Ethiopian News, Current Affairs and Opinion Forum
-
Tiago
- Member
- Posts: 3294
- Joined: 30 Jul 2018, 02:09
Post
by Tiago » 12 Dec 2023, 02:40
Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini was ousted from politics in July 1943 when the country's prospects of victory in World War II soured. The ouster was the beginning of the end for Mussolini; he was immediately arrested and imprisoned at the Hotel Campo Imperatore in central Italy until September, when German paratroopers rescued him. He was taken to Germany, and then Lombardy in northern Italy, but he seemed to know the end was near. In 1945, he told an interviewer, "Seven years ago I was an interesting person. Now I am a corpse."
Just a few months later, he'd really be a corpse. In April 1945, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were trying to escape Italy for Spain when they were stopped by communist partisans, taken hostage and shot. Their bodies were taken to Milan's Piazzale Loreto, site of the execution of 15 anti-fascists the year before, and hung upside-down. Passersby spit on the bodies and pelted them with rocks, according to BBC news reports at the time. Photos of the corpses were widely circulated and even sold to American servicemen as grisly souvenirs.