Who killed Mussolini? That question has inspired one of the most enduring conspiracy theories to have emerged out of the second world war. Now, a Hong Kong-based author has helped reignite the old controversy.
Most students of history know that Italian communist partisans killed Il Duce and his mistress, Clara Petacci. There is, however, another version that has always lingered on the fringes like the illegitimate offspring of proper history. In this theory, agents from the British Special Operations Executive, working with the partisans, killed Mussolini - on the orders of Winston Churchill.
This conspiracy theory has now been resurrected, thanks to two new books. One is called Les Derniers Jours de Mussolini (The last days of Mussolini) by Pierre Milza, a French historian and specialist in Fascist Italy. The other is titled Ben - a historical novel written by Hong Kong-based Italian novelist and journalist Angelo Paratico - which was published this summer in Milan. Both titles have the Italian and British press up in arms.
The Italian press is, by and large, sceptical about the books' thesis. However, Paratico says many Italians believe the story, including the late Renzo De Felice, the dean of studies of Italian Fascism and Mussolini.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph in Britain, author and historian Guy Walters angrily dismissed the theory. 'No! No! No! Churchill did not order the assassination of Mussolini,' he wrote. 'Milza's claims should go straight in the big dustbin along with claims about Josef Mengele's secret tribe of twins and Hitler surviving the war.'
Of the two titles, Paratico's book is the less historically upsetting, because he merely uses the British-inspired assassination plot as the setting for the exploits of his hero, an SOE operative dispatched by Churchill to do his dirty deed. Milza, however, wrote about the plot as history. Churchill, Milza believes, wanted Mussolini killed to hide the existence of secret correspondence, the most compromising part of which was his alleged attempt to entice Il Duce into a separate peace. This would have violated his prior agreement with US president Franklin D. Roosevelt.