Mossad's Nazi Commando: The Shocking True Story of Otto Skorzeny and Israel's Secret War Against Egypt's Rocket Program
He Was Hitler's Favorite Commando. Then He Worked for the Jews.
In the summer of 1962, a black Mercedes pulled up to a quiet villa in Madrid. Inside that house lived a ghost from history-a six-foot-four scarred giant who had once been called "the most dangerous man in Europe." He had snatched Mussolini from a mountaintop prison, plotted to kidnap Eisenhower, and walked out of an Allied courtroom a free man. Now, two Israeli agents were knocking on his door with an offer he could not refuse.
This is the story they tried to bury.
The Rockets Aimed at Tel Aviv
By the early 1960s, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had assembled a chilling resurrection of the Third Reich's most lethal minds. Inside a secret facility known only as Factory 333, German scientists who had built Hitler's V-2 rockets at Peenemünde were now engineering missiles designed for one purpose: the annihilation of Israel.
Wolfgang Pilz. Heinz Krug. Hans Kleinwächter. Names that had vanished after the war now reappeared on Egyptian payrolls. The warheads they were developing would carry radioactive waste, cobalt-60, even chemical agents. Israel's intelligence chief Isser Harel understood what every Israeli would soon learn-history was preparing to repeat itself.
And so began Operation Damocles-the most audacious, ruthless, and morally complicated covert war of the twentieth century.
A Devil's Bargain
What Mossad did next defies belief. To stop the German scientists, they recruited the one man capable of getting close to them: Otto Skorzeny, SS-Obersturmbannführer, personal favorite of Adolf Hitler, godfather to the postwar Nazi underground known as ODESSA.
The Jews would hunt Nazis. With a Nazi.
From the cafés of Munich to the rocket testing grounds outside Heliopolis, from poisoned letters and parcel bombs to disappearances that were never solved, Gary Covella, Ph.D. reconstructs a campaign of espionage so explosive that Israel itself classified the details for over half a century. You will witness the assassination attempts, the kidnappings, the back-channel deals between sworn enemies, and the haunting moral question that tormented every operative involved: What does it cost a nation to survive?
Inside This Book You Will Discover:
- The declassified Mossad operations that targeted German scientists across three continents
- The shocking truth about what happened to Heinz Krug-and the two competing stories of his death
- How Skorzeny's recruitment unfolded in a single tense meeting in a Madrid hotel room
- The failed letter bombs, the maimed secretaries, and the international scandal that nearly destroyed the operation
- The secret agreement between Israel and West Germany that hung in the balance
- Why David Ben-Gurion himself was forced from office over this hidden war
For Readers Who Crave the Truth Behind the Headlines
This is not a story of clean victories. It is a story of nations at the edge of extinction, of intelligence officers forced to shake hands with the murderers of their grandparents, of a young Jewish state willing to make a pact with the devil to ensure it would never burn again.
The Holocaust was over. The men who built it were not. And Israel was done waiting.
Mossad's Nazi Commando tells you the story your history books never could.
Turn the page. The war in the shadows is about to begin.
