On September 12, 1943, twelve German gliders landed on the plateau below the Hotel Campo Imperatore, on the Gran Sasso in the Abruzzi. They took Benito Mussolini out. He had been held there since his dismissal and arrest on July 25, when the Fascist Grand Council voted against him and the King had him taken away in an ambulance. He was flown to Rome and then to Germany, and within weeks he was heading a new Fascist state in the north.
It was codenamed Eiche. The operation was put together quickly, after the armistice of September 8, when the Badoglio government announced it had signed with the Allies and then fled Rome. The German high command wanted Mussolini for the same reason they occupied the country: they intended to hold northern Italy, and a government headed by him gave the arrangement a political face.
Otto Skorzeny was given the job and got the publicity for it, and the publicity was not entirely deserved. The planning and the troops belonged to the Luftwaffe's 7th Flieger Division under General Kurt Student, and the approach was to put gliders down on the sloping ground beside the hotel, with Skorzeny's small group of SS commandos riding along. One of the other risks was that Mussolini was being held on the second floor, and the rescue party arrived expecting a fight with the carabinieri guarding him, who surrendered without firing.
The subsequent flight out is the technically interesting part. Mussolini was flown to the airfield at Aquila in a Fieseler Storch, a small observation aircraft, piloted by Heinrich Gerlach. It was overloaded. Skorzeny was wedged in behind. It barely cleared the field. From Rome he was flown to Vienna and then Munich, and on September 23 he broadcast from Munich announcing the Italian Social Republic.
The state he headed, usually called the Republic of Salò after the town on Lake Garda where its ministries sat, controlled the parts of Italy the Germans still held. It lasted nineteen months and was characterized by the civil war between its forces and the partisans, and by the deportation of Italian Jews. Mussolini was captured by partisans at Dongo on April 27, 1945, and shot the next day.