Benito Mussolini — Fascism’s founder, shot and hung in a Milan square

On the afternoon of 28 April 1945, with German forces in Italy days from surrender, Italian partisans shot Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci against a villa wall at Giulino di Mezzegra, on the western shore of Lake Como. They had been captured the day before while trying to slip across the Alps into Switzerland, Mussolini reportedly disguised in a German greatcoat in a retreating convoy. The next morning the bodies were trucked to Milan and strung up by the heels from the girders of a half-built petrol station in the Piazzale Loreto, where a crowd that had suffered twenty years of his rule kicked, spat at, and reviled the corpse of the man who had invented Fascism and ruled Italy as its Duce.

Mussolini had come to power more than two decades earlier through a mixture of street violence and constitutional theatre. A former socialist agitator turned nationalist, he founded the Fascist movement in 1919 and built it on squads of black-shirted militants who beat and murdered socialists, trade unionists, and political rivals while a frightened liberal establishment looked away. In October 1922 his followers staged the March on Rome; rather than resist, King Victor Emmanuel III invited Mussolini to form a government, and on 30 October 1922 he became, at 39, the youngest prime minister in Italian history. He owed his office to a constitutional appointment underwritten by the threat of force.

From 1925 he dismantled what remained of Italian democracy, banning opposition parties, muzzling the press, and ruling by decree as a one-party dictator wrapped in a cult of the all-knowing Duce. His regime crushed dissent, conquered Ethiopia in a brutal colonial war that used poison gas, intervened in Spain, imposed antisemitic racial laws in 1938, and bound Italy ever tighter to Nazi Germany. The 1939 Pact of Steel and his decision to enter the Second World War alongside Hitler in June 1940 were the fatal commitments. Italy was militarily and economically unready, and a chain of defeats — in Greece, North Africa, and finally on Italian soil — destroyed both the war effort and the dictator’s authority.

The collapse came in two stages. In July 1943, after the Allies landed in Sicily, the Fascist regime’s own Grand Council voted Mussolini out; the king dismissed and arrested him. Rescued by German commandos, he was installed as the figurehead of a Nazi puppet state in the north, the Italian Social Republic, presiding over a savage civil war against the partisans until the German position collapsed and he was caught and shot. He died not in battle but at the hands of the Italians his regime had oppressed, and the manner of it — the public display in the Piazzale Loreto — was both vengeance and a deliberate erasure of the cult he had built.