Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (7 page)

The fanatical killer who was once secretary of the Fascist party was brought into the square in an open truck at about ten thirty in the morning. The bodies of Mussolini and the others had just been hanging for several hours. I had reached the square just before the truck arrived. As it moved slowly ahead, the crowd fell back and became silent. Surrounded by armed guards, Starace stood in the middle of the truck, hands in the air, a lithe, square-jawed, surly figure in a black shirt.

The truck stopped for an instant close to the grotesque corpse of his old boss. Starace took one look and started to fall forward, perhaps in a faint, but was pushed back to standing position by his guards. The truck drove ahead a few feet and stopped. Starace was taken out and placed near a white wall at the rear of the gas station. Beside him were baskets of spring flowers —pink, yellow, purple and blue—placed there in honor of fifteen anti-Fascists who had been murdered in the same square six months before.

A firing squad of partisans shot Starace in the back, and another partisan, perched on a beam some twenty feet above the ground, turned towards the crowd in the square and made a broad gesture of finality, much like a dramatic umpire calling a man out at the home plate.

There were no roars or bloodcurdling yells; there was only silence, and then, suddenly, a sigh—a deep, moaning sound, seemingly expressive of release from something dark and fetid. The people in the square seemed to understand that this was a moment of both ending and beginning. Two minutes later, Starace had been strung up alongside Mussolini and the others. “Look at them now,” an old man beside me kept saying. “Just look at them now.”
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After dumping Mussolini’s body in the square, Audisio drove on to partisan headquarters at the Palazzo di Brera to make his report and announce the dictator’s death on the radio. The first bulletins stated simply that Mussolini had been executed, but later reports carried graphic accounts of the scene in the Piazzale as he and his mistress hung side by side while the mob pelted them with abuse. Winston Churchill was horrified when he heard, delighted to see the back of Mussolini but appalled at the outrages inflicted on Clara. Adolf Hitler made no comment when he was handed the news on a slip of paper, but the section about Mussolini hanging upside down was later heavily underlined in pencil, almost certainly by the Führer. He had already announced that he had no intention of being taken alive by the Russians, put on display in a monkey cage for the amusement of the rabble. He did not intend to share Mussolini’s fate in death, either.

Rachele Mussolini was still at Cernobbio when she learned of her husband’s fate, listening to the radio in the Blackshirt’s house:

“Justice has been done!” the voice proclaimed. I found myself thinking that Benito was now beyond the reach of human ingratitude and beastliness. He had given everything for Italy—even his own life.

The men who died with him I had known for years, in fair days and foul, as his colleagues. Some were better than others and some I had liked more than others, but they all remained steadfast and loyal to the end, despite the risk.

And that woman too, the woman whom they put alongside Benito at the very last moment so as to increase the scandal which she paid for with her life.
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That was the worst of it for Rachele, the ultimate betrayal. Her husband had been with another woman when he died. She couldn’t believe it, couldn’t accept that Mussolini had chosen to share his final moments with someone other than the mother of his children. Rachele still had the last letter he had written her, the one in which he had sworn that she was the only woman he had ever really loved.

But there was no time to brood about that now. Too much was happening outside:

I was prostrated by the news of the murders and barely noticed the shooting going on all around the house. Civil war was in full swing. My children never left me and their sobbing added to my grief, though I did my best to keep back my tears. The hours dragged on until it occurred to me that our presence in the house might involve our hosts in serious trouble. I talked it over with the children and we agreed that we had better put an end to all this uncertainty. So we sent someone to tell the Committee of Liberation at Como where we were.
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Before long, three partisans arrived and began to search the house. A policeman went through Rachele’s suitcases while a young partisan found a miniature of her dead son, Bruno, in a valuable frame. “This belongs to the people,” he told her, quietly pocketing it for himself. Rachele complained to the policeman, who made him give it back.

That afternoon, at her own request, she and her two children were taken to the police station at Como. Rachele had begged the bishop of Como to take Romano and Anna Maria into his care, but he had judged it wiser to refuse. Instead, she asked for her children to be placed in police custody, where they would be much safer than on the street. With so much killing going on, there was no knowing what might happen to them if they were left on the street.

They were separated at the police station, the children hustled away while Rachele was transferred to the women’s section of the prison. She was supposed to sign the register on arrival, but the prison governor apparently insisted that it was unnecessary and scratched her name out to protect her identity. She was put in a small cell with several other new arrivals. The women were so upset at finding themselves in custody that only one of them recognized Rachele, who quickly swore her to secrecy.

Newcomers of both sexes continued to arrive during the afternoon and early evening as Como’s Fascists were rounded up. Revenge was not long in coming, as Rachele soon discovered:

We could hear something of what was happening outside. Someone in the courtyard read out a list of names, and this was followed by a burst of machine gun fire and, after an interval, the rumbling of cart wheels. The process was endlessly repeated and it went on like that all night. It was a ghastly business. The young woman who had recognised me was frantic about her husband. He was one of those in the courtyard, and every time the names were given out she clung to the window bars and screamed hysterically. Another woman was swearing she was a Communist who had been imprisoned for infanticide and yelling to be let out.
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Alone among the women, Rachele remained comparatively calm. Still unrecognized, she was a puzzle to her cellmates, who kept asking why she wasn’t crying. “Haven’t you left anyone behind?” they demanded. But Rachele was past all that. With her husband gone, she had no tears anymore. She had lost her fear of death, too. It was only a matter of time before her turn came to face the firing squad, but Rachele Mussolini really didn’t care what happened to her now. All that mattered was that it didn’t happen to her children as well.

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FARTHER SOUTH,
in an eighteenth-century palace overlooking the Bay of Naples, the German army in Italy was about to surrender. The Germans still had half a million men under arms, but with most of Italy in Allied hands and their escape routes to the north blocked by partisans, they had little option but to raise the white flag. A delegation had arrived at Caserta the previous day to negotiate the terms.

The delegation comprised two middle-ranking officers, Lieutenant-Colonel Viktor von Schweinitz of the Wehrmacht and Major Eugen Wenner of the SS, and an interpreter. They had been horrified to learn on arrival that there were no terms to negotiate. Mindful of the mistake made in November 1918, when the German army had been allowed to march home with all its weapons as if it had never been defeated, the Allies were insisting on unconditional surrender this time around. They had given the Germans a two-page surrender document to sign, accompanied by eighteen pages of supplementary details. The Germans had sat up most of the night studying it.

The document presented them with a host of problems, not least that they lacked the power to agree to it. They were under instructions from their commanders not to accept the internment of the German army after its surrender. They had been ordered to negotiate its return home instead. But the Allies were adamant that there would be no going home for the German army after it had laid down its weapons. Its men were to be imprisoned behind the wire until the Allies were ready to release them.

Wenner and von Schweinitz couldn’t agree on a response. In a military bungalow in the grounds of Caserta’s Bourbon palace, they discussed it into the small hours of April 29. Wenner was for capitulating, but Schweinitz was worried that because the Wehrmacht had forbidden him to accept internment, they would repudiate the agreement if he did. There seemed no way out of the impasse until Gero Gävernitz, their interpreter, pointed out that German soldiers were being killed as they spoke and more were dying every minute. Schweinitz relented at that, reluctantly agreeing to accept the surrender terms if he could get them past his chief, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, at Bolzano.

A telegram was quickly drafted to German HQ. It was past four in the morning as Gävernitz took it to General Lyman Lemnitzer, the American representative at the talks:

With the draft of the telegram in my pocket, I drove in the early dawn alongside the cascades of the Royal Park, which reflected the waning moonlight, to General Lemnitzer’s office in the huge building of the Royal Palace.

I found him still at work at his desk. He was greatly encouraged when I showed him the draft of the message and ordered it to be encoded at once. As Wally, our OSS radio operator, had not yet taken up his post at Wolff’s headquarters in Bolzano, the message was sent to our office in Bern, Switzerland, from which point we requested that it be taken by courier to Vietinghoff’s headquarters at Bolzano. This lengthy method of transmission made it unlikely that an answer would be received before two or three days at the earliest.
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But that was too long for the Allies. Allowing seventy-two hours for the news to reach all German units in the field, they wanted the agreement signed that same day to prevent any further loss of life. They calculated that Wenner and von Schweinitz would have to leave Caserta with the agreement by 3:00 p.m. at the latest, if they were to be safely back on their own side of the line by nightfall. There was no more time to lose.

Bowing to the inevitable, the two Germans agreed to the surrender. It was signed at two that afternoon, in the ballroom of the royal palace. The room was crowded when they arrived for the ceremony: eleven British and American generals and admirals, a Russian general and his interpreter, several other officers, and a battery of newspapermen and radio journalists flown in from Rome for the day. The Germans were disconcerted to see film cameras as well and a row of klieg lights and microphones. They had been expecting to sign the surrender in private, not least because they were afraid of being murdered if their identities became known, killed as traitors by their own people when they got home.

Yet there was nothing they could do about it. Schweinitz repeated his claim that he was exceeding his powers in agreeing to the internment of the Wehrmacht, but was told to sign anyway. Wenner signed, too, sitting in a sports jacket at the end of a long table. The ceremony was over by 2:17 p.m. The Germans were airborne by three o’clock, taking off in an Allied aircraft from Marcianise airfield, en route for Annecy in the Haute-Savoie. From there, they were due to travel in plain clothes to Switzerland, and thence through the night to Bolzano. The surrender was still a secret, not to be revealed until it came into effect at 2:00 p.m. on May 2. It remained to be seen what General von Vietinghoff would make of the agreement when he met the two envoys and learned the severity of the terms.

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NAPLES HAD BEEN IN ALLIED HANDS
since October 1943, but the city was still not back to normal. It had been heavily bombed before the Allies arrived, the docks and factories pounded repeatedly in the run-up to the invasion. Food remained scarce, and the black market was rife. Prostitution was still rampant, among not just local women, but others from all over southern Italy who had flocked to Naples to sell themselves to the Allied soldiers, particularly the black troops of the American army, who were the kindest to them and paid the most.

In the port of Pozzuoli, a few miles around the bay from Naples, Romilda Villani had been struggling for years to bring up two illegitimate children without any help from their father. A good-looking woman, she had won a cinema competition at seventeen to discover “The Girl Who Is Garbo’s Double.” The prize had been a trip to Hollywood and a screen test with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Her father had forbidden her from taking it up, so Romilda had gone to Rome instead, where a man claiming to be a film producer had swiftly seduced her, leaving her pregnant with her eldest daughter, Sofia, and later also Maria.

Now they were back in Pozzuoli, living in squalor on the Via Solfatara, so named for the sulfur that steamed from the nearby volcano. Their house had been damaged in an air raid, the windows blown out, the walls cracked, and the roof sagging, but they had patched it up as best they could and were making do, struggling every day to find enough to eat. Romilda had opened their top floor apartment to American servicemen, giving them an Italian home to relax in for a few hours during the day, somewhere to sing around the piano and forget about the war for a while. The Americans brought food, fantasized about Romilda, and smiled at Sofia, so ugly and skinny at the age of ten that she looked as if she had never had a square meal in her life.

Sofia had only been five when Italy entered the war. German soldiers had arrived in Pozzuoli soon afterward, as she later recalled:

They were our allies then, and friendly, and my earliest memories are of delightedly watching the young, handsome soldiers in their beautiful uniforms, playing war games in the back yards of the houses on our street. I don’t think I had ever seen a blond, blue-eyed man before the German soldiers arrived. It was exciting to stand in front of our house and watch the troops march by, and it was especially exciting when long columns of tanks rumbled down the street.
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