Eighty years ago this week the curtain falls on Europe's dictators

 

Mussolini was captured by communist partisans as he tried to escape. On party orders he, his mistress Clara Petacci  and other fascist companions  were shot. Their bodies were taken to Milan and hung by their ankles from the girders around a garage on the Piazzale Loretto where fifteen people chosen at random had been murdered in 1944 as a reprisal for partisan attacks. 

Hitler married his mistress Eva Braun in a civil ceremony at the Fuehrerbunker.  He tried out a cyanide pill on his Alsatian dog Blondi and, once he was sure it was effective, gave one to his wife to kill herself. He then shot himself dead.

Hitler had named his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to succeed him as Reich Chancellor. He spent only one day in the office and then he and his wife  killed themselves, first having murdered six of their young children. His wife's son by her first marriage was a prisoner of war in British hands and survived the war.

Marshal Petain left Switzerland to which he had been taken from Germany. He presented himself at the French border with the intention of being taken in custody by the French authorities. He was determined to be submitted to some form of official investigation which he believed would exonerate him for his actions as the head of the Vichy regime.