* * *
At dawn the next morning, Claretta left for Milan, taking pains over what she had described to her man as ‘little feminine things’. So she asked that her bag be packed with ‘her cardigans with pink buttons, eight of her best blouses, two negligees, one black, the other velvet with fur trimming, plus an orange one to wear on getting up from bed in the morning, and some summer ones’ (which could be found in a separate suitcase). She also wanted to be equipped with stockings, shoes, toiletry and sanitary absorbents. Her father’s chestnut-leather bag must similarly not be forgotten. As two contemporary historians have noted: ‘it was not a list for a woman expecting to die at any minute’.52 She had, however, left her diaries and other papers behind, perhaps indeed with a sense of consigning a legacy to history. She arrived safely later that day at her sister’s flat in Milan, still, according to Myriam’s memoirs, accompanied by her SS guard, Spögler.53
Over the previous fortnight, Myriam had kept up her barrage of letters to Mussolini, especially when it became clear that she, Mancini and her parents were finally going to flee the ‘inferno’ that lay all around in ‘martyred Italy’ and abandon the equally ‘martyred’ Claretta to her lover’s by no means trustworthy hands. Marcello and his children also required succour, Myriam did not forget to remind the Duce. They belonged to a family of virtue. By contrast, Rachele, a woman of ‘criminal insanity’, and the rest of his legitimate kin deserved to be cursed and cursed again. They never ceased their plotting to get rid of Claretta and even to murder her ‘in the medieval manner’. They were literally driving him ‘mad’. But Mussolini had utterly lacked courage in dealing with his wife, Myriam lamented in sentiments that her correspondent had so often heard from Claretta, and so treated her sister ‘like a dog or a donkey’. How could a man of his ‘intelligence and good sense’, Myriam protested, leave her to get herself alone to Milan in the current dangerous world? No wonder her poor sister now had the beginnings of an ulcer to add to her other woes, an illness she could share with him.
Just as was true of Claretta’s correspondence, in Myriam’s prose there was space for aggression and space for peace. So, Myriam requested beseechingly, could she take with her a recent photograph of the Duce for remembrance’s sake, and would he make sure to write at once to Serrano Suñer, so she and her parents could ‘avoid the bureaucratic path and arrive straight to Franco without need to call on people whom we don’t know and may be full of gossip’? Or maybe Portugal was a better venue. In whichever sanctuary, it would not be good if the Petaccis were subject on arrival to police or customs inspection.54 ‘You know how to write without me telling you’, the piccola idiota (as she again winningly called herself) wrote with some temerity. It was not good enough for him to be rude to Mancini, when the lawyer arrived to fix final passport (and presumably financial) arrangements. ‘Today I think of Claretta as a Saint [sic] and a heroine, if still, in spite of everything, she has decided to follow your destiny, which she rightly considers her destiny,’ Myriam pronounced, once more slipping into accusatory mode. ‘She is split in two, in three. You and the patria, Mamma and Papà, me, Marc[ello] and Benghi. Too many, too much for just one little heart.’ Sadly, time and again, Claretta had won no real understanding or comfort from Mussolini, her sister wailed. But, perhaps at the last, he would comprehend how ‘Great [sic], absolute and sublime’ was the love that Claretta had given and would always give him.55
Myriam was not the only scribe among the Petaccis. On 10 April Giuseppina Persichetti typed her last farewell to the Duce. It was unfortunate, she conceded a little smugly, that, since the events of 25 July ‘bound together our tragedy and your tragedy’, the Petaccis had been forced to live from ‘your oxygen’, ‘contrary to our principles of fairness and dignity’. Now she was trusting in God’s help to get them ‘safe and sound to their destination’. But she was leaving behind Claretta and Marcello, ‘with their rooted faith, their generous acceptance of holocaust, their ardent love for poor Italy and you’. As a mother who had given her own child to him, she nourished one last wish: ‘Take care of her as the most sacred thing that you possess. Protect her, defend her with the sense of responsibility that her sacrifice of Love demands. Do not ignore how delicate, sensitive and fragile she is and how she needs understanding, loyalty and tenderness.’ He simply must recognise that Claretta was the most beautiful and worthy aspect of his life, her mother demanded in vow and prayer.
The Petaccis had gone to prison and sacrificed their civic life to him, Giuseppina reiterated. So she was certain that he would ensure that Marcello did not suffer any more ‘humiliations’ and be ashamed of his name. Mussolini must recognise that her son was ‘one of the few faithful left to you’. Marcello’s ‘intelligence, energy and versatility’ made him an ideal potential minister at the highest level, his mother remarked on the evident principle that she should never give up. Departing to Spain, she was not sure whether her son had succeeded in ‘making his little angels safe and secure’, she added with a frisson of fear. But she knew Mussolini would offer every assistance to them. So she signed off, ‘with tears in my eyes, as that most tragic being, a mother and an exile, I kiss your hands and thank you’. With her whole heart, she hoped they would meet again and God would help and bless him. Then, in unfeigned invocation, she recommended Claretta to his love and devotion one last time.56
The only Petacci to stay silent through these weeks was Francesco Saverio, perhaps demonstrating how justified was the conclusion of one contemporary that Claretta’s father had remained ‘bemused’ by the whole affair.57 Another sympathetic account states that, even before 1943, the doctor had lost patients through his daughter’s notorious behaviour and his wife’s snobbery. He had been left silently to hope for a fate for him and his family that was not too horrid. In his world, away from the official Fascist gender order, the women led and he followed, less the appeaser and more the servant.58
* * *
The Petaccis’ flight from Malpensa airport outside Milan was finally organised for Saturday, 21 April. But the times were difficult to say the least; delays blocked departure, and the family finally reached Barcelona in the early evening on the 23rd – whereupon they went straight to the Ritz Hotel – after a bumpy four-hour trip in a plane with false Croatian markings. If Myriam’s romantic recollection can be trusted, they were furnished with only 8,000 lire, £10,000 and a few ‘jewels’. They did carry with them, however, ‘some letters of recommendation’. As Mussolini had predicted, the Francoist police seized the plane and interned the crew.59 According to Myriam, Claretta had written her a lengthy farewell letter. It combined marital advice – she should view Mancini as her ‘father, brother and friend’ – final good wishes for her parents, and the announcement of her firm determination to ‘follow my destiny which is also his [Mussolini’s]’. ‘I shall not destroy with a cowardly gesture,’ she swore, ‘the supreme beauty of my offering’ of love and devotion.60
Marcello’s actions during the concluding weeks of the Fascist regime cannot be fully charted. Their detail is confused by the numerous conspiracy theories since constructed about what he may have been doing, with the leading one marshalled by his surviving son, Ferdinando. It claims that, by 1945, and in all likelihood well before that, Marcello had been working for Winston Churchill and the British secret service as an agent under the code-name ‘Fosco’.61 No sources in the United Kingdom have ever been found to justify this claim. Marcello’s partner, Zita Ritossa, did say in her memoirs that she, their children and Marcello successfully crossed into Switzerland on 18 April (conspiracy theorists allege some last-minute compromise with the British minister there, Clifford Norton).62 But, perturbed by the thought that the Swiss would hand him over to the Allies as a ‘war criminal’, Marcello soon decided to return to Milan where he and his family were together on 23 April.63 His choice to punt on Italy, Mussolini and his sister was a fatal one.
* * *
Mussolini had left Lago di Garda for Milan without briefi
ng the German authorities in Italy, who were, in any case, seeking their own independent peace with the triumphant Allied armies. By 24 April, however belatedly, he took care to send Rachele, Romano and Anna Maria to sanctuary at a villa on Lake Como owned by the wealthy silk industrialist Mantero family. In the very early morning of 26 April Rachele tried to cross the Swiss border with her two youngest children at Ponte Chiasso, but was refused entry by the border guards and returned to her refuge at Como. Over the previous days in Milan, the Duce had begun a scattergun series of negotiations with Cardinal Schuster, the archbishop of Milan, with the partisan leadership, with men who might or might not fondly remember Mussolini’s socialist origins, with his own surviving repubblichini (devotees of the RSI) and with his regime’s military commander, Rodolfo Graziani. There was still talk of a last redoubt and a final heroic fight but, whenever an attempt was made to count arms and men, it became quickly clear that such talk was in vain.64
With the evident failure of his efforts to find a compromise, on the evening of 25 April Mussolini left Milan, which was promptly liberated by armed partisans. He reached Como some hours later. With Graziani now taking his own path, in the wee hours of the next day Mussolini’s convoy moved on to Menaggio, where there was a crossroad to Lake Lugano and the Swiss border. There the dictator again dithered, going part of the way west and then turning back. Claretta, Marcello, Zita and the two boys now caught up with the Duce in their yellow Alfa Romeo 6C 1500 (from which fluttered the Spanish flag, with its claim of diplomatic immunity). Marcello had extracted from the friendly Spanish vice-consul in Milan a passport stating that he was Don Juan Muñoz y Castillo, a businessman. There were other children in the convoy but most had been left behind at Como; Marcello’s motivations remain imponderable. He may have been trying to protect his sister and to act as head of the Petacci family. He may have been engaged in one last adventure. He may have been unable to perceive an alternative to uniting his destiny and that of his partner and sons with Mussolini’s.
Whether he wanted to be or not (and perhaps to his mute surprise), Mussolini was now reunited with Claretta. The couple had time for one final noisy quarrel over Elena Curti, who had also joined those remaining with Mussolini to the last, as had Virgilio Pallottelli.65 Romilda Ruspi, however, had remained at Monza. At dawn on 27 April, now assisted by a retreating German anti-aircraft unit commanded by Lieutenant Hans Fallmayer, the convoy re-formed and headed further north along the lake. Claretta, wearing a rich mink coat and a neat and stylish turban-style hat, again travelled with Marcello and not with Mussolini. One partisan later reckoned that she was carrying with her 150,000 lire, 30,000 Swiss francs, some gold coins and:
a quantity of foreign paper valuables, two gold watches studded with diamonds and rubies, 16- and 9-carat-diamond gold rings, two white gold and silver earrings with drop pearls, a necklace of cultivated pearls, a 2-carat solitaire diamond, two flower-shaped clips and two heart-shaped ones with diamonds and opals, and a little gold bracelet set with rubies.
Such treasure again did not suggest craven surrender to imminent death. It was later found that she also was concealing another ancient family ring, a gold locket with a rosary crown from the shrine of Santa Rita, and another with diamonds forming the intertwined letters C and B, plus a miniature of Mussolini inscribed with the motto: ‘Clara, I am you and you are me. Ben 24 April 1932–24 April 1941.’66 Zita Ritossa and Marcello Petacci had similarly brought much cash and jewellery with them.67 Little of this impressive collection was ever returned to the surviving members of the Petacci family.
* * *
The convoy’s passage – whether towards Switzerland, the Valtellina or Germany – was interrupted at 7 a.m. on the morning of the 27th. Just north of a village called, as it happened, Musso, and just short of the town of Dongo, the well-armed Nazi–Fascist vehicles were halted by what was only a small force of partisans. Negotiations began.
While talks proceeded, some of the Fascist chiefs in the group began to identify themselves, one being Ruggero Romano, the minister of public works, who may have been trying to save his wife and adolescent son (he was successful). By the afternoon it was agreed that the German troops could proceed but the Italians must stay behind and accept their fate. Now, in the confusion, with Claretta’s desperate shouted blessing, Mussolini agreed to don a German greatcoat and conceal himself with Nazi soldiers in the back of a truck that moved off with the other German vehicles. At Dongo, however, when there was a further inspection, Mussolini’s identity was revealed. He was arrested and dragged into the small local town hall. The Germans then finally moved away to the north.
Marcello and his family had also been allowed to travel on from Musso: the flag of neutral Spain had done its job. However, at the village of Germasino, their journey ended, with some dispute remaining over the cause. According to Walter Audisio, a communist who had fought alongside anti-Franco forces in Spain, ‘When I addressed him [Marcello] in Spanish, I might as well have been speaking Ostrogothic. Not only could he not understand but he did not know a single phrase in Spanish.’68 A rival partisan account suggests that Marcello’s passport bore in different sections two different birthdates – 1912 and 1914 – and was palpably false.69 A third claim is that partisan suspicions were raised by the children chattering in Italian to each other about how ‘stupid and bad’ those who resisted Mussolini were.70 The partisans decided that ‘the fair-haired, well-built man with a small birthmark on his fat chin’71 must be Vittorio Mussolini, an ironical fate given the enmity between Marcello and the real Vittorio.
Audisio allegedly slapped the face of the man whom he identified as Vittorio Mussolini, with a threat to shoot him there and then ‘like a dog’; in the interim he seized from his jacket a gold cigarette case, a gold fountain pen and an ordinary propelling pencil. Such violence rapidly elicited from Marcello outraged yelps that he was not Mussolini’s eldest son. Rather, he maintained, without yet providing a name, that he had always been an anti-Fascist at heart and was, in fact, ‘the head of the intelligence service in Italy’. When that grand contention was greeted with incredulity and he was dragged off to see a priest for final absolution, Marcello tried yet another of his fantastical stories. ‘It is because of me,’ he averred, ‘that the Germans never succeeded in using secret weapons.’ He asserted, with some echo of an earlier scheme, that with an engineer friend he had discovered a way to have water replace petrol in combustion engines, an invention which, had it been deployed by the Axis, could have changed the course of the war.72 His story won over the Capuchin to whom he had been brought, either out a priestly ignorance of science or priestly hope in finding grounds for mercy. But Marcello’s lofty pretensions to be an inventor – the last throw of a fantasist – cut little ice with the partisans.
While Claretta’s brother struggled to avoid execution, that destiny was what awaited fifteen Fascist bosses who had been identified in the convoy. They included Party Secretary Alessandro Pavolini, who had attempted an armed escape and been wounded in the resultant fire, Ruggero Romano, Paolo Zerbino and Nicola Bombacci, never a Fascist minister but an old friend of Mussolini from his socialist days, whose personal contact with the Duce had been restored during the Repubblica Sociale in an effort to counter Mussolini’s loneliness and isolation.73 They, Marcello, Zita and the children were now driven back to Dongo by their partisan guards, with death creeping ever nearer.
* * *
The radical Fascists were, in fact, briefly to outlive Mussolini and Claretta. After his identification, arrest and interrogation at Dongo, Mussolini was imprisoned for the night of 27 April in a decaying barracks at Germasino; it belonged to the Guardia di Finanza, a specialised police force targeting smuggling to and from Switzerland. The defeated dictator now asked that his best wishes be sent to a female friend, whom he admitted to be ‘Signora Petacci’, travelling with ‘that Spanish gentleman’, as Mussolini cautiously phrased it.74 Once he had returned to Dongo, the liberal partisan chief, Pier Luigi Bel
lini delle Stelle, separated Claretta from her brother – she had been fussing about a broken nail and had asked for cognac (to be given only a sip of more humble brandy)75 – and conducted what he recorded as an hour-long interview with her.
Bellini acknowledged that, he had, until then, thought of her as ‘an adventuress who had attached herself to a man of power out of pure self-interest’. But, in the course of the conversation, she earned his commiseration through her emphasis on how Mussolini had been surrounded by ‘wretches’, whose only thought had been ‘saving their own miserable skins’.76 After she had made plain her dislike of the Fascist diehards, Claretta tried to suggest that the best course of action for the partisans would be to hand Mussolini over to the Allies. This idea remains the source of massive and continuing conspiracy theorising, often connected with the alleged ‘Churchill letters’ noted in the introduction of this book; that controversy will be avoided here.
When Bellini replied that he was too patriotic an Italian to allow national responsibility for the Fascist regime to be subordinated to the Allies, Claretta rejected the idea of a trial as a humiliating ‘torture’. ‘It would be better for him to die at once,’ she wailed. Under further questioning, Claretta denied that she had been a key ‘adviser’ to the Duce and began to sob, arousing a combination of sympathy and suspicion from her captor. As she dried her tears, she related to Bellini just how deeply she had loved Mussolini and how different she therefore was to his other women. She had offered, she pledged, ‘true love, absolute devotion, complete dedication, love such as would have soothed him in moments of rest and loneliness and relieved his mind in moments of stress and worry’.
Obscuring her family’s past and continuing squabbles and the longstanding struggle between them and the Mussolinis, switching to her private and renouncing her public persona, and perhaps convincing herself in the process, Claretta affirmed that recently she had won her lover over and brought him to her side. ‘I never entertained the idea of entering into politics or government affairs, let alone advising him,’ she ran on with a virtue that seemed as much directed at her absent partner as her partisan interlocutor. ‘If I have ever used my influence over him it has been to recommend to his notice someone who had asked me to plead his cause, officers, party leaders and other important persons who had fallen into disgrace, people who wanted recommendations for a job or what have you. I simply tried to help them all because I always tried to do good to everyone,’ she remarked disarmingly, before moving on to the claim that she had never been especially ‘jealous’ but had rather always forgiven his foolish women and tried to do her best for them, too.
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