During the last week of April 1945, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met their respective fates 48 hours apart.
Mussolini had been the powerful prime minister of Italy since 1922, better known as Il Duce (The Leader). Originally a very popular figure, his power base began to wane after the outbreak of World War II, due mainly to his catastrophic alliance with Nazi Germany.
Following the Allied invasion of Sicily, Mussolini was dismissed by the king in July 1943 and placed under house arrest in the Apennine Mountain. German paratroopers rescued him at Hitler’s orders that September, and he was appointed to lead a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy called the Italian Socialist Republic.
As the Allies neared his stronghold in Milan in April 1945, Mussolini attempted to flee to Switzerland in an Alfa Romeo sportscar with his 33-year-old mistress, Clara Petacci.
He wore a German helmet and overcoat, which did little to disguise his famous face. For two solid decades, Italians had been seeing it practically everywhere: on posters, coins, in cinemas, and on the front page of Italian newspapers.
Mussolini and his mistress were captured and summarily executed by firing squad in the village of Giulinio di Mezzegra on the shore of Lake Como on 28 April 1945. It was a quick job, fearing that Hitler would try to rescue him again.
The image of their bodies strung upside-down on a metal girder at a petrol station in Milan sent shivers down the spine of Adolf Hitler.
Determined not to give the allies the satisfaction of killing him in a similar fashion, two days later, he committed suicide at his Berlin bunker, along with his long-term girlfriend, Eva Braun. They married shortly before their deaths; she ended her life with cyanide poisoning, and he ended his with a gunshot to the head on 30 April 1945.
29 April 1945. Adolf Hitler married his long term partner, Eva Braun, in the Berlin bunker, on the last full day of his life. They celebrated their vows during a brief party with a small select group. The couple had already decided to die together on the following day. pic.twitter.com/cXe3456ely
— Prof. Frank McDonough (@FXMC1957) April 29, 2023
The bodies of Hitler and Mussolini
More amazing than their back-to-back deaths is what happened to the bodies of Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler ordered that his body and that of Braun’s be rolled up in a rug and then carried out of the bunker’s emergency exit to the garden behind the Reich Chancellery, where they were burnt with petrol.
Mussolini’s corpse and that of his mistress were dumped like garbage in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto public square, where a local branch of McDonald’s now stands. Months earlier, this is where Mussolini had displayed the bodies of his killed opponents.
People began to throw rotten vegetables at his body, taking revenge by beating and kicking, while one woman took out a pistol and emptied it into his body, shouting: “Five shots for my five assassinated sons.”
His body was then buried at an unmarked grave in Milan until 1946, when a Fascist fanatic dug it up, washed it at a nearby fountain, and then took it for safekeeping. He left behind a note that read: “Finally, O Duce, you are with us.”
The body remained missing for four months until it was found at a monastery outside Milan that August. The Italian government kept its whereabouts secret for an entire decade until 1957 when Prime Minister Adone Zoli restored Mussolini’s bones to his widow, Rachele Guidi.
He was then allowed a formal burial at Predappio, his hometown in Italy’s Sangiovese countryside. Mrs. Mussolini had been briefly arrested after her husband’s demise, only to be released and left to live a free life. She opened a restaurant to make a living and was given a state pension in 1975, four years before her death.
In 1966, the US government restored samples of Mussolini’s brain, which had been removed for traces of insanity before burial. The tests returned negative, and the pieces of Mussolini’s brain were sent to his widow.
