Who killed them? And why?

 

April 28, 1945, Giulino di Mezzegra, in the Province of Como, Italy. In a place so marginal to be almost invisible, there dies, after having been captured while he was fleeing and convicted without a trial, Benito Mussolini. And with him, Claretta Petacci.

There was no order to shoot Benito Mussolini and his ministers. So, who did really kill him? A dialog with Luciano Garibaldi.

From Pangea, rivista avventuriera di cultura e idee.

Traduzione di Leonardo Pavese

About that day, oh what a paradox, the only certain thing is that it is not certain what you, certainly, will find in history books. That is, that the one who killed Il Duce was “Colonel Valerio,” an alias that can be traced back to Walter Audisio, an accountant from Alessandria, later a representative and a Senator of the Republic in communist garb.

One could say that what matters are the outcomes and not the means. But it is not true: legends are built on the bodies of leaders. The identity of a nation is built on the corpse of her killed leader. And it is better not to go into details about who commissioned the killing. It is best not to get lost in subtleties, so that the myth will acquire a clear statuary dimension, pure, one that can even be turned “pop,” like in Carlo Lizzani’s movie Mussolini ultimo atto.

In order to exist the myth needs a dead man; better if his body is examined in all its details, hanging upside down; and even better if it is disfigured.

        Luciano Garibaldi, an Italian reporter with the trait of frankness (and who does not pretend to be a historian), began to shed some light on all the incongruences about the death of Mussolini in 1994, through a series of reportages in the paper La Notte. And started to write a book, La pista inglese (The British TracK, published by Ares in 2002), in which he put forth the hypothesis of an action of the British services in the murder of the Duce. According to Garibaldi, it was Winston Churchill who would have wanted to eliminate his former partner Mussolini and therefore instigated the Italian resistance partisans. We use the conditional here, because the phantomatic exchange of letters between Churchill and Mussolini is the holy grail of every contemporary historian.

    But Garibaldi’s report is endowed with the gifts of synthesis, plenty of sources and vis polemica. 

Luciano Garibaldi

 

            The following is our Luciano Garibaldi interview:

Let’s start from “Colonel Valerio,” that is, Audisio: what was his role in the operation that resulted in the death of Mussolini and Claretta Petacci?

            “Colonel Valerio” who, according to the history books was the book-keeper Walter Audisio, according instead to “Bill” (Urbano Lazzaro, the partisan who captured Mussolini) was Luigi Longo, number two of the Italian Communist Party; but, even today, nobody knows who he really was.

Colonel Valerio arrived in Dongo in the early afternoon of Saturday, April 28, 1945, and announced in the public square that he had received from the CLN-AI (National Liberation Committee – Northern Italy) the order of executing on the spot “Mussolini and all the Secretaries of the Republic of Salò,” who had been captured by the partisans while they tried to escape. However, he did not obey his orders to the letter. Having found Benito Mussolini already dead, he “executed” his corpse and, as far as the others were concerned, he did not limit himself to the Republican ministers but, for good measure, he had a Republican Air Force captain shot, plus an Interior Ministry clerk, a journalist, an old former communist comrade and others; and, even that — the total amounted to fifteen dead — was not really enough for him.

Who had ordered the execution of Benito Mussolini?

            The order of shooting Mussolini and his secretaries did not exist. Il CLN-AI, which was the legitimate representative of the Bonomi government in northern Italy, had not issued any death sentence, let alone an execution order, because it was not in its power.    Sandro Pertini the representative of the Socialist Party in the CLN-AI (later the President of the Italian Republic) in a speech broadcast at 8 pm on April 27, (therefore, many hours after Mussolini had been captured), and broadcast again at 1 pm the following day (when Mussolini was already dead) said:

            “He must be delivered to a People’s Tribunal that will try him with no delay. He must be and will be executed. This is what we demand; even though we think that, for that man, a firing squad would be too much of an honor, because he deserves to be killed like a mangy dog.”

Without the “mangy dogs,” but with similar references to the need of a “tribunal,” were the statements by the representatives of the other parties: Leo Valiani for the Partito d’Azione, Achille Marazza for the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana) and Giustino Arpesani del Partito Liberale. On the same wavelength was Ferruccio Parri (founder of the Partito d’Azione, later Italian Prime Minister), still hiding in Switzerland, who added: “As far as the people who were shot on the public square in Dongo, whom “Valerio” chose according to unknown criteria, it seems to me that some of them absolutely did not deserve that end.”

In fact, the CLN-AI should have complied with the April 22, 1945, n.142 Dll (Lieutenancy Legislative Decree)  concerning “Crimes committed by Mussolini and the Fascist Ministers, which instituted the CAS (Extraordinary Assize Courts) to try them.

Why should the CLN-AI act illegally? As a rebellion against the Government of the Lieutenancy? There was no reason to do that. The fact is that, faced with the fait accompli, that is, the killing of Mussolini and Claretta Petacci by the British services, the CLN-AI was forced to mumble the following posthumous claim after a frenetic consultation with Rome:

            “The CLN-AI declares that the execution of Mussolini and his accomplices, ordered by the CLN-AI, is the necessary conclusion of an historic phase which leaves our country in moral and material ruins,” etc.

Let’s go back to Colonel Valerio: what are the elements that render this character so historically shady?

            A book would not be enough to describe in detail the contradictions in which the book-keeper Walter Audisio (presented by the Communist Party as “Colonel Valerio”) stumbled during the twenty-three years he had left to live after that April of 1945 . But let us examine the most obvious ones.

            In a memorial he dictated to the party’s newspaper L’Unità and published by that paper between November 18 and December 17, 1945, Audisio insisted emphatically on discussing the exchange he had with Claretta, when he denied her permission to put on her panties.

Walter Audisio

The story was contradicted at the time by Lia De Maria in whose house the Duce and Claretta Petacci were taken as prisoners, who said that Claretta must have surely worn underpants because she was having her period. Well, in Audisio's book In nome del Popolo Italiano, published posthumously in 1975, there’s no mention of that episode.

There emerge, however, a few other absurdities: such as, Walter Audisio repeatedly addressed Mussolini with the informal “tu,” although he writes that he had duped him into believing that he was a fascist who was there to free him. Lastly, the book goes on and on describing the trembling cowardice of Mussolini when faced by his executioner, something that was denied by other communist partisans like Michele “Pietro” Moretti and Aldo “Guido” Lampredi.

On January 23, 1996, l’Unità published a report about the executions in Dongo written by Aldo Lampredi “Guido,” an officer of the PCI (Italian Communist Party) that had been delivered by him to Armando Cossutta in 1975. From the report we learn that Mussolini, at the moment of death, did not drool (Audisio’s version) nor did he bellow “Viva l’Italia!” (Moretti’s version), but he yelled instead “Aim at the chest!”  This posthumous honoring of Mussolini by the official communist paper, which had been demonizing him for more than half a century. seems inexplicable and without reason. Especially, on the part of someone like Lampredi, who up until that time had said nothing; which would make one think he hadn’t even been present at the killing.

The fact is that such an important statement was pulled out of a drawer twenty-one years later, right in the middle of the polemic raised by me about the “British Track” (hypothesis also backed by Dr. Renzo De Felice), and all the discrepancies in the various communist tales.

Dr. Caio Mario Cattabeni’s autopsy report revealed that there was no trace of food in Benito Mussolini’s stomach. Contrary to what was stated by Walter Audisio and by Lia De Maria, according to whom Mussolini ate polenta, bread, salame, milk, and fruit at noon on April 28. This evidence gives credit to the hypothesis that Mussolini could not have eaten that lunch because he was already dead.

What proof is  there to confirm the hypothesis that the execution of Mussolini and Claretta happened in the morning of April 28, and not in the afternoon?   

There is an extensive study (three-hundred pages, a copy of which has been in my possession for decades) written by the late Dr. Aldo Alessiani, who was for forty years the legal medical consultant for the Court of Rome, which concludes that it is clear from the trajectory of the bullets and the rigidity of the bodies at the time of autopsy that the death of Mussolini occurred in the morning of April 28, and the shots were fired from above down and not from below up, as if the shooting had been done in front of the gate of Villa Belmonte.

Moreover, there are two more questions which the “vulgate” (as Renzo De Felice called it) could not answer: Why were the executions in Dongo consummated coram populo (in front of everybody, TN), while the killing of Mussolini and Claretta Petacci happened in secret? Why were all the people of the city shooed off so nobody could witness their execution? The PCI and the CVL (Freedom Volunteers Command) never answered.

Not everybody agrees with you…

I’d just like to mention two important writings that refute the version that is still taught to our students today, seventy-five years after the fact. I would put in first place a very authoritative member of the Italian Resistance, Urbano Lazzaro alias “Bill.” He was the deputy commander of the 52^nd Garibaldi Brigade and the man who captured Mussolini. In his book “Dongo, mezzo secolo di menzogne, (“Dongo, half a century of lies”), Lazzaro reconstructed in detail the death of Mussolini, placing it in the morning of April 28 in front of the De Maria’s home, and attributes the killing not to Walter Audisio but to Luigi Longo, the number two of the Italian Communist Party and commander in chief of the Garibaldi Division.

In the book by Franco Bandini that is now a classic, Vita e morte segreta di Mussolini (Life and Secret Death of Mussolini, Mondadori, 1978), the death of Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petacci is for the first time placed in the morning of April 28, in front of the De Maria’s house; while at 4:30 pm the bodies of Il Duce and Claretta were “re-executed by firing squad” in front of the gate of Villa Belmonte. That was done to give credit to the official version of the execution, which had been agreed to in the course of frenetic phone calls between Walter Audisio and the leadership of the Communist Party and the CVL.

But as early as 1950, the great reporter Paolo Monelli,highlighted the many contradictions that rendered the official version of the death of Mussolini unbelievable  in his historical work Mussolini piccolo borghese (Mussolini petit bourgeois) .

The late historian Alessandro Zanella, from Mantua, in the book L’ora di Dongo (The Hour of Dongo, Rusconi, 1993), reconstructs the shooting of Mussolini and Claretta Petacci as it occurred on the morning of April 28, 1945 in front of the De Maria’s home, carried out by “Capitano Neri” (Luigi Canali) and the partisan “Gianna” (Giuseppina Tuissi) and their comrades, basing his version of the facts on a legal record of that time in which the brother of “Gianna” attributed to his sister and “captain Neri” the responsibility of the killing. That attribution could hold true even if the solicitors or the executors were agents in the service of British Intelligence.

And that is what Bruno Giovanni Lonati openly declared. After fifty years of silence, he reveals in his book Quel 28 aprile. Mussolini e Claretta: la verità» (That April 28. Mussolini and Claretta: The Truth, Mursia, 1994) that was him, ordered by the British intelligence services, who killed il Duce, while “Captain John,” a Briton, shot Claretta. But that is not all. Also, in the second witness account of  Dorina Mazzola, taken by Giorgio Pisanò and published in the book Gli ultimi 95 secondi di Mussolini (The Last 95 Seconds of Mussolini, Il Saggiatore, 1996), Mussolini and Petacci were killed in the morning of April 28 under the house of the De Maria in Bonzanigo.

Claretta

But why would Winston Churchill scheme to eliminate il Duce?

Many documents published in the essential book by Ricciotti Lazzero Il sacco d’Italia (The Sack of Italy, Mondadori, 1994) offer much more than a simple trace about the contacts between Churchill and Mussolini during the years 1944-1945. From a few recordings of telephone calls and from several letters between il Duce and Claretta Petacci (the letters were all photographed, before being given back to the two owners by Germans who guarded Mussolini) — all the material was sold to Lazzero by General Karl Wolff, commander of the Waffen SS — it can be inferred that, as early as 1944, Winston Churchill considered Stalin the greatest peril for the Western World, and pressured Mussolini to induce Adolf Hitler to put more pressure on the Eastern Front.

With the fall of the Third Reich and of Fascism, and with the Yalta agreements between Washington, London and Moscow in the background, the British services would have had understandable reasons [so that on the contacts between Mussolini and Churchill the curtain was pulled]. 

This is the substance of the alleged exchange of correspondence between Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini. It was personally confirmed to me by Mussolini’s attendant Pietro Carradori, who revealed to me the numerous private meetings of Mussolini with Brit[ish agents. The goal was to convince Hitler to cease the resistance in the West and turn all his forces to counteract the Red Army advance into Europe. All this was told in my book Vita col Duce (Life with il Duce Effedieffe, editore, 1999).

Finally my account of the events received a resounding confirmation in Peter Tompkins’ book Dalle carte segrete del Duce (From the secret papers of the Duce, Marco Tropea editore, 2001), who espoused without reservations the “British Trace.” Tompkins was an American CIA agent in Italy in 1944-1945.

So, this mysterious record of the exchange of letters Churchill-Mussolini would have been taken from Mussolini when he was captured on the German lorry on the western side road of Lake Como, just before Dongo. It was seized by the partisans of the 52^nd Brigata “Garibaldi” and given by them to the British Agents. 

That is surely possible. But there is more. And it’s about the story, still to be verified, of the copies of those letters that Mussolini would have given to the man he totally trusted, that is, the Secretary of Education Carlo Alberto Biggini. I dealt at length with that in my book Mussolini e il Professore. Vita e diari di Carlo Alberto Biggini (Mussolini and the Professor. The Life and Diaries of Carlo Alberto Biggini, Mursia, 1989).  The death of Biggini is shrouded in mystery. He was a very close friend of Mussolini, and the depositary of all his most private confidences. He was taken to the hospital in Milan just after the “Liberation” for a grave form of deadly cancer. He was only forty-three years old. But there are authoritative statements, like Fr. Agostino Gemelli’s, that debunk that diagnosis.

What is certain is that Biggini died far from his family; and the ones who assisted him at the end later denied any contacts with him. Certainly, a consequence of his death was the total silence about the copies of the documents that il Duce supposedly gave him before the end.

The head of Fascism hoped that those documents would save his life and make sense of Italian politics towards the end of the war. The documents disappeared and did not help Mussolini or his faithful friend. The clues that make certain the existence of a secret exchange of correspondence between Mussolini and Churchill after 1940 even came from the then Japanese ambassador to Rome, Shinroko Hidaka, who until now had his mouth sewn shut, and all lead  to that bag of documents that was given to Biggini. And disappeared forever.  

Many thanks to J. Jenkins Pavese for reviewing the English text.

Your comments will be greatly appreciated.

L. Pavese