Mussolini not so bad, says Silvio Berlusconi

SILVIO Berlusconi provoked outrage on International Holocaust Remembrance Day yesterday by defending Benito Mussolini.

SILVIO Berlusconi provoked outrage on International Holocaust Remembrance Day yesterday by defending Benito Mussolini.

His remarks coincided with preparations in Rome to build a museum dedicated to the victims next to the former fascist dictator's home. The former Prime Minister told journalists at a remembrance ceremony in Milan that Il Duce was right to ally himself with Hitler.

A day after Angela Merkel acknowledged that Germany had "everlasting responsibility" for the Holocaust, Mr Berlusconi said Italy "does not have the same responsibilities as Germany".

He added: "Obviously the government of that time, out of fear that German power might lead to complete victory, preferred to ally itself with Hitler's Germany rather than opposing it. As part of this alliance, there were impositions, including combating and exterminating Jews."

He insisted that Mussolini "did good things", and described his notorious anti-Jewish racial laws of 1938 as his "worst mistake".

It is not the first time that the ever-controversial billionaire, who struck an alliance with former fascists to form his present political party, has defended Mussolini. A decade ago, he told an interviewer that the wartime leader had never killed anyone, and, more recently, provoked uproar by cracking a joke about Jews in the Holocaust. His latest comments, on the 68th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, prompted accusations that he was courting fascist sympathisers before the election on February 24 and 25.

"Berlusconi is using Mussolini as bait for nostalgic voters. He is posing as Il Duce reincarnated. It's hideous and ridiculous," Carmelo Briguglio, a centrist MP, wrote on Twitter.

Maria Ida Germontani, a senator who broke away from Mr Berlusconi's party, said: "Mussolini was not the victim of Adolf Hitler, as some want to believe, but his teacher. It's forgotten that fascism in Italy began 10 years before nazism in Germany."

Work will begin in the northern summer on a E21 million ($27.1m) Holocaust museum next to the palatial home in Rome used by Mussolini from 1925 until the Allies began advancing on the city in 1943. He paid the owners one lira a year in rent.

"It was a symbolic gesture to build a Shoah museum next to Mussolini's residence," said Leone Elio Paserman, the president of the museum foundation, whose own family members were deported to death camps.

The vast Villa Torlonia, commissioned by the banker Giovanni Torlonia in 1797, was the last of the great estates built by Roman nobility. Its neo-classical grandeur caught the eye of Mussolini, who used the outbuildings to hold parties and show films. After the liberation of Rome in June 1944, it was occupied by the Allied High Command, which stayed there until 1947.

Parliament has approved the first E3m for work to begin on the museum. It is expected to be completed in 2016, more than a decade after it was announced. It will commemorate the 7500 Italian Jews - out of a total Jewish community of 40,000 - who died in the genocide.