The previous November, while the Germans and Allies were still fighting south of the Gustav Line, Pavolini had called the Neo-Fascists together to Verona, where a new ‘manifesto’ had been thrashed out. Mussolini had chosen to remain absent, yet despite his marked nonappearance the Neo-Fascists had, during a highly charged gathering, agreed in principle to holding elections, restoring the power of the judiciary, allowing freedom of the press, and a number of other measures. None of these things had since happened, however. Rather, it was following the Congress at Verona that Pavolini, in particular, had insisted on revenge for those Fascists who had ‘betrayed’ Italy and Mussolini the previous July. Most of the nineteen members of the Fascist Grand Council who had voted against Mussolini had since gone to ground, but six had been arrested and flung into jail, including Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and former Foreign Minister, who had been extradited, at Pavolini’s behest, from Germany. Rather than restoring the rights of the judiciary, an ‘Extraordinary Special Tribunal’ had been set up, overseeing a sham trial in which the six were accused on trumped-up charges of treason. They were, of course, found guilty, and rather than being given any chance to appeal, all but one – and Ciano included – were hurriedly executed by a cack-handed firing squad who made a complete mess of their task early the following morning. The executions had been carried out swiftly so as to limit the Duce’s opportunity to intervene.
Mussolini could – and should – have stopped the executions at the very least, but he had been warned that it would damage his standing with Hitler if he interfered. He at first dithered and then let it happen, just as he had allowed the Neo-Fascists to arrest other former Fascists, four generals, and several admirals. The admirals had also been executed without mercy.
So much of the key to fascism’s success in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s had been the spectacle it offered: the rallies, the speeches, the songs and the marches, and in this regard Mussolini had always been a particularly visible leader. How different it was now in the early summer of 1944. The Duce had barely been seen in public for months, instead cosseting himself away at the Villa Feltrinelli in Gargnano; but he had not been idle, nor had he entirely lost his political verve.
Mussolini’s political life had really begun as a journalist and as a socialist before he had broken away from the party, and it was to these roots that he had now returned. Since becoming head of the RSI his journalistic output had been extraordinary, and although he had not restarted his old paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, he had opened a new press agency, Corrispondenza Repubblicana, for which he wrote a large number of uncredited articles. Most of his pieces focused on Socializzazione – or socialisation – as he called it. Not for nothing had he insisted on calling the new republic the Socialist Republic of Italy – just about the only concession he had gained from Hitler. Neo-fascism, he believed, was merely the political structure through which his brand of socialism could best be implemented – a brand that still valued the notion of a nation state and the heroism of Italians. Yes, the war was surely lost, despite Hitler’s talk of secret weapons; but he still believed there could yet be a new revolution in Italy, and indeed across all of Europe, one that united those who mistrusted communism – a movement that was growing in Italy – and which loathed, as Mussolini did, the middle classes, the bourgeoisie. He began to see a future where Europe was united, and whereby a bridge could be made that linked the ideology of socialism and fascism together. This renewed political passion gave him hope. Mussolini was not completely beaten yet.
From the moment the Duce had lost his virginity to an elderly prostitute at the age of seventeen, he had maintained a voracious sexual appetite that had not dimmed over time. He had slept with hundreds of women, but although he remained married to his wife, Rachele, he had also always kept at least one principal mistress. This honour now belonged to Claretta Petacci, twenty-eight years his junior, and the daughter of a Vatican doctor.
There was another young woman who played an important part in his life. Elena Curti was twenty-one, intelligent, and highly vivacious, and one of Mussolini’s few trusted confidantes. There was, however, nothing sexual in their relationship. Rather, Elena was his illegitimate daughter, the offspring of another of the Duce’s favourite mistresses, Angela Curti Cucciati.
Elena had been born in 1922, soon after Mussolini had become prime minister. However, in a sense her origins date back to the birth of fascism, to the turbulent years immediately following the First World War when an embittered Italy struggled to come to terms with failure and its hollow victory in the war. The emerging fascist movement, led by Mussolini, had repeatedly clashed with the growing number of socialists. During a fight in Milan, a communist school teacher had been killed and all the Fascists involved flung into prison. One of these was the man Elena had grown up calling her father. Her mother had then contacted Mussolini, who at the time had been editor of Popolo d’Italia, and had asked for his help in trying to get her husband out of prison. How much Mussolini had been able to help is uncertain – probably not much, because he soon began an affair with Elena’s mother. Signor Curti had not been released from prison until after Elena had been conceived.
Elena had grown up knowing none of this, however, although she had witnessed her parents’ marriage disintegrate. ‘My father [Signor Curti] had a tendency towards violence,’ she says. ‘My mother used to tell me he was a bad man. She put great fear into me.’ Aged eight, she was abducted by Curti and kept locked up with a distant relative in Mantova, far from her home in Milan. After five months, she was sent away to the Convent of the Ursuline Sisters in Milan. ‘I remember I hadn’t even gone through the doors,’ says Elena, ‘but I was standing in the magnificent Bramante courtyard and I was greeted by a tiny nun with shining blue-green eyes. She listened to my story and then said, “So now you know what real suffering is like.”’ Only later did she discover that her mother had turned to Mussolini for help – help that had resulted in Elena being taken from both parents and placed in the convent instead. But it had been a happy place for her. With the love and security shown her by the nuns, she had blossomed both artistically and academically.
It was when she came of age at eighteen that her mother had taken her to Rome to meet Mussolini and that she finally learnt the truth. Understandably, this was deeply traumatic for her, although having slowly but surely come to terms with her dramatically changed circumstances, she began to feel rather proud of her true parentage. Nor did Mussolini forget her; rather, he continued to help both her and her mother. Whilst at university, following the establishment of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, Elena began to work for the new government.
Until the spring of 1944, Elena had been living in a requisitioned hotel in Maderno, a few miles north of Salò, and working as a secretary in the Ministry of Popular Culture. Now a favourite not only of her father, Mussolini, but also of a number of the young officers and officials of the new republic, she was enjoying life and the attention she was being given.
She had a new job, too, as the ‘Eyes of Mussolini Within the Party’. Every fortnight, a car would collect her and take her to see Mussolini in his villa, and she would tell him frankly about what she had observed in the intervening two weeks, as well as the general state of morale.
In this new role there were also other assignments for the Duce. It was in early May that Elena was contacted by an Italian Air Force officer named Virgilio Pallottelli Corinaldesi. ‘The Duce has sent me,’ he told her. ‘He’s charged me with a secret mission and you must accompany me. A couple,’ he explained, ‘does not get noticed so easily.’ Intrigued, Elena did as she was asked. Their task was to go to Gorizia on the Yugoslav border to gauge the political and military climate there, even though this was now part of the Greater Reich. Mussolini had been told that Italian officers and officials there were working with the enemy – the Yugoslavian Communists – and he wanted them to find out the truth and report back.
It was no easy task getting there. They were given a car, a considerable