Otto Skorzeny

Otto Skorzeny rescued Mussolini from a mountaintop hotel with gliders in 1943 and spent the postwar decades as a consultant to several governments. He was a Viennese engineer with duelling scars from student fencing who joined the SS and, after being invalided from the Eastern Front, was given command of German special operations. The Gran Sasso raid in September 1943 landed gliders on a slope beside the hotel where the deposed Mussolini was held, took him without a shot fired, and flew him out in a light aircraft badly overloaded; the propaganda value was enormous and the operation had been planned by others. He later kidnapped the son of the Hungarian regent Horthy to force Hungary to stay in the war, and during the Ardennes offensive ran Operation Greif, sending German soldiers in American uniforms behind the lines, which caused far more disruption through the resulting suspicion than through anything they did. He was tried at Dachau in 1947 for that and acquitted after a British officer testified that the Allies had done the same. He escaped from an internment camp in 1948, settled in Franco's Spain, ran a business advising governments on security, and by his own later account and Israeli archives worked for Mossad in 1962. The Greif operation caused Allied troops to challenge each other with questions about baseball, and Bradley was stopped three times. His postwar clients reportedly included Peron's Argentina and Nasser's Egypt, where German veterans trained the army. The Mossad connection, reported from Israeli archives in 2016, involved him assassinating a German rocket scientist working for Egypt in exchange for being removed from a wanted list - a request he is said to have refused, asking for the removal first. He died in Madrid in 1975, the same year as Franco, and his funeral drew former SS men from several countries.

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