The Body of Il Duce (9 page)

The corpses of Mussolini, Petacci, and the other Fascists endured a two-stage trial. At first they lay on the ground in a heap, exposed to the gaze—and the blows—of the crowd. Then two of the bodies, along with those of Mussolini and his mistress, were strung up on a bar in front of the gas station in the southwest corner of the piazza—safe from the rage of the people but there to be ridiculed by all comers. The first stage of this Calvary mirrored the first step in the original—the mob's demand that Jesus be killed. “Let's hear your speech now, let's hear your speech!” someone called to Il Duce's corpse, just as someone had shouted to Jesus, “Perform your miracle now, save yourself!”
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Mussolini's theatrical skills, admired for twenty years, suddenly became the charge against him. One woman shot at the corpse, riddling it with bullets; men and women started to kick it, turning Il Duce's “iron skull” into a mass of broken bone and gray matter. So this was the great provider, the one who would save Italy from centuries of famine and starvation! The women of Milan pelted him with their vegetables and black bread, the rations they had eaten for the five years of the war. So this was virility incarnate, the great lover! The partisans of the Oltrepò Pavese rested Mussolini's head on Claretta Petacci's breast, in a rude simulation of the act of love.

The corpses of Mussolini, Petacci, and the other Fascists lay on the ground in a heap, exposed to the gaze and the blows of the crowd. (
Foto Publifoto/Olympia
)

Piazzale Loreto, April 29, 1945. (
Foto Publifoto/Olympia
)

The second stage of Mussolini's Calvary, too, mirrored the Crucifixion: like Christ on the cross flanked by the two thieves, Mussolini was strung up by his heels along with the other Fascists. The fact that Mussolini was not alone showed that his fate was no different from the fate of the others; ultimately, there was nothing special about his body. They were all hung head down, which, since the Middle Ages, represented the worst possible insult. At the same time, this was a reminder of the butcher and his meat hooks; it condemned Mussolini and company to an animal destiny. And in case the crowd was unable to distinguish one criminal from another, the partisans hung the person's name in front of each pair of feet.

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Foto Publifoto/Olympia
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The privilege of the victors lay in the fact that they had survived. Mussolini and the Fascists were dead; the partisans were alive, and survival was the key to their power. They drew their force from Piazzale Loreto itself, a place of sovereign transition—sovereign being the sphere in which someone can be put to death without there being a crime. In Rome, King Victor Emanuel III and his son Umberto would continue, with some confusion, to play out the comedy of their sovereignty, but only the people who had known how to finish Mussolini off could really claim any sovereign role in the new Italy.

The public display of Mussolini's corpse also served another basic purpose: it ruled out the possibility that Il Duce was still alive. Half a century after the event this assertion might seem tautological, but in the overheated climate of April 1945 the most obvious truisms could seem inventions and the most outrageous inventions plausible. There were many false rumors about the fate of the Axis leaders. The fact that Hitler's body had disappeared, spirited away by the Soviet secret services as a weapon to use in the coming Cold War, would soon prompt whispers that the Führer had survived. By showing off Mussolini's body in a public square, the partisans wanted to prevent any Italian version of that legend.

Unintentionally, even the police who directed traffic toward Piazzale Loreto were helping to quash any such potential myth, since the more people filed into the piazza, the more witnesses observed Il Duce's demise. The shots fired at the dictator, the spectacle of the bodies hanging upside down, the placard bearing Mussolini's name: all these combined to rule out a new twist on the old European tradition of the “hidden king,” in which the sovereign is forced to hide but awaits the moment to return and make his subjects happy. Only an emigrant—someone like the man identified as Guglielmo P., who remained in Ethiopia after the collapse of Italy's imperial pretensions—could imagine as late as 1951 that Mussolini was still alive and plotting his comeback. “You bring us terrible news,” he told the journalist who assured him he had personally seen Il Duce's body in Piazzale Loreto.
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When all was said and done, there was also a strong streak of voyeurism at work that day. Decades later, witnesses still recalled the women's caustic comments about the stockings Claretta Petacci involuntarily displayed. It was said that firemen had appeared to clean the bodies, filthy with spit and urine after their exposure to the crowd. One spectator heard a comment that was then repeated in Milan like a litany: “They're nice and fat, nice and fat, nice and fat.” In truth, the man admitted, “I don't remember that they were so fat.”
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As it happened, Mussolini had lost weight during the war years; he had never regained the state of florid good health that he enjoyed during his greatest popularity. But the people of Piazzale Loreto needed to see Mussolini as fat because it would prove that he had had a plot to starve them. In the “piece of butcher's meat” hanging in the square the Milanese saw a man the size of an ox.
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However, this was not “the ox of the nation”—a description the dictator had proudly adopted—a hardworking animal, willing to pull the plow all the way to the end of the field at the urging of the people.
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Now the crowd viewed Mussolini more as the beast in the bullfight, an animal you had to kill if you did not want to be killed yourself.

“The filthy beast has been hung up in Piazzale Loreto,” wrote Carlo Emilio Gadda, a well-known Milanese novelist whose expressionist sensibility made him particularly acute at describing the world of the slaughterhouse.
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Gadda wrote of the dictator's being “tossed into a tripe soup,” again pointing to the bovine qualities of Il Duce's body. Whether animal or human, Mussolini's was a body to stare at, to consume even after the partisans—following an order by the American military command—cut him down and sent him to the city morgue. From 2:00
P.M.
on April 29 until 7:30
A.M.
the following day, when the coroners of the University of Milan began their autopsy, Il Duce's body continued to satisfy the morbid curiosity of all. Not content just to photograph the bodies as they lay on the morgue slabs, the U.S. Army cameramen moved the placards with the names so the corpses could be identified more easily and placed Mussolini and Claretta Petacci arm in arm for greater effect. Earlier, when the bodies were still hanging in the piazza, Italian photographers had used rifles to prop up their cameras so as to get a better shot of the dead dictator's face.

No longer an object of art as in the 1930s, Mussolini's body had been reduced to a mere thing—but a thing everyone still wanted to see. Partisans and curious onlookers who had somehow gained entry to the morgue lined up to look at Il Duce's corpse. In an autobiographical novel, Carlo Mazzantini, a Blackshirt, tells a tale, probably invented, of a young Communist prison guard who offers to take him and other Fascist prisoners to the morgue (“We could pop over this afternoon, on the late side,” the guard says). “It still seemed incredible—incredible that he had existed and incredible that he was dead,” Mazzantini writes, particularly successful in conveying the disorientation shared by both guards and prisoners, Communists and Fascists, facing a world without Mussolini. In his account, the more thoughtful of the anti-Fascists felt only a void in the presence of Il Duce's miserable corpse; the prison guard, “with his gun and a kerchief around his neck, seemed small and rather useless.”
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A Milanese photographer, on the other hand, captured a group of partisans at the morgue armed and smiling as they filed by the dictator's battered remains.

The crowds never stopped coming, not even during the autopsy itself. Caio M. Cattabeni, the head coroner, grasped immediately that he had been called on to operate under very difficult conditions, in a morgue where “journalists, partisans, and ordinary people” would keep bursting in.
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Among the onlookers was a pensioner who had been brought along by his neighbor, a doctor, and who recorded what he saw during a pause in the autopsy. Although his report is probably not reliable, it is worth recounting since it shows how the body of Il Duce continued to prompt fantasies even after his death. In this account, the body lies on the marble slab, open from the forehead to the groin. On one side of the slab are the internal organs that have been removed. While everyone else is on a break, two nurses in surgical gowns begin playing Ping-Pong with Mussolini's organs. “Grinning hideously, they tossed those miserable remains back and forth—now the liver, now a lung, now the heart, now a handful of intestines.”
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The conditions under which the coroners were working probably explain why the autopsy report lacked some crucial details, such as a description of the victim's clothes, usually essential in describing gunshot wounds to the body. Those missing details were one of the reasons hypotheses continued to circulate about Il Duce's death fifty years after his capture and execution. Still, Professor Cattabeni's report gives all the important information: Mussolini was killed by rifle fire from Colonel Valerio or another partisan, then battered by repeated postmortem violence. The report's mention of bullet wounds, bone damage, and skin lacerations with no bleeding refers to shots, kicks, and blows inflicted on a dead body.

Partisans and curious onlookers lined up to see Il Duce's corpse. (
Foto Publifoto/Olympia
)

“The corpse of an assassinated man is a terrifying accuser,” the emigrant anti-Fascist Vincenzo Vacirca said of Matteotti's body; the same can be said of Mussolini's. The autopsy report reveals more than any historian could about how the Italians of Piazzale Loreto treated the body of Il Duce. Here are some of its findings: head misshapen because of destruction of the cranium; facial features rendered all but unrecognizable due to gunshot wounds and extensive contusions; eyeball lacerated, crushed due to escape of vitreous matter; upper jaw fractured with multiple lacerations of the palate; cerebellum, pons, midbrain, and part of the occipital lobes crushed; massive fracture at the base of the cranium with bone slivers forced into the sinus cavities.