"[3][4] By the beginning of the 1940s, Bombacci had officially distanced himself from communism by publishing pamphlets warning the Italian population on the dangers of Bolshevism and how Stalinism had degenerated socialist values.

"[7] The project of socialization overseen by Bombacci was viewed with suspicion and boycotted by the occupying Nazi German forces; it was also unpopular among the Italian proletariat, who responded with huge strikes.

"[9] After his death, he was hanged upside down at Piazzale Loreto in a public display, along with Mussolini, Clara Petacci, the secretary of the Republican Fascist Party, Alessandro Pavolini, Achille Starace and others.

[11][12] Four days after his death, his old friend and comrade Victor Serge read of the event in a newspaper in Mexico, where he was living in exile, and wrote several pages in his journal concerning him.

Engaging in what he called "practical psychology", Serge tried to imagine how a former communist could become a fascist: "Among some Italians, particularly among the ex-Marxists and ex-syndicalists, two visions became apparent: that with the liberal democracies exhausted and socialism weakened, the corporatist regimes were going to impose their new formulas; and that through this narrow gate would pass collectivism, the precondition for a socialism different from that desired by the nineteenth century, ... corresponding better to man's basic nature.