Galeazzo Ciano
Galeazzo Ciano was Mussolini's foreign minister and son-in-law, and was shot by his own government tied to a chair. Born in Livorno in 1903, the son of a decorated naval officer who became a fascist minister, he entered the diplomatic service, married Mussolini's daughter Edda in 1930, and was foreign minister by 1936 at thirty-three. He was vain, well-dressed, popular with the Roman aristocracy, and kept a diary from 1937 that is one of the essential documents of the period — because he wrote down what was said in rooms nobody else recorded. He negotiated the Pact of Steel with Ribbentrop in May 1939, and discovered afterwards that he had committed Italy to a war Germany intended to start within months, which was not what he had been told. He spent the following months trying to keep Italy out and was overruled in June 1940. His diary records his growing contempt for the Germans and his conviction that the war was lost, alongside his own part in the invasion of Albania and the disastrous attack on Greece, which he had pushed. Mussolini dismissed him in February 1943 and sent him to the Vatican as ambassador. At the Grand Council on 24 July 1943 he voted with the majority to remove Mussolini from command — and then fled to Germany with his family, which delivered him to the Germans who reinstalled Mussolini a fortnight later. He was tried at Verona in January 1944 and executed by firing squad, shot in the back. Edda smuggled the diaries to Switzerland.
- Lived: 1903 CE – 1944 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: diplomat, minister, politician
