Remembering Mussolini's Fall: The Power of Resistance and the Toll of Autocratic Incompetence

We pay much attention these days to how dictators come to power, but understanding how they decline and exit –almost always involuntarily—and remembering the disasters they caused to their people and the world is equally important right now.

To mark the anniversaries of the deaths of Il Duce and the Führer, this week I am adapting some excerpts from the “Endings” chapter of my book Strongmen, which is being reprinted again due to popular demand. Today’s essay is about Benito Mussolini, and tomorrow’s is about Adolf Hitler.

Mussolini was shot by Italian partisans on April 28, 1945, three days after Italian partisans and the Allies liberated Italy. On April 30, 1945, Hitler killed himself as the Red Army entered Berlin. In Spain, Francisco Franco remained in office, taking right-wing dictatorship into the Cold War era, but in Italy and Germany the long nightmare of Fascism came to an end.

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The fates of Mussolini and Hitler were entwined from the start. Throughout the 1920s, Hitler worshipped Mussolini and learned from him, and during the 1930s each autocrat enabled the other. Yet the start of World War II gave the Führer the upper hand.

“I follow my instincts, and I am never wrong,” said Mussolini, who by 1939 had appointed himself head of the Ministries of War, Army, Navy, Colonies, and the Air Force. In February, he committed Italy to the Pact of Steel alliance with Germany, even though Italy needed years to replenish finances and military equipment exhausted by years of combat in Ethiopia (Italy had invaded Ethiopia in 1935) and in the Spanish Civil War.

By mid-August 1939, having stretched his forces further by invading Albania, Mussolini dispatched his son-in-law and Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano to Germany to convince Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hitler to call off the war. The encounter did not go well.

As a last resort, Mussolini declared that Italy would be a “non-belligerent” country. Ignoring the counsel of his generals and Hitler’s increasingly angry messages, Mussolini spent the next nine months in denial, passing hours each day with Clara Petacci and other lovers.

The success of Hitler’s blitzkrieg in France changed the Italian leader’s mind. On June 10, 1940, Mussolini announced Italy’s mobilization. On June 11, the first Allied bombs hit Italian cities, starting years of civilian suffering.

Huge numbers of Italians evacuated to the countryside, and those who remained in the cities spent time in cellars and other improvised bomb shelters. Focused on the glories of foreign conquest, Mussolini had never developed anti-aerial defenses to protect his people.

“You may be powerful, but you’re not immortal. You too will die one day,” Lina Romani from Trent warned Mussolini in a letter a few days after the bombardments began.

The Italian military fought valiantly given the lack of provisions and weapons, but they could not overcome Italy’s inability to fight a multi-front war. A misguided strategy that diverted troops from Africa to the Balkans and Russia made it easier for the Allies to liberate East Africa. In May 1941, Emperor Haile Selassie returned to his Ethiopian throne, and in 1942-43, the Allies also took Libya, ending Fascism’s imperial dream.  

As Italy became a liability, Hitler treated Mussolini imperiously, haranguing him for hours at their meetings. Mussolini, in turn, blamed his people for being “cowards.”

1942 was the turning point on the home front. Under the pressure of air raids, hunger, and desperation, more Italians lost their fear of the regime. In Turin, workers organized large-scale strikes, the first in sixteen years. Communist networks revived and Christian Democrats organized Catholic resistance from inside the Vatican.

Mussolini’s personality cult now started to deflate. In 1942, a record number of people were also arrested for insulting Il Duce. In 1943 far fewer Italians wrote to ask for his photograph. By then he barely appeared in public, fueling rumors he was sick or dead. When he spoke on the radio people were not sure it was him. His image, once so indelible, had lost its impact.

 Once the Allies landed in Sicily, the emergency deepened, and on July 25, 1943, Mussolini’s own Fascist Grand Council removed him on grounds of incompetence. Unable to comprehend this insubordination, Mussolini came to work the next day as though nothing had happened. King Vittorio Emmanuel III, who had appointed Mussolini to power in 1922 and now ruled alongside Marshal Pietro Badoglio, had him arrested, and he was taken to an island penal colony and then to the Gran Sasso mountains.

The news that Mussolini’s tyranny had ended caused a sensation. Mussolini sculptures were smashed and pictures of him tossed from windows. People made bonfires out of their Fascist uniforms and party cards. Throughout the summer of 1943, as the Allies advanced up the peninsula, the country lived in limbo, its military still fighting in the Axis although Il Duce was no longer in power.

It can be exceedingly difficult to get rid of dictators. Mussolini’s second act started with Marshall Badoglio’s September 8, 1943 surrender to the Allies. As the King and Badoglio went south to set up the Kingdom of Italy in Allied-liberated territory, SS commandos rescued Mussolini so Hitler could install him as head of a German client state, the Republic of Salò.

This meant that Italy’s labor, food supply, and military were subordinated to the needs of the German war machine. Italian Jews were deported or taken to Trieste to be exterminated in the Risiera di San Sabbia camp. Many non-Jewish Italians, clergy included, sheltered Jews in home, factories, and monasteries.

When civil war exploded between Nazi-backed Fascists and Allied-backed partisans, Europe’s largest Resistance movement took shape. Fighters flowed in from over 50 nations, ultimately creating a force of more than 250,000.

For Italians, joining the Resistance reactivated codes of honor and humanitarianism that Fascism had scorned. The partisan Ada Gobetti, whose husband had died in 1926 after being beaten by Fascists, saw the Resistance as the recovery of a bond of solidarity, founded “on a simple human relationship, the feeling of being at one with many.”

Mussolini was foiled in his escape attempt when Communist partisans captured him and Petacci on April 27 and shot them the next day. On April 29 their bodies were taken to Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, where someone with a sense of gallows humor placed a scepter in the dead Mussolini’s hands.

“No one had ever looked at the Italians the way he had when he was alive,” wrote Curzio Malaparte of Il Duce’s gaze that had captivated so many. Now Italians beat that corpse until the famous face was almost unrecognizable. To allow more people to see that he was really dead, Mussolini’s body, along with those of Petacci and Fascist officials, was suspended from a gas station before being taken to the morgue.

The corpses of Benito Mussolini, Clara Petacci, and Fascist officials are displayed in Piazzale Loreto, Milan, April 29, 1945. Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

Long after his demise, Mussolini’s body continued to call to some Italians. In 1946 it went missing for three weeks after some Fascists stole it from its unmarked grave. After that, the state kept the location of his corpse secret even from his family. In 1957, Mussolini was brought to his birthplace, Predappio, for re-burial.

There to meet him was his wife Rachele, who had outlasted all of his lovers and knew him better than anyone in the world, which is probably why she never prayed at the temple of his greatness. This was her judgment of Il Duce in a 1946 interview: “My husband appeared to be a lion, but instead he was a rather sad and small man.”