Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 233 - Otto Skorzeny Part 1: The STEM Lord, Sword Fighting Enthusiast

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

Otto Skorzeny was Hitler's favorite Commando during WWII, he was also a total loser. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Stuart Smith. Otto Skorzeny: The Devil��s Disciple Dr Robert Forczk. Rescuing Mussolini: Gran Sasso 1943 Otto Skorzeny. Hitler’s Commando

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities

like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the Legion of the Old Crow today. And now, back to the show. Hello and welcome to this podcast that we do called the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Liam. Hello, Liam. Go fuck yourself. Okay. Hi, Joe. Hi, my sweet boy oh let's let's see if we have everything in line for the podcast is our internet gonna kick us out of the zen caster room probably is uh is our depression in check absolutely not dude yeah listen

occasionally we both spiral together and it's fine struggle a little bit up here I struggle a little bit I completely understand man yeah like it's been a bad week for me personally even though my book came out

this week I know this is coming out quite a long time in the future. So my book will have already come out, but yeah, like it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't a good time. Not a bad week. No,

I don't think I've had one of those in a while. Unfortunately. I, I will say my friend who will remain unnamed because I don't know if he listens to this, but I don't want to embarrass them. Had don't dox them. Just put their entire mailing address and phone number in the margins.

The had the worst weekend I've heard of in quite some time. And the problem is it was all his fault. Yeah. That's, that's one of the problems that I'm currently having is I've done everything that's led me to this moment. Oh, yeah. Yeah, bud. Ooh, that's not a good feeling, is it? Yeah, welcome back to Depression Cast. Yeah, no, it's super tight when you know the reason you're failing is because you set yourself up to fail. That's my favorite thing about depression. That's my favorite thing about depression.

Well, and I don't manage some of my emotions as good as maybe some people should. So I end up constantly replaying things in my head, which just creates a feedback loop. Oh, I do that? Yeah. The end is me not getting out of bed for two days, but it's not like I slept. That's good stuff. Yeah. We are, we, listen, we have a healthy a healthy grip on our depression is what we have. That's right.

You know what really helps with depression, Liam? Psychic damage. Nazis. Total amounts of psychic damage. We've got to go back to the Nazi minds. I will say this one is a bit of a an interesting nazi i'll say now i this does require an intro because every once in a while as we are want to read was a lieutenant colonel in the waffen ss yeah oh yeah it gets worse um yeah yeah i said the thing um uh the every once all there's a guy

so wild um that looks like they kind of jumped out of central casting for a B-rate James Bond film or better known as every James Bond film. A good example of this is Baron Sternberg. He is our go-to for the crowning achievement of crazy guy that we've ever talked about. I truly don't think he'll ever be eclipsed. I don't think anybody's beating the king of wolf rehab on that. But the reason why is because he is an unmitigated... No way you can describe him is he not a bad person. And the reason why I'm bringing him up is because we're talking about Otto Skorzeny he's different than

Sternberg he's obviously not nearly that bad even though he was a literal Nazi and a member of the SS it's hard to compare they have worked for oh boy oh yeah I'm not going to ruin this close the page.

Oh, gee, come on, man. Every time with this shit, every fucking time with this shit, Joe, every time I think it can't get any fucking worse, why am I doing this to myself? And then I fucking read this shit, Joe. I fucking read this shit, and my boy is doing work for unnamed country and i'm just like really that's the fuck that's what we gotta fucking do we gotta fucking go to the nazi barrel like if it makes you feel any better we'll talk about that it probably didn't happen

but oh jesus christ there's different kinds of guys we've talked about like the the pyramid of dudes or whatever the flow chart of dudes rock like we've both agreed that Baron Unger and Von Sternberg while being a absolute human monster fits somewhere on the dudes rock spectrum because I mean come on but you also

have to understand where these guys are coming from Otto Skorzeny is a fucking lunatic however he's not the same kind of lunatic he's more of an ernst junger kind of a lunatic who just really loved war uh boy yeah uh like he could not get enough of this shit uh and he kind of transcends every other kind of dude's rock idea we've ever talked about and i need to point out here because we we say dudes rock or the word transcends, we don't mean it as a good thing.

Otto Skorzeny is widely known as Adolf Hitler's favorite commando. So, oh, and eventual Mossad hitman, allegedly. So we're not talking about a good person here. So like, you know, obviously, a lot has been written about Skorzeny

and therein lies one of the problems most of the people who have written about him cite him cite scorzini and scorzini loves him some motherfucking scorzini uh he was unreliable narrator mean anything to you yeah like he is at he's his best marketer the best hype man and uh and his own best historian long after his own death and that means a lot of we know about him is complete bullshit at worst or exaggerated to make him sound good at best and uh so while we chart this man's very weird life i'm gonna do my best to try to cut through some of that. And for our sources is Otto Skorzeny, The Devil's Disciple by Stuart Smith, which is probably the best critical look at the man's life, as well as Dr. Robert Forzik's

Rescuing Mussolini Gran Sasso in 1943, which is again, a critical look at the operation that made him famous. Yeah, we'll be talking about that part too. operation that made him famous yeah we'll be talking about that part too um and also scorzini's own book hitler's commando which good god is that a bad book do not read it um it reads like someone is more high on their own supply than anybody's ever been before in their life it's like reading it's it's like reading a fucking autobiography of a seal um a navy seal not the cute one so i would read a cute seals autobiography um i there's a reason why i almost never use autobiographies as sources uh because everybody kind of makes themselves sound slightly better

than they should uh but you kind of have to when it comes to square zeni because everybody cites it everybody talks about it um oh and a small note here just in case you're this is your first episode listing on this show this entire series about a fucking nazi a hardcore unrepentant nazi so no matter what we say about his crazy life or maybe you think it was too long it was significantly too long uh no matter what we say about his life or how you uh perceive we're saying something remember he's a piece of shit and we fucking hate him welcome to the show hi i just book yeah if this is your first time in this neighborhood you should know that we do

not suffer nazis well no uh our editor is jewish i'm Jewish. Why do I lead with Nate? Why do I lead with Nate? I'm Jewish. I am the only non-Jewish man involved in the production of this podcast for now. We'd love to have you. You already got the hard part over with. Yeah, we're ahead of the curve on that one, baby. So to speak.

Now, Otto Johann Anton Skorzenzeni was born yeah he was born june 12 1908 in vienna uh in the dying days of the austral hungarian empire now unlike some of the people we've talked about here he was not born from like a bad background uh i assume this is a normal german household in the early 1900s uh he was solidly upper middle class uh his father anton was a construction manager of some kind and he was a real asshole uh you could absolutely see how this guy ended up raising hitler's favorite commando uh he never a sentence to hear yeah yeah like to be fair this whole family ends up becoming nazi party members so like i don't feel yeah anton lives long enough to see his son become an ss legend so and i i have no doubt he was very proud of that yeah do us nope nope nope nope i'm not gonna make nate do more work that that beat button's getting burnt out.

Now, his dad was really cheap. He never doted on his family. And he did this on purpose because he believed that if the family and his sons, because he had several sons, had everything that they've ever wanted, they'd turn into soft little boys. He was one of those guys. Yeah. soft little boys. He was one of those guys. The family had long military history involved in both the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany. It would only get longer

because if you remember the date, World War I is about to start. His dad got drafted to serve in the Austro-Hungarian military and if anybody who's been listening to our show before is probably shocked to learn that he survived virtually unscathed. Unlike millions of other people his mom also had most of the men in her family drafted as well uh and devil's disciple the book devil's disciple notes that this all of the service was

quote without distinction i don't know why i include that i just thought it was like that i like that you can't fucking do that right you stupid nazis these are pre-nazis they're not quite there yet they're gonna be nazis they can suck my dick joe i mean you know hitler is sharing a trench line with them so you know only if the artillery was a little bit more accurate go back in time give the italians high Mars or something. Yeah, please. Now, after World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire famously shit itself and died, taking most people's livelihoods with it to include the Skorzeny families.

However, Otto, at this point, obviously Otto did not fight in World War I. He was too young. He was very good in school, at least in what he considered quote, real subjects, he was a STEM Lord. He hated the humanities.

As you can imagine from someone raised by a dad like them, he fucking hated anything that didn't, uh, you can like touch with your hands. Like he was an engineering, uh, nerd and a math nerd, which is going to be interesting when we talk about his military career.

Cause when you think of engineers you think of people who are very careful with plans stuff like that yeah he's not um so it's kind of weird he also learned quite a few languages that seems to be stemmed from his dad his dad spoke like three or four languages um but he eventually went to college to study engineering he went to austria's technical university uh you know the famed atu i assume they're if they're well the fighting himmlers yes if they were an american university they're like shitty d4 ncaa team be like the yeah yeah the bearcats because that's a we have way too many teams named the Bearcats.

Bearcats are kind of sick, though, dude. Unlike Nazis. He did get into sports. And it's honestly the coolest sport I've ever heard of because of how dumb it is. Fencing. And not the kind of fencing that you think it is. No, this is the one that fucked up his face, right? Yes.

Now, for starters, this kind of fencing was not considered a sport. It was considered a way to train character and personality. What the fuck does that even mean, man? It's like that bullshit, like iron sharpens iron bullshit. Oh, okay. You get a whole bunch of young, impressionable fucking university students. And I'll turn into Draymond Green. Right. Yes. young impressionable fucking university students and i'll turn into draymond green right yes uh now i went to the same school how does that make you feel uh worse people have gone to my school that is true god damn is that true

didn't you go to penn state you went to michigan state know, but didn't you go to Penn State? Is this a competition? I went to Temple. We have Bill Cosby. Thank you. Oh, okay. Well, thank you for that correction to make you sound fair. And also Ted Bundy. Ooh, well. Didn't graduate, but he did go to Temple.

Yeah. Which is surprising because Ted Bundy was normally famous for finishing things. Oh. because ted bonnie was normally uh famous for finishing things uh now uh the the key part of this fencing was that there was no protective gear though i should point out some schools did have protective like leather uh and like uh like a face guard was like kind of like a face guard. Moe was kind of like a nose guard. And these swords were sharp. They were like broad swords. But specifically in Austria, where Skorzeny lived and was going to school, that kind of protection was considered

some pussy shit and discarded entirely. Now it gets dumber than this. Because if you watch fencing, like on the Olympics or whatever the fuck you find yourself on at 3 a.m. because you can't sleep and you're on youtube and you're watching fencing um and you notice people are moving around an awful lot you're dodging you're dipping you're you're i don't know doing a i don't know tuck and roll tuck and roll tuck and roll i don't know what fencing moves are called

um but you're trying not to get hit um so that's a point or something not here it's not oh in this kind of fencing you could not dodge incoming blows you could not even flinch the goal is not to get the goal is not to like not get hit uh you didn't dodge the goal is to get hit and shrug it off now if you're thinking yourself that sounds like a really good way to catch a sword to the hit and shrug it off. Now, if you're thinking yourself, that sounds like a really good way to catch a sword to the face and lose the tip of your nose or whatever. You're right. It happened all the time.

And those resulting fencing scars were considered a badge of honor. And Skorzeny himself, if you look up a picture of him, had a prominent scar running down the side of his face. A big sucker, yeah. And he was super proud of it, like a Nazi Rurouni Kenshin.

Oh my fucking God. And not to mention, this guy is also like 6'4 and built like a brick shithouse. You could see how he'd be into this kind of thing. And while in school, he fought 14 of these duels. And from my understanding, I don't really think you win or lose these unless you flinch or run away. But yeah, he definitely did not. His face is a bit ugly from these.

Oh, that's a Nazi. Fuck him. These facial scars were so prized within the Nazi inner circle. It was considered like something of a symbol of badassery. And there's a lot of Nazis who claim to have them that fake them and you can tell like with prosthetics they would have other scars and say it was from dueling

there was one guy I can't remember who it was he was quite high up he got like a car accident when he was younger and he had a scar on his face and he claimed it was from a duel and all the people like Skorzeny who really were whipping swords at each other's faces like it doesn't seem like with the one that i have because if you notice that is not a small scar oh that's a that's a big sucker yeah um now despite being a stem lord scorzini was actually

kind of bad at school uh he believed in doing the bare minimum in order to get by uh which admittedly i could respect uh like he's like one of the things that he said is like well if i can't be and like an all straight a student which he wasn't going to be why would i struggle to get b's when i can just casually walk across the finish line and get c's and it's like all right yeah you know what they call uh doctors who average season medical school a va doctor yeah oh jesus um now he did that to be fair they gave him a lot of free time because he wasn't studying and you know what he dedicated all that free time to politics and he says we're talking about a nazi you could probably guess what kind of politics uh now the nazi party wasn't quite around yet um i mean it was in some form but he wasn't in it yet

he joined the academic legion which despite it despite its name was a right-wing paramilitary which just sounds like the the dumbest group of nerds on earth um it formed in the aftermath of the 1927 mar Marxist uprising in Austria, which is sometimes dubbed the Austrian Civil War. Now, this lasted four days, ended with a large-scale purging of leftist elements within the country and a strengthening of the right, which we know how this one ends in this country. Now, there is a lot of these student militant groups on the right, and most of them had been unofficially absorbed into an organization as the Austrian Home Guard. Another paramilitary group is actually independent of the military due to post-World War I restrictions on the Austrian military.

And because of that, it actually became more powerful than the austrian military to the point that the austrian military eventually just absorbed it in the late 30s um yeah uh however the home guard kind of shit itself and died uh uh due to inter-party conflict uh and of course the eventual absorption uh now this inter-party conflict kind of disgusted Skorzeny, who rapidly became a, drumroll please, pan-Germanist. Oh, duh. Now, remember, this is before the Nazis again. He was not a Nazi yet. But he still believed, because Austria was in a really bad kind of way at the time.

And he believed that the only way to save Austria was a union with Germany, which now this is like 1920s Germany. Remember, he thought better off as a union state, which tells you how bad things were. Yeah, that's fair. But there was only one party within Austria that was preaching pan Germanism and

German unionism. And that was the Austrian Nazi party, which the entire Skzini family quickly warmed up to and auto joined in 1932 uh now just in case you did this because he was worried about that like you people think that he did this like because i was trying to explain that he was worried about the austrian economy or whatever uh he did this after being inspired by a speech by joseph goebbels so he's he's he's. So he's a true blooded Nazi here. He's a real fucking fascist.

Yeah, fuck this guy. And he joined the SS two years later. Now, at the time, being a member of the SS and right-wing psychopath didn't pay the bills. So he needed to get a job. Unfortunately, he had a hard time finding a job. And he got married a couple months after he joined the SS. And he just so happened to marry a construction manager who's worth millions upon millions of dollars, married a daughter, and then got a divorce a few years

later after he bought a part ownership in her dad's company. So do with the information what you will. He did this kind of stuff a lot. And this kind of frames Skorzeny's life pretty accurately. He's a shameless self-promoter and a ladder climber. Like, for example, you know how I told you... I can't believe a Nazi would be shameless. That's crazy. You normally think them to be true believers or whatever, which don't get me wrong. Skorzeny was a through and through anti-Semite to the day he died.

But he pretty obviously didn't care so much about what nazis believed um he cared about as much as advancing himself sure exactly for example like he hated humanities people he hated lawyers stuff like that uh he was only friend like truly friends with engineers and other people who would become like him later on which is like commandos that's interesting just because the nazis are so obsessed with like paperwork and order and shit like that and sort of legal lease in a way like right yeah we seem to care about that interesting i mean like because his very profession of being a commando kind of flies in the way of orderly regulation um and that's one of the reasons why it took him years to get there. And for example,

one of his best friends is a guy named Ertz Kaltenbrunner, who's again, historic dickhead. And I say best friends, but more like closest connection because Skorzeny actually fucking hated him. But Kaltenbrunner was the head of the Austrian SS. And he was so influential with the Nazi circles, he would eventually replace Reinhard Heydrich after he got killed. So he's super powerful. And Skorzeny was smart enough to see if I hitch myself to Colton Brunner squizini's entire career we never would have heard of he would have been behind a desk somewhere as an ss functionary doing nothing um so like you can kind of see he always attaches himself to more powerful people to rise up because on his own he's kind of nothing but by cozying up to colin brunner he knew an important which he knew was a very important connection to have even if the austrian nazi party was dumb as hell by nazi standards they wanted to take that's pretty impressive by Nazi standards. They wanted to take power. That's pretty impressive.

Yeah. For instance, they want to take power independently of the German Nazi party, even though a key linchpin for the German Nazi party was taking over Austria. So they didn't really need them in charge of Austria as much as they just needed them to be a puppet for the German Nazi party, which is, of course, what would eventually happen. But a poll about Austrian independence found that the majority of Austrians wanted to be independent from Germany. And this included members of the Nazi party who were supposed to be in favor of the German Union, which is the whole reason why the German Nazi party was propping them up. So when a popular vote for independence was coming up, and it looked like the fuck Germany option might win, Hitler, who is now in power in Germany, made sure he wasn't going to let that happen.

And this is via threats of the German army on the border, like wink, wink, nudge, nudge, we will fucking invade you. And the chancellor resigned. The chancellor of Austria resigned. He was then replaced by a handpicked Hitler who made sure he to invite the german army right in the next day um and this is the anschluss uh now scorzeni in his version of the anschluss said he took no active part in uh germany's takeover austria when in reality there was a special hit team that was supposed to kill the austrian Chancellor should he refuse to resign and of course that he was a member of it. Fantastic. Absolutely

fantastic. A kind of funny but unimportant side note here because I like talking about this dumb dueling so much. One of the things, like that was one thing that Skorzeny loved. He considered it like a cornerstone of a manhood. The dueling with swords

and making each other uglier uh what's one of the things the first things that the nazis banned was this kind of dueling because you know they they needed people with their faces intact for military service why um if you don't have a face makes you more aerodynamic don't need it you know if if squirezini had lost his whole nose he would be able to move through the air faster. That's right. Yeah. But it was another reason was because this dueling was popular in Germany as well.

And everybody kind of knew that one of the things you did when you weren't smashing each other in the face with a sword was talking about politics. And the Nazis didn't want anybody talking about politics that wasn't within the party line. They didn't want any talking about politics that wasn't within the party line. Yeah, they didn't want any of these independent circles.

Now, this is where things get dark for a little bit. Despite Squirzeny avidly denying it until the day he died, there's a fuckload of evidence to suggest that he immediately took part in Kristallnacht. Of course he did. part in Kristallnacht. Now, that was November 10th, 1938, and he was now a very high-ranking member of the SS, close to the Austrian SS commander.

There's an even greater than zero chance he helped organize Kristallnacht within Austria. He could have possibly, as well, personally burnt down two synagogues. you guy at the very least he directed the burning down of two synagogues so yeah eat my ass every once in a while we got

to point out this guy was a through and through nazi to the day he died so who can eat my ass i'm alive and he's dead so suck that shit scoreboard motherfucker um now despite all of this scores honey was not actually in the military any military he was just in the ss guy oh right right right because the you know there's the ss and there's a waffen ss um and

the at this point the nazis invade poland he was some soulless ss functionary at night because he still was not making a salary and working his normal job at the construction office during the day. So when the war finally started, he wanted to join what he believed the most heroic and dashing of all military

branches within the Third Reich, the Luftwaffe. And he was immediately rejected. Bitch ass, too old. He's 31. Also, he's too tall. He's 6'4". He cannot fit in a plane. So he went and joined the Waffen-SS, the armed branch of the party structure. He wanted to become an officer, but he was they were being fed into a killing field in the Eastern Front and their standards would slowly be cut.

They still had racial purity laws and stuff at this point. But he got a waiver and his connections got him in the door for officer's training, doing basic training with the SS live and start out of Hitler. Now, training at this point for the SSs took a really long time it's actually quite interesting i don't think i've seen many officers training that look quite like it like it involved effectively on the job training as a non-officer for quite a while oh boy yeah but it took like two years uh which i mean that length isn't super long but you know normally you don't end up having to suck shit with grunts in order to get commissioned.

The closest thing you have is a couple weeks in ROTC where you have to go to the field and play soldier. Of course, this would also end for the SS as a generation of guys who are a bit too fair-skinned got smeared into the mud.

He's assigned to manage transportation and logistics for an SS unit during the invasion of France, which is probably not the heroic ideal he was looking for. He saw himself being a war hero, and here he was literally killing these bullets. And that unit was the SS Totenkopf

Division, better known for all of the concentration camps they helped staff. There's the Totenkopf Verband known for all of the concentration camps they help staff now there's the totenkopf verbond which was like the actual concentration camp guards right one in the same truly one in the same yeah so uh squirrany right when squirrany writes about his own history he tends to downplay this part of his career or leave it out entirely depending on how you read yeah now as you can imagine, tending to trucks and paperwork was not what he saw himself

doing during the sprawling early stages of World War II. So, he was not a very good soldier. Again, one of the few things about him I can respect. He got a job that he hated and put exactly zero effort into it. Yeah, been there.

He got in trouble constantly, mostly for insubordination. But one of the... Now, sometimes you have to look into these charges because back in the day, insubordination could mean anything. Like nowadays, if you get charged

with insubordination, it's normally for just refusing an order. But back in the 40s, one of his insubordination charges was holding his own supply officer at gunpoint in order to get new tires for his truck. All right.

Okay. I don't respect it, but all right. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's sometimes efficiency, I guess. All right. All right.

Yeah. Now, somehow back then, this did not get you prison time. Oh, okay. I have no idea how, but he did eventually get something akin to prison time. Now, he was at a bar drinking as soldiers want to do. As you do.

And he saw a picture on the wall that he really did not like. It is a picture of a guy. I believe it was some Nazi party member that he really did not like. And he told the bartender, take that shit off the wall. And when the bartender didn't, he simply unholstered his sidearm and shot it.

Jesus! Just shooting a fucking painting off the wall. What a key. But in Skorzeny's telling of the story, he doesn't shoot at it. He only threatens to shoot at it. Remember, he threatens to shoot a painting of the wall like a complete normal person everything's going great here yeah uh and he got locked in the barracks for a few weeks uh

which is you know kind of like prison let's do it i would i would argue that he probably should have gone to prison for holding someone at gunpoint for some new tires but you know whatever whatever what are you gonna do right now after this he took part in the nazi invasion of yugoslavia where he wrote out the entire thing in the rear at the baggage train because he's still a logistics officer there is no glowing records of his military experience from this time unless of course you believe squirzeny without any evidence um now in his book he claims he was promoted to oberstrom fewer which is effectively a lieutenant um because he captured 60 pows all by himself now wow this didn't happen uh because you know he fought for the one country in world war ii that pretty much never failed to

get everything down on paper um because we have German military records that prove that he was not actually promoted for a year after this. Yeah. He didn't get any medals for this. If you capture 60 POWs by yourself, you're probably going to get a medal for it. So we can probably assume it didn't happen.

He finally did actually see combat during the invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Congratulations, my guy. You finally got what you wanted. I hope you enjoyed it. Well, good news, he didn't. As nobody did during this point.

Maybe the first, but you're like, me sewing. Ha ha, yes, me outside of Moscow in the winter. Oh, no. His unit was part of many that took part in the Nazi push towards Moscow, which, in case you were not aware, did not go great. His unit was annihilated. We don't really have actually a lot of firsthand accounts of his time during this. He doesn't really write about it, which is actually kind of telling because yeah you'll see why you'll see why um his unit was fucked up so bad within the first couple months of fighting they were pulled completely off the line uh and he was

awarded an iron cross second class for his actions it was pulling a wounded man away uh something like that now his first campaign his first real campaign ended after six months this is not because of a wound which he would eventually get wounded which is weird uh but because gallbladder got infected uh which actually happened to me a couple years ago and that shit does suck uh that sounds unpleasant i will say that it is very unpleasant it feels like you just kind of have a hot knife being slowly rotated into your guts until I had a doctor tear out my gallbladder. Yeah. No.

But he didn't get his gallbladder removed. I think at the time because it was just so much harder to do. And so this would be like a reoccurring problem for him for his entire life. But while he was being pulled back to a hospital because of his gallbladder, an air bursting shell exploded over him and he got a piece of shrapnel lodged in his skull. The classic twofer. Yeah.

After that little bump on the noggin, you know, the indirect bunk, if you will, in 1942, he ended up teaching back at the same place where he was a cadet two years later because it took him a while to recover from the gallbladder thing more longer. in 1942, he ended up teaching back at the same place where he was a cadet two years later. Because it took him a while to recover from the gallbladder thing,

longer so than the shrapnel to the head. So while he was recovering, they pretty much made him a teacher. And this is where something weird happens. He gets promoted and then gets the real promotion. And he gets assigned back with the Totenkopf division for the occupation of Vichy France. Vichy France!

Which is not going to win anybody any glory or promotion. I should have hanged Patan when they had the chance. I mean, they got around to it. No, he wasn't killed, man. Philippe Patan was not executed because of his age.

Oh, fuck, you're right. I know one history fact. That's it. That's it. When they go to hang, his head just snaps off and dust comes out. Now, this is where the weird thing happens. His unit gets reassigned to the Eastern Front to make up for you know all of the losses of the eastern front and this is when he suddenly comes down to blinding headaches yeah and he gets excused from redeployment now he gets excused from his unit to go back to a

hospital and he promptly goes awol and then nearly kills a man in a bar fight via stabbing and this is also around the same time his dad died so yeah uh otto is is not doing so hot uh that's so good i also believe that this is kind of something nobody ever really talks about is that he would seem to have done anything to never go back to the eastern front because he doesn't ever um even with all this commando shit like he personally never goes back to the eastern front he He's obviously fucking terrified. Does not get turned into blood mulch. No, no.

There seems to be a part that's kind of missing from his personal biography, his intense fear of ever having anything to do with the Soviets ever again. Do not wish to be turned into blood mulch. Now, before he could be ordered to go back to war after getting better, he leveraged his connections with Kaltenbrunner once again in order to get into one of the SS commando units. Now, this happened to be something of the perfect time for someone like him. And by someone like him, I mean a close friend, a very powerful Nazi, not that he was qualified for this. Remember, he's been a logistics officer this entire time. because he had been teaching for so long, Colton Brunner kind of knew how to use him and how to recommend him. Because he couldn't just be like, this is my friend. You have to hire my friend, right?

Like, you have to give him a reason. He's like, well, he's been teaching in the SS officer program for years. So obviously he'd be good at teaching the SS commando unit. And he was quickly named the leader of SS special forces, or in German, the Sonderluregang

Orenberg, which I know I nailed. I nailed that perfectly. And the leader of SS special forces does not mean he was the commander. Like it means he was the leader of training. He would eventually become the commander, but he always had commanders over him. He never had like he wasn't like a general or anything like that. He was never a member of like a general or anything like that. He was never, right.

Right. Or anything. Um, people make it sound like he was operating completely independently and he absolutely was not. Um, though the unit's name would change a ton of times. I'm not going to track them all because you know how Nazis love them. Some name changes.

I'll do it. They, they fucking love naming, man. They're not. Google man. Just renaming YouTube red to youtube premium to youtube music jesus christ youtube red sounds like if youtube started a porn page

it was youtube premium before youtube premium i mean the nazis renaming military units and collapsing them down is a lot like the what the soviets said just tacking new honorifics onto all their it's like i just don't keep track of them because it's pointless sure um generally it's known as the 502nd jaeger battalion um but depending on there's also like special task groups and these is the just it's not important it's often said he got this position because of his reputation his daring his outside the box thinking it's so good he didn't get to have the decency to turn himself into

meat mulch. He didn't do any of that. He was completely and totally unqualified. He was not a commando. He was a logistics officer, and he got this because of party connections. There had been a lot of political backstabbing at the time, which is why I said

this is the perfect time for him to try this. Wilhelm Canaris, who's the head of the German intelligence wing, the Abwehr, Abwehr, I don't know how to pronounce it. He was the head of that, like the regular intel service. And he was a double agent. And the weird part is, is a fair amount of people were actually aware of it. There was quite a agent. And the weird part is, is a fair amount of people were actually kind of aware of it. Like there was quite a few people within the Nazi government was like,

the guy's so bad at his job, he's probably a spy. But this also created something of a Nazi civil war within the administration of the country as the SS and the regular intel services

hated one another. I mean, the SS hated everybody who wasn't an SS. And the SS wanted to supplant the Adware with their own intelligence services. And one of the ways they thought about doing that was via commandos and people like Skorzeny.

But the same goes for virtually everything. Like, Heydrich, Himmler, and Kaltenbrunner wanted the effect of the entire third reich to be nothing but like an ss state um everything else is considered untrustworthy um so by the time hitler decided to green light this commando training program program colton brunner had replaced hydric because hydric was murdered uh rest in piss um he killed via the horse hair insulation of his own car seat it's scoreboard bitch one of my favorite dumb stories about the hydrix assassination is um uh dr theodore morel

who was hitler's personal doctor and noted complete wild psychopath who just loved giving people drugs uh correctly told the doctor how to save Hydric's life, which was to give him an antibiotic. Hydric died of blood poisoning. And the doctor who's taking care of Hydric's life, that seems unnecessary, and didn't listen to him, so Hydric died. So literally the one time Theodore Murrell was correct.

Yeah, he's dead now. Not at all in that one. Yeah. It's my favorite part of that fucking story. But now, Colton Brenner was head of the Reich Security Office, which was one of the highest ranking offices, making him one of the highest ranking people in Germany.

Solidly having, I don't know, weird fart filled tea meetings with Hitler because Hitler farted a lot. Just another fun fact. Yeah. He had like an intestinal issue, which is one of the reasons why morale kept giving him drugs just cause him to fart all the time as you did as i don't know what to do with that it's just really

funny to think about all the times that like you see adolf hitler looking stern in a room like that's the face of man who's currently yeah because his little tummy hurt um it's true no no he shot himself in the head never mind yeah yeah good now hitler saw calton brunner as loyal and therefore this guy who hitler never heard of squarzenny that calton brunner was uh saying hey we should make this guy head of the commandos must be loyal to that was was it. That's all it was. Nobody gave a fuck about his reputation. It was just loyalty. Loyalty and connection.

So stupid. Now, all of this kind of actually makes his future success quite weird because we talk about political loyalty, political loyal appointees tripping over their own feet and dicks into positions of power quite frequently and always ends badly but that's not what happens here like if scorzini uh

does nothing we would not be talking about him but like he i won't say he's always successful of course he's not we're gonna talk about those too um but like famously he he's the guy who rescues mussolini which we're talking about in part two. But we'll get there. Just normally, you don't expect someone like him to actually make it. Like rise up. Yeah, sure. Now, unlike the Allies, especially the British and eventually the Americans, special operations or special missions did not play a super important part in German war doctrine.

They didn't even have a special operations doctrine at all. all squares any would invent it because he had no choice um the closest they had was the german intelligence sabotage teams which we talked about before in our operation pistorius episode um so not the greatest agents out there this had something to do with the old school prussian idea of war um that dominated german high command um i mean not not to say that they weren't nazis of course they were nazis this nazification of the wehrmacht is pretty well documented and we did a whole episode on that um but they did believe that this whole thing was like distasteful and ungentlemanly which i understand is fucking rich coming from literal nazi military officers right yeah like that but it's because

they did see you know obviously i'm not counting them fighting the soviets in this but they saw fighting the americans and the british and the french or whatever as like fighting their peers and you know they believe that you know you fight your military peers and then this honorific way which is complete bullshit of course um and that's why you saw such a massive change of tactics between the eastern and western fronts is you know you see you see how they treat people as what they see as humans and people they treat people as subhumans right um but they believe that you know wearing enemy uniforms or sneaking enemy lines and doing uh shit like that was considered like below them uh but it's 1943 now now and Germany isn't looking so good anymore.

Yeah. So the, the, the facade of honor starts to slip away a bit. Yeah. I can't believe the Nazis would do this. Yeah. I expected more honor from my genocidal Imperial project.

Um, uh, and you know, they were on the defensive in most places. So things began to change scores. Any Phil under Walter, a guy named Walter Schellenberger, who is now in head of all German intelligence and who's just an all around a weird guy. Schellenberger is kind of not in his right hand. He loves himself some freaks, man.

Yeah, they're all nerds. Like fascists are nerds. That's what it comes down to. And like they have really and like not all nerds are fascists, of course, but all fascists are nerds. Not all nerds are fascists, of course, but all fascists are nerds. Sure, yeah. And I mean that because they're weird in a way that is detrimental to their own well-being. For instance, Schellenberger did not believe in paperwork, which is weird for a Nazi. He didn't believe that it existed?

He thought that it was slowing him down. Okay. He thought that it was slowing him down. And he believed in only passing orders verbally, which meant that virtually nothing he said was followed. You can't play telephone that way. His superiors hated him because of this. Hitler especially didn't like him because Hitler loved paperwork. Strange bird, man. And Schellenberger also wasn't... Skorzeny didn't like him because hitler loved paperwork strange bird man and schellenberger also wasn't like

squirezini didn't like him either he wasn't like a commando he wasn't um anybody that squirezini respected but anyway squirezini went about recruiting his own his new commando outfit which turned out to be quite hard um because he wasn't allowed to pull anyone from regular ss or army units uh he had to pick from units that nobody else wanted, which was mostly the multinational SS units that nobody cared about. So there were actually at first, very few Germans in his units. They were like Dutch, Serbs, Arabs, Flams, and ethnic Germans from places that were not Germany. There's also a lot of Hungarians. Yeah. But there still wasn't enough people.

So he started recruiting from the nearby SS penal camp. This is for members of the Waffen SS that had been locked up for breaking rules. And the SS at the time had a lot of inane bullshit rules. The

vast majority of people in that camp were actually there for the grave crime of quote defeatist talk which to be fair later on the war people just got hit just got strung up for this so like at the time just getting thrown in the prison in a penal camp was a good deal also got you out of the war however it turned out they didn't really want to be soldiers anymore and none of them even wanted to train um like when he turned up there the camp commandant just like picked people like you'll go train with them and they're like right fuck i will okay and and they just refused to uh they decided that a stint in ss fucking prison camp was better

than having to say yeah like i don't know like how much i don't want to be your friend so bad i'd rather go to ss prison camp yeah and these and this is like at a time where the waffen ss was like they had to go through purity tests and interviews like you had to really want to join the ss before like you know 43 right um and these guys have like had gotten one whiff of the eastern front like nope i'm staying in the camp until the shit is over i'm fucking fuck the master race i'm sitting in my own shit in this tent goodbye goodbye close the flap on your way out please never has race science been defeated so quickly uh now eventually that plan failed uh and they were uh allowed to recruit from the vermont but they but the vermont itself didn't exactly have a ton of guys to go around to give all to these special

projects on account of you know the war so he fell back on a group of people that nobody cared about the ss totem camp for bond better known as Concentration Camp Guards. Oh, Jesus fuck. They had not seen any combat and barely had any training whatsoever. A lot of these guys had actually never fired a rifle before posted to a concentration camp.

He recruited a lot of these guys because wouldn't you know it, concentration camp guards largely did not know what they were signing up for when they got recruited that's fair like they a lot of them assume they're like pow camp guards like wait where am i where am i going you're gonna be a real bastard you're gonna be the kind of guy that gets strung up at the end of the war yeah like sliding aside like ah you see all this evil shit the ss is doing you're gonna do worse than that like oh you're gonna be a guy so awful that when you if you escape from germany 80 years from now

it took like cleveland someone will recognize you so and someone will drag your ass back to germany yeah dying i'm not nursing home i'm not a big believer in uh in the death penalty i can make an exception for SS, obviously. Oh, no. I mean, I think we've said this a few times, and neither of us are pro capital punishment. However, in situations like this. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, as I've said, also crimes against children, crimes against animals. By and large, I oppose the death penalty because I think the state isn't in the business of execution be in the business of executing people but you execute a guy who killed some puppies maybe i turned the other way for a bit yeah that's kind of how i feel like when uh like eventually we'll do a series in like the nuremberg trials or something was like when the because like the the court uh cases were not law um like it was% a victor's court. Even the US Supreme Court's like, I'm taking part in this. This is a kangaroo court. And to that I say, yeah, I don't care.

Don't care. Scoreboard. Scoreboard. Back-to-back World War champs. Even the fucking executioner they picked was just some drunk from Nebraska who had never been an executioner before. They asked him, the US Army's looking for an executioner. And he's like,

Yeah, I was an executioner back before I got drafted. I was a hangman for Oklahoma and Texas. Well, at the time, neither Oklahoma or Texas used hanging as their method of execution. They had long since moved to the electric chair. And the Army is like, Cool. Works for us. We don't care. Here here's a rope and he fucked up every single execution um and to that i say lol like yeah i don't fucking care like that's that's what it is ultimately it's like i understand like i'm a man i try to be a man of principles i try to be a man who doesn't you know who believes things consistently and and then and the nazis come into the picture and i'm just like yeah what happens to him happens to him let it ride baby honestly i i wouldn't be i think some of that uh drunk uh that that drunk guy uh

executed at least one or or two people from the story um yeah i mean i i thought it was schellenberger but schellenberger died two years after he's uh released from prison because he he had a liver problem. But there's probably someone in the story that the drunk guy executed. Oh, he died of being a pussy? Okay. His liver was just built different. And by built different, I mean a bad thing.

It was worse. Yeah, worse than mine. Sucker. Yeah, I'm going to look, bitch. It makes you feel any better. He was in prison from the Nuremberg trials until the mid-50s when he died. And he was in prison the whole time. So just going jaundiced in prison at...

Was it Landsberg Prison? I'm glad he suffered a little bit. As US and Soviet prison guards laugh at him. Now, like I said, they started recruiting from the Totenkampfverband. But he still didn't have enough people because they had a death machine to run. So eventually, they were supplanted by a few hundred people from the Luftwaffe and the army. So it wasn't all death camp guards.

And on this podcast, we call that progress. Now, they trained in the commando shit you would expect to demolition scouting intelligence gathering because largely like a huge part of his commandos jobs to be intelligence gathering which is something that people said he was very good at despite the fact he had no actual training in it because he's just a really good narc or

something but their commando training was also cut short it wasn't very thorough because a lot of the guys they were getting remember it's 1943 and they're and he was getting people that nobody else really wanted so a lot of corners had been cut at this point when it came to just regular basic training like he had to teach the concentration camp guards how to fire the rifles oh jesus christ yeah which you would think is one thing that concentration camp guards knew how to do. You'd think, right? But no.

No, I guess not. These soulless monsters do not make great soldiers. Weird. But like I said, Skorzeny was not some kind of commando mastermind. He had no history doing this. He had taught basic officer school at an SS academy. He was not teaching paratroopers or whatever. He had no idea what he was doing.

So he based the entire training program off of statements made from captured British commandos. Since, despite all of the jokes that we make during this show, the British really did have the most successful commandos of World War II. Mostly just because they were ahead of the curve. Another thing that he learned, British and Third Nation commandos who worked for the special operations executive or the soe flipped very easily when they were captured many of them immediately upon being captured like look you don't have to torture like we've talked about before if you just put out the torture implement on the table in front of me i will tell you everything about yeah i'm done you want my social security number you want my mom's address just don't tear off my fingernails man we're cool

here right like and to that i say yeah why i mean you're gonna you're you're going to tell them everything at some point because you know they're gonna torture you you might as well just get it over with what's the well if i tell you everything i know and and when i tell you everything i know when all my fingers are broken the only thing has changed that my hands are all my fingers are right. Especially because a lot of commandos get fucking executed because they're allowed to execute commandos. You're considered a saboteur, which

under the Geneva Convention, you're offered no protection at all. You might as well be like, look, man, just shoot me and get it over with. Now, after studying a lot of these interrogations, he figured out the best way to make everybody ironclad proof from interrogation is to make sure he only recruited absolute, no questions asked, rabid Nazi loyalists. And he did.

Yeah. I mean, I don't think that's the answer to this question because you can torture that loyalty right out of someone on a long enough timeline. Right, of course. And that happened. Of course it did. But there is one little problem here. SOE commandos, which is what he's basing this off of, had basic training, which is what they were going through,

basic commando training. But they also had specialized training pertaining to whatever mission they were about to be sent on. They trained for specific missions. And that still happens today. For example, the Bin Laden raid in Pakistan, they built a full-scale replica of his home like Nathan Fielder

and had them run through the fucking course for months before they finally won this mission. That's something that they learned in World War II was the best way to go about training for specialized missions, and they still do it today II was the best way to go about training for specialized missions, and they still do it today. However, in order to do that, you need to know what your mission is.

You need to know what these commandos are going to be used for. And nobody in the Nazi command was telling Skorzeny what the fuck his commandos would be doing. So they couldn't do any specialized training. But this is also one of the foundational dumb things about the Nazi government in that it did not work. Now, way to be, idiots. Now, I think we've talked about this before. There are so many different departments within the Nazi government.

And many of them are doing the exact same job, all headed by different men who all hated one another and almost nothing ever worked. And this spawned a partially true belief that Hitler did this on purpose. Now, there's a dual reason for this. If everybody hates one another, they can't plot against you. You're too distracted plotting against your fellow SS,

whatever, I don't know member of the local the local local yes yeah the local dick sucking office of whatever third branch of government you work for um and you're going to be too busy plotting to work your way up that ladder rather than plotting to kill hitler or whatever but another part of this is he believed that if he made five people do the same job, the best idea would raise to the surface like that really dumb idea that the fucking yeah,

Nazi meritocracy. Okay, guy. But that truly also can't work because you see the internal functions of the government were only based on party loyalty and personal connection. So they like defeated themselves like congratulations hitler you've played yourself you've done it um but i mean this also uh quarter

in your ass because you played yourself um i mean and like obviously this creates a an environment of government where everybody just doesn't work because everybody's doing the same minor bullshit and there was other like on a long enough timeline, way, way down the chain of command, the Nazi military did this and it did work. But it's because you tell three junior officers to do the same thing and they come up with a good idea for a single general rather than the leader of a country having his entire government operating that way. You cannot expand that operation to be the entire government. It does not work that way. You cannot expand that operation to be the entire government. It

does not work that way. Now, this paralyzed decision-making, and especially when it came to planning commando operations. And then you also had Heinrich Himmler. Oh, yes. You son of a whore. Himmler, the engineer of the Holocaust and a cult-obsessed moron, Himmler, the engineer of the Holocaust and a cult-obsessed moron, was not a military man at all in any stretch of the imagination. He was a party loyalist through and through who attached himself at the hip to Hitler and was just an SS functionary. Though there is a really funny time where he did get an army group command towards the end of the war. And it failed so hard that Hitler yelled at him until he had a mental breakdown which is funny uh he tried to run an entire army group command out of his personal

train um on the eastern front of his personal luxury train on the eastern front outstanding war which had like a single telephone line um and no radio and uh he didn't even know how to read a map because why the fuck would he know how to read a map he's not a military guy uh and uh he didn't even know how to read a map because why the fuck would he know how to read a map he's not a military guy uh and uh yeah that went about as well as you can imagine running an army group which is i believe hundreds of thousands of people with a single 1944 phone line outstanding outstanding um now he was you know the ss. So he had a say in everything the SS did. And he kept coming up with plans that were completely and totally impossible for the SS commandos to do, like attacking Soviet factories and infrastructure that were thousands of miles behind enemy lines, when at the time, the Nazis were having a hard time just keeping the line where it was. the time the nazis were having a hard time just keeping the line where it was um and not to mention like how are you going to infiltrate a team of hundreds of people thousands of miles behind enemy lines in the soviet union but and and and to be clear everyone knew himmler's plans were dumb everybody did nobody entertained himmler's bullshit however he was still fucking

himmler so it's not like autoscores and he could be like that's a dumb no right because he's him right yeah he's fucking himmler um so in the middle of training uh for real missions he had to act like he was planning himmler's dumb operations that that was specifically that one where going behind enemy lines in the soviet union he had to fake that he was playing that for 18 months before himmler saw something shiny and forgot about it. Though he finally did get a real Operation Forest Commandos to plan for. Operation Franz. Now, this mission was not exactly what Skorzeny had in mind for what he trained his team for,

but it was within things that he thought they were vaguely capable of. However, again, because the commandos were not this entity that had their own separate command, they were kind of just loaned out. And this plan, Operation Franz, was developed by a guy from the Gestapo, not someone from the military.

So like the worst kind of cop ever plans a military operation. Outstanding. Now, the plan was to parachute into Iran in order to support an uprising against a chosen British dictator and the resulting dual occupation of Iran of British and Soviet forces. There was an uprising going on, and he believed that if they supported and trained them, they could turn into force multipliers, expand this across Iran, make it a manpower hole and resource hole for the British and the Soviets. military trainers, weapons, money, and military trainers, I should say.

Money to smooth things over with locals, guns because they didn't really have that many, and military trainers so you could turn them into an effective guerrilla force. However, the guy from the Gestapo decided at the last minute, we don't actually need the military trainers. Let's just bring the guns and the gold. They brought literally gold bars with them.

Oh, boy. Because the idea was we would need more planes to drop these guys in because you need 20 or 30 more people, whatever it might be. And they didn't really have that many planes. They didn't have to requisition more. So they didn't want to do that. So instead, they're like, we'll just bring more gold because then you can bribe more tribesmen that people may be on the fence into joining.

Now it's telling that when Skorzeny heard this plan, he did not go with them. So you can probably guess how this one went. The commanders jumped in Dairon, loaded down with gold and their personal firearms. They landed, made contact with the raging insurgency that was actually quite small, and got themselves robbed at gunpoint of all of their gold. And then when they were done robbing them, the insurgents simply walked them over to the British camp

and turned them in. Nice. Outstanding. That is the kind of thorough military genius you expect from Hitler's favorite commando. Like, wait, you guys got robbed and then turned in. God damn it. However, there is one operation that Skorzeny is known for. Pulling Benito Mussolini's ass out of the fire, at least temporarily,

and evacuating them to Northern Italy to rule over a Nazi puppet state until he got the old upside-down treatment. That is the legendary Grand Sasso Raid. Grand Sasso! I don't know. Make it sound Italian. Big sausage. Big sausage. Operation Big Sausage.

Operation Big Sausage. And that is where the real Otto Skorzeny mythos was truly born and would continue to spiral out of control ever after and that is where we'll pick up next time right how you feeling about old Otto

I I I just I don't understand why man did not have the decency to pick up a Luger and put it inside his mouth and then pull the trigger on the Luger and make a Jackson Pollock painting all over the floor, which is all he would have been good for. I mean, to be fair, you can also blame the guy from university who did not just cleave off his head and leave it dangling like a pest. I was also thinking that. I mean, it's interesting. from university who did not just cleave off his head and leave it dangling like a pest. I was also thinking that.

I mean, it's interesting to me to watch these people get these mythos surrounding them, the Guderians, the Skrizenes, people like that. I'm like, no, they rose that far because the German military had true experts and this, that, and the other thing.

No, that's why they won, right? That's why they won. Yeah, exactly. That's why they won. Oh, wait. It truly is a soft revisionism of reality. Yeah, for sure. And this happens from people who even aren't sympathetic, right?

Right. You see people who say, fuck the Nazis or whatever. This score is any guy. Couldn't have been a Nazi because of things that we're going to talk about. And he was just like an honorable Prussian commando. And I was like, no, he was a soulless party guy who worked his way up. Yeah, exactly.

The dude was schlubbing it behind a fucking desk in Austria until he made friends with someone powerful. Kimball Jr. Yeah, exactly. I think that's one of the things that drove that um that drew me to the story and honestly when i went into it i didn't know that about him i did think of him as this weird like my first script was titled the real life bond villain because he did seem like one but then when i researched him i'm like no he's just some fucking asshole he's just a company guy yeah he's

just he's a lifelong company guy who Yeah, he's just a lifelong company guy who knew the guy who was like middle management, HR, who eventually made his way up to be the boss, like the shift boss or whatever. I don't know. There's nothing special about this guy, which is why I think he's so interesting. Because for things like the Nazis to happen,

you need an army of not special people just middle management assholes who do who only care about continuing their life as long as it doesn't hurt them in any particular way or self-aggrandizement yeah yeah anyway that's part one liam plug your shows make me uh well there's your problem what i was doing yeah well there's your problem and 10 000 losses everybody thank you for listening to the show um if you like what we do here consider supporting the show uh via patreon uh you get unlocked stuff from one dollar all the way up to 25 um whatever you'd like to give us we have a $25 tier one time somebody asked for it i'm like which is weird because you can just do your own custom donation like you don't need a tier um you know the dumbest thing is i give this podcast

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in ways I don't fully understand people have told me that but thank you again everybody and until next time do unprotected sword fights with your friends