Hektor wrote:hermod wrote:Hektor wrote:Ciano may have wanted to save his own ass there. Calculating that the odds weren't on the Allied, but not on the Axis side. So rather have 'some change' in Europe, but remain in a position to survive it as healthy and wealthy as possible. Singing to the piper's tune is of course useful in this. No surprise one would get people doing this.
During WWII, Ciano was a friend of the Axis as reliable as Italy had been a belligerent of the Triple Alliance during WWI...
Well, turns out Mussolini didn't trust him neither:Ciano was dismissed from his post by the new government of Italy put in place after his father-in-law was overthrown. Ciano, Edda and their three children fled to Germany on 28 August 1943 in fear of being arrested by the new Italian government. The Germans turned him over to Mussolini's administration. He was then formally arrested on charges of treason. Under German and Fascist pressure, Mussolini had Ciano imprisoned before he was tried and found guilty.[25] After the Verona trial and sentence, on 11 January 1944, Ciano was executed by a firing squad along with 4 others (Emilio De Bono, Luciano Gottardi, Giovanni Marinelli and Carlo Pareschi) who had voted for Mussolini's ousting. As a further humiliation, the condemned men were tied to chairs and shot in the back, though Ciano managed to twist his chair around at the last minute to face the firing squad before uttering his final words, "Long live Italy!"
So he fled to Germany for fear of the new regime, but supposedly he was put on trial by 'under German and Fascist' pressure. The part of his execution sounds a bit theatrical or apocryphal. .... Kind of like Jews locked in the gas chamber singing 'the International'
The victors of 1945 vastly used the words told by traitors as an alleged reliable source of information on the leaders and government they (the traitors) had helped to destroy. There's nothing as unbiased as a traitor, isn't it? And anyway, some people who had plotted to murder Hitler would never have lied about him and his regime, would they?
