Milan bombings. When Italy surrendered in 1943, German forces occupied most of Northern Italy until 1945. As a result, resistance groups formed. As the war came to an end, the American 1st Armored Division advanced on Milan—but before they arrived, the resistance seized control of the city and executed Mussolini along with several members of his government. On 29 April 1945, the corpses of Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci and other Fascist leaders were hanged in Piazzale Loreto. During the post-war economic boom, a large wave of internal migration (especially from rural areas of Southern Italy) moved to Milan. The population
Clara Katharina Pollaczek incorporation into Nazi Germany, she crossed to Prague where she lived for a while. When, in 1939, the Germans completed their occupation of Czechoslovakia, she was visiting friends in Switzerland. She stayed in Switzerland, receiving financial support from relatives, till war ended in 1945. During this period she became a Roman Catholic. (The last practicing Jew in her family had been her grandfather.) In 1945 she joined her son Karl who had ended up in Gillingham in England, but he was married with children: the home was cramped and, unlike her younger son, Clara did not feel settled in England.