Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler

Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler

As World War II (WWII) approached, Mussolini announced his intention of annexing Malta, Corsica, and Tunis. He spoke of creating a "New Roman Empire" that would stretch east to Palestine and south through Libya and Egypt to Kenya. In April 1939, after a brief war, he annexed Albania, a campaign which strained his military. His armed forces are generally considered to have been unprepared for combat when the German invasion of Poland led to World War II. Mussolini thus decided to remain 'non-belligerent' until he was quite certain which side would win.

On June 10, 1940, as the Germans under General Guderian reached the English Channel, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. In October, Italy attacked Greece and lost in result 1/3 of Albania, until Germany attacked Greece as well. In June 1941, he declared war on the Soviet Union and in December he declared war on the United States.

Following Italian defeats on all fronts and the Anglo-American landing in Sicily in 1943, most of Mussolini's colleagues (Count Galeazzo Ciano, the foreign minister and also Mussolini's son-in-law, included) turned against him at a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council on July 25, 1943. King Vittorio Emanuele III called Mussolini to his palace and stripped the dictator of his power. Upon leaving the palace, Mussolini was swiftly arrested. He was then sent to Gran Sasso, a mountain recovery in central Italy (Abruzzo), in complete isolation.

Mussolini was substituted by the Maresciallo d'Italia Gen. Pietro Badoglio, who immediately declared in a famous speech "La guerra continua a fianco dell'alleato germanico" ("The war shoulder to shoulder with our Germanic allies continues"), but was instead working to negotiate a surrender; in a few days (September the 8th) Badoglio would sign an armistice with Allied troops.

Rescued by the Germans several months later in a spectacular raid led by General Kurt Student, Mussolini set up the Italian Social Republic, a Republican Fascist state (RSI, Repubblica Sociale Italiana) in northern Italy with him living in Gargnano. But he was little more than a puppet under the protection of the German Army. In this "Republic of SalÐ"І", Mussolini returned to his earlier ideas of socialism and collectivization. He also executed some of the Fascist leaders who had abandoned him, including his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. During this period he wrote his memoirs entitled My Rise and Fall.

On April 27, 1945, in the afternoon, near the village of Dongo (Como Lake), just before the Allied armies reached Milan, Mussolini, along with his mistress Claretta Petacci, were caught by the Italian partisans as he headed for Chiavenna to board a plane for escape to Switzerland. The day after, April 28, they were both executed along with their sixteen-man train, mostly ministers and officials of the Italian Social Republic. The next day their bodies were hung, upside down, in Piazzale Loreto (Milan) along with those of other fascists, to be abused by the