Lightheartedly relating these events in a casual conversation with Hitler before the war, the Führer gravely turned to him and said with deep sincerity, “Duce, you’re too good to be a dictator!”¹⁵

Aware now his life had come to an end, Mussolini tore open his shirt and demanded that he be executed at once. Fumbling nervously, Audisio obliged by trying to shoot him with an Italian automatic rifle, but it would not fire. Twenty two years earlier, just after the Fascists had come to power, an elderly Catholic nun had prophesied from her death-bed in Rome that no weapon in all Italy would ever be found to kill Benito Mussolini. The trembling Audisio tried again, this time with an Italian pistol. It, too, refused to function. The Duce stood calmly waiting, while a French hand-gun was loaded, then aimed point-blank at his bared breast. The MAS 7.65mm pistol fired, and he fell, among the last of the 410,000 Italians to die in Mussolini’s War.

During its final months and those immediately thereafter, partisans killed an additional 300,000 of his followers in the paroxysm of bloodshed that seized all Italy.