One of Hitler’s favourite commandos became a gentleman farmer in the Curragh in County Kildare. Otto Skorzeny was born in Vienna in 1908, joined the Austrian Nazi movement, distinguished himself in the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front, and was personally selected by Hitler for special missions.
In 1943, with Mussolini imprisoned in the Hotel Campo Imperatore, a ski resort high in the Apennine Mountains, the Führer ordered Skorzeny to lead the rescue. The plan was to crash-land gliders on a rocky slope beside the hotel and overwhelm the guards before they could organise a response. It worked, more or less, though the paratroopers who actually planned the operation spent years trying to claw back the credit from a man who had elbowed his way to the front of the photograph.
Churchill acknowledged the audacity in the House of Commons, and Skorzeny became the disgusting regime’s daredevil hero. During the Battle of the Bulge, Skorzeny deployed English-speaking German commandos in American uniforms to infiltrate Allied lines, prompting panic and confusion. Rumours spread that his men were planning to assassinate Eisenhower, who spent Christmas week confined to his headquarters in Versailles for fear of his life.
When the war ended, Skorzeny stood trial at Dachau for using enemy uniforms in combat and was acquitted. He was then held at an internment camp in Darmstadt awaiting a denazification hearing, from which he escaped in July 1948 with theatrical flair: three former SS men dressed as American military police walked in and announced they had orders to transfer him to Nuremberg. He was gone before anyone thought to check. Skorzeny later claimed the Americans had supplied the uniforms themselves. He fled to Madrid, set up an import-export business widely believed to be a front for the Nazi ratlines, and was rumoured to have had an affair with Eva Perón in Argentina.
In 1957 he arrived in Dublin to a reception at the Portmarnock Country Club that would have embarrassed a less shameless man. Journalists wrote admiring profiles and ambitious young politicians, among them a rising star named Charles Haughey, organised dinners in the Nazi’s honour.
The unrepentant six-foot-four commando with his duelling scar and his white Mercedes was doing what the young people tell me is called aura farming. By 1959 he had bought Martinstown House, a 165-acre gothic country estate near the Curragh, intending to make Ireland his permanent home. The Irish government said no, quietly and after considerable internal argument.
Dr Noel Browne raised questions in the Dáil, warning that Skorzeny appeared to be engaged in anti-Semitic activities and neo-Nazi networks and should not be permitted to use Ireland for that purpose. Rumours circulated that the estate was part of a postwar Nazi escape route. State files show the government was keeping close tabs. Visas were strictly temporary, capped at six weeks, and he was barred from travelling to Britain.
Among those who had initially waved through his first visa application was Conor Cruise O’Brien, then a senior official in External Affairs, who later expressed unease at the whole business. The contradictions were present from the very beginning. By the early 1960s the welcome had grown cold.
In 1971 he sold Martinstown House. He died in Madrid in 1975, unrepentant to the end, his coffin draped in Nazi colours and his funeral attended by former SS comrades. Even then he had been anything but retired.
He had set up the Paladin Group, an international directorate of strategic assault personnel, and in one of history’s more jaw-dropping ironies, the most dangerous man in Europe had ended up working for the Mossad, feeding them information on German scientists building missiles in Egypt aimed at Israel.
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