HITLER’S FAVOURITE COMMANDO
In his new book The Devil’s Disciple STUART SMITH reveals how SS officer Otto Skorzeny won the affections of the Führer by staging a daring rescue of deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini
ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1943, a team of 100 German paratroopers and commandos landed in gliders on the summit of Monte Portella, an 8,000ft peak in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. Their target was the imposing Hotel Campo Imperatore where deposed Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had been held captive for the previous two weeks under the watchful eye of a large detachment of Italian guards.
The man who tumbled out of the first German glider and immediately assumed command of the situation looked every inch the expedition’s leader. He was Herculean in build and ruggedly handsome.
The whole of the left side of his face was etched with a manly duelling scar, his eyes were a penetrating slate-blue and beneath his steel helmet – later exchanged for a jaunty garrison cap – was a glossy crop of dark hair swept into perfect position. Hollywood could not have cast a finer hero. His name? Otto Skorzeny.
It was he who bluffed his way past Mussolini’s Italian guards using a captured Italian general and freed the former dictator alive.
Within half an hour of landing Skorzeny was standing side by side with the man he had just rescued, enjoying a photo opportunity. He had come, he told Il Duce, on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler to escort him back to Berlin.
A few days later these photos and the accompanying newsreels would be relayed across the world. Indeed, such was the admiration of Skorzeny’s derring do that it was regularly referred to by British boys’ adventure comics such as The Eagle in the post-war period.
The success of the mission, known as Operation Oak, also cemented Skorzeny’s reputation as a soldier of daring in the eyes of Hitler, the man who had appointed him Mussolini’s guardian, and the then 35-yearold went on to become known as the Führer’s favourite commando.
Skorzeny’s exploits earned him a reputation as the “father of special operations” and when US Navy Seals infiltrated Pakistan to eliminate Islamist mastermind Osama bin Laden their operational planning was influenced by his legacy.
But in the course of researching my biography of Skorzeny, The Devil’s Disciple, I was reminded how much of the mystique surrounding him can be traced back to the commando’s self-glorifying memoirs and some rather credulous biographies written under his influence. What a gifted self-publicist he was.
SKORZENY did not – as he would have us believe – mastermind the raid that freed Mussolini. He hadn’t got the military experience to do so. Planning and tactics were decided upon by the Luftwaffe and overall commander of the mission was General Kurt Student.
That said, it is quite conceivable that the raid would never have taken place, still less succeeded, without Skorzeny. It was he who, during the summer of 1943, followed up every lead provided by his employer, the SS foreign intelligence service – the one organisation that proved capable of delivering the goods on Mussolini’s whereabouts at a ski resort on Gran Sasso mountain.
To Student, very much the professional military man, the rescue of Mussolini was a tiresome politically motivated mission. To Skorzeny, as Hitler’s personal emissary, it was pivotal to his dreams of glory, which meant at the very least winning the Ritterkreuz – the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, the Third Reich’s highest military honour.
But his plans for fame and glory were almost undone at the outset. Allied to Skorzeny’s heroic vitality was a streak of recklessness and disregard for human life. Take, for example, the events that followed the retrieval of Mussolini on that remote mountain-top. Student’s personal pilot Heinrich Gerlach had landed the only available getaway aircraft, a light two-seater reconnaissance plane, with great skill on a strip of land just 35 yards long.
Having bagged his trophy, Skorzeny was determined no one else should share the glory and insisted on accompanying Mussolini in the luggage compartment of the plane. This was a decision that very nearly cost all three their lives as the overburdened plane plunged off the short runway into the valley below before gaining height.
Likewise, opportunism and indifference to the lives of others underpinned Skorzeny’s planning of Operation Greif. He and Hitler devised a plan to infiltrate German commandos wearing American uniforms and driving captured US jeeps and tanks behind enemy lines during Germany’s last big offensive of the war, the Ardennes campaign of December 1944.
It initially succeeded when the rumour got around that Skorzeny’s true aim was to kidnap General Eisenhower who found himself essentially incarcerated in his Paris HQ by his own side at the height of the offensive.
A brilliant piece of warfare, yes. But the rumour, as Skorzeny and his senior officers will have known, was a hoax. They would also have known PUT ON TRIAL: But Skorzeny was acquitted psychological the only way to successfully disseminate it was for the Jeep commando teams to be captured by the Americans, something that would mean they would be shot as spies after interrogation – as actually happened. Some say that Operation Greif was the inspiration behind The Eagle Has Landed, the 1976 film about German soldiers posing as Brits in wartime England as part of a plot to kidnap Winston Churchill. Funnily enough the film begins with the original black-and-white footage of Skorzeny’s capture of Mussolini, which is presented as the mission that gives Hitler the idea of capturing Churchill. At the end of the war Skorzeny was captured in the Austrian Alps and it was payback time for the Americans. Two years into his captivity, they organised a war-crimes trial centred on his activities during Operation Greif but it backfired disastrously. Skorzeny outsmarted his accusers, was acquitted on all counts and eventually left to postwar Franco’s Spain where he turned into a successful businessman.
His reputation during this time grew to mythic proportions as “the most dangerous man in Europe” set his hand to a series of selfglorifying memoirs devoid of the ethical complications.
PEOPLE came flocking to his Madrid apartment: journalists – including the Daily Express foreign editor Charles Foley – and Hollywood film producers desperate to acquire the rights to Skorzeny: The Movie.
The CIA visited too, as well as Israel’s Mossad, both hungry for information on an Egyptian rocket programme devised by Nazi scientists.
Skorzeny died in 1975 a multimillionaire. Despite his violent past it was cancer that finally got him, not one of his enemies.
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