Skorzeny, The Most Dangerous Man In Europe

Otto Skorzeny earned his reputation through audacity. As Hitler's preferred commando, the Austrian Waffen-SS officer became notorious for a string of operations that seemed to belong more to fiction than military history: the daring rescue of Benito Mussolini from an Italian mountain fortress, the elaborate deception of Operation Greif during the Battle of the Bulge. By the war's end, Allied forces had labelled him the most dangerous man in Europe.

Captured in May 1945, tried at Dachau, and ultimately exonerated, Skorzeny vanished from Allied custody and surfaced in Franco's Spain, where he would spend the next quarter century. What followed is the subject of this documentary.

Drawing on declassified material and exclusive access to the Skorzeny papers, the film traces the contours of a post-war life that proved as consequential as the wartime one. Arms dealing, Nazi escape networks, advisory roles to foreign governments, and covert work for Western intelligence services including both the CIA and Mossad: the picture that emerges is of a man who reinvented himself with the same cold calculation he had applied on the battlefield.

His daughter and leading historians contribute to a portrait that is as troubling as it is difficult to look away from.