 To circumvent the ban on using prisoners of war as forced labor, the Germans re-designated their Italian prisoners as "military internees" and shipped them to Germany as slave labor.The Germans freed Mussolini in the Gran Sasso raid (12 September 1943) and set him up as the leader of the Italian Social Republic (RSI) puppet state that kept fighting the Allies until it collapsed when the German forces in Italy surrendered in the spring of 1945.The Allies were of two minds on how to treat the Kingdom of Italy after the armistice.