German commandos snatched Mussolini from a mountaintop hotel — then their overloaded escape plane had to dive off a cliff edge just to stay airborne.
On 12 September 1943, German paratroopers and Waffen-SS commandos stormed the Hotel Campo Imperatore, a remote resort 2,112 meters up in Italy's Gran Sasso mountains, to free the deposed Benito Mussolini. Ordered personally by Hitler and codenamed Operation Oak, the raid was designed as a propaganda coup after Mussolini's own government had arrested him weeks earlier.
The mission was far less daring than the Nazis later claimed. By the day of the raid, German forces already controlled the surrounding territory, and Mussolini's Carabinieri guards had little interest in fighting them — the whole operation was over in minutes, with only two men killed.
Ten glider-borne assault teams landed directly on the mountain plateau beside the hotel, while ground troops in tanks and armored cars sealed off the valley below. Hauptsturmführer Otto Skorzeny broke formation to make sure his SS troops touched down first, ahead of the paratroopers who had planned and led the operation.
Getting Mussolini out proved more dangerous than getting in. A tiny Fieseler Storch STOL aircraft was flown up to the plateau for the evacuation, already at its safe weight limit with just the pilot and Mussolini aboard — but Skorzeny insisted on climbing in as a third passenger anyway.
The pilot, Hauptmann Heinrich Gerlach, warned that the overloaded plane could never lift off the short, rocky mountainside runway. Ordered to try anyway, he let the Storch roll and bounce down the rocky slope and off the edge of the mountain itself, plunging toward the valley floor to build enough airspeed to fly — and pulling up with only feet to spare before it would have crashed.
Mussolini was flown onward through Vienna and Munich to East Prussia, where he reunited with Hitler. Physically and mentally broken by his imprisonment, he was pressured into heading a new Nazi puppet state, the Italian Social Republic, in northern Italy for the remainder of the war.
Skorzeny returned home a celebrated hero, promoted and awarded the Knight's Cross, and later built his fame further with bestselling memoirs crediting himself and the SS with the entire rescue. The paratroopers who actually planned and led the ground assault were quietly written out of the story for decades.
Mussolini's freedom did not last. As Germany collapsed in April 1945, he was captured by Italian partisans while trying to flee to Switzerland and was executed along with his mistress Clara Petacci on 28 April 1945.