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Benito Mussolini was caught in a village called Dongo, on the western shore of Lake Como. Fleeing from the Allied advance, which had reached the Po River, the Italian dictator had tried to disguise himself in a German army overcoat and helmet. He sat slumped among German soldiers in the back of a truck convoy retreating northward from Milan. Italian resistance forces had blocked the lakeside road by cutting down a tree, and when the German convoy ground to a halt, the partisans began searching the trucks. One of the Italians took a closer look at a fat man slumped in a corner and recognized that famous profile. Il Duce!
The partisan leader thought he should say something historic. "In the name of the Italian people, I arrest you!" he declared. "I won't do anything," said il Duce. The partisans, who had also captured Mussolini's 33- year-old mistress, Clara Petacci, and 16 of his underlings, promised the prisoners that they would not be harmed. The resistance men asked for instructions from Milan. The headquarters, where the Communists had a strong influence, decided to send an officer known as Colonel Valerio to kill the fallen dictator. Over the protests of the local partisans who had captured Mussolini, Valerio drove il Duce and his woman out into the country, then stopped by the side of the road.
"No! No!" cried Mussolini as Colonel Valerio fired five rounds with his machine pistol.
The bodies were loaded into a truck and hauled back to Milan. There they were dumped at a half-built gasoline station where the Fascists had recently executed 15 partisan hostages. Before long a crowd gathered and began shouting curses at the still corpses.
"While I watched," a TIME correspondent reported, "a civilian tramped across the bodies and dealt Mussolini's shaven head a terrific kick. Someone pushed the twisted head into a more natural position again with a rifle butt ... A bullet had pierced his skull over the left eye and emerged at the back, leaving a hole from which the brains dripped."
So that the crowd could see better, the partisans tied Mussolini's heels with wire and then strung him up on high, upside down, with Petacci strung up beside him. The crowd went on striking and shouting and spitting at the bodies.
About ten miles northwest of Munich stood Dachau. There, back in 1933, Hitler had established the first of the Nazi concentration camps. There on April 29, troops of the U.S. Seventh Army freed 32,000 survivors and buried uncounted thousands of corpses. Dachau was one of the last of the camps to be liberated and one of the worst. A TIME correspondent who accompanied the troops and inspected the whole incredible scene--the gas chamber, the crematorium, the 5-ft.-high stack of cadavers--found himself overwhelmed by the overjoyed survivors. "There is nothing you can do," he reported, "when a lot of hysterical, unshaven, lice-bitten, half-drunk, typhus-infected men want to kiss you."
The air war too was steadily nearing its end. The last German V-2 rocket hit Britain on March 27. The rubble heaps that had once been the great cities of Germany--Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne--were mostly in Allied hands now.