He took the country into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany in June 1940.[2] Following the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943, Mussolini was deposed and put under arrest; Italy then signed an armistice with the Allies in Cassabile.[3] Later that year, he was rescued from prison in the Gran Sasso raid by German special forces and Hitler installed him as leader of the Italian Social Republic, a German puppet state set up in northern Italy and based at the town of Salò near Lake Garda.[4] By 1944, the "Salò Republic", as it came to be called, was threatened not only by the Allies advancing from the south but also internally by Italian anti-fascist partisans, in a brutal conflict that was to become known as the Italian civil war.[5]