The Nazi Who Became a Mossad Hitman

Otto Skorzeny was a swashbuckling Nazi agent who
rescued Mussolini and captured Horthy’s son and rolled him up in a carpet.  The short-lived Salo Republic that Mussolini presided
over from September 1943 onwards deported around 8,000 Italian Jews.  By capturing his son, Skorzeny forced Horthy to
abdicate in favour of Szalasi, leader of the Iron Cross, whose murderous
rampages and pogroms in Budapest from October 1944 to January 1945 when Soviet troops
liberated Budapest, led to the death of approximately 50,000 Jews.

Skorzeny was therefore suitably qualified to be an Israeli
agent.

Tony Greenstein

On
September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. The basic facts were simple:
Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home.

The
only other salient detail known to police in Munich was that Krug commuted to
Cairo frequently. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been
hired by Egypt to develop advanced weapons for that country.

HaBoker,
a now defunct Israeli newspaper, surprisingly claimed to have the explanation:
The Egyptians kidnapped Krug to prevent him from doing business with Israel.

But
that somewhat clumsy leak was an attempt by Israel to divert investigators from
digging too deeply into the case — not that they ever would have found the
49-year-old scientist.

We
can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with
Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century
ago — that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate
the German scientists working for Egypt.

Moreover,
the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal
gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets,
was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf
Hitler’s personal favorites among the party’s commando leaders. The Führer, in
fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of
the Iron Cross, for leading the rescue operation that plucked his friend Benito
Mussolini out from the hands of his captors.

But
that was then. By 1962, according to our sources — who spoke only on the
promise that they not be identified — Skorzeny had a different employer. The
story of how that came to be is one of the most important untold tales in the
archives of the Mossad, the agency whose full name, translated from Hebrew, is
“The Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions.”

Key
to understanding the story is that the Mossad had made stopping German
scientists then working on Egypt’s rocket program one of its top priorities. For
several months before his death, in fact, Krug, along with other Germans who
were working in Egypt’s rocket-building industry, had received threatening
messages. When in Germany, they got phone calls in the middle of the night,
telling them to quit the Egyptian program. When in Egypt, some were sent letter
bombs — and several people were injured by the explosions.

Krug,
as it happens, was near the top of the Mossad’s target list.

During
the war that ended 17 years earlier, Krug was part of a team of superstars at
Peenemünde, the military test range on the coast of the Baltic Sea, where top
German scientists toiled in the service of Hitler and the Third Reich. The
team, led by Wernher von Braun, was proud to have engineered the rockets for
the Blitz that nearly defeated England. Its wider ambitions included missiles
that could fly a lot farther, with greater accuracy and more destructive power.

According
to Mossad research, a decade after the war ended, von Braun invited Krug and
other former colleagues to join him in America. Von Braun, his war record
practically expunged, was leading a missile development program for the United
States. He even became one of the fathers of the NASA space exploration
program. Krug opted for another, seemingly more lucrative option: joining other
scientists from the Peenemünde group — led by the German professor Wolfgang
Pilz, whom he greatly admired — in Egypt. They would set up a secret strategic
missile program for that Arab country.

In
the Israelis’ view, Krug had to know that Israel, the country where so many
Holocaust survivors had found refuge, was the intended target of his new
masters’ military capabilities. A committed Nazi would see this as an
opportunity to continue the ghastly mission of exterminating the Jewish people.

The
threatening notes and phone calls, however, were driving Krug crazy. He and his
colleagues knew that the threats were from Israelis. It was obvious. In 1960,
Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief administrators of
the Holocaust, in far-off Argentina. The Israelis astonishingly smuggled the
Nazi to Jerusalem, where he was put on trial. Eichmann was hanged on May 31,
1962.

It
was reasonable for Krug to feel that a Mossad noose might be tightening around
his neck, too. That was why he summoned help: a Nazi hero who was considered
the best of the best in Hitler’s heyday.

One of the Mossad’s
top priorities was stopping German scientists from working on Egypt’s rocket
program.

On
the day he vanished, according to our new information from reliable sources,
Krug left his office to meet Skorzeny, the man he felt would be his savior.

Skorzeny,
then 54 years old, was quite simply a legend. A dashing, innovative military
man who grew up in Austria — famous for a long scar on the left side of his
face, the result of his overly exuberant swordplay while fencing as a youth— he
rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS. Thanks to
Skorzeny’s exploits as a guerrilla commander, Hitler recognized that he had a
man who would go above and beyond, and stop at nothing, to complete a mission.

The
colonel’s feats during the war inspired Germans and the grudging respect of
Germany’s enemies. American and British military intelligence labeled Skorzeny
“the most dangerous man in Europe.”

Krug
contacted Skorzeny in the hope that the great hero — then living in Spain —
could create a strategy to keep the scientists safe.

The
two men were in Krug’s white Mercedes, driving north out of Munich, and
Skorzeny said that as a first step he had arranged for three bodyguards. He
said they were in a car directly behind and would accompany them to a safe
place in a forest for a chat. Krug was murdered, then and there, without so
much as a formal indictment or death sentence. The man who pulled the trigger
was none other than the famous Nazi war hero. Israel’s espionage agency had
managed to turn Otto Skorzeny into a secret agent for the Jewish state.

After
Krug was shot, the three Israelis poured acid on his body, waited awhile and
then buried what was left in a hole they had dug beforehand. They covered the
makeshift grave with lime, so that search dogs — and wild animals — would never
pick up the scent of human remains.

Wiki
Commons  Yitzhak
Shamir

The
troika that coordinated this extrajudicial execution was led by a future prime
minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, who was then head of the Mossad’s special
operations unit. One of the others was Zvi “Peter” Malkin, who had tackled
Eichmann in Argentina and in later life would enter the art world as a New
York-based painter. Supervising from a distance was Yosef “Joe” Raanan, who was
the secret agency’s senior officer in Germany. All three had lost large numbers
of family members among the 6 million Jews murdered by the cruel,
continent-wide genocide that Eichmann had managed.

Israel’s
motivation in working with a man such as Skorzeny was clear: to get as close as
possible to Nazis who were helping Egypt plot a new Holocaust.

The
Mossad’s playbook for protecting Israel and the Jewish people has no
preordained rules or limits. The agency’s spies have evaded the legal systems
in a host of countries for the purpose of liquidating Israel’s enemies:
Palestinian terrorists, Iranian scientists, and even a Canadian arms inventor
named Gerald Bull, who worked for Saddam Hussein until bullets ended his career
in Brussels in 1990. 

Mossad agents in Lillehammer, Norway, even killed a
Moroccan waiter in the mistaken belief that he was the mastermind behind the
1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the terrorist group
known as Black September. Ahmed Bouchikhi was shot down in 1973 as he left a
movie theatre with his pregnant wife. The Israeli government later paid compensation
to her without officially admitting wrongdoing. The botched mission delayed
further Mossad assassinations, but it did not end them.

To
get to unexpected places on these improbable missions, the Mossad has sometimes
found itself working with unsavory partners. When short-term alliances could
help, the Israelis were willing to dance with the proverbial devil, if that is
what seemed necessary.

But
why did Skorzeny work with the Mossad?

He
was born in Vienna in June 1908, to a middle-class family proud of its military
service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From an early age he seemed fearless,
bold and talented at weaving false, complex tales that deceived people in
myriad ways. These were essential requirements for a commando officer at war,
and certainly valuable qualities for the Mossad.

He
joined Austria’s branch of the Nazi Party in 1931, when he was 23, served in
its armed militia, the SA, and enthusiastically worshipped Hitler. The führer
was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then seized Austria in 1938. When
Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II broke out, Skorzeny left his
construction firm and volunteered — not for the regular army, the Wehrmacht,
but for the Leibstandarte SS Panzer division that served as Hitler’s personal
bodyguard force.

Getty Otto
Skorzeny

Skorzeny,
in a memoir written after the war was over, told of his years of SS service as
though they were almost bloodless travels in occupied Poland, Holland and France.
His activities could not have been as innocuous as his book made them seem. He
took part in battles in Russia and Poland, and certainly the Israelis believed
it was very likely that he was involved in exterminating Jews. The Waffen-SS,
after all, was not the regular army; it was the military arm of the Nazi Party
and its genocidal plan.

His
most famous and was in September 1943: leading commandos who
flew engineless gliders to reach an Italian mountaintop resort to rescue
Hitler’s friend and ally, the recently ousted Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini
and spirit him away under harrowing conditions.

This
was the escapade that earned Skorzeny his promotion to lieutenant colonel — and
operational control of Hitler’s SS Special Forces. Hitler also rewarded him
with several hours of face-to-face conversation, along with the coveted
Knight’s Cross. But it was far from his only coup.

In
September 1944, when Hungary’s dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy, a Nazi ally,
was on the verge of suing for peace with Russia as Axis fortunes plunged,
Skorzeny led a contingent of Special Forces into Budapest to kidnap Horthy and
replace his government with the more hard-line Fascist Arrow Cross regime. That
regime, in turn, went on to kill or to deport to concentration camps tens of
thousands of Hungarian Jews who had managed to survive the war up to that
point.

Also
in 1944, Skorzeny handpicked 150 soldiers, including some who spoke fair to
excellent English in a bold plan to fend off the Allies after they landed in
Normandy on D-Day in June. With the Allies advancing through France, Skorzeny
dressed his men in captured U.S. uniforms, and procured captured American tanks
for them to use in attacking and confusing Allied troops from behind their own
lines.

The
bold deception — including the act of stealing U.S. soldiers’ property —
plunged Skorzeny into two years of interrogation, imprisonment and trial after
the war ended. Eventually, Allied military judges acquitted him in 1947. Once
again, the world’s newspapers headlined him as Europe’s most dangerous man. He
enjoyed the fame, and published his memoirs in various editions and many
languages, including the 1957 book “Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The
Autobiography of Hitler’s Commando Ace,” published by Greenhill Books. He spun
some tall-tale hyperbole in the books, and definitely downplayed his contacts
with the most bloodthirsty Nazi leaders. When telling of his many conversations
with Hitler, he described the dictator as a caring and attentive military
strategist.

There
was much that Skorzeny did not reveal, including how he escaped from the
American military authorities who held him for a third year after his
acquittal. Prosecutors were considering more charges against him in the
Nuremberg tribunals, but during one transfer he was able to escape — reputedly
with the help of former SS soldiers wearing American military police uniforms.

Skorzeny’s
escape was also rumored to have been assisted by the CIA’s predecessor agency,
the Office of Special Services, for which he did some work after the war. It is
certainly notable that he was allowed to settle in Spain — a paradise for Nazi war
veterans, with protection from the pro-Western Fascist, Generalissimo Francisco
Franco. In the years that followed he did some advisory work for President Juan
Peron in Argentina and for Egypt’s government. It was during this period that
Skorzeny became friendly with the Egyptian officers who were running the
missile program and employing German experts.

In
Israel, a Mossad planning team started to work on where it could be best to
find and kill Skorzeny. But the head of the agency, Isser Harel, had a bolder
plan: Instead of killing him, snare him.

Mossad
officials had known for some time that to target the German scientists, they
needed an inside man in the target group. In effect, the Mossad needed a Nazi.

The
Israelis would never find a Nazi they could trust, but they saw a Nazi they
could count on: someone thorough and determined, with a record of success in
executing innovative plans, and skilled at keeping secrets. The seemingly
bizarre decision to recruit Skorzeny came with some personal pain, because the
task was entrusted to Raanan, who was also born in Vienna and had barely
escaped the Holocaust. As an Austrian Jew, his name was originally Kurt
Weisman. After the Nazis took over in 1938, he was sent — at age 16 — to
British-ruled Palestine. His mother and younger brother stayed in Europe and
perished.

Like
many Jews in Palestine, Kurt Weisman joined the British military looking for a
chance to strike back at Germany. He served in the Royal Air Force. After the
creation of Israel in 1948, he followed the trend of taking on a Hebrew name,
and as Joe Raanan he was among the first pilots in the new nation’s tiny air force.
The young man rapidly became an airbase commander and later the air force’s
intelligence chief.

Raanan’s
unique résumé, including some work he did for the RAF in psychological warfare,
attracted the attention of Harel, who signed him up for the Mossad in 1957. A
few years later, Raanan was sent to Germany to direct the secret agency’s
operations there — with a special focus on the German scientists in Egypt. Thus
it was Raanan who had to devise and command an operation to establish contact
with Skorzeny, the famous Nazi commando.

The
Israeli spy found it difficult to get over his reluctance, but when ordered, he
assembled a team that traveled to Spain for “pre-action intelligence.” Its
members observed Skorzeny, his home, his workplace and his daily routines. The
team included a German woman in her late 20s who was not a trained, full-time
Mossad agent but a “helper.” Known by the Hebrew label “saayanit” (or “saayan”
if a male), this team member was like an extra in a grandly theatrical movie,
playing whatever role might be required. A saayanit would often pose as
the girlfriend of an undercover Mossad combatant.

Internal
Mossad reports later gave her name as Anke and described her as pretty,
vivacious and truly flirtatious. That would be perfect for the job at hand — a
couples game.

One
evening in the early months of 1962, the affluent and ruggedly handsome —
though scarred — Skorzeny was in a luxurious bar in Madrid with his
significantly younger wife, Ilse von Finckenstein. Her own Nazi credentials
were impeccable; she was the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s talented
finance minister.

They
had a few cocktails and were relaxing, when the bartender introduced them to a
German-speaking couple he had been serving. The woman was pretty and in her
late 20s, and her escort was a well-dressed man of around 40. They were German
tourists, they said, but they also told a distressing story: that they had just
survived a harrowing street robbery.

They
spoke perfect German, of course, the man with a bit of an Austrian accent, like
Skorzeny’s. They gave their false names, but in reality they were,
respectively, a Mossad agent whose name must still be kept secret and his
“helper,” Anke.

There
were more drinks, then somewhat flamboyant flirting, and soon Skorzeny’s wife
invited the young couple, who had lost everything — money, passports and
luggage — to stay the night at their sumptuous villa. There was just something
irresistible about the newcomers. A sense of sexual intimacy between the two
couples was in the air. After the four entered the house, however, at a crucial
moment when the playful flirting reached the point where it seemed time to pair
off, Skorzeny — the charming host — pulled a gun on the young couple and
declared: “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and
you’ve come to kill me.”

The
young couple did not even flinch. The man said: “You are half-right. We are
from Mossad, but if we had come to kill you, you would have been dead weeks
ago.”

“Or
maybe,” Skorzeny said, “I would rather just kill you.”

Anke
spoke up. “If you kill us, the ones who come next won’t bother to have a drink
with you, You won’t even see their faces before they blow out your brains. Our
offer to you is just for you to help us.”

After
a long minute that felt like an hour, Skorzeny did not lower his gun, but he
asked: “What kind of help? You need something done?” The Mossad officer — who
even now is not being named by colleagues — told Skorzeny that Israel needed
information and would pay him handsomely.

Hitler’s
favorite commando paused for a few moments to think, and then surprised the
Israeli by saying: “Money doesn’t interest me. I have enough.”

The
Mossad man was further surprised to hear Skorzeny name something that he did
want: “I need for Wiesenthal to remove my name from his list.” Simon
Wiesenthal, the famous Vienna-based Nazi-hunter, had Skorzeny listed as a war
criminal, but now the accused was insisting he had not committed any crimes.

The
Israeli did not believe any senior Nazi officer’s claim of innocence, but
recruiting an agent for an espionage mission calls for well-timed lies and
deception. “Okay,” he said, “that will be done. We’ll take care of that.”

Skorzeny
finally lowered his weapon, and the two men shook hands. The Mossad man
concealed his disgust.

“I
knew that the whole story about you being robbed was bogus,” Skorzeny said,
with the boastful smile of a fellow intelligence professional. “Just a cover
story.”

The
next step to draw him in was to bring him to Israel. His Mossad handler,
Raanan, secretly arranged a flight to Tel Aviv, where Skorzeny was introduced
to Harel. The Nazi was questioned and also received more specific instructions
and guidelines. During this visit, Skorzeny was taken to Yad Vashem, the museum
in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the
Holocaust. The Nazi was silent and seemed respectful. There was a strange
moment there when a war survivor pointed to Skorzeny and singled him out by
name as “a war criminal.”

Raanan,
as skilled an actor as any spy must be, smiled at the Jewish man and softly
said: “No, you’re mistaken. He’s a relative of mine and himself is a Holocaust
survivor.”

Naturally,
many in Israeli intelligence wondered if the famous soldier for Germany had
genuinely — and so easily — been recruited. Did he really care so much about
his image that he demanded to be removed from a list of war criminals? Skorzeny
indicated that being on the list meant he was a target for assassination. By
cooperating with the Mossad, he was buying life insurance.

The
new agent seemed to prove his full reliability. As requested by the Israelis,
he flew to Egypt and compiled a detailed list of German scientists and their
addresses.

Skorzeny
also provided the names of many front companies in Europe that were procuring
and shipping components for Egypt’s military projects. These included Heinz
Krug’s company, Intra, in Munich.

Raanan
continued to be the project manager of the whole operation aimed against the
German scientists. But he assigned the task of staying in contact with Skorzeny
to two of his most effective operatives: Rafi Eitan and Avraham Ahituv.

Eitan
was one of the most amazing characters in Israeli intelligence. He earned the
nickname “Mr. Kidnap” for his role in abducting Eichmann and other men wanted
by Israeli security agencies. Eitan also helped Israel acquire materials for
its secret nuclear program. He would go on to earn infamy in the 1980s by
running Jonathan Pollard as an American Jewish spy in the United States
government.

Surprisingly
flamboyant after a life in the shadows, in 2006, at age 79, Eitan became a
Member of Parliament as head of a political party representing senior citizens.

“Yes,
I met and ran Skorzeny,” Eitan confirmed to us recently. Like other Mossad
veterans, he refused to go on the record with more details.

Ahituv,
who was born in Germany in 1930, was similarly involved in a wide array of
Israeli clandestine operations all around the globe. From 1974 to 1980 he was
head of the domestic security service, Shin Bet, which also guarded many
secrets and

‘Money doesn’t
interest me. I have enough,’ the Nazi told the Mossad agents.

often
conducted joint projects with the Mossad.

The
Mossad agents did try to persuade Wiesenthal to remove Skorzeny from his list
of war criminals, but the Nazi hunter refused. The Mossad, with typical
chutzpah, instead forged a letter — supposedly to Skorzeny from Wiesenthal—
declaring that his name had been cleared.

Skorzeny
continued to surprise the Israelis with his level of cooperation. During a trip
to Egypt, he even mailed exploding packages; one Israeli-made bomb killed five
Egyptians in the military rocket site Factory 333, where German scientists
worked.

The
campaign of intimidation was largely successful, with most of the Germans
leaving Egypt. Israel stopped the violence and threats, however, when one team
was arrested in Switzerland while putting verbal pressure on a scientist’s
family. A Mossad man and an Austrian scientist who was working for Israel were
put on trial. Luckily, the Swiss judge sympathized with Israel’s fear of
Egypt’s rocket program. The two men were convicted of making threats, but they
were immediately set free.

Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion, however, concluded that all of this being out in
public was disastrous to Israel’s image — and specifically could upset a deal
he had arranged with West Germany to sell weapons to Israel.

Harel
submitted a letter of resignation, and to his shock, Ben-Gurion accepted it.
The new Mossad director, commander of military intelligence Gen. Meir Amit,
moved the agency away from chasing or intimidating Nazis.

Amit
did activate Skorzeny at least once more, however. The spymaster wanted to
explore the possibility of secret peace negotiations, so he asked Israel’s
on-the-payroll Nazi to arrange a meeting with a senior Egyptian official.
Nothing ever came of it.

Skorzeny
never explained his precise reasons for helping Israel. His autobiography does
not contain the word “Israel,” or even “Jew.” It is true that he sought and got
the life insurance. The Mossad did not assassinate him.

He
also had a very strong streak of adventurism, and the notion of doing secret
work with fascinating spies — even if they were Jewish — must have been a
magnet for the man whose innovative escapades had earned him the Iron Cross
medal from Hitler. Skorzeny was the kind of man who would feel most youthful
and alive through killing and fear.

It
is possible that regret and atonement also played a role. The Mossad’s
psychological analysts doubted it, but Skorzeny may have genuinely felt sorry
for his actions during World War II.

He
may have been motivated by a combination of all these factors, and perhaps even
others. But Otto Skorzeny took this secret to his grave. He died of cancer, at
age 67, in Madrid in July 1975.

He
had two funerals, one in a chapel in Spain’s capital and the other to bury his
cremated remains in the Skorzeny family plot in Vienna. Both services were
attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate
to give the one-armed Nazi salute and sing some of Hitler’s favorite songs.
Fourteen of Skorzeny’s medals, many featuring a boldly black swastika, were
prominently paraded in the funeral processions.

There
was one man at the service in Madrid who was known to no one in the crowd, but
out of habit he still made sure to hide his face as much as he could. That was
Joe Raanan, who by then had become a successful businessman in Israel.

The
Mossad did not send Raanan to Skorzeny’s funeral; he decided to attend on his
own, and at his own expense. This was a personal tribute from one Austrian-born
warrior to another, and from an old spy handler to the best, but most
loathsome, agent he ever ran.

Dan
Raviv, a CBS News correspondent based in Washington, and Israeli journalist
Yossi Melman are co-authors of five books about Israel’s espionage and security
agencies, including “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars”
(Levant Books, 2014). Contact them at [email protected]