Edda Mussolini Ciano, 85, Daughter of WWII Dictator

ROME Edda Mussolini Ciano, 85, the daughter of Italy's wartimeFascist dictator whose husband was executed by her father's regime,has died, doctors said Sunday.

Ciano had been ill for some time. She died Saturday night ofcardiac arrest related to lung and kidney failure in a Rome hospital.

The oldest and favorite of Benito Mussolini's five children,she is best remembered for an episode in which her father refused tostop the execution of her husband, Galeazzo Ciano.

Galeazzo Ciano, a playboy count, held various top Cabinet postsunder Mussolini in the 1930s and in the early years of World War II.

In July, 1943, he voted against Mussolini at a Cabinet meetingthat led to the dictator's arrest and the fall of Fascism.

Under orders from Adolf Hitler, occupying German troops freedMussolini and installed him as head of a puppet regime known as theSocial Republic of Salo, based in northern Italy.

The new regime found Galeazzo Ciano guilty of treason andordered him executed. Mussolini turned a deaf ear to his daughter'spleas for a pardon and Ciano was shot by a firing squad in 1944.

Edda Ciano helped smuggle her husband's diaries and documentson Italo-German relations to Switzerland in the vain hope of swappingthem with the Germans for her husband's life.

Her direct appeal to Hitler, whom she admired from an earlyage, also failed.

After the execution, Mrs. Ciano, a determined Fascist who wasone of her father's closest advisers in the 1930s, disavowed him andthe family name.

"You are no longer my father for me. I renounce the nameMussolini," she wrote to him.

After the war Mrs. Ciano lived quietly in Rome.

She broke her public silence on wartime events in a 1975 book,My Testimony, and several years before her death she attended apublic mass in memory of her father.

Edda Mussolini Ciano was born in 1910 in the Mussolini family'shome province of Forli in central Italy. She married Galeazzo Cianoin 1930. They had three children, Fabrizio, Raimonda and Marzio.She is survived by Fabrizio and Raimonda.