Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II

by Nicholas Best

  * * *

  FOR RUDOLF HESS, far away in South Wales, there were no bridges to cross anymore. Following his dramatic flight to Scotland in 1941, he had been a prisoner at Maindiff Court, an outpost of Abergavenny’s mental hospital, since June 1942. Hess had spent the day in his room, as usual, hard at work on his memoirs. He had been writing all afternoon, covering sheet after sheet of foolscap with his ramblings, pausing only at half past six to call for a hot water bottle to ease the stomach pains, perhaps imaginary, that were causing him so much distress.

  It was a race against time for Hess. He knew the war was almost over. He had known it ever since the American army crossed the Rhine at Remagen, using specially trained Jews to hypnotize the Germans and prevent them from defending the bridge. Hess was determined to get his memoirs down on paper before the end came. It was most important that he did:

  I had been imprisoned for four years now with lunatics; I had been at the mercy of their torture without being able to inform anybody of this, and without being able to convince the Swiss Minister that this was so; nor of course was I able to enlighten the lunatics about their own condition …

  Outside my garden lunatics walked up and down with loaded rifles! Lunatics surrounded me in the house! When I went for a walk, lunatics walked in front of and behind me—all in the uniform of the British army.7

  Hess kept scribbling until it was time for dinner. He ate a hearty meal and then began writing again immediately afterward. He continued writing far into the night. It was the only agreeable occupation that remained to him, now that the lunatics had taken over the asylum.

  PART TWO

  SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 1945

  5

  CHAOS IN ITALY

  BLOOD WAS OOZING FROM THE BACK of the moving van as Audisio’s partisans drove the bodies of Mussolini and the others to Milan in the dark. They were stopped several times on the way by American troops, who flagged them down at road blocks and examined Audisio’s credentials by flashlight. Trusting to luck that the Americans wouldn’t notice the blood, Audisio produced a pass from partisan headquarters signed by a U.S. intelligence officer and told them he was traveling on the orders of the Committee of National Liberation.

  They reached Milan just before 11:00 p.m. on April 28. Audisio stopped to make a telephone call at the Pirelli works on the Via Fabio Filzi and was surprised to find himself arrested by another band of partisans as he returned to the van. He and his men were accused of being Fascists and lined up against the factory wall with their faces to the brickwork. Audisio could hardly credit what was happening as he tried to protest, only to be told that he would be shot out of hand if he opened his mouth again. The corpses in the van and the list of Fascists in his possession had convinced his captors that he, too, was a Fascist, removing Mussolini’s body to a place of safety. It wasn’t until after 2:00 a.m. on April 29 that a partisan officer arrived from headquarters to identify Audisio and his men and order their immediate release.

  The van continued on its way, heading for the Piazzale Loreto in the center of Milan. It drove along the Viale Padova, waking a man named Giuseppe Marchi, who rushed to the window to see what was happening. Bypassed by the American army en route to the north, Milan had been seized by the partisans four days earlier. An orgy of killing had followed as Fascists were arrested en masse and old scores settled. Hundreds of people had died and the fight was still continuing as rival groups struggled for control. A heavy motor vehicle driving through the deserted streets in the middle of the night was an obvious cause for concern at a very nervous time. Marchi watched discreetly through the gap in the shutters and did not return to bed until he saw the van disappear safely in the direction of the Piazzale Loreto.

  It arrived sometime after 3:00 a.m. The Piazzale was a vast open space at the junction of five main roads. The partisans had just renamed it the Square of the Fifteen Martyrs, in memory of the hostages shot at the filling station there in August 1944. The van drew up at the same spot, and the bodies of Mussolini and the others were thrown out, dumped in a heap beside the now-derelict garage, to show that the martyrs had been avenged and that justice, after a fashion, had been done.

  The bodies remained where they had fallen until daybreak. They were guarded by eight of Audisio’s men, too exhausted after forty-eight hours without sleep to do anything except slump wearily against the girders of the building as dawn came up over the city. The news of Mussolini’s execution had already leaked out and was spreading rapidly as passersby came to see for themselves. By 8:00 a.m., a large crowd had gathered and was growing larger by the minute, as more and more people came hurrying in from all over Milan. Some wore partisan armbands and carried rifles and shotguns with them. Others were in their Sunday best, on their way to Mass until their attention had been caught by all the commotion.

  Somebody hauled the bodies apart and tried to lay them out in order. Clara Petacci was placed against the legs of her brother Marcello, with Mussolini’s head on her breast. Two young men emerged from the crowd and began to mutilate Mussolini’s body, stamping repeatedly on his head and kicking his jaw until his face was completely disfigured. Somebody else shoved a stick into his hand and closed his fingers around it while the crowd cheered. Then a woman appeared with a gun and emptied five shots into his chest, one for each of the sons she had lost in the war.

  The crowd quickly became hysterical at that, determined to have its revenge on Mussolini. Audisio’s men lost control as the mob surged forward. Warning shots were fired, but no one took any notice. The mob fell on the bodies, spitting and snarling, lashing out with their boots and fists, yelling obscenities at the corpses. Audisio’s men sprayed them with a hose, to little effect. The people were determined to have their pound of flesh, venting their frustration on the bodies of Mussolini and his cronies for all the miseries they had suffered in the long years of war.

  “Who do you want to see?” yelled a man in shirtsleeves, his bare arms covered in blood as he held up a corpse.1

  The crowd roared out one name, then another. The man held them up in turn, one after the other, all the Fascist leaders who had been Mussolini’s accomplices in the war. He held up Mussolini, too, his eyes wide open as his head lolled forward, and Clara Petacci, her face bruised and her thighs caked with blood as she flopped in the man’s arms. The crowd was delighted. They bayed for more.

  “Higher!” people yelled. “Higher! We can’t see.”

  Somebody produced a rope. One end was thrown over a girder. Mussolini’s body was hauled up by the ankles until everyone could catch a glimpse of him, dangling upside down above the crowd. Clara followed,her nakedness in full view as her skirt fell over her face. A woman was jeered as she stood on a stepladder to tie the skirt back between Clara’s legs. Clara’s features were relatively serene, despite the battering she had taken. She remained a beautiful woman, even in death. But Mussolini looked ghastly, his face a swollen mess, his lips drawn back from his teeth like a baboon’s.

  The crowd exulted at the sight. Thousands hooted in derision as the man they had so recently applauded in life hung limp and forlorn beside his mistress, part of his skull missing from a bullet wound in the head. Their bodies were swiftly joined by two others, strung up alongside them like a row of carcasses in a butcher’s shop. Jim Roper, one of the first war correspondents to reach Milan with the advancing Americans, arrived just in time to see the bodies twisting in the wind:

  Mussolini’s face was ashen gray. His dark jowls hung loosely. He wore a nondescript military jacket and gray riding breeches of the Italian militia, which had a tiny red stripe down the sides. But the air of splendor which once surrounded the blacksmith’s son who rose to become the world’s first dictator was gone. His body, which had been manhandled many times, was covered with grime. He wore high black boots, but there was no luster left in their polish.2

  The bodies had been hanging for some time when a truck arrived, bringing another of Mussolini’s henchmen for execution. Achille Starace ha
d been a Fascist since 1920, a fanatical supporter of Il Duce’s from the first. As party secretary, he had persecuted Jews and identified himself very closely with Mussolini’s cult of personality. Now he was forced to pay the price as the partisans took their revenge. The New Yorker’s Philip Hamburger joined Roper in time to see it:

  The fanatical killer who was once secretary of the Fascist party was brought into the square in an open truck at about ten thirty in the morning. The bodies of Mussolini and the others had just been hanging for several hours. I had reached the square just before the truck arrived. As it moved slowly ahead, the crowd fell back and became silent. Surrounded by armed guards, Starace stood in the middle of the truck, hands in the air, a lithe, square-jawed, surly figure in a black shirt.

  The truck stopped for an instant close to the grotesque corpse of his old boss. Starace took one look and started to fall forward, perhaps in a faint, but was pushed back to standing position by his guards. The truck drove ahead a few feet and stopped. Starace was taken out and placed near a white wall at the rear of the gas station. Beside him were baskets of spring flowers —pink, yellow, purple and blue—placed there in honor of fifteen anti-Fascists who had been murdered in the same square six months before.

  A firing squad of partisans shot Starace in the back, and another partisan, perched on a beam some twenty feet above the ground, turned towards the crowd in the square and made a broad gesture of finality, much like a dramatic umpire calling a man out at the home plate.

  There were no roars or bloodcurdling yells; there was only silence, and then, suddenly, a sigh—a deep, moaning sound, seemingly expressive of release from something dark and fetid. The people in the square seemed to understand that this was a moment of both ending and beginning. Two minutes later, Starace had been strung up alongside Mussolini and the others. “Look at them now,” an old man beside me kept saying. “Just look at them now.”3

  After dumping Mussolini’s body in the square, Audisio drove on to partisan headquarters at the Palazzo di Brera to make his report and announce the dictator’s death on the radio. The first bulletins stated simply that Mussolini had been executed, but later reports carried graphic accounts of the scene in the Piazzale as he and his mistress hung side by side while the mob pelted them with abuse. Winston Churchill was horrified when he heard, delighted to see the back of Mussolini but appalled at the outrages inflicted on Clara. Adolf Hitler made no comment when he was handed the news on a slip of paper, but the section about Mussolini hanging upside down was later heavily underlined in pencil, almost certainly by the Führer. He had already announced that he had no intention of being taken alive by the Russians, put on display in a monkey cage for the amusement of the rabble. He did not intend to share Mussolini’s fate in death, either.

  Rachele Mussolini was still at Cernobbio when she learned of her husband’s fate, listening to the radio in the Blackshirt’s house:

  “Justice has been done!” the voice proclaimed. I found myself thinking that Benito was now beyond the reach of human ingratitude and beastliness. He had given everything for Italy—even his own life.

  The men who died with him I had known for years, in fair days and foul, as his colleagues. Some were better than others and some I had liked more than others, but they all remained steadfast and loyal to the end, despite the risk.

  And that woman too, the woman whom they put alongside Benito at the very last moment so as to increase the scandal which she paid for with her life.4

  That was the worst of it for Rachele, the ultimate betrayal. Her husband had been with another woman when he died. She couldn’t believe it, couldn’t accept that Mussolini had chosen to share his final moments with someone other than the mother of his children. Rachele still had the last letter he had written her, the one in which he had sworn that she was the only woman he had ever really loved.

  But there was no time to brood about that now. Too much was happening outside:

  I was prostrated by the news of the murders and barely noticed the shooting going on all around the house. Civil war was in full swing. My children never left me and their sobbing added to my grief, though I did my best to keep back my tears. The hours dragged on until it occurred to me that our presence in the house might involve our hosts in serious trouble. I talked it over with the children and we agreed that we had better put an end to all this uncertainty. So we sent someone to tell the Committee of Liberation at Como where we were.5

  Before long, three partisans arrived and began to search the house. A policeman went through Rachele’s suitcases while a young partisan found a miniature of her dead son, Bruno, in a valuable frame. “This belongs to the people,” he told her, quietly pocketing it for himself. Rachele complained to the policeman, who made him give it back.

  That afternoon, at her own request, she and her two children were taken to the police station at Como. Rachele had begged the bishop of Como to take Romano and Anna Maria into his care, but he had judged it wiser to refuse. Instead, she asked for her children to be placed in police custody, where they would be much safer than on the street. With so much killing going on, there was no knowing what might happen to them if they were left on the street.

  They were separated at the police station, the children hustled away while Rachele was transferred to the women’s section of the prison. She was supposed to sign the register on arrival, but the prison governor apparently insisted that it was unnecessary and scratched her name out to protect her identity. She was put in a small cell with several other new arrivals. The women were so upset at finding themselves in custody that only one of them recognized Rachele, who quickly swore her to secrecy.

  Newcomers of both sexes continued to arrive during the afternoon and early evening as Como’s Fascists were rounded up. Revenge was not long in coming, as Rachele soon discovered:

  We could hear something of what was happening outside. Someone in the courtyard read out a list of names, and this was followed by a burst of machine gun fire and, after an interval, the rumbling of cart wheels. The process was endlessly repeated and it went on like that all night. It was a ghastly business. The young woman who had recognised me was frantic about her husband. He was one of those in the courtyard, and every time the names were given out she clung to the window bars and screamed hysterically. Another woman was swearing she was a Communist who had been imprisoned for infanticide and yelling to be let out.6

  Alone among the women, Rachele remained comparatively calm. Still unrecognized, she was a puzzle to her cellmates, who kept asking why she wasn’t crying. “Haven’t you left anyone behind?” they demanded. But Rachele was past all that. With her husband gone, she had no tears anymore. She had lost her fear of death, too. It was only a matter of time before her turn came to face the firing squad, but Rachele Mussolini really didn’t care what happened to her now. All that mattered was that it didn’t happen to her children as well.

  * * *

  FARTHER SOUTH, in an eighteenth-century palace overlooking the Bay of Naples, the German army in Italy was about to surrender. The Germans still had half a million men under arms, but with most of Italy in Allied hands and their escape routes to the north blocked by partisans, they had little option but to raise the white flag. A delegation had arrived at Caserta the previous day to negotiate the terms.

  The delegation comprised two middle-ranking officers, Lieutenant-Colonel Viktor von Schweinitz of the Wehrmacht and Major Eugen Wenner of the SS, and an interpreter. They had been horrified to learn on arrival that there were no terms to negotiate. Mindful of the mistake made in November 1918, when the German army had been allowed to march home with all its weapons as if it had never been defeated, the Allies were insisting on unconditional surrender this time around. They had given the Germans a two-page surrender document to sign, accompanied by eighteen pages of supplementary details. The Germans had sat up most of the night studying it.

  The document presented them with a host of problems, not least that they lacked the po
wer to agree to it. They were under instructions from their commanders not to accept the internment of the German army after its surrender. They had been ordered to negotiate its return home instead. But the Allies were adamant that there would be no going home for the German army after it had laid down its weapons. Its men were to be imprisoned behind the wire until the Allies were ready to release them.

  Wenner and von Schweinitz couldn’t agree on a response. In a military bungalow in the grounds of Caserta’s Bourbon palace, they discussed it into the small hours of April 29. Wenner was for capitulating, but Schweinitz was worried that because the Wehrmacht had forbidden him to accept internment, they would repudiate the agreement if he did. There seemed no way out of the impasse until Gero Gävernitz, their interpreter, pointed out that German soldiers were being killed as they spoke and more were dying every minute. Schweinitz relented at that, reluctantly agreeing to accept the surrender terms if he could get them past his chief, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, at Bolzano.

  A telegram was quickly drafted to German HQ. It was past four in the morning as Gävernitz took it to General Lyman Lemnitzer, the American representative at the talks:

  With the draft of the telegram in my pocket, I drove in the early dawn alongside the cascades of the Royal Park, which reflected the waning moonlight, to General Lemnitzer’s office in the huge building of the Royal Palace.

  I found him still at work at his desk. He was greatly encouraged when I showed him the draft of the message and ordered it to be encoded at once. As Wally, our OSS radio operator, had not yet taken up his post at Wolff’s headquarters in Bolzano, the message was sent to our office in Bern, Switzerland, from which point we requested that it be taken by courier to Vietinghoff’s headquarters at Bolzano. This lengthy method of transmission made it unlikely that an answer would be received before two or three days at the earliest.7