for example, in which all the brothers and their friends speak in exactly the same way.” (The Agnellis are the industrialists who have forged and led Fiat, the automaker.)
That Time article appeared in the issue of July 24, 1939. Edda was on the cover, which advised, “She wears the diplomatic trousers.” The story inside was titled “Lady of the Axis.” It began, “Most noteworthy Italian exponent of the Fascist dictum that a woman’s place is in the home is none other than Donna Rachele Mussolini.” But “Italy’s outstanding exception” to this dictum was the Mussolinis’ eldest child. The article was entertaining, scalding, and sensational, depicting Ciano as a lightweight and mediocrity, and his wife as a conniving floozy—of dubious maternity.
Making a visit to Berlin, Edda “liked the heavy masculine atmosphere,” said Time. “Handsome young Nordic men were always at hand to keep her in a proper Germanic frame of mind.” In Budapest, “the Countess was said to have made eyes at one of the sons of old Regent Horthy. This could easily have been excused, but when the Count and Countess showed up for a hunting expedition arranged by the Regent four hours late with only the excuse they had overslept, there were strained feelings.” Edda was also depicted as a raging, hard-line Fascist, which was quite true.
Whether she ever knew the contents of the article is unclear. In her memoirs, she writes, “Time even devoted its cover to me one week. What a boon to the ego!”
There were actually towns named for Edda, or at least one of them. After Mussolini invaded Albania in April 1939, he renamed Saranda, or “Santi Quaranta,” as the Italians had called it, “Porto Edda.” The name stuck until Italian fortunes were reversed later in the war.
Edda Mussolini Ciano loved Fascism, loved Nazism, and loved Hitler. In her memoirs—penned well after the war, in the mid-1970s—she is entirely open about this. In May 1940, she argued with her husband, expressing her disgust, indeed “shame,” that Italy had yet to enter the war on Germany’s side. Her father no doubt knew how she felt as well. And she did not have to endure her “shame” for much longer. “A month later,” she writes, “Italy entered the war, but I must emphasize that, though I was delighted by my father’s decision, I had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
She nonetheless had a role to play in Axis relations. I will let her explain: “Given my Germanophile sympathies, I was, without being aware of it, the link between the Führer and my father. I found it normal that two dictators should be allies. And this all the more so since, as soon as he took power in 1933, I had begun to consider Hitler a veritable hero.”
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
