On April 28, 1945, Benito Mussolini was executed while trying to flee to Switzerland as Allied forces approached northern Italy, and an angry mob later mutilated his corpse in a public square in Milan.
Public DomainBenito Mussolini poses in uniform in 1940.
Benito Mussolini’s death on April 28, 1945, marked the end of a dark chapter in Italian history. After seizing power in 1922, the dictator ruled his country with an iron fist. Although he was deposed in 1943, Nazi Germany reinstated him as the head of its puppet government in northern Italy during World War II. However, as the Allies closed in at the end of the conflict, Mussolini wanted to avoid being tried as a war criminal, so he decided to flee to Switzerland.
His plan failed. The dictator, who had spent two decades splashing his face across Italy in his bid to become a modern Julius Caesar, was recognized by partisans. They captured and executed him alongside his mistress, Clara Petacci, and a dozen other fascists. But that was just the beginning.
The morning after Benito Mussolini’s death, partisans dumped his corpse in Milan, and an angry crowd soon converged. The mob kicked, spat at, and urinated on the body of “Il Duce” while shouting curses at the dead dictator. His mutilated corpse was then hung upside down from a gas station, a symbolic retribution for the suffering he had caused.
Benito Mussolini’s execution and the defilement of his body reflected the intense hatred he inspired and the lasting scars his rule left on Italy. Even today, his legacy remains one of devastation and terror marked by his ruthless policies and Italy’s painful struggle for liberation.
Inside Benito Mussolini’s Rise To Power
Benito Mussolini took control of Italy thanks to both the pen and the sword.
Public DomainFuture Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the early 1900s.
Born July 29, 1883, in Dovia di Predappio, Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was intelligent and inquisitive from an early age. In fact, he first set out to become a teacher, but he soon decided the career wasn’t for him. Still, he voraciously read the works of great European philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Georges Sorel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx.
In his 20s, Mussolini ran a series of newspapers that amounted to propaganda sheets for his increasingly extreme political views. He advocated violence as a way to effect change, particularly when it came to the advancement of trade unions and safety for workers.
The young journalist and firebrand was arrested several times for fostering unrest in this way: In 1903, he was imprisoned for supporting a violent workers’ strike in Switzerland. His views were so extreme that the Socialist Party even kicked him out, and he resigned from its newspaper.
Public DomainMussolini’s booking file following his arrest by Swiss police on June 19, 1903, for supporting a violent strike.
Mussolini then took matters into his own hands. In late 1914, with World War I newly underway, he founded a newspaper called Il Popolo d’Italia, or The People of Italy. In it, he outlined the major political philosophies of nationalism, militarism, and extremism that would direct the rest of his life.
“From today onward we are all Italians and nothing but Italians,” he once said. “Now that steel has met steel, one single cry comes from our hearts — Viva l’Italia! [Long live Italy!]”
Il Duce’s Transformation Into A Brutal Dictator
After his career as a journalist and his service as a sharpshooter during World War I, Benito Mussolini founded Italy’s National Fascist Party in 1921.
Backed by increasing numbers of supporters and paramilitary squads dressed in black, the fascist leader began calling himself “Il Duce” (“the Leader”) and soon became known for fiery speeches fueled by his increasingly violent political worldview. These “Blackshirt” squads cropped up all over Italy, setting fire to government buildings and killing opponents by the hundreds. Meanwhile, Mussolini himself called for a general workers’ strike in 1922, as well as a march on Rome.
When 30,000 of Mussolini’s supporters did indeed enter the capital calling for revolution, it wasn’t long before Italy’s reigning leaders had no choice but to cede power to the fascists. On Oct. 31, 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini prime minister. At 39, he was the youngest person ever to hold the office, and he now had a wider audience for his speeches, policies, and worldview than ever before.
Public DomainMussolini marches with Blackshirts in 1922.
Throughout the 1920s, Mussolini remade Italy in his image. And by the mid-1930s, he had begun asserting his power beyond Italy’s borders. In 1935, his forces invaded Ethiopia and, after a brief war ending with Italy’s victory, declared the country an Italian colony.
Some historians go as far as claiming that this marked the start of World War II. However, when the conflict officially began in September 1939, Mussolini took his place on the world stage like never before.
How World War II Led To Benito Mussolini’s Death
Five years after the Ethiopian invasion, Benito Mussolini watched from the sidelines as Adolf Hitler invaded France. In his own mind, Il Duce felt it should be Italy fighting the French. Undoubtedly, however, the German military was bigger and better equipped with more effective leaders. Thus, Mussolini could only watch, align himself with Hitler fully, and declare war against Germany’s enemies.
Now, Mussolini was in deep. He was at war against the rest of the world — with only Germany to back him up.
The dictator was also beginning to realize that Italy’s armed forces were woefully behind those of his enemies. Mussolini needed more than just fiery speeches and violent rhetoric — he needed a strong military to back up his dictatorship.
Public DomainAdolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Munich, Germany, circa June 1940.
Italy soon used its might to invade Greece, but the campaign was unsuccessful and unpopular at home. There, people were still out of work and starving, and they were feeling rebellious. Without Hitler’s military intervention, a coup surely would have toppled Mussolini in 1941.
Facing pressure on the home front, Benito Mussolini was removed from office by the king and the Grand Council in July 1943. The Allies had re-taken northern Africa from Axis forces, and they had also invaded Sicily. Il Duce’s days were numbered.
Forces loyal to the Italian king arrested Mussolini and imprisoned him. The opposition then kept Mussolini locked away in a remote hotel in the mountains of Abruzzo. However, in September, Nazi forces carried out a risky rescue mission and flew Il Duce to Poland to confer with Hitler.
Public DomainAfter “Il Duce” was removed as prime minister, Hitler installed him as the head of the Nazi puppet government in northern Italy.
The Führer convinced Mussolini to set up a fascist state in northern Italy, the Italian Social Republic. That way, Mussolini could hold power while Hitler maintained an ally.
Il Duce returned to Italy triumphantly and continued to suppress his opposition. Members of the Fascist Party tortured anyone with alternate views, deported people with non-Italian names, and maintained an iron grip in the north. German troops worked alongside the Blackshirts to maintain order.
This reign of terror came to a head on August 10, 1944. Fascists rounded up 15 suspected anti-fascist partisans, or people loyal to the new Italy, in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. With German SS soldiers looking on, Mussolini’s men opened fire and killed them. From that moment onward, partisans called this place the “Square of the 15 Martyrs.”
The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock PhotoThe corpses of the 15 anti-fascist martyrs in Piazzale Loreto on August 10, 1944.
Eight months later, the people of Milan would get their revenge on Mussolini in an act that was equally as savage.
Inside The Grisly Death Of Benito Mussolini
By the spring of 1945, the war in Europe was coming to an end, and Italy was broken. The south was in ruins as Allied troops advanced. The country was battered, and it was, many thought, all Il Duce’s fault.
However, arresting Mussolini was no longer a viable course of action. Even though Hitler was surrounded by Allied troops in Berlin, Italy didn’t want to take any more chances with its own destiny.
On April 25, 1945, Benito Mussolini agreed to meet with anti-fascist partisans at the palace of Cardinal Alfredo Schuster in Milan. It was here that he learned Germany had begun negotiations for Mussolini’s surrender, which sent him into a fearful rage.
Public DomainThe farmhouse in northern Italy where Benito Mussolini was held the night before he was executed.
The 61-year-old dictator took his mistress, 33-year-old Clara Petacci, and fled north, where the pair joined a German convoy headed to the Swiss border. At least this way, Mussolini believed, he could live out his days in exile.
He was wrong. Il Duce tried to wear a Nazi helmet and coat as a disguise in the convoy, but he was instantly recognized when the vehicles were stopped by partisans near the Lake Como town of Dongo on April 27. His bald head, strong jaw, and piercing brown eyes gave him away. Mussolini had plastered his face all over propaganda nationwide for more than two decades — and now it had come back to haunt him.
Fearing another rescue attempt by the Nazis, partisans whisked Mussolini and Petacci away to a remote farmhouse. The next morning, the partisans ordered the pair to stand against a stone wall near the entrance of Villa Belmonte in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra, and a firing squad shot the couple down in a barrage of gunfire. According to a May 1945 report in TIME, Il Duce’s final words were, “No! No!” Other witness accounts claim Mussolini told his executioners, “Aim at my heart.”
Keystone/Getty ImagesBenito Mussolini lies dead in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto with his mistress, Clara Petacci.
Just like that, Mussolini’s violent life had come to a violent end. However, Benito Mussolini’s death wasn’t the end of the dictator’s story. Still not satisfied, partisans hauled the corpses of Il Duce, Petacci, and more than a dozen other executed fascists to Milan — where they faced the wrath of angry mobs.
The Gruesome Aftermath Of Benito Mussolini’s Execution
The night after Benito Mussolini’s death, a cargo truck roared into Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, the Square of the 15 Martyrs. Around 3 a.m., the bodies of Il Duce, Petacci, and the other fascists were dumped in the square unceremoniously. By dawn, residents of Milan had converged on the scene to take out 20 years of frustration and fury on the corpses.
People began hurling rotten vegetables at the dictator’s body. Then, they took to beating and kicking it. One woman felt Il Duce wasn’t dead enough. She fired five shots into his corpse at close range — one bullet for each son she’d lost in Mussolini’s failed war.
Public DomainBenito Mussolini, second from the left, hangs upside down from the girders of a gas station in Milan.
This invigorated the crowd even more. One man grabbed Mussolini’s body by the armpits so the crowd could see it. That still wasn’t enough. People grabbed ropes, tied them to the feet of the corpses, and strung them upside down from the iron girders of a gas station that was under construction nearby.
According to Ray Moseley’s Mussolini: The Last 600 Days of Il Duce, the crowd shouted, “Higher! Higher! We can’t see! String them up! To the hooks, to the hooks, like pigs!”
Indeed, the human corpses now looked like meat hanging in a slaughterhouse. Mussolini’s mouth was agape. Clara Petacci’s eyes stared blankly into the distance.
Word of Benito Mussolini’s death spread quickly. Adolf Hitler heard the news on the radio and purportedly vowed not to have his corpse desecrated in the same fashion. He died by suicide just two days after Mussolini was executed. In his final will, scrawled on a piece of paper, Hitler wrote, “I do not wish to fall into the hands of an enemy who requires a new spectacle organized by the Jews for the amusement of their hysterical masses.” The Führer’s inner circle burned his corpse as Soviet forces closed in.
What Happened To Il Duce’s Body?
Even after Il Duce’s corpse was mutilated in Milan, the story of Benito Mussolini’s death wasn’t over yet. After his body was lowered from the girders and taken to a local morgue, a photographer captured the unrecognizable remains of the dictator and his mistress.
Public DomainA macabre autopsy photo of Benito Mussolini and his mistress in a Milan morgue. This was taken after an angry mob desecrated their bodies.
Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave in a Milan cemetery, but the location wasn’t kept secret for long. On Easter Sunday of 1946, a young fascist dug up Il Duce’s remains. A note left behind said the Fascist Party would no longer tolerate “the cannibal slurs made by human dregs organized in the Communist Party.”
The corpse turned up four months later in a monastery near Milan. It was moved to a Capuchin monastery 30 miles away, where it was hidden for 11 years. Then, in 1957, Italian Prime Minister Adone Zoli turned Mussolini’s bones over to his widow. She buried her husband properly at his family crypt in Dovia di Predappio.
However, that still isn’t the end of the story of Benito Mussolini’s death. In 1966, the U.S. military returned a slice of Mussolini’s brain to his family. Officials had cut out a portion of his brain to test for syphilis. The results were inconclusive.
After this look at Benito Mussolini’s death, read about Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian writer who inspired Mussolini’s rise to fascism. Then, take a look at photos from fascist Italy that provide a chilling look at life during Mussolini’s reign.
