The Body of Il Duce

by Sergio Luzzatto

  This was one of many clashes over inscriptions, if not on church bells then on monuments to the war dead. Socialist and Communist militants wanted only partisans to be honored, while Catholics insisted on commemorating all “the fallen in all the wars.” While the left sought to impose a religion of republicanism, the Church in the early postwar period put itself forward as the nation’s chaplain, encouraging a blanket pardon for sins that tended to conflate individual responsibility with collective guilt. Millions of Italians—many of whom had been committed Fascists from World War I—were profoundly eager to see the distinction between Fascism and anti-Fascism disappear, while some non-Catholic moderates were inclined toward a conciliatory approach like that of the Christian Democrats. One of them was Indro Montanelli, a journalist known to Italian readers first as a Mussolini apologist, then as a war correspondent, and finally as an opponent of the Republic of Salò.

  In the fall of 1945 Montanelli published a slim volume, Here They Do Not Rest, dedicated to “all the Italians who died in this war,” whether in prison, in the trenches, in the mountains, or in their cellars.13 The book was composed of three ostensibly autobiographical texts that Montanelli pretended had been left him by an elderly priest as the spiritual last testaments of three victims of the civil war. All invented, one of the victims was an anti-Fascist, one a critical Fascist (much like Montanelli himself), and one a complete agnostic regarding the Fascist /anti-Fascist divide. Montanelli’s purpose was to present a case for what he thought of as the “gray zone,” those Italians who took no obvious side.14 He was writing for all the people too polite to be involved in politics, to convince them to “remain bystanders” and not be swayed by the “professional anti-Fascists.”15 Guglielmo Giannini, publisher of Uomo qualunque, was not mistaken when he praised the book as the gospel of the qualunquista. In the early postwar years, Montanelli was a key figure in persuading Italians that the conflict over Fascism and anti-Fascism should end with the death of Mussolini.

  Here They Do Not Rest: what better formulation of the troubled postmortem destiny of certain victims of the civil war? After the Liberation of Milan, the bodies of Blackshirts who had been executed were dumped by the wall of the Musocco cemetery, and there, under the hostile gaze of the partisan guards, mothers, wives, and girlfriends searched for familiar signs in the heap—the color of an item of clothing, the shape of a shoe—in order to identify their men. As for Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, and company, their bodies were buried in great haste and secrecy in section 16 of the cemetery in unmarked graves. In February 1946, when a false rumor began to circulate that Mussolini’s and Petacci’s bodies had been dug up by the British and taken to England, not even the Carabinieri were able to get cemetery officials to tell them which bodies were buried exactly where.

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  ON APRIL 11, 1946, the prefect of Milan received an anonymous letter on the letterhead of the Partito Fascista Democratico, or Democratic Fascist Party, proposing that the prefect himself, a stern man of the Resistance, agree to a political accord as well as to an ultimatum. The anonymous writer invited the “Communist democracy” of postwar Milan, as he called it, to “walk the path between Fascism and anti-Fascism” that the Fascist Party was ready to lay down. But this accord, said the letter, depended on the prefect’s willingness to release the Fascist prisoners being held in the San Vittore prison and allow a mass to be held in a church in Milan to honor the Blackshirt victims of April 1945. The prefect had a week to make up his mind and issue a press release; failing that, the Democratic Fascist Party would begin a battle, to be fought with “terrible means and methods” in the name of the Fascist martyrs.16

  The prefect, Ettore Troilo, gave no indication that he was overly worried; he limited himself to forwarding the anonymous letter to the minister of the interior, the Socialist Giuseppe Romita. Just the previous month, Troilo, in a monthly report, had denied that there was any risk that Fascism could be revived in the Lombardy region and suggested that Fascists—legally forced to operate in secret and living on the margins—were more likely to become common criminals. The prefect had not changed his opinion, not even when copies of Lotta fascista, the Democratic Fascist Party’s newspaper, were circulated at a political meeting at the end of March. Yet Lotta fascista was a violent publication, full of virulent appeals to punish the “cannibals” of Piazzale Loreto and strike the preachers of the “vile word of the Jew of Trier” (Karl Marx), as well as demands that Mussolini’s remains be reinterred at the Altar of the Nation in Rome’s Piazza Venezia.17 But in Rome, Minister of the Interior Romita expressed some alarm about the appearance of the Fascist paper and sent a “very urgent” message to Troilo urging him to find the activists responsible as quickly as possible.

  Thus, political and law enforcement officials had trouble evaluating whether clandestine neo-Fascism represented a real danger. Were the Democratic Fascist Party’s threats merely words or did they reflect actual plans of action? In Rome, Romita was taking no chances: with just fifty days until the June 2 referendum on whether to abolish the monarchy in favor of a republic, he wanted to rule out any neo-Fascist attacks or blackmail. And, despite Troilo’s lack of concern, there were many in Milan who were worried, especially about an ongoing conflict between police regulars, who served under the crown, and auxiliary police forces, made up of ex-partisans who had refused to work under the regulars’ command. After the Liberation, the police had spent more time pursuing ex-Resistance fighters than veterans of the Republic of Salò, according to an April 11, 1946, report given to the Ministry of the Interior. This state of affairs had allowed the “rebirth of neo-Fascism.”18 But it was a small rebirth, if we are to judge by the numbers of clandestine neo-Fascists operating in the region between 1945 and 1946. The Mussolini Action Squads, which specialized in bombing the Committee of National Liberation’s headquarters and distributing portraits of Mussolini, counted fewer than 300 members in all of northern Italy, while the Democratic Fascist Party had no more than 250.

  Historians have not yet studied the clandestine neo-Fascist demimonde, and until they do we must rely on the scant available accounts of militants. One, written by a former member of a Mussolini Action Squad, shows the movement faithful divided into three categories: the “desperadoes,” those who were “burned,” and the “creatives.” The desperadoes had lost brothers or fathers in the civil war and saw the goal of neo-Fascism as personal vendetta. The burned were people who could not return home because they would be condemned to death by the partisans. The creatives were the liveliest and most vital element of the movement, the writer says: men old enough to have fought in the war but still young enough to believe in politics, men distanced enough from the bloody side of the civil war not to see everything in terms of an eye for an eye.

  One such member, Domenico Leccisi, is key to the next phase in the odyssey of the body of Il Duce. Leccisi was young in 1946, just twenty-six years old. He was hardworking and bold, having written most of the first issue of Lotta fascista and the letter of ultimatum to the prefect of Milan. He understood political symbolism, having begun his career as an insurgent burning posters for Open City (Roma, città aperta), a film dear to the Resistance. And he knew how to use his imagination, at least with regard to Mussolini: he came up with the idea and the plan to steal the body from its grave in the Musocco cemetery.

  Leccisi began his political life in 1943, after fighting as a soldier on the French and Yugoslav fronts. Not long after the Italian armistice and Mussolini’s escape from prison at Gran Sasso, Leccisi, who worked for a metallurgical company near Como, distributed a leaflet in which he urged Italians to support Germany against the English Leviathan. “With the Duce of our youth on our side, no one can stop us,” the leaflet exhorted, and as the slogan suggested, Leccisi had come of age in the Fascist youth groups during the 1930s.19 Born in 1920, the son of a railway station chief, he was too young to recall the origins of the Fascist movement. He had lived through Mussolini’s reign as a child and adole
scent and become an adult only with the beginning of war, when the regime was already waning. So Leccisi was exposed to the last gasp of Fascist propaganda, which was steeped in antibourgeois sentiment, fervent on social equality, and unforgiving on the matter of revolutionary justice. Young people like Leccisi had felt moral outrage in July 1943 when Mussolini was removed from office by the king. They felt he had been betrayed by the Fascist leadership and by the rank and file’s indifference; they were appalled by the founding fathers’ “suicide,” as they saw it. With the surrender to the Allies and the dissolution of the Fascist state, they were all the more convinced that Italy needed young idealists. The fact that Mussolini owed his political resurrection at Salò to the Germans made Leccisi and the others certain that the alliance with Hitler was the only way to realize the absolute truths of the totalitarian religion.

  Leccisi would have imbibed the cult of Il Duce from his schoolbooks as a Fascist adolescent. But he also had the special good fortune, at sixteen, to see Mussolini in person, to get so close he could almost touch him. At Forlì in 1936, in the company of twenty thousand members of the Fascist youth league assembled from all over Italy, he had proudly received a magnificent diploma as “Chief Centurion.” Sixty years later his eyes still misted over when he recalled the words Mussolini had addressed to the valiant young crowd: “You are the springtime of life, you are the regime’s heartbeat.” But soon after the assembly at Forlì, Leccisi’s admiration for Mussolini began to waver on the battlefields of France and the Balkans. Was it possible that the Fascist leadership was responsible for Italy’s military disasters and that Mussolini himself was blameless? Like many other young soldiers raised to believe in Italy’s invincibility and chastened by the defeats of war, Leccisi decided that Il Duce had been “Petaccified,” that the aging dictator had become foolish in his pursuit of Clara Petacci. The Republic of Salò was Mussolini’s chance to redeem himself, to return to the ideals of early Fascism, especially in the social sphere. The Social Republic would limit bourgeois property rights and give the working class some control of the factories: it would take from the rich and give to the poor. This was the last possible opportunity to bring protest to the halls of government. During the civil war, Leccisi was a true believer—anticapitalist, anti-Semitic, in favor of the so-called socialization of the economy.

  Socialization, meaning the participation of workers in management, was the most important measure Mussolini tried to install as head of the Social Republic. Against the explicit opposition of the Nazi authorities but in the spirit of the Republic of Salò (it was not called “social” for nothing), Il Duce sought to let the state manage companies deemed necessary to the national interest. From early 1944, when the socialization policy was formally inaugurated, Domenico Leccisi expressed his support in a series of articles in the Fascist press, gaining the notice of Giuseppe Spinelli, head of the organization of Milanese industrial workers. In June 1944, Spinelli asked Leccisi to head a new office overseeing public canteens and refectories and policing food supplies and prices. It was a thankless job in some ways, not only because people were angry about tight rationing but because the big agricultural and industrial suppliers had a great deal of power and resisted his interference. But it was exciting for Leccisi, who considered himself a Fascist revolutionary, because controlling supplies and prices was a key element in the economic redistribution integral to the socialization policy.

  The energy with which Leccisi went at the job—seizing goods hidden in stores’ back rooms, filing charges against merchants selling rationed goods illegally, closing down dozens of shops, directing the rounds made by inspectors, most of them factory workers—did not endear him to the German police or to the Milanese notables of the Social Republic, to whom these methods seemed decidedly Bolshevik. But Leccisi’s position was strengthened when Spinelli was named mayor of Milan. For a brief period Leccisi served as chief of the political section of the local Fascist Party, returning in the fall of 1944 to his job supervising food supplies, a job that rumor had it Mussolini himself said was being done well. However, when several of Leccisi’s inspectors were caught trading goods they had seized from merchants, the head of the province ordered the immediate shutdown of the inspection operations. Leccisi reacted with a protest, leading three hundred workers past the prefect’s office and then under the windows of the Fascist federation in Piazza San Sepolcro. That evening Radio Bari, representing the Badoglio government, announced that the workers of Milan had finally rebelled against the Fascists. But the German authorities were none too happy, and neither was the Republic of Salò’s minister of the interior, Guido Buffarini Guidi, who ordered Leccisi arrested. Thanks to the intervention of Spinelli, the young hothead saw his arrest order canceled.

  Just a few weeks later, back in Piazza San Sepolcro, Leccisi had the greatest satisfaction of his young political career. As a journalist for Brigata Nera Aldo Resega, the Fascist federation’s Milan weekly, he was presented to Mussolini, who was making an official visit to the city. Il Duce had apparently been informed of Leccisi’s exploits and gave him special treatment—not the Fascist salute but a warm handshake. Surprised by the gesture, Leccisi felt the need to respond in kind. He held out a copy of the magazine and succeeded in croaking, “Duce, with this paper we have stepped on the corns of quite a lot of people.”

  “Very good,” came Mussolini’s reply. “People who have corns need to know there is someone who can step on them.”20 It was Leccisi’s second meeting with Il Duce; the third would take place after the dictator was dead, on Easter night 1946.

  During the final months of the Social Republic, Leccisi was mostly busy with journalism. He wrote on economic policy for, among others, the Fascist daily La Repubblica fascista; the last of his articles was published the day Milan was liberated. Leccisi, like some other young journalists working in the twilight days of the Social Republic, always signed his articles, near-masochistic proof of his unfailing faith. In writing, Leccisi found solace for the sorry turn events had taken. How else to explain that on the very day the regime came to an end he was writing about the Social Republic’s iron will to make good on its promise of “a new era of distributive and social justice”?21

  Like many other journalists writing for the Salò press, Leccisi never referred to the German occupation, remaining silent about the Third Reich’s support of the Social Republic. On April 7, 1945, when he wrote the latest of many articles in favor of socialization, another, anonymous columnist on the same page urged that the property of Italian Jews be seized and sold and argued that “any position of moral … hesitation” was criminal.22 Leccisi never seemed to understand that being a Social Republic militant meant defending the Italy of the Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp, which in turn meant defending the Germany of Auschwitz.

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  IN A CELEBRATED passage that Italo Calvino thought one of the most telling in modern Italian literature, the novelist Elio Vittorini describes the restless days of early postwar Italy as an unending railway journey—a country where life was conducted on a train, traveling from one end of the peninsula to the other without actually stopping. It is on one of those trains that we find Domenico Leccisi, who between 1945 and 1946 traversed northern Italy daily, traveling from the countryside near Cuneo, in Piedmont, where he lived with his wife and daughter, to Milan, where he kept in touch with his neo-Fascist friends. According to his memoir, published decades later, he was on a train when he first hatched the plan to steal Mussolini’s body. The Turin-Milan route that he traveled every day passed right by the Musocco cemetery walls. Looking out the window, seeing the cypresses growing among the tombs and the large cross that stood above the main gate, Leccisi found himself continually thinking about the mortal remains of Mussolini lying there. Il Duce’s last resting place, Leccisi thought, an anonymous grave, was not worthy of him. “One sleepless night” after the usual trip, Leccisi decided to move the body. “To force Italians to think about the need to have closure on the pas
t, the cover had to come off of that tomb.”23

  Opening up a grave to induce historical closure? The reasoning is too tortured to sound convincing. The truth, in fact, was very different: far from wanting to bring the story to a conclusion, Leccisi wanted to start a new narrative, one about Il Duce’s body, buried without so much as a marker but still alive in the memories of Italians. This story was to commence on the eve of the first anniversary of Mussolini’s execution, just as Italy was preparing for the referendum to abolish the monarchy in favor of a republic, just as the government was about to pass an amnesty for many of the Fascists accused of crimes. The theft of Il Duce’s body was supposed to send a message that Fascist ideology was thriving. With regard to the referendum, the act would announce that the Fascist vote had to be taken into account for either side to win the ballot. Furthermore, the message would proclaim that the far right was capable of pursuing its own ends, should the amnesty for Fascists fail to bring them into the legitimate political arena. In short, the theft of Mussolini’s body over Easter 1946 was not intended as a mere act of daring. As Leccisi saw it, this was a way to transform clandestine neo-Fascism into a legitimate political force.