Edda writes fondly and tenderly about Hitler, recalling the time she joined him and the family of Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda minister, on the shores of Lake Wannsee. Hitler played with the Goebbels children, “giving all signs of pleasure at doing so and at hearing them call him ‘uncle.’” She met with Hitler on several occasions, and “was always struck by his extraordinary kindness and affection toward me as well as by his patience.” She had standing to argue with him—because “he knew that he could have confidence in my honesty, in my fidelity and in my friendly feelings toward his regime.”
The countess gives us a clue about Hitler and women, a theme with which we started this book: “During the receptions at the Chancellery, I was often struck by the number of very beautiful women surrounding Hitler.” At a particular reception, “a Nazi dignitary pointed out one of these women to me. She was a marvelously beautiful blonde with the body of a goddess, and he whispered in my ear that for the moment she had captured the Führer’s heart.” It was not Eva Braun. Whoever the blonde was, she “confirmed my impression that Hitler’s misogyny and his ‘marriage with Germany’ were only a legend.”
After the war, Edda was not entirely insensitive to the question of the Holocaust. In those memoirs, she writes that she is being “objective and sincere when I deplore the extermination of the Jews by the Germans.” She continues, “It is true that I believed that the Jews, although charming personally and in small numbers, represented a danger since they were eager for power and because at a certain period (and even today) they controlled the levers of command almost everywhere in the world. I was equally convinced, because the propaganda confirmed it and there was nothing to prove the contrary, that the Jews had neither pride nor a sense of humor, and I was delighted to be an Aryan.”
There is a “but” coming: “But I shivered in horror when I learned what the Germans had done to them, for such extermination cannot be justified, and my father would have opposed it with all his force if he had known of it.”
What can we say about a woman who writes the above passages? That she is repulsive, certainly, but also that she is frank (leaving aside the question of Mussolini’s awareness of the Holocaust). Edda herself says that, after the war, an expression arose in Germany: “Hitler? Don’t know him.” But she was different. “I myself prefer to say, ‘Hitler, Goering, Goebbels? I knew them.’ It is more honest.”
We will now return to the war, and to February 1943, specifically: Mussolini dismissed his entire cabinet, including the foreign minister. Ciano had been advocating a separate peace with the Allies; he knew the war was lost. He was being demoted to the position of ambassador to the Holy See; Mussolini had decided to be his own foreign minister. The boss said to his son-in-law, “Now you must consider that you are going to have a period of rest. Then your turn will come again. Your future is in my hands, and therefore you need not worry.”
Ciano recorded those words in his diary, on February 8. At the end of the relevant entry, he wrote, “Our leave-taking was cordial, for which I am very glad, because I like Mussolini, like him very much, and what I shall miss most will be my contact with him.”
The Allies breached Sicily on July 9. On July 24, the Fascist Grand Council, of which Ciano was a member, had a historic and fateful meeting. A motion was proposed restoring powers to the king. This would have the effect of dismissing Mussolini. The motion passed by a large margin, 19 to 7. Voting with the majority was Ciano. The next day, Mussolini woke up and went to work as though nothing had happened. The king (Victor Emmanuel III) had him arrested and imprisoned. One of Edda’s sons said to her, “What are we going to do? Are we going to be killed like the czar and his children?” Edda replied that it was possible.
In September, Mussolini was snatched, i.e., rescued, by German commandos. Hitler soon set him up as the head of a rump and puppet government at Salò, on the shores of Lake Garda in northern Italy. This was the “Italian Social Republic.” Ciano and several other Fascists who were part of the Grand Council majority were tried and sentenced to death.
Edda was in an agonizing position (to put it far too mildly). She had “always loved and admired my father more than anyone else in the world,” as she would write; she also loved her husband, whatever his failings. She fought tooth and nail for him, doing everything she could to spare him. She begged her father to stay the execution, and did so as persistently and passionately as she could. She writes, “I even believe that if he had been informed, toward the end, that I had been killed, he would have heaved a sigh of relief, despite his affection for me.” In a desperate gambit, she tried to use Ciano’s diary as blackmail against the Fascists and Nazis. That volume included some damning facts and observations.
The hard-core, bitter-end Fascists and the Nazis very much wanted to see the “traitor” Ciano dead. How much leeway did Mussolini have? Was he simply a puppet on Hitler’s hand? This has long been a matter of dispute. Vittorio Mussolini—the next of the children we will consider—gives one interpretation, in a memoir: If the dictator had “used his authority to impede the course of justice,” Italy’s “newly resurgent Fascism” would have been dealt “a mortal blow,” and the Nazis would have taken the opportunity to “tighten their grip, already terribly heavy, on our benighted country.” In this telling, Mussolini’s refusal to spare Galeazzo Ciano was a patriotic act.
Ciano and the others were killed on January 11, 1944. The method of execution was distinctive and meaningful: They were made to sit down in chairs, and then tied to those chairs; then they would be shot in the back. This was supposed to be a humiliating way to die, fit for traitors. Before the bullets flew, Ciano swiveled in his chair to face the shooters. This was a fairly brave death. And Edda was very brave, in her efforts to save her husband, herself, and their children. Indeed, she showed physical courage, on the road and on the run. Eventually, she escaped into Switzerland (where the children had already been spirited).
For a time, she hated her father, and her family more generally. She wrote to Mussolini, “You are no longer my father for me. I renounce the name Mussolini.” It must be said, the dictator took it hard, too. Some people contend that he never recovered from the drama of Galeazzo and Edda. Vittorio writes that Mussolini was “the truest and most tormented victim of the whole tragedy.” This is the Mussolini-family style—operatic, hyperbolic, and self-pitying—but there must be some truth in the statement.
After the war, Edda served a detention on the island of Lipari, off Sicily. In 2009, a book came out detailing an affair she had in those days: Edda Ciano and the Communist: The Unspeakable Passion of the Duce’s Daughter. It was made into a movie.
Edda lived out her life in Rome. In a sense, she was a woman without a country, at least for some years. The anti-Fascists hated her, of course, because she had been a true-believing and spectacular Fascist. But some of the Fascists hated her, too, because she was the wife of a “traitor,” and a collaborator with him. Eventually, she reconciled with her family. You can see photos where she has her hand tenderly on her mother’s shoulder. But there was always some ambivalence in her thinking.
Not until 1974 did she write her memoirs, or speak them to a chronicler. They came out in English under a classically relativistic title: “My Truth.” One of the reasons she did not speak out earlier, she says, is that such speaking “would only have served to trample even more on the memory of Mussolini.” Addressing the key question of whether she blamed her father for her husband’s death, she says this: “Although he was not directly involved at the beginning, he did follow a policy of noninterference, either because of a lack of courage or that sort of fatalistic attitude that makes us say, when faced with a given situation, ‘Very well, so be it! The wheels have begun to turn, we shall see what comes of it all.’ Therefore, he was partially responsible for what happened.” Mainly, however, she makes excuse after excuse for her adored father.
As for Galeazzo Ciano, she says he did not betray Mussolini. No, in voting as he did on the Grand Council, he had been “misled into making an error of judgment.” The widow insists not only that Ciano was no traitor, but that “my father knew it too.” She calls her father and her husband “the only beings whom I loved and