Verona trial

The six men were Giovanni Marinelli; Carlo Pareschi; Luciano Gottardi; Galeazzo Ciano, the former Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Mussolini's son-in-law; the honoured Marshal of Italy Emilio De Bono; and Tullio Cianetti.

Vincenzo Cersosimo was appointed examining magistrate, with Blackshirt Colonel Aldo Vecchi as president of the court, and Andrea Fortunato as public prosecutor.

The execution of the five captured defendants who had been sentenced to death was performed as hastily as possible, by firing squad, on the morning of 11 January 1944.

[2] The condemned were tied to chairs and shot in the back by a Blackshirt firing squad led by Nicola Furlotti, under the supervision of SS officers who also photographed and filmed the event.

[3] Victor Klemperer, a famous Dresden-based literature professor and diarist, who – although being Jewish – had survived the Hitler years, writing diary notices for almost every day,[4] commented on the trial and the execution in a diary notice from 15 January 1944 as follows (translating the German original): "For me it is certain that the trial was a farce, that the execution was the work of the Germans, that Mussolini had almost nothing to do any longer with the whole affair – he is now almost invisible, the shadow of a puppet –, above all: that with this whole affair one wants to deter primarily internal opponents (Paulus, Seydlitz)."