Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  Getting Mussolini out of Rome in secrecy was complicated. He wasn’t allowed to go home to the Villa Torlonia and had to leave for Ponza without even a change of underwear. It was only on 30th July that a lobster fisherman on the island, Antonio Feola, was permitted to bring over, on board his motorboat, two suitcases sent by Rachele containing underwear, clothes, ten thousand lire and a few photographs of their children. In that August of 1943 it was bakingly hot under a blazing sun on La Maddalena, and the place was full of sullen Italian officers and suspicious German navy crew; isolated from the main theatres of war on the mainland, it was also crawling with spies. Hitler had set up a special SS group commanded by captain Otto Skorzeny; made up of some of the best German intelligence agents, it was given a single task to carry out: to find Mussolini and free him, with the help of the Luftwaffe parachute division under their commanding general Kurt Student. An agent from Skorzeny’s team, Lieutenant Warger, arrived on La Maddalena disguised as an interpreter; thanks to his knowledge of Italian he was able to get first-hand information from the island’s inhabitants. It was not hard for Warger to come across traces of the island’s special “guest”. Badoglio, who had taken over from Mussolini as the head of government when the latter was deposed, had sent the head of the military police General Saverio Polito to accompany Mussolini to the island. Polito had reported back that La Maddalena was swarming with German marines, and despite all the precautions that had been taken to maintain the utmost secrecy news of Mussolini’s presence on the island was already circulating. The former Duce was being held in the Villa Weber, a short distance outside the island’s small main town. On 14th August Polito called at the villa, together with the Admiral Bruno Brivonesi, the chief naval commander in Sardinia, to talk to Mussolini. The two men told him about the anti-Fascist demonstrations which had taken place throughout Italian towns and cities, with statues of the Duce being smashed to pieces in towns and cities and his portraits being taken down and burned. After their conversation had ended, Mussolini wrote in his notebook: “It would be naive of me to be surprised at the reaction of the masses. Leaving aside my enemies who’ve been waiting in the wings for twenty years, and the people I’ve punished or disappointed, etc., the ordinary mass of people has always been ready to pull down the idols they worshipped yesterday, even at the cost of repenting their actions the following day. Yet in my case this won’t happen – I feel in my blood – that infallible voice – that my star has set for ever.”21

  Obviously Mussolini knew that his notes were being read by the military guards who had been put in charge of him. His lines were also intended to send them a reassuring message: they needn’t fear, the founder of Fascism now considered himself finished and done with “for ever”. Mussolini’s political instincts had not entirely abandoned him, however: true to form, he kept various options open for as long as he could. He had listened attentively to the depressing accounts told him by Polito and Brivonesi during their two-hour encounter, but he was also keeping one ear cocked for more hopeful sounds which were coming from those who remained loyal to his legend. When he had been transferred from Ponza to La Maddalena, the soldiers guarding him had got the daughter of the caretaker of the Villa Weber, Maria Pedoli, to do Mussolini’s laundry for him regularly. It was she who smuggled in a report, written on two sheets of foolscap, of the events which had taken place after 25th July, the day of Mussolini’s arrest, written by the former podestà, or Fascist mayor, of La Maddalena, Aldo Chirico. Chirico was a committed Mussolini loyalist and happened to have access to inside information, since a cousin of his, Colonel Ettore Chirico, had been responsible for guarding Mussolini as a prisoner during his first days of captivity in Rome. It was very soon an open secret that the Duce was on the island. Chirico and other local Fascists started to organize plans to liberate him. Mussolini himself mentions – in Pensieri Pontini e Sardi – one clumsy attempt, their first, which the carabinieri managed to stop a short distance away from the Villa Weber. Maria Pedoli continued to smuggle messages in and out of the house; Mussolini’s notes were usually signed “Mussolini (defunct)”. His moods must have been variable – depression and discouragement, detachment, the wish to leave public life altogether and a nostalgic longing to be back in his house in the Romagna. On the other hand this was the man who had founded OVRA, the regime’s extremely efficient secret police: the amateurishness of hiding notes in Pedoli’s laundry basket cannot have escaped his notice. It was obvious any messages would be discovered, so signing himself “defunct” could have been merely a decoy. Rachele Mussolini in her memoirs mentions the precautions she had to take at this time when she wrote to her husband: “I was allowed to write to him, but I didn’t know where he was. I had to give my letters to the carabinieri, who forwarded them. I knew all correspondence with him was being checked; in one letter I wanted to tell him that many people in the Romagna were waiting for his return, so I wrote, ‘Here everyone is waiting for the river to start flowing again.’ Benito replied: ‘I’m very sorry to hear, Rachele, that Romagna is suffering from drought…’”22

  A small piece of paper – the authenticity of which has been proved, but which is written in a very different style, and with different contents, and is not signed “Mussolini (defunct)” – has recently come to light thanks to the painstaking researches of Enrico Manieri. The paper has been roughly cut to measure about twelve by ten centimetres; it was folded very small and tucked into the back of a book. The note on it reads: “Count the number of guards round the villa. Dr Chirico is willing to help you – he will give you details of the plan. I am grateful for all you are doing. Destroy this note when you’ve read it. 16th August. Mussolini.” We do not know who the intended recipient was, but the note makes it clear that Mussolini was himself attempting to devise an alternative plan for his escape – where he intended to go and what he purposed to do there is impossible to tell.

  As long as he was alive, even at moments of despair, he went on looking for possibilities of political manoeuvre, even at the last when there was nowhere to go, but he could not have foreseen that the manoeuvres would continue after his death, around his dead body. In a letter written while he was on La Maddalena – one of those he knew would be opened and read by the military police – he wrote that the last ten months had reduced him to the state of being threequarters dead while the rest was a mere heap of skin and bones. During the period of his imprisonment on the Gran Sasso in the Apennines, still alternating between bouts of depression and efforts to find a way out of his impasse, he attempted suicide; the end of his regime was bloody and violent, and he would have been unable to foresee how his legend would persist, how the cult of his body – that “heap of skin and bones” – would live on. It is possible to establish when the cult started to be constructed: the wounds he received as a soldier during the First World War, which were widely reported in the national press. The wounds were a vital element in his campaign to win over the support – and the votes – of the veterans as they returned from the front. It is far more difficult to pinpoint the end of the myth. According to the official version, which, however, does not stand up to detailed historical examination, Mussolini is said to have been shot on 28th April in Giulino di Mezzegra, a small village on the shores of Lake Como; what is certain is that Colonel Valerio, the code name for Walter Audisio, the Partisan who executed him – again according to the official version of events – was the man who took the body to Milan. He probably realized that a straightforward announcement of the execution might not be enough to convince people the dictator was dead; it was necessary to put the corpse on public display in order to humiliate it and put an end to the myth. The local Partisans round Dongo didn’t have the authority to oppose Audisio’s decision; they let the lorry carrying its cargo of corpses leave for Milan while they went round showing – like a relic – the Luftwaffe overcoat which Mussolini had worn in his final attempt to disguise himself and evade capture.

  In the early afternoon on 29th April, the US Hig
h Command, the Vatican represented by Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster and the various heads of the alliance of Partisan troops in northern Italy, the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale dell’Alta Italia (National Liberation Committee of Northern Italy), or CLNAI, combined forces to get the corpses removed from Piazzale Loreto, but they couldn’t stop people flocking to the site. On the canopy of the petrol station from which the bodies had been hung, the name of each had been painted with an arrow pointing down for easier identification. Over the next few days normal activity resumed at the petrol station (as far as that was possible given the fuel shortage), and the few cars which were still in circulation started to call at what had become the most famous petrol pumps in the country, just so they could fill their tanks where drops of blood and other matter had fallen from the corpse of Mussolini the myth. Small crowds gathered to read out the names painted on the edge of the canopy, and every demonstration and protest march in the city would include Piazzale Loreto as part of their route, as if the petrol station had turned into a symbol of the new Italy. During the regime tourists had flocked to Piazza Venezia hoping to catch a glimpse of Mussolini and, according to Fascist propaganda, Italians could never have enough of gazing at him. There was a lugubrious aftermath to this touristic interest as people started to visit the mortuary where the bodies had been brought from Piazzale Loreto on 29th April. One of the cameramen who was working with the Fifth Army, Morris Berman, admitted in a later interview that he had arranged the corpses of Mussolini and Petacci so they were linked arm-in-arm: “I thought theirs was the kind of love story which would interest the public, and so I put them in that position.”23

  When these images were released by the United States National Archives in Washington fifty years ago, there was a worldwide interest in them. On that April day in 1945, the mortuary where the bodies had been taken was full of Partisans, soldiers, journalists, spies, photographers and cameramen as well as ordinary people who were curious to see the corpses; when they found those of Mussolini and his mistress they wanted to be photographed smiling alongside them. Even the room where they were taken the following morning at 7.30 for autopsies to be carried out was full of spectators milling about. Everyone wanted to take photographs of Mussolini’s penis, the activities of which had for so long engaged the Italian public’s imagination (a similarly prurient interest was aroused by the discovery in the Russian autopsy of Hitler’s corpse that the German dictator had had a single testicle). For a long time it was widely believed that Mussolini had syphilis. On the day of the autopsy, American intelligence agents managed to obtain a part of Mussolini’s brain in order to take it back to the United States for laboratory analysis. Over twenty years later, in March 1966, an official from the US Embassy in Rome knocked on the door of Rachele Mussolini’s house and handed her a yellow envelope containing a small box with six glass slides wrapped in cotton wool and cellophane: the remains of her husband’s brains which the American authorities had now decided to return to her.

  The sheer confusion in the autopsy room on the morning on 30th April probably meant that the surgeon who carried out the examination was unable to do it properly and made some mistakes; Mussolini’s corpse was the first one he examined, but he forgot to look at the state of the clothing found on him, which might have provided important evidence for future historians.

  The body was finally laid to rest – if we can call it that – in the Musocco cemetery in Milan. The tomb was numbered but, in the naive hope it would remain undiscovered, no name was placed on it. Neither the military nor civil authorities took any measures to protect the site, despite the fact that many people knew where it was located. There are reports in the newspapers of the time of people going there at night to dance or even urinate over the tomb. On the night of 22nd April 1946, a young Fascist supporter called Domenico Leccisi – he’d been born in 1920, just after Mussolini started his ascent to power – decided to show the country that the Duce, a year after he had been shot and buried, could still have a political impact. Leccisi, along with two other Fascist companions, easily circumvented the wardens who were supposed to protect the cemetery, dug up the tomb and retrieved the coffin, from which they removed the by now disintegrating corpse – two finger bones dropped off while they were carrying it – and took it away with them. The seizure of the Duce’s dead body had the planned effect – in its own way it was a brilliant political coup de théâtre – and caused a sensation. The news broke on the eve of the first anniversary of the general Partisan uprising on 25th April, although this coincidence may not have been in Leccisi’s mind when he planned it: it is more likely it was a decision taken on the spur of the moment, to benefit from the fact that the police in Milan were fully occupied in dealing with disturbances which had broken out in the city’s main prison. Photographs and film footage of the empty grave went round the world, while in Italy the newspaper reports of the event, often replete with gruesome details, had an influence on the course of the electoral campaigns which were then underway in the country – the most significant in the nation’s history – for the referendum to decide whether Italy should remain a monarchy or become a republic, and for the election of members to the newly created Assemblea Costituente della Repubblica Italiana (Constituent Assembly of the Italian Republic), who would draw up the new constitution.

  The theft of Mussolini’s corpse was the first sign that the Fascist movement still existed and still claimed a political role. On 26th December 1946 a group of veterans who had been part of the Italian Social Republic after 1943 founded the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement). The new party chose as its symbol a flame in the three colours of the Italian flag burning above a stylized representation of Mussolini’s coffin, the same coffin which Leccisi had prised open in his attempt to effect a political resurrection using the dictator’s body. A police investigation into the theft of the corpse was carried out, and on 31st July 1946 Leccisi was arrested. His arrest turned out to be the making of him: he became a popular figure on the extreme right wing and won election as a parliamentary deputy, gaining more votes than the top name in the list of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) candidates, Pino Romualdi, born in Predappio in 1913 and reputed to be one of Mussolini’s illegitimate offspring (his jaw in particular resembled the Duce’s). Leccisi the gravedigger remained in parliament until 1963, when his view of himself as a “left-wing Fascist” led him into conflict with the party’s leadership, which eventually excluded him from running at the elections. Before then, in 1957, his vote had been crucial in saving the government headed by Adone Zoli, a friend of the Mussolini family and from the same region as they were, in a parliamentary vote of confidence. Until that year, Mussolini’s body had remained in hiding in the chapel of the Capuchin monastery at Cerro Maggiore near Legnano; it was in 1957 that the Zoli government decided it should be restored to the family. It was buried in a tomb in Predappio, where it has remained, attracting an average of over one hundred thousand visitors each year. On various significant anniversaries – of his birth, of his death, etc. – various neo-Fascist ceremonies are held there, the object of much criticism and condemnation, yet the local council finds it difficult to prevent them, since this rather particular business brings a lot of money into the small town.

  The crowds in Piazzale Loreto in 1945 were huge, but nevertheless only a tiny minority of the Italian population saw with their own eyes the corpses hanging upside down. Later accounts of the episode – in history books and in newspapers, and occasionally on television – attempted to reconstruct what happened there using only a few blurred images, but in April 1994 a programme was broadcast which succeeded in opening up the wounds of this national psychodrama to the extent that it became front-page news in all the national papers and was also reported abroad. It was due to a series of coincidences. The author of the present book had discovered in the film collections of various archives around the world – the United States National Archives in Washington, the Imperial War Museum in London, t
he State Archives in New Zealand and in other countries which had supported the Allied forces during the war – some of the original film footage shot by the cameramen who accompanied the troops throughout the Italian campaign. After a close examination of the content of the reels, I proposed making a television series based on this material to be called Combat Film. The idea was to show in each episode the films exactly as they had been shot at the time, without making any cuts or editing them in any way, even leaving the original clapperboard shots in as a kind of proof of their authenticity. The transmission triggered a storm of criticism in the newspapers, much of it based on the belief that the date of the broadcast was a deliberate provocation: shortly before the programmes were shown, on 27th March 1994, a new and untested coalition formed by Silvio Berlusconi together with Gianfranco Fini’s Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance), the successor party to the Fascist Italian Social Movement founded in 1946, had won the general election. In actual fact the footage and the proposal had been sitting in the offices of the Italian state television corporation for over a year waiting for the directors of RAI 1 to give it the go-ahead. The decision to proceed with the making of the film was accompanied by what are in large media companies the usual moves and countermoves of institutional politics, with the result that I was at first assigned a co-author and then, together with him, relegated to a merely supporting role in the final phase of production when the film footage was shown in the studio. The channel’s main executives then took over direct control of the post-production editing and direction. For the programme, which was recorded only a few hours before being broadcast, three politicians were invited as the main studio guests: a young – born in the 1950s – and prominent politician from the left, a leading representative of the Christian Democrats who’d been a dispatch rider in the war for the Partisans and a leader from the political right who’d fought on the side of the Italian Social Republic. All three behaved exactly as politicians invited to a television debate on some current issue behave. Yet in this particular programme the guests invited to comment needed a considerable knowledge of the particular historical background if they were to interpret the films correctly, especially as there was no commentary – the films were shown exactly as they were originally shot, i.e. without sound. The three politicians in the studio had not even had the opportunity to see the films before the programme began recording. The transmission was watched by a record thirty-five per cent of the Italian population, including youngsters who’d never seen black-and-white films of such excellent quality before on Italian television and thought they were recent reconstructions rather than fifty years old. No one in Italy – apart from the crowds which gathered on that April morning in 1945 in Piazzale Loreto – had ever seen so clearly and so vividly the event which took place there; the entire ten-minute sequence shot by the military cameraman was shown in the first episode, and no one was prepared for the impact such a scene would make or for the thought that such “Mexican butchery” had occurred in the most advanced and well-administered city in northern Italy.