Did Churchill kill Mussolini?

last updated 8 January 2015

Rome

Winston Churchill was behind the 1945 assassination of Benito Mussolini, according to a documentary that aired in Italy this week. The show said that the British wartime prime minister was trying to make sure that secret letters he wrote the Italian dictator wouldn’t be made public. The letters allegedly offered Italy a separate peace with the Allies, in defiance of President Roosevelt’s insistence that the war could end only with the capitulation of all Axis powers. In the documentary, a former Italian partisan, Bruno Lonati, says that he helped a British agent kill the Italian dictator and that the agent retrieved the letters. Historians, who have always held that two Italian partisans killed Mussolini, were skeptical. “It’s just a love of conspiracy,” said World War II expert Christopher Woods.