--- title: How Benito Mussolini died url: https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/endings/benito-mussolini/ description: Benito Mussolini, head of the Italian government from 1922 to 1943 and then of the German-backed Italian Social Republic, was captured at Dongo on 27… section: FRAME --- ![Illustration: a Second World War naval-intelligence collage of a Pacific theatre map, aerial reconnaissance photographs and radar plots.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-wwii-pacific.jpg) [Regimes](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/) / [How they died](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/endings/) # How Benito Mussolini died At a glance The head of the Italian government from 1922 to 1943 was captured by partisans at Dongo on 27 April 1945 and shot with Clara Petacci the next afternoon; his body was hung by the feet in a Milan square on 29 April, stolen in 1946 and buried at Predappio in 1957. - **Leader:** Benito Mussolini - **Died:** 28 April 1945 - **Place:** Giulino di Mezzegra (Mezzegra), near Lake Como, Italy - **Cause:** Shot by Italian partisans acting for the Committee of National Liberation for Northern Italy (who fired, and at what hour, is disputed) - **Regime:** [Fascist Italy under Mussolini](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/fascist-italy/) On this page - [The final days](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/endings/benito-mussolini/#the-final-days) - [The death](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/endings/benito-mussolini/#the-death) - [What happened to the body](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/endings/benito-mussolini/#what-happened-to-the-body) - [How the death was announced and used](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/endings/benito-mussolini/#how-the-death-was-announced-and-used) - [Timeline](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/endings/benito-mussolini/#timeline) - [Same-standard note](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/endings/benito-mussolini/#same-standard-note) - [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/endings/benito-mussolini/#sources) **In one line:** Benito Mussolini, head of the Italian government from 1922 to 1943 and then of the German-backed Italian Social Republic, was captured at Dongo on 27 April 1945, shot with his companion Clara Petacci at Giulino di Mezzegra on 28 April, and displayed with other Fascists in Milan's Piazzale Loreto on 29 April. ## The final days The king dismissed Mussolini on 25 July 1943 and he was arrested. German paratroopers freed him on 12 September 1943, and from 23 September he headed the Italian Social Republic in the German-occupied north (see [Fascist Italy under Mussolini](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/fascist-italy/)). On 25 April 1945, as the Allied offensive broke through in the Po valley, the Committee of National Liberation for Northern Italy (CLNAI) called a general insurrection. That day Mussolini met CLNAI delegates at the Archbishop's residence in Milan. The talks ended without agreement and he left the city that evening for Como. On 26 April he moved up Lake Como, and on 27 April he joined a German column of about forty vehicles heading north. At Musso partisans of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade stopped the column. The Germans were let through on condition that no Italians travelled with them. In the afternoon at Dongo (Italian sources give about 16:00) Mussolini was found in a German lorry, wearing a German greatcoat and helmet, and was identified and arrested. Clara Petacci, his companion since the 1930s, was arrested with him. Mussolini was held overnight at Germasino and then taken to a farmhouse at Bonzanigo (Mezzegra), where Petacci joined him in the early hours of 28 April. ## The death The CLNAI leadership had decided that he should be put to death rather than handed over to the Allies, although article 29 of the 1943 armistice required Italy to surrender him on demand. The man sent to carry it out was the Communist partisan Walter Audisio, known as "Colonnello Valerio", with Aldo Lampredi and others. ![A dark iron gate between two white gateposts in a stone wall, with a small black cross plaque on the wall reading Benito Mussolini 28 aprile 1945](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/images/endings/benito-mussolini-3.jpg) The gate of Villa Belmonte on Via XXIV Maggio, Giulino di Mezzegra, photographed in 2011. The plaque on the wall to its left marks the place where, in Audisio's account, Mussolini and Clara Petacci were shot. [Source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Villabelmonte.JPG): Photograph by kibira, 9 October 2011, Giulino di Mezzegra, Public domain (PD-self, released by the photographer). Audisio's account, published in *L'Unità* on 25 to 29 March 1947, runs as follows. He reached Dongo in the afternoon of 28 April, collected Mussolini and Petacci at Bonzanigo, drove a short way to the gate of Villa Belmonte on Via XXIV Maggio at Giulino di Mezzegra, and read a sentence in the name of the Italian people. His submachine gun jammed. He took the partisan Michele Moretti's MAS 38 and fired. Italian sources give the time as 16:10. Lampredi's confidential report of 1972, published in *L'Unità* on 23 January 1996, confirms the mechanics but omits the reading of a sentence and differs on Mussolini's last words. The disputed points are these. - **Who fired.** Audisio claimed to have fired himself. Other accounts give the shot to Moretti. In 1993 the partisan Urbano Lazzaro claimed that "Valerio" was in fact Luigi Longo, the Communist leader, which the party's 1947 identification of Audisio contradicts. - **Time and place.** Bruno Lonati's memoir of 1994 puts the killing at about 11:00 at the farmhouse and claims British direction. Giorgio Pisanò and Franco Bandini also put it earlier, at or near the house. A 1993 reconstruction from stomach contents suggests about 05:30. Several historians reject these versions. - **The wounds.** The autopsy of 30 April by Professor Caio Mario Cattabeni reported at least seven entry wounds on Mussolini's body. Reports give seven or nine, and the calibres were not identified. The same evening, at about 17:50, fifteen prisoners from the column, including the party secretary Alessandro Pavolini and Nicola Bombacci, were shot on the lakefront at Dongo. ## What happened to the body The bodies of Mussolini, Petacci and those shot at Dongo were loaded onto a lorry that evening. They reached Milan at about 03:40 on 29 April (Italian sources) and were left on the ground at Piazzale Loreto. Sources give the number as seventeen or eighteen. The place was chosen because on 10 August 1944 fifteen prisoners had been shot there on the orders of the German SS commander in Milan, Theodor Saevecke, by men of the Fascist Muti legion, and their bodies left on view. Achille Starace was captured in Milan and shot in the square at midday, and his body was added. ![Several bodies hanging upside down by the feet from a steel girder frame above a crowd of onlookers in a Milan square](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/images/endings/benito-mussolini-1.jpg) The bodies hung at Piazzale Loreto, Milan, on 29 April 1945; Mussolini and Clara Petacci are among them. Commons credits the photograph to Vincenzo Carrese. [Source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mussolini_e_Petacci_a_Piazzale_Loreto,_1945.jpg): Photograph credited on Commons to Vincenzo Carrese, Milan, 29 April 1945; Commons source: auction and collector listings (paulfrecker.com, the-saleroom.com). The photographer credit is Commons' and was not independently verified., Public domain (Commons tags PD-Italy and PD-1996: Italian simple photograph, protection of 20 years expired before 1996). **Content note:** Content note: a historical photograph of the bodies of Benito Mussolini, Clara Petacci and other Fascists hung by the feet in public after their deaths on 29 April 1945. It is shown uncropped as a record of the event and of how it was staged. This object is shown as it was published. [Why](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/#as-it-was) ![A gravel path between tall clipped cypresses leading to a small brick chapel with a white cross on its roof, under a blue sky](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/images/endings/benito-mussolini-4.jpg) The approach to the Mussolini family crypt in the San Cassiano cemetery at Predappio, photographed in September 2018, where his body was buried on 1 September 1957. [Source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Predappio,_tomba_di_Benito_Mussolini_(01).jpg): Photograph by Gianni Careddu (Wikimedia Commons user Discanto), 23 September 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). A crowd gathered from early morning. Accounts say the bodies were spat on, kicked, shot at and urinated on, and that Mussolini's face was disfigured. About 11:00 firemen washed them and hung seven, among them Mussolini and Petacci, by the feet from the girder of an unfinished petrol station (an Esso station in English-language accounts). Participants said this put the bodies out of the crowd's reach; it has also been read as a mark of infamy. In the afternoon the bodies were taken down and removed to the Institute of Legal Medicine at Piazzale Gorini. Italian accounts say the partisan command ordered this, and English-language accounts say American military authorities did. The sources consulted do not settle it. Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave at Musocco cemetery in Milan. On the night of 22 to 23 April 1946 a group of neo-Fascists led by Domenico Leccisi, of the Democratic Fascist Party, dug up the body and carried it off. It was found at the Certosa di Pavia on 12 August 1946. The state then kept it at a Capuchin convent at Cerro Maggiore for eleven years. In 1957 the government of Adone Zoli released it to his widow Rachele, and on 1 September 1957 he was buried in the family crypt at the San Cassiano cemetery in Predappio. ![Illustration: a rally crowd seen from behind as anonymous silhouettes, with crowd-estimate charts.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/graphics/rally-silhouettes.jpg) Illustration, not an archive object ## How the death was announced and used The CLNAI's communiqué of 29 April described the shooting of Mussolini and his accomplices as "la conclusione necessaria di una fase storica" ("the necessary conclusion of a historical phase"), as quoted by the historical site Fatti per la Storia. The historian Claudio Pavone (*Una guerra civile*, 1991, pp. 512-514) writes that the CLNAI fully endorsed the execution, "deprecando soltanto" ("deprecating only") "l'esplosione di odio popolare che è trasceso in quest'unica occasione a eccessi" ("the explosion of popular hatred that went to excesses on this one occasion"), which it also attributed "al clima voluto e creato da Mussolini" ("to the climate wanted and created by Mussolini"). The display was explained as retaliation for the Loreto killings of 1944; the sources consulted give no written order for it. ![A printed postcard of the hanging bodies, with the names Bombacci, Gelomini, Mussolini, Petacci, Pavolini and Starace written above them and the caption GIUSTIZIA E' FATTA, MILANO 29-4-45](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/images/endings/benito-mussolini-2.jpg) A postcard print of the scene at Piazzale Loreto, captioned "Giustizia è fatta" ("Justice is done") and dated Milan, 29 April 1945; the names above the bodies are as printed on the card. [Source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_dead_body_of_Benito_Mussolini_Piazzale_Loreto.jpg): Postcard print, unknown author, Milan, 29 April 1945; Commons source: auction listing (liveauctioneers.com), Public domain (Commons tags PD-Italy and PD-1996; photographer unknown; the printed card bears a 'reproduction forbidden' notice, which does not extend the expired Italian term). **Content note:** Content note: a postcard print of the same scene, showing bodies hung by the feet and a crowd; the caption "Giustizia è fatta" is the postcard's own. Shown uncropped as a record of how the event was circulated at the time. This object is shown as it was published. [Why](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/#as-it-was) Photographs of the hanging were printed as postcards. One surviving card carries the caption "Giustizia è fatta" ("Justice is done") with the date. *Time* of 7 May 1945 wrote: "The first of the Fascist dictators was the first to meet death at the hands of the people he had so long oppressed." The phrase "macelleria messicana" ("Mexican butchery") for the scene in the square is attributed to the resistance leader Ferruccio Parri, though some sources give it to Leo Valiani. The news reached Adolf Hitler in Berlin on 29 April (Ian Kershaw; see [How Adolf Hitler died](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/endings/adolf-hitler/)). The theft of 1946 and the reburial of 1957 are the subject of Sergio Luzzatto's *The Body of Il Duce* (2005). ## Timeline - 25 July 1943: dismissed by the king and arrested. - 12 September 1943: freed by German paratroopers; 23 September, the Italian Social Republic is set up. - 25 April 1945: the CLNAI calls the insurrection; Mussolini leaves Milan for Como in the evening. - 27 April 1945: stopped at Musso and arrested at Dongo. - 28 April 1945: shot with Clara Petacci at Giulino di Mezzegra (Italian sources give 16:10); fifteen others are shot at Dongo. - 29 April 1945: the bodies are displayed at Piazzale Loreto, Milan; Starace is shot there. - 30 April 1945: autopsy by Cattabeni. - 22 to 23 April 1946: the body is stolen; 12 August 1946, found at the Certosa di Pavia. - 1 September 1957: reburied at Predappio. ## Same-standard note This page uses the same sections and definitions as every "How they died" page and marks disputed points with the sources on each side. Mussolini died in the last days of a war, killed without a trial by armed partisans, and the display of his body was public and carried out by a crowd and partisan units. This differs from leaders who died of illness or in custody, and from those who were tried first, such as Ceausescu, and no equivalence is implied. ## Sources - Walter Audisio, *L'Unità*, 25 to 29 March 1947, and *In nome del popolo italiano* (1975); Aldo Lampredi, report of 1972, *L'Unità*, 23 January 1996. - Claudio Pavone, *Una guerra civile* (Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), pp. 512-514, extract at https://www.deportati.it/static/upl/cl/claudiopavone,piazzaleloreto29aprile1945.pdf, for the CLNAI endorsement. - Armistice of 29 September 1943, article 29. - R. J. B. Bosworth, *Mussolini* (2002); Sergio Luzzatto, *The Body of Il Duce* (2005); Ian Kershaw, *Hitler, 1936 to 1945: Nemesis* (2000). - Secondary summaries used for dates and competing accounts: "La morte di Mussolini", Fatti per la Storia, https://fattiperlastoria.it/morte-mussolini-piazzale-loreto. - Australian War Memorial, record P05264.007 (postcard photograph): https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1176162 - "Italy: Death in Milan", *Time*, 7 May 1945: https://time.com/archive/6599845/italy-death-in-milan/