Gran Sasso raid

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Operation Eiche (German for 'Oak') was the daring rescue of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini by German special forces in World War II. It was planned by General Kurt Student.

[edit] Overview

Mussolini was being transported around Italy by his captors, whilst Otto Skorzeny, selected personally by Hitler and Ernst Kaltenbrunner to carry out the mission, was tracking him.

Intercepting a coded Italian radio message, Skorzeny used his own reconnaissance to determine that Mussolini was being imprisoned at Campo Imperatore Hotel, a ski resort at Campo Imperatore in Italy's Gran Sasso, high in the Apennine Mountains. On 12 September 1943, Skorzeny joined the team to rescue Mussolini in a high-risk glider mission. The commandos crashed their gliders into the nearby mountains, then overwhelmed Mussolini's captors without a single shot being fired. Skorzeny attacked the radio operator and his equipment, and formally greeted Mussolini with "Duce, the Führer has sent me to set you free!" to which Mussolini replied "I knew that my friend would not forsake me!" Mussolini was first flown from Campo Imperatore in a Luftwaffe Fieseler Fi 156 Storch liaison aircraft, then flown on to Vienna (where he stayed overnight at the Hotel Imperial) and given a hero's welcome.

The operation on the ground at Campo Imperatore was in fact led by Lieutenant Count Otto von Berlepsch, planned by Major Harald Mors and under orders from General Kurt Student, all Fallschirmjäger (German Air Force Paratroop) officers; but Skorzeny stewarded the Italian leader first into Rome and eventually into Berlin, right in front of the cameras. After a pro-SS propaganda coup at the behest of SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Skorzeny was granted the majority of the credit for the operation.

[edit] Aftermath

The operation severely hampered Allied advances into Italy^{[citation needed]}, as well as granting a rare late-war public relations opportunity to Hermann Göring. Mussolini was returned to power again in the German-occupied portion of Italy (the Italian Social Republic). Otto Skorzeny gained a large amount of success from this mission; he received a promotion to Major, the award of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross and fame that led to his "most dangerous man in Europe" image.

Nazi propaganda hailed the operation for months, the Axis otherwise having little about which to boast in the fall of 1943. As it turned out, it was the last of Hitler's spectacular gambles to bear fruit.