8 – Benito Mussolini
It doesn’t really need to be said in advance that Benito Mussolini was a tyrant. The man who came to be known as Il Duce was the first fascist dictator in Europe and arguably the first man to specifically set out with a political goal of a totalitarian state that, in theory at least, was established from below. His legacy as an autocrat within the grand pantheon of 20th-century dictators might not rank him on the same level as his contemporaries Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, but suffice to say, Mussolini was a massive tyrant and, come to the end of his reign, found himself on the receiving end of some very satisfying comeuppance.
Mussolini did not come from a well-off or privileged background. He was born in Romagna, in the center of Italy, the son of a blacksmith and devout socialist father. The young Benito, named after Mexican socialist and anti-clerical activist Benito Juarez, was schooled from an early age in politics, with his father imparting on him a mix of socialist, Italian nationalist and militarist ideas, all of which would come to play a large role in his later outlook. When he was 19, he emigrated to Switzerland to avoid having to do national service. He was unable to find gainful employment and instead spent his days reading political philosophy and agitating among Italian migrant workers, before one run in too many with the Swiss police saw him return to Italy.
Now 26, Mussolini continued to work towards socialism, becoming one of the most famous activists in Italy. While publicly he was a socialist, his private thought had begun to shift: having avidly read Nietzsche, he became convinced the people were not intrinsically as equal as socialism held that they were. He supported the First World War, when most of the Italian left did not, and was expelled from the Socialist Party. It was at this point that he formed the first incarnation of the Fascist Party, a revolutionary organization inspired by both the populism and economics of the left, but also the nationalism of the far right.
When the war ended, Mussolini’s Fascists began to grow and grow in strength. Italy was rocked by far-left activism – the Biennio Rosso, the red two years, which saw the country teeter on the bring of communist revolution – and his new political group was active in the streets, breaking up demonstrations of the left. The government did little to halt the Blackshirts, as the Fascists were often known, feeling that they preferred their violence to that of the communists. The power of the Fascists grew and, in 1922, Mussolini led the famous March on Rome, which saw the government capitulate and hand him the reigns of power.
As Prime Minister, he cracked down on all dissent and opposition. He broke up the trade unions, gerrymandered elections and turned Italy into a police state. Abroad, he invaded Libya, Ethiopia and Albania, while also intervening in the Spanish Civil War and becoming increasingly close to Hitler and Germany. Mussolini’s regime was not as explicitly racist and anti-Semitic as that of the Nazis, it was still politically very close and, when war broke out, it was with them that Italy sided.
When the Second World War began to turn on the Axis Powers, Italy would feel the brunt of it first. The Allies turned them over in North Africa and then invaded southern Italy in 1943. It was enough to see Mussolini arrested and deposed, but he was released and then placed in charge of a smaller entity, under the control of Germany, known as the Italian Social Republic. When that too began to fall, Il Duce tried to escape to Switzerland but was caught by partisan fighters. He was taken to the small village of Dongo, Lombardy, and summarily executed by a firing squad. He died just two days before Hitler himself would commit suicide in his bunker in Berlin. Once dead, Mussolini’s body was urinated on, spat on, kicked and mutilated. He was strung up in the main square of Milan, hung upside down and disfigured.
It was an ignominious end for the man who had once ruled Italy with an iron fist. His fate was not one that was shared by many of the Axis leaders at the end of the Second World War, though he would be far from the only one who would feel the wrath of the people. Our next subject had a similar lust for power and a similarly painful end, just a few hundred kilometers to the north. He was the Butcher of Prague, Reinhard Heydrich.