Roberto Farinacci

National Fascist Party (PNF) Fascists and Nazis Counter-revolutionary forces 1892–1945 ✕ Executed by firing squad

Ras of the Cremona squads, party secretary and leader of the hardline, pro-German, antisemitic Fascists

Raised in poverty in Isernia, Molise, he worked on the railways in Cremona. An interventionist socialist in the First World War, he followed Mussolini after it and in 1919, as Ras of Cremona, organised squads that terrorised the population into submission, notorious for forcing castor oil on opponents. Party secretary from 1925, he centralised the party and purged its radicals before being removed. He fought in Ethiopia in 1935 as a militia officer, joined the Grand Council the same year, became a minister in 1938 pushing the racial laws, and sided with Nazi Germany in the Second World War. He fled to Germany when Mussolini fell in 1943, and in April 1945 partisans captured him and shot him at Vimercate.