The Strange Case of a Nazi Who Became an Israeli Hitman

Otto Skorzeny. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Kurt Alber

Otto Skorzeny was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite soldiers – a Waffen-SS commando the Allies called “the most dangerous man in Europe.” Decades after the war, according to an investigation by Israeli journalists Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, he went to work for the Mossad.

It is one of the strangest stories to emerge from the years after the Holocaust, and a reminder of how long the shadow of the Nazi era stretched over the young State of Israel.

Hitler’s commando

Skorzeny was born in Vienna in 1908. He joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931 and, when war broke out, volunteered for the Waffen-SS – the armed wing of the Nazi Party, not the regular German army. He fought in Poland and Russia, and in his post-war memoirs described those years as if they had been almost bloodless. The Israelis who later dealt with him did not believe it.

Skorzeny with Benito Mussolini after the Gran Sasso raid, September 12, 1943. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Toni Schneiders

He became famous in September 1943, when he led a glider raid on an Italian mountaintop hotel to free the deposed dictator Benito Mussolini. Hitler awarded him the Knight’s Cross and put him in charge of the SS special forces.

A year later, Skorzeny helped topple Hungary’s leader, Admiral Miklós Horthy, who was trying to leave the war. The Arrow Cross regime that replaced him murdered or deported tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who had survived until then.

After the war Skorzeny was tried and acquitted by an Allied military court, escaped further custody, and settled in Franco’s Spain – a haven for former Nazis. From there he advised governments including Egypt’s.

Nazi scientists, Egyptian rockets

In the early 1960s, dozens of German scientists – many of them veterans of Hitler’s rocket program at Peenemünde – were building missiles for Egypt. Israel, home to so many Holocaust survivors, was the obvious target. Stopping them became one of the Mossad’s top priorities.

The scientists began receiving threatening phone calls and letters; some were sent letter bombs. Israel had captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 and hanged him in 1962, and the Germans knew the threats were coming from Israel.

One of them, Heinz Krug, turned to the most feared commando he knew for protection: Otto Skorzeny.

Recruiting a Nazi

According to Melman and Raviv’s sources, Mossad chief Isser Harel decided that instead of killing Skorzeny, the agency would recruit him. To get close to the German scientists, Israel needed someone on the inside – and Skorzeny had the access, the skills and the contacts.

The operation was run by Joe Raanan, the Mossad’s senior officer in Germany. Raanan was himself born in Vienna, as Kurt Weisman. He escaped to Palestine at 16; his mother and younger brother were murdered in the Holocaust.

Skorzeny agreed to help. He reportedly asked for one thing in return: that Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal remove him from his list of war criminals. Wiesenthal refused, and the Mossad is said to have forged a letter telling Skorzeny he had been cleared.

Skorzeny (left) and Adrian von Fölkersam in Budapest, October 16, 1944. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

He was brought secretly to Israel and taken to Yad Vashem. During the visit, a survivor recognized him and called him a war criminal. Raanan told the man he was mistaken.

Back in Egypt, Skorzeny gathered the names and addresses of the German scientists and the front companies supplying Egypt’s weapons programs. According to the investigation, he also lured Heinz Krug to a forest outside Munich in September 1962, where Krug was killed. The campaign of pressure worked: most of the German scientists left Egypt.

A secret taken to the grave

Skorzeny never explained why he helped Israel. His memoirs do not mention Israel or Jews. Protection from assassination, a taste for adventure, perhaps even regret – no one knows for sure.

Skorzeny waiting in a cell as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, November 24, 1945. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

He died in Madrid in 1975. At his funeral, former SS men gave the Nazi salute. Among the mourners, keeping his face hidden, was Joe Raanan – the Holocaust refugee who had run him as an agent.

Why this story matters

The Holocaust did not end in 1945 for those who survived it. For the founders of Israel, many of whom had lost their families, the threat of a new attempt to destroy the Jewish people was real – and they were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to stop it, even working with a man like Skorzeny.

At the March of the Living, we teach the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath so that the next generation understands both what happened and what it has meant for the Jewish people ever since.

Based on reporting by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, first published in Haaretz in 2016.

Read survivor stories from the March of the Living