LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Benito Mussolini: Fighting Fascists
built 635 days ago
On 12 September 1943, two months after he was stripped of power, Mussolini was rescued by the Germans in Operation Oak (Unternehmen Eiche). This was a raid planned by General Kurt Student and carried out by SS Lieutenant Colonel (Obersturmbannführer) Otto Skorzeny. The Germans relocated Mussolini to northern Italy where he set up a new fascist state, the Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana, RSI).
Source:
Called up for military service, Mussolini served at the front between September 1915 and February 1917. During that period he kept a war diary in which he prefigured himself as a charismatic hero leader of a socially conservative national warrior community. In reality... he spent most of the war in quiet sectors and saw very little action . It has always been thought that he was seriously wounded in grenade practice in 1917 and that this accounts for his return to Milan to the editorship of his paper. But recent research has shown that he in fact used what were only very minor injuries to cover the more serious affliction of neurosyphilis . Fascism became an organized political movement following a meeting in Milan on March 23, 1919 (Mussolini founded the Fasci di Combattimento on February 23, however). After failing in the 1919 elections, Mussolini at last entered parliament in 1921. The Fascisti formed armed squads of war veterans called squadristi to terrorize anarchists, socialists and communists.
Source:
After retiring as supreme ruler of Fascist Italy (for the second time) good ol' Benito decided to embark on a career as a musician. For some with the determination of Mussolini lack of talent was no barrier. His major achievement was his collaboration with George Formby and The Communist Rebels to create the smash hit "Hanging from a Lamppost". After moderate success he decided to try other ventures. His new dream was to become Kojak, but his screen test was ruined by his uncontrollable giggling, so in 1954 he instead created his own wine company.
Source:
The assassination of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who had requested the annulment of the elections because of the irregularities committed, provoked a momentary crisis of the Mussolini government. The murderer, a squadrista named Amerigo Dumini, reported to Mussolini soon after the murder. Mussolini ordered a cover-up, but witnesses saw the car used to transport Matteotti's body parked outside Matteotti's residence, which linked Dumini to the murder. The Matteotti crisis provoked cries for justice against the murder of an outspoken critic of Fascist violence. The government was shocked into paralysis for a few days, and Mussolini later confessed that a few resolute men could have alerted public opinion and started a coup that would have swept fascism away. Dumini was imprisoned for two years.
Source:
Mussolini was survived by his wife, Donna Rachele Mussolini, by two sons, Vittorio and Romano Mussolini, and his daughters Edda, the widow of Count Ciano and Anna Maria. A third son, Bruno, had been killed in an air accident while flying a P108 bomber on a test mission, on 7 August 1941. Mussolini's granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini, daughter of Romano Mussolini, is currently a member of the European Parliament for the neo-fascist party Alternativa Sociale; other relatives of Edda (Castrianni) moved to England after the Second World War.
Source:
When Fascists threatened to march on Rome, King Victor Emmanuel III invited Mussolini to form a coalition government (Oct. 28, 1922). By 1926 the Fascist leader had transformed the country into a single-party, totalitarian regime. In his new “corporative state,” employers and workers were organized into party-controlled groups representing different sectors of the economy. The system preserved capitalism and expanded social services, but abolished free trade unions and the right to strike. The Lateran pacts with the Vatican (1929) ended a half-century of friction between church and state and proved to be long-lasting.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Fighting Fascists