Edda Mussolini, daughter of Benito Mussolini and one of the people who most influenced him, was sentenced, in 1945, to a sentence of probation and confinement on the remote Sicilian island of Lipari. She thought it was a provisional phase before the Italians and the Allies could prove crimes that would allow them to drastically toughen the punishment. As Caroline Moorehead records in her biography Edda Mussolini: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe (Vintage, 2022), she believed that she could end up like her father.
However, Edda enjoyed peaceful boat excursions in Lipari, and was even allowed to move to a much more comfortable residence, the villa of her new lover, Leonida Buongiorno, a former partisan and prominent member of the Communist Party on the island. The police, one can imagine, sweaty, amused and resigned, followed the couple on foot, by car or by boat when they did not have to watch them while they were sunbathing on the terrace.
Far from facing capital punishment, Edda did not complete even half of her period of confinement, because, ten months after arriving in Lipari, she benefited from a massive amnesty decreed by the communist Minister of Justice, Palmiro Togliatti.
For months, Mussolini's daughter had striven to defend her innocence in a long memorandum, where she claimed that her role in the fascist regime had not gone much beyond attending and organizing social events. Politics was not his thing. The parties were his thing. Please, she said, but she had applied for a fascist card in 1936, and only when the party leader Achille Starace had forced her to!
Certainly, she explained, she had dedicated herself to making friends in the main European capitals on her father's behalf, but there couldn't have been many Nazis among them, because she didn't know German! Oh, and as much as they credited with recordings that he had pressured Benito Mussolini to support Hitler, the truth is that he had only asked him, because they had already committed themselves to the Germans (it's ugly to lie) and because supporting Hitler seemed the best for the country: the Nazis were, in 1940, the most likely winners of the Second World War. Edda, as we can see, had an answer for everything.
She was informed of the amnesty in 1946, and just a year later, another extraordinary piece of news arrived: the Italian Supreme Court had rehabilitated her deceased husband, Galeazzo Ciano. This, who had been Foreign Minister under Benito Mussolini and the dictator's "brother-in-law", was now considered by the judges as one of the "martyrs of the liberation war" of Italy against the fascists and Nazis.
In the following years, Edda would soon claim part of her properties in court. And there were many that she recovered, despite the fact that she had become rich, like the entire Mussolini family and those around her, thanks to the privileges of a regime that at the time was considered illegitimate and corrupt. But what was Edda's fault for all that?
Since Edda died as an octogenarian in the mid-nineties, more has become known about what she did or did not do in the bowels of the regime. The British Caroline Moorehead documents many of them thanks to exceptional access to the Ciano and Mussolini families, as well as thousands of pages of unpublished memoirs of people who knew and treated her in those crucial years. What we know invites, at the very least, skepticism.
Firstly, his relationship with the Nazi leaders can be considered, at the very least, privileged. In the early 1930s, Edda Mussolini was already a personal friend, above all, of Magda, but also of Joseph Goebbels. He had met Magda in Switzerland, and it was she who helped her, on a semi-official visit in 1936, to enter society in Berlin, which included interacting with Adolf Hitler or Hermann Göring, who told her about what then seemed like expansionist illusions. .
Edda, already considered by the European press as an advisor and key representative of Mussolini, who traveled wherever he needed to sound out support and obstacles, acknowledged years later that it was on that visit that she began to like Hitler.
Shortly after, in October 1936, it was her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, who landed in Germany as the new head of Italian diplomacy. Ciano took advantage of the trip to sign a secret protocol with the Francoists, already immersed in the Civil War, and to provide Hitler with secret cables tapped by Italian intelligence that proved British hostility against the Nazi regime. The grateful Führer gave him a signed copy of Mein Kampf and told him that he hoped that Italy and Germany would one day join together in an alliance against the communists that would challenge the Western democracies.
In the months following Edda and Ciano's trips, Mussolini concluded an anti-Soviet agreement with Hitler, removed Italy from the League of Nations, and gave a speech in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan where he said that Germany and Italy were, literally, a union. “axis” around which all European countries that wanted peace should revolve.
At that time, the Duce was debating the convenience of not definitively taking sides with the Nazis and using his flirtations with Berlin only to extract concessions from the British and French. His intention was not to slide into an armed conflict for which Italy was not prepared. Ciano, at the end of 1938, already feared that Hitler would not be satisfied with his recent annexation of Austria, nor with recovering former German territories awarded to Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia after the First World War. And that fear made her ask his father-in-law the need to prevent a mad Germany from rushing Italy into the trenches.
Despite everything, in 1939, Ciano and his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, sealed a pact by which their countries undertook to assist each other in the event of a war. Although the head of Italian diplomacy had begun to publicly oppose the war, in the negotiations with Ribbentrop he did not bother to ask in exchange for either the traditional consultations prior to an offensive, or even a minimum guarantee that the possible invasion of Poland would not be the preamble to a major invasion, nor the obligation to report approximate dates of the start of hostilities. Basically, in 1939, both Ciano and the Duce gave Hitler carte blanche and placed themselves at his disposal.
From 1936 to 1939, Edda Mussolini, already in favor of allying with Germany, even if it had to go to war, notably increased her influence over her father. This caused, for example, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, to try to win her sympathy with an interview in Rome and an immense bouquet of flowers, which even the Italians found extravagant.
A few months later, in July 1939, Edda would appear on the cover of Time. The American magazine did not hesitate to affirm that she was an extraordinarily influential woman with a “mediocre” husband… and that, to tell the truth, she was the one who called the “pants” in the affairs of Italian diplomacy.
As Moorehead warns, the journalists were exaggerating, and, furthermore, many more factors than Edda intervened in Mussolini's decision to enter the war on Germany's side in 1940. Among them, the fear of breaching the mutual assistance pact that Ciano and Ribbentrop had signed in 1939; the confidential communication from Berlin, in May 1940, that Germany was preparing to invade Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg; the deep impact it had on Mussolini when Hitler conveyed to him, also in the spring of 1940, that he did not need Italy to crush the allies; and, finally, the way in which the very rapid advance of Stalin's and Hitler's troops in Europe seemed to confirm this after the Nazi-Soviet pact.
Edda Mussolini's ascendancy did not determine Italy's participation in the Second World War, in the same way that her husband's pressure on the Duce was not able to prevent it. The Nazis forced Galeazzo Ciano out of the Foreign Ministry in 1943. By then, he had been plotting for three years to get Italy out of the trenches, which had included all kinds of meetings with foreign diplomats, with the Italian king and with high dignitaries of the Holy See. He had even dared to anticipate to the Queen of Belgium the invasion of her country by the Wehrmacht. Hitler even called him a “traitor” for that.
Another of the clues that reveal Edda Mussolini's credit about her father, in particular, and about the fascist regime, in general, is that her husband could dedicate himself to conspiring for years without being immediately shot. Given Ciano's epic indiscretion, Moorehead notes, everyone who was anyone in Rome knew what he did. However, when Berlin imposed her dismissal in February 1943, Mussolini allowed him to assume her legation to the Holy See and continue plotting for a few more months.
Shortly afterwards, after the invasion of Sicily by the allies in July 1943, the Great Fascist Council voted, before Benito Mussolini and with an overwhelming majority, a motion that affirmed that the dictator must answer for the shipwreck of fascism and that his leadership needed to be “reviewed.” Ciano not only supported the motion, but he did so with a resounding speech. The next day, the Italian king gave the order to arrest Mussolini.
Ciano believed that his father-in-law was finished and that things would go well for him. He was wrong. Edda, meanwhile, began maneuvering to flee Italy, faced with the advances of the allies. Francisco Franco offered her a plane for her and her children, but without her husband. Hitler said the same thing, but ended up evacuating the entire family, and, although he promised them that he would take them to Argentina by plane, stopping in Spain, he took the opportunity to keep them all in Munich.
When the Führer met with Edda in Germany, he made it clear that he did not even want to see Ciano. Edda and Hitler sat face to face twice, and in one of those meetings, she dared to shout at him in public that she had lost the war. Hitler detested Ciano, and handed him over to the fascist militias to be executed by a tribunal that he had previously negotiated. In January 1944, like some of the other members of that Fascist Council who had facilitated the deposition of Mussolini, he was tried and shot in the back, like the traitors.
In any case, it says a lot about Edda's prestige that she was able to convince, as Tilar J. Mazzeo relates in her essay Sisters in resistance (Scribe, 2022), the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, to organize a rescue operation. of her husband behind Hitler's back, a few days before the verdict.
Benito Mussolini, overwhelmed by his daughter's reaction, never wanted to take responsibility for the execution, denied having intervened in the process and having received the requests for clemency sent to him by the accused, which could have saved their lives, and, finally, He put all the blame on the Nazis. “The Germans,” the Duce told his secretary Giovanni Dolfin when he was informed of the execution, “needed this tragedy, this blood, to convince themselves of our good faith.”
The concrete impact that Edda Mussolini's actions had on fascist politics can be discussed. What can no longer be debated, with the documented biography of Caroline Moorehead in hand, is that Edda exercised substantial political power in the regime, that she became rich thanks to it and that all those who opposed her, including her father, learned to fear it. “My daughter – Benito Mussolini once stated – she has a strong and violent character; she is capable of everything.”
This text is part of an article published in number 666 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
