"Diaries" show Mussolini opposed going to war-senator

By Staff
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ROME, Feb 12 (Reuters) Five volumes of private diaries kept by Benito Mussolini in the run up to World War Two show the fascist dictator was privately against going to war, an Italian senator said in a newspaper.

Marcello Dell'Utri, a close associate of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said he had spent several hours reading the diaries being held by a lawyer in Switzerland, Corriere della Sera daily reported.

''They were kept in a house by someone who has recently died,'' Dell'Utri was quoted as saying. ''He was a partisan who arrested Mussolini and took possession of some of the things the Duce was carrying.'' The diaries contain daily entries by Mussolini between 1935 and 1939 in the run-up to the war which Mussolini joined on the side of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.

''We cannot and we must not take up arms, which in any case we don't have,'' Mussolini is quoted as writing.

The Corriere, however, quotes several historians expressing doubts over the authenticity of the diaries. In 1983 German news magazine Stern published extracts from diaries supposedly written by Hitler which later turned out to be a hoax.

Mussolini ruled Italy from 1922 until 1943 when he was overthrown. He was killed in 1945 by Italian resistance members and his body hanged upside down in a square in Milan.

The paper's Web site published a copy of one of the pages which showed handwritten text which in the photograph is illegible.

''There's an expert's report which attests to their authenticity,'' Dell'Utri said. ''Mussolini's handwriting is clear and recognisable, even if in the diary it's a little hurried.'' The senator declined to identify who owned them, saying the partisan's two children each had a claim on them.

''There are a few problems with the inheritance, but soon these diaries will be released and published,'' he said. The Corriere also quotes Mussolini's granddaughter saying the diaries are real.

''I have no doubts on their authenticity,'' said Alessandra Mussolini, a right-wing member of the European Parliament who often speaks out to defend her grandfather's name.

REUTERS DKS BST0455

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