Did the Brutal Death of Mussolini Contribute to Hitler’s Suicide?
Did the Brutal Death of Mussolini Contribute to Hitler’s Suicide? Seventy years ago on Tuesday, partisans in the backwoods of northern Italy summarily executed Benito Mussolini after they happened to foil the dictator’s attempted escape across the Swiss border. Seventy years ago on Tuesday, partisans in the backwoods of northern Italy summarily executed Benito Mussolini after they happened to foil the dictator’s attempted escape across the Swiss border. “You can imagine the shock when they found him. They had no idea what to do with him,” Professor David Kertzer — whose book, The Pope and Mussolini , won a Pulitzer Prize last week — told Foreign Policy. The partisans settled on shooting Mussolini alongside his young mistress, Claretta Petacci, and passed their bodies to an angry crowd, which brutalized the corpses and hung them upside down from a girder in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, for display and preservation. Mussolini and Petacci greeted U.S. military autho...