shoot their way
through; someone else suggested they ought to turn back and try
to get round the road block by another road; but most of them
thought that it would be madness to try to do anything until Fall
meyer got back. As the morning wore on, however, and the German
officer did not return, some of the Fascists decided to seek the help
and protection of the parish priest. Don Mainetti had returned from
the mountains and was just about to have his midday meal when a
man came up to his house and said, *I am Bombacci. I am ready to
give myself up to the partisans. Will you help me, Father? ’ Bom
bacci later told his captors that he had become disillusioned with
Mussolini at Menaggio because he believed, as Lieutenant Birzer
did, that he had planned to make his escape into Switzerland alone
with Petacci and that only when he had been given proof that the
frontier was impassable did he make an attempt to get to the Vai-
tellina. Several others of the Duce’s followers believed that Bom-
bacci's suspicions might be justified. And his example in giving
himself up to the protection of the parish priest ‘ was soon followed
by others ’, so Mainetti told his bishop afterwards. ‘ In my dining
room ’, his report went on, ‘ were gathered the Ministers Zerbino,
Augusto Liverani, Fernando Mezzasoma, nervously wiping his spec
tacles, and Ruggero Romano with his fifteen-year-old son Constan
tino. . . . It was now past one o’clock. I managed to get some soup
307
MUSSOLINI
for the fugitives. Partisans arrived at the house with Captain Bar
bieri in command. Barbieri tries to discover if Mussolini is in the
lorries. Romano says he was with us in Menaggio, but since then
he has vanished. Bombacci, however, approaches my sister and says,
“ He is with us. It is not fair that he should get away.” *
He was making no attempt to do so. He sat in the armoured car,
reading his documents and listening to the intermittent broadcasts
of news on the wireless, deriving a brief hope from the report that
he had been arrested in a town far away from Musso. Elena Curti
Cucciati has described how, while he sat calmly waiting for Fall-
meyer to return, a small figure in blue overalls and a crash helmet
appeared at the window of the armoured car. Elena thought it was
a boy and wondered what he was doing there until the helmet was
removed, long black hair tumbled down around a woman’s anxious
face and she recognized Claretta Petacci with her ‘beautiful
luminous eyes’. Mussolini spoke to her ‘tenderly’ as he tried to
comfort her.
While he was still talking to Claretta in a low voice, Fallmeyer
returned to the armoured car and told him that he had not been
able to negotiate a passage for the Italians, but that all the German
lorries could pass through provided that it was agreed that they
should be searched at Dongo to see if any Fascists were hiding in
them. Birzer suggested that Mussolini should put on a German
soldier’s overcoat and get into the back of one of the trucks. Trans
lating for the others Mussolini said, ‘ He says I could get through
too, disguised as a German.’
‘ Go on, Duce,’ Claretta said immediately. ‘ Go on, save yourself.’
She was almost in tears.
But he did not want to move. He thought that Fallmeyer had
perhaps made a deal with the partisans, agreeing to hand him over
to them in exchange for a free passage back to Germany for himself
and his soldiers.
‘ I’m afraid we’ve been betrayed, Lieutenant,’ he said to Birzer.
‘No, Duce. Put on a German overcoat and helmet and hide in
one of Lieutenant Fallmeyer’s lorries. They will be searched, but it
is your only hope.’
‘ Very well. But remember your orders are to defend me.’
‘Of course, Duce.’
Birzer walked away to separate the Germans from the Italians.
When he returned Mussolini was still in the armoured car, and
Claretta Petacci was sitting on the roof, crying bitterly.
‘ Lieutenant,’ Mussolini said angrily as Birzer came up to him.
3 °8
THE FLIGHT FROM MILAN
‘If my Ministers cannot have the same protection that you are
affording me, I refuse to move.’
‘But, Duce, it is impossible. The conditions are signed. All
Italians must remain behind/
‘ But at least my friend can come with me/
‘ That is impossible as well/
Mussolini remained seated, his mouth set in a stubborn line,
refusing to move. But after Birzer had left to bring the lorry, in
which Mussolini was to hide, alongside the armoured car, the others
persuaded him to change his mind. When Birzer drove up with the
lorry and said, ‘Duce, this is your last chance/ he climbed out
silently and, helped by Carradori, he put on the German overcoat
and helmet and stepped up into the lorry.
As it drove away Claretta ran after her lover and frantically tried
to jump onto one of the other lorries, and Birzer had to use all his
strength to drag her off the tail-board.
So Mussolini went on into Dongo alone. The partisans, warned
of his presence in the convoy by a bicyclist who had seen him in
the armoured car and by Don Mainetti, were waiting for him in the
square.
309
15
THE CAPTURE
27 A P R I L 1945
lini did not answer him, so the partisans searched him and took
from his pocket a loaded revolver. Again he made no protest. When
a partisan tried to take from him his two brief-cases, however, he
turned round sharply. ‘Be careful/ he said, ‘those cases contain
secret documents of great importance both historically and for the
future of Italy/
It was an isolated outburst. He seemed resigned and broken and
looked weak and old and ill. As he walked across the square to the
mayor’s office in the handsome but crumbling building beneath
the overhanging slopes of Monte Bregagno, Lazzaro said to him,
‘ Keep calm, we will not hurt you/
The mayor, Dr Giuseppe Rubini, also tried to comfort him.
‘ Don’t worry/ he said, ‘ you will be all right.’
‘I know,’ Mussolini replied with a sort of ingratiating conde
scension. ‘The lake people are kind-hearted.’
He was allowed to sit down in the mayor’s office and the parti
sans and townspeople crowded round him asking questions which
he answered with indignation, offended pride or a misguided eager
ness to please.
‘Why did you betray Socialism?’
‘ I did not betray it. Socialism betrayed itself.’
‘Why did you murder Matteotti? ’
‘ I had nothing to do with that.’
‘ Why did you stab France in the back? ’
‘ It would take too long to explain why Italy had to enter the
war.’
‘ Did you make the speech after your release from the Gran Sasso
of your own free will, or were you forced to make it? ’
‘ It was forced on me.*
‘ Why did you allow such stern measures to be taken against the
partisans? Some were tortured, did you know that? ’
‘ My hands were tied. There was very little possibility of opposing
Kesselring and Wolff in what they did. Again and again in conver
sation with General Wolff I mentioned that stories of people
being tortured and other brutal deeds had come to my ears.
One day Wolff replied that it was the only means of extract
ing the truth, and even the dead spoke the truth in his torture-
chambers/
The questions were thrown at him one after the other, and he
answered them all. Talking made his mouth dry, and he asked for
a drink. He was given a glass of water and then a cup of coffee. He
drank eagerly and then fell into silence with his hands on his knees,
312
THE CAPTURE
staring at the wall. He had taken off the German greatcoat and
thrown it to the floor and sat bareheaded in the uniform of the
Fascist Militia.
Outside the German convoy was allowed to continue its journey
to the north, and soon afterwards one of the partisans’ political
commissars, Francesco Terzi, sent a message in the opposite direc
tion to Como to report the capture of Mussolini and to ask the
local Committee of National Liberation what should be done with
him.
It was now about half past three. It would be some time before
the partisan who had gone to Como could be expected to return
with the instructions of the Committee of National Liberation.
The young partisan commander in Dongo, Count Pierluigi Bellini
Delle Stelle, decided that he would have to move his important
prisoner to a safer hiding-place in case an attempt was made to
rescue him. By seven o’clock he had made up his mind to take
Mussolini farther up the mountainside, to the frontier guards’
barracks at Germasino.
A heavy rain was falling again now, and it had become much
colder. One of the partisans guarding him asked Mussolini if he
wanted to put the German greatcoat back on. ‘ I never want to see
a German uniform again,’ he said and instead put on a pair of
blue overalls he found lying in a comer of the room. In the car
which took him up to Germasino he began to shiver feverishly. It
was a slow journey, for the rain poured blindingly down, splashing
against the windscreen so violently that the driver could scarcely
see the road in front of him.
‘ This is the second time you have been a prisoner,’ said one of
the guards making a nervous attempt at conversation.
‘That’s life, my dear boy,’ Mussolini replied with a hint of
cynical gaiety. ‘ That’s my fate, from dust to power and from power
back to dust.’
He had recovered some of his lost spirit now, as if he had found
encouragement in the idea of martyrdom. At Germasino he seemed
almost happy. As the guards lit a fire for him and prepared a meal
he talked to them as if he were their guest and not their prisoner
and when he was asked to sign a piece of paper attesting that he
was being treated well, he did so willingly. ‘The 52nd Garibaldi
3*3
MUSSOLINI
The young partisan sent from Dongo with the news of Musso
lini’s arrest had arrived in Como at half past six. Unable to find
any members of the local Committee of National Liberation he
had given the information to Gino Bertinelli, a lawyer, who a few
hours previously had become Prefect. ‘ Go back at once,* Bertinelli
had told him, ‘ and tell your commander to take Mussolini some
where safe up in the mountains, otherwise he will be found and
rescued again. I will try to get in touch with Milan.’ The messenger
hurried back to Dongo to give these instructions to Count Bellini,
who had already made the arrangements for Mussolini’s removal
to Germasino.
Later on that night the information that Mussolini had been
taken up to Germasino was received in Como by a close friend of
General Cadoma, Colonel Baron Giovanni Sardagna, who had
recently been appointed commander of the town by the Committee
of National Liberation. Sardagna put an urgent call through to
Cadorna and after a long delay, and on a very indistinct line he
was able to talk to Cadorna’s chief-of-staff, Colonel Palombo.
‘Mussolini has been arrested this afternoon near Dongo/ Sar
dagna told Palombo. ‘W hat shall we do? They’re asking me for
orders. W hat shall I tell them? ’
3*5
MUSSOLINI
‘ I can’t say exactly yet. We’ve already been told about the arrest.
I’ll call you up and give you orders later.’
*All right. But we’ll have to be quick about this.’
1Of course. But I can’t tell you anything definite now. I'll ring
and tell you later.’
At about half past eleven Sardagna’s telephone rang. It was not
Palombo to speak to him, but a telegram from the Committee of
National Liberation in Milan. The message read : 4Bring Musso
lini and the gerarchi to Milan as soon as possible.’
Before acting on these orders, Sardagna telephoned again to
Palombo.
‘Listen,’ he said when at last he got through to him. ‘I can
understand your order, but I would like you to confirm it verb
ally.* To bring Mussolini to Milan was easier said than done, he
protested. There were not many men he could trust. So it would
have to be done by a few picked men secretly at night. They would
be sure to run into road blocks. Of course, they might be able to
take him by water as far as Como, but it would not be easy to find
a suitable boat. 41 must confess,’ he said firmly, 4the whole thing
seems extremely risky.’
‘Well, surely,’ Palombo insisted, ‘you can at least find a safe
place where he could be hidden for a while.’
And so it was decided that he should be taken from Germasino
to Blevio, a village seven kilometres north of Como, where a friend
of Baron Sardagna’s, a rich industrialist named Remo Cadematori,
had a large secluded villa with a long frontage to the lake. Sardagna
telephoned Cadematori and told him that he needed his villa to
hide someone in. The man would be brought across the lake from
Moltrasio during the night. If he was asked who it was, he
must say that it was an English officer who had been wounded.
Cadematori asked no questions, but he knew instinctively
that the man was Mussolini. He went out into the cold night
to sit on the steps of his boat-house and waited there, with his
old gardener for company, looking out across the dark waters of
the lake.
from the barracks at Germasino, and at half past two in the morn
ing, near the Ponte della Falk, his car met the car which had
brought Claretta Petacci from Dongo. It was still pouring with
rain, but everyone got out of the cars and Mussolini, a blanket
slung over his shoulders and his face partly concealed by a bandage
so that he should look like a wounded man on his way to hospital,
walked towards Claretta. They greeted each other with a formality
which was both pathetic and absurd.
‘Good evening, Your Excellency.”
‘You, signora 1 Why are you here? ’
‘ I would rather be with you/
That was all that was said. The cars splashed off through the
rain towards Moltrasio. Next to the driver of the leading car was
Luigi Canali—a partisan who called himself ‘ Captain Neri ’—and
in the back Claretta sat between two other young partisans,
Giuseppe Frangi and Guglielmo Cantoni, who were both fisher
men. In the second car Mussolini sat between Count Bellini and
Canali’s mistress, Giuseppina Tuissi, who was pretending to be a
nurse. In the front, beside the driver, was Michele Moretti, known
to his fellow-partisans as ‘ Pietro Gatti \
The slippery roads twisted in and out of the rock beside the lake.
Sometimes the cars stopped at a road block, and men would come
out of the darkness with lanterns swinging in the slanting rain;
often the sky was suddenly and brilliantly illuminated by flares
and the quick light of shells exploding in the distance. Once they
were fired on from the hills to their right, and Count Bellini
jumped out of the car, shouting and waving his arms. At Moltrasio
the cars stopped near the Hotel Imperiale, and Count Bellini got
out again and walked away with Luigi Canali.
Mussolini sat still, not speaking. It was very quiet in Moltrasio,
but seven kilometres to the south rockets were flying through the
air above Como and there was the sound of firing in the streets.
The Americans advancing fast across the Plain of Lombardy had
already reached the Bergamo Alps.
After a quarter of an hour Luigi Canali and Count Bellini came
back to the cars. ‘I certainly did not intend/ Bellini said after
wards, ‘that I should run the risk of having to hand Mussolini
over to the Americans/ The plan of taking him across the lake to
Remo Cadematori’s villa at Blevio was abandoned. Canali sug
gested that Mussolini and Petacci would be more safely hidden if
they were to be taken back through Azzano to a farm near Bon-
zanigo where he knew a peasant and his wife, Giacomo and Lia De
3 !7
MUSSOLINI
Maria, who had sheltered partisans on the run from Fascist troops.
This couple would take them in and ask no questions. Count
Bellini agreed to this, and the cars turned round and drove back
north again.
The prisoners reached Azzano at about a quarter past three in
the morning. The De Marias’ house was some way up the steep
mountainside, and Canali told the others that they would have to
leave the cars and walk. He led the way up a narrow path flanked
by stone walls. It was still raining hard, and the water rushed down
the path as if it were the bed of a mountain stream. Mussolini’s
spirits had fallen. The rain had soaked through the blanket which
he still wore over his shoulders. Claretta held his arm tightly.
Despite the heavy rain a full moon shone dimly through the
clouds so that when they reached the outskirts of Bonzanigo
they could see the white walls of the farmhouse in front of
them.
Canali called to the De Marias, making the sound—coaxing,
penetrating and repetitive—that farmers use to call their animals.
It was the partisans’ signal, and in a few moments the door opened.
Giacomo De Maria stood in the doorway with his wife, holding an
oil lamp, behind him. They recognized Canali and stood aside to
let him in. Mussolini followed him and slumped down on a
bench in the kitchen with Claretta next to him, her arm through
his.
‘They are prisoners,* Canali said. ‘Treat them well. Let them
sleep.’
He left the two young fishermen, Cantoni and Frangi, to guard
them and went back to the cars with Count Bellini, Giuseppina
Tuissi and Michele Moretti.
Giacomo De Maria lit a fire and offered the two prisoners some
thing to eat. He did not yet know who either of them was.
‘ W hat can I get the gentleman? *he asked Claretta, unwilling to
address directly the huddled figure with the bandaged head next
to her.
‘Niente,’ Mussolini mumbled, shaking his head, not looking up
from the fire, his hands deep in the pockets of the blue overalls.
‘ Coffee for me, please,’ Claretta said.
*We haven’t any real,’ De Maria said apologetically, ‘ but I could
make you some from flavoured powder.’
‘ I don’t mind.’
He heated the coffee in silence. No one spoke. At length his wife
came down from an upstairs bedroom, where she had turned her
318
THE CAPTURE
two sons out of a double bed and sent them into the loft. She said
the room was ready if the gentleman would like to go upstairs.
Mussolini did not answer her and he did not move.
‘The room is ready/ Claretta said softly. ‘Shall we go up? '
He stood up then, but still he said nothing as he followed Signora
De Maria up the steep stone steps to the whitewashed bedroom on
the top floor, where an immense walnut bed was the only furniture
apart from two chairs with straw seats and a washstand. Mussolini
walked towards the window, and De Maria, who had followed him
up the stairs, thought that he meant to escape and quickly came
up behind him to close the shutters. Claretta went over to the bed
and felt it, as if she were in a hotel, but when she asked for another
pillow she did so diffidently.
‘ He is used to two/ she said. It seemed to Lia De Maria that she
was shy. And she noticed when she gave her another pillow that
she looked at a darn in the linen closely and then put it on her side
of the bed. The other two pillows she put on the side nearer the
window where Mussolini liked to sleep.
He was sitting on the bed now, undoing his bandage. Signora
De Maria watched him. As the white muslin unwound from his
forehead she began to recognize the familiar face of the Duce. She
stared at it, bewildered and alarmed, and the sound of Claretta’s
voice, asking if she might wash, made her jump.
‘ We are mountain people/ she said nervously. ‘ You must excuse
us. You will have to go downstairs to wash/
Claretta followed her downstairs to an outhouse, where she
washed with one of the fishermen looking through a crack in the
door. She had a good body with nice breasts, he said afterwards,
and was not surprised that Mussolini had taken to her. He followed
her back to the room when she had finished and told her that the
door would have to be left ajar.
She finished undressing in the dim electric light and got into bed
beside her lover. She murmured something to him and he replied.
Cantoni and Frangi, listening through the partly open doorway,
tried to hear what they were talking about, but they could not.
They thought they heard the names ‘Pavolini' and ‘Graziarli'
and they believed that Mussolini said, ‘I ’m sure they won't kill
me/ and then something like ‘ Can you forgive me? ' and later on,
when she had answered him, he murmured, ‘ That doesn't matter
any more.' At one point when the talking stopped, the two youths
became nervous and thought that perhaps the prisoners were plan
ning to escape. They threw open the door suddenly and sprang
3*9
MUSSOLINI
into the room. Claretta pulled the sheet over her face and cringed
down beside Mussolini, who sat up and said to them in a voice of
mild reproof, ‘Go away, boys. You needn’t behave like that. Don’t
be tiresome.’ They noticed how exhausted he seemed and how
haggard and despairing his face was.
They left the room and squatted down once more outside on the
landing. The light was switched out; and soon afterwards, above
the continuous murmur of the wind and rain beyond the landing
window, they heard the sounds of Mussolini’s heavy breathing. All
night long he slept, the closed shutters in front of the window of
his room muffling the roar of thunder and hiding from him the
strangely phosphorescent glow of the almost continuous lightning.
At dawn the two young guards slept too; and as they slept the
storm abated.
At about eleven o’clock Signora De Maria went out into the
fields. It was a lovely morning. The earth was sodden, but the air
was warm and clear. There was a gentle breeze from the south. She
looked back at the house and saw the Duce leaning out of the
window looking across towards the snow-covered mountains beyond
the Lago di Lecco and pointing out the peaks to his mistress. Lia
De Maria finished her work in the fields before returning to the
house.
Her husband went up to the bedroom to ask if the prisoners
would like something to eat. It would have to be simple food, he
added with a peasant’s defensive humility. Claretta asked for
polenta with milk, knowing that to be the food of the alpigiani and
hoping perhaps that the man would be pleased at being asked for
it. Mussolini said gruffly he did not mind what he had. He was
depressed to the point of despair. His eyes were bloodshot and his
face was paper white beneath the grey stubble of his beard. He did
not ask if he might wash or shave.
De Maria brought a box into the bedroom, and his wife covered
it with a white table-cloth. Claretta ate the polenta and seemed to
enjoy it, but Mussolini was not hungry. He spent a long time
silently eating a piece of bread and a slice of salame. He kept put
ting the bread down and picking up a glass of water, from which
he took little sips as he stared at the red flowers embroidered
on the table-cloth. Was it true that the Americans had taken
Como? he asked his young guards. They said it was, and he nodded
resignedly.
When she had finished her polenta Claretta went back to lie on
the bed. She pulled the covers up to her chin and shut her eyes, but
320
At Villa Feltrinelli in 1945
she did not seem to be sleeping. Mussolini sat on the edge of the
bed with his back to her, looking out of the window at the
mountains.
A clock in the village struck the hours as the long day wore
on.
16
‘COLONEL VALERIO’
27- 28 A P R I L 1945
28 A P R I L 1945
It was a large villa standing back from the road behind a stone
wall. Two families of evacuees lived here—Bernardo Bellini, an
engineer, with his wife Teresa, and Rinaldo Oppizzi with his wife
Aminta and their two little girls Lelia and Bianca. When
Audisio’s car stopped outside the wrought-iron gates of the villa,
Signora Bellini was sitting on the terrace of the villa looking out
over the lake. Her husband was inside listening to the wireless
with Rinaldo Oppizzi. Below her in the garden Lelia Oppizzi was
reading a book and the Bellinis' maid, Giuseppina Cordazzo, was
weeding one of the flower-beds. Suddenly they heard a man’s voice
shout out, ‘ Get inside ! Go indoors I ’
Teresa Bellini caught sight of a heavily built man getting out of
the car wearing what she thought was a black beret and holding the
lapels of his coat. He looked ‘ like a mountaineer ’, she says, ‘ hold
ing on to the straps of his rucksack ’.
Audisio ordered Claretta to follow Mussolini out of the car, and
the driver watched him as he levelled his machine-gun at them
both and ‘pronounced a few words very quickly’. The driver
thought they referred to an order Audisio had received and to a
sentence of death he had been ordered to execute, but ‘ everything
happened so quickly’ he was not sure. Mussolini remained com
pletely motionless and impassive, but Claretta lost control of her
self and threw her arms around him, jumping up and down and
shouting, ‘Noi Noi You mustn’t do it. You mustn't I ’
In a voice which Geminazza described as ‘dry and nervous’,
the colonel said, ‘ Leave him alone, otherwise you’ll get shot too.’
But Claretta paid no attention and went on jumping up and down
convulsively as she clung to Mussolini. Audisio squeezed the trigger
330
DEATH AT VILLA BELMONTE
and Claretta rushed at him, grabbing the barrel of the gun in both
her hands and shouting, 'You cannot kill us like this/
Audisio shot again. Geminazza saw the sweat pouring down his
face. He squeezed the trigger a third time, but the gun was jammed
and he pulled his pistol from his pocket. That would not fire either,
and he shouted to Moretti, ‘ Bring me your gun/ Moretti gave him
his French machine-gun and he pointed it at Mussolini, who faced
him squarely, holding back the lapels of his jacket. ‘ Shoot me in
the chest/ he said. Geminazza heard the words distinctly. They
were the last Mussolini spoke.
The first shot which Audisio fired from Moretti’s gun killed
Claretta, who fell to the ground without a sound. The next hit
Mussolini, who stumbled back against the stone wall of the villa,
where he slid slowly to the ground with his legs bent under him.
He was not dead and lay on the ground, breathing heavily. Audisio
went up to him and shot him again in the chest. Mussolini’s body
jerked violently and then lay still. Audisio looked at it in silence for
a moment and then said to Geminazza, ' Look at his expression.
Doesn’t it suit him? ’
Moretti came up to them and made a gesture at Geminazza, as
if to say, 'Accidents can’t be helped.’ Audisio offered them
cigarettes and, although he did not usually smoke, Geminazza took
one. He felt ‘ very shocked ’ and hoped it would soothe his nerves.
He helped the others pick up the empty cartridge-cases from the
road and then he got into the car to drive the two colonels and
Michele Moretti back to Dongo. The two fishermen were left to
guard the bodies. It was twenty minutes past four.
Less than a minute had passed since the car had stopped beside
the villa gates. As it drove away again there was a sudden roll of
thunder, and a few seconds later a torrential rain began to fall.
The people in the villa heard the shots and agreed that in all
there were ten; but a high hedge which grew above the level of the
wall had prevented them from seeing what had happened. The
maid, Giuseppina, pretending that she wanted to pick some
radishes, went up quietly to peep through the hedge; but a voice
called out, ‘ Via! Via! ’ and she went away without having seen
anything.
At six o’clock Geminazza drove back from Dongo, where
331
MUSSOLINI
1The fifteen executed men were Marcello Petacci, Fernando Mezzasoma, Nicola
Bombacci, Alessandro Pavolini, Paolo Zerbino (Minister of the Interior), Ruggero
Romano (Minister of Public Works), Augusto Liverani (Minister of Communica
tions), Paolo Porta (Inspector of the Fascist Party in Lombardy), Luigi Gatti
(Mussolini’s secretary), Alfredo Coppolo (President of the Institute of Fascist Cul
ture), Ernesto Daquanno (Director of the ‘ Stefani * Agency), Mario Nudi (Presi
dent of the Fascist Agricultural Association), Colonel Vito Casalinuovo, Pietro
Salustri (a captain in the Air Force) and Hintermayer, a propagandist.
3 3 2
18
THE PIAZZALE LORETO
29 A P R I L 1945
334
NOTES ON SOURCES
In most cases the source for both direct and indirect quotations is
indicated in the text. Where this has not been done the authorities
are given below.
GENERAL
M u s s o l i n i ’s r is e to p o w e r , p a r t i
M u s s o l i n i ’s f o r e ig n p o l ic y , p a r t 2, chapter i
between Acquarone and the King and between Mussolini and Cap
tain Vigneri. Montenelli’s and Lualdi’s articles in the Corriere della
Sera, Canevari’s article in Meridiano d’Italia and the article from
Epoca listed in the bibliography all add interesting but minor
details of which I have made use. The account of the interview
between the King and Mussolini is based on Mussolini’s two
accounts—one given in a broadcast during the following September
(quoted in Dal 25 luglio al io Settembre) and the other in his Storia
di un anno—and on the versions which the King subsequently gave
to members of his staff and which are recounted by Monelli.
Count Grandi’s meeting with Ciano at Montecitorio is recounted
by Anfuso. His actions and feelings before the Grand Council meet
ing have been described by Saporiti and in ‘ Dino Grandi Explains ’
in Life.
My account of Rome after the arrest of Mussolini is based on
Monelli’s Roma ig43 and Anfuso’s Da Palazzo Venezia al Lago di
Garda.
General Cadorna, Ferruccio Parri and Battaglia give the most reli
able personal accounts in La Riscossa, Il movimento di liberazione
e gli alleati and Storia della resistenza italiana respectively. Luigi
Villari’s The Liberation of Italy is bitterly anti-British but reliable.
I have extracted from this Luigi Longo’s account of Communist
influence in the Partisan brigades. Mussolini’s visit to Germany in
February 1945 was described by Major Albonetti to Michele Cam
pana, who described it in turn to Monelli.
343
MUSSOLINI
345
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(I948)
Il Momento (especially for Memorie, by Roberto Farinacci, January
and February 1947)
350
BIBLIOGRAPHY
355
IN D E X