Clara and Eva. Love of a good fascist man
Who doesn’t love a great love story. Well, apart from those who don’t that is, but for the rest of us, when its comes to loyalty, devotion, and total commitment in the stand by your man school of love you till I die, its hard to beat these two who devoted themselves to fascist love. Clara (Claretta) Petacci and Eva Braun have some curiously similarities. Both born in 1912. Both were young when they fell in love with older powerful fascist men. Both were 33 when they chose the Stand-by-Your-Man school of romance over leaving and living. Both had some glamour photography in their youthful past. Both had a catholic upbringing. Anyone interested in the inner workings of love and devotion can learn much from these women.
Clara “Claretta” Petacci was born into a wealthy religious family in Rome in 1912.
Her father, Francesco Saverio, like Mussolini born in 1883, was a high society doctor, a physician of the Holy Apostolic Palaces, who became enamored with fascism when Mussolini rose to power in the 1920’s. Her mother, Giuseppina, jokingly called ‘the Duce indoors’, a pious Catholic and determined social climber. Clara’s brother, Marcello Cesare Augusto, man about town, trained to be a surgeon but preferred the life of a venture capitalist with illusions of grandeur. And the youngest Petacci, Myriam, born 1923, the little sister, destined to grow up quickly while ‘chaperoning’ Clara, married Italian marquis Armando Boggiano in 1942. The Petacci family were ready to declare themselves racists and Anti-Semites and to glorify Mussolini (Hitler and Franco), while at the same time staunch Catholics, capitalists, bourgeois, snobs and Romans. Clara Petacci idolised Benito from an early age. As 14-year-old Petacci wrote to him in a tone projecting affectionate loyalty.
Clara first met Benito in 1932, when his car passed her and she initiated a meeting. She was 20, 28 years his junior. It was April of 1932 when 48 year old Mussolini drove past her. She called out, “Duce! Duce!”. When he stopped Clara told him she had been writing letters to him since her early teens. At that time, 1932, Benito was married to Rachele Guidi. His fifth ‘legitimate’ child with Rachele was born in 1929. His youngest daughter, Anna Maria, at that time three years old. Mussolini had a wife with five legitimate children, and nine illegitimate children from eight different women.
When Claretta met Benito he was in his second marriage; to Rachele Guidi. Rachele was born into a peasant family, the daughter of Agostino Guidi and wife Anna Lombardi. After the death of Rachele’s father Agostino, her mother Anna began a sexual relationship with Alessandro Mussolini. Benito’s father. In 1910, Rachele Guidi moved in with Benito. Their first child Edda was born in 1910.
Despite living with Rachele for four years, Benito married another in 1914. Ida Dalser, (born 1880) was a successful working beautician. Benito was strapped for cash at that time when his strong socialist view cost shim paid work opportunities. Ida supported him with earnings from her beautician job. She married him, supported him, and had a son with him, who was born soon after he divorced her, in 1915, to marry Rachele. Did Benito pay his ‘Taxes” for his wife and child, as he referred to child maintenance. Although a Court in Milan ordered him to pay maintenance to his wife Ida Dalser and their child, Benito Albino Mussolini, the story goes, a fire burned the office in Milan containing the records of his marriage to Ida.
Benito married Rachele Guidi shortly before the birth of Benito Albino Mussolini, in a civil ceremony on 17 December 1915. Their second child, Vitorio was born a year later, in 1916. Rachele Guidi bore five children by Benito Mussolini, two daughters and three sons. Throughout Mussolini’s reign Rachele Guidi was portrayed as the model fascist housewife and mother, unconditionally loyal to Mussolini until the end.
It is not clear when Clara and Benito’s romance was consummated. Although the record shows their affair began in 1933, in 1934, Clara was married to Air Force officer Riccardo Federici. Her marriage fizzled when Riccardo was sent to Tokyo as Air Attaché in 1936. In 1936 twenty-four year old Clara was able to formally pursue her true love when Benito provided an apartment for her in the Palazzo Venezia, his fascist party HQ. Clara’s infatuation with Benito appears to have been mutual. Her diary describes their trysts in the words of a bourgeois Catholic girl, Clara, given to regular mass on Sunday morning and coitus with the dictator at his office in the Palazzo Venezia on Sunday afternoon. Clara was the official mistress of the married fifty-three-year-old dictator, with a wife and five legitimate children, and nine illegitimate offspring from eight different women.
At this stage, the early war years, Benito was very much on the up. Mussolini was raised by a pious Catholic mother and an Atheist father, described at the time as ‘Anti Clerical.’ As a young man Benito proclaimed himself to be an atheist. Benito believed science had proven there was no god, and that the historical Jesus was ignorant and mad. He considered religion a disease of the psyche, and accused Christianity of promoting resignation and cowardice.
Benito’s effect on Italy became increasingly profound. His fascism was, at times, not the master-race Jew-killing ideology of Hitler. He did not share the same admiration for Hitler as Hitler did for him. There are many examples of him defending Italian Jews from any Nazi persecution, possibly related to his atheism not recognizing religious differences in the catholic context. But his words changed along with his fortunes. The diaries of Clara include rants by Benito that read: “The Jews should be killed and so too at least three million Italians, descendants of slaves from the first Roman Empire and unwilling to march behind their dictator”. For a period of time his positive effect on Italy had made him enormously popular. Until July of 1943. A series of defeats in his role as Axis partner to Hitler led to the Italian King, Victor Emmanuel, firing him as prime minister. Italy mostly rejoiced believing the end of Mussolini also meant the end of the war. The king appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio as the new prime minister. Mussolini was detained under armed guard, with plans to hand him over to the Allies as Italy dissolved the Fascist Party and began negotiating a new alliance with the Allies. Hitler intervened, saving Mussolini. For about a year and a half, Mussolini was based in Salò, the northern Italian town where he set up a fascist German-puppet republic in the final years of WWII, under the protection of his German liberators, for all intents and purposes, the Gauleiter of Lombardy.
In an interview in January 1945 by Madeleine Mollier, a few months before meeting his famous end, Benito said;
“Seven years ago, I was an interesting person. Now, I am little more than a corpse. I am finished. My star has fallen. I have no fight left in me. I work and I try, yet know that all is but a farce… I await the end of the tragedy and strangely detached from everything I do not feel any more an actor. I feel I am the last of spectators.”
Although by 1945 the end seemed inevitable. Clara stood with her man through the good times and the bad. She was not going to leave him now after some 12 years together. Clara was still a petite beauty at 33, standing 5 feet 3. In 1939 Benito had gifted Clara a car. An Alfa Romeo 6C Sport Berlinetta. Four gears, 110 horse power. In Italian red. That car would influence their outcome in April of 1945.
In more recent years Clara Petacci’s diary has been published. Clara’s all but stenographic record of Il Duce’s words amplified by letters the two exchanged, notably in 1943-5 during the last desperate months of Italy’s Second World War. The diaries reveal Mussolini as a typical patriarchal dictator, one much given to misanthropic and misogynist boasting, content that he was a ‘loner’. Yet he often rang Clara a dozen times a day and, certainly by 1943-5, she was as influential as anyone else in pushing him on to his (and her) bitter end.
On 25 April 1945 Allied troops were advancing into northern Italy. The collapse of the Salò Republic was imminent. With his protector Hitler cowering in a bunker, less than a week from his own similar demise by 9mm round in the head, Mussolini decided to make a road run to Switzerland, intending to board a plane for escape to Spain. He arranged to travel in Clara’s Alfa. Clara and her surgeon-turned-venture-capitalist brother Marcello, posing as a Spanish consul, drove to meet Benito. The three planning to cross the final stretch to the Swiss border in that Alfa rather than one of Benito’s own fleet of more expensive more noticeable Alfa Romeos.
Two days later on 27 April, their motorcade, including the red Alfa with Clara, her brother Marcello and Benito inside, was stopped near the village of Dongo (Lake Como) by communist partisans named Valerio and Bellini. Mussolini could not have hoped to pass unrecognized. He was formally identified by the Political Commissar of the partisans’ 52nd Garibaldi Brigade, Urbano Lazzaro. Soon after the order passed down to execute them all.
The next day, 28 April 1945, Mussolini, 61, and Petacci, 33, were summarily shot, along with most of the members of their 15-man convoy including Clara’s brother Marcello Petacci. The shootings took place in the small village of Giulino di Mezzegra, conducted by a partisan leader who used the nom de guerre Colonnello Valerio. His real identity is generally thought to have been Walter Audisio. Alternate speculation names a plumber named Moretti.
After Benito was shot in the head and the appointed executioner approached Clara with gun in hand. She requested that he shoot in the chest and not the face. A vanity request that was honored. Soon after, when the bodies were moved, it turned out that Clara did not favor underwear. (Taki Theodoracopoulos told me that.) Catholic prudence of the day ensured that although she was dead, and despite wilful disrespect for this hated fascist group being to the fore, when Clara was hung next to Il Duce, her skirt was firmly secured by a rope to preserve her modesty in death.
On 29 April 1945, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and the other executed Fascists were loaded into a van and moved south to Milan. At 3:00 a.m., the corpses were dumped on the ground in the old Piazzale Loreto. The piazza had been renamed “Piazza Quindici Martiri” (Fifteen Martyrs’ Square) in honor of fifteen Italian partisans recently executed there. The corpses were pelted with vegetables, spat at, urinated on, shot at and kicked; Mussolini’s face was disfigured by beatings before the bodies were hung upside down from the roof of an Esso gas station. The bodies were then stoned from below by civilians. This was intended both to discourage any Fascists from continuing the fight and as an act of revenge for the hanging of many partisans in the same place by Axis authorities. Meanwhile, the worlds unluckiest jogger Achille Starace was captured running past the hanging party.
The other two men honored to be strung up that day next to Mussolini in that very famous picture are Nicola Bombacci a religious former communist turned fascist. And Alessandro Pavolini. a very brilliant lawyer, a very cruel man and a very religious fascist. Who died in Lake Como after an Italian Mexican standoff. A character of great charm, who wooed the movie star of the era and founded the Black Brigades. A fascist gang of some distinction, who wore a death skull emblem on their caps, much like the Gestapo.
Then there’s Eva Braun who was herself extremely busy on that very day, April 29 of 1945. Weeks before, Braun traveled from Munich to Berlin to be with Hitler at the Führerbunker. Knowing the longer term outlook for their love was bleak she travelled with the promise of marriage to console her. It must have taken some rationalizing for a 33 year old attractive woman to choose to die with her man rather than take any one of many possibilities to disappear anonymously.
After midnight on the night of 28–29 April, Hitler and Braun were married in a small civil ceremony within the bunker. The event was witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Hours later Hitler hosted a modest wedding breakfast with his new wife. The honeymoon was unlikely much to write home about. When Braun married Hitler, her legal name changed to Eva Hitler. Signing her marriage certificate was the single occasion in which she got to use her married name.
Eva chose to stay in that bunker deep under Berlin, in dark and desperate trouble that offered no possibility of a happy ending. Her marriage lasted less than 40 hours before Adolf shot her in the side of the head. His last decision as führer before firing the next round from his 9mm Luger into his own head. A clean break settlement with no legal wiggle room. The date was April 30, 1945. Poor best man Goebbel’s was upset. His wife and six children were all in the bunker. On the evening of May 1st, Goebbels and his wife Magda, executed their six children, all named with an H (for Hitler).
Like Clara, Eva was a member of the 33 club. Both were 33 when meeting the consequence of a good relationship choice turning out to be a bad one. Both chose former catholic partners. Funny how many fascist leaders are raised catholic. In recent years catholic leader Robert Mugabe, with his much younger wife springs to mind. After the death of Mugabe’s first wife, Sally Hayfron, in 1996 seventy-two years old Robert Mugabe married 31 years old Benoni born Grace Marufu, in an extravagant Catholic mass titled the “Wedding of the Century” by the Zimbabwe press. What fun they had with the billionaire Catholic lifestyle in a country racked with poverty.
Unlike Grace Marufu, both Eva and Clara found attractive, intelligent, articulate, stylish and remarkable fascist men. Hitler, at 5 feet 9 inches had Hugo Boss to dress him. Mussolini, at 5 feet 7, was a typically stylish Roman. Mussolini and Hitler both spoke magnificently. Both drove smart cars. Both booming articulate orators who could move crowds to ecstasy. Both commanded huge audiences of adoring admirers. Both earned undying partner love that survived the most difficult challenge unscathed. Until death do us not part. Both women seemed unconcerned by what their men did for a living. Unconditionally supporting their success without question. Both chose to die alongside their man.
No romance writer could make up a greater love story than these two.
From left to right, the bodies of Bombacci, Mussolini, Petacci, with her skirt tied to preserve her modesty, Pavolini and Starace in Piazzale Loreto, 29 April 1945
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