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THE LAST 600 DAYS OF IL
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Copyright © 2004 by Ray Moseley
First Taylor Trade Publishing edition 2004
This Taylor Trade Publishing hardcover edition of Mussolini is an original
publication. It is published by arrangement with the author.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
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Published by Taylor Trade Publishing
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Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicatton Data
Moseley, Ray, 1932-
Mussolini : the last 600 days of il Duce / Ray Moseley,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-58979-095-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Mussolini, Benito, 1883-1945. 2. Heads of state—Italy—Biography.
3. Fascism—Italy—History. 4. Italy—Politics and
government—1914-1945. I. Title.
DG575.M8M66 2004
945.091'092—dc22
2003026579
TM
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments vii
1 The Last Spectator 1
2 After the Fall 6
3 Birth of the Salo Republic 25
4 The Fate of the Roman Jews 41
5 Mussolini and Claretta 52
6 A Most Unhappy Family 64
7 Galeazzo Ciano and Edda 70
8 Troubles on All Fronts 81
9 The Partisan War Develops 101
10 Il Duce and the Jews 114
11 The Liberation of Rome 124
12 A Terrible Summer 131
13 More Atrocities, Greater Despair 153
14 “I Have Ruined Italy” 167
15 The Secret Negotiations 174
16 In Search of a Way Out 190
17 Peace Hopes in the Balance 196
18 Looming Defeat and Paralysis 210
19 A Temporary Loss of Nerve 220
v
VI CONTENTS
20 The Fall of Fascism 225
21 Flight and Capture 249
22 Mussolini Tamed: The Polite Prisoner 263
23 “I’ve Come to Shoot Them” 275
24 Execution of II Duce: Whodunnit? 289
25 Piazzale Loreto: A Shameful Denouement 311
26 The German Surrender 323
27 Lakeside Murders and the Dongo Treasure 333
28 The Mysterious Churchill File 341
29 The Dead Sprout Wings 350
30 Epilogue 364
Chronology........................................................................................368
Dramatis Personae ...........................................................................375
Notes...................................................................................................383
Bibliography ......................................................................................412
Index ...................................................................................................416
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
Three people are owed special thanks for their contributions to this book.
Michael Dorr bears primary responsibility for it, having suggested that I write it,
and he offered important advice that helped to improve the original manuscript.
My wife Jennifer displayed all the skill of a professional editor as she read the
manuscript with a critical eye, saving me from numerous mistakes and some in
felicitous phrases. Cheryl Adam provided the icing on the cake with her superb
editing. Ross Plotkin and Mandy Phillips ably carried Michael’s work to comple
tion after his departure from Cooper Square Press.
Special thanks also go to Umberto Lazzaro for providing additional details to
his previously published accounts of his capture of Mussolini in April 1945. My
critical judgment of his published account of how Mussolini was killed by parti
sans in no way reflects any lack of appreciation for his generous assistance. Licia
Cusinati came to my rescue splendidly in resolving some tricky problems of
translation from Italian texts. Leonora Dodsworth, with her usual efficiency, fer
reted out vital information from archives in Rome, with the kind assistance of
Wladimiro Settimelli.
Giorgio Delle Fonte, director of the municipal library in Dongo, Italy, and his
wife Edda Cecchini contributed valuable archival material and were very helpful
in suggesting other sources of information.
Others I wish to thank for their encouragement and help in various ways are
Bill Landrey, Robin Knight, William Tuohy and Marco Donghi. Finally, I would
like to mention Alberto Botta, who will disagree with nearly everything about
this book but who was kind and helpful when I sought his assistance.
For Jennifer, Ann and John
THE LAST S P E C T A T O R
I work and I try, yet know that all is but a farce.
—Benito Mussolini
In the late winter of 1945, Benito Mussolini found himself acutely aware that
his life had nearly run its course and ahead lay only a few agonizing weeks or
months that were sure to bring more disasters, more defeats. His mood was black
and, almost obsessively, he began to speak about his approaching death. He may
have clung to a thread of hope that he could survive, but he was in a room with
out exits. The German armed forces that had sustained his puppet government
since its creation in September 1943 were inexorably being driven out of Italy,
the frontiers of his Fascist republic were shrinking almost daily and Mussolini
was aware that German military leaders were negotiating with the Allies behind
his back in neutral Switzerland. With Soviet forces and those of the Western Al
lies steadily sweeping toward the heart of the Nazi empire, Germany offered no
refuge, nor did Mussolini seek one. He was determined to die in his own coun
try. In February, seeing with sudden clarity the inevitable destruction of all he had
lived for, Mussolini suffered what his German doctor called a nervous break
down, and his physical and mental powers deteriorated noticeably. He slept
badly, ate little and once again grew thin, as he had earlier when he suffered from
an ulcer.1 By now he probably regarded death as a welcome release. From the
moment he had been overthrown in July 1943, arrested, then rescued by the Ger
mans and forced by Hitler to take up the reins of government once again, Mus
solini had been a miserable figure in the grip of anger, shame and depression.
The Germans had lost faith in him and humiliated him almost daily, denying him
2 MUSSOLINI
any real exercise of power, brutalizing and even enslaving his people and stealing
his country’s assets. He hated some of the Fascists around him, hated where he
lived in remote isolation beside Lake Garda, the most melancholy of the Italian
lakes and not a place of his choosing. His private life was turbulent as always.
Sometimes he and his peasant wife Rachele would pass each other coldly in the
villa they shared without recognizing each other’s existence.2 His mistress,
Claretta Petacci, lived six miles away in another lakeside villa and his moments of
comfort with her were few.
“Death has become my friend, it doesn’t frighten me any longer. Death is a
grace of God for one who has suffered too much. . . . For me the doors will not
open except for death. And it is also right. I have made mistakes and I will pay, if
this poor life of mine can serve as payment.” Thus did Mussolini unburden him
self to Madeleine Mollier, wife of the press attaché at the German Embassy and a
Red Cross volunteer in a German military hospital in Italy. She had interviewed
him for a German magazine in 1938, when he was at the height of his powers in
Rome, and he remembered that well. “Seven years ago I was an interesting per
son. Now I am a corpse.” Mollier had won his consent to be interviewed and pho
tographed again, one of the last interviews he would give and an exceptional one
in that it contained no hint of dissimulation or self-serving distortion of the facts.
He could be more frank than he had ever been before, because in effect he was
speaking from the grave; he had asked her not to publish anything until after his
death, and it was not until 1948 that Mollier did so. “Yes, madam, I am finished,”
he said. “My star has fallen. I work and I try, yet know that all is but a farce. . . .
I await the end of the tragedy and—strangely detached from everything—I do not
feel any more an actor. I feel I am the last of the spectators.” He said he had be
gun to die in January 1944, when extreme Fascists in his regime had compelled
him to acquiesce in the execution of his son-in-law and former foreign minister,
Count Galeazzo Ciano, after Ciano had helped vote him out of office. That had
brought a rupture with Edda Mussolini Ciano, his favorite child, a painful break
for both that would not be repaired in his lifetime. “The agony is atrociously long.
I am the captain of the ship in a storm. My ship is broken. I am in the furious
ocean, on a piece of wreckage. This impossibility to act, to put things right! No
one hears my voice.. .. Now I am enclosed in silence. But one day the world will
listen to me.”3
He was now sixty-one, and, in the twenty-third year of his tumultuous leader
ship, prematurely aged and a shadow of the dynamic figure—shoulders back, jaw
thrust forward imperiously—who had once held millions in thrall. He had
brought backward Italy into the modem world, his oratory had electrified a na
tion, he had once been widely admired abroad and his ambitions for conquest had
initially won approval among his own people. He was a man of genius, his fol
lowers never tired of declaiming in the glory days, but now that description rang
