Where did the Czech gold go at the end of the Second World War? Part 2 - Otto Skorzeny to 27.2. 1945

What we're putting together is a puzzle where we only have a few pieces, and even those are often not completely reliable. If we want to create a story or a picture that is close to reality, we have to fill in the missing pieces based on guesswork and knowledge of the mentality of the people involved. The key person here is Otto Skorzeny, but we must not forget Hitler, who apparently gave the orders that Skorzeny carried out. Skorzeny was always tasked directly by Hitler, with one exception, and that was the building of the bridgehead at Schwedt, which was entrusted to him by Himmler as commander of all forces on the Eastern Front at the time.

There is, however, one big problem with this. If we are to work on uncovering the reality, we must conceive of these people and their motivations completely without ideological spectacles. This is easy to do with the older wars, where for example there is no longer any particular emotion towards Napoleon (outside of France) and we can discuss the abilities or incompetencies of all the leaders of the conflict in a completely dispassionate manner. With Nazism, however, it is different. To this day there is a hate campaign waged against the defeated ideology and its leaders that prevents us from seeing them dispassionately. One example for all. When Herman Göring was mentioned in school, the teacher declared that he was a coward who escaped responsibility for his crimes by committing suicide. Göring was certainly not a moral man, he stole works of art much more openly than Hitler himself, but it is undeniablethat in the First World War he was an aerial ace who fought and shot down planes made of canvas and wire. Aviators of this type must have been insanely brave. And a couple of decades later, the courage of such a man is being taken in the mouth by a hen-pecked Czech schoolteacher.

Anyway, the SS men were portrayed by Nazi propaganda as Old Shatterheads proudly marching forward, driving the steppe men before them somewhere beyond the Urals. Today, they are portrayed as spawn of hell who met their caloric needs by eating Jewish babies. This is not to deny that there were pathological sadists and murderers among the SS. But not all of them.

This propaganda in a milder form is still running today. If you watch a series on the SS that ran on TV recently, they subtly push the idea that the Waffen SS were not elite units, that it was just propaganda, and that even commanders of regular Wehrmacht units complained about their unprofessionalism. These slanders are currently affecting Skorzeny as well. Articles are appearing that his action to liberate Mussolini was not his action at all, that it was the action of General Student and his paratroopers. According to these articles, Skorzeny was declared the liberator of Mussolini only for propaganda reasons, because he was an SS man. One of the typical articles of this kind is here: Mussolini's liberation was like an action movie, Skorzeny gets the glory - News

This statement may seem logical, but it is not true. If you look at Skorzeny's other actions, such as the capture of Hungary, Skorzeny's "handwriting" or "modus operandi" is clear. He seems to have signed the Grand Sasso. The German paratroopers may have been excellently trained and participated in the action (because Skorzeny didn't have enough of his own men at the time), but the idea, the organization and the actual command in the field belonged to him. Therefore, we need to sift through everything we know about his character and priorities from his friends, his enemies, and from himself, in order to gauge his actions and motives at moments of which we have no relevant testimony.

Below is an extract from his biography up to 27 February 1945. I am extracting only the essential facts; there are four books about him (in English) for those who are interested in the details. One was written by himself and three are by his enemies Madler and Cílek. Not to mention a lot of internet sources.

I found several biographies of Skorzeny in the sources I used, many of them containing errors (for example, years with up to a year wrong). As a basis (where not otherwise cited) I used his own biography extracted from the book "My Command Operations". I have done so knowing that the biography is certainly biased, trying to portray himself in the best possible light, apparently omitting many things entirely, and conversely, I have identified blatant lies in it. I have compared this book with other sources such as Julius Mader's The Hunt for the Scarred Face and R. Cílek" "I, Skorzeny ..." and "Skorzeny - Life on the Edge" by the same author. I also searched for mentions of Skorzeny in books and sources aimed in a different direction (Kenneth D. Alford: "Hitler's Millionaires", Libor Parizek "US Mission Velichovky", P.W.Stahl Geheimgeschwader KG 200). Both Roman Cílek and Julius Mader are openly hostile to Skorzeny, hence the balancing of sources.

The biography ends on 27.2.1945. Until then, his life and actions are quite clear and obviously hide nothing mysterious. Our investigation begins on 28 February 1945, when Skorzeny received a telephone call from Colonel General Alfred Jodl. That's in the next section.

Otto Skorzeny was born in Vienna into a civil engineer's family on 12 June 1908. Skorzeny's father's family came from Cheb, where they had moved from Poznan, West Poland, from Skorzencin Lake, a territory belonging to Imperial Germany until 1918. The standard of living of the middle-class family before the First World War was good, but this changed during the war and especially in the years after it. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was one of the defeated powers and broke up into several independent states (including Czechoslovakia). The standard of living fell catastrophically and in the 1920s it was extremely difficult just to make a living. Hunger reigned, and this probably scarred the young Skorzeny for life. One source states that Skorzeny did not taste butter for the first time until he was 17 years old.

Skorzeny managed to study civil engineering (like his father). While studying, he engaged in the then-popular sabre duels (he completed 14 of them) and had large scars on his face from this time. In the 1930s, the Nazi movement began to rise in Germany, led by Hitler, who at the time was making economic policies to dramatically raise the standard of living of the population. This appealed to the young Skorzeny, who joined the NSDAP (1932) where he was listed as member number 1,083,671, and also joined the SS, where he had been since 1934 - membership number 29,579."

In 1934 he also marries a girl named Gretl and they go on their honeymoon to Italy. This later allows him to claim to know Italy and leads to him getting his most famous assignment - the kidnapping of Mussolini. But that wasn't until ten years later.

He actively participated in the occupation of Austria by German troops and its annexation to the Third Reich.1938 he commanded in the rank of SS-hauptscharführer (ensign) the SA troops in the capture of the presidential palace and personally arrested President Miklas.

In 1940, he volunteered for the army, passed the difficult tests for admission to the Waffen SS and was assigned to the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler unit under the command of SS-Brigadeführer Paul Hausser. After 10 May 1940, he took part in the attack on France as an SS-untersturmführer (lieutenant) within the division later named das Reich.

From 6.4.1941 he took part in the attack on Romania and Serbia. Skorzeny, although he only went on reconnaissance, managed to capture a group of 60 Serbian soldiers, including five officers. For this feat he was promoted to the rank of SS-obersturmführer (lieutenant).

On June 22, 1941, he is part of the attack on the Soviet Union. In December 1941 he is seriously wounded at Mozhaisk, refuses demobilization, but also has serious health problems (which persisted throughout the war and only ended with his POW camp operation) so he is demobilized to Germany in January 1942.

He was treated in Karlovy Vary but was not completely cured and on discharge was given the category "GvH", i.e. Garnisonsverwendungsfahig in der Heimat - fit for garrison duty in the homeland.

Skorzeny constantly tried to get to the combat units. Finally, on 18. 4. 1943, he was promoted to hauptsturmführer (captain) and with immediate effect was given full command of the unit, which was inIn camp documents it has been variously referred to up to now, most often as Friedenthal, the Special Purpose Battalion and the Seehof School.

This battalion was to be the German answer to the British commandos, or American berets. The Germans were behind the Allies in building up these units because Hitler was initially distrustful of them. This stemmed from the difficulties of the occupation of Crete, which was carried out by paratroopers. In the end it was successful, but the losses were such that Hitler resisted a repeat. He only changed his mind after the (unsuccessful) attempt by British Special Forces in November 1942 to kidnap Afrikacorps commander Ernst Rommel.

Skorzeny had to build the battalion essentially from scratch, but had significant help from SS-obergruppenführer Juttner, who enabled him to obtain volunteers, material and information.

The first assignment was to send some paratroopers to Iran, where they were to harm the supply of material from the US to Russia. The landing was successful, but the result of the action was rather unconvincing and remained in the shadow of the famous success with the kidnapping of Mussolini.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Skorzeny)

On July 26, 1943, he was summoned to Adolf Hitler's headquarters. Here were 6 officers who were apparently shortlisted for the secret assignment. Skorzeny managed to convince Hitler that he was the most suitable candidate. This was to free Benito Mussolini, who was arrested and interned in Italy on (July 25, 1943) , source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini. Hitler was (apparently quite rightly) concerned that the Italians wanted to hand Mussolini over to the Allies and make a separate peace. By that time, the Allied landings in Sicily had already taken place (July 9, 1943). There were many German soldiers on Italian territory, so the place of Mussolini's imprisonment was kept in strict secrecy. The Germans also did not want an open conflict with their so far formal Italian ally. Therefore, the most important task was to track down Mussolini's whereabouts. That was Skorzeny's task. Because Skorzeny had few trained men at the time, most of his forces in this operation were General Student's paratroopers.

Skorzeny searched Italy for several weeks in an explicitly detective-like manner, and indeed he finally succeeded in discovering the Duce on the island of Santa Maddalena, a small island near Elba. They prepared an amphibious operation, but on the eve of the operation the Italians moved Mussolini to an unknown location. The search began anew, and wiretaps eventually revealed that Mussolini was being held in the Hotel Campo Imperatore on Gran Sasso, a mountain range accessible only by cable car.

Skorzeny drew up a plan to attack the hotel in the mountain saddle using gliders and, in parallel, to capture the lower station of the cable car by a military attack from the ground. The plan was promptly implemented (on 12 September 1943) and worked essentially as expected. Mussolini and Skorzeny took a small Fieseler Storch plane from the hotel to the military airfield and then a larger plane to Vienna. There they checked into a hotel. I quote below from Skorzeny's book "My Command Operations" because I consider this part important and will refer to it in my analysis of the events of April:

SS General of Arms Querner, who escorted us from the airport to the Hotel Imperial, told me shortly before midnight that the Chief of Staff in Vienna wanted to see me. Shortly afterwards, the colonel reported to me and in a solemn tone declared:

"Hauptsturmführer Skorzeny, I come by order of the Führer, Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, and my mission is to present you with the Knight's Cross in addition to the Iron Cross!"

He removed his own order and placed the ribbon on my Badly shaved neck, over the coat of my truly battered paratrooper uniform. I regretted that my father was no longer alive; he would have been even more pleased than I was.

What followed was a confusion of congratulations, handshakes and repetitive questions. The telephone rang and I didn't notice, but General Querner said, "The Führer wants to speak to you personally!"I picked up the receiver and recognized Hitler's voice: "...You have accomplished a unique feat that will go down in military history, Skorzeny. In addition, you saved my friend. I knew that if anyone could do it, it would be you. I've authorized the SS Sturmbannführer to lend you the Knight's Cross. I know you already wear it, because I gave orders for it to be handed over to you immediately..."

One fact emerges from the above. Hitler used promotions and decorations much like a tamer in a circus uses a sugar cube. If someone completed a task to his satisfaction, he had to be rewarded immediately. He did not wait until they met in person to present him with the decoration. It's a different system to ours, for example, where decorations are presented at the castle on 28 October.

This event made Skorzeny popular and was used by German propaganda - so his scarred face was known by almost everyone, and there are quite a few sightings of his movements even at times when he wanted to keep it secret.

After this action, support for his Special Purpose Battalion increased even more. Generals Jüttner and Jodl then gave him general permission to select soldiers from all three branches of the army - land, air and naval - for his jagdverband. On 5 August 1943, three motorized companies and Jägerbataillon SS 502 with a staff company were formed from the Sonderverband Friedenthal. His unit began to receive special assignments. Some Skorzeny solved successfully, in other cases he was not so successful. Chronologically, these were mainly the following actions:

In the spring of 1944, Skorzeny received orders from OKW to track down Tito's headquarters, destroy it, and capture Tito. They searched intensively for him, and even managed to find Tito's main tent in a cave in the mountains just hours after Tito had left it, finding his marshal's uniform there as well. As part of the search, they established special economic relations with the Yugoslav partisans - Skorzeny received a large sum in fakein fake pound notes and used them to buy weapons, food and supplies from the guerrillas, which the British supplied by submarine. Typical of Skorzeny was that (despite having an unlimited source of counterfeit notes) he bargained extensively with the guerrillas. He was convinced (probably rightly) that such a business transaction would then appear credible. (This approach of his will also be evaluated later). Tito moved his headquarters to the island of Vis. Skorzeny was preparing an amphibious operation, but it did not happen in the end because of the failed assassination of Hitler on 20 July 1944 (Operation Valkyrie). Skorzeny and his men made a very significant contribution to the failure of the rebels and earned Hitler's opinion that he was not only capable but also loyal at all times.

The Special Purpose Battalion grew after these successes. SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, as head of the special "S" (Sabotage) section within VI.Office (SD-Ausland) of the Reich Security Office (RSHA) 13.September 1944, he was given the task of building up the SS Fighter Corps (SS Jagdverbände) - these unions were intended to perform special tasks, especially anti-partisan warfare. A total of five unions were formed (Ost, Südwest, Südost, Nordwest, Mitte (originally SS-Jäger-Bataillon 502))

As German defeats continued, the Nazis began to lose their allies. After Italy, a similar process occurred in Hungary. Hungary was ruled at the time by Admiral Horthy, who had a son, Niklas. Niklas negotiated with mediators for a separate peace with the Soviet Union, and information about these negotiations reached the Germans. Skorzeny had been attending meetings in Hitler's headquarters on the subject since September 10, 1944, with the conclusion that he had been given the task of ensuring that Hungary remained an ally of Germany. The first part of the task was the kidnapping of Admiral Horty's son, which took place on 15.10.1944. After an intense firefight with security, Niklas Horthy was kidnapped wrapped in a carpet. The second part was the capture of the heavily fortified Budapest Castle. Skorzeny (who was in command of the operation, although he only held the rank of major) rejected Police General von Bach-Zelewski's proposal to destroy the castle by firing a huge 650 mm mortar called the "Thor" with a 2,200 kg shell. Skorzeny bet on the moment of surprise, 16. At 6 a.m. on October 6, 1944, he drove into the castle with several cars in which SS soldiers sat as if on parade right in front of the barrels of Hungarian machine guns and managed to take the fortressbefore the Hungarians recovered and with only minor losses (4 dead and 16 wounded on the German side and 3 dead and 15 wounded on the Hungarian side).

When Skorzeny described the operation in Budapest to the Führer, he replied, "You have done very well, my dear Skorzeny. I promote you to SS-Oberstrurmführer from 16 October 1944 and award you the German Gold Cross."

Skorzeny's next famous action was Operation Greif. Skorzeny was expected to assemble teams of fluent English-speaking soldiers who, in captured vehicles and uniforms...to infiltrate behind Allied lines and support the German operation in the Ardennes by sabotage and direct combat operations behind enemy lines. There were not enough English-speaking volunteers in the German army, and information about this action was leaked to the Allies, yet it succeeded in creating chaos and significantly damaging the combat capability of American and British troops. Here, however, it was more a coincidence than Skorzeny's ability. It is worth noting, however, that despite Hitler's strict prohibition against his personal participation in the fighting on 16-18 December 1944, Skorzeny was seriously wounded in the eye. Skorzeny mentions in his memoirs that after the offensive was over (the defeat of the German forces), Hitler told him on 31 December 1944 that if Skorzeny had been commander-in-chief, he thought things would have turned out differently. There is no reason to distrust Skorzeny here; Hitler seems to have had unbounded confidence in his ability and loyalty at the end of the war, and we take this as essential to our analysis and hypothesis of events at the very end of the war.

Against this background, he was provided with a special squadron 200 (Geheimgeschwader KG 200) designed, among other things, to drop his agents behind enemyand to evacuate his troops from the rear of the Eastern Front, and established good relations with its commander, Siegfried Knemeyer. The squadron also concentrated extremely long-range aircraft (Ju 390 range up to 9,700 km, Ju 290 range 6,150 km) because of plans for direct flights across Siberia to Japan and the possibility of bombing New York.

Skorzeny's last official combat operation was to build a bridgehead at Schwedt on the Oder. He was ordered to do this by Himmler, who as supreme commander of the SS was his formal superior and at that Adolf Hitler's orders, he was also the army commander at the time, although he had no military or command experience. The order to secure the bridgehead was given to Skorzeny on 30 January 1945 and he withdrew all his men from Friedenthal with the exception of a guard company under the command of Adjutant Karl Radl. The town and its surroundings were in chaos before the approaching Red Army, the roads were full of evacuated civilians, but also disorganized soldiers fleeing from the enemy. Skorzeny imposed a very brutal regime to keep his men from dispersing.

Quote from the book "I Skorzeny ....)

On the fourth of February, a public execution took place in front of Schwedt Castle, and the hanged man's body, frozen to the bone, remained on display for five days afterwards. Anyone could read the sign attached to the man's suit: "I, Kurt Floter, hang here because as mayor of Konigsberg I left my town at the mercy of the enemy."Other executions took place directly on the bridges over the Oder, at the Schwedt cemetery wall, in the town of Angermiinde and in other places. Norbert Robert, a 20-year-old tank driver from Cologne, was strangled by a rope just because he spotted his mother in a refugee column that was passing by and went to help her with her luggage for a few dozen minutes. Twelve similar incidents were recorded in the Schwedt town chronicle after the war, but a note to this list indicates that the list may not be completebecause the bodies of the dead were forbidden by Skorzeny's orders to be entered in the official register of the dead and were buried in mass graves without any identification.

...

On the western outskirts of the town and in its surroundings, he had a cordon of SS officers equipped with considerable, even thuggish, powers erected, whose duty it was to stop by threats and even force the forced every retreating unit, every soldier, sometimes wounded, who, with terror in his eyes at the horrors he had experiencedof the previous battles, he intended to disappear as far as possible from possible contact with the ruthlessly behaving enemy.

Due to the lack of any supplies of weapons and ammunition, Skorzeny had the area searched and found weapons factories that contained cannons, machine guns and ammunition. He organized a reconnaissance across the river in Inowroclaw, during which one of his best friends, Adrian von Fölkersam, was killed. He must have assumed that everyone would die on that bridgehead. But he was saved, and on the evening of 28 February he was called back to headquarters by Hitler. For the defence of Schwedt, he was given oak branches to add to the Knight's Cross. (Other sources state that he did not receive the oak branches until April 9, 1945 https://forum.valka.cz/topic/view/10662#169776)

Skorzeny's next mission was to try to blow up the bridge at Remagen, captured by the Allies on 7.3.1945, to slow down the Allied troops. However, the bridge was so well protected that Skorzeny's divers failed to destroy it and it collapsed on its own on 17.3.1945.

Skorzeny's last officially acknowledged meeting with Hitler was on March 30, 1945.

So what was Skorzeny really like?

He was undoubtedly one of the most capable, if not quite the most capable, Special Forces commander in history.

He had Hitler's unbounded confidence in terms of both ability and loyalty.

He prepared actions down to the smallest detail. One account says his officers knew each other "by their tired faces".

Although the operations prepared by him were sometimes extremely risky, they were never suicidal and there was always an escape plan for the men deployed.

Accomplishing the mission was always of the highest priority to him, and no morale or anything else was placed above it. He calmly had a young boy hanged for a triviality because he needed to cast a greater terror on his subordinates than the advancing Red Army. He didn't kill or murder needlessly, but he was ruthless and efficient when he deemed it necessary to accomplish the task.