The brain of Benito Mussolini, who led Italy into war, flowed out onto the sludge of the dirty Loreto Square in the center of Milan on April 30, 1945.

 　　The brain of Benito Mussolini, who led Italy into war, flowed out onto the sludge of the dirty Piazza Loreto in the center of Milan on April 30th, 1945. In the afternoon, the American army removed the bodies and ordered them to be taken to the morgue in Milan, where the badly damaged bodies of Mussolini and others, covered in bullet holes, were taken. The American army photographed Mussolini and his mistress, Clà Letta Petrucci, lying side by side in an eerie pose.

　　After the Allied forces won in North Africa during World War II, they landed on the island of Sicily in the summer of 1943. They advanced up the Italian peninsula towards the capital, Rome. On June 5th 1944, they liberated the capital, Rome. Benito Mussolini, the dictator of the Italian Fascist Party, who had held absolute power since 1922, was removed from his position and imprisoned after the fall of Sicily.

　　In late 1943, a commando unit of the Nazi German army succeeded in rescuing Mussolini, who had been imprisoned in a ski resort in the Apennine Mountains. Mussolini was unable to regain power over the whole of Italy. At that time, the Italian government had already changed its policy and was fighting on the side of the Allies. Mussolini, acting on Hitler's orders, established the Italian Social Republic in northern Italy and became its puppet head of state.

　　As the war situation in World War II worsened for Nazi Germany in 1945, they had no more energy to support Mussolini. At the end of April 1945, after Mussolini's group escaped from their base in Milan, anti-fascist partisans pursued Mussolini. A directive was issued to make the far-right leaders pay for their long-standing war crimes. On April 27th 1945, Mussolini and his mistress, Clà Letta Petacci, were both captured by the partisans on a road near Lake Como, close to the Swiss border. The following day, on the afternoon of April 28, two days before Hitler's suicide, they were shot dead by machine gun in a summary trial. Mussolini, Petacci and the 14 other dead fascists were taken to Milan's Piazza Loreto, where they were literally beaten and kicked by a mob of onlookers before being hung upside down from a petrol station in the square. It was Loreto Square, where the fascists had executed 15 partisans and displayed their bodies before August, by the SS of Nazi Germany.