Otto Skorzeny: The Nazi Commando Who Later Became a Mossad Hitman
Updated: 8 hours ago
Adolf Hitler called him the most dangerous man in Europe, and for once the propaganda undersold the story rather than inflating it. Otto Skorzeny spent the war building a reputation as Nazi Germany's foremost commando, escaped justice afterward with help from old comrades, farmed quietly in Ireland while Dublin society lined up to shake his hand, and then, according to Israeli intelligence records, was recruited by the Mossad and personally shot dead a German rocket scientist working for Egypt. Almost none of that last chapter makes it into the shorter version of his story.
Quick answers
Who was Otto Skorzeny?
An Austrian-born Waffen-SS commando who led the 1943 raid that freed Benito Mussolini, later ran the deception operation behind the Battle of the Bulge, and became internationally infamous as Hitler's most trusted special forces officer.
Did Skorzeny ever face real justice for his actions?
He was acquitted at Nuremberg on a technicality, escaped a detention centre in 1948 before further trials could proceed, and spent the rest of his life a free man in Spain, Argentina and Ireland.
Is it true he worked for Israeli intelligence?
According to Mossad records made public decades later, yes. He was recruited in 1962 to help identify German scientists building missiles for Egypt, and is alleged to have personally killed at least one of them.
Why did he move to Ireland?
He bought a large farm estate in County Kildare in 1959 and was, for a time, genuinely welcomed by parts of Irish high society, before growing political concern eventually made his position there untenable.
A scarred fencer joins the Nazi cause
Otto Johann Skorzeny was born in Vienna on 12 June 1908, into a family with a long military tradition. He studied engineering at university and took up competitive fencing, and it was in a duel there that he picked up the deep scar across his left cheek, known in German student circles as a Schmiss, a badge of honour among duelling fraternities rather than a mark of any real violence. Combined with his considerable height, it gave him the imposing look that later fed directly into his wartime reputation.
Skorzeny joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1932 and enlisted in the Waffen-SS following the 1938 Anschluss. His early war record was unremarkable, serving on the Eastern Front during the invasion of the Soviet Union without particular distinction. His fortunes changed in 1943, when a fellow Austrian, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, took over the Reich Security Main Office and put Skorzeny in charge of a new special operations unit.
The raid that made him famous
Skorzeny's reputation was made almost overnight in September 1943, when he took part in the raid that freed the deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from a mountaintop hotel prison at Gran Sasso. Nazi propaganda turned him into the operation's swashbuckling star, and the story stuck for decades. It's since become one of the better-documented cases of wartime myth-making: multiple historians, drawing on the private letters and reports of the general who actually planned the raid, argue Skorzeny held no real command authority that day at all and was, in the words of one of his own colleagues, effectively a passenger. The full story, and exactly how the credit got so badly misallocated, is covered in depth in our account of Operation Eiche. What mattered for Skorzeny's career was that the myth worked. He returned from the mountain a national hero, with a promotion and the Knight's Cross to prove it.
Chaos, paranoia and firing squads: Operation Greif
Skorzeny's next major operation came during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. Hitler personally ordered Operation Greif, tasking Skorzeny with forming a brigade to seize bridges over the Meuse River while a smaller group of English-speaking German soldiers, dressed in American uniforms and driving captured Jeeps, slipped behind Allied lines to sow confusion. Forty-four of these disguised infiltrators made it through American lines. Twenty-three were eventually captured, and eighteen were executed by firing squad, a legal outcome under the rules of war for combatants caught fighting in an enemy's uniform.
The psychological impact ran far beyond the actual sabotage. American troops grew so suspicious of infiltrators that soldiers began quizzing each other on baseball trivia and local geography to prove their identity. Brigadier General Bruce Clarke was held at gunpoint for five hours after incorrectly naming which league the Chicago Cubs played in, and General Omar Bradley was stopped repeatedly at checkpoints despite being one of the most recognisable men in the Allied army. One captured German soldier, under interrogation, invented a rumour that Skorzeny's real target was General Eisenhower himself. The claim was almost certainly false, but Eisenhower's own staff took it seriously enough to confine him under heavy guard for the following days, a genuinely disruptive result from a single fabricated story.
Long Jump, Panzerfaust and a leap that never happened
Skorzeny's name became attached to a string of other operations, real and rumoured, through the war's final years. His most ruthless came in October 1944, when Hungary's regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, began secretly negotiating an armistice with the Soviets. Under orders codenamed Operation Panzerfaust, Skorzeny's men ambushed Horthy's own son at a staged meeting, beat him unconscious, rolled him in a carpet and flew him out of the country to Mauthausen concentration camp as a hostage. According to Codenames.info, Skorzeny then rolled a column of tanks up to Budapest's Castle Hill and had Horthy himself removed from power within hours, clearing the way for a far more compliant pro-Nazi government to take over. He was also reportedly linked to a planned raid against Yugoslav partisan leader Josip Broz Tito, and to Operation Long Jump, an alleged 1943 plot to assassinate Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt during the Tehran Conference, though the operation's very existence remains disputed, with Skorzeny himself dismissing it as Soviet propaganda invented after the fact.
Saved by an unlikely witness, then an escape with old friends' help
Skorzeny was held after the war and appeared as a witness at Nuremberg in 1945, but his own war crimes trial over Operation Greif came later, at the Dachau Military Tribunal in the late summer of 1947, on the argument that dressing soldiers in enemy uniforms violated the laws of war. It's a detail that gets conflated even in otherwise careful retellings. Three of his men captured during the operation had already been executed by American firing squad back in December 1944, blindfolded with paper targets pinned over their hearts, so Skorzeny had every reason to expect the same outcome. He was acquitted after an unexpected defence witness came forward: Forrest Yeo-Thomas, a British SOE agent known as “The White Rabbit” for his own wartime exploits and survival of Buchenwald, who testified that Allied special forces had used enemy uniforms behind German lines too, undercutting the prosecution's entire argument. Further legal proceedings loomed regardless, and in 1948 Skorzeny escaped from a detention centre in Darmstadt with help from former SS comrades, some accounts suggesting sympathetic American guards looked the other way. He never faced a European court again.
Ratlines, Perón, and a gentleman farmer in County Kildare
Skorzeny spent the following years moving between Franco's Spain and Perón's Argentina, reportedly working for a time as a bodyguard to Eva Perón, and became entangled in the postwar Nazi escape networks known as the ratlines. Then, in 1959, he did something considerably stranger than going into hiding: he bought Martinstown House, a 160-acre estate in the Curragh, County Kildare, and settled into life as an Irish gentleman farmer. According to IrishCentral, he'd been welcomed at a Dublin reception two years earlier attended by members of parliament and a young Charles Haughey, who would later become Ireland's Taoiseach, and Irish newspapers of the era wrote him up less as a war criminal than as a kind of real-life Scarlet Pimpernel. Locals grew used to the sight of a scarred, six-foot-four former SS colonel driving a white Mercedes into the village to collect his post.
The welcome soured over time. Questions were raised in the Irish parliament about whether Skorzeny was using the country as a base for renewed far-right activity, and British authorities made clear he would not be permitted to enter the United Kingdom. He eventually spent less time in Ireland as scrutiny grew, though he kept the estate for years afterward.
Hitler's commando becomes Israel's hitman
The strangest chapter of Skorzeny's life came in the early 1960s, and for decades it existed only as rumour before Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman laid it out in detail in his book Rise and Kill First, adapted for Newsweek. Facing intelligence that German scientists were helping Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser build a missile programme aimed at Israel, the Mossad initially considered killing Skorzeny, who had personal and business ties to several of the scientists involved. Spymaster Isser Harel decided recruiting him would be more useful than eliminating him.
The approach ran through Skorzeny's wife, Countess Ilse von Finckenstein, a cousin of Hitler's former finance minister Hjalmar Schacht. Confronted directly by Mossad agents in a Madrid bar, Skorzeny is said to have drawn a pistol and demanded to know who they really were, before agreeing to cooperate on one condition: removal from Simon Wiesenthal's public list of wanted Nazi war criminals. According to reporting in The Forward, Skorzeny didn't just pass along information. He is alleged to have personally lured Heinz Krug, a German rocket engineer working on the Egyptian programme, into a car under the pretence of driving him to safety, only to have him killed in a forest outside Munich. Krug's body was never found.
Death and a legacy he never once apologised for
Otto Skorzeny died of lung cancer in Madrid on 5 July 1975, aged sixty-seven. Former SS comrades reportedly gave the Hitler salute and sang Nazi-era songs at his funeral, and his ashes were later interred in the family plot in Vienna. He never expressed remorse for his wartime record, and his postwar life reads less like a redemption story than a long series of increasingly strange re-inventions: fugitive, farmer, and finally, if the Mossad's own account is accurate, assassin working for the very state built by the people his old regime had tried to exterminate.
Separating the myth from the record
Skorzeny spent much of his own life encouraging the legend, publishing a memoir that historians now treat with real caution given how much of his fame rested on a raid he didn't actually plan. He shares that pattern with plenty of other self-mythologising wartime figures on every side of the conflict, though few had quite as improbable a third act. His story sits naturally alongside other tales of postwar reinvention and hidden double lives, from the true story behind the Mussolini rescue he's most remembered for to Krystyna Skarbek's own remarkable, and far less self-promoted, career as one of Britain's most fearless wartime spies.
FAQ
Did Skorzeny actually plan the Mussolini rescue?
No, according to most modern historians. General Kurt Student approved the raid and Major Harald Mors planned and commanded it; Skorzeny held no formal command role.
How many of Skorzeny's disguised soldiers were executed in the Battle of the Bulge?
Eighteen of the twenty-three captured, under the recognised laws of war governing combatants caught in enemy uniform.
Did Skorzeny face any consequences for working with the Mossad?
None that are documented. He died in 1975 without ever being tried again by any government for his wartime or postwar activities.
Was Skorzeny tried at Nuremberg?
Not for his own crimes. He appeared there only as a witness in 1945; his own war crimes trial over Operation Greif took place separately, at the Dachau Military Tribunal in 1947.
What happened to Skorzeny's Irish estate?
Martinstown House in County Kildare remained his property for a period after growing political scrutiny made his continued presence in Ireland increasingly difficult.
You might also like
Operation Eiche: The Real Story Behind Hitler's Rescue of Mussolini, Krystyna Skarbek / Christine Granville: One of Britain's Most Fearless WWII Spies and The Capture of Mussolini, His Final Hours and the Strange Journey His Body Went On After His Death
