Sex Lives of the Great Dictators by Nigel Cawthorne

imprisoned in the Visconti Castle at Novara. There she spent her time writing love letters to her beloved Benito - who she addressed as "Ben" - and filling her diaries with memories of the wonderful times she had had with him.
    "I wonder if you'll get this letter of mine," she wrote, "or will they read it. I don't know and I don't care if they do. Because although I used to be too shy to tell you that I loved you, today I'm telling all the world and shouting it from the roof-tops. I love you more than ever."
    The letters never reached him. They were intercepted by the censors
    Mussolini was rescued by the Germans and set up a puppet state in Northern Italy. Clara, determined to rejoin him, persuaded the nuns who were looking after her to smuggle a letter out to the German headquarters in Novara. They sent a staff car to fetch her.
    Although the Germans did not trust her, they thought they could use her. They found her a villa on Lake Garda where Mussolini could visit her every day. Her guard at the villa was the young and charming Major Franz Spogler, who reported directly to Gestapo headquarters in Vienna.
    However, the Germans' plans fell a little flat because Rachele learned that Clara was around. Her jealous outbursts meant that Mussolini could see little of his mistress. But occasionally, in the evenings, he would leave his official Alfa Romeo outside his office to allay suspicion and drive over to see her in a small Fiat. Their meetings were cold and sad.
    Twice he told her that he did not want to see her any more. On both occasions, she began to cry and, yet again, he relented.
    Eventually Rachele could take no more and went to see Clara herself. Clara sat in silence while Rachele berated her. Then, when Rachele's ranting finished, Clara said quietly: "Il Duce loves you, Signora. I have never been allowed to say a word against you."
    This placated Rachele for a moment. Then Clara offered to give her typed copies of the letters Mussolini had sent her.
    "I don't want typed copies. That's not why I came," Rachele shouted and flew into a rage again. She hurled abuse at Clara. With her face growing redder and redder, Clara phoned Mussolini.
    "Ben, your wife is here," she said. "What shall I do?"
    Rachele grabbed the phone and forced Mussolini to tell Clara that he had known
    beforehand that Rachele had been planning to come to see her. Rachele told Clara that the Fascists hated her almost as much as the partisans did.
    Both women ended up crying. When Rachele eventually left, her parting curse was:
    "They'll take you to the Piazzale Loreto"- Milan's haunt for down-and-out prostitutes. This is exactly what happened.
    As the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula, Mussolini left Rachele to make a last stand at Valtellina. When they parted in the garden of their villa, he said he was ready to
    "enter into the grand silence of death".
    His advisers told him that he should fly to safety in Switzerland or Spain. A former mistress, Francesca Lavagnini, invited him to join her in Argentina, while (tiara suggested that they stage a car accident and announce that he had been killed.
    Mussolini rejected all these proposals. Once he had made sure Rachele and his family were safe, he urged Clara to flee to Spain. The Petacci family went, but Clara herself refused to go.
    "I am following my destiny," she wrote to a friend. "What will happen to me I don't know, but I cannot question my fate."
    Together Mussolini and Clara fled north to Como. There, Elena Curti Cucciate, the pretty, fair-haired daughter of his former mistress Angela Curti, joined them. Mussolini went for a walk with her, which sent Clara into paroxysms of jealousy.
    "What is that woman doing here?" she screamed hysterically. "You must get rid of her at once. You must! You must!"
    He didn't. Instead, Elena and Mussolini travelled on in a German convoy, but Clara caught up with them when they were stopped by a partisan road block on the road to Switzerland. The