By: Aaron Good
A recently discovered document found in West German archives reveals that during or just before the month of September 1962, a US military officer met with notorious Nazi assassin and terrorist Otto Skorzeny. The US officer spoke with Skorzeny in Madrid, Spain to complain about the foreign policy of US President John F. Kennedy.
The document was discovered within the Otto Skorzeny file of Germany's BND archives. German researcher and filmmaker Dirk Pohlmann found the report and shared it with his friend, the great Swedish academic Ola Tunander---who then forwarded it to Peter Dale Scott and me. It raises very interesting questions about Skorzeny, a man who was already a suspect in the eyes of some JFK assassination researchers.
This is a scan of the document:
Here is a working English translation:
Subject: Skorzeny, Madrid
With respect to the documents in Madrid, an excerpt from a report from an [outsider] whose sources have significant business in Spain via the Trading Company of Otto Skorzeny. The report is dated Sept. 21, 1962.
Until recently, Skorzeny was the general representative of the VÖST [Note: this appears to refer to a Nazi manufacturing company, Voestalpine]. This position was terminated without justification. It’s assumed, that either the Socialist Party of Austria or even the [Socialist Union] was behind this.
Materially, Skorzeny should be fine without the position with the VÖST. Recently he’s supposed to have purchased property in Ireland and has had his villa in Mallorca for a while, although he lives in his [flat] in Madrid.
According to the source, Skorzeny has continued contact with American military, particularly contact with flight officers [probably closer to say air force officers] of the US Army.
In these circles [i.e., among US military officers], one is distraught over the politics of the current president and his close advisors. The advisors are “wusses” who do not believe in the supremacy of the west over the east. The election of Kennedy was a catastrophe, which was achieved by bribery and corruption which cannot be undone in one legislative session, etc.
Similarly, the officers are critical of the millions spent on Poland solely for elections or given to “n****r states” [i.e., African nation-states] whose diaspora in the US could be courted as voters.
According to Skorzeny, American foreign policy is a chain reaction of stupid decisions that isn’t a real foreign policy – rather, it’s foreign policy based on domestic politics (as is common for America).
The September 21, 1962 date is notable. It is likely that the meeting took place in that month, an eventful month for Skorzeny. On September 11, 1962, a German scientist named Heinz Krug vanished after a day spent at his office. Krug was one of many former Nazi rocket scientists who were working for Nasser's Egypt. In 2016, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported "that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt."
According to Dan Raviv and Yossi Melmanm, the authors of the article,
[T]he most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s personal favorites among the party’s commando leaders. The Führer, in fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, for leading the rescue operation that plucked his friend Benito Mussolini out from the hands of his captors. But that was then. By 1962, according to our sources—who spoke only on the promise that they not be identified—Skorzeny had a different employer. The story of how that came to be is one of the most important untold tales in the archives of the Mossad.
As detailed by Professor Chris Simpson in Blowback: America’s Recruitment Of Nazis And Its Effects On The Cold War, Skorzeny was assisted in a mysterious jailbreak before he could be tried for war crimes. He was then used by the CIA to get close to the Egyptian insurgent officers led by Gamal Nasser. Allen Dulles tasked the Nazi spymaster Reinhard Gehlen with helping the Egyptian officers on intelligence and security matters. Gehlen then deployed Otto Skorzeny to assist Nasser and company. According to Raviv and Melmanm it was years later---in early 1962---that Mossad recruited Skorzeny.
During the strange evening when he was recruited, Skorzeny became suspicious about two new friends that he and his wife (the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, aka "Hitler's banker") had met in a bar in Madrid. Surmising that they were not who they claimed to be, Skorzeny pulled a gun on them and said, “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and you’ve come to kill me.” The Israeli spies explained that they were not there to kill him, but that if he killed them, Mossad would send spies who would indeed kill him. However, they merely needed Skorzeny to do some jobs for Mossad. In exchange, they agreed to have Skorzeny's name removed from an Israeli list of Nazi war criminals.
This was how a Nazi assassin went from being a war criminal awaiting trial, to being a CIA asset, to being a Mossad agent, to killing a German scientist at the behest of Israel, to finally having a friendly chat with a high-ranking, right-wing US Air Force officer about how President Kennedy was a disaster for giving too much away to black people and for not recognizing the supremacy of the West over the East.
For those who have been following the release of the Four Died Trying film series, it is also worth noting how the treason-minded US military officer in question here also had complaints about "millions...given to 'n****r states' [i.e., African nation-states] whose diaspora in the US could be courted as voters." When Four Died Trying moves to the next major assassination after President Kennedy---the murder of Malcolm X in 1965---viewers will learn about how US foreign policy elites were alarmed at Malcolm X and his campaign to tie African liberation to the struggle of black Americans.
As mentioned above, some respected JFK researchers believe that Skorzeny was a key figure in the Dallas assassination of President John F. Kennedy. While the book Coup in Dallas relies on some source material of disputed authenticity, it contains much interesting material on Otto Skorzeny. Regardless of the extent of Skorzeny's actual involvement in the Dallas plot, this newly discovered 1962 memo shows how deadly serious the Cold War national security state was in terms of opposing the foreign policy of President Kennedy.
Check out the trailer for Four Died Trying, premiering on November 22, 2023:
Special thanks to the source of this document: Dirk Pohlmann has made about 20 documentary films on the Cold War, on intelligence and on covert operations for the German television channels Arte and ZDF. His most recent was the 2015 film Täuschung: Die Methode Reagan (Deception: Reagan’s Method). You can read some of his work at Free 21 and he is the host of The Dirk Pohlmann Show.