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Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, was shot dead on the 28th of April 1945, in the final days of World War II, near Lake Como in Italy.
The official version of events claims that he was assassinated by a small group of Italian partisans as he attempted to flee to safety in Switzerland and then hung up on scaffolding in a square in Milan. But some claim this wasn't the whole story. So what really happened? And who was behind the assassination of one of the most powerful men in Europe?
Mussolini was extremely powerful. He was known as the leader, but he should have been known as the dictator. It was his way or the highway. No one's really certain to this day who killed Mussolini. It may have been, you know, the Italians, very likely. It could have been on the orders of the Germans. It could have even been on the orders
of Churchill. Churchill wanted him dead because he had written to him frequently before the war, and it's believed that those letters were actually still preserved in a briefcase in Mussolini's villa. There is no greater story than the death of Mussolini for attracting conspiracy theories.
Great dictators who have ruled with fear, with torture, with murder, very often come to an incredibly brutal end. He was one of the most famous leaders of World War II, a headstrong fascist who ruled Italy with an iron fist. But why did he slowly lose the support of his people and his closest lieutenants? Who killed him in the end? And how did his body and that of his mistress
come to be hung up in a square in Milan. At first, Mussolini was somewhat of a Renaissance figure. He was the editor of a magazine that spoke on behalf of the proletariat. He became a young prime minister, very striking looking, created a wonderful architectural movement. He was passionate about architecture.
But things quickly went bad for him. Power corrupted. He created the fascist party. He put himself above Parliament, answerable only to the king. He was the youngest Italian prime minister. He was very popular because he seemed very powerful and that he was going to turn Italy's fortunes around. They were very optimistic when he came to power. That changed.
He was from a kind of lower middle class family. He was a particularly violent youth who was always getting into trouble for stabbing his classmates. This is the kind of chap we're talking about. He was quite short. He looked like a pugilist. He had a very sort of thrust out jaw, very piercing eyes. He was built like a bulldog. He was a very powerful physical presence who turned into one of the most powerful political presences, you know, there's ever been on the world stage.
He wasn't there to make his country a better place, a safer place, a more affluent, happy place. He was there for his own advancement and every decision he made was about his own advancement and people saw this. People knew that that was the case.
But because he ruled with such an iron fist, because he ruled with fear, he made people fearful of what might happen to them if they didn't agree with him. He ensured that there was constantly a state of disharmony in the country, so he went from war after war after war, exhausting people, depleting resources. So in a way, he knew that if he kept the situation like this, then he was able to advance whatever his own agenda personally and professionally was.
In 1940, Mussolini took his country into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany, but soon met with military failure. By the autumn of 1943, he was reduced to being the leader of a German puppet state in northern Italy and was faced with the Allied advance from the south and an increasingly violent internal conflict with the partisans.
In April 1945, with the Allies breaking through the last German defenses in northern Italy and a general uprising of the partisans taking hold in the cities, Mussolini's situation became untenable. The biggest challenge for Mussolini was the fact that he was militarily incompetent.
I think the real problem was that he suddenly looked at Hitler in 1940 and saw these astonishing, you know, conquests. You know, France, Poland, annexed Czechoslovakia the year before in '38. All the low countries
So he had looked at these amazing successes and thought, well, I need to do the same thing. And so in order to kind of prove himself to Hitler, Mussolini embarked on this very ill-fated conquest or attempted conquest of the Balkans of Albania and Greece. Now, these, as we know, are very mountainous regions. They're very difficult to invade and to seize and to actually hold.
And the Italian army really wasn't up to the job. And so as that invasion falters, Mussolini has to turn to Hitler to get the German army and air force to come in and finish off the job that Mussolini has botched. Now, of course, this does not play out well on the domestic front at all. And so I think the Italians look at this leader and they realize, hang on a minute, he really doesn't have what it takes.
At first, Hitler really admired Mussolini. He liked his bravado, his ego, what he had accomplished. But Mussolini made one strategic blunder after another, going into wars he had no business going into. And this really depleted his resources, depleted his funds. And after a while, he really had nothing left to offer Hitler. So Hitler drops Mussolini like motel matches.
went off Mussolini purely and simply because he was a very useless military leader. His armies were not what the Germans were. And to be honest with you, Mussolini and the Italians let down the Germans. And to Hitler, that was it. The kiss of death.
In the last few months of Mussolini's life, he's in a little village outside of Lake Como. But he's been completely marginalized. The man once ruled supremely, and now he's got a little tiny fiefdom in the north of Italy. Gone are all the bodyguards, just a few loyalists there to kind of support him. But he has no power. He can't call on anyone. He can't influence anything. He is truly a sitting duck.
He knows that the war has gone badly, for him to put it mildly. A man who was number two in the world's most powerful alliance suddenly is now just this very frightened, shrivelled figure, almost literally hiding in Milan, hiding in a village outside Milan. He's terrified. He knows that his card is marked and he knows there's very little he can do.
He attempts to disguise himself as a kind of drunken German soldier and tries to escape into Austria. But, you know, he's far too recognizable a figure. I mean, he's such a distinctive figure with his sort of, you know, bulldog-like head with his jaw stuck out. You know, there's still, you know, part of him that you're not going to mistake Mussolini no matter what clothes he's wearing. The official story is that in the final days of World War II in Europe on April 25th, 1945,
Mussolini and his lover Claretta, or Clara Patacci as she was known, fled Milan hoping to reach Switzerland. They were intercepted near the border, around Lake Como, where they were both said to have been shot by Walter Aldizio, a communist partisan. However, since the end of the war, the circumstances of Mussolini's death and the identity of his killer have been subjects of continuing confusion
dispute, and controversy. Massimo Polidoro is an Italian investigative journalist who has spent over a decade looking into the records and files. He believes that the truth hasn't yet been told about what really happened and why. He agreed to meet British investigative journalist Jamie Theakston at a hotel in Milan.
There is still confusion, isn't there, around how Mussolini was actually killed? Yes, there is confusion because there is not an actual record of what really happened and took place. One of the theories revolves around Hitler's role. Because in the beginning there were quite...
There was animosity between Hitler and Mussolini because Hitler wanted to invade a part of Italy, but then he didn't. And when he invaded Austria, Mussolini didn't say anything.
was important to Hitler, so they became friends and allies. And actually, in the beginning, Mussolini was a role model for Hitler because he had already been a dictator in Italy for 10 years when he raised power. So when he tried his so-called beer-hole push in order to get power, and he was arrested and failed, he actually had in mind Mussolini's march on Rome that gave him power.
So there was this master-apprentice situation at the beginning where Mussolini was the master. But then, of course, it reversed as time progressed and at the end of the war Mussolini was just a puppet in Hitler's hands and was nothing like he was before. He lost all kind of power on Italian. He has no popularity. So it was a way to be lifted.
So there is this hypothesis that maybe you just kill him and all the information that he may have, compromising or not or whatever, my situation could disappear. So Massimo, what is the accepted history on the death of Mussolini? He was trying to escape to Switzerland and he stumbled upon a group of partisans. They were controlling all streets.
You know, it was the end of the war and they were trying to get him. He was trying to escape to Switzerland. He was found, recognized, and the following day he was shot. And this is the story that is considered to be more likely. It's generally accepted that Mussolini and his mistress were shot by local partisans who basically cornered him like a rat.
because by then Italians had suffered so much at his hands and the war had come to their door and just torn them apart. And here he was, lording it over them, and they shot him. And that is the standard story. Benito Mussolini was executed with his partner by an Italian partisan called Walter Odasio.
The reason he was killed, the war wasn't over and they were rather worried that after he'd been captured, the Germans who were still around, of course, around Milan at the time, could try and rescue him and still continue to use him as a puppet dictator to help the war effort. And so he had to go, he had to die, and he was shot. The details are a little bit unclear, but we can be sure pretty much of the basic skeleton.
Basically, he's been abducted by the partisans and he's been driven along and he's then told to get out the car. The couple are told to get out the car by the gates of this villa. And it's there that they are machine-gunned to death. At least four to seven bullet holes are found in Mussolini's body. Their dead bodies are then put in the car and driven off. It's a pretty ignominious, nasty death. But of course, because it's done in secret, because
you know the people doing it the identities of those who doing it is very very opaque it's not clear as a result conspiracy theory starts to form the bodies of mussolini petacci and 16 other fascists were taken to milan and left in a suburban square the piazza le loretto for a large angry crowd to insult and physically abuse
They were then unceremoniously hung upside down from a metal girder outside a service station in the middle of the square. Like a sort of awful act of savagery, you know, everyone wants to have a piece of Mussolini, literally, they want to beat him and they want to smash up his corpse. And his face, when you see images, it's sort of smeared almost into this sort of grotesque
It's like it's melted. Mussolini's famous jaw has just become this sort of amorphous blob. Never is there a more striking photographic image of the end of Mussolini than that picture. It was a disgusting spectacle. It didn't do humanity any good whatsoever. It was grotesque.
what happened to those bodies, as indeed it would have been to what would have happened to the living people. Emotions were running high, the mob was ruling, and anything could have happened, but for their sakes, mercifully, they were at least dead when it did happen.
You're not talking about very long ago. And certainly what you saw was sort of, I guess, the same jubilation that you saw when Saddam Hussein was killed. The people finally felt that someone had brought their country down into disrepute, that had dragged them into wars they had no reason being in, was gone. And those pictures are haunting. It must have been quite a sight.
Thousands of angry people shouting and braying at their dictator's dead body hung up from a makeshift scaffold as people hurled insults at them before their bloated, beaten, and bloody corpses were left to fall on the ground. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Halloween is the spookiest time of year. A time where we get to have fun with what scares us.
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Visit BetterHelp.com/ForbiddenUS today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp.com/ForbiddenUS. Alice Salvagin is a guide in Milan who often brings curious tourists to the site of Mussolini's gruesome hanging in Piazzale Loreto. This happened at the end of April 1945.
His body and other 18 people were here hanging upside down for three days. And they were damaged, they were spat, they were kicked. It was really brutal, day and night. And just describe to me the scene. So there was Mussolini himself, hanged upside down. Exactly, with his lover and other 16 people.
There's something in psychology called the just world hypothesis that we kind of want to believe that the world is a fair place and sometimes that means enacting punishments that we see as suitable. So all of the things that we're socialized into about being civilized and compassionate and having a judicial system, I think a lot of that goes out the window when there's that level of kind of pain and anger and hatred which no doubt would have been there for Mussolini.
The mob certainly took their revenge for the horrors of the war out on the bodies, spitting at them, basically tearing bits off them. I mean, they were so battered. And I mean, there are photos of them having been knocked down and lying on the ground, and they don't look particularly human.
So the public actually were, I guess, defiling the bodies whilst they were hanging up? They ruined his body on purpose to be cruel.
So this was the Italian public getting an opportunity to express their anger, I guess. Exactly, and to express all their anger and that was a reaction of all the happenings of the last few months and years. So it was like the end and they want to declare with all their hate to the body of the last fascist remained.
You've got, you know, Patachi and Mussolini, you know, by supposedly civilised European people literally sort of abusing a corpse. It is so raw, so brutal, so chaotic, so savage. And yet it's there, you know, in modern times. And it's still with us. As long as you're on the right side of a dictatorship, you're all right.
and so is the dictator. But once things turn against you, it can be very brutal and very bloody. In the case of Gaddafi, in the case of Saddam Hussein, once the people have turned against you because you've held them with such an iron fist, that they are very brutal with you. And they were very brutal with Mussolini. And I think he deserved it. Mussolini was eventually buried in an unmarked grave
But in 1946, his body was dug up and stolen by fascist supporters. Four months later, it was recovered by the authorities, who then kept it hidden for the next 11 years. Eventually, in 1957, his remains were allowed to be interred in the Mussolini family crypt in his hometown of Pradapio.
His tomb has become something of a place of pilgrimage, and the anniversary of his death is often marked by neo-fascist rallies. Every year on the anniversary of his death, fascists and others hold ceremonies and services outside the gates of the villa where he was shot and executed.
Probably a much revered man to this day. And of course the big one is, yes he was a fascist, but he wasn't a Hitler, he wasn't a mass exterminator. And there are still a lot of people in Italy that would like to see him back. In the post-war years, the official version of Mussolini's death has been questioned in Italy in a way that has drawn comparison with the JFK assassination conspiracy theories.
Journalists, politicians and historians have put forward a wide variety of theories and speculation as to how Mussolini died and who was responsible. At least 12 different individuals have at various times claimed to have been the killer. Were there eyewitnesses and testimonies on that morning when he was killed by people who were there?
You know, the name of the person who killed him is not known. It's supposedly a partisan named Walter Audizio. That was his claim, that what he said was all over his life. But another partisan said instead that it was a person named Luigi Longo, which became a very important politician in the Communist Party after the war.
So there's still debate about the identity. So this group of partisans who were supposed to have killed him can't even agree amongst themselves who it was who actually pulled the trigger? You know, it could be that one wanted to get the credit and the others wanted as well. It's even hard to know exactly what happened. Maybe more than one person shot. Today,
There's nothing to examine. There are no forensics to be done. So you're left with questions.
One important thing you have to understand about Italy, even today, the Italians love conspiracy theory. It is the home of conspiracy Italy. Their distrust for politicians is so great. And so anything they're told, they instantly assume to be a complete lie. And there is no greater story than the death of Mussolini for attracting conspiracy theories. And even today, you know, the death at the hands of the partisans
which we know to be pretty reliable, is still called the official version of Mussolini's death. You know, the word "official" is very much put into inverted commas. The Italians don't want to believe that it's simply a case of communist partisans bumping off a man they detest. Why, to this day, are we still not sure who it was who killed Mussolini?
Though it's never been proved,
Several historians and writers believe that Mussolini's death was actually part of a British Special Forces operation. Their plan was supposedly to retrieve compromising secret agreements and correspondence between Winston Churchill and Mussolini and to kill the dictator himself.
Churchill was a great admirer of Mussolini as far back as the 1920s, when in fact it was quite the thing for educated British and Americans to admire the rise of the strong man in Europe. Hitler was greatly admired, but Mussolini perhaps more so. Before the start of the war, Churchill asked Benito Mussolini to avoid getting into an alliance with Hitler.
and wrote letters to him. Supposedly, he even expressed some kind of admiration for him. And this letter became quite embarrassing afterwards. And so, in order to recover them, they had to kill Mussolini. So this is another possible theory.
There are suggestions that overseeing this, or funding it, or helping them in some way, were some British secret service agents, possibly a branch of Churchill's own Special Operation Executive, because they wanted to make away with some documents that would have incriminated Churchill that Mussolini was carrying. Churchill had written to him frequently before the war
If these documents had been publicised, it would not have looked good for Churchill. And I think he needed Mussolini gone and I think he needed all of the documents destroyed. When you look at the address of these letters, Chartwell, Churchill's private home in Kent, you realise that these are amateur forgeries. Things are spelt wrong, the address is not the correct format for a British address.
the signature's all wrong, the typing, things are misspelt. They're clearly written by someone who doesn't even speak English as a first language, yet these are purporting to come from Churchill, you know, during the war, just before the war, to make it look as though Churchill was trying to form an alliance with Mussolini. And of course,
People want to believe these stories because they think they know what the true story is behind world events. No, there is no Mussolini murder by the British. It's utter nonsense. Clive Irving is a former investigative journalist from the Sunday Times who, back in the 1960s, found himself caught up in a bizarre and now infamous scandal. He was shown documents by a man called Charles Keane.
who claim that they were the authentic war diaries of Benito Mussolini. But what secrets did they reveal? And what light did they shed, if any, on Churchill's dealing with the Italian dictator? He meets with British investigative journalist Jamie Thexton to discuss these alleged diaries. How were you contacted by Charles Keane? This guy in the city of London called me and said there was a man who was a friend of his, described as a businessman, with no more precision than that,
and that Charles Keane in turn had been contacted by some Italian friends who said that they had found the long-lost diaries of Mussolini. Was I interested? Obviously, I was very interested.
And tell me a little bit more about that first meeting. What did he show you? He showed me some photo sets of pages which he claimed were from Mussolini's diaries. And I asked if I could keep them for 24 hours so I could have them checked out. He was very resistant to that, but in the end he agreed and I took them to the Foreign Office and the Foreign Office librarian pulled out files where there were many examples of Mussolini's own handwriting, very florid.
handwriting, so it was unmistakably a close match. But of course, that wasn't any kind of proof. It was just that they weren't off. They were close enough to be taken seriously. And you, at that stage, were pretty comfortable that they were the real deal? Before it ever got to the point of a serious negotiation,
We insisted on certain things being done. We insisted on checking the paper to see its age, and in fact it turned out to be what they said was a special kind of paper that was produced only for Mussolini by some printing plant in Rome made specially for him that he used frequently.
We checked out the ink, the age of the ink, and we did everything that a good forensic investigation should do. So on all the technical grounds, where the thing might have fallen down, where it might have been exposed early, it passed. Having what he thought could be real pages from Mussolini's war diaries, Clive still needed to get conclusive proof that they were in fact authentic documents.
and managed to arrange a meeting with Mussolini's son, Vittorio, who had seen the diary that was being held in Italy first-hand. It was pretty clear to me that Vittorio did not want to endorse them. He didn't feel confident that he could say they were his father's diaries. And one of the interesting reasons for that was, I think, when we discussed this, was that his father was sexually rapacious, and this is well documented.
And there was no hint of that in any of the texts of the diaries that we saw. There was no libido present in any of the texts. It was very dry stuff. And I thought that the combination of that together with Vittorio's doubts was a little bit worrying. With the realization that the diaries were in fact fake, Clive could do nothing else but drop the story. But he still believes Mussolini's true diaries do exist.
If indeed you think that Mussolini did keep a diary, what do you think happened to it? Well, there were some people who thought that what we decided in the end were forged diaries were actually authentic, because fascinating enough, several years after this was all over,
Two guys from Interpol, one of them was a British detective and one of them was an Italian detective, came to interview one of the reporters that I'd sent to Italy on the stories. By this time, this reporter, Jeremy Wallington, was a senior TV executive, and he felt that the Interpol guys had not made up their minds at all that they were fakes. In fact, that there was a possibility
There's not much of Mussolini's life left to see or visit today, but his house in Rome, Villa Torlonia, is still standing, in which he used to entertain on a grand scale.
It's also home to an underground bunker that he had built in 1942, after the Allies bombed Milan and Turin, fearing Rome would be next.
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Mussolini often said that he would face any enemy wartime bombers head-on, standing on the balcony of his house. So exactly why he needed a bunker wasn't clear. But could it be because he was aware of plots against his life? The bunker used to be his wine cellar,
But when war came, he had it fitted out as a private air raid shelter and command post that could be used by himself, his wife, and his five children. Local guide and historian, Annalisa Aljizi, agreed to meet British investigative reporter Jamie Theakston and show him around.
It started in 1942, November 1942. By the time he was deposed and arrested, this was not finished yet. This is going six and a half meters underneath the ground level. So the bunker could host up to 30 people, Mussolini, the family and the guards.
So like a big reinforced vault door.
And this structure would have been able to withstand a bombing attack from the Allies? Yes, it's completely safe, very modern. It's all made with reinforced concrete, so absolutely no problem in case of a bomb attack.
Mussolini had bunkers built to protect him, of course, against Allied bombers. The first one was actually created in the wine cellar, but he actually had to go out of doors to get into it, and that wasn't a good idea. And so he had a very, very large, extensive one underneath the kitchen.
The irony of the whole thing is that he, as far as we know, didn't use the main bunkers at all. He used the one under the kitchen a bit, but I think the fascinating thing is that why he needed air raid shelters, no one knows, because he actually stated to his people that when the Allied bombers come, I will be standing on my balcony.
Wow, so there's more tunnels down here. OK, but this wouldn't have been part of the bunker, no? Right.
As the war progressed, the Allies were increasingly keen to kill Mussolini and came up with a top secret plan called Operation Ducks, which planned to bomb Villa Torlonia on the 13th of July, 1943. The plan was to send some bombers over to Italy to bomb Mussolini's house, Villa Torlonia, with a plan, of course, to kill him. Now, it was all over.
for Mussolini. It was all over for the Italians by then anyway. Why they would have bothered to do it, I don't know. They actually called it off. They realised, I think, the futility of the whole thing. But it makes you wonder why they wanted to do it. And I genuinely wonder if it is because there were some letters, secret documents from Churchill. I think Churchill wanted him dead.
So how was Benito Mussolini killed? There are two main credible theories. The first one is that he was shot by communist partisans as he tried to flee to the Swiss border. The second is that a top-secret British special forces unit was sent to Italy to assassinate him. So what's the truth? Accepted history hands it to the partisans, but doubts still linger.
It's very interesting that great dictators who have ruled with fear, with torture, with disappearing people, with murder, they very often come to an incredibly brutal end. Looking at Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and, of course, Mussolini. Because the people had had enough. And if you keep people down through fear,
so intensely, it's going to come back at you equally intensely. Is Mussolini as much of an embarrassment to Italians today as Hitler is to Germans today? Well, probably not as much because Hitler was behind the Holocaust. But the fact is that Mussolini went along when Hitler asked him to pass the laws against the Jews.
So he's responsible certainly for that. It's a mixed bag how Mussolini has been remembered. His architecture lives on. Stunning. There are certain loyalists who visit where he was shot and where he's interred in the family tomb, and they do that as a pilgrimage every year. But overwhelmingly, he's remembered as a tyrant.
The murder of Mussolini is, I'm afraid, not a conspiracy. It is simply a death, a murder, by the gates of a villa at the hands of some communist partisans. That's what happened. There's always this need to have more complexity. There's always this need to have some sort of conspiracy amongst certain quarters. The evidence is simply not there.
Like Hitler's demise, just who killed Mussolini and his mistress in the dying days of World War II has just enough mystery and ambiguity surrounding it to keep the conspiracy theorists happy. It appears that both Churchill and Hitler had reason to want him to die, as did the Italian partisans. But one thing is not in doubt: that their bodies were gruesomely hung up on a scaffold in a square in the center of Milan,
and then violently abused by a braying mob of Italians. Many people in Italy feel it was a fitting end for a brutal dictator. And there's a famous saying in Italy: "Who kills by the sword will perish by the sword."
