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Diary of Mussolini's lover reveals tears of 'old sentimentalist Hitler'
Nick Pisa in Rome17 Nov 2009
Diaries written by the lover of Benito Mussolini tell of the intense and at times tearful relationship between the Italian dictator and Adolf Hitler.
In the documents, which have never been published before, Claretta Petacci describes Hitler as a "sentimentalist" who was so overcome that he cried when he met Mussolini.
She also notes Mussolini's fervent anti-Semitism and his disgust at mixed-raced marriages of Italians settling in African colonies. Mussolini also boasts of being a racist "before Hitler was born".
She was 20 when she met Mussolini, by then 49. She was his lover for nine year until, at the end of the war she, like him, was shot and hanged from a lamp-post by partisans.
In an explosive new book called Secret Mussolini her diaries from 1932 until 1938 have been put together and will be published tomorrow in Corriere Della Sera.
In them Petacci recalls how Mussolini described the conference at Munich in October 1938 where he met Hitler and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
Petacci wrote of how Mussolini had described the meeting: "The welcome was fantastic and the Fuhrer was very pleasant. Hitler is an old sentimentalist at heart. When he saw me he had tears in his eyes. But he does have angry outbursts which only I can control."
Professor Christopher Duggan, an expert on Italian 20th century history at the University of Reading, said: "Hitler did have a soft spot for Mussolini. He loved Italian culture and he once said he would retire to Florence when he had sorted out the new world order."
