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Chancellor Willy Brandt, whose wartime exile in Norway frees him of any Nazi taint, and other German leaders have no intention of letting people become sanguine about Hitler. "The names of Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, Mauthausen and Schirmeck have lost none of their horror," President Gustav Heinemann reminds them. "Nothing can mitigate them, no rhetoric can dissipate them, they cannot and must not be relegated to oblivion."
He Made the Trains Run on Time, But . . .
Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were gunned down by a partisan and strung by their heels, in a gruesome outpouring of hate. These vengeful murders and two other events in Fascism's twilight—Mussolini's ouster as Premier by his own Grand Council, and Italy's switch to the Allied side—ensured that il Duce would be remembered with a certain sympathy. Today Italians refer quite easily to Mussolini, not by name but as "quello" (that one) or "lui" (he), and the references are often flattering.
Unlike Hitler, Mussolini has mementos aplenty. The principal one is his tomb in Predappio, the Apennine village where he was born almost 87 years ago. His ornate crypt and a nearby restaurant owned by Widow Rachele, now 80, are magnets for tourists and a shrine for the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement, which polled 1,400,000 votes (4.5% of the total) in Italy's last general election. As many as 5,000 people flock to Predappio on pleasant Sundays.
Like the Caesars. There are other reminders. Near Rome's Duca d'Aosta bridge over the Tiber is an obelisk on which his name is inscribed. Communists once demanded that the stone, marking the former Foro Mussolini, be removed or rechiseled. The government ruled that Mussolini had become just one more dictator in the city's history, along with Caesar, Caracalla or the 14th century Cola di Rienzi. Like them, he was entitled to a place in the ruins.
The man who made the trains run on time is survived by far more practical memorials. In two decades, Mussolini not only built 1,534 miles of railroads but also carved out 620 miles of waterway, 1,075 miles of highway and 400 major bridges. He leveled Roman slums to create pretentious imperial avenues and vistas and in a 14-year project drained the Pontine marshes to reduce malaria and provide land and homes for 60,000 peasants. The achievements, however, were overshadowed by depravities of the spirit. Parliament was emasculated, and opponents were dosed with castor oil or beaten to death. Mussolini provided Italy with empire by slaughtering Ethiopians, then led the country into a war in which Italians were slaughtered by both sides.
Mere Parenthesis. Some Italians dismiss Mussolini out of hand. Benedetto Croce called him "a mere parenthesis in Italian history." But that ignores the fact that Mussolini was in power for 20 years, a fifth of Italy's span as a modern nation and longer than any Premier before or since.