On this day in 1945 Benito Mussolini was executed. The doomed dictator was captured by Communist partisans the day before as he attempted to flee to neutral Switzerland. On the afternoon of April 28 he and his remaining associates were lined up against a wall and shot by machine-gun fire. In a humiliating end to two decades of fascism, their dead bodies were hanged from the gantry of a Milan petrol station.

While the crowds gathered that day rejoiced in Mussolini’s execution, famously spitting on his body, a considerable minority of Italians did not rally to the new democratic politics. Two years previously the country was split between the pro-Allied government in the South and Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic (RSI; often called Salò) in German-occupied regions. The ensuing war set not just Axis against Allies, but Italians against Italians.

Even after the Fascist collapse in 1945, diehard elements defended the lost cause. Beyond the murky world of underground paramilitary groups, they also formed a new party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI). Named after the RSI, this party was by the 1970s Italy’s fourth largest electoral force, scoring close to 10 percent of the national vote. It was not just a far-right party, but one that explicitly claimed Mussolini’s legacy.