Translated material
Obersturmbannfuhrer SS in the service of Mossad
How Israeli special services recruited Otto Skorzeny: The Forward
During the Second World War, Otto Skorzeny was called the most dangerous person in Europe. A native of Vienna, in 1931 Skorzeny joined the Austrian branch of the NSDAP, in 1939 signed up as a volunteer in Waffen-SC (the elite division of Leibstandart SS Adolf Hitler, created on the basis of the personal protection of the Fuhrer), and already in 1943 commanded the largest special operations of the Reich. As the American edition of The Forward found out, Skorzeny was in the service of Mossad - collaborating with Israeli special services after 20 years, he hoped to protect himself from Nazis hunters.
The authors of the article in The Forward are American journalist Dan News and his Israeli colleague Yossi Melman. They wrote several books about the history of Israeli special services. Their sources for an article about Otto Skorzeni are retired employees of Mossad. In particular, Raviv and Melman refer to the testimony of the Israeli intelligence veteran Rafi Eitan , who confirmed them that he oversaw Skorzeny.
The most famous operations of Otto Skorzeni is the liberation of the overthrown Benito Mussolini (with the help of paratroopers who descended to the place from silent non -humorous gliders) and the establishment of the progerman regime in Hungary (with the previous kidnapping of the son of a less progerman Hungarian ruler Miklosha Horthy). There was also an unfulfilled plan for the murder of the leaders of Great Britain, the USA and the USSR during the 1943 Tehran Conference and an unsuccessful sabotage in 1944, when several hundred German soldiers with impeccable English, dressed in American uniforms and moved to captured American tanks, had to hit the allies into the back.
After the war, Otto Skorzeny was arrested. It is known that he collaborated with American intelligence. Despite the fact that the UN suspected him of war crimes, they judged Skorzeny for theft of American property during the same diversion of 1944 - and justified. After that, Skorzeny, under unknown circumstances, escaped from custody (according to one version-with the help of retired SS men, dressed in American uniforms; according to the other-with the assistance of the American special services) and was hiding for several years from persecution in different countries, until it settled in Franco Spain.
Living in Spain, Skorzeny collaborated with a variety of organizations - from the neo -Nazi "Spanish circle of friends of Europe" to the Egyptian special services, the Argentine government and the CIA. It was also known that in some period he was an informant of Mossad, however, the article of Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman first tells, under what circumstances Skorzeny was recruited by the Israeli intelligence services and what his work was.
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According to the authors of the article in The Forward, the initial plan of Mossad was to kill Scoricen. The Israeli security forces first tested the method of political murder in the 1950s, and by the beginning of the 1960s the country's special services were already searched for the world of the former Nazis. In 1962, Adolf Eichmann, one of the organizers of the Holocaust, was convicted and executed in Israel. Two years earlier, Mossad agents abducted him in Argentina. It is known that the surname Skorzeny was listed in the list of Nazi criminals of Simon Vizenthal .
The idea of using the former Nazi saboteur, as Raviv and Melman writes, belonged to the director of Mossad Isser Harel. In 1962, his organization tried to prevent the development of missiles in Egypt - over the program, which, as it was believed in Israel, threatened the existence of the country, and German scientists worked, who had previously created missiles for the Reich. The Israelites tracked at scientists and sent them letters with threats, and this tactic was fruit. Hinz Circle, one of the leaders of a group of researchers, having received such a letter, decided to protect himself and his colleagues. To this end, he turned to Otto Skorzeny.
The plan of Israeli intelligence, according to Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, was to get to the Nazi scientist with the help of a former saboteur and kill them. A group of agents was sent to Spain who had to establish surveillance of Skorzeny and develop an operation to recruit it. The operation was led by Joe Raanan, an Israeli intelligence officer who was born, like Skorzeny, in Vienna. The group also included a German girl called Anke (the real name is unknown). It was decided that the contact with Skorzeni would establish Ankei and her partner (for this agent, the authors do not even give a pseudonym; they write, however, that he said "on an impeccable German with an Austrian accent").
Anke and her partner met Skorzeny and his wife in the Madrid bar, where he often went. They gave themselves out for a couple of tourists from Germany, saying that they had just been robbed. As Raviv and Melman write, during the evening all four drank cocktails and flirted, and in the end went together to the Madrid Villa Skorzeny. However, in the house he suddenly took out a gun and said: “I know who you are and why you are here. You are from Mossad, and you came to kill me. ” The man said to this: “You are right, but only partly. We are from Mossad, but if we were going to kill you, you would be dead for a long time. ” “Then, perhaps, I will kill you,” Skorzeny answered. To this, she noticed: “If you kill us, then the next will not drink with you, but simply knocked out your brains.”
Thinking (and not lowering the pistol) Skorzeny asked how he could be useful. The man promised him a generous reward in exchange for information. Skorzeny said that he was not interested in the money, and set the only condition: he wanted his name to be deleted from the list of Simon Vizenthal. The man promised to arrange it, and they shook hands.
According to the authors, Mossad agents really handed the Skorzeny request to Vizental, but he refused. Then the scouts handed Skorzenycen a fake letter, allegedly from Wizenthal.
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Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman write about several operations performed by Otto Skorzeny on the Mossada task. On September 11, 1962, the former Nazi saboteur shot the Haine Circle - when he met him in Munich to discuss the safety of German scientists in Egypt. His body was never found. Then, in November of the same year, Skorzeny sent a parcel with a bomb at the factory where the Germans worked. As a result, five Egyptian workers died.
Of course, many in Israeli intelligence wondered why the famous German agreed to cooperate so easily? Did he really care about his reputation so much, and therefore demanded that he be excluded from the list of war criminals? Skorzeny understood that as long as he was on the list, he could be killed. Cooperation with Mossad was for him insurance (English.).