Mussolini’s Final Hours
Mussolini’s Final Hours The Italian dictator’s final days and his body’s strange journey in the years after. By April 25, 1945, Benito Mussolini’s dream of re-creating the Roman Empire, much like the crumbling Roman Forum itself, lay in ruins. With the Allies closing in from the south and anti-fascist partisans rising up to seize city after city in northern Italy, Mussolini’s power base was quickly evaporating. The 61-year-old Italian dictator who sought to become a modern-day Julius Caesar had first risen to power more than two decades earlier when he became prime minister in 1922. “Il Duce” allied himself with fellow fascist Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in World War II, but his outdated Italian military was badly outclassed. By July 1943, the Allied invasion of Sicily and bombing of Rome caused the Italian high command and King Victor Emmanuel III to remove Mussolini from power and place him under house arrest. In September 1943, Nazi paratroopers staged a daring c...