The Body of Il Duce

by Sergio Luzzatto

  From one end of occupied Italy to the other, the battle to recover the bodies and bury them became a kind of extension of the partisan struggle. Often it was the parish priest, taking up his traditional role as community conscience, who would gather up the slain Resistance fighters. A number of men of the cloth paid with their lives for this service. At Marzabotto, in Emilia-Romagna, where the Germans carried out a vicious reprisal against the partisans, two priests were shot for trying to bury a few of the eighteen hundred civilians who were massacred. In these wars of the cemetery, the secular values of the Resistance bowed to popular religious belief, the conviction that a person sent to the grave with respect would be resurrected sooner. Keen to gain legitimacy with villagers in the countryside, the partisans frequently went to great risk to give the fallen a Christian burial. Each victim’s sacrifice was understood to testify to the holiness of the Resistance struggle. But there was a negative side to this attention to proper burial, for the more the partisans insisted on it, the more the Fascists were determined to treat dead Resistance fighters with the maximum disrespect.

  Thus, the tortured and condemned of the Resistance, in addition to knowing they would die, knew their bodies would be shown off in ways designed to frighten others. It was a fate some faced with materialist indifference. “Don’t make a fuss about the corpse or anything else,” wrote the Roman partisan Fabrizio Vassalli, a thirty-five-year-old economist, to his parents on the eve of his execution. “Wherever they leave me, they leave me.”4 Other partisans saw their fate with great lucidity. “They are letting me rest now until all my wounds heal,” wrote Umberto Ricci, a twenty-two-year-old accounting student from Ravenna who had endured long torture sessions. “Then they are going to present me to the public tied up with a piece of rope.”5 Some were unable to conceal their distress: “My body is here by the school near Albegno, this side of the bridge,” wrote eighteen-year-old Renato Magi, a Tuscan bricklayer, to his parents. “You can come right away to get me.… As I write, my heart pains me, dear Mother and Father, please come right away to get me.”6

  The civil war was also this: a tragedy of and about bodies. “My thoughts to my dear wife and my loved ones, my body to my faith”: Giulio Casiraghi, a Communist factory worker from the outskirts of Milan, carved those words on the door of his jail cell before his fatal transfer to Milan’s San Vittore prison.7 Casiraghi could never have imagined the prophetic force of his words. His body and those of fourteen other political prisoners, shot and dumped in Piazzale Loreto on the morning of August 10, 1944, in reprisal for a suspected partisan attack, inflamed the Communist faithful as few others had. “They were one on top of the other covered with flies, lying beneath a terrible hot sun, one with his arms spread out, one all twisted up, one head down, one with his eyes wide in terror”;8 face to face with the corpses of these fifteen anti-Fascist martyrs, Communist veterans vowed to make their struggle more punishing than ever. Workers from nearby Monza and Vimercate passed by the dead, shocked at the way their comrades were exhibited. Hundreds of Milanese citizens passed as well. One man took a gun and shot into the heap, but there were many women who dared to bring flowers and children who pushed to the front to see the spectacle of death. From the murderers to the victims to the spectators, this was a wholly Italian tragedy: August 10, 1944, was to go down in the memory of the Resistance.

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  IT HAS BEEN said that Mussolini, knowing he could not avoid reprisals for the partisans’ bodies, ventured that the Fascists would “pay a high price for the blood of Piazzale Loreto.”9 What is certain is that the ferocious executions of August 1944—ordered by an SS commando but carried out by a Fascist squad—provoked a crisis at the highest levels of the Social Republic. Piero Parini, the Fascist official governing Milan and the surrounding province, resigned, and with him went any hope for a moderate administration in the Lombard capital, which instead became the focal point of the civil war. But the symbolic consequences of the event were more important and would have the greatest bearing for the body of Il Duce, as nine months before his death Piazzale Loreto had become a place of memory for anti-Fascists, not only for Lombardy partisans but for Resistance fighters throughout northern Italy. Just as a young man from Vicenza cycled the hundred miles to Milan to honor one of the widows and pay homage at the square, many partisans saw Piazzale Loreto as a symbol of an enemy who had to be defeated and a vendetta that had to be honored.

  Fourteen political prisoners, shot and dumped in Piazzale Loreto on the morning of August 10, 1944. (Foto Publifoto/Olympia)

  The Nazis’ and Fascists’ practice of exhibiting the dead bodies of the enemy left its mark on the literature of the period. Writers and poets of the Resistance—Corrado Govoni, Salvatore Quasimodo, Franco Fortini, Elio Vittorini—filled their work with images of dead people who had not been properly buried. There were partisans whose only grave was “a long coat, stiffened with frost,” mothers who raced toward sons “crucified on a telegraph pole,” heads of hanged victims left on the sides of a bridge and at the market, on the ground the “fingernails of those who had been shot,” and the bodies of boys “with serious faces, boys who had not died children,” scattered on the sidewalk.10 But it was the fifteen bodies thrown into the square in Milan that left the most vivid mark. In the winter of 1944–45, Alfonso Gatto’s poem “For the Martyrs in Piazzale Loreto” circulated widely in clandestine anti-Fascist circles:

  It was dawn, and where people worked,

  where the piazzale was the lit-up jewel

  of the city moving to its lights

  from evening to evening, where the streetcar’s very screech

  of iron on iron was a salute to the morning

  and to the fresh faces of the living,

  they wanted a massacre, so that Milan

  would have everything mingled in the same blood

  on its doorstep, its proud young sons

  and its strong old heart clasped together as in a fist.

  Gatto’s anger was the anger of a Communist, but his grief was that of the entire city. Yet, unwittingly, the perpetrators’ heartless message, their memento mori, offered the survivors some consolation, since they were uplifted by the victims’ ars moriendi, by their courage in death:

  I see the new day that at Loreto

  above the red barricades the dead

  are the first to hail, still in their work clothes

  and with their hearts to the wind, still beating

  with blood and their own purpose. And every day,

  every hour, this fire burns eternal,

  every dawn has its heart injured by that lead,

  by those innocents snuffed out at the wall.11

  Another episode of violence against the partisans took place on the eve of liberation in Dongo near Lake Como, prior to Mussolini’s capture there. On April 24, 1945, four partisans were shot and left on a hilltop as the anti-Resistance Black Brigades of the Social Republic went house to house on the outskirts of the town. Two days later, some of the townspeople, mostly managers and workers from the nearby Falck ironworks, climbed the hill to recover the four bodies. As they came back down the funeral procession grew, joined by other men and women. According to a local friar, the bodies were brought back into town by “a whole crowd of people eager to participate in this tribute of mercy and faith.” When the cortege arrived at the Falck gates, the mourners stopped and recited the prayers for the dead, and a “profound and religious feeling took hold of all those present.”12 But the prayers were soon interrupted by gunshots as the Black Brigades arrived and began firing into the air.

  What happened next seems almost tragicomic, taking place as it did just hours before the Liberation, as “men and women … bruised and bloodied” rushed through the mill gates or into nearby houses, leaving the four bodies to the Fascist militiamen. Only after friars from the local convent of the Madonna delle Lacrime intervened did the Black Brigades agree to turn the bodies over to the families and leave under cover of the night
time curfew. The incident infuriated the townspeople, who were especially alert when they heard the next day that a column of Nazis and Fascists, possibly including Benito Mussolini, was moving along Lake Como.13 It is likely that they told Colonel Valerio what had happened when he came up from Milan to carry out partisan justice. And it is easy to imagine that the incident gave Valerio good reason to extend his job beyond the execution of Mussolini and his men and to prolong their suffering beyond death.

  * * *

  BEFORE LIBERATION, PIAZZALE Loreto served as a place of memory for anti-Fascists only in their imaginations. Once the city was liberated, it immediately became a genuine site of memory, even before Colonel Valerio and his companions arrived from Dongo with their Fascist dead. On the afternoon of April 27, the day before Mussolini’s execution, partisan troops from the Oltrepò Pavese district marched to Milan and into Piazzale Loreto, where they were welcomed as heroes. The partisan brigades and the people of Milan celebrating in the square were all but paying official homage to the fifteen patriots who had been dumped there. The next afternoon they were joined by more partisan troops, who marched from the Valsesia hills. By now there were wreaths of flowers where the bodies had lain and a hand-lettered sign reading “Square of the Fifteen Martyrs.”

  Thus on the morning of April 29, when the truck bringing Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, and several senior Fascist officials left their bodies in Piazzale Loreto, the partisans had hardly chosen just any Milan square. Colonel Valerio/Audisio was following the first rule of partisan vendetta: that justice should be carried out where injustice had been done. The retaliation was premeditated, according to Mussolini’s wife, Rachele, who told her biographer that she had received an anonymous letter in Salò in which the writer promised, “We will take them all to Piazzale Loreto.”14 It was also premeditated by Audisio, who claimed to have thought of dumping Mussolini in Piazzale Loreto back in August 1944, when he saw the fifteen patriots lying there. More likely, as Aldo Lampredi reported, the vendetta was planned at the last minute, decided during the journey from Dongo to Milan. In any case, it was a natural step given how much the partisans had suffered from the practice of the Fascist militiamen; they could scarcely resist doing the same when they had the chance.

  The corpses of Mussolini, Petacci, and the other Fascists endured a two-stage trial. At first they lay on the ground in a heap, exposed to the gaze—and the blows—of the crowd. Then two of the bodies, along with those of Mussolini and his mistress, were strung up on a bar in front of the gas station in the southwest corner of the piazza—safe from the rage of the people but there to be ridiculed by all comers. The first stage of this Calvary mirrored the first step in the original—the mob’s demand that Jesus be killed. “Let’s hear your speech now, let’s hear your speech!” someone called to Il Duce’s corpse, just as someone had shouted to Jesus, “Perform your miracle now, save yourself!”15 Mussolini’s theatrical skills, admired for twenty years, suddenly became the charge against him. One woman shot at the corpse, riddling it with bullets; men and women started to kick it, turning Il Duce’s “iron skull” into a mass of broken bone and gray matter. So this was the great provider, the one who would save Italy from centuries of famine and starvation! The women of Milan pelted him with their vegetables and black bread, the rations they had eaten for the five years of the war. So this was virility incarnate, the great lover! The partisans of the Oltrepò Pavese rested Mussolini’s head on Claretta Petacci’s breast, in a rude simulation of the act of love.

  The corpses of Mussolini, Petacci, and the other Fascists lay on the ground in a heap, exposed to the gaze and the blows of the crowd. (Foto Publifoto/Olympia)

  Piazzale Loreto, April 29, 1945. (Foto Publifoto/Olympia)

  The second stage of Mussolini’s Calvary, too, mirrored the Crucifixion: like Christ on the cross flanked by the two thieves, Mussolini was strung up by his heels along with the other Fascists. The fact that Mussolini was not alone showed that his fate was no different from the fate of the others; ultimately, there was nothing special about his body. They were all hung head down, which, since the Middle Ages, represented the worst possible insult. At the same time, this was a reminder of the butcher and his meat hooks; it condemned Mussolini and company to an animal destiny. And in case the crowd was unable to distinguish one criminal from another, the partisans hung the person’s name in front of each pair of feet.

  (Foto Publifoto/Olympia)

  The privilege of the victors lay in the fact that they had survived. Mussolini and the Fascists were dead; the partisans were alive, and survival was the key to their power. They drew their force from Piazzale Loreto itself, a place of sovereign transition—sovereign being the sphere in which someone can be put to death without there being a crime. In Rome, King Victor Emanuel III and his son Umberto would continue, with some confusion, to play out the comedy of their sovereignty, but only the people who had known how to finish Mussolini off could really claim any sovereign role in the new Italy.

  The public display of Mussolini’s corpse also served another basic purpose: it ruled out the possibility that Il Duce was still alive. Half a century after the event this assertion might seem tautological, but in the overheated climate of April 1945 the most obvious truisms could seem inventions and the most outrageous inventions plausible. There were many false rumors about the fate of the Axis leaders. The fact that Hitler’s body had disappeared, spirited away by the Soviet secret services as a weapon to use in the coming Cold War, would soon prompt whispers that the Führer had survived. By showing off Mussolini’s body in a public square, the partisans wanted to prevent any Italian version of that legend.

  Unintentionally, even the police who directed traffic toward Piazzale Loreto were helping to quash any such potential myth, since the more people filed into the piazza, the more witnesses observed Il Duce’s demise. The shots fired at the dictator, the spectacle of the bodies hanging upside down, the placard bearing Mussolini’s name: all these combined to rule out a new twist on the old European tradition of the “hidden king,” in which the sovereign is forced to hide but awaits the moment to return and make his subjects happy. Only an emigrant—someone like the man identified as Guglielmo P., who remained in Ethiopia after the collapse of Italy’s imperial pretensions—could imagine as late as 1951 that Mussolini was still alive and plotting his comeback. “You bring us terrible news,” he told the journalist who assured him he had personally seen Il Duce’s body in Piazzale Loreto.16

  When all was said and done, there was also a strong streak of voyeurism at work that day. Decades later, witnesses still recalled the women’s caustic comments about the stockings Claretta Petacci involuntarily displayed. It was said that firemen had appeared to clean the bodies, filthy with spit and urine after their exposure to the crowd. One spectator heard a comment that was then repeated in Milan like a litany: “They’re nice and fat, nice and fat, nice and fat.” In truth, the man admitted, “I don’t remember that they were so fat.”17 As it happened, Mussolini had lost weight during the war years; he had never regained the state of florid good health that he enjoyed during his greatest popularity. But the people of Piazzale Loreto needed to see Mussolini as fat because it would prove that he had had a plot to starve them. In the “piece of butcher’s meat” hanging in the square the Milanese saw a man the size of an ox.18 However, this was not “the ox of the nation”—a description the dictator had proudly adopted—a hardworking animal, willing to pull the plow all the way to the end of the field at the urging of the people.19 Now the crowd viewed Mussolini more as the beast in the bullfight, an animal you had to kill if you did not want to be killed yourself.

  “The filthy beast has been hung up in Piazzale Loreto,” wrote Carlo Emilio Gadda, a well-known Milanese novelist whose expressionist sensibility made him particularly acute at describing the world of the slaughterhouse.20 Gadda wrote of the dictator’s being “tossed into a tripe soup,” again pointing to the bovine qualities of Il Duce’s body. Whether ani
mal or human, Mussolini’s was a body to stare at, to consume even after the partisans—following an order by the American military command—cut him down and sent him to the city morgue. From 2:00 P.M. on April 29 until 7:30 A.M. the following day, when the coroners of the University of Milan began their autopsy, Il Duce’s body continued to satisfy the morbid curiosity of all. Not content just to photograph the bodies as they lay on the morgue slabs, the U.S. Army cameramen moved the placards with the names so the corpses could be identified more easily and placed Mussolini and Claretta Petacci arm in arm for greater effect. Earlier, when the bodies were still hanging in the piazza, Italian photographers had used rifles to prop up their cameras so as to get a better shot of the dead dictator’s face.

  No longer an object of art as in the 1930s, Mussolini’s body had been reduced to a mere thing—but a thing everyone still wanted to see. Partisans and curious onlookers who had somehow gained entry to the morgue lined up to look at Il Duce’s corpse. In an autobiographical novel, Carlo Mazzantini, a Blackshirt, tells a tale, probably invented, of a young Communist prison guard who offers to take him and other Fascist prisoners to the morgue (“We could pop over this afternoon, on the late side,” the guard says). “It still seemed incredible—incredible that he had existed and incredible that he was dead,” Mazzantini writes, particularly successful in conveying the disorientation shared by both guards and prisoners, Communists and Fascists, facing a world without Mussolini. In his account, the more thoughtful of the anti-Fascists felt only a void in the presence of Il Duce’s miserable corpse; the prison guard, “with his gun and a kerchief around his neck, seemed small and rather useless.”21 A Milanese photographer, on the other hand, captured a group of partisans at the morgue armed and smiling as they filed by the dictator’s battered remains.