Dictators rarely have happy, quiet deaths surrounded by family and friends after a long, happy life.
Instead, death tends to be a rather hurried affair that cuts them down in their prime. More often than not it takes them a bit by surprise and it’s seldom pleasant. Benito Mussolini was no exception. (READ MORE by Aubrey Gulick: Saving Rome With a Laurel Wreath)
Mussolini wasn’t exactly a successful totalitarian dictator — although he certainly wanted to emulate his northern neighbor. There were several reasons for that.
First, he was dealing with a state that had only recently been united in government and was still sore about it. Italians in Milan didn’t like Italians in Rome, and neither of them liked the Italians in Naples. By the time Mussolini came to power, most Italians didn’t even speak the same language.
Second, Mussolini wasn’t a great military strategist. Before the war, he used the festering discontent Italians felt about World War I and the much more prescient issues of the national economy during the Great Depression to come to power. Once the war had begun he developed a bad habit of losing every military campaign he touched — a fact that didn’t sit well with the Italian army or his northern allies. (READ MORE: World War True)
Even by 1943, Mussolini wasn’t ruling Italy anymore. The Italian king had personally fired him and he owed his tiny puppet government in the north entirely to the German army — an arrangement that frustrated both Mussolini and Adolf Hitler (although Hitler had bigger problems to deal with at that point.)
When the end came, it came quickly. The final Allied march across Europe was like lightning. Mussolini found himself in the difficult situation every failed dictator finds himself in when the world is on his tail and he resolved to flee with his mistress to Switzerland. He might have made it if he hadn’t been stopped by communist partisans at the border who instantly recognized him. (READ MORE: It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like 1938)
The following day, on April 28, 1945, Italy’s Il Duce was executed by firing squad and taken back to Milan where his remains were met by an angry mob of Italians who resented him. The American liberators became so nervous about the violent and angry Milanese that they hid the body in an unmarked grave.
It didn’t stay there for long. The few remaining Italian fascists decided to “save” it and led Italian police on a wild hunt across the countryside for four months. When the government finally did get its hands on Mussolini’s body, it managed to bury him behind a monastery and keep the location a secret for 11 years. Today, Mussolini is interred at his family’s graveyard.
This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s Substack, Pilgrim’s Way on April 29, 2024.
