The Dictator’s Favorite Daughter: The Story of Edda Mussolini – The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe

Edda’s early years were spent in poverty, she was well aware of hard work and frequent beatings. My father was almost never home – either he was fighting, or he was in the hospital with injuries, or he was working for days, or he was in jail. Before bringing the girl to Benito’s cell for a first date, her mother told her to be sure to hug her father – so he could quietly pass his items to the child.

Edda loved her father and was his favorite. Benito raised her in a spirit of stoicism, forbidding any signs of vulnerability. At the age of five, the girl was afraid of frogs – the man caught one and forced Edda to hold it because “Mussolini never showed fear.” Edda grew up with cold emotion, but at the same time bold and courageous. “I have succeeded in conquering Italy, but I will never be able to submit Edda to my will,” Mussolini once said.

As a teenager, Edda unexpectedly went from the daughter of a fanatical beggar to the child of Italian dictator Duce. Benito adored her, but Edda still had to compete for his attention with hundreds of other women. And she won: everyone considered her an eminence grise and perhaps the only person Mussolini listened to. Edda was much more of a “first lady” of the regime than her reclusive mother, who raised chickens and rabbits and rarely left her house.

In 1930, when she was 19, Edda Mussolini married Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s loyal foreign minister: it was a match made in heaven. More than five hundred guests were invited to the wedding – invitations were sent to Roman aristocrats, diplomats from more than 30 countries and all high-ranking fascists.

After the ceremony, the newlyweds left for their honeymoon in three cars. Edda sat behind the wheel of her white Alfa Romeo, with her husband beside her. Servants and luggage were placed in the second car, and security in the third. When the procession left, Edda noticed a fourth car – Benito Mussolini was driving in it, who did not want to part with his beloved child. His daughter managed to persuade him to come back.

After their honeymoon, the couple was sent to Shanghai, where their vices became evident: Galeazzo chased women, Edda drank gin all day and lost huge sums at cards. She wasn’t jealous: all her life she had seen her father cheat on her mother and considered it a common occurrence. Perhaps she also started business – there was a lot of gossip in diplomatic circles about her affairs.

Edda herself, anticipating the inevitable end of the regime, declared that she was not going to deprive herself of pleasure: “There is no point in behaving well if you know that the guillotine awaits you. ” She drank, smoked, threw luxurious parties, loved to gamble – and absolutely did not resemble the ideal wife and mother of that time, and even the birth of three children did not change anything.

In 1939, Edda appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the caption: “She wears diplomatic pants.” A Swiss newspaper called her “the most influential woman in Europe”; over time, Edda also received the title of the most dangerous. She and Ciano were considered the golden couple of the Italian regime, but it was Mussolini’s daughter rather than his son-in-law who possessed the “masculine” qualities. The girl was smart, capricious and stubborn, her husband was indecisive, vain and lazy.

Restless and easily bored, Edda traveled widely, often as her father’s emissary. She was like him: intelligent, sarcastic and prone to sudden mood swings. “Acerbically intelligent, capricious, like a wild mare and endowed with a thoroughbred ugliness,” is how the German living in Rome, Eugen Dolman, describes her. Edda, he said, had “Mussolini’s eyes that illuminated everything and everyone they looked at.”

Edda and Galeazzo, who became Minister of Press and Propaganda, were not only at the center of attention, they were at the point where the most important decisions were made. But if Ciano and Mussolini hesitated, Edda was full of confidence and urged them to side with Germany. “The most German of all Italians,” Adolf Hitler said of the girl.

In 1943, as Italy faced military defeat, Ciano was among a group of senior officials who voted against Mussolini in the Fascist Grand Council. Benito is arrested and replaced as Prime Minister by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who concludes a truce with the Allies.

But the Germans quickly flooded Italy with troops and saved Mussolini: he became the puppet dictator of a new state: the Italian Social Republic. Ciano had already been arrested, and although Edda begged her father to spare her husband, he was executed.

It is said that on the night of the execution, Mussolini called the SS commander in Italy, Karl Wolf, and asked if he could pardon Ciano without harming himself in Hitler’s eyes. “Hardly,” Wolf replied. (One of Edda’s sons would later publish a memoir with the spectacular title “When Grandpa Shot Dad.”)

Also read: The Cruelest Mother in the Third Reich: How Magda Goebbels Raised Her Children

After her husband’s death, Edda and her children fled to Switzerland, where she hid under a false name. She carried with her Ciano’s diary, which detailed years of negotiations with Italy’s allies and enemies. According to rumors, the Germans even promised to release Galeazzo in exchange, but after learning of the deal, Hitler himself banned it.

Benito continued to care for his daughter – he sent her money and messages, but Edda wanted nothing to do with him. Less than a year later, Mussolini himself was killed – he never had time to make peace with his daughter.

When the war ended, Edda sold the papers to the Chicago Daily News, but it turned out there was nothing sensational or even interesting about them. Edda died in 1995 at the age of 84 and almost all the obituaries published the sentence she said: “I would rather be the wife of a victim of fascism than the daughter of the Duce.” »

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