The Pope and Mussolini (63 page)

Edda’s threat failed to save her husband. At the firing range, Ciano and those condemned with him trod across ground white with frost, then were forced to sit backward in a line of rickety wooden folding chairs facing a wall. Seventy-seven-year-old General Emilio De Bono, marshal of the Italian armed forces, with his trademark white goatee, sat alongside him. He wore a dark suit and a black hat, sitting with legs splayed apart, hands tied behind his back. Both men asked to face their executioners but were refused. Ciano was hit in the back five times but still breathed. Lying on the ground, legs still awkwardly straddling his chair, he cried for help. The commander of the firing squad rushed to his side. Extracting his pistol from its holster, he fired a shot into the
ducellino
’s head. “It was like the slaughtering of pigs,” said a German diplomat who witnessed the scene.
³

Unlike his wife, who had always disliked her son-in-law and thought
he got just what he deserved, Mussolini took no comfort in Ciano’s death. Perhaps he had a presentiment that his own was not far off and would be no less sordid. In mid-April 1945 the Allied army broke through the mountains south of Bologna. It advanced northward as the remaining German forces retreated. On April 24, with the Allied army approaching, popular insurrections erupted in Venice, Genoa, and Milan. Mussolini had spent the previous week in Milan where, on April 25, Cardinal Schuster hosted a meeting between the Duce and a delegation from the central resistance committee, hoping to avoid a final bloodbath. Mussolini, learning that the Germans had begun talks with the resistance forces without telling him, remarked, “They’ve always treated us like servants.” Looking pallid, shrunken, like a man who could foresee his own death, he asked for guarantees for his Fascist compatriots and their families, but the resistance leaders said they would accept nothing other than unconditional surrender. Mussolini asked for an hour to decide. Faced with the prospect of being taken before a “people’s tribunal,” he decided to escape.

Reaching the town of Como, on the southwestern tip of the lake of the same name, Mussolini, in Rachele’s account, stopped to write her a letter. He had one of his fat blue pencils with him. “Dear Rachele. Here I am, having arrived at the last phase of my life, the last page of my book. Perhaps we two will never see each other again.… I ask your forgiveness for all the bad things that, without meaning to, I did to you. But you know that you were for me the only woman whom I truly loved.”

At three
A.M.
the next morning, along with other Fascist leaders, he got in a convoy of cars going north, undecided whether to try to escape over the Swiss border or to seek a hideout in the Italian Alps. The weather was terrible, and they were hoping for reinforcements, so they stopped at a town along the lake, where Mussolini went for a walk in the rain with his daughter Elena Curti, who had come to be with him. Clara Petacci, chasing after her lover, found him strolling along the lakefront with the attractive young redhead. Furious, she threw a tantrum so violent, she injured her own knee.

Early on the morning of the twenty-seventh, a detachment of two
hundred German soldiers passed by. Mussolini and his SS guard decided their best chance lay in joining them. Putting on a German uniform, Mussolini, accompanied both by his daughter and by Clara Petacci, got into an armored car bound for the border. They did not go far before a squad of partisans intercepted them. The Germans, although greatly outnumbering their foe, had lost their stomach for fighting and offered to talk. After six hours they reached an agreement. The partisans would let the Germans cross the border unmolested on the condition they be allowed to inspect the vehicles for any hidden Italians. Despite his German uniform and dark glasses, Mussolini was recognized and seized, along with his fellow Fascists.

The local partisan chief, astonished by the prisoner he had taken, sent word to the resistance headquarters in Milan, requesting instructions. For his part, the diminished Duce asked only to be able to say good-bye to Clara. Until then the partisans had not realized she was among their captives. Clara insisted on staying by her lover’s side and sharing his fate, and the two spent a final sleepless night together in a nearby farmhouse. In the meantime, instructions had come from Milan. In the morning, the two prisoners were put in a car for the short drive to Mezzegra, along Lake Como. There, as they approached a modest villa, they were told to get out and stand in front of a wall. It was raining. Clara, still wearing her fur coat, was crying. “Are you happy that I have followed you to the end?” she asked. Mussolini, impassive and resigned to his fate, perhaps unaware she had even spoken, did not respond. As the partisan took aim, Clara struggled to put herself in front of Mussolini in a final, futile effort to protect him.

The next morning the partisans placed the two bodies in a truck and carted them off to Milan. In Piazza Loreto the Duce and his mistress were dumped alongside the cadavers of fifteen other Fascist leaders who had met similar fates. The previous August the Germans had shot fifteen imprisoned partisans, in reprisal for Allied bombings and resistance raids, and had exhibited their bodies in that same piazza. Such was popular justice. Twenty-three years of Fascist rule had suddenly ended—the city was freed from the German army and SS. In
their delirium and anger, the growing crowd took their revenge on the bodies, spitting on them, cursing them, kicking them, striking the corpses with sticks and their bare hands. A woman fired five shots into Mussolini’s corpse, to avenge her five sons, she said, who were dead because of him.

To shield the bodies from the crazed crowd, some of the partisans hoisted them up, one after another, hanging them by their feet from scaffolding at a gas station on one side of the piazza. From the wounds in Mussolini’s head, brain matter seeped out and dripped onto the ground. Next to him swung Clara Petacci, who had always called him “Ben.” Someone with a sense of propriety had fastened her skirt to her legs with a piece of rope, so that as she hung upside down, it did not fall over her head.
⁴

Achille Starace, longtime stage manager for the Mussolini cult, swung alongside the Duce. It was the closest he had gotten to him in years. Mussolini had stripped Starace of his position as party head in the fall of 1939, thinking the Fascists needed a different approach for the oncoming war. By the spring of 1945, the Duce’s once proud pit bull had been living penniless and abandoned in Milan, spending his days wandering the streets in a sweat suit and torn sneakers. When Milan was liberated, a group of partisans recognized him, although his unintended disguise was, in its own way, more complete than Mussolini’s had been. His trial that day lasted only twenty minutes before he was shot, his body hauled up at the gas station scaffolding in Piazza Loreto.
⁵

Rachele, Mussolini’s long-suffering but ever-feisty wife, was taken by Allied forces and, along with her two youngest children, confined to the island of Ischia in the gulf of Naples. She would later return to the small village of Predappio, where she had first met Benito as a schoolgirl. In 1957, after years of effort, she finally succeeded in getting his body back so that it could be buried where he had been born. Unlike her husband, she lived to old age, dying in 1979.

Loyal Fascist to the last, Roberto Farinacci had fled Rome the day after Mussolini was deposed in July 1943, flying to Munich. He was
taken directly to Hitler’s headquarters where, after first meeting with Ribbentrop, he saw the Führer. Once Mussolini was installed to lead the Republic of Salò in the north, Farinacci returned to his old fiefdom in Cremona, still predicting a Nazi victory. In late April 1945, with Allied troops poised to enter the city, he and a small group of followers hurried into their cars and drove off. Attempting to run a roadblock north of Milan, they came under fire. Their driver was killed, and Farinacci was seized. The partisans marched their captive to a nearby town, where a “people’s tribunal” was quickly assembled. Following a trial that lasted only an hour, he was condemned to die.

At the town plaza where he was to be executed, Farinacci asked for a priest, who took his confession and offered absolution. Blindfolded and told to stand facing the wall so he could be shot in the back, Farinacci resisted. His captors did their best to beat him into submission. But just as the men of the firing squad began to squeeze their triggers, Farinacci turned around and raised his arm in Fascist salute. The bullets hit his chest as he shouted “
Viva l’Italia!
” His body remained where he fell for several hours, giving passersby ample time to add their kicks and spittle. Those with guns fired gratuitous bullets into the lifeless body of the most fascist of Fascists.
⁶

Guido Buffarini, with whom the papal nuncio and Tacchi Venturi had met so frequently, had enjoyed the Duce’s confidence to the end. One of the minority who had voted in Mussolini’s favor at the fateful Grand Council meeting, he had been arrested by the new Badoglio government but then freed by the Germans. Making his way to Salò, he became minister of internal affairs in the puppet Italian government, doing Hitler’s bidding in rounding up the Jews. On April 25, 1945, he was with Mussolini in Milan, and he, too, tried to make it to the Swiss border. The partisans who seized him sent him to Milan for trial, where he outlived the Duce by three days, a firing squad putting an end to him on April 31.
⁷

Eighty-three years old when Mussolini was shot, Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi returned to his books. In 1951, forty-one years after the first volume of his classic history of the Jesuits was published, the final
tome appeared. When he died, in March 1956,
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
published brief obituaries. Both credited him for brokering the Lateran Accords, the one significant negotiation between Pius XI and Mussolini in which he had played only a secondary role.
⁸

On ascending St. Peter’s throne, Pius XII decided to keep the devout, unworldly Francesco Borgongini on as his nuncio. Through the war years and beyond, he remained in that post. In 1953, a year before his death, the pope named him a cardinal.

Father Agostino Gemelli, founder and rector of the Catholic University of Milan, who had won such applause from Farinacci with his anti-Semitic lecture in Bologna in 1939, continued to curry the favor of whoever was in power.
⁹
At the war’s end, Italian authorities established a commission aimed at removing the most important Fascists from positions of public influence.
¹⁰
Confronted with the fact that in 1933 he had denounced two of his own students to the police for engaging in anti-Fascist activities, and in the face of other accusations, Gemelli was suspended from his position as rector, pending further hearings.

The following year, a second commission continued the work of the first, presided over by Ezio Franceschini, professor of literature at Gemelli’s own Catholic University. The new commission absolved Gemelli and allowed him to return as rector. Gemelli then appointed Franceschini to be dean of the Faculty of Letters, eventually to become rector of the university himself.
¹¹
Today Gemelli enjoys a place of special honor in Rome, where the city’s most important Catholic hospital and a train station bear his name.

The king fared less well. In late August 1939 the American ambassador in Rome received urgent instructions from President Roosevelt: he was to carry the president’s personal appeal to the king, urging him to do all he could to prevent Italy from going to war. As Victor Emmanuel was then at his mountain retreat in Piedmont, Phillips boarded a train bound for Turin. When the ambassador’s car reached the remote camp, the king stood awaiting him, dressed in ordinary country clothes and a soft brown hat. He walked the ambassador to a small
wooden cabin, where Phillips delivered Roosevelt’s last-minute appeal.

Victor Emmanuel remained silent as the ambassador read. When he finished, the king spoke. He was simply a constitutional monarch, he explained. “All I can do, in the circumstances, is to refer the message to my government.” Phillips was deflated. A thick silence fell between them. Not knowing what else to say, the American ambassador asked him how the fishing was going. The king’s face lit up. He had already caught seven hundred trout, he said proudly, but would remain at his camp until he had caught his customary thousand. Asked if he would then return to Rome, as the world was descending into a horrific war, he answered that no, he planned to go to his farm near Pisa, adding, “You know, I hate palaces.”
¹²

Having added King of the Albanians to his proliferating titles, following Italy’s invasion of that defenseless country in April 1939, Victor Emmanuel did his best to avoid blame as Italian troops suffered one disaster after another. At the war’s end, disgraced by his close association with the Fascist regime, the king abdicated, in the vain hope that the monarchy could survive under his son, Umberto. In a 1946 plebiscite, Italians voted to send the royal family into exile. Postwar Italy would be a republic.

Unlike the king, Pius XII escaped any blame for the disaster that had befallen Italy. Indeed, many have portrayed him as a heroic opponent of the Fascist regime. The “Pius war,”
¹³
as they have been called—the heated debates over Pius XII—have focused not on his relations with Mussolini but on those with Hitler. Did he bear responsibility for not condemning the Holocaust when Nazis and their collaborators—many of whom considered themselves Catholics—were murdering Europe’s Jews? Was he “Hitler’s pope,” as the provocative, if misleading, title of John Cornwell’s controversial book suggested?
¹⁴
His critics accuse him of cowardice and betrayal of the pope’s prophetic mission. His defenders argue that he was the best friend that the Jews had.