April 12 - 30, 1945
Three World Leaders Die Three Different Deaths: Stroke, Execution and Suicide.
On 12th April 1945 the 32nd President of the USA, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), died of a hemorrhagic stroke less than three months into his fourth term. He left Vice President Harry S. Truman in charge of the country. Shockingly, FDR had kept his vice president in the dark about the atomic bomb’s development and it was not until Roosevelt died that Truman learned of the Manhattan Project.
Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, “Il Duce”, allied himself with fellow fascist Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in World War II, but his outdated Italian military was badly outclassed. By 25th April 1945, with the Allies closing in from the south and anti-fascist partisans rising up to seize city after city in northern Italy, Mussolini’s power base was quickly evaporating. He was trying to flee to Switzerland with his mistress, Petacci, when some partisans apprehended him and executed him and his party by a machine gun firing squad on 28th April. A Milanese crowd mutilated their bodies and then strung them up by their feet from the girders of a gasoline station in a corner of a public square.
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini , 10 May 1938
Source: Creator: Keystone Credit: Getty Images
As the Soviet Army closed in on Berlin, Hitler received news of Mussolini’s death. Determined not to give his enemies the satisfaction of killing him or defiling his body, Hitler committed suicide on April 30 and had his corpse subsequently burned.
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