Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Sometimes she would berate Mussolini about his other lovers. He would grow angry and insult her. She would cry, which would make him more angry still.

  She asked Zita Ritossa, her brother’s mistress, how she could keep Mussolini’s love. Zita advised her not to make herself so readily available to him. Clara said she had already tried that, but it did not seem to bother him.

  Indeed, by 1939, Mussolini was trying to get rid of her. He told Princess di Gangi of Sicily that he found Clara “revolting”. In the spring of 1943, the police guarding the entrance of the Palazzo Venezia were given orders not to let Clara in. She pushed past them, only to find Mussolini cold and unforgiving.

  “I consider the affair closed,” he said. It was the kiss-off line he had used a hundred times before with other mistresses.

  But Clara cried and he softened. He tried on several other occasions to dismiss her, but the outcome was always the same. The war was going badly, he would say, and his liaison with her made him look weak. It would not matter if he had hundreds of mistresses, but his devotion to just one had led to harmful gossip. One of his officers said that Clara was “doing Il Duce more harm than the loss of fifteen battles”.

  While Mussolini gave Clara practically nothing — a small present now and again, and occasionally 500 lire to buy a dress — the hard-pressed Italian tax-payer thought that Mussolini was using their money to keep his mistress in luxury, while they suffered the deprivations of war. In fact, it was Roman shopkeepers and businessmen who were keeping her in expensive clothes and perfumes in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with Il Duce.

  “I won’t come in the day any more,” Clara begged. “Just after dark. For a few minutes, just to see you and to kiss you. I don’t want to cause a scandal.”

  The real scandal, though, was her family. Before the war they had built a luxurious villa in the fashionable Camilluccia district. It had black marble bathrooms. Knowing which side their bread was buttered, they lavished special attention on Clara’s bedroom. The walls were mirrored and the huge silk-covered bed was raised on a dais. But when Mussolini visited and was asked whether he liked the place, he replied: “Not much.”

  Clara’s mother suggested that she ask Mussolini to pay for the villa, but Clara refused even to suggest it. However, everyone assumed that he had picked up the tab.

  Even if they did not receive direct patronage from Il Duce, the Petacci family were clever enough to use their position to their advantage. Clara’s brother Marcello, a naval doctor, for example, made a fortune smuggling gold through the diplomatic bag.

  In July 1943, when the Allies landed in Sicily, Mussolini was voted out of office by the Fascist Grand Council. The next day he was arrested by order of King Victor Emmanuel III. Clara was arrested too and imprisoned in the Visconti Castle at Novara. There she spent her time writing love letters to her beloved Benito — who she addressed as “Ben” — and filling her diaries with memories of the wonderful times she had had with him.

  “I wonder if you’ll get this letter of mine,” she wrote, “or will they read it. I don’t know and I don’t care if they do. Because although I used to be too shy to tell you that I loved you, today I’m telling all the world and shouting it from the roof-tops. I love you more than ever.”

  The letters never reached him. They were intercepted by the censors Mussolini was rescued by the Germans and set up a puppet state in Northern Italy. Clara, determined to rejoin him, persuaded the nuns who were looking after her to smuggle a letter out to the German headquarters in Novara. They sent a staff car to fetch her.

  Although the Germans did not trust her, they thought they could use her. They found her a villa on Lake Garda where Mussolini could visit her every day. Her guard at the villa was the young and charming Major Franz Spogler, who reported directly to Gestapo headquarters in Vienna.

  However, the Germans’ plans fell a little flat because Rachele learned that Clara was around. Her jealous outbursts meant that Mussolini could see little of his mistress. But occasionally, in the evenings, he would leave his official Alfa Romeo outside his office to allay suspicion and drive over to see her in a small Fiat. Their meetings were cold and sad.

  Twice he told her that he did not want to see her any more. On both occasions, she began to cry and, yet again, he relented.

  Eventually Rachele could take no more and went to see Clara herself. Clara sat in silence while Rachele berated her. Then, when Rachele’s ranting finished, Clara said quietly: “Il Duce loves you, Signora. I have never been allowed to say a word against you.”

  This placated Rachele for a moment. Then Clara offered to give her typed copies of the letters Mussolini had sent her.

  “I don’t want typed copies. That’s not why I came,” Rachele shouted and flew into a rage again. She hurled abuse at Clara. With her face growing redder and redder, Clara phoned Mussolini.

  “Ben, your wife is here,” she said. “What shall I do?”

  Rachele grabbed the phone and forced Mussolini to tell Clara that he had known beforehand that Rachele had been planning to come to see her. Rachele told Clara that the Fascists hated her almost as much as the partisans did.

  Both women ended up crying. When Rachele eventually left, her parting curse was: “They’ll take you to the Piazzale Loreto” — Milan’s haunt for down-and-out prostitutes. This is exactly what happened.

  As the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula, Mussolini left Rachele to make a last stand at Valtellina. When they parted in the garden of their villa, he said he was ready to “enter into the grand silence of death”.

  His advisers told him that he should fly to safety in Switzerland or Spain. A former mistress, Francesca Lavagnini, invited him to join her in Argentina, while (tiara suggested that they stage a car accident and announce that he had been killed.

  Mussolini rejected all these proposals. Once he had made sure Rachele and his family were safe, he urged Clara to flee to Spain. The Petacci family went, but Clara herself refused to go.

  “I am following my destiny,” she wrote to a friend. “What will happen to me I don’t know, but I cannot question my fate.”

  Together Mussolini and Clara fled north to Como. There, Elena Curti Cucciate, the pretty, fair-haired daughter of his former mistress Angela Curti, joined them. Mussolini went for a walk with her, which sent Clara into paroxysms of jealousy.

  “What is that woman doing here?” she screamed hysterically. “You must get rid of her at once. You must! You must!”

  He didn’t. Instead, Elena and Mussolini travelled on in a German convoy, but Clara caught up with them when they were stopped by a partisan road block on the road to Switzerland. The partisans said that, to prevent unnecessary bloodshed, they would allow the Germans through — but not any Italian Fascists. Clara urged Mussolini to disguise himself as a German and make his escape. Then she burst into tears. He donned a German greatcoat and helmet and climbed on board a German lorry. As it pulled away, Clara ran after it and tried to clamber on, but one of Mussolini’s ministers grabbed her. It took all his strength to pull her off the tailboard.

  Someone, however, had spotted Mussolini at the road block. In the next town, the convoy was searched and he was found. The redoubtable Clara caught them up again, only to be arrested herself. At first, she pretended that she was not Clara Petacci but a Spaniard. She even asked the partisans what they would do to Clara Petacci if they caught her. But soon she confessed.

  “You all hate me,” she told her interrogators. “You think I went after him for his money and his power. It isn’t true. My love has not been selfish. I have sacrificed myself for him.” She begged to be locked up in the same jail as him.

  “If you kill him, kill me too,” she said.

  Orders were given to take Mussolini and Clara to Milan. When the two cars carrying them met up on the road, they were allowed a few moments to talk. Clara was absurdly formal.

  “Good evening, Your Excellency,” she said.

  Musso
lini was angry to see her.

  “Signora, why are you here?” he demanded.

  “Because I want to be with you,” she replied.

  The prisoners and their escorts arrived at Azzano at a quarter past three in the morning. They were to stay at the home of a partisan family called the De Marias.

  At about four o’clock the next night, a man in a brown mackintosh named Audisio turned up, saying that he had come to rescue them. They were driven to a nearby villa where they were ordered out of the car. Their “rescuers” were Communist partisans who had been ordered to execute Mussolini, along with fifteen other leading Fascists.

  Clara threw her arms around Mussolini and screamed: “No! No! You mustn’t do it. You mustn’t.”

  “Leave him alone,” Audisio said, “or you’ll be shot too.”

  But this threat meant nothing to Clara. If Mussolini must die, then she wanted to die too and she clung on to him.

  Audisio raised his gun and pulled the trigger but missed his target. Clara rushed at him and grabbed the barrel of the gun with both hands. As they wrestled, Audisio pulled the trigger again.

  “You cannot kill us like this,” Clara screamed.

  Audisio pulled the trigger a third time, but the gun was well and truly jammed. So he borrowed a machine gun from a fellow partisan and sprayed them with bullets. The first shot killed Clara. The second hit Mussolini and knocked him down. The third killed him.

  Their two bodies were thrown onto the back of a lorry, on top of the corpses of the other Fascists who had been executed. They were driven to Milan. In the Piazzale Loreto, they were strung up from a lamp-post by the feet. Clara’s skirt fell down over her face, leaving her lower half naked. A partisan stood on a box and tied the torn hem of her skirt up between her legs to preserve some of her modesty. Curiously, though Mussolini’s mistress was widely hated, many men who were there that day remarked on Clara’s face. Even beneath the dirt and smears of blood, they said, she was remarkably beautiful.

  5. HITLER HAVING A BALL

  Adolf Hitler was the most evil man of modern times; but, although he has been dead for over fifty years, he still has a growing band of followers across Europe, America, Russia, India, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Far East. Racists, anti-Semites, religious fundamentalists, authoritarians and just plain nutcases are mesmerized by his demagoguery, his totalitarian vision and his simple, bloodthirsty solution to any political problem. But if his followers knew about his pitiful, pathetic, perverted sex life, they would find it hard to hold him in such awe. It is difficult to have any respect for a man who likes to cower naked on the floor while being kicked by a woman or gets the ultimate sexual satisfaction from being urinated or defecated upon. Several of his lovers committed suicide, they were so appalled at his depravity.

  There is no doubt that Hitler was a very strange man. That was plain long before he came to power. His ranting, hypnotic speeches often excited women to orgasm. A man who worked as a cleaner in Munich said that they would sometimes lose control of their bladders too and the whole of the front row would have be to sponged dry. Hitler would have loved that.

  Homosexual men were convinced that Hitler was a homosexual too. Almost all of his bodyguards were homosexual. So were many of the inner circle of the Nazi Party. Reichsmarschall Herman Goring was a transvestite. Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess was known as “Fraulcin Anna” and Ernst Rohm, the homosexual head of the Nazi storm troopers and Hitler’s long-time friend, said: “He is one of us.”

  Soon after the Night of the Long Knives, when Rohm and his friends were killed, there were mass arrests of homosexuals in Germany. The following year, the law was revised to make it illegal for a man even “to touch another man in a suggestive way”. Homosexuals were given pink stars to wear and sent to the concentration camps. It is estimated that over half a million homosexuals died during Hitler’s Reich. What was he trying to prove?

  Early newsreels show that his gestures and walk were very effeminate — until Leni Riefenstahl, the great film actress, film-maker and possible lover of Hitler, began shooting him from a low camera angle to emphasize his power and encourage his mythic status. American generals would joke that he would never have gotten through West Point with his camp little mincing walk.

  Another characteristic was his habit of clasping his hands protectively in front of his genitals. This prompted the joke that he was “hiding the last unemployed member of the Third Reich”.

  When war broke out, the Allies needed to know what made the Nazi dictator tick. If they could get inside the mind of the man, perhaps they would be able to predict what he was going to do next. In America, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the OSS — the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA put Boston psychologist Dr Walter C. Langer on the case. Assisted by Dr Gertrud Kurth, a refugee from Hitler’s persecution, and Professor Henry A. Murray of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, he collected all the material he could from published sources and interviewed as many people as he could lied who had known Hitler personally. Langer and his team made a particular effort to understand Hitler’s sex life. In the psychoanalytical theories that were fashionable at that time, this was thought to be crucial.

  Although Langer’s report was sent to propaganda departments, it was not itself a tool of propaganda. Langer tried, as objectively as possible, to distil everything that was known about Hitler and his sexual proclivities. General Donovan expressed his satisfaction with the report. It was circulated widely. British foreign secretary Lord Halifax personally congratulated Langer; and it was read by Churchill and Roosevelt with evident satisfaction.

  Given his psycho-analytic background, Langer, naturally, traced the roots of Hitler’s behaviour back to his childhood. Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, was an Austrian customs official on the German border, a good-looking man and an insatiable womanizer. He was the illegitimate son of Anna Maria Schicklgruber, a housemaid who had worked in the home of a wealthy Jew named Frankenberger. Frankenberger was probably Alois’s father. Later, Anna Maria married Johann Georg Heidler, whose name could be spelt in a number of ways, including the way Alois chose to spell it — Hitler. But Alois Schicklgruber did not change his name to Hitler until the age of forty, long after his step-father was dead and only then because he thought it would help his career in the customs service.

  Hitler’s mother, Klara Polzl, first came to work for her uncle, Alois Hitler, when she was sixteen and, by all accounts, very beautiful. She was nanny to Therese, Alois’s illegitimate daughter by a former lover in Vienna. A relative of Johann I Heidler, she was not a blood relative of Alois’s.

  Alois lived in a tavern in Linz and Klara had been warned about his drunken, womanizing ways. He was married to Anna Glassl, fourteen years his senior. She had brought with her a considerable dowry, which Alois soon squandered while satisfying his sexual lust with a serving maid, seventeen-year-old Franziska “Fanni” Matzelberger.

  Klara’s supple young body scarcely escaped the attention of the lecherous Alois, and soon the atmosphere became so heated that Anna could stand no more and she fled.

  With Anna out of the way, Alois’s young lover Fanni took her place. She was clever enough to spot that Klara could, in turn, step into her former place as Alois’s mistress. So she refused to go on living with Alois unless he sent Klara away.

  Fanni and Alois married. They had two children, Alois Junior and Angela, but soon after the birth of Angela, Fanni became ill and Alois sent for Klara to nurse her on her deathbed. When Fanni finally succumbed, Alois consoled himself with Klara. At the same time, he was having an incestuous affair with his daughter Therese, who had an illegitimate son by him. Klara, too, became pregnant.

  Alois and Klara married. Their first son, Gustav, was born a few days after the ceremony, but died within a few days. Klara lost two more children in a diphtheria epidemic. Then on the morning of 7 January, 1885, she had a son, Adolf, who survived.

  Having lost three children already,
Klara lavished all her love on Adolf” . She continued breast-feeding him long after the age when he should have been weaned.

  The morbid bond between mother and son was further strengthened by the death of another child, Adolf’s brother Edmund, at the age of six. Mara’s sixth and final child, Paula, survived but was feeble-minded. Hitler, alone of Mara’s six children, was sound. Her love for all of them was focused on him. He described himself throughout his life as a “mother’s boy”, even writing about his mother in his political treatise, Mein Kampf.

  The cloying love between Klara and her only sound child left little room for Alois. A promotion meant that he was away from home a lot, but when he returned he expected sex from her. Once when Klara would not oblige him, he went to visit his former lover in Vienna, Therese’s mother. But she was in the advanced stages of pregnancy and could not help him out. Alois returned to Linz full of sexual craving and, on a hot August night, he brutally raped Klara in front of her son who was, at the time, too young to go to her assistance.

  For the first seventeen years of his life, the young Hitler witnessed the total sexual subjugation of his beloved mother by his brutal and drunken father, until January 1903, when Alois collapsed and died. It was a relief to all concerned. His epitaph read: “The sharp word that fell occasionally from his lips could not belie the warm heart that beat beneath the rough exterior.”

  That epitaph certainly belied Hitler’s feeling for him. After the Anschluss, which unified Austria with Germany, the cemetery where Alois was buried became part of an artillery firing range, destroying his grave for ever.

  With Alois dead, mother and son were alone together, but not for long. Four years later, Klara Hitler contracted breast cancer. The doctor who treated her, Eduard Bloch, was Jewish. I Hitler was also one of his patients, having caught syphilis in Vienna.

  Despite the fact that his mother had already had one breast removed and was plainly dying of cancer, Hitler had decided to enroll at the General School of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As the capital of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna was a cesspit of vice. Its infamous red-light district was Spittelberggasse, where girls sat seminaked behind lace curtains.