Rachele grabbed the phone and forced Mussolini to tell Clara that he had known beforehand that Rachele had been planning to come to see her. Rachele told Clara that the Fascists hated her almost as much as the partisans did.
Both women ended up crying. When Rachele eventually left, her parting curse was: “They’ll take you to the Piazzale Loreto” — Milan’s haunt for down-and-out prostitutes. This is exactly what happened.
As the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula, Mussolini left Rachele to make a last stand at Valtellina. When they parted in the garden of their villa, he said he was ready to “enter into the grand silence of death”.
His advisers told him that he should fly to safety in Switzerland or Spain. A former mistress, Francesca Lavagnini, invited him to join her in Argentina, while (tiara suggested that they stage a car accident and announce that he had been killed.
Mussolini rejected all these proposals. Once he had made sure Rachele and his family were safe, he urged Clara to flee to Spain. The Petacci family went, but Clara herself refused to go.
“I am following my destiny,” she wrote to a friend. “What will happen to me I don’t know, but I cannot question my fate.”
Together Mussolini and Clara fled north to Como. There, Elena Curti Cucciate, the pretty, fair-haired daughter of his former mistress Angela Curti, joined them. Mussolini went for a walk with her, which sent Clara into paroxysms of jealousy.
“What is that woman doing here?” she screamed hysterically. “You must get rid of her at once. You must! You must!”
He didn’t. Instead, Elena and Mussolini travelled on in a German convoy, but Clara caught up with them when they were stopped by a partisan road block on the road to Switzerland. The partisans said that, to prevent unnecessary bloodshed, they would allow the Germans through — but not any Italian Fascists. Clara urged Mussolini to disguise himself as a German and make his escape. Then she burst into tears. He donned a German greatcoat and helmet and climbed on board a German lorry. As it pulled away, Clara ran after it and tried to clamber on, but one of Mussolini’s ministers grabbed her. It took all his strength to pull her off the tailboard.
Someone, however, had spotted Mussolini at the road block. In the next town, the convoy was searched and he was found. The redoubtable Clara caught them up again, only to be arrested herself. At first, she pretended that she was not Clara Petacci but a Spaniard. She even asked the partisans what they would do to Clara Petacci if they caught her. But soon she confessed.
“You all hate me,” she told her interrogators. “You think I went after him for his money and his power. It isn’t true. My love has not been selfish. I have sacrificed myself for him.” She begged to be locked up in the same jail as him.
“If you kill him, kill me too,” she said.
Orders were given to take Mussolini and Clara to Milan. When the two cars carrying them met up on the road, they were allowed a few moments to talk. Clara was absurdly formal.
“Good evening, Your Excellency,” she said.
Mussolini was angry to see her.
“Signora, why are you here?” he demanded.
“Because I want to be with you,” she replied.
The prisoners and their escorts arrived at Azzano at a quarter past three in the morning. They were to stay at the home of a partisan family called the De Marias.
At about four o’clock the next night, a man in a brown mackintosh named Audisio turned up, saying that he had come to rescue them. They were driven to a nearby villa where they were ordered out of the car. Their “rescuers” were Communist partisans who had been ordered to execute Mussolini, along with fifteen other leading Fascists.
Clara threw her arms around Mussolini and screamed: “No! No! You mustn’t do it. You mustn’t.”
“Leave him alone,” Audisio said, “or you’ll be shot too.”
But this threat meant nothing to Clara. If Mussolini must die, then she wanted to die too and she clung on to him.
Audisio raised his gun and pulled the trigger but missed his target. Clara rushed at him and grabbed the barrel of the gun with both hands. As they wrestled, Audisio pulled the trigger again.
“You cannot kill us like this,” Clara screamed.
Audisio pulled the trigger a third time, but the gun was well and truly jammed. So he borrowed a machine gun from a fellow partisan and sprayed them with bullets. The first shot killed Clara. The second hit Mussolini and knocked him down. The third killed him.
Their two bodies were thrown onto the back of a lorry, on top of the corpses of the other Fascists who had been executed. They were driven to Milan. In the Piazzale Loreto, they were strung up from a lamp-post by the feet. Clara’s skirt fell down over her face, leaving her lower half naked. A partisan stood on a box and tied the torn hem of her skirt up between her legs to preserve some of her modesty. Curiously, though Mussolini’s mistress was widely hated, many men who were there that day remarked on Clara’s face. Even beneath the dirt and smears of blood, they said, she was remarkably beautiful.
5. HITLER HAVING A BALL
Adolf Hitler was the most evil man of modern times; but, although he has been dead for over fifty years, he still has a growing band of followers across Europe, America, Russia, India, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Far East. Racists, anti-Semites, religious fundamentalists, authoritarians and just plain nutcases are mesmerized by his demagoguery, his totalitarian vision and his simple, bloodthirsty solution to any political problem. But if his followers knew about his pitiful, pathetic, perverted sex life, they would find it hard to hold him in such awe. It is difficult to have any respect for a man who likes to cower naked on the floor while being kicked by a woman or gets the ultimate sexual satisfaction from being urinated or defecated upon. Several of his lovers committed suicide, they were so appalled at his depravity.
There is no doubt that Hitler was a very strange man. That was plain long before he came to power. His ranting, hypnotic speeches often excited women to orgasm. A man who worked as a cleaner in Munich said that they would sometimes lose control of their bladders too and the whole of the front row would have be to sponged dry. Hitler would have loved that.
Homosexual men were convinced that Hitler was a homosexual too. Almost all of his bodyguards were homosexual. So were many of the inner circle of the Nazi Party. Reichsmarschall Herman Goring was a transvestite. Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess was known as “Fraulcin Anna” and Ernst Rohm, the homosexual head of the Nazi storm troopers and Hitler’s long-time friend, said: “He is one of us.”
Soon after the Night of the Long Knives, when Rohm and his friends were killed, there were mass arrests of homosexuals in Germany. The following year, the law was revised to make it illegal for a man even “to touch another man in a suggestive way”. Homosexuals were given pink stars to wear and sent to the concentration camps. It is estimated that over half a million homosexuals died during Hitler’s Reich. What was he trying to prove?
Early newsreels show that his gestures and walk were very effeminate — until Leni Riefenstahl, the great film actress, film-maker and possible lover of Hitler, began shooting him from a low camera angle to emphasize his power and encourage his mythic status. American generals would joke that he would never have gotten through West Point with his camp little mincing walk.
Another characteristic was his habit of clasping his hands protectively in front of his genitals. This prompted the joke that he was “hiding the last unemployed member of the Third Reich”.
When war broke out, the Allies needed to know what made the Nazi dictator tick. If they could get inside the mind of the man, perhaps they would be able to predict what he was going to do next. In America, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the OSS — the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA put Boston psychologist Dr Walter C. Langer on the case. Assisted by Dr Gertrud Kurth, a refugee from Hitler’s persecution, and Professor Henry A. Murray of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, he collected all the material he could from published sources and interviewed as many people as he could lied who had known Hitler personally. Langer and his team made a particular effort to understand Hitler’s sex life. In the psychoanalytical theories that were fashionable at that time, this was thought to be crucial.