Mussolini Executed by Italian Partisans
On this day · 28 April 1945
As the Third Reich collapsed, Italy's fallen dictator was caught fleeing for Switzerland and shot dead beside Lake Como.
On 28 April 1945, with World War II in Europe in its final days, the deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was executed by Italian partisans. Days earlier he had abandoned Milan, hoping to slip across the border into neutral Switzerland. Resistance fighters intercepted his convoy near Lake Como, recognising the man known as Il Duce despite a disguise.
The next day his captors brought Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, to the village of Giulino di Mezzegra on the lakeshore and shot them. Their bodies, along with those of other executed Fascist officials, were trucked to Milan.
Hung upside down at a Piazzale Loreto petrol station, the corpses were jeered and abused by crowds celebrating the regime’s collapse.
The grim public display marked the symbolic end of more than two decades of Fascist rule in Italy. Two days later Adolf Hitler took his own life in Berlin, and within a week the war in Europe was over.
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