How the Mossad Recruited Hitler’s Most Dangerous Commando
In 1962, facing a deadly Egyptian missile threat built by ex-Nazi scientists, Israel’s Mossad launched Operation Damocles, a covert campaign involving secret missions, targeted assassinations, and an unlikely alliance with Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s most notorious commando.
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In the simmering summer of 1962, Cairo’s streets buzzed with a chilling boast. Newspapers, their ink black as dread, screamed of Egypt’s new menace: ground-to-ground missiles, tipped with chemical death, aimed straight at Tel Aviv’s heart. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s iron-willed president, had summoned ghosts from the past—German scientists, once loyal to Hitler’s war machine, now crafting weapons to threaten Israel anew. Fifteen years after the Holocaust’s ashes settled, the specter of a “second Shoah” loomed, and Israel’s leaders trembled. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion confessed the fear that stole his sleep, while Meir Amit, head of Military Intelligence, clutched a list of these German minds, their names a haunting echo of Peenemünde’s V-2 rockets.
In Jerusalem’s shadowed corridors, the Mossad stirred. Led by Isser Harel, a man with steel in his soul, the agency launched a clandestine crusade, codenamed “Operation Damocles.” Their mission was to thwart Nasser’s arsenal, to silence the scientists whose hands still bore the stain of Nazi sins. Agent Wolfgang Lotz, a master of deception, slipped through Cairo’s alleys, gathering names and secrets. Threatening letters flew, phone calls hissed with menace, and bombs disguised as parcels claimed lives. Yet the mission demanded more, a traitor within the enemy’s ranks, a man who knew the dark arts of war. And so, the Mossad turned to a figure both feared and fabled: Otto Skorzeny, the towering commando dubbed “the most dangerous man in Europe.”
Born in Vienna in 1908, Skorzeny was a giant, standing nearly two meters tall, his frame heavy with muscle and menace. His face bore a jagged scar from ear to chin, earned in ritual sword duels where blood was a badge of honor. As a young man, he thrived in these “dueling societies,” where scars marked a man’s courage. That scar, etched deep, became his calling card, earning him the moniker “Scarface.” By 1943, Skorzeny was Hitler’s chosen warrior, a Waffen-SS officer whose daring made him a legend. His greatest triumph came in September of that year, when the Führer himself tasked him with a mission that would echo through history: rescuing Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fallen dictator, from a mountain prison.
High in the Apennine Mountains, at the Campo Imperatore Hotel, Mussolini languished under guard. Skorzeny, hungry for glory, led a daring assault. On September 12, 1943, Luftwaffe paratroopers and SS commandos descended on the 2,130-meter peak, their gliders silent as specters. They seized the hotel without a shot, catching the guards off guard. A tiny Fieseler Storch plane, meant for one passenger, awaited. Defiant, Skorzeny squeezed aboard with Mussolini, his bulk threatening to ground the craft. The pilot protested, but Skorzeny invoked Hitler’s name, and the plane, groaning under the weight, barely cleared the jagged ridge. The rescue was a propaganda coup for the Third Reich, and Skorzeny, adorned with the Iron Cross First Class and promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer, was hailed as the “perfect Aryan.” Even Winston Churchill, grudgingly, called it “a feat of great daring.”
Skorzeny’s legend grew darker in 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler summoned him to the Wolf’s Lair, where the air was thick with desperation. The Führer unveiled Operation Greif, a scheme as bold as it was treacherous: Skorzeny and his commandos, disguised in American and British uniforms, would seize bridges over the Meuse River, sowing chaos behind Allied lines. To prepare, Skorzeny sought men fluent in American slang, studying POWs to mimic their swagger. His “Panzer Brigade 150” wielded captured tanks and trucks, but rumors, perhaps spread by a double agent codenamed “Ostrich”, whispered of a grander plot: to assassinate General Dwight Eisenhower.
In Paris, Allied headquarters descended into panic. Barbed wire coiled around SHAEF, tanks rumbled into place, and security tightened like a noose. Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s aide, recalled the chaos: a car’s backfire halted work, phones rang with frantic checks on “the boss.” Eisenhower, the linchpin of the Allied counteroffensive, used a double, Lieutenant Colonel Baldwin B. Smith, to ride in his car, a decoy for Skorzeny’s supposed assassins. The rumor branded Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe,” though he later denied any plot to kill Eisenhower, insisting in court, “If I had tried, it probably would have succeeded.” His exploits, real and rumored, painted him as a master of manipulation, a soldier whose myth outshone his deeds.
After the war, Skorzeny slipped through American fingers, fleeing to Spain, a haven for Nazi veterans. There, in 1962, the Mossad found him, a ghost of the Reich living in luxury. Isser Harel, wrestling with the moral weight of enlisting a Nazi, saw no choice. The threat of Egyptian missiles, crafted by ex-Nazi scientists, demanded an insider. Yosef “Joe” Raanan, head of the Mossad’s Germany branch, bore the personal scars of the Holocaust, his mother and brother perished in the camps. Yet duty called, and Raanan’s team shadowed Skorzeny in Madrid, watching his home, his habits, his life.
One evening, in a plush Madrid bar, Skorzeny and his wife, Ilse von Finckenstein, met a German-speaking couple, a Mossad agent and a young assistant named Anna. They spun a tale of robbery and ruin, earning an invitation to the Skorzenys’ villa. There, the air turned electric. Skorzeny, his charm a mask, drew a pistol and growled, “I know who you are. You’re from the Mossad, here to kill me.” The agent, unflinching, replied, “You’re half right. We’re Mossad, but if we wanted you dead, you’d be gone by now.” Anna’s voice was steel: “Kill us, and the next ones won’t share a drink. They’ll blow your brains out. Help us instead.”
Skorzeny, after a tense pause, lowered his gun. “What kind of help?” he asked. The Mossad offered money, but Skorzeny, his wealth secure, demanded something else: removal from Simon Wiesenthal’s war criminal list. He claimed innocence, a claim the Mossad doubted but accepted as leverage. Hands clasped, a pact was born, a Nazi turned ally in a game of shadows.
Flown secretly to Tel Aviv, Skorzeny walked the halls of Yad Vashem, his presence a paradox. A Holocaust survivor pointed, shouting “war criminal,” but Raanan, quick as a blade, smoothed the moment with a lie: “He’s my relative, a survivor himself.” Skorzeny’s motives were murky, perhaps a shield against assassination, perhaps the thrill of espionage, but he delivered. In Egypt, he mapped out German scientists, their addresses, their secrets, including Heinz Krug’s “Intra” company, a front for Nasser’s ambitions. When Wiesenthal refused to clear his name, the Mossad forged a letter, a lie to keep Skorzeny loyal.
His work was deadly. An Israeli-made bomb, sent by Skorzeny, killed five Egyptians at the “Factory 333” missile site. Some say he shot Krug himself; others, like historian Ronen Bergman, claim Krug died under interrogation in Israel. Three Israelis, including future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, dissolved Krug’s body in acid, burying it in a lime-covered pit. Operation Damocles, ruthless and bold, drew blood but also scrutiny. When a Mossad team was arrested in Switzerland for threatening a scientist’s family, the backlash stung. Ben-Gurion, fearing damage to Israel’s image and arms deals with West Germany, accepted Harel’s resignation. Meir Amit, the new Mossad chief, turned the agency’s focus from Nazi hunts.
The Egyptian missiles proved a mirage. By the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, no weapons of mass destruction emerged. The 1962 Cairo parade, with its “Al-Qahir” missiles, was later called a hoax by German scientists. Skorzeny’s final act for the Mossad came when Amit asked him to arrange a secret meeting with an Egyptian official for peace talks, but the effort fizzled.
Skorzeny’s motives remained a riddle. Was it survival, a hedge against Wiesenthal’s pursuit? Or the lure of danger, a siren call to a man born for battle? He died in Madrid in July 1975, at 67, his body claimed by cancer. At his funerals, Nazi salutes and Hitler’s songs filled the air, his medals, some bearing swastikas, gleaming defiantly. Joe Raanan, the Mossad man who tamed him, stood silently at the Madrid service, a final nod to the devil he’d danced with.
In the annals of espionage, Skorzeny’s tale is a paradox, a scarred warrior, once Hitler’s blade, turned guardian of a Jewish state. It speaks of a time when survival demanded unholy alliances, when the Mossad, to shield Israel from a second darkness, shook hands with a ghost of the first.