The Body of Il Duce

by Sergio Luzzatto

  As Il Duce well knew, there are no sixth acts. The heads of the Resistance knew it, too, among them Leo Valiani, a leader of the Action Party, whose newspaper urged that Fascist criminals be dealt with as to do no further harm. Luigi Longo, a Communist leader, wrote that Mussolini should be “killed right away, in whatever way possible, without a trial, without theater, without any historical declamations.”53 Socialist leader Sandro Pertini invited the partisans to kill Il Duce “like a mangy dog.”54 Their conviction was widely shared by the rank and file of the Resistance. In those feverish days there were few militant anti-Fascists who believed that pardon was a republican virtue. One of the few anti-Fascists willing to look to the lessons of history was Mario Borsa, an aging journalist installed by the Committee of National Liberation as editor in chief of Corriere della Sera. With regard to Mussolini’s fate, he quoted an intellectual of the unification period, Carlo Cattaneo, who said of an opponent, “If you execute him you will do the just thing, but if you don’t you will do the sacred thing.”55 Except that justice was more in demand than sanctity.

  For most of those who had fought in the Resistance, Italy had arrived at a turning point—and a new view of the body of Il Duce. In an editorial in the Socialist Party daily Avanti! Pietro Nenni argued on April 28 that the “dust mop of a man” who had been arrested at Dongo on Lake Como should be shot at once, before the Allies could get their hands on him and press for the mockery of a trial. Nenni was only sorry they could not “take the mop around Italy and show it off like a circus freak.”56 The Socialist leader gave vent to the same fantasy for which Fiat worker Alfredo Colombi had been sentenced to five years of confinement. The difference was that now even the cruelest fantasies could be translated into reality.

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  AFTER MORE THAN half a century Italian curiosity about what happened at Dongo has still not been satisfied. The arrest of Mussolini, disguised in a German greatcoat and helmet; his brief imprisonment by the partisans; the execution of Fascist officials on the shores of the lake—there has been material enough to fill thousands of pages of books and articles and miles of film. Italians are even more fascinated, if possible, by the events at nearby Giulino di Mezzegra, where Mussolini was shot a day after his arrest. Fifty years of so-called revelations have failed to slake the thirst for the long-running drama of the deaths of Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petacci. This book gives no new version of that tale, nor does it add details to the ongoing debate as to which Communists had a hand in the execution, where it took place exactly, and the precise number of bullets fired. In fact, no new evidence has emerged since 1945 to cast doubt on the reconstruction provided in the newspapers in the days immediately after Mussolini’s capture and death: Il Duce and his mistress were shot in front of the gates of Villa Belmonte at Giulino on the afternoon of April 28, 1945, by a squad of Communist partisans. They were led by a Colonel “Valerio,” later identified as Walter Audisio, and by a “Guido,” later confirmed as Aldo Lampredi.

  Resistance leaders, especially Luigi Longo, chose the men to carry out this mission with great care. Both Valerio and Guido were experienced men whose time as partisans had been preceded by years of anti-Fascist militancy. An accountant from Alessandria, in Piedmont, Audisio began his Communist career in his early twenties when he started the local underground. Arrested in 1934, he was exiled to the island of Ponza, where he met leading Communist figures and grew more politically sophisticated. In 1939, for health and family reasons, he sent a request to Mussolini to be freed from exile. The request was granted, but it cost Audisio credibility among his comrades in Alessandria, who never fully forgave what they saw as a repudiation of his political activities. In the Resistance, though, Audisio proved himself a strong military leader at the head of the Garibaldi Brigades, and it was as such that he was recommended to Longo. Guido’s political militancy was even deeper than Valerio’s. Born in Florence, Lampredi was ten years older than Audisio and had been a member of the Italian Communist Party since its founding in 1921. He was arrested in 1926 and sentenced by the special tribunal for crimes against the state to ten years in prison, six of which he served. After two years of study at the party school in Moscow, Lampredi joined the International Brigades to fight in the Spanish civil war. As a captain in the republican army he gained the respect of Longo and went on to serve as a key figure in the Resistance in northeast Italy.

  There are reasons to think that Lampredi, the more significant party figure, was the dominant actor in the squad that executed Mussolini, not Audisio, as has often been thought. But at the time it suited Communist strategy to portray a minor character, Valerio, as the chief decision maker. The Communists did not want to appear solely responsible for the execution of Mussolini and the other Fascist officials. Rather, they wanted it to seem like a purely military action flowing from the Committee of National Liberation and carried out in conjunction with the other Italian Resistance forces. Their concern was to emphasize the execution’s legality as well as to gain legitimacy with the other parties in the Resistance as a democratic, not a revolutionary, force. To that end, on April 30, the party daily, l’Unità, published an account of the execution in which Valerio occupied the limelight and Guido remained in the background. Six months later Valerio published a new and more detailed version of the events leading up to the shooting of Mussolini.

  To say there were propagandistic elements to these two accounts would be to put it mildly. The Communists wanted to offer a shameful portrait of Il Duce at the moment of his death, so Valerio stressed the grotesque side of Mussolini’s behavior that day, his initial conviction that the mysterious colonel had come to save him and then his subsequent terror of dying. Relying on the account in l’Unità, the Communist review Rinascita expanded on the theme, reporting that “Mussolini behaved, in the final days and minutes of his life, like a dust mop of a man.” Having graced Il Duce with the same description that Pietro Nenni had used in Avanti!, Rinascita went on to echo Sandro Pertini’s comments, saying that Mussolini “died like a dog.”57 As far as the Communist Party was concerned, Italians should be in no doubt that at the brink of death, Il Duce showed himself a real coward.

  Decades later, an account by Lampredi would lead historians to doubt two circumstances in Audisio’s version. Audisio claimed to have read a death sentence to Mussolini, “in the name of the Italian people,” before he faced the firing squad, thus giving the rough justice of the day the guise of a formal sentence. Audisio also reported that Mussolini had said nothing before he died. In Lampredi’s account, written in 1972 exclusively for the Communist Party leadership and not published until 1996, “Audisio read no sentence; perhaps he said a few words, but of this I’m not certain.”58 As for Mussolini, according to Lampredi, Il Duce actually rose to the occasion as he faced the firing squad: widening his eyes, tugging open the collar of his coat, he shouted, “Aim for the heart!” In his memo Lampredi assured the Communist leadership that he had never spoken to anyone or written anything about Il Duce’s last words, and he promised not to do so in the future. The confidential nature of his later version suggests that it is more reliable than Valerio’s description provided to the party daily right after the mission.

  To read a death sentence to a condemned man is to ennoble the proceedings of an execution, which would otherwise be unavoidably squalid. But it is also a way of speaking to the conscience of the condemned, a way of recognizing that he is human. Similarly, to address the executioner with challenging words implies that a summary last will and testament will be registered, thus that the hangman has some humanity left. The scene outside Villa Belmonte—the Communist partisan standing before Il Duce, Il Duce before the partisan—was not changed in its historical significance, but its symbolic significance depends on who spoke and who was silent. In reality, Audisio was probably silent and Mussolini was the one who spoke. In the legend, it was Audisio who spoke while Il Duce remained silent. Party discipline did the rest: Lampredi also kept silent, and his memo of 1972 r
emained secret for another twenty-four years. Thus the Communist Party succeeded in transmitting its own account of Il Duce’s death to the collective memory.

  Still, to Italians in 1945, no matter what happened in the last seconds of Mussolini’s life, it could not have offset the actions of his last days, his desperate search for a way out, even dressing up in a German greatcoat and helmet to hide from the partisans. It was a comical show, very different from the Wagnerian pomp of Hitler’s demise. By committing suicide in his bunker before the Russians arrived, Hitler seemed to control his destiny right to the end. The temptation to compare the deaths of the two dictators was strong among those steeped in Fascism’s ideology of honor. The most intellectually honest of Fascist supporters saw Il Duce’s shameful end as a severe judgment not only on Mussolini but on the national character of those Italians who had idolized him for so long.

  Interned in a military concentration camp in Germany for refusing to enroll in the army of the Republic in Salò, Giovanni Ansaldo, a famous journalist and onetime apologist for the Fascist regime, was one of the believers who reflected on Mussolini’s behavior at the end. Having learned of Il Duce’s capture, Ansaldo wrote in his diary:

  Ending up like that, such a shameful, miserable end, is irrefutable proof that the man we admired, loved, and served was a grotesque, cowardly fraud. And that he and all of us who thought we were so clever to follow him were idiots. All the people laughing about Mussolini’s last act haven’t understood how it dishonors all of Italy, how it brands the words Carnival Nation on our foreheads. A truly tragic end would have been more honorable for everyone: for him, for us, and for the country.59

  Ansaldo thought the lack of tragedy in Il Duce’s end was a failing that would weigh on the country’s future. “After ruining Italy, after standing in the way of Italian life for twenty years, [Mussolini] has once again thrown his body across the country’s path. He is an obstacle, even if he has been defeated … he can still harm us.” A few days later, when the news of Mussolini’s fate at Piazzale Loreto reached Ansaldo’s prison camp, he compared the different tragedy quotients of Italian and German history. The Führer, he said, had “died like a man,” while Mussolini had proved himself “a frightful ass.”60

  From his barracks, Ansaldo was not alone in deploring the banality of the script of Mussolini’s last hours. To many Italians, the events seemed all too uninspired. Mussolini trying to flee with the departing German troops; stopped at a roadblock by partisans who recognized Il Duce despite his German uniform; shot twenty-four hours later by a Communist firing squad, his body falling under a hail of bullets fired by three or four nameless partisans: what could be more banal than the scene at Giulino di Mezzegra? How could history play itself out in such an undistinguished way? Years of “revelations” purporting to solve the “mysteries” surrounding Mussolini’s death suggest that the collective imagination did not easily accept so unadorned a version of events. As early as the end of April 1945, rumors were circulating that soon earned the status of legend. A tall gentleman wearing a light-colored civilian overcoat had joined Colonel Valerio on the firing squad: who was he? Around the shores of Lake Como, it was whispered that the man—in fact Aldo Lampredi—was none other than the son of Matteotti.

  Historians know that false reports can be as interesting as confirmed fact. The legend that Mussolini was shot by the son of Matteotti points to a widespread need in liberated Italy to find in Il Duce’s executioner a man worthy of the role granted him by history. Other rumors about the firing squad were equally telling. In one, the executioner was the most famous of Resistance fighters, the partisan commander of the Valsesia district, Cino Moscatelli. But the rumor about Matteotti’s son is especially remarkable because it connects the mythical prehistory of Il Duce’s corpse with its actual history. Twenty-one years after the Matteotti murder, memory of the Socialist deputy was still so strong that people could believe his son had avenged his death. Nor was it the first time that the specter of Matteotti appeared in wartime Italy. Two years earlier, the Fascist prefect of Chieti had fallen for the rumor that the city—site of the farcical trial of Matteotti’s murderers in 1926—was about to be bombed by an enemy plane piloted by one of the murdered man’s sons.

  It had taken the partisan firing squad mere seconds to finish off Mussolini, but in fact he had begun to die two decades earlier, when his henchmen plunged their knives into the body of Giacomo Matteotti.

  2

  THE OX OF THE NATION

  As Il Duce’s life ended in front of the gates of Villa Belmonte at Giulino di Mezzegra, a new chapter began: the story of Mussolini’s dead body. It was to be a tragedy, starting the very next day, when Colonel Valerio dumped several corpses—of Mussolini, his mistress, and some high-ranking Fascist officials—in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. After a crowd formed around the bodies and began kicking them, the partisans decided to hang the corpses—feet up, head down—from a high crossbar in front of a gas station. There they remained for hours, open to the gaze of thousands of Italians who came to stare. Thus free Italy began its new life with a celebration of death. It was hardly an edifying ritual with which to baptize the just-liberated nation.

  Nevertheless, what happened at Piazzale Loreto on the morning of April 29, 1945, represented an end as well as a beginning, extreme unction as well as baptism by blood. Before looking at the impact of this episode on postwar Italy, we should therefore examine it in the light of the preceding years, in the context of Italy’s civil war raging between anti-Fascists and supporters of the Salò republic.

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  THE DIARY OF Corrado Alvaro, a well-known writer and journalist, offers some insight. One day in the fall of 1944, when Rome had been free for several months, Alvaro had returned from his morning walk and was enjoying the quiet of his studio. But the silence was only partial, because he kept seeing images of death pass before his eyes. “There are photographs of patriots who have been hanged posted in the streets,” writes Alvaro. The anti-Fascists had put up pictures of partisans killed by the Nazis and Fascists in other areas of Italy. The crowds on their way to work had stopped to look at them. There were women shopping and “girls, having just put their makeup on, with that bored, impatient look on their faces.” Alvaro does not share these young women’s indifference, since in every partisan’s photograph he fears he will recognize his son. At the same time he understands that he will see more than most in these pictures of Italians whom the Nazis and Fascists feel obliged not only to murder but to leave hanging in public. Of one partisan hung up on a butcher’s hook he says, “It looks as if she is flying; it’s incredible how the ideas of love, of seriousness, of a wedding—of flight, in short—can emerge from a young woman’s picture even if she is strung up on a butcher’s hook.”1 The body displayed to the public gaze is both memento mori and an example of ars moriendi, the art of dying; the roles played by Fascist and anti-Fascist bodies are essentially the same.

  The exhibition of people who had been hanged or shot was used by the Social Republic as an extreme way of controlling the population, a silent but supremely eloquent method of social control. Butcher’s hooks served an important function, degrading human beings by treating them as animals. There was nothing new in this: the Fascists had tried a similar expedient on the natives in their African colonies. But it would be wrong to credit the practice of showing off the dead only to the Fascists. Since the Spanish civil war, European anti-Fascists had also been trading in corpses. For the Republicans, displaying their adversaries’ dead bodies (even digging them up) was a symbolic way of denying legitimacy to the enemy’s cause. In Italy’s civil war, partisans could not wait for the liberation of Milan and the capture of Mussolini to exhibit Fascist corpses like hunting trophies. There were several such episodes, among them the horrendous battle between partisans and the forces of the Social Republic in the village of Poggio Bustone in March 1944, in which the Fascists were defeated. Local farmers took the losers’ bodies, stuck them on pitchforks, an
d hung them one by one on the trees along the main street, “lined up … like so many rows of straw.”2 A year later, in liberated Rome, a crowd descended on Donato Carretta, the director of the Regina Coeli prison under the Nazi occupation, threw him in the Tiber, drowned him, and dragged his body to the prison, where they strung it up from a window, then beat and kicked it for more than an hour. In the months following the Liberation other Fascists were lynched and their bodies put on public display.

  Nevertheless, it was fairly uncommon for the partisans to show off their victims. When they did, the dead were more likely to be other partisans accused of theft or betrayal than the Fascist enemy. It was the Republic of Salò that considered this tactic one of its fundamental weapons. In northern and central Italy there were countless cases of Resistance fighters, killed by Social Republic forces, whose corpses were shown off for hours, sometimes days. For example, the bodies of three anti-Fascists from San Maurizio Canavese, near Turin, were put on view in the town square on February 11, 1944. The townspeople was made to file by the corpses, “including the schoolchildren and, horrible to say, even the nursery school children.”3 Only much later, when it was dark, did the Fascists allow the families to take the bodies away for burial. That night, despite police surveillance, three small white crosses marked with “Peace to the innocent” appeared in the square after the dead had been removed. The next day, the crosses were taken away.