Background
Otto Skorzeny was born in Vienna on 12 June 1908.
Otto Skorzeny was born in Vienna on 12 June 1908.
Studied engineering.
After his university studies and joining the Freikorps, he became a Nazi in 1930. A protégé of his compatriot Ernst Kaltenbrunner, whom he had known at the time of the Anschluss in Vienna, Skorzeny joined the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Regiment in Berlin in 1940 after being turned down for the Luftwaffe. After serving in France, the Netherlands and Russia, he was invalided home in December 1942, suffering from gallstones. At first given a desk job, he was transferred in April 1943 to Amt VI of the Reich Main Security Office and given charge of a special purposes commando unit ‘Oranienburg’.
Skorzeny's task was to develop a school of warfare on ‘commando’ lines and to this end he studied British methods closely, especially the British attempt to kidnap Rommel. His first missions in the Middle East and Russia failed because the General Staff was obstructive with supplies and the political leadership kept changing its mind. At the end of July 1943, Skorzeny was ordered by Hitler to rescue Mussolini, who was then a captive of the new Italian government which sought an armistice with the Allies. The difficult, enterprising raid was carried out on 12 September 1943, when glider-borne troops commanded by Skorzeny were landed on a small plateau in the Abruzzi mountains of Central Italy. The garrison of 250 soldiers guarding Mussolini who was located at the Hotel Camp Imperatore, in an almost inaccessible skiing resort, were taken by surprise and surrendered in a few minutes to Skorzeny's small force of ninety soldiers in gliders. Mussolini was carried off by Skorzeny in a light Storch aircraft after a remarkable takeoff and arrived in Vienna the same evening. The cloak and dagger affair was turned into a great success by Goebbels’s propaganda machine and Skorzeny was built up as a hero and the 'most dangerous man’ in Europe.
Promoted to SS Major General, Skorzeny demonstrated his resourceful¬ness and quick thinking shortly after the 20 July plot, returning to Berlin to mobilize an SS special duties battalion and giving his support to officers loyal to Hitler. In the autumn of 1944, Skorzeny was called in again to kidnap the Hungarian Regent. Horthy, who was then planning to negotiate an armistice with the Russians. After another spectacular raid, ‘Action Horthy' was brought to a successful conclusion and one more deposed Axis ruler was escorted back to Germany by Skorzeny on 17 October 1944. During the Ardennes offensive in December 1944 Skorzeny was given another bold assignment, ‘Operation Greif. in which a special brigade consisting of 2,000 English-speaking Germans disguised as American soldiers were ordered to seize the Meuse bridgehead and cause chaos behind the Allied lines. Skorzeny’s brigade was unable to hold on long enough to be relieved by the main German force and most of the infiltrators were unable to get back to their own lines, many of them being summarily shot. Nevertheless, the operation caused considerable confusion and a spy fever in the Allied ranks, even leading to the isolation of General Eisenhower for security reasons in case of a kidnap attempt.
At the end of the war Skorzeny served briefly as a divisional Commander in Bach-Zelewski’s corps on the Oder front. He was eventually captured by American forces in Styria on 15 May 1945 and tried as a war criminal two years later. An American tribunal at Dachau acquitted him on 9 September 1947 of illegal practices during the Ardennes offensive, after a
British officer testified that he had done nothing which his Allied counterparts had not themselves planned or attempted to carry out. After his release, Skorzeny was re-arrested by the German authorities, but escaped from an internment camp in 1948 and then founded a clandestine organisation called ODESSA to help ex-SS members to flee Germany. In 1951 he opened an import-export business agency in Madrid under the protection of the Franco régime and was involved in promoting business between German firms and the Spanish government. He was also a prominent figure in the post-war fascist and neo-Nazi International, trading on his notoriety as a highly publicized war-time adventurer. Skorzeny used his business cover in Spam to reorganize the escape routes for wanted Nazi criminals who had previously fled via Rome to the Catholic countries of Latin America with the help of a Vatican laissez-passer. He was able to buy in bulk a steady supply of valid Spanish passports, arrange for funds, set up the travel plans and provide cover stories. Skorzeny purchased a small hotel in Dema on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, from which an escape network to Africa and the Arab countries was established, as well as to South America. He also co-ordinated activities in West Germany with the Waffen-SS veterans’ organization HIAG, the Stahlhelm and the Deutscher Soldatenbund (Federation of German Soldiers) to supply men and money for the escape routes, to press for the release of all war criminals and to orchestrate anti-war-guilt propaganda.
At the end of the 1950s he became a landowner in Eire, buying a 170-acre farm where he bred horses and spent the summer months. He died in Madrid on 5 July 1975.