During World War II in Italy, thousands of partisans who resisted Benito Mussolini's fascism and the Nazi occupation forces lost their lives by hanging.

   During World War II in Italy, thousands of partisans who resisted Benito Mussolini's fascism and the Nazi occupation forces lost their lives by hanging.

  On September 12, 1943, Mussolini, liberated by German SS troops, established the Salò Republic—a puppet regime under Nazi Germany—alongside his most ardent fascist supporters. The name derived from the small northern town of Salò on Lake Garda, where he established his headquarters. Nazi Germany and the Fascists began persecuting Italian Jews, though many were saved by the local population. Meanwhile, anti-Fascist partisans waged a brutal civil war against Nazi Germany and Mussolini's militias. In response to Resistance actions, the Fascists and Nazi German forces carried out horrific reprisals, such as the massacre at the Alderina Caves. There, 320 Italians were shot in retaliation for a terrorist attack that killed 32 German police officers. 

   The German army had deployed large numbers of troops to control Italy in case it withdrew from the war. Beginning September 3, 1943, British forces under Field Marshal Montgomery launched an invasion of the Italian peninsula from the south. Meanwhile, the Germans disarmed the Italian army, arrested soldiers who had participated in the civil war, and sent the majority to forced labor camps in Germany. Areas where the Italian army resisted faced particularly brutal repression by their former German allies. On the Greek island of Kefalonia, approximately 5,000 Italian soldiers were executed as a result of the resistance movement.

   From September 1943 until the end of the war, a war of attrition raged in Italy. The German forces skillfully utilized the mountainous terrain to construct successive defensive lines, which the Allied forces broke through one by one. In the spring of 1944, the Allies launched a major offensive to break the stalemate on the Italian front. On June 4, American forces reached Rome, but German troops had already withdrawn from the city. The Germans retreated to the Gothic Line, positioned on the opposite bank of the Po River basin in northern Italy. From 1944 through the winter of 1945, the front lines again reached a stalemate. However, in April 1945, amidst the complete collapse of Nazi Germany, the Allies defeated the German forces in Italy.