Ciano di Cortellazzo, Count Galeazzo

Ciano di Cortellazzo, Count Galeazzo (1903–44),Mussolini's son-in-law and heir apparent, who served as his country's foreign minister for seven years. He ‘combined irresponsibility, fecklessness, vanity, and the snobbery of the newly rich with a political judgement keener in many respects than that of Mussolini, deep family feeling, apparently genuine religious conviction, and physical courage’ ( M. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, Cambridge, 1982, p.47).

A lawyer by training, Ciano worked as a journalist before entering the foreign service in 1925. In 1930 he married Mussolini's daughter Edda, and promotion followed rapidly. In 1935, at the outbreak of the war with Abyssinia, he was minister for press and propaganda (but left to become a bomber pilot) and the following year he was appointed minister for foreign affairs. Initially he supported the Rome–Berlin axis but later changed his mind, for he feared German expansionism and was opposed to Italy's throwing in its lot with Hitler. He became convinced that Germany would eventually lose any war it started, that Italy was in no position militarily to support it, and that he must form a Balkan bloc to thwart any German move into the Mediterranean. He therefore opposed the Pact of Steel, signed in May 1939, and, after the Nazis had occupied the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, he proposed and directed the invasion of Albania the following month as an appropriate response to Hitler's aggression. When war broke out in September 1939 he exerted his influence to keep his country neutral, but he had no power base of his own, nor a feasible alternative policy to war. After Mussolini pledged himself to Hitler in March 1940, when they met at the Brenner Pass, Ciano told Sumner Welles, whom Roosevelt had sent to Europe to investigate the possibilities of peace, that he was still ‘determined to do everything within his power to keep Italy from getting into the war’. But Hitler's sweeping victories in May– June 1940 not only reinforced Mussolini's determination to enter the fray and take what pickings he could, but also altered Ciano's perception. On 10 June, dressed as a major in the Regia Aeronautica, he handed the Allied ambassadors Italy's declaration of war; on 23 June he and Badoglio negotiated the Franco-Italian armistice which was signed the next day; and on 27 September he signed the Tripartite Pact. Throughout the summer he urged an invasion of Greece, which he considered had an ‘unneutral’ attitude; when it was eventually mounted, from Albania in October, the conflict was known as ‘Ciano's war’, and its failure brought him immense unpopularity with the Italian people.

In January 1941, when Mussolini tried to placate the Italian public by sending many of his ministers, and other high officials, to the front, Ciano spent three months with a bomber squadron based at Bari. He returned to his post in April 1941, but his role was now reduced to not much more than that of a messenger. However, Mussolini's fate was too closely tied to his son-in-law to dismiss him and Ciano remained as foreign minister until the radical cabinet changes of February 1943 when he was appointed ambassador to the Holy See. He was part of one of the conspiracies to overthrow Mussolini and voted for Dino Grandi's motion in the Fascist Grand Council that July which resulted in his father-in-law's dismissal. In August, after the Germans had occupied those parts of Italy not in Allied hands, he was tricked into delivering himself into the hands of the Gestapo and was sentenced to death at the Verona trials and executed.

Bibliography

Muggeridge, M. (ed.), Ciano's Diaries, 1939–1943 (London, 1947).