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
The Great Dictator something curiously appropriate about the little tramp impersonating the dictator, for by 1939 Hitler and Chaplin were perhaps the two most famous men in the world. The tyrant and the tramp reverse roles in "The Great Dictator", permitting the eternal outsider to address the masses". In "The 50 Greatest Jewish Movies" (1998), Kathryn Bernheimer writes, "What he chose to say in "The Great Dictator", however, was just what one might expect from the Little Tramp. Film scholars have often noted that the Little Tramp resembles a Jewish stock figure, the ostracized outcast, an outsider." Several reviewers of the late 20th