Benito Mussolini (29.7.1883 Predappio/Italy – 28.4.1945 Como/Italy)

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was the son of a village blacksmith. Educated by Salesians in Faenza and at a state school in Forlimpopoli, he initially qualified as a primary school teacher. However, he soon gave up teaching in favor of active political involvement with the socialists: after holding local posts and managing local party newspapers in Trento and Forli, he joined the party executive in 1912, becoming editor-in-chief of the main party organ Avanti. Opposing the party line, he called for Italy to enter the First World War; as a result, the Socialist Party expelled him in the fall of 1914. When war broke out he volunteered for military service. After being seriously wounded on the Isonzo, he left the army in May 1917.

On February 18, 1919 he founded the Fascio di Combattimento, from which the Fascist Party emerged, with Mussolini himself becoming the ‘leader’ (‘Duce’). After the ‘March on Rome’ on October 27, 1922, he and his ‘Black Shirts’ gained power in the state, which he consolidated through the ruthless use of force, the elimination of parliament, and the suppression of civil rights. In terms of foreign policy, Mussolini attempted to expand Italy into a Mediterranean empire based on the ancient model. Temporary occupation of Corfu as early as September 1923 was followed by campaigns of conquest against Ethiopia/Abyssinia (1935 to 1936), Albania (April 1939), Egypt (1940) and Greece (1940/41). These operations by the Italian armed forces revealed Italy’s military weakness, however. Having met Hitler on an equal footing before the war, including on a state visit in 1937 and at the signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Mussolini was now forced to ask him for help.

Defeat in Africa and the social and political crisis at home led to the overthrow of the ‘Duce’ by the ‘Grand Fascist Council’ on July 25, 1943 and to Italy’s capitulation on September 8, 1943. Hitler had Mussolini freed from prison on the Gran Sasso (Abruzzo) by a commando operation and made him leader of the northern Italian puppet state Repubblica Sociale Italiana. But after the Germans withdrew, Italian partisans arrested him on April 28, 1945: he and his lover were shot near Como after being sentenced by a tribunal. The bodies were put on display the next day on Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.