Communist partisans caught Mussolini disguised in a German greatcoat as he tried to slip into Switzerland with retreating German troops. After a brief detention in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra, they executed him along with his mistress Clara Petacci. His body was later hauled to Milan and hung upside down in a public square, where crowds spat on and beat it.
Mussolini's fall was as undignified as his rise had been theatrical. Twenty months after Italy switched sides in the war, Il Duce attempted a last, pathetic escape north, hidden in a convoy of retreating German soldiers and wearing a helmet and greatcoat borrowed from a Luftwaffe corporal. Partisans of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade recognized him at a checkpoint near the village of Dongo despite the disguise.
Held overnight in a farmhouse, Mussolini and Clara Petacci were shot the next afternoon on orders relayed from the Committee of National Liberation, which wanted him dead before Allied forces could take custody and put him on trial. The bodies were driven to Milan's Piazzale Loreto, the same square where fascist forces had displayed the corpses of executed partisans months earlier, and strung up by their feet from a gas station girder.
Crowds surged forward to kick, spit on, and hurl stones at the corpse. Photographs of the desecration circulated worldwide within days, becoming one of the war's most searing images of retribution. Two days later, Hitler would take his own life in his Berlin bunker, having reportedly been unsettled by news of his ally's grisly end.