Italian Social Republic (Repubblica di Salò)
Mussolini ran a German puppet state in northern Italy for nineteen months and was shot at the end of it. He had been voted out by the Fascist Grand Council on 25 July 1943 and arrested by the king, and Italy signed an armistice with the Allies on 8 September. The Germans occupied the north immediately, disarmed the Italian army — some 600,000 soldiers were deported to Germany as labour — and rescued Mussolini from a mountain hotel by glider on 12 September. The Italian Social Republic was proclaimed later that month with its administration at Salò on Lake Garda. It had a flag, a militia, a foreign ministry and no independence: the Germans annexed the Alpine provinces and Trieste in practice, and the republic's authority ended where a German officer disagreed. Its first act of substance was to try the members of the Grand Council who had voted against him, including his own son-in-law Ciano, and shoot five of them in the back at Verona in January 1944. The republic's other function was the deportation of Italian Jews, some 8,000 of whom were sent north, chiefly through Fossoli. The country fought a civil war behind the Allied front. The Resistance grew to perhaps 250,000 by 1945 and the republic's Black Brigades fought them with reprisals against villages. Mussolini was caught by partisans near Lake Como on 27 April 1945 in a German column, shot the next day, and hung by the feet in Milan. The republic also produced a manifesto promising worker participation in industry and the socialisation of enterprises, which is where Mussolini had begun thirty years earlier. Almost none of it was implemented, and the state existed on German sufferance to the last week.
- Year: 1943 CE
- Category: Political
