MUSSOL H m m m THE LAST 600 DAYS OF IL DUCE RAY M O S E L E Y TA YLO R fr> ,, r. balk HINg Nm York . r„ 'r0nt0 • Oxford Copyright © 2004 by Ray Moseley First Taylor Trade Publishing edition 2004 This Taylor Trade Publishing hardcover edition of Mussolini is an original publication. It is published by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. Published by Taylor Trade Publishing An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicatton Data Moseley, Ray, 1932- Mussolini : the last 600 days of il Duce / Ray Moseley, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58979-095-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Mussolini, Benito, 1883-1945. 2. Heads of state—Italy—Biography. 3. Fascism—Italy—History. 4. Italy—Politics and government—1914-1945. I. Title. DG575.M8M66 2004 945.091'092—dc22 2003026579 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America. C O N T E N T S Acknowledgments vii 1 The Last Spectator 1 2 After the Fall 6 3 Birth of the Salo Republic 25 4 The Fate of the Roman Jews 41 5 Mussolini and Claretta 52 6 A Most Unhappy Family 64 7 Galeazzo Ciano and Edda 70 8 Troubles on All Fronts 81 9 The Partisan War Develops 101 10 Il Duce and the Jews 114 11 The Liberation of Rome 124 12 A Terrible Summer 131 13 More Atrocities, Greater Despair 153 14 “I Have Ruined Italy” 167 15 The Secret Negotiations 174 16 In Search of a Way Out 190 17 Peace Hopes in the Balance 196 18 Looming Defeat and Paralysis 210 19 A Temporary Loss of Nerve 220 v VI CONTENTS 20 The Fall of Fascism 225 21 Flight and Capture 249 22 Mussolini Tamed: The Polite Prisoner 263 23 “I’ve Come to Shoot Them” 275 24 Execution of II Duce: Whodunnit? 289 25 Piazzale Loreto: A Shameful Denouement 311 26 The German Surrender 323 27 Lakeside Murders and the Dongo Treasure 333 28 The Mysterious Churchill File 341 29 The Dead Sprout Wings 350 30 Epilogue 364 Chronology........................................................................................368 Dramatis Personae ...........................................................................375 Notes...................................................................................................383 Bibliography ......................................................................................412 Index ...................................................................................................416 A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Three people are owed special thanks for their contributions to this book. Michael Dorr bears primary responsibility for it, having suggested that I write it, and he offered important advice that helped to improve the original manuscript. My wife Jennifer displayed all the skill of a professional editor as she read the manuscript with a critical eye, saving me from numerous mistakes and some in­ felicitous phrases. Cheryl Adam provided the icing on the cake with her superb editing. Ross Plotkin and Mandy Phillips ably carried Michael’s work to comple­ tion after his departure from Cooper Square Press. Special thanks also go to Umberto Lazzaro for providing additional details to his previously published accounts of his capture of Mussolini in April 1945. My critical judgment of his published account of how Mussolini was killed by parti­ sans in no way reflects any lack of appreciation for his generous assistance. Licia Cusinati came to my rescue splendidly in resolving some tricky problems of translation from Italian texts. Leonora Dodsworth, with her usual efficiency, fer­ reted out vital information from archives in Rome, with the kind assistance of Wladimiro Settimelli. Giorgio Delle Fonte, director of the municipal library in Dongo, Italy, and his wife Edda Cecchini contributed valuable archival material and were very helpful in suggesting other sources of information. Others I wish to thank for their encouragement and help in various ways are Bill Landrey, Robin Knight, William Tuohy and Marco Donghi. Finally, I would like to mention Alberto Botta, who will disagree with nearly everything about this book but who was kind and helpful when I sought his assistance. For Jennifer, Ann and John THE LAST S P E C T A T O R I work and I try, yet know that all is but a farce. —Benito Mussolini In the late winter of 1945, Benito Mussolini found himself acutely aware that his life had nearly run its course and ahead lay only a few agonizing weeks or months that were sure to bring more disasters, more defeats. His mood was black and, almost obsessively, he began to speak about his approaching death. He may have clung to a thread of hope that he could survive, but he was in a room with­ out exits. The German armed forces that had sustained his puppet government since its creation in September 1943 were inexorably being driven out of Italy, the frontiers of his Fascist republic were shrinking almost daily and Mussolini was aware that German military leaders were negotiating with the Allies behind his back in neutral Switzerland. With Soviet forces and those of the Western Al­ lies steadily sweeping toward the heart of the Nazi empire, Germany offered no refuge, nor did Mussolini seek one. He was determined to die in his own coun­ try. In February, seeing with sudden clarity the inevitable destruction of all he had lived for, Mussolini suffered what his German doctor called a nervous break­ down, and his physical and mental powers deteriorated noticeably. He slept badly, ate little and once again grew thin, as he had earlier when he suffered from an ulcer.1 By now he probably regarded death as a welcome release. From the moment he had been overthrown in July 1943, arrested, then rescued by the Ger­ mans and forced by Hitler to take up the reins of government once again, Mus­ solini had been a miserable figure in the grip of anger, shame and depression. The Germans had lost faith in him and humiliated him almost daily, denying him 2 MUSSOLINI any real exercise of power, brutalizing and even enslaving his people and stealing his country’s assets. He hated some of the Fascists around him, hated where he lived in remote isolation beside Lake Garda, the most melancholy of the Italian lakes and not a place of his choosing. His private life was turbulent as always. Sometimes he and his peasant wife Rachele would pass each other coldly in the villa they shared without recognizing each other’s existence.2 His mistress, Claretta Petacci, lived six miles away in another lakeside villa and his moments of comfort with her were few. “Death has become my friend, it doesn’t frighten me any longer. Death is a grace of God for one who has suffered too much. . . . For me the doors will not open except for death. And it is also right. I have made mistakes and I will pay, if this poor life of mine can serve as payment.” Thus did Mussolini unburden him­ self to Madeleine Mollier, wife of the press attaché at the German Embassy and a Red Cross volunteer in a German military hospital in Italy. She had interviewed him for a German magazine in 1938, when he was at the height of his powers in Rome, and he remembered that well. “Seven years ago I was an interesting per­ son. Now I am a corpse.” Mollier had won his consent to be interviewed and pho­ tographed again, one of the last interviews he would give and an exceptional one in that it contained no hint of dissimulation or self-serving distortion of the facts. He could be more frank than he had ever been before, because in effect he was speaking from the grave; he had asked her not to publish anything until after his death, and it was not until 1948 that Mollier did so. “Yes, madam, I am finished,” he said. “My star has fallen. I work and I try, yet know that all is but a farce. . . . I await the end of the tragedy and—strangely detached from everything—I do not feel any more an actor. I feel I am the last of the spectators.” He said he had be­ gun to die in January 1944, when extreme Fascists in his regime had compelled him to acquiesce in the execution of his son-in-law and former foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, after Ciano had helped vote him out of office. That had brought a rupture with Edda Mussolini Ciano, his favorite child, a painful break for both that would not be repaired in his lifetime. “The agony is atrociously long. I am the captain of the ship in a storm. My ship is broken. I am in the furious ocean, on a piece of wreckage. This impossibility to act, to put things right! No one hears my voice.. .. Now I am enclosed in silence. But one day the world will listen to me.”3 He was now sixty-one, and, in the twenty-third year of his tumultuous leader­ ship, prematurely aged and a shadow of the dynamic figure—shoulders back, jaw thrust forward imperiously—who had once held millions in thrall. He had brought backward Italy into the modem world, his oratory had electrified a na­ tion, he had once been widely admired abroad and his ambitions for conquest had initially won approval among his own people. He was a man of genius, his fol­ lowers never tired of declaiming in the glory days, but now that description rang