On this day in 1945: After Italy’s🇮🇹 fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had try to flee to the Swiss border, communist partisans captured him, his mistress and other fascist officials, and subsequently executed him.
The others were also executed and the bodies were brought to Piazza Loreto in Milan, where Italians who had suffered under Mussolini’s fascist rule began to beat the corpses.
The bodies of Mussolini, his mistress and other fascist officials were hung up on the metal framework of an unfinished Standard Oil petrol station for all to see.
The founder of fascism, who defined the ideology as the merging of corporation and state, started his rise to power with the blackshirts: fascist thugs who were often funded by industrialists to brutally suppress strikes and trade unions.
After coming to power, promising Italian people national strength, he presided over endless mediocrity, disasters, constant repression and atrocities.
Italy’s economy was a second-rate industrial power, lagging far behind other industrialised European countries and the Soviet Union, and was unable to tolerate the weight of modern mechanised warfare and Mussolini’s militarist delusions of grandeur.
His humiliating defeat in Ethiopia🇪🇹 brought horrors for the Ethiopian people, including the regular use of mustard gas against civilians, and constant massacres. 300,000+ Ethiopians were killed in Mussolini’s war.
After an assassination attempt on Italian official Rodolfo Graziani in 1937, Italian forces carried out large-scale massacres in Addis Ababa, killing tens of thousands in days.
Mussolini also launched a disastrous invasion of Greece, which led to his forces being pushed back into Albania. Hitler intervened with the invasion of Greece in 1941, quickly defeating Greek and British forces, but by now Mussolini had become nothing more than an embarrassing subordinate.
By 1943, he had plunged Italy into economic and military disaster in North Africa and the Eastern Front, leading the Italian economic elites to withdraw their support for him. Mussolini was arrested, and Italy’s new government signed an armistice with the allies.
Hitler once again had to intervene, rescuing Mussolini, and installing him as the head of a Northern Italian puppet regime, the Italian Social Republic, after a German invasion. By this point, the allies had already invaded southern Italy.
As Nazi Germany collapsed and Mussolini’s forces were on the retreat, partisan uprisings spread, leading to the effective collapse of Mussolini’s government and his subsequent capture and execution.
Mussolini promised Italy glory, and instead presided over the destruction of his own country through fascism.