rome | Benito Mussolini was a fierce anti-Semite who proudly said that his hatred for Jews preceded Hitler’s and vowed to “destroy them all,” according to previously unpublished diaries by the fascist dictator’s longtime mistress.
According to the diaries, Mussolini also talked about the warm reception he received from Hitler at the 1938 Munich conference — he called the German leader a “softy” — and attacked Pope Pius XI for his criticism of Nazism and fascism.
On a more intimate note, Mussolini was explicit about his sexual appetites for his mistress and said he regretted having affairs with several other women.
The dairies kept between 1932 and 1938 by Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s mistress, are the subject of a book released last week, “Secret Mussolini.”
Historians said the diaries appeared to be convincing and reinforced the image that Mussolini was strongly anti-Semitic, even though early on there was some Jewish support for his fascist movement.
But they cautioned that these are the diaries of the dictator’s lover — not Mussolini himself — and therefore must be taken with an extra grain of salt.
Corriere said the diaries shed new light on Mussolini, who had been seen as more obsequious toward the pope and “dubious” over Italy’s racial laws, which led to widespread persecution of Italian Jews.
“I have been a racist since 1921. I don’t know how they can think I’m imitating Hitler,” Mussolini is quoted as boasting in August 1938. “We must give Italians a sense of race.”
Italy’s racial laws restricted the rights of Jews and expelled them from government, university and other fields.
In 1943, German troops occupied northern and central Italy, and thousands of Jews were deported. According to some researchers, there were 32,000 Jews in 1943 in Italy, of whom more than 8,000 were deported to Nazi concentration camps.
“These disgusting Jews, I must destroy them all,” Mussolini was quoted as saying by his lover in October 1938. At another point he calls them “enemies” and “reptiles,” according to the book.
Mussolini also denounced Pius XI, who saw the rise of anti-Semitism in the last years of his 1922-39 papacy, as harming the Catholic Church. Pius commissioned an encyclical to denounce racism and the violent nationalism of Germany, but he died before releasing it and it was never published.
According to the book, Mussolini said that “there never was a pope as harmful to religion” as Pius XI and accused him of doing “undignified things, such as saying we are similar to the Semites.”
For years, the Vatican has struggled to defend Pius’ successor — the wartime Pope Pius XII — against claims he didn’t do enough to save Jews from the Holocaust.
Mussolini, Italy’s leader from 1922 to 1943, had kind words for Hitler, whom he said was “very nice,” according to the book. “Hitler is a big softy, deep down,” Mussolini is quoted as telling Petacci shortly after the 1938 conference in Munich.
Mussolini and Petacci were shot by partisans on April 28, 1945, and their bodies were displayed to a jeering crowd hanging upside-down from a gas station in a Milan square.
Piero Melograni, a historian who has written several books on fascism and World War II, said that early excerpts from the book were “convincing in terms of the character that emerges and therefore the authenticity of the diaries.”
Another prominent historian, Giovanni Sabbatucci, said that while he has no reason to doubt the authenticity of the diaries, he is less sure of their historical significance because they might not reflect Mussolini’s real thoughts.
“We must not forget that, even when authentic, we are reading what a mistress was writing about what her lover told her,” he said in a phone interview.