Italian Social Republic (RSI)

A puppet state run by a dictator the Germans had rescued from a mountaintop, governing an Italy that was already a battlefield. Mussolini was voted out by his own Fascist Grand Council in July 1943, arrested by the king, and imprisoned; German paratroopers took him from a hotel in the Gran Sasso in September and installed him at the head of a new republic in the north after Italy had surrendered to the Allies. It is usually called the Republic of Salo after the lakeside town holding several of its ministries. Real authority lay with the German occupation, which had annexed the northeast in all but name. The regime adopted a socialising programme repudiating the monarchy and the industrialists who had abandoned Mussolini, and tried and executed five of the men who had voted against him, including his own son-in-law Ciano. Its forces fought a civil war against the Italian resistance in which tens of thousands died, with reprisal massacres of civilians carried out alongside German units. Italian Jews were deported to Auschwitz from its territory, most from the north. The republic never held elections or effective sovereignty. Partisans caught Mussolini trying to reach Switzerland in April 1945 and shot him. His body was hung in a Milan square. The republic lasted about 19 months. Its legacy divides Italian memory still. The republic existed from September 1943 to April 1945 in northern and central Italy. Salo sits on Lake Garda. Its armed forces numbered a few hundred thousand at most. Around 8 thousand Italian Jews were deported and fewer than a thousand survived.

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