Otto Skorzeny: The Devil’s Disciple

Contents

Prologue

Maps

1. The Knowledge of Pain

2. Accidental Soldier

3. Thugs in Field Grey

4. The Liberator of Mussolini

5. Special Ops and High-Value Targets

6. Miracle Weapons

7. The Stauffenberg Plot – July 1944

8. The Scherhorn Affair

9. The SS Changes Tack

10. Operation Panzerfaust: Budapest, October 1944

11. Everything on One Card: Operation Greif

12. Operation Greif: Mission and Aftermath

13. Implosion: The Schwedt Bridgehead

14. Skorzeny’s Last Stand

15. Trial and Errors

16. Escape from Darmstadt

17. Apocalypse Soon: Preparing for World War III

18. Neo-Nazis and Colonel Nasser: Skorzeny’s Wilderness Years

19. The Years of Plenty

20. Ghosts of the Past: Skorzeny’s Last Years

Epilogue: Man and Myth

Glossary

Note on the Waffen-SS

Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgments

Prologue

12 September 1943: Gran Sasso, central Italy

The Propaganda Kompanie cameraman panned across the white peaks and jagged ridges looming above, and the grassy, rock-strewn slopes. He filmed the exterior of the Hotel Campo Imperatore, and Luftwaffe paratroopers and SS commandos posing and grinning. They were rightly pleased with themselves, and the Propaganda Kompanie men encouraged them to play up for the camera. One blond, boyish paratrooper was singled out for a close-up: ‘Take off your helmet! Look to the sky!’

They had reason to smile. In a daringly planned and well-executed operation, this small team of a hundred men had landed in gliders, seized the mountain-top and the hotel from a large detachment of Italian guards – without firing a shot – and rescued former dictator Benito Mussolini from captivity. If the Führer’s strategy went to plan, this would scupper the rebel Italian government’s peace deal with the Allies. It would also play brilliantly in the next edition of Die Deutsche Wochenschau, the official state newsreel – hence the heavy Propaganda Kompanie presence.¹

Even in flickering monochrome on cinema screens, the mountain setting looked spectacular. The troops resembled supermen. Mussolini, done up tight in a long winter overcoat and dark fedora, walked out of the hotel towards the camera among a crowd of soldiers. They grinned. Il Duce grinned. At his right elbow, guiding him, was a tall, imposing German officer in a pale uniform, moustached, with a long scar disfiguring the left side of his face; he was evidently conscious of the camera’s eye. The clipped voice of the narrator identified him as SS-Hauptsturmführer Skorzeny, commander of the lightning strike which had just liberated ‘Der Duce’. To Skorzeny’s satisfaction, his name was correctly pronounced, a matter to which he attached great importance.

Mussolini’s rescue was a gift for the producers of Die Deutsche Wochenschau.² As each week passed, their job – which was to depict the Third Reich’s magnificent performance in the war – was getting harder. Allied aircraft were firebombing cities in the heart of the Reich, and German forces were being pushed back on all fronts. Just a few weeks earlier, they had lost the Battle of Kursk, and would never again be able to take the offensive on the Eastern Front. In this same edition of the newsreel, the propagandists continued the increasingly difficult task of conjuring from the relentless, grinding retreat a heroic defence of civilisation against the Communist barbarian horde.³ Luckily they had other things to counterbalance it – such as Operation Achse (Axis), Germany’s lightning seizure of control in Italy. It had been triggered by the Fascist government deposing Mussolini and plotting to sell him to the Allies in exchange for favourable peace terms. On cinema screens, the taking of Rome by German forces looked like a victory. Against that background, the heroic rescue of Mussolini – throwing a spanner in the traitors’ works – was a propaganda triumph for the Führer. It helped to distract from the fact that the Allies, having taken North Africa and Sicily, had just landed on the Italian mainland at Salerno.

The newsreel rolled on. With Skorzeny sticking to Mussolini’s side (and the camera’s lens), the group of officers and men walked to the waiting getaway plane. The aircraft brought in for the task was an ultra-lightweight Fieseler Fi 156 Storch, chosen for its ability to take off from extremely short improvised runways; indeed, it was such an eager flyer that in a good headwind it could hover. At the controls was Luftwaffe Hauptmann Heinrich Gerlach, personal pilot to Generaloberst Kurt Student, commander of the Luftwaffe’s airborne arm, XI. Fliegerkorps, and the man in overall command of this operation. Gerlach had been specially selected for the mission, and after circling overhead for a while had executed a superb landing on a strip of ground only 35 metres long.

The little Storch could only take one passenger. This should pose no problem; after all, there was only one important man on that mountain-top. Gerlach would fly Mussolini to Rome while the rest of the German team departed by cable car and truck.

SS-Hauptsturmführer Otto Skorzeny didn’t see it that way; in his mind there were two important men who needed to get to Rome, and he was one of them. Was he not the mastermind and leader of the operation? In fact, he was neither, but he had a special role and was determined to make the most of it. In this moment he had the eye of the world on him, and he’d be damned if he would step aside. Skorzeny was more conscious of the cameras on him than any other man on that mountain except for Mussolini. He wanted to be seen personally bringing Mussolini to freedom. German military men had a name for this kind of thirst for glory: Halsschmerzen – ‘sore throat’ – an allusion to the Ritterkreuz (Knight’s Cross), which was worn around the neck. Glory and romance drove Otto Skorzeny – and an acute sense of his own image. On this day, despite being an SS officer, he was wearing the romantic golden tan tropical kit of the Luftwaffe, a service he greatly admired and in which he had once briefly served.

Skorzeny informed Gerlach that he was coming aboard. Away from the camera, a brief and angry discussion took place between the two. Given the extremely short take-off strip, having Skorzeny’s weight in the plane was an invitation to disaster. Skorzeny invoked the name of the Führer, who had appointed him Mussolini’s guardian; it was more than his life was worth to let the prize out of his sight. He exhorted and threatened, and soon got his way.

Back on screen, Skorzeny smilingly helped a distinctly anxious-looking Duce into his seat and strapped him in. Mussolini, himself an experienced pilot, knew they were courting disaster. The engine started, and Skorzeny squeezed himself into the luggage compartment. Gerlach held the Storch on its brakes and ran the engine up to full power. Surrounded by cheering, waving commandos, the plane lurched forward, bouncing on the uneven ground as it lumbered towards the edge of the precipice.

The newsreel cut away an instant before it reached the brink. The men on the ground gasped as the Storch shot over and dropped instantly out of sight, plummeting into the void, taking with it Otto Skorzeny’s hopes of glory and Adolf Hitler’s scheme for a strategic solution in Italy. The engine howled, strained … and after a horrible pause the fragile plane reappeared in the distance, struggling, slowly climbing away, shrinking to a dot as it banked away westward.

There could hardly be a more apt symbol of Otto Skorzeny’s life thus far – and to come – than the fall and flight of that little plane.

Maps

1.The Gran Sasso Raid, 12 September 1943

2.Projected advance of 6. Panzerarmee, 16–18 December 1944

3.Fölkersam’s assault on the Warche Brück, Malmédy, 21 December 1944

4.The Schwedt Bridgehead, early February 1945

5.The final campaign in Germany, showing extent of the Alpenfestung, April–May 1945

THE GRAN SASSO RAID, 12 SEPTEMBER 1943

PROJECTED ADVANCE OF 6. PANZERARMEE, 16–18 DECEMBER 1944

FÖLKERSAM'S ASSAULT ON THE WARCHE BRÜCK, MALMÉDY, 21 DECEMBER 1944

THE SCHWEDT BRIDGEHEAD, EARLY FEBRUARY 1945

THE FINAL CAMPAIGN IN GERMANY, SHOWING EXTENT OF THE ALPENFESTUNG, APRIL–MAY, 1945

1

The Knowledge of Pain

Otto Skorzeny was born into a once great empire just as it entered its twilight. He grew up in its crepuscular radiance, his life shaped by a belief that his homeland’s greatness could be restored through courage, conflict, and the purging of bad influences. In that respect, he was like millions of other young Austrians and Germans; but in most other ways Otto Skorzeny was a one-off.

In 1908, the year Skorzeny came into the world, Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary celebrated his diamond jubilee, marking 60 years’ inglorious reign over Europe’s greatest empire. Vienna, the Skorzeny family’s home city, cosmopolitan fin de siècle capital, was the centre of a sprawling patchwork quilt stretching from the borders of Italy and Switzerland to the Ukraine and the northern marches of the Christian Balkans; but like its monarch, the empire was backward-looking and well past its best. Beneath a crust of feudal traditions, the magma of nationalism was welling. In this jubilee year, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, thus opening up one of the cracks that would lead to the eruption of World War I and eventually the empire’s implosion.

Not that anyone would have dreamt of such a nightmare in the serene Vienna of 1908 where, on 12 June, a baby was born into the prosperous middle-class Skorzeny family. Otto was the third child and second son of engineer and architect Anton Skorzeny, who at 38 years old presided over the successful construction business he had built up in his twenties. The family name was a fairly unusual one, originating in the east Pomeranian village of Skorzęcin*. There were military connections on both sides of the family; Anton served as a reserve artillery officer in World War I,¹ while his wife, Flora (née Sieber Steiner-Hardt), came from an old military family which for generations had patrolled the far-flung borders of the empire, apparently without distinction.²

The defeat of the Central Powers in 1918 brought the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an end, and Otto spent the second half of his childhood in the embittered, economically dysfunctional rump state that remained. It was a challenging world in which to build a life. But Otto Skorzeny relished a challenge, and had a way of coming out on top, even if he had to face adversity to get there.

Unlike his father, the young Otto was little concerned with traditions, but did share a passion for technology and engineering, which he saw as the key to the future. At school he found ‘realistic’ subjects like mathematics and science ‘quite easy’, but disdained the humanities and wasn’t a prolific reader.³ However, he proved a competent linguist; French, which was seen as more sophisticated than German, was the preferred language in Viennese bourgeois households of the time, while English (which he spoke with a British accent) and Spanish came to him quite easily in later life.

Like his father and his elder brother Alfred (born 1900), Otto trained to be an engineer. Having entered Vienna’s Technische Hochschule (Technical University) in 1926, he passed the first examinations in the winter of 1928–29, putting the initial, mainly theoretical, stage of his training behind him, and embarking on the three-year practical engineering course, which he preferred.⁴

No amount of practicality could guarantee a viable job in post-war Austria. Right from the start, the new republic was a failed state. The ethnic German population had been the empire’s most ardent supporters – unsurprisingly since they monopolised most positions of power and influence within it. Now, not only had they lost the war – with all the material privations that involved – but they also found themselves being punished for having started it.

The victorious Allies had sought to rationalise the political geography of a Europe which had just experienced the collapse of four enormous empires: Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman. They did so by invoking ‘ethnic self-determination’. The great difficulty was in deciding whether this should be based on racial characteristics, common language, cultural and religious values, or all these things combined. Looking at the ethnic kaleidoscope of post-war Europe, it was clear that no standard blueprint could suffice. The resulting states would be artefacts, defined arbitrarily by the victors.

Worse, the Versailles peace treaty seemed, to German minds, vindictive: if ethnic self-determination was the supreme principle of statehood, why were Germany and Austria forbidden from combining into a single Grossdeutsch (Greater Germany) state? Most Germans regarded this as calculated Allied hypocrisy, designed to subjugate them while they paid off colossal reparations for a war they did not admit to starting.

The shrunken boundaries of Austria ensured that many factories supplying the domestic market were deprived of raw materials, while the natural resources that remained were frequently denied processing plants. The former free-trade area of 54 million people was now a mosaic of competing protectionist states.

There were political problems too. Austria’s new democracy had shallow roots. That might not have mattered if it had been supported by a prosperous, confident middle class. It wasn’t. Austria’s middle class was weak, disaffected and disproportionately impoverished by the break-up of the empire. People’s savings were ravaged by inflation (the money that would have bought a small house before the war had, by 1922, been reduced to the value of a postage stamp).⁵ Many businesses were undercapitalised, and a vast army of professionals – military officers, bureaucrats, lawyers, accountants, doctors, architects and civil engineers – found themselves redundant. Even before the Great Depression, many middle-class people had written off the republic. Efficient authoritarian rule – preferably bringing Anschluss (unification with Germany) in its wake – became an increasingly attractive alternative for them.

As a schoolboy, Otto Skorzeny showed no susceptibility to these radical ideas. There was no foreshadowing of his later enthusiasm for Fascism. Politics in the Skorzeny household were conventionally right-wing – nostalgia for the empire and the lost business opportunities it represented, and dislike of the post-war regime, but little more. Indeed, their reaction to adversity seems to have been dignified resignation. Skorzeny recalled that he was 15 before he had his first (post-war) taste of butter: ‘My father told me there was no harm in doing without things; it might even be a good thing not to get used to a soft life. And he was right.’⁶

At university, however, Skorzeny’s political attitudes changed. Despite his flair for engineering, he did only the minimum work to get by. But if not highly motivated academically, he was very active athletically. He was a massive young man – 6 feet 4 and heavily built – with good physical coordination, and an enthusiastic sportsman, especially in sports that involved machines or weapons. It was this that brought him closer to politics.

In 1927, in his second year at the Technische Hochschule, he became immersed in the activities of the Schlagende Verbindung: the duelling society. Built around ritualistic duels with the Schläger sword (in which the object was to gain and inflict impressive facial scars, not to kill one’s opponent) and gargantuan drinking sessions, such societies were a fixture of German and Austrian universities, and membership constituted a rite of passage for a certain kind of macho student. Otto Skorzeny excelled at duelling; by the time of his graduation he had fought 14 Schläger duels.⁷ The expectation of personal injury was high – and indeed, desired. Skorzeny’s success made him a target for those who wished to test their mettle. During his tenth duel, in 1928, he received a severe slash from ear to chin on the left side of his face, forming the scar which became his trademark; it was stitched up on the spot without anaesthetic. For the Schlagende Verbindung, handling pain and injury was a more important test of character than winning. In later years, Skorzeny liked to characterise his prowess as a kind of Spartan preparation for warfare:

I was to be grateful for the self-discipline we learned in our student clubs. I never felt so bad under fire as I did at eighteen when I had to fight my first duel, under the sharp eye of my fellow students. My knowledge of pain, learned with the sabre, taught me not to be afraid of fear. And just as in duelling you must fix your mind on striking the enemy’s head, so, too, in war. You cannot waste time feinting and sidestepping. You must decide on your target and go in.⁸

Many leading Nazis bore duelling scars – or Schmisse – as badges of honour, social status and manhood. They were frequently belittled; Himmler claimed to have one, though it looked more like a shaving mishap, while the enemies of SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner claimed he had come by his in a car accident. Skorzeny’s scar was never subject to doubt, and his prowess as a duellist was outstanding.

Like his scar, Otto Skorzeny acquired his politics in student clubs. Austro-German student associations were originally a product of the nationalistic fervour stirred up during the Napoleonic Wars. By the 1920s many had acquired a reactionary ethos dressed up as ardent patriotism. Skorzeny, like many other duellists, became a member of Vienna’s Markomannia Student Society – named after the Marcomanni, an ancient Germanic tribe of the Danube region which had resisted Roman conquest.

Many of its members – especially the duellists, with their culture of martial machismo – developed close affiliations with shady paramilitary organisations then beginning to flourish. Austria was polarised politically; parties on the left found inspiration in the fledgling Bolshevik state of Russia; the right increasingly looked to unification with Germany. A Marxist putsch in 1927 was brutally suppressed by government forces, but not before the insurgents managed to terrify Vienna’s bourgeoisie. One important outcome was the formation of the paramilitary Academic Legion in Austrian universities in 1928. Acting on a sense of patriotic duty, Skorzeny joined it.⁹

The Legion was a thinly disguised chapter of the most powerful Austrian paramilitary force of the time, the Heimwehr (Home Guard). Enforcing state security and order was difficult for the right-leaning coalitions that ruled Austria from the mid-1920s onwards, due to a cap imposed on the armed forces by the 1919 Treaty of St Germain. They had little option but to accept the support of paramilitaries, which were hostile to the concept of parliamentary democracy and for the most part recruited from disgruntled war veterans. During this period the Austrian Nazi Party with its paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) wing was weak and divided compared with the Heimwehr, which rapidly assimilated the student groups. By the time of his graduation in December 1931, Skorzeny was a Heimwehr platoon leader and deputy company commander.

His association didn’t last long. Walter Pfrimer, leader of the Heimwehr’s radical, pan-German wing, attempted to turn the Heimwehr into a parliamentary party and play the politicians at their own game. Skorzeny saw this as a ‘tragic’ move, and ‘by 1930, I and most of my comrades regarded it as a signal to sever our connection … We were determined to have nothing to do with party politics and not allow ourselves to be the tools of party politicians.’¹⁰ Pfrimer’s initiative miscarried badly at the ballot boxes. When Pfrimer embarked on a last-ditch ‘March on Vienna’, in the style of Mussolini’s ascent to power in 1922, the result was a fiasco.

Under Pfrimer’s successor, Prinz Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg, the Heimwehr reluctantly formed a coalition government with the ruling Christian Social Party, and, as part of a deal with Britain and France, abandoned support for Anschluss. This left the Nazi Party as the only significant standard-bearer of pan-German ideals. Many middle-class Austrians who had no interest in the details of Nazi ideology now turned to the party, believing that political union with Germany was the only way of delivering them from their economic plight.

* * *

After completing his thesis on ‘The Calculation and Construction of a Diesel Engine’ and graduating as a mechanical engineer on 31 December 1931, Otto Skorzeny confronted the challenge of making a career for himself. He welcomed the rise of the Nazis. So did his father, Anton, who liked the idea of a Nazi government because it would be ‘good for the economy’.

Anton’s initial enthusiasm would wane rapidly after the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss by Nazi gunmen in yet another unsuccessful putsch in 1934.¹¹ But while his father drifted away from the Nazis, Otto Skorzeny moved closer. He joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1932, inspired – he claimed – by a speech Josef Goebbels had given in Vienna.¹² Shortly afterwards, on 19 June, Dollfuss banned the party, driving it underground.

The party took on new disguises,¹³ including cultural, sports and social clubs, the chief among them being the Deutschen Turnerbund 1919 (German Gymnastic League 1919), which Skorzeny joined. Although the government banned the party as a political organisation, they failed to suppress its specialist paramilitary organs, whose survival was partially guaranteed by their autonomous funding. Skorzeny remained a party member, and in February 1934 he joined its most elite organisation, the Schutzstaffel (SS).¹⁴

Although Nazism appealed mainly to the dispossessed lower middle class, Skorzeny’s background in the university-educated Viennese bourgeoisie is entirely characteristic of an SS recruit at this time. The National Socialist emphasis on quick, decisive solutions to apparently complicated, intractable problems provided exactly the kind of credo that appealed to many young adults – educated ones among them – whose employment opportunities were minuscule.

Skorzeny, a cunning operator, did better career-wise than most. After graduation, while engaging in right-wing politics in his spare time, he started working in a garage as a glorified mechanic. Within a couple of years his situation improved dramatically, with a junior partnership in Meidlinger Gerüstbau, a small but successful construction and scaffolding company. He owed his step-up to marriage; in May 1934 he wed the company owner’s 19-year-old daughter, Margareta Schreiber (‘Gretl’), after a four-year relationship.¹⁵ The honeymoon was ‘sporty’, involving a motorcycle and sidecar tour of some of Italy’s principal sights: Bologna, Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, Florence and – a portentous choice – the Abruzzi, near Gran Sasso. (His touristic knowledge of this part of Italy would later influence his selection for the Mussolini rescue operation.)

In 1937, Otto and Margareta divorced.¹⁶ In January of that year, he had bought a majority share in the now flourishing scaffolding company – a business relationship that would survive to the end of the war.¹⁷ It is hard not to read this cynically, as if Margareta had served her purpose in helping him onto the economic ladder and could now be discarded.

* * *

By 1937 the political temperature in Vienna was feverish. Underground Nazi propagandists busily and skilfully played upon economic dispossession, political uncertainty and anti-Semitic prejudice, mixing them into a cocktail that many middle-class Austrians found intoxicating. Despite comprising a minority of Vienna’s population, Jews dominated the professions (university dons, lawyers and doctors) as well as the industrial, mercantile and financial classes and many skilled trades, a fact which was ripe for anti-Semitic propaganda. Contradictorily but seductively, the Jews were portrayed as masters of world capitalism, Bolsheviks intent on revolution, and rootless carpetbaggers denying middle-class Viennese folk their rightful station in life. This paradoxical racial doctrine was one that Otto Skorzeny, as an active and ambitious member of the SS, unquestionably embraced.¹⁸

The pre-war Austrian SS differed greatly from the SA in purpose, scale and membership. The SA was a streetfighting organisation, mainly composed of unemployed, thuggish working-class men, whose primary purpose was to protect the party’s own political meetings while intimidating other people’s. The SS, by contrast, was essentially a party police force, and mostly middle class. Its members usually had jobs, often in the professions and the civil service, and their preoccupations tended to be more cerebral: particularly the amassing of police intelligence by covert means. The architect of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, wanted to create an elite, like the Roman Praetorian Guard; therefore, SS membership was restricted, to about one-tenth of the SA’s. By early 1938 the Austrian SS had no more than 7,000 members.

While political machinations in Germany had caused the fortunes of the Austrian SA to wane, the SS steadily gathered momentum as the preferred instrument of an increasingly powerful Nazi regime in Berlin. The head of the SA, Ernst Röhm, had been liquidated and the SA emasculated in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.† The Austrian SA survived in strength, but Berlin’s money was channelled to the Austrian SS, who provided Berlin with priceless intelligence as Hitler limbered up for his final confrontation with the Austrian government.

A pivotal figure at this time – and a key player in Skorzeny’s own future – was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who became head of the Austrian SS in 1936. Kaltenbrunner’s background resembled Skorzeny’s. Born into a family of lawyers, the 6-foot 7-inch, granite-featured colossus gained a law doctorate but found his progress blocked by the Depression. Disillusionment and increasingly extremist convictions drew him to the Heimwehr; then, for much the same reason as Skorzeny, he turned to the Nazis, becoming a member of the party and the SS in 1932.

Skorzeny and Kaltenbrunner had been acquainted through the student society network (Kaltenbrunner was a member of the Arminia fraternity based in Graz), their relationship going back to at least 1929.¹⁹ So well acquainted, indeed, that by 1938 Skorzeny was a frequent guest at Kaltenbrunner’s Vienna home.²⁰

While Kaltenbrunner covertly built up the Austrian SS, Hitler was manoeuvring himself into position to annex the country. The balance of power had changed in Austria. Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg led a Fatherland Front coalition that was on the point of implosion. There had been no elections since 1933, and the country was being ruled by emergency decree – which scarcely enhanced its moral authority. Isolated internationally, Schuschnigg was under pressure to seek an accommodation with the Nazis.

Complicating the situation for Hitler, the Austrian Nazi Party was attempting to pursue its own agenda, encouraging the threat of German military intervention, but not the reality. Austrian Nazis hoped to stage their own independent accession to power. This was not part of Hitler’s plan at all. In these circumstances, close collaboration between the Austrian SS (which remained loyal to the Führer) and Hitler’s agents on the ground in the German embassy would be critical. Legally, German forces could only enter Vienna by invitation, after an internal revolution had been effected. Annexation could then be completed.

It was Schuschnigg himself who precipitated the crisis, by calling a national plebiscite on the question of Austrian independence. The date was set for Sunday 13 March 1938, and a massive pro-independence campaign began. Jewish organisations, having witnessed the treatment of Jews in Germany since 1933, threw their weight behind the campaign. Popular opinion – even among those who broadly sympathised with Nazi ideology – tended towards independence. Schuschnigg endeavoured to ensure a ‘Yes’ vote by barring people aged under 24 from voting, on the principle (not admitted publicly) that the most enthusiastic Nazis were generally below that age.

Otto Skorzeny denounced the plebiscite as ‘bizarre’ and the government that called it as lacking ‘any popular basis’. True to Nazi orthodoxy, which regarded everything opposed to Nazism as a Jewish–Communist conspiracy, he deemed the Yes campaign a submission to the influence of the Soviet Union.²¹

With Austria looking certain to vote for independence, Hitler faced the intolerable prospect of being rebuffed by his own homeland. He therefore took measures to derail the plebiscite and to install a puppet chancellor. The pliable right-wing politician (and secret Nazi) Arthur Seyss-Inquart was his choice. Seyss-Inquart was already Minister of the Interior, having been appointed as a concession to stave off German invasion earlier that year. Now Hitler planned to dial up the pressure. Otto Skorzeny and his comrades were ready to play their parts.

Friday 11 March 1938 was unbearably tense in Vienna. The government and the nationalist youth movement had campaigned hard all day, air-dropping leaflets and driving round in flag-draped trucks. But in the evening the atmosphere grew ugly; the Nazis came out on the streets and marched with flaming torches into Leopoldstadt, the Jewish district – with a terrifying menace. The German army was at the border, and an ultimatum was sent to Schuschnigg – to call off the plebiscite or face invasion. Nazi forces were already in de facto control of parts of the country; SA men occupied the Vienna Ringstrasse, and Kaltenbrunner’s SS surrounded the Chancellery. About 10 pm a special group of 40 young SS troopers from 89 Standarte entered the building. Schuschnigg finally buckled before the threat of violence and resigned.

That same evening, Seyss-Inquart became chancellor, and the next day, at his invitation, German forces entered Austria.

Otto Skorzeny would later distance himself from the events of that Friday evening, claiming he had assembled at the gym with other members of the Deutschen Turnerbund (which of course was a Nazi front organisation), because of the dangerous situation outside. ‘I had arrived and was just about to change,’ Skorzeny disingenuously claimed, ‘when the news of the resignation of Schuschnigg’s government came over the radio. It took us completely by surprise.’²²

Actually, Skorzeny and his comrades had already left the gym, clad in mountain coats and ski-pants, and were among the Nazis forming a ring around the Chancellery as Schuschnigg resigned. Just after midnight, Bruno Weiss, the local head of the Gymnastic Association, burst excitedly out of the Chancellery building with a ‘special mission’ for Skorzeny, on behalf of the new leader, Seyss-Inquart.²³

A confrontation was brewing, he said, and Skorzeny was needed to forestall it. Head of state President Wilhelm Miklas, Austria’s internationally respected figurehead, having reluctantly accepted Schuschnigg’s resignation and appointed Seyss-Inquart, was returning by car from the Chancellery to the Presidential Palace in Reisnerstrasse. Miklas’s safety could not be guaranteed. An unreliable contingent of SA men was reported to be moving to take control of the palace, while inside was a detachment of the president’s Guards Battalion. Someone needed to intervene, and Skorzeny, being ‘a man with a cool head and common sense’ (as Weiss allegedly described him), and one of the few Viennese at the time with access to a car, was ideal. ‘In the name of the new chancellor,’ said Weiss, ‘I instruct you personally to go to Reisnerstrasse and calmly but energetically intervene to avoid any incident.’²⁴ There was no time to lose:

Luckily I was able to recruit a dozen comrades on the spot, who were loaded into two or three cars or jumped onto their motorcycles. We roared into the night, straight through the crowd, which cleared a path for us. We arrived at the front of the palace just as the president drove in. We stayed right behind him and I ordered that the large entrance gate be closed.²⁵

As Skorzeny and his men entered the hall, the president and his entourage were about to go up the stairs. At that moment, Leutnant Friedrich Birsak of the Guards appeared at the first-floor balustrade with 20 guardsmen, and drew his pistol. Pandemonium broke out, the guards shouting, the presidential entourage crying out – finally, Frau Miklas appeared and added her screams to the din.

‘Quiet!’ Skorzeny yelled.

‘Present arms!’ ordered the Leutnant, and 20 rifles were aimed at the Nazi intruders.²⁶

Skorzeny attempted to calm the situation; he arranged for Miklas to speak by phone to Seyss-Inquart, who confirmed that the young man was acting on his orders. Satisfied, the president asked Skorzeny to take command of the Guards detachment, while the SA kept order in the street outside. Skorzeny had saved the day; he even became friends with Leutnant Birsak.

At least, that was the way Skorzeny told it. Others, including President Miklas and Leutnant Birsak, remembered it quite differently. Miklas testified that, far from offering his good offices as an intermediary and preventing bloodshed, Skorzeny had actually arrested him – and he by no means felt secure in his custody.²⁷ Birsak maintained that it was only because of his own robust defence of Miklas that Skorzeny’s men backed down from violence.²⁸

In truth, Skorzeny’s orders from Weiss probably originated not from Chancellor Seyss-Inquart but from Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Seyss-Inquart had no connection with the incident at the time; he was, he claimed, ‘just a telephone girl’ acting as an intermediary between Berlin and the outgoing Austrian administration.²⁹ Directing the action that evening was one of Kaltenbrunner’s men, Odilo Globocnik, who had taken personal control of the Chancellery switchboard. Acting in the chancellor’s name, Globocnik was coordinating the SS and SA seizures of police stations, barracks and government offices all over the country – including, naturally, the presidential palace. Globocnik’s men also detained government officials felt to be unsympathetic to the Nazi cause – ‘detaining’ sometimes being a euphemism for murdering.

Miklas, who had compromised Nazi plans by refusing to buckle earlier in the evening, was almost certainly on the SA hit-list. Yet he wasn’t killed. Skorzeny, notwithstanding his glossing over of his true mission that night, probably did play a role in calming things down. Kaltenbrunner would have realised that the murder of such a respected international statesman would have dire consequences for the public image of Anschluss – and by extension that of Hitler himself. It is clear from Kaltenbrunner’s later warmth towards him (going well beyond their casual friendship) that Skorzeny was owed a debt of gratitude. Safeguarding Miklas’s life may well have been the cause.

Whatever the details, Skorzeny had made his first small mark in the history books, and raised his stock with the SS elite.

* * *

Most Austrians, presented with a fait accompli, welcomed Anschluss. A minority – particularly the Jews – regarded it with dread. Anti-Semitic persecutions began right away – baiting in the streets; mob punishments; shops, businesses, and homes confiscated; expulsions from professions and from schools and colleges. This was only the beginning; worse was to follow.

Whether Otto Skorzeny took an active part in this is unknown. As a member of the local SS, it seems highly likely; although the SA tended to be more active in mob behaviour than the SS, Skorzeny would certainly have been involved in the systematic confiscations, looting, and repression of Jews.

That includes the direst single act of anti-Semitism in the months following Anschluss – the night of violence known as Kristallnacht, on 9–10 November 1938, when Jewish properties and synagogues throughout the Third Reich were smashed and burned by squads of SA and SS. Jewish men were arrested in their thousands and deported to Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. Otto Skorzeny allegedly joined in the destruction of at least two of Vienna’s synagogues that night, though he later denied it.³⁰ As an active and ambitious member of the SS, it would be extraordinary if he did not take part in Kristallnacht, which was no spontaneous outburst of mob violence but a planned and systematic assault on the Jewish population, carried out on the orders of Himmler via his deputy Reinhard Heydrich – who was by now head of the Gestapo (the state secret police).³¹

* * *

Sport had been Skorzeny’s route into the Nazi Party; now it brought him into conflict with it. No sooner had Anschluss been implemented than the Nazis banned duelling. Skorzeny was furious, considering it a denial of manly self-expression. He made his views on the subject forcefully known.³² But to no avail. He consoled himself by taking up motor racing. The SS motor section, to which he was attached as a Staffelhauptscharführer (master sergeant), supplied the cars. Skorzeny won three gold medals during the 1938 season, also excelling at motorcycle-and-sidecar racing.³³

Sport even played cupid in his life; he met his second wife, Emmi Linhart, at a swimming pool. They married in March 1938.³⁴ He moved out of his apartment in Rothemühlgassestrasse 59³⁵ (close to his scaffolding company in working-class Meidling) to a bigger one in Aichholzgassestrasse 8. There they were to remain until, some time after the death of Skorzeny’s father in April 1942, the couple would move to the family home at Peter-Jordan-Strasse 37, in the more salubrious Döbling district.³⁶ His only child, a daughter named Waltraut, was born in February 1940.

Skorzeny’s views on women were patriarchal, meshing perfectly with the Nazi Party’s doctrine of Kinder, Kirche, Küche‡. Many years later, Waltraut summed up her father’s attitude: ‘Women were just an accessory to him, not really part of his vision. They were not important in his life. He had no empathy for them. And if they were ill, or weak, he had no interest in them.’³⁷ Waltraut was a disappointment to him – during Emmi’s pregnancy, Skorzeny had not only believed that the child would be a boy, but decided on a name, Klaus-Dieter.³⁸ How unkind of providence to give him a girl.

He would see very little of Waltraut in the early years of her life for, by the time she was born, Skorzeny was at war.

* Now in Poland

† A bloody purge, carried out by the SS between 30 June and 2 July 1934, to eliminate Hitler’s political opponents.

‡ Children, church, kitchen

2

Accidental Soldier

Skorzeny had signed up for military service the minute war broke out. His transition from Nazi sportsman and thug to SS warrior was not a straightforward one, proceeding by way of a stint in the Luftwaffe.¹

There was very little of the conventional soldier about Otto Skorzeny. He was headstrong, disliked obeying orders and had an erratic tendency to improvise as he went along: not the sort of things likely to endear him to the military mind. When he volunteered for the Luftwaffe on 1 September 1939, it was the most sophisticated air force in the world, which resonated with his passionate interest in leading-edge technology; also, as the glamorous junior service its traditions were less hidebound. But although he had a small amount of flying experience,² the heroics of aerial combat were to elude Skorzeny. He was too big to be a fighter pilot, and at 31 too old for flight training. (He must have known this in advance, but probably thought he could bluff his way through.) Reluctantly, he spent the next five months in a Viennese communications depot – an experience he loathed.

Transfer to the Waffen-SS came about almost by accident, though his longstanding Allgemeine-SS membership smoothed the way. By 1940, thanks to increased mechanisation, the Waffen-SS was on the lookout for officers with a technical background – preferably ones who were already SS members. Stuck in a rut, Skorzeny volunteered in the hope of becoming a commissioned officer.³ His age was a disadvantage, but he got through as the oldest of 12 (out of 20 applicants) who made the grade as engineer officer-cadets. On 1 February 1940 he began basic training in Hitler’s personal SS regiment, the Leibstandarte-SS ‘Adolf Hitler’.⁴

By 1940 the Waffen-SS was already growing into the elite national guards corps Hitler desired. It embodied new thinking about warfare. What mattered was mobility and the ability to improvise in the heat of battle. The basic unit of warfare was not the small section of military tradition, but the middle-size Kampfgruppe or versatile battle group. Out went the traditional infantryman’s rifle and in came front-line weapons of much greater flexibility, primarily sub-machine guns, hand grenades and explosives. A new battledress, consisting of camouflage blouse and suit, came to replace the traditional field service uniform. Camaraderie and a warrior ethos were instilled in the troops, reminiscent of the spirit among the soldiers of Sparta. The ideal was a force of supple, adaptable, battle-ready athletes capable of covering 3 kilometres on foot in 20 minutes.

Traditional distinctions between ranks – a fetish in the Prussian military establishment – were minimised. Officers and NCOs were encouraged to share the same hardships as their men – and indeed to compete in the same training teams. All would-be SS officers had to serve for two years in the ranks before graduating to military academy. Ethical standards among recruits were extremely demanding; in barracks, all doors and cupboards were left unlocked, in the belief that trust fostered a sense of fellowship.

Strictly speaking, the Waffen-SS that Skorzeny had joined was a relatively new military institution* – the ‘armed’ as opposed to the political wing of the SS† – which had been incorporated shortly before war broke out. In practice, its roots were much older. Its origin is to be found in a lie, and a criminal act of extreme violence.

The lie was Adolf Hitler’s, and the criminal act the event of 30 June 1934 known as the Night of the Long Knives. In eliminating the leadership of the increasingly troublesome SA, Hitler was also striking a Faustian pact with the Prussian-dominated military establishment: they would be allowed to retain the integrity of their traditions and responsibility for the external security of the country, at the price of Hitler having exclusive authority over its internal security apparatus. Except, it wasn’t that simple. In disposing of, or at least emasculating, one private army, Hitler and Himmler circumspectly created the conditions for breeding another – that of the SS.

The SS could, in a tenuous way, trace their military traditions back to the storm-troopers of late World War I and the post-war Freikorps, but their practical purpose was as a police force and bodyguard dedicated to the protection of various party Gauleiters‡, of which Hitler was the most important. Only when Hitler came to power as Reich Chancellor did the bodyguard role take on an explicitly military dimension with the creation, on 17 March 1933, of what came to be known as Leibstandarte-SS ‘Adolf Hitler’. It originally consisted of 120 men selected from Hitler’s former bodyguard in Munich, but was soon upgraded to several companies. And it was commanded by his former chauffeur, bodyguard and redoubtable fellow World War I veteran, Sepp Dietrich. Dietrich was a natural warrior in the storm-trooper mould, but lacked the necessary sophistication to create a crack Guards regiment.

Ostensibly, these Third Reich Household Troops were ceremonial – concerned exclusively with protecting Hitler’s person in the Chancellery. The Night of the Long Knives soon demonstrated they had a very different purpose and capability. The carefully elaborated programme of targeted assassinations – nearly 300 in all – that took place on the evening of 30 June and morning of 1 July 1934 must be credited to Himmler’s rapidly rising adjutant Reinhard Heydrich – a man to whom the adjective ‘sinister’ barely does justice. But the lead part in the butchery was actually carried out by Dietrich and several companies of the Leibstandarte-SS ‘Adolf Hitler’.

This ruthlessly executed purge was a milestone in two respects for the SS. On the one hand, the organisation had been allowed to decapitate and displace its principal rival, the SA. On the other, the event fueled in Hitler and Himmler a desire to create a more broadly based military force fanatically dedicated to National Socialist ideology (in other words, to themselves) that would form a ‘fourth element’ in the Wehrmacht.

Naturally, they had to be careful to keep the military establishment on side. So, in raising three new regiments of what were now known as SS-Verfügungstruppe (SS-VT), they adhered to the polite fiction that these were solely for the internal security of the regime; only in time of war would they be used for military purposes. What exactly these ‘military purposes’ were would be established later. In the meantime, the new units were to be restricted to light armaments, and were forbidden artillery, in order to avoid friction with the Reichswehr.

Most of the new recruits came from local SS Politische Bereitschaften (police units), which had been crudely forged into national units. Manifestly, they had neither the background nor training to deliver Himmler’s secret agenda – an elite national guards corps. That objective was only accomplished by attracting