He had been a lieutenant colonel in Hitler's Elite Guard. He was intelligent, cunning, courageous. His faceice-blue eyes, sabre-scarred chin, thin, contemptuous smilewas a symbol of Nazi fanaticism. He denied most of the legends that had grown around his name (one: that he had been assigned to assassinate General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Said he: "Only a rumor. You can be sure that if any attempt had been made it would have succeeded.") But the truth about Otto Skorzeny was impressive enough.
In the summer of 1943, after Mussolini had become the prisoner of Italy's Badoglio Government, it was Skorzeny whom Hitler...