The Mysterious Murder of Benito Mussolini
Documents from US Strengthen the British Theory and Churchill’s Role
Jun 30, 2009
The official truth about the murder of the Duce of Italy had been revealed first on the pages of l’Unità in November of 1945. The newspaper of the Italian communist party, the strongest in Western Europe, affirmed that partisans, the anti-fascists armed to free Northern Italy from the German occupation, killed Mussolini and his lover Claretta Petacci in front of the gate of Villa Belmonte in Giulino di Mezzagra, on the Lake of Como.
There were doubts from the beginning on this official version and they came from academic historians like Renzo De Felice or non-professionals like Giorgio Pisanò, with new testimony that periodically give us fresh facts or a different version of the facts.
The Doubts of Renzo De Felice: the Correspondence between Mussolini and Churchill
Renzo De Felice is the author of a monumental biography about Mussolini. His studies on fascism are essential for a scientific approach. The Italian historian was deeply convinced that there had been a secret correspondence between Mussolini and the British premier Winston Churchill. The original papers have never been found and the fact that they should have been important for Churchill is the basis for an alternative and widely believed version of Mussolini’s death.
The correspondence should have been carried in a bag by Mussolini until the last minute of his life but it disappeared. The British intelligence service was already present in Milan in those days with the “colonel Silvestri”, alias Max Salvadori, who had the order to maintain relations with the partisan’s organization, the CNLAI (National Liberation Committee for North Italy) that gave the order to kill Mussolini.
British Spies on the Lake of Como
Strange and mysterious deaths occurred surrounding the months after the murders. Most of this case concerned communist partisans or witnesses to the fact, simultaneously increasing curiosity and the mystery.
The first to talk about the other version was Giorgio Pisanò in the ’50s. Pisanò came from the fascist side and his description was immediately criticized by professional historians, but his narration published in the magazine Oggi had a great public success.
Bruno Lonati, a former official of the partisan organization and member of the communist party during the war, gave his version in the ’90s. As a direct witness he reported that the order to kill Mussolini came from a British special operation executive, the “captain John”, who was sent to northern Italy with the specific aim to kill Mussolini.
Peter Tompkins, an agent of the US Office of Strategic Services in Rome during the war, journalist and writer, co-produced a documentary based on the narration of Lonati entitled Mussolini: the final truth. He claimed that after three years of testing the narration, he was finally convinced.
The latest news came from a report on the last days of Mussolini written by colonel Valerian Lada Mocarski, director of the Central European office of OSS in Bern. The papers were found in the National Archives and Records Administration of College Park, Maryland, declassified in 2000 by President Clinton, but a similar copy of them had also been found in the papers of Renzo De Felice. It is likely that they were the basis of his doubt. De Felice died in 1996 before finishing his studies on Mussolini’s death and the correspondence with Churchill.
The documents found made reference to the uncertainty of the American secret service about the truth regarding the murder of Mussolini and the failure of Mocarsky to get information from the partisans directly involved in the action: two of them mysteriously disappeared, and the other two refused any collaboration.
Sources:
Renzo De Felice, Brenda H. Everett: Interpretations of Fascism, Harvard University Press, 1977
Renzo De Felice, Bernardo Díaz Nosty: Rojo y Negro, Ariel, Editorial S.A
Luciano Garibaldi: Mussolini: The secrets of his death. Did Churchill Order Musolini's Execution, Enigma Books, 2005
Michaela Sapio, Gli ultimi giorni di Mussolini tra storia e verità
Il rapporto del colonnello Lada Mocarski per conto dell’Oss, «Nuova Storia Contemporanea», Anno XIII. n. 1, Gennaio-febbraio 2009
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