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 this technique is not necessarily a prerequisite of the dictator novel, as there are many that do not utilize magical realism. A predominant theme of the dictator novel is power, which according literary critic Michael Valdez Moses, in his 2002 review of "Feast of the Goat", is linked to the theme of dictatorship: "The enduring power of the Latin American dictator novel had everything to do with the enduring power of Latin American dictators". As novels such as "El Señor Presidente" became more well-known, they were read as ambitious political statements, denouncing the authority of dictators in Latin America. As