The cameras of September 29, 1938, caught him moving with ease through the grand halls of Munich, a tall, handsome man in his mid-thirties whose confidence seemed to belong to the building itself. Galeazzo Ciano, Italy’s foreign minister, was the son-in-law of Benito Mussolini and the man widely expected to inherit the fascist dictatorship. Around him, European leaders had gathered to decide the fate of Czechoslovakia, and the atmosphere was thick with calculation and the fragile illusion of peace. He was not an outsider to any of it, nor a reluctant participant.
He was a central figure in the system pushing the continent toward war, a loyal servant of a regime closely bound to Nazi Germany, and he benefited in full from its power. The war that followed would bring military catastrophe, internal collapse, and a slow disillusionment with the Axis alliance. The same man who walked those Munich corridors would one day vote to bring down his own father-in-law and help shatter the regime he had served. Yet that reversal could not wipe away what came before.
In the end, Galeazzo Ciano would pay for both his loyalty and his betrayal with his life. He was born on March 18, 1903, in Livorno, a port city on the Tuscan coast. His father, Costanzo Ciano, had been an admiral in the Royal Italian Navy, decorated as a hero of the First World War and rewarded with the title of count by King Victor Emmanuel III. Costanzo was also a founding member of the National Fascist Party and deeply corrupt, using his political connections to manipulate stock prices and accumulate enormous properties.
He owned a newspaper, farmland in Tuscany, and a range of other holdings, all built on the exploitation of public office for private gain. In that household of wealth, ambition, and intimacy with power, the young Galeazzo grew up accustomed to luxury and to the assumption that the state existed, at least in part, for the benefit of those who served it faithfully. Father and son both marched with Mussolini’s black shirts in the March on Rome in October 1922, the political spectacle that brought the fascists to power in Italy. Galeazzo studied philosophy of law at the University of Rome, worked briefly as a journalist, and then entered the diplomatic service.
He was posted to Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires before serving as an Italian diplomat in China. He was charming, handsome, and socially confident, a young man who moved easily through the worlds of power and glamour that fascism had created for its faithful. In the late 1920s in Beijing, according to the wife of Milton Edward Miles, who later headed US naval intelligence operations in China during World War II, Ciano met Wallis Simpson, the future Duchess of Windsor. The affair, Miles’s wife claimed, left Simpson pregnant, and a botched abortion left her infertile.
Whether or not the story was entirely accurate, it spoke to the reputation Ciano carried. On April 24, 1930, at age twenty-seven, he married Edda Mussolini, the eldest daughter of the dictator. The wedding bound him permanently into the inner family of the regime and accelerated his rise. Soon after, the couple left for China, where he served as Italian consul in Shanghai.
They had three children: Fabrizio, Raimonda, and Marzio. The marriage was outwardly glamorous but inwardly troubled, with both spouses conducting affairs throughout its duration. Back in Italy in 1935, Ciano became Minister of Press and Propaganda in his father-in-law’s government. That same year, Mussolini launched the invasion of Ethiopia, and Ciano volunteered as a bomber squadron commander.
He led the 15th Bombing Squadron, known as La Disperata, over Ethiopian territory, earned two silver medals of valor, and returned home a celebrated figure. On June 9, 1936, at the age of thirty-three, Mussolini appointed him foreign minister of Italy. He was now widely regarded as the heir to the dictator himself. Shortly after taking office, Ciano began keeping a diary, a daily record of his meetings with Mussolini, Hitler, Ribbentrop, and the other leaders of Europe.
He would continue writing until his dismissal in 1943. The diaries would outlive him and later stand as testimony to the international affairs of the Second World War. The new foreign minister was not merely a bureaucrat. In 1937, he was allegedly involved in organizing the murder of Carlo and Nello Rosselli, two exiled Italian anti-fascist brothers killed in the French spa town of Abano Terme on June 9.
The brothers had founded the movement Giustizia e Libertà, Justice and Liberty, and the regime regarded them as a serious threat. They were killed. As foreign minister, Ciano deepened the alliance between Italy and Nazi Germany, meeting repeatedly with Adolf Hitler and with German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. He helped guide Italy toward the Pact of Steel, the military and political alliance signed in May 1939.
Yet even as he built that alliance, unease grew in private. He recorded in his diary that Ribbentrop was evasive and that the German lied about German intentions. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, starting the Second World War without consulting Italy, Ciano was furious. Germany had violated a direct promise Ribbentrop had made only months earlier.
Ciano urged Mussolini not to enter the war, arguing that Italy’s armed forces were wholly unprepared for a major conflict with the European powers. Mussolini accepted the advice at first and declared Italy non-belligerent. Before the German assault on France in 1940, Ciano quietly leaked a warning of the impending invasion to the government of neutral Belgium. When Mussolini declared war on France and Great Britain in June of that year, Ciano recorded his reaction in his diary with quiet despair.
“I am sad, very sad,” he wrote. “The adventure begins. May God help Italy. ”
He went along with the war regardless, including the disastrous Italian invasion of Greece in October 1940, a campaign poorly planned, badly executed, and ended in humiliating setbacks that required German intervention.
Throughout 1941, as Italian forces struggled across North Africa and the Balkans, Ciano made derogatory and sarcastic remarks about Mussolini in private, sometimes to people who reported them directly to the Duce, as Mussolini was known. Friends advised him to exercise more caution. He ignored them. His self-importance had grown alongside his years in office, and he seemed to believe that his position as son-in-law gave him a form of immunity that did not, in reality, exist.
By late 1942 and into 1943, with the Axis suffering catastrophic defeats in North Africa and the Eastern Front slowly collapsing, Ciano turned entirely against the war. He began actively pushing for Italy to seek a separate peace with the Allies. Mussolini responded in February 1943 by removing him from the Foreign Ministry, offering instead the post of ambassador to the Holy See. Ciano presented his credentials to Pope Pius XII in March 1943 and remained in Rome, watched closely by the regime he had served and was now beginning to move against.
On the afternoon of July 24, 1943, Mussolini summoned the Fascist Grand Council to its first meeting since 1939, prompted by the Allied invasion of Sicily. At the meeting, Mussolini argued for continued war efforts and his own supreme command, attempting to downplay the military failures. That defense opened the door for Dino Grandi, a former foreign minister and ambassador to the United Kingdom, who launched a blistering attack on his long-time fascist comrade. Grandi placed on the table a resolution asking King Victor Emmanuel III to resume his full constitutional powers.
In effect, it was a vote that would lead to Mussolini’s ousting from leadership. The motion won by an unexpectedly large margin: nineteen to eight. Ciano voted in favor, against his own father-in-law. The vote quickly became a trap.
The new Italian government dismissed Ciano from his post and soon placed him and his wife, Edda, under house arrest. Fearing further prosecution, the couple fled secretly on August 27, 1943, evacuated by a German military aircraft from Ciampino Airport in Rome to Munich, along with their three children. They applied to be transferred to neutral Spain, ruled by dictator Francisco Franco, where they planned to wait out the war. The Germans refused.
Hitler was furious at Ciano’s vote against Mussolini, and those around him had no interest in protecting a man they regarded as a traitor. After German paratroopers rescued Mussolini from captivity in September 1943 and installed him as head of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state in German-controlled northern Italy, the Germans handed Ciano over to his father-in-law. Ciano was formally arrested on charges of treason. His wife, Edda, fought with everything she had to save him.
She possessed his diaries, hundreds of pages recording private meetings with the most powerful men in Europe, and she offered them to the Germans in exchange for Ciano’s life. Hitler vetoed the deal. The trial of Mussolini’s son-in-law and other high-ranking Italian officials was held inside the medieval Castelvecchio in the city of Verona between January 8 and 10, 1944. Of the nineteen council members who had voted against Mussolini, only six had been captured.
The tribunal was composed of hardline fascists, and the verdict was predetermined before any testimony was given. Ciano’s defense attorney resigned and was replaced by an incompetent public defender. The clemency appeal filed after sentencing was deliberately withheld from Mussolini until after the executions had been carried out, ensuring that he could not intervene even if he had wished to. Mussolini reportedly spent the nights before the execution unable to sleep, not from grief, but from anxiety over how Hitler would view any sign of weakness.
In the end, he did nothing. On the morning of January 11, 1944, Ciano and four others, Emilio De Bono, Luciano Gottardi, Giovanni Marinelli, and Carlo Pareschi, were taken to the execution site. The sixth defendant, Tullio Cianetti, had been spared after recounting his vote. Five chairs had been placed in a row.
The condemned were tied to them with their backs to the firing squad, a deliberate final humiliation. The execution was supervised by SS officers who photographed and filmed the event on Hitler’s orders. Ciano managed to twist his chair around at the last moment to face the firing squad. His final words were, “Long live Italy.
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In the end, however, Ciano also took revenge for his death. Thanks to his wife, his diaries survived. They were used during the Nuremberg trials, where they helped convict Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former foreign minister of Nazi Germany, who was hanged for his crimes. Gian Galeazzo Ciano was not a man of principle.
He served the fascist regime through its most criminal years, helped construct the alliance with Nazi Germany, and was, in all likelihood, involved in political murder. The irony is that he was not executed for his crimes, but by the same regime he had willingly served for years. He was forty years old.
