Benito Mussolini Mussolini was rescued from captivity in the Gran Sasso raid by German paratroopers and "Waffen-SS" commandos led by Major Otto-Harald Mors. Adolf Hitler, after meeting with the rescued former dictator, then put Mussolini in charge of a puppet regime in northern Italy, the Italian Social Republic (, RSI), informally known as the "Salò Republic". In late April 1945, in the wake of near total defeat, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci attempted to flee to Switzerland, but both were captured by Italian communist partisans and summarily executed by firing squad on 28 April 1945 near Lake Como. His body was
Dictator novel Roa Bastos's "I, the Supreme" (1974), and Gabriel García Marquez's "The Autumn of the Patriarch" (1975). He defines the dictator novel as a novel which draws upon the historical record to create fictionalized versions of dictators. In this way, the author is able to use the specific to explain the general, as many dictator novels are centred around the rule of a one particular dictator. Within this group he includes those novelists who took to task authoritarian figures such as Vargas Llosa's "Conversation in the Cathedral" (1969) and Denzil Romero's "La tragedia del Generalísimo" (1984). He even includes Sergio Ramírez's