Killing the SS Read online

  Eli Rosenbaum sees to it that all documents related to Elfriede’s past be sent to German officials in Cologne. Only upon her departure from America does the investigator make an official statement.

  “Thousands of innocent women were brutalized and murdered at Ravensbrück through the active participation of Elfriede Rinkel and other guards,” Rosenbaum announces to the press. “Her presence in the United States was an affront to surviving Holocaust victims who have made new homes in this country.”

  Shock runs through San Francisco’s Jewish community. “She was so small and quiet—you would never imagine she could have done things like that,” remarks one elderly woman.

  A neighbor, Alice Fung, is stunned. “She was a sweet lady. She cared about other people. But she was a very private person.”

  Another of Elfriede’s neighbors, Gunvant Shah, who lived across the hall for thirty years, is saddened. “I feel deeply hurt. She is like a grandmother,” Shah tells reporters, then adds: “She is eighty-four years old. She felt remorse. She felt the burning in her heart. Where is the humanity?”

  * * *

  Eli Rosenbaum is a realist. He carries on the work first begun by Nazi hunter Benny Ferencz in the years immediately following the war. Decades ago it was the jurist Ferencz who once noted how fruitless the job could be: “I had 3,000 Einsatzgruppen members who every day went out and shot as many Jews as they could and Gypsies as well. I tried twenty-two, I convicted twenty-two, thirteen were sentenced to death, four of them were actually executed, the rest of them got out after a few years,” Ferencz famously opined.

  “The other 3,000—nothing ever happened to them.”

  That is the daily struggle for Eli Rosenbaum: finding those members of the SS who have not been brought to justice. He knows he will never locate them all. But as the deportation of Elfriede shows, there are days when justice is served by finding just one.

  * * *

  Incredibly, Elfriede Huth Rinkel is set free in Germany. Officials there examine the evidence against her, then choose not to file charges, stating that they can find no proof that she committed a crime.

  In 2007, a reporter tracks Elfriede down to an exclusive senior citizens’ home just outside Düsseldorf. “Elfriede Rinkel” is emblazoned on a plaque outside her room. No longer a “sweet old lady,” a bitter Elfriede has become so rude that residents at Senioren Residenz on Linsellesstrasse admit to being stunned by her brusque behavior. The home’s administrators shield Elfriede from visitors. Her lush accommodations are funded by the monthly Social Security checks she still receives from the U.S. government. With no law in place to stop these payments, there is nothing anyone can do about it.2

  “Forget it,” Elfriede Huth Rinkel snarls when journalists finally get her to answer the phone. “There is nothing to say.”

  As of the writing of this book, Elfriede Rinkel remains alive at age ninety-five.

  29

  MARCH 27, 2016

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  MORNING

  Hitler’s favorite SS commando has been dead since 1975, his coffin draped in the Nazi colors three decades after his service to the Third Reich came to an end. The funeral of Otto Skorzeny was attended by dozens of former Schutzstaffel comrades who relived old times singing the Führer’s favorite songs and offering the one-armed Fascist salute on the chapel steps.1

  Sitting quietly among them, a Mossad agent surveyed the church, a Jew surrounded on all sides by Nazis. Yet he was there not to spy but to say good-bye to the SS officer.

  In his Nazi heyday, the tall, garrulous Skorzeny was recognizable by the dueling scar running the width of his left cheek. During the Second World War, the Austrian native was dubbed “the most dangerous man in Europe” by the United States and its allies because of his ruthlessness and feats of military daring that bordered on the impossible.

  Now, forty-one years after the funeral of Otto Skorzeny, on this warm spring Saturday, the journalistic writing team of Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman are revealing shocking new details about the life of this staunch Nazi who once worked to implement Hitler’s Final Solution against the Jews.

  Raviv, a clean-shaven American who once worked for CBS News, and Melman, a bearded Israeli columnist in his midsixties, are specialists on the Mossad and Israel’s extensive spy network. Raviv and Melman bring to life ghosts from the world of Nazi hunting such as Isser Harel, Peter Malkin, and Simon Wiesenthal. The reporters published a story just today in the Forward, one of the world’s leading Jewish newspapers.

  Relying on conversations with former Mossad agents, some of them still so deeply undercover that their names cannot be revealed, the writers spin a tale of murder, betrayal, and intrigue unlike any other in the seventy-year search for Nazi war criminals.

  SS-Obersturmführer Otto Skorzeny, the journalists claim, had a second career after World War II ended: he worked for the State of Israel.

  * * *

  The year is 1962. Mossad director Isser Harel still basks in the glory of the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann two years ago and is eager to continue hunting down Nazis. The infamous SS commando Otto Skorzeny is an obvious target. The Nazi, now fifty-four and much heavier than he was during the war, is known to live in Spain with his forty-two-year-old wife, Ilse. Though Simon Wiesenthal has placed Skorzeny high on his list of Nazi war criminals deserving prosecution, the former SS man makes no effort to hide his identity or whereabouts, for he lives under the protection of the nation’s Fascist dictator, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Skorzeny’s sense of security is so complete that in 1957 he publishes a memoir of his commando exploits during World War II.

  For this reason, the Mossad team investigating Skorzeny is well aware that kidnapping the commando and bringing him to trial in the manner of Eichmann is unrealistic. Diplomatic relations between Spain and Israel are poor, due to Franco’s support of Hitler during the war and Franco’s subsequent announcement that Jews were conspiring with Freemasons to take over the world. An attempt to extract Skorzeny from his lavish Madrid villa would prompt an enormous international incident.

  So, the Mossad decides it would be much easier to simply kill him.

  Meanwhile, the nation of Israel faces a more immediate Nazi threat. Teams of German scientists who once labored in Adolf Hitler’s rocket program, designing the V-1 and V-2 weapons that were fired most effectively at Great Britain, are at this time being employed by Egypt at a site known as Factory 333 outside Cairo. The Egyptian government is trying to produce a new generation of rockets capable of annihilating Israel.2

  To the Mossad, Skorzeny’s World War II transgressions demand his assassination, but that can wait. Stopping these proposed rocket attacks is far more urgent. “These are people who are marked to die,” is Harel’s explanation for the reign of terror he plans to level against the Nazi scientists working for Egypt.

  In what will become known as Operation Damocles, Harel will use intimidation, letter bombs, and threats against the families of any rocket expert working with the Egyptians. Anonymous phone calls will be placed in the dead of night, warning the scientists that their lives are in jeopardy should they continue their research. In the mind of Isser Harel, former Nazis making rockets for Egypt is a continuation of the Holocaust.

  With his usual meticulous attention to detail, Harel orders his agents to compile a dossier on each of the scientists. One individual of note is Dr. Heinz Krug, a forty-nine-year-old former Peenemünde researcher. Krug now runs a corporation known as Antra, based in Munich, but is secretly involved in making Egyptian missiles. It is common for him to commute to Cairo for work. But as Harel’s agents begin a barrage of midnight calls, Krug knows his safety is compromised. He imagines that the Mossad will do to him precisely what they did to Adolf Eichmann.

  In desperation, Krug contacts a former Nazi, someone he can trust, a man with the experience and cunning to protect him from the Israeli threat. He calls Otto Skorzeny.

  Unfortunately for Heinz Krug, Isser Harel has called Sko
rzeny first.

  * * *

  Rumors about the former SS commando are legend. He is thought to be the leader of Die Spinne network of former Nazis.3 Gossip has him seducing Eva Perón. Skorzeny is even thought to have a fortune in looted Nazi wealth so vast that some compare him with King Solomon.

  But facts may trump rumors. A soldier since the age of twenty-three, Skorzeny distinguished himself in the early days of World War II, fighting throughout Poland and Russia. As a member of the Waffen SS, Skorzeny was familiar with plans for Jewish genocide, as the firing squads and mobile gas vans for murdering Jews were common along the Eastern Front. The depth of his participation in the genocide is unclear.

  Then came September 1943. Adolf Hitler himself ordered Skorzeny to rescue embattled Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from members of the Italian government who had taken him hostage. “Il Duce” was being held at the Campo Imperatore Hotel, high atop a ski resort in central Italy’s Gran Sasso massif. Rather than fighting their way up the mountain, Skorzeny and his band of paratroopers land by glider.

  The Italians selected the Campo Imperatore for its remote location and commanding views, allowing them advance warning of any attack. Mussolini is heavily guarded, as he begins his third week as a prisoner of the Italian state.4 The hotel is empty of guests, its only residents being Il Duce and the two hundred military police known as carabinieri standing by to repel would-be rescuers.

  Otto Skorzeny has the forethought to take custody of an Italian prisoner named Gen. Fernando Soleti, who collaborated in the coup against Mussolini before falling into German hands. Having no choice but to assist the Nazis, Soleti is among the German troops landing atop the mountain in gliders. As the SS surrounds the Campo Imperatore Hotel, Soleti cries out to the Italian carabinieri inside, ordering them not to shoot lest they be shot themselves for treason.

  No one fires.

  Skorzeny rushes into the hotel, where he destroys the radio room, making it impossible for the Italian guards to send a belated cry for help. Then he finds Mussolini.

  “Duce,” Skorzeny tells the Italian Fascist. “The Führer has sent me to set you free.”

  “I knew that my friend Adolf would not forsake me,” replies Mussolini.

  Time is of the essence. A lightweight German Storch aircraft lands on the rocky plateau. Mussolini is placed on board the two-man plane. The German paratroopers will flee the mountaintop on foot, fighting their way through the Italian partisans, if necessary.

  However, Otto Skorzeny insists on flying out with his prize. The pilot revs the engines to their maximum before attempting a takeoff. Skorzeny’s weight makes that impossible. The Storch arrives at the edge of a steep plateau without gaining altitude. As the horrified SS troops look on, the getaway plane drops straight down. But Otto Skorzeny’s legend is only enhanced by what happens next: the pilot uses this new airspeed to gain control. He levels the Storch long before it can hit the valley floor. The pilot soon lands just outside Rome, where Mussolini and Skorzeny then board another plane for the flight to Vienna.

  The mission would be the making of Skorzeny. Two days later, Hitler himself awards his fellow Austrian the Third Reich’s most valuable prize: the Iron Cross.

  * * *

  Skorzeny would continue to dazzle the Führer with his courage, conducting missions behind Allied lines, kidnapping politicians disloyal to the Third Reich, and even attempting the assassination of Allied leaders Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference. Operation Long Jump, as the plan was known, was called off when Soviet spies uncovered the mission.

  The Nazi publicity machine made much of Skorzeny, so it was no surprise that he was arrested by Allied authorities following the war. During the Dachau Trials of 1947, he was charged with ordering his men to wear U.S. Army uniforms and for stealing Red Cross parcels from prisoners of war. Skorzeny was acquitted but then held in prison pending further charges.

  On July 27, 1948, three former SS officers wearing stolen U.S. military police uniforms walked Skorzeny out of the penitentiary gates in a brazen prison break. Shortly afterward, Skorzeny allegedly began the smuggling of more than six hundred Nazis to South America through his Die Spinne network. He remained a fugitive from justice until 1952, when a West German court declared him officially denazified, allowing him to travel freely without fear of arrest. It was shortly thereafter that Skorzeny made his way to Buenos Aires as a guest of the dictator Juan Perón. While acting as Perón’s adviser, he is thought to have consorted secretly with Eva Perón in the guise of serving as her bodyguard.

  This blend of fact and innuendo follows Skorzeny. But there is no doubt about what transpired the night of September 11, 1962, in a dark woods outside Munich.

  * * *

  The operation begins with Otto Skorzeny sitting at a Madrid bar with his wife, Ilse. She is a middle-aged beauty with glamour that seems at odds with Skorzeny’s bloated appearance. The SS man has been deeply unsettled by the Mossad’s kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann and, like many former Nazis in exile, believes it is only a matter of time before the Israelis come for him, too. He is also well aware that Simon Wiesenthal has placed him on a list of known war criminals. So Skorzeny treats all strangers with suspicion.

  At the end of the bar, Skorzeny notices a couple sitting down. The woman is just shy of thirty, flirtatious and chatty. Her partner is more subdued. The barman, hearing them speak German, introduces the pair to Skorzeny and his wife. As they strike up a conversation, the couple explain that they are tourists who have just been victimized—robbed on the streets of Madrid. All of their possessions, including luggage and passports, are missing. In an act of kindness, Ilse offers to let them spend the night at the Skorzeny home.

  The moment is a setup. The German tourists are, in fact, Mossad. Another team of agents has been following Otto Skorzeny for several weeks, tracking his patterns of behavior. Mossad boss Isser Harel has decided that Otto Skorzeny is the perfect man to break the inner circle of scientists. They will trust him, as no member of the SS will have more credibility than Skorzeny. Thus, incredibly, Harel wants to recruit the commando to work for Israel and help eliminate the German scientists.

  The two couples have a few more drinks before traveling to the Skorzeny home. Upon entering the villa, there is a bit of tension in the air, which is increased when Otto Skorzeny suddenly levels a gun at the Mossad agents.

  “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and you’ve come to kill me,” Skorzeny says.

  “You are half right,” the Israeli man coolly replies. “We are from Mossad. But if we had come to kill you, you would have been dead weeks ago.”

  “Maybe, I would just rather kill you,” replies Skorzeny.

  “If you kill us, the ones who come next won’t bother to have a drink with you,” comes the response. It is the woman this time. “You won’t even see their faces before they blow out your brains. Our offer to you is just for you to help us.”

  Otto Skorzeny is stunned. “You need something done?”

  The Mossad agents nod in agreement and explain the mission Isser Harel has in mind.

  Then the Nazi names his price. It is not money. It is a moment that shows the incredible power that Nazi hunters now hold over SS war criminals.

  “I need for Simon Wiesenthal to remove my name from his list,” Skorzeny tells the Mossad.

  “That will be done,” says the male Mossad agent.

  The deal has been made: SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny now secretly works for Israel.

  Within days, he is on a flight to Tel Aviv.5

  Much of Otto Skorzeny’s career as a Mossad agent is still confidential. Among his handlers was Rafi Eitan, one of the agents who tackled Adolf Eichmann on Garibaldi Street and later witnessed his hanging. Fifty years after it transpired, “Mr. Kidnap” will only admit to “running” Skorzeny and will give few other details of their work together.

  But it is known that on the night of Septe
mber 11, 1962, three Mossad agents are in a car closely following a white Mercedes sedan. They wear gloves still dirty from digging a small grave that afternoon. Their location is a highway just north of Munich. The sun is going down.

  Inside the white Mercedes are Otto Skorzeny and Heinz Krug, the embattled Nazi rocket scientist who is meeting with Skorzeny about securing protection from the Mossad. The SS man is calm and reassuring, informing Krug that the car behind him carries three bodyguards whom he will introduce in a nearby wooded location.

  If Krug is suspicious, he does not show it. As Isser Harel predicted, no Nazi could be more trustworthy to another Nazi than the great Otto Skorzeny.

  The two cars pull off the highway into a forest. The trees blot out the setting sun. Heinz Krug turns off the engine and steps out from behind the wheel. He turns to look at the second vehicle, curious about his new bodyguards. Krug is a heavyset man who wears his hair combed straight back. His neck is thick, shoulders broad.

  Otto Skorzeny walks behind Krug and suddenly fires the first bullet into the back of Krug’s skull. Skorzeny likes to kill, and does so without hesitation. The second shot is fired as Krug lies dead on the ground.

  Working quickly, Skorzeny and the Mossad agents douse the corpse with acid so that it cannot be identified, then they kick the body into the grave dug earlier in the afternoon. In order that tracking dogs will never find the body, the agents cover it with lime. One of the Mossad agents is Yitzhak Shamir, destined to become prime minister of Israel. Another is Peter Malkin, a former member of the Eichmann kidnap squad.

  The final member of the Mossad team is named Joe Raanan. It is Raanan, a fellow Austrian, who works most closely with Skorzeny during his time with Mossad, training the former Nazi in the ways of a spy. Raanan keeps Skorzeny very busy. In November 1962, five Egyptian workers at Factory 333 are killed as a result of a letter bomb posted in Egypt by Skorzeny. In the end, the hiring of the SS commando proves to be a successful move by Mossad; German scientists start refusing to work in Egypt. By 1964, the rocket program ceases to exist.