Otto Skorzeny

[vegetius]

Back in the early 80's I was visiting the Imperial War museum in London and met a group of Vets and got talking. It turned out they were Skorzeny's troops and even showed me a photo of several of them on a mountain in Italy. I spent the whole day with them and had a thoroughly good day, (and several beers!).

[HARRY THE MOLE]

Back in 1970 whilst on exercise in West Germany, the Leyland 10 tonner towing our Meadows generator skidded on a tight bend as my gun sub made its way to a new position on a farm. The end result was a badly crumpled wing on the generator. Upon reaching our position, and after I had got the generator running and supplying power to the Bofors gun, the farmer came over to me and introduced himself as a former SS Panzer Grenadier. He surveyed the damage to my generator and later came back with two sledgehammers and proceeded to straighten out the bent and buckled fender. He did a superb job!

Cheers,
Steve

[rbminis]

Moved to the History and Research section of the forum.
Ralph.

[7againstthebes]

Thanks for the recommendation to read his book. The point of a book is to sell it. Sometimes that comes at the cost of the truth which we discover lives somewhere in between fiction and non-fiction.

Skorzeny, aka Rolf Steinbauer, always drums up a considerable amount of debate. Like P.T. Barnum Skorzeny is one hell of a grifter. The professional people who are engaged in this are not writing books about it or putting themselves out into the public eye.

Here's an amazing document from 1957 from the FBI that was declassified. Clearly both the CIA and FBI kept dibs on him and his wife mispellings and all in this primary source document.



And here's another fascinating declassified document from 1970



Legal attache document showing newspaper clippings on him in their files

[harmonica]

where is that action figure from?

[harmonica]

..good call--great subject to read about ...

[Witt]

where is that action figure from?

It is a 1/6 scale figure from Dragon Models.

[Aldo]

where is that action figure from?

Dragon 1/6 scale action figures

[Anderson]

I recall reading a newspaper story years ago that some years after the war Skorzeny lived in a rented house in a village in Ireland. His neighbours didn't know who he was until after he had gone. No doubt the intelligence agencies monitored his movements. A little surprising he wasn't recruited by one of the Western intelligence agencies,(or was he?) many former Nazis were.