As rulers who committed unforgivable and ruthless acts, many dictators have become targets of
worship or hate, even after death.
From being embalmed for eternal display, to being stolen from a burial site, to being
moved from one burial site to another, here's what happened to the bodies of some of the
most-notorious dictators.
Forced to flee his country as Allied forces started making their way up the Italian peninsula,
Benito Mussolini tried to escape to Switzerland with his mistress, Clara Petacci, and a few
German guards on April 25, 1945.
Though dressed up in German clothes, years of public propaganda had made the infamous
"Il Duce" immediately recognizable.
Two days into their journey, Mussolini and Petacci were captured by Communist partisans
and, on April 28, 1945, were executed by firing squad.
The two corpses were then hung upside down by a gas station in Milan, where crowds gathered
to curse, spit, kick, and defile them.
After a fraught, emotional public display of outrage at the dictator who had led so
many Italians to their deaths, Mussolini’s body went into an unmarked grave but, according
to NPR, was dug up by neo-Fascists and stolen just a year later.
The brief debacle ended when Italian authorities quickly arrested the thieves and hid the body
in a Milan monastery for over a decade, but Mussolini's corpse wasn't finished moving
around quite yet.
Finally, in 1957 Mussolini’s wife got it transferred to the family mausoleum at Predappio,
where it receives 100,000 visitors a year.
With his dictatorship ending, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler killed himself, along with new
wife Eva Braun on April 30, 1945.
As explained by Smithsonian, Hitler didn’t want the same end as Mussolini and ordered
his and his wife’s bodies to be burned after their deaths.
The charred remains were discovered by Russian troops just a few days later on May 5.
After taking some photographs of the remains, the Russians supposedly buried them in a secret
location, then later dug the remains up and buried them in another secret location, where
they remained for 25 years.
In 1975, the head of the KGB ordered for Hitler and Braun to be dug up so their burial site
wouldn’t become, quote, “a pilgrimage for fascists."
The corpses were burned to ash and dumped into the Biederitz River, but the Soviet Union
kept a part of Hitler’s jaw and a portion of his skull.
While some claim that the skull is actually a woman's, despite Moscow rejecting that claim's
validity, the teeth have been identified as Hitler's, and the remains are held in the
Russian State Archive to this day.
Though now widely considered a ruthless dictator who sent millions of fellow citizens to their
deaths, when Joseph Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet leader received ceremonies fit for
a hero.
For three days, his body went on temporary display at the Hall of Columns.
Thousands rushed to catch a glimpse, with an estimated 500 people reportedly dying in
the mayhem.
Following the viewings, the Soviet Union then sought to preserve and display Stalin's body,
as had been done with Vladimir Lenin's corpse.
Embalmers worked hard for seven months to prepare Stalin's body for long-term display,
and in November 1953, the corpse was placed near Lenin's in the mausoleum at Moscow's
Red Square.
In the years following his death, however, Soviet leaders began opening up about Stalin's
brutality, acknowledging his role in the mass killings of Soviet citizens.
In October 1961, just eight years after he died, the body was quietly removed from the
mausoleum and buried 300 feet away in an area half-hidden by trees.
A simple gravestone marked the site, inscribed with just the line "J.V. STALIN 1879–1953."
A bust of the former Soviet leader was added in 1970.
After winning the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, Francisco Franco established a fascist
dictatorship over Spain and ruled until his death in 1975.
As the country transitioned into a democracy, his body was embalmed and buried in a mausoleum
northwest of Madrid called the Valley of the Fallen.
The locale holds the remains of combatants from both sides of the Spanish Civil War.
But with Franco buried there, as the BBC reports,
"The site is a shrine for Spain's far right to pay homage to the dictator."
Yet it also became a hated location for others who saw it as glorifying Franco and his rule.
So in 2019, the Spanish government approved efforts to exhume Franco's body and move it
elsewhere, despite resistance from Franco's family and right-wing political parties.
In October of that year, the Spanish dictator was reburied at El Pardo-Mingorrubio cemetery,
next to the El Pardo palace near Madrid that had been his official residence.
On September 9, 1976, founder of Communist China Mao Zedong passed away.
His passing was sudden, and little preparations were in place.
Though the Communist chairman had requested his body to be cremated, his widow Jiang Qing
and several high officials decided he would join Lenin and Ho Chih Minh in being embalmed,
as reported in The Guardian.
After a tense, complicated process, Mao's body was finally put on permanent display
at a grand mausoleum in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
There, in Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, lies Mao’s preserved corpse, draped in a red
flag emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, with his face illuminated by an eerie red
light.
After ruling Romania for a quarter of a century, Nicolae Ceausescu was ousted in a violent
anti-communist revolt in 1989.
Betrayed by his pilot as he tried to flee by helicopter, the dictator and his wife,
Elena, were executed by firing squad on Christmas Day at a military base outside of Bucharest.
The graphic ordeal was recorded on video, with disturbing footage of the couple weeping
and begging for mercy even airing on French television.
“Ceausescu was a dictator.
If you consider all the atrocities he committed, I’d say only one charge was possible: crimes
against humanity.”
The former dictator and his wife were allegedly buried about 65 feet apart in the Ghencea
military cemetery, and doubts eventually surfaced as to whether both bodies were actually there.
According to the BBC, in July 2010, after years of demands from the couple's children,
their bodies were exhumed and DNA tests conducted to confirm their identities.
In November of that year, it was confirmed that the remains were indeed Nicolae Ceausescu’s,
though there wasn't enough material to confirm Elena's identity.
Ultimately, the Ceausescus' remaining child, Valentin, then in his 60s, was satisfied with
the results.
Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge government controlled Cambodia for less than four years,
from 1975 to early 1979, but an estimated two million Cambodians died during his brutal
rule.
Even after the Vietnamese took over the area, the dictator remained the head of the Khmer
Rouge forces, who had retreated into the jungle as guerrilla fighters.
But by 1997, he was overthrown in an internal power struggle and put under house arrest
by his own men.
On April 15, 1998, Pol Pot died in his sleep due to heart failure.
As reported by the Phnom Penh Post,
“His death [...] came hours after the Khmer Rouge leadership had decided to hand him over
to an international tribunal."
The coincidental timing spurred rumors that he had actually killed himself to avoid being
taken alive, according to the BBC.
Ultimately, after being briefly embalmed and put on public display as proof of his death
to the world community, Pol Pot's body was cremated without an autopsy.
After leading a military coup, Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, in a reign
marked by massive human-rights abuses.
While Pinochet was forced to step down from presidency in 1990, he remained as commander-in-chief
of the army until 1998, the same year that he was arrested in London at the urging of
Spain.
By then, the former dictator was 83, and his old age and ill health would often be cited
as reasons for him to not stand trial for human-rights abuse, fraud, and corruption
charges, as reported by NBC News.
Though after years of wrangling in the courts, it was finally decided that Pinochet would
indeed stand trial for his crimes, before any legal proceedings could begin, the Chilean
ex-dictator died, on December 10, 2006.
Denied a state funeral but granted a military one, Pinochet's body was cremated and his
ashes given to his family to be buried in Santiago.
After Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging on December 30, 2006, his body
was swiftly transported by a US aircraft to Awja, his home village in the Tikrit region
of Iraq north of Baghdad.
Entombed in a lavish mausoleum since 2007, the former Iraqi leader's corpse was moved
to a secret location in early 2014 amid fears that it would be vandalized.
According to Reuters, the cautionary move was justified by subsequent events, when,
in August 2014,
"Shi'ite militiamen broke into the grave site, tore down photographs of the former Iraqi
leader and then set the area on fire."
Just a few months later, in March 2015, the entire mausoleum was nearly completely leveled
by further conflict in the area, as reported by the BBC.
Captured and executed by National Transitional Council (or NTC) fighters, Muammar Gaddafi
died of gunshot wounds in an ambulance on its way to a Misrata hospital on October 20,
2011.
Hated by many Libyans, the dictator's body was gracelessly placed on a dirty mattress
inside a meat-storage freezer.
Hundreds of people visited to confirm his death with their own eyes, as described by
ABC News, while leaders debated what to do with Gaddafi's corpse.
His body lay in that freezer for four days before the NTC finally readied to move the
corpse on October 24.
Rejecting requests from Gaddafi's tribe to bury him in his hometown of Sirte, the NTC
instead opted for a secret location in the desert, to prevent his supporters from making
the grave a shrine.
In power for 17 years after the death of his father and "national founder" Kim Il Sung,
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il died suddenly on a train on December 17, 2011.
His body was then embalmed and put on display in the Kumsusan mausoleum, in the same manner
as those of many other communist leaders.
The nod to the same style used in presenting Mao's corpse is pretty direct, with Kim's
preserved body apparently tucked under a red blanket, with a spotlight illuminating his
face, in a room bathed in - yep, you guessed it - red.
When the preserved corpse was first presented to a few select visitors in 2012, ABC News
reported that widely recognized personal belongings of his were on display, including:
"The parka, sunglasses and pointy platform shoes he famously wore in the last decades
of his life."
The body, placed just a few floors away from father Kim Il Sung's body, is now open for
viewing to the public.
Once revered as a hero and leader of Zimbabwe's independence movement against the legacies
of colonial domination, Robert Mugabe's legacy was tainted by his authoritarian rule as president
for over three decades.
Despite once boasting that, quote, "only God" could actually remove him from the seat of
power, Mugabe had to eat his words, when, in 2017, he was forcefully ejected from office
by members of his own political party, at the age of 93.
Mugabe spent his final years between Singapore, where he received treatment for cancer, and
his residence in Zimbabwe's capital city, Harare.
On September 6, 2019, Mugabe died in Singapore, at the age of 95.
After a state funeral, which, according to the BBC, didn't have an enormous attendance,
the location of where the former leader would be buried became a point of debate between
the government and his family.
"But it's also the moment they'll make their final judgment of the man and his legacy."
While the government wanted Mugabe to be buried in Zimbabwe's National Heroes Acre monument
in Harare, it eventually agreed to the family's wishes to bury Mugabe at his rural home in
Kutama.
Still, as reported by CNN, traditional chiefs in the country continue to demand that the
ex-dictator be exhumed and reburied at the National Heroes shrine.
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