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.

Mobutu Sese Seko — 32 years of looting, swept away by a rebel march

In mid-May 1997, Mobutu Sese Seko fled the country he had ruled for nearly thirty-two years. A rebel column under Laurent-Désiré Kabila was closing on the capital, Kinshasa; the army Mobutu had starved and neglected melted away rather than fight; and the dictator, his body wasted by advanced prostate cancer, boarded a plane into exile. On 17 May 1997 Kabila’s forces entered Kinshasa unopposed, and the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mobutu died less than four months later, on 7 September 1997, in Rabat, Morocco, and was buried far from the nation he had treated as a private estate.

Mobutu had seized power on 24 November 1965 in a bloodless coup, his second intervention in the chaos that followed the Congo’s independence from Belgium. As army chief he had earlier helped engineer the removal of the elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba, whose handover to secessionists in Katanga ended in Lumumba’s murder in 1961. Backed by the United States, France, and Belgium as a Cold War bulwark against communism, Mobutu consolidated absolute power, banned rival parties, and in 1967 made his Popular Movement of the Revolution the only legal party — one every citizen was deemed to belong to by birth.

He recast the country in his own image. In 1971 he renamed the Congo “Zaire” and launched a campaign of authenticité, ordering Zairians to drop Christian names and Western dress; he took the name Mobutu Sese Seko, “the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest.” Behind the nationalist theater, the state became a machine for personal enrichment. He nationalized foreign businesses and handed them to relatives and cronies who looted them, amassed one of the largest private fortunes on earth — by some estimates rivaling the size of the national debt — and let the country’s roads, hospitals, and schools rot while he built a palace in his jungle hometown and chartered Concorde flights to Paris. Ordinary Zairians, sitting atop some of the richest mineral deposits in the world, grew steadily poorer.

The regime outlasted the Cold War only briefly. When the Soviet collapse removed Mobutu’s value as an anti-communist client, Western support cooled. The decisive blow came from the east: the 1994 Rwandan genocide spilled millions of refugees and armed génocidaires into Zaire, and in 1996 Rwanda and Uganda backed a rebellion that gathered Zairian opponents around Kabila and marched across the vast country in months. Mobutu, dying and abandoned, could not stop it. His fall removed a kleptocrat, but it opened a far bloodier chapter: the wars that followed would draw in much of the region and kill millions.