The Israelis were determined: they would stop Egypt’s missile programme. Mossad intelligence agents were scratching their heads. How, 17 years after the end of the Second World War, could they get close to the German intelligence gathered around Wolfgang Pilz? The answer was at hand: they must make a pact with the devil. Someone the Germans would trust. Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s former favourite specialist. Heinz Krug thought of him too. He needed protection. He was receiving threatening letters. Letter and parcel bombs were arriving at selected addresses. Quite a few people were killed and injured. Many Germans left Egypt and Heinz Krug called 54-year-old Skorzeny. They got together. They never saw Krug again.
He was felled by a Skorzeny pistol shot and threatened by his war experiences, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported two years ago. “An honourable enemy who fought me face to face may be my friend in the future, but I could never deal with a sneaky enemy who sneaks up behind my back.” This is how Otto Skorzeny concluded his autobiography, Special Mission. The hidden enemies were not his allies, but two of his fellow prisoners who, he claimed, had given false testimony in the denazification process. He was acquitted by the Allies at the Nuremberg Trials.
Otto Skorzeny initially tried to clear his name formally, but when his hearing was postponed, it no longer seemed worth it. He fled the Darmstadt camp instead. Under what circumstances is still unclear today. Some say that he was helped to the other side of the wire by former SS friends disguised as American soldiers, others that he was really helped by the Allies.
Whoever he is, Skorzeny was free again in July 1948. He lived in Argentina for a short time, advising President Juan Peron while allegedly sharing a bed with his wife Evita. His journey took him to Egypt and then to Spain, where he settled in the former Nazi-leaning Spain and started an import/export business.
He lived a casual life, but not a relaxed one. He knew he was on Israel’s war crimes list, and he knew it could cost him his life at any moment. He did not agree to cooperate with the Mossad for the money; in return, he wanted to be taken off Simon Wiesenthal’s list. Mossad could not achieve that either, it could only forge his agreement. Skorzeny was satisfied. In the end, it was not really the Israelis who took his life, but cancer.
The poisonous Russian winter
At the age of 67, he said goodbye to a truly eventful life. He spent 23 years in business and 30 in war adventures. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. It was a complete surprise for the native of Vienna, but it was also the first opportunity for him to show his resourcefulness in stressful situations.
He was a member of the German Gymnastics Federation, which had so-called defence units. After the new Chancellor Arthur Seyss-Inquart had finished his speech, on the day of the referendum, 12 March 1938, Austrian President Wilhelm Miklas set off in his limousine for the Presidential Palace. The Guards were there. And there were the SS. There was a high probability that there would be bloodshed.
Skorzeny was accidentally tasked to resolve the situation peacefully. He was heading that way, jumping two steps at a time in the Presidential Palace, and froze in front of the rifles of the guardsmen pointed at him. Some on the ground floor also raised their weapons. “If just one of them loses his nerve now, anything can happen,” Skorzeny thought. He started shouting that they were mad and that they would be responsible for whatever happened. The new Chancellor was sending him, he added, and he persuaded President Miklas, who was standing nearby, to call the new Chancellor together. In the meantime, he ordered, no one should fire a bullet. And so it happened.
The 30-year-old Skorzeny was so overwhelmed by the taste of adrenaline that as soon as general conscription was announced, he immediately volunteered. He was too old to be an aviator, but not to be an officer of the Waffen SS or the armed branch of the SS. When it really started, he landed in France, but he saw no real combat there or later in Spain. He did not notice that “civilians were hostile to German soldiers”. Holland? A similar story.
He first became acquainted with war only in the then Yugoslavia. On 5 April 1941, he was with his comrades on the Yugoslav-Romanian border. It was pouring rain. The roads turned into muddy tracks. “We were all on the edge. It was the baptism of our new battalion and my first direct contact with the enemy.”
On 6 April 1941, at 5.45 am, the order to attack came. Bullets were flying everywhere. “Two hours later, it was all over, we had taken the enemy positions.” They started to penetrate inland. “We passed a group of prisoners who, with an almost Oriental fatalism, were either sitting on the ground, smoking or chewing bread, or lying on their backs, staring up at the grey sky. They hardly looked at us when we approached.”
A few weeks later, Skorzeny could not believe that “such a short and simple war march could cause such losses”. They were having hundreds of vehicles captured in the west. “In this war, vehicles were important not only for mobility, but above all to ensure the supply of war supplies”. Without them, there is no victory, as they realised towards the end of the war.
He crossed the battlefields of Poland and some of the then Soviet Union, reaching the Smolensk-Moscow highway near Gyatsk with his division. There, as a professional engineer, he saw a T34 tank for the first time. The Germans had no conventional weapons against him, but they quickly found that molotov cocktails, or bottles filled with petrol and sealed with cork stoppers from which a strip of burning cloth was oozing, were quite useful. When the bottle broke on the hot engine crankcase, the vehicle was engulfed in flames and the enemy was defeated. Hand bombs were also effective. If they hit the right part of the tank, the crew had to surrender.
In Russia, Skorzeny was struck above all by the stoicism of the people. The Russian soldier “endured much more pain than a Western European. I saw with my own eyes a soldier who had had both arms amputated a few hours earlier get up from his mattress and walk unaided to the toilet in the courtyard.”
Six Russian mechanics were once caught. Ivan was an exceptional expert. One day he was nowhere to be found. One of the lieutenants allowed him to visit his home because he lived nearby. Ivan promised to return. Skorzeny was furious. He was going to lose his best man for stupidity, he thought, but the next morning Ivan did come back. Skorzeny was sure it was because of their kitchen.
Even this could not make up for the poisonous Russian winter. It completely crushed the morale of the troops. Then a song came over the loudspeaker. The lyrics said: once everything ends; every December is followed by May! “As banal as it sounds, this feeling renewed hope and fighting spirit.” But they could not conquer Moscow, even though his division was only 15 kilometres to the north-west and they could see Moscow from the village bell tower.
On the verge of collapse, they were covered by 30 centimetres of snow after the retreat. The thermometer read 30 degrees below zero. They sought shelter in houses that were still standing, but had to take to the streets. The Russians invaded every evening and street fighting was inevitable. They could not bury the dead. They were lying there, with their eyes looking up into the air. Their bones had to be broken so that they could be placed in a natural position. They made pits with explosives and threw them into them every day.
The cold weather rendered the vehicles unusable. The guns had to be destroyed during the retreat. If they had had tractors, they could have taken them away. Skorzeny did not see the rest of the story. He returned sick to Vienna, not knowing that his normal military career was over.
British gifts
He spent six months in Berlin, trained and in April 1943 was certain that Germany would win the war. When they told him they needed an expert of his calibre to form a special unit, he had no idea what they were talking about. He had heard that there were two intelligence services, the military and the RSHA, or the State Security Department. The military was divided into three departments: the first was for military spies, the second was for organising sabotage and spreading enemy propaganda in foreign countries, and the third was for detecting enemy spies. The RSHA, which was part of the SS and was founded in 1938, dealt with political espionage.
Almost nobody in Germany knew about the existence of the Brandenburg Division, which was assigned to special tasks, nor about the Oranienburg Centre, which was set up in 1942 and, as the Brandenburg Division, fell under the SS. Skorzeny only heard of them when, in April 1943, he was offered the opportunity to expand and modernise the activities of Oranienburg, which was to be dedicated to special tasks.
But he knew that now he would no longer be a soldier and would always have to be available. “Live dangerously!” he heard Nietzsche’s words in his head and accepted a job in Sector IV, as the RSHA was also called.
His superior, SS Senior Jührer-Battalion Leader Schellenberg, introduced him to the job by telling him to “rob, borrow or steal” all the information he needed for his special unit and for the espionage and sabotage centre he had to set up. A whole new world opened up for Skorzeny.
Already in his first action, called Franz, which failed in Iran before it had even got off to a good start, he realised that “the battlefield at home is nothing like the front where our lives hang in the balance and everyone is trying to help the other. Here, personal jealousy was much stronger than in the field. The supreme command was vested in sacro egoismo and sacred bureaucracy.”
He had to learn how to manipulate quickly if he wanted to survive, and he had to learn how the special forces worked just as quickly if he wanted to succeed. He started with the British and was surprised to realise how much better they were than the comparable Brandenburg division. Research did not get on his nerves, fighting bureaucracy did. As soon as he brought an old acquaintance, Karl Radl, into his new special battalion, SS-Jäger-Battalion 501, now based in Friedenthal Castle, he put the burden on his shoulders.
He started work as enthusiastically as if it had not been the fourth year of the war. He drew up a training programme and moved it to Holland because it was geographically more suitable for special forces. There he also got to know the British intelligence officers at close quarters. They questioned the captives about their working methods and the instructions they had been given, and based on this information they drew up their training. According to German information, half of the informers were captured immediately after landing on the ground, and some three-quarters of the Allied dropped material also ended up in German hands. Skorzeny thus solved the problem of how to get intelligence equipment – almost all of which he had was British. Among other things, they sent him a pistol with a silencer, which was the first time he had ever held one. He wanted the Germans to make one, but it was too inaccurate and the projectile too powerful for his purposes.
In between, he learned how to survive in high circles. You must never say what you think and never express doubt about the feasibility of a task, he learned. With even the silliest plan, you must first show extreme enthusiasm and then report on the progress of its preparation. You can only tell the truth later, and even then in small doses. “One only becomes an expert in the art of diplomacy when one has succeeded in making the plan completely forgotten,” he explained the ultimate aim of the strategy. It must have taken 18 months for Himmler to forget his order to Skorzeny to immediately sabotage the smelters in Magnitogorsk in the Urals, even though he did not even have precise maps of the area.
When they first met in the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia in July 1943, he was only allowed to tell Hitler what he had been told to say: a few words about his military career. “I was trembling all over my body. In two minutes I was going to meet Adolf Hitler face to face.” Later, he could hardly remember the details of the meeting, but he remembered that Hitler had no difficulty pronouncing his name correctly, while the others did not.
“When I spoke, he looked straight at me without taking his eyes off me for even a second.” There were five other officers in the room. Hitler asked if any of them knew Italy. Skorzeny had honeymooned in Italy in 1934 with his first wife, Margareta Gretl Schreiber. He did not explain this to Hitler, only that he had been in Italy and that he was Austrian. Hitler looked at him long and closely. “The other gentlemen can go. You, Captain Skorzeny, stay,” he finally spoke.
He explained how the King of Italy had betrayed his “friend and loyal comrade” Mussolini and how he must be “rescued immediately or he will be handed over to the Allies”. The mission was secret, and only five people were allowed to know about it apart from Skorzeny.
Skorzeny went to Italy with a small group. He was constantly given false information about Mussolini’s whereabouts, and when he had the right information, he arrived too late, but in the end he only got the Italian fascist leader to safety. Mussolini presented him with a gold watch as a token of his gratitude, and Hitler was completely charmed by the success.
A month later, Skorzeny was in France, only this time he did not rescue the leader, Vichy Marshal Petain, but had to stop him. Petain was allegedly in contact with General de Gaulle, which worried members of Hitler’s General Staff about whether he might be planning to defect from southern France to North Africa.
“We certainly learnt one thing then – what patience means!” They were constantly receiving conflicting orders from Paris. Time for action! Call off the action! And again: Time for action! Skorzeny couldn’t figure out what his subjects wanted. The heads of the intelligence services, the army, the police and the foreign ministry agreed on nothing.
Soon he had enough. When he could not even get reliable information on Petain, he organised his own intelligence network, but was nevertheless quite satisfied when, on 2 December 1943, he was ordered to suspend his preparations and withdraw his troops. Finally, he took a holiday and went skiing with his second wife, Emmi Linhart, and their three-year-old daughter, Waltraut.
Hunger for fuel
Not long afterwards, he became commander of Special Battalion 502. The letter concluded with the words, “However, the SS command must make it clear that this does not involve men or material.” In disbelief, he had to realise that his new battalion was just a letter on a piece of paper. He had to find his own way. He began to recruit members of Special Battalion 502 from all branches of the armed forces, so that in the end he had in his ranks everyone from pilots to sailors, and from Norwegians to Danes, Dutch, Belgians and French.
Now he began to think about a new weapon, like the one he had seen in the Italian special forces unit, Flotilla X-MAS. For example, a ship loaded with ammunition, operated by one man. Just before the ship hits the target, the man jumps off. The Italians also introduced him to a diving school for special forces. So-called frogmen attached explosives to enemy ships.
He wanted to turn conventional torpedoes into one-man torpedoes. The main torpedo would not have an explosive, but only a glass dome and an operator. The torpedo with the explosive would be mounted underneath it. In the spring of 1944, this simple weapon was used to sink or destroy more than 6 000 tonnes of shipping without losing a single man.
He thought about the loss of many of them in the spring of 1944, when the Allied offensive was expected. Allied supply routes would have to be cut. The General Staff responded to his proposals as usual, saying that they were overwhelmed with work, that the idea was great, but … The Air Force was more enthusiastic. They jointly proposed to Hitler “flying” torpedoes or suicide attacks on Allied ships.
Hitler rejected them. “In his view, such self-sacrifice is not in the character of the white race and is contrary to the German mentality.” He told Skorzeny, who was convinced that this offensive would decide Germany’s fate, that “we must not imitate the kamikazes”.
But Skorzeny came up with the idea of building a one-man-operated aircraft, similar to the V1 bomb, that would work like a water torpedo. The technical solutions were not a problem, nor was the possibility of production, because the aircraft factories were almost inoperative because of the constant changes in plans, but the famous German bureaucracy was different. Once he had received the go-ahead to carry out his idea, the factory congratulated him on his optimism and told him that the first “flying” torpedoes would not be ready in five weeks, as he had dreamed, but rather in three or four months.
He got his engineers to work. They worked 15 hours a day and built three test vessels in ten days. Now all they had to do was test them. The first pilot took to the air without any problems. There were no problems during the flight either, only when landing. He failed to land on the runway. He crashed in a field not far away. The story repeated itself with another pilot. Even though both survived, the competent ministry banned further testing.
The fault was not detected because it was not present. The excellent German pilot Hanna Reitsch, the chief production engineer and an engineer from the Ministry concluded that the error was human. None of the pilots were used to handling such a small aircraft at such high speeds, so none of them knew how to land it.
Hanna wanted to take to the air. We would have to wait for the relevant committee to give the go-ahead. The commissions met infrequently and were slow to make decisions. They were one of the sharpest thorns in the side of Skorzeny, who decided quickly and efficiently. On top of that, Hanna was Hitler’s favourite. If anything had happened to her, Skorzeny could have said goodbye to life.
“In an emergency, a soldier has to be ready to act against orders,” Hanna persuaded him. With a deep sigh, he agreed with her. Hanna rose safely into the air and landed safely. The other two test pilots had no problems either. After a total of 20 flights, the Ministry allowed further testing and production of the craft.
But it did not matter, because this same ministry had no aviation fuel for the planes. Skorzeny asked for it week after week, shouted and shouted again, but each time so little came that in the autumn of 1944 he had to abandon the idea. “In this war, nothing was wanted more than fuel and fought for more than nothing.”
His battalion continued to spend half of its time recruiting men and material, but was still far less well equipped than the Allied Special Forces. Skorzeny only got the planes when he asked if he could repair American ones that had to make emergency landings in Germany or the occupied territories and set up a factory to get them into flying condition. The only problem was that they were too heavy to land on dangerous terrain, so new gliders for 12 men were built.
He did not need them to assassinate Tito. Because the Germans needed too many men to control the partisans, Hitler wanted to get rid of Tito and weaken the partisans. By early spring 1944, Skorzeny already knew that Tito was somewhere near Lumberjack. He decided to lead his men himself, but nothing came of the action. On 2 June 1944, the 10th Corps would attack Tito’s headquarters in Operation Konjic’s Leap, or Rössenlsprung, he was told by the General Staff. He tried to persuade the leaders to call off the operation. Too many people knew about it and Tito’s informers must have heard about it. Without success. The 10th Corps went on the offensive on 2 June 1944 and, according to Skorzeny’s predictions, was left empty-handed. There was no chance for a new attack.
Kidnapping of the son of the Hungarian Regent
On 10 September 1944, Hitler had him summoned to his General Staff. He told him in confidence that the Hungarian Regent, 76-year-old Miklos Horthy, was preparing to conclude a unilateral armistice with the then Soviet Union. Since the Germans would lose a good number of troops with it, Skorzeny would have to attack and capture the Budapest citadel if Horthy was to go through with his plan. The coup d’état should be carried out by parachutes or gliders, Hitler advised him, and he would have all the forces he needed under his command.
Skorzeny remained silent, even though it was crystal clear to him that Operation Panzerfaust could not be carried out by either paratroopers or light aircraft, because both would become easy targets for defence from the citadel. He left the decision for later and went to look around Budapest. With forged documents and wearing civilian clothes, he visited an acquaintance of an acquaintance. “I am almost embarrassed to say that I have never lived so luxuriously as I did for those three weeks, and in the fifth year of the war!”
Meanwhile, intelligence agents learned that Miklos Horthy, the Regent’s younger son, would meet Tito and Russian representatives on 10 October 1944. Skorzeny brought his man, a Croat, to the talks and learned that the Regent himself might come to the next meeting five days later. This was not ideal, but Skorzeny had other things to worry about.
The more he looked at the Citadel, inside and out, the less it became clear how he could conquer it. It stood on a hill, with a labyrinth of tunnels beneath it. The undertaking was complicated, so he decided to begin by kidnapping the younger Horthy at the second meeting, thus forcing his father to abandon his intention. Since Horthy Jr. was affectionately called Nicky and the Germans misunderstood this as Micky, the operation was called Mouse, as in Micky Mouse or Mickey Mouse.
It was a beautiful sunny Sunday. The roads were empty. Skorzeny’s soldiers were stationed in a side street. His driver and another member of the air force, in civilian clothes, were sitting in the square in front of the meeting place, seemingly casually. Skorzeny drove himself. He noticed a Hungarian military van with three soldiers and a civilian car parked in front of the building. He assumed it was Horthy’s. Without thinking, he parked so as to block their way. Then he started to repair the engine of his car.
The floor above the offices had been occupied by German police the day before. When a German policeman tried to enter the building at the appointed time, machine guns were heard coming from a van. The policeman fell, and Hungarian soldiers appeared on the balconies and windows. Two Hungarian officers fired from the front door.
Skorzeny had just enough time to hide behind his car door. The driver and another member of the air force fought their way through the fire to reach him. They were left to fend for themselves. In those few long and tense minutes, they defended themselves as best they could. Before Skorzeny’s men came out of a side street, the car had been searched and the driver wounded in the leg.
Hungarian soldiers in the house next door were preparing to attack. They were bombarded by the Skorzeny trio. They blew up the door and some nearby marble, trapping them temporarily in the building. At that point, the fire died down. It lasted perhaps five minutes.
Four prisoners, including Horthy’s son, were brought down from the top floor. They were forced into a car and driven away. Skorzeny should not have followed them, but he dared not let them out of his sight. On the way, they encountered Hungarian soldiers. If they had discovered the prisoners, things could have got complicated. He ordered the driver to stop. He ordered the Hungarian commander to rush to the citadel and restore order, because there was complete chaos. It worked. The Hungarians went ahead and he got his prisoners safely on a plane to Vienna.
But victory was not yet in his hands. The Hungarians fortified the citadel and trapped everyone inside, including the German ambassador. At two in the afternoon, Skorzeny was told that Miklos Horthy had concluded a unilateral armistice with the Russians. The negotiations between the Germans and the Hungarians that followed broke down. The time had come for Operation Panzerfaust. Skorzeny had to take the citadel. The orders were to do it at 6 a.m., when no one would expect an attack, and he wanted to do it as quickly as possible and with as few casualties as possible. He had to get up the hill as unnoticed as possible.
The road was mined. He could only hope that no lorry would run into a mine. They were about 1000 metres from the citadel when they heard loud explosions in the distance. They accelerated towards the stone barricades, broke through them and rushed up the stairs. Skorzeny came across a Hungarian soldier. He demanded to be taken to the leader immediately. As he hurried after him, he noticed that he was walking on the chosen red carpet.
He found himself facing a Hungarian Major-General. He demanded that he order the surrender or he would be responsible for the bloodshed, and assured him that any resistance was pointless because he was defeated, although he was not quite sure whether this was true or not. After a short deliberation, the Major-General surrendered the fort. The guns fell silent, the mission was accomplished, but the Regent was nowhere to be found. The SS had taken him earlier, his family had sought refuge in the Papal Nunciature.
Skorzeny took the citadel in about half an hour with relatively few casualties: four dead on the German side, three on the Hungarian side, and a few wounded. Horthy was taken by special train to Hirschberg Castle in Upper Bavaria, and earned a promotion to SS Senior Chief of the Storm Troopers and a gold cross. He did not meet Horthy again until after the war, when they were both prisoners. Horthy did not want to see him at first, but they ended up talking for two hours.
Ardennes Offensive
On 21 October 1944, however, Hitler also spoke for a while when he invited Skorzeny to the General Staff to celebrate the success of Operation Panzerfaust. He told him about the plans for the December offensive, now known as the Ardennes offensive. The war, he explained, had exhausted America and England. If they were pressed now, the people would revolt and force the government into an armistice with Germany.
Even if he agreed to a new offensive, they spent five weeks deciding from which area to launch it, until they chose northern Luxembourg as the starting point. Skorzeny had to destroy at least one bridge, preferably three, between Liège and Namur on the Meuse. He had warned Hitler from the start that the operation would be pure improvisation, because there was no time to prepare. Hitler understood, but he insisted. He also wanted Skorzeny’s boys in British and especially American uniforms to infiltrate the enemy, gather information, do damage and, above all, mislead the enemy.
This is a clear violation of the international law of war, Skorzeny’s lawyer explained. If a small group of Special Forces were caught in foreign uniforms, they would be treated as spies and tried in a military court. But since there will be 150 of them, international law only forbids the use of weapons when a soldier is wearing a foreign uniform, he continued, advising Skorzeny that his men should wear German uniforms under the foreign uniforms and take them off before they start shooting.
But this was the least of the problems Skorzeny faced. Although the operation was secret, orders were sent around from the General Staff to look for English-speaking soldiers in all branches of the army for the special operation. Skorzeny’s eyes glazed over. He immediately wanted to call it off, but all he heard was that he was what he was now and to continue with his preparations. After the war, he learned that the Americans had found out about the operation eight days after him.
Skorzeny would have to set up a completely new armoured brigade 150 in just five weeks and bring together men who had never seen each other before, because they were supposed to be special forces. Mission impossible. There were not enough German soldiers who could speak English. At the same time, they couldn’t get enough tanks, let alone American tanks. It was the same with American rifles. There was not enough ammunition for either tanks or rifles. The relevant service sent him Allied uniforms, but there were hardly any American uniforms among them, only British uniforms. They had to remake them themselves. When Skorzeny met his men for the first time on 20 November 1944, they were in even worse shape than he had expected them to be.
The German army was no better off, so the date of the offensive was constantly postponed. They had neither enough weapons nor enough men. Skorzeny even struggled to get a plane to take aerial photographs to give him even an approximate sense of what he was getting into, and it was killing him that Hitler had forbidden him to set foot on the front line, lest he be captured.
When the offensive began on 16 December 1944, and with it his Operation Greif, he was so low on fuel that the only way his brigade would have reached the Meuse River was if it had not been involved in serious fighting on the way. The biggest feat before the offensive was how to distribute the fuel so that no vehicle would be without it.
According to the basic plans, the German forces should have taken so much enemy territory on the first day that on the second day of the offensive the Special Forces would have reached their first bridge, south of Liège, without much difficulty. At five o’clock in the morning it began. By midday the fighting was heavy, but no tangible breakthrough. By the evening nothing had changed drastically. It was clear to Skorzeny that Greif had to abandon his operation because it was doomed to failure. He turned it into an intelligence operation.
His brigade was divided into 10 groups of 15 soldiers each. The leader of one group, a sailor, was a bit lost on land and landed in Mélmedy, which was under American control. He and the boys quickly took to their heels and “carried her off with nothing worse than a fright”. Of the nine groups, six or eight managed to get behind the battle lines, although Skorzeny did not trust their reports. He knew that the soldiers would rather lie than admit that they had not dared to take the other side.
He was only sure that the Allies had captured two groups and that five of them had done what was reported. The leader of one group, who spoke excellent English and also knew one of the American dialects, walked around the hostile area a bit to see for himself what was going on. After a few hours, a tank regiment drove by and stopped. The commander asked him for news. The German informer was happy to serve him false ones. On the way back, he and his group destroyed the telephone cables that had just been laid and the road markers that the Americans had set up for orientation.
The second group returned with reports that the bridges on the Meuse River were not very well guarded and of the location of mines and fallen trees on the three roads leading to the front. The third group convinced the Americans in a village that they were in a German sandwich. The commander ordered a retreat. The fourth group discovered an ammunition pit. It managed to advance around until evening and blew it up. Incidentally, it also cut the telephone cable in three places.
The boys achieved more than Skorzeny had expected, and during interrogations of the captured Americans, Skorzeny realised that they had made a mistake in the planning of the operation. Because they had not even considered that the Americans had enough jeeps to carry only two soldiers each, they had put four soldiers in each jeep, making them suspicious in the eyes of the Americans.
Beg? Suicide?
As the offensive continued, Skorzeny found himself in the vicinity of Malmédy. In the evening he went to the divisional headquarters. He was just standing at the front door when the familiar air pressure of an explosion blew him through. A bomb hit a nearby lorry, he was unhurt. In the darkness he ran with others to a car parked nearby. They set off. They tried to stay in the middle of the road without their lights on. They had just crossed the bridge when a sound echoed nearby. He jumped out of the car into a nearby ditch.
He felt something sticky on his face. Blood. In shock, he realised it was coming from near his right eye. He quickly returned to the General Staff. He was not impressed by the sight in the mirror, but he thanked his luck when he realised that two bullets had only grazed his leg. It could have been much worse.
In a Polish hospital, bomb fragments were removed from his face and the wound was stitched. He did not feel much pain, although he refused strong anaesthetics and the doctor’s recommendation to go to hospital. He returned to the battlefield at his own risk. He remained there for at least a week, although in the meantime he was laid up with chills and suspected that his wound had become infected. It was not until New Year’s Eve 1944, when Hitler summoned him to his General Staff, that he was cleansed. There, he was attended to by his doctor, but he could not guarantee that he would keep his right eye. It recovered, but he was no longer in command of Armoured Brigade 150 because it was disbanded at the beginning of January 1945.
But the war continued and Skorzeny was everywhere. He had the commander of a police battalion arrested for abandoning his men in Königsberg on the verge of defeat. He put him before a divisional court-martial and sentenced him to death. Then he found himself in trouble. He replied sharply to Himmler in a telegram, and Himmler wanted to see him immediately. Skorzeny arrived four hours late. Himmler went mad, Skorzeny remained silent. When Himmler only fell silent, he explained to him what was happening on the battlefield at Nipperwies, that they were not being supplied with material and that he could not come at the appointed hour because he could not leave his men during the fighting. Himmler calmed down and assured him at dinner that they would win the war.
On the last day of February 1945, he was summoned to Berlin, but he was not allowed to bring his men with him. A month later, he was sent to the so-called Alpine fortress without being told why. He assumed that the General Staff would move there and start to form a new team, but on 30 April 1945 he heard on the radio that Hitler had committed suicide, and six days later that the armistice had come. He was caught in the mountains.
At first he thought of fleeing abroad and suicide, but finally he decided to share his fate with his husbands. On 15 May 1945, he told the Americans to send a car to pick him and his staff, which still included Karl Radl. To his surprise, it did arrive.
From then on, he spent three years in and out of prisons and camps, spending most of his time in solitary confinement. He was constantly asked whether Hitler was still alive and whether the Germans were planning to execute General Eisenhower during the Ardennes offensive. They also wanted confirmation that they had killed captured American soldiers at the time. He kept saying that Hitler had committed suicide and that they had not killed prisoners of war. He had also heard the rumours during the Ardennes offensive, but they were not confirmed by the internal investigation. As for Eisenhower, he enlightened them that if he had really intended to kill him, he would already be dead.
At the Nuremberg trial, he was tried for the unauthorised use of foreign uniforms, although despite his persistent denials, ill-treatment of American prisoners of war, torture and killing were also inserted into the indictment, presumably to bring the case to trial. He was saved from conviction by Field Commander F. Yeo Thomas, who testified that British Special Forces were also deceived by the foreign uniforms.
Now Skorzeny is left with the denazification process. He was sure there would be no problems, but things got complicated when a soldier said that Skorzeny had sentenced him to death for refusing to take part in an operation. Skorzeny did not disclose what incriminating things Karl Radl had said in his statement, only that both were untrue. He never made any secret of the fact that he had escaped from the camp, but he said nothing about his collaboration with Mossad or his role in the secret organisation ODESSA, which smuggled war criminals into South America. According to some, he was not only a member, but also its founder. Once a specialist, always a specialist.
