Fall of Mussolini
The Fascist Grand Council voted Mussolini out of power in the early hours of 25 July 1943, and the king had him arrested that afternoon. Italy had lost North Africa in May and the Allies had landed in Sicily on 10 July. Rome had been bombed for the first time on 19 July, during a meeting between Mussolini and Hitler at which Mussolini failed to raise the question of Italy leaving the war. The Grand Council had not met since 1939. Dino Grandi, a former foreign minister and ambassador to London, called it and moved a resolution restoring command of the armed forces to the king. It passed nineteen to seven, with Ciano — Mussolini's own son-in-law — voting for it. Mussolini treated the vote as advisory and went to his usual audience with Victor Emmanuel III the following afternoon, where he was told he was the most hated man in Italy, dismissed, and arrested by carabinieri as he left, driven away in an ambulance. Marshal Badoglio formed a government, announced that the war continued, and secretly negotiated an armistice signed on 3 September and announced on 8 September. The Germans had prepared for exactly that and disarmed the Italian army within days, seizing Rome and the north. Otto Skorzeny's glider troops took Mussolini from a mountain hotel on the Gran Sasso on 12 September, and he was installed as head of a puppet republic at Salò. Italy then had a civil war as well as an occupation, and Mussolini was shot by partisans in April 1945.
- Year: 1943 CE
- Category: Political
