Hitler’s resolve was strengthened when he learned of the fate that had overtaken Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci. The pair were picked up by partisans on 27 April 1945 in a column of cars, trucks and armoured vehicles full of German troops and Italian Fascists on its way to Italy’s northern border, near Lake Como. An armed detachment led by the Communist partisan ‘Colonel Valerio’, who had spent five years in prison in the 1930s for anti-Fascist activities, put them up against a wall and shot them with a sub-machine gun in an act of ‘Italian people’s justice’. After executing fifteen
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