A dictator's final resting place

Benito Mussolini's crypt in Romagna

By Kaya Burgess

The beaten and bloodied body of Muammar Gaddafi was buried in a secret desert location at dawn today, against his wishes to be buried in his hometown of Sirte and against his family’s wishes to have his body returned.

What happens to a deposed dictator in death can be as crucial to the nation they ruled as their actions while alive, drawing a symbolic line under their tyranny while being careful not to martyr them to their remaining followers.

Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was apprehended in April 1945 trying to flee to Spain via Switzerland. Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were summarily executed. He was then taken to Milan and hung upside down from a meathook from the roof of an Esso gas station, while people threw stones and spat on the body.

Though Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave in a public cemetery in Musocco, his body was exhumed by Fascist loyalists who moved the body around for months, to the ire of the new democratic government. The body was finally found in August 1946 and buried at Mussolini’s birthplace in Predappio in Romagna, placed in a crypt below a marble bust of his face.

Romania’s most notorious leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, was executed by firing squad after a show-trial in 1989, leading to famous images of Ceauşescu and his wife Elena dead after the shooting. Their bodies were buried either side of a path in the Ghencea cemetery in Bucharest, though their son demanded an investigation into rumours that the graves did not really contain their remains. The bodies were exhumed last year and DNA testing proved it to be the remains of the Ceauşescus.

When Josef Stalin died of a brain haemorrhage in 1953, his body lay in state in Lenin’s mausoleum in the Kremlin for eight years until it was removed and interred next to the walls of the Kremlin as Russia sought to move on from his legacy, while Idi Amin’s body remains in the Ruwais Cemetery in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, as his last wish to return to Uganda in 2003 was greeted by a reply from President Yoweri Museveni that he would have to “answer for his sins the moment he was brought back”.

After his controversial execution, with reports of him being abused both before and after death, Iraq’s deposed dictator Saddam Hussein was buried in the village of Al-Awja, his birthplace just outside Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad. The remains of Cambodian dictator Pol Pot were cremated at Anlong Veng following his death, too quickly for the government to investigate rumours that he had committed suicide or been poisoned, while Augusto Pinochet was also cremated, at the Parque del Mar cemetery in Concón in Chile, with his ashes remaining at a family residence due to an army ban on scattering them on military land.

Yet the most enduring mystery around a dictator’s demise is that surrounding history’s most notorious dictator, with conspiracy theories around Adolf Hitler’s final resting place continuing to rage. Hitler shot himself with his pistol, using the same 7.65mm Walther PPK pistol his neice had used in her suicide. With the corpse of his new wife Eva Braun, Hitler’s body was placed in a bomb crater outside his Berlin bunker, doused in petrol and burned as Russian forces approached. Conflicting reports showed that his body was buried and dug up on several occasions, before being secretly buried in Rathenow in Brandenburg. His body was then reportedly moved to a Soviet garrison in Magdeburg and, when the facility was returned to the East German government in 1970, a Russian KGB team exhumed unnamed remains, believed to be those of Adolf Hitler, from a site in Magdeburg and burned them before scattering them in the Biederitz river.

A fragment of skull reportedly belonging to Hitler went on display in 2000, though DNA testing showed it to be the skull of a young woman.