OTTO SKORZENY: HITLER'S MOST DANGEROUS MAN WHO COULD NOT BE CAUGHT
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SKORZENY. THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN EUROPE.
On November 28, 1943, three men were in Tehran whose assassination would have changed the course of the war. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—in the same city, for the first and last time. Security, perimeters, encrypted messages.
And somewhere in the city, or already on the way there, was a man whom Hitler personally tasked with eliminating all three.
Two months before Tehran, he had, in front of all of Europe, rescued Mussolini from a mountaintop prison—alive, in seven minutes, without firing a shot. Hitler called him "the most dangerous man in Europe." Churchill called him "the most brazen feat of the entire war."
That's the strange thing. He was being hunted by Soviet intelligence, British military intelligence, and the American presidential security service. He died a natural death in 1975, in Madrid, in his own bed. He was never convicted. After the war, he wrote books, gave interviews, and spoke about Soviet operations against him—while Soviet intelligence itself remained classified.
Victors pay more. It's called the asymmetry of results.
I spent eight months researching this story in the archives before I decided to tell it. No theories, no speculation. Only what's documented—the parts that can be verified.
You will learn:
— How seventeen-year-old Soviet intelligence officer Vartanyan and a group of seven conducted surveillance on twenty German agents in Tehran—and why his name remained classified forty-eight years after the operation
— How the German Friedenthal network operated in Tehran for years—traders, diplomats, and officials—and why Soviet intelligence learned of the "Long Jump" plan not through interception, but through a man who didn't always understand for whom he was working
— What did the Volga German Rudolf Meyer, who was never caught and who doesn't appear on any post-war lists—neither Soviet nor German—write on a scrap of paper?
— Why is the file containing the name of the operational leader of the German battle group in Tehran—the man who escaped across rooftops and was never caught—still classified and no plans to declassify it?
— What exactly did Vartanyan mean when, in response to a journalist's question about Tehran, he spoke not of victory, but of... And about Gasparyan, the youngest in the group, whose ribs were broken that night.
There's one man in this case, about whom the documents contain only three words. Rudolf Mayer, a Volga German from Saratov. Not convicted. Not repatriated. Not listed among the dead. This happens to people who worked for several sides and are of no use to any of them when the job is done.
There was such a man—and then there wasn't. Just three words, written in neat handwriting.
This story cannot be told briefly. You can only reach the end—and understand why Soviet intelligence won in Tehran, and the only person who emerged from this story is Skorzeny.
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