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 Captain from Köpenick (1945 film) story of a simple shoemaker [...] up against the Prussian mentality of authoritarian militarism and bureaucratic obedience, the desperation of the permitless worker rejected over and over, all these were foreign to pre-war America in 1941. [...] Unlike Max Adalbert (1931) and Heinz Rühmann (1956) who played the shoemaker as the "little guy", ... Bassermann is angry, always rebelling and defying the powers that be, channelling his own experience as a Nazi exile: A powerful performance, making this film perhaps the most German of all exile films.“ The Captain from Köpenick (1945 film) The Captain from Köpenick, also known as