Skorzeny was finally brought to trial before a military tribunal in 1947 on a lesser charge that his deployment of German commandos disguised as Allied soldiers during the Ardennes offensive constituted a war crime. Press from around the world gathered to cover the proceedings. With the help of a tenacious American defense attorney, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Durst, Skorzeny argued that every side in the war had at one time or another employed the exact same tactic. If his actions were considered a war crime, any similar Allied effort would have to be held to the same criminal standard. At the eleventh hour, Skorzeny’s attorney called a surprise defense witness to the stand, a decorated British RAF war hero who testified that he and his commando unit had worn German uniforms on a number of missions during the war. The tribunal acquitted Otto Skorzeny of all charges. Afterward, the thwarted and furious chief prosecutor told the press: “I still think Skorzeny is the most dangerous man in Europe.”
Although technically free, Skorzeny remained in American custody while they debated what to do with him. Attempts by the Soviets and the Czechs to extradite him for war crimes in their own tribunals, where he faced certain execution, clouded the issue. While those efforts were tied up in the courts, he was finally transferred to a German detention camp in early 1948. A few months later, with help from agents of the recently formed Central Intelligence Agency, three former SS officers arrived at the camp disguised as American military policemen and presented forged documents that authorized them to transport Skorzeny to a hearing at Nuremberg the following day. The American soldiers on duty signed the release, and Skorzeny walked out of the prison in the custody of the disguised MPs. He promptly disappeared. When his absence was discovered and his cell searched later that day, officials found a letter Skorzeny had left behind, addressed to the German court, explaining his actions:
After the capitulation of the German Army, Mr. Chairman, I, as a soldier, which is all that I was, freely gave myself up with a trust in the justice of the victors without making any effort to avoid my responsibility. For over two years I tried to clear myself and restore the honor of my name to the world. The American military tribunal in Dachau cleared me of all charges and therewith declared to the public that I had acted and fought purely as a decent soldier and had only done my duty to my Fatherland. In spite of this official release I was kept under arrest. The American authorities offered me the choice to go to either a DP camp or a German internment camp. I chose the latter in the hope of finding only justice before a German court and have prepared myself for months for these proceedings. However, I will not allow myself to fall under a one-sided, outside influenced decision and thus lose the honor which was restored to me by the American court. For these reasons I have withdrawn myself from further German court proceedings. If I’m given an opportunity to come before a German court which stands only under the law and is strong enough to resist the hatred exerted from outside sources as is worthy of German justice traditions, I will immediately place myself at your service. As a German who fought for his country, as did every German man, I have only one wish: to live in honor in my Fatherland.
Yours sincerely, Otto Skorzeny
Hindsight makes it clear that in the utilitarian opinion of Bill Donovan and the CIA, Skorzeny possessed more value as a living intelligence asset than a dead war criminal. Although rumors reported his whereabouts all over the globe, one of the world’s most sought after fugitives spent the next two years living in Paris, where he regularly dined at the Café de la Paix. Recently declassified documents confirm that he was now working on behalf of the Western Allies, gathering intelligence against the French Communist Party. After his identity was revealed in France, he published his memoirs and moved back to Germany, where he lived under an assumed name for a few years, before finally settling in General Franco’s fascist Madrid. He would spend the next twenty-five years straddling an unsettling line between Western intelligence informant and godfather to the surviving remnants of the Waffen-SS, known initially as “The Brotherhood” and later more notoriously as Odessa. During that time, drawing on his early training as an engineer, Skorzeny founded a technical consulting company and amassed a considerable personal fortune. He amplified that fortune with a number of less savory business ventures, among them industrial espionage, assassination for hire, and international arms dealing. Throughout these years Skorzeny lived the social life of a dissolute playboy, romancing dozens of glamorous socialites and minor royalty, including, for a time in Argentina where he worked as a consultant with that fascist regime, Eva Perón. Operationally conceived on the back of Skorzeny’s World War Two commando force, to this day Odessa remains the original prototype for the modern terrorist organization.
When he finally succumbed to cancer in 1975, Otto Skorzeny was laid to rest in a Madrid cemetery. In surviving footage of the funeral, a band plays “Deutschland Über Alles” while the aging members of his organization offer their dead leader a sustained Nazi salute as his casket lowers into the grave.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
The 150th Panzer Squad, Operation Greif, and all the details about training at the Grafenwöhr camp are based on fact, most of which remained classified by American Military Intelligence for fifty years after the end of World War Two. Much of what the Allies learned about the objectives of the operation during the Battle of the Bulge, including the plot to kill General Eisenhower, came from a captured German commando named Karl Schmidt. Two American-born soldiers took part in the attack; one was a deserter by the name of William Sharper. Another of the German commandos, the son of a diplomat, had learned English while growing up in England.
Less than half of the men who trained at Grafenwöhr and served in Skorzeny’s Brigade 150 survived the war. The casualty rate among the commando group, Company Stielau, approached 75 percent. Of the twenty members of the commando group who took part in the Second Objective, eighteen were either killed in action or captured and executed by American forces during the Battle of the Bulge.
The remaining two men have never been accounted for.
Los Angeles, California
November 2006
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my agent, Ed Victor; editor in chief Will Schwalbe; my editor, Gretchen Young; and my expert researcher, Jennifer Bidwell.
Mark Frost
