Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). The newly born Jewish state, which felt surrounded by the Arab world, did not hesitate to recruit former Nazis into its ranks in some cases. Israeli historian Danny Orbach, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, examines this dark chapter. In his new book, Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War (currently being translated into dozens of languages), he argues that at least four war criminals were recruited by the Mossad for anti-Arab purposes. This deadly embrace, driven by realpolitik and money, transcended ideologies and political alliances, but inevitably ended up confronting what had always been considered taboo: collaboration between former Nazis and the State of Israel, according to the author, whose remarks were reproduced by the communist magazine Contropiano on its online portal on 18 August. Orbach bases his findings on a series of documents recently released by Mossad and German and American archives. ‘It was material that would have been completely inaccessible thirty or even twenty years ago, and thanks to which I was able to uncover the story of Nazi refugees who played a surprising role in the
conflict between Israel and the Arab world,’ Orbach explains. His research has enabled him to confirm the role of at least four members of the Third Reich who actively collaborated with the Tel Aviv secret service after the war. ‘I don’t rule out that there were others, but at the moment I don’t have enough evidence to confirm that,’ he adds. The best-known and most controversial case is that of Walter Rauff, a man who was an officer in the SS security service during the war and was involved in the development of the mobile gas vans in which thousands of Jews were killed. He was later involved in the extermination of French Jews. In 1945, he escaped trial and found refuge in Syria, where he entered the service of dictator Husni Za’im, who tasked him with creating a Gestapo-inspired unit to exterminate the Jews of Palestine. However, this plan ultimately remained on paper. Four years later, after a change of government in Damascus, Rauff was expelled from the country and attempted to emigrate to South America. On the way, he came into contact with the Israeli secret service in Italy, to whom he sold information in order to take revenge on the Syrians. He then became an Israeli agent in Egypt. When his Nazi activities became known in Israel, he fled to Chile, where the Mossad tried to eliminate him in 1980 but failed. Four years later, Rauff died of cancer. Even if his collaboration was short-lived, it shows ‘that Israel had no qualms about recruiting former Nazis immediately after the war,’ according to Orbach, who reveals that the list of Mossad recruits also included Otto Skorzeny, the former SS Standartenführer who freed Mussolini from his refuge in Gran Sasso in September 1943. Originally, the Mossad wanted to liquidate him in a large-scale manhunt in 1960, but then concluded that he would be much more useful to them alive and decided to recruit him. Avraham Ahituv, who later became director of the Shin Bet secret service, met Skorzeny in a hotel in Madrid and hired him to sabotage Egypt’s missile programmes. The former Nazi officer did not want money for this, but asked that his name be removed from the list of wanted criminals compiled by Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter. However, according to an internal Mossad report quoted in Orbach’s book, his request was denied. The collaboration nevertheless continued and lasted until Skorzeny died of cancer in Spain in 1975.
