London: Though Benito Mussolini regarded
Adolf Hitler as a "very kind man, he was "jealous" of the Nazi
leader's power and fame, declassified diaries of the Italian
dictator's mistress have revealed.
Claretta Petacci's journals, which will be published
this week, describe a meeting he had with the German leader in
1938 after the then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
agreed to Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland, 'The Daily
Telegraph' reported.
"The Fuhrer was very kind. At heart, Hitler is an
old sentimentalist. When he saw me he had tears in his eyes,"
Mussolini was quoted as telling his lover.
The diaries also show Mussolini was irritated by
being regarded as a junior partner to Hitler, maintaining that
his fascism and anti-Semitism dated back to the 1920s, before
Hitler rose to prominence.
"I've been racist since 1921," he proudly told his
mistress on a boating trip on August 4, 1938, two years before
Italy declared war on Britain. "I don't know how they can
think that I'm imitating Hitler, he wasn't even born then (in
a political sense)."
In another entry, Mussolini rails against Italians in
Italy's African colonies having relationships with locals.
"Every time I get a report from Africa, it makes
me upset. Just today, another five arrested for living with
blacks. Ah! These dirty Italians, they are destroying in less
than seven years an empire. They have no consciousness of
race," he said.
The book, Secret Mussolini, contains extracts
from Petacci's diaries written between 1932 and 1938. They say
Mussolini was madly in love with Miss Petacci, once telling
her he mentally undressed her at the theatre and that he had a
"mad desire" for her.
She was just 20 when she met the fascist dictator, who
was married with children and 29 years her senior. In April
1945, with total defeat looming, the couple tried to escape to
Switzerland but were caught by Italian partisans, executed and
strung up from a petrol station near Milan.
Bureau Report
First Published: Wednesday, November 18, 2009, 10:06