Benito Mussolini Part 7: Break for the Border…
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It's January the 11th, 1944. Just before 9am. We're in Verona, in the grounds of Fort San Procolo. Across the lawn through the snow, five men are let out. They're dressed in crumpled suits and overcoats. The clothes they were arrested in. The air is cold, bone-chilling. Breath billows in the air. Before the high grass verge of the fort's shooting range, five wooden school chairs have been spaced a few feet apart.

Opposite is a platoon of black shirt militiamen, each with a rifle at the ready. There's also an SS cameraman on hand, there to record things for posterity. There is one final indignity. The prisoners are made to sit with their chests against the backrest, facing away from the firing squad. It's the death designated for a traitor, to be shot in the back. Last cigarettes are lit. A priest moves along the line.

Some with hands bound past final letters. It's hard to know whether the shivering is fear or just the cold. Since their show trial concluded yesterday, most have accepted their fate. The one has held out hope, praying that family ties will spare him the bullet. He is Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Duce's own son-in-law, someone till recently regarded as his heir apparent. Despite the pleas of his wife, Eda, Mussolini's daughter,

The pardon never comes. Mussolini has a greater loyalty. He's doing this for his friend Adolf Hitler. Tied to the chair, Ciano refuses a blindfold. As the riflemen draw their bolts, he performs one last defiant act. Spinning around, looking his executioners in the eye, he issues a cry: "Viva l'Italia!" From the Noiser Network, this is the final part of the Mussolini story. And this is Real Dictators.

Wind back to July 1943 and it's hard to keep pace with events in Italy. Allied troops have landed in Sicily. A mid-aerial bombing and a fast surrendering army. The country is in turmoil. Mussolini's attempt to reassert his authority has backfired spectacularly. The fascist Grand Council he convenes ends up voting him out of office. That same day, July 25th, a shell-shocked Duce visits the King to tender his resignation, only to be arrested.

bundled away in an ambulance. On the streets of Italy, rumors spread. Then, at 10:45 p.m., comes the radio announcement: "His Majesty the King Emperor has accepted the resignation from the office of Head of the Government, His Excellency Cavalieri Benito Mussolini, and nominated as Head of the Government and Cavalieri, Marshal of Italy, Pietro Badoglio." Confirmation of Mussolini's fall turns to open celebration across the land.

Professor John Foote. All over Italy, when the news breaks, smashing out fascist symbols, it's a kind of overturning moment of liberation. Fascists are not seen on the streets. It's an incredible moment. Of course, it's a bit premature because the war will go on for another two years. On the streets, a chant goes up. Benito e finito. As Mussolini is being driven away, he's oblivious to the opening move of Badoglio's new government.

It is formally abolishing the Italian fascist party. Within 48 hours of Mussolini's arrest, the movement he founded is no more. Professor Helen Roche.

Suddenly, as soon as people think that he's gone for good, they're tearing down Faski's emblems. They're ripping off their PNF badges and stamping them underfoot. They're threatening people who are still wearing the party badge that they'll stuff it down their throat. It's amazing how within such a short space of time, you can go from this absolute worship thing

to just throwing him under the bus. Aged 71, Badoglio seems a reasonable pick as the new leader, a career soldier, an esteemed general loyal to the crown, a man who fell out with Mussolini over the disastrous invasion of Greece. But his CV comes with ugly stains. Professor Nicholas of Shaughnessy.

Well, I think that we should give him his full title, the Duke of Addis Ababa, which is what he got for conquering Ethiopia.

He was, along with Graziani, the biggest of the butchers. They used terror concentration camps, genocide gassings. Pretty truly amazing, actually. But Doglio is never tried as a war criminal for his crimes in either Libya or Ethiopia. Because, you know, he's suddenly one of our boys. And so spends the rest of his life in contented retreat. Away in Germany, news of Mussolini's overthrow rocks Hitler.

He also wonders what might happen if the German people, or the generals, turn against him. Eight German divisions are already in Italy under Field Marshal Kesselring. He will accelerate the flood of troops. As Hitler grapples with the collapse of the Russian front, Italy will become an unwelcome drain on resources. So where the hell is Mussolini? For the moment, no one knows. There is good reason for the secrecy. Il Duce is now a valuable bargaining chip.

To the Allies, he can be leveraged. Proof that Italy has turned a new leaf. Though we are far from that scenario yet. Sowing further confusion, Badoglio addresses the nation. The war goes on, and Italy remains faithful to its word. He pledges, for the moment, to keep fighting alongside Germany. Whatever the outcome, Mussolini has a big prize. There are plenty of angry Italians, too, who'd like to get their hands on him.

And it's anyone's guess what the Germans might be plotting. Dr. Lisa Pine. Hitler said Mussolini, my friend and our loyal comrade in arms, was betrayed yesterday by his king and arrested by his own countrymen. I cannot and will not leave Italy's greatest son in the lurch.

He went on to say that Italy under a new government would desert Germany and he would keep faith with his old ally and his dear friend and that he didn't want him to be handed over to the Allies. Straight from his arrest, Mussolini is taken to a Carabinieri barracks. The next day he's put in a car with blacked out windows and driven down the coast to Gaeta. There he's put aboard a naval corvette and taken out to sea. Plans change by the minute.

The prison island of Ventotene has approached, then bypassed. They head instead for Ponsa, 70 miles off Naples. Mussolini puts ashore on July 29th, his 60th birthday. But the downside of having developed a cult of personality is that everyone knows who you are. Word is already out. After a week, Mussolini is relocated. It's a perilous passage across the Tyrrhenian Sea. The Allied navies are out in force.

But the ship docks at another island, La Maddalena, off the coast of Sardinia. In this rocky outpost, Mussolini fancies himself a Napoleon. First an Elba, now a St. Helena. He's put up in a comfortable villa overlooking the sea. There he has wild nightmares, and they concern a giant ape. Before the war, Mussolini had been captivated by the film King Kong.

He has visions now of being captured by the Americans and exhibited in a cage at Madison Square Garden. As ever, nothing in Italy stays secret for very long. His cover is blown again. Three weeks later, he's put aboard a Red Cross seaplane. The order has come to stash Mussolini somewhere completely inaccessible, the top of a mountain. Clorox Antiva smells like grapefruit, cleans like Clorox, and feels like...

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They land on September the 3rd. The fighting becomes more and more intense. The Germans are waiting for them during the coastal assault on Salerno. But three weeks later, the Allies take Naples. On September the 8th, 1943, at the Palazzo Venezia, Badoglio calls a cabinet meeting. He announces what has been expected for six weeks: a decision delayed due to the foot-dragging of the king. He has sought an armistice. Italy is out of the war.

It's an amazing moment, and it's very important for the Second World War, because one of the key allies of Germany leaves. I mean, overnight, kind of exits, and it changes the whole balance of world history. Italy has not yet determined its path. This is the home of Machiavelli, after all. They've long survived by playing the great powers off against each other. Unfortunately, the result is chaos. Professor Joshua Arthurs...

With the Grand Council of Fascism, this is really a vote of the higher-ups to save their own skins, to try to maneuver out of the war in such a way that they can maintain their own position by jettisoning him. And then the king makes much the same calculus, that Italy can be steered out of the war,

Without having to capitulate to the Allies, they seem to think that the Germans will just go home. And all of this proves disastrously wrong. In his bunker in East Prussia, Hitler summons his commanders. Two military missions are set in motion. The first, Operation Axis, initiates the full German military occupation of Italy. And the second, Operation Oak, well, it's all cloak and dagger.

It's September the 12th, 1943. Just after 2pm. We're high in the Apennines, the range of mountains that runs down the spine of Italy. The Gran Sasso, literally Great Rock, is a huge, jagged hump rising to 10,000 feet. Two hours north of Rome, it's close enough for the Capitals well-heeled to enjoy little skiing. At least, they did so before the war.

Atop the Gran Sasso sits a resort hotel, now empty, the Campo Imperatore. The construction of the complex is incomplete. The architect designed a trio of buildings in the shape of three letters, D-V-X, Latin for Duce, a name to be visible from the heavens. But only the D was finished, and in it, today, sits Benito Mussolini, Duce in the D of ducks.

The hotel seems the perfect place to keep him now. Remote, accessible only by a funicular railway, protected by armed guards. As the hotel's only guest, Mussolini is given the best suite in the house, waited on as if he'd never been overthrown. From his armchair he looks out, contemplating the spectacular view, when suddenly, out of nowhere, an aircraft sweeps down.

Its wingtip skimming mere feet from the glass. It's silent. A glider. It skids across the grassy slope. Coming to an abrupt stop. On its wings, a black cross is. On its tail, a swastika. And out of its hold, poor German paratroopers. They clamber up the scree, machine guns at the ready. They've even brought a film crew with them. Their lead man waves at Mussolini, telling him to get back. With the defending Carabinieri putting their hands up,

The paratroopers burst into the hotel. A minute later, standing before Mussolini is an officer, six feet four, square-jawed, and with a dueling scar running down his cheek. He introduces himself as Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skruzeny, and he has come, he says, on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler. He is here to set Il Duce free.

"Duce, the Fuhrer has sent me as a token of his loyal friendship." To which Mussolini replied, "I knew that my friend Adolf Hitler would not have abandoned me." Outside, a small single-engined aircraft bumps along to land near the glider. It keeps its engine running as it turns back into the wind. The hotel staff line up to bid Mussolini farewell. His guards even pose for photos with their attackers.

In Germany, the Grand Sasso raid will be presented in newsreels as a daring commando operation. A high-octane action thriller. It is, in fact, entirely stage-managed.

It's one of the great set pieces of dramaturgy in World War II. It's not actually led by Colonel Scorzini. There's another one in charge, but Scorzini takes the credit because he's such a kind of gothic figure with his dueling scars and so forth. And later, actually, paradoxically, in the 1950s, finds a renaissance figure

employed by Israel's Mossad, which is an unusual, should we say, career move for an SS colonel. The pilot gestures frantically. They must go. He also insists there's only room for one passenger, but Skorzeny has promised to deliver Mussolini personally. He's coming along for the ride. The pilot opens the throttle. The run-up is ridiculously short. Engines straining. The plane plunges over the edge. The pilot heaves back on the stick.

But with skill, he brings the nose up into the Apennine sky. Mussolini is spirited away. The next day, after an overnight in Vienna, Mussolini is reunited with his family in Munich. Then he's airborne again, winging his way to Rastenburg, East Prussia, with a big, romantic reunion with the Führer. On September 14th, 1943, his Junkers 52 comes in low over the thick pine forest.

save for the chunk carved out of it for Hitler's Wolf's Lair HQ. It seems to stretch on forever. As Mussolini comes down the steps, an excited Hitler is waiting for him, dressed in a long leather trench coat, though it's hard not to betray his dismay. Hitler is truly shocked by Mussolini's appearance. He's so haggard. He's so awful. In the morning sunshine, they hug, but once settled in the bunker, Hitler gets down to business.

He urges Mussolini to take revenge on the Badoglio regime as soon and as painfully as possible, and especially on those cowards of the Grand Council who voted him out of office. Mussolini has a confession. He's not sure he's got the stomach for this anymore. Hitler admonishes him. What is this sort of fascism that melts with the snow before the sun? He's got a plan, he says, and it must be put into immediate effect. He will reinstall Mussolini. Fascism will live on.

"And if he doesn't go along with it?" asks Mussolini. Hitler tells him that he will have to treat Italy like any occupied territory. It will not be pleasant. Mussolini has flown back to Munich. There, on September 18th, he takes to the radio. Black shirts. "Italian men and women, after a long silence, my voice comes to you once again, and I'm certain you recognize it."

"Perdoglio's government is illegitimate," he continues. "The king acted unlawfully. He proclaims instead the establishment of an Italian social republic."

So the Italian Social Republic is declared, it presents itself as the fullest realization of the fascist vision. That for the past 20 years, Mussolini had had to compromise with the king, with the establishment. And now by declaring a republic, fascism was liberating itself from those constraints. That finally the fascist revolution would be completed.

The news of Mussolini's return, plus the German troop surge, will have an immediate effect. The king in the meantime has fled Rome, abandoning Rome to Hitler basically, which is another terrible betrayal of the Italian people. He's pissed off to the south, leaving the capital city basically undefended. There's a bit of resistance but not much. Hitler's Field Marshal Kesselring takes Rome in two days.

In its aftermath, 650,000 Italian soldiers will become POWs. From exile in Malta on October 13, Badoglio formally declares that Italy will now take up arms with the Allies against the Axis. And they change sides, which is very complex of course for the Italian armed services, some of whom choose to fight for the Germans. But Italy changes sides in the middle of World War II. Eleven days after his rescue,

Mussolini is back in his new republic's capital. Not Rome, as he hoped, but Salo, a small town in Lombardy in the north of Italy, tucked away on the shores of Lake Garda. To claim that Mussolini is now in charge of a new, independent Italy is to vastly overstate the case. His domain will amount only to the bits that the Germans let him control. Nominally everything north of Rome, though that will start to contract as the Allies advance.

Mussolini declares boldly: "I am not here to renounce even a square meter of state territory. Where the Italian flag flew, the Italian flag will return. But that too is a fantasy. Parts of the northeast have already given over to direct Wehrmacht military command. Italy's Balkan and Greek territories are also signed over.

really, this Salo Republic or the Italian Social Republic was effectively a puppet state of Nazi Germany. This relationship between Mussolini and Hitler has turned completely on its head and now Mussolini's entirely dependent on Hitler not only for having rescued him but also for him to continue in Italy. The Republic may have nominal offices in Verona but Mussolini is effectively working from home.

From the villa Feltrinelli, in the lakeside village of Gardnano. He will spend his time here under virtual house arrest, the SS monitoring his every move, every phone call. Albeit in a luxury residence, set amid the pine trees, with exquisite views over the lake.

He is basically a prisoner of the Germans, a very pampered prison. It's a beautiful part of Italy, Lake Garda. The views are magical. But he is a prisoner in effect, while having all the symbols of a foreign office. It's actually just a costume drama role. He is a bird in a gilded cage. Mussolini's family has returned to him. The Germans have even found a nearby house for Clara Bottacci.

But as for being the Duce again, he has some old loyalists in place. General Graziani as his defence minister. Alessandro Pavolini is his party secretary. The Rasputin-like Nicola Bombacci is his enforcer. There are also twenty-odd thousand blackshirts who've yomped north. But it's all a charade. Mussolini, it's joked, is the Gauleiter of Lombardy, a sawdust Caesar.

A woman struck dead after hearing a haunting whistle. A series of childlike drawings scrawled throughout a country estate. A prize horse wandering the moors without an owner. To the regular observer, these are merely strange anomalies.

But for the master detective, Sherlock Holmes, they are the first pieces of an elaborate puzzle. I'm Hugh Bonneville. Join me every Thursday for Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. I'll be reading a selection of the super sleuths' most baffling cases, all brought to life in their original, masterful form. The game is afoot, and you're invited to join the chase.

As ever in Italy, even in these remote parts, chaos swirls around. And you've got this very complicated moment where Italy is basically divided. Part of it is still fighting with the Germans. Part of it is fighting with the Allies. Many people are not doing either.

And it's a civil war and a war at the same time. Does Italy even exist? What is Italy in 1943? Nobody knows. The Social Republic, its main function, and I think it needs to be taken seriously, was as a repressive instrument. Its role in assisting the Germans in rounding up Italian Jews and in fighting anti-fascist partisans. There's another order of business, or rather unfinished business, to which Mussolini must attend.

Those nineteen members of the fascist Grand Council who brought him down. Dino Grandi has fled to Spain. General De Vecchi has gone into hiding. Others live under Allied military protection. And then there is Galeazzo Ciano. Fearing arrest by the Badoglio regime, Ciano had tried to flee the country. Naively, he trusted the Germans and their assurances of a safe passage to Spain for himself, wife Eda, and their three children.

but he was conned. The plane they boarded flew them straight to Munich, right into the belly of the beast. There, after Mussolini's rescue, he held a meeting with his father-in-law in which the Duce seemed on the path to forgiveness. But his mother-in-law, Rachele, is not inclined to be merciful, nor is Adolf Hitler. Ciano is returned to the Italian Social Republic and delivered straight to the Gestapo.

I mean, the soap opera starts with Giano's own vote at the Grand Council. Giano is his heir apparent, his son-in-law, and seems to be best positioned to take over. And he's amongst those who side against Mussolini. There is this general bloodletting, purging the ranks of everyone who betrayed him. The Germans hunt down five more of the rebel ministers. Giovanni Marinelli, Carlo Pareschi,

Luciano Gottardi, Tullio Cianetti, and General Emilio de Bona. Over two days from January 8th, 1944, they will be put on trial at the Processo di Verona, held in a courtroom in the Castelvecchio, tried on a charge of treason, of plotting with the enemy. They find it laughable at first. 77-year-old de Bona reminds the court that he's been an honorable soldier his entire life. How could it be a plot? Asks Ciano.

if Mussolini himself had been handed the motion in advance. But the eight-man tribunal of hardcore fascists reaches its foregone conclusion. With the exception of Cianetti, who gets a life sentence on the strength of a written apology, they are each condemned to death. Those still at large are sentenced in absentia. And so, on the morning of January the 11th, the five men are led from the Scalzi prison and into the snow of San Procolo. It's a clumsy execution,

The militiamen are poor shots. Ciano, only wounded, lies bleeding, gasping for breath. An officer takes out his pistol, finishing him off with a bullet to the head. One report claims Ciano's last words as not "Viva l'Italia" but "Mamma mia". Afterwards, Il Duce shrugs. "So far as I'm concerned," he says, "Ciano has been dead for ages." Professor Giulia Albanese

It shows the violence of this dictatorship, who is able to do anything to anybody in a way. And the fact that most of the people near Mussolini are in favor of killing his son-in-law, starting with his wife.

I mean, it is a world which is violent in the end, a world in which power counts more than human relationship, which is heading to its end and the process. So the Verona is a symbol of this. Chana was foreign minister and son-in-law, like, you know, the perfect double fascist. He'd actually married into the Massoud family. You couldn't get more powerful than that.

They're shot, you know, tied to chairs like traitors and not even given proper sort of dignified executions. It's pretty horrible. And you know, that's the last days of fascism becomes more and more nasty and vindictive. Chana will leave an important legacy, his diaries. Smuggled out of the country by Eda, they will, after the war, give invaluable insight into the inner sanctum of Benito Mussolini.

See, Arnaud was the most prominent figure of the regime. He was also in many ways one of the most skeptical. But like all of them, he was pulled forward by the tumult of Italian fascism's capacity for self-deception. But we really are in the world of Jacobin tragedy, the world of Shakespearean tragedy, when the final denouement is the entire stage is covered in bodies.

Finally, Kesselring's defensive Gustav line is broken. The US Fifth Army enters Rome on June 4th, 1944. It's the first Axis capital to fall. In a fit of depression, Hitler takes to his bed. His staff will have difficulty rousing him 48 hours later, when in the early hours of June 6th, D-Day, Allied forces begin landing in Normandy. For the Fuhrer, the news will only get worse.

Axis partners Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland are all throwing in the towel. Germany will have no choice now but to abandon Italy and withdraw its armies to defend the fatherland. On July 20th 1944, Mussolini is flown up for another meeting at the Wolf's Lair. His plane touches down amid a scene of panic. There are SS men running back and forth. Vehicles drive him here and there. Ominously, from the centre of the forest compound,

A pall of black smoke is rising. As he's driven through the perimeter, past the fences and checkpoints, Mussolini is given some devastating news. There has been an attempt on the Fuhrer's life. A bomb had gone off, placed in a briefcase under a map table as his officers gathered around it. It's okay, Mussolini is assured. Hitler has been extraordinarily lucky. In fact, in a strange twist of fate, it was Mussolini who saved him.

It was news of Ilduce's arrival that caused the morning strategy meeting to be brought forward. The plotters were rushed. The meeting with the Fuhrer is surreal. He looks like a character from a cartoon. He has a blackened face. No eyebrows. His trousers are in shreds. He seems delirious, euphoric, clearly drugged up.

Hitler shows Mussolini the plans he has for a new set of wonder weapons, rockets and such like, that are going to change the course of the war, just you see. Mussolini, never one to be outdone, tells him about an Italian scientist who has invented a death ray. As he leaves, Hitler grabs Mussolini by the arm. He tells him, "Please believe me when I tell you that you are my only friend." In Italy,

Kesselring is now fighting a rearguard action, holding the new Gothic line north of Florence. The Germans were now flooding through North Italy, tying it down, controlling it, and they couldn't be dislodged. Of course, they're remarkably brutal to the Italian partisans. The reason the memory of Mussolini is execrable in Naughty to Bebought North-South is because of what the Germans were doing.

They were massacring hostages, villages, and so on. They're not just going after the partisans. But they did what the Germans did everywhere, brutal reprisals against the civilian populations. That, of course, just fueled partisan rage. But the days of the German occupation, and with it, the Salo Republic, are numbered. The partisans are getting their act together, coming now under a Committee of National Liberation for Northern Italy.

So there are disparate partisan groups. Some are formed as early as September 1943 with the Italian surrender and soldiers taking to the hills to avoid capture by the Germans. It includes young men fleeing labor roundups in the draft in the Salo Republic, peasants who've taken to the hills,

And at times they work hand in hand, but there's also at times conflicts over what the ultimate goal of resistance is. Is it just to free Italy of the Germans, to defeat fascism, or is it to wage a revolutionary class war and create a new Italy after the war? In his villa on the lake, Mussolini carries on in a state of delusion, still calling cabinet meetings to discuss collective farming and economic reforms.

In his downtime he reads, plays his violin or takes a turn on the tennis court where his opponents are instructed to let him win. He's holed up there without too much power on the lake really waiting for the end because it's inevitable at that time and he's much more realistic than Hitler in that sense. He knows the end is coming and he's preparing for it. He's doing things like taking money out of bank accounts.

I mean, Italian fascism basically drained the Bank of Italy and stole enormous amounts of money for itself. It was a very corrupt regime. I have documentary evidence of Mussolini taking cash from the central bank and giving it to his sons in the last days. A visitor to the Villa Feltrinelli is a journalist named Madeleine Moliere. She had been bowled over by the Duce in his prime. He confesses to her.

Seven years ago, I was an interesting person. Now, I'm little more than a corpse. My star has fallen. I have no fight left in me. I await the end of the tragedy. So he knows the end is nigh. He knows it's near. He knows there is no elegant way of getting out. And that this is his last chapter, which he's got to both write and read. His last performance in the theater, which he has to both perform and watch.

I mean, I guess that he knows that he is towards the end. I guess he knows and everybody knows near him. Then I don't know which is the degree in which he pretends things are not like this. By spring 1945, it's game over for the Germans in Italy. On April 16th, Mussolini calls his last cabinet meeting. He's advised to cut his losses, to get out, leave the country. Nearby Switzerland is the obvious choice.

From there he can get to Spain. There is talk of Argentina, even Polynesia. But no, says Mussolini. He is going to take a loyal army of 3,000 blackshirts and head to Valtellina in the northeast. And there, like the Spartans, they will make their final heroic stand. But before that, he's going back to his spiritual home, Milan. He bids Rachele and his family goodbye. Then, under a close SS escort,

He heads off. It's a strange few days in Milan. All across northern Italy the cities are falling. Genoa, Trieste, Bologna. With allied armies just sixty miles away, there Mussolini sits, in the Palazzo Monforte, acting like the big cheese he used to be. But with a partisan uprising set for April the 25th, the local German commander informs Mussolini that he's evacuating,

He has arranged for some vehicles to get them all out of there. That night they head north, skirting the shores of Lake Como. Mussolini is still unclear as to whether he's going to perform his last heroic stand, or make a boat for Switzerland. One thing's for sure, he's going to be doing it on a budget. In the baggage train had been a truck full of gold bars, looted from the treasury. The wealth with which he'd hoped to set up anew. Amid the chaos, the truck has been plundered.

the booty no more. So this regime who spoke of justice order, these men were taking money from wherever and using public money for very private reason and enriching them in an horrible way while they were in government and while they were pretending to work for a nicer or for a more just world. What is that? All is not yet lost.

Word comes that German vehicles are now being given an amnesty, being allowed safe passage through the partisan checkpoints. Though, a warning: it's not a luxury being afforded to any Italian fascists who might be caught in their company. There is a German armored column of 40 vehicles in the area, Mussolini is told. It's retreating to Innsbruck. He and his entourage must go with them, take their chances. Within hours, Mussolini finds himself inside a Wehrmacht armored car.

Petacci joins the convoy too, in an Alfa Romeo driven by her brother Marcello. The car has Spanish diplomatic plates. They will pose as members of Spain's Milan consulate. 7:00 AM, on April 27th, 1944, just past the village of Menaggio. The column which has been rumbling along the narrow winding road comes to an abrupt halt. Up ahead is a roadblock, a felled tree and a pile of boulders.

With the lake on one side and a rock face on the other, there's no way round it. They're sitting ducks. From up above, and seemingly all around them, shots ring out. The Germans return fire, but they're shooting at ghosts. The column's commander, Lieutenant Falmeyer, waves his arms. Ceasefire. He can see men now moving behind the barricade. Partisans. Quickly he fashions a white flag. He edges along the road.

Two partisans come out and do the same. Falmeyer reminds them of the deal, that German vehicles should be given safe passage. The partisans seem unsure. It's a long and tense wait, over six hours, during which time Falmeyer is taken away to speak with the local commander. To great relief, he returns. They are to be let through. But first, they must follow the partisans to the village of Dongo for their vehicles to be inspected.

Back in the armored car, Mussolini is handed an infantryman's greatcoat to throw over his militia uniform and a German army helmet. He's whisked back to one of the troop trucks, given a machine gun and told to climb in, to sit all the way inside. Unfortunately, at this moment, Clara Patacci starts screaming at the top of her voice, banging on the side, accusing her lover of abandoning her. To those spying on the convoy from the hillsides,

The histrionics have been noted. At 3pm the column of vehicles pulls into the Dongo village square, tantalizingly only six miles from the Swiss border. Moving down the lines of infantry trucks, a partisan finds, in the fourth one, a soldier dressed oddly, hunched forward, with a machine gun pressed between his knees, and he's wearing sunglasses. The Germans protest. He's just drunk, sleeping it off, leave him be.

but the partisan has an inkling. The brigade commander is called over, a man named Urbano Lazzaro. He climbs aboard. "Are you Italian?" he asks the soldier. The soldier looks up. "Yes, I am." Lazzaro smiles, momentarily lapsing into the old formality. "Excellency, we were expecting you." In front of the perplexed villagers, Benito Mussolini has marched across the cobbles to the mayor's office.

Patachi, meanwhile, failing with her Spanish ruse, is having trouble convincing anyone she's not the Duce's mistress. News travels fast. The HQ of the Liberation Committee is suddenly inundated with messages from the American OSS. They are reminded of the armistice agreement that was signed between Badoglio and Eisenhower. Specifically, it's Clause 29,

that Benito Mussolini, his main fascist associates, and all persons suspected of having committed crimes of war, will be immediately arrested and handed over to the United Nations forces. But this is too big a prize to give up. It's rather a case of the victims recognizing their tormentor. One of the partisans recognizes the disguised Mussolini. And what of course happens is that the Allies

And the Italian government, it still has an official government, are all petitioned to get him, to put him on trial. Some members of the Liberation Committee remain intent on doing things by the book. Others are going to take matters into their own hands. The race is now on to get to Mussolini first. A car screeches towards Lake Como. It contains a hardline communist partisan who goes by the alias Colonel Valerio.

Along the way, he and his accomplices have commandeered a removals van. Mussolini seems relaxed in captivity. It's as if a weight has been lifted. He laughs and jokes with his captors. That night he and Patacci are taken to a farmhouse in Giulino di Mazzegra. Fifteen Italians from the convoy have also been brought nearby, plus Patacci's brother. The tensions soon return. Sleep is fitful. They're aware of heated conversations downstairs.

that their partisan captors might not be all on the same page. For the rest of the day, all they can do is lie around and wait. At 4pm on the 28th, Valerio reaches the house. Pulling rank, he brushes past the guards and goes up the stairs. Mussolini and Patacci, dozing on and off on the bed, stare up at this striking tall man in the long brown trench coat. They should gather themselves, he tells them. He has orders to bring the Duce back to Milan.

Though not, he neglects to add, alive. Whoever Valerio is, most probably a man named Walter Odisio of the Freedom Volunteer Corps, he appears used to giving orders. Mussolini and Pataccio are led outside by Valerio's men and hustled through the village square, then bundled into a car and driven away with armed men perched on the wheel arches and running boards. It speeds along for a short distance,

At 4.10pm, it stops at the entrance to a country house, the Villa Belmonte. Mussolini and Pataccia are told to get out and stand by the wall. It's no use, sighs Mussolini. It's the end. He simply opens his shirt and tells them to aim for his chest. Though Pataccia is not going to go down without a fight. Screaming, you cannot kill us like this. She rushes Valerio and grabs the barrel of his machine gun.

He pulls the trigger, but it jams three times. It will not be the case with the automatic weapon he snatches from his colleague. Within an instant, Mussolini and Patacci are lying on the ground. There is a faint smile on the Duce's lips, a hint of breathing still. Valerio puts another bullet in the Duce for good measure.

Being killed with the uniform of an SS is the worst end that anybody could imagine for a man like him. And it's really the manifestation of what fascism was, I would say. Also the relationship with Lara Petacci

was a sign of it, not only for the fact that she was the lover in a regime that pretended that family was the most important thing, but also because she was a constant source of corruption.

I think that the execution has a lot to do with the partisans wanting to cement their control and their legitimacy is really the future leadership of Italy rather than as subservient to the allies who are presumably then going to put Mussolini on some kind of international tribunal. The bodies are slung in the back of the removals truck, along with the other executed loyalists.

Before the shots were fired, the family living in the villa claimed they heard the assassin give some kind of speech, as if Mussolini were being read a death sentence. Some say it had been approved back in Milan, others right there in the mayor's office, but no one will ever know.

It was very important for them to show the populace that they were in charge and also that in a sense, Italians had liberated themselves. That instead of viewing the liberation of Italy as an Anglo-American accomplishment, that there was a symbolic dimension to it where the resistance claimed moral legitimacy and political legitimacy by filling that vacuum when the Germans fled.

The lorry is driven through the night to Milan. And there, as we know from the opening scene of this story, in the early hours of Sunday the 29th, the bodies will be deposited in the Piazzale Loretto, dumped on the very same spot that Mussolini's goons, on behalf of the SS, performed a summary execution of 15 partisans. That morning, as the crowd brutalized the bodies, there seems an air of disbelief. Can this really be the Great Il Duce?

Of the fascists to have gone to ground is a man named Achille Staracci. He had worked his way up to becoming Mussolini's propagandist, his chief spin doctor. Since the collapse of the regime, he's been living incognito in the city. Staracci's curse is that he's also a fitness fanatic. And that morning, in his shorts and tennis shoes, he decides to go for a run. Curious as to the commotion in the square, he jogs past.

Only for someone to recognize him too. Before he knows it, he's being dragged over to identify Mussolini's corpse. A look of shock on his face is all that's required. Within minutes, he too has been shot, and will be strung up next to his old boss and his mistress. Alongside Pavolini, Bombacci, and an activist named Gelomini. His last words, accompanied by a defiant fascist salute, are "Viva il Duce!"

So he was hated as well because he was always the man next to Mussolini in all the photos. Everyone used to act, so it probably wasn't a good idea to go for a jog that day. The pictures of Mussolini hanging from the girder of the filling station will be wired around the world. Front page news everywhere.

It's one of the most amazing moments of the Second World War. A lot of journalists made their careers on that. And the image of Mussolini hung up by his feet is this incredible, obvious moment of end. End of him, end of the regime, overturning of power, return of democracy, but in quite a brutal way. Also, he's still the center of attention. Everyone's still looking at him, but he's dead. In his bunker under the Reich Chancellery, the news stuns Hitler.

Having learned what happened to Mussolini, Hitler took the decision to commit suicide himself, not to leave his fate in the hands of anyone who might get their hands on him and Eva Braun too. Once the bodies are taken down, they will lay in the mortuary to be snapped by a US Army photographer. He arranges Mussolini and Patacci with a little more dignity. From there, they will be taken away to be buried in unmarked graves in the city's Masoco Cemetery. Tredapio, Italy

The present day, Mussolini's birthplace is now his resting place. After his body was dug up and stolen on more than one occasion, it was in 1957 interred here at the family's marble crypt. With candles burning before a bust of Ilducci and surrounded by fascist regalia, it's become a shrine. The souvenir shops, meanwhile, sell all manner of Musso merch.

Someone bought me a bottle of Mussolini wine, which had its face on it. Buy all kinds of Mussolini tat. It's a really fascinating place to go, but it is quite unnerving when you see people openly with fascist tattoos or fascist t-shirts walking around the town. It's not just here, but right across Italy that Mussolini still casts his shadow. There are traces of him in the fascist era architecture, in the black shirt thuggery of the football ultras.

And of course, in Italian politics, members of the Mussolini dynasty to this day sit in the Italian and European parliaments, the spirit of Il Duce conjured as a figure of authority, a reformer rather than a murderous dictator.

It is a common refrain that Mussolini also did some good things. This is something you still hear in Italy a lot today. And people who say that tend to cite the modernization of the country under his rule. A lot of that modernization was explicitly done in the aid of fascism's ultimate goal, which was war and conquest.

It's, I think, important to recognize that Mussolini did kill many people. He killed hundreds of thousands, even potentially millions of Ethiopians, of Libyans, of Yugoslavs, of Greeks, Albanians. That while we don't have an Italian Auschwitz, that's not to say that the fascist war was benign.

It's extraordinary, given the absolute cruelty of the Germans in those areas of Italy they occupied, that the legacy and imagery of Mussolini is not just for Etudeau. It's also representative of the power of Mussolini's propaganda. The notion that there was a good sight in him, that he was human, Mussolini the lover, Mussolini the passionate man.

Mussolini the musician, Mussolini the lover of grand opera, although Stephen Fry takes the view that the only countries which had fascism were countries with a tradition of grand opera, which happens to be true. Whatever way you approach him, the fact is that Mussolini will be forever linked to Adolf Hitler. But in a perverse way, this has led to an easier ride.

That in the league of comparative evil, pound for pound, he fares rather better

Yes, this is also part of the way in which in Italy the figure of Mussolini and the experience of Italians was perceived. But for me, it is both a very problematic way of looking at this issue and in a way it downplays the role that Italian fascism had in changing deeply the European political context.

In a way, we cannot say what would have been of Europe if Mussolini hadn't took power in 1922. And we are certain of the fact that he greatly influenced many other right-wing parties and many other right-wing leaders in the 20s and 30s, including Adolf Hitler.

I think it's important to say that in terms of their reputation, Hitler's obviously war never rehabilitated and nor should it have been. But by contrast, Mussolini's was a little bit more ambivalent. And you have in Germany this attitude towards not some towards the Holocaust, where the idea has been for so long, never again.

And I feel that in Italy, maybe there was never that drive to really confront what had gone on in the same way. Italy doesn't really have a museum of fascism. If you go around Berlin, there's tons of museums of fascism and of Nazism and tons of memory. Italy has done a lot of work with the anti-Semitic stuff, but with fascism itself, it still seems to be a real taboo.

to deal with it and to talk about it and to historicize it properly. And if you don't historicize it, it still can be acceptable. When we make comparisons between contemporary political figures and the fascists of the past, almost routinely the comparison is made with Hitler, with a genocidal maniac. And any comparison with Hitler ends up making the other person look considerably more benign.

But Hitler, in some ways, was the exception. And Mussolini was the archetype. We can learn a lot about the nature of authoritarian power, the use of political violence, the use of propaganda, the construction of a cult of personality. We can illuminate what they're all about by holding them up against Mussolini more effectively. Had he made different decisions, it's said, Mussolini could have died peacefully in his bed, just like General Franco. But who knows?

Mussolini, through fascism, was the godfather of ultra-nationalism, the architect of the totalitarian state. Without him, there would have been no Franco. Moreover, no Hitler, and arguably, no Second World War. Real Dictators will be back soon, with, among others, the stories of Fidel Castro and Jean-Bédel Bocasa. Stay tuned.