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
Clara Katharina Pollaczek incorporation into Nazi Germany, she crossed to Prague where she lived for a while. When, in 1939, the Germans completed their occupation of Czechoslovakia, she was visiting friends in Switzerland. She stayed in Switzerland, receiving financial support from relatives, till war ended in 1945. During this period she became a Roman Catholic. (The last practicing Jew in her family had been her grandfather.) In 1945 she joined her son Karl who had ended up in Gillingham in England, but he was married with children: the home was cramped and, unlike her younger son, Clara did not feel settled in England.